Queen of The Hill (Knight Games) (11 page)

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. I should have known this was her true motivation. When she told me she was taking over Polina’s realm, I should have suspected yours would be next.”

“Are you saying that Tabetha played a part in Polina’s disappearance?”

Rick paced to my cupboard and removed a wineglass. After rinsing the dust out in the sink, he picked up the bottle of wine. “Anything stronger?”

“Above the sink. I keep Scotch for Dad.”

He put down the bottle and retrieved the Scotch, pouring a shot into the wineglass and tossing it back. I wasn’t sure that alcohol did anything for Rick, but maybe he needed the burn in his throat to give him the courage to say what he needed to say. “Did you notice the gargoyles next to Tabetha’s fireplace?”

“Yeah, they came alive when she got angry. Creepy as hell.”

“That’s not within a wood witch’s natural power.”

“Meaning?”

Rick’s eyes darted around my kitchen. “Do you have a pen and paper?”

I dug a pen out of my junk drawer and grabbed an envelope from a stack of unopened mail next to the fridge. Electric bill. The great equalizer. “Here, use this.”

He drew a five-pointed star with circles at each of the points.

“A pentagram,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Yes. The symbol of ultimate power. Each point represents one of the five elements.”

“Five? I thought there were four: earth, wind, fire, and water.”

“For the children of Hecate, there are five.” Inside the circle resting on the top point, Rick wrote
Wood,
then inside the circle to the right
Air,
then
Earth
, then
Metal
, then
Water
. “You are an air witch. Your power increases with the night air, you can control the weather, and you can create fire without using a spell—like when you light a candle with your breath.”

I nodded. “Okay. And Tabetha is a wood witch. She can make things grow and animate plants to do her bidding.”

“Correct. All witches have the power to manipulate all five elements. However, if the element is outside their natural source of power, they must use sorcery—spells, enchantments—and the result is weaker.”

“But Tabetha could also create heat. She blasted me with it.”

“Witches manipulate fire and ice as it relates to their element. Air is the only element that can produce true fire. The oxygen feeds the flame. But the spring follows Tabetha. Water boils and freezes. Metal melts. Tonight, the gargoyles animated with Tabetha’s anger, not her enchantment.”

“Let me guess, Polina was a metal witch,” I said.

“Precisely. When Tabetha inherited Polina’s realm, she inherited Polina’s power.”

Poe snorted. “She intends to absorb the entire pentagram.”

“So, what you’re saying is Tabetha always intended to acquire my realm, one way or another, to attain natural power over the air.”

“Not just the air, earth too,” Poe said. “When you made Rick, you gave him caretaker magic, which is based on the power of the earth. The combination has made you strong. She means to inherit both air and earth upon your abdication of your throne.”

I looked at Rick. “She’d have everything but water. What would happen if she obtained all five elements?”

“The elements enhance each other.” Rick drew arrows between the circles at the points of the star. “Wood feeds air, both by plants producing oxygen and burning in fire. Air feeds earth by carrying natural matter from one place to another, and as fire, burning things to ash.”

“Fertilization and pollination,” I clarified.

Rick nodded. “Earth houses metal within it. Metal nourishes water. Water feeds wood.”

“She’d be exponentially more powerful,” I mumbled. “She’s not just gaining another element, she’s gaining the relationship between them.”

“Yes.”

Poe squawked to interrupt. “And she’s losing balance. The elements are meant to keep each other in check. Wood parts earth. Earth dams or muddies water. Water extinguishes fire. Fire melts metal. Metal chops wood.”

I pressed my fingertips into the sides of my head, feeling like my brain might explode sorting out the implications. “Is it even possible for one witch to house all that natural power within herself?”

Rick shook his head. “I do not know,
mi cielo
, but I do not wish to find out. Tabetha’s heart is hard. If she succeeds in quenching her thirst for power, I fear there will be no stopping her.”

I guzzled the last of my wine. “So what do we do?”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I believe your only option is to call her bluff and allow her to kill Logan,” Rick said.

The base of my wineglass hit the counter, hard enough for the stem to break off in my hand. “Fuck!” I yelled as glass sliced my palm. I grabbed a paper towel and pressed into the cut. “I’m not paying her off with Logan’s life. He’s my friend.”

