The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) (13 page)

“And you’re one hundred and thirty nine.” I still couldn’t believe it. “One
hundred and thirty
nine
. Gods. How is it going to look when I get you a ‘
congratulations on your 140
th
birthday’
card next year?”

Collette giggled, and for a moment she sounded young. Too young even for the twenty something year old she appeared to be now. “Je ne sais pas, ma cherie.”

I… don’t… know? Is that what she said?
“Anyway, what do we do now?”

She produced the note again and read the rhyme. “We found ze oak,” she said, “And now we look for ze reeds.”

“Reeds,” I echoed, turning around and looking toward the pond.

If my education was up to par, reeds grew close to bodies of water. So I moved away from the tree, padded down the light slope toward the unmoving shore, and there they were. I couldn’t tell any species of reed apart from any other, but I knew what the cattail type looked like because they looked kinda like corn dogs. After a quick search, avoiding the occasional leaping frog, I found some.

“Here,” I called, and Collette came to where I was but didn’t approach the water. “These are definitely reeds,” I said, pulling one up out of the ground.

Collette’s brow furrowed.

“What is it?”

She glanced at the tree, then up at the sky, and then looked at the reeds. “Something doesn’t seem right.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, approaching with the reed in hand.

“Zis part about ze moon,” she said, showing me the note.

I read it again, then again.
Look to the moon, think to the reed, around the oak is the path you need.
“Are we too early? Should we have come at night?”

She shook her head. “I think we have zis wrong.”

“Things would be easier if we could use magick,” I said, sighing and dropping the reed to the ground.
Sorry,
I thought.

“Non, Magick would not make things easier. Zis is a riddle we must solve by ourselves.”

“A riddle… look to the moon, think to the reed.”

A frog croaked nearby and I heard a plop as it threw itself into the pond. The water rippled lightly, and the ripples seemed to point toward the withered oak. My eyes followed a crooked stump into the grey sky, and suddenly it came to me.

“Rede!” I said, causing Collette to jerk a little. “Not reed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean R E D E as in the Wiccan Rede, not R E E D as in the plant. Is it possible you misunderstood him?”

“It is. He spoke, I wrote.”

“The Wiccan Rede,” I said, enjoying the trickle of excitement running through me. “I know it. Gods, I
lived
it.”

“How do you know ze Wiccan Rede is being referenced here?”

“
Deosil go by the waxing moon, chanting out the joyful tune. Widdershins go when the moon doth wane, and the werewolf howls by the dread wolfsbane
.”

Collette’s eyes widened. “Desoil is old language. It means clockwise.”

“And widdershins is anti-clockwise!”

“So… iz ze moon waxing or waning?”

“Fuck,” I said, looking up at the sky as we made our way back to the tree. “I don’t know. I know it’s a gibbous moon tonight, but I’m not sure if it’s growing or shrinking.”

“And I suspect we will only have one chance. If we get it wrong we will not be allowed entry.”

Waning.

I halted, spun around, and then looked at Collette. “Did you hear something?” I asked.

Collette shook her head.

Around I went again, eyes and ears peeled, searching, but heard only the whisper of the trees. More and more I was beginning to feel like I hadn’t heard anything at all, that the whisper hadn’t even been language; it had just been a feeling, an instinct given voice by my rational mind. Where the instinct had come from I didn’t know, but it was so total and urgent that I knew—without a doubt—to ignore it would have been a mistake.

I took Collette’s hand, stepped toward the withered oak with its crooked arms, and then walked around it anti-clockwise three times.

CHAPTER 13

Damien came awake like a cat in the dark. “Lily!” he screamed, hands thrusting outward as if to catch someone who was falling away from him, falling into a pit of smoldering Dark Fire. But as his heart slowed and his vision came to him in that gradual, sleepy way it does sometimes immediately after waking, he realized he was only reaching for a ghost. A ghost that didn’t look like Lily, but rather someone he thought he knew.

He ran his hands through his hair and felt the cold, clammy, wet feeling of sweat at the back of his neck. It was on his chest and shoulders too, and his pillow. It took him a moment to regain himself, but eventually his legs listened to his brain and he swung them out of bed. He sat there for a moment, with his elbows on his knees and his hands wrapped around the back of his head, waiting for the moment to pass, and then jerked up at the sound of someone banging frantically on his bedroom door.

His heart leapt into his throat again, but this time it wasn’t terror; only surprise. The moment passed. Damien stood, walked to the door, opened it, and Aaron Cooper spilled into the room like a rush of water.

“Aaron,” Damien said, “You scared the shit out of me, man. What is it?”

“She’s in trouble,” he said. “I know she’s in trouble.”

“Who? Amber?”

“Yes, fucking Amber! Who else?”

Aaron’s face had been the face of a man that hadn’t had much sleep when he walked through the door, but now it was turning red with the kind of anger that could turn the temperature up in a room.

“Okay, I need you to relax and tell me what happened,” Damien said, hands outstretched in front of him.

Aaron swallowed, paused, and said “I called her, or she called me. And when I picked up the phone I heard… something… on the other end of the line.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know.”

But Damien thought Aaron did know, or at least he suspected he knew. “I’m gonna get Frank,” Damien said.

“No,” Aaron said, “He isn’t in the house. I don’t think he came home last night.”

“Then you’re gonna have to tell me what you think you know.”

