Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
A s soon as the doors to the Excited Women’s Ward slammed shut, Abby let out a blood-curdling scream that ricocheted around the building’s foyer and up its wide staircase.
Stella would have done the same if her throat hadn’t closed up, making it hard to breathe.
They’d only made it a few steps inside the dark paneled space with its broken tiled floor when an invisible lasso of magic encircled Stella, Ethan, and Abby. It made several passes before cinching them tightly together, back to back to back. The bindings cut into Stella’s waist and more loops crisscrossed her chest.
“Set up,” Ethan snarled. “It’s a goddamn set up.” He grabbed hold of the invisible bindings and tried to tear them away.
Stella did the same, but the magic was too strong. She was unable to fathom what was happening.
She whipped her head toward the three ghosts, who were cowering in the corner. They had to be behind this.
“You said my mom wanted us to wait in here!” she accused. She wished the women weren’t already dead. Right now, she would have liked to kill all three of them.
“We said you were lucky your family wants you,” said the second ghost. “Dr. Ford wants you. He’s your family, is he not?”
Hawk growled and tried to pull at the ropes from his side of things, but by the sounds of his bellows, he wasn’t having any luck.
Ethan’s fingers brushed against Stella’s.
“Aether,” he said. “We need something to cut through these ropes.”
Their hands were awkwardly trapped against their bodies, but Stella managed to weave a few of her fingers together with Ethan’s and pinch them tight.
The warmth of his hand had a calming effect. She focused on his strength, marveled at how far he’d come in the four short months she’d known him, gave a fleeting thought of regret to the strong possibility their time together was about to be cut short, then allowed the blue ribbons of magic to unfurl from her body.
Out of the corner of her eye, Stella saw the red ribbons of Ethan’s magic curling through the air. They braided together with her magic, turning the ribbons a vibrant violet. Then a thin strand of aether threaded through the bindings.
Their paired magic was there for them. But would it be enough? The aether was unusually thin, and the invisible ropes were strong.
“What are you doing?” Abby asked, twisting her neck to try and see.
“Trying to cut through this binding spell,” Stella explained, though she was already losing hope. The more the aether picked away at the knots, the tighter the ropes became. And it hurt.
“I can’t even see what’s holding you,” Hawk snapped as he clawed at the small spaces between them, trying to find purchase. “How am I supposed to get them off if I can’t see them?”
The sound of shuffling footsteps yanked Stella’s attention to an open doorway that led to one of the hospital wings. The Collector limped through it and into the foyer. The fingers on his left had were doing that thing Jun had described, touching his thumb to his pinkie, then his ring finger, and moving on to each of them before repeating the pattern three times.
His features were even more warped and twisted than Stella remembered.
He stopped to brace himself against the wall, as if he’d walked ten miles to get there. So, maybe the poppet had wounded him after all. Just not enough if he was still on his feet.
Hawk growled, and a light shimmered around his body as if he was unsure whether to shift or not.
The Collector decided for him. A molten hot blast of magic shot across the foyer, hit Hawk in the center of chest, and sent him flying toward the staircase. His back hit the stairs, and his head bounced against a tread.
Abby screamed again. “Hawk!”
Hawk didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound.
The Collector leaned against the wall, panting.
The three ghosts, who’d been waiting silently in the corner of the room wrung their hands.
“Why would you help him?” Ethan asked, indicting the ghosts with his fury.
“He promised us life,” said the third ghost, the one whose two hair buns were sewn in place. “We can live again.”
“Evil doesn’t create,” Stella said, groaning at their stupidity. “It can only destroy.”
“Doctor Ford?” the third ghost asked, turning toward the Collector with an imploring expression.
“I have no more use for you.” The Collector threw his arm out in their direction, and it seemed as though something grabbed the three women from behind. They doubled over and were dragged backward, asses first, through the wall, disappearing from view.
The Collector also bent over, but he put his hands to his knees and breathed heavily as if he’d just run a marathon.
“What’s happening?” Abby asked. The way they were joined together, her back was to the entire scene.
