Her inventory continued into the next day. No further customers entered the shop, to her sense of momentary respite. The minutes ticked by unchecked and with no one arriving to return the relic she had requested. It had been many centuries since anyone had witnessed the power the Tulloch witches yielded. Mortals had become less accepting of the supernatural and for the survival of magic it had to be kept hidden. Over the generations the Tullochs had receded into the background, allowing the world to carry on without them, standing stationary and simply observing, collecting, and chronicling what came to pass. It was only rarely they interfered in anything.
Duncan had taken it upon himself to change the families’ mantra by loaning out belongings that weren’t his to give. It had all accumulated in Iona being sent down to fetch it, mingling with parlour magicians and their petty tricks. Their power was inferior, but if they wielded the relic now in their possession the effects were filled with devastation, not just for their special enemies.
Time went by and no visitors came.
When she heard the door open and close, she was pulled from her subconscious time keeping and into the present when Barbara’s footsteps floated through the archway and into her ears. Passive aggressive friendliness bloomed in the smile the older woman gave as she appeared in front of the desk. It was near the end of the day, about time for the shop to close and her real task to begin.
“Is it good news?” Barbara queried.
“It was written down,” Iona confirmed, handing over the glass bottle with the ready-made placebo liquid sloshing around inside.
Duncan hadn’t written anything down about Barbara and her requirements, but from what Iona could fathom from Isobel’s meticulous recording the entire prescription was a fake. Some ailments could be solved with herbs, others were cured by belief, and it was important to tell the difference.
“Excellent,” Barbara beamed as she took the bottle and slipped it into her handbag, “Will ye be here long?”
If all went well later that day then she wouldn’t. However, that would mean the shop’s closure, and by its decision to open once a Tulloch was inside, she thought it may have other ideas about another lengthy time in solitary.
“I couldn’t say,” she replied vaguely.
The older woman hid her disappointment well. Repeating her gratitude, she left, and the door locked behind her, the sign flipped to the closed side. There would be no further visitors that day.
Iona briefly glanced at her watch before walking out, trying to ignore the excitement that had begun to bubble through her veins like tiny speckles of air through water that’s coming to the boil. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been free, uninhibited by constraints placed on her by her family. They had finally given her permission to use whatever amount of force she saw fit, and Tullochs weren’t ones to leave their threats unexecuted.
Her warning to the spiritualists had been more than clear, yet they had refused to cooperate. Iona would need to remind them what the price was for ignoring a Tulloch request.
Spiritualism, Wicca, herbalism, tarot readings and divination were all small, but equally flimsy, branches of a tree that spanned the entirety of human history. Where there were humans and nature there had always been power ebbing and flowing between the two. Some lucky ones had been able to harness the full power for themselves, but they were rare, almost unique. For those who wished to feel special in a world that was edging towards globalisation there were the twigs and branches that diverged away from the trunk, weaker alternatives that gave them a taste of power. Spiritualism was one.
Its focus point was not on the ground beneath their feet, the proud trees who breathed new life into the world, or the rushing of water and streams, but those who had been buried beneath the dirt. Ancestor worship was not new, but drawing power from the dead and calling it magic was a relatively novel idea. With a history spanning little over two hundred years it was the infant cousin of the Tullochs ancient gift.
They drew on the power the lingering dead gave to the places where their bodies were interred, and only a select few were spread across the city. Outside of the city boundaries it would be nigh on useless, but within the invisible walls it was more concentrated. If one was destroyed, however, it would release the spirits and allow them to move on, effectively removing a large piece of the spiritualist’s source of power. By refusing to return the Tulloch family relic they showed that they were in desperate need of power, a boost to their own, and hence would not be pleased if she were to destroy a piece of it.
