The Demon Lover (29 page)

“Well, that’s not unusual. Lots of witches teach at Fairwick.”

“Yes, but no one knows this one’s a witch. He’s there under false pretenses.” He handed me his notebook. Under
Abigail Fisk
Justin had written a name I knew. It was Frank Delmarco.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I
didn’t have a lot of time to digest the news that Frank Delmarco—blunt, proletarian, Jets fan Frank!—was a witch. And a witch descended from a Fairwick witch who had known and been wronged somehow by Bertram Ballard! I was late for tea with my grandmother and I wasn’t about to incur her wrath. It was bad enough that my sweater was damp from the OxiClean Justin had sprayed on it to remove lacuna-ooze.

I arrived breathless at the Grove Club, which was located in a town house in the East Forties, not far from the Williams Club and the Century club. Unlike those august New York institutions, though, it had never been clear to me what purpose the Grove Club served. On the few occasions I’d been invited to share tea with Adelaide there, I got only the vaguest impression of the other club members tucked away in the recesses of their high-backed chairs: a glimpse of a thick ankle encased in support hose and a handmade English walking shoe, a charm-braceleted wrist reaching for a china teacup, the rare male voice (the membership was strictly female) murmuring in restrained tones, as if afraid he might be thrown out if he rattled the spindly eighteenth-century furniture, gilt-framed portraits, and eggshell-thin china cups with his manly bass. Since my grandmother was a well-off, unmarried woman with interests in genealogy, nineteenth-century novels, and American folk art, I assumed the other members must be sedate older women of a similar background with similar interests. But today as I passed the dusty oak-paneled bar beneath its mural of classically robed women dancing in a forest, I noticed two smartly dressed young women drinking martinis and laughing loudly.

So maybe the current membership was not so old and not so sedate.

One of the women was wearing skinny black slacks tucked into riding boots and a well-cut wool riding jacket. She looked vaguely familiar to me, but her back was to me and she was also wearing an enormous fur hat that masked her hair color. The other woman was blond, wearing a Missoni knit tunic, leggings, and pale suede boots. Models, I decided while climbing the grand curving staircase to the second floor. Maybe the club loaned out its rooms for fashion shoots. You certainly couldn’t find a better facsimile of “ye olde stodgy English club” in the city. The Laurel Parlour looked exactly the same as the first time I had tea there when I was twelve: the same high-backed wing chairs upholstered in forest green, the same varnishy oil paintings of elderly gray-haired ladies looking down their noses disapprovingly—or so I had felt at twelve in a scratchy lace and velveteen dress from Bergdorf’s. I struggled not to feel looked down upon now as I scanned the islands of chairs for my aunt. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” Adelaide would say, quoting Eleanor Roosevelt when I complained of feeling uncomfortable in some environment. The effect of the admonition was often to make me feel worse, as if I were somehow complicit in my degradation, but today it made me lift my chin and square my shoulders. I was twenty-six, not twelve; I had a Ph.D. and a good job. Just because Adelaide had sniffed when I told her I’d taken the job at Fairwick meant nothing. What did she know about the academic job market …?

“Miss McFay?” An Asian man in a dove gray suit had appeared soundlessly beside me on the thick Persian rug. “Miss Danbury is waiting for you over here.” He waved a white-gloved hand, like a magician performing a conjuring trick, toward the grouping of chairs nearest the fireplace. I followed him across the room, keenly aware of eyes following me from the dim recesses of the deep, plush chairs. Was it my imagination or had the hum of conversation ceased as I crossed the room? I had the unnerving feeling that I was being tracked by raptors hidden in their arboreal roosts and found myself nervously listening for the rustle of feathers. When we reached the chair by the fire, my escort bowed to me and backed away, his shoe soles sliding on the carpet as deftly as Michael Jackson moonwalking in the “Thriller” video.

“Adelaide?” I asked, addressing the back of the chair.

A gnarled hand grasped the wooden chair arm, which was carved like a bird’s talons, and began pulling her up.

