Arrabelle

Arrabelle had to sit down. She’d been staring at the television screen too long, her eyes not wanting to believe what they were seeing. Watching the BBC World News, it was easy to decipher what was happening in the world . . . and why.

“So that’s it,” Arrabelle said finally—though there was no one in the well-appointed waiting room to hear her. “Decision made, no questions, no thought . . . just action.”

She sat back against the plush leather couch, covered her mouth with her palm, and shook her head in disbelief. She would’ve expected better from humanity. She had expected better. She’d believed that someone in charge would want to discover what the blood sisters were all about. Wouldn’t just round the witches up and put them in internment camps—jerry-rigged from abandoned prisons and schools . . . basically any building they could throw camp beds in and then police with the military.

The United States was spearheading the international campaign to collect and imprison blood sisters. The European Union, China, and Russia were following suit, as well as many of the former Eastern bloc countries and most of Asia and Africa. New Zealand, Australia, some of Central and South America, Cuba, Canada, and Iceland were the holdouts.

“You’re still watching.” It wasn’t a question.

Evan stood in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb. He looked wiped out but healthier than he’d been only a day earlier. The women they’d rescued from the underground warehouse had saved him—pouring their own psychic energy into his body to heal him. Arrabelle understood their reasoning: Maybe he and the others . . . Lyse, Niamh, Arrabelle . . . could actually fight The Flood. Stop them, even.

Though this was an outcome Arrabelle was becoming less and less sure about reaching.

“Train wreck,” she said, thinking about more than just what was happening up on the television screen. “This shit, what’s happened before this . . . it’s getting really bad and we’re not doing anything to stop it.”

“It’s the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Makes it look worse than it is,” Evan replied. “But I feel you. I don’t like sitting around, either. I want to be doing something.”

“It’s so frustrating. And I don’t think the news is blowing it out of proportion. I believe it’s bad out there. Really bad.”

Evan didn’t argue with her.

Probably because he knows I’m right, Arrabelle thought.

She returned her gaze to the flat-screen television on the wall, watching as three older women were forcibly removed by police officers from a house in Glastonbury. The women were all brown-skinned with white fluffy clouds of hair puffing out around lined faces and frightened eyes. Only the oldest woman, so frail she used a walker to maneuver down the stairs of the semidetached house, looked disdainful of the proceedings. When one of the policemen tried to take her arm to hurry her along, she shooed him away with a feral growl.

A news anchor was talking over the picture, but as Arrabelle watched, the sound abruptly went out.

“Evan, did you mute the TV?” she asked, but Evan raised his hands in the air to show that his hands were empty.

“Not me,” he said as Arrabelle found the remote control on a small side table by the couch and pressed the volume button until it was all the way up.

Still no sound.

Piercing green eyes looked out at them from the screen. The old woman was staring directly into the lens of the news camera. The semidetached house, the policemen . . . they were still there, but out of focus. Like the background had been frozen in time so this elderly blood sister could reach out across time and space to connect with them.

“What the—” Arrabelle began, but the old woman let out a hacking cough and the sound stopped Arrabelle short.

“Bell, they’ve come for us—” the old woman said, then covered her mouth with a shaking hand as she fought back another cough.

Arrabelle climbed off her perch on the couch, moving closer to the television screen.

“Bell, they’ve come for us—” the old woman began again.

“Evan? Are you seeing this? She just said my name—”

Evan nodded and left his place by the doorway to join her in front of the television. He stood close enough to take her hand in his own.

“—and we will wait for the sign,” the old woman continued, and Arrabelle could see the wrinkles on her worn face as she spoke. “But don’t make us wait too long.”

She winked at them and then the picture and sound returned to normal. Of course, they’d forgotten the volume was now on its highest setting and it made them both jump. Arrabelle raised the remote and quickly turned the volume down.

The picture changed again and a coiffed, male news presenter sat in a studio, chattering about the newly discovered existence of magic. Evan took the remote from Arrabelle and pressed the power button. The screen went dark, cutting off the man midsentence.

“Enough.”

Even under the best of circumstances, Arrabelle was a total news junkie. Now she was obsessed.

“I think we need to know—” Arrabelle said, grabbing for the remote as she protested.

“We know all we need to know, Bell. We’re screwed.”

Arrabelle shut her mouth. Evan was right. There was no amount of knowledge that was going to save them from the hatred being directed toward them and their sisters.