Her journey from the shop ended outside a cemetery that dated back to the 18th century. She had chosen it purposefully because it was the one that gave her the worst feeling. Most of the pollution the city emanated was from this metropolis of the dead. She may not be able to see them, but they made their presence felt by stifling the air everyone breathed. Ordinary mortals walked past it on their daily routine and didn’t think twice, it was one of many in the city, but not all were special. Most of the original spiritualists were buried within, and hence why Iona had chosen it first.
She crossed the threshold and felt the air change, taste the rejection on the tip of her tongue. The dead knew the intentions of the living, could feel the power coursing through her veins like an electric current, and knew they were all in danger of being forced to let go of their mortal memories. Without their graves, without a constant stream of offerings, prayers, and visitors they would cease to be a part of the world, and their grip would loosen until it was gone.
They had very little power themselves to do anything about her presence in their cemetery, and she was glad for it. One of the more ancient ones, the graves were much more than just marble slabs with gold writing scrawled on the surface. The land was made up of intricately designed mausoleums, statues of crying angels, carvings of Roman vases and oddly eerie birds. Some names were faded, others still as bright as if they had been painted yesterday. If one were to fall over it would crush the unlucky soul beneath it.
Iona bent down to the ground beside one of the graves and rubbed her fingers over it, feeling the sacred power sparking against her own like two pieces of metal. The cemetery stones and dedicational plaques may hold the power of the spiritualists, but the soil, the trees, and their deep roots were a conduit for hers. She pushed her fingers deeper into the soil until they were completely immersed, the gritty moist flakes clinging to her skin and digging under her nails until they were an extra part of her.
The vibrations were tremors at first, ones that someone wouldn’t feel unless they stopped and stood still, concentrating on the ground beneath their feet. Gradually they became bigger until the soil surrounding her hands quivered and bounced like grains of sand moved by the ocean. The tremors began to pound at the bases of the headstones, knock on the sides of the mausoleums, and shunt against the feet of the weeping angels until cracks grew like ivy up each one. Pieces of glistening black marble began chipping off, bigger chunks soon falling away, creating clouds of dust that floated into the air and swept out across the city as if a multi-storey building had been demolished too quickly. Iona’s will dismantled the graves of spiritualists long dead, and she would see them destroyed. It released a concentrated earthquake within the boundaries of the necropolis.
When she was finished there was nothing but a large plume of dirt and dust in the air, pieces of marble, stone, and granite lying on the ground in fallen disarray. Despite being unable to see very far in front of her, due to the smog, the air felt cleaner, and she breathed easier now that she had destroyed the spiritualists’ centre of worship.
A crowd had gathered outside of the cemetery, but she managed to slip out unnoticed by most. There was a handful who saw her and recognised her for what she was. Where some saw a destroyer, others saw hope.
***
It wouldn’t take long for word of the destruction to reach the ears of the spiritualists of the city and their young Mistress. Wasting no time, Iona didn’t return to the shop but went directly to the source, to the place she had been summoned to like a dog to their master and reiterated her reasonable demands for the return of her family’s property. She could hear the disgruntled buzz from the bar before she rounded the corner of the street it was on and saw many strangely dressed people running in and out, muttering and conferring between themselves. When she entered everyone took notice, including the Mistress who had descended from her royal apartments and mingled with her subjects.
The door swung closed to a silence which crackled. Iona could feel power begin to tingle her fingertips, reacting with the growing fear of the patrons and the possible threat a room full of weakened, angry spiritualists could do.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” the Mistress was the first one to speak, panicked indignation lining her voice.
“You were warned of the consequences of not returning my family’s relic,” Iona stated plainly.
“We need it now more than ever!” the young girl protested as if her life depended on it.
The invisible war raging beneath the surface of the bustling city was beyond Iona’s knowledge, but she was aware she had given the opposition a new advantage. She hadn’t meant to interfere, but inadvertently through her actions she had. Her instructions had been to use anything necessary to retrieve what belonged to their family before it was used, and in that moment as she stood surrounded by a gaggle of them, she was tempted to destroy every cemetery in the city to render them powerless.
