Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Fifty-Four: Where A Soul Goeth

The witches got drunk and tried to get Abraham and me drunk, too, of course. Abraham declined, protesting with a teasing charm that they must forgive him for the paranoia that the betrayal of their werewolf allies had stoked in his undead heart. After all, he reasoned, the witches had such skill that they could have feasibly poisoned the liquor brought by the waiters right under his alert nose. All the witches pretended to laugh at his joke, but underneath we all knew that Abraham was not really teasing, and the witches were not really laughing.

Maeve might bear some love for me and so might Abraham, and they might have even worked together in a time of need, but they did not truly trust one another. It was very clear from the glitter in Abraham's eyes as he toasted her coven with his undrunk glass, and in the way Maeve smiled so uncharacteristically sweet in response to his toast.

"You wouldn't poison your own granddaughter, would you?" I asked Maeve with a grin as I inspected my own drink.

"Not without good cause," she said airily as she pawed for a cigarette.  Abraham, despite his reservations about witches, was there with an immediate, gentlemanly flame to light it. "Besides," she took a long puff, blew it directly into his unbreathing face, and waved the cigarette in dismissal of my concerns. "I spent a lot of my own energy making you utterly irresistible today. I would never waste my own efforts. It's a shame your vampire would rather fight than fuck." She smirked as she looked around the room. "But if you find yourself too impatient, you can always choose a mundane. They are all positively salivating over you, thanks to my coven's good work."

I blinked and looked around the room, startled. Maeve wasn't wrong. Every man in the room had his eyes on our party. On me.

It wasn't my dress, either, because I had glamored my clothing, adjusting the ball gown to a spangly black and burgundy cocktail dress of the times. Yet all the men stared at me as if I were some kind of anomaly in a sea of attractive, similarly dressed women. The reason was my boosted, magical aura, which they could sense.

The weaker ones leered or gave me lovestruck looks, and the men of stronger character eyed me with speculation as if I were a thing that might be won at a betting table. I met the eyes of one of those men by accident—one who must have been a recently arrived guest I had not met. Politeness caused me to smile at him. He broke into a confident grin and rose immediately, striding toward me.

"By all means, encourage him if you wish me to bleed him dry within the hour and present his corpse to Evander," Abraham said in a low voice as he rose to shake hands with the man.

I felt a scowl form on my face for Abraham. I had no idea he felt his fealty to me had somehow come with a duty to defend me as Van's territory. I had no time to respond to him because my pursuer was upon us and I rose automatically at Abraham's side.

The man—not old, but older than a man in his forties of my time might appear—was introduced to me by Abraham as James Couzens, an executive in the Ford Motor Company. Abraham was quite clear in introducing me as Miss Cecilia Dunne, fiancée of his distant cousin, Evander. All the vampires, with the exception of Geordie, referred to each other with vague familial associations when speaking to mundane resort guests. Everyone who came here came to know who Evander Livingstone was in short order because he was currently touted as a majority owner in the resort, managed by his elder "cousin," Thacker and Trotter's father.

As the man kissed my hand, reaching for mine with a hand so clearly possessed of an expensive wedding band, I asked pointedly, "And is your wife vacationing with us as well, Mr. Couzens? I'd like to make her acquaintance."

Mr. Couzens was not a stupid man, perhaps not even a disloyal one. The power infused in me by the Mystic Mountain Coven could likely overcome any mortal man's better judgment. But given my clear insinuation, Couzens appeared to be recalled to sense—and possibly even his marriage vows. He switched his pursuit of me to pursuit of my good opinion, told a charming anecdote of his wife's latest letter from Rome, where she was vacationing with their children, and dismissed himself with the hope that he might dine with Evander and me sometime before his time at the resort was up. Abraham flatly told him not to count on it.