Page 81 of The Women of Wild Hill
As if a switch had been flipped, the water around Jacobs turned electric blue.
“Oh my god!” Jacobs screeched, lifting an arm out of the water. A thick fringe of tentacles dangled beneath it. “Get them off me!”
“Here, let me help.” With a hand on the top of his head, Brigid dunked him. The water lit up as his head briefly sank beneath the waves. When Jacobs resurfaced, his face had disappeared behind dripping tentacles that glowed like a party wig. A particularly large man-of-war had clamped onto his mouth, muffling his screams.
He splashed around blindly, furiously trying to rip it off. Then his hands fell away as his body spasmed. Within seconds he’d gone limp. The water turned dark and the senator vanished.
Feeling refreshed, Brigid waded back to shore, wiggled into her dress, and returned to the party.
HOURS LATER, SHE WAS ATLiam’s side, nursing a Dark ’n’ Stormy, when they heard shouts from the beach. A naked body had been washed ashore by the waves. No one could identify the corpse, which appeared strangely mummified. Translucent tentacles wrapped around its head, torso, and limbs. What little could be seen of the skin beneath was raw and blistered.
When investigators arrived, they asked to see the security camera footage. Calum Geddes had been paranoid about assassination, and every inch of the property was covered. Brigid, still there to offer her support, felt a fear she’d seldom known.
“I turned off the system before the party,” Liam informed the police. “My guests tend to be camera shy, and most come with their own security. We had a small army of private guards here tonight.As far as I knew, this was the safest place in New York. I’m afraid I never anticipated an assault from the sea.”
“Natural causes are taking down a lot of big shots lately,” the head detective said. “There was that billionaire in Manhattan got attacked by birds. The spider bites out in the Hamptons. And some guy in Texas was just eaten by feral hogs.”
“Mother Nature’s gone serial killer,” his colleague quipped.
It sounded to Brigid like nature had finally gotten around to addressing a parasite problem. But for once, she held her tongue.
The investigation ended shortly after. Someone at the morgue leaked a picture, and it quickly made its way around the internet, where it was often posted side by side with images of the burned Arkansas children. It wasn’t lost on anyone how similar the injuries appeared.
The Meat Man
On the rare occasions when Flora spoke about her own mother, she never failed to mention how utterly ordinary Lilith had been. She didn’t mean the description as an insult, merely proof of the mysterious ways in which DNA worked. Some Duncan back in the mists of time must have been normal, too, and passed her traits (or lack thereof) down the line to Lilith.
Flora had loved her mother dearly, even if she hadn’t known her all that well. Both of her parents had been workaholics throughout her childhood. She’d spent more time with Ivy than she had with either of them. Flora was twenty-eight and living in Los Angeles when her parents died in a twin-engine plane crash that was ruled accidental at the time. Perhaps they’d intended to share their secret with her someday. In any case, Flora had been surprised to find clear instructions in her parents’ will. While Levi’s remains were to be donated to science, Lilith was to be buried alongside the witches on Wild Hill. At the time, it seemed wildly out of character.
If only she’d known, Phoebe thought. With just a few cursory internet searches, she’d identified at least thirteen of the men who’d likely been poisoned by the very same substance that would one day take Flora’s life. Lilith’s victims were Nazi scientists whose crimes were ignored by the American government in the hopes they’d share their knowledge with the West instead of the Soviets. Who knew what future horrors their deaths had prevented.
Phoebe’s grandparents were heroes, and Lilith was most certainly a witch. Phoebe knew her mother would have been proud of their courage. It was a shame no one had told her. And as she labored inthe mansion’s old kitchen, Phoebe’s family gave her food for thought. Light and dark, life and death, healing and killing. As far back as she could remember, Ivy had taught them these weren’t opposite concepts. They were complementary. Symbiotic. They worked together in complex ways.
