Accession Page 3

  She turned around fully. “It stinks. Knock it off.”

  “Fine,” he said while he sulked. “Leave it to you mortals to have no taste. Why, when I served the High Queen of Richmond, we bathed in the mixture daily.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Really? I wouldn’t put it past a sane woman to throw it out while you weren’t looking.”

  “You jest, I’m sure,” he said haughtily. “There is nothing like kobold mud baths to reduce wrinkling in the skin, and boy, did she ever need it. If you ever saw her naked, it was like a pig carcass hit with the black plague and then put in the drying machine with—”

  “All right, enough!” said a horrified Katherine. “I really didn’t need that image in my head. Really didn’t want to know what the Queen of Virginia looked like, naked or clothed.”

  “Richmond!”

  “What?”

  “She’s the High Queen of Richmond, Katherine,” Gestap said. “You should know that. There are no high queens of the states, just the capital cities.”

  She glared at him. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe we’re not all educated on the fineries of court. What’s the difference? She might as well be the Queen of Virginia—nothing gets past any queen, high or not, in the domain she rules.”

  “Regardless, it’s prudent in political circles to know who’s who and where they rule. If you ever said that in court, you’d be laughed out,” he said with a sniff.

  “Whatever,” said Katherine as she stomped to the back of the shed and undid the latch on the double doors that opened onto the swamp in the back.

  “Not whatever.”

  “It’s not like I’ll ever have a chance to go to a high court. That’s Mother’s duty once a year, and then Rose’s when she ascends to take her place.”

  Katherine reached over to grab the spear with the serrated blade on the tip from where it leaned against the inside of the shed. Turning her head to look over at Gestap, who had already hopped over, she walked out on the ramp with him by her side.

  “One doesn’t need to experience something to have knowledge of it,” he tutted. If she wasn’t so irritated with him, the sight of a massive toad tutting would have made her crack a smile.

  As she took a seat in the small skiff tied next to his shed, she murmured, “Actually, I changed my mind. Rose isn’t afraid of you. She’s afraid of your mouth.”

  He didn’t hear her, as he was busy diving happily into the swamp. As she waited for him to rise to the top of the moonlit waters, she pushed off from the ramp with help from the blunt end of her spear. Gestap soon emerged and took hold of the rope at the front of the skiff with his large mouth. With powerful kicks of his hind legs, they were off into the swamp.

  She took in the waters around them, disturbed only by the ripples from his kicks. Huge lily pads and swamp cypress trees broke the surface frequently. The cypress trees in particular were magnificent to watch. Their massive trunks were so wide at the base that the trees looked like the round teepees of the Native American shamans who came to Georgia once a year to renew the sacred 1850 concord of Coven-Shaman Relations. The concord was one of many enacted by the witch queens in remembrance of the Trail of Tears beside their shaman brethren. Witches and shamans may not believe in the same gods and certainly didn’t practice similar magic, but they did agree on the benefits of remembering the past and respecting their ancestors.

  Katherine mused on the history of the original colonies as she sat back and the cool mist of the swamp enveloped her. As Gestap swam further in, he led the skiff on a convoluted path around and between the whispering trees. As Katherine tilted her head back to watch the fern-like foliage pass overhead, she relaxed, her body stilled, and the cool moistness of the earth, the distinctive smell of the flowering lilies, and the flicker of fireflies in the night surrounded her. When the lilac blossoms passed by, she made sure to grab a handful.

  She listened to Gestap’s swift but powerful strokes until they got to a platform in the center of the swamp. It was a recycled shipping crate that she’d brought out here years back after getting tired of stabbing prey from the unstable skiff. Stabbing the pole into the shallow waters that surrounded the platform, she vaulted off the skiff with the momentum it gave her with a grunt. And then she watched with wary eyes.

