“And then what?”
“What do you mean ‘and then what’?” It wasn’t quite warm enough. I reached for the fan dial.
“Give it a second. It’s a temperature control, not an on/off switch.” Ted slapped my hand away again. “Once you find out, what will you do? And will it make any difference?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t see that we have any choice.”
“This isn’t your fight.” Emilia’s sleepy voice came out of the backseat. “It’s mine. You should take me back to Elmville before it’s too late.”
We had been having variations on this basic conversational theme for a while. I couldn’t see leaving Emilia to the tender mercies of whatever fate had in store for her. Plus, I was pissed as hell that someone she trusted was using her and had used me. I was a little tired of being a pawn in someone else’s game.
“Not gonna happen.” Something was wrong. I was comfortable. I looked down at the temperature dials and over at Ted. “How did you do that?”
“It requires a little patience.” He leaned back in the seat and smiled at me. “You’ll never be able to do it.”
I didn’t argue. So I asked the question that had been bothering me the most. “Emilia, why would your
mentora
want to screw you over like this?” Because there was no doubt in my mind that that was exactly what was happening.
Who had guided Emilia to make the voodoo dolls? Who knew where they were hidden? Rosalinda.
The question was why. And what was she doing playing tonsil hockey with a boy half her age?
I HAD BEEN RIGHT ABOUT NORAH. SHE’D HAD NO PROBLEM with the idea of letting Emilia stay with us. I’d even come completely clean about the whole being-cursed thing.
“I’ll look some protection spells up in the grimoire. Maybe I can help keep us all safe.” She spread a thick layer of organic natural peanut butter on a piece of whole-grain toast. It did not look appetizing. It looked bumpy. I don’t like my sandwiches to be bumpy. But she was eating, which was nice.
“Thanks.” I hesitated, not sure how to bring up what had happened here in the apartment. “How are you doing?”
She licked the peanut butter off her lips and smiled. “I’m fine. Never better.”
“Really?” I pressed.
“Really. It’s a little like finding out that ice cream is actually good for you.”
I raised my eyebrows, not sure I understood.
“You know how much I love ice cream?”
I did. Norah adored ice cream. It was one of her only vices. She fought it like the devil, but sometimes she just couldn’t take it anymore and she’d dive into a half gallon of Super Fudge Chunk or Rocky Road and not come up for air until it was gone. She’d moan about it for days afterward.
“I wanted him like I want ice cream. I fought wanting him. I didn’t want to want him, but I did, Melina. Desperately. It terrified me. You know I can’t fight the ice cream craving forever. I was afraid it was going to be just like that, but this time the regret was going to be much, much worse.”
I could see that.
“But it’s not like that.”
“How is it, then?” I asked.
“It’s . . . sweet.” She smiled.
Sweet had not been what I expected. Hot. Steamy. Erotic. Dangerous. Those I’d expected. Not sweet.
She threw her arms around me and gave me one of her warm hugs. “I’m okay. It’s okay. You don’t have to worry.”
It was a little like telling me I didn’t have to breathe, but I’d give it a try.
We went out to the living room, where Emilia and Meredith waited for us.
“Have you heard anything more from Paul?” I asked Meredith.
She shook her head. “Tell me a little more about this
mentora
of yours.” Meredith sat down on the futon couch.
“She’s a very powerful
bruja
. Very wise and very strong. She’s taught me so much.” Emilia’s eyes began to fill with tears. “I don’t understand why she’s doing this to me.”
Meredith took Emilia’s hands in hers. I saw her jump a bit and then settle down. “You’re quite powerful yourself,” she said.
Emilia smiled. “It was like a miracle when I met Rosalinda. Always I’d had these feelings inside me, this sense of things that needed to burst out of me. Sometimes they were so strong, but I had no idea what to do with them. She taught me how to channel that energy, how to use it, how to help people with it.”
“How did you find her?” Meredith wasn’t letting go of Emilia’s hands.
