Succession of Witches (15 page)

Cassie slept in, not bothering to get out of bed until almost noon. Fortunately, she could tell by the appetizing smells wafting upstairs that her father was still making breakfast.

“—what about St. Louis?
I thought your company had a branch in St. Louis,” Cassie heard her mother say as she approached the kitchen.

“We are not moving to St. Louis.”

“I’m just pointing out that it’s an option.”

“It’s not an option, we move there, my luck, they’ll close the branch two months later and lay everyone off. That happened to Bob Winderhoten.”

“Why are we talking about moving?” asked Cassie. She took half of a cinnamon raisin bagel out of a basket on the counter and leaned against the doorframe, gnawing on it.

“Cassie, sit down in a chair if you’re going to eat,” said Annette, but Cassie could tell she wasn’t really paying attention. “It’s just, what with the extreme violence in this city these
days, I think it’s time to start considering making a change.”

“Extreme violence?”
Cassie parroted, then felt a lurch in her stomach. What had happened now, and what were the chances it had something to do with her?

Her father shot a glance at her as he finished making Annette’s egg-white omelet. “Don’t tell your brother, but there’s been a triple murder.
Last night, Sodatown, three bodies. It’s been all over the TV this morning.”

“Decapitated, too.
Don’t forget that part,” said Annette around a mouthful of bagel. “Fust, duh hurrible mudah—”

“Mom, swallow first.”

“—The horrible murder last fall, with those…those people dumped on our lawn, and now this? I swear, this city is being taken over by the Mob.”

They were all startled when the doorbell rang.

“Who’s coming over now?” asked her father, depositing the omelet on a plate and wiping his spatula on a dishrag. “Maybe it’s the oil guy.”

Cassie jumped in front of her father. “Um, maybe we should just let it ring? It could be one of
those annoying Jehova people,” she babbled.
Please
, she thought,
whatever’s going on that’s leaving people dead, let it not have anything to do with me and my family. Please.

Her father walked around her smoothly. “If it’s the oil guy, I owe him a check.”

He looked through the peephole, then turned to raise an eyebrow at Cassie. “Friend of yours?”

Cassie looked through the peephole and saw the redheaded vampire, standing on her porch with a bookbag and notebook in her hands. Puzzled, but relieved, she opened the door.

“Miriam? What are you doing here?”

Miriam gave her a look like she was a simpleton. “Don’t you remember, Cass? We were going to study for AP Euro today.
Hundred Years War? Ring any bells?”

Cassie stared at the slim vampire for a moment,
then caught on. “Oh, right. Sorry, slept in and totally forgot about it.”

She turned towards her parents. “Mom, Da
d, this is Miriam, a classmate—”

“Call me Miri
!,” chirped Miri.

“—a
classmate, and we have AP Euro together. I’m sorry, I forgot to mention I invited her over to study today. My bad.”

Her father, who always liked it when she brought friends from school home, looked delighted. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miri,” he said, shaking her hand. Miri beamed at him, and Cassie felt a momentary desire to choke her.

Annette was not as easy to charm. “Aren’t you one of those people from the prayer group?” she said. Her tone made it sound like an accusation.

Miri locked eyes with Annette, and Cassie felt a chill go through her. “You don’t remember the prayer group. You think I’m a friend from school, and everything with Cassie is fine.”

“Everything with Cassie is…fine?” repeated Annette.

“Yes, everything is fine,” Miri repeated, dividing her gaze between Cassie’s mother and father, “And you don’t need to worry about her so much anymore, or keep tabs on her all the time. You know your daughter is safe.”

“Our daughter is safe…” the two repeated in unison. Cassie looked from Miri to her parents, open mouthed.

“That’s right,” said Miri. Then she smiled, nearly revealing her pointy canines. “Is there any coffee left, by the way? I am seriously dying for coffee right now.”

“Come with me,” said Cassie, yanking Miri into the house by her wrist. “Mom, Dad, we’ll be studying in my room.”

“Sure baby, whatever you want,” said Annette, walking back to the kitchen. Her father was already looking at the pennysaver.

Cassie dragged Miri up the stairs, although she knew the vampire was letting her do it. When she got to her room, she threw Miri in and closed the door.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Miri sat down on Cassie’s bed and blinked, hugging her notebook to her chest. “Coffee? Please?”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, hypnotizing them?” Cassie whispered. “They’re my parents!”

“Yeah, and they’re going to get in serious trouble if they keep following you around, like last night. Trust me, it’s better this way,” said Miri, stretching. Cassie couldn’t help but notice she was wearing another revealing outfit, complete with a short skirt and thigh-high stockings with elaborate stitched patterns. “Look, you can’t ask Sam to do it because it’s weird, but now they’re out of your hair and safer too. You can think I’m the bad guy, I don’t care, but please, please can I have some coffee? I’ll even take the day-old stuff in the pot if that’s all you have.”

