A Time for Potions Part I

If you’d asked Indigo this morning what was the scariest thing she could imagine, she would have joked, “Me! A middle-aged mom of too many kids, trapped in the wrong body with kids who look nothing like she feels in her heart.”

  If you asked her now, the answer would be, “watching all your babies die,” and that was something to consider. Was it really so terrible, having healthy, alive kids? So what if they didn’t look like she did…They were safe. Everything else came second.

  It all started with movie night. It was Zero’s turn to pick the movie, and Indigo was honestly hoping for the new terribly-titled Iguana Second Chance. Most sappy romance movies had either a dog or a kid, but this one had an iguana. What could go wrong, there?

  Instead, Zero came to her with an old wooden board and a little black arrow with space for two hands at its base. His other arm was full of some of their favorite movie snacks — popcorn, dark chocolate with cherries, walnut brownies, and — of course — soda. She smiled at the heap as he settled it on the table, and tried not to frown at the ouija board. It looked suspiciously nothing like an iguana romance.

  She set down her hair brush.

  “I had an idea,” Zero said, in that tiptoe voice he donned whenever he was anxious but had convinced himself he wasn’t. He held up the board. “Remember this?”

  “Isn’t that Mal’s?”

  Their daughter, Mallory, had gone through many obsessions in her short life, but the most memorable was definitively the eighteen months she’d been obsessed with the occult. She’d worn dark eyeliner and purple-and-teal eye shadow and dressed all in black, insisting the walls were full of ghosts and shadows.

  It had been a long eighteen months. Indigo had heavily encouraged Mallory in the direction of science, which had strong opinions on the existence of ghosts. Mallory had stopped talking about hearing voices in the walls, and started talking about telescopes and celestial spheres. The ouija board had been forgotten.

  “My brothers and I had one once,” Zero observed, and she could see from the subtle tension in his back and face that he really wanted to fool around with this thing and see what happened. And really, what was the harm? It would be fun. They could feel giddy and young and capable of anything again, which would be its own kind of magic.

  Zero looked at the board. “Ours was illegally brought over from Babylon. As far as I know, they’re not illegal here…”

  Why would they be? The queen, Aadya, probably didn’t even know what they were. Which raised the question… “Why are they illegal in Sylem?”

  Zero’s home realm had a lot of strange laws that usually made sense once their origin was explained, even if Indigo didn’t agree with said laws, but banning a foreign occult tool that swept in like your average fad and faded into near-obscurity with the same alacrity? It made no sense.

  Zero shrugged. “Probably because if the dead can speak, the living get in trouble.”

  Now that made sense. No one in Sylem had clean hands, which meant everyone had something to hide. Even Zero had skeletons in his closet.

  “But also,” Zero said, “because they’re considered…a betrayal of Wicca, or something like that.”

  For all it claimed to be about life energy and the magic of willpower, Wicca seemed to naturally orient around death. She couldn’t see how a tool for connecting with spirits would betray Wicca — just secrets.

  “But they’re fake,” she teased lightly, because he was uncomfortable and she wanted him to smile, to relax. “It’s a game, over-hyped by one generation of humans. That era of human history is plagued by false spiritual encounters.”

  Zero raised his eyebrow. “We could watch a movie, instead of playing with an over-hyped toy, if you prefer.”

  She could watch Iguana Second Chance when it was her turn to pick. No way would she let go of an opportunity to laugh with him. Laughter was its own kind of snuggling. She reached for the board. “Some toys are fun even when they’re over-hyped.”

  Zero helped her clear the table of snacks — she grabbed a walnut brownie before they moved them to the far end of the coffee table — and then put his hand on the arrow. He gave her a challenging look. “It works better if we’re both touching it.”

  Ah. A thrill of anticipation coursed through her as she realized the anticipated laughter wouldn’t happen. Something better — a surprise of some kind — was Zero’s plan. Maybe he’d gotten her a car to race against him in, or a new set of canvases. Whatever it was, he would spell it out on the ouija board, while pretending it was the spirits.

  She liked this. It was romantic.

  “What are we asking it?” she said, barely able to keep a smile off her face. She’d have to find something romantic to do for him next week. Car wax, or a magic-strengthened set of wrenches, or…or…something. She’d think of something.

