Blood Ties (11 page)

I relaxed my body, from my toes with the flecked nail polish to the top of my scalp, which was still a little damp from my shower. I sank into the mattress and allowed it to mold around me like a firm marshmallow. I felt safe, embryonic even. And I closed my eyes.

Usually I fantasized about guys around campus I crushed on and, regrettably, even Rafe. He was the only man I’d ever been with, and I thought for sure I’d never experience the love or touch of another human being after him. So I learned how to love and touch myself instead.

Before I could go through my mental Rolodex of guys, an image I’d never seen before entered my mind. His appearance was crystal clear—Technicolor vivid. It was almost like he was really there. His face was overly serious, but sexy nonetheless. He had otherworldly eyes that were the strangest shade of blue I’d ever seen. His body was rocking—slim, athletic—yet it had many scars on it.

I started to rub my lower belly in a small, circular motion.

The dream lover stood at the foot of my bed and stared at me for a moment…
in that way
…giving me notice that things were about to get really X-rated. My chach began to ripple with slight contractions in anticipation.

This fantasy was so real, I thought I could actually hear the bed squeak as the phantom lover climbed over the footboard and parted my bent knees. He slithered his body between my legs and kissed me. At first his full lips were slightly opened, teasing me. The wetness moistened my eager lips. He opened his mouth wider and then closed his warm lips around mine. I couldn’t hold back and French kissed him, drawing his hot breath into me. He pulled back, taking control, and returned us both to a more measured pace.

As I hallucinated that he was nibbling on my lower lip, my hand continued acting as a substitute for him. My index finger went down…all the way down. It made its way through a full bush of pubic hair. The thickness of my hair felt good to me. It grew rambunctiously, yet was fine, silky, and shiny like raven’s feathers.

Even though my eyes looked straight at the ceiling, in my fantasy they were squarely on the face of my lover. I imagined him entering me, gyrating with perfect rhythm and pace. I rubbed myself, headed toward ecstasy. My fingertips became slick as the strokes became longer, deeper, harder. I thought the friction was warming up my palm, so I didn’t pay too much attention to its growing warmer, then hotter. But when the heat became uncomfortable, I jerked my hand out of my panties and saw it was glowing red.

I ran to the bathroom and turned on the light. I stood in front of the old, scratched-up porcelain sink with the rusty drain hole. The fuzzy lightbulb above me dimmed and gave a jaundiced haze to the small space.

My hand felt like I had dipped it in a vat of acid. A ghostly, white-hot knife blade sliced through the skin, etching something on my palm. I closed my hand, afraid to look at it directly. I held it up to the medicine cabinet mirror instead, and opened it up. The shining fleur-de-lis reflected back, illuminating the bathroom with an eerie, red hue.

Unbeknownst to me, at that same moment, witches from all over felt that the world had shifted somehow. To some this revelation was subtle, like the soft buzz of a mosquito around the ear. However, others had a more visceral, disturbing effect.

Chapter Fourteen

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

C
atherine paid no mind to the distant clamor of New York City’s rush-hour traffic. Instead she sat motionless in her sunken, concrete tub inlaid with intricate, blue and black mosaic tiles. The water had been perfectly transparent, but as Catherine’s dead cells sloughed off, it turned a sickening yellow.

She looked at her bony body. It resembled a Sphynx cat’s— wrinkled, leathery, thin-skinned. And she was like an alien within it. The body was a foreign entity to her, an inconvenient vessel she inhabited for the time being. Otherwise she was just numb, devoid of any real feeling, trying to remember emotions like the ones she’d had before the Ancient spirit had become a coresident in her body.

That stoic attitude abruptly changed when a feeling of odd portent caused Catherine to sit straight up. A dreadful, prickly sensation bristled under her skin. Bulging, blue welts rose to the skin’s surface. Her blood temperature rapidly dropped way past normal unnatural low. The blood became so cold, it started to form the tiniest shards of ice right in her veins, causing minute cuts as the blood pulsed through her body. Catherine’s body involuntarily seized up on her, and she slipped under the water.

As she struggled to regain her bodily control, she saw a vision of Grace. The girl held up her hand, blazing with the fleur-de-lis symbol. The vision cut to a future event—Grace and Catherine engaged in a battle to the death, throwing magic rays at each other. They both let go of their final rays knowing one of them would die. However, the vision ended before the winner was revealed.

Catherine bounded to the water’s surface, gasping for air. She got out of the tub, her body heavy like she had just stepped back on land after being in the ocean all day. She lumbered over to a black hutch and rummaged through its multitudinous drawers, and found a small, red sachet. It contained the herb agrimony, used to reverse hexes and curses. She untied the bag and dumped its contents straight into her mouth. She gagged on the dry, twiggy concoction as it scratched its way down her throat.

“Chetan!” she yelled, coughing up bits of agrimony. Chetan rushed in as fast as he could, knowing there would be hell to pay if he made Catherine Bolingbroke wait.

“Yes, Catherine?” he asked, caught off guard by her panicked expression.

“Get the car. Grace has awakened, and I need more backup.”

“Where are we going?” Chetan said, trying not to look at Catherine’s crinkled, naked body.

“Jersey, you fool.”

