Chapter Eighteen
Indigo
“What do you mean, you can’t tell me?” I asked, fingers tightening around the edge of the table until the wood creaked.
GG glowered at the offending hand until I released her antique furniture.
It was a struggle not to go full kelpie and upend the fish tank across the room.
But giving in to the destructive impulse to drown undeserving gypsies would undermine my promise to my new high witch.
I wasn’t sure Wanda and I would ever see eye-to-eye, but I owed her better than that.
And it would probably upset the boy and his mother too. Pity.
“I mean I can only tell you the things your mother entrusted to my care,” GG continued. “If you want the tale, you’re going to have to uncover it for yourself in her projects and ciphers.”
“I’ve tried that already,” I grumbled. “Can you tell me what you do know about Mother’s association with Murrain?”
She cocked her head to the side. “I don’t know much about what happened in the years between her meeting Murrain and her return. And what I do know… well, your mother bound me not to tell you—with her witchcraft.”
“Why would she have done that?” I demanded.
“Because the information was too dangerous for everyone involved,” GG answered. Then she gave me a consolation prize smile. “You’ll have to work it out on your own, Indigo. I can’t spoon-feed you the answers.”
I leaned back in my chair, finally releasing my grip on the coffee table. The ritual that Maverick had finally worked out with the elder gypsy didn’t require the backing of the full coven. Imani, Betanya, and Olga were taking turns monitoring the defenses while the rest of us did the heavy lifting.
“Bound,” I repeated softly, more to myself than to her.
A binding of the sort GG was describing was rare and used only to guard the blackest of secrets.
Wrapping dark magic and painful curses around the truth to obfuscate it wasn’t worth the effort otherwise.
Mother had expanded the frontiers of bloody, violent, and illegal magic and had never once bound me from sharing word of it.
That meant whatever she’d found worthy of guarding had to be something truly ugly.
“Why?” I asked at last. “Why bind you? You’re an alchemist. Murrain wouldn’t have killed you for whatever knowledge she was trying to hide.”
GG’s eyes were a similar shade to Poppy’s.
The lines around them were far more pronounced, especially when she gave you a disapproving once-over.
“I suspect that’s exactly the reason. Murrain wouldn’t kill me, he’d keep me, and with me any woman in my line who showed any real talent.
Your mother and I may have disagreed on a great deal, but family wasn’t one of them.
” She shrugged then. “If I couldn’t speak the truth aloud, I couldn’t betray it to anyone. ”
And GG would have remained an unimportant footnote in my mother’s life and journals if not for me. If I hadn’t taken up with the only man frightening enough to make Mother run, this woman would never have needed to fear the enigmatic monster named Murrain ever again.
I crossed my arms over my chest, glowering down at the bathing suit I’d been wrestled into a few minutes before.
It was an older one-piece that GG said belonged to her daughter, Poppy’s mother.
The modest navy number was a relief when I considered the alternative.
I was sure GG’s swimwear was an old-school bathing costume, complete with a hat, and I couldn’t pull off a look that antiquated.
.. again. I’d been a spritely seventy-something the last time something like that had been in vogue.
“I still don’t see why I have to be sitting in a kiddie pool to make this work,” I grumbled to no one in particular. “I’m beginning to think this is some kind of sick inter-species schadenfreude setup I’m walking into.”
It was the only explanation I could think of off the top of my head.
Why else was I being put into a skintight outfit and dunked into suspicious substances if not for the entertainment of all involved?
I understood there was some kind of alchemy involved, but surely things wouldn’t get so wet that I had to prepare by wearing the least sexy swimwear man had ever devised?
In front of a blood warlock, a gypsy, and her son, no less?
“Because I don’t have enough time to fill anything larger,” GG said with a dry smile. “I did what I could with what I had on hand. I doubt anyone else could give you a supercharged lipid bath on short notice.”
“Lipid?” I echoed. “As in, fat?”
“In this case, the consistency is more like pudding, but yes. It’s the best medium I have for a fertility ritual. It will save that young man the necessary energy if he only has to do half the heavy lifting.”
“Fertility ritual?” I asked, frowning.