Stella grabbed hold of Abby’s hand and squeezed, hoping to give her some reassurance. They’d find their way out of this mess. They had to. She still couldn’t believe the witch board had been wrong, that it had led them to disaster.
Her mother wanted to put a stop to her husband: Stella’s father, the Collector. She had given Stella the bracelet, the means for powerful travel , and the planchette for her witch board. She’d communicated to them the date: October 31, 2015.
That couldn’t all have been an elaborate ruse so the Collector could eventually steal their magic and kill them. Her mother couldn’t want that. Or had it been just one more betrayal?
The ghosts’ warning echoed in Stella’s ears: You can’t trust family .
Stella’s arms might have been bound tight against her body, but she was still able to rotate her wrist and flick her fingers in the Collector’s direction. A magical flame shot straight for him, but the Collector rose out of his bent posture and snuffed it out.
Stella tried again, creating a magical flame thrower, but the Collector doused it with a wall of water.
So much for killing him with fire.
All she’d manage to do was make him breathe a little more heavy. His chest heaved, and he panted. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Stella asked.
“The poppet,” he said, wheezing a little. “ Somebody’s wounding me. You must have a poppet on you.”
To this, Stella said nothing.
The Collector groaned, and he prowled forward, stopping right in front of her.
Stella tried to see hints of the father she’d once known hidden somewhere in his warped face, but all she could see was evil.
His lip curled, and he reached between her and Ethan. He found the poppet tucked into the back of her jeans and retrieved it.
He stared down at the holographic vinyl figure, its silver hair, stretched face, and black button eyes.
“Just out of curiosity…” He hooked his finger into the poppet’s leg seam and ripped it open. His monogrammed ring fell out the bottom and bounced against the floor, skipping twice before coming to rest.
The Collector picked it up. His eyebrows rose with surprise, and he slipped the ring on his finger.
He twisted it this way and that, really studying it. Then he shook his head and made an ugly laugh. “And here I thought it was you who was wounding me. Didn’t anyone tell you the personal object has to be intimately tied to the person for a poppet to cause them any harm? I never wore this ring for more than a few seconds.”
Stella pressed her lips together and held her tongue.
“I would’ve thought Marietta taught you better,” he sneered. “Then again, she was only ever a potion maker.”
He tossed the poppet to the far side of the foyer, discarding it as if it were trash and of little concern.
Stella’s heart deflated. His apathy was valid. With the poppet clear across the room and the blackthorn still in her pocket, she couldn’t do any more damage.
Worse, he seemed to be getting his second wind.
He came closer, and his nostrils flared. “Aether?”
Stella clenched her teeth.
The Collector chuckled, as if enjoying the anticipation of having such an elusive power all for himself.
“Why did you kill David Hurley?” Stella asked, bile creeping up the back of her throat.
The Collector’s eyebrows shot up in surprise—either at the question itself, or at her interest in the answer.
“He’d served his purpose,” he explained flatly. “Using his face allowed me to get into his trust account. Once his firm figures out that he—or rather I—embezzled half a million dollars, Hurley would wish he were dead anyway. I helped him out.”
“So, it wasn’t punishment for giving us the chance to find the witch board?”
“That certainly didn’t help his cause. Attorney-client privilege is supposed to be sacrosanct.”
“And Stella’s mother?” Ethan asked. “Whose side is she on?”
“That should be obvious,” the Collector snapped.
“It’s not,” Ethan replied. “She brought us here tonight. Was it to kill, or be killed?”
“My wife was smart,” the Collector said, “and she was fearless. What she was not, was ambitious or imaginative. Or at least not imaginative enough. I was the one who was always thinking of a million different scenarios and preparing for each of them.
“For example,” he continued, “if you found the witch board, I imagined you could arrive on this night, that is, if you could figure out how to use it.”
“We did,” Stella said.
“Clearly,” he replied. “And to answer your first question, your mother brought you here to stop me. That was always her intent because—again—no imagination. She couldn’t see what I could see. The future that was meant to be ours.”
