The Water Witch (34 page)

Taking that as a yes, I entered the bathroom. At one time it had been papered in a lovely water lily pattern, but now blossoms of mold bloomed over the water lilies and the paper hung in long strips like seaweed. Brass shell-shaped wall sconces clung to the walls like barnacles, their lightbulbs long burned out but now filled with flickering votive candles. Even the taps on the sink were shaped like shells.

I turned to the bathtub. Lorelei was stretched out beneath a froth of bubbles that sparkled in the flickering light. Her hair was piled high on her head in the same style as in the old
photograph. “You were wasting, weren’t you?” I asked. “That’s why you had to leave.”

She shrugged. “I suppose. I did feel tired all the time,” she said, blowing at the bubbles. “Taking care of a human baby is so much more work than laying eggs.”

“So why’d you come back?”

“To mate. It doesn’t work in Faerie. Even the humans who wander in are no good to us.”

“Humans wander in?”

“Occasionally. Where do you think people go when they go missing? Sure, some of them are lying in a ditch with their throats slit or living new lives under assumed names in Mexico, but
some
wander into Faerie. It happens all the time in the woods when the door opens on the solstice.”

I thought of the young men I’d seen with the undines in Faerie, of one in particular, a dark-haired man with sad eyes. “Did one happen to wander in about eighty years ago?”

Lorelei shrugged. “Time is different in Faerie. All I know is when it’s time to mate … Now that you mention it there was a sulky boy who kept begging to go back, but it’s not as easy to get back into this world as to get out of it.”

Except maybe tonight
.

“So, is that why you won’t leave? Because you have to mate?”

Lorelei laughed and stretched one bare, foam-flecked leg up to the ceiling, daintily pointing her toe. “Oh, I’ve done
that
already. One of those pretty Stewart boys was quite accommodating. No, the reason I won’t leave is this.” She reached into the water and pulled out a dappled green oval. At first I thought it was bar of soap, but then I noticed it was glowing.

“Is that an egg? You’ve laid …” I peered into the tub, through a patch of foam near Lorelei’s feet, and saw a pile of green-spotted eggs—and one gold one. An Aelvestone.

Lorelei shifted uneasily. “I should have laid them in the Undine, but those damned Stewarts warded the house. Poor things,” she said, looking at the eggs. “They’ll die if they don’t get into flowing freshwater soon.”

Lorelei was gazing at the egg cupped in her hand with the same expression on her face as she’d had in the photograph of her and baby Lura. She had loved Lura, but when she had begun to waste away she’d chosen to go back to Faerie. Perhaps that meant her love wasn’t a very deep kind, but who was I—who hadn’t been able to love Liam enough to make him human—to judge her? Frank didn’t believe she was responsible for the murders of the fishermen—and now neither did I.

“I want to offer you a deal,” I said.

She looked up, the flicker of interest in her moss green eyes making her look momentarily human.

T
wenty minutes later, we came downstairs, Lorelei dressed in a green silk gown embroidered with seed pearls that I suspected had been Lura’s wedding dress. I was carrying a canvas bag full of undine eggs. I called Lura in off the porch and told her what we planned to do. A fleeting look of sadness passed over her face when she realized her mother was planning to leave again, but she set her mouth and took the bag from me.

“I’ll bring them to the headwaters,” Lura said.

“That’s near the door to Faerie,” I said. “I’ll walk that far with you.”

“Won’t the Stewarts want to accompany you, seeing as you’re the doorkeeper?”

“I’ll tell them to take Lorelei to the door.”

Lura looked back at her house. The living room floor was under six inches of water. Bits of glass and tin bobbed on the surface. The house groaned and creaked, its timbers cracking under the strain of the water. It didn’t look like it would last till morning, which—I noticed, glancing at the lightening sky in the east—was almost here.

“We have to hurry. I have to be at the door by sunrise.”

Mac and Angus were waiting for us at the edge of the tartan ward. “Lorelei has agreed to go with you,” I told them. “Lura and I are going to walk to the door ourselves.”

“You shouldn’t be alone in the woods right now. We’ve seen strange creatures about.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Lura said, spitting on the ground.

