Temporally Out of Order Read online

  Holly knelt on one knee and extended his hands. Grudgingly, Angie placed the teapot in his hands. Holly gathered it close, holding it as Angie had, and petted it. Angie let out a sob and raced to me, burying her face against my capri-clad thighs.

  I pointed to the door and the vampires both bowed, so vampy-formal, and departed, closing the door quietly. I watched and as soon as they reached the end of the drive, I raised the protective wards and pulled Angie to me on the couch. At the door to the hallway, Little Evan was hugging the jamb, crying in sympathy with his big sister. I held out a hand to him, too, and we all four snuggled on the couch, my children, my unfortunate not-familiar, and me.

  An hour later, as I was tucking a sleeping Angie back into bed, I heard another ward-ding. I had very bad feeling when I looked out and saw the same two forms at the end of the drive, illuminated by the security light. With trepidation, I went to the toy box and looked inside. The teapot was nestled into a corner.

  I knew my daughter was strongly gifted with power, and she was probably capable of calling the pot back to her, but I hadn’t felt any kind of magical working in the house or on the grounds. Which meant the teapot had come back on its own or under another’s working. It might be a danger to us all. As if it was made of dynamite instead of fired clay, I lifted it from the box and carried it out onto the front lawn, to within four feet of the ward and within six feet of the vamps. Who now looked like what they were—dangerous predators; unhappy, dangerous predators.

  “Do you taunt us with the return of our master’s teapot?” Jerel asked.

  “No. It came back on its own.” Both vamps blinked, the twin gestures too human for the bloodsuckers. “It’s heavily spelled, and seems to have a will of its own. I’d like to try an experiment. I’d like to drop the ward, hand you the teapot and see what happens.”

  “You did not call the teapot back to you?” Jerel asked.

  “No. My word is my bond.”

  Jerel nodded once, the gesture curt.

  I dropped the ward, stepped to the vampires, placed the teapot in Jerel’s hands this time, and stepped back. The ward snapped back into place. Within thirty seconds, the teapot disappeared. “Not me. Not my magic. Certainly not my daughter’s magic.” I let derision enter my tone, because no witch’s gifts came upon them before they reached puberty. Except Angie’s. And that was a secret. A dangerous secret, to be protected as much as my children themselves.

  The vamps looked from me to each other, and back. “What do we do now?” Holly asked.

  “You will break this spell,” Jerel demanded.

  “Tell me the tale of the teapot. And how the master of the city knew it had appeared at my house. I’d be very interested in that one.”

  Holly’s eyes went wide, human-wide, not vamped-out. “That never occurred to me. Where did it come from and how did it get here, and how did our master know of it?”

  “Right,” I said. “You go back to the vamp master and ask him those questions, because if he wants his teapot—or whatever it really is—back, I’ll need to know everything to break whatever spell is on it.”

  “We will be back by midnight,” Holly said, excitement in the words.

  “Wrong. I have a family and you two have intruded enough on family time tonight. You go back and chat with your master. I’ll see you an hour after dusk at Seven Sassy Sister’s Herb Shop and Café.”

  “Your family business,” Jerel said, letting me know that my entire extended family could be in danger because of the blasted teapot.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, and turned my back on the vamps. Secure behind the strongest wards that Big Evan and I could create, I walked slowly back to my house and shut the door on the bloodsuckers. And leaned against it, trembling. I was in so much trouble. I had less than 24 hours to break a spell on a weird teapot that was clearly far more than a teapot. No wonder Lincoln Shaddock wanted it, whatever it really was.

  oOo

  I got the children off to school in the morning, without letting Angie discover that the teapot had returned to her toy box, and texted my sisters: “911 my house. Hurry soonest after breakfast crowd.” They’d all get here as fast as possible. The 911 call was used only for extreme emergencies. Meanwhile, I set four loaves to rise and made salad enough for all of us, all my sisters. There were seven of us, or had been until our eldest had died after turning to the black arts. We were still grieving over that one. Four of us were witches, and the remaining two were human. Four of the youngest were taking classes at various universities and colleges in the area, but they’d get here any way they could after the 911 text. Family always came first.

  oOo

  Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, my air witch sister, set her toddler Iseabeal Roisin—pronounced Ish-bale Rosh-een—down at the door. Ishy ran, shouting for the cat, “Kekekeke,” her arms raised. The witch twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, had called in sick for their morning classes and closed the herb shop. Our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were the last to arrive, having cleaned up the café after the last of the breakfast crowd.

