Page 17 of Silk Skullduggery (Haven Hollow #40)

“Can you help me get her to my car?” I asked.

“She can still walk,” Finn said hastily. “That’s how we got her to the couch. She can even do stairs, but we went slow.”

Between the three of us, we managed to shepherd Poppy to the car without any problems. Once she was safely buckled into place and I shut the door, I turned back to face Finn.

“No.”

He blinked at me, so pale his freckles stood out like sepia ink on his cheeks. “I didn’t say anything.”

“I know.” I put my weight on one leg, hip cocked to the side. “You were about to, though. You were going to demand to come too. And I said no.”

Finn opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off by lifting my hand. “I know what you’re going through—or I can imagine it,” I corrected myself. “But I need to focus on your mom right now. And whether you mean to or not, you will be a distraction to me, Finn. And I… we can’t afford that. So, you need to stay here.”

Again, all of it true. Finn represented one huge distraction, really. Because I knew Poppy would forgive me almost anything in the world. She wouldn’t forgive me for putting her son in danger for no reason, and I couldn’t blame her. And I knew that what I was planning to do—it was dangerous.

I looked Andre in the eye. “Will you stay with him?”

Andre stood behind Finn, hands on his shoulders, bracing. “Of course.”

That was one worry off my back, at least. Too bad about all the other ones I still had to deal with. With one last nod, I backed out of the driveway and headed for the coven house.

***

The curse strands were doing their best to latch onto my arm by the time I pulled into the gravel driveway of the coven house. I had to wrap my arm in strands of crimson magic to keep the demon threads from getting a grip as I escorted a still mostly comatose Poppy up the few steps and into the house.

I heard a sharp inhale as I came into the great room, and something clattered to the floor.

“What happened?” Imani cried as she hurried over. The book she’d been reading discarded on the rug.

I turned my body, blocking her from reaching out to Poppy. “Don’t touch her. You might get cursed, and I need your help with this.”

She stared, eyes wide, but nodded sharply.

I shuffled Poppy towards the couch, and I could tell by the way she was trembling, her pale complexion almost gray around her cheeks, that her energy was almost gone. I got her settled down, leaning into the softness of the cushions.

It was one thing I’d insisted on when we’d been setting the house up; furniture people might actually want to sit on. My mother had insisted on a pile of expensive, fashionable pieces at the Crescent City manor house, and it had all been thin and brittle and horribly uncomfortable. I’d hated it.

“Imani, could you please alert the coven? Tell everyone to get here as fast as they can. Tell Maverick to bring Taliyah, if he can. We need as much magical mojo as we can get.”

She nodded, the long coils of her hair sliding over her shoulders. Imani’s thumbs flew across the screen as she texted. “I think Olga and Betanya are upstairs. I sent them a message, but I’ll go up and get them as soon as I alert everyone else.”

I checked on Poppy, but there wasn’t any change. A lock of lank blond hair had fallen into her eyes, and I smoothed it back to tuck behind her ear. I knew it bothered her to have her hair in her face.

The curse clung when I pulled away, as if sensing its meal was almost spent, and with a truly vindictive flare of magic, I burnt the tendrils that were touching me.

Poppy twitched, and made a small sound, but didn’t otherwise react. I forced myself to breathe normally, to focus on what I was doing, but every moment bit at me like fire ants marching over my skin.

“Make sure everyone knows that the curse is contagious. It will latch onto you if you make contact.”

Imani nodded, distracted as she typed. “Got it.”

Once I was sure Poppy was as okay as she was going to be without magical interference, I got my own phone out.

Texting angry was harder than I thought it would be. My fingers were shaking just enough to make it hard to hit the buttons, and the urge to key smash was huge, but would ultimately be unhelpful.

The text I sent to Lorcan I wanted to make sure was flawless. I wanted him to read my perfectly articulated word choice, and my flawless grammar and punctuation, and understand exactly how much danger he was in if he chose to ignore me.

Lorcan. I don’t know what is going on with you lately, and I officially do not care at the moment. Something is very wrong. Poppy is in mortal danger, so get your ass to the coven house as soon as vampirically possible, or Goddess help you.

I saw the read notification and didn’t wait any further and I didn’t check for a reply. I shoved my phone into my pocket and stalked off to double check all the protections and wards on the house, and make sure that they were all in top order.

If everything went according to plan, we were going to have some unexpected company shortly.

By the time I made it back to the great room, the entire coven was arriving. Betanya had been the only one upstairs, studying the last shreds of the white silk and the lingering protections, in fact. Olga had been out, and was wearing a floaty dress, makeup and perfume and had her silver hair arranged in a braided crown around her head, which was alarming for several reasons. I just hoped she hadn’t been on a date. We all had enough to deal with without having to listen to her wax poetic about her newest beau.

Imani was sitting a careful distance from Poppy, speaking to her in a low voice. It reminded me of the tone she used when she was working. Imani owned a hair salon in town, but a very special one. The braiding, coloring, cutting and styling you could find at any upscale place. But only in Haven Hollow could you get blessings for love, or luck, or happiness woven into your hair along with the treatments.

When she had a client in the chair, Imani was very good at keeping up a one-sided conversation. Easy, light hearted chatter that didn’t require a lot of focus, or even a response, if they wanted to doze or relax into the luxury of being fussed over. And that was the same tone she used now.

I didn’t know if it was helping, or if Poppy could even hear her from wherever in her mind she’d retreated to, but some gentle words from a friend were rarely a bad decision, and I shot Imani a grateful look.

Maverick and Taliyah arrived together, neither looking very happy about things. Taliyah’s face, in particular, looked a bit like a thunder cloud. She was in full Police Chief mode, complete with the stance of sweeping her jacket back with her wrists to rest her hands on her belt, not so subtly shoving off and drawing attention to her badge. I didn’t even know if she was aware that she was doing it, or if it had just become habit, held over from when she was a homicide detective in Portland.

