28. Hello, Witch
ELOISE
After a long afternoon of chores, I grab a book from Grams’s library and lay down in bed. But the more I try to read, the more my mind churns. I finally give up, put the book aside, and reach for the October issue of Echo Mills magazine. For the three hundredth time, I inspect each page.
The phone rings. Only one person would be calling me right now —Maeve.
“Hello?” I’m still a little miffed about what went down at Bad Witches Club and all the secrets she’s been keeping from me. A fracture has silently formed between us, a passive divide of things unsaid that could fester like a wound if left untreated.
“I thought I’d come by tonight. We’re overdue for some girl time,” Maeve says.
“You bring the wine. I’ll make some snacks to go with the tea we’re going to spill.” Her laugh heals something inside me. We’ll get over this bump. I know we will.
“On my way,” she sings.
I pop out of bed and run downstairs. As luck would have it, Grams has some cheese puffs in the deep freeze. I preheat the oven and spread them on a cookie sheet, making a mental note that I need to dig into my hidden stash and buy groceries or I”ll be eating sympathy casseroles forever.
A soft knock comes on the front door, and there’s Maeve, her black fringe drawing a stark line above heavy-rimmed glasses. Purple dragonflies decorate her casual black dress. A set of black moto boots completes her ensemble.
“Oh my gods, you look great, Eloise! You changed your?—”
I lunge at her, hugging her hard like she’s leaving for war. Pressure forms behind my eyes, and before I know what’s happening, I’m sobbing into her shoulder.
“Whoa. Are… are you okay?”
Wrestling my emotions under control, I wipe beneath my eyes. “Sorry. I guess I didn’t realize how much I needed a friend until I saw you there. This week has been… confusing.”
She winces. “Then I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think my visit tonight might not make things easier.”
I usher her toward the kitchen. “Start talking.”
Twenty minutes later, we’re two glasses and several cheese puffs in, and I’m more frustrated than ever. “Let me get this straight. You can see that Tony receives large sums of money via wire transfers from a shady foreign entity named Genesis Corp, but you can’t prove it precisely because it’s a shell company and the ownership of the account is locked down tighter than a nun’s coochie.”
“More or less.” Maeve giggles. “I claim zero expertise in nun anatomy.”
“But it’s weird. Your forensic accountants see the red flags.”
She massages the bridge of her nose like she’s getting a headache. “Yes. We’ve even questioned Tony about it. He has paperwork saying that the company is paying him for consulting services. His phone records back that up. But shit, no consulting service is worth what they’re paying him. It amounts to millions of dollars.”
I show her the Echo Mills Today magazine and recap again everything we learned about the warehouse. “He’s behind this. I know he is. I saw that invoice. And the operation is coincidentally torn down, right after? It’s too fishy.”
“And it’s a free magazine with free ads. How would he make any money? It’s not even a good free magazine.” She rubs one of the pages between her fingers. “It feels like it’s printed on recycled paper, and there isn’t anything useful in here, unless you plan to wipe your ass with the pages.”
“I know! It doesn’t make any sense. Tony is an asshole, but he’s genuinely good at business. He wouldn”t invest in something that didn’t pay off. And why the secrecy?”
Bending her fingers into claws, Maeve gives an angsty cry. “This stinks of tax evasion but without a direct link between him and Gold Weaver and Gold Weaver and Genesis, we’ve got nothing. As the goddess is my witness, I swear you married into the mob. Tony is up to some shady shit on a level on par with organized crime. We can see money coming in from Genesis but none going out from his companies, and definitely no outlays for a printing operation. When it comes to the courts, they’re going to believe the simplest explanation.” She slants me an empathetic look.
“That I didn’t see what I thought I saw.”
“Maybe he had an invoice, but it wasn’t his. Who knows where that came from or why it made him angry? Maybe he has a friend who runs the magazine.” She shakes her head. “I believe you but that’s what his lawyers are going to tell the judge.”
I lean my forehead against my fists, feeling deflated.
“Hey...” Maeve rubs my shoulder. “I’m going to keep trying. I just can’t figure out what he’s doing, and with less than two weeks until our court date, the chances that we figure it out before then are slight.”
I bury my face in my hands. “You think I should prepare myself to lose the house?”
Gently, she guides my wrists apart and meets my gaze. “No, Eloise. I’ve never thought that. Call the fucking advocate and command him to kill Tony. As long as you are still married, you are the beneficiary of his estate. Not only does the prenup go out the window, but his claim to this property also becomes moot.”
“But I’ll be a murderer.”
She blows out a deep breath. “I say this as your friend, not your attorney. You’ve got to defend yourself.”
“This isn’t self-defense. He’s threatening my property, not my life.”
Maeve groans in frustration. “There are more ways to kill a person than to stop their heart from beating. This house and everything in it is your life. It’s the only life you’ve ever known outside of Tony. He’s threatening to take that from you. Threatening to keep you from your inheritance, your ancestral bonds, and the heritage that makes you the beautiful person you are. If that’s not threatening your life, I don’t know what is.”
I pour another glass of wine. She”s right, about everything. “All right. If I can’t figure out another way, I’ll ask Damien to do it at the end of the week.”
Maeve chews her lip. “Thank you.”
I don”t say anything more, afraid I”ll talk myself out of it if I do.
“Still calling him Damien, huh?” She squints at me.
