Awakening (Birth of Magic #1) Read online

  When at home I let Alexis do the cooking—she had plenty of practice from her fifty years of marriage to Marco—but I had learned well enough first from Mama and later from my adventurous youth. It didn’t take long for me to slip into the simple rhythm of kitchen life again. I began peeling potatoes to fry up for the slumbering Nazi scientists, finding the task strangely soothing.

  That was until I got careless and just about cut my finger off. This came when I was thinking about another time I had peeled potatoes in Germany. Then I had been twelve years old, just a plump little girl with her head full of dreams about finding some nice man and settling down with him. I had so badly wanted to be Frau Braun’s adopted daughter, to stay with her forever. Then not long after I turned thirteen the damned magic came back and that was that. I had to leave her before she could find out what I was, before she had me roasting on a stake like Caroline back in Salem.

  “Are you all right?” one of the girls asked me.

  From my days with Frau Braun I knew German well enough that I could answer without using a Speak in Tongues spell, “I am fine. Go back to work.”

  I washed the cut on my finger and then wrapped it with a towel. Back in my jacket I had one of Alexis’s Restoration potions, but even if I had my jacket here I wouldn’t waste it on so minor a wound. I saved that for serious injuries, though usually it was someone I’d been fighting who wound up drinking the potion.

  The cut had stopped bleeding when it came time to set the table. Someone had set up portable tables in the enormous Hall of Singers to accommodate the Nazi scientists. I followed the other women into the room, trying not to gape at the elaborate decorations. By the time we finished, the first of the scientists was sitting down.

  There were forty of them in all, mostly men, but a handful of women as well. I figured them for secretaries, which also explained why they kept to a table by themselves, not important enough to sit with the boys. Other than a few muttered courtesies, no one paid any attention to us servants. That hadn’t changed much either since I’d last been working in a kitchen.

  The rest of the day I went about doing dishes, helping with lunch, cleaning the linens, and then helping with dinner. Lunch was served precisely at noon and dinner precisely at five. In a short time it seemed everyone had a routine down like clockwork. I managed to keep up with it well enough.

  After finishing up the dishes and laundry from dinner, we boarded the bus back to the lodge. Everything followed the same procedure as last night, except this time I was sitting at the table in the lodge instead of pretending to be one of the staff. I tried not to rush through my bowl of stew; appearing anxious now would surely tip off the SS gorillas that I was up to something.

  Once locked in the bedroom, I found my jacket where I’d left it. No one had taken the crossbow or Colt; probably the staff would have been too petrified of Nazi retribution to try stealing anything. Then I vanished myself back to Edinburgh. The real Greta Bitterhauf was still asleep, a smile affixed to her face. She’d probably hate me for eventually waking her up from her pleasant stupor, back to her grim reality. I made a note to tell Alexis her potion might work a little too well.

  I didn’t go back just to check up on her. I went over to the closet to retrieve a fresh set of clothes. The dark green tunic and leggings were dusty and out of fashion, but they would be a lot more comfortable than one of Greta’s dresses. Not to mention dark green blended in with the darkness better than white.

  Since I had been in the kitchen of the castle earlier, I could vanish myself back there. As expected, the fires had gone out and everything was quiet. The guards wouldn’t bother watching this too closely with everyone gone. They’d made sure to take a proper head count earlier, so in their minds the only way for someone to get in would be from the road.

  It took me almost an hour of wandering around the dark, silent hallways of the castle before I found the Nazi scientists. Along the way I slipped past a couple of guards, none of whom seemed overly intent on their jobs. Like tourists they gawked at the vaulted ceilings and elaborate paintings. That saved me the trouble of having to incapacitate them as I worked my way around the castle’s main keep.

  I found the scientists in the throne room. The enormous machines they had installed in the room clashed with the quaint religious paintings and marble columns. I didn’t have any idea what those machines did, but I doubted it would be anything good. I made my way slowly along the second floor of the throne room, ducking behind the pillars so no one would see me.

  Soon enough I realized a mistake I had made earlier: the women with the scientists were not secretaries. From the way the scientists came to attention when the women marched into the room at fifteen minutes to midnight, it was obvious they were the ones in charge. They had put on black robes over their normal clothes to give them a more ominous appearance.

  Their leader was a blond who reminded me of Alexis when she had been young. The slight girl carried a book so big that I expected her to collapse to the floor at any moment. She and the others stopped to face the dais, which at the moment was empty. They continued to stare as if expecting something to happen while the scientists buzzed around their machines, flipping switches and turning knobs.

  At five minutes to midnight the women clustered around the one with the book. They brought their hoods up to cover their faces. I was too far away to hear them from the second floor. Since there was no way I could get down there without being seen, I used a Hearing Aid spell to help me listen in on their conversation.

  What I heard couldn’t be right. They weren’t speaking in German anymore; they were speaking the language of magic. Only members of the coven were supposed to know that language. With the hoods on I couldn’t see the women’s faces, but from the tilt of their necks I knew they were reading it out of the book. That was the second odd thing; the coven didn’t have books of spells. The only written documents were scrolls in the archives and Clare the archivist made sure none of those left her sight. So just what the hell was going on here?

