Legacy of the Witch Read online

  “Amarrah, are you okay? What’s up? You never watch TV.”

  I blinked. “I thought I knew her. But, um, I was wrong.”

  I have to go to Ohio, I thought.

  But you can’t. You’ve got finals coming up.

  Not for two weeks. That’s plenty of time to get there and get back.

  Don’t be ridiculous. How will you even find her?

  Not her. Him. She said it belonged to her fiancé.

  Still…

  All the way to the library I was having this inner argument. I didn’t have a lot of money, but Ohio wouldn’t be an impossible drive, and I did have a decent car. I could take my books with me, try to get as many assignments in advance as I could and cram for finals on the road.

  It could be done.

  The notion just wouldn’t leave me alone. And when I slept that night, I swore my grandmother was standing over my bed, shouting at me. “You must go, Amarrah! You must go and get the box! You promised me!”

  And from there I dissolved into an image from the story. I was thirteen and very dirty, dressed in rags, with bruises on my arms and face. I’d finished my chores and run to play along the edges of the riverbank, where the grasses were tall and lush, and there I’d spotted a beautiful boy swinging a sword as if in the heat of battle with some invisible enemy.

  Hiding behind the tall reeds, I watched, fascinated by him, until he tripped over a stone and fell on his face. I couldn’t quite suppress my giggle.

  He spotted me, frowned and pushed himself up, brushing the dust off his clothes. “Come on out, girl. I see you hiding there.”

  Bashful, and wondering if I’d just earned myself another whipping, I stepped out into his view, painfully aware of my disheveled state. I tried to smooth my hair back, but it was of little use. “I didn’t mean to spy on you,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve never seen a boy so young wield a sword with so much skill.” Flattery, I thought, might save me from punishment. But even so, it was no less than the truth.

  He smiled a little. “Even if I did make a fool out of myself at the end.”

  “You were intent on your form. You didn’t see that stone.”

  “Did it seem…good?” he asked. “My form, I mean.”

  I met his eyes, touched that my opinion was of any interest to him. “To me it did. I couldn’t look away.”

  He smiled wider and came closer. “I’m Harmon, son of Brock. My father’s one of the most skilled swordsmen in the king’s guard. He’s been training me to join him in the ranks.”

  “You’ll be a soldier, too, then?”

  “I hope to be, yes.” He looked me up and down. “And you…you’re a servant girl, yes?”

  I nodded. “Amarrah. I’ve been a kitchen slave since I can remember, but today was my last day. Tonight I get to move into the harem quarters, to be slave girl to the slave girls.” I smiled when I said it, and he did, too, getting the joke.

  “Bet they’ll clean you up some. I’ve never seen a dirty slave in the harem quarters.”

  “You’ve been inside?” I asked.

  “No. I meant…no.” He moved closer to me, then, bending, dipped his hand into the sacred river. Rising, he wiped my face with his wet fingertips. He did this a few times, then stood back. “You’re going to fit in there,” he said. “I see beauty under all that dirt.”

  I felt the blood rush straight to my cheeks. He had returned my compliments with one of his own, though he could not have known how deeply it had touched me.

  Then someone called my name. The fat cook, who’d warned me earlier that she had orders to get me cleaned up and dressed appropriately for my move into the harem quarters.

  “I have to go.”

  “If the old bat beats you again,” he said with a sharp eye on my bruises, “kick her in the shins and run away. You should not have to take that. At least not anymore.”

  “If she does, it will be the last time. The ladies of the harem are kind. I’ll be grateful to them forever for taking me away from the kitchens.” The cook called again, and I turned. “I’d better go.”

  “I’ll see you again, Amarrah,” he said.

  “I don’t know how.” The harem quarters were off-limits to most. “But I hope so. Goodbye, Harmon, son of Brock.”

  “Goodbye, Amarrah, slave girl to the slave girls.”

  I met his eyes one last time and felt like a bolt of lightning shot from his to mine, jolting my heart into a stronger beat. One so startling that I woke up.

