Serpent's Kiss: A Witches of East End Novel (21 page)

“Oh, my goodness, Mother, could she be a witch who was convicted and hanged?” exclaimed Ingrid.

Joanna thought of the girl and what she was wearing. “Yes, of course, it’s a witch who needs my help. One of us, a goddess,” added Joanna. “But where is she? Where would I find her and why hasn’t she regenerated? Why is she roaming around as a spirit? What’s wrong?”

They both spoke over each other. Joanna’s dragon-bone runes had been familiar to the wraith because she was one of them—and obviously she knew
The Poetic Edda
well. The grave with the blank headstone had very likely been her hanging as well as burial site. She was from the region. A convicted witch, excommunicated from the church, would be denied a proper burial on hallowed ground. A convicted witch was a dead one, hanged, buried in a shallow grave, usually with no headstone, often without even a record of death, leaving no traces, as if she’d never existed. However, someone had taken the care to provide a headstone for her, a bold and risky act, which suggested she had been loved.

“Dad said she was a girl, but how did he know that? We knew because you saw her,” Ingrid said excitedly.

“The Norn spread,” said Joanna. “She could have placed the runes another way. But she set them in clusters of three. Maybe Norman is guessing that she is one of the Norns since they’re female.”

“The girl said, ‘Find me!’
Where
is what I want to know,” Joanna said.

Ingrid exhaled a lengthy sigh. Decoding messages from the dead was perhaps a fun pastime, but wherever this was leading was apt to be dangerous. “Earlier when I asked you about whether there were consequences to speaking with the dead, you started to say yes, then got distracted.”

Joanna peered up at Ingrid, bunching her lips. “Getting information from the dead is a minor infraction. If you take something from that side, Helda takes something back from this side—quid pro quo.”

“Well, these quid pro quos might possibly add up if you don’t stop here, Mother.” Ingrid stared questioningly at Joanna. “Are you going to make contact again?”

“Oh, I am. This girl needs me. I have to help her. It’s my calling, darling. I just need to figure out where to find her. Worry not, my child!” This was the thing about the Beauchamp women, the common thread that ran through all of them, hubris: they were each stubborn in their own way and sometimes too confident for their own good.

Ingrid knew there would be no dissuading her mother, but she tried nonetheless. “But I am worried!”

“
Bah!
” said Joanna. “I will do a protection spell to counteract all that. It’s nothing. She smiled at her sweet, concerned daughter. “On a lighter note, your father is coming for Thanksgiving. Maybe we can get Freya to cook! Wouldn’t that be marvelous?”

Ingrid laughed. “Go ahead and deflect, Mother! You’re incorrigible.” Once again, Ingrid asked Joanna to promise to come to her for help, despite the fact that her mother had broken the last one. “Double promise this time!”

Joanna winked. “I double promise!”

A streak of lightning ripped through the blanket of gunmetal clouds, then big, fat, hard drops began to pelt the Mini. The windshield wipers thrummed as Freya tried to peer through the downpour lashing at the window while she gripped at the steering wheel. Along the sides of the small road, cattails and reeds swayed wildly in the squall. It was nasty out there—cold, windy, and now this heavy rain. She pulled into the lot of the Ucky Star and put on the navy slicker she kept in the backseat. She tugged the hood over her pouf of red hair that became irritatingly static during a storm, grabbed the shopping bag of food on the passenger seat, then made a mad dash toward Freddie’s door, splashed by the sheet of water cascading down from the walkway above. The place looked like a sinking ship.

Freddie let her in. The flimsy walls and windows rattled in the wind, and she heard a
drip, drip, drip
in the bathroom. A leak like that would drive her bonkers. Freddie took the shopping bag and helped her take off the rain slicker, then placed it on a hook by the door. He was in jeans and a turtleneck, a blanket slung over his shoulders. The heaters didn’t have much effect, and the room’s scent carried a tinge of mildew. It was extremely humid in here.

“Thanks for the food, Freya. I really couldn’t do all this holing up without you.” He came in for a hug, but she didn’t see it, eluding his grasp as she wandered over to the desk.

“I can’t stay long. Just here to check up on you. See what’s going on, what you’ve been up to.”
All this holing up
, she thought skeptically, picking up a pen on the desk, then throwing it back on the pad. It did look tidier. She gave him that. “So you’ve just been
holing
up.”

“Yeah … exactly,” he said, nervously picking at his fingernails. He seemed agitated, as if he wanted to say something more but decided not to. “What about you?” he said, his words coming out in a big rush. “Has Killian said anything to you … anything that might help me?”

“No! Of course not!” Freya said, suddenly suspicious.

They stared at each other, as if they were trying to get a read, attune their twin senses, but each came up against a wall.

Freddie shrugged. “Anyway, it’s not like I can leave. You know that, Freya. I can’t risk the Valkyries finding me. Until I know what to do, I absolutely cannot set foot outside this room.”

So her brother was blatantly lying to her. She had unmistakably spied him in the alley behind the North Inn. She had never known him to lie, not to her. It wasn’t like Freddie to tell a fib; he was too sincere, as earnest as the sun. Although lately, he’d been more of a mercurial twin than a bright and constant one. And what if she were wrong? What if this weren’t Freddie at all? She thought of Bran and his deception.

“What’s wrong, Freya?” Freddie moved toward her, but she began to back away.

“Nothing’s wrong, Freddie. I’m just in a hurry.” She had turned around and was already collecting her rain slicker from the hook. “I have to open the bar. I just wanted to say a quick hi and drop off that food.” She was thinking of her last moments with Loki. Could he have returned? Might this be him in another disguise? Had she been deceived again?

