Awakening (Birth of Magic #1) Read online

  Celia sat on the floor, looking up at me. She put the pieces together fast, saying, “You’re a witch. I should have known when you came onto me with that corny poor farm girl story.”

  “That was just an accident. I didn’t know who you were. Who either of you were.” I looked down at Ethan, who was still drawing on the paper, recreating the design for whatever he had been working on in the lab. “Who are you working for? The War Department? The Nazis?”

  “I’m an independent contractor,” Celia hissed at me.

  “I don’t think so. You have to have someone backing you. Who is it?”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything.”

  Though I’d killed a lot of monsters over the years, I couldn’t keep tears from clouding my vision. “Why are you doing this, Celia? Ethan loves you. I thought you loved him.”

  “I do love him,” she said, her voice faltering. Maybe I was going too soft, but I believed her. “But this is more important.”

  “What is it? What was he working on?”

  “I already said that I’m not going to tell you anything. I’d never help a witch.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you, Celia. I hated having to do it. Especially after you became my friend.”

  “We were never friends.”

  “Celia—”

  “You’re a sap, witch. I’ve been playing you and him and the whole damned school. None of you know what I’m capable of.”

  She moved faster than I thought possible, as fast as the girls in the Nazi castle. Before I could think of a spell or even brace myself she’d leapt over Ethan to grab me by the front of my blouse. She slammed my head into the top bunk hard enough that I saw stars.

  When I landed on my rear I tried another Static Charge, but she was already sidestepping it. She seized me with both hands, lifting me into the air. “You shouldn’t have made yourself such a runt,” she said before hurling me through the room’s window.

  Levitation wasn’t all that easy with a stationary object. It required a lot of concentration to keep yourself from rocketing into the stratosphere or catapulting yourself into a wall. Some of my sisters in the coven were much better at it than I was, but then they had minds that focused a lot better than mine did.

  Levitating onto the roof of a moving train took a lot more concentration, especially since I wasn’t in my real body. That kind of concentration was difficult with my head still swimming from Celia hitting it against the bunk. I didn’t have much choice though with the gravel shoulder of the tracks coming at me at sixty miles per hour.

  Closing my eyes, I willed myself to rise. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that I was above the train, but that the sleeping car had already gone past. I barely managed to reach out and grab onto the roof for the caboose before it went speeding by. For a moment I hung like a flag from the roof of the caboose. Then I used Maria’s scrawny muscles to pull myself into a standing position.

  Now that I had steadied myself, I vanished back into Celia’s sleeping car. She was folding up Ethan’s blueprint while he sat on the floor, still staring blankly into space, the pencil poised in midair. The moment I appeared, Celia grabbed him, holding him in front of her as a human shield. A knife appeared in her hand as if by magic. It wasn’t like any kind of knife you could buy in a store; the knife was a sharpened shard of black crystal, like nothing I’d seen before in all my years of dealing weapons.

  “Get out of here or else I’ll slit his throat,” she said.

  “You aren’t going to kill Ethan. You love him.”

  “I love the Chairwoman more.”

  “The Chairwoman? Is that who’s backing you?”

  Celia grimaced. “I’ve said too much already. Step out of the car or I’m going to slit the kid’s throat.”

  I stayed where I was. “Even if you love this Chairwoman more, I doubt he’s finished his plans for you. You wouldn’t want to take an incomplete blueprint back, would you?”

  “We can have someone else finish them.”

  “One of your Nazi friends? Like the ones at the castle?” For just a moment the surprise registered on her face. “That’s right, I’m the one who broke up that shindig. Now, why don’t you let Ethan go and give me the plans?”

  “I can’t.” Her face reddened as if she were about to cry. “I won’t fail her. Especially not because of some witch.”

  We were locked in a Mexican standoff. She couldn’t kill Ethan or else I would get her. I couldn’t kill Ethan to get to her. I could have tried vanishing behind her, but I’d already seen how quick she was. But as we stood there, a plan formed in my head.