“You might as well know he ate me out and gave me the strongest orgasms I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
Her brows shoot into her thick bangs. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Goddess, Eloise. You come across all prim, proper, and gentle, and then you tell me you let a killer with fangs feast on your lady bits. I don’t know what to do with that information.”
“Be happy for me. I know that when I’m done with the candle, he’ll be gone, but I need this. I need to feel wanted again, and he’s done that for me.”
“Okay. I guess that makes sense. And he can’t hurt you as long as you have the candle.”
I take another drink to keep from saying anything about how I plan to let the candle burn down the rest of the way the minute this is all over. I love Maeve, but keeping Damian a prisoner for several lifetimes is wrong.
I reach for the bottle and drain the remains of the wine into Maeve’s empty glass. Her eyes are already glassy. A drunk Maeve is a forthcoming Maeve, and I still have questions. “So, uh, about my mother and Bad Witches Club.”
She frowns. “I was wondering when you’d get around to asking me about it again.”
“How did my mother know about the supernatural world?”
Hesitating, she leans back in her chair. She seems to be deliberating on something, maybe trying to find the right words to break bad news. I make the gimme motion with my hand, but she just thrusts both arms toward me. “What do you see when you look at me?”
“My best friend, Maeve.”
She narrows her eyes in annoyance.
“Okay, um, a beautiful woman.” She circles her hand in the air, wanting more. “A beautiful goth woman.”
“Closer. What do you notice about my tattoos?”
I shrug. “They’re all skeletons. Skeleton mermaid, skeleton dragon, plain old skull.” Maeve is covered in bones and skulls. It’s her thing.
“Everyone in my family has tattoos like this, although maybe not so many as me. My father only has one, and it’s right over his heart. Like this one.” She moves the neck of her dress aside to reveal a tattoo of a skull and crossbones constructed of tiny symbols. “Can you guess why we all have this same tattoo?”
“Wait, Damien has one too! I saw it on his chest.”
“Sort of. Damien’s is different. It’s the same shape, but the symbols that make it up are different. His is a mark of his service to us, but this—” She taps the tattoo “—is the Gowdie sigil.”
Damien told me a few things about witches, sigils, and family spells, but I’m not sure he was supposed to share, and I don’t want to get him in trouble, so I play ignorant. “Does the tattoo have something to do with you being a witch?”
She nods. “Every witch bloodline has a sigil. It’s a magical symbol that tells the world we belong to the bloodline and also imbues us with certain powers. Each family has a specialty, a keyspell that is handed down and perfected generation after generation.”
“A keyspell?”
“Think of it like a keystone, a bedrock on which all the family’s magic is built. All magical families have a unique keyspell. Only two other bloodlines have an animator keyspell, but theirs are different than ours. Animators can command anything.” With a twist of her hand, one of the cocktail napkins folds itself into a bird and flaps its wings.
“Oh my God.” I had the gist of what an animator could do, but nothing prepares you for seeing a napkin try to fly.
“The Gowdie specialty is animating the dead. Give us a cemetery, and we are something to be feared. Other animator families specialize in mechanical animation or animating plants or animals. We specialize in bones. It’s how we were able to capture Damien. He’s a shade, but when he manifests in his human form, he has bones like we do. My family was able to lock into those bones.”
The implications send a shiver through me. “Can you control a living person, then?”
“It’s possible, but the magic would require a lot of power and wouldn’t last long. Living creatures with higher intelligence fight the magic. Vampires and shades though, are the exception. It works on a deeper level. They are supernatural creatures and our magic locks onto what animates them like… like… the teeth of a cog linking into another cog. It’s possible for us to take control.”
It sounds brutal. I redirect her back to our original conversation. “Maeve, what does any of this have to do with my mother?”
She wraps a hand around mine and squeezes. “Your mother and father both wore the tattoo that’s on your back over their hearts.”
“Yes. That’s why I chose it. I wanted to feel close to them.”
“Your mother was obsessed with fantasy creatures, so much so her work is dripping with them.”
“Yeah? So?” Goosebumps march up my arms at the look in her dark eyes.
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” Maeve licks her lips. “I don’t know for sure, okay? It wasn’t like I knew your parents outside my friendship with you. But I believe the pattern on your back is a sigil. I believe your parents might come from a bloodline of witches, one that isn’t registered with the Council of Witches, and I think you have witch blood in you, even if you can’t do magic.”
A sharp inhale lodges in my throat. Then I just laugh. “I think I’d know if my parents were witches.”
“How?” she asks softly. “I didn’t come into my power until I turned seventeen, and my parents gave me this tattoo.” She taps the skull over her heart. “Only after did they start teaching me spells. Before that, my understanding of magic was academic. It’s possible your parents planned to teach you their magic eventually but never got a chance.”
I can’t breathe. My mind leaps between thinking this is a sick joke and thinking Maeve must be mistaken. But my mother painted those murals. She’d rubbed shoulders with the supernatural community. Then a question comes to me. “Did your parents know about any of this?”
“They suspected.”
“Do they have any idea what the tattoo means? If my parents were witches, what’s the Harcourt keyspell?”
She shakes her head. “They don’t know. What I’ve told you about us, Eloise, is a tightly guarded secret. Other established families know, of course, but it’s not something we broadcast. We gather with other magical families four times a year. Your parents never participated.”
“So, what you’re saying is, I have a magical symbol on my back that could mean I’m like you, or could mean nothing at all.”
Maeve adjusts her glasses. “I’m afraid that’s right.”