Demon's Delight

Witch Way

MARYJANICE DAVIDSON

Street Corners and Halos

CATHERINE SPANGLER

The Demon's Angel

EMMA HOLLY

Angel and the Hellraiser

VICKIE TAYLOR

MaryJanice Davidson

To my husband, who is my opposite in every way:
politically, religiously, economically, and neurologically.
Do I believe in love at first sight? You bet! Do I believe
opposites attract? I have two children (both look like him)
who would testify to that fact.

Thanks again to Cindy Hwang at Berkley, who never clutches her head (at least in my presence) when I pitch a new idea. And thanks to the fabulous cover artists and the flap copy techs; I could never sum up a book (or four novellas) in two paragraphs, but those bums make it look easy.

Not all witches were bad. Not all witches were even witches, particularly during the madness of the Salem witch trials.

But some were. And they got pissed. That's all I've got to say about that.

She turned me into a newt! It got better.

—Monty Python and the Holy Grail

My mother says I must not pass

Too near that glass.

She is afraid that I will see

A little witch that looks like me.

With a red mouth to whisper low

The very thing I should not know.

—
Sarah Morgan Bruamt Piatt,
The Witch in the Glass

There is no hate lost between us.

—
The Witch,
Act iv, Sc. 3

There is no love lost between us.

—
Cervantes,
Don Quixote,
Book iv

T
UCKER
Goodman did not take his hat off, a whipping offense if anyone else dared try it. He pointed a long, bony finger at the witch in the blocks and said, in a voice trembling with rage and age, “You are an unnatural thing, cast out by the devil to live among good people—”

“Good people,” the witch said, craning (and failing) to look at him, “like the Swansons? You know perfectly well the last three littluns born on that farm weren't got on the missus, but instead, the eldest daughter. Not to mention—”

“Liar!” Farmer Swanson was on his feet, his face purpling, while Mrs. Swanson just huddled deeper into the bench and cried softy into her handkerchief. “That
thing
filled my girls' heads with lies!”

“Silence, Farmer Swanson!” Silence reigned, as the witch knew it would. There was no reasoning with a mob. Unless you were the leader of the mob.

“I think we can all agree—”

“That you're a creaky old man who likes having marital congress with fifteen-year-olds to keep the evil spirits away.” The witch laughed.

“—that since you were sent here, there has been naught but wickedness afoot.”

“Except for all the children I cured of the waxing disease,” the witch pointed out helpfully.

No one said anything. The witch wasn't surprised. Say just the wrong thing at the wrong time, and things like guilt or innocence didn't matter. Defend a witch, and you'd be burned alive, too. Just a handy scapegoat to roast and dance about. That's all they really wanted.

“You will die in agony, yet cleansed by fire.”

“Terrific,” the witch muttered.

“And in penance for your evil deeds, your children and your children's children, down through the ages, will be persecuted and hunted until you share your powers with your greatest enemy.”

“I see no logic in that order of things,” the witch commented. “Why not just kill me and get it over with?”

“Because you keep coming back,” Goodman said, clearly exasperated. “My great-great-grandfather told me all about you. You bring your mischief to the town and have your fun and then are burned and show up in another town a few years later.”

“I like to keep busy.”

“This time, if you don't give over your powers to your greatest enemy, you'll be doomed to walk the earth forever, alone and persecuted.”

“And if I do give over my powers to my greatest enemy?”

Goodman smirked, revealing teeth blackening with age. “But you never will, unnatural thing. You don't have a heart to share, to open. And so I curse you, as this town curses you, doomed to walk the earth forever, alone.”

“How very Christian and forgiving of you,” the witch muttered.

Goodman, wrapped tightly in his cloak of smug judgment, ignored the witch's comment. Instead, he sprinkled a foul-smelling herb poultice in the witch's hair and clothes, ignoring the sneezes, then stood back as flaming chunks of wood were tossed, arcing through the air and landing on the pile of wood the witch was standing on.

