Chapter Twenty-six
T he moon drew a pale sliver on the velvet night. I clutched Grimm’s Fairy Tales for comfort. Was I an idiot for summoning a witch I knew was out to get me? Yet, what other option did I have?
To protect myself, I had to confront Beata. To confront her, I had to call up every whisper of magic I possessed and keep my wits sharp. I yawned, then shook my head and yanked my eyes wide. I still hadn’t recovered from my night in jail.
Although I hadn’t asked him, Rodney had followed me. He padded silently at my side, and I was grateful for his company.
“Here we are, baby,” I told him. “I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?”
Rodney ignored me and settled on a fallen log, curling his tail around him.
“You don’t have to be here.” I knelt to kiss the top of his head. “It will be dangerous. You’d be safer at home.”
He responded by tucking his paws under him in classic cat loaf position. He was staying put.
I filled my lungs with night air and slowly released it. Far off, an owl hooted. Otherwise, it was unnaturally quiet here. No crickets, not the merest crackling in the underbrush. The air was still.
I lit a taper and tipped it to drip wax onto a rock in the middle of the fire pit I’d built when I burned Babe’s linens, a mere three nights ago.
Its center had been thoroughly raked and swept for evidence, but the police tape, if there had been any, was gone.
I steadied the taper in the melted wax, and Rodney leapt from the log to join me.
My heart, formerly thumping at a paradelevel volume, steadied.
I stood tall, Grimm’s Fairy Tales at my feet, feeding me energy. I faced east. “Wind, with the force of gales that send ships over oceans, lend me your protection.” A breeze rose, ruffling my hair before subsiding.
I turned toward the south. Was that a rustle I heard near the trail? I scanned the dark but saw nothing. “Fire, you foster life with the sun, stirring seeds into fields of grain, rousing an acorn into a mighty oak. Lend me your protection.” The candle’s flame stretched thin and tall, then shrank.
I turned again, this time toward the west. “Water, you are the great mother, giving birth and holding our emotion. Lend me your protection.” Wet drops, impossible but present nonetheless, touched my hands.
One more convocation. I faced north. “Earth. Your body nurtures the roots of mighty trees and grounds us all. Lend me your protection.” Below my feet, the ground trembled.
“Elements of the universe, protect me.” I dropped my hands.
With that, a dome of opalescent light rose around Rodney and me, infusing shimmer into the air surrounding us. Despite its translucence, I felt the dome’s protection as if it were cast of steel. Nothing could hurt me here. No bad magic could enter, of that I was certain.
Now for the spell from my grandmother’s grimoire. Closing my eyes, at first I strained to remember the words, and then they flowed without effort. Strangely, the words transmuted from English to another language as they left my lips. Scottish Gaelic? Whatever it was, I intuitively understood it.
I hesitated before the spell’s final words, but I had to say them. It was now or never. “Her name is Beata.”
I tensed. The forest’s silence shattered as crows, cawing and flapping their wings, alit in the trees around me. Their cries were loud enough that I flattened my palms to my ears. Rodney growled and crouched low. Seconds stretched to minutes, and the minutes weighed heavily.
I was safe beneath the dome of protection. I knew that. But it took everything I had to stay calm.
Then the cawing stopped. The crows seemed to melt away.
Just outside the dome, barely six feet from me, a woman appeared.
It was not Babe Hamilton—or Lise Bloom. I’d never seen her before.
Her long golden-red hair moved around her face as if a breeze stirred the otherwise still night.
Her skin was as pale as the face of a Titian angel.
She smiled, and my heart caught. I saw my grandmother in her expression.
“Josie,” she said.
I reached for her, but drew back my arm before it pierced the dome. Beata was a witch far more experienced than I, and her strength was glamour. She could too easily deceive me. I had to be on guard.
“I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time,” Beata said. She smiled, and warmth suffused me, tingling in my veins. “Thank you for summoning me.”
This wasn’t what I’d expected. I drew from the book at my feet and felt its energy course through me as if an umbilical cord attached us. As I focused on Beata, I caught a flash of Babe Hamilton—and someone else. Who?
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“You’ve heard about me,” Beata said.
“Yes. I’ve been warned.” Behind me, Rodney growled. “You used your magic for selfish reasons. You stole your own sister’s husband and drove him to suicide.”
She dipped her head, then raised it. “Ailith,” she said, naming my grandmother, her sister. After my nod, she continued. “I don’t know exactly what she told you, but I’m certain there’s one thing she left out.”
I nudged my ankle an inch to feel Rodney’s comforting weight. “Really?” I said, the doubt clear in my voice.
“My sister was a wonderful woman in many ways, but she was always jealous of me.” She laughed once.
“No. I would never seduce her husband.” Beata’s expression, calm and loving, confirmed it.
“I did have a child out of wedlock, though. I’m assuming she told you about that.
She didn’t tell you who that child was, did she? ”
What was she implying? I summoned the paltry amount of will I had left. “You set me up as a killer. I don’t know how you did it, but somehow you made it look as if I was wandering town when Ian disappeared. You made Ian’s body materialize in the atrium.”
Wide-eyed, Beata shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I would never do that. Why would I hurt you?” She drew her hands together, then opened them wide. “The murderer, the real one, must be framing you.” She nodded slowly. “That’s it. Someone is setting you up. Tell me more.”
For a moment, I was confused. Of course it was Beata who’d framed me. Making me appear to be where I wasn’t. Making notes vanish. Making bodies appear. No one but a witch could have pulled off this kind of deception.
“My grandmother warned me you’d find me, that you need me to break the spell holding back your full magic. Yet you want me in jail. Why is that?”
Beata glowed as if she were the good witch Glinda from The Wizard of Oz .
A ring sparkled from her hand. Her dress—a gauzy linen shift—might have come from any era over the past few centuries.