Chetan drove the black Mercedes GL550 through Elizabeth, New Jersey. Catherine sat quietly in the backseat, glaring with superior repugnance at the city’s denizens. To her that place was nothing more than a filthy wasteland of 7-Elevens and Dunkin’ Donuts. However, Catherine also believed the best hunting grounds for protégés were in places like this.

Environments like law practices, venture-capital firms, and Wall Street would seem to contain an unlimited pool of protégé candidates. The problem was those people embraced their demons and used them to get what they wanted with no remorse. Therefore Catherine had nothing to tap into. That was why she found the so-called innocuous environments to be the best places for finding protégés. In these safe havens, wickedness abounded. It was simply obscured, masked by the veneer of civility. It festered beneath the surface, where it took on a delightful malignancy. Wickedness grew exponentially with the effort it took to keep it down. Therefore, in most of these “good” people there were powerful alter egos that somehow always managed to express themselves in road rage, gossip, passive aggressiveness…the list went on and on.

The Mercedes arrived at the pickup loop of a popular outlet mall. Catherine carefully examined herself in a compact mirror. She had performed a beauty spell for the occasion. The spell had cloaked her body in an illusion of adorableness. Her craggy skin was now dewy, youthful, all peaches and cream. Her scraggly hair appeared voluminous, with a slight wave. The scent of her flesh was a bit soapy, with hints of citrus and vanilla.

Chetan turned toward her. She could see he wanted to ask her something, but was afraid to annoy her. He bravely asked anyway.

“Pardon me for my ignorance. But why don’t you just recruit other witches? Why use humans for such a dangerous endeavor?” Chetan crouched as if he were expecting a frying pan to come flying over the seat.

“It is impossible to turn another witch into a protégé— especially one who’s already inhabited by an Ancient. Only humans can be used for that purpose. But not just any human. The protégé must have something in them…a certain ruthlessness, immorality, selfishness that goes beyond the norm. Most humans don’t qualify for the job, as being a typical asshole is not enough. The ones I seek are truly extraordinary beings. Much more extraordinary than you even.”

Catherine smirked, knowing Chetan was irked by her insult and could do nothing about it. He got out of the Mercedes and tried to keep a straight face, making sure his expression didn’t betray him. He did not want to give Catherine any reason to cut him from what he considered a prestigious position as her helper. And, most importantly, he didn’t want to rile her up, thereby causing his own demise.

“Would you like me to accompany you?” he asked after he opened Catherine’s door and offered her his hand.

“No. This task I must do alone.”

Catherine refused to touch the escalator railing, which was sticky from candy, snot, and other unidentifiable fluids. As the escalator ascended, mall patrons on all levels focused in on her—the obvious fish out of water. The pot-bellied shoppers wore the standard suburban uniform of cargo shorts, unflattering graphic tees, and tired sneakers and sandals. Catherine sported a tailored pencil skirt, a taupe silk shirt, and six-inch stilettos.

She arrived on the second floor, next to one of those clothing stores that Pied Piper-ed teenagers in with their pedophilic advertising. She decided to stroll in the middle of the walkway, against the flow of pedestrian traffic. This allowed her to casually bump into people, skimming their skin to pick up on their auras. Within five minutes, Catherine reckoned, she had touched about ten people. She picked up on someone who had just cheated on the SAT, another who had shoplifted a scarf, and still another who let a cashier undercharge him at the GAP. But no one with the special gifts.

Catherine wound up in the food court, which was littered with chain restaurants offering up a gross hodgepodge of MSG-laden, lard-infested chemical cocktails they called food. As she passed a server handing out samples of syrupy Chinese food on toothpicks, she suddenly sucked in a breath—a signal that her protégé was somewhere in the vicinity. It was now just a matter of finding them. Catherine quickly made her way around the perimeter of the food court, rapidly bumping into people getting a sense of who they were.

First she bumped into a teenage girl who just wasn’t having it. The girl wore a belly shirt that showed off her spray tan and Daisy Dukes that showed off everything else.

“What, stupid bitch? You don’t see me standing here?” she barked before taking a bite of her greasy pizza.

“How can I
not
see you? You’re bright orange,” Catherine came back, all the while scanning the food court for the protégé. Tan Girl put her pizza down and whipped her dishwater-blonde hair into a ponytail. She pumped her fists at Catherine.

“Aw, Uptown wants to fight. Let’s go,” the girl said.

And Catherine did want to go. On a different day, she would have used her powers to grab the girl, toss her in the air, and send her careening over the crowd. But Catherine needed to conserve her energy to capture her protégé, and settled on a more moderate retaliation. She winked one eye, causing Tan Girl to trip and land face first in the custodian’s bucket of dirty water.

As that section of the food court burst into riotous laughter, a hand brushed across Catherine’s. Her senses went into overdrive, as if she were a plug being stuck into a socket. She didn’t even have to look at the human to know this was her protégé.

“She got what she deserved, talking to such a gorgeous woman like that,” said a nebbish voice.

Catherine had to stretch her neck to look up at the man staring down at her. “Oh, I’m okay. I just let petty things like that roll off me,” she said, doing her best impersonation of coy.

The stranger’s towering height was his only attractive attribute. His voice was whiny and high-pitched. Catherine unconsciously put her finger to her ear, doing a suctioning motion. She figured he had just gotten off from some lame office job, considering he was dressed in a cheap sports jacket and khaki pants. She fought to not focus on the smudge of mayonnaise he had neglected to wipe off his chin.