“She came into the café where I work one day. I waited on her. When she was leaving, she asked me if I knew what I was. She left her card and said that if I wanted to know, I should call her. If she hadn’t stopped in when I was working, I don’t know if we would have ever met. It has been the happiest coincidence of my life.”
Meredith took a deep breath in and let it out, then she released Emilia’s hands. “I doubt it was a coincidence. I’m also surprised she didn’t chase you out of town right away.”
“Why would she have done that?”
“Emilia, you must know, you’re a very powerful witch. I have a feeling that your Rosalinda doesn’t like to share much and you’re in her territory. Has she ever had any other students?”
Emilia shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
Meredith made a funny noise in the back of her throat. “Is Rosalinda a healer like you?”
Emilia’s eyes flew open. “How did you know I was a healer?”
Meredith smiled. “I can feel it from you. Can you tell what I do best?”
Emilia shut her eyes. Then she smiled. “You protect things, don’t you?”
“I do, indeed.” Meredith smiled back at her. “What does Rosalinda do? What’s her specialty?”
“Mainly potions, but she’s done a bit of everything.”
Meredith turned to me. “And you saw her with a much younger lover?”
“It sure looked that way to me. He’s no more than seventeen or eighteen and she’s a woman near forty. What does that mean? Besides the fact that Rosalinda is totally skeezy.” And has terrible taste in men. Teenaged boys? Eesh. I remember what my brother and his friends were like at that age. Let’s just say that hygiene wasn’t high on their list.
Meredith chewed on a fingernail. “Relationships like that don’t tend to be equal. One participant is always the student and one is always the teacher. There’s an imbalance in power. When a sexual relationship is imbalanced, well, skeezy is the least unpleasant thing it can be.”
“Do you think she’s abusing him?” I asked.
“I think the relationship is abusive by its very nature. I also think that Rosalinda is very interested in making sure she’s always the one in power in all her relationships.” She turned back to Emilia. “She knew you were in her town. She didn’t show up at the café when you were working by accident. She felt your presence, as you would feel the presence of a powerful witch moving to your town. She was seeking you out.”
Emilia thought about that for a moment. “And if she was? Why is that so bad?”
“It wouldn’t have been if she’d been honest with you and told you that. Instead she began your relationship with subterfuge and I doubt anything much has changed.”
Emilia started to protest. Meredith held her palm up to stop her. “She wasn’t there to teach you. She was there to control you and I’m guessing you’ve gotten to be more witch than she can handle.”
“Do you think it was her plan from the start?” I asked. “To get Emilia to kill those boys?”
Meredith shook her head. “No. I’m sure she was looking for Emilia’s weakness from the start. She was undoubtedly looking for ways that she could manipulate her or things that made her weak, like her anger and hatred for the boys who killed her cousin. But there’s a piece to the puzzle I’m sure we don’t have yet, something that put everything in motion. It doesn’t matter, though. We need to figure out a way to turn Rosalinda’s manipulations back on her before Emilia ends up dead.”
“I won’t curse someone again,” Emilia said quietly.
“Of course not,” I said. I gestured toward her burned arm. “We’ve all seen how great that works out.”
“It’s not just that. When I made those dolls . . . I found a darkness inside myself, one I didn’t know existed before. When I poured all that hatred into those dolls, I felt that darkness grow.”
Meredith took Emilia’s hands again. “We all have some darkness in us. Don’t be ashamed of it. It’s part of all of us. Without the dark, there can be no light. The important thing is that you know it’s there. You can learn to use its power—and, make no mistake, it is very powerful. You can’t let it reign over you, though. Not without ending up like Rosalinda.”
“So what do we do? How do we counteract what Rosalinda is doing?” I asked.
Meredith sat back in the papasan chair and chewed on her lower lip. Emilia sat and looked at her hands.
Norah said, “I have an idea. What if we tried to counteract it with love?”
I put my head in my hands. It was such a typically Norah suggestion. In some ways, I was relieved. She was getting back to being herself. It’s what I’d wanted, after all, for things to be like they used to be. On the other hand, her charmingly naïve view of the world still made me want to weep. I looked up, trying to figure out a nice way to tell her that that was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard, to find Meredith and Emilia staring at her, mouths agape.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Meredith said.