  When we were all sitting in my kitchen, the toddlers happily talking to each other in incomprehensible kid-language, I realized how long it had been since we sat like this, working on a magical problem. Since our eldest, Evangelina, had died as a result of consorting with demons. Well, at the hand of my BFF, but that was another story. We were all red-haired, some more blond, some more brown, some of us flaming scarlet. All of us with pale skin that simply couldn’t tan. All of us rowdy and chattering and happy to be together again. We had to do this more often. Not the teapot part, just the playing hooky and visiting part.

  To capture their attention, I centered the teapot atop the old farmhouse table, then caught them up on the teapot problem, the vamp problem, and the time limit problem. I had been studying the teapot for hours, so I already had some new things to share. “It isn’t, strictly speaking, just a teapot. It’s both a teapot and not a teapot, the result of a spell, and is magical, in some way, on its own. I can’t tell why it keeps coming back here and I can’t make it stay away.”

  “Yeah,” the human Regan said. “That whole not having a magic wand really sucks.”

  “Haha,” Liz said, sounding bored with the oft-used banter.

  “What I want to do is to raise the wards on the house, make a magic circle, and study it together.” I looked at the human sisters. “You two will have to babysit and keep watch. Pull us out if anything strange happens.”

  “We always get stuck with the babysitting duty,” Regan complained.

  “Word,” Amelia said, sighing her agreement. “Fine. I’ll go play with the kiddies.” To her sister she said, “If you need help hitting them with a broomstick to break a circle, lemme know. I want in on some of that.”

  I raised the house wards and my witch sisters made a protective circle around my kitchen table by joining hands. It wasn’t as formal as the circle in my herb garden but it was enough to study the current situation. The combined magical power of the Everhart sisters is weighty, intense, and deep. It tingles on the skin, it whispers in the air, and in this case, it made a teapot spill its secrets.

  Half an hour after starting, we broke for tea and slices of fresh bread with my homemade peach-hot, untraditional peach preserves with chili peppers. While I put the snack together, Liz said, “His name is George.”

  “Not he, as in a human he,” Cia said, “but a male something.”

  “He stinks,” Carmen said. “A bit like muskrat. Or squirrel. Something rodent-ish.”

  “I got wet dog out of the scent,” I said.

  “Whatever he is, he’s alive,” Liz said.

  “And not evil,” Cia added. “Trapped. The result of a hex.”

  “Only a witch could have done a spell that captured a soul with a hex, and a blood-witch at that,” Liz said, exasperated. Blood-witches spilled blood to power spells. The bigger the spell, the more blood needed. Human sacrifice had been known to be involved in black magic
ceremonies.

  As we talked, I passed out plates, butter, the peach-hot, and topped up our mugs. “It feels like wild magic. Something not planned, but the result of something else. As if the incantation is sparking off all over the place.”

  “Why did it come here?” Cia asked.

  “Opposites attract?” Carmen asked. “Your house is free and happy and he isn’t?”

  “Maybe he thought you could free him?” Liz asked.

  “Or the death-magics pulled him in against his will,” the human twins said, nearly synchronous, walking into the kitchen together.

  “Somebody didn’t call us for the eats. Bad sisters,” Regan said.

  Amelia added, “Right. Evil sisters. And anyway, you left out the death-magic possibility. Maybe it’s here to get Molly to do something deadly to it.” No one replied and I sat frozen in my chair, my hands cupped around my heated mug.

  “What?” Amelia asked, her tone belligerent. “Sis, the witches among us were there when your magic turned on the earth.”

  “The rest of us saw the garden of death afterwards,” Regan added.

  “And we all know it’s still dead,” Amelia said. “Doesn’t take a witch to know that nothing will ever grow in that soil again.”

