Cary stumbled away from the door when Emilia ran out into the night. She’d taken charge of the girl, treated her like a favored pet. Or worse, she’d treated Emilia like a servant whose feeling and opinions didn’t matter.
As much as Cary loathed to admit it, she felt for the girl. Not only were their circumstances undeniably similar, but Emilia chaffed under the same restrictive treatment Cary had suffered. Though Cary would not call her back, would not try to exert her will over Emilia, the temptation remained. She had to watch Emilia run out into the darkness in case she never returned.
“You were flirting pretty heavily with Regina.” Cary screamed in shock. She had not been surprised, truly surprised in over a thousand years. The sound she made when Betsy spoke came out like a shriek and inflicted a renewed shock upon Cary’s mind.
Until that moment, she’d not know she was capable of emitting such a sound. Rather than scramble away from Cary or sit up in disgust, Betsy started laughing. “You’re supposed to be some terrifying demoness, right? Mistress of all the spells, or whatever…” She wheezed as tears rolled off her cheeks. “And I just scared the pants off you! You might need to check to see if you shat yourself.”
Blood flowed up to Cary’s cheeks and tinted them red at Betsy’s laughter. For a moment, the rage and fury of a demoness tried to rise in her chest. But as the young woman knelt up in her borrowed bed laughing so hard tears fell from her eyes, Cary had to join her. It was funny.
Cary was the thing that watched, that observed. And this slip of a witch with hardly any power had scared bile up to Cary’s throat.
When she finally calmed enough to speak, she said, “I did not mean to flirt, not in the way you mean. Not in the way Emilia suspected.”
“She’s had a crush on Max first, then on me. You weren’t around for those times.” Betsy shrugged. “It’s not that she’s jealous…” Betsy bit her lip and bobbed her head back and forth. “I mean she is, you heard her. But it’s more like she’s waiting for all of us to leave her…”
Betsy’s voice trailed off and Cary could almost taste the unspoken words on the air: “like her mom.” Emilia had spoken them before in a moment of vulnerability to Betsy. In fact, she’d spoken them while she recovered from her romantic attachment to Betsy’s brother Max. “I would not leave her.”
“Have you told her that?” Betsy waved her hands. “I mean, showed her that?”
“I…” Cary crumpled under the teen’s regard. As much as the demoness imagined herself a cynical and weary traveler of the world, the truth was she had fewer than two romantic attachments in her near-ten thousand years. All of those had taken place before she’d been captured by Elelele. “I do not know how to demonstrate such a… conviction.”
“Well, you already blew it twice.”
“What do you mean?!” Cary took a half-step toward Betsy and stopped herself. Again the teen spoke the truth. “Ah, yes. The first time when I arrived here and… just now?”
“You gotta understand. She’s…” Betsy swallowed and shook her head. “We are terrified of being left alone. I mean… Maybe I’m over analyzing things, but with Cynthia, it’s like the one person we all want to go away never will. And everyone else either dies or gives up on us.”
“Who gave up on you, Betsy?” Cary curiosity got the better of her. She could have scanned her way through Emilia’s memories. And she might have found what she sought there. But this conversation built a bridge between the demoness and the teen. For the first time, Cary felt certain that these mortals strove to help her.
“My aunt Sharron.” Betsy answered without a second’s thought. “She left Max and me when our dad died.” Fanning her hands before her like an explosion bursting before her eyes, Betsy continued. “She knew magic, real magic. The kind you and Cynthia know like you’ve studied your whole lives. And she wasn’t so afraid of the Cabal or anyone else that she wouldn’t use it.” Betsy shrugged and stared at a framed bit of intricate lace the likes of which Cary had never seen before. “Maybe she should have been more afraid.” Shaking herself, Betsy offered a wry smile. “But yeah, all three of us are broken in our own ways. Max can’t stand to hear Sharron’s name. It sets him off like stabbing him with a hot poker.”
Cary heard the lack of metaphor in Betsy’s voice as if she knew as well as her brother the feel of a hot poker. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Cary said, “I too know the horror of a vile master.” Speaking of her past made Cary’s voice quaver. “He… my former partner, a demon I trusted with my life and safety, betrayed me. He sold me out to a greater power.” Licking her lips, Cary closed her eyes and let the visions wash over her. “My former master commands incredible magic and temporal power. More than any mortal and even most fiends. If he were so inclined, he might threaten Cynthia’s master. But his ambitions never rose as high as his cruelty and his curiosity.