Rick grabbed the garbage from under the counter and pitched the pieces of glass, then offered me his wrist. “Blood?”

“Not now,” I snapped, pressing the wound. “It’s out of the question. I’m not sacrificing Logan.”

Poe exchanged glances with Rick. I knew that look. It was the if-only-she-understood-how-serious-this-was glare.

“I get it, okay? If we do nothing, she kills him. If I do as she asks, she absorbs our powers and probably kills us all, just as she probably killed Polina. So the question is, how do we stop her before she can do either?”

“How long did she give you?” Poe asked.

“The spring equinox. I need to hand over my territory by our wedding day.”

“Of course,” Poe said. “The spring equinox is the season when a wood witch has the most power. Everything sprouts. The trees come back from the dead.”

“Great. So I’m supposed to give her more power on the day she already has the most?”

Rick took my hand. “I know Logan means something to you.” He looked at me with pity and a well-concealed jealousy.

“He’s just a friend. He used to be a good friend. I can’t let him die to serve our purposes. It’s too Machiavellian. I couldn’t live with myself.”

“No one wants Logan to die. But we can’t give in to Tabetha. If she inherits our elements, only the goddess Hecate would be more powerful. Tabetha would be invincible.”

I scowled. “Then the question is, how do we remove Logan from the equation without giving Tabetha what she wants?”

Neither Poe nor Rick had any answers for me.

“A
gain,” Rick commanded.

Arms laden with heavy stones, I concentrated on lifting from the frozen ground. Rick had brought me to the clearing behind his cottage to hone my skills in preparation for battling Tabetha. I’d already put in thirty minutes of swordplay, another twenty starting things on fire, and now was attempting to teach myself to hover. Levitating on command did not come naturally to me. Sure, I’d done it on accident when Rick and I were making love, but this, doing it again and again like some sort of endurance sport, hurt my brain.

True, I’d levitated my spell book, but working that magic on my own body was an entirely different animal. The intention had to come from within, from a hotspot deep within my heart.

The air around me buzzed against my skin. Eyes closed, I willed myself to become a part of it for the fifteenth time that day. I felt my boots leave solid ground. My toes dangled beneath me. I opened my eyes.

Rick smiled. “Good. More than a foot this time.”

“A foot?” I made the mistake of glancing down. The ground rushed toward me, and I landed in a jumble of stones and limbs. “Ouch,” I said, too tired to put any real emotion behind it.

“You must try harder,
mi cielo
. Tabetha says she’ll wait until the equinox, but there is no guarantee. She cannot be trusted. You must learn to defend yourself.”

“Do I look like I’m not taking this seriously?” I pushed a small boulder off my bruised abdomen and scrambled to my feet. “Besides, it’s hopeless. No matter how hard I try, I’m not going to make up for a thousand years of missed experience. Even if I remembered all the magic from all my past lives, Tabetha has at least six hundred years on me.”

“You can’t think of it that way. You have access to two elements, just like her, and you have the larger cemetery. If she comes here, to your territory, you will be able to access that power. She won’t.”

I narrowed my eyes and pointed at my chest. “I can access the dead here and she can’t?”

“Yes.”

“A lot of good it did me when she came here before.”

Rick rubbed his palms together. “It takes intention,
mi cielo
. I should have taught you the skill long ago. I thought we had time.”

“Teach me now.”

He knelt down and began to unlace my boot.

“What are you doing?”

“It is easier to connect with the dead when you are barefoot.”

“It’s twenty degrees out here. Does connecting with the dead require frostbite?”

“Do you want to learn to tap into this power or not?”

I toed out of my boots and planted my bare feet on the snow-covered grass.

“Concentrate. Send your intention into the earth below you.”

I tried. I really did. I closed my eyes and reached out to my cemetery the way I often metaphysically reached out to Rick.

“How do you feel?” Rick asked.

“Cold. Like my pinky toe is going to crack off.”

He tipped his head and pursed his lips like he was disappointed.

