Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1) by W. V. Fitz-Simon

Author:W. V. Fitz-Simon [Fitz-Simon, W. V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dedo Press
Published: 2020-09-16T22:00:00+00:00

27

As the hand of twisted bark pulled her toward the card, a second emerged and reached for her neck. Before it made contact, the silver glitter of a kitchen knife sliced clean through both. Her mother hissed a word in her secret language. The hand shriveled as it fell. She spun the blade around her fingers to switch her grip and, with another hissed word, impaled the card on the table backhanded, slicing it in two.

“Sorry, Elsie.” She spun the blade to a forward grip. “Best take care of the pieces.”

Mrs. Dearing snapped her fingers once over each fragment and uttered something Gaelic in her impenetrable Scottish accent. The card stock ignited and burned into embers that drifted away in their own heat.

A groan and a shudder shook the kitchen. In every uncovered pane of glass, the image of a gray and gnarled face with diseased yellow eyes stared out at them. The glass warped and bulged inwards.

“Cover your faces,” said Gosha’s mother.

With fingers wrapped around her acorn pendant, she traced a circle in the air with the tip of her knife and repeated a whispered two-syllable word. Mrs. Dearing dropped to a crouch and grabbed Gosha by the sleeve to pull her down with her. The air around Gosha’s mother pulsed and radiated outward above their heads, rippling and refracting the light in the room as if through a prism.

The glass in the windows bowed in to the point of breaking. Her mother stabbed out with the knife and all the glass shattered, pushed outwards away from them into the night.

“Salt!”

Her mother ran to the cupboard under the stairs and grabbed an armful of boxes of table salt before darting out into the garden.

“Salt?” Gosha followed Mrs. Dearing to the cupboard.

“Take this.” The housekeeper handed Gosha a large container of salt. “We need to create an unbroken circle around the entire house. Quick.”

Nowhere in London ever reached full dark at night. Outside, the thick white line of her mother’s salt trail glowed yellow under the streetlights across the back garden and stopped at the neighbor’s garden fence. Her mother’s white coif of hair disappeared around the far side of the adjoining semi-detached.

“Go the other way.” Mrs. Dearing passed two more boxes of salt to Gosha. “I’ll hold it off until you close the circle.”

Two minutes later, Gosha met up with her mother at the other side of the house and joined their two trails of salt.

“All done?” asked her mother.

“Yes, it’s enclosed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Mamusha!”

“Step over, but be careful.” Her mother waved her across the circle and stooped to pick something up from beside the front door. “Don’t break the line.”

To Gosha’s surprise, it was a whimsical stone gargoyle with a finger stuck up its snout. Her mother placed it on the ground at the edge of the circle and patted it on the head, its round face staring out into the night. Gosha could almost take the terrifying events in the house in her stride compared to this bizarre, softer side of her mother.

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