Kick The Candle (Knight Games) (2 page)

Michelle tapped the yellowing page. “Hey, there are some notes here in the margin.
Tabitha 1701, Abraham 1823, Gertrude 1898.
Grateful, I think this is a list of past familiars. There's a half dozen here. Is that how many times you've lived before?”

I shrugged.

“Well? Are you going to do it?”

“Maybe. Does the spell look difficult?” I tried to read it through myself but Michelle’s head was in the way. She was practically crawling into the page. My friend seriously needed glasses.

“You tell me. It says you have to meditate. Once your mind is clear, you make an offering in your silver bowl and a willing spirit will come to you.”

“What kind of offering?”

“It doesn't specify.”

“As long as it’s not blood.” I’d learned the hard way that blood, my own, was required to sort a human soul to the afterlife. When I’d put Logan back into his body, I had to slice my arm and bleed into my silver bowl to make his soul “stick.” The cut itself healed magically, but the blood loss on top of the mystical effort involved left me exhausted.

“I guess it can be anything that's valuable to you,” she said.

I nudged her out of the way and read through the spell myself. “Look, this symbol in the corner means I can do it during the day.” I pointed to a yellow circle next to the title.

Michelle nodded and looked at me expectantly.

“It might be nice to have a pet,” I said.

“Grateful, this isn't just a pet. This is a
familiar
, the perfect pet to balance you. It's like petmatch.com but better. This little guy will make you more powerful. Hell, all I've got at home is a pug with flatulence.”

“You love Bosco.”

She giggled. “He was an impulse buy that grew on me.”

I sighed and plopped back into my chair. “I don't know, Michelle, do we have time for this? I really wanted to get more done today.”

Tipping her head to the side, my friend folded her arms across her chest. “Really? The pages aren't numbered but this thing has to be five thousand long. We've been at it all month and have barely made a dent.”

With attitude, I combed my fingers through my hair and rolled my eyes. “All the more reason to buckle down and get to work.”

She jabbed her open hands toward the mammoth book. “Hello? It's going to take us a year to enter all of these spells. It's not like we don't both have full-time jobs. This is like moving a bucket of water with an eyedropper.”

“Now you're exaggerating.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “What's the rush anyway?”

Crossing the attic, I leaned against the window frame and watched the naked branches of the oak tree in my front yard twist in the late November wind. Less than six weeks until Christmas. I was sure Michelle had better things to do with her day off than enter spells into my database. My chest sank thinking about the burden I'd been to her the last several months. I was the reason she’d been possessed by a vampire, after all.

But I
was
in a hurry. Besides the danger of Julius’s growing coven, and the fact that he probably wanted me dead, Julius said that Rick had lied to me, that I didn't need a Caretaker to regain my power. Julius was a vampire and almost certainly deceiving me. I had no reason to trust him. But ever since he’d said the words, I'd questioned my connection to Rick and the boundaries of my power. In my gut, I had the tiniest needling that Rick was keeping something from me. I'd tried time and time again to put the feeling aside, but it wouldn't leave me alone.

My past incarnation had the wherewithal to name a guardian of my magical attic, Prudence. She’d helped me learn about what I was. Unfortunately, when I accepted my role, Prudence moved on to her eternal reward. With her gone, if I couldn’t trust Rick, the only source of power, protection, and information I had was the
Book of Light
. I was sure all of the answers I needed were within its pages.

I didn't want to trouble Michelle with all the details. She'd done enough to support me already. This was my boat to row. Besides, I was willing to bet obsessing about it was exactly what Julius wanted me to do.

“It could save my life, Michelle. The book weighs hundreds of pounds. This is the only way I can take it with me while I’m learning. I may need one of these spells in an emergency.”

“Really?” She leaned across the book. “An eavesdropping bee is going to protect you against a vampire attack on the fly?”

“You’ve got a point,” I mumbled. “But it’s still my best hope.”

Michelle rubbed her palms together. “I’m not saying the database isn’t important, but it isn’t everything. It’s going to take time. No matter what you do, you’re going to have to learn how to use this magic. There are no shortcuts.”

I sighed. “You're right. This is just the workaholic in me coming out.”

“Exactly. It will all get done eventually. A little a day and by the time you're thirty, you'll be done.” With one arm, she hugged my shoulders playfully.

I suddenly felt compelled to entertain her. She'd earned it. “You wanna watch me summon a familiar, or what?”

“That's the spirit.”

We jogged downstairs to look for something to offer the familiar's spirit. Unlike when Logan lived here, the house was a mess and there was nothing in my pantry but coffee grounds. I opened the refrigerator to check if food had mysteriously appeared there while I was in the attic. It hadn't. The contents consisted of a box of baking soda, a half empty bottle of ketchup, and the remains of Valentine's take-out from two weeks ago with dodgy looking fuzz growing under the lid. I tossed the take-out but grabbed the coffee grounds. Michelle appeared in front of me with a bottle of wine from the cellar.

“This should work,” she said.

“Wine? Is that necessary?” I asked, not thrilled about wasting a bottle.

“The book said you needed an offering. The connotation is that you sacrifice something important to you. You don’t want to use blood and there's nothing more important to you in this house than wine and coffee, except maybe me, and I'm not sitting in that bowl.”

“Wine and coffee it is.”

We returned to the attic, and I pulled out the wooden trunk containing my magical paraphernalia. On top was my blade, Nightshade. Made from the femur of the patron saint of cemetery workers, Nightshade could only be wielded by me. I set her aside to dig beneath her space in the trunk. Under her was a silver bowl, salt, candles, a few shrouds, and a bell. My predecessor had left the witchy toolkit, and I was becoming more comfortable with it day by day. I selected the bowl.

