Page 40 of Devils and the Dead
“How did you know we were here?” I asked Cassie once the elf queen was gone.
What I really wanted to know was how she’d managed to show up at exactly the right moment. My eldest sister was a powerful witch, but she wasn’t omniscient.
Sylvie shot me a guilty look. “I called her. I just wanted to give her a heads-up that we were trying to break the curse. Just in case the whole mountain crashed down, or we all turned into newts, or something.”
I frowned, not sure if Sylvie had been worried that her magic might produce the unintended and disastrous results, or if there would be a backlash from the curse being broken. Probably the latter. None of us had loads of experience with fae magic, and zero with the elven brand of fae magic. It had been wise of Sylvie to warn Cassie of what we were doing, and I felt like a fool for not thinking of that myself.
“I didn’t come up here to micromanage you or anything,” Cassie told me. “Honestly, I didn’t intend to come up here at all until the wards went off. I had to use a spell that Lucian helped me craft. Damned near teleported myself into the middle of the creek.”
I swung my head around to look at Cassie. “The wards went off? If the elf queen’s portal triggered the wards this time, then it probably did when she came here to curse the others. Isadora was Accident’s witch when the elves first arrived, but seventy years later, Grandma would have been the witch in charge of Accident. She must have known.”
Sylvie’s eyes widened. “And if she knew, there would be a note in her journal.”
“That note might not be of any use,” Cassie warned us. “Grandma wouldn’t have been able to teleport. By the time she drove up to Savior Mountain to check on the ward alarm, the queen and the elves living here were most likely gone.”
“She probably thought the elves returning home trigger the ward,” I mused. “Maybe that’s how the rumor that they’d left started.”
Cassie shrugged. “Maybe. It wouldn’t have been a perimeter ward, since the queen probably appeared right in the middle of the settlement, just like she did this time. Residents sometimes trigger the overall protective wards with their magic. Clearly opening up a big-ass portal on the mountain triggers them as well.”
“The wards of thirty years ago weren’t quite as good as the ones we have now,” Sylvie cautioned.
She was right. Bronwyn took care of the perimeter and safety wards, and she was unusually talented when it came to that sort of magic.
“I still want to check both Isadora’s and Grandma’s journals,” I told them. “Just in case there’s something useful there.”
Cassie nodded. “It’s a good thing today is Sunday. We’ll all be together for dinner tonight, and we can fill everyone in and strategize. Bronwyn is going to need to pull out all the stops on creating a beautiful, enchanted gift. We need to present the queen with something she’ll absolutely love—love enough to let that poor elf free.”
“And we need to find this Everbloom,” Sylvie reminded us.
“I’ll try to communicate with Tinsel later,” I said. “With the other elves free, he might be more willing to risk giving the flower back to the queen.”
“He doesn’t have much to lose,” Cassie said. “This is his only chance to be free from an eternity of suffering.”
There was so much riding on this whole thing. Tinsel. The town of Accident. All of our residents here. And we only had forty-eight hours.
Clinton came toward us. “I heard what that elf woman said. We’ll help. We’ve gotten to know this mountain pretty well over the last few months. If you can get a description of this flower, or any idea of where it might be, then I can turn the whole pack loose to search.”
“Thank you. We’ll definitely take you up on that offer,” I told him.
The werewolves cordoned off the area with the log with caution tape, and I gave both Sylvie and Cassie a ride back to town, dropping Sylvie off at her house before going to Cassie.
I left my eldest sister prepping for tonight’s dinner and headed up the stairs into the attic. It was warm up there. The heat rose through the two floors below and counteracted the chill weather that was moving in. I sorted through boxes until I found the one I wanted, then sat in an old rocking chair and began to read.
With only a vague idea of when the elves arrived, I started with one of Isadora’s journals from a hundred years ago and flipped through scores of entries about town festivals, sanitation systems, and the usual issues with the werewolf pack. Finally I found a brief few paragraphs that mentioned the elves.
The wards chimed today at 1:36 this afternoon in the wilds of Savior Mountain. No one lives there currently, but the shifters do occasionally hunt there and the fairy-folk hold festivals in the watershed area, so I was not alarmed. Sometimes their magic triggers these wards—an issue I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to fix for the last ten years. After I finished my baking, I put on my boots and made my way there, hoping I did not disturb one of the fairy-folk festivals, as that makes them grumpy. Imagine my surprise when I arrived to see a newly cleared area and houses! The place appeared to be vacant, but my amulet glowed, sensing magic and the presence of more than just me and the animals in the woods. I cast a spell, and it told me these were newcomers, the likes of which Accident had never seen before.
I called out a greeting, and they came forth. There were thirteen small fairylike creatures. The leader’s name is Tinsel and he informed me that they were elves, come here to live in peace. I welcomed them, let them know the rules of Accident, and said that they should feel free to come see me with any questions or concerns they might have.
They all seemed cautious and wary. Afraid. I know newcomers are often overwhelmed, so I left them in peace and intend to check back with them in a few weeks.
I paged further ahead in the journal, noting that while Isadora made several visits to the elves over the next few months, they continued to seem afraid and to prefer their solitude. Any offer to participate in town events or meet the others was met with a polite but firm refusal. Finally Isadora stopped visiting them, trusting that they’d let her know if they needed anything or changed their mind about meeting the townfolk.
The whole thing sounded fishy to me, but I could see how my great grandmother would not have noticed any red flags. The werewolf pack back then was also reclusive and isolated on their mountain territory. Heck, the werewolf clan had still been that way most of my life. It was only recently, after the pack had split, that werewolves were more frequently seen in town, and a brave few outside of Accident in the human world. The joy of Accident was that the residents could live the way they wanted with only a few rules to abide by. They could walk about in their natural forms and perform their magic without fear of persecution from the humans. It was the utopia that our ancestor, Temperance Perkins, had founded when she’d narrowly escaped the witch trials with her life, and each successive generation of witches had dedicated our lives to protecting the town and the residents.
I couldn’t blame Isadora for not digging into the background of the newcomers and discovering their secrets. It wasn’t the way we did things in Accident.
It took me hours, but in my Grandmother’s journals I found the final entry about the elves just as the smell of pork ribs permeated the attic.