“What do you think she meant when she said they would wait for ‘the sign’?” Evan added when he was sure Arrabelle wasn’t going to argue further.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, shrugging. It was cold in the waiting room, and Arrabelle shivered.

A young nurse passed by the doorway and nodded at them. Arrabelle inclined her head in return, grateful that the nurse didn’t stop to chat. She was also grateful they were the only people there in the waiting room, so that she didn’t have to make small talk with other restless families as they waited for their loved ones to get better.

“You haven’t slept in days,” Evan said as he guided Arrabelle back to the couch where they sat down together, their bodies so close Arrabelle could feel the heat of Evan’s skin against her own.

“You haven’t slept, either,” Arrabelle said.

“Let me just take care of you for a minute, dammit,” he said, as he took her by the shoulders and turned her around in her seat, so that her back faced him. She sighed as he began to rub her shoulders.

“God, that feels good,” she said, closing her eyes.

“You’re so tense. Just relax.” She could hear the command in his voice and she tried to let the tension in her body flow out of her. “You’ve always run hot, Bell. Your skin is like a furnace.”

Though Arrabelle had been in love with Evan since she was a teenager, this new evolution in their relationship—him actually reciprocating her interest—made her nervous. Which only made her more tense—and she could feel her shoulders hunching again.

She heard Evan laugh, and she turned her head to glare at him.

“What?” she demanded.

“You’re the only woman I know who gets more tense when you give her a massage.”

Arrabelle snorted.

“I’m not more tense,” she protested.

“I’m touching you. I think I can feel when you tense up—like right now—”

Arrabelle pushed him away but kept her outrage playful.

“How dare you?! I can’t believe—”

Evan silenced her with a kiss. She felt herself relax, the tension in her body replaced by longing. She tried to extend the kiss, her teeth nipping at his lips, but he pulled away.

“When this is all over,” he said, grinning at her. “I promise.”

She wished it were “all over” now. She felt impatience growing inside her.

“One more kiss?” she begged.

At first, Evan shook his head, but then he relented. He turned her back so she was facing him again and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her in close. She waited, anticipation building as she let him run the show.

“You’re very beautiful,” he said, staring deep into her eyes, and she felt like she was falling, tumbling head over heels toward him.

“Thank you,” she murmured, her eyes dropping to his mouth.

“You’re welcome,” he said, softly.

She watched his lips form the words, felt the sound travel to her ears, slip into her brain. She loved the cadence of his voice, the low tremble of his words. She closed her eyes, letting the nearness of their bodies overwhelm her senses.

“Where’d you go?” he asked after a few moments of silence. She opened her eyes and smiled.

“Somewhere far away from here. Where it’s okay to be what we are.”

Evan’s eyes dropped to his hands, where they rested in his lap.

“Yeah, I’d like to go to that world.”

Arrabelle’s grin faded. They’d moved away from a romantic moment to something . . . well, the subject didn’t bring pleasant thoughts with it. The mood broken, Evan sighed and got to his feet. Arrabelle was annoyed with herself for wrecking the only nice thing that had happened in hours.

“I don’t know why I brought that up,” she said, her throat constricting. “I do want it to be okay. But I’m just so scared things will never be right again.”

Evan pivoted on his heel, turning back to look at her.

“Things change, Bell,” he said. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop that. We can only hope that, eventually, these changes will bring about something good . . . an empathy and compassion in humanity that until now, I think, has been buried so deep inside that we forget we have it.”

Arrabelle didn’t have a ready answer for this.

“But we’re in the transition phase,” he continued. “We have to bear the suffering so others who come later . . . they don’t. It’s a beautiful gift we give . . . and as awful as all this is”—he indicated that he meant their situation by stretching out his arms—“we do it because it’s the right thing. We do it selflessly, and for others, because we can.”

She loved Evan so much in that moment she could hardly bear it. A wave of pure, unadulterated, unconditional love so powerful it left her empty after it had surged through her.

“I love you.” She murmured the words quietly, letting their weight speak for them.

Evan seemed embarrassed by this show of affection, but he swallowed and nodded.

“I know you do . . . I love you, too.”

But there was a sense of futility beneath his words, and Arrabelle wondered what he’d been thinking about when he’d said them.

•   •   •

Arrabelle found Lyse in the bathroom. She felt intrusive cornering her coven master there, but she wanted to speak to Lyse in private.

“Can we talk?”

Lyse was leaning against the counter, her back to the door, but her reflection caught Arrabelle’s eye and beckoned her inside the room.