  I said the magic words to make an inanimate object come to life. Not the knife in her hand, which I suspected was some kind of magic blade, but the pencil in Ethan’s hand. The yellow pencil turned into a yellow snake that slithered out of his grasp to drop onto the floor. Before Celia could stop it, the snake was wrapping up her leg.

  She had to push Ethan out of the way to get at the snake. That gave me the opening I needed. I used another Static Charge to throw her back. This time I got more oomph behind it, throwing her through the wall. I watched as she went flying away from the train, hurdling the railing of a bridge. I did nothing as my friend plunged to her death in the gorge below.

  Once I was sure she was gone, I gathered up Ethan and then we vanished from the train.

  Chapter 8

  We appeared in the parlor. For once Alexis seemed surprised to see me. She took a step back, putting a hand to her mouth. “Oh my. Is he—?”

  “No, he’s alive. He’s just in some kind of trance. He should snap out of it soon.”

  “That’s good.” Alexis took another step back. I couldn’t help noticing her skin was tinged with green. “I think I need to lie down.”

  I had to drop Ethan on the sofa in order to catch Alexis before she hit the floor. Her eyes were open but not focused on anything. “Alexis, what’s going on? Alexis!”

  When she still didn’t respond, I slapped her lightly on the cheek. I’d never raised a hand to either of my sisters before, but in this case I didn’t think she would mind. Her eyes focused on me for a moment. Her voice sounded small, like a child’s, as she said, “I don’t feel good.”

  With that she passed out again. I was lucky she was light enough that even still as Maria Costopolous I could carry her upstairs, to her bedroom. “You get some rest,” I whispered. “I’ll take care of it.”

  As I went downstairs, I replayed in my mind what Alexis had first said about the disturbance she’d felt. It had made her violently ill, probably about as ill as in the parlor a couple of minutes ago. I remembered too the way the necklace had reacted by his lab. Out of curiosity I hurried back to my bedroom to retrieve the necklace from my dresser.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise to see that it reacted to Ethan the same way it had to his lab. Whatever he’d been working on might be gone, but some part of it was still with him, lingering inside of him like a virus. A virus that made Alexis, who was more sensitive than me to the presence of magic, ill when in close contact.

  Getting Ethan downstairs was a trickier proposition, but I still didn’t want to risk vanishing him. Not without a better idea of what he’d been up to. So I hooked my arms around his armpits and began dragging him through the house. He didn’t stir as I went through the kitchen to the basement steps. I had to go backwards, a step at a time, but I’d been on these steps often enough that it wasn’t a problem.

  Besides the furnace, sinks for doing laundry, and other normal basement fixtures, our basement also contained a large metal vault. We’d used the same company as Rampart National Bank to build it not long after we moved in. Inside the vault were Alexis’s potions, magic ingredients for making more potions, and my collection of charms and magic weapons. I dragged Ethan past these, over to a barber’s chair I’d salvaged from a shop going out of business.

  The chair wasn’t made for sleeping in, but Ethan should be comfortable enough until he snapped out of whatev
er trance Celia had put him in. I stared at him in the chair for a moment, thinking of Celia on the train. It was hard to believe that just six hours ago we had hugged as friends and now she was dead. I sat down on an old milk crate and put my head in my hands.

  Celia had mentioned someone named the Chairwoman. Who was that? Obviously a codename of some kind, but not one I’d ever heard before. There had to be some way of finding out—

  “Hello, Stephanie.”

  I turned to see Gretel on the stairs. “Nice of you to let yourself in.”

  “I thought you and Alexis might be occupied at the moment.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  Gretel walked across the room, her eyes narrowing as she stared at Ethan. Maybe she felt a bit of what Alexis did. “This is the cause of all this trouble?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know that yet.” She pulled up a crate next to mine while I gave her a condensed version of what had gone on at the college and then on the train. “You have any idea who the Chairwoman is?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really or no?”