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“For the first hundred years, I thought he was training me, testing the limits of my resilience. It wasn’t until the third century under his captivity that I realized he enjoyed the torment for its own sake. Certainly, he wanted to know how much damage I could take before I broke. He wanted to expand my memory and force me into the mold he wished. But in a way, that goal came second to his goal of exacting pain for the crime of my very existence.”
Cary wound down, uncertain of how much more she wished to say of Elelele. To speak of him, especially to utter his name, was sheer folly. Betsy put her hand on Cary’s. “How long were you with him?”
The lie flashed through her head. Cary very nearly spoke it. But the truth dogged her, nipping at her heels for want of informing these… children what she was capable of, what she had suffered. “When Constantine convened the Council of Nicea, I was almost eight thousand years old.”
Betsy made no sound, though she pulled her hand away. Her mouth opened and shut and she tilted her head. “You’re serious?”
“I have no cause to deceive you.”
“Then… how old were you you when… you were taken?”
“I’d known fewer than five centuries when my master claimed me and made me his own. I’ve served him for the better part of nine thousand years.”
Betsy shook her head. “How are you still…”
“Alive? Unfortunately, my body is such that it is exceedingly difficult to destroy.”
“I was going to say ‘sane,’ but sure that works too.”
Cary snorted, a habit she’d picked up in her brief time among these mortals. “By your standards, I very much doubt I am sane. I still consider returning to my master, begging him for his indulgence and mercy, knowing that I will certainly not receive the faintest blush of the latter.”
“We… this whole time… our lives must seem so fleeting to you.”
Cary laughed, her head tilted back and almost howling. Betsy shook herself and retreated a few inches. “You are wise beyond your meager years, Betsy. Yet you are wholly mistaken. This is the most I have experienced, the most I have lived in… at least a thousand years. I… my time among you has already become precious to me. In part because I had a chance to make Ms Olren’s acquaintance.”
“Jesus, you need to tell her this… that.”
“I am not so convinced.” Cary waved her hand in a circle. “I think perhaps you were correct initially when you instructed me to show her how I felt.”
A weight had departed from the space between Cary’s shoulders, as if she finally lowered her arms and refused to carry her stone. “We should go find he…”
Thunder coursed though Cary’s body, shocking her to her core. A power inflicted itself upon her aura as something dark and insidious attempted to crawl within her and lay eggs of mind control. For a moment, she thought Papa Butch had betrayed her, but in the next, she knew that something had happened to Emilia. “Something bad has happened to Emilia. Go and rouse Regina and Papa Butch. I will seek her on foot!”
Cary flew off of the bed and out of the room before Betsy could respond. She’d given her instructions. Without knowing more, all Cary could do was move as fast as she could and hope to catch Emilia and those who attempted to harm her. Sparse grasses ripped and died beneath Cary’s feet as she scrabbled over the ground. Soil flew up behind her like a great stream of water at the back of a whale. Emilia’s tracks shown as clear as if lit by golden sconces in the dirt. Still, Cary could not move swiftly enough.
The foul intrusion upon her will could not reach Cary directly. Filtered through the link between her and Emilia, Cary still knew that some force bent itself over Emilia’s will. Large black vehicles sped away in the night as Cary arrived. No matter how fast she moved in her human form, she would not capture those automobiles now. As she stood watching Emilia’s captors escape, Cary willed herself into the form of an ancient roc, a mighty and swift drake, or even a peregrine falcon.
Her form remained the same, unchanged and human. Silently, still fearful that she would draw his ire, Cary swore vengeance upon Elelele for this, for locking in her in this ineffective body. Even though she could assume the shape of a Temptress, she was no better equipped to run down an automobile.
When her rage subsided, Cary found a new object for her hate. Scrawled upon the ground, she saw a name she’d set out of her mind while saving Emilia from Joshua and his ilk: Samantha.
Cursing anew, Cary dug her taloned hands into her palms and panted in refreshed fury. Samantha presented an obstacle Cary had already failed to surmount. That she would challenge the woman for taking Emilia was a foregone conclusion. The only question remained: would either Emilia or herself survive the exchange?
Walking back to the main compound of the Voodoo Gardens, Cary steeled herself to demand aid from both Papa Butch and Joshua. The former owed her nothing, the latter would die in screaming agony if he refused. She moved slowly not out of an absence of urgency. Despair weighed her feet down. Papa Butch’s vision had come true and Cary’s own negligence had sped it along. She could see the speckled lights in the distance, set between her and the series of buildings. Hurrying along would gain her nothing at this point.