“Xander thinks voodoo’s power is mostly in the herbology and root work,” Claire explained to Eddie and Therese. “Kind of like homeopathic medicine with a little bit of conjured energy stirred in.”
“Okay,” Eddie said, “but if magic and medicine can mix to make something beneficial, why can’t it mix to make something harmful? How is it any different from modern medicine, which can heal, but can also destroy if used in the wrong way?”
“I don’t know,” Xander admitted. “I guess I haven’t given much thought to black magic.”
Therese gave a forlorn sigh.
“What?”
“Just . . . you guys are a long way from your roots, that’s all.”
Xander flushed a little. Claire lowered her eyes back to the book in front of her, wondering why more and more, it seemed Eddie, and now Therese, was the voice of reason.
The light from outside—already minimal when they’d arrived—had faded to gray by the time they finished all the books in the back room. Therese had long since gone back to work at the front of the store. Claire stood up and stretched. She’d made a list on her phone of spells involving blood and had stacked the books containing them on the floor so they wouldn’t get mixed back in with the others.
“What did you get?” Eddie asked her.
She looked at her phone. “Something to boil the blood, something to turn it to ash, and one recipe that seemed to stop it from flowing.”
“Could that be it?” Xander asked. “I mean, if you turned blood cold enough, it might not move through someone’s veins.”
“Anything’s possible,” Eddie said. “But without the original spell or something clearly pointing to Cold Blood, there’s no way to know for sure.”
“What did you guys find?” Claire asked them.
She listened while they checked their respective lists. Although some of the spells were freaky enough to give Claire chills, nothing came up that could be clearly interpreted as Cold Blood.
Allegra crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Now what? There has to be somewhere else we can look.”
Claire realized how surreal her world had become as they all turned to Eddie. Just a few days ago, they had thought he was some crazy Guild outcast. Now he was the only one really helping them.
“Let me talk to Therese,” he said. “Maybe she can ask around some of the more . . . unconventional channels.”
“Now that sounds intriguing,” Allegra said.
“That’s one word for it,” Eddie said wryly.
Eddie filled Therese in on their failed search, and she agreed do some digging for information on the Cold Blood spell. They said good-bye and headed back to Eddie’s car in the twilight, the sun almost completely lost behind the looming overpass.
Claire gazed out the window as they drove back to the Cup to pick up their cars. She thought about the Cold Blood spell, wondering what had happened to it. How could such a powerful spell, one that struck fear even in Marie, just disappear into the vapor of history?
She glanced at Sasha and turned back to the window with her heart in her throat. The Drummonds and hers were the only families left to suffer a break-in.
They were almost out of time.
They parted at the Cup and agreed to touch base the next day. Eddie waited for Sasha and Allegra to drive off before turning to Claire and Xander.
“You be careful now,” Eddie said. “And I don’t just mean on the drive home.”
Claire had one foot in Xander’s car when she remembered something. “Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“You never told us what you were seeing. In your dream about me?”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he walked back toward them, stopping when he was right in front of Claire.
He sighed, his eyes dark with regret. “The Houngan was bleeding you. And your blood was being used to kill the others.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Claire had dinner with her parents and then went upstairs. She tried to read, but her eyes skimmed over the words, her brain absorbing nothing. She read the same page four times before she gave up and set the book aside.
She lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Marie. The letters left no doubt that at least one version of the Cold Blood spell had been hers.
And yet she’d hidden it well.
Other than rumors, no one had even heard of it. If Therese couldn’t find anything out through her mysterious “unconventional channels,” the firstborns were in serious trouble.
Claire turned over the possibilities in her mind, grasping at anything that might give them answers. Anywhere the spell might be recorded.
But she came up empty, and after what seemed like forever, she finally got up and walked across the room. She searched the floor around her desk and armoire until she caught a flash of red peeking out from under the wardrobe.
Bending down, she picked up the gris-gris bag she’d thrown across the floor a couple of nights before. She lifted it to her nose, the scent of sage and verbena and the underlying smell of the Solomon’s seal chips still strong.
She took it back to her bed and put it under her pillow. Then she lay down, recalling the words to the Insight spell and murmuring them into the darkness.
Claire moved through the hall, not of her usual house, but of another, smaller home that felt welcoming even though it was unfamiliar.
Candles flickered from the sconces on the wall, frankincense heavy in the air. She followed the smell, coming to a small room off the main hall. Soft golden light reached to her from within. She stepped into the room.
The first thing she noticed was the altar on top of a table in the corner. Candles of every color and several wax dolls sat atop a fringed cloth as the smoke from a stick of incense coiled into the air. The plaster walls were cracked in places, but the room was comfortable and warm with flames emanating heat from the fireplace.
The rustling of paper forced Claire’s attention to the writing table against the wall. A woman sat there, long black braids snaking down her back as she bent her head to something on the desk, her hand moving swiftly back and forth. She muttered softly as she wrote.
Claire moved closer, aware that she was dreaming and would not be seen. As soon as she looked over the woman’s shoulder, she understood. The woman was writing not on paper, but in a book. Claire recognized the script, both from the letters they’d found and the spell book that felt more familiar than ever.
It was her great-great-grandmother Marie.
She finished her writing with a flourish and stood, leaving the book open on the writing table as she crossed to the altar. Claire caught a glimpse of the page on which she’d been writing.
A Plea to the Loas
Claire wanted to finish reading what was on the page, but Marie commanded her attention as she picked up a chunky dish on top of the altar. She began choosing things from the table, throwing them into the dish so quickly that Claire could barely follow her movements.
She ground the ingredients together before lifting a tiny carafe and tipping it over the stone bowl. A stream of glistening oil poured into the mixture. Marie again mixed everything together before turning to a pewter pitcher, pouring a clear liquid from it into the dish.
When she’d again mixed everything together, she picked a brush up from the table and carried it, together with the stone bowl, back to the writing table.
She sat down and began brushing the mixture over the script. Claire watched in fascination as the words began to fade. Marie was still brushing toward the bottom of the page when the top half disappeared completely.
By the time she leaned back to survey her work, the entire page was blank.