Sour, p.18
Sour, page 18
“I had no way to control what he did then or what he did when he raised me and hurt me and my mom. I’ve never had control of anything in my life, and now you’re telling me I’m the gray, some chaos witch. I’ll bet that means you think I’m going to live closed off and alone, the way you do, for the rest of my life. I am not going to live like that. I can’t live alone like that, Murphy! I can’t!”
The idea of living an isolated life was appalling to Betony, who lived for her friends and her social media and her outings.
“I’m not alone anymore, Betony,” I replied. “I have my friends and my coven. It doesn’t have to be that way for you if you don’t want it to be. Let us help you, Betony. We can try to figure out how to work with it.”
“Like they helped you? They didn’t do shit for you. No, thank you!” Her eyes darted around in panicked haste in search of something. “Where’s Rolf?”
I swallowed and panned the floor, looking for the dog. “Rolf” was nowhere to be found, and I wasn’t sure where he’d gone. A rustling on the veranda side of the house drew everyone’s attention to the place where Conall entered with a small cluster of the coven on either side of him, looking more abashed than I’d ever seen.
“Where’s Rolf?” Betony repeated, her panic level rising. I stepped forward, aching to lay a hand on her arm to ease her tension but refraining, knowing that it would only worsen it.
“Rolf isn’t your dog, Betony.”
“Where is Rolf?”
“Right here,” Conall said, his hands protectively over his middle as if he was still undressed and expected a blow to his groin for his honesty.
Betony froze, and I could almost hear the wheels in her head registering this new piece of information. “You were a dog.” Her voice was cold, lacking emotion. Conall nodded. She let out a short, incredulous snort from her nose. “That’s why you were following me around. Not because you liked me. Fuck. Nothing in my life is what I thought it was. Nothing.”
It struck me as bizarre that she gave the same weight to Rolf being her familiar as she did to her mother and father killing the mothers of three people whose lives she claimed to value, but I also hadn’t lived her life.
“I was the dog,” Conall admitted.
Betony scoffed and studied the tops of her boots, seeming to see the blood droplets for the first time.
“How?” Her voice was biting, angry, bitter. “You’re an orange witch.”
Conall delivered his disarming smile, but it didn’t affect Betony, who remained stone-faced. “A spell,” he admitted. “LaDonna has power over both flora and fauna, being a green witch. She cast it.”
Betony’s gaze shot back and forth from Conall to me, ignoring anyone else in the room. “Why?”
“We wanted to keep you safe,” I said. “You and everyone around you. We didn’t know for sure at first.”
“That I was the gray?”
I nodded. “I suspected,” I admitted. “But I thought it might still be me. Until we knew for sure, we thought it best if Conall kept an eye on you. His prophecy skills might have helped him to see danger coming.”
Betony nodded in tandem, then broke her rhythm and started shaking her head instead. “Y’all are unbelievable. Everyone wants to control me. My parents. My friends. You two.”
“It wasn’t about control—”
“Then what was it about?” Her voice wasn’t a shriek, but it was close.
“We didn’t want you to hurt anyone. Including yourself.”
She scoffed again, her composure startlingly back in place, her mind undoubtedly flashing back to the scissors she’d driven into her father’s abdomen less than an hour before. “A bit late for that, aren’t you?”
She pivoted on the soft rubber sole of her boot, and Jake’s voice called out from the back of the room. “Betony!”
Betony whirled back around, eyes flashing. A bulb on a table lamp flashed and popped before it went black, and a startled noise came from behind me as someone grabbed what sounded like a cup sliding across a table.
It’s starting.
“What?” Betony barked.
“My keys,” he said softly. “I need them back.”
She sneered and dug into her backpack, where she found Jake’s keys. Jake hadn’t moved from where he stood, and I wondered if this was a ploy to pull her back into the room where we could contain her. Betony clearly thought so as well.