Angus looked reluctant, but he finally agreed. The other Stewarts had formed a circle around Lorelei. Though a series of hand motions they wove a tartan shawl that they cast over her shoulders. Lorelei adjusted it as she might a mink stole and linked her arm through Angus’s. “Let’s go, boys,” she said, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. She left without a backward glance for her daughter.

“I know,” Lura said as the procession disappeared into the woods. “She’s shallow and flighty, but she’s my mother. I still remember her singing to me when I was small.”

“I think she’s doing the best that she can,” I said. As we took our own path into the woods, I hoped the Stewarts could handle her.

Lura and I followed the Undine into the woods. At first neither of us talked, the rain and the rushing water making it difficult to hear anything we would have said anyway. Then the rain slackened to a drizzle. We walked in slushy silence a while longer, the sound of our boots sucking mud the only noise in the forest.

“Birds are quiet this morning,” Lura commented. “They know something’s wrong.”

A little while later she picked berries from a bush, popped
one in her mouth and handed me one. “Bilberry. Good for night vision.”

I put it in my mouth with some trepidation, but it was delicious—and familiar. I recalled the vision I’d shared with Raspberry of the taste of berries and wondered if Lura had fed them to her sister undines. A bit farther on she plucked a red flower from the ground, handed me the flower, and popped the leaves in her mouth. “Red clover leaves are good for my rheumatism, which’ll be acting up after all this rain.” She continued plucking plants from the trees and ground and telling me what they were and what they were good for.

“Where did you learn so much about plants?” I asked.

“My father spent a lot of time in these woods … His mother was a witch. Here, you’d better take this.” She handed me a white-crowned flower and stuck one behind her ear. “Yarrow,” she explained. “Provides magical protection.”

Now that it was lighter I could see into the woods on either side of us. Creatures lurked within the white mist rising from the wet ground: cloven-footed satyrs, slim boys with antlers branching from their heads, small furry creatures with wide flat tails and long sharp teeth …

“Are those …?”

“Zombie beavers,” Lura said. “They’re coming up with the floodwater. We’d better hurry. They’d like nothing better than to eat these eggs—and us.”

We increased our pace but a hundred-year-old woman can go only so fast, even if she is part undine and part witch. The fat, bristly beavers scurried along the ground with surprising speed, gnashing their teeth and chattering back and forth to one another. Lura was chattering to herself as well. I was afraid she’d come unhinged, and who could blame her? The chattering noise itself was enough to drive one mad, let alone
the sight of those sharp teeth and long claws. I was already terrified when a huge pine tree crashed to the ground inches in front of us.

“Go over it!” Lura screamed, grabbing my arm and scrambling over the huge tree. “They want us to run into the woods.”

Or they wanted us to get tangled in the pine branches. The sleeve of my rain jacket snagged on a branch. I turned to free it and found myself nose to nose with one of the sharp-toothed predators. It snapped at me, its fangs missing my face by a centimeter as I pulled backward, peeling myself out of my jacket and landing on the ground. I scrambled to my feet and found myself next to Lura, trapped in a small square, hemmed in by downed trees. Teeth-gnashing beavers surrounded us.

Lura knelt and picked up two thick branches that had fallen off the trees and handed me one. She muttered a string of indecipherable words and the ends of both sticks burst into flames. She thrust the burning stick into the beavers’ faces. They fell back, chittering. I swept my stick in a wide arc, singeing the whiskers off two of them. Lura muttered another series of strange words and a forked tongue of lightning split the sky and hit one of the beavers. When they saw their fallen comrade, the rest of the beavers scampered into the woods. Lura muttered a few more words and a sudden downpour extinguished our pine torches. “That should be the end of them for a while. They hate fire.”

I helped Lura climb over a tree. She seemed suddenly frail and worn out, as if using magic had drained her. I offered to carry the bag of eggs, but she refused. “They’re my sisters,” she said.

We walked the rest of the way in silence. When I first met Lura, I’d thought she was a sad, pathetic recluse, but seeing her in these woods where she’d spent her entire life, I realized that she’d had a full life. She knew every inch of these woods
and the creatures in it, whether they belonged to this world or Faerie. She’d watched over her sisters as they grew, protecting them against predators and bringing them treats to eat. She might have learned her first magic from her father, but she’d honed her craft in these woods. Looking at Lura and the way she regarded each tree and plant and creature, I saw that she loved the forest.

