Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
Forty minutes later, I was ensconced in my garden room on the wicker chaise, watching magic spark as it spun inside the circle Margaux had drawn with rosemary and peppermint-infused mage chalk on the tile floor. It dipped and rose, moving in writhing whorls.
I wanted to climb inside the circle and let the power infuse me, but I had to wait for my coven sisters.
“Coven sisters.” I tested the words, saying them aloud, absorbing the syllables as they echoed off the glass walls.
It sounded kind of … nice.
I flipped onto my back and covered up with the delicate, green afghan Abuela Lulu had crocheted for me as a child. The yarn had softened over years of love and use, and wrapping myself in it felt like being hugged by my grandma.
My lids began to droop.
I slept.
At three a.m., I awoke to a disturbance in the room.
Cecil and Fennel were asleep in their beds beneath the herb planter.
The gnome had his stubby toes tucked into the mother-of-pearl planter containing the string-of-pearls plant.
The plant wasn’t yet strong enough to support him sleeping in it all night, but I imagined he felt calmer keeping skin contact with it.
At some point during the night, I’d tossed the afghan aside and flipped onto my stomach. I closed my eyes and rolled over onto my back again, kicked out my legs, and stretched my arms. Yawned. Opened my eyes.
A multitude of eyes stared down at me through the glass ceiling.
The creature wasn’t human, wasn’t even close. The word eyes even seemed wrong, as they were more like gelatinous fidget objects, the sort you tossed onto your desk and worked in your hand when on a phone call with your boss. Oozing, beige, amorphous things jammed into a mound of meatloaf.
The creature spread over the ceiling, its body drooling down the sides of the room, covering the windows and blocking the door.
It didn’t seep inside, but the room was hardly airtight, and it wouldn’t be long before the gooey body squeezed in through spaces between the windows and the sills that made up the garden room’s walls.
I sat up on the chaise and whispered to the boys, “Don’t freak out, but there’s something on the roof.”
Fennel rose and padded over to the chaise.
“You see it, too, right? I’m not losing it?”
He stared up. “Mreow.”
“Thank the goddess.”
Cecil sputtered awake, mid-snore. He pulled his toes out of the planter, straightened the tip of his purple hat, and slumped over to us. His beard was no longer mauve, but a carnation-pink color.
He chittered his annoyance at the interruption. The sound was low and groaning, like an old man getting out of bed in the morning.
“Look up,” I said.
Cecil slowly turned his head to peer at the ceiling. His hat wilted—the tip pointing straight up before sagging back down. He didn’t speak—not to complain, shriek Gnomish obscenities, or even give the thing his favorite rude hand gestures.
Instead, he darted up the leg of the lavender planter, climbed inside, and disappeared.
“He’s not going to be any help,” I muttered.
Fennel stared intently at the thing, mesmerized.
The creature now covered the entire structure, its body thick and dark and impenetrable. The room grew several degrees colder. It was insulating us from the outside heat. Sealing off the oxygen, too? I supposed we’d know soon.
The coven spell swirled at the same rate as before, steady and strong, throwing up sparks as it hit the boundaries defined by the chalk.
“Why isn’t the creature coming inside?” I was annoyed at how my voice shook. “It clearly wants to.”
I didn’t know if it was the question or the tone in which I’d asked it, but Fennel jolted out of his trance. He pounced on the chaise and nudged my cell phone with his nose.
“What are you doing?”
He slapped the phone with his paw. “MeOW.”
I got the message. “Who do you want me to call? Ronan? Margaux? Bronwyn? Is this a witch thing?”
Cats didn’t have eyebrows, but they did have a brow bone that could make them look definitively annoyed.
“You want me to call Sexton, don’t you?” I asked dully.
He cocked his head to the side as if considering this then shook it.
That was a relief. “Who then? Ida?”
His tail swished, and he nosed the phone again.
“You want me to drag Ida into this?”
Again, he did the swish/nose thing.
I didn’t call her right away. I first tried three spells that did absolutely nothing—though the coven spell continued chugging right along—a stasis potion I thought might help, and one of Cecil’s “localized” flash bangs that ended up backfiring and leaving me temporarily blinded.
It was only after my head began aching so badly that I had trouble thinking straight that I actually called her.
She answered on the second ring. “Betty?”
“This is going to sound really weird, but…” I described the creature and its behavior then said, “Fennel thinks you can help.”
“No, he knows I can. Hang tight. I’m on my way.”
“Be careful. This thing means business, Ida.” I coughed, and my head did a vertigo roll.
