Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
“You spaced out for a moment is all, Betty.”
“There weren’t any women standing by the truck windows, Betty.”
“How could my claw have done that when I never shifted, Betty?”
I sat at my kitchen table staring at my iced coffee. It slid around on a pillow of condensation, leaving a snail trail of water behind it. Normally, I would’ve chased it with a napkin, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to move my hand.
“I’m calling Ida,” Ronan said.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Ronan crouched at my knees and stared up at me. He’d led me straight to the bathroom to clean the wound when we got home, took me to the garden room to have Cecil put a poultice and a bandage on it, then sat me at the table with my drink and a lavender scone.
I’d touched neither.
“You won’t talk to me or the boys. Whatever’s happening, you need to—”
“I told you everything. You don’t believe me,” I said, dully. “Which is fair, since I don’t believe me, either.”
“I will always be the one who believes you. Always.” He kissed my wrist, the back of my unhurt hand, and each fingertip, one by one. “I heard your story and saw the chain. I just don’t understand why I have no memory of it.”
It meant something, that he trusted me enough to distrust his own eyes, but I could barely feel the sentiment. It was as if Demon Betty had flooded my bloodstream with her numbness, though she’d faded away once I was back in this realm.
“Where’s the chain?”
He glanced over his shoulder into the living room. “On the coffee table. You said the hooded man used it like prayer beads?”
“That’s what it looked like. I don’t know his intentions, and I’ve never seen any magical use chains like that.”
“Do you think he was a magical?”
“He was using magic, but I assumed he was a demon.”
“Can you ask D.B.?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I picked at my bandage. “Demon Betty isn’t separate from me anymore—not on this plane, anyway. The witch, the demon, me, we’re all together. Amalgamated. Fused. Healed.”
Healed was a strange way to put it, but the moment it was out of my mouth, I knew it was the truest way to say it.
I couldn’t separate either of them from Regular Betty now.
Day-by-day, choice-by-choice, we had become one.
The process had started after the kintsugi mirror incident and gone into overdrive after I/she/we killed the seven Org assassins.
“Because, in this world, she is me and I am her and the witch is both of us and we are all together, and I sound like a Beatles’ song.”
“Then call Ida. She’s a necromancer. Wouldn’t she have some insight? Or talk to Fennel. He’s a cat, and you said before that he had the ability to traverse the—”
“Ronan, I love you with every cell in my body, but please stop making suggestions,” I said as gently as I could. “I need to think—to process all this.”
“Got it.” He kissed my hands one last time and rose. “Do you want me to leave? Give you some time alone with your thoughts?”
That was the last thing I wanted. “No, please stay. I need you to be here. I just also need you to—”
“Shut my trap,” he said, with a grin.
“You’re trying to help, and I appreciate it. I just need some quiet company, I guess.”
He smiled, looking entirely unoffended. “It’s okay. Sometimes I need quiet company, too. How about I run out to the truck, grab my laptop, and you can listen to me tap on the keys and curse the unnecessary complexities of the tax code under my breath for a while?”
That made me smile. “I would love that.”
“Sound familiar at all?” I asked.
It was early evening, and I was slumped against the cushions on Ida’s couch with Fennel snoozing on my chest, talking to her via the pass-through between her kitchen and living room.
“I don’t recognize the place,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean anything. Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise, they’re all subjective and mostly specific to the soul—especially Paradise. In other words, you see what you want to see.”
“Makes sense. One woman’s heaven is another woman’s hell.” I stroked Fennel between his cute triangle ears. One ear twitched.
“I doubt that you were in the actual Hell, though.”
“Why?”
“Because you were with Ronan. No matter the scenario, I can’t conjure up a version of Hades that involves you being there with the man you love. I can envision scenarios where that love would be used against you, but that’s not what happened.”
“Watching him suffer would be Hell for me—watching any of you suffer would be. Maybe that was next, and we prevented it.”
“Doesn’t feel right. You said you were nervous but not terrified.
Nothing attacked Ronan, in fact it sounds like you were both fairly in control of yourselves the entire time.
He was even able to shift.” She appeared in the opening and tapped her finger against her chin.
“I’m guessing it was something Hell-adjacent. ”
“Purgatory, you mean.”
“No. Each realm is its own thing, but like a suburb in a city, it has pockets that belong to it and yet are their own thing. Sounds like you landed in someone’s pocket.”
“Well, that makes me not feel better,” I muttered.
