If the Broom Fits

“
I
'm coming with you
,” Leslie said as she tossed a bag into the backseat of my generic black SUV and seat belted herself into the passenger seat before I could even process what was happening.

“Get out.” I put the car in park and stared at her. This wasn't a road trip. I didn't want company.

She folded her hands calmly into her lap, but didn't, you know, open the door and get out. “You don't have a choice. Unless you're going to physically remove me from the vehicle…” She raised an eyebrow and I looked away. “That's what I thought. I'm coming with you,” she repeated without any sort of gloating in her voice.

I ground my teeth. I'd spent the entire week after Christmas with the human witches—and even stayed for a couple extra days. Enough was enough. Any more friendly-togetherness and I'd lose my damn mind. Being alone right now sounded like heaven. No endless chatter. Watching a movie without a running commentary. No bickering. Not having to wait to use the bathroom. These were all things I'd previously undervalued. Plus, what I was about to do wasn't a coven matter. It was personal. “This has nothing to do with any of you. I want to go alone.”

“Does it have to do with you?” Leslie blinked at me innocently.

“Yeah. . . .”

“Then it's a coven matter. You are, after all, one of us.”

Ugh. If I could've shoved her out of the car I would've. Stubborn women, all of them. I rolled my eyes and shifted back into drive. “I don't know what we'll find. It could boring.”

“I can survive a little boredom.”

“Could be dangerous.”

She shrugged. “Great, then it's an adventure.”

I accelerated hard out of the driveway. She was hopeless.

The snow drifting down from the early morning sky was comforting somehow because it let me know Orion was there. Not because I trusted him—let's face it, I knew nothing about him other than he'd known my mother and had pissed off the gods, which wasn't a fantastic start. However, whatever it was that chose spirit guides, chose Orion to be mine and since that moment I had trouble not letting what he said take root. I had to learn the whole story behind my past. Needed answers. What if just being a dark witch didn't exactly make you evil? All the assumptions I'd made in my life were shaken. I needed the truth. That's why I had to go to my mother's house—
my
house. Bizarre. One quick property title search and I suddenly had an address and a legacy I'd never known about until Orion blew into my life.

My trip felt like it would be one of those major life events…one I was apparently going to experience with Leslie.

I reached over to the glove compartment, careful not to touch her even though I was completely covered and had my gloves on. When you lived your whole life unable to touch another living being without killing it, you took precautions that might seem extreme to outsiders, but were actually completely justified. I tossed Leslie the map with the address written on a sticky note stuck to the front. “You navigate.”

“Did you try your phone's GPS?”

“It said address not found. Go figure.” All things considered, if the address of a notorious dark witch like my mother had been on the GPS I would have been more suspicious.

“So you've never been there? How do you know it still exists? Maybe the house is gone. It's been a long time.” Leslie peeled off the sticky note and unfolded the map.

Technically, I guess I had been there at least once. I was probably born in the house. Dark witches always gave birth to babies that couldn't be touched, so it didn't really seem like a hospital sort of labor. And that particular day was also the day I took my first life: my mother's. “It's the address listed on a title in her name. It might be nothing, but it's a place to start. It's worth a chance.”

I tried to stamp down the kneejerk reaction I had to thinking about my mother. Mostly it was anger with a heavy dose of bitter resentment and not a lot of sympathy. That was one of many problems with Leslie coming along with me. She was not only a witch (a good one), she was also an empath. It was going to be hard to keep any of this to myself and I wasn't really ready to share it with anyone.

But no matter how hard I tried, Winter Darkmore (my mother) wouldn't be pushed to the back of my mind. Pandora's box had been opened and every detail I knew about her and what happened back spilled into my thoughts. But trust me, I didn't know much.

Dark witches don't have regular babies. The magic they invite into themselves doesn't stop with their flesh. At conception, magic pools in the child and boils inside its veins. When the child is born, the power they house is the darkest of all magic in existence: death magic. I am that child. I have that magic. I am a necromancer.

I discovered the negative side effect of being able to control the dead early in life: everything I touch dies, whether I intend it to or not. The flipside, however, is I can turn any undead being into my minion for as long or as short a time as I desire. I can reanimate the dead. I can (I recently discovered) even send someone to purgatory then bring them back out because technically that didn't break the death curse, so long as they did die at some point after being touched by me. It wasn't much of a loophole, though. Most people in purgatory didn't make it back out, with or without my help. The Queen of the Fae and fellow coven member, Selene, was the exception—as she was for so many things in her charmed life. And yet, it was impossible to dislike her and not root for her a little.

None of this mattered though. I didn't want any of it. I didn't want to be cursed to an existence of solitude. I didn't want to be forced to live my life surrounded by the dead. I wanted what the rest of the coven had. I wanted a real life.

“Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” Leslie asked once we were on the highway, heading north to Kilkenny—a place so small it barely registered on the map.

I shrugged, still combatting thoughts and trying not to let them through to the surface.

My mother's life was the only one I never felt bad about taking. After all, none of this had been my choice. It was entirely hers. She knew what she was and what she was doing. She chose to end her life and bring me into a world where I would be alone. Everything undead wanted necromancers gone because we were a threat, and so did most of the living because we were terrifying. Finding a place I fit—in the human world or the Abyss—was all but impossible. That's why I was a bounty hunter. I could work alone and even though I was human and therefore slower, smaller, and more easily killed, all I had to do was get an ungloved hand on an attacker and it was all over. I was possibly the most lethal bounty hunter around. A reputation that probably saved me more times than I could count.

And that's where the coven came in. They could get me what I wanted.