“Here,” she said and hurled them in his direction. I followed the arching path of the keychain with my eyes. Jake lunged forward to catch them, and he dropped them the instant they touched his hand, which came away rusty red with her father’s drying blood. Jake made a horrified noise and gripped the wrist of his bloody hand with his opposite palm as if he expected his contaminated hand to become possessed.
When I turned back to where Betony had stood a moment ago, she was gone.
Chapter 27
Betony’s absence left an energy vacuum behind as the door closed after her. In my peripheral vision, I noticed a few coven members sinking heavily into seats around the parlor. It was now nine forty-five in the evening. The three remaining teens approached me abashedly and apologized for having to leave to be home before their ten o’clock curfews. They promised to track Betony through Pingion in case I needed help to find her.
On the other side of the room, Miriam still had her ear pressed to her phone. That was a good sign. Maybe 9-1-1 was keeping her on in case they needed us.
“Conall?” He was at my side in a heartbeat. “Will you get the charged water from upstairs? The jar from the last coven meeting?”
He nodded. “Good idea.”
I would have gotten it myself, but I wanted to be present in case Miriam needed my input on the call. Sure enough, as Conall returned with the jar and several small glasses, Miriam extended the phone to me so I could offer guidance to the officers en route to Betony’s house. When they asked how I knew something was wrong, I lied and said I’d been on the phone with Betony when I’d heard a scuffle. They thought they’d be reporting to a standard domestic call and saw no reason to keep me on the phone when I confirmed they’d found the correct house. I heard the familiar sound of Betony’s dog, Rascal, barking through the phone and one officer saying, “Here, again?” as I hit the End button.
I rushed upstairs to change out of my costume, opting instead for my standard jeans and Doc Martens topped with a t-shirt. As I descended the stairs, Hanna came to my side, her face clouded with concern. She’d changed from her Queen of Hearts costume into more serviceable clothes as well—jeans and an oversized sweater. “Should we have kept Betony here?”
I shook my head. “We need to give her a few minutes alone to calm down, or she might go postal. She’s got to figure some things out.”
“Murphy, she already killed her dad. How much worse could it get?”
“I know, and I don’t want her trying to kill anyone else tonight.”
She and I helped Conall serve glasses of Source-charged water to the coven. Knowing what I intended to ask them to do next, I knew they’d need a full measure of power to do it. I served LaDonna and Luke first, and as I bent down to give the high priestess her glass, she said, “Shall I bring in the Lughaidh cauldron?”
Amazed, I pulled back, and then I noticed the shy smile on Luke’s face. He’d foreseen the need for the clan cauldron, and so they’d brought it. Of course, he did. I nodded, and Luke rose to fetch the coven’s favorite tool from their SUV.
As Conall continued to serve the coven, I leaned in to speak with LaDonna in hushed tones.
“Protection spell?” she suggested.
I shook my head. “Binding spell. The strongest one you know. We need to keep Betony from hurting herself or anyone else, and after that, we can focus on protecting the town against her grayness.”
LaDonna nodded, and I realized I’d just instructed my high priestess instead of the other way around for the first time.
“Do you have anything of Betony’s?”
“There’s a small stack of ankle socks behind the register near the sales ledger,” I said. She smiled amusedly, but didn’t ask why.
I hastened to join Conall in dispensing the water, and when we finished, I motioned to Hanna and Conall to join me in the hall. LaDonna’s voice rang through the bottom story. As the three of us rushed through the vestibule to the backdoor and down the veranda steps, she asked the coven members to assemble the requisite materials from the storefront.
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes after ten. Twenty-five minutes had passed since Betony had stormed from the building. She had no car, and lord knew she wouldn’t be contacting her mother for a ride anyplace—especially home, where her father was bleeding from a stab wound that she’d inflicted. I wondered how long it would take for an ambulance to arrive now that the cops were on the scene.
My mind reeled as I considered Betony’s possible options for places to take refuge. It was Samhain—the veil between the living and the dead was thin, the Walker Hill Cemetery was only two blocks away, and Betony’s favorite family member was her deceased grandmother, the one person she knew who loved and accepted her just as she was.