Cassie wrestled with her conscience. The thing was
, Miri was probably right. Constantly inventing excuses to manipulate her parents was getting old, and they probably would be a lot safer if they just stayed out of everything. But it still felt wrong.

“Why do you want coffee anyway? I thought vampires couldn’t have human stuff.”

Miri shrugged. “I can still taste coffee a little bit, for some reason. I don’t drink it in front of the others because I don’t want to rub it in.”

Cassie sighed, then went downstairs to get both of them some coffee. Annette always made too much, anyway.

Her parents ignored her as she poured the dark brew out of the industrial-sized carafe. Against her better judgment, she tested Miri’s spell. “Hey guys? I’m going to go out and have wild, unprotected sex now. And fail out of school. And get a tattoo. Is that okay?”

“Whatever you want, sweetheart,” said her father.

“Tattoo?” said Annette, her voice shrill with alarm. “I mean, alright…sure, dear. It’s fine.”

The tattoo was kind of pushing it
, Cassie thought. But as she ran up the stairs, careful not to spill the coffee, she felt an odd combination of sickened and relieved.

When she handed Miri the mug, the vampire drained it almost instantly. “Hits the spot,” she said. “Anyway, if you haven’t noticed, my job as your personal bodyguard starts today.”

Cassie sat down on her favorite purple cushion the floor, cradling her own mug of coffee. “Yeah, I didn’t really think you were here to study Euro.”

“Oh I’m here for that too,” said Miri, putting the empty mug down on Cassie’s night table and laying back on the bed. “I haven’t posed as a high school student since forever, so I need to review some of the material.”

Cassie looked up, puzzled. “I thought…I thought vampires went to high school over and over again. You know, as part of your cover.”

Miriam sat up and gave her a withering look that, when she thought about it later, Cassie realized was utterly deserved. “You really think anybody would keep going to high school over and over again if they didn’t have to? Who does that?”

“Uh, never mind. Just something I saw in a movie,” said Cassie. She took a big gulp of her own coffee, in part to hide her embarrassment. “I’m not the only one who gets a bodyguard, am I?”

Miri swung her legs over the side of the bed.
“Here’s the sitch: I shadow you and your friends at school. When Mike and Jay aren’t at school, Billingsly and a daywalker named Arthur are going to shadow them. Liam is going to hang around the shop whenever Sam isn’t there to protect Khalil and Dwight, then guard Khalil outside of work while Dmitri guards Dwight. Capice?”

Cassie thought about that. “What about Ethan?”

“What about Ethan?” parroted Miri. “He’s staying at the shop for now, so that falls under Liam’s jurisdiction I guess. No one really has any idea what to do about him though.”

“Uh, did Sam…tell you what I did?”

Miri grinned. “Yup. You are one seriously cray-cray little familiar. And….” Something passed over Miri’s face.

Cassie felt nervous. “What?”

“Umm, I guess this is one of those times…I have to puke.”

Using her vampire speed, Miri blew past Cassie and into the bathroom across the hall.

Mike had stopped by around midday and dropped off a bunch of handheld games he wasn’t using for Ethan, so the boy had plenty to do while Sam, Khalil and Dwight ran the shop. He was playing something that made a lot of annoying bleeping sounds while Sam did the dishes by hand. Their sanitizer had broken again, but if Sam was honest, he didn’t really mind. Cleaning always calmed him, and calm was something he was going to need if he was going to deal with this Ethan situation.

He knit his brow as he towel dried a pastry plate. What were they going to do with him? They couldn’t just send him to school—as far as the law knew he was officially dead, and they had no paperwork for him. They could, and probably would have to, make up a whole new identity for him, but Sam didn’t even know where to start with that. Maybe he could ask Eugene Buckley.

He slowly realized that the object of his musings had been trying to get his attention for some time. “Sam?
Hey, Sam?”

“What?”

“Why do you work at a coffee shop when you’re a demon?”

Sam stopped scrubbing a dish for a moment and looked at the boy.

“Why do you ask?”

Ethan dropped his gaze and went back to his game.
“Just curious.”

At that moment, the phone rang, Sam was content to ignore it and let Dwight handle it, but in a moment, he heard the creak of the door to the front opening and realized it was for him.

“This one threatened to turn me into a rat,” said Dwight, extending the cordless phone in Sam’s direction.

“Moving up in the world, I see,” said Sam, taking the phone from him. “Hello?”

“How dare you, you filthy son of a whore.”

Sam blinked “Pascal?”

“Stealing my familiar, that I can at least understand, but why did you have to burn the whole house down? I lost my entire record collection!”

Sam blinked again. “What?”

“Don’t play dumb, you filthy half-breed piece of—”

“No, I’m serious. I don’t know what’s going on. Someone burned your house down?”

“Your familiar did, you bastard! When I got home last night there was nothing left. I had to pay an investigative witch to use a piece of the charred wood to scry for what happened, and you know they don’t come cheap.”

