The Water Witch (29 page)

“Let me guess, another intervention? What have I done wrong this time?”

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Liz said, twisting her hands nervously. “It’s all my fault …”

“No, it’s mine,” Ann said, laying a hand on Liz’s arm.

“We need to talk,” Soheila said. “Can we come in … or …” She lifted her head and sniffed. The scent of fresh-baked cornbread had wafted out from the kitchen, but I had an idea that Soheila was scenting the man who had baked it. “Do you have company?”

“No … yes … I mean, Bill is here … He’s my handyman …” The minute I said it I could have bit my tongue. I heard a door open and close in the back of the house. Had he heard me? “Come in, I’ll be right back.”

I ran back to the kitchen and found it empty. The pan of corn bread rested on a folded dishcloth next to a pot of tea, all laid out on a tray. There was a note beside it.
It looks like you’re busy and I did have some other things to do. I’ll be back later to check on your basement. Yours, Bill
.

“Crap, crap, crap,” I muttered as I went back into the library carrying the tray.

“I can understand why you’re upset,” Liz said, taking the tray from me and placing it on the coffee table. “But first let me tell you the one piece of good news. We’ve located Lorelei. She’s at Lura’s house. The bad news is that Lura won’t let
anyone in, but we’ve placed a guard around the house so at least she won’t hurt anyone.”

“That
is
good news,” I said, “so why do you all look so grim?”

Soheila and Liz looked at Ann.

“Duncan Laird,” Ann said, lowering her eyes. “He came to my house the morning after our first circle and told me he wanted me to recommend him as your tutor. Of course I said no, but then he said he had enough Aelvesgold to make Jessica well forever. He told me he didn’t want to hurt you. He said he was your incubus and he only needed some time with you …” She raised bloodshot, hooded eyes to my face and gasped. “Did he do that to you, dear?” She raised a trembling hand to my face.

“Duncan Laird did this when I used a spell last night to unmask him. Are you really sure that he’s the incubus? I didn’t know incubi had claws.”

Soheila picked up a book from the coffee table, flipped through it, and laid it back down open to a full-color insert. The picture that leered up from among the teacups was Fuseli’s
Nightmare
—a pointy-eared imp with long claws leering evilly as he crouched on the breast of a swooning maiden. Was that the face that would have greeted me if Duncan hadn’t struck me? Was that why he had lashed out—so I wouldn’t see him like that?

Ann craned her neck to look over at the picture and shuddered. “Is that what they look like in their natural state?”

“We have no
natural
state,” Soheila answered. “Incubi and succubi feed on human desire. We take the shapes humans imagine for us. We become their dreams … or their nightmares. I tried to explain that to Angus when he went up against your incubus to destroy him …” Soheila’s eyes glistened when she mentioned Angus’s name.

“You don’t have to talk about it if it’s too painful,” I told her. It wasn’t just Soheila I wanted to spare; I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how the creature I’d once slept with had killed the man Soheila loved.

“I think you should know,” Soheila said, wrapping her hands around the mug of tea Liz handed to her. “After Angus saw his sister destroyed by the incubus, he spent years studying the lore, but in the end it wasn’t the stories about incubi that helped him. It was one of the old Scottish ballads that gave him what he needed.”

“A Scottish ballad?” I asked, feeling a strange chill. “Was it ‘Tam Lin’?”

“How did you know?” Soheila asked, clearly surprised.

“My parents told me the story when I was little …” I stopped, trying to recall something on the edge of my memory. Some other time when I’d heard the ballad recently, but the thin filament of memory had slipped away.

I continued, “I thought about the story last night. How Jennet has to hold on to Tam Lin while he becomes a snake, a lion, and a burning brand, and how that was what I’d have to do … Only I didn’t. I let go.” I heard my voice wobble on the last words. Liz patted my arm and Ann took out a tissue from her purse and handed it to me.

“How could you help but let go when he lashed out at you? That’s what Angus discovered. He believed that if he tracked the incubus down to where he had been created and waited for him on Halloween night, as Jennet does, he could turn him into a human being and then kill him. But when he grabbed hold of him he became the one thing that Angus couldn’t fight—his sister, Katy.”

“Oh,” I said, “that must have been awful.”