  This time of the night was what the teens at her high school liked to call the witching hour. Little did they know they were right. It was the space and time just before the break of the sun’s rays through night’s passage. A lot of things could happen between now and dawn, and a lot of things did happen. She wasn’t afraid. Just wary. She really didn’t want to be late for homeroom. If there was anything she hated more than tardy attendance, it was having to slink into class in front of every single hot sophomore in Bethlehem High. The irony ran like a delicious thrill through her. A witch attending a human school named after a Christian sacred site. But you did what you had to do, and when you came from a family of matriarchs born to rule a small town, that included mingling with the locals. After all, Sandersville was eighty percent human, following the trend of most witch-human population densities up and down the east coast.

  Standing next to the edge, she watched Gestap circle around the platform with ease. She didn’t urge him to hurry, because he wouldn’t listen. While she waited for him to get his act together, her thoughts turned to what she was in for at school. For one thing, she wasn’t the most popular kid. Being a small fish in an even smaller pond was what happened when fifty witches and warlocks attended a combined middle and high school of eight hundred students.

  Because she couldn’t or wouldn’t use her gifts unnecessarily she was the target of every witch or wizard with a desire to jump up the social ladder and the brains to realize she was vulnerable. Of course, her mother wouldn’t step in.

  I’d die of embarrassment if she did, anyway, Katherine thought to herself. What self-respecting teen had their mom take up for them?

  She made light of it now, but her stomach flipped in unease. Being a queen’s daughter had advantages...and one major disadvantage: anyone who wanted to hurt her mom could go through her daughters. Which was why they had guardians, and Katherine was sure that none of her tormenters had done much worse than put exploding tomatoes in her locker. Rose had put a firm hand down as queen bee that no more stupid tricks were to be practiced on her sister at Bethlehem High without her say so after one particular incident had managed to make Rose collateral damage. But even that only made life more livable but not necessarily comfortable.

  Katherine shifted on the hard planks. It wasn’t just her coven brethren that were a problem. She could deal with their childish antics well enough and she had a few friends...no matter what her sister said otherwise or her mother thought.

  What bothered Katherine more than anything was that no matter what she said or how carefully she said it, the humans were afraid. She had to admit, they had reason to fear. They lived in a coven-controlled society, and they knew that no matter who they elected or what position they served, the witches and warlocks ruled the lands of their thirteen states. In fact, the superiority of coven members was the only thing the Coven High Council of the Thirteen Colonies seemed to agree on these days. Not only was the human government coven-controlled, but every queen ruled their territory with absolute authority. And not every queen chose to do so as fairly as her mother did. She had heard horrible tales of humans murdered over something as small as a social slight farther south in Georgia. But everyone turned a blind eye to what happened outside of their own town or county. Over the years she had a made a few attempts to make friends across human-coven boundaries. She’d even managed to have a sleepover with one girl. That had ended with an experience best left unexplained, except to say that the girl had left screaming with a live snake writhing in her hair. So for now, Katherine let her inter-species attempts at bonding go. She didn’t have to like the way society was run, but she did have to live with it. The last witch to protest the injustice of coven rule in the countrys
ide had been burned at the stake—by her own coven.

  Fear tended to silence people, human and witch alike. In Sandersville, at least, the people were happy, the crops were fruitful, and the businesses run by human, coven, and others alike were protected by the queen’s laws. Her mother didn’t even require a queen’s tax like her sister queens in most other areas. Which was why Katherine’s family didn’t have servants, she drove a ratty old Camaro, and Rose worked weekends at the local clothing boutique to buy the latest fashions out of New York.

  That said, the money their mother did have went to making sure they had the best coven and human education possible. It put them in a strange position. Their mother was one of the few in Lancaster County that could both afford to have her daughters attend coven lessons and wanted her second daughter to have the opportunity. Most witches taught their first-born alone; after all, it was the first-born that was gifted with the most magic and the right to rule. Even if that just meant a farm on the edge of the county, the first-born witch would inherit her family’s seat of power. It just so happened that Rose would inherit an entire town and the surrounding land.

  Talking to Gestap absentmindedly, she said, “My birthday’s in three weeks, you know.”