  “Is anyone there?” Zero called out into the dim living room.

  The arrow started to move. 

  Indigo laughed and rolled her eyes at him. “Having fun?”

  “That’s not me,” he said with a little frown at the corner of his mouth. His lips played with the idea of a smile, and he shook his head.

  “Mm,” she teased. “And this isn’t me.” She slid the arrow toward I in order to spell I love you, but the arrow — Zero — fought her and crossed to M. 

  “M?” Zero grinned. “M what? Make me dessert?”

  He’d already made dessert. She grabbed a second brownie, aware she probably shouldn’t have much more. Her Wiccan body didn’t metabolize food as well as her Fae body had, and she had to be more careful what she ate, how often she was pregnant, and how often she exercised.

  Fortunately, Zero kept her exercised plenty most days.

  She resisted the urge to kiss him. If she distracted him too soon, he’d forget about whatever surprise he had planned and then she would have to wait an hour or two before she found out what it was. 

  She watched the arrow move toward A. “Ooh look,” she joked. “It went to A. For MAke me dessert?”

  “That one was you,” Zero accused, but they both knew it wasn’t. Indigo relaxed her grip on the arrow and let Zero guide it to the subsequent letters. L. L. O. R. Y.

  Mallory? Indigo looked at Zero. What surprise would he have that involved Mallory? His face was a mask of confusion.

  She hesitated. What if…But no. It wasn’t real. 

  Then why did Zero look lost?

  Tentatively, Indigo said, “How difficult was it for you to get this out of her room? Had the wards failed?”

  Mallory, like her older brothers, had warded her bedroom against invasion by parents and siblings. They could get in, because she’d done the wards when she was first learning magic, but being in her room was uncomfortable, filled with a pressure to get out.

  Zero shook his head. “It was in the closet where you put the confiscated soda and candy.”

  That made no sense. Why would Indigo confiscate a Ouija board? “I didn’t put it there.”

  Zero lifted his fingers from the arrow. “We should check on Mallory.”

  Indigo’s breath caught.

  No. She pressed back on the fear. This was still part of whatever Zero had planned. “When this turns out to be a surprise hidden in Mallory’s room, don’t be shocked that I tell you off.”

  “Unless she’s pranking us,” Zero said. “Or Spence is.”

  Spence wasn’t a bad idea. He lived for chaos. Sawyer, their youngest, was also a possible culprit. But how would they get the ouija board to spell out Mallory’s name? She didn’t know if Wicca could manage something like that.

  Zero opened Mallory’s door. The room was as clean as usual, with books and papers spread out on every surface except the bed, where Mallory lay asle…

  No, she wasn’t asleep.

  Zero crossed the room before Indigo, but Indigo knew death well enough when she saw it, that she didn’t need to feel Mallory’s neck to be sure she was gone. Zero still checked for a pulse, for warmth, because the doctor in him always felt that hope that she could be brought back.

  There was a time when a dead child would have crushed Indigo, but with Wicca magic, Mallory could be brought back. This was an inconvenience. The bigger trouble was that Zero had once lost a son who couldn’t be brought back, and he had trauma around child deaths.

  She saw a helpless expression cross his face, but then he set his jaw and became clinical and determined, distant in a compassionate way. He examined Mallory’s body. “No pulse. Her lips are covered in some pink powder.”

  Pink powder. That sounded like a high-sugar candy, maybe. The exact kind of thing a kid would sneak because they knew Indigo hated having it in the house. Too much sugar meant cranky kids — first they were wired, and then they were miserable and fought and then slept after resisting even that. She hated sugary drinks and foods. Add to it that all of her kids were neurodivergent, and that candy and soda was full of dyes that also impacted their behavior, and…of course she banned it.

  They saw her as a hypocrite because she and Zero drank soda once a week on movie night, as a special treat. But Indigo didn’t run around the house screaming like a banshee, or have an oopsie with a candle and the curtains, or get in a fistfight with Zero over the purple crayon. That was the difference the kids didn’t see. When they were ready for soda, they could have it. In moderation, just like she did.

  But Mallory…She must have snuck candy. And…choked? “Did she choke?”