“It was. He was so shocked that he let her go—and then the incubus became a horrible beast with claws that struck
him down. Angus lived through the attack and came back to me, but he was already dying from the poison. I tried to save him, but I couldn’t.” Soheila touched the marks on my face. “But I don’t sense any poison in you.”

“There was,” I said, blushing as I remembered how Bill had rubbed my skin to release the poison. How had he known how to do that? “But it passed out of my system.”

“You were lucky,” Soheila said. “Angus died within a month and in great pain. But the fact remains that Duncan Laird attacked you.”

“And,”
Liz added in a despairing wail, “all this time that we thought he was helping you gain power, he’s probably been draining you. You haven’t gotten rid of your wards, have you?”

“Not completely,” I admitted, feeling the coils lash inside me at the question. “But they’ve been loosened. I think they’re almost gone. And,” I added, remembering the footnote I’d read in Wheelock last night, “I think I’ve found a way to keep the Grove from closing the door.”

“Good,” Liz said. “We may need it. The Grove and IMP have announced a schedule change. The meeting is today.”

T
oday?” I cried, touching the marks on my face. “But we need more time!” I still had to study the spell in Wheelock and I needed time for the loosened wards inside me to dissolve.

“Well, we don’t have it,” Liz said briskly, glancing at her watch. “I should be there already. Ann and I will go ahead and let Soheila help you with those scratches. You can’t go looking like that.”

Liz got to her feet and smoothed her skirt. I noticed now that she was dressed in her best tweed Chanel suit, ready to face her opponents in pearls and vintage couture. “This schedule change is meant to unnerve us. We mustn’t let it.”

Liz and Ann went on ahead while Soheila stayed behind to help me apply makeup over the marks on my face. She used a touch of Aelvesgold and said a spell that she told me her sisters used to cover wrinkles. “Better than Botox,” she assured me.

I dressed carefully in my best interview suit. For luck, I pinned on a brooch my father had given me. It was fashioned out of two interlocking hearts—a Scottish design called a luckenbooth brooch. Downstairs, I tossed Wheelock in my
leather briefcase. When Soheila gave me a look, I told her about the footnote.

“If the icon has a door on it, that means only a doorkeeper can read the spell,” she said. “Be careful, though. Those correlative spells can be very dangerous.”

So everyone kept telling me.

We walked together to Beckwith Hall, where the meeting was being held. It had stopped raining. The day had turned muggy and hot, the air holding a sultry threat of another downpour.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” I said as we walked. “If Duncan is really the incubus, why don’t I feel more attracted to him? Whenever he tried to kiss me, I pushed him away.”

“Hm.” Soheila tilted her head and looked at me, then touched her hand to my arm. “Maybe the wards are keeping him away.”

“They didn’t the first time,” I argued, “with Liam.”

Soheila shrugged and hugged her arms around herself. “Maybe you are becoming stronger. A strong human can resist the pull of an incubus.”

I told her then about the dreams.

“Oh,” she said, “but still, you resisted him in the flesh and …” She slanted her eyes toward me and the corner of her mouth tugged into a half smile. “You slept with someone else, didn’t you? That fellow Bill?”

I blushed, but there was no point lying to Soheila. “Yes. It sort of just happened. He was there after I was attacked and was so sweet.”

“It’s good you’ve moved on to someone else. It means you’re breaking the hold the incubus had on you. It’s better this way. There’s no future in a relationship between a human and one of his kind.”

I had a feeling we weren’t talking about me anymore. “Frank would miss you if you went, Soheila. We all would, but Frank most of all.”

Soheila nodded, her face a mask of pain. “I’d miss him, too,” she admitted. “But it’s because of him I must go. If I were trapped here without access to Aelvesgold eventually I would be driven to feed on humans. If I ever hurt him …” She shivered despite the warmth of the day. “I’d never forgive myself.”

She forced a grim smile and squeezed my arm. As she turned to continue walking, I wondered if that’s how Duncan had felt after he struck me—and if that’s why he ran away.