  Bubbles surfaced. She assumed he was speaking to her. She wasn’t willing to stick her head in the water to find out, even though she was perfectly proficient in mer linguistics. And then it happened. The swamp water all around them began to bubble up as if she sat in the middle of a hot spring. Gripping the spear with the serrated tip held out in front of her, she waited anxiously.

  Chapter 4

  Before she could blink, Gestap leapt straight up out of the water with a swamp gator right on his tailless behind. The gator’s white belly glistened as it emerged from the water and its maw was wide open to take a chunk out of the giant frog that rose above it. Then it all froze like a picture in a frame. The gator hung upright in mid-air while Gestap loomed above it with a smirk on his froggy face. It was almost comical to watch the gator immobilized by Gestap’s magic—unable to move, unable to eat the succulent froggy meat just above him, and unable to save itself. Because now it was Katherine’s turn. With a sharp push she thrust her blade into the under-flesh of its vulnerable belly and up into its heart for a clean kill.

  Gestap landed on the platform next to her with a thump.

  “Well done, Katherine,” he said, pleased.

  She turned to him with her hands on her hips. “You were supposed to get a small one. What’s small about a six-foot gator?”

  If a frog could shrug, he did. “The only male in the area.”

  Her eye twitched. “The only gator in the area?”

  “Well, no,” admitted the shifty kobold, “but you know how much I love to snack on the balls.”

  “Gestap!”

  “Well, you asked.”

  “I did not ask you that,” she said with a disgusted look. “We need to get back to the shed in thirty minutes, so get to it.”

  “Get to it?” said the mildly affronted car-sized frog.

  She turned and glared into his large red eyes. There was no need to look down, since he was her height sitting on the platform.

  With gritted teeth and a flourish of her hand, she said, “Oh mighty kobold, would you commence eating your breakfast now?”

  He sniffed. “All you had to do was ask.”

  She refrained from calling down a hail of lightning on his head like she wanted to.

  Stepping back, she watched as Gestap hopped off the platform. In mid-leap he transformed into his true form. A creature half the size of a normal human with the appearance of a woodland sprite: two arms, two legs, homespun clothes, short-cropped hair and a generally mischievous expression. She actually preferred his toad disguise for two reasons: one, it didn’t hide how dangerous he truly was; and two, Gestap tended to embrace his darker side more in his natural form. As a toad he was lazy. As she watched him climb up the gator’s still form, she noted the subtle difference between a sprite and a kobold’s form. The retractable claws appearing on his hands and the rows of razor-sharp teeth that she knew were in his mouth were dead giveaways to the kobold heritage. With a grunt, Gestap latched on to the pale under-flesh of the gator, tearing the belly to shreds and sticking his head completely into the cavity he had made.

  Katherine turned away, disturbed. Even she couldn’t watch this morning after morning. The only good thing was that she’d gotten so used to it that she no longer had to stop by the side of the road to puke up her guts on the way to school. She knew he was using the suckers in his tongue to drain the alligator dry of blood rather than eating the pure flesh, but he didn’t have to bury his head in the creature to do that. He just liked to. With a shudder she realized he was also probably searching for the creature’s reproductive organs with his long, prehensile tongue. Gestap didn’t kid around about his breakfast.

  It took him fifteen minutes of slurping, some chewing, and decidedly disturbing grunts before he was done. When he finished, the alligator dropped into the swamp waters with a splash. She heard the other gators who’d surfaced at the smell of the blood surround the corpse and feast on the entrails. She still didn’t turn around. She’d made that mistake once before. The sight of Gestap’s bloody serrated teeth and the vicious glee on his face had sent her ten-year-old self crying home to her mother in a swirl of dark magic. It had been the first and only time she’d ever teleported. Unfortunately, her aunt, the one who hunted demons in graveyards for fun, had been at the house and had frog-marched her back to the swamp to collect Gestap with a stern lecture.