“The air feels like that time I was in Mammoth Lakes a few years back, you remember how I told you about that witch I dated who ran triathlons? Should’ve known it wasn’t going to work out when he bought me running shoes for my birthday.
” My stomach turned inside out. “Oh, merciful goddesses.”
“Sounds like it’s feeding. Stop babbling and conserve your air.” She hung up.
“Feeding?” I fell back against the chaise in a lethargic lump. “Hey, you guys okay?”
Fennel looked fine. He stared up at the ceiling, tail wrapped neatly around his feet.
The tip of Cecil’s purple hat appeared out of the lavender, then his nose, and then his pink beard. He also looked okay. Better than me, for sure.
The air grew steadily denser—heavy, like a stone planter sitting squarely on my chest. I lay in the darkness, head screaming, gulping every breath. Fennel began to show signs the atmosphere was affecting him. He stretched out on the floor on his back and sipped air. Cecil shuddered in the lavender.
The next few seconds were like something out of a horror novel.
An eardrum-shredding scream chopped through the air. My teeth hurt and ears plugged, but the darkness began to lift and the air cooled, thinned, and became breathable again.
I glanced over at the door to see the strange eyeball creature receding into the gloppy ground meat form it had assumed when I’d first noticed it. It retracted all the way up to the roof.
Fennel pulled himself to his feet and shouldered open the door. Air whooshed into the room. I rolled off the chaise and onto my hands and knees, drew a huge breath into my lungs, coughed it back out, and did it again until I could hold it without a struggle.
Cecil was already scampering across the tile floor after Fennel, and I sidestepped the coven spell and half-stumbled, half-ran after them both.
Ida was in her nightgown—a BTS T-shirt and black nylon pajama bottoms. She stood to one side of the garden room and held Meredith high above her head with the celebratory excitement of a team hoisting a winning quarterback on their shoulders.
“Woohoo! Good girl.”
I poked my fingers in and out of my ears, trying to unplug them.
I was shocked I still had my hearing after the Mictlan mandrake’s shriek, but I supposed that only went to show how dangerous the creature that had trapped me inside the garden room had been.
A being capable of muffling a mandrake scream had to be deadly.
“Where’s Fennel?” I asked.
“Finishing off the hunger beast. Best not to distract him.”
“Hunger beast?”
She shrugged, lowered Meredith, and cradled the plant against her chest. “Beast, demon, monster, critter, whatever.”
Fennel growled and hissed as he circled the thing, corralling the gloppy mound into a single spot. It was now the size of a dinner plate, and from what I could see, no less gross or scary.
“What’s he going to do?” Because he definitely looked like a cat with a plan.
“Watch.”
Fennel’s eyes turned stoplight green, bright and glowy—his magic was active. His jaw unhinged like a python’s, and he made a series of start-stop breathing noises, like the sound of a vacuum hose when you put your hand over it.
The weird blob sent sucker-like tendrils out behind it. They suctioned to the roof and gripped the glass.
“Nope, not going to work,” Ida said, “and the monster should know that. Then again, hunger beasts aren’t exactly at the top of the dean’s list.”
I nodded, even though I had no idea what she was talking about.
Instead of advancing on the creature, Fennel remained where he was. When he had the beast in his mouth, he brought his teeth together in a guillotine slice of a bite. The thing screamed, the sound gurgling and weak, and then the remaining bits of it slid off the roof in a wet, oozing mass.
Fennel shook all over then leapt off the roof and onto the grass beside me and began cleaning his paws like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Like he hadn’t just done something impossible.
I peered down at him. “Not your first hunger beast?”
“Meow.”
Ronan ran outside like a wolf with his tail on fire. He was partially shifted and fully naked. “Betty? Are you all right?”
Ida politely turned her head. I ran straight into his arms and let his warmth sink into me. “We’re all okay. It was just a hunger beast.”
“Just a what?”
Remarkably, the coven spell wasn’t affected by my near-suffocation. It whirled and glittered and spun itself into a dense field of magic centralized in the chalk circle, utterly unaffected by my near-death experience.
At six a.m., Ronan brought us mugs of coffee. Once Ida had been satisfied that I was in good hands, she’d gone home with Meredith. Ronan had stayed, dozed with me on the chaise and listened, not saying as much as I’d expected him to.
“Hunger beast. What a weird world,” he said.
“Also, my partner is a demon eater. Don’t forget that part.”
We both stared at Fennel, who was hunkered down in his bed under the planter.