Page 5 of Her Dreadful Will
When Mya came back to herself, she was sitting on the rugs next to Delie and somehow she was holding Dylani, cradling his fuzzy head against her arm.
And she had told this stranger everything. Every damn dream and struggle and fear.
Soleil finished ringing up the items that Mya barely remembered selecting, and she brought over the bag, the receipt, and Mya’s card. Mya took a peek in the bag, and every item was perfect. Just what she needed.
A satisfaction stronger than happiness swept through her. Soleil helped her take the children outside and buckle them into the stroller.
They exchanged numbers and promised to text sometime, and then Mya walked home, suffused with a fervent purpose that lasted throughout the day. She cleaned the first floor, did every scrap of laundry, crafted a chore chart for the older boys, and started making a budget. The baby cooed contentedly and Delie played by herself—miracles that would have astonished Mya on any other day.
But this wasn’t just another day. This was the day she would begin again.
4
Dressed in a hooded jacket the color of a nighttime forest, Soleil glided along the sidewalk. The concrete path was swollen in places, pushed up and cracked open by the roots of the big trees in the yards she passed. Overhead, the stiff glossy leaves of a massive magnolia rasped against each other’s edges, whispering in the breeze. Under those boughs the night shadows clustered thickly. Soleil was glad to move from beneath the tree into the open air again.
The streetlights were few and far apart, lone golden sentinels in a sea of blue-green darkness.
In her fingers Soleil gripped a broken piece of magnetite etched with a magical sigil, whose other half she’d dropped into the basket of Mya’s stroller. The chunk in Soleil’s hand tugged lightly, drawing her toward its other half.
Mya’s house couldn’t be far ahead. The pull was getting stronger.
An effective hyacle required five key ingredients:
The Intrinsic Self
The Cherished Token
The Touch of Nature
The Charmed Essence
The Unshadowed Light
First, a piece of the subject’s self. Hair, nails, teeth, bone, skin—any of it would work.
Next, the Cherished Token. A little harder to identify and to claim without being caught.
Touch of Nature—a bit of earth or some growing things from land the subject owned or touched regularly.
The hyacle was always stronger if the fourth ingredient, Charmed Essence, was a bodily fluid like blood, urine, semen, or saliva. Soleil preferred blood, but she usually had to settle for water from the subject’s land, tinctured with dried cornflower or shredded bay leaf, with a scrap of their dwelling to strengthen the attachment.
She’d plucked a few loose strands of hair from Mya’s shirt, and quietly snipped a lock of the baby’s curls while directing his mother’s gaze elsewhere. The baby’s hair would do for a Cherished Token, but Soleil needed two more ingredients to craft Mya’s hyacle.
Over the past weeks, she had made many such excursions. She wished she could bring Cerberus with her, but she and the tall Doberman were still getting to know each other, and his silent obedience was a work in progress.
The magnetite lurched so sharply to the left that Soleil almost lost her grip on it. So this was the house then. Of course it was. A beautiful home, with a first-floor porch and a second-floor balcony, and pillars running the height of the place up to an elegantly gabled roof. The double front door spilled amber light through frosted windowpanes onto eight bricked steps.
Soleil moved ahead a few paces, then ducked off the sidewalk into the shadow of a hedge. The thick darkness smelled of wet grass, cedar, and earth. She inched along, her eyes fixed on one of the flowerbeds at the corner of the house. She could pluck some grass from right here and count it as Touch of Nature, but if she collected something from nearer the house, the hyacle would be more powerful. Since a couple of her ingredients were already weak, she needed a stronger one.
No one was on the sidewalk or in the yard, and the bushes shielded the space from neighbors. Despite the light from the front windows, she didn’t see anyone moving around downstairs.
She fumbled with her messenger bag, tucking the magnetite into a side pocket and slipping out a cloth pouch for the plant and a green glass bottle for the Charmed Essence water. She’d have to find a hose spigot or a birdbath or something.
With a quick inhale, she darted forward. Five swift steps across the lawn, and her fingers sank into the black earth of the flowerbed, scooping up dirt and tiny sprouts.
A series of staccato barks blasted her ears. Startled, she dropped her handful of earth. A dog was in the house, barking through an open window somewhere above her. “Damn,” she whispered and scrabbled in the flowerbed again, recklessly dumping soil and damp leaves into the cloth bag. She clawed at one of the boards, too, raking off scraps of paint and earning herself a splinter in the process.
The barking increased, and a second dog joined in.