“One moment, please.”

Sam put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Ethan. Did Cassie burn Pascal’s house down?”

Ethan seemed to shrink into his chair. “Uh….”

“You can be honest, I won’t blame you.”

“She and Khalil did. It was the only way I could leave.”

Sam took his hand off the mouthpiece. “Well, this is news. I never heard about that.”

“Do you expect me to believe your familiar was acting independently?” Pascal snarled. He said it as though the very idea of a familiar acting on his or
her own was laughable.

“Believe what you want. In any case, I’m sorry.”

There was a pause.

“You’re sorry you burned down my house and stole my familiar?”

“No, only about the house. I’m keeping Ethan.”

He pulled the phone away from his ear right when Pascal began to scream, clicking the button to hang up on the other demon. He didn’t feel like listening to a bunch of vague threats. He sighed and put the phone down on the edge of the sink.

“He’s mad, isn’t he,” said Ethan quietly.

“You could say that.”

After a pause, Ethan continued, still looking down. “Do you think he’s going to come after me?”

“Doesn’t matter.
If he does, I’ll kill him.”

“But what if he comes with lots of demons?”

“Then I’ll kill all of them.”

Ethan beamed at him like he’d just been promised a trip to the ice cream store. Sam felt slightly nauseous. If he was supposed to raise this kid now, he was off to a pretty rocky start.

Apparently, just because Miri could drink coffee, that didn’t mean her
body was happy about it. After she spent five minutes in the bathroom, paying for the abuse she had inflicted upon her vampiric digestive system, the two of them actually did study. While they went over Euro, English and Calculus (which Miri clearly didn’t have the math background to understand at all), the vampire requested, and drank, two more cups of coffee. Apparently throwing up frequently was a small price to pay for being able to taste it. Cassie wondered if there was a support group for bulimic vampires.

After both girl and vampire had reached their studying limits, Miri rolled over onto her back on Cassie’s bed and stretched out, not caring that she was exposing her ruffled black panties. Cassie watched her with a grudging admiration; vampire or not, she’d never seen someone as thoroughly comfortable in their own skin as Miri seemed to be.

There was silence for a few moments as Cassie put away her calculus notes in her bookbag, then Miri turned towards her. “So, what’s the deal with you and Sam, anyway?”

“Huh?”

“You’re his familiar, and everyone knows you’re going to be this awesome witch, but you two haven’t sealed the deal yet. What’s that about?”

“Uh…it’s not that simple. We have…issues.”

“What kind of issues?”

Cassie tried not to look as uncomfortable as she felt. “Look, no offense, but it’s kind of private, okay?”

Miri plopped down on the floor across from her, a serious expression on her face. “Yeah, well tough. There’re tons of kids out there dying of what I was dying of. If I could become a witch, heal people like that, I’d do it in a second. I want to know what the holdup is.”

Cassie felt her face burning. This had gone in an entirely unexpected direction. “Uh, you know what I have to do to become a witch, right?”

Miri snorted. “Yeah, so? It’s not that big a deal.”

Cassie looked down. “Well, maybe it’s not a big deal for you.”

She felt Miri looking at her, appraising. “I get it. You have a princess complex.”

Cassie’s head snapped up. “Excuse me?”

Miri leaned back against the bed, spreading her legs wide. “Everybody’s telling you about this wonderful pure magic you have, and what a super-special snowflake you are, and now you think your virginity is like, the holy grail,” she sneered. “That’s such a spoiled princess thing.”

“Shut up,” said Cassie. “You’re supposed to protect me, not butt into my life.”

“I’m supposed to serve my master. And that’s what I’m doing.”

Cassie nearly screamed. Even though she was irritated with Miri, hearing that tone of absolute obedience somehow offended her on the other woman’s behalf.

“How can you say that? Isn’t that humiliating?”

Miri looked confused for a moment,
then looked at her with an almost pitying expression. “Cassie, there’s hierarchy everywhere—master and servants, king and subjects. That’s just as true in the human world as in ours, and you know it. The only difference is we’re honest about it.”

Cassie shook her head vigorously. “It’s different.”

“Is it? Imagine if I wasn’t a vampire, and I had a job in an office somewhere. I’d have to make my boss happy, otherwise he could get rid of me like that,” she said, snapping her fingers. “I’d have to do things I didn’t want to do, maybe even things I hated, because I couldn’t survive without him. Now, how is that different from a vampire serving a demon?”

Cassie opened her mouth to argue,
then closed it again. She wanted to believe Miri was wrong, but she had a sickening feeling that there was more truth to what the vampire was saying than she would ever be comfortable with.

“Fine, but at least we don’t say ‘I serve my master,’” Cassie mocked.

“No, you say ‘I can’t quit because I need the insurance,’” said Miri, matter-of-factly. “Because that’s not humiliating.”