  I was alone in my bedroom. My gidaty’s photo, a picture of her in her younger and happier days, stood framed on my nightstand. I looked into her eyes, and she seemed to stare intently back at me.

  “All right, Tata. All right, I’ll do it.”

  Maybe I had lost my mind. Or maybe not. But I was going ahead with my plan, and nothing would stop me. I had promised my grandmother, after all.

  *

  Akron was a lot bigger than Cortland, but otherwise not so different. The U.S. had a very homogenized quality to it. One place wasn’t a lot different from the next, not like my homeland, where miles might as well have been light-years.

  I bought a city map from a gas station as soon as I was close, then stopped at a telephone booth to look up the number for the library. I needed to know who Glenda Montgomery’s fiancé was, and I figured my best bet was to go through the engagement announcements in the local newspapers. The library’s microfiche would have what I needed.

  It took hours, but I found it. An engagement announcement featuring that doe-eyed blonde with the empty head and her gorgeous hero soldier in full uniform. The clip was more than a year old, which was why it took me so long to find it.

  “Mrs. Dulcet Montgomery is pleased to announce the engagement of her daughter, Glenda, to Staff Sergeant Harrison Brockson. The wedding will take place after Sergeant Brockson finishes his upcoming tour of duty in Kuwait.”

  The man had obviously finished his tour and come home safely. Their wedding could be any day now. In fact, it could have happened already for all I knew. Those TV shows were probably recorded long before they aired.

  I stared at the man in the photo and frowned as an odd little itch formed in the back of my brain. As if I knew him from somewhere but just couldn’t quite remember. He was handsome, and when I stared at his eyes, my heart beat a little faster. Dark eyes. Familiar.

  I removed the microfilm from the machine, and dutifully returned it to its container and put it away. Then I asked for a phone directory from the reference desk.

  And there it was. Harrison Brockson’s number was listed, and so was his address. 355 Water Street in the suburb of Tallmadge.

  I wrote it down on a slip of scrap paper, thanked the librarian and turned to head out the door to my car.

  But once I got in I just sat there, drumming my fingers on the wheel. “All right, I know where he lives. Now what?”

  Just drive out there and see what the place is like. Then come up with…something.

  I closed my eyes for just a moment and decided that yes, that idea felt like the right one. The next logical step. So I opened my map and located Tallmadge, and then Water Street. It would be dark soon, but it wouldn’t take long to get there.

  It was just dusk, the sky turning to twilight purple, when I drove my very-out-of-place car through the wealthy neighborhood. Every house was like something out of Beautiful Homes, all of them huge, many of them fenced in. I suspected they all had alarm systems and guard dogs but told myself I was being overly dramatic.

  Scanning the numbers on the mailboxes and driveway pillars, I slowed as I drew closer, and then came around a sharp curve in the neat, narrow lane to see 355 in gold-colored digits on a brick driveway post. It was part of a pair that flanked the paved drive and had lights on top as if to tell me I’d arrived.

  The driveway curved away from the road, splitting a lush green lawn that rose gradually to the house perched on top. Gorgeous, like the rest, but very different from them. It was an archit
ect’s dream, all stained wood, unexpected angles and huge windows.

  All this? For a soldier? I didn’t know much about the army, but I didn’t think staff sergeants made that much money.

  Well, I’d found the place. Now, how was I going to get inside?

  Just do it, child. You promised!

  Tata’s voice, of course, egging me on. And more real than a whispered thought or memory. It was as if she was in the car, in the passenger seat, giving orders.

  I pulled into the driveway and headed up to the house, racking my brain for a reason why I might be there and falling on the simplest. I was lost. I needed to use a telephone, or maybe ask for directions to someplace. Shutting my car off, I stiffened my spine, stared at the house and spoke without intending to, the words just sort of spilling from my lips, surprising me. I didn’t know I still remembered them.

  “I bind you now, oh box, to me, by the power of three times three, return return return to me.”

