Joy of Witchcraft (19 page)

I wasted a moment, wishing Neko were with us to bolster my fading energy. But he had his own mission—procuring clothes and groceries for all three of us, everything we needed to start life anew. After one more steadying breath, I touched my fingertips to my forehead, my throat, and my heart.

I wasn’t working a spell, not precisely. Instead, I spread my fingers wide, offering up my right palm as if someone were reading my lifeline. Slowly, cautiously, I gathered my thoughts, drawing them into a shimmering golden ball. As I breathed, the light grew on my palm, becoming brighter, firmer, a tiny sun nearly bursting with potential.

The sphere was hard but yielding, like skin stretched over a pregnant woman’s belly. It pressed against my palm as if it had physical weight. The world around me shrank, thinning and disappearing until everything was the ball. Everything was the power. Everything was the light.

Not everything, though. Because
I
still existed. And a tiny corner of my brain knew that David still existed, that he was sheltering me with his body, ready to protect me against anything that would do me harm.

I measured the energy cradled in my palm, and I offered up a quick prayer to Hecate that it would be enough. In response, the ball flashed brighter, amplifying my bound power, doubling, tripling the force. Before I could lose the balance, I stabbed at the sphere with one Word, a single thought: “Display!”

The energy exploded, hurtling away as if I’d burst a balloon with an atomic ray gun. All of the power I’d poured into the ball shattered as it hit the air, dispersing into billions of microscopic droplets, filling the stairwell with the faintest fog visible only to witchy eyes.

I swayed for a moment, leaning hard against David’s knees, but when I regained my balance, I could see that my working had been successful. The fog wasn’t randomly distributed about the stairwell. It condensed in some places, growing thicker, like a forensic scientist’s fingerprint powder.

There, by the front door—the distinctive sweep of wards removed in haste. In the center of the foyer, a ghost of a binding spell, as if some former mistress of this home had tamped down the magical powers of all her arcane guests. Around the arch that led to the parlor, the memory of a peacemaking spell, encouraging good will and bonhomie among all who passed into the next room.

Those were all remnants of an older magic than I used, part of a formal social structure from the days when diners expected placecards, when gentlemen took brandy and cigars after supper while segregated ladies gossiped among themselves. They were phantoms of the past.

But my working revealed more than my predecessors’ social niceties. Because between the dusty wards and the dissipated binding spell and the crumbling peacemaking spell, there was something else. Something new. Something jangling against my senses.

Not just some
thing
. Some
things
, many of them. One here in the foyer. Another in the parlor. A third in the dining room. More in the kitchen, and up the stairs, in the bedrooms—hard knots of energy that drew in the dust of my display working like cancerous cells lighting up a medical display. They were tiny, small enough that I’d never sense them without the augmenting fog of the magic I’d worked.

I could see the closest one from where I sat, tucked in tight beneath the newel. Indeed, I couldn’t lean in for a closer look because David’s fingers had tightened into a vise. He wasn’t letting me get close to the nugget. He wasn’t going to risk my harming myself.

“What is it?” I breathed.

“A bug,” he said grimly. “And it hasn’t been there long. If I had to guess, I’d say Teresa had a long night, setting all of them. What? Do I sense seven more?”

I nodded and whispered, “What does it transmit? Is she listening to us now?”

David answered in his ordinary voice. “Not by sound. But she’s monitoring astral energy. She’ll recognize the Display Word. She’ll know she’s been discovered.”

“So do we leave them in place? Use them to feed her false information?”

He shook his head. “That wouldn’t work. She knows you’ve found her out, so she won’t trust anything she receives. It’s easy enough to destroy them.”

“How?” I braced myself, preparing to spend the energy to disinfect my new home.

“I can do it with warder’s magic,” David said. “And you can save your strength for the rest of this place. You’ll have to repeat the Display Word in each townhouse.”

I climbed to my feet, grabbing hold of the banister to steady myself when the room began to spin. “Easy,” David said, rising to join me. I took a deep breath, and the floor evened out beneath my feet.

