Weather Witch (17 page)

On horseback now, the Councilman dropped back to ride beside the wagon. Jordan tipped her chin up and looked away in defiance. She would prove she was no Witch. She would forgive them the indignities they had served her and might even be so gracious as to not mention it again in public.

Stevenson pressed his horse close to the wagon and smiled. “It won’t be long now,” he assured. “And you’ll be with your own kind. All will be
right as rain
,” he said, his tone mocking.

But beneath his slick smile she remembered the threat. If she could not be Made she would be made to disappear. And there was only one way to do that.

Murder.

Chapter Nine

I am he that walks with the tender and growing night …

—WALT WHITMAN

Philadelphia

The young man no longer stuck to the shadows, no longer waited until nightfall to work his magick—or
mischief,
as those Grounded would claim. He was tall and broad of shoulder with dark hair and gray eyes and a coolness about him that made people think of first frosts and snowfalls. And with good reason.

Because Marion Kruse was a coldhearted young man.

Truth be told, he wanted nothing more than to return to a simpler time. A time he didn’t wander the roads and towns doing small things to amuse himself and set others to wondering. He wanted nothing more than to be back at his mother’s feet, reading books about pirates and scoundrels that made her laugh and tell him and his brother to never grow up to be wicked—that goodness was its own reward. He wanted nothing more than to grow fat on Chloe’s generously proportioned biscuits and call her “nanny” again. Nothing more than to go fox hunting with his father and friends (even that frustrating pretty boy Rowen Burchette) and dance with an attractive girl.

He wanted nothing more than to go back to before he’d been Made.

But Marion had been taught that going back was nigh unto impossible.

For a few years after his escape he had drifted through the forests and along strange roadways, meeting people and learning more about them than he’d ever known before. Too often knowing more meant respecting them less. But over the years he kept drifting closer and closer to his home city of Philadelphia. Not intentionally, but one night he looked up at the stars and realized they were nearly in the exact position as those he’d watched from his bedchamber on the Hill.

He paused on the sidewalk by a window box filled with begonias. They were his mother’s favorite. So he moved on, glancing at the sky and the airships hanging there, big glass-bottomed airboats fat as fruit in fall. He lifted his face to better view the shadowy bellies of the ships overhead and wondered how many were infested with pirates—or respected captains with a pirate’s worldview. The airships were modern ones with wings, rudders, and a large balloon keeping them aloft even when their Weather Witch of a Conductor could not. They were the stuff of myths and legends.

Like his kind had been once.

Funny how magick and myth became reality so readily. He grunted, looking back at the begonias.

He wouldn’t harm them.

But roses …

There were bushes of them in the next yard, bold blossoms so big they nodded on thorny canes. Nearly perfect, blooms wide to drink in summer’s sun. The gate and delicately crafted wrought-iron fence separating these roses from the ones inside looked familiar. He’d been here before.

Funny how your feet led you back to the places your heart longed for most.

This was her house. Her estate. These roses? The pride of her family—pictured proudly on the Vanmoer family crest. Her family?

Ruined his.

Her family was the reason, even after all this time, he dared not go home. Not that his family was where they used to be—but he dreamed someday to find them again. To track them down. To be their prodigal son.

But knowing such a move might ruin whatever they had raised themselves back up to he had never asked after them. Never tried to find them. Never sent them word he was free. It was the same reason he had hesitated outside the city’s gate, reconsidering. The same reason he had halted at the base of the Hill.

But sometimes you couldn’t help but be led back around. Sometimes destiny called so cruelly you dared not disobey. So he had climbed the Hill. Had found this house. And, as destiny seemed to dictate, he would make her family suffer.

In small, quiet ways.

At least at first.

He bent to sniff the bouncing blossoms, touching the stem of just one. Because all it took was one when your heart was full of ice.

Then he was on his way again, ambling merrily along, before anyone noticed anything was amiss. By the time they shouted, seeing how the rose petals blackened, dropping, and how the cane frosted, darkened, and twisted in on itself, deadening all the way to its knobby heart—by then he was gone.

