Chapter 27 Mirage #3
Inside, it is vacant. The soft whimpers hushed the second I open the door.
But it is identical in every way to how I remember.
The same gauzy curtains and collection of perfume bottles, the same oversize bed and mirrored vanity.
But the drawers are empty, the candle I found consumed long ago in the fire I started.
I wait on the chaise longue, eyes trained out the window as the moon sails over the water, stars winking into existence like beads on a grand dress, until I see her pale form gliding along the bluffs, pacing in the dead of night, looking to the horizon.
She is white and billowing against the pitch of sky.
And I don’t run and hide, don’t cower under the blankets in my room.
I take a breath, rise from my seat, and go to meet her.
The night is unseasonably cool, and the winds are high.
I cross my arms against them as I walk, barefoot in the grass, to the place where she stands.
I wonder if she will waver, blow away on a gust before I can reach her.
But she is constant in her cradle by the sea, her back to the house where she was murdered, her gaze on the water where her body was found.
When at last we are side by side, I tell her, “I know what happened to you.”
She blinks, soulless eyes reaching through the dark, and then she looks at me. “And I know what happened to you.”
She is softer this way, so much easier to take in than the portrait, without the hard lines of flesh and blood, without the years of misunderstanding, of secrets and lies between us. “Mother said you cast a love spell on a man with no heart, and it brought us all to ruin.”
She smiles. “Your mother spoke the truth. Part of it, at least. My Winnie was always a smart girl.”
“Why?” I ask her. It is what I have wanted to ask since the day I arrived here.
“Why does anyone young do anything foolish?” she responds.
“Because they believe they can get away with it. I was infatuated and incorrigible, but I never wanted to hurt you or your mother. I couldn’t see what it would become inside him.
And by the time I did, it was too late. The die was cast, my hand played.
The magic spiraled out of me and punched a hole through my future, then kept on going. ”
“We shouldn’t have it,” I tell her, casting a baleful glance at my own hands. “This power. It’s dangerous.”
“Power is always dangerous,” she agrees. “But the magic is not to blame. That lies solely with me. Wisdom is the antidote. Temperance. Compassion. And you have need of them all now.”
It’s an eerily similar refrain to what the the Fathom told me herself.
“Can we ever truly be free?” I look to the house, so perfectly restored. “Or will this place, this legacy, continue forever? The spell passing into eternity?”
“You will free us,” she says confidently, “when you free yourself, Judeth. You are not bound by my mistakes, especially now. Stop living in my shadow; start casting your own.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her.
“Give me up,” she says easily. “Look around; there is no one else holding me here but you.”
I shake my head at her. “No. I didn’t do this. I didn’t take the money. The house, having it rebuilt—that was all him.”
She smiles again. “It’s not Macallister’s money anymore. It’s no one’s unless you claim it. Do something better with it than he ever did. Stop running from what is yours.”
I pause, unsure how to respond, and watch her turn back to the sea, the water crashing below us. She makes it sound so simple, but I’ve never felt free to own what’s mine. The magic. The money. The voice.
“I used to think it was you,” I tell her. “When I was young and I heard the voice inside me, I thought you were whispering to my heart.”
“The voice was always your own,” she says. “It was always a part of yourself you’d been taught not to trust, made of the pieces you carved away that were not docile, that were liberated. So, they took on their own life when given the chance.”
“Did you hear it too? A voice like mine?” I ask her.
Her eyes glitter with memory. “I heard a voice, but it belonged to another, a creature who thrashed inside my dreams, as powerful as she was pitiful.”
“The Fathom.” I stare at her, disbelieving but knowing she cannot lie. Not now, not like this. “Long before Arla or me, she called to you.”
The Fathom had mentioned a sensitivity that made connection easier, one it seemed I lacked, but which my grandmother and Arla must have had.
Was it their affinity for water? Or their affinity for power?
The desire to use their magic, the willingness to create something with it? Even to destroy something with it?
“I was just beginning to stir with her whispers when I met your grandfather,” she recalls.
“I came here following that voice. But he captivated me, young and brash as he was, a bull among men. And I could think of nothing and no one else. When I felt him slipping through my fingers, I made a bargain with the creature in my dreams—show me how to hold on to him, and I would set her free. It was an exchange of prisoners. And so she gave me the spell which would be my undoing. I cast my net into the sea and caught my prize in return, but he was no prize at all. I thought I could pick up where I’d left off, that once I had him, I could return to what beckoned in the dark, fulfill my end of the deal.
But he ensnared me as surely as I had him.
You can’t own a life. It’s a lesson we both learned the hard way.
I was trapped here, close but still too far.
I could do nothing. And the knowing ate at me.
The incessant wailing of a beast not of heaven or earth but trapped between.
A cry that no one else could hear. I’d come out here in the night to escape it, but it only grew stronger by the water, in the dark. ”
She turns to me again. “I thought maybe your mother would succeed where I had failed. But after what she’d seen and been through, what she’d come to believe, she would never have dared to save it even if she could hear it.
She hated her power because of what I’d done with mine.
The only time I saw her use it was the night he came for you. ”
“The fire…” I whisper
She nods, grave. “I felt her in that searing heat and rage and joined her there. I thought we could undo all the damage that had been wrought, but I was wrong. Because it lived on in you.”
“But I found your spell,” I confess to her. “The candle in your room. The flowers, the snake. Why continue to work it if what you wanted was to be free?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t reworking it.
I was trying to undo it. Many, many times over, I tried.
I gathered the same items from the spell she’d given me and remade them over and over, but with two extra letters—unbind.