“Josie,” she said, and the word was a caress.
“Josie, you’re family. You are closer to me than you could know.
What you feel, I feel. Why do you think I’ve been watching you? To protect you. Let me help you.”
She was so seductive. Conflict paralyzed me.
“It can be lonely being a witch. Perhaps you know that,” Beata said.
Of course I understood that feeling of loneliness. I had confessed to Sam that I was a witch. He couldn’t handle it. My heart seized.
“You’re family,” Beata repeated. “Let me be here for you.”
She reached forward as if to hug me, and I dropped my arms to my side. She couldn’t breach the dome as long as I didn’t pierce it first.
“Come now,” she said in a soothing voice. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to help you.”
“Help me?” Now my words came freely. “You’ve done the opposite for months. You stymied my power and cut off my magic by charming the linens you sold me. You sent crows to monitor me.”
Beata’s brows drew together. “I’ve what? No, you misunderstand. The crows were there to make sure you were okay. You’re my family. More than that, you’re….”
A rustling beyond the trees drew both of our attention. A coyote? A bobcat, maybe? Then the woods were silent again. I couldn’t get past the crazy feeling we were being watched. Nerves.
“What about the charmed quilt? Why did you do that?” I demanded.
She looked genuinely puzzled. “You thought I would hurt you? I intended to protect you. That’s why I wove the glyph into it.” Her expression relaxed. “My magic is still quite weak, and I might have miscalculated. I wanted you to feel cared for, not diminished.”
When I didn’t respond, she continued. “Think of the good things in your life these past months. You were almost killed not long ago.”
She was right. I’d helped bring in a murderer, safely.
“Your time with Sam, the good times,” she said.
“Maybe I had something to do with protecting you. Did you think of that?” She stepped forward and raised a palm, but the protection dome held her back.
She lowered her hand. “It’s true that your grandmother— my sister—bound my magic.
I was a powerful witch, like you. Now my magic is ordinary.
There’s only so much I can do to help you. ”
Aunt Beata was so convincing. She was loving, calm, and her energy melted into my wounded heart like honey in tea. Yet I knew the emotion I felt was my own need to be consoled, not her magic. Her magic couldn’t trespass the dome.
Then again, wasn’t that what glamour was—the ability to use your own needs and desires against you?
“I know you hurt,” Beata said softly. “Sam let you down. Rejection like that—rejection of who you truly are—cuts deeply. I’ve seen how you’ve suffered. He ignored your calls and texts. He dismissed you like your time together meant nothing to him.” She stepped closer. “You deserve better.”
I was so tired. Her words tantalized me. This must be what an addict feels when she’s been deprived of her drug of choice, then finds it dangled before her.
Again, something rustled in the brush, and my aunt’s features seemed to harden—just for a second. I might have imagined it. Or had I?
“You’re right. I need your help,” I said. Tears burned at my eyes. “I don’t know what’s happening. I was so happy. Now my world is falling apart.” I stooped to pick up Grimm’s Fairy Tales and hugged it to my chest, feeling the soothing flow of magical energy.
“I understand.”
I sank to sit on a rock. “I’m so in love with Sam. I know people can fall in and out of love, and that I could find someone else, but there’s no one like Sam. No one.”
It was true. I was hopelessly stuck on the way Sam looked at me when I spoke, as if the house could be on fire but my words were more important.
I loved cooking dinner with him, Sam at the stove, me chopping herbs.
I cherished our evenings on the back porch with Nicky playing and Sam telling me about his day as the sun set over the river.
I even adored the crazy way Sam smiled when he was upset and frowned with happiness.
But he couldn’t accept a fundamental part of who I was. A witch. I’d opened myself to him completely, and he’d turned his back without explanation. My heart ached more deeply than I ever thought possible. None of this would matter a whit, however, if I spent the rest of my life in prison.
Even if I were somehow cleared of the murder charge, my professional life was a shambles. The library’s trustees openly fought about the children’s books, and neither side seemed to value my opinion.
“I can help,” Beata repeated. Her voice was warm, hypnotic, and flowed through my blood like whiskey.
“You didn’t deserve to be arrested. You didn’t kill anyone,” she said.
By the thin light of my candle, Beata’s resemblance to my grandmother grew.
“You couldn’t. Justice is in your blood. I understand.”
I wanted to step forward and fall into her arms. The past week had been the most difficult of my life, and the days to come didn’t look to be any easier. Oh, how I craved comfort.
She let out a sigh. “Josie, how I wish you’d let me help you. If I had my full magic, I could. I could make it all go away.” She spoke more rapidly. “I could find who murdered Tyrone Beaudrie and convince him to turn himself in.”
“You’re sure it’s Tyrone?”
“Yes, Josie. It’s him. I know.”
“Who killed him?” I asked.
“I have an idea. Beaudrie has no doubt made a few enemies over the years. With my magic restored, I could extract a confession.”
“With glamour,” I said.
“Yes. It’s my gift.” Her eyes searched the dark sky. “I could make Sam see the truth about you, too, that you’re a good, loving woman with the genetic anomaly of magic. He’d understand.” She laughed, and the warmth lightened my heart. “I bet I could even get Wanda to love cats.”
For a moment, I allowed myself to bask in the possibility. I’d be back in Sam’s arms, inhaling his clean, woody scent and feeling the vibration of his voice in his chest. People in town would know I wasn’t a criminal.
“If only my magic were released,” Beata whispered, her gaze on mine.
That was it. My grandmother had been right. She wanted me to break my grandmother’s containment spell.
I was the only person who could sever those bonds for her. At the same time, she was the only person who could set me free, who could bring my old life back to me.
We stared at each other in the dark. Beata was serene, a faint smile on her face and a question in her eyes.
I stepped forward, through the protective dome, into her arms.