If the Broom Fits (11 page)

“I got it,” Kat said, unlocking the door in a moment. We took Donovan to his office and removed his winter stuff. “Should we leave him in the chair?” she asked.

I spotted a couch piled with old newspapers and a few books. “Let's do the couch. If he remembers anything, maybe he'll think it was a dream.” I rushed over and cleared it off then helped Katrina lie him down, but when I tried to stand up I snagged on something. I pulled harder, finally breaking free with a snap.

“Come on, Jess. We've got to go. His eyes are moving.”

I scanned the floor for what had caught me, but I didn't see anything. Maybe our coats caught together or something. I didn't wear jewelry or anything else that could hook on him. I let Kat pull me out of the room, then we nearly ran out the front door and she locked it behind us.

Back in Enchantment, we finally stopped to breathe. She looked as guilty as I felt. “I didn't want to do that,” she said.

“Me either.” I took a deep breath. “We have to be more careful when it comes to regular people.”

She nodded.

“Which memories did you try to erase?”

“Just the ones that have to do with today. I really tried not to make it too strong.”

“Okay. It will be okay.” I took a deep breath. The one thing that would make all of this worthwhile would be finding the killer and putting a stop to him once and for all. “Let's find this guy.”

“You keep calling whatever this thing is a him. Couldn't it be a girl?”

“Sure,” I nodded. I hadn't really thought much about it. “Strangulation just seems like a more masculine way to kill someone. But it could be a woman. So let's narrow it down. Based on the energy we saw, what isn't it?”

“Definitely not fae or vampire. Fae energy is more colorful and vampires always leave behind traces of red. Really it's the white light that confuses me most. Normally white is something good. Not that good beings can't do bad things, but they don't tend to feed on others.”

“But there was darkness that surrounded the light and almost extinguished it,” I said. “Maybe it's something in the process of changing.”

I
opened my car door
, sank into the seat, and started the engine to warm myself up. I leaned against the headrest. It would be so nice to leave and not look back—and I might have, had I not left Leslie in that house with the other coven. I massaged my temples. I couldn't tell if they were all dark witches or not, but I really didn't see what that mattered. I already had a coven. If I was the betting sort though, I'd say Alexis definitely leaned that way, but maybe not Aisha. But then again, I didn't know if that even made sense.

I flipped on my windshield wipers, but they wouldn't move under the weight of the snow piled on my windshield. I fished around in my backseat until I scrounged up an ice scraper. When I finished clearing the glass, I climbed back into the driver's seat, shifted the car into four wheel drive and slowly climbed up the invisible driveway until I was parked in front of the house. I was prepared to run back down to close the gate, but it was already shutting behind me. I grabbed Leslie and my bags from the backseat and our cellphones.

I stomped up the steps, knocking snow off of my boots as I went. Inside, I checked that Leslie was okay and held up her phone before sitting it on the table by the door. She nodded and didn't look distressed as she spoke to the other coven members. I climbed the stairs like I was going to meet my doom because that's how it felt. I left Leslie's bag in the hallway outside my mother's room and took mine with me into the baby room. The door closed softly behind me, and I didn't bother to turn on the lights.

I leaned against the wall and slid down it until I could press my face into my knees and block out the rest of the world. I took off my gloves and threw them across the room, then wound my fingers into my hair and pulled. The external pain helped with some of the internal chaos of warring thoughts and memories. When my thoughts were a bit quieter, I sat up and dug some pain relievers out of my bag. All of this was giving me a migraine. I popped two pills without a glass of water, shifted to lying on my back, and stared up at the stars rotating around the ceiling.

At first I didn't even notice when Orion lay down next to me.

“I'd think you'd be sick of this view,” I said finally.

His eye crinkled. “I never get to see this view. I'm either part of it or my clouds block it.”

I turned to face him and he propped his head on his elbow and watched me. The urge to reach out and smooth the lines between his eyebrows made me press my hands into the floor. This was the person who had ruined my life, withheld information, failed to guide me when it was his
job
, and been absent my whole life.

I should want nothing to do with him, but for some reason I was struggling to even dislike him. There was something in the way he looked at me . . . a little admiration, maybe, or apology. That, combined with the fact his life was quite possibly worse than mine was, made me…I don't know. Confused.

Gut instinct said that the very fact I couldn't muster up genuine dislike for him meant that he was dangerous and I should stay away from him because obviously my judgement was clouded where he was concerned. But a deal was a deal.

