Something Wicked by Evelyn Vaughn Page A

it from a green taper candle and, once it had half burned away, dropped it into her scrying bowl.

    Whoosh! A ring of blue flame danced, eerie and elflike, across the water’s surface.

    “No.” Nonna stared into the magic fire. “There must be a way. Ah, yes.” Magic was about willpower. To know, to will, to… something —I always forget that ingredient—and to stay silent. When Nonna looked up at me, her old eyes shone with the blue fire. “A pilgrimage. You must find Her source. Only then can you right your wrongs and fulfill your destiny.”

    Okay. I suspected there was more, but one crisis at a time. “So where’s Her source?”

    “Where She is most remembered. Where She was once worshipped. I think perhaps the old world…” The flame had quickly burnt out, leaving only water and a curl of ashy paper. Nonna drew a cloth of black silk over the bowl. “Never have I sensed so strong a calling, child. You have much to do.”

    “The old—you mean Italy? Greece? I can’t! We’ve got the funeral, and then there’s all the court stuff.” The preliminary hearing was scheduled for the next week.

    I’d already made arrangements to cut my hours and take night shifts until Victor was imprisoned for good, hopefully for life, hopefully with abusive cellmates. Was I supposed to leave the country, on top of all that? Sorry, Queen of the Night, but no.

    “I’ve got to be there for Diana.”

    “Give me your hands,” commanded Nonna.

    When you grow up in a family of witches, you don’t argue things like that. She laid her old, worn hands palm up on the altar cloth. I put mine in hers, the cast one, too. Her fingers embraced me.

    Outside, those same noisy dogs howled.

    “It is time you resume your training, cara. It is time you let Her speak to you, and not through me.”

    “But Ben Fisher—”

    “It was your curse. Only you—or She—can deflect it.”

    My stomach knotted, but I felt the truth through my fingertips. “You mean I should train as a witch.”

    “You say She saved your life.” Nonna released my hands with a final, comforting pat.

    I nodded. Dark or not, deathly or not, that much felt too true. “Yes, Nonna. She did.”

    “Then your life is Hers.”

    I took a deep, shaky breath full of incense and candle-wax—and magic. Time to get that vesica piscis pendant out of my drawer.

    As long as Victor Fisher’s life was Hers as well, it was a deal I could live with.

     

    The next week felt unreal for so many reasons. For one thing, I found a toad in my house. Twice. In February.

    The medical examiner released Diana’s body. It seemed like half of Chicago showed up for her burial alongside our parents’ graves, but not all of them were there to express sympathy. The crowd trampled the snow to mud, and her true friends seemed lost among them. Diana’s funeral had become an event, not about her life so much as her sensational murder.

    Like I didn’t have enough reasons to hate Victor Fisher.

    Valentine’s Day passed, barely noticed. I went back to work—part-time, at an inpatient facility instead of driving to my patients—and the normalcy of wage-earning felt like a betrayal of Diana. It wasn’t. I was on automatic pilot, doing the old fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. My job also drew me deeper into that “threshold between life and death” that Nonna had mentioned as one of Hekate’s realms. Hospice work had never been about saving lives, after all. My patients were already dying. My job, which I’d been drawn to after watching my mom go through YaYa’s lingering death, was about making them comfortable, keeping them company and being there for their loved ones after they passed.

    And yeah, that part also felt weird now. The blind leading the blind.

    Nonna began training me in magic. Intensely. I was surprised by the déjà vu, by how much my mother must have already taught me in my early childhood—the importance of candle colors, of moon phases, of rhyme. I