Page 25 of Spellbound

“Stop all that blubbering,” said the witch. "It won't do you a bit of good."

~Hansel and Gretl, a Grimm’s Fairy Tale

I wound up spending the night, though we didn’t do much talking after all.

He pan-fried the steaks, which were delicious.

And he had already baked the potatoes in the microwave.

I made us a salad, and we sat at the bar to eat and drink wine.

Mostly, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, and as soon as we loaded the dishwasher, we wound up going back to his bed.

At some point, way in the night, his cell phone rang, and it must have been Rosalyn, wanting to know if I was with him.

He told her I was, and I turned over and went back to sleep.

When I woke up, with the sun streaming in the windows, the smell of coffee led me out to the kitchen. He was at the stove and turned to look at me as I came out.

I came up behind him and slipped my arms around his waist. “You should have woke me up.”

“You looked too peaceful. Besides, it’s just eggs and sausage. Sit down and have some.”

“Oh, I don’t usually eat breakfast.”

“That’s why you’re so thin,” he said, setting a plate down on the counter in front of me. “Eat that.”

“And if I don’t want to?”

He leaned over and gave me a long, toe-curling kiss. “You’ll do it anyway,” he whispered against my lips. “I want to talk to you again after breakfast, and you’ll need your strength.”

“Talk about what?” I said, taking a bite to humor him.

“Now that you’re not being oppressed by that curse—which we still have to talk about, by the way—I want you to tell me about your mother’s death.”

I put down my fork and glared at him.

He simply leaned over and kissed me again, ending with a bite of my bottom lip.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“For sticking out that bottom lip in a pout. You look about five when you do that.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“No problem,” he said and kissed me again and gave me another little nip. “I told you I could eat you up, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I got up, pretending to be mad though I really wasn’t, and he caught me before I made it three steps away and brought me back to my seat, feeling me up thoroughly as he did.

We spent the rest of the morning that way, along with cleaning up the kitchen.

I was having fun for the first time in a while, and that’s why I hated it so much when he took me by the hand and led me over to the couch to sit down with me.

“Do you feel ready to talk about it now? You’re not being oppressed anymore, so it should be easier on you.”

“I-I guess so. I really do hate talking about it.”

“I know, honey. Let’s get it over with so we don’t have to do this again.”

“Okay. Fire away. Ask me what you like.”

“Did your mother ever hurt you? Did she hit you or abuse you in any way?”

I lifted my shoulders a little. “It depends on what you mean by abuse. She slapped me a couple of time when she got annoyed. She locked me in my room occasionally. And in the storage room a couple of times.”

“For how long?”

“Not long. A few hours. I never believed she’d really hurt me. She just wanted me to do what she asked. And I kept telling her no.”

“What did she want you to do?”

I sighed. “She wanted me to summon a demon.”

Ben gasped at that, and his brow furrowed. “Why on earth did she want you to do that?”

“She wanted things, and she didn’t have enough power to do it herself. She said that she read in a book of magic that if you needed more power, you could make a demon do things for you.”

“What kind of things did she want?”

“The usual, I guess. Money, nice clothes, power…. It was mostly about money. She liked nice things, but it was never enough. If my dad bought her diamonds, she’d want emeralds.

Or bigger diamonds. I think her family had been really poor when she was growing up.

She’d tell me, ‘You could do it if you wanted to, but you won’t. Because your father told you not to!’”

“Is that right? Did your father tell you not to?”

“Yes.”

He took my hand in his and looked directly into my eyes. “Did you kill her, Ash?”

I didn’t say anything at first, and he brushed his lips against my cheek. “I need to know, honey. No matter what you tell me, it won’t change the way I feel about you. I know you were young.”

“I never felt all that young. Around that house, I grew up fast. And I knew right from wrong. What she wanted was wrong. But in a way, I-I guess I killed her, but I didn’t mean to.” I sighed because it was such a bad memory—her face changing so fast and going so white and still.

“Tell me what happened.”

“Like I said, I didn’t mean for her to get hurt. I was just trying to get rid of the demon or whatever it was that she conjured up.”

“How did she finally manage that?”

“She used a spell someone had given her—another witch.”

“She actually managed to conjure one up?”