“Return the relic,” Iona reiterated, losing patience.
“Why are you so unsympathetic to your own kind?” the young woman implored, her eyebrows drawn together sadly.
Irritation surged through Iona and made the thought of destroying the cemeteries more tempting. Rather than eliciting sympathy it had caused grave insult to Iona’s buoyed pride.
“You’ve said that ye need the relic to win the war, yet you’ve had it for some time and never used it. Indecision is a sign of a weak leader, as is being unable to protect your people’s sacred places of worship. Why should these people follow you when you can’t protect them or their inheritance? What power of your own do you have to lead them in this war you’ve waged on the immortals?” Iona put harshly.
“The immortals are older than us, they have power of their own and duplicitous natures, they manipulate their enemies into losing.”
“The weak are manipulated. The object ye stole from my family would give ye all the power you need to defeat them, but I think the reason ye haven’t wielded it is because ye know yourself not to be strong enough.”
“That’s not true!”
“You are a leader in name only” Iona continued viciously, “A figurehead that people are quickly losing faith in. Ye can’t protect your cemeteries, your home, or your followers.”
In a burst of temper, Iona reached out to the older man who had come to see her just the day before, standing on the threshold to the shop scruffily dressed, a royal summons in his hands.
He had annoyed her then and now he was about to feel her wrath.
His blood began to solidify like water touched by winter frost, his muscles would harden until they were more like marble than flesh, and finally his skin would become like rough stone hewn from a quarry. Everyone looked on in awe as one of their companions was turned to finely chiselled granite, a perfect rendering that no mortal artist could have completed.
Iona could have left him as a statue, she should have for restraint was one of the only things that separated the Tullochs from others like them. However, restraint wasn’t high on her list of priorities and in another surge of ill-thought temper she crushed the stone statue until it crumbled to sand on the floor. The gasps, although inaudible, were filled with blood curdling fear.
“For every hour ye refuse to give me what I ask for one of your followers will be turned to the same ash that your cemetery lies in. What sort of leader will you be, Mistress?” she spat the word in the disgust she had felt when she had first heard it, “What use will triumph over the immortals be if you have no followers to share it with?”
Iona had seen many a crestfallen face, but none of them had pulled her out of her ill-advised temper quicker than the one that adorned the young woman’s features as she looked at the pool of sand on the ground. Control and restraint were the only things separating the Tulloch witches from the barbaric, extinct clans that had gone before them, and in her rage and blinding irked pride Iona had thrown that lesson away, allowed it to crumble like the loyal servant in a pile on the floor. She had wanted respect, even if it was through fear she needed to get it, but even she sensed it had gone too far.
It was too late to recant, too late to cease with her forceful comments and bullying tactics. Her orders were to retrieve the relic at whatever cost. Deciding to embrace the reputation she was carving for herself she swept her eyes around the room suggestively, making it appear like she was looking for her next pillar of salt.
“Enough.”
It was barely a whisper, one that would have been missed if the room hadn’t been as deadly quiet as it was. The surrender came from the young Mistress, her face ashen as she continued to gaze at the pile of sand on the ground. Iona waited for her to speak again, to be sure that it was surrender lingering on her lips.
“I see we’ve been mistaken in thinking you were our ally. You are not Duncan. He was kind, he sympathised with us, and he was a better person than you will ever be,” the Mistress threw spitefully at Iona.
She was unaffected by the rebuke. The saintly version of Duncan the young Mistress had known was only one of his personas, one of his many faces for many clients. Perhaps Iona was being unkind, but she doubted he would have aided the spiritualists without some form of recompense, whatever that may have been.
The Mistress reached into her pocket and brought out a small midnight velvet covered jewellery box. Iona ignored the urge to grin. All this trouble for such a small trinket seemed ridiculous, but it was always the smaller things that held the most power, so her grandmother said.
“Here, take it!” the Mistress spat.
