Chapter Twenty-Three : A Poppy is Still a Poppy by any Other Name
Corinne
“There’s a way to reverse the curse.” Zoey spoke the words on an exhale, and I felt my chest tighten, my heart thumping against my rib cage as if it were an animal looking to escape the bars of its cage.
“What’s the catch?” Brenna was attentive, immediately going on the offensive, digging for information.
“We need some of her hair.” Zoey’s gaze darted between Brenna and I. “And we need to complete the counter-spell before the Three Nights in Hell is complete.”
“This isn’t a good idea.” The soft french lilt of Marie’s voice interrupted the discussion, halting the information gathering process entirely.
“What?” Brenna’s voice broke with indignation.
“You cannot simply undo a curse - what are the consequences of such an action? Especially when the spell is already halfway done!”
Marie’s family practiced a dark kind of magic nestled in the French Alps and valleys, and so she grew up learning how to cast a sufficient curse at the same time she learnt how to steep tea.
“When does your Three Nights in Hell spell end?” Brenna turned towards me fiercely, and I secretly prayed to my goddess that I wasn’t making a mistake as I answered her.
“Tonight is the second night.” I swallowed past the burn in my throat, my answer was acid to my lips.
“See?” Brenna flung her arms wide. “There’s still time.”
“I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Marie huffed in defeat, but the decision seemed to slip into place easily, and I wondered if I would look back at this moment and use it as a marker for when things changed.
“How are we going to get her hair?” Zoey thrummed with anxiety and I knew that she didn’t want to do this, but she also couldn’t live with herself if we didn’t do this. For someone who was born into the Hoodoo culture, Zoey tried to distance herself from dark Magick as much as she could.
“I could just phone her?” It was a question more than a statement, but the way we were pressed for time, I wasn’t sure we had any other option. The entire room stared at me as if I had somehow sprouted a third head.
“I know that I’ve been unconscious for the past few days, but didn’t this woman try to kill Dimitri and me, and wasn’t her sister here earlier today threatening you?” I appreciated Ravi’s easy way with words a lot less in our current circumstance.
“She came to beg for her sister’s life, not threaten.” I felt the need to defend her actions because the truth was that if it had been one of my sisters from the Club, I would have done the same thing.
“Yet.” Ravi narrowed his gaze on me as he spoke.
“Yet.” I conceded, repeating the same word. The tension hung in the air, but I couldn’t sit here and do nothing. What I’d inflicted upon Lauren did not sit right with me, not now that I knew she was carrying a child. And wasn’t The Empress all about fertility and motherhood?
I pushed away from Dimitri and walked out of the kitchen to make the phone call. Zoey had forwarded me her number earlier - the Nagmi sisters were well known in the Hoodoo community, their lineage sought after when it came to Magickal pairings. According to Zoey, Lauren and Stacey had been inseparable growing up. I wondered if Zoey knew them - had played with them when she was a child herself. But I didn’t ask her because as warm and welcoming as being part of that community seemed, Zoey had distanced herself, and I had no choice but to respect the boundaries that she erected.
The phone rang four times before she answered, and with technology bridging the distance between us, I could hear the panic in her voice, her sorrow.
I shut my eyes, swallowing down the emotion that threatened to boil over - that threatened to engulf me - stealing the breath from my lungs.
“This is Corinne.” My voice sounded hollow - brittle - to my ears, but that was still better than revealing my guilt.
“What do you -”
“We need a lock of her hair.” I cut her off. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say - didn’t want her to make me dislike her even more than I already did - because then I may not want to help them. I didn’t want to be that person - the kind that could turn a blind eye in the wake of an unborn child being murdered by their hand.
“We found a way to reverse the curse, but we’re on a time limit, and I need a lock of her hair to complete the counter-spell.” I rushed the information out of me before Stacy could protest again. I heard her voice catch over the phone, but she did not speak.
“You have an hour to bring a lock of her hair to me if you want me to do the reversal. If you’re late, we will have missed the time frame, and then there will be nothing left to do.”
I hung up, robbing her of the opportunity to respond. If she wanted me to save her sister, then she needed to deliver what we needed.
I turned around, my steps faltering as I found Marie lingering in the doorway, Dimitri’s warm gaze on me as he stood a foot behind her. They had heard my entire conversation.
“All hail The Empress.” Marie raised her glass before her in a toast, and I had to swallow the flames of shame that licked at my throat.