  Because as vicious as Gestap was, he was also loyal to her family. He was bound by blood to the witches of Sandersville after being kicking out of the courts up north for a reason he wouldn’t disclose—and whatever it was it must have been good to be banished from seven different high queen courts. According to the agreement he had with her mother, Gestap had to be led to and from his feeding grounds with the aid of a witch of the Thompson bloodline. Since Rose threw up at the very sight of blood, the queen couldn’t be bothered to do it, Cecily was too gentle, and no one knew where Aunt Sarah was from day to day, that left Katherine to be his handler.

  Soon she heard the sounds she associated with his transformation back into the form he preferred—the large and rotund toad. As she turned back and walked to the edge of the platform, he leapt into the swamp water to clean himself of entrails and blood. She hopped into the skiff without a word and they headed back to his shed. After taking another shower and hoping she didn’t stink like gator guts, she headed into the garage with a prayer.

  “Please gods, Mother of the Earth, Lord of the Skies, Tinkerbelle, whoever is out there,” Katherine mumbled, “if you get me to school today, I will do everything in my power not to set anything on fire...or kill anyone. I pinky-swear, I’m on my best behavior.”

  As she opened the garage door, she looked at the car furthest from the door with disdain. Slowly Katherine walked by her mother’s Lexus SUV, her sister’s Volkswagen Beetle, and came to her own clunker, a 1982 Chevrolet Camaro that looked like it belonged on the set of that time-travelling 80s movie with the crazy professor. Staring at it glumly, she noticed that her three-year-old paint job was peeling—badly. She knew she shouldn’t have taken it out to those two farm boys who swore up and down that they could do it up like an auto body shop. But she hadn’t really had a choice. It was them or drive all the way to Gainesville on fumes. Now she had a car with orange tiger stripes and chipping paint. It looked like a diseased stray cat.

  Her main problem wasn’t the paint job, though. It was the three hundred-dollar malfunctioning carburetor, which had turned into a non-functioning starter, plus a messed-up thingamajig with a two hundred-and-fifty-dollar price tag. She had already fixed the carburetor. She couldn’t afford to fix the other two problems until she got the witches’ brew she’d promised the town’s only real mechanic—Cliff. He didn’t trust medical doctors, which suited her ju
st fine. If the man wanted to trade his three hundred-dollar service for a brew that would cost him fifty dollars from a human doctor, that was okay by her.

  For now, she just prayed. The starter worked...sometimes.

  “All right, Marigold,” she said nervously, “it’s just you and me today.”

  Opening the driver’s side door with a tentative pat of the hood, she slid into her comfortable seat lined with faux fur and palmed her jangle of keys to find the one to slide into the ignition slot.

  As she turned her hand a heartbeat later, Marigold coughed to life. Did she forget to mention that poor old Marigold had an oil leak, too? Katherine shut the driver’s side door with a hard yank. If she didn’t, the door tended not to close.

  As Marigold warmed up, Katherine put a tired forehead down on the cracked leather wheel with a sigh. Once, just once, she wished the town had enough money to provide both of the queen’s daughters with a car. She flicked the garage door button on her overhead visor and glared at Rose’s brand-new Beetle with clenched teeth as the door behind her slowly rose.

  She hated the style of the Beetle, but what she wouldn’t give for a car that didn’t leak oil like it was going out of style, didn’t falter every mile, and actually started every time she wanted it to.

  Swiftly she backed out of the garage and drove around the left side of the house’s wraparound porch to pull out on the mile-long driveway. It was a straightforward shot to the road from there, so she stared at her home in the rearview mirror for a moment. The day had just begun to dawn, washing the white two-story home in a glow of red and orange. The burnt-red shutters stood out in the morning sun and the well-tended lawn showed off the prowess of her mother’s natural command over the earth in her dominion. As she turned right at the gated entrance, Katherine had a wistful moment of desire to be back in bed, but she knew the faster she got to class, the quicker this day would be done. As she drove along, the windows closed shut as tightly as she could close them and the heater turned on full-blast, she hoped it would make it to the parking lot. Unfortunately, the heater clunked out two miles down the road and banging on the dashboard did squat to make it work again.