Wicked Ever After (A Blud Novel Book 7) (14 page)

16

The witch cackled,
just like the fairy tales said she would.

“Where’s your Hansel, Gretel?” Hepzibah trilled, her overly smooth face more beautiful and youthful than when I’d last seen her. I had been human then and frightened of her.

Now I was a Bludman, and I was godalmighty pissed off.

“Where’s my grandmother?” I asked, my flame-tipped fingers curling into a fist between us.

She shook her head and grinned like a fanged pumpkin. Her eyes were lined in black, with swooping corners, her lips matte red. During our last encounter, her hair had been in red and black dreadlocks, but now it was dark and disturbingly glossy, set in pin curls. I couldn’t imagine how many hundreds of years she must have stolen from innocent people to look this young. And if the situation had been different, I would have clawed for her eyes and pulled her hair and gotten into a horrible fight.

But the stakes were too high. She had my grandmother.

And I still had a grudge that couldn’t be settled with a resounding bitch slap.

“Ruby’s in my parlor with her boy toy,” Hepzibah said, and it struck me as utterly bizarre that she was from Earth, like Demi and Casper and me, but had somehow ended up a wicked vampire witch. People from Sang did not say things like “boy toy,” especially not about the most well-muscled strong man on the entire island.

“Can I have her back?”

In response, she threw back her head and laughed the wild, unselfconscious laugh that firmly differentiated a Bludman from a human.

“For a price,” she said, amused. “But you might want to talk to her first.”

With a flip of her hair, my archenemy, the evil vampire witch, spun around and stalked down the pitch-dark corridor, her skirts dragging on the stones. I had no choice but to follow her, holding my blue light in front of me as she ducked down side tunnels and disappeared around columns. The fear was replaced with suspicion, with doubt, with anger.

She could have killed me in the dark. But she hadn’t. She seemed amused.

Which meant she was up to something, and history had proven that such situations went badly for me.

As I hurried, I realized that we were in catacombs much like the ones Demi had used in Paris and had incorporated into Sang’s first production of
The Phantasm of the Theatre
. But she had described the Paris catacombs as morbidly beautiful, with intricate designs constructed of skulls punctuated by delicate finger bones and fine mosaics of glittering stones that could only be seen by lantern light. These catacombs sleeping under London were heavier, thicker, more utilitarian. At least it didn’t smell much like dead people and dripped only when we passed under thick pipes. I concentrated on following Hepzibah’s skirts, lest I remember that the enormous, towering, hermit-crab-like sprawl of London was above me and might shudder and implode and crash at any moment, squashing me like a bug.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked to pass the time.

“I have my reasons.”

“Duh. But why do you need my grandmother?”

Her cackle echoed down the tunnel. “I don’t need her. She came to me.”

“She came to you to kill you.”

Another cackle. “Not quite.”

I turned a corner and
saw the witch silhouetted in orange light. There were voices echoing beyond her—familiar ones. I recognized my grandmother’s laugh, albeit much younger and more carefree than I’d ever heard it on Earth. The rumbling voice that answered her had to be Torno, then. And they didn’t sound as if they were being imprisoned and tortured by an evil witch. My heart and feet sped up as I hurried to make sense of it all.

“She’s here,” Hepzibah said.

With a dramatic flounce, she sprawled onto a settee in front of a grand fireplace. I could only stand in the doorway and gape, because it wasn’t often one saw a doppelgänger of the Beast’s library in the catacombs under London. Bookshelves went up at least two stories, complete with rolling ladders and a gold chandelier, although I did note that in addition to books, scrolls, and grimoires the shelves held urns, bones, and candy jars full of fluid and subtly writhing flesh like what I’d seen and crushed at Mr. Sweeting’s shop. Furniture and rugs were placed just so near the fire, and I was gratified to see a black cauldron bubbling over the flames. I couldn’t help wondering if it was really part of her witchcrafting or just an affectation from someone who’d seen Disney movies and assumed that any decent witch ought to have a bubbling cauldron full of toil and trouble.

The other side of the picturesque room, however, was a combination dungeon and mad scientist’s laboratory. Iron bars were set into the stone, and behind them were my grandmother and Torno the strong man.

And then my grandmother did the strangest thing I could imagine.

She opened the door to the cell and walked out, laughing.

“Nana?” I said, and she
held her arms open and laughed a Bludman’s laugh.

“You always were the damnedest child,” she said in her new voice, which was notable for its lack of a dying person’s puckered, toothless wheeze. She sounded sharp and amused. And somehow . . . wrong.

I stepped into her embrace with the strangest feeling running up my spine, as if I were about to hug the monster under my bed. “Nana?” I said again, unsure as hell.

Firm fingers dug into my shoulders as she held me away, inspecting me. She must have liked what she saw, as she grinned and winked a kohl-lined eye.

“I told you, sugar. My name is Ruby. And you weren’t supposed to come here. This is between me and Elizabeth.”