  I didn’t need the Hearing Aid spell a minute later; the women began chanting loud enough for me to hear them without any help. Their chanting became louder, until it finally reached a fevered pitch as a clock struck midnight. As one, the women turned to the empty dais and shouted in English, “Now is the time! Come and make your home here! Come and destroy these puny mortals!”

  I followed the women’s gaze to the dais. At first I didn’t see anything, but then I saw it—a line of sparkling white light suspended in midair. The sparkling line grew wider, becoming a curtain of light. Now I knew what they were up to: they were trying to summon demons.

  Another of Caroline’s theories was that demons, bogeymen, and the like came from another realm. Religious people would call it Hell or some variation thereof, but Caroline theorized it was another plane of existence. Sometimes by accident a rift would open to connect their plane to ours, allowing the dark spirit to come through. But obviously these women had worked out a way to create such a hole. Or at least they were trying like hell to make one.

  They might succeed if I let them get any further with this. I figured I’d found out what Gretel wanted to know. These women had a firm grasp of magic, enough that they could create that curtain of light. They still didn’t have enough control in order to make the rift open and I didn’t plan to let them learn that control.

  I vanished myself down to the first floor, right into the cluster of women. They were better than I’d thought, reacting almost instantly to my presence. I landed a punch to one’s jaw, but by then the other three struck defensive positions in front of the girl with the book.

  “You’re a witch,” one growled from inside her hood.

  “That’s right. So make this easy on yourselves and surrender now, unless you want to end up as toads.”

  “Your magic can’t hurt us,” one of them said.

  It turned out she was right. I tried a Static Charge spell that should have sent them flying across th
e room, but nothing happened. “Ah, shit,” I said. I forced a smile to my face. “Guess we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way then.”

  Whoever had trained these girls had done a damned good job of it. I had learned martial arts from Naoko Sato, one of the oldest witches in the coven, who had learned her technique from the masters. Naoko had said I was her best student, yet these girls were almost as good. When I tried to sweep one’s legs from under her, she was already rolling away. I had to execute a snap roll myself to keep from getting kicked in the face by one of the others.

  They drove me back onto the dais, where the shimmering curtain had fizzled out. I saw the one with the book scurrying away, but there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, not with these girls keeping me too busy to even think about vanishing myself across the room to stop her. I blocked and countered their kicks and punches until I felt myself getting tired. It had been a long time since I’d been in the dojo with Naoko; if I survived I’d have to pay her a visit.

  Despite how much younger they were than me, they tired of our fight first. They were just little slips, but enough to give me openings. One didn’t quite block my kick to her right knee, allowing me to get enough of her to send her sprawling. Another’s punch was just slow enough that I could dodge it and then chop her in the throat. As for the third one, I spun around while reaching into my jacket for the Colt.

  Compared to modern weapons it didn’t look so impressive. The Colt was one of the first ever made; I won it off Samuel Colt himself in a little Texas town nearly a century ago. Despite the gun’s age, it still worked like new. While the last of the three girls was striking a defensive pose, I shot her in the left thigh.

  The bad thing about the Colt was that it was loud. I knew before long I’d have guards filling the hall. They wouldn’t think twice about destroying the antiquities with their machine guns if it meant putting a few holes in me too. The time had come to get the hell out of here and tell Gretel what I had found.

  First, there was one last thing to take care of. The scientists were all smart enough to have fled at the first sign of trouble, leaving their machines untended. My magic might not work on the girls, but my Fireball spell worked well enough on those machines. They turned to nothing more than heaps of sparking slag in seconds, as did good portions of the floors and walls. Gretel would probably have had a conniption about that if we didn’t have so much to worry about.

  Chapter 2

  Since I was on this side of the Atlantic, I decided to pay a visit to the old homestead outside Marseilles. For old time’s sake I vanished myself into my old bedroom, which at the moment was completely bare. All of the furniture and paintings had been sold while my old dolls and dresses had been put into storage after the last war.

  There was no furniture anywhere in the house, so that I had to sit on the floor in front of the fireplace in the parlor. When I closed my eyes I could see the sofa with Alexis sitting on it, sewing a new dress. Caroline would be next door in the library, poring over her books, cramming her head with knowledge. Not that any of that knowledge had helped her deal with an angry mob in Salem. Mama would be in the kitchen, talking with the servants about dinner or some other domestic chore, never once raising her voice in anger because a “proper lady” didn’t do such things.

  A familiar voice startled me from my thoughts. “If I’d known you were coming, Miss Joliet, I’d have put out a chair for you.”

  “That’s all right, Justine. I won’t be here long.”

  I opened my eyes and saw that Justine Deveaux had turned into her mother: heavyset, slack jowls, and gray hair giving her a matronly appearance. After the war she had been just a slip of a thing, so scrawny at twenty-five that people still thought she was a teenager. It might have depressed me to see how she’d aged if I hadn’t grown used to it long ago.