  Then I got out of the car and marched right up to the door.

  The man who opened it was not the same man I’d seen in the newspaper. That was my first thought. And then, as I stared at him, my eyes moving up and down his face, I realized that he was the same being, just not the same person. His time in Kuwait had changed him. He’d left a carefree young man, but now he was…darker. Harder. And far more attractive than I’d been expecting. And still there was that niggling familiarity.

  I’d sensed it from the engagement photo, but in person there was something more. Something that made my throat go dry and made my heart start pounding faster. Maybe it was that shadow of beard just starting to cover his strong jawline and chin. Or the intensity of his sapphire-blue eyes—eyes that kept changing like a mirage to dark brown, then near black, in my imagination.

  Who is he?

  “It’s about time,” he said. “You’re over an hour late.”

  I blinked, my semi-formed excuses flying from my mind as my brain sought ways to handle this new situation. He seemed…angry.

  He looked past me at my car, frowned a little. Like he knew a ten-year-old Pinto didn’t belong here, but then shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “What, no excuses? No apologies?”

  “I’m, um…sorry. I got lost.”

  His eyes narrowed on me, and I had to avert mine. Do I dare just run with this? What if the person he’s really expecting shows up?

  I looked his way again. He wasn’t in uniform, I noted. Jeans and a button-down shirt that he’d been in the process of buttoning up before I’d interrupted him. The bit of his chest I could see tried to capture my eyes, and I had to jerk my gaze elsewhere and hope he hadn’t noticed.

  And still there was this ache in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t make sense of.

  His eyes had shifted past me again, as if checking to be sure I was alone. Then they returned to me, and he looked from my head to my toes. Finally he gave a nod. “Okay. Come on in. I’ll show you what we’ve got to work with.”

  “All right.”

  I walked in when he stepped aside and took a look around me. The place was more breathtaking on the inside than on the outside. There was a giant fireplace on one wall made of perfect rectangles of gleaming granite. Leather furniture, lush and brown. Hardwood floors lined with oriental rugs. I could see straight through to the dining room and the kitchen beyond it.

  “This place is…fantastic.”

  He nodded. “Thank you. You need anything before we get to work? Bathroom? Coffee?”

  I lifted my brows. “Can I have both?”

  His lip quirked up at one corner, an almost smile that made my heart turn over. So familiar. And dear. How?

  “Through there.” He pointed toward a hall leading off the back of the living room, but I got stuck looking at his hand, the strength and breadth of it. The long, slender fingers. Then I snapped out of it and followed where that gorgeous hand was pointing. “Thanks. I’ll be quick, promise.”

  He nodded and closed the entry door behind me as I walked through the house, looking all around as I did. It shouldn’t seem suspicious, I thought. The place was breathtaking; who wouldn’t look it over?

  I’d seen no alarm panel near the door. But I saw no sign of my grandmother’s treasure box, either. When I reached the far end of the living room, I headed down the short hall and spotted the bathroom immediately.

  The lights came on automatically, revealing a spotless half bath, with tan fixtures, a beige rug, nothing on the walls besides a medicine cabinet over the sink, and light-colored wood trim, like pecan or something. There were merlot towels on the rack and a bar of hand soap on the soap dish. Irish Spring.

  Closing my eyes, I leaned back against the door. “What is it he thinks I’m here to do?” I couldn’t even imagine. Maybe he’d hired a maid or a nanny or a party planner or…oh, a house sitter! That would be marvelous, a house sitter. Then he could just get out and leave me to search for the witches’ box.

  I took a few minutes, washing my hands with the green soap and thinking about the guy in the commercial, standing in the hills of Ireland and slicing off the edge of the bar with his pocketknife to show us that it had those striations clear through, though why we should care, I couldn’t fathom. The stuff smelled great, though. Drying my hands on the seat of my pants because I didn’t want to mess up one of those gorgeous towels, I looked into the mirror and realized I needed a touch-up.