“You're already about two minutes into your ten. You sure you want to keep talking about stars?” I asked.

“Now who's cheating?” He didn't look bothered by it.

“Learned from the best.”

“That you did.” He put his hand over mine.

I let the heat of his skin linger a few moments, my eyes fluttering shut. Being touched by someone warm was intoxicating. When the entire pool of people who could touch you were vampires, ghosts, and other undead creatures, you didn't exactly get used to the cold, but you expected it. Slowly, regretfully, I slid my hand out from beneath his and folded it over my stomach. “I'm listening.”

“The first time your mother made contact with me she was sixteen. She and her friends had formed their own coven, apart from their parents, and were looking for their place in the cosmos. I don't think they meant to get me, but I was the one who came. Before that, I couldn't even remember the last time I had spoken with a living, breathing human. I can't even remember what they asked, but I answered their questions as long as the spell held, then went home.” His voice was soft and low, almost mesmerizing, and an ironic smile quirked his lips at the word home.

“The next time must have been a few years later. She was alone when she called me to her. She was determined to run away and marry some boy. She went on and on about how her parents had forbidden the marriage, but she was old enough to marry anyone she wanted. She wanted to know her future. She wanted me to look into the stars and divine whether she would be happy with him.”

I picked the star I believed to be Orion out of the false sky and followed its movement across the ceiling as I listened. “What was his name?”

“Jonathan Darkmore,” he said. “I warned her that it wasn't as easy as looking into the future because destinies are not set in stone. Anything can change. Even the tiniest event can affect the whole course of the human race—and it's impossible to know the magnitude of an incident until it's too late to change it. Still she wanted to know, so I looked to her future and saw no reason to believe she wouldn't be happy with him for a long time to come. I told her as much, but also advised her to wait until she knew him better. There was no rush. They had the rest of their lives.”

I chewed on my thumbnail, but didn't say a word.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Why would I wait to start living the rest of my life?' The next time we spoke she was deliriously happy. She'd just found out she was with child. She asked if I would watch over her baby. I agreed. After all, what else did I have to do? She smiled and said she had a plan for that too. She had been looking and thought she found a way to free me. I warned her not to do it. I told her not to cross the gods, warned they didn't have a sense of humor, especially where it came to me. I also told her that if she was caught, they'd make her regret her action for the rest of eternity.”

Orion drew in a deep breath and released it before continuing. “But her mind was made up. She felt I had been punished enough. There was a time lightning would have struck anyone for speaking with such insolence, but those days had long since passed and in her time she was a powerful witch learning her boundaries with no real care or thought to the gods. She told me about the door and that I had to watch for it to appear. But the door never showed, not for me. But she did manage to open one into the cosmos, only to the wrong constellation—the fallen angel Ornias, who had been banished ages ago. He went through and has not returned since.

“The next time she called me, she was distraught. She told me about Ornias, but did not know his name. She said he strangled your father and left the farm. All she wanted was Jonathan back. I told her it was too late. It was best leave the dead where they were, but she couldn't do it. She felt she had to make right what she had set off course. That was when she started opening the door to the underworld, trying to find him, to save him. What she found down there wasn't her husband though. It may have resembled him, but the creature spoke only lies and your mother believed it. She believed she could save him and you. By the time she discovered the truth, it was too late. Winter had crossed the line too many times and could never return. The darkness called to her and she knew her last chance to fix everything she had destroyed in her arrogance was you.”

Orion turned to look at me again. “The last time she called me, she told me her plan. She said she knew she could not survive your birth, but she wouldn't see you killed. A member of her coven agreed to take you in and watch out for you. When you came of age, the coven could cast a spell, with you leading, that would bring her back without the darkness. She theorized that while the darkness controlled her magic, it did not have her heart or she could not have loved you as she did. That was all. She made no promises to me, nor did I ask for them. I long ago stopped fighting the punishment set upon me. It is mine to bear.”

I plucked at my shirt as I listened to him and thought about what he was saying. “Why now, after all this time?” I whispered. He'd told me he had forgotten or lost track of me, but given everything he had just said, I couldn't believe that. Orion wasn't a fool and he wasn't forgetful. Leslie had pointed it out earlier. He always told me just enough to get me to do what he wanted me to do and let it seem like it was my choice.

“Because you're ready,” he said. “And we're running out of time. You had to be strong. You had to be a survivor. You had to be self-sufficient. Anything less and the road you must travel would crush you. It's time to undo Winter's infractions.”