  She turned to me, smiling slightly. With Gretel you never knew how much she actually knew and how much she pretended to know. That illusion had helped keep her in charge of the coven for thousands of years. “I’ve heard rumors of someone seizing magic artifacts over the last few years. No one I know has ever seen her or spoke to her.”

  “Celia had. She knew her.” I shook my head. “I killed her.”

  Gretel patted my shoulder. “You didn’t want to.” She motioned to Ethan. “You did what you had to do to save him.”

  “I suppose.”

  We didn’t say anything for a minute. Finally Gretel gave my shoulder a squeeze. “Are you up to another assignment?”

  “I haven’t finished this one.” I looked up at the ceiling, thinking of Alexis. “Before I do anything, I have to get him away from Alexis. Whatever he’s been doing makes her queasy if she gets to close.”

  “Alexis always has been sensitive to magic.”

  I shrugged Gretel’s hand away. “I know that. You think I don’t know my own sister after all this time?”

  “I didn’t mean that.” She sighed. “Once the Masquerade potion wears off, I want you to get him out of here. Take him someplace no one will look for him. Keep him there until we can find out what’s going on and put a stop to it.”

  “I’m not a babysitter.”

  “Yes, but he trusts you. You’re his friend.”

  “I won’t be when he realizes I killed his fiancée.”

  “I’m sure you can think of a way around that.”

  “Probably.” It was my turn to sigh now. “I suppose you’ll want me to use this trust to find out what he knows.”

  “That would make our jobs a lot easier, don’t you think?”

  “Who’s our?”

  “Me, Naoko, Rose, and Tabitha. We’ve been trying to find out something about this Chairwoman for some time. Though from what you told us about what happened at the castle, I think it’s a safe bet the Nazis are involved in it.”

  “Wonderful.” I looked over at Ethan. There was no denying Gretel’s logic. I was Ethan’s friend; he would trust me far more than a stranger. I didn’t like the idea of using that trust to pry information from him, but there wasn’t any choice in the matter. Whatever Celia, this Chairwoman, and the Nazis were doing, it couldn’t be good. “All right, I’ll do it. But on one condition.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “You keep Alexis out of this. She’s been involved too much as it is already.”

  “That was her choice. I had nothing to do with it. And I don’t suppose I need to remind you that you’ve already put her at risk by using her as a decoy at the dance.”

  “She wasn’t in danger,” I said, but I knew that wasn’t true. At the time I hadn’t thought she was in danger, but now that I’d seen what Celia could do, I knew we had both been in danger that night. So had Ethan and Harold and everyone else. “Just don’t let her get any more involved in this.”

  “Your sister’s not a child. She’s stronger than you give her credit for.”

  “Not for this sort of thing. Promise me you’ll keep her out of it.”

  “I’ll do everything I can, but not even I can control every little thing.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  As usual, Gretel wasn’t really making much of a promise. You never could pin her down to anything concrete. I’d just have to hope this vague almost-promise would be enough. I took her hand, giving it a shake. “Deal.”

  Gretel nodded and then rose to go. She had reached the stairs before she turned around. “One more thing. Don’t let him know about the coven or magic unless absolutely necessary. Do you understand?”

  “Sure. I’ll keep it under my hat.”

  “Thank you, dear. And give Alexis my regards when she wakes up.” With that Gretel disappeared, but I knew she wasn’t really gone. She never was.

  ***

  It was a race between whether Ethan would wake up, Alexis would wake up, or the Masquerade potion would wear off. I locked the basement door and then retreated to the kitchen. I sat at the table with a bottle of Chateau de Deveaux, a telephone book, and some maps. The latter two I would use to plot my escape with Ethan; the former would keep me from being sober enough to think about Celia again.