  “Get the board,” Zero said in his doctor’s voice. “Bring it in here.”

  Right. The board. Because it did work, and their dead daughter was communicating wiht them on it!

  She ran to the living room, grabbed the board so quickly the arrow fell under the couch, got down on her hands and knees to retrieve the arrow, and then raced back to Mallory’s room. Zero had shifted Mallory so she was lying with her head on the pillow, arms at her sides, legs straight out. She could have been sleeping, except she never slept on her side.

  “Did you choke?” Indigo asked the board.

  She wasn’t even touching the arrow, but it scraped across the board until it had settled on No.

  “Did you eat something that might have been poison?” Zero asked. He took a tool from his medical bag and scraped some of the pink powder onto a glass square, put a drop of liquid on it from an eye dropper, and then covered it with a second glass square.

  The arrow slid to Maybe on the board.

  Mallory. How could she touch the arrow? Was it somehow both here and in Death? Was Mallory trapped here somehow? Had they dragged her here out of Death when they started using the board.

  “Did someone give you something weird?” Zero asked. He continued his examination of her body, having placed the glass sample in a little pouch to protect it.

  The arrow moved again. S. A. W. Y.

  Sawyer, her younger brother. Indigo wrung her hands. “Why would she take something from him?” All of them knew he couldn’t be trusted. He was always trying to prank — or worse — people. Indigo looked at the ouija board, and she could practically see Mallory’s mortification at realizing she’d fallen for one of Sawyer’s gags. “Why did you take something from him?”

  “And what?” Zero said. “Candy?”

1. A. K. E. U. P.

  They both stared at the ouija board. Mallory had only recently discovered makeup, right around the same time she’d discovered a certain freckled temple assistant with big muscles and pretty eyes.

  “Sawyer!” Zero bellowed, all signs of the calm doctor erased from his demeanor. He sent his familiar, a black leopard named Jinx, bounding away from him and into the hallway. A moment later, she returned, nudging Sawyer into the room.

  Sawyer was an interesting specimen. When Mallory was born, Indigo had sobbed quietly — she’d thought she was alone! — about how little her newborn daughter looked like her old body. Somehow, it hit differently with a daughter than it had with sons, and she’d realized she would never have a child that looked like she’d looked as a little girl. It had been heartbreaking.

  Zero had gone and…Well, he’d done something romantic and adorable, something he thought was a reasonable reaction to her grief: He’d had kids with her brother.

  Sawyer was one of them, arguably the most intense. Did he look like a little auburn cherub half-Fae child? Yes. He also resembled portraits of demons Indigo had encountered in her lifetime. (She encountered the portraits, not the demons.) He was intense — sweet, but always up to something. Even when he slept, his dreams were full of experiences that made his body twitch and his eyes move back and forth behind his lids.

  And when she had a child who never rested, she never rested.

  They hadn’t had any more kids since Sawyer, and she didn’t even mind. This kind of thing was exactly why. What if Sawyer decided to off an infant to find out if he could hide poison in baby formula?

  “Oh,” Sawyer said, full of excitement. “Did it work?”

  “Work?” Indigo huffed. “It killed her!”

  “Good, good,” Sawyer said, approaching Mallory’s body. Zero blocked him from getting too close, so he turned back to face Indigo and said, “Next, we try Talise. I’m trying to figure out how fatal it is. Like, obviously it’s a yes on fatality. Do you think Talise would take lipstick powder if I just happened to leave it on her vanity?”

  Talise — the Dragon heir — had wisely hidden her room from the likes of Sawyer.

  “No,” Zero growled, which was good because Indigo was only a half second from asking Sawyer just who he thought we was who would be testing poisons.

  “But she’d think it was from her brother or something, right? I told Mal this stuff was from Seamus.”

  Seamus! That was the name of the temple assistant. Of course Mallory would trust anything from him, in a naively-hopeful way, even if it came through Sawyer.

  Zero ignored him and scooped Mallory into his arms, headed toward her bedroom door. He must have decided his office was a better place to 

  “She’ll be fineeee,” Sawyer insisted, hurrying after him. He at least had the grace to look worried about his sister.