Orion had passed on a letter to me from my mother about how she had discovered a way to break the curse before she died. Of course she didn't give me the spell. No, she said I had to resurrect her and then she could break the curse. But if she had the spell, she had to have written it down somewhere. “We need to find her Book of Shadows,” I muttered out loud, rubbing the key I wore on a chain around my neck.

Leslie turned toward me. “Your mother's? That's why we're going to her house?”

“Yes,” I said begrudgingly, not quite forgetting—or forgiving—how she'd horned into my trip. “As I said earlier, I don't know what we'll find there. There could be all sorts of traps.”

Leslie's eyes trailed down to the key in my hand. “Do you know what the key goes to? How long have you known about her house?”

I weighed my options. Finally I sighed. “I don't know what it goes to, no. I only know it's related to what my spirit guide wants me to find.” That was true enough. Orion was my spirit guide and he had given me the key.

She nodded. “That makes sense—but don't you think it's weird that all those gifts were about her, then the spirit guide you spoke to in our meditation sent you on a journey to find her? The timing just seems overly coincidental. Do you have any idea who left the gifts yet?”

Over Christmas I received two anonymous gifts left on the coven's doorstep from Orion. I didn't want to tell them about him yet because they'd worry and until I knew there was actually something to worry about, it seemed pointless to cause drama. He had given me the key that was somehow connected to my mother's house—and that she'd apparently wanted me to have—and a letter from her as well as a picture. Those three tiny clues about her life were more than I had ever had in the past. But Orion knew more and so long as it kept snowing, there was a chance I could talk to him again because he was still earth bound and not cast back up into the stars by his own curse. I ignored Leslie's questions. I had already shared more than I wanted to with her. I would tell her the rest if and only if it came to the point that she needed to know.

“Did we just pass Bradford?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Kilkenny should be soon.” She refocused on the map.

I squinted through the much heavier snow, looking for my turn. I eased my foot off the gas and took the exit ramp slow and steady. At the top, a sign pointed us forty-six miles to the left. The road was completely empty even though it was prime commuting time. Perhaps the people of Kilkenny worked in town or maybe the weather was keeping them indoors. Either way, I eased out onto the road with an uneasy stomach and started toward the house where I was born.

“So you knew nothing about this place before last week?” Leslie asked.

I nodded, flipping my windshield wipers up a notch.

“Then suddenly you get a key from some unidentified person and a letter saying your mother wanted you to
bring her back from the dead
and the first thing you do is rush here?” She shook her head. “You know you'd be the first person to die in a scary movie, right? Have you never heard of a trap? This has trap written all over it.”

“It's not a trap.”

“But how do you know?” Her knee bounced up and down.

I sighed. “I didn't ask you to come with me.”

“What does that matter? It doesn't change the fact you're doing exactly what whoever gave you this stuff wanted you to do. Not to mention the sudden change of heart. It's all, well, sort of alarming.”

I adjusted the defrost controls. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you got in the car with me. And why do you suddenly have so many questions?”

“You were quiet on the first half of the drive. I've had a lot of time to think. None of this makes sense. Are you always this reckless? In your line of work, I don't see how you could be and live to talk about it.”

“Yes, okay? I'm reckless.” It was a complete and absolute lie, but maybe it'd shut her up.

“But you're not. You're the most careful person I've ever met. That's why none of this makes sense.”

I blew out a long breath. She wasn't going to drop this until she understood. “It's not a trap. When I said I didn't know who gave me those presents, I wasn't completely honest. My spirit guide gave them to me.”

She frowned. “The one from the meditation?” I nodded. “That's not possible. He can't be a guide unless he is…”

“Dead? He is.”

“Then how did he leave gifts?”

“It's complicated, but trust me he did. I know because I actually spoke to him in person before the meditation. I don't really know him, but he knows a lot about my past and that might help me figure out my future.”

I got my wish. Leslie stopped talking. She stared out the window almost chewing on the words I'd spoken. Suddenly though, the silence was grinding on my nerves. Now that I had shared that much, I actually wanted her opinion. I bit the inside of my lip to keep from saying anything. Minutes ticked away before she finally leaned forward.

“I think that's the road we want,” she said, squinting.

I slowed down. I had forgotten to even look for our exit. “Old Miller's Point?”

“Looks like it.”

I flipped on my signal though the roadway was completely untraveled. We still had a good twenty miles to go until we reached Kilkenny. Obviously Mother chose to live in the country.

“We're looking for 8591,” she said, double-checking the sticky note.

“You really don't have an opinion about what I told you?” I finally blurted out.

She scrunched her button-like nose. “I have plenty of opinions, but I doubt you want to hear any of them. I'm not here to make your decisions for you. I came to support you. I just wanted to know what we were walking into.”

Ugh. I wanted to slap my palm against my forehead, but this was no time to take a hand off the wheel.

“If I had a million dollars, I'd bet the house we're looking for is behind those gates.” She pointed to her left at a large black iron fence that guarded the property. My eyes followed it down the lane toward two massive gates that were completely out of place in the middle of farmland. I turned and came to a stop directly in the center of the gates and put my car in park. The house beyond the gates was set back from the road, but from what I could see it was just a modest old farmhouse. The gates were overkill. I shoved my door open against a gust of wind and looked for a way to open the monstrous thing. The brick columns on the sides didn't have a call box or a keypad. The structure looked like there should have been two separate gate panels, but when I actually looked at the design work, I couldn't see how they came apart. I shook the gate and it barely moved.

Snow clung to my hair and eyelashes and melted against my face. “Well shit,” I muttered as I moved a few steps back to get a better look. “Open sesame,” I said, flinging my hands up, not because I expected it to work, but because I was out of options.