I thought if I could retrace my steps, untie what had been knotted, I could find a way to finish what I’d come here to start. But it failed again and again.”
Untying a knot isn’t always as simple as making one. But I need to understand both if I’m going to straighten this out. “So how did you do it? How did you bind a man with no heart?”
“Blood,” she says frankly. “I gave the night and the ocean a life that wasn’t mine to give. Such things are always bought this way. Only blood can bind, and only blood can unbind.”
No wonder the magic turned foul, the spell rotten. It was cast in another’s sacrifice. Such a thing can never end well.
“So why didn’t your death release us from the spell you cast?” My grandfather should have gotten better after she was gone, but he only became worse in her absence.
“To do the working,” she says now, “the blood must be taken. To undo it, the blood must be given.”
There are only four kinds of blood when it comes to magic, Arla had said. And then I hear the Fathom in my dream: Opposite forces cancel each other out. Magical blood and nonmagical blood. Blood given and blood taken.
Rudzitin’s spell to hold the Fathom needed blood taken. But it still wasn’t enough. Not to last forever. It needed magical blood as well.
But without Arla’s re-creation of his rite, sealed in the blood of our full circle, all I need to undo Rudzitin’s bind is the magical blood of one person, my own freely given.
Aurelia is fading, streams of ghostly white drifting away on the wind like dandelion seeds. She won’t haunt these bluffs anymore, her story told, her debt passed down to me. “Wait! I still don’t understand. Why didn’t I die that night?”
Her hand reaches out to stroke my face, but it is just a breeze toying with my skin. “Because the Fathom brought you back, spit you out like a seed from the pulp. Someone must complete the bargain I struck.”
I watch her dissipate over the water, a chill penetrating my bones where moments ago it was warm. Her voice carries back to me, unencumbered. “Free the deep and it will wash our sins away…”
I pad down the long hall to the bedroom, dragging over a chair and clambering up to reach above the mantel and rip her portrait down.
It comes away easily in my hands, the faintest trace left behind to mark where it once hung.
Tucking it under an arm, I fight the winds all the way back to the cliff, where I inch closer to the edge than I’ve ever allowed myself before.
She said to let her go, to let them all go. And so I will.
With a great heave of my arms, I fling the painting out over the water and watch it drop, splintering across the rocks and sliding into the sea.
I watch until the last shreds disappear beneath the waves, until I can be sure no piece will wash ashore and the sun begins to bleach the sky in the distance.
And when I am certain her memory is laid to rest in the same fashion as her body was, only then do I go inside.
Mira and Levi are awake. They follow me as I enter and stalk toward the kitchen.
I ate last night before bed, but the sleepless night has killed my appetite for breakfast, so I only make a hasty cup of coffee.
Levi, however, nibbles a muffin, watching me.
I must look as crazed as Aurelia was rumored to be, my hair matted, clothes wrinkled, eyes red with lack of sleep.
But, like Cadence, I’m clearer than I’ve ever been. And I know now what I need to do.
I turn to Nina’s daughter. “Mira, I need you to do me a favor.”
She pours her own coffee, nods stiffly. “Sure. What is it?”
“I need you to reach out to Mr. Lampitt,” I tell her.
“Mr. Lampitt is gone, I’m afraid. He died last year. It’s Mr. Colby now. Says he tried to reach out to you, but some man told him he had the wrong number.”
Roger. I can hear the words in his hollow monotone.
I’d caught him watching me type in my passcode more than once.
Not that it mattered; I had nothing to hide.
My past maybe, but nothing in my phone. He must have picked up because he saw a man’s name calling.
He was never very good at sharing. No wonder he picked me, a woman he didn’t even have to share with herself.
He wasn’t Macallister Bates, but he wasn’t far enough off.
If only he knew that phone call was his ticket to all the items on his fantasy Christmas list. I scrawl my number across the back of a business card from Pacific Creative and slide it over to her.
“In that case, let Mr. Colby know he can reach me at this number. I’m ready to receive my inheritance. ”
She takes the card and nods. “Okay.”
“I don’t want you to worry about your job. I have work for you. You won’t miss a single paycheck. But I need you to do one more thing for me.”
She scrutinizes me, her eyes shifty with suspicion. She has reason to be mistrustful. My family doesn’t have the most stellar history. Even Levi seems uneasy, unsure of what I’m about to say.
“Don’t sleep here.” I tell her. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. Pack your things and find somewhere to go. Check yourself into a nice hotel, on me.”
She looks torn. “But Mr. Colby—”
“Mr. Colby works for me now,” I tell her. “Never mind whatever else he’s said. Never sleep here again.” My eyes burn with deadly sincerity, and Mira is forced to capitulate.
“I’ll leave today.”
I’m relieved, but then Levi gets a call. He steps out of the room, and when he returns, the color has drained from his face. “My grandfather had an accident in the night,” he says. “A fall outside. A neighbor found him this morning. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”
Something doesn’t smell right about this news, and it’s clear Levi is struggling to understand how his grandfather ended up outside at night in the first place. “Will he be all right?”
“I don’t know. I need to head back. I need check on him and speak with the doctor.”
“Of course,” I tell him. “I’m all done here.”
We finish our coffee as we hastily gather our belongings while Mira packs. After I see her out, I turn to Levi and tell him, “I have to do one last thing.”
I extract the painting of Thalassa from the back of my car and carry it inside. Using the same chair I did before, I stand and hang Anneli’s painting over the fireplace where Aurelia once was. Climbing down, I inspect my work, straightening her a little before I turn to leave.
At the door to the bedroom, I pause and look back. “Do your worst,” I tell the ancient goddess, and leave Solidago behind.