En Route to Holgate

Wagons holding sweaty-looking occupants were already parked when Jordan’s transportation pulled alongside them, and came to a snorting stop. Their wagons were smaller, their occupants less well-dressed, and their horses more worn from what Jordan supposed had been longer journeys.

The Councilman and Tester walked over to a small crowd of agitated and mean-looking men. Voices raised and Jordan pressed her face to the bars again, hoping to hear something of importance. The crowd grew more animated, arms flailing and pointing to the wagons before motioning down the hill toward something just beyond her sight.

Then she saw the guns.

Men stood beside the wagons, muskets and rifles at their sides. Some carried the weapons, switching them from one hand to another and always—
always
—looking down the hill to something beyond.

The Tester and Councilman nodded, the Councilman growling out, “Hurry now! And you”—he pointed to one of the strangers—”you tell Johnson I’ll lynch him myself if this goes wrong. It stinks of treason, him arranging us all to meet so near to water and him being noticeably absent. He needs to remember where his loyalty lies now!” The wagons began to unload, guns on the would-be Witches as much as the mystery downhill. Jordan’s door opened and she bounded toward the exit but was met by others being escorted in. “But…”

“You will travel together now,” Stevenson reported, sweat heavy on his brow.

Watching his eyes she realized that although he spoke to her, he, too, watched what everyone else watched. Another wagon opened, and more Witches were loaded in with Jordan. No, she corrected herself. Not more Witches, more
prisoners,
Jordan thought. Maybe some of them were as she was.

Mistaken.

Two more wagons—these carrying a few sad-eyed prisoners—and the door clanged shut, the lock turned, and the Councilman took the key.

“And your name,” a boy asked her, his gaze raking across her dress and now less than perfect hair, “what did they used to call you?”

“The same thing they will call me when this misunderstanding is all cleared up.
Lady
.”

She barely flinched when the wagon’s inhabitants fell into fits of laughter around her. Turning her back on them, she pressed her face to the bars, steeling herself to the idea that she would not bother knowing any of them as she would be plucked from their questionable ranks soon enough.

Then she heard it—they all heard it—a noise that made the hairs on her arms raise and set her teeth on edge. A thin, trilling wail accompanied by soft, wet sounds like a child in oversized boots sloshing through puddles. The men with guns lined up, backs to the wagons. The drivers held the reins of their horses tight but still the beasts stomped and cried, tugging at their bits and bridles until their mouths foamed and bled.

“Get into your wagons and carriages and away,” the Councilman commanded. “This is no place to make a stand—not with so much water…” He abandoned them all—handing his horse’s reins to another rider, and, leaping into the carriage, he knocked so hard on its ceiling to signal the driver that they all heard.

“Johnson’s doomed us all!” someone shouted as the other men scrambled to follow suit, climbing onto the wagons or into the carriages.

Horses bolted, carts jolting away as steeds panicked. Jordan and the other prisoners saw them then as their wagon bounced forward and away—a long line of wet and glimmering speckled shapes, hunched and slithering over the hill toward the retreating wagons.

They moved like fish forced onto land, even their awkward motions made with inherent grace, an alien fluidity that Jordan had only seen basely mimicked by dancing prima ballerinas. They flopped forward, heads covered in spines and long, limp green-and-blue things that shimmered and looked like weeds that grew out of their domed skulls. They pulled themselves onward with broad hands and webbed fingers, thick bodies ending in a long, winding tail rather than a pair of legs and feet. But what caught Jordan’s attention most were their mouths …

Huge hinged jaws removed any chance the beasts might be considered beautiful and were lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth—so many teeth, in fact, the creatures seemed incapable of closing their mouths. Thin, rubbery lips could never stretch far enough to obscure such razor-filled mouths.

Jordan only realized as they raced away that her position in the packed and standing-room-only wagon had changed. Instead of pressing close to the bars to better witness the attacking Merrow, she pushed as far as she could into her fellow prisoners—decorum and all things proper forgotten in the face of horror.

