Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful Read Online Free PDF

at the foot of the stairs, examining the newel post.
    It was well worth examining: a screaming griffin with every feather and every curl beautifully articulated and its head polished smooth and black as ebony. Rodney gave it a brief, seemingly unconscious caress as he started up the steps. When Kim followed suit, I thought I saw the carved eye blink.
    I must have made a noise, because Rodney halted his slow ascent and gazed down at me, standing open-mouthed below. “Lovely piece of work, isn’t it? We call it the house guardian. A joke, of course.”
    “Of course,” I echoed. “Cute.”
    It seemed to me that the house had more rooms than it ought to. Through open doors, I glimpsed libraries, salons, parlors, bedrooms. We passed through a stone cloister where discouraged-looking ficuses in tubs shed their leaves on the cracked pavement and into a green-scummed pool. I don’t know what shocked me more: the cloister or the state of its plants. Maybe Ophelia’s green thumb didn’t extend to houseplants.
    As far as I could tell, Kim took all this completely in stride. She bounded along like a dog in the woods, peeking in an open door here, pausing to look at a picture there, and pelting Rodney with questions I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, like “Are there kids here?” “What about pets?” “How many people live here, anyway?”
    “It depends,” was Rodney’s unvarying answer. “Step this way, please.”
    Our trek ended in a wall covered by a huge South American tapestry of three women making pots. Rodney pulled the tapestry aside, revealing an iron-banded oak door that would have done a medieval castle proud. “The study,” he said, and opened the door on a flight of ladder-like steps rising steeply into the shadows.
    His voice and gesture reminded me irresistibly of one of those horror movies in which a laconic butler leads the hapless heroine to a forbidding door and invites her to step inside. I didn’t know which of three impulses was stronger: to laugh, to run, or, like the heroine, to forge on and see what happened next.
    It’s some indication of the state I was in that Kim got by me and through the door before I could stop her.
    I don’t like feeling helpless and I don’t like feeling pressured. I really don’t like being tricked, manipulated, and herded. Left to myself, I’d have turned around and taken my chances on finding my way out of the maze of corridors. But I wasn’t going to leave without my daughter, so I hitched up my wedding-appropriate long skirt and started up the steps.
    The stairs were every bit as steep as they looked. I floundered up gracelessly, emerging into a huge space sparsely furnished with a beat-up rolltop desk, a wingback chair and a swan-neck rocker on a threadbare Oriental rug at one end, and some cluttered door-on-sawhorse tables on the other. Ophelia and Rachel, still dressed in their bridal finery, were sitting in the chair and the rocker respectively, holding steaming mugs and talking to Kim, who was incandescent with excitement.
    “Oh, there you are,” said Ophelia as I stumbled up the last step. “Would you like some tea?”
    “No, thank you,” I said stiffly. “Kim, I think it’s time to go home now.”
    Kim protested, vigorously. Rachel cast Ophelia an unreadable look.
    “It’ll be fine, love,” Ophelia said soothingly. “Mrs. Gordon’s upset, and who could blame her? Evie, I don’t believe you’ve actually met Rachel.”
    Where I come from, social niceties trump everything. Without actually meaning to, I found I was shaking Rachel’s hand and congratulating her on her marriage. Close up, she was a handsome woman, with a decided nose, deep lines around her mouth, and the measuring gaze of a gardener examining an unfamiliar insect on her tomato leaves. I didn’t ask her to call me Evie.
    Ophelia touched my hand. “Never mind,” she said soothingly. “Have some tea. You’ll feel better.”
    Next thing I knew, I was sitting on a chair that