“Okay, okay, I’ll try again.” I closed my eyes and focused on the hotspot behind my breastbone. The wind buzzed against my skin and I channeled it down through my heels, into the dirt. I blocked out the cold, Rick’s presence, everything. I breathed deeply.

An electric tingle pricked the arches of my feet. The power wormed through my ankles to my knees. “I can feel it,” I whispered. I tried to will a stronger connection.

“Drink,
mi cielo
.”

I opened my eyes. Flat on my back in the snow, I stared into the bleak afternoon sky with Rick’s bloody wrist between my lips. I pushed it aside. “What happened?”

“You lost consciousness.”

“But I felt it. The power was right there.” Frustration made my words sharp and hard.

Rick grabbed my boots and lifted me into his arms. “You will keep practicing. It will come.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“It always does.” His words were soft and encouraging.

I leaned my head against his chest. He helped me put my boots back on.

“Up,
mi cielo
. We have more work to do.”

“G
rateful, you are needed at the nurses desk,” Berta, our unit secretary, said from the door. The ER was humming for the third night in a row, and I looked up at her from a sea of rubber gloves, bandages, and tape.

“I’ll be there as soon as I start this IV,” I said.

She nodded and closed the door behind her.

I slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and rubbed a disinfectant swab in swirls over the vein I’d chosen in my patient’s forearm. The narrow ribbon of blue was barely visible beneath the skin. I checked her chart. “Mrs. Scott, can you tell me why you are here today?” It was always good to keep them talking while I inserted the catheter. The prick wasn’t particularly painful, but people got weird around needles.

“I was grocery shopping, and I just passed out. One of the employees called 911, and here I am.” The woman smiled. She looked about forty, neatly groomed, but pale and clammy.

I tied a rubber tourniquet just above the spot I had targeted and tapped the vein with my finger until it popped slightly. The reaction was less than I’d expected; she was definitely dehydrated, which would explain the syncope. Still, I was sure I could hit it.

“This might pinch a little,” I warned as I positioned the needle at a shallow angle. She turned her head away. I was quick and accurate. A flash of blood, and I advanced the catheter and untied the tourniquet. “Do you have any medical conditions that might have contributed to your loss of consciousness? Has this ever happened before?” While she was distracted, I filled several vacutainers with her blood, and then carefully removed the needle. I had that puppy secured in a heartbeat with an occlusive dressing and connected to the saline drip I’d prepared.

“No. Nothing. I’m not on any medications. I’ve always been healthy.”

“All set.” I tossed the remnants of my procedure in the bin and removed my rubber gloves. “We’ll send your blood samples to the lab and see what’s going on.” I used the sink in the room to wash up.

“Nurse?” Mrs. Scott said from behind me. “I think there’s something wrong.”

“Yes?” I turned around. A growing spot of blood had appeared on the blanket over the woman’s pelvis. I looked at her arm. The insertion site wasn’t bleeding. “Do you have your period?”

She shook her head, groggily.

Donning a new pair of gloves, I peeled back the blankets. The source was no mystery. A sloppy bandage over her femoral artery was soaked through. I hit the button on the wall to call for help and put pressure on the wound.

“Mrs. Scott, what happened here? Did you have an accident?”

Her eyes glazed over. “Nothing happened. There’s nothing wrong.”

Uh-oh. Was this? Could it be? I tugged the bandage out from under my palm and got a good look at the source of the bleeding. Vampire bite.
Shit.

“Nothing’s wrong. Nothing happened,” she repeated. And then her eyes rolled back in her head.

Help arrived in the form of the trauma team and a crash cart.

Turns out the vampire had ripped open her femoral artery, then bandaged it and sent her on her way. The vamp had compelled her to believe nothing had happened. She could have bled to death. Thankfully, the surgeon was able to repair the damage.

The predominant theory was that she had suffered an animal attack. Yeah, an animal bite to the inner thigh. That made sense.

With all the drama, hours had passed since Berta had given me the heads-up to check the desk. I took my break and headed that way. On the corner of the desk, a bouquet of flowers in a crystal vase brightened the otherwise bland décor. Roses, lilies, and a few blooms I didn’t even know the names of filled out the arrangement. It was gorgeous and exotic, and it had my name on it.