Cross-legged on the floor next to the wine and coffee, I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. I flexed my shoulders toward my ears, inhaled, then released the breath, slumping forward. I tried to relax as much as possible, concentrating on the flow of breath at the back of my throat. When a thought threatened at the corner of my consciousness, I pushed it aside.

They say when you enter deep meditation that you visualize a light of some sort moving toward you. I did. A green light that seemed flat at first until I reached it and then expanded into a tunnel. The light branched out and formed leaves. And then, in my clear mind, I was in a garden. Even though I logically knew my body was sitting in my attic meditating, I
was
physically there, nestled in blades of cool dewy grass with my bowl and offering beside me. The sun was warm upon my face, and the leaves of the plants rustled in the sweet-smelling breeze.

From a grove of trees, a naked woman stepped toward me. Large dark eyes and silky black hair contrasted sharply against the light that shone behind her head. She stopped just short of my bowl.

“Hecate,” she said. “Welcome to my garden. Make your offering.”

I wanted to know more about this woman and this place, but my intuition warned this was not the time to ask. Maybe it was the way her skin glowed like it was radioactive and the light broke around her torso. Reflexively I reached for the wine and poured half of it into the bowl. I sprinkled coffee over the top.

The woman laughed, a sound as pure and clear as a choir of bells. My eyes started to hurt so I looked away from her, back at the bowl. It was empty.

“Yes, I know who you seek, and I send him to you with my blessing. He is yours and will teach you what you need to know.”

The woman opened her hand. A black butterfly bobbed toward me, growing fast and spreading out until it barreled into me. I somersaulted backwards from the impact, eyes closed against the onslaught. Everything—the garden, the woman—disappeared in a wash of darkness.

“Grateful!” A hand slapped my cheek. “Grateful, snap out of it!”

I opened my eyes to see Michelle hovering over me.

“D-did it work?” I stammered.

The corner of Michelle's mouth tugged upward. “Um, yeah. It worked.”

“So what is it? A cat? An owl?”

“Maybe you should see for yourself,” she said.

She helped me up to a sitting position. Behind my silver bowl was a huge black ball of feathers. I reached for it and a pair of beady black eyes popped open to peer at me. A large hooked beak snapped the air and two shiny black wings stretched on either side of a lissome black body.

“It's a crow,” I said with distaste. On the spectrum of magical creatures, I hadn’t expected a yard rat. The thing looked like something I’d shoo off the garbage cans.

Michelle took a step back. “That’s not a crow, Grateful; it’s a
raven
. And I think it just pooped on your floor.”

E
ww.
My familiar had, in fact, pooped on the floor, and defecating appeared to be the extent of his talents. I spent a solid minute staring into his beady black eyes but no shooting stars or magical tingles came to pass.

“What are you going to name it?” Michelle asked.

“Hmm, what do you name the creepy, hooked-beak, bird of death? I’m not sure.”

Michelle lowered her voice to an Alfred Hitchcock bass. “Quoth the raven, nevermore.”

“Nevermore is too long, and too obvious.” I snapped my fingers. “Of course, Poe! I’ll name him Poe.”

“Stellar. Now that you’ve named him, what will you do with him?”

My shoulders sagged, the magic hangover hitting me hard. I hugged my knees to my chest and closed my eyes.

“Drained you, huh?”

“To the porcelain bottom.” I rubbed my eyes. “Do you know what ravens eat?”

“Not a clue, but that’s why I have my old friend Mrs. Google.” From her back pocket, she removed her phone and typed a few words into the search bar. “Ugh.”

“What?”

“Listen to this. Ravens are omnivores eating whatever is easiest to catch, including the dead bodies of other animals, small living rodents, reptiles, other birds, and occasionally grains and berries. They will also eat maggots and animal poo.”

“Eww,” I said. “That’s disgusting.”

“
I prefer baby goat, but don’t knock maggots until you’ve tried them,”
Poe said
,
ignoring the way Michelle and I gaped in surprise at the deep tenor voice coming out of his throat. “They are surprisingly sweet and nutritious.”

“The bird just spoke,” I said.

“Yes. The big, scary bird just spoke to us in a muddled European accent.”

“Do you have a problem with my accent? Because the east coast Jersey shore lilt you’ve acquired isn’t exactly prizeworthy.”

I snorted, covering my mouth with my hand.

“Oh, that’s rich,” Poe said, laughing low and dark. “Not exactly an aristocratic giggle you have. Did you snort like that before you became a witch or was the cause a spell gone bad? Because if it was the second, my condolences for the loss of your femininity.”

Michelle wrapped an arm around my shoulders and helped me to my feet. “Um, Grateful, your familiar is a total ass.”

“Yeah. I don’t get it. The woman in the spell said he would be what I needed. I don’t think I needed another smart-ass in my life. I have you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

I nodded.

“So, about that young goat. I am feeling quite hungry. It doesn’t have to be freshly born. A few days old is fine. If you open the window, I can find one myself.”

I glanced toward the window, noticing the gray-toned sunset. Looked like a winter’s storm was coming. Someone needed to tell Mother Nature it was still November. “Are you sure you can take care of yourself if I let you outside?” I turned toward the big black bird.

“Of course, dear witch. I may be new to you but I am no spring chicken.” He cackled at his own joke, breaking into caws that didn’t match his low, human-like voice.

“Do you think it’s a good idea to set him loose on Red Grove, Grateful?” Michelle asked. “We hardly know him.”

I pointed a hand toward the pressing night. “I've got to go see Rick,” I said.

She groaned. “Right. You’ve got a job to do. You let Poe out. I’ll get some paper towels to clean up the mess.”

“You’re the best.”

“Sorry about the state of things,” Poe said, tilting his head toward his excrement. “Blackberries. They’re a habit really. Once you eat one…” His low laugh trailed off.