“I’m okay,” I said. When David narrowed his eyes with skepticism, I set my hands on my hips. “I’m tired, and I’m hungry, and I hope there’s a working bathroom in this place, but I’m fine.” I shoved a tendril of defiance along the magical bond between us, emphasizing my words.

His set jaw told me he wasn’t happy, but he didn’t really have a choice. The best way through this thicket was forward, and that meant finding and scouring away every one of Teresa’s spying devices.

We started with the one in the foyer. David rested his hand on top of the banister, settling his palm on the newel post. “Wait,” I said, before he could work his magic. “Should you be the one doing this?”

“You think we should call Ghostbusters?”

I grimaced. “Teresa’s going to have power over you at some point. You shouldn’t upset her now. Let’s have one of the other warders wipe these out after Thanksgiving Break.”

David dismissed my concern with one tight shake of his head. “She gets me for one night. I won’t let her manage me through fear till then.”

Before I could acknowledge the logic of his words, David breathed in sharply, clenching his fist above the newel as if he were crushing a nettle. I
heard
his magic, an arpeggio like someone rolling knuckles over the black keys on a piano. The sound grated against my ears, unfamiliar, like Chinese opera.

Even as I registered the discord, I felt the crunch of shattered magic. A puff of golden dust exploded from David’s fist, mixing with steel-grey debris. The remnants of my Display Word floated away, and I knew Teresa’s bug had been destroyed.

I followed David into the parlor, listening and watching as he destroyed another bug. The dining room was next, then the kitchen. We headed upstairs to the bedrooms, zeroing in on each device.

No matter how many times I heard the musical notes, the sounds never became familiar. There was something
off
about them, something that jangled, separate and apart from my own witchy abilities. Warders’ magic had a different foundation from witches’ power, a completely different structure.

“Ready for the next section?” David asked, when he’d banished the device in the third-floor bedroom.

“Lead the way.”

We headed up to the attic, taking advantage of the passage between the houses, a hallway as immaculate as the rest of the home. The walls were finished with fine grass wallpaper.

In the next townhouse, I spoke my Display Word on the second-floor landing, giving my spell’s fine dust a better chance to reach every corner of the building. I knew what to expect this time—the remnants of witchcraft from generations past, the tight knots of power left by our current “benefactor.” David destroyed each bug, and we moved on to the next townhouse, and the next, and the next.

Blanton House was an architectural marvel. There were details in every room—ornate chandelier plaques in the centers of the ceilings, carvings of leaves and woodland creatures on the staircases, shimmering glass tiles set in the bathrooms. Mirrors surprised me in unlikely niches, and each townhouse had at least one floor-to-ceiling stained glass window that rippled with Tiffany glass. I felt as if I was walking through a museum, a gorgeous re-creation of a home suitable for Andrew Carnegie or J. Pierpont Morgan.

Room by room, we claimed Blanton House for our own. Floor by floor, we banished Teresa’s devices, guaranteeing that my magicarium could function in privacy, except for Pitt’s mole. House by house, we took possession of our new lives.

When we were through, I was exhausted, and David didn’t look much better off. Dark circles had bled beneath his eyes. The strong set of his jaw merely emphasized the hollows of his cheeks. We both needed food for grounding—simple food and clean water and an unbroken twenty-four hours to sleep.

My phone buzzed as I swayed on the landing. I dug it out by reflex, frowning when I saw Neko’s name. He’d likely felt the drain of the last few hours and was calling to check up on me.

“Hey,” I said, answering the phone. “You would not believe—”

“You’ve got to see this,” Neko interrupted.

“Where are you?”

“The farmhouse.”

“Is it the harpy?”

“Just get here. Fast.” I heard shouting in the background before he hung up.

With an order like that, neither David nor I was inclined to waste time driving from Washington up to Parkersville. Instead, David closed his arms around me, pulling me close to his chest. One moment, I was staring at sunshine streaming through century-old windows in a parlor that once belonged to the mistress of one of the most powerful men in Washington. The next, I was
nothing
; there was no time, no space, no place in the entire world for me to be, to breathe, to live.

