Awakening (Birth of Magic #1) Read online

  “He’s invented something. He calls it a ‘magic wand.’ It allows mortals to use magic like we do.” I shrugged as I thought of what he’d said on the lifeboat. “At least that’s his theory. He never got the chance to try it out. They want him to finish it in Germany for the Nazis.”

  “This cannot be allowed. For mortals, especially mortals such as these to have access to magic would be disastrous.”

  “I know.”

  Naoko grunted a little, but she managed a sitting position so that she could put a hand on my shoulder and look me in the eye. “You may have to sacrifice Alexis in order to keep them from obtaining this secret.”

  “I can’t do that. She’s my sister.”

  “She is my sister as well—”

  “The hell she is! I’m not talking about sisters in the coven, I’m talking about real sisters. I’m not going to let them kill her for some phony baloney ‘magic wand.’”

  “As much as we both care for Alexis, her life may be necessary to prevent a catastrophe that would kill millions.”

  “I don’t know those millions. I do know Alexis. She’s done nothing wrong. Nothing to deserve this. I—” A sob choked off my voice. I was the one who deserved to be sacrificed for the good of the cause. Me, who had betrayed not only Alexis but my own daughter as well.

  “Your guilt blinds you to the truth. Alexis’s only importance is her importance to you. That is what has kept her alive all these years.”

  I stared at Naoko, another cold shiver running through me. It was starting to make sense now. By all rights Gretel should have kicked Alexis out of the coven for marrying Marco, taken her powers to make her a mortal. But she hadn’t. Alexis had theorized Gretel thought the punishment of losing Marco and her offspring would be enough, but maybe there was something more sinister behind it. If Gretel had done that, I would have gone against her and then Gretel wouldn’t have me to kill monsters for her anymore. She wouldn’t have me to call upon when she needed someone to infiltrate a Nazi fortress or play bodyguard to a young mortal in over his head. “Goddamn her,” I whispered.

  I thought Gretel might appear to defend herself, but she didn’t. Wherever she was, she probably figured Naoko could do a good enough job of it for her. “She does what is best for the coven and the world at large.”

  “I don’t care. Alexis is not a pawn. Not for Gretel or the Nazis. You said it yourself, she’s a wise woman. She’s a special woman. She’s worth a dozen of you or Gretel.”

  “I am sorry, Stephanie. I do not mean to belittle your sister. I care deeply about her as well. As does Gretel. You are very special to us. We have watched you since you were children, grow into the women you are. You are like our children.”

  “Mama would never let us sacrifice Alexis either.”

  “Your mother would do what is best for the coven, even if that meant sacrificing one of her children.”

  “You can think that if you want. You probably know her better than I do.”

  “Yes, I do. I know you as well.”

  “Then you know I’m not going to listen to you.”

  Naoko smiled slightly again. “Yes, I do know that. You still let your emotions guide you, despite my attempts to teach you otherwise.”

  I nodded to her. “I’m going to get Alexis back. If you and Gretel have a problem with that, you can try and stop me.”

  “I do not hope that is necessary.”

  “Neither do I. I’d hate to have to kill the both of you.”

  “I would not wager on that outcome.” That was as close as Naoko would get to boasting. I took her hand to help her up to her feet. “I will go and tell Gretel what we have discussed.”

  “She probably knows already. Or she’ll pretend to know.”

  “You must not let your anger at Gretel consume you. Now is when we need to rely on our friends.”

  “How do you know Gretel isn’t behind all of this? She’s the one who has those charms of us.”

  “Gretel has no reason to destroy the coven. It’s her creation.”

  “Maybe she thinks it’s getting out of her control.”

  “That is paranoia, nothing more.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I didn’t expect Naoko to give me a hug, but she did. “Good luck to you, my sister. When next we see each other, I hope it is under better circumstances.”

  She took a wobbly step back then and vanished. I just hoped that in her condition she made it wherever she was going.

  ***

  Ethan took longer to wake up, though I didn’t think he was as badly injured as Naoko. It might have been because he was a mortal that the potion took longer. At least it gave me some time to myself, not that I really wanted it at this point. Most of that time I spent counting down the minutes until I was supposed to go to Florence. What would I do then?

  I still didn’t know when Ethan finally woke up. He let out a yawn as if he’d just been taking a long nap and then sat up. He blinked a few times as he looked around the stall, his eyes finally settling on me. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Nepal. I have a friend who lives here.”

  “Nepal? How did we get here?” He rubbed his head. “Last thing I remember is being in that plane. Celia was going to kill you. We rolled around on the floor…she stabbed me. She stabbed me and—” His eyes widened as the memory came to him. “She stabbed me and then you tackled me and there was a flash of light. Now we’re in Nepal. How long have I been asleep?”

  “About sixteen hours.”

  I could see him doing the mental calculations, trying to determine if we could have gotten to Nepal in sixteen hours. The real explanation for how we’d gotten here continued to elude him. “Did you take over the plane? What about Celia? Where is she?”

  I put my hand on Ethan’s shoulder. The time had finally come to tell him what was going on; we didn’t have time to get back to Florence otherwise. “Ethan, you remember that story you told me in the lifeboat? About that night when you were a little boy?”

