Serpent's Kiss: A Witches of East End Novel (8 page)

“I don’t know! Things are moving around in that house. I put one thing in one place, then
boom
, gone, then
boom
, in another place, or I cannot find it.” Gracella spoke hurriedly, as Tyler clung to her leg. “Then strange noises upstairs. But no way am I going up there in the attic, Miss Ingrid!”

It was getting dark outside, and the lights hanging from the eaves of the house automatically lit on their own, which made Gracella jolt and start to hyperventilate.

“It’s okay, Gracella. Those lights are on a timer,” Ingrid said, attempting to reassure her. She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, reciting a calming, protective spell in her head, and Gracella’s breath quieted.

“It’s the strange ones,” said Tyler.

Ingrid crouched to be at Tyler’s level. “What did you say?”

“The strange ones. I talk to them; they talk to me. They’re nice but very clever,” the boy said, screwing his face at her.

Ingrid laughed at the word
clever
coming from a child’s mouth. “You mean, like, imaginary friends, Tyler?”

He shook his head no.

“I must be going, Miss Ingrid. I must get home. Will you tell Miss Joanna what is happening in this house, that I could not finish all my work today because of these crazy ghosts. Please make them go away, so I can come back and do my work. I don’t like this. I am not coming back until you tell me they are gone.”

Ingrid promised Gracella she would tell her mother and that she would take care of the house and make it a safe place for everyone. “I’ll get to the bottom of it. You have my word, Gracella.”

She watched as Tyler and his mother peeled out of the driveway in their Subaru, the little boy looking sad as he waved to her from the back window.

Ghosts? What was going on? Joanna hadn’t mentioned anything to her, and she hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary herself. Ingrid let herself inside and checked all the bottom-floor rooms of the rambling house. Everything looked clean, neatly tucked away and properly set to rights by Gracella’s careful hand, but upon entering the living room, Ingrid heard a noise, a scraping sound followed by thumping. Those burglars, maybe? Unlike Matt, she didn’t think the burglars and pixie refugees were one and the same. Well, he didn’t know they were pixies, just a band of homeless kids, and she had definitely sent them on their away.
Ugh, Matt again!
He occupied her every thought. Even when she thought she had found a respite, there he was again. If this was what being in love was like, she wanted none of it.

She climbed the stairs and checked the bedrooms. All four looked fine, including the one that sat empty, sadly waiting for her brother’s return, although Ingrid knew poor Joanna might have to wait an eternity, until this house had long turned to ruin.

Now the attic. It looked as it usually did, books on a shelf, boxes piled on top of boxes, dusty discarded furniture, old daybeds, couches, lamps, desks, Joanna’s large steamer trunk, but nothing egregiously amiss, and she couldn’t imagine where the noises had come from. There was one box lying sideways on the floor, clothes spilling from it: their childhood costumes, wings, tutus, and taffeta dresses. Perhaps that box had made the noise. Maybe it had fallen from the other and squished the one beside it, gravity doing its work until it succumbed and tipped.

There was one final place to check. She returned down the flight of stairs, heading toward Freya’s bedroom. Once inside, she opened her sister’s closet, which smelled like Freya’s perfume: sweet and sultry. Ingrid waved her hands in front of her face. Did Freya spray her clothes with the stuff? Her feathers and furs and microdresses and décolleté blouses and the collection of heels dating back to a weathered pink leather pair of 1920s flapper-girl shoes? Oh, how she had worn those out!

There was a “silky corner” where Freya’s slinky lingerie hung from pink satin hangers: baby blues with beige lace, red satin, taupe silk. Ingrid felt envious of all this femininity dangling on the hangers. She was not jealous of Freya, but she felt so ignorant when it came to these sorts of things. Hudson always told Ingrid she had great style. But perhaps she needed to work on being a little more—sexy? Then maybe Matt would … ugh, thinking of Matt again. It had to stop.

Ingrid drew her wand from her shoulder bag, then pushed past Freya’s garments and the sign with the quip about Narnia and made her way down the long ebony-floored corridor until she arrived at Freya’s Manhattan apartment. Magical passageways were so much more useful than commuting, Ingrid thought.

There was the smell of charred wood in the air, as if someone had recently lit a fire. A lone pillow and crumpled blanket lay on the plush velvet couch facing the fireplace, and in the kitchen Ingrid found an unfinished cup of coffee by the sink (the milk hadn’t turned yet). She saw her sister’s telltale red lipstick on it.

Well, at least it was Freya who had been here and not someone else. Or something else. Whatever had scared off their housekeeper.

Now why had Freya been sleeping here, Ingrid wondered. She was under the assumption that Freya spent most of her nights on the
Dragon
. Freya hadn’t mentioned anything amiss, not even when Ingrid had told her all about the awful date with Matt. Freya thought Ingrid had overreacted and that it was far from over; she was sure Matt would call Ingrid soon.

Ingrid hoped her sister would come to her for advice if she were having relationship problems. On second thought, how could she solve Freya’s problems when she didn’t even know how to solve her own?

Joanna walked outside with a basket and garden shears to gather some fresh bouquets for the house. From early spring through fall, her garden blossomed with different flower varieties, bursting in a multitude of colors along the perimeter, climbing the fence, in the beds, a fragrant onslaught to the senses. This time of year the burnt-orange roses had bloomed, as well as her coral gerberas and rich purple dahlias, pink and white winter daphnes, marigolds from vivid yellow to orange to a deep, rich red. She began cutting the tall-stalked sturdy ones before moving on to the more delicate flowers, placing them on top so they wouldn’t get crushed. She wound through foliage and plants in her clogs, snipping here and there.