Stella’s chest hurt. It killed her to hear him talk about her mother that way. Her mother was brilliant. Caring. Wise. And calculating. She’d given her daughters everything they needed to be victorious, but Stella had screwed it all up.
Once again, she’d wasted her mother’s gifts. Just like the store. She was going to lose it all.
“So, now what?” Ethan asked, sounding more annoyed than concerned, and Stella had to say, she appreciated his strength. Her father’s words had the opposite effect on her.
“You are full of questions with obvious answers,” the Collector said. “We pick up where we left off, of course. Though now I have all three of you together.”
Abby whimpered.
Hawk still lay sprawled and motionless across the stairs, his loose curls covering his face.
“Give me five minutes to prepare,” the Collector continued, “and I’ll have everything I need to complete the perfection of my magic. I’ll fix the past, and I’ll create the future we all deserve. I’m only sorry you won’t be here to enjoy it with me.”
He strode confidently toward the side of the foyer that Abby was facing. Stella could no longer see him, but she heard something slide across the floor.
“What’s he doing?” Stella asked.
“Pocket door,” Abby said. “He just opened it, and… Oh, shit.”
“What?” Stella asked.
“His surgery,” Abby said woodenly. “I can see his work table. The cauldron is already steaming.”
“If he wants our magic,” Stella said, gritting her teeth as she struggled against the bindings, “he’s going to have to pry it out of our cold, dead hands.”
Ethan grunted as he too pulled at the bindings. “News flash, Red, but that’s exactly what he plans to do.”
“You guys,” Abby whined. “This is bad. Really bad.”
“Don’t panic,” Ethan said. “Can you conjure any magic with your hands bound?”
“Sure,” Abby said, “but not my strongest.”
“What about shifting?” Ethan asked. “That might break us out of here.”
“Not with all of us bound together,” Abby said. “You’re too close. I could kill you accidentally.”
“Can you see any gurneys in that room?” Stella asked.
At her question, Ethan twisted his body to see for himself, which only tightened the restraints around Stella’s body. She winced in pain.
“I can’t see any,” Ethan said.
“Me neither,” Abby said. “Just the work table.”
“We don’t have much time,” Stella said. “I’m supposed to end him with fire. How in the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“The prophecy could’ve been wrong,” Ethan said.
“He’s adding something to the cauldron,” Abby said, continuing with her play-by-play.
“Come on, Ethan,” Stella cried. “The aether. It has to work on these knots.”
“I’ve been trying this whole time,” Ethan said. “It isn’t working.”
“We can’t stop trying.” Stella tried to wrench herself free, but to no avail.
“We need to stop and relax,” Ethan said.
“I’m not going to my death without a fight,” Stella said.
Hawk remained lifeless on the stairs.
“No,” Ethan said. “I’m not saying to give up, I’m saying this isn’t working. We need to come up with something else.”
“He’s testing the temperature of his siphoning spell,” Abby said. “We’re running out of time. Do whatever you need to do.”
But Stella couldn’t think of any spells that would work. Not her freezing spell, or her flattening spell. She didn’t have the ingredients to turn them invisible, not that that would be helpful. She had nothing in her arsenal that would affect the binding spell or the Collector.
In utter frustration, she let out a feral scream, and the aether flew up to the ceiling. It may have been invisible, but the cloud of power it created above their heads was impossible to ignore.
The cloud grew bigger and bigger, slowly spreading until it covered the entire ceiling. It was like a carpet of powerful magic that rolled across the flat plane and filled every corner.
“Shit,” Ethan muttered. “Can you feel that?”
Stella nodded. She’d never felt anything like it. Even the few times she and Ethan had called upon their paired magic, it had never grown so massive.
“How are you making it so big?” Ethan asked.
“It’s not me,” Stella said. “I thought it was Abby’s magic.”
“Not me,” Abby said. “I haven’t done anything yet, but…”
Her body tensed, and without slapping her hands together over her head—simply because she couldn’t—she sent up a wave of vibration into the cloud.