Their wagon was ahead of a few others, and, wide-eyed, they watched as the Merrow paused in their slick progress to coil onto their tails and then—

They launched. Bodies sailed through the air like the school of exotic fish swam in the Mayor’s much-lusted-after aquarium. They were all at once silver and blue and green, flashing like the ocean’s sapphire waves and landing on the closest horses.

One horse reared up and struck out, squealing, forelegs flying. But the Merrow were everywhere—a swarm of flesh and teeth, burrowing wide mouths into horseflesh. Screaming, a horse bucked and broke free of harness and traces even as the carriage’s driver fired his gun and reloaded. Men on the same wagon fired a volley, their guns cracking out their reports’ noise as both bullet and ball left barrels and the sweet scent of black powder filled the air.

The escaping horse went down on its knees and Jordan turned away when blood fountained up from it, but turned back (morbid curiosity winning against fear) in time to see more Merrow launch themselves.

This time at the men.

Those deaths were faster than the horses’. Not cleaner, not gentler, but faster. Bones cracked and heads came free of bodies and Jordan discovered another use for the bucket in the wagon’s corner when she emptied the sparse contents of her stomach into it. She rose again, watching as the bloodshed disappeared from sight, their wagon’s rioting horses calming as they gained greater distance from the threat. Soon the horses slowed to a jog, their sweat a lather so thick it dropped to the road in clumps like freshly whipped meringue.

The awkward caravan paused a few miles farther down the road, pulling to a stop at a broad crossroads. The Councilman and Tester exited their coach and the group reconvened. There were no more worried looks although the men were clearly shaken and filled their sentences with curses. A few fierce words were exchanged and everyone remounted, the wagons going their separate ways. Jordan settled as best she could among the crowd of bodies, wondering how soon—if ever—they’d feel safe again.

Holgate

“You come from a proud tradition,” Bran said, tucking his hands behind his back and leaning forward to better look at the little girl. Her eyes wandered the space, her gaze bouncing from item to item and drinking each in almost as often and fully as she drank up the water he kept handy. “You’ve gotten dehydrated,” he said. “I thought Maude would take better care of you.”

“She took excellent care of me, Mister—papá,” the child corrected, rolling the horn cup between her hands. “She is sweet. My mother—God rest her soul—would have liked her.”

Bran paused and nodded agreement. “Yes. I feel certain she would have. Here.” He took the cup and set it on his desk’s slanting surface. “This is my main library. Here there are three rules you must follow: listen, obey, and never, never open the door to the laboratory. It is here that you will help me do the gentle parts of what Making means.”

“What are the gentle parts?”

“Research. You will fetch me books and learn to read and tidy up as we work,” Bran said.

“And the not so gentle parts of Making?” she asked, her eyes so big and bright his heart thumped oddly.

“There are parts of my job that are—”

“Too hard for me?”

“Too hard for you to
see,
” he clarified. “It is not an easy thing I do.”

“Is it hard for
you
?” she asked, her voice soft as rainsong.

He straightened, twisting his fingers together before him. “It used to be,” he finally said, his voice matching hers in gentleness. “Yes. It used to be nearly impossible.” But he smacked his hands together and she gave a little hop. “But. We both come from a proud tradition,” he assured her, perhaps more to assure himself than the blond little sprite before him. Why did the words trouble him so much now?

They were hardly a lie …

His father had said the same words every day that Bran could remember. And, if nothing else good might be said of his father, it could always be said he was honest.

Brutally so.

Philadelphia

Rowen couldn’t remember a time without Jordan. It was strange knowing there was no Jordan to call upon, no Jordan to joke with, no Jordan to frustrate to the point he swore steam would pour from her ears …

No Jordan to confound.

And no Jordan to court.

He played with his hair a bit more, focusing in the mirror with fierce determination deep-set in his brow as he ran his brush through it again. He paused, staring at “fierce determination” reflected back at him, and he snorted. Such an expression would give him wrinkles prematurely. And although wrinkles on a man were a distinguishing mark of character (whereas on a woman they were simply ugly) Rowen did not care to add any character to his face until he was at least forty. Or fifty if he was fortunate. So he relaxed every muscle in his face and stared slack jawed into the mirror.