  “Huh? Oh, that. Sounds dumb, I know.”

  “It doesn’t.” I looked him in the eye. “I know it happened Ethan. I was there.”

  “You? It was you? But how?”

  “It’s like you said, Ethan, it was a witch who came through that window. I was that witch. My sister thought you were in trouble. She asked me to go there and kill the bogeyman in the closet. That’s what I do, I kill bogeymen, demons, and the like. I was stupid; I forgot to check under the bed for you. So when you came out, I used a spell to wipe your memory.” I turned my eyes down to the floor. “I didn’t do it good enough.”

  “That can’t be. That witch, she was…she was old. She wasn’t like you at all.”

  “I’m four hundred forty years old,” I said and he stared at me, running through another set of calculations. By all rights a woman my age should be dust by now. “I can use magic to make myself look younger or older. My sister gave me a potion to look younger so I could go to Cuthbert and find out what you were doing.”

  Ethan let out a nervous chuckle, the laugh of someone who wants to not believe what’s happening, but isn’t sure about it. “This is a joke, right?”

  “No, it’s not. I can prove it to you if you want.” I took a few steps back and then levitated myself into the air, until my head scraped against the rafters.

  Ethan folded his arms over his chest, clearly not impressed. “Any magician can do that.”

  I used a Glow in the Dark spell then to make my body glow with dim blue light. “You know any magicians who can do that?”

  “Maybe.”

  With a sigh I vanished myself so that I was standing right next to him. “Well?”

  He stared at me, blinking a few times. “That flash of light…just like on the plane. Is that how we got to Nepal?”

  “That’s right, Ethan. I grabbed you and vanished you here.”

  “What about Celia? Did you do anything to her?”

  “No. Far as I know her and the plane went
back to Germany. Or they might have gone to Casablanca to make repairs first.”

  “Germany? Celia’s not a Nazi.”

  “I don’t know if she is one or she’s just working with them.” I sighed again. “You saw those guys on the plane with her. Did they look like Boy Scouts to you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “They’re Nazis and they were doing her bidding. She wants to turn you over to Hitler, you and that magic wand of yours.”

  He still wanted to disbelieve it; he loved Celia that much. His mind was rational enough, though, that he finally accepted it. I caught him just as he began sobbing. “What happened to her?” he said through his tears.

  “I don’t know. I wish I did.” I waited a minute or two for him to work it out. Then I pushed him back and looked into his red eyes. “Ethan, they’ve taken my sister. They’re going to kill her unless I bring you to Florence in about a day and a half.”

  “Florence? As in Italy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. For now we need to get to Italy. Fast.” I took hold of his hand and squeezed it. “Just hold on tight and close your eyes.”

  He did as I asked and then we were gone.

  Chapter 19

  We didn’t go straight to Florence. The Nazis would be waiting for us there, I was sure. If they saw us wandering the streets, they’d probably try to grab Ethan before the scheduled meeting. That way they could have him without giving Alexis up; the old having their cake and eating it too.

  Instead I took us to Venice.

  From my trips there, I knew a quiet alley where we scared only a few rats when we vanished in. I waited as Ethan blinked his eyes and then looked around. “Where are we?”

  “Venice.”

  “Venice? Italy?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  I shrugged at this. “I guess it is to a mortal.”

  “Mortal?”

  “That’s our name for people like you.”

  “Oh. And does that mean you’re immortal?”

  “Not really,” I said, thinking of Caroline. “We’re just less mortal than you.”

  Before he could ask anything else, I seized his hand and then led him out of the alley. From there it became more obvious where we were from the canals running between the ancient buildings. I gave Ethan another moment to gape at these.

  “Now do you believe me?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he gasped. “It’s incredible.”

  “It’s a beautiful city.” I couldn’t help letting out a sigh. “You should have seen it a hundred twenty years ago.”

  The city hadn’t changed too much since then, but one notable difference were the black-clad soldiers on the corners. They weren’t Nazis, but they weren’t far removed either. I asked myself why I had brought us here, practically into the lion’s mouth.

  There was one good reason. Whoever this Chairwoman was, she knew a lot about me, possibly enough to know what had happened the last time I visited Venice in the company of a man. If so, she would probably think the memories would be too painful for me to revisit. In which case I might be able to fool her long enough for the meet in Florence.

  “What are we going to do now?” Ethan asked.

  I shrugged again. “See the sights.”

  “That’s it? Should we come up with a rescue plan for your sister?”

  “That wouldn’t do much good. We don’t know what they’re going to bring to the party and there’s no one we can call on for help.” No one we could trust, I thought but didn’t say, not wanting to scare him any further. Naoko would be tracking Gretel down, but if Gretel was in on it, then that wouldn’t do us any good.

  “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “They aren’t going to kill Alexis. Not yet. They need her.”

  “What about Celia? We have to find a way to help her.”

  “She’ll find us when she’s ready.” I took his arm again. “Come on, I’ll give you a personal tour.”

