CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Elysian
“Elysian has already ruled out a curse breaking,” Praneeta noted. She paged through her kidskin grimoire. Elysian had always loved watching the pages of that particular grimoire fly by, glimpsing the illustrations in rich purples and reds, the text of the spells inscribed around them in spirals in a language she couldn’t read. Praneeta stopped on a page with an image at the center of a stone fireplace, thick slashes of red ink representing the flames. “I have this spell that is supposed to send the subject home, but I’ve never been able to get it to work. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to take the bus from work every day.”
“We could add a binding,” Katie suggested.
“A what?” Walt asked.
“A binding,” Elysian repeated. “It’s a way of brute forcing spells. A spell with a binding can’t fail, but Katie’s joking about using one. They require a massive amount if power, and this situation, while awful, doesn’t need emergency measures. Not until we’ve tried simpler solutions.”
“I’m sure the boy can move himself,” Julia said. “What we need is an address.”
Walt bristled at being so casually referred to when he was sitting right there, but Elysian doubted that Julia noticed it. She wasn’t watching Walt the way Elysian was.
“I’ve got one address,” he offered. “But I don’t know if it’s mine. Going there might land me in even hotter water.”
Elysian drummed her fingers on the tabletop. Something was on the tip of her tongue.
“Do you remember anything?” Annette pushed. “If you have an image to hold on to, we could do a location spell. Do you remember what your house looked like? Your workplace? A beloved pet, even.”
“His girlfriend,” Elysian said, her voice barely loud enough to be heard over the susurration of the other witches flipping pages in their grimoires.
“Yes, my girlfriend.” His voice caught, like the word felt wrong in his mouth. Or maybe Elysian was hearing what she wanted to hear. “Wherever she is is probably home, right?”
Elysian’s mouth set into a small line of discomfort at the word ‘home’. Part of her wanted him to think of this house as his home. She wanted the word to conjure up images of the kitchen, her arm brushing against his side as they worked at the counter. She wanted him to think about the lanterns on her ceiling, about her spreading a blanket over him on their surprisingly comfortable couch. She wanted him to think of his hand on her breast in the quiet of her bedroom. But that was the selfish part of her, the one that she didn’t let make decisions.
“It’s the best thing we have to go on right now,” Elysian said. She didn’t meet his eyes. His mouth twisted, a mirror of her own. She wondered how strong his wolf senses were, if he could hear the unhappy beat of her heart or the blood rushing in her ears.
She spun around in her chair and reached for the telephone table that sat against the wall. It was an odd little piece, more like two-tiered shelf. One formed the table top, an old-fashioned rotary phone sitting on it but not plugged in to anything, while a cushion had been placed on the lower section to make a seat. She pulled a folded map from a stack beside the phone, and spread it out on the table.
“Something meaningful to you will make the spell work better,” Katie said. “Anything that can be hung from a string.”
“I don’t really own anything…” he said. “Except. Wait.” He jumped up from the table, and went into the living room. From her seat at the table she could see him dig between the couch cushions and the frame and pull out something wrapped in a napkin.
He laid the napkin on the table, pulling back the folds to reveal the pieces of her grandmother’s teacup he had gathered from the floor.
“You gave me this to try to help me, and I broke it,” he explained. “I put it away until I could get some glue to repair it.”
Elysian stared down at the shards of ceramic. He was right. The pieces belonged to him until he had a chance to put it right. Things didn’t need to be a source of joy to be meaningful. “You’re a really good guy, Walt,” she said. Then her cheeks flushed as she looked up to see the circle watching her, their expressions ranging from Annette’s sympathy to Katie’s amusement.
She selected a piece from the napkin that still had the loop of handle attached. “This will work,” she said. She tugged a ribbon out of her grimoire, losing whatever place it had been marking, and slipped it through the handle.
She held her hand across the table to Walt, and laced their fingers together so both their palms faced toward the map. The shard of teacup dangled between them.
The other ladies shifted, joining their hands together to form a chain around the table. The energy of the room shifted, like the air was humming. It felt like when a storm was building.
Walt chuckled. “Wow, the wolf does not like that.”
Elysian squeezed his hand. “Just try to focus your mind on the image of your girlfriend.”
The teacup began to swing in circles above the map. They started out large and lazy, swinging from coast to coast, then grew both faster and smaller. The hum grew louder, and then the teacup stopped moving, the ribbon growing tight like the magic was trying to pull it toward a spot on the map.
“Oh,” Elysian gasped.
The teacup had come to rest immediately above Salem, Oregon.
His girlfriend was here.