Convicted Witch: Jagged Grove Book 1 (19 page)

Just then thunder rocks the room again, followed closely by a pounding on the door. I look at Bilda, since I’m spooked and she seems to know more than me about what’s going on here. She nods.

“Glade, you wanna get that? It sounds like we’re open for business.”

He leaves Rain in her chair and goes to unlock the door. When he comes back, he’s half-dragging a skinny man who is soaking wet and holding a bloody rag to his head.

“What happened?” I ask, going to him. “I’m Trinket, by the way. I can help-.”

A commotion at the door makes me stop. Three more people - no, four - run inside, all of them dripping and groaning and clutching wounds.

“This town’s being ripped apart,” one man shouts over the nose of the others.

I’m listening and nodding, but I’m also trying to remember what it was like, back when I healed simple cuts and bruises for fun. How did I even begin? How did I begin earlier, when Bartholomew got hurt? I don’t remember, and it’s frustrating me. My recent healings were more life and death, so my magic sort of took the lead. This time, though, I don’t feel that familiar pulse of power. I don’t feel anything.

I’m staring at him, and he’s staring back at me, when Bilda hurries over to us. She pinches the skin above my elbow.

“Ow,” I say.

She reaches past me to take the man’s hand. “I’ll take care of him. You go help the others.”

I open my mouth to tell her that I can’t, but her eyes narrow. “Intention, Trinket. Be intentional.”

The man shoots me one bewildered look and then Bilda is dragging him away.

I move to the group of people who just came in and kneel down in front of a heavyset woman with hard eyes and a huge new bruise darkening her face and throat, just as the window behind the reception desk explodes. Glass rains in, followed by the downpour and a cold wind that crawls across the back of my neck. I need to get her out of this room, first of all.

I take her hand. It’s cold, too. “Come with me. I’m going to help you.”

As I say the words, some tiny thing shifts in my mind. I feel it, but can’t quite place it, I speak again, pulling her along with me to the exam room where Bilda is putting a poultice on the first man. “I’m going to help you,” I say, putting emphasis on the
going
part of my little mantra.

Another shift in my mind, more perceptible now, and my hands begin to tingle. I can’t help but smile a little, but I bite my lip to hide it. Can’t have anyone think that the doctor has gone bananas.

I direct her to sit on the exam table, which she does, and then run my fingertips along the edges of the bruising. Her lip is busted, too, something I couldn’t quite see before. I touch it and watch it knit together. Not completely healed, but enough that there won’t even be a scar.

When the bruising starts to fade I ask her to swallow, but she shakes her head. In a croaky voice, she whispers, “It hurts.”

I place my palm across her Adam’s apple. “Swallow for me,” I say. In my mind, the images come unbidden, like slides from a Viewfinder, and I know I’m building intention. I see her tissue clear and strengthen. I see her blood vessels rearrange themselves. I see her bruises fade away, leaving behind a surprisingly pretty smile.

The effort makes me lightheaded, but when I pull away she looks a million times better. I stare at her with a goofy grin, which she doesn’t return.

“Better?” I ask finally. “Try to talk.”

She does, hesitantly. “I’m afraid it will hurt,” she whispers. Then, surprised at her own strong voice, she rubs her throat and says louder, “I think you fixed it. Wow.”

The bruising is just a shadow now, but I make her feel her face for tender spots before I let her go. “Find shelter,” I say, following her out to the reception room. “Stay out of this storm.”

I’m still smiling as I go get my next patient.

T
he trickle of people becomes a steady flow that keeps both me and Bilda busy for the next two hours. As I work with patient after patient - my patients! - I slowly piece together what is happening.

It seems the docks were the first to go, although no one knows why. The pretty seaside setting that welcomed us to Jagged Grove is gone now, for all intents and purposes, and the levees are beginning to creak and crumble here and there. “If that goes,” says one old fisherman to me as I reset his shoulder, “We’ll all be ass over teakettle.”

I smile at Bilda over his head and she smiles back. Her hair, curled to a frizz, is sticking up all over and I see a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She’s being amazing, knowing exactly which of her concoctions fixes what problem, and never complaining about how tired she must be getting.