The witch wriggled, but the town elders knew their business: The witch was trussed as firmly to the center pole as a turkey on a spit. An unpleasant comparison, given what was happening right now…

“Well, if I
do
come back,” the witch shouted over the crackling flames, “you can bet I will never set foot in Massachusetts again!” Then, as his feet caught fire, Christopher de Mere muttered, “Fie on this. Fie all
over
this.”

The villagers watched the man turn into a living candle, making the sign of the cross, as he hardly made a sound, except for the occasional yelp of pain or muttered taunt. And later, scraping through the ashes, they never found a single bone.

Things were quiet.

For a while.

R
HEA
Goodman sat at the broad wooden table in her mother's farmhouse and waited expectantly. Her parents, Flower and Power (real names: Stephanie and Bob), were looking uneasy, and Rhea felt in her bones that It Was Time.

Time to explain why she'd been brought up a nomad, moving from commune to commune.

Time for Flower and Power to explain why they clung to the hippie thing, even though they were in their fifties and ought to have ulcers and IBM stock.

Time to explain her younger sister's insistence on playing “kill the witch! kill the witch!” with the kid as the hero and her as the witch.

Her theory? Flower and Power had robbed a bank. Or blown up a building. Because they were on the run, no question.

Only…from whom?

And her little sister was just weird.

“Rhea, baby, we wanted to sit you down and have a talk.” Flower ran her long, bony fingers through her graying red hair, waist length and for once not pulled back in the perpetual braid.

“About your future,” Power added, rubbing his bald, sunburned pate. He was about three inches shorter than her mother, who, at five-five, wasn't exactly Giganto. She had passed both of them in height by the time she was fourteen. “And your past.”

“Super-duper.” She folded her hands and leaned forward. “And whatever you guys did, I'm sure you had to do. So I forgive you.”

“It wasn't us,” Flower said, sitting down, then changing her mind and standing. Then sitting again. The sun was slanting through the western windows, making the table look like it was on fire, and for the first time in memory, Rhea saw her mother wince away from the light. “It was destiny.”

Yeah, you were destined to rob a bank. Or free test animals. And then have kids and spend the rest of your life on the run. Homeschooling, ugh!

“As the eldest—”

“Yeah, where
are
the other ankle biters, anyway?” Rhea had four brothers and sisters: Ramen, Kane, Chrysanthemum, and Violet, aged nineteen, fifteen, twelve, and eight, respectively.

“Away from here. This is business strictly for the eldest of the family. For centuries it has been this way.”

Abruptly, Flower started to cry. Power got up and clumsily patted her. “We can't tell her,” she sobbed into her work-roughened hands. “We just can't!”

“We must,” Power soothed.

“Hey, whoa, it's all right!” She held her hands up in the universal “simmer down” motion. “Whatever you did, it's cool with me.”
Good God, did they kill someone?
“I'm sure we can figure something out.”

“It's not what we did, it's what you're going to do.”

“Go back to college? Forget it. Like the man said, it's high school with ashtrays. Get a new job? Working on it. Try to get one of my poems published? Working on that, too.”

“No,” Flower said, lips trembling. “Nothing like that.”

“Then what is it?”

“It's destiny.”

“Yeah, great, what does that mean?”

“You're going to kill the greatest evil to walk the earth, and you'll die in the process,” Power told her. “So it is, so it has been, so it shall be. Only if the hunter makes the ultimate sacrifice will the witch be vanquished.” He sounded like he was quoting from a book. Then he continued, and his voice no longer sounded like a recitation. “I'm so sorry, Rhea. I'm just so, so sorry.”

Her mother was beyond contributing to the conversation and simply cried harder.

Rhea felt her mouth pop open in surprise. “So, uh, you guys didn't rob a federal bank?” Then, “Don't tell me all those fairy stories you told me about witches and witch-hunters and demons are
true
. Because if they are—”

Flower and Power nodded.

“Jinkies,” she muttered and rested her sharp little chin on her folded hands.