“Not her. It was the other witch. But then my mother couldn’t control it. It wanted to kill us.”

“Okay, back up. Tell me about this other witch.”

“I don’t know who it was. I can’t picture their face. I think they obscured it so I couldn’t see them very well.”

“Why didn’t this other witch just do it for her?”

“They didn’t have enough power either, my mother said. They even tried to do the spell together and it just brought up a lot of yellow, bad-smelling smoke.”

“But they thought you had enough power to do it?”

He nodded. “They knew I did. And I did too. ”

“Where did she come from? Was she a friend of your mother’s?”

“I think so. I really don’t know. She had the spell all written out for me and all I had to do was read it. I told her I couldn’t. I was scared to do that, because a demon could kill us! Dad said it would!”

“Calm down, Ash.” I sent him some soothing energy, and he took a deep breath and sighed.

“Your dad knew about this?”

“My mother had been asking him to do it for her. Dad wouldn’t do it, though. He told me she might try to get me to do it and what to say if she did. He made me go over and over the words with him.

“But that night, they set up the board and read the spell the other witch had brought. The air got thick and felt like when you go up in an airplane and your ears are full. Then it looked like all the shadows in the room started swarming together like-like bees do in a cartoon, and it suddenly appeared right in the middle of them. It was big and ugly and standing on its hind legs, which weren’t human, but more like a goat’s legs.

It had black fur and huge, gnarly hooves.

The worst thing was its face. It was like something out of a horror movie.

Rotten teeth and a wide, flat nose, and solid black eyes with no whites at all.

And two curved, black horns, growing out of its forehead.

My mother tried to talk to it, but it just started…

tearing at her.” I began to choke a little as the bile filled my throat.

I could see it all again plainly in my mind’s eye, as that thing started ripping her apart .

“The other witch backed up against the wall and didn’t even try to help her. She left me to do it.”

“What did you do?” he asked softly.

I was sitting beside him, and he put his arm around me. I shuddered and wiped my face. “It was awful. That smell in the room, like rotten eggs.”

“That’s brimstone—Sulphur. Can you tell me what happened then?”

“I threw that thing off her.”

“ You did?” His voice sounded incredulous, but that was what happened. I grabbed its arm, and its skin felt like sandpaper. I pulled as hard as I could to make it stop, to get it off her.

“The demon shouted and flung my mother away and she went flying back and hit the wall, but I shoved that fucking thing as hard as I could and it soared back to hell where it came from, using the words my dad told me to use. I screamed them in its ugly face as it got back up to come after me again, and it-it just disappeared. But as I said those words, the other witch flew at me like she wanted to stop me from getting rid of it, and I started hitting them too I flung them away like I did the demon. My mother managed to get to her feet, and she went after them herself, but the witch said some words and my mother just-just dropped.” He covered his face with his hands.

“I ran over to her, but she wasn’t breathing.

She was all limp and I tried to wake her up, but I knew she was gone. She was dead.”

“The witch killed her.”

I shrugged.

“Ash, why didn’t you tell your father what had happened? Why did you let them think you killed her and let them bind your powers?”

“I don’t remember much about all that.”

“You must have been in shock.”

“Maybe.”

“What happened with the other witch? Did they just leave?”

“I-I honestly don’t remember.”

****

Ben

He’d been though a lot, and I hated to keep asking questions, but I really did want this to be over for him. The old saying was that the truth would set you free. He deserved a little freedom from worrying about all this, and I wanted to give it to him. I had to keep pushing him for answers.

“Have you ever seen this other witch again?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, they had something over their face. It made them look blurry.”

An obfuscation spell? Did this witch think Asher might recognize them otherwise?

“Can we stop now? I’m tired.”

I kissed his forehead and held him close. I needed to process what he told me, because this changed everything.

That other witch—whoever it had been—had spelled him not to remember.

Whoever it was didn’t have the power to kill him, I believed, or else his body would have been found alongside his mother’s.

That witch, whoever it had been, had left Asher—a nine-year-old child—there to take the blame and stood by saying nothing as the Council called him a warlock and discussed putting him to death for killing his own mother.

If it was the last thing I ever did, I would find that motherfucker and kill them for that.