Before the two of them could descend on me, demanding answers and who knew what else, Lorcan arrived. His hair was windblown, like he’d run the entire distance between work and the coven house to get here.

It hadn’t quite hit me, the fact that I hadn’t seen him in person in days, until he was standing right there in front of me in slacks and a button up, smelling of fresh night air. He reached out a hand to me, hesitating, like he wasn’t sure of his welcome.

I was tired of being strong for everyone else. Yes, I was an adult, and yes, I was the High Witch of the coven, but it had been a truly rotten few days, and the stress of having to make hard decisions while my closest friend was being slowly smothered by some demon’s spell was taking a significant toll on me.

I took two steps forward and all but threw myself into Lorcan’s arms. Feeling him real and solid, having his arms close around me as I buried my face into the soft cotton of his shirt, it brought an uncomfortable prickling to my eyes. Probably something to do with the fabric softener. You just couldn’t trust the grocery brands.

I finally leaned back after an endless moment, but I didn’t fully pull away. I gave Lorcan a searching look, checking him over, but nothing was out of place. There was no particular tension around his eyes. He met my gaze squarely, so no real sign of a guilty conscience, or anything I really needed to worry about. The spider demon still had the place of honor on my crap to get done list.

Lorcan gave me a little squeeze as I looked him over. He must have really run all the way, because he hadn’t even bothered to put on his jacket or anything. I noticed he had remembered to put on the watch he’d gotten from the auction, though.

I gave him a stern look. “I don’t know what’s up with you recently, but I have this to deal with right now, so I’m not going to get into it with you. But if you think you’re going to disappear after this is done and not talk to me other than through texts and cheesy pictures, you married the wrong witch.”

Lorcan winced, looking apologetic. I held his gaze for another moment, just to really drive my point home. Also, because being held by him reminded me just how much I’d missed having him to rely on. We had days of backlog to catch up on, and the second the spider demon was taken care of and Poppy was safe, you’d better believe that I was going to be cashing in.

Taliyah was radiating impatience like a glacier radiated cold, so I peeled myself away from Lorcan, who still hadn’t said a thing, and he better not have been thinking I didn’t notice that little quirk, because it was noted, and I headed over to where she and Maverick were hovering.

“Wanda.” Taliyah converged on me the instant I moved towards her. “What is going on?”

I took a deep breath and proceeded to word vomit everything I’d found out or figured out on my own ever since I’d managed to bully Ethan from the auction house into sending me the notes. It wasn’t actually all that much, but it was enough for me to sketch out the plan I’d come up with. Calling it a ‘plan’ was maybe being a little bit generous. It was more of a hail Mary pass, but Poppy wasn’t going to be able to hang on much longer, and I would cheerfully commit felony arson before I let some jumped up arachnid hurt her.

“So, we’re taking this thing down tonight.” Taliyah’s eyes were cold, and the way the sentence ended flatly turned it from a question to a statement. “No more victims.”

“That’s the plan.” I turned just a little so that I could call back over my shoulder. “Betanya, you have the silk?”

She held up the sad little grocery store bag full of scraps. “What’s left of it. It really is mostly threads, with a few smaller patches here and there.”

I’d thought that might be the case, but that was fine, we’d deal with it. I took the bag from her and stuck my hand into the fragile nest of silk threads, cool and slippery against my skin. If I concentrated and really looked for it, I could still feel the ghost of the protective spells woven right into the fabric, coating every strand.

Part of me wished I could speak to the witch who had first done the enchanting. It was a master’s work. I’d seen some impressive things done with textiles in my day, a lot of them done by myself, of course. Maverick was incredible when it came to embroidered spells, and that had made the world of difference when it came to the things sold in Wanda’s Witchery. But neither of us could pull off something as complex and truly stunning as the white silk. And to think that they’d done it not only under stress, but with their entire village under attack by a ravenous spider demon. That kind of work should have taken years to make. Every stitch was well thought out and carefully tugged into place.

There was absolutely no way we were going to be able to recreate the original trap. I was fantastic with clothes. Making them, altering them, enchanting them, I was your girl. But I also started with fabric, even when I sewed one-of-a-kind commissions. I’d never woven a darn thing in my life. I didn’t even know how to use a loom. Did people still even use looms? I had no clue.

And Maverick was incredible with an embroidery needle, but without fabric to anchor it, there wasn’t much point. The fact was, we were going to have to improvise, and just hope for the best. In my defense, it was a tried-and-true Haven Hollow method for most of our problems.

I turned back to face the room, and I was a little taken aback by the intensity I was met with. Every eye was on me, other than Poppy’s, who was still staring into the middle distance, her eyes only half-open. But every witch was tense and waiting, their faces set into grim lines. They reminded me a little of hunting dogs just itching to be let off their chains.

Say what you would about the covens, and I certainly had. They could be back-biting, spiteful, controlling in their conformity, and we often made enemies as easily as someone made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But everyone in the supernatural community knew one very important fact.

If you came for one member of a coven, you’d have to face all of them.

As nasty and catty as we could be to each other, no witch would sit back and let an outsider go after one of her sisters. We were a united front against the world, our magic twined together for the benefit and protection of all.

Poppy might not have been a witch, but she was a member of Circle Scapegrace, and no one in that room was happy that some creepy crawler decided that she was an available meal.

The Tsuchigumo had made a big mistake coming after one of us. Because now the fury of an entire coven, the scrappiest, most defiant coven I’d ever heard of, was going to come full force right down on its head.

No one messed with my people. It was time to make that very clear.

“Alright everyone,” I said to the room. My smile was nothing more than a flash of barred teeth. “Here’s the plan.”