The Blood Witch Saga

3. Merry Meet

My plan worked, to forget the entire week, to forget Finneas, and not look at the trunk. I got through the weekend, got Rusty and my smoked-out clothes to the laundromat to rid them of the final remnants of that mess, and I even went to a Halloween party that a coworker was hosting at her new McMansion in the new subdivision and stayed for nearly a half-hour before I claimed a headache and took off for the motel.

By the time Monday rolled around I was able to put it behind me, as long as I didn"t look at the wooden trunk. To solve that problem, I put it in the trunk of my car. Out of sight, and all of that.

Monday, I was juggling my coffee and briefcase to get my badge out of my pocket, when my boss opened the door for me, grinning like she had a secret. “Either you let your husband back in the bedroom, or you got Jaime to actually study for a test,” I joked.

She followed me to my desk. “Remember when you told me you couldn"t wait to get out of here?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You mean, the day I landed here? It grows on you.” The city would never be home, it was too dry, dusty, and stifling for that, but I had started to get used to the place.

She nodded knowingly. “Yeah, but you"re not going to say no to a transfer.”

That got my attention. “What?”

She held up a hand. “It"s not exactly what was promised, but they have a product line that"s struggling, and their manager just walked out. Corporate office wants to send you out early, see if you can get it on its feet again.”

“Isn"t that what I was supposed to be doing here?” I asked, turning on the computer.

“You have. Your line has improved tremendously. I"m giving it to Alex. It"s a step up for him. They want you in San Francisco by the end of the week.”

I blinked at her, trying to catch up. At least I didn"t have a house to sell, or much in the way of belongings. “Okay…so what"s the incentive for me?”

“Pay increase now, and another when you get the move to the new product line, plus a housing benefit for the first three months to give you time to get settled. They have corporate housing. There"s a furnished apartment waiting on you.”

I sipped my coffee and nodded slowly. “I guess I better get Alex in here and start getting him up to speed.” Alex was a good guy, and he had the chops to be a good manager. He"d started out on the lines, moved up to line lead, then to inspector, and from there he had been working under a senior product manager for more than a year while he finished his BA. This would be his first position with the title manager, but he had the skills.

I spent the time from then to the morning meeting getting my things together for him, which was fairly easy, considering I always knew the job there was short-term. I"d expected another six months, in reality, but I wasn"t going to argue with the change. I wanted out of El Paso after the week I"d had.

We told the product line later that day and had a brief going away party at lunch on Tuesday. Before the sun was up on Wednesday, I was on the road, headed west. It was October 31st, Halloween. I wasn"t a big holiday person. Holidays always made me feel like the interloper I was, lurking in the background of my foster family"s happiness.

Halloween was worse than Christmas at times. My costumes were always hand-me-downs from years past, worn by other foster kids before me and trick-or-treating always felt far too close to begging for me to be comfortable. It was just as good to be on the road then. I wouldn"t have to deal with trick or treaters or anything.

I got as far as Los Angeles and got a hotel room. I left the mysterious trunk with its mysterious contents in the trunk of the car, but pulled in my suitcase, and grabbed Rusty off the dashboard. Maybe it was silly, a grown woman hauling around a stuffed animal that was so threadbare and worn, patched in multiple places, and goofy looking, but it was the only thing I had left of the time before, and I’d gotten accustomed to always having him near.

I planned on ordering pizza and getting a good night"s sleep so I could head out fresh in the morning. It was six and a half hours to the corporate housing place, and I wanted to get there with enough time to check in with my new boss.

Two bites in, there was a knock on my door. I muted the TV, which I"d set to a news station, and went to the door. I looked through the peephole, squinting at the old woman on the other side. “Girl, stop eyeballing me and open this door,” the woman demanded, making me step back.

“I don"t know you,” I responded, frowning at the door.

“Of course you don"t, but I aim to fix that. Now, open this door.”

I will probably never understand the impulse at that moment to do as she said, but I unlocked the door and opened it. There in the hotel hallway was the most unlikely woman I had ever seen. She was old, in her eighties or nineties maybe; I’m a terrible judge of age. Her hair was an array of white with blue, purple, red, and yellow braids that were arranged in a mess of swoops and loops spilling out from under a precariously perched green top hat with yellow tulle exploding out one side.

