“All right, damn it. I’ll eat healthier, but I don’t like salad.”
“You don’t have to eat salad. Just add more vegetables and meat, cut down on the starches and sugar, and watch the level of caffeine in your blood.”
“You’re not taking away my caffeine. Or my booze.”
She laughed. “No, we’ll still party. But maybe we should curtail the once-a-week bashes.”
It sounded like a prison sentence, but maybe she did have a point. And it wouldn’t hurt for a while to see what happened. “All right. We keep our parties a little less boozy, I’ll eat better and maybe even have Aegis teach me how to make something besides a sandwich, and I’ll start working out. But I’m not budging on the caffeine. Not yet.”
“Well, you can’t just throw everything away at once,” Sandy conceded. She motioned to a large building up ahead. “That’s a good gym and it’s close to your house. Why don’t we go in and have them show us around?”
And just like that, I found myself in the clutches of a werewolf trainer named Wilson.
Chapter 14
WILSON FAIRHAUL PUT me through a short but gritty set of tests to assess my state. Mortified, I had to acknowledge just how out of shape I was. By the time I left, he had signed me up for personal weight-training sessions twice a week, a low-impact aerobics class, and a yoga class.
He also gave me instructions on what to make for breakfast—a smoothie that had at least a dozen ingredients in it, most of which I had never heard of, and instructions to quit the caffeine by two p.m. each day. He had wanted me to stop drinking it by noon, but I had given him a look that had cowed him into silence.
Sandy stood there laughing the entire time. After that was done, we swept out of the gym, which was one of those Spandex wonder gyms, sans the incessant Euro-tech music that made me grit my teeth. My checkbook had taken a beating and so had my ego.
After the gym, Sandy took care of several of her errands. She dropped off her dry cleaning, and I took the opportunity to pick up mine. She stopped at the health food store, on the pretext of needing a few supplements. But I knew she was giving me the chance to get what I needed. I stared at the list Wilson had prepared for me and finally just shoved it at the clerk.
“Apparently, I’m now a fixer-upper,” I said, already mourning the loss of my morning doughnuts and pastries.
“You are nothing of the sort. You’ll be surprised by how quickly you respond. The Mad Maudlin I knew back in the day was strong enough to take down ten vampires before breakfast, which—if I remember right—was usually bread and cheese, and maybe an apple if we were lucky.” Sandy narrowed her eyes. “We aren’t anywhere near old, so don’t use that as an excuse. Modern living has made us soft.”
“It hasn’t made you that soft,” I muttered as the clerk handed me a package and I swiped my credit card to the tune of two hundred and fifteen dollars.
“That’s because I happen to love exercise. But cheer up, at least you have a cute trainer.” She winked at me.
I snorted. “Right. That’s more of a distraction than a help. But he did seem nice, and as much as I hate to admit it, last night’s encounter with Thornton convinced me that I really need a good, solid tune-up, so to speak. Okay, now what?” I was actually happy to be out running errands with her. It took my mind off what I had hidden down in my basement.
“Well, we can’t break the hex until tomorrow night, if what Garret told you is correct. I have to make a stop at Neverfall, so want to come along?”
I had actually never been out to the school, and it seemed like as good a use of the rest of the morning as anything else. “Sure. I called the bank and made sure that everything was set, so I’m good. Will Jenna be there?”
She nodded. “Derry asked if I could pay for Jenna’s summer term. She sent me the money and I told her I’d be glad to.”
Derry Knight was one of Sandy’s socialite friends. The air-kiss, hug-hug, ladies-who-lunch crew. Shortly before Winter Solstice, Derry had asked Sandy if she would take over as her daughter’s guardian while she went on a worldwide jaunt that was scheduled to last two years. That way, if anything happened to Jenna, there would be somebody who could be reached immediately. Sandy had agreed, and she seemed to be getting into the spirit of pseudo-motherhood. Jenna only came home on select weekends from the academy, and she was old enough to where she really didn’t want constant mothering.