Iona, for once, did as she was bid by the young girl. As her fingers enclosed around the box about to take it away the Mistress tightened her grip.
“We will beat the immortals, and then you’ll regret this interference.”
“I’m not your enemy.”
“If you’re not with us you’re against us,” the girl seethed.
“The world isn’t always so clearly divided,” Iona warned.
The Mistress loosened her grip on the box and let Iona take it. She didn’t linger to enjoy her ill-won victory. As the door closed behind her she could hear the sorrowful cries of the Mistress mourning her follower, and the breeze blowing away the sandy remnants of his life.
***
Guilt. It was an emotion that she, above most people, was very well acquainted with. Should she feel bad for her actions in retrieving the relic? Was what she did wrong? Children are taught to tell the difference, and then given examples where there is a clear distinction, but in life that was rarely there. Killing the man was drastic, and not her best hour, but a point had to be made. Many more people would have been needlessly slaughtered if the Mistress had indeed gathered the strength and courage to use the relic she had carelessly carried around in her pocket. It was all for the greater good. At one time she thought that saying was simply to make her family feel justified in the pain they caused others. That thought had passed with experience, but now it reared in her mind.
As she turned the corner onto the street the shop was on, she felt a buoyancy in her soul at the thought of returning home a success. She had spent too long in the bustling, poisonous, unclean city and longed for the clean air and friendly atmosphere of the north.
Her soul quickly returned to guarded and mistrusting when she saw the small entourage gathered outside of the shop and the shiny, black limousines parked illegally outside. She could tell the small mob was well dressed from a distance, their personally tailored suits were obvious, as was the bespoke details adorning some of them.
To Iona it was obvious they weren’t mortal, and it appeared that the Mistress of the spiritualists wasn’t the only one to think that people took sides so easily. As she was about to pass the small gaggle of followers one emerged from the crowd and stepped in front of her to block her path.
“Miss Tulloch, I presume?”
“It’s hardly presumptuous when you already know,” she retorted.
His smirk turned jagged at her sharp response. From the glint in his eye, she could tell he wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to in such a way, and if she were any other being she would have felt intimidation at the way he was looking at her, as if in just one swipe he could end her.
“Not one for niceties, I see.”
She remained silent. The man before her was tall, at least a head more than she was. His hair was a strange marriage of red and gold, whilst his eyes were a warm, melting hazel that sparkled as he looked at her. Everything about him was neat, kempt, and high maintenance, which she supposed was to be expected when you’d lived a few hundred lifetimes.
“Then allow me to get straight to the point,” the smirk faded, and he took a small step towards her, another bid to intimidate, “I’d be greatly honoured if you and I could find somewhere to talk. It seems we have much to discuss.”
Iona brushed past him, heading for the shop door, “We have nothing to discuss.”
“That’s not what your actions have implied.”
She turned around, preferring the new distance between them, “I have no enmity with the spiritualists, which is what I know you’ve come here to talk about. My business with them is done.”
“You encompass a great deal in the term,” the smirk returned, “I don’t destroy anything when I do business.”
“I was making a point, but it doesn’t mean I’m their enemy or your ally. I will give you the same answer as I gave the spiritualists when they asked me for an alliance. I have no interest in your petty squabbling over this city, and neither does my family. Any arrangement ye had with my predecessor, if there was any, ceases with me. Am I clear?”
The smirk still adorned his face like the dark twinkle of his eye, but it was strained and certainly not as full of mirth as it had been. Through it she could see a myriad of emotions, one of them disappointed hope. He had seen the destruction of the cemetery and thought that the one weapon that could help him drive away the spiritualists for good had finally shown up on his doorstep. Now he knew that it hadn’t.
“Perfectly.”
He turned sharply back to the limousine and got in, slamming the door closed. If she had made one enemy that day, then she had made two.
She watched as the cars pulled away from the double yellow lines painted perfectly on the tarmac and was glad she was going home.