Episode 17 of The Witch’s Key: “I Needed You To Understand”
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Listen To Episode 17
Episode 17: “I Needed You To Understand”
“I assume he’s refusing to cooperate,” Martin said as we joined the others in the clearing.
“He keeps saying he had nothing to do with those missing girls,” Darius said, practically snarling as he looked at Bates. “I don’t think he understands just how miserable his life can get out here alone in the woods with no one looking out for him.”
Martin placed a calming hand on Darius’s shoulder. Bates didn’t look comforted by Martin’s appearance. In fact, he looked even more terrified, despite Martin’s calm demeanor.
“What is your relationship to Julie Peterson?” Martin asked.
“Look, I’m done with her, I promise,” Bates said. “You tell me to leave town, I’m gone. Besides, I was simply trying to earn an honest buck. That Moondust isn’t hurting anybody, especially not in such small quantities.”
Uncle Martin stared at Bates for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether to believe him or not.
“Come on, Martin, you know me. I have never hurt anyone,” Bates said. “I was helping the lady sell some cupcakes. What’s the crime there?”
The man was literally shaking.
He definitely didn’t appear like some criminal mastermind, but people—or demons—could be good actors when they wanted to be. I didn’t trust him, and neither, it seemed, did Martin.
“It seems quite convenient that you appeared in Newcastle precisely two weeks before the first young woman disappeared,” Martin said. He lifted his hand and spread his fingers apart. Electric sparks seemed to jump between his fingertips like lightning bolts.
Bates started to cry.
“I didn’t do anything to those girls, I swear to you,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“You didn’t answer my question.” Martin took two slow steps toward Bates. “What is your relationship to Ms. Peterson? How did you first meet her, and what was your arrangement?”
Bates swallowed and took a few deep breaths. He looked like he was about to pass out.
“I met Julie at one of those holiday expos in Knoxville just before Christmas,” he said. “I was selling cookies and pies in the booth next to her, and I kept having people come back for seconds. By noon, I’d sold out of my entire stock. She wanted to know why, and she was pretty, you know.”
He shrugged at this, as if we should all understand what he meant.
“A Christmas expo?” Darius asked, pacing. “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re supposed to believe that? Just how dumb do you think we are? You went through a portal today and left a young woman behind to be attacked by a trap demon. Where did you go, Bates? What were you and Julie Peterson doing there?”
Bates’s eyes widened and he looked around the circle, his eyes finally landing on me.
“Who? Her? I’ve never even seen that girl in my life,” he said. “I didn’t know there was any kind of trap set in there, which is why I ran like hell when I came back through to see the place half destroyed and full of ashes. I didn’t want any part of it.”
“A likely story,” Darius said.
Gowan stepped forward. “Just tell us where the portal took you,” he said. “Let’s start there and work our way back to the truth.”
“The portal just leads to a factory,” he said. “Julie wanted me to bring an extra supply of Moondust out to her there. She’s got some big hopes of opening up a nationwide operation. I didn’t have enough dust, though, and she got angry. Sent me back for more. I tried to tell her my lab was destroyed, but she didn’t believe me.”
My ears perked up at this.
“What happened last night?” I asked. “Who destroyed your lab? Was it Blythe Greer? How do you know her?”
Bates looked confused. “How do you know my sister?”
My jaw nearly dropped to the ground.
“Ms. Greer is your sister?” I asked. I turned to Martin. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“She’s his half-sister,” Martin said. “She’s always looking to keep him out of trouble with the Council, but Bates here can’t seem to stop himself from getting involved in questionable dealings.”
I shook my head. It suddenly felt like we were on a wild goose chase. All these things that seemed so important now looked relatively innocent.
If he was telling the truth, anyway.
“So, what happened to the lab?” I asked.
“There was some kind of fire in the woods last night,” Bates said. “One second I was smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out if it was time to pack up and head to another town, and then next, I was rushing my moon sprite friends out of a blazing warehouse. I drove them to safety, and when I came back ,the whole place was just gone. Everything I owned was destroyed.”
“Except a few bags of that Moondust you were talking about,” Darius said.
“Well, yeah,” Bates said. “Those were in the back of my van.”
“And where are the moon sprites now?” I asked.
“Temporarily in a motel near the old bottle factory,” he said. “I don’t think I can convince them to stick around much longer, though. Not unless I can find them a better place to stay.”
Martin made brief eye contact with Asher, who nodded and got in his car. He was most likely headed to that motel to make sure Bates’s story held up.
“So, you moved here because Julie Peterson wanted to sell more cupcakes,” Darius said. “What do you know about her possible involvement in the case of five missing girls in this town? Have you heard her talk about them? Has she ever mentioned where she might be keeping them?”