“Hepzibah?”

My Nana—Ruby—snorted and pulled me back into a hug of sharp edges and no comfort. Quick as a blink, she whispered in my ear, “Stay out of my way,” before pushing me back.

I stumbled over the cave scree and stared at her beautiful smile, trying to see my Nana’s kind face and sweet eyes in this hard, mysterious Valkyrie. She pulled a slim cigarette case out of her trouser pocket, lit the end of a cigarette, and blew a smoke ring at me, arms crossed.

“She told you her name was Hepzibah? What a crock. Her name’s Elizabeth. Elizabeth Merrywell. And she’s my mother’s sister. Which makes her your . . .” Nana looked up at the ceiling. “Great-great-aunt?”

“Once removed,” the witch said from her settee, twirling a bored hand as one booted foot dangled over the edge.

“Okay, so if we’re all one big, happy family, why is this so weird?” I asked.

Torno stepped forward, a hand the size of a grizzly paw heavy but gentle on my shoulder. “She needs to know,
cara mia
,” he said, kind eyes flicking back to Ruby.

“Come on, then.” Ruby sighed and strode to the witch’s carefully placed sitting room, taking up the other sofa and curling into the corner, leaving room for Torno. When he sat, she snuggled back against him, content as a cat in a sunbeam.

What the hell was happening?

The witch didn’t sit up or move, and Nana inclined her head toward the lone wingback chair. When I didn’t immediately sit, she jabbed her cigarette to shoo me. As if in a dream, I joined them.

“Well?” I said, feeling very much like a prim and confused Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.

The witch finally sat up, looking very bored in every way except for the overbright way her eyes glinted. “If we must,” she said. When she clapped her hands and shouted, “Tea!” a clockwork lemur emerged from the darkness, pushing, of all things, a laden tea cart. Its long tail, striped copper and silver, curled overhead, holding a steaming teapot.

“You’re the youngest. You serve,” the witch said, inclining her head to me, and I knew exactly how Alice must have felt at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

I stood stiffly and took the first cup and saucer from the cart, holding it dumbly.

“Two lumps and a splash of milk,” Hepzibah said, and I used the tongs to place two heart-shaped lumps of sugar in the cup with an echoing
plink
. The milk was pale pink, and when I went to take the teapot from the lemur, the thing somehow managed to look affronted and poured the hot blood for me with a superior air.

I added a dainty spoon to the cup, turned to the witch, and threw the cup’s contents right into her too-smooth face.

Hepzibah screamed and scrabbled at her eyes. My grandmother laughed, and Torno made the sort of
tsk, tsk
noise old men make when young women do silly, thoughtless things. The clockwork lemur let out a tinny sigh and hurried into the darkness, returning seconds later with a pile of neatly folded tea towels.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” Ruby said, trying to hold in her laughter and smoke. “You’re only making it worse.” A few beats later, the laugh escaped her, and she rode it like a wild horse until she was gasping for breath and coughing. “Not that I blame you.”

“Sorry, Auntie Elizabeth,” I said, obviously not sorry at all.

“I should’ve killed you when I—”

My grandmother threw a towel in the witch’s face. “Shut up, Aunt Lizzie. Haven’t you learned yet that you can’t order people around?” Sitting back down, Ruby looked at me, and something cold in her eyes struck me to the core. “One lump for me, no milk. And if you throw it at me, you’ll be sorry.” She took a long drag and smiled an icy smile.

My fingers twitched in defiance, but I fixed her tea and placed the saucer gently in her smooth, clawed hands. “You want me to mash up some Ambien and put it in your blood pudding? You need a suppository? Anything else I can do for you, my poor, dying grandmother?”

She turned her face as if I’d slapped her. “Probably deserved that.” She sipped her tea and nodded approval of the grand gesture of a sugar cube. “I didn’t enjoy dying slowly any more than you enjoyed watching me do it.”

“Yeah, well, you stopped saying thanks a while back, didn’t you?” It felt stupid and movie-foolish, standing there by the fire, so I held out a trembling cup to the lemur. It poured with elegant tidiness, and I gulped down the lava-hot blood without adding any sort of civility to the gesture. I held it out again, the lemur poured, I drank, I thanked it for some strange reason, and I hurled the dainty cup into the fire, finally strengthened enough to say what I had to say. “Look, you wanted to be young and healthy, and you are. You wanted to be free of me and my lovely little caravan, and you are. You want to hang out with our aunt, the bitchy witch who almost ruined my life here and made every day full of worry and self-loathing? Great. But I’d like to get back to my life without you, if you don’t mind. Maybe Criminy has a spell that can help me forget I brought you over.”

Hepzibah laughed and tossed the bloody towel onto the ground. Her face was burn-pink, lit lurid orange by the fire, but she seemed too amused with the overall proceedings to focus her anger on me. Without standing, she snatched another cup. The lemur hurried to fill it, and she plunked in her own damn sugar and sat back watching Ruby and me as if we were a riveting but ridiculous soap opera.