  I shrugged my bag off my shoulder and fixed my makeup, then tried to untangle my jet-black hair. It was dead straight and completely out of style. I couldn’t make it “big” no matter what I did to it. Or curly, either.

  I popped a breath mint for good measure and opened the bathroom door, then peeked into the living room.

  He wasn’t there.

  I stepped out, looking around, walking through the room and taking my time. There wasn’t a lot of clutter, and I saw only a few places where the chest might be hidden. A closet near the front door, a pair of end tables with doors on the front that must have storage space inside.

  I moved past the staircase, into the dining room, noting the large hutch—two possible drawers there—and the china closet. That had a drawer, too. Then into the kitchen where, of course, every cupboard was a possibility.

  Stainless steel fixtures, white appliances and more of that same light wood. The countertop looked like marble and matched the pattern of the floor. White with black swirls. There was a note stuck to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of an American flag, and I moved a little closer.

  6/21, 6:00 pm, help arrives.

  Today’s date. It was 7:30. Obviously he thought I was the help he’d been expecting.

  Footsteps behind me made me jump guiltily and turn around.

  “Sorry if I scared you before. I’m antsy about this. Deadline’s breathing down my neck, and it’s taken me three months to realize I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. So…”

  “Don’t worry. Now that I’m here it will…be done in no time.” Just as soon as I figure out what it is, I thought.

  He moved past me to the counter, poured coffee into two mugs, then moved aside with his in his hand. “Help yourself to cream and sugar.”

  I moved forward, standing awfully close to him, but he didn’t move away. I added cream and sugar to my mug and inhaled as I stirred. “It’s good,” I said after my first sip.

  He nodded, his eyes on me and way too intent. “A little late for this, I guess, but I’m Harry,” he said, and extended a hand.

  “Amarrah,” I said.

  “I probably shouldn’t ask, Amarrah, but are you…Middle Eastern?”

  I lifted my brows and withdrew my hand before it reached his, instantly offended, as I so often was since Operation Desert Shield had begun. “That’s because I’m Iraqi. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “In fact, that makes you even more qualified to help with the project, don’t you think? It’s good to meet you, Amarrah.” He reached forward again. This time
I let him clasp my hand in his…

  …and something happened in my brain. There was a flash, and I was that little girl again.

  I was standing in the garden off the harem quarters, with a pool and a fountain. Walls surrounded it, hallways leading in all directions. Three walls were formed by the quarters themselves, and a fourth stood between me and the outdoors, higher than my head.

  It was over that wall that he came.

  Harmon, the soldier’s son. He leaped the wall and landed softly on his feet. It was well after dark, and I was surprised to see him.

  And delighted, because I knew I was beautiful now. My lovely harem mistresses, Lilia, Magdalena and Indira, had braided baubles into my hair, lined my eyes with kohl, dressed me in their own cast-off trailing garments of soft fabric in exotic colors, even draped me in their old jewels. I looked like one of them, and not all that much younger.

  Harmon said, “I’ve been watching for you to come out, so I could see how you are doing.” And then he stopped, looking me up and down, his eyes widening. His mouth opened, but no words emerged.

  I pressed a palm to my chest, spreading my trailing skirts with one hand and twirling so they flew around me. “Do you like it?”

  “I can barely breathe,” he said.

  I frowned at him. “Does that mean you like it?”

  “It means I like it. Yes. You are more beautiful than I could have imagined, Amarrah. I almost wish I wasn’t already promised to another.”

  I lowered my head. “You are?”

  “A foreign general’s daughter. But…but our wedding is a long way off. I don’t want to talk about that now.”

  “No? What do you want to talk about?”

  He shrugged. “When you can slip away, so we can see each other for more than a few minutes.”

  My heart warmed. He liked me, I knew it. “What about right now? My chores are finished. I was just on my way to bed. No one will notice if I disappear for a short while.”

  He smiled, nodding and holding out his hand. “We’ll walk outside the city, into the desert, under the stars. It will be magic.”