“
Claro que si
,” Emilia said.
I stared at all three of them and tried to figure out if the entire world had gone crazy.
Which was when my door flew open and Sophie ran in, threw herself in my arms and started to cry.
IT TOOK FIVE MINUTES TO CALM SOPHIE DOWN ENOUGH SO that she could talk. “Are you hurt?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“Angry?”
Again, a negative.
“Sad?”
Nope. That apparently wasn’t it either.
Emilia came in with a cup of tea and handed it to Sophie. She took two sips, sat up straight and said, “I made the delivery.”
It took me a few seconds to remember. It was Wednesday. The day she was supposed to go back up into the mountains to deliver the axe to Ginnar.
Meredith sat down next to her. “Tell us all about it.”
“Well, I did it just like I did last time. I let the axe guide me. It didn’t take me to the same clearing.” She looked over at me.
“It’s fine. If it worked, it was fine,” I reassured her.
She gave me a quick nervous smile. “It worked. It worked great. This time, I set it on the ground like you said. It took about an hour, but he came and got it. And you’re not going to believe this part!”
I didn’t believe that anything happened that I wouldn’t believe. I’ve been doing this for a while. I’ve seen a few things. “I’m listening.”
“He said thank you!” She clapped her hands together.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You did a great job, Sophie. Just great.”
She sprang up and gave me a quick hug. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a Spanish test tomorrow I have to study for.”
She was out the door in a flash. We all sat for a moment.
“I have a plan.” Emilia said it so quietly, it hardly seemed like much of a declaration, but it stopped all of us in our tracks.
“Do tell.” I sat down on the futon couch. I was all ears because I pretty much had nothing. Just because I could figure out how a Messenger should deliver an axe, didn’t mean I could figure out how to take down a
bruja
.
“Rosalinda has done her damage. Bossard, Rawley and Littlefield are dead. I can’t change that now.” She sunk the heels of her hands into her eyes then started to speak again, although her voice was rusty. “I won’t let her get rid of me, though. Not this way.”
“Okay. But how are you going to make it stop? I don’t think we can just tell the cosmic forces that you didn’t mean any harm with those dolls. You can’t just go into the cemetery at midnight and yell out a ‘my bad’ and have them say okay.”
“I know. I need to put out a different energy to the world. I put a lot of hatred into those dolls. What if I filled a doll with an equivalent amount of love and put that out into the universe? Just like Norah suggested. Maybe it would balance out the hatred.”
I looked over at Meredith.
She took a second to think it over, biting ever so gently at her lower lip. Finally, she said, “I’ve heard of worse plans. Who would you give the doll to?”
“Rosalinda,” Emilia said, with no hesitation.
A slow smile spread across Meredith’s face. “I like it. Not only are you sending love out into the world, hoping it will come back threefold to yourself, you’re also neutralizing some of her hatred and envy by deflecting it with love.”
“And respect,” Emilia added.
“It’s diabolical in its niceness.” Meredith chuckled. “What do you need for the doll?”
“Not much,” Emilia said. “Some muslin, some thread and some felt.”
Fabulous. I could pick all that up at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Maybe they would start a special voodoo doll section over by the scrapbooking supplies.
“What kind of tools will you need?” Meredith asked.
“Not much,” Emilia said. “A knife, an egg, some candles. Nothing fancy.”
“Any special kind of knife?”
“Not really.” She grinned. “Our practices grew under the watchful eye of the Spaniards. We were better off if our tools were things you could find in any kitchen anywhere. It made us safer.”
“Anything else?”
She bit her lip. “Yes. I need something of Rosalinda’s. Something truly of her. A lock of hair. A fingernail.”
“That’s going to be fun to get. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions on an easy place to pick those items up,” I said.
“Sadly, no. Rosalinda is very careful with items from her person and warned me to do the same. It wouldn’t be good to have a
bruja
fall under someone else’s influence. We’ll have to break into her house to get what we need.”