GG nodded. “Constructing a body is difficult work, even when you’re doing it the traditional way.”
“But why fertility?”
She shrugged. “We’re essentially rebirthing Lydia, aren’t we?”
“I guess so.”
GG continued. “The incubus can provide the spark of life. Poppy, Finn, and I will keep the energy from pouring outward. You have the most difficult portion to perform.”
If we were using a fertility ritual, it stood to reason I’d have to mimic birth.
Pain came with that package. I’d never had a child in real life.
The war had been too real, too close for me to feel comfortable bringing a fresh witch into the bloody conflict.
Even safeguarding my nieces had bored anxious holes into my psyche.
I hadn’t been good, smart, or fast enough to drag them out of harm’s way.
I’d gotten Lydia killed merely because of my proximity.
So, no, kids never had been in my forecast and never would be.
I didn’t like pain, but in this case, it served a purpose. I nodded tightly at her. “I understand and I can accept that. I suppose there’s no way to get an epidural beforehand?”
GG’s eyes sparkled for the first time since we’d met. “Afraid not. We’re doing this the natural way.”
“In a lipid bath with an incubus and a blood warlock, as God intended it,” I said dryly.
“Something like that.”
***
The lipid bath looked and smelled closer to the brown stuff they suspended beans in than chocolate pudding.
At least that might have had a little titillation factor.
Sitting across from a shirtless incubus in a kiddie pool full of goo wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Sure, he looked pretty lickable, even in castoff gym shorts RJ had dug out of his truck at the last moment.
My libido couldn’t leap high though while stuck in the baked bean quagmire.
There was something sludgy in my cleavage.
It was hard to feel randy when I squelched every time I moved.
We’d set up GG’s patio. Most of the stones were broken, with grass or weeds poking through the jutting edges.
Hanging baskets hung off the end of the eaves, casting long shadows over Angelo’s face.
Most of his profile was lost to shadow, except for the glimmer of red at the very center of his eyes.
His demon was close to the surface, a predator prowling close enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Relax,” he said in a low voice that was probably meant to be soothing. It just made me think of erotic audio dramatizations. The incubus had a nice voice.
“Easy for you to say. The Blood Warlock won’t be using you as a vessel to bring a full-grown woman back into the world, will he?”
Angelo inclined his head, conceding the point.
The evidence of his inner darkness still remained near his pupils, the only hint I had that he had any qualms about the experiment we were about to conduct.
So much could go wrong. We could fail. Lydia could go full Pet Cemetery and come back wrong on us.
The only hands we could place our hope in belonged to a dangerously unstable warlock. So, no pressure.
Poppy was on her hands and knees, inking the stones all around us with magical formulae in a language I was only vaguely familiar with.
She seemed to be able to breeze through each page from her grandmother’s book because it took only a few minutes to establish each set.
By the time she was done, each block of text would glow a subtle white-gold in time and pulse in time with my heartbeat.
If anyone had the stones to glance over the fence to see what we were up to, it would have looked like some kind of new-age orgy was taking place around a kiddie pool.
“You’re doing well,” GG remarked from a lawn chair as she watched her granddaughter work.
She’d sunk into it gratefully when Poppy and Finn snatched her supplies from her hands, insisting on setting things up in her stead.
“I wasn’t this intuitive at your age. Have you been doing any studying and simply didn’t realize it? ”
Poppy shrugged, finishing up the most recent chipped flagstone before glancing up at her. “I mean, I’ve been around witches for ages. I probably picked up a lot of general knowledge. One skill set tends to overlap with another, right?”
GG’s eyes softened, and she spared an indulgent smile for her grandchild. “I suppose it does. I knew going to a Hollow would do you some good.”
Poppy’s lips twitched into a small, satisfied smile. “It did. Thanks, GG. It changed my life.”
“Are we about done?” I interjected before the conversation could turn maudlin. If Poppy managed to smudge the lines with grateful tears, we’d have to start all over. The bare minimum was already stretching my tolerance to its breaking point.
“Just about,” Finn said, without any rancor. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard the irritation in my voice and chose to ignore it, or if he was as impervious to bad vibes as was his mother. “Does this look right, GG?”