I’d only meant to vent some of my anger at Adelaide. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, she had a knack for making me feel small and inferior. I knew now that part of her attitude toward me stemmed from shame at my father’s fey ancestry. Like many anti-fey witches, she believed that a union between witch and fey canceled out both powers. But that didn’t excuse the cold, loveless environment in which she’d raised me after my parents died—or her conspiring with the nephilim to destroy my town. I didn’t expect, though, to see those feelings of shame and smallness reflected in her own eyes.
“I am not here at their bidding,” she said loudly. She lifted her hand to smooth her already immaculate hair, and I noticed that the fingers were bent and knotted. Her arthritis, which had been cured with Aelvesgold, was back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked coldly. “Did they cut off your supply of Aelvesgold? Is that why you’re here? Well, you’re just going to have to use Motrin and Bengay. There’s no more Aelvesgold here.” That wasn’t entirely true. I knew that there was a whole lump of the stuff—an Aelvestone—in the headwaters of the Undine, but that was meant to nourish the undine eggs I’d moved there this summer, and I wasn’t about to tell anyone about that. “The nephilim have sucked all remaining traces of it out of Fairwick.”
“Yes, they did to us, as well,” Adelaide said, her voice tremulous. I peered into her face. My grandmother had looked much the same from my earliest memories on, never seeming to age a bit, yet now her face was creased with a network of fine lines that looked like cracks in a dry desert. She looked as if all the moisture—and life—had been sucked out of the marrow of her bones.
“To all of us,” one of the women behind her said, stepping forward. The voice, with its gravelly Australian accent, was familiar. It sounded like that of Jen Davies, a reporter I’d met last fall when she exposed my roommate Phoenix’s fraudulent memoir and who, I’d later learned, was a junior member of the Grove. But this couldn’t be Jen Davies. Jen, a Jivamukti yoga enthusiast and marathon runner, was a paragon of physical fitness. This woman was at least two inches shorter, stooped, and gray haired.
“Yeah, it’s me,” the woman said with a self-deprecating laugh that turned into a cough. “What? You thought I got that ass just by doing yoga?”
“Jen? What happened to you? To all—” My mouth dropped open as I saw the third person in the group. “Phoenix?” I asked incredulously. The last time I’d seen my former roommate, she was being sedated and dragged off to a mental hospital, shortly after Jen Davies had exposed her bestselling memoir as fraudulent.
“I looked for you after you left the hospital,” I said, feeling guilty that I hadn’t tried harder. “But your mother wouldn’t tell me where you were. I was afraid …”
“That I’d gone off on a bender?” Phoenix asked, smoothing back her abundant crinkly hair. She’d let it go completely gray—a pale platinum silver that somehow suited her. In fact, she looked remarkably well, especially in comparison with Adelaide and Jen—who, I noticed now, was leaning heavily on Phoenix’s arm. “Well, I did,” she said, answering her own question. “I was holed up in a hotel room in Hoboken until Jen found me and took me to this marvelous Grove retreat in—” At a glance from Jen, she closed her mouth, but only for half a second. “That’s right, I’m not supposed to say. It’s kind of a spa for witches who have gone through traumatic events. Jen got me in even though I’m not a witch. Your friends were right about that, by the way. I didn’t have an ounce of magic in me—at least not then—but that turned out to be a good thing when those monsters attacked.”
“The nephilim attacked a Grove retreat?” I asked. “But why? I thought you were all in cahoots.”
Jen laughed at the phrase, but the laugh turned into a hacking cough. “We’ll tell you all about it, but your grandmother’s right, you know?”
I looked at her blankly.
“You really ought to offer her—and all of us—some tea and”—she looked past me toward the counter—“some of those scrumptious-looking pumpkin muffins. I’m famished … and it’s a long story.”
Phoenix insisted we all have a hot beverage before she began the story. She asked for a soy chai latte for Jen, and Earl Grey with milk and sugar for Adelaide. She had Frank move Adelaide’s chair three times to make sure she wasn’t seated in a draft, then settled a fluffy mohair shawl around my grandmother’s shoulders. Then Phoenix asked Leon if he could make her a hazelnut half-decaf latte with half skim, half whole milk and just a smidgen of whipped cream on top.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, winking at me. “That sounds like the order of a manic-depressive, doesn’t it?”
“Well …” I hemmed and hawed. I was still too shocked at watching Phoenix tend to my imperious grandmother as if she were her own beloved granny—and at my grandmother for tolerating the treatment—to be thinking anything at all about Phoenix’s coffee order. But now that she mentioned it …
She laughed. “I know! But, honestly, it was being bipolar that saved my life.”
“And mine,” Jen said, laying a gaunt hand on Phoenix’s. “If you hadn’t been there when the nephilim attacked, I would have been killed.”
“What happened?” Moondance asked.
Phoenix opened her mouth to begin, but Adelaide laid a hand over hers and she instantly stopped. I’d never seen Phoenix so easily silenced.
“I think I should tell it,” Adelaide said, in a heavy, throaty voice I’d never heard from her before. As she began, I realized that the unfamiliar tone was regret.
“After we left Fairwick this summer, we repaired to the retreat. Closing the door was a monumental effort for us.” She glanced at me and blanched. “You underestimate your own strength, Callie. We had to fight your will to work the closing spell.”
“I thought it was the nephilim who closed the door,” I said, blinking away a tear at the memory of Bill’s blood pouring through my fingers, his mortality evidence of my love for him, which had come too late to save him.
“The nephilim have no control over the door,” Adelaide replied. “That is their one weakness. When they were banished from Faerie, their fey magic was destroyed—except the Aelvesgold in their wings. The fey took pity on them and left them that, although some say it wasn’t pity but cruel irony that they would leave the nephilim with Aelvesgold but without the ability to use it. If they’d known how the nephilim would use their Aelvesgold, the fey would have done it differently. Since the time of the witch hunts, the nephilim have bribed witches to do their bidding with the promise of Aelvesgold. I’m afraid that we were foolish enough to succumb to their bribery.”
“And what’s different now?” Moondance asked.
“They betrayed us,” Adelaide answered. “When we left here, we went to a sanctuary to recoup our powers. The nephilim knew we were at our weakest. They attacked our compound and spread their narcotic incense throughout, rendering all our number unconscious. And then they began to devour us.”
“Devour?” I heard Leon and Moondance repeat the word at the same time I did.
“I don’t know what else to call it,” Adelaide said, her face white. “They spread their wings over their victims first. They have barbs beneath their feathers, thousands of tiny needle-like barbs …” Adelaide shuddered, and Phoenix took up the story.
“I saw the whole thing. I was in my six A.M. yoga class when everybody just keeled over in the middle of a sun salutation. For some reason, I was immune.”
“We think perhaps because of her particular brain wiring,” Jen said.
“Who’d have thunk it? My screwy wiring came in handy for something. Anyway, when I saw everyone hit their sticky mats, I ran out into the courtyard for help and saw those monsters—one had just landed on a sweet little witch from South Carolina. He got his hooks in her and she screamed. I tried to get him off, but when I did she started cracking. It was as if he had drained her of all the vital juices in her body. Then I heard Jen screaming and saw one of the nephilim on top of her, with its wings wrapped around her.”