“Here,” Lura said when we reached a fern-circled clearing. “This is the source of the Undine.” I followed her through the ferns to a large granite boulder and knelt beside her. It was the spring that Soheila, Liz, and Diana had led me to almost a week ago.

Lura sat back on her heels and looked around the glade. “This is where I first met Quincy,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

She parted the ferns growing around the boulder and disclosed a heart carved into the rock with intertwined initials—
Q
and
L
—in the same design as the one carved into the bench at Lura’s house. “We met here every day that summer. It’s where he asked me to marry him.”

“It’s a beautiful spot,” I said, admiring once again the spill of water from basin to basin, the wild irises fringing each pool, and the yellow water lilies floating on their surfaces. Weeping willow branches fell in a curtain over one of the pools. It looked like the spot in Faerie where I’d made love to Liam. My own eyes filled with tears at the memory and my heart with an unbearable sense of loss. Liam was really and truly gone. I was glad he hadn’t come back as Duncan, but the fact remained he hadn’t come back at all. It was time to let Liam go once and for all.

As I splashed cold water on my face to wash away the tears, I felt one more coil of the wards dissolve and the beat of my heart, slow and steady. I repeated the words of the spell that
bound me to the door.
“Quam cor mea aperit, tam ianua aperit.”
I could feel my heart beating up against the last cold link of the wards. They were almost all gone. I reached into the water again and met a pair of dark brown eyes. I froze, looking into a man’s face. I sat back on my heels and looked over at Lura. She was also washing her face in the water. With each splash, her skin looked smoother and firmer. She trickled a handful of water over her head and her gray hair turned to gold.

I looked back at the face in the water. Quincy Morris was trapped below the surface studying me. But I wasn’t who he was looking for. I reached into my pocket and found the stone I’d stuck in there earlier. The fairy stone, as my father had called it when he gave it to me. It was white with a hole in the middle. I slipped it over my ring finger and, holding my hand above the water, said, simply, “
Open
.”

Nothing happened. The power inside me writhed, trying to break free, but it still was held in place by the last of the wards. Then I recalled the Aelvestone in my pocket. I took it out and held it over the water. Concentric circles appeared on the surface.

I dropped the stone in the water. The circles spun in a spiral, tunneling deep into the pool, opening up a funnel. Then a head broke the surface and a man rose up from the water. Hearing the disturbance of water, Lura looked up … and gasped.

“Quincy?” she said, all the years since she’d seen her lover falling away from her face like water rolling off a stone.

The dark-haired man—the same one I’d seen on the shores of Faerie—walked toward her, his face radiant. “Lura!” he cried, falling to his knees beside her and gathering her into his arms. “I came here on the morning of our wedding day to pick flowers for you and I fell into the pool. I woke up in a
strange place. I’ve been trying ever since to get back to you.” He held her at arms’ length and looked into her face. “I was afraid it would have been too long. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, but it must not have been any time at all. You look just the same.”

Lura caught her breath and covered her mouth with her hand, then she looked at me, eyes wide. The enchantment of the spring water would end soon. I guessed that it wasn’t vanity that made Lura fear the transformation, but the pain it would cause Quincy to know how long he’d really been away.

“You can both go back to Faerie,” I said. “The passage is still open.” I pointed to the still-swirling water.

Lura and Quincy looked at each other. “I probably wouldn’t know how to live in this world anymore,” he said. “Would you mind?”

“No,” Lura said, “I wouldn’t mind at all. There’s nothing to keep me here, only …” She touched the bag beside her and looked at me.

“I’ll put them in the water,” I told her, “and watch after them.” I recalled that they wouldn’t hatch for one hundred years. “As long as I can, and then I’ll find someone else to watch them.”

Lura gave me a beatific smile of gratitude. She had been beautiful. She
was
beautiful. She stood and held her hand out to Quincy. He took her hand and stood beside her. They looked as they might have on their wedding day. There were even flowers in Lura’s hair. The yarrow she’d stuck behind her ear had grown into a wreath. And he was wearing a tartan mantle of the same plaid as the shirt he’d worn eighty years ago—the same plaid that Lura had been wearing for eighty years in his memory.