  I stood up from the floor and violated protocols by hugging her. “How are things here?” I asked.

  “Quite well, madam. We’re sure to have quite a harvest this year. Francis is thinking he’ll have to hire extra help to deal with it.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Chateau de Deveaux wine has been around for four centuries, made from the grapes of our vineyard. Mama named it after the Deveaux family who worked for us first as field hands and then later as business partners. She thought naming the wine for our family would draw too much attention, something I’m sure Gretel warned her about. Since Alexis and I took up permanent residence in America fifty years ago, the Deveauxes have had the vineyard and the rest of the estate to themselves. We could have sold the place for a fortune, but there were too many memories here.

  “I could have William bring in a cot if you’d like to stay overnight,” Justine said. “Or you could stay with us. We’d be happy to have you.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll be leaving soon. But thank you.”

  “Of course, ma’am. Would you like any refreshment before you leave?”

  “A bottle of your most recent vintage that’s drinkable would be swell.”

  “I’ll go to the wine cellar posthaste and fetch one.”

  “Thank you, Justine.” Before she left, I added, “Make sure to bring two glasses.”

  Despite that Alexis and I had owned the estate for over four hundred years, the Deveauxes did not know what we really were. The only one who knew was Clare, but she couldn’t leave the archives without a séance. Not even Henry knew and he was the closest of the entire family tree to me.

  After Justine brought up a bottle, I opened it and poured two glasses. Justine probably wanted to go home to her family, but she was loyal enough not to mention it. I drank my first glass in one swallow, hoping that the alcohol would ease some of the pain from tonight. Not only my visit to the castle, but also the pain that accompanied me whenever I came here.

  “That’s good stuff,” I said. “Francis does good work.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “How’s the rest of your family doing?”

  She told me about her daughter Margaret going to school in Paris and her younger son William who was planning to take over the family business. I shook my head at this. “Might not be a business for him to take over soon enough.”

  “What makes you say that, ma’am?”

  “That nut in Germany’s getting ready for war.”

  “Germany? I don’t think we’ll have more trouble with them. Not after what happened last time.”

  I smiled at this. That was the thinking going around Europe and America as well. No one took Hitler and his minions seriously. History really couldn’t repeat itself so quickly, could it? But I knew what I had seen the last few days. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind what the Nazis would do if they could summon demons or other nasty creatures. There was only one thing demons did well: sow chaos. I’d destroyed enough of them in one lifetime to know that.

  I couldn’t tell Justine that, so I said, “Stranger things have happened.” I seized her free hand in mine. “Promise me that the moment he comes across the border you’ll get your family out of here.”

  “Wherever would we go? This is our home. It has been for centuries.”

  “Go to Edinburgh. I have friends there. Or New Orleans,” I said, thinking of Andre, who still “lived” there, though he didn’t live anywhere in the traditional sense of the word. “Or come to Rampart City. Alexis and I will be glad to put you up.”

  “That’s kind of you, ma’am, but—”

  “I’m not giving you a choice. When the bullets start flying you can either get yourself on a plane or I’ll come here and do it for you. Understand?”

  She nodded, though I doubted she really did. She probably thought it was an idle promise. After all, how could an old woman like me drag her from her home? But I would vanish the lot of them from here in a heartbeat, Gretel’s rules be damned. Their family and mine had been intertwined for centuries; I would make sure that continued for another four centuries if I could.

  I finished the bottle, n
oting Justine hardly touched her wine. Seeing this, I thought again that she must want to go home and rest. It had been foolish of me to pop over here in the middle of the night. “I’d better let you get home before Francis calls out a search party.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. If you’d like to stay—”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Alexis is expecting me back.”

  “Of course. How is Madam Gallo?”

  “She’s the same as always.”

  “That’s good to hear. Has she found anyone else?”

  “No, she hasn’t.” Alexis could never replace Marco—neither could I. “Goodnight, Justine.”

  “Goodnight, Madam Joliet. Have a pleasant journey.” I nodded at this, though I knew my journey was going to be anything but pleasant from here on out.

  ***

  The Deveauxes had kept the path through the forest just as I remembered it. I closed my eyes, following the same steps I had since I was seven years old. Back then Henry had escorted me through the woods, keeping an eye out for the trouble I was too stupid and headstrong to avoid. He had always done that, feeling it his duty as my servant—and my friend.

  One day we had followed the tracks of a deer along the forest trail until we saw the animal itself about a hundred yards ahead. It stopped grazing to stare at us for a moment. Then it darted into the brush. Before Henry could stop me, I followed after the deer. I leapt through the brush, not caring if Mama tanned my hide for ruining another dress.

  I didn’t have the balance of a deer, so that when I landed, my left ankle twisted sideways until I heard something pop. I lay on my back, crying and wailing while the panicked deer ran deeper into the brush. Not long after, Henry appeared; he much more sensibly stepped through the brush to kneel beside me.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “What does it look like?” I screamed at him through my tears.