The Red Witch (Amber Lee Mysteries Book 6) (16 page)

Part of me wished I had listened to Frank and maybe set a no-sex rule with Aaron; “
no sex until this is all done, okay?
” But the heart wants, and the body obeys. That’s just the nature of being human. Logic doesn’t always come into the picture, and when it does come in it sometimes shows up at the worst time; when it’s too late.

“If I have a baby with him,” I finally said, “What’s going to happen?”

“It’s hard to say,” Luther said, “But when I was fighting her, I tasted her fear of you. I didn’t know who you were or what you looked like, only that you were real and that she was afraid of you. Her soul was laid bare to me for the briefest of instants, but an instant is all it took for me to see what I needed to see.”

“And what you saw sent you running,” Collette said.

“Wouldn’t you run too? She knew she wouldn’t die at my hand. Why should I have even tried?”

“You made ze right decision in trying to escape, but hiding in here helps no one.”
“So what was I to do, then? Go after her again?”

An argument began. It didn’t rise like a crescendo, it just exploded. Collette was on the side of honor, telling him he should have found other witches to help him deal with this woman, who was obviously a threat. Meanwhile he was arguing that it was either his skin or hers, and he chose his. Neither of the two were wrong, and that was the sucky part.
What would I have done if I had been him?
I didn’t know. What I did know was that their voices were starting to melt into each other, and before long their individual intonations had merged to create a single monotonous drone to accompany the high C ringing loudly in the back of my head.

Somewhere in the cottage a clock cuckooed. I didn’t jump, but the sound caught my attention and somehow drove me deeper into my own thoughts. The moment of clarity that followed was like watching the thin orange line of light spread across the horizon with the rising of the sun, and watching the sky go from blue, to rose, to yellow. Suddenly, everything clicked into place.

Collette hadn’t brought us all the way here to listen to a story we had heard before. We had read the book I had taken from the priest the night of Aaron’s transformation. We knew the story maybe even better than Luther did, even if he had helped us understand its nuances a little better. No. She had brought us all the way here to
enlist
his help. Of course, I had no way of knowing this with any kind of logical certainty. It was just…

Instinct
.

“We need your help,” I said, cutting through their ethical argument.

Luther swallowed. He tugged at his waistcoat, looked at me, and said “I’m giving you my help.”

“No, you’re telling us more of what we already know.”

“You wanted to know what her weaknesses are, and I’ve told you what they are. You are. Your power, your blood, it’s what the witch both wants and fears most of all. What more do you want?”

“You,” Collette said, revealing her true purpose.

“You can’t have me,” Luther said, shrinking away into his cottage like a cat that had gotten fed up of being stroked and now wanted to go somewhere dark to hide, and maybe sleep. “Now I think you should leave.”

“Memento mori,” Collette said, taking a step toward him. “
Remember zat you have to die
. Zese are ze words by which all Necromancers live, non?”

Luther couldn’t deny it. I watched his lips press into a thin line and for a moment thought he was about to throw Magick at us. His fingers flexed and clenched, flexed and clenched, but he did nothing else. “I think you should leave,” he repeated.

“Do you know ze spell of trans-location?” Collette asked, ignoring him.

He narrowed his eyes. “I know of it.”

“Zen you know zat in order to use it one must have had contact with ze intended target.”

“Don’t.”

“You have had contact with her, and you have lived. Zis makes you unique.”

“I won’t.” Luther kept shrinking away from Collette, but she kept coming. Insisting with her eyes as much as her posture and her words.

I had heard of the spell of trans-location before—a spell that allows a witch to cross great distances in the blink of an eye, as long as she has something to anchor herself to—but I had always considered that kind of Magick to be way too far out of my league. Spells that broke the laws of reality in such a massively vulgar way weren’t the kinds of spells I wanted to be using.

And yet…

“You have to help us,” I said, standing, “I don’t want anyone else to die. If there’s a chance—even a little one—that we can get to her while she’s not expecting us, we have to try.”

“I won’t risk my life again for nothing,” he said, “I have built a perfectly comfortable pocket of space to live in and I aim to die old and cold, not at the hands of some devil-touched witch. I got away from her once, but it won’t happen again.”

“No,” Collette said, “It won’t. If you come upon her again she may well kill you. But if you help us, you will have ze Red Witch at your side. You will have Fate at your side.”

I caught Luther by the shoulders as he circled a column to get away from Collette, who now had the air of a dark cloud descending upon a man standing on a lonely road with no umbrella. “Luther,” I said, “If I have this child while she lives, she’s going to hunt it down and kill it, or worse, use it to kill others. I don’t want that kind of blood on my hands and neither do you.”

“I won’t have that blood on my hands; it’ll be on hers.”

“Our power is borrowed, Luther.” Collette said. “Our life is borrowed. And when we die, we will not become Whispers like Amber will. Zis is ze price we pay for our Magick.”

Whispers?
My brow furrowed and I turned around, searching for Collette’s eyes, but they were on Luther. I would not get an answer to my question right now.

“That’s not true,” Luther said. He was trembling. “Necromancers can become Whispers.”

“If zey give their lives selflessly.”

Collette paused, and suddenly the room fell silent. I could hear the ticking of the clock by the door, the fluttering of leaves caught on the faint breeze, and the steady drip-drop of water falling into a bucket somewhere. The moment seemed to hang, to stretch, until finally it snapped back into the continuum of time.

“Help us,” Collette said, “And if you die, you will join your ancestors. You will join ze Goddess.”

I wanted to get Collette to stop talking.
Don’t worry; if you die it’ll be alright! You’ll be with the Goddess! Well said, Collette. We’ll get his help like that for sure
! But Luther wasn’t denying the things she was saying, and he hadn’t laughed at her suggestion that, should he die, it would all be for the best. Was he considering it?

