“Didn’t she say you kicked her out of town?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Tamara was trouble. I knew it from the moment we first met, but I’m a sucker for dangerous women, and I fell for it all. That was, ‘till I figured out she was trying to stage a coup, wanted to take everything I had. Almost succeeded too.”
“What stopped her?”
Remy narrowed his eyes. “I may have been keeping things… the way I liked them… but I had friends, back then. She was always too self-obsessed. In the end, I had backup, and she didn’t.”
“Do you know what she’s gonna do now that she’s back?”
“Honestly, no. But we should probably forget about her for now, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” I said, though I wanted to talk more about Tamara—the woman who had Remy’s heart once upon a time. Remy gestured to the center of the ballroom, and I started moving toward it. When I reached the chandelier, which stood at the center of the room, I stopped and turned to find Remy holding what looked like a cat carcass in his hands.
“What the hell is that for?” I asked.
“Relax. It ain’t going nowhere. In fact, that’s part of the reason why I brought it in here. Less places for it to hide, at least until we move the furniture in tomorrow.”
I examined the cat from where I was without getting any closer. It was a calico; black, white, ginger, and thin. “You’re telling me that cat isn’t dead?”
“Oh, it’s dead alright; probably about six hours dead, now.”
“You didn’t—”
“Nah, I found it nearby.”
Craning my neck around to study the empty room, I asked, “So, how is it going to…?”
Remy set the dead cat down on the floor. It had been semi-wrapped in a tarp, and he stretched this out, now, so the cat was lying on a square of fabric. I didn’t want to look at it—the poor thing’s eyes were bulging, its jaw hung open, and its tongue and gums were already starting to blacken. I turned my eyes away from it and focused on Remy.
“Don’t tell me you’re grossed out,” Remy said.
“No,” I said, perhaps a little too defensively. “So, what do you plan on doing with this thing?”
“We are going to wake it up.” Remy cracked his knuckles. “You’ve been a good student; you’ve already learned more than I thought you would.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing until I was told what it was.”
“Maybe not, but your soul did. Your soul was telling you what to do, guiding your hands and mind. Like when you gave your blood to those snakes and made them grow. That was the kind of blood magick only learned practitioners use.”
“Because I’m a high magician.”
“Exactly. Now, imagine what you could do with some serious training—some serious discipline.” He clasped his hands together and smiled. “But I think your training has been going along well, and now it’s time to graduate you. So, we’re going to bring this cat back from the jaws of death.”
I turned my eyes on the cat again, then frowned. “How?”
Remy took a deep breath and circled around the cat, and around me. “What is blood magick?” he asked.
“It’s about using your own energy to empower your magick.”
“Yes, but it’s so much more than that.”
A question had risen into my throat. I had to swallow it down to prevent it from manifesting. Asking Remy how it was he maintained his pseudo-immortality probably wasn’t going to be part of his lesson plan for the day, but maybe he was leading up to it? If he was, I wasn’t about to spoil it by asking a question out of turn.
“So, you’re telling me you can bring this cat back from the dead,” I said.
“I can,” he said, “But what I want to find out today is if you can, using high magick instead of a recited incantation with several witches, which is how this sort of thing is usually done.”
“What… by thinking it?”
He came full circle and stood in front of me again. “Yes, and by adding a little blood to the mix.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This seems dangerous.”
“Blood magick is just as much about the blood itself as it is about intent. If you hesitate, if you aren’t sure, the magick won’t work.”
I stared at the cat again. “What would we have to do?”
“Just do what you would usually do, and try to bring this cat back from the jaws of oblivion… before it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“Wait too long and the spirit departs.”
I nodded and knelt to retrieve my knife from its ankle sheath. I gripped the handle tightly in my hand and drew the knife up, but kept my knee against the floor. I stared at the cat’s cold, rigid body and pressed my lips into a tight line. Slowly, I lined the edge of the knife up with the palm of my left hand.
What I was about to do shouldn’t have been natural. Magick itself was the most natural thing in the world—in the universe. Its power was limitless, assuming you knew how to wield it. You could do anything. But just because you could didn’t mean you should. Binding people against their will, killing people outright with magick, and reversing death’s decision, were the kinds of acts that would take a witch down a dark path.
What made me draw the knife along my palm and split the flesh was Remy himself. He had lived over two hundred years, had cheated death time and again with magick, and he was still here. No angry God had come to strike him down, no great curse had come over him. Maybe he was privy to some secret I didn’t yet know.
I hoped that was the case.
Drop after drop of crimson blood fell upon the carcass, sinking into its dull fur. I shut my eyes and imagined the cat starting to twitch as its heart began to beat once more. I felt its blood beginning to warm and could almost hear it slowly oozing through dead veins and arteries, gradually moving faster and faster. A strong wind slammed against the ballroom’s windows, stealing my attention and making my eyes snap open.
Through the glass panels in the door itself, I saw waves of dark leaves relentlessly strike, one after the other, causing the door to rattle on its hinges. Something about this wasn’t right. It was as if the wind itself were objecting to what I was about to do, howling for me to stop, go no further. My heart started to pound with a kind of ferociousness I hadn’t known was even possible.
“Madison,” Remy said, and I turned my eyes upon the cat… but it wasn’t there.
“What the hell!” I yelled. “Where is it?”
“I’ll find it.”
I scanned the room and caught Remy moving around in my periphery while the wind continued to batter against the door. “I shouldn’t have done this,” I said. “I shouldn’t have tried to do it!”
“Madison, here,” Remy said.