Sandy headed for the other side of the island, stopping at an espresso drive-thru. “I know how traumatizing this morning was to you. Go for it. Caffeine is your comfort food now, but don’t overdo it.”
I stuck my tongue out at her but ordered a triple-shot latte and was about to add a brownie on top of it when Sandy shook her head. I changed my order from a brownie to a banana.
As we pulled onto Rosewood Road, the traffic seemed brisk. The water was choppy today, and in the distance, clouds were rolling in, black and laden with rain. As we zipped along in that comfortable silence of friends who didn’t need to talk, I nursed my latte, realizing it would be the last of the day. The banana tasted surprisingly good, and I decided that maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad change after all.
“I wish I had had a school like Neverfall when I was young,” I said after a while.
“I know. Instead, we had the witch hunters after us.” Sandy shook her head. “At least now, even though there’s plenty of hate against the PretCom, it’s not as prevalent as it was and we can counter it more.”
“If humans find out that some vampires can walk during the day, that may change.”
“But are vamps really part of the preternatural community?” Sandy flashed me a quick look. “I mean, seriously, I want to know. That’s never been fully decided, and who—if anybody—is the one who gets to make that decision? Do humans get to decide who belongs to our ranks? Or do we, as a whole, define the meaning of what it means to belong to the PretCom? And what about humans with psychic and magical abilities? They do exist. Are they part of the PretCom?”
I let out a long sigh. “It’s too early for philosophical arguments. But if you want my answer? Yes, vamps do have a right to claim PretCom status. As far as humans with magical abilities, there’s a vast difference between being a psychic human, and being born a witch. Our DNA is different—that’s been proven. Just like a shifter’s DNA is different, and so are the Fae.”
“What would that make Franny?”
“She’s a ghost. A spirit. She was once human. Ghosts aren’t exactly PretCom, because you can be any race and end up as a spirit.”
“What about vampires? Most of them were human before they died and were turned.”
Sandy grinned as she steered the car around a slow-moving tractor puttering along. The road was long and winding, hugging the outside of the island as it made the entire circuit. It started at the ferry terminal, going around the entire island, and numerous businesses and beaches had sprung up along it.
To our right, the water stretched toward the horizon as the scent of brine and kelp filled the air. The tide was going out, leaving stretches of beach littered with seaweed and shells. They washed up on the quarter-sized rocks that formed much of the region’s shores. The rocky beaches were filled in with gravel, and seaweed draped over the driftwood logs that came thundering in on the stormy waves of autumn and winter. The giant logs rolled across the shore, lodging on the beach as reminders of just how dangerous the waters in this area could be.
It amazed me that the Meré could survive in the riptide and the currents that lashed at the edge of the islands, but they did.
Here and there a stray patch of beachgrass sprouted up, shifting the structure of the dunes. The Bedlam Horticultural Society had taken to weeding it out because beachgrass displaced the nests of shorebirds and native foliage. Unfortunately, it was a tenacious plant. The fight against the patches of tall windblown grass seemed to be entrenched for the long run.
I watched the stretch of mudflats, expose
d as the tide rolled out. “Makes me think of Fata, you know.”
“I know,” Sandy said. “You miss her, don’t you?”
I pressed my lips together, turning over her question in my mind. Fata had been a force of nature. “I think at times, I do. But she was so chaotic, and so hard to control…”
“You can’t control a water spirit. You just can’t. Just like you can’t control the ocean. She’ll do as she wants, and her moods shift on a dime. But…I miss her too.”
I shivered as she spoke. “I wonder if she thinks about us.”
“I don’t know whether I hope she does or I hope she’s forgotten us.” Sandy shook her head, as if to drive the thought away. “Let’s talk about something else, all right?”