  “She will be,” Indigo agreed. “We’ll worry about you later.”

  Sawyer ignored the threat.

  “Mallory isn’t fine,” Zero said, setting her on his examining table. “She’s dead. What if someone found out and took her soul?”

  “You found out,” Sawyer challenged. “Did you take her soul?”

  They should have just watched Iguana Second Chance, except that wouldn’t have prevented Mallory’s death. It would have left them oblivious to it, possibly until morning.

  “I might take yours,” Indigo warned. She held her hand out. “Give me the rest of the poison. Now.”

  Sawyer gave her the look that demand deserved. He demonstrably did not have the poison on his person.

  Indigo’s arms shook with rage and fear for Mallory.

  “Really,” Sawyer said, “who believes in lipstick powder?”

  “Don’t blame the victim!” she snapped. “Poison! Now. In a safe container!”

  Sawyer groaned and huffed and rolled his eyes and did all the other things he usually did to convey his exasperation with the reality of having parents who actually had rules and boundaries. When that failed to elicit a reaction from either of them, he moseyed out of the room, shoulders slumped dramatically.

  Zero unlocked his office safe and removed a vial of shimmering blue liquid — a single dose of life energy potent enough to revive one dead person.

  Mallory would be fine.

  Zero administered the dose directly into Mallory’s mouth. She gasped alive, her eyes flung open and her lungs raspy. Before she oriented or uttered a word, her eyes rolled back and she lost consciousness. Zero checked her pulse and shook his head.

  She was gone. Again? “What did he use?”

  “I don’t know,” Zero said. He rolled up his sleeves. “This is strong enough to kill a Dragon. I want to get her soul safe before we do anything else.”

  “How?” Indigo wouldn’t know how to protect a soul if her life — or Mallory’s — depended on it. She was clueless.

  Zero looked around his office, as if it held the answers he sought. “Put her somewhere else. An animal, maybe.”

  The ouija board flung itself across the room.

  Zero chuckled. “I’ll take that as a no, Mal? If you can hear us…It’s safer.”

  The ouija board flipped over, and the arrow moved to No.

  Zero sighed, but got out his microscope and the little glass squares he’d put some of the poison onto in Mallory’s room. He slid the glass squares onto the tray of the microscope and leaned his eye in close, fiddling with a knob.

  Indigo looked around. This was the boring part of what Zero did — the endless and meticulous research that stood behind every change he made to his technique. 

  She paced. He looked at her, with an expression that said, that’s not helping.

  “What is taking Sawyer so long?” she groaned, since she had Zero’s attention.

  Zero glanced at the door, and then shut off the microscope light. “I’ll check.”

  He left Indigo alone, except for Mallory’s silent spirit, and returned after a couple of minutes. He was now carrying Sawyer’s limp form.

  No. Both of them? How had Sawyer been careless enough to contaminate himself? Or had he done it deliberately, in the hopes they would be so relieved he was safe, later, that they wouldn’t punish him?

  She wouldn’t put it past him to try something like that.

  “He touched the powder,” Zero groaned. He turned the microscope back on and resumed his research, muttering, “We have two dead kids and a substance that could be anything.”

  Indigo put her hand on his arm. “I don’t want you wiping any more poison off them. If it kills you, there won’t be anyone left to save them.” Indigo certainly wasn’t competent enough to save anyone using Wicca.

  “There’s always your favorite dungeon resident,” Zero teased, somehow capable of levity despite the situation. Indigo squeezed his arm in appreciation, laughing.

  “Maybe,” she mused as lightly as she could manage, “he’ll volunteer to wipe the poison off and die.”

  Zero chuckled, and switched off the microscope again. “I think I know what it is, but we should check with a Djinn or—”

  He broke off, staring over Indigo’s shoulder. She turned to see the ouija board hovering in the air, the arrow moving frantically.

1. P. A. D. E. N. T. O. O. D. E. A. D.

  Indigo stared at Zero. This was about their other son, who was presumably alive. “Spaden too dead?” she said aloud.

  Zero grabbed a pair of medical gloves, shaking his head. “Spaden’s dead too.”

  Oh. 

  Oh, they were all dying.

  This was a different kind of crisis.