  “And then there’s the whole thing about your familiar keeping you in control,” Regan said, the conversation Ping-Ponging as my world skidded around me.

  “And about the music spell Big Evan made to keep your magics under control,” Amelia said. “Not talking about this is stupid. Gives it power.”

  Regan said, “My twin is taking her second year of psychology. Pass the cream. Thanks. She’s teacher’s pet because she can add the witch perspective to the psycho stuff.”

  Amelia huffed with disgust. “Not psycho stuff. That’s rude to people with emotional or mental disorders or illness.” Regan rolled her eyes and buttered her bread, taking a big bite.

  The time my human sisters argued allowed me to settle. “Okay.” The Everharts went still as vamps themselves. Because Amelia was right. It wasn’t something we talked about. Ever. And secrets, things hidden, buried, and left to molder in the dark of one’s soul did give evil the power to rule. “So,” I said, taking a fortifying gulp of tea. “What do you think about the death-magics? Did the teapot come to me to die?”

  My sisters all broke into talking at once, suggesting things like meditation and prayer, singing chants, spells to disrupt my death-magic, and suggesting that we simply bust the teapot and see if that would work to free the trapped soul. At that one, the teapot vanished, and appeared instantly back in hiding in my daughter’s toy box. Liz dubbed it the teleporting teapot. Then the human sisters cleared the table and started research into Lincoln Shaddock’s history, trying to find out about his relationship to witches and the teapot. There was nothing in the standard online databases, but I had an ace in the hole with Jane Yellowrock. She had tons of data on vamps, including Lincoln Shaddock, and she sent it to us, no questions asked. The information she offered confirmed the vamps’ story.

  Shaddock had been turned after a battle in the Civil War. When he came through the devoveo, he traveled to find his family. His wife had remarried and moved south. She rejected him. According to the data, there was evidence that she was an untrained, unacknowledged witch, not uncommon in those witch-hating times. There was nothing about a teapot, not that it mattered.

  By lunchtime, we had a plan. Of sorts.

  oOo

  We closed the café and the herb shop at dusk, and rearranged the tables so there was an open place in the middle of the café. All of us, children, witches, and humans, stood in the middle, circled around the toy box with its magical teleporting teapot, held hands, warded the space where we would work, and blessed our family line with the simple words, “Good health and happiness. Protection and safety. Wisdom and knowledge used well and for good. Everharts, ever hearts, together, always.” Then we broke the circle and the human twins piled our children into my car and headed back to my house. We witches? We waited.

  Seven Sassy Sisters was decorated in mountain country chic, with scuffed hardwood floors, bundles of herbs hanging against the back brick wall, tables, and several tall-backed booths, seats upholstered with burgundy faux-leather and the tables covered with burgundy and navy blue check cloths. The kitchen was visible through a serving window. It was comfortable, a place where families and friends could come and get good wholesome food, herbal teas, fresh bread, rolls, and a healing touch if they wanted it. We also served the best coffee and tea in the area. But it wasn’t the sort of place that vampires, with their fancy-schmancy, hoity-toity attitudes, would ever come. Until they knocked on the door just after dusk.

  This time there were four vamps: Holly, his red hair in a ponytail, Jerel, a blond female vamp wearing a fringed leather vest, jeans covered in bling, and cowboy boots, and Lincoln Shaddock. He bore a striking resemblance to the actor in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, a beaked-nosed frontiersman but with a clean-shaven chin, tall, rawboned, and rough around the edges. Unlike most vamps who dressed for effect, Shaddock was wearing dark brown jeans and a T-shirt with a light jacket. And an honest-to-God bolo tie with a gold nugget as the clasp.

  I took a steadying breath and unlocked the door, stepping back as they filed in and stood in a semicircle on one side of the toy box. The witches stood ranged on the other side. Holly said, “May I present—”

  The outer door slammed open and Angie Baby raced inside, strawberry blond curls streaming and tangled, face flushed and sweaty. She had run from … somewhere. She dashed between us, rammed the toy box open, grabbed the teapot, and screamed, “George is mine! He likes me, not you!” And … she stuck her tongue out at Lincoln Shaddock, the most important master vamp in the Appalachian Mountains.