“Walker Hill,” I said and started hoofing in that direction. Conall and Hanna hustled after me.
“We’re not driving?” Conall asked.
I shook my head. I couldn’t explain it, but walking was the way to go. If there was one concept I’d had drilled home in the past few weeks, trusting the Source was always the way to go.
Half a block down the road, my phone pinged, and I pulled it from my back pocket. Amber, it appeared, had formed a new chat group. I kept my feet rushing forward as I read.
Amber Jade: Betony, are yoi OK?
Bet: No I’m not fucking OK. What do you think asshole?
Two-tone siren song: Where are you?
Bet: I need help. Can y’all help me? I need to focus some power for something.
Cadence: You need to turn yourself in.
Two-tone siren song: Turn herself in? What happe ed
Bet: Cadence it’s not your problem. I need help.
Cadence: She stabbed her dad.
Two-tone siren song: wtf Betony?
Bet: You both know how bad he was to my mom and me. Mostly me. At least when he fucked mom, she probably wanted it some of the time.
The implication of her words was so horrific that it took a moment for my mind to register. Holy shit. Had the others known? Why hadn’t anyone said anything, or gone to the authorities? Or was this the first they’d heard of it as well? As much as Betony had confided in me, I didn’t know that about her. I paused for a moment so I could thumb a response:
Mama Murph: Betony, if that’s what’s been going on, you have a defense for what you did.
I tried to keep typing, but before I had a chance, a message popped up.
Mama Murph has been removed from the group.
Fuck.
Chapter 28
As I suspected, the lock and chain to Walker Hill Cemetery lay in pieces on the ground. I tried not to think about the height of power Betony had reached to lever enough torque to mangle the thick steel like that.
She’d left the gate open behind her—not smart on Halloween night if she wanted to be alone. Maybe she didn’t.
I pushed the creaking, black iron gate open a tiny bit so the three of us could enter the cemetery astride one another. Walker Hill encompassed nearly eighty acres of graves and low, rolling hills; Betony could be anywhere—if she was here at all. I felt a pull northward and followed it up the gravel road like a bloodhound tracking a scent. Conall and Hanna trailed me closely, as silent as specters.
As we crested a short rise, I saw her: Betony, still in her clown costume, now rumpled and hanging from her frame. She had a new board on the grave before her; the plastic shrink wrap lay discarded in a pile on the grave beside her. I saw in the glint of moonlight the familiar circle planchette from a newly unwrapped Mystic Spiral game.
I motioned to Conall and Hanna to duck behind a nearby mausoleum. Perhaps if Betony could speak to her grandmother, she might hear a soothing voice she needed. It was worth giving her a chance.
We were barely close enough to hear Betony’s voice, which had shrunk from its normal, boisterous level in her sadness.
Her fingers poised on the planchette, Betony called. “Gramma? Are you here? I need help. Please.”
I tapped into a deeper intensity of Source power. Across the cemetery, a handful of ghostly forms glowed and meandered among the gravestones, and they seemed content where they were. None of them stood near Betony.
“Gramma?” Betony’s voice broke, and she sobbed, her body hunched over in grief and despair.
A silvery hand emerged from within the grave below, followed by the rest of an ethereal body.
Oh, thank goodness.
The silver hand touched the planchette and moved it, probably to the word Hello. That was standard.
“Gramma?” Her voice choked with joy now, and Betony sat up to better help her relative move the piece so they could converse.
Without warning, a glowing, sickly, yellow-orange, undulating, misshapen form emerged from a cloud that came from nowhere. The shape was rangy, and I caught the odor of sulfur mixed with marijuana and cigarettes on the next breeze.
Betony’s father’s physical body had died, but his aggrieved energy had found her, and he wasn’t there to plead for her forgiveness. I emerged from behind the mausoleum, and my hand raised to get Betony’s attention. My mouth opened to cry out a warning, but the sickly form slid into the planchette in a sulfurous lightning bolt, traveled up Betony’s fingers into her arm, her body, and filled her form.