Bates held his hands out. “Can you please untie me? This is starting to really hurt,’ he said.
“No,” Martin said simply. “Answer the questions.”
“I mean, yeah. I’ve heard her talking about the girls who have gone missing, but mostly it’s just her talking about how she hopes no one comes to take Olive away from her,” he said. “She goes on and on about how she’s raised that little girl by herself and how if anything happened to her, she’d just die. Typical motherly stuff, I guess. I never thought anything of it.”
I started pacing, too. This wasn’t adding up.
If Julie Peterson was just greedy for a cupcake empire, then why set that trap on her house? Especially if Kai was right and that trap was set specifically for me. What would Julie Peterson possibly have against me? I just moved here.
The crazy thing was that I believed Bates. He seemed to be telling the truth about why he came here, but there was still so much missing to this story. It just wasn’t adding up.
Ms. Peterson was still the most likely suspect here, but why would Algrath care about setting up a cupcake empire?
He wouldn’t.
Had we been totally wrong about her? Was all this stuff with Bates just a coincidence?
No, I didn’t believe in that. There was a connection here. I could feel it. We just had to keep digging.
“We’re getting nowhere with this guy,” Darius said. “Let me take him back to the house, Martin. I’ll question him with a truth potion, if you have all of the ingredients. Then we’ll have the answers we need.”
“I have everything you’ll need,” Martin said. “But I will be returning to the house with you both. I have a few things I need to research before it gets too late. Gowan, you’re in charge here. Keep Lenny’s training going for as long as she can stand it. Then, come join me for a nice dinner at the house.”
Gowan smiled at me, his eyes full of mischief. “Will do, sir,” he said. “But I won’t go easy on her just because she’s a Thorne.”
“Of course. I would expect no less from you,” Martin said.
I tried to act like I wasn’t scared, but inside, I was trembling. How much more of this could I take?
“I’m going to head back into town, too,” Kai said. “I have to get ready for work. I’ll come back out as soon as I get a chance, though.”
I was definitely sad to see him go. Could I handle this all by myself? Today had already proved just how little I really knew.
Gianna and Gowan stayed with me in the woods, drilling me on what they called the fundamentals for more than two hours, before I finally begged for a break and sat down.
My body ached, and as I sat there drinking water, I dreamed about looking through Mom’s spellbooks for some kind of bath bomb that would cure aching muscles. I closed my eyes, daydreaming about the warmth of the bath and the comfort of my bed.
My eyes snapped open, though, when I heard Gowan scratching in the dirt at the center of the clearing. He was using a stick to draw a circle with a pentagram and other symbols inside it.
“Trying to catch a demon?” I asked, almost laughing. I had never seen anyone draw this particular symbol in the dirt, but I’d seen it in some textbooks that used to be in Dad’s library.
“Exactly,” Gowan said.
I stood and watched him more carefully.
“I didn’t think anyone used these types of Demon Circles, anymore,” I said. “Mom always told me they were so ancient and simple that they hardly ever worked compared to some of the more advanced techniques Slayers have now.”
Gowan made a guttural sound and cursed under his breath.
“I take it you disagree?” I said, laughing.
“This is no laughing matter, Lenny. Your mom was right about this being a more ancient technique, but it was good enough for Slayers for centuries before the coven developed those so-called modern techniques,” Gowan explained as he finished off the circle. “In my experience, a well-placed Demon Circle is much more effective and reliable than many of the newer approaches. A Demon Circle never fails.”
“Yeah, as long as you can trick the demon into stepping into one,” Gianna said, stepping out from behind a tree.
She had a small brown bunny in her hands, and I suddenly felt a bit sick to my stomach.
“What are you doing with the bunny?” I asked.
Gowan suppressed a smile as he took the rabbit from her and ran his hand across its back a couple of times.
“If you’re clever enough, it’s not that difficult to trick a demon into a circle trap like this,” he said. “The biggest limitation is that a Slayer doesn’t always have time to draw and activate it before the fight begins. Still, it’s important for modern Slayers to understand why this simple magic works so effectively. Sometimes, I think the Council would rather we all turn only to modern magic, but if we abandon our old ways completely, the knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals will eventually be lost.”
“And the bunny?” I asked again, chewing on my bottom lip.
“An exercise in your dedication to the cause,” he said. “Since we don’t have a demon handy, I want you to practice on this cute little creature.”
I groaned. I did not want to do this.
“Lenny, you stand back about six more feet toward the trees.” He turned and counted out about fifteen feet back from the opposite side of the Demon Circle.
When he turned back toward me, he leaned his head toward the bunny and whispered a few words I couldn’t hear. Above the rabbit’s head, a small mirror image of the Demon Circle appeared, marking the bunny.