  We were all frozen, my sisters in horror, me in sudden, blinding fear for my child, Jerel with a sword half drawn, Holly with a bemused smile on his face, and Shaddock in … fury. Utter, encompassing fury. His pale skin flushed with blood, his eyes vamping out, the pupils widening, white sclera flaming scarlet as the capillaries dilated. And his fangs clicked down from the roof of his mouth, the snap the only sound in the dead silent room. Then everything happened at once.

  Lincoln pointed a long bony finger at Angie and took a single step toward her.

  Moving faster than I could follow, Jerel drew his sword with a soft hiss of steel on leather. Holly stepped toward Angie Baby. Both vamps put themselves between my daughter and the enraged vampire. Jerel pointed his sword at his master’s throat. Holly maneuvered, barehanded, his feet rooted and knees bent, clearly much more dangerous than he appeared—a martial art master of some form or other. Or several. Bladed. That was what Jane called it. His body was bladed. He was primed to attack his boss.

  Lincoln slowed, but shouted, “Witches deal falsely! We will have our property!”

  “Children are sacrosanct, my Lord,” Jerel said softly.

  “It would pain us to bring you harm,” Holly, said, his red ponytail swinging.

  “I am not ready to become the MOC, just yet, Honey, but if you hurt that young’un, I’ll let ‘em take your head,” the blond said, which identified her as the heir apparent of the Shaddock Clan, Dacy Mooney. And she too stepped between the vamp and the rest of us. I remembered to breathe and reached for Angie, pulling her close enough for Carmen to activate the ward we had prepared. It closed us in and closed the vamps out. “Take a good cleansing breath, Link,” Dacy said. “Relax. Or it will be the last time you lose your temper.”

  Outside, my van squealed into the lot and stopped hard. The twins boiled out before the vehicle even stopped rocking, one holding two handguns, the other with a shotgun. “Son of a witch on a switch,” I cursed softly.

  “I’m not here as the blood-master of my clan,” Lincoln Shaddock said with a strong Tennessee/Kentucky accent. “I’m here to regain what I lost.”

  “We all want to regain what we lost when our humanity left us,” Dacy said, “but
we got rules and limits. And memories. That has to be enough,” she finished, her tone telling how much she had lost and how painful memories could be.

  “Children. Are. Sacrosanct,” Jerel said his tone adamant, light glinting off the steel of his long-sword.

  The twins moved into the room and positioned themselves so they could shoot Shaddock and not one of us. Holly shifted so he could get to Regan and Shaddock both. His face was intent, focused, and troubled. He would kill if he had to. But he clearly didn’t want to.

  Lincoln blinked and looked at my daughter, cradling a brown and yellow teapot like a pet. His fangs clicked back into his mouth. His eyes paled and lightened, as did his skin. And he blew out a puff of breath as if he really needed to breathe for something other than talking. He looked up to me. “My apologies, ladies. I am … not myself tonight, I haven’t been myself ever since I felt the burst of magic. I raced to see if …” he paused and shook his head as if changing what he had been about to say, “but it was only the teapot. But the teapot was better than nothing. Better than the nothing that I had. I ask your forgiveness.”

  And then he did the strangest thing. The fiercest fanghead in the hills dropped to one knee. The three defending vampires stepped slightly to the side so Lincoln could see us, but not so far that he could get to us if he still wanted. He said to Angie Baby, “I especially beg your forgiveness, little witch child. I was distraught and forgot how frightening my kind can be.”

  “George is scared of you,” Angie said.

  Lincoln smiled, a purely human smile, and said, “No. The dog was named George, not the teapot.”

  Angie narrowed her eyes fiercely. “What kind of dog?”

  Lincoln’s smile widened. “A Bassett Hound. He was my best, my very best, dog. Ever. I gave him into my Dorothy’s keeping before I went off to war. He was ancient and toothless and fierce in protecting her when I appeared that night. Until he caught my scent. There must have been something still of the human scent about me. For he came to me when my Dorothy would not.”