“Don’t get up,” I said, edging around in front of the chair and leaning down to plant a kiss on my grandmother’s cheek. The feel of her cool skin and the familiar scent of Chanel No. 5 instantly brought me back to my childhood, but when I moved back and got a good look at my grandmother for the first time I really thought I had time-traveled back to my twelfth birthday. I hadn’t seen Adelaide since she’d come to my college graduation four years before, and so I’d been preparing myself for her to look older. After all, she was in her eighties and the hand I’d clasped was an old woman’s hand. But except for her hands, which remained crabbed around the carved talons, she didn’t look any older than the sixty-something woman who had taken me in. Same thick blue-black hair (maintained by weekly appointments at the hairdresser), worn in the same neat, but dated, chin-length pageboy, same keen close-set gray eyes and sharp hawklike nose. Even her outfit—a cherry red wool suit, cream silk blouse, and pearls—was one I felt sure I’d seen before. Albert Nipon, I thought. The black onyx intaglio brooch was the same one she’d always worn.

“You look great,” I said truthfully. “The southwestern climate must suit you.”

She waved her hand, the fingers remaining curled, to dismiss the compliment. “The dry air is good for my arthritis, but the minute I set foot in this city it flares up. Sit down. You’re making me nervous hovering there.”

I sat down in the chair across from her, perching on the edge rather than settling back in its recessed depths. The Asian man reappeared with a tray, which he placed on the table in front of us, containing a hobnailed iron teapot and two china cups decorated in a branch pattern that when I was little I’d thought looked like skeleton hands. He placed a silver strainer over my cup and poured a stream of fragrant jasmine tea from the squat iron pot into my cup, repeated the procedure with my grandmother’s cup, and then bowed himself away. All through this ritual my grandmother’s gunmetal gray eyes remained fixed on me.

“You’re looking well,” she admitted grudgingly. “Although I don’t see how that damp, cold upstate climate can agree with anyone.”

“I don’t mind it,” I said. “The campus is very pretty in the snow …” Unbidden an image of Liam kissing me on the snowy path above the southeast gate flashed before my eyes. “And I have a lovely Victorian house. You should come visit …”

“I can’t abide those drafty old Victorian houses,” she said, ignoring my invitation. “And those small college towns …” She shuddered, a movement that made her collarbones stand out against her neck. Her skin, I noticed, although unwrinkled, looked thin where it stretched over her bones, like a fine silk gone threadbare at the seams. “It must be like living in a fish-bowl, everybody knowing your business.”

My grandmother, I recalled, had always maintained a meticulous layer of privacy between the compartments of her life. She never socialized with the neighbors in our building or invited guests home. She lunched at her club, attended meetings of the various boards she belonged to, and went to the annual parties of arts institutions she supported, but I never heard her refer to anyone as a friend.

“I like that part,” I said. “People look out for one another. During the ice storm I went house to house with Dory Browne to make sure everyone was okay—”

“Dory Browne? Is that one of your colleagues at the college?”

“No,” I said, lifting the teacup to my lips, “she’s the realtor who sold me Honeysuckle House and she’s friends with the dean, Liz Book …”

“Elizabeth Book? Is she still there? She must be ancient. How do you get on with her?”

I looked up from my teacup, surprised. “How do you know Liz Book? You didn’t mention it when I told you I got the job.”
A second-tier college with a second-rate staff
is what she had said then.

“Our paths have crossed. I always found her a bit … 
diffuse
. And perilously naïve. That whole philosophy the school practices of recruiting students from all over when there are plenty of qualified young people right
here.
” She tapped the arm of her chair as if she literally meant
right here
, and I looked around the muted parlor as if candidates for admission were going to pop out of the recessed chairs.

“I had no idea you were so well acquainted with Fairwick …” I put my teacup down on the table and leaned forward. “Just
how
well acquainted are you anyway, Adelaide?”

Her gray eyes widened at the direct question and she retreated even further into the shelter of her wing-backed chair, but then she smiled, her thin lipstick-red lips parting over yellowed teeth. “Quite well acquainted. I see you’ve been initiated into their little cult. Tell me, did they promise to train you to be a witch?”