  I’d killed plenty of monsters in my time. I’d killed monsters from the dark planes of existence. I’d killed monsters like vampires who had once been human. But with Celia it was different. She wasn’t a monster. Not like a bogeyman, demon, or vampire. Maybe she wasn’t much better than the Nazis, but for a brief time she had been my friend.

  I drank straight from the bottle, unable to keep the memories from replaying themselves. I scanned my memory for a sign that I should have picked up on. How could I have misjudged her so badly? How could Ethan? I didn’t relish what I would have to tell him once he woke up. I would have to tell him that his fiancée had died. She had died because of me.

  So many people had come and gone in my life that I knew I shouldn’t fixate on this one. I’d known her for two days. It wasn’t the same as Henry, Marco, Rachel, Sohpie, Mama or any of the others. That didn’t really help, at least not right now.

  After finishing off the bottle, I opened the cabinet to retrieve another. I held the bottle in my hand, staring at the label. From experience I knew liquor couldn’t really get rid of the pain. At best I could drink myself into a stupor, so that I might forget about it for a little while. But it would all be waiting for me when I came to.

  What I needed to do was to focus on something else. With Ethan still out of it, I couldn’t do much about getting him somewhere safe. In the meantime, maybe I could try and find out who this Chairwoman was who had sent Celia to kidnap Ethan. This Chairwoman was as much as fault as I was, if not more so. Somehow she had corrupted that innocent girl, making her into a monster.

  With my fists clenched, I vanished from the kitchen.

  ***

  Although it was midnight, there was still plenty happening on Bourbon Street. I wove my way through the crowds, elbowing aside a few drunks as I went. I tried not to look at the couples so that I wouldn’t have to imagine Ethan and Celia and how in love they had seemed.

  Among the bars and shops still open at this late hour was a little café. It wasn’t much to look at, just a couple tables outside with checkered tablecloths and a few more inside. I stomped past the outdoor tables, into the café. There was a drunk sleeping it off in one corner and in the opposite corner a student with a stack of books and a cup of coffee.

  I took a seat at a table along the back wall. It took a minute for the owner of the café to appear from the back room. He shuffled towards me, his yellow eyes squinting as he studied my face. Besides the yellow eyes, people might have noticed something a bit odd about his pale skin with its bluish tinge. Anyone who shook his hand noticed how cold h
is skin was.

  There was an easy explanation for this: the owner of the café was dead. Or undead really. Back during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 he’d been mortally wounded. His wife refused to let him die, though. She sought out a local witch, one not affiliated with the coven. This witch used her voodoo to bring the man back to life in a manner of speaking. He could walk and talk, but his heart never beat again.

  When he got close enough, I took his cold hand, interlacing my fingers with his and putting my thumb over his hand. His eyes lit up at this. It had been the secret handshake we had used during the Revolution to identify ourselves as those opposing Louis’s tyranny. “My word,” he said. “Could this really be the famous Stephanie Joliet coming to pay me a visit?”

  “Hello Andre,” I said. I gave him a hug, not caring how cold he felt. I looked around the café. “Looks like business is booming.”

  “I’d be doing a lot more business if I sold liquor,” he said, looking out the window at the drunks staggering by. His gaze turned to the drunk in the corner. “Only those looking to sober up come in here.”

  “You could start closing up at nights.”

  “What else I got to do with myself? Can’t sleep no more. All I can do is lay in bed and look up at the ceiling. Worse than sitting around here.”

  We sat back down at my table. If Rachel had asked, I would have told her that voodoo magic wasn’t a good idea. It was a step below dark magic, something that did more harm than good. But then if I’d been here I might have been able to save Andre with a Restoration potion.

  The worst part was that Rachel had died two years later trying to give birth to their third child. The child, a little girl, had lived, but something had gone wrong in the delivery; Rachel bled to death in her own home. Andre could have tried saving her with the same voodoo magic, but he knew firsthand what kind of life would await her. He hadn’t been able to do that for his wife, choosing to let her go instead.

  “You look a lot different than the last time I saw you,” he said.