Aaron hesitated, thought, then closed his eyes and breathed a deep breath. Damien hadn’t seen the blackness of Aaron’s nails until now, nor had he noticed just how much they resembled little bits of razor-wire or seen how they drank in the dawn-light filtering in from the Eastern facing window. But he had noticed them now, and he saw how they shank before his very eyes and seemed to lose their edge of deadliness in a manner of seconds.

“I think Amber’s in danger,” Aaron said, “More than she knows. And maybe we’re all in danger too.”

“What kind of danger?” Damien asked. He became immediately aware that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Last night had been warm for an October eve and he had taken it off and thrown it over the chair by his desk before getting into bed. He reached for it now and slipped it on. It smelt like yesterday.

“You remember last year? Just before Chris—Yuletide?”

How could Damien have forgotten? December of last year was the month his relationship with Amber had ended, but it was also the month Aaron had firmly crossed the line between human and
not-human
. It had terrified him at first, the thought of being so close to a
werewolf—
a fucking
werewolf
. And he could feel the pinch of panic at the back of his throat even now, with Aaron in his bedroom, but he swallowed the fear down and nodded. “What about it?”

“One night, when Amber was… on the night I transformed… Amber had gone to see you after you had broken up, to talk about it. Well I, I was at home, and the same thing happened that night just before everything started to go haywire in my house.”

Damien didn’t really want to hear about that night, didn’t want to think about it, and didn’t want to imagine a world where his actions may have driven Amber into the arms of another man—although they probably had—but he was able to put himself aside for a moment, hopefully long enough to listen to what Aaron had to say.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Damien said.

“I was waiting,” Aaron continued, “And then she called me on the phone. Only when I picked up, it wasn’t her. It was… fuck, I couldn’t tell you what I heard. It wasn’t a voice, they were sounds. Screams, gargles, as if the person on the other side had the mic hooked up to a horror movie.”

When it looked like Aaron wasn’t going to continue speaking, Damien said, “What does that have to do with Amber right now? Or us?”

“The same thing happened last night. I… I was waiting for Amber to call and then I decided to call her, but before I could dial her number she called me. And what I heard on the other side of that line were the same damn sounds I heard that first night. Then I blacked out.”

“Blacked out?”

“It wasn’t sleep,” he said, “I know it wasn’t sleep because I’m tired as all hell right now and I’ve been down for over nine hours. I blacked the hell out, Damien.”

Damien thought long and hard for a moment. His brow furrowed and he brought his hand up to his mouth, then bit the nail on the index finger; a habit that went back to his high school days—one he thought he had kicked a long time ago.

“We have to get Frank,” Damien said, “And we have to get a message through to Amber. Have you tried her cell?”

“Yes I’ve tried it and I’m getting nothing. I left her a message to call me as soon as she’s able, but I don’t know if she will. Or if she can.”

“If she can? Of course she can.”

Aaron advanced on him and for a moment that same pinch of panic he had felt moments before turned into a tight knot almost constricting his ability to breathe. His muscles told him to back up and he did in a quick jerking motion. Aaron, sensing this, stopped, raised his hands in an ‘
I’m not going to hurt you’
kind of way, and said “The last time I heard that sound was during the time when a demon was trying to possess Amber. It cut her off from the world as best it could but she was here, and we could help her. How are we going to help her if we’re all the way on the other side of the God-damned Atlantic?”

Damien Colt sat back down on the bed and ran his hands through his hair. The sweat on the nape of his neck had come back.

CHAPTER 14

Circling the withered oak, with one hand lightly brushing against the bark and another hand firmly clasped with Collette’s, I started to feel like a little girl playing in the woods. It was as if Collette and I had been transformed into eight year old versions of ourselves; two little girls, hand in hand, one with fire-red hair, and one with hair as black as the darkest night, walking circles around a tree in the heart of an autumn-touched forest.

The girls knew the tree was special; haunted, magical, or living, it didn’t matter to them. What mattered was that the tree was somehow more than it appeared to be. Every shudder of its branches, every firefly twinkling in the air, every ant crawling along the bark; these weren’t just signs of life but intelligent life. It was as if the tree was somehow responsible for producing the sounds they could hear and the smells in the air; a tree that could influence the world around it.

And such a tree would undoubtedly be a portal to a different world. The girls knew if only they could say the right words or offer it the right tribute it would whisk them away to a land of enchantment where they could embark upon wonderful adventures. They would face down goblins and trolls, ride on the backs of dragons, and dance in gardens so full of life the garden itself would dance with them.

And when they were done, they would be home in time for supper.

But what if these girls knew the words? What if they knew what they had to do to open the portal, and they opened it without thinking? They would open the portal fully trusting, in the way children often do, that everything would turn out to be okay, that they would find their wonder and enchantment on the other side of the withered tree, that they would get their adventure, and that they would come home unscathed.

Sometimes I wished I had that bulwark against fear; that wall of faith—
innocence?
—that says “don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay.” But as one grows up the shield wears and breaks and you’re left with a logical mind that’s only too ready to accept fear. Then all you have is your mettle, but courage is fickle. One minute you’re sure of your actions, charging forth into the breach like a knight on a battlefield. But all it takes is a moment, an instant of contact with a withered old oak tree—when you feel just how very cold and firm the bark is, and you smell the abundant aroma of putrefied flesh, and the tree starts to feel almost like mummified skin under your fingertips—for your suit of armor to collapse around you until you’re left bare and vulnerable.