We found a small gathering outside the lecture hall. The only sign indicating the event read
SYMPOSIUM ON THE DIALOGUE OF DISCOURSE DETERMINED BY THE DEBATABLE DEXTERITY OF DYNAMIC DISSENT
. No doubt it was boring and intimidating (not to mention alliterative) enough to drive away any laypeople. Caspar Van der Aart from earth sciences was talking to Joan Ryan from chemistry, and also some people from town—Dory Browne and two of her cousins and the guy who ran the Greek restaurant, whom I always suspected might be a satyr. I noticed a number of the witches from the circle—Moondance and Leon Botwin and Tara Cohen-Miller—talking among themselves. When they saw us they stopped talking abruptly, as if they’d been talking about us. Moondance, wearing a T-shirt that read
I BELIEVE IN FAIRIES
, approached us.

“We heard the meeting had been moved up and wanted to show our support, but they’re not letting us in. They say it’s private. I say if this meeting is going to determine the fate of our friends and neighbors, we should be allowed to attend.”

“I agree completely,” I said, glad for once to be on the right side of her belligerence. “Let’s see what we can do.”

One of Adelaide’s blond minions was stationed just inside the door to the lecture hall. Soheila strode toward him, but the second her toe crossed the threshold she shrieked and fell to the floor. I knelt quickly beside her to see what was wrong … and recoiled in shock. Her arm was spidered with a pattern like tree branches. As I watched they broke through her skin and wrapped themselves around her slender forearm and wrist, growing thicker and rougher. Bark formed over their surface and leaves sprouted. A tree branch was growing out of Soheila’s arm. I reached forward and touched it gingerly. Soheila winced.

“My God, that’s horrible. How can we get rid of it?” I looked up at the impassive face of the fair-haired man.

“The branch will recede in a few minutes as long as she doesn’t commit any more infractions,” he said.

“She only tried to walk through a door—a door on
our
campus! She works here, for heaven’s sake! This is outrageous!”

“We sent an email out this morning specifying that no demons would be allowed in the meeting, unless specifically summoned. We can’t have them influencing the proceedings.”

“And yet the proceedings will decide our fate,” a gruff voice called out from the circle of onlookers. Recognizing it, I got up from Soheila’s side and eagerly peered through the crowd as it parted to let one large, flannel-shirted man through.

“Brock!” I cried, so glad to see him up and looking well that I threw my arms around him. A red welt appeared on his face, always a sign he was embarrassed. I unwound my arms from him and stepped back. Brock gave me a wistful smile, but when he raised his head to look at the fair-haired guard,
an ugly red stain spread across his face and his brows knitted together. “My family has lived in Fairwick for more than a hundred years. You can’t force us to leave.”

“No one is being forced to do anything.”

The soft but precise voice came from behind the blond man. I saw the smooth silver chignon first and then smelled Chanel No. 5, a scent that always sent a chill down my spine.

“Adelaide,” I said, greeting my grandmother by her first name, mostly because I knew it would annoy her. “Why can’t Brock and Soheila attend the meeting? Brock’s family has watched over the woods and protected Fairwick for more than a century. Soheila
teaches
here. It’s hardly fair to exclude them from a meeting deciding their fate.”

“We’ve provided a video simulcast,” Adelaide said, pointing to two flat-screen TVs mounted on the lobby walls. “You are all welcome to stay out here and listen. But we can’t have any demons who are capable of magically influencing the proceedings inside. It’s a simple precaution.”

“Brock’s not a demon!” I said. “He’s a Norse divinity! And Dory!” I cried, pointing at my friend, who was wearing a floral skirt, a yellow sweater set, yellow espadrilles, and carrying a quilted handbag. “She’s a brownie. What could be more harmless than a brownie?”

Adelaide gave Dory a withering look. “Brownies are one step away from boggarts. Do you know why brownies don’t like to be thanked?”

This was something I’d always wondered about. Dory and her cousin brownies were always doing good deeds, but they did hate being thanked for them. “I assume it’s because they’re modest,” I answered.

Adelaide laughed. “Shall I tell her?” she asked Dory, whose pink cheeks had gone pale.

“No, let me,” Dory said, turning to me. “Many, many
years ago a brownie did a favor for a human being, but the human didn’t thank him. The brownie got so angry that he … well, he killed him.”

“And ate him,” Adelaide added.

“Yes, ate him. The brownies were in danger of being thrown out of this world. In atonement we agreed to do favors and services without benefit of thanks. Every time we’re thanked, we lose a step toward that atonement.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to imagine one of the brownies
eating
someone. “Well, at least they’re
trying
to make up for their wrongdoings …” I gave Dory a reassuring look. Brock put his arm around her.