Page 70 of Witches of Dubious Origin
“Where’s Eloise?” I asked.
“She’s resting. I think coming that close to a ghoul shook her up.” Olive glanced back at the laptop. “She hasn’t lost any more body parts, so that’s something.”
Weariness settled over me. I was tired all the way down to my soul. I wasn’t used to nonanswers for answers and I really loathed not being able to find a case study or a dissertation or something that would help me comprehend this new reality I was living in. The only thing I could think to do was solve the problem at hand.
To that end, I asked, “Did you discover anything about my mother’s death?”
Olive glanced back at me, considering. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“It’s the assignment, isn’t it?” I knew I sounded a bit snippy and I would have felt bad about it except that a corpse had tried to strangle me and I didn’t have enough emotional bandwidth to feel regret for my tone.
Olive’s lips actually turned up at the corners. “Very well, Ziakas.”
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she was pleased with me. “I don’t have definitive proof of murder.”
I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or not. I had no time to process as she continued.
“What I do have are some troubling medical records,” she said.
I glanced at the chair near me. It was upholstered in white suede. I’d be an absolute ass to sit on it, but I was so exhausted. I pulled the chair out and sat—gingerly, but I sat.
“Have you ever heard of the Waning Curse?”
I frowned. “Waningas in a waning moon?”
Olive’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Exactly. It coincides with the waning gibbous, third quarter, and waning crescent phases of the moon.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“Essentially, it’s used on a witch or a mage to slowly kill them.” A flicker of sympathy flashed in Olive’s dark eyes. “I believe the curse was used on your mother.”
“But why?” I asked.
“I suspect whoever did it wanted the grimoire, but your mother must have refused to tell them where it was,” Olive said.
“It was hidden in time,” I said.
Olive leaned forward. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s a theory that Agatha has,” I said. “She believes we could never figure out where my mother was because she was hiding in another time.” I told her about my mother’s sporadic visits and the strange antique gifts she always arrived with, like the dollhouse and the raven puppet.
“Which would explain why Eloise couldn’t feel the grimoire and find Juliet,” Olive said.
“What proof do you have that she had this Waning Curse?” I asked.
“The symptoms she had are what you’d expect—exhaustion, hallucinations, ravenous hunger but an inability to eat, difficulty in communicating, and her patient chart indicates a gradual slowing in the function of her body’s organs with no indication of any known illness. Her magical powers would have gone dormant as well, meaning she couldn’t even help herself with magic. Of course, human doctors wouldn’t have known what was wrong with her or have the cure.”
“So she just wasted away into nothing and no one helped her?” I asked.
Olive nodded. “Her official cause of death was cardiac arrest.”
“That’s what we were told.”
“And it’s probable that her heart gave out because of the curse,” Olive said.
“And you’re absolutely certain she was cursed?” I asked.
“I’d say, more accurately, your mother was magically murdered.”