The wrinkles around her eyes seemed to make them sharp somehow, and her nose showed signs that it had been broken at some point in her life. Her emerald green dress was like something from a Victorian painting and yet didn"t seem out of place in the least. She tut-tutted at me and waved her intricately carved cane in my direction before bustling herself over the threshold and into my room. “Not even a beginner"s warding. Really, this simply won"t do!” She dropped an old-fashioned handbag onto the bed and turned to look me over. “Close the door, dear. You"re letting in the bugs.”

I was staring. I knew I was staring. I shook my head and closed the door, confused about what exactly was happening. “Who are you?”

“Ah, yes. Good. You have at least some common sense then. I am Merry Ander-Wheather. Your—” she squinted at me like she was trying to remember something, “Your great-aunt.”

“What?” I was still stuck on the sight of her and the way she barged into the room. I looked at her again and realized. “Finneas.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and held my breath, wishing the whole mess away.

“The dear boy did say he was having trouble getting through to you. That"s why I"m here instead. We felt maybe family would be more—”

Cold rage dumped into my stomach, and I threw the piece of pizza in my hand in the general direction of the box. “I have no family.” I ground the words from between my teeth and stepped toward her menacingly. I had nearly a foot of height on her, but she was clearly not intimidated.

She drew herself up to her full height, planting her cane between us like some kind of boundary. “You may not know it yet, Thána Augusta Celene Alizon, but you do indeed have a vast and varied family who have spent years looking for you.”

yearsI took a step back. “I"m not that hard to find.” I had never heard my full name pronounced that way. Like Finneas, she said Thána with that odd inflection, the h nearly silent. I"d only ever seen the full name written, on that note in my backpack that day. Everyone ignored my middle names. I was just Thána Archer most of the time, though I did have a couple of foster sisters that called me Arch. I turned away from her, hiding the tears that had welled up unexpectedly. “I lived in the same town for years.”

She was staring at me; I could feel her. “I mean, the same place where I was left. Twenty-two years ago.” The anger stirred again, and I turned back. “You should have started there.”

Her black eyes softened, and she nodded sadly. She pulled the only chair in the room closer to her and climbed up on it. She was so short her feet didn"t reach the floor. “Oh, mi paidí, I know.” Her voice took on an accent of some sort, but I couldn"t place it. Maybe Greek, but not really. “If we had known where she took you…but everything was so—” she waved her hands and shook her head. “There is time for that when we are all safe.”

“Safe?” I asked. “Safe from what? Disappearing cars?”

“Finneas told us, of course. Their methods are crude.” She shook her head. “There is much for you to learn, dearest Thána. So much. For now, let us just call them ‘those that wish you dead’.”

I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose again, as if the action could magic me back to before Finneas. It was all too much. My stomach churned with rage, mixed with an age-old desperation for family, and I thought for a moment I might be sick from it all.

“I should have come myself to begin with, but then, I am no tracker like Finneas.”

I turned to look at her, and for a moment I was reminded of a woman"s face I had seen in that book that was in the trunk Finneas had given me. It was the eyes. Her face was set round with wrinkles and her hair had lost the shiny black of youth, but her picture was in the book. “So, Great-Aunt then?” I asked. “And you"re here to…what, exactly? Tell me I"m a fairy princess and whisk me away to a magical land to ride unicorns and drink dewdrop tea?”

She snorted. “Heavens no, child.” She shook her head vigorously and laughed so that the entire chair shook. “No royal blood in either of your family lines…well, except that Lord…whatshisname five generations back on your father’s side, but his family was disgraced long before we rejected the monarchy as a governing system.” Her eyes swept the room. “Where"s the trunk?”

I was frowning so hard my face hurt and I tried to force myself to relax the muscles, at least a little. “What?”

“The trunk. Finneas did give you the trunk?”

Right, the one with the magic lock on it. “It"s in my car.”

“Oh, no, that won"t do.” She stood up and bustled to the door. “It"s not safe out there.”

“It"s fine,” I answered. “It"s locked in the trunk.”