“You know about that?” I asked, my voice shrill in the hushed room. Normally I would have struggled to remain composed in front of my grandmother, but I’d just been chased by a bloodsucking parasite and found out my most normal colleague was secretly a witch.

Adelaide looked surprisingly pleased at my reaction. “Of course I know, dear, what do you think the Grove is?” She waved a crooked hand to indicate the gloomy room.

“You’re … witches?” I whispered.

“The Grove is an old name for a coven, from when our ancestors met in the forest. But just because our ancestors had to lurk around dark cold forests doesn’t mean
we
do. The membership of the Grove practices a more refined version of the Craft.”

I thought about the rite Soheila, Liz, and Diana had held to cast out the incubus from my house. It hadn’t been refined, but it had worked. But then they hadn’t all been witches …

“Do you know about the fairies, too?”

Adelaide clucked her tongue disapprovingly. “The Grove does not admit fairies, gnomes, elves, or dwarves. We consider dependence on such creatures a sign of poor discipline in the Craft. Besides, those creatures can be so … disruptive. And dangerous. I do hope you haven’t gotten involved with any up there at Fairwick. It’s what I was afraid of when you took the job.”

“So it wasn’t Fairwick’s academic standing you disapproved of?”

“Well, there’s that, too. They didn’t even make the
U.S. News & World Report
top one hundred colleges, which I attribute to their liberal admissions policy, letting in refugees from all over the world … and
off world
. I mean, would you want
your
daughter to sit in class next to a hobgoblin … or room with a phouka?”

“I really like my students,” I said, shocked by the venom in Adelaide’s voice. “And I haven’t seen any hobgoblins.”

“That you know of. What we at the Grove hear is that Elizabeth Book allows otherworlders to attend—and
teach
—in human guise. Who knows what sort of creatures you’ve got in your classes! It’s irresponsible not to let people at least know what they’re dealing with. I wanted to warn you when you took the job, but you’ve never listened to me.”

“But you never even told me I had fairy blood!”

Adelaide leaned forward and grabbed my hand so quickly I gasped aloud. Her crabbed fingers dug into mine like pincers. “Of course I didn’t tell you that you had the taint of the fey. Your mother, although she never chose to practice the Craft, was descended from a long line of distinguished witches. She disgraced her heritage by marrying a man with fairy blood.”

“What heritage?” I asked, ignoring the slight to my father. I’d always known my grandmother didn’t like him, but I’d thought it was because he was Scottish.

“The heritage of the Grove. One of its tenets is that we do not associate with fairies.”

I snorted. “But witches have been the victims of prejudice and persecution for centuries. Why would you be intolerant of fairies?”

“It was the association of witches with demons—which is just another name for what you call fairies—that brought about that persecution. It is also well known that fey blood neutralizes a witch’s power, which is why, I assumed, you showed no signs of any talent for withcraft. Your mother assured me she saw no sign of it.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Although perhaps we were both hasty in that judgment … at any rate, now that you do know the true nature of Fairwick College it would be best if you resigned.”

I sat back in my chair, yanking my hand out of Adelaide’s clawlike grasp, and stared at my grandmother. Small white lines had appeared around the corners of her mouth where she clenched the muscles to control her expression. I could feel the anger rising off her, though, like heat waves, except that her anger was a cold thing. I noticed, too, now that neither of us were speaking, that the Laurel Parlour was deadly silent. Tucked away in their deep cavernous chairs the members of the Grove were listening.

“And if I don’t resign from Fairwick?” I asked, pitching my voice loud enough to be heard throughout the hushed room. “What will your club do to me?”

“You always were so dramatic, Callie.” She shook her head and smiled, almost fondly, as though at a small pet’s misbehavior. “The Grove won’t do anything to you, but …” Her smile vanished. “Neither will we help you if you are in danger there. And trust me, sooner or later, you
will
be in danger there.”

I thought of the incubus who had nearly wrecked my house and the vampire who had gotten me to agree to an ambiguous deal. I thought about Frank Delmarco, who was hiding the fact he was a witch. What I had always hated about fighting with my grandmother was that she often made a good point. And that she often turned out to be right.