I swallowed hard, biting the inside of my cheek. “I'd like to be alone now.” My voice was hoarse and thin.

He vanished, leaving me alone with the darkness, my thoughts, and the stars waltzing across the fake sky.

I don't know how long I stayed on the floor, replaying everything he said over and over again. There were moments when self-righteous rage at his, hers,
everyone's
actions made me dig my fingernails into my palms. Why did any of them get to decide my life for me? I needed to be strong, so everything was taken from me. All because my mother was young and stupid and in love I had to grow up on the streets, kill countless people, and know nothing about who or what I was.

Orion had sat up in the sky, watching as I broke again and again only to shove the pieces back together. He'd never once showed himself or let me know I wasn't alone. Not only that, there had been a coven looking for me, waiting for me to find them. There had been a place I could have belonged, but now it was too late. He waited until I was so shattered and my heart was so frozen that I couldn't let anyone into my life.

I shook my head. I couldn't do this anymore. If the road before me was harder than the road I had already traveled, I didn't have it in me to finish. I'd rather just give up.

I wiped away a single tear as self-pity took hold, but I wouldn't give into it. I focused on the stars on the ceiling instead. The paths they traveled didn't actually make sense. Instead of moving in a repeated circular pattern, theirs were jagged. Almost chaotic, but not quite. I watched the movements of one star carefully, following the motion with my finger.

It wasn't chaotic at all. It was a message. I scrambled to my feet just as there was a faint knock at the door. Leslie stuck her head in.

“Have you checked your phone?”

I ignored her question. “I found something.” I hurried across the room, retrieved my gloves, and slipped them on. “There's a message in the stars.”

Leslie looked up. “How can you tell?”

“The movements are all wrong—not circles like they should be. Turn on the light.”

Leslie flipped the switch and I picked up the star projector thing and looked for a way to open it. “The movements form letters.” There were no seams in the box. How was that even possible?

“Hey, Frost,” Leslie said and I looked up at her. “What's this?” She pointed at the back of the projector.

I turned it over. Still no seams, there was a hole about the size of a key.

“Also, have you noticed there isn't a plug for this or a battery?” She raised an eyebrow. “How's it working?”

I took a better look at the item in my hands. “I don't know.” I sat it back on the dresser by the door and took off the key from around my neck. Leslie nodded encouragingly as I stuck it into the hole. With a pop and a sizzle, the top of it flipped back. It held no lighting mechanisms or mechanical innards at all. There was simply writing over every square inch of wood. I looked closer at what it said. It was a spell. Not the same spell my mother put in the letter, though. This one was too jumbled to get a complete sense of without rewriting it and even that, if we were dealing with dark magic, could be dangerous.

“This is all really interesting, but back to the reason I came up here. Kat and Jess have been trying to get in touch with us.”

I barely registered her words, as I tried to piece the words together in my head to no avail. Orion was the one who made sure I saw this. He “turned it on.” Obviously, it was one of those clues he wanted me to find on my own. We'd have to write it.

“You trust people, right?” I asked Leslie.

She sighed. “Of course I do. I mean not all of them, obviously, but I think people are mostly good. Why?”

“How do you know who to trust and who to question? Like what do you do if you can only get one side of the story? How do you know where to find the truth?”

She made a face. “I don't know. Instinct I guess. How did you know you could trust us?”

“I didn't. I don't. You guys are a calculated risk,” I said with complete honestly.

She gave me a half smile like she thought I might be joking, but couldn't tell. “You don't mean that…”

I nodded. “Sure I do. Look, I know that I'm not one of you and I'll never be one of you. I'm okay with that because I need you. I've been trying to break my curse for thirty years and I've made more progress since I've known you guys than I had all of the rest of my life combined. That's what makes it worth the time and the risk. Sure you might betray me at some point, but you also might help me. And frankly, the benefit outweighs the cost. But I also watched how all of you handled impossible odds. You faced them unflinchingly and you always supported one another. So that also told me about your character. Things like that can't be faked. However, I also understand that if it came down to saving me or saving anyone else in the coven, you would choose the other. Basically I feel like I know where I stand with you guys.”

Her eyebrows pulled together, but she didn't deny my words because deep down she knew I was right. And it was better this way. No pretenses, just cold, hard facts that had no business being confused by emotion. That was how all interaction should be.