We’ve developed an unspoken system, of sorts - she manages the smaller cuts and bruises, while I handle more serious open wounds and injuries with my magic. Rain keeps everyone in the reception room calm, and Glade is busy boarding up windows against the storm that still rages outside.

We make a fantastic team, if I do say so myself.

When I send an injured man out and no one comes in to take his place, I finally feel like I can sit down for a minute. Bilda is just sending her patient out with a pat on the shoulder when I take his place, sliding my ass up on the worktable. It’s the first I’ve sat down, and it feels really, really good.

She turns to me. “What can I do for you, girlie?” she asks.

“A bottle of bourbon. Can you conjure one of those, please?”

She chuckles, then looks closer at me. “You’re pale.”

“It’s hard work. Harder than I thought it would be,” I admit. My blood is still buzzing, though. “I got woozy there a few times.”

She nods. “A lot of your energy goes into this sort of work.”

We both jump as a tree cracks and falls nearby. It sounds like it barely missed our office.

“You think Rachel has something to do with this?” I ask. “Seriously?”

“Yes. I do.” She points to the far corner of the worktable and I see the cup I found earlier, but it’s glowing an odd washed-out blur color. “What is it?”

“I checked it out. It’s been spell-cast.”

“Who would cast a spell on an empty...?” My voice trails off as I realize that the cup probably wasn’t always empty “Oh. You think Maggie was poisoned.”

“I think - and this is just conjecture, mind you - that Rachel was a jealous witch. I think she set her sights on the twins’ dad and did some harm when she didn’t get her way. Then I think she went after Maggie for the same reason.”

“Wait - was Maggie part of the coven?” I was following until this last, but now I’m confused again.

“No. Think about what Jones said to Angelo earlier. I’m going to find you some juice or something before you keel over.”

I do think about it, right after I lay back on the table and groan for a full minute because it feels so good to straighten my spine, but I have no idea what thing he’d said. I mean, Jones is hot and all that, but I don’t go around memorizing our conversations. So I try approaching it another way.

If Rachel was jealous enough to kill, who would she kill Maggie over? Obviously somebody who was a threat, but from all I’d heard, Maggie was the sweetest person around. Nobody has a bad word to say about her.

Jealousy.

Rachel. Maggie.

Maybe Rachel had a lover hanging around the office and Maggie started flirting with him. Even worse, what if she took him away from Rachel? It seems silly, because these were grown women instead of high school girls, but it makes sense if Bilda is right. I glance at the cup again. And somebody cast a spell on that cup, which I’d be willing to bet was Maggie’s. The position of it under the coatrack told me it could easily have rolled from her hand as she died.

But this all seems too much like conjecture, and I’m too tired to care, to be honest. “Bilda!” I call out, wondering where she went. The office isn’t that big. “Just tell me who Rachel was screwing, already. My head hurts.”

A female giggle answers me from the doorway.

“Rain?”

“Sorry. No. Just us.” This voice is male, and I sit up so fast that I get dizzy again. Putting a hand to my head, I look to see the beautiful Wisp, clutching the hand of a Land’s End model. He’s all decked out in corduroy and hiking boots, with closely cropped blonde hair. Even from here I can see the professional highlights and bright white teeth. This has to be the one and only Scott Trevine.

The two of them look completely untouched by the storm.

“Oh. Sorry. Can I help you?” Neither of them look injured, and it’s got to be close to midnight.

Scott picks Wisp up and carries her to my exam table. She looks at him, batting her eyelashes and cooing something I don’t want to hear. I swallow a smirk, because I guess she’s hurt, after all. “What’s the problem?”

“I think Wisp twisted her ankle earlier on some steps. Can you see to it?” He has moved down her practically swooning body to cradle her ankle gently in both hands, like it’s the Hope Diamond.

“Sure.”

I bend over the table to take a look, but there isn’t much to go on. I don’t see any swelling, and she doesn’t flinch when I put pressure on it. A couple of times this evening, my intuition has told me where to look for an injury, but I’m getting nothing there, either.

I look up. “Can you show me exactly where it hurts?” I ask.

She pulls her foot out of my hands and giggles again, but this time the sound makes my skin crawl. “I’m not hurt, actually. I just had to open the door. It’s time for you to leave,
Trinket
.”