I’d never seen that particular spell cast before, but I understood immediately that it meant the circle would trap the bunny the same way it would trap a demon.
Hopefully, all he’d ask me to do was trap it. If he asked me to kill that bunny, I was going to have a serious problem.
“Okay, Lenny, see if you can trick the rabbit into the circle,” Gowan said, setting the rabbit down in the pine needles. “Don’t see it as a rabbit. See it as the demon you’re trying to banish.”
I took a deep breath. It was hard to pretend an adorable little bunny was a killer demon, but okay. I wanted to get better, and I trusted that Gowan knew what he was doing.
I tried a variety of things to convince the rabbit to cross into that circle, but if I tried to go anywhere near it, the bunny hopped away. Gowan had created some kind of barrier around the clearing so that the bunny couldn’t completely hop into the woods to get away, but for about five minutes, all I’d managed to do was move it from one outer part of the clearing to another.
“If something isn’t working, try something different,” Gowan said. “If you want to be an effective Slayer, you have to think fast and innovate. You have to use everything around you. What else can you do here?”
I cleared my mind and tried to see past the frustration of feeling like a complete failure out here. What else could I use? If I was a bunny, what would trick me into following a human?
The image of a carrot immediately popped into my mind, and I felt a simple rush of exhilaration. I reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt. I knew if this was a real-life situation, I wouldn’t have much time to turn this into an acceptable replica of a carrot, so I allowed my mind to forget everything else but that handful of dirt and what I wanted it to become.
Instantly, my hand began to hum with the power of my own intention. I cleared my mind and imagined a carrot. We hadn’t gotten advanced enough to talk about color shifting and making things look realistic, but right now, this was the best idea I had at my disposal.
I glanced at Gianna, and she nodded.
That simple encouragement was all I needed. I poured my pure intentions into the handful of earth and smiled when it formed into a passable carrot shape with a slightly orange tint. Not perfect, but it was a good start.
But would it be enough?
I leaned down and held the carrot toward the bunny.
“Come on, little one,” I said in a soft voice. “Are you hungry?”
That got its attention. The bunny sniffed along the ground and took a few hops toward me.
“That’s it,” I said, backing up into the circle just a couple of steps. “Come on.”
As the bunny moved toward me, I kept backing up further into the circle, enticing it to keep moving. When his first little bunny foot crossed into the circle, nausea rolled through me.
Was this going to kill the poor little guy?
I glanced at Gowan, but his face was a blank slate.
I sighed and backed up again. “Come on, little bunny. That’s it. Get your carrot,” I said, teasing him toward me.
I kept my eyes trained on the bunny’s feet, and I gasped the second he fully crossed into the circle. The area all around us pulsed with a new kind of energy, and I could just make out the faintest outline of the circle’s barrier all around us.
Dang. Would I be able to step out of it now? Or was I trapped, too?
I quickly stood and took one tentative step out of the circle, then sighed in relief. Okay, I wasn’t stuck at least. But what was going to happen to this little rabbit?
He tried to hop toward me, but it seemed like he was stuck in molasses. He could move, but his movements were slow and labored as he crossed the circle. When he reached the barrier near me, he pushed against it, but he couldn’t cross over it.
The bunny was officially trapped and alive.
I relaxed my shoulders and smiled up at Gowan. “There,” I said. “I did it.”
“Very good,” he said. “Not bad for your first try, although you realize if this was a real demon, you would have lost him by now. In order to use a Demon’s Circle, you have to be witty. Clever. It’s very different from the brute-force magic the Council trains its Slayers with now, but it works. You’ve also expended very little energy to get to this point.”
I nodded. He was right. It was a lot more work fighting off the demons at the Peterson house this morning.
“Now, for the second part of your test,” he said. “It’s great that you were able to get the demon into the circle, but once its there, you need to banish or contain it in some way. This takes quite a bit more power. Even willpower, sometimes, especially if you stop to think about what you’re doing.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, not sure I understood what he meant about willpower.
“Once trapped, a demon knows it has limited options, so it will often go right for your weakest spot. For a lot of Slayers, our weak point is our emotions,” Gowan explained. “In my experience, most demons who get snared in a trap like this will immediately shift into the human form and begin to beg for mercy. Even though you know there’s a demon inside that person, it can be very difficult to do what needs to be done.”
I swallowed hard and stared at the circle. He was going to make me kill this bunny, wasn’t he?
“So, now that we know you can use your wits to get the demon into the circle, we need to practice what you’ll do once he’s there.” He took a mirror from his pocket and tossed it to me.
It was just one of those handheld compact mirrors that a lot of women carried in their purse. I opened it.