“And if I don’t?” Luther asked.

“Zen when she finds you—and she will—you will simply cease to be. Your story will never be told.”

“We can’t force you,” I said, “But if you
can
help us… then we need you more than anyone has ever needed anyone else.”

Luther’s eyes danced between mine and Collette’s. I could see the cogs in his mind churning, his logical side calculating the odds of success. Of survival. They weren’t high for any of us, but if what Collette said was true, and I had no reason to believe it wasn’t, then he was our conduit to Linezka; our only way of finding the asp in the sand and plucking it out of hiding with a single stroke.

The success of our mission—which had now become a suicide mission, admittedly, but I remained hopeful about our chances—rested firmly on Luther’s answer.

And it was a no.

CHAPTER 17

What if she’s not fine?

Frank’s thoughts ran around like weasels chasing each other in the dark. He didn’t want to—no, he couldn’t—believe Amber was in any trouble she couldn’t handle, but if that was true then why had he been puffing cigarettes this last hour like his life depended on it? He had been trying to quit for a long time; in many ways the cigarettes were a reminder of his old life, of his old, excessive ways. To triumph over cigarettes would be to say farewell to the old Frank. But the old Frank still had some fight in him, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

And maybe that was a good thing. Didn’t ex-junkies need some kind of way of coping with their new lifestyle? Maybe smoking was Frank’s way of coping, so it was at all possible that his inability to quit was his own internal defense system making sure Frank wouldn’t inadvertently cut the one thing keeping him from slipping back into his old ways.

So he smoked, and as he arrived at the house he took one last, deep drag before stubbing the cigarette out, flicking the butt to the wind, and opening the door.

Aaron and Damien were both there, in the kitchen, with a beer each in their hands. From the look of them neither had said a word in a while. It was as if they had been told a friend of theirs had just been killed in a terrible accident. But no one had been killed, not yet at least, and this caused Frank’s eyes to roll. He tutted and said “Oh for Christs’ sake.”

“What?” Damien asked.

Frank strolled into the house, unwound his scarf, and hung it on the back of the front door. When he slid his coat off and hooked it up over the scarf, he said, “Could you guys be more depressive?”

“Amber could be in trouble,” Aaron said, as if to justify his mood.

“Yes, maybe. But you’re both acting like she’s dead. If she were dead, don’t you think we’d know?”

Damien gave Aaron a glance, and then his eyes went to Frank. He nodded. “I think we would.”

“Then let’s get this show started and try to make contact with the Red Witch, shall we?”

Both men nodded and followed Frank up the stairs to the first floor, and then up the tiny ladder into the attic. The first thing Frank’s eyes went to was the cauldron. It had been almost a full year since Yule and they hadn’t yet moved it out of the attic like they said they were going to.
Even witches can be lazy,
he thought as he fully entered the room and stood upright.

The next thing his eyes went to was Amber’s altar. It wasn’t anything like Frank’s, which was a bleak, gothic thing, covered in crucifixes, bleeding Christ figurines, rosaries, and tall white candles that had melted almost to nubs. Amber subscribed to the Wiccan tradition, so her altar reflected her belief in the Horned God and the Goddess of the Moon. Frank, however, had seen the devil’s twisted, beautiful face, and in recent months his world-view had taken a turn for the Catholic so his altar reflected as much.

Amber’s altar took up an entire fifth of the attic space and was made up of a large, converted vanity set, a couple of end-tables placed next to each other, and all the dry plants, crystals, candles, and pentacles she could possibly have gotten her hands on. Many of her candles, most of which were every color except white, were scented, and since the window was kept closed throughout the entire day it meant that the attic would greet you with the warmth and fresh smell of a spring garden all year round.

What Frank was most interested in, though, was the tall mirror perched upon the vanity set.

He walked over to it, noting the empty space where Amber’s Book of Shadows once sat—she had taken it with her to Berlin—and sat on the stool. Damien and Aaron came in a few moments after, their combined footsteps thumping loudly on the wooden floorboards as they shuffled around to find a comfortable place to stand in.

“What are you going to do?” Aaron asked.

Frank stared at himself in the mirror and for a moment saw a gaunt, thin, pasty white skeleton of a man staring back at him. Leering. He would have jumped if he hadn’t recognized the reflection in the mirror and for a moment he found himself wondering if this really was what others saw when they looked at him. And if so, how was it that Michael—
Michael
, with his caramel skin, almond eyes, and
the dimples on his cheeks—liked him?

He shook his head and the cloud around his mind disappeared. “I’m going to contact Amber,” Frank said, “But I’m going to need your help.”

“Us?” Aaron asked.

Damien stepped toward the altar and stood nearby. He knew what it was Frank needed from him, but Aaron wasn’t a witch, and nothing about witchcraft ever came easily to a werewolf.
At least not that werewolf
.

“I need both of you to put your hands on my shoulders,” Frank said, “Aaron, right hand, left shoulder. Damien, left hand, right shoulder.”

Frank closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment to take in Amber’s essence. This wasn’t a Magickal thing, strictly speaking. It was simply a matter of sitting at the place Amber often sat, smelling the sage and the mint and the rosemary she often smelt, and allowing a moment for the space to accept him as an extension of Amber. Her brother in Magick.

“Alright,” he said still with his eyes closed, “Now I need you to both be very quiet. Don’t even breathe. Close your eyes, too.”

Aaron and Damien exchanged a look, and then they closed their eyes and started to take slow, inaudible breaths. Immediately Frank could feel prickling vibrations on his shoulders, but the difference in strength between them was as clear as night and day. If Damien was an idling hybrid engine, then Aaron was a V8 revving up in neutral. What Frank couldn’t understand was
why?