I knew why she wanted to change the subject. Fata had been our third—completing our triad of power. And she had also nearly been our downfall. When we last saw her, she was racing out to sea on a wave, her fury bringing up such a gale that more than one ship in the area had capsized. Sandy and I had had to let her go. We had to let her run free without trying to make her fit into our world. And yet…Fata could so easily be like cool rain on a thirsty morning, the comforting embrace of rising mist on a cold autumn day.
Pushing my thoughts of her away, I cleared my throat. “You said Max solved the problem with the clients who were backing away from their deal?”
The frown on Sandy’s face vanished. “Yes, and what a relief. It would have been a nasty battle in court because they had signed contracts and he had gone ahead and put in orders based on those contracts. The orders were already under way, so he would have lost a tidy sum of money and been stuck with too much stock. But he worked it out with them to everybody’s advantage. I never realized running a clothing business could be so complicated.”
I paused, then blurted out, “What the hell am I going to do about Essie and that damned book? I can’t give it back to her, Sandy—not with those spells in it. And if I tear them out and give it back to her, she’s going to know I’ve seen it. The minute she gets those suitcases and finds out that Thornton’s journal’s not there, she’ll either figure out I know what’s going on, or she’ll think he hid it in my house and send somebody to try to find it. Either way, I’m facing one hell of a mess. Times like these, I wish Linda was still here and I could take my problems to her. But now, I’m the High Priestess and I have to make the call.”
“You talk to Auntie Tautau yet? She’d be the one I’d turn to.”
“I tried, but she was out. On the way home can we stop at her place and I’ll give it another try?”
“Sure. Look—we’re almost to Neverfall. It’s out on that arm of the island.”
Bedlam Island had several stretches of high land that reached out into the strait, long fingers well above the waters so that—unless a tsunami rolled in—they were safe from most of the storms and the high tides. Neverfall Academy for Gifted Students was a set of stone buildings that sat on a thousand-acre campus on the northeastern side of Bedlam Island.
The campus stretched out along the cliffs looking over the water, and a large retaining wall kept students from falling off. There were two branches, one for younger students and one for the students in their teens. The gray stone buildings were paired with the dormitories, also of stone make, that rose like towers behind the main buildings. While there were day classes for some of the pupils living on Bedlam, most of the students lived in the dorms and went home only for vacations.
As we pulled in through the main gates, we could see some of the students were outside practicing soccer. A younger class looked to be having a nature walk around campus. We drove slowly through the winding road leading up to the main administrative building. As we pulled into the lot, parking in the visitors’ section, Sandy leaned back and took off her sunglasses.
“You know, we should become more active with the academy. The coven, I mean. We have a lot we could teach them,” she said.
I thought about it for a moment. “You’re right. We’re living history. We have a lot of first-hand knowledge that today’s generation can never experience. Textbooks are one thing, but you cannot begin to impart what life was really like until you’ve lived through it.”
“I’ll have a talk with the principal and see if we can work something out. Meanwhile, let’s go. It won’t take long.”
NEVERFALL WAS AS imposing on the inside as it looked on the outside. A labyrinth of staircases and hallways, the interior of the main building, with its hustle and bustle, actually perked me up. The atmosphere felt industrious, and the sight of so many kids hurrying from one class to another made me smile.
I had learned one-to-one. My grandmother had taught my mother as much as she could and then quit bothering until I came along. My mother had been more interested in how she could use a love charm to get somebody to support her. But Granny had seen a spark in me—literally. She told me that when I was still in diapers, I had gotten angry. I held out my hand, crying, and a flame had flickered for a few seconds over my fingers.
Luckily, she had been there to see it, and from the beginning, she had taught me, bringing me into the local coven before I was barely able to toddle around. The high priestess had mentored me herself, and as long as I was home to do my chores, my mother didn’t care what I did. In fact, the less she had to deal with me, the better. I had been taught to read and write—illegal in our area, for anyone not of the nobility—and by the time I was ten, I was a whiz at counting sums.