It made the aether growl viciously—like a cornered wolf. The sound was impressive, but it didn’t bring them any closer to escape.
“What’s this?” The Collector rushed back into the foyer, presumably responding to the noise. His eyes were wide and focused on the ceiling.
Stella tried to get the aether to do something—to swallow the Collector whole, or for Abby’s added wolf magic to sink its teeth into his shoulder and drag him away. But nothing happened.
They’d just conjured an insane amount of magic with enormous potential, but it wasn’t doing anything but growl over their heads. The magical bindings prevented them from pushing the magic any further.
The Collector kept his awestruck gaze on the ceiling as he raised his hands in the air.
In response, Stella’s feet left the ground. She sucked in a breath and looked down. The three of them were still bound together, and they were rising like a pillar into the air.
“Hawk!” Abby cried out as if she fully expected him to get off the stairs and do something.
“What’s happening?” Ethan asked.
They floated as one, across the floor toward the other room and the Collector’s surgery. This was it. The Collector was going to rob them of their magic, and they were all going to die.
“Fire!” Ethan said, raising his voice to get over the sound of growling aether. “Stella you need to strike now.”
“I’ve already hit him with fire,” she said, grunting as she tried in vain to free herself from the bindings. “Twice. It didn’t work.”
“Not him,” Ethan said. “The aether. Light the aether on fire.”
Stella stopped struggling and glanced up at the ceiling. The snarling blue cloud shimmered and roiled like a pool of propane. Would it ignite?
“It could explode,” she said, as they floated even closer to the surgery. “It could kill us.”
“We’re dead anyway,” Abby said. “At least we’ll take the Collector out with us.”
With no other options available, Stella flexed her wrist and pointed a finger toward the ceiling.
The aether sparked, then— whooosh! —the gas ignited.
The cloud turned a turquoise blue and churned with power. The heat was intense, and Stella got a whiff of burned hair.
Just as Stella thought it would blow them all sky high, the blue flames constricted like a fist squeezing tight, funneling down to a single point at the center of the ceiling.
The paint blistered, one large bubble growing at the center of the ceiling. It popped, and an arrow of flaming aether shot out of its center, down toward the far corner of the room and the discarded poppet.
Fire pierced the poppet’s heart.
The Collector screamed, and his eyes widened in accusation. He pressed his hands to his chest, and he dropped to his knees.
“One of your hairs was still buried deep inside,” Stella said. “I guess Marietta did teach me something after all.”
The Collector bent his head back. His mouth opened in another scream, though this one silent.
His eyes bulged out of his head before erupting like two overfilled water balloons. Blood ran down his face, and he fell forward, like a toppled tree.
Stella’s heart lodged in her throat, and she would have thought it was done, except just at that second, the poppet exploded into bits of stuffing, buttons, and yarn.
And with it, the Collector’s body shattered like a hive that had been knocked from a rafter. He broke into thousands of pieces, and magic of all kinds, all scents, and all eras zipped and spun around the room like thousands of angry wasps.
The tornado of magic swirled, blowing Stella’s hair off her face and causing her to turn her head to protect her eyes. Ethan was doing the same. She didn’t know what Abby was doing behind her, but she hoped she was okay.
The newly released magic twisted into a spiral, then shot straight up toward the ceiling. It pierced the already compromised surface, then blew the roof right off the hospital ward.
At the explosive sound, Stella opened her eyes and tipped her head back to witness the magic of thousands of collected witches filling the night sky. It washed the blackness in aurora borealis blues, greens and purples before drifting to the ground and seeping back into the world.
The magical bindings softened and sloughed away from their bodies.
Stella fell forward. She caught herself just before her face hit the floor several feet below.
Ethan and Abby landed beside and behind her.
Ethan grabbed Stella’s arm and pulled her to her feet. Their eyes locked. The silence in the foyer was deafening, and a million conflicted thoughts rushed through Stella’s mind, though one rose to the surface.
The Collector was dead. Her father was dead. And somehow she, Ethan, and Abby had survived.
“Is it over?” she asked. “Does this mean it’s really over?”