She jumps up from the table, takes Scott’s hand, and disappears through the door again. Actually, disappear is the wrong word. They ooze out of my sight and, presumably, out of my office. I wonder where in the hell Bilda, Glade and Rain went.

Behind me, near Bilda’s table, I hear laughter. It’s a woman’s laugh too, but not the smug little twitter that belongs to Wisp. This is the full-throated laugh of a grown woman, and I know without even thinking about it that it belongs to Rachel.

A new kind of pressure fills the room, or maybe I should say that it fills my head. Suddenly I can’t breathe, and then tunnel vision closes in, followed by a nausea like I’ve never felt before. I taste seawater, somehow.

From the doorway, Angelo says, “Leave her alone.”

I can’t see him. I can’t see anything.

“Ooh, how pretty. Coming to her rescue is so gauche, Angelo.” Her voice comes closer to me, as if she’s turned in my direction. “He’s always been the knight in shining armor type, though. You would have eventually found that out.”

“Rachel.” Angelo’s voice is sharp.

I’m reeling, just trying to stay upright and not puke all over myself. I grip the sides of the table so hard that I think I might be breaking the bones in my hand, and I still feel my knees failing.

The part of my mind that isn’t focused solely on survival is wondering why Angelo is here, and why he’s jabbering with the ghost instead of helping me. I try to say his name, but my throat is closing shut and all that comes out is a little squawk.

Rachel-thing laughs.

“I don’t want her, Rachel.”

OK, either my hearing is going, too, or Angelo just
purred
that last sentence at the ghostie Rachel thing. His smooth, sexy voice seems farther away now, and off toward the reception room I hear the door slam. Oh good, now I’m locked in here with Angelo and his...

Several pieces fall into place at once, and if I could breathe, everything would make sense now.

At the same moment, I feel whatever crushing hold that Rachel has on my body loosen, just a little. I take a deep breath while I’ve got the chance. A couple more and I could actually stand on my own, but I don’t get that lucky. Her invisible grip, or whatever it is, closes in again.

I hear pounding, and then Bilda’s voice. She’s chanting something, and I pray hard that it’s something powerful that will yank me out of the Rachel’s dead, witchy grasp.

Evidently it isn’t, though.

“I’m so sorry, Trinket,” I hear Angelo say. He’s close by, but I can’t tell exactly where. “I’m in love with Rachel, and I will always be hers.”

I suddenly want to cackle, and recognize the signs of my own hysteria. I swallow the laughter, suck in a half-breath and say, “’K.”

Holy hellfire. I was trying to avoid one love triangle, and now I’m apparently involved in another one - with dead people.

God, I want to go home. Raleigh’s such a great city. If I live through this, I will kill Angelo, take his weird portal-boat hostage, and force them to take me home. Or something.

All at once, the pressure is gone. I slide down the side of the table as my knees give way, banging the back of my head on the edge as I go. The door comes open and then I’m surrounded by Bilda and the twins. They’re trying to help me up but I shake my head and wave them away. I only want to sit here and breathe for a minute. My bones feel like jelly.

The storm is dying down outside, so maybe Rachel is gone. I hope so, for the sake of all of us.

Bilda speaks up first. “I heard Angelo in here. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.” I rub my chest, which hurts, and decide that it’s OK to try to stand. Glade reaches out to help me up.

Bilda takes my face in both of her cool hands and forces me to meet her eyes. “Trinket, I am so sorry. I was trying to get you to use your intuition and figure out what was going on - I didn’t think it would hurt if you figured it out yourself.”

I close my eyes, and the answer to my questions come rushing back, now that I can think about them and, you know, breathe. “So Rachel got a taste of revenge with Glade and Rain’s parents, then took out Maggie for...what? Flirting with Angelo?”

Bilda nodded. “Jones told me that Angelo used to hang out here a lot.”

“OK, that makes sense, then. But why did...?” I gulp. “Oh, for crying out loud. She thought I wanted to...?”

Bilda nodded again. “Pretty much.”

“Well, that’s stupid. Angelo is my jailer, not my boyfriend.”

“Tell her, not me.”

I would, but I’d rather never be anywhere near her again. I look around the room. “Do you think she kidnapped Angelo or something? He disappeared at the same time she did. I think.”