A group of girls passed by, giving us a wide-eyed look. One of them stopped and, in what looked like a spontaneous burst of courage, asked, “Are you Mad Maudlin? We heard she lives on the island, and…”
I blushed. “Yes, I am.”
“We’re learning about you in history class—about the vampire hunts.”
I decided then and there that if Neverfall was teaching stories about me, I should be there to make sure they were correct. “Well, maybe I can visit your class someday.”
She blushed again. “That would be waysome!”
Waysome? Deciding to take it as a compliment, I waved as she hurried to catch up with her friends. I followed Sandy into the billing department and watched as she wrote out a check that made me cough when I saw the amount. Apparently, quality magical education didn’t come cheap. Another five minutes and, clutching a receipt, we headed back to the car.
As we exited the building, I caught a whiff of some floral scent. It was too early for most flowers, but then we saw that a teacher was showing a class how to make a patch of daffodils bloom. There must have been a hundred flowers in the patch, and as they all opened up at once, the fragrance wafted past us.
“Talk to the headmaster. They’re teaching classes about us, so I think we should be there to make certain that whoever wrote the history books got the info correct.” I slid in and fastened my seat belt.
Sandy laughed. “I just hope they don’t tell the kids about our hundred-year after-party.”
Snorting, I agreed. “That would have to be sex-ed class, I guess. Anyway, so everything taken care of?”
She started the ignition and eased back down the driveway. “Yeah, tuition’s paid and all is well. Where to next?”
I couldn’t think of anything else that was pressing. “Let’s drop in on Auntie Tautau. Maybe she’ll have some advice for us. The gods know I could use it.”
As we headed back to the other side of Bedlam, my thoughts strayed back home. Even with the shadow warriors protecting my property, I wouldn’t be comfortable until I had figured out how the hell to deal with Essie and that damned book.
THE AUNTIES WERE a phenomenon onto themselves. They had always been, as far as we knew. They were power incarnate, beyond any witch known, and yet they belonged to no coven, no circle, no group. Ancient—we had never heard of a young Auntie—their origins were a mystery.
Most of them went about in the guise of old women who were seen as no more than the eccentric neighbor do
wn the street, or the crazy cat lady who lived on the edge of the forest. But one mistake, one misstep over the line and the Aunties could twist you up and dice you into hash for breakfast. They protected and guarded those who were necessary to the web of fate, and while they weren’t able to intervene when someone upset the balance, they were able to remove people from the path of danger if it was deemed necessary.
Auntie Tautau worked with the Witches’ Protection Program, which was much like the human Witness Protection Program—only it protected its members more thoroughly. Once the witches in question were removed from their current life and sent into the tumble of changes that the WPP enacted, nobody would ever find the witch again. In fact, our former high priestess and her daughter had been sent into the program, and all we knew was that they were happy and safe. We would never see them again.
We pulled up in front of Auntie Tautau’s house. A cozy cottage, it was nestled in the folds of tangled huckleberry and ferns, rose bushes and vine maple, all surrounded by fir and cedar. A single birch tree grew in the front yard, which was also overgrown.
As we stepped out of the car, Auntie Tautau appeared on the wraparound porch.
The first time I met her, she had been wearing a muumuu, but today she was in a tidy rose-print dress with a wide white bib apron over the front. She was squat and short, sturdier than anybody I knew, with long gray hair that hung to her waist. Today it was in a ponytail rather than a braid, and she was wearing a straw hat with a pink ribbon. A crow sat on the bow. It blinked at me and I realized that it was alive. The first time I had seen it, I had thought it was stuffed. I was wrong.
“Come, come. I found your note the other day and wondered when you would return.” The Irish accent was the same as I had remembered, a thick brogue that rolled off her tongue. She motioned to the door. “Fat raindrops are on the way. Hurry or you’re likely to get drenched.”
Sure enough, as we hustled toward her door, they began to fall—huge fat raindrops that splattered when they hit the sidewalk. We entered the cottage, and once again, the tidiness of the cottage belied the tangle outside.