In those days, neither she nor her sister had ever really believed it. Phoebe was a healer, a light in the darkness, a giver of life. Brigid, the dark-dwelling executioner, was her polar opposite. But thinking about Lilith’s life made Phoebe question that logic. Her grandmother had been both executioner and giver of life. And she sure as hell wasn’t boring.
Whenever the girls had asked what Lilith’s power was, either Flora or Ivy would answer, “Chemistry.” That hadn’t struck Phoebe as terribly interesting—certainly not compared to other gifts in the Duncan line. Only now was she developing an appreciation for it. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how long she toiled over the hot cauldron in the mansion’s basement, she couldn’t replicate her grandmother’s poison. She was keenly aware the clock was ticking. Brigid couldn’t be controlled much longer. Unless they could put their plan in action soon, her sister would go rogue. There was no doubt in her mind. It was only a matter of time.
It terrified Phoebe that Brigid had acted so irresponsibly at the Geddes house. It was sheer dumb luck she hadn’t been caught on camera. And the similarities between her sister’s relationship with Liam Geddes and their mother’s affair with his father weren’t lost on Phoebe, either. She did not want to see her sister sacrificed to the mission the way Flora had been.
But she just couldn’t get the mix right. When the latest batch of ingredients literally went up in smoke, Phoebe would have hurled the cauldron across the room if it hadn’t been too heavy to lift. Instead, she threw a bucket of water on the kitchen fire and stomped upstairs for a much-needed break.
She’d long since visited its every room, but she never tired of wandering around the old mansion. Angus Campbell’s father had filled the house with books and art that he never had a chance to enjoy—if he’d ever had any intention of doing so. There was always something new to discover. On one excursion, she’d found a framed photo of Wild Hill shortly after the Campbells took possession of the land. The only sign that any humans had ever breached the virgin wilderness was a small, rose-covered hut on the site where the mansion would one day stand.
For the longest time, she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the picture. Even in static black-and-white, the hill called to her. And Phoebe was forced to marvel at her own hubris. She’d been mad to imagine she could keep her daughter away from this place. The Old One had gotten her way, as always. All Phoebe could do was beg her forgiveness and pray that she’d keep Sibyl safe.
Nothing had happened by accident. They were all part of a larger scheme. What role they would play in it remained a mystery. But she saw evidence of it everywhere she went in the mansion. Even the paintings that lined the grand staircase told a story. The six portraits had intrigued Phoebe the first time she saw them. They were all of women who shared a marked resemblance that suggested they might be family. They weren’t Campbells, that much was certain, but they gazed down at her from the wall with satisfied expressions, as though they were right where they wanted to be—and were pleased that Phoebe had finally arrived.
Only the last of the portraits bore a plate. It read,Janet Douglas. The name didn’t seem terribly promising before Phoebe searched for it. The world was full of Janet Douglases. But there was only one whose face matched the one in the painting—a woman also known as Lady Glamis, accused of conspiring to poison King James and burned at the stake as a witch.
The Campbell patriarch, it seemed, had decorated his walls withportraits that pleased his eye. It had never occurred to him that the subjects’ power might be more than skin deep—or that they would reign over the mansion he built long after his death.
PHOEBE WAS STILL LOITERING ONthe landing when she heard a tapping from one of the rooms on the second floor. She followed the sound to Bessie’s favorite chamber, on the far west side of the building. There, she found a raven peering in at her through the window and tapping its beak against the glass. Most ravens look alike, even to witches, but this one was far bigger than most of its fellows. She could have sworn it was the same creature that had come to see her in Texas.
When Phoebe opened the window to let it inside, the creature took off in the opposite direction. Phoebe followed it as it flew across the grounds, over the heads of Brigid and Sibyl, who were talking in the drive. Sibyl wore gardening apparel, but Brigid was dressed in a black sleeveless dress, five-inch stilettos, and a hat with a veil. Once again, she’d raided Sadie’s old wardrobe.
“Where are you going?” Phoebe called down to her sister.
“Josh Jacobs’s funeral service,” Brigid shouted up.