“Oh, child, you have much to learn. We must bring it inside.”

“I don"t want it inside,” I said abruptly, moving so I was between her and the door. “I don"t want it at all, honestly.”

Her face clouded over, and she stared at me for a long time like she couldn"t believe I had said such a thing. “You can throw away your heritage, Thána, if that is what you desire, but it will not protect you one little bit from those who mean to end you before you"ve begun. Now, go and get the trunk, and be quick about it.”

I grabbed my keys from the dresser, shaking my head as I went out the door and down the stairs to my car. I popped open the trunk and took the ornate box out, setting it on the ground so I could close the trunk again. I had no idea why I was humoring the crazy old woman. If I"d had to guess it was that little girl inside who ached with not knowing her family, latching on to the first semblance of family that presented itself.

When I got back to the room, Merry was busy emptying her handbag on my bed. I shut the door and crossed the room to put the trunk on the table. “What are you doing?” I asked.

Merry didn"t answer, just started humming and she took a bag of rocks to the door. I watched her stack them in sets of two. The rocks were nearly perfect cubes and they seemed to catch the light as she moved. When she had four sets of rocks spaced evenly across the front of the door, she sat back, her mouth moving, though I heard no sound.

There was a flash, and something seemed to extend up from the rocks to cover the door. It was see-through, but it shimmered in the light from the nearby lamp. “There now, that"s better.”

I squinted at the door and moved closer. “What is it?”

“Wards,” Merry answered, moving back toward the bed. “A simple sort of wards to guard a door or window.”

I ghosted my hand over the shimmering surface. Static electricity filled the gap between my hand and the barrier, prickling my palm with energy. When I turned around, Merry had retaken the chair and was happily munching on a piece of my pizza.

“I"m starting to think this whole thing is just some crazy tequila-fueled nightmare,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Maybe if I go to sleep now, I"ll wake up back in my apartment and none of this will have been real.”

Merry apparently found that funny, her eyes twinkling at me as she chuckled. “Come, Thána, you know in your heart what is real.” She tapped the box with her cane. “Open.”

“You"re awfully bossy for a woman I just met,” I muttered, but I dutifully pressed my thumb to the lock and the lock opened. I reached into the box and pulled out the book, opening it where the envelope had been stuck into it.

“You haven"t read it yet?” Merry asked, jabbing a finger at the envelope.

“No.” I still didn"t want to read it. Instead, I pointed to a picture. “Is this you?”

She leaned in, her eyes crinkling as one finger traced over the much younger face. “Ah yes. The woman beside me is your grandmother, my sister. Her name was Celene Edith. Now she was a powerful woman.”

I looked back at the picture. Celene Edith stood inches taller than Merry in the image, a rich-looking fur coat drawn around her. She was well-coiffed, her dark hair smoothed and shaped and swept up into a tidy knot while Merry beside her looked like she had crawled out of bed for the picture, her hair a wild mass of black curls.

“You should read the letter.”

Merry"s voice pulled me back from the picture and her finger poked the envelope closer to me.

“Maybe I don"t want to,” I responded. “What good could it do? It doesn"t change the fact that I was left abandoned with no memory of who I was.” The words sounded overly bitter, even in my ears. I was behaving like an adolescent.

I snatched the envelope and paced the room with it. Unopened, it was nothing significant, just some artifact of a long-forgotten past. Once it was opened, everything changed.

“I can tell you only that you were loved, child,” Merry said, her words softly hanging in the air between us. “Your mother saw no other recourse to keep you safe.”

“My mother?” I had long ago come to grips with the notion that either my parents were dead, victims of some horrific death that was so great I blocked it, and them, from my mind completely, or that they were heinous people who couldn"t be bothered with me.

Neither of them gave me great comfort, but it seemed easier than what Merry was saying, what secret this envelope held. “I can"t take you the next step on this journey until you"ve read the words your mother left for you,” Merry said.

I sighed and turned the envelope over. I was being silly. Just open it. I slipped a finger under the flap and broke the seal. A folded piece of paper was all the envelope contained. I pulled it out and unfolded it, turning to the light from the window to read it.