“Come on into my office,” Lyse said, raising an eyebrow at her surroundings.

“I’m just trying to understand what we’re doing,” Arrabelle said, moving farther into the space. “What the game plan is.”

“We need Daniela. We wait for her to wake up,” Lyse said, still facing the mirror—and Arrabelle felt like she was having a conversation with Lyse’s reflection instead of the woman herself.

“And then?” Arrabelle asked, joining Lyse in front of the row of sinks.

“And then we go to Devandra,” Lyse replied.

“I’m with you so far . . .”

“But what after that? That’s what you want to know,” Lyse said, her shoulders slumping as she deflected Arrabelle’s question.

“Yes, that’s the crux of it,” Arrabelle agreed, her eyes wandering across the face of the mirror, seeing the row of closed toilet stall doors. Her mind decided there were monsters hidden behind the beige metal doors, all of them just waiting for her to leave so they could gobble Lyse up.

It was an eerie feeling.

“To be honest,” Lyse said as she pushed off the counter and turned to face Arrabelle, “I’m waiting for a sign.”

It was the exact same phrase the old woman on the television screen had uttered. Lyse seemed to sense Arrabelle’s confusion—or maybe it showed on her face. Arrabelle had never been great at hiding her feelings.

“That’s crazy.”

“What’s crazy?” Lyse asked.

“Evan and I were watching the news and then something weird happened . . . this old woman—a blood sister from the U.K. the police were ‘collecting’—started speaking to me,” Arrabelle began. “She looked right at us, like we were on Skype, and then she said my name.”

“She was using magic?” Lyse asked.

Arrabelle nodded.

“Yeah, pretty sure she was. But the weird part was after that. When she said, ‘We will wait for the sign.’”

Lyse frowned, then lowered her gaze, thinking.

“What the hell does it mean,” Arrabelle asked, “that you just said the exact same thing?”

Lyse shook her head. She had no more insight into things than Arrabelle did.

“I don’t know why we both said the same thing. I can only tell you that every time I’ve been confused or uncertain, I take a leap of faith and some sign appears, directing my course,” Lyse said, and then she shrugged, looking embarrassed. “It’s a lame answer. I know.”

Arrabelle laughed.

“At least, like you just said, you’re honest about your lameness.”

“Well, I’ve got that going for me,” Lyse said, and rolled her eyes. “God, I’m not good at all this, Arrabelle—”

“You’re doing it, though,” Arrabelle said.

“That I am. It scares the shit outta me, but I just keep moving forward. It’s all I know how to do right now. Run toward the thing that scares me?”

The last idea came out as a question, and Arrabelle wondered if there was a part of Lyse that was asking her for reassurance. That she felt alone in all this and wanted Arrabelle’s support.

“I don’t think it’s a terrible plan,” Arrabelle said, finally. “We should be more proactive. We should go to The Flood ourselves, cut the head off—and by that I mean take care of Desmond Delay—and then we’ll see if they can function with him gone.”

“I like it, in theory,” Lyse said, “if we only knew where to start . . .”

Arrabelle had been thinking the same thing. It was an idea that she’d been kicking around in her head for a while: how to find The Flood and dispatch them on their own turf?

“They’re elusive,” Lyse continued. “They cleared out of their underground lair and left nothing for us to use to find them.”

“I think . . . if you’re amenable,” Arrabelle said, choosing her words carefully, “that I might have a way to find them. But we’d need the whole coven to do it.”

“Go on,” Lyse said, as she retrieved a rubber band from her jeans pocket and caught her dark hair into a ponytail.

“We can do what they’re terrified of us doing: We can use our magic and cast a spell.”

“Do you think we have the kind of power to do that?” Lyse asked—and Arrabelle kicked herself for forgetting how new Lyse was to the whole “witch” thing.

“Um, you transported four people to another dimension,” Arrabelle said. “I think we can manage a location spell.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Lyse said, shaking her head. “You should be the coven master, not me.”

“Well, I’m not and you are,” Arrabelle said. “So suck it up and stop beating yourself up. We’re a coven and we’ll figure this out together. We’re not monsters, we’re not evil, we use our powers for good. That’s all you need to know.”

Lyse leaned against the countertop and gave Arrabelle a sheepish grin.

“Can I admit something else to you?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t even believe magic is real,” Lyse said. “I watched you guys perform your ‘rites’ and I wanted to laugh. It all looked so silly and didn’t seem to accomplish much of anything.”