“You should really have Fennel with you all the time,” she continued. “He can get you back here if you get stuck.”
Ice clinked as she set out a bowl of fresh water for the magical cat. Fennel leapt off my chest, hit the floor with a loud thump, and slinked into the kitchen. A second later, I heard him slurping. Ida grinned as she passed him on her way into the living room.
“Not only Fennel.” I sat up, dug the chains out of a reusable DiscMart shopping bag I’d brought with me, and dropped them on the floor.
Her eyes went wide. She reached for them but drew her hand back before touching a single link. Her legs seemed to go out from under her as she plopped into the recliner beside the sofa.
“How did these get here?” she asked.
“They’re what the hooded figure threw at Ronan and me to send us back.
He was working these things like a priest praying the rosary in an exorcism movie—with intention and focus.
Demon Betty suddenly appeared like she used to, all gray skin and numbness, and told me what to do.
When I tried to talk to him, the guy threw the chain, and it wound around us, and suddenly we were back in the truck.
Ronan, with no memory of anything, and me sitting there staring at the ice cubes in my coffee feeling like I’d lost my mind. ”
“Infernal power exudes from them.” Ida rucked up the sleeves of her lemon-yellow cotton blouse then clasped her hands over her knees. “They came through with you?”
“Yeah. I’m assuming infernal power is a bad thing.”
“It’s just metal fused in Hell, is all. It’s got negative connotations by way of where it comes from, but I don’t know that it’s bad, per se. Some people think necromancers are evil, and look at me.” She framed her face with her hands and cracked a wide, comical smile. “I’m as nice as can be.”
“True, you are the bestest.” I stared down at the chains, coiled on the carpet like a snake about to strike. “Evil or not, I was kind of happy to see them. Until then, I’d been kind of scared that I imagined the whole thing.”
“What about your hand? That’s not exactly a paper cut.”
“Yeah, but a claw wound can be explained away easier than a magic chain appearing under my feet. If I’d imagined the rest, why couldn’t I have imagined how I’d gotten the cut on my hand? But the chain was something else. It made no sense except in the context of what happened.”
“But you still thought you’d imagined it at first.” She ran a hand over her short, white pixie and stared at me through eyes that sparkled like blue topaz. “You need to trust your brain, Betty.”
She was right. Ida usually was. Except that time she’d decided to dye her hair neon orange. She’d been dead wrong about that. Neon pink was much more flattering on her.
Fennel padded into the room, wiggled his rump, and leapt onto the sofa beside me. I stroked his soft, sable fur.
“Those women you mentioned concern me,” Ida said.
“If they were even really there. Time hadn’t passed, but they were nowhere around when I came back to myself.”
“Oh, they were there. I don’t know if they sent you into that pocket, or whatever we’re calling it, but if you saw them, they were there. Could they have used a spell to disappear? Do you think they were witches?”
Gods, it was nice to have a friend—and boyfriend—who demanded I trust myself.
“Witches? Maybe. To be honest, their magic reminded me of yours. It was powered by something very different than an elemental or learned-magic witch—or even an average mage.”
“Necromancers? Two of us working together?” She clasped her hands together in her lap.
“This isn’t something to take lightly. We’re pretty scary on our own, but group us together, and we become something else.
Like your kind.” She gave me a pointed look.
“A coven is far more powerful than a single witch.”
“Ooo, subtle,” I teased.
“I’m only saying. You’ve stayed on as alpha of the wolf pack to help keep you safe from The Org, yet you’ve refused to listen to Margaux Ramirez’s proposal about forming a coven. Why?”
“What’s going on here?” I narrowed my eyes, watched her squirm in her recliner. “Ida Summer, have you been scheming with Margaux behind my back?”
“Well now,” she smoothed her yellow jogging pants over her knee, “I wouldn’t say I was scheming.”
“Schemer!” I jabbed my finger at her. “You’ve been talking to her. Bronwyn, too?”
“Only a little. A couple of lunches, nothing to write home about.”
“Something,” I said, “to write home about. With me being home in this scenario and writing being you opening your yapper and telling me about it.”
She lifted her chin. “They’re concerned for you.”
“Uh-huh. Right. It’s all about my wellbeing.”
“Fine. They’re in it for themselves, too, but that doesn’t make it a bad idea. You’ve attracted the attention of something big, Betty. The Org isn’t Floyd Pallás. They’re much more dangerous, and you’re going to need to gird yourself with a great deal of magic to protect yourself.”