She stopped at the bed of Japanese anemones, where ferns poked through along the chocked fence—pink, violet, and snowy white flowers, dainty bright yellow pistils resembling little suns at their centers.
My son inside each one of them
, she thought wistfully. She reached to cut the stem of a set of white ones, when suddenly its leaves withered, petals falling to the ground.

“Huh!” Perhaps there had been a morning frost.

She reached for another, chose a perfectly healthy-looking one, and just as before when her fingers grazed it, it withered instantly, bending and falling to its death. She tried again, and this time a slew of them died, petals spilling like tears into the undergrowth.

No, it wasn’t a frost but something entirely different. She finally had to admit that she knew what was happening inside the house—with all the objects being moved and misplaced, especially now with the flowers dying in the garden. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but the last had been such a traumatic ordeal that Joanna had pushed it out of her mind, denying that something similar could recur.

It happened in 1839, when she was visiting England for several months. Events had unfolded in the same way: the belongings in her flat moving around, roses wilting in the garden, and then the mischief had escalated with the frightened horses on the landau she rode around town. The carriage had tipped and been dragged at a gallop along the cobblestone streets of London, killing the coachman. After that, Joanna could not ignore it anymore and had been prompted into action.

The story began with the death of a young English aristocrat from a long illness at the very same time that a farm girl in the countryside of Dorchester plummeted to her death inside a well. Neither had known the other in life due to their geographic distance and entirely different social spheres.

It was in death that they fell in love. When they arrived in the first layer of the glom toward the Kingdom of the Dead, they immediately recognized each other as soul mates. Somehow they learned about the Eurydice clause under the Orpheus Amendment, which stated that if two iterant souls met in the Dead’s Kingdom before the first gate and fell in love, they could be granted a second chance at life as long as they remained true to each other. If they did not, then their punishment entailed dying anew, but this time they would never encounter each other again in the glom or beyond.

Philip and Virginia could not imagine ever forsaking each other, and so they campaigned for the chance to live and love each other in mid-world. Joanna’s sister, Helda, the Queen of the Dead, was not pleased about their request but, unable to refute the existence of the Eurydice clause, directed the couple to appeal to Joanna instead. “You must make your plea to her, not me. She is the only one charged with the delicate business of resurrection, the only one among us who can bring you back to life. That is not my territory.”

The two hapless romantics roamed the glom, striving to contact Joanna however they could, using their abilities to push objects without touching them, or choking the life out of small plants. They became increasingly desperate as Joanna—either deliberately or obtusely—failed to hear them and they eventually resorted to frightening the horses that pulled the landau.

That finally got Joanna’s attention. Since Joanna had no desire for others to be harmed by such recalcitrant spirits, such folly, she acceded to their request and brought the lovers out of the spirit world and back to the land of the living. Philip was still on his deathbed, while Virginia’s body was just rescued from the well when the “miracle” happened. Upon revival, they found each other and immediately wed.

Philip’s family cut him off and disinherited him for marrying a commoner, but for a while they lived happily in the Dorchester countryside. Then the bills came, and the fights. Philip took to gambling, and his losses piled up. He blamed Virginia for his misery, and she in turn blamed him for failing to provide for them. Virginia was pregnant and became ill during the final months of pregnancy. Destitute and penniless, Philip begged his family for money and help with medicine and food. By the time he returned to his beloved’s side, she was dead, the child a stillbirth. He shot himself and that was that, a tragic story.

Joanna sighed, thinking of how beautiful those two had been, how rosy and happy when she had visited them in their little Dorchester cottage.

There was always a catch. Philip and Virginia had tried to cheat death, and more recently Joanna had tried to bring back Lionel Horning. Lionel was only in a coma; he hadn’t gotten past the seventh circle where his soul would have been forever bound to Helda. Still, on his return, he was, as her girls called it, “zombified.” Helda always won her souls in the end.

Joanna shook her head, thinking of her stubborn and proud sister. But at least now she knew what was going on. A spirit, or spirits, sought to contact her. She couldn’t ignore the signs anymore.

Joanna closed her eyes in her garden, letting the perfume of the flowers wash over her and feeling the sunshine on her face before moving fearlessly into the glom. She stepped into the twilight world. It was dusky, and above her were tiny, dim pinpricks of light that illuminated the sandy path just well enough for her to make it out.

She heard an owl’s call, and she hooted back at it. The scent of something rotten filled the air, something heavy and viscous, the smell of death. Joanna moved off the path, toward the sound of the owl. A spirit who sought contact would be on the first level, the one closest to the seam. She didn’t need to continue any farther.

“Is anyone there?” she whispered as her words echoed back toward her. She kept her voice as quiet as she could, not wanting to bump into Helda. Her sister could be vindictive.

She heard the flapping of wings, the owl lifting from a branch. She wished she had her wand, so she could see better, but instead she extended her hands to feel around in the darkness. She ran smack into a tree, the bark dead, dry, papery to the touch. She picked at it with a fingernail, and it began to ooze a shiny, dark liquid.

“Anyone?” she asked again, and again only her voice came back to her:
Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

She did not feel the presence of a soul seeking her here, so she found the path, returned to mid-world, opened her eyes, and was happy to be standing once again in her lush garden.

Freddie Beauchamp sat at his desk in the Ucky Star, playing hunt-and-peck on his laptop. Now how could a god recently returned from Limbo, new to the modern era, come about such technology?