“Do you know how to use that?” he asked. “Have you ever trapped a demon inside a mirror or object before?”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen it done a couple of times before, but I’ve never done it myself.”
“Well, today’s your lucky day,” he said. “All you have to do is point the mirror toward the demon and say the incantation. In Quod Relego.”
“And if I do that to the bunny, what happens?” I asked. “He’s not really a demon, so it won’t hurt him, right?”
“It’s likely to kill it, but what’s one bunny sacrificed compared to a demon going free? Or worse, you losing your life because you didn’t have the courage to go through with it?” Gowan asked, moving around the circle to stand next to me. “It’s time now, Lenny. Say the incantation.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t do that.
I mean, I was all for practicing, but what had this bunny ever done to anyone?
“You must,” Gowan said, standing so close to me now, it felt like he was practically breathing down my neck.
“I can’t do it,” I said, my heart racing. “Just let me practice without the bunny.”
“No, you have to know that you can do it no matter who or what is inside that circle,” Gowan said. “What if there really was a demon inside of that rabbit? Would you be too much of a coward to follow through because it was too cute?”
“No, of course not,” I said. I wanted to just drop the mirror and walk away, but there was also a piece of me that knew he was right.
Being a Slayer was not easy, and sometimes you had to make really difficult decisions.
“Do it,” he said. “Your time is running out. Do it now, Lenny.”
With trembling hands, I pointed the mirror toward the bunny. Everything inside me protested, though. It just looked so cute and innocent. A few minutes ago, he was hopping through the woods, minding his own business. He didn’t deserve this.
“You’ve got five seconds,” Gowan said. “Five seconds or you fail the test and you might as well go home and forget all of this. You can’t do this, maybe your friend dies.”
My entire body tensed, and a tear rolled down my cheek. I didn’t want to do this.
I took a deep breath, then opened my mouth and tried to force the words out. I tried to make myself say them as Gowan began counting down.
“Five. Four. Three.”
I shook my head. “I can’t,” I shouted.
“Do it,” Gianna said.
“Two…”
I looked down at the bunny. It was just staring up at me, its big brown eyes full of fear and confusion.
“One…”
I tried to imagine there was a demon hidden inside that bunny’s body, but I just couldn’t force myself to say the words.
Instead, I closed the mirror and handed it back to Gowan. “I can’t do it,” I said, trying to hold back tears. “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”
“Fine, I’ll do it,” Gowan said, opening the mirror and pointing it toward the bunny.
“No, don’t,” I said.
“In Quod Relego.”
I couldn’t watch. I turned away as he said the words. I walked over to a nearby tree and leaned against it.
I didn’t want to see the dead bunny, but I also knew I had failed. We were running out of time, and I was too weak to even hurt a bunny.
“Lenny, turn around,” Gianna said.
“I don’t want to,” I said, tears coming now. Maybe I was just too tired. Too worn out after a full day of training. I couldn’t force myself to turn.
Gowan placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Turn around, Lenny.”
His voice was so soft and understanding, which wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting. I expected him to be angry with me.
I turned, meeting his eye as I wiped the tears from my face.
Gowan stood there, the bunny in his hands. Perfectly alive and happily chewing on an actual piece of bright, orange carrot.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or punch him in the arm.
“But you said it would kill the bunny,” I said. “I would have done it if I’d known it wasn’t going to hurt him.”
Gowan passed the bunny and the carrot to me, and I stroked its soft coat and nuzzled my nose against it.
“It’s a hard lesson to learn, but I wanted to illustrate a point, Lenora. When you’re up against a demon like Algrath, he could look like anyone,” Gowan said. “He could look like me or even Martin. If it ever comes to that, you need to know you can do what has to be done. Do you understand me? If you want to be a Slayer and truly rid the world of evil, you have to be strong. You have to be able to make tough decisions.”
He took the bunny from me and set him down on the ground. We all watched as the poor little guy hopped away.
“And sometimes,” Gowan said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “you may have to kill or hurt someone you thought you loved. Or the image of someone you loved. With tricksters and mimic demons, you have to be stronger than you realize. You can’t have any blind spots or weaknesses when you’re a Slayer. Not if you want to survive. I’m sorry I was so harsh, but I needed you to understand what it might be like tomorrow.”
I nodded, letting his words really sink in. We still didn’t know who Algrath was pretending to be. He could be anyone.
As I followed them to the car to head home for dinner, I felt true fear deep down in my gut for the first time since all of this started. Who was Algrath? And when the time came, if he looked like someone I loved, would I be able to do what needed to be done?
All I could do the whole way home was stare out the window and pray that whatever happened, it wouldn’t come to that.