Rage filled me. He’d found yet another way to invade and violate Betony. Now, not only did I have to deal with Betony and her uncontrolled, untrained chaos energy, I had to contend with the dark, confused soul of an evil dead man.
Aw, fuck!
I retreated behind the mausoleum again to gather my thoughts, positioning myself to monitor Betony, who was trying to speak to her grandmother without success. Her poor grandma was struggling in vain to wrench the offensive ghost from within her granddaughter. Betony must have sensed her grandma’s touch; she pulled her hoodie around her tightly and rocked back and forth.
“What’s wrong?” Hanna whispered.
In hushed tones, I told them what I’d learned from the group chat on my way to the cemetery and finished the story with the battle invisible to them that was happening on the hill before us. The appalled looks on their faces matched the disgust I’d felt as the story unraveled.
“Can we fight her? Them?” Conall asked.
I shook my head. “I’m an untrained Summate, and she’s an untrained gray and possessed besides. I have no idea how to handle this.”
“She has otherworldly strength,” Hanna observed. “Maybe we need otherworldly strength, too.”
Of course! And with the veil between the living and the dead so weak, there’s no better night to ask.
Reading her mind, the way we so often did, Conall led the three of us through the dark and trees to the other side of the cemetery and the plot of land where our mothers lay in neighboring graves.
We joined hands near the foot of their plot. It was up to me; Conall and Hanna didn’t have the power to call the dead without a tool like a Ouija board or a Mystic Spiral; only I had the power of black witches.
My heart hammered, and I knew they felt the way my fingers trembled in their hands. Normally, I tried to cast in rhyme because I appreciated the pattern and rhythm, and it helped my energy, but there was no time to linger on niceties or drum up fancy words just for effect. Lifting my face to the sky, I found the waxing crescent moon overhead in a wide break in the clouds and used it as a focus object as I spoke:
“Hermes, Mercury, Ankou, Persephone,
Guardians of the gates and guides to the spirits of our ancestors,
We ask you to call our mothers, Nora Blackwell, Leah Chava, and Veronica Barry,
We, the bone of their bone and blood of their blood,
desire their assistance, their guidance, their knowledge, and their protection.
The Samhain veil is thin
Please let our loved ones in.”
The pattern of the final few words resonated with me, and I repeated it. Conall and Hanna joined me, and as the spell's power grew in strength, a light rain began. I closed my eyes and bathed in the rhythm of the words, the chill in the falling water, in the closeness of my two best friends, and in the love and power we channeled between us. I imagined an otherworldly curtain pulled back by ghostly hands.
The call of a crow perched in a tree behind me told me we’d succeeded, and the energy in the air around us shifted and became charged. I opened my eyes. Beside us stood three wavering, orbital forms that oscillated between a glowing silvery-white and rose. The raindrops reflected the brilliant colors as they swept past.
“They’re here,” I breathed, and then I realized that my friends’ eyes flickered with the same silvery-rose color as the orbs.
“You can see them, too!” I cried. Their eyes both appeared glassy with wonder and joy.
“See who?”
Crap. Betony had found us. That she couldn’t see the positive energy that made up the ghosts around us told me everything I needed to know about the place where her mind had gone.
“We’re visiting with our mothers,” I tried to keep my tone as matter-of-fact as possible, but Betony, filled with her father’s rage and the chaotic energy she harnessed naturally, saw an opportunity to argue.
“You mean the ones my mom and dad killed?” Her voice was acid.
I tried to think of a way to appease her, but words refused to come. My thoughts felt ensnared like a dolphin in a net.
She managed to fuck up your life without being near you, Murphy. How well do you think you’re going to handle her chaos when she’s standing fifteen feet away and wants to use it?
The bright orbs circled us and placed themselves protectively between Betony and us. Fueled by their presence, I stood taller and faced the young woman who had, until tonight, viewed me as a mentor.