I couldn’t be afraid because I wasn’t anything at all.

Then I was standing next to David on the gutted driveway of the farmhouse. Channels gouged the gravel, deep reminders of the firetrucks that had been there less than twenty-four hours before.

The stench hit me first, the reek of burned electrical wires, of melted plastic, of a thousand things that were never meant to go up in smoke. My eyes watered, and my throat closed around a series of convulsive coughs.

Neko stood at the edge of the charred ruins, his feet planted along the soot-stained line that had once been our front porch. The destruction behind him looked like it might collapse at any moment. The chimney still stood, outlining the edge of the living room, but the entire roof had crashed through to the basement.

“Neko, be careful!”

My familiar turned to me, a grin splitting his face. “Took you long enough.”

I shrugged off David’s restraining fingers and walked to the edge of the destruction. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to be shopping.”

Neko fluttered a hand against his hip pocket, presumably gesturing toward the credit card David had dangerously surrendered that morning. “I figured I should be fiscally responsible. I came back to see what I could salvage.”

“Since when are
you
fiscally responsible?”

Neko offered up a resigned smile. “Okay, I wasn’t all that worried about spending David’s money. I just had to see if it was as bad as it seemed last night. I couldn’t believe…”

His voice tightened, as if he’d inhaled too much of the fire’s sooty remains. He blinked hard, and my own eyes watered in response. “We’ll get through this,” I said. “It will take time, and we may never have a collection like—”

“But you do,” Neko interrupted.

“I do what?”

“You
do
have a collection.”

I stared at him as if he were speaking Ancient Phoenician.

“The vault,” Neko insisted. “It kept everything safe.”

I heard every syllable he uttered. I understood each individual word. But when I put them all together they were nonsense. “Neko,” I said. “Look at this.” I gestured to the utter destruction behind him. “You can’t even walk across there.”

“I don’t have to. I’ve been part of the Osgood collection for over a century. I know the feeling of all those things—the books, the wands, the runes and crystals. They’re there.”

I wanted his words to be true. I wanted everything to have survived. But the entire house was destroyed. The attic had fallen
through
the two floors.

My familiar danced back to my side. “Reach for it,” he said. “Go ahead. Extend your senses.”

Before I could protest, he took my hand and planted it on his shoulder. The magical strand between us flexed, and he opened his mirrored power. He was ready, waiting for me to draw on whatever reserves I needed.

I turned my head to look at David, fully expecting him to stop me from continuing. Instead, he jutted his chin toward the reeking mound. “You heard the man,” he said. “Try it.”

I closed my eyes and took a calming breath. My logical brain told me this was impossible. I’d taken classes on disasters in library school. I knew the impact of fire, of heat, of the water that followed after. I understood the vulnerability of parchment, of paper, of wood.

But no class in library school had discussed magical goods. And no disaster of this magnitude had ever taken into account a paranoid warder, a vault meant to keep out the most prying Coven Mother in the world, the most duplicitous Head Clerk of Hecate’s Court who had ever served the world of witches.

I sent a tendril of my power through the ruins.

And I leaped back in immediate reflex. The stinking destruction I could sense with my nose and eyes was nothing compared to the perception I gained with my powers. With magic, I could see the precise path the harpy had taken through the house. I could detect each burning feather she’d shed, every bitter downsweep of her wings. My powers let me create a map that crossed from collapsed room to collapsed room, doubling back through the ruins countless times.

Neko whined, and I realized my curled fingers had dug in like a harpy’s claws. I eased my grip on his shoulder, sending a whispered mental apology.

I braced myself, and I reached out again. This time, I consciously closed my mind to the route of the harpy’s destruction. I blocked out the echoes of psychic distress from the night before, the horror of my students, my own stunned disbelief as my home kindled like a well-aged Christmas tree.

Instead, I focused on items I knew were part of the Osgood collection. The crystals were as good a place to start as any; stone had
some
chance of coming through fire.