Page 109 of Wicching Hour

Imposing my will over the natural world, I pulled on the ocean around me and flung my hands at the door. If it hadn’t worked, I would have looked damn stupid. As it was, a huge wave knocked down the doors and flooded the floors beyond.

“Well done,” Bracken said, patting my shoulder. “If I’m not mistaken, everywhere the ocean has touched is now yours.” He extended his hand, inviting me to go first.

Eyes wide, Robert looked like he was frozen in place. When I waved him forward, he blinked and swallowed.

“Okay now?” I asked.

Still mute, he nodded.

I stepped through the doorway and was hit by a horrible stench.

Following closely, Declan grimaced. “It’s mold, candle wax, blood, and shit.” His eyes lightened and his long, razor-sharp claws slid out through the too-small gloves. He surveyed the room and then pointed at a door to the right. “It’s coming from behind there.”

“I feel like we should check this floor, just to make sure nothing is sneaking behind us but?—”

Robert flew up in the air. For half a beat, we all stared up, trying to understand what had just happened, then I made out the outline of a monstrous spider clinging to the high ceiling. It appeared to have stung Robert with a paralytic because he stopped struggling. Declan leapt, claws out, as the spider began to cocoon his prey.

I lifted my hand to help, but Bracken pulled me away.

“It’s a diversion,” he said. “Declan will kill it. You and I need to find Cal.”

A spider leg hit the wet floor and sizzled in the ocean water. Bracken was right. It killed me to do it, but Cal had to be stopped and I had to trust Declan to hold his own.

Bracken reached for the doorknob and then stopped himself with a headshake. His hands moved in a spell. The doorknob turned and the door popped open. He looked down into the dark and then back at me. “Here we go.”

I took the lead again, heading down the stone steps. Declan was right: The stench was overwhelming down here. Even in this form, I felt bile rising. I heard skittering around us, but I didn’t want to know what it was.

At the base of the stairs, we saw three doors. Around the edges of one, torchlight flickered and I heard the low murmur of chanting. We didn’t have time to check and battle whatever was behind all these doors.

Closing my eyes, I drew from the ocean and asked for my phosphorescent friends to help. My head fell back as I asked the Goddess for assistance as well. As a wave crested within me, I let go and a huge wave splashed up the walls and went under the doors.

The dark door behind us now glowed phosphorescent. The flickering light and chanting had been a ploy. Bracken and I moved to the now glowing door. I flicked my fingers, but it didn’t open. Bracken tried his spell and again, nothing. He pulled the blade out of his pocket and ran it along the seam of the door where a latch would be.

The door swung in. Soft glowing light from the wet floor cast strange shadows in the dark room. Copying the queen’s move, I made a ball of light in my hand and tossed it up toward the ceiling. The ball burst, splashing light around the room. Gran was crumpled in the corner, seemingly thrown there and forgotten.

The concrete floor dipped in the middle, where I assumed there was some kind of drainage. I didn’t want to think about what needed to be hosed down in this room. Gran, at least, was on the far side, so she wasn’t lying in water.

What I could see of her arm was covered in bleeding cuts. Her clothes were dirty and rumpled. Her hair had fallen from its bun. I sensed movement, though. She was breathing. Stepping in, I braced for an attack. The room seemed empty but for Gran and a worktable with a grimoire, a ceremonial bowl filled with a foul liquid, and an athame. Calliope’s ceremonial dagger was covered in blood, no doubt Gran’s.

I only felt one person in the room, so while Bracken approached the book, I went to Gran, laying my hand on her shoulder. “Gran? Can you hear me?”

She rolled over and I was staring into Cal’s face. She lifted a hand and Bracken flew into the air, hitting the stone ceiling before dropping in a heap beside the worktable.

I wanted to run to him, but knew I couldn’t turn my back on her. “What have you done with Gran?”

She rose slowly, grinning. “You know the old bat never trusted you. Why do you care what I do to her?”

I circled to the side, trying to block Bracken, who I hoped would be okay. I let my guard down and braced for the cacophony of overlapping thoughts and emotions. My head pounded, but I sensed pain behind me. He wasn’t dead. “Maybe because, unlike you, I’m not a psychopath.”

She shrugged. “Sticks and stones. My friend says he wants to work with you.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him we didn’t need you, but he thinks with your fae magic, we’d be unstoppable.” She smiled slyly. “Wouldn’t you like to get even with all the horrible cousins who made your life miserable? Come on. You know you hate them as much as I do.”

She may have been trying to talk me into joining her on the dark side, but she was thinking about some kind of hidden chamber behind me. I also felt Robert’s fear and Declan’s rage as they battled whatever was up there.

Her right hand fisted—the motion she used for casting spells—but I was still trying to figure out what was in the hidden room. It was important to her, and she wanted whatever she’d secreted in it kept away from the rest of the world. The spell she sent at me took the wind out of me and made me stumble back a few steps, but I shook it off, much to her shock.

The spell smelled of blood and death. That asshole had just tried to kill me.

Flicking my fingers, I sent back a spell, freezing her lungs. Her eyes widened as she tried to draw in a breath.

---