  ***

  We started our grand tour of the city at St. Mark’s Basilica. Though Ethan wasn’t all that religious, his mouth still went slack as he stared at the building. Even St. Michael’s in Rampart City didn’t have the majesty of this place.

  I pointed to the bronze horses in front of the basilica. “Those spent a little time in Paris thanks to Napoleon,” I said. They had been returned to Venice just months before Marco and I visited the cathedral.

  “They’re beautiful,” Ethan said.

  “Yes, they are.” As I stared at the horses I thought not of Marco but of Henry, who had tended my family’s horses in those early days. He would have liked these, though he probably would also lament that the bronze of just one horse could have fed his family for an entire year.

  Ethan touched my arm. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I never had much use for churches. As a witch the church would have burned me at the stake as a heretic. Even if I weren’t a witch, the pope had instigated the war that killed my Henry, taking him from me. That was something I couldn’t forgive, not even after four hundred years.

  Yet even I couldn’t deny the beauty of the mosaics inside the cathedral. Adding to the beauty of the experience was the wonder in Ethan’s eyes as he looked around. It was the same expression I’d probably worn when Marco brought me here. There we had been, a couple of adulterers in God’s house and yet no lightning had struck us down, no plague of locusts swept us away. We had remained unharmed—or so we’d thought at the time.

  “Do you want to sit down?” Ethan asked, interrupting my thoughts again.

  “Skip it,” I snapped. The moment was ruined now, Ethan paying more attention to me than the cathedral. When he took my arm I shook it away, not wanting to be reminded of Marco’s arm around mine.

  I did finally consent to sit down on a pew with Ethan next to me. We watched the other tourists gaping at the building, speaking a variety of languages: Italian, English, French, and even German. The latter worried me the most as I wondered how many spies the Nazis had around the city. If anyone recognized us, we would have to make a quick getaway, though I had no idea where we could find sanctuary at this point.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” Ethan whispered. “We could go to Antarctica or the North Pole—”

  “It doesn’t work that way. We can only go somewhere I’ve been before. Besides, we don’t have any winter clothes with us.”

  “Good point.”

  While we sat there, my eyes turned to the confessionals. I had a lot of sins to confess, several lifetimes worth. Maybe I should get some of them off my chest before we went to Florence. Not that it would make any difference. Saying some prayers and rubbing some beads wouldn’t change what I had done to Alexis, how I had betrayed her for years. Nor would it absolve me of any guilt for not protecting her. In other families the older sibling was supposed to protect the younger ones; Alexis wasn’t capable of protecting herself, not from something like this.

  I didn’t realize I was crying until an old woman stopped to offer a handkerchief to me. “Grazi,” I said. I dabbed at my eyes and tried to get a hold of myself. Bawling like a lovesick girl wasn’t going to help any more than confessing my sins.

  I returned the handkerchief to the old woman, who nodded to me before shuffling off. Ethan didn’t say it, but I knew what he was thinking. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m just a little tired.”

  ***

  Ethan had gotten sick on the Gardenia, but the gondola didn’t seem to faze him at all. He spent most of the ride leaning forward to get a better look at the buildings, to the point that I worried we might have to fish him out of the canal. “You don’t want to fall in there,” I hissed at him in English, “a lot of shit has flowed into these canals.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Ethan said. He did move back slightly in his seat, though
.

  I pointed out the most well-known buildings, and a few that weren’t so well-known. “Up there was where I fought a class one demon. Chased him all the way through the building to the roof. Then put a bolt through his neck.”

  Ethan stared at me in disbelief for a moment. “Do you kill a lot of demons?”

  “I’ve killed more than my fair share.”

  “Don’t you get scared?”

  “Of course. You think I’m an idiot?”

  “You just don’t seem like the type to be frightened by anything.”

  “I’m scared of a lot of things. Like what they’ll do to my sister.”

  “You really love her, don’t you?”

  “Is that so surprising?”

  “No. I think it’s nice.” Ethan turned to stare at the city. “I never had any sister or brothers. I always wished I did.”

  “Siblings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Sometimes they can be downright annoying.” I sighed, thinking of Alexis asking me to become twelve again just to help her land Marco. But then I thought of all the dresses Alexis had made for me and how she waited up for me to come back from a mission. “But they can be wonderful too.”

  I had started to cry again. This time there was no old woman to offer a handkerchief, so I used my sleeve as I had when I was a little girl. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “Venice gets me a little sentimental.”

  “I can see why.”

  I reached over to pat his hand. “Everything’s going to work out. Somehow we’ll find a way to get my sister back and keep you away from the Nazis.”

  “What about Celia?”

  “I don’t know.” It was my turn to look away at the grand old city. “There’s no spell or potion that can break their hold over her. I wish there were.”

  “I wish I knew why she was working for them. She never seemed like that kind of person to me.”

  “People can surprise you sometimes.”

  “No kidding,” he said with a sigh.

  We glided along the canal in silence for a couple of minutes until I said, “If we can get her away from them, maybe we can talk some sense into her. That might be all she needs.” I doubted this; no girl could go undercover for as long as Celia had if she didn’t believe in what she was doing. Still, I knew Ethan needed to hear this at the moment.