When she had fallen for Loki’s ploy and their love was consummated, he was bound to her, obliged to obey her forever. She had made him give her the ring that allowed him to move between worlds, then return through the hole inside the
Yggdrasil
, the Tree of Life that also connected all the worlds from whence he had come. But before he had slipped back into
Yggdrasil
, he had muttered something in a language she didn’t understand. Had he said he would return then? Perhaps Freya would be stuck with Loki forever, the god of mischief chasing her throughout eternity, the albatross that never let her rest. “
You are more like me than you think, dear Freya
.” Had he returned as her twin to prove that to her this time?

She reached for the slicker and felt her arms being clasped. Freddie—or Loki—swung her around. Their eyes locked. If she looked hard enough would she see that unscrupulous soul peering through these large green eyes? Instead she saw her reflection, and Freddie let go of her.

“What’s gotten into you, Freya?”

Was he trying to manipulate her, tug at her heartstrings? Loki knew her well. He knew how strong her love was for Freddie.

“I’m sorry. The storm has made me jumpy, and I really have to get to work,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you sure you haven’t found anything? Nothing? Nothing at all to make you think that your little brother might be right? That there might be something about Killian that you’re not telling me?”

“God, Freddie, I told you already. I haven’t!” She certainly wasn’t about to tell him—whoever he was—about the trident mark on Killian’s back. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore, only that she needed to get out of there.

“I think there’s a forest and houses above maybe?” Kelda crouched to tie the laces of her combat boots. She had permanently appropriated Freya’s black leather mask and looked up at Ingrid through it.

They were up in the attic, and Ingrid had passed around the amnesia antidote Freya had made for her, and now she and the pixies were waiting for it to take effect.

“Does that ring a bell for anyone else?” asked Ingrid. “Anyone?” She held her wand in one hand and tapped it against her palm. Actually, she felt a bit like a schoolmarm, the wand a ruler, the pixies gathered around, staring at her with too much reverence. Well, except for Sven, always the loner, presently sprawled on his bed.

“I think it starts with an
A
,” said Irdick. “But it makes my head hurt to think about it.”

“What starts with an
A
?” asked Ingrid.

“The place where we’re from starts with an
A
, Erda,” Sven grumbled from where he lay, an arm swung over his eyes. He hadn’t joined them, claiming it made his body too achy thinking about any of it, but Ingrid suspected he was hungover.

“Okay, okay, that’s great!” said Ingrid. “We know you can’t use money, that the name of the place starts with an
A
, and you live in trees?”

“It’s a c-c-c-city,” said Val. The front of his Mohawk swooped over an eye.

“There are noises below, other pixies working,” said Irdick. “
I think
… Ouch!” He put a hand to his forehead.

Ingrid scratched at her head with her wand. “I’m confused.”

Nyph came over to Ingrid and tugged at her sleeve. “This antidote isn’t working, Erda.”

Ingrid started with a sudden realization. “How do you know my name is Erda? How do you know my ancient name?”

Nyph pushed her silky brown hair out of her face and shrugged. “I don’t feel well,” she said.

“What else?” Ingrid asked, scanning their sharp little faces that stared blankly back at her. This potion of Freya’s was clearly not effective, and if anything it was making the pixies ill.

Now that Joanna was certain the wraith was a dead witch, one whose features recalled Johannes Vermeer’s
The Milkmaid
, she decided to use that as a jumping-off point. On the bookshelf in her study, she looked for her book on golden age Dutch painters, where she knew she would find the painting in question. She opened it to the picture, then gazed at the oil on canvas: the arresting touches of cornflower blue in the cloth that draped the edge of the table and the belt of the milkmaid’s apron, illuminated by sunlight pouring from a window.

She glanced out at the Atlantic. It was an unusually bright and warm November day, white ripples undulating on the calm surface, all the way to Gardiners Island. It was too cold to garden and Joanna turned back to her work.

The book cited that the exact date of the painting’s origin was unknown but placed it at circa 1658. The witch had been dressed in seventeenth-century clothing, but the painting perhaps helped narrow down an approximate time frame.

The settlers had brought the styles of the Continent to the Americas. Still, there were deviations between the wraith’s style of dress and the milkmaid’s. The fabrics of the wraith’s clothing were a palette of somber colors. Her dress, modest in style, covered her nearly completely, which Joanna knew had nothing to do with weather: her hair hidden by the cap, the collar of the blouse beneath her bodice tightly encircling the base of her throat, her sleeves reaching to the wrists (unlike the milkmaid’s, which were pushed above the elbows), and her skirt falling past her feet. Any hint of flesh besides face and neck, or parts of the body that might be deemed sensual (chest, cleavage, ankles, or feet) were cloaked. Joanna was familiar with this strict and austere dress code. This girl had been living among English Puritans, just as the Beauchamps had once themselves. The seventeenth-century settlers of Long Island were of the same stock and breed as those who had driven her girls to their nooses at Gallows Hill in Salem.

Joanna gleaned that the girl was about eighteen years of age, of lower station, suggested by the plainness of her dress—a servant or farm woman, the latter common on the east end of Long Island, a region whose economy thrived on sheep, agriculture, and whaling. Perhaps she was married. If she were and because of her social rank, she would go by the title goody (short for good wife or mistress of the house) rather than misses, which was afforded only to the elite. Joanna knew the history. She had lived it.