“This isn’t how it was supposed to go,” Ruby said.

“Such fire,” Torno said, sounding almost awestruck. “It must run in your family.”

And that’s when I realized what to do, how to stop this purgatory of confusion and me being the only one who had no control, the only one who didn’t know the next step, the glancer whose glance had been stolen. I grabbed Hepzibah’s arm with both hands, jerked her up from the sofa, and threw her into her fire.

17

My grandmother dropped
her cigarette and jumped up, looking genuinely shocked. “What on earth?”

“This isn’t Earth. It’s Sang,” I said, dusting my hands off. “Guess your glance didn’t show you that part, huh?”

“Not this part, either,” my grandmother muttered, looking past me at the fire.

As I turned to give her a good talking-to, something slammed into my shoulder, driving me to the ground. It was the witch, and she wasn’t on fire, not even close. She wasn’t even abnormally warm. But she was furious and clawing for my eyes as if she’d forgotten she had fangs at all, thank heavens. I hadn’t forgotten, though, and my beast rose and hissed, and everything went over in that strange red haze, in slow motion, with the thump of my head on the settee and the witch’s boot kicking over the tea cart. We tussled like cats, hissing and clawing, slapping and yanking out hair. She got me onto my back, her bony arm pressing the breath out of my throat. I kicked her over, tried to snap her wrist like a pencil, and failed. I finally managed to crawl on top of her, pinning her hands, and my fangs grazed her neck with delicious victory.

And I stopped.

Somehow . . . it didn’t feel right.

I wanted the victory of ripping out her throat, but the feral domination I’d experienced during my fight by the boulders was missing. This almost felt like . . . like a play. And I didn’t know the right lines. I’d glanced on this woman’s life, and although certain parts of this scene matched what I’d watched in that fearful, sucking jolt all those years ago, neither one of us was poised to do any damage. This wasn’t how she was going to die, and we both knew it. Ruby and Torno sat on their couch, watching us with polite interest as if we were tussling puppies.As if they weren’t remotely worried.

I guessed my grandmother had had her own jolt, too.

“Are you done yet, sugar?” Ruby asked.

I stood up and brushed down my skirts. “Why are we even here?” I said, grouchy, returning to my chair as the fight drained out of me.

Hepzibah rolled over and stood, and I couldn’t help noticing that her movements were very much like mine. Even her swiftly healing face, in the firelight, showed commonality with mine and with Ruby’s. Had I really almost killed my own great-great-aunt on the floor of her witch’s parlor?

“When I touched you,” Ruby said, “I saw that I needed to come here. Not only because no one had seen my aunt since she died in a coma but also because it’s part of . . . destiny? Whatever it is I see when I touch people.”

“You saw us sitting here?”

She shook her head at me. “This part is just waiting. Something else is supposed to happen.”

“At least tell me why Torno is here.”

Ruby looked at the enormous strong man fondly—in a way that she’d never looked at my grandfather, actually. Their hands were clasped together, and thus far he’d just seemed like a benevolent mountain.

“You know, sugar, your grandfather was a harsh man from a different time, and I married too young. Until the day he died, I served him and danced on the end of his string. And soon after we buried him, I got sick. Didn’t really get to enjoy freedom much and never knew the love of a kind man who saw me for what I was.” She looked up at the strong man with more affection in her face than I’d seen for me since she’d landed in Sang. “My glance told me Torno was the one, and when I found him in the caravan, it was love at first sight. After that, he wouldn’t let me go alone.”

“Ah,
cara mia.
That is not so true,” Torno said gently, rubbing her arm. “It is
you
who would not leave
me
behind.”

I had glanced on him, long ago, in the caravan, but I had no control over what I saw when I touched someone’s hand. With Torno, I had seen that Catarrh and Quincy were going to betray him, and Criminy had somehow handled it. Well, and now that problem was permanently handled, I supposed. How would my life have gone differently if I had seen a vision of Torno and a young woman who looked a little like me and more like my grandmother’s old black-and-white pictures? Perhaps there was a reason glances left so much to mystery.

“I’m glad y’all found each other, and congratulations on being a hell of a cougar, but I still don’t see why I had to come here and why I’m not fighting that old bitch to the death. Why are we just sitting around, drinking blood tea and talking?”

“We’re waiting,” Ruby said in her don’t-defy-your-grandma voice.

“For what?”

The lemur appeared with the witch’s pipe, and she settled back to smoke, just as smug and cozy as she’d been the first time I’d met her. Her smoke rings floated up and up into the darkness of her cave, and she grinned a Cheshire cat’s grin and pointed her pipe into the murky darkness outside the fake fire’s dancing light.

“For him.”

A shadow coalesced, and I was drowning in joy and fear and adrenaline.

“Hello, love,” said Criminy Stain.