She paused, gauging Arrabelle’s response—but Arrabelle kept her expression neutral, waiting to hear Lyse out.

“And then all this stuff happened . . . we went into the dreamlands, we saw what The Flood did to all those women and girls,” Lyse continued. “And I’m not forgetting about the ghosts—sorry, Dream Walkers, you call them . . . it all scares the shit out of me.

“It’s a lot,” Arrabelle agreed. “And I’m sorry that it’s hard for you to believe—”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Lyse said, interrupting Arrabelle. “I’m saying that it’s taken me a while, but I believe in it. All of it. I accept that what I know can’t rationally be true . . . is true.”

“Eleanora was trying to protect you,” Arrabelle said, pulling herself up onto the countertop to sit. “But she did you a disservice.”

“I know she did,” Lyse agreed.

“It wasn’t because she was trying to screw you over,” Arrabelle said. “It was because she loved you and wanted you to be ‘normal’ for as long as possible. She knew what was coming and knew it would be bad, so she gave you the gift of time. Time to live a real, nonmagical life.”

Lyse nodded.

“Yeah, I know. I know she loved me, too.”

“Hessika dreamed it all,” Arrabelle added. “Eleanora knew you would be involved somehow.”

“Yeah, she did,” Lyse said. “Why did no one believe them?”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Arrabelle replied. “I think because we like the status quo . . . no one wants to believe anything bad can happen—and then the bad things happen and we’re blindsided.”

“We’re all so stupid,” Lyse said.

“There’s definitely a balance in life. Between good and evil, stupidity and intelligence, awareness and denial . . .”

Arrabelle leaned back against the sink counter and sighed.

“I feel like I’ve had a healthy dose of the stupidity and the denial,” Lyse said.

Arrabelle saw that Lyse was being self-deprecating.

“You’re learning not to see things in terms of being black and white. To be cognizant of the gradations,” Arrabelle said. “Just remember that we are working to make things better, to tip the scales in the other direction a little, so that the scales stay balanced. That’s it. That’s our job.”

“The Flood wants to tip it all the way over,” Lyse said, her voice rising in anger. “I hate them and everything they stand for.”

“They think they’re right,” Arrabelle said. “They think they’re on the side of good. They want humanity to change, and they think the only way to do it is to wipe the slate clean—”

“Which is messed up,” Lyse said.

Arrabelle shrugged.

“Without change, the world is stagnant—”

“Without good change, you mean,” Lyse said.

“No. Change is neither bad nor good. It sides with no one. It just is.”

Lyse began to pace, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers.

“This conversation is giving me a headache.”

Arrabelle didn’t disagree.

“The blood sisters have always tried to maintain the balance,” Arrabelle said, hating that she sounded like a teacher lecturing to a class. She hoped Lyse appreciated the effort. “When we perform our magical rites, it’s more about the power of connection. We connect to our sisters and, through each other, we connect to the flow lines. We draw our power from the Earth—and that power goes out into the world through us and through our good acts. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Lyse said. “I think so.”

“In other terms, the blood sisters bring connection to the world—”

“And The Flood brings bad?”

Arrabelle shook her head.

“They bring imbalance and that’s bad,” Lyse said, amending her answer.

“The good guys shouldn’t control the world any more than the bad guys should,” Arrabelle said. “The good guys telling everyone what to do would be just as bad—in its own way—as what The Flood is doing.”

Lyse seemed to accept this answer. She stopped pacing and stuffed her hands deep into her jeans pockets.

“Okay, so we don’t work for the good guys or the bad guys . . . we work for the balance.”

Arrabelle smiled. Lyse was learning fast.

“Let’s do that spell you were talking about,” Lyse said. “The locating one.”

“Perfect,” Arrabelle replied. “We’ll try when we have Daniela and Devandra back with us.”

Lyse gave her a tight smile.

“Sold. Now let’s get the hell out of this stupid bathroom.”

Arrabelle laughed.

“But I liked your office,” she said, grinning as she hopped off the countertop and headed for the door, Lyse’s footsteps echoing behind her.

Lost in her thoughts, Arrabelle stepped out into the corridor and headed down the hallway toward Daniela’s room. Her mind raced as she tried to fashion a plan for when they found The Flood . . . because she knew that stopping them would be the only thing that tipped the balance back into place—and returned the world to normal again.

Of that, Arrabelle was almost certain.