The Water Witch Read online

  The Water Witch is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Carol Goodman

  Excerpt from the next book by Juliet Dark copyright © 2013

  by Carol Goodman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Juliet Dark.

  This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dark, Juliet.

  The water witch / Juliet Dark.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54242-7

  1. Women college teachers—Fiction. 2. Witches—Fiction. 3. Fairies—Fiction. 4. Imaginary wars and battles—Fiction. 5. University towns—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3607.0566W38 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2012041729

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Cover design : Eileen Carey

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Juliet Dark’s Forthcoming Novel

  PROLOGUE

  The dream began as all the others had, with moonlight pouring through an open window, shadow branches stretching across the floor, the scent of honeysuckle on the air.

  “You’re back,” I whispered. “I thought …”

  “That you had sent me away,” he whispered, his teeth gleaming pearly white as his lips parted. “You did. But it’s not too late to call me back. I miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” I sighed.

  The moonlight cleaved the dark, carving a cheekbone out of shadow, which I longed to reach out and stroke, so achingly familiar was the face taking shape just inches from my own. But I couldn’t move. He was still only shadow hovering above me but I could feel the weight of him, pressing down on me.

  “I can’t,” I panted. “It won’t work. We can’t be together …”

  “Why not?” he cooed, his honeyed breath lapping against my face. “Because they told you I was no good for you? That I would hurt you? How could I ever harm you? I love you.”

  I breathed in his words and let out a long sigh. My breath filled his chest, each muscle rippling in the silver light like water running over smooth stones in a stream. I felt those hard muscles slam down against my chest, forcing the air from my lungs. He sipped the air from my lips and the moonlight drew hands from the dark that stroked my face, my throat, my breasts …

  I gasped and his hips bore down on mine. I was filling him out with my breath. All I had to do was keep breathing and he would become flesh and blood.

  But I couldn’t breathe.

  He was sucking the breath out of me, draining my life. His legs parted mine and I felt him rigid against me, waiting to enter me …

  Waiting for what?

  He moved away, his body shifted lower. “You have only to call my name to bring me back,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You have only to want me to make me flesh again.” His lips sealed each word to my throat, my breasts, my navel … “You have only to love me to make me human.”

  Oh, that. If I loved him he would become human. It seemed a small thing. I was close, wasn’t I? As close as his lips were to my skin as they brushed along my inner thigh. Tantalizingly close. I had only to call out his name and tell him I loved him for the waiting to be over, for the teasing to end …

  He was teasing me. The little nips on my thighs, the way he moved against me and then retreated. He was holding back, waiting for me to release him from his exile.

  “You’re trying to bribe me,” I said, my voice betraying my desire. His lips froze on the crook below my right kneecap and grew chill. His face appeared above mine, more shadow than moonlight, already fading.

  “I wouldn’t call it a bribe,” he said, his voice sulky. “Just a little taste of what could be.”

  “But it cannot be,” I said, trying not to let him hear the regret and frustration in my voice or how much I wanted to love him. “I don’t love you … yet … and I can’t love you when you try to make me love you, so you’ll suck the life out of me before I can love you.”

  He frowned. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked confused. He looked sweet when he was confused, like the boy he must have been centuries ago before he became … this. I could have loved that boy, I thought, but then his confusion turned to anger.

  “Nonsense,” he hissed, “those are just words.” His body curled into a coil of black smoke. “If you could feel what it’s like …”

  The coil of smoke whipped against the windowpanes, smashing wood and glass. Moonlight flooded in, only it wasn’t moonlight anymore; it was silver water rushing into the room, a wave crashing over my bed, the water shockingly cold after the warm breeze and his hot kisses. I still couldn’t move. I was powerless to save myself as the water rose around me. It began pouring from the ceiling, down the walls, into my mouth. As the waters rose his face floated above me, watching without pity as I drowned. This is what I had done to him, his expression seemed to say. I had exiled my incubus lover to the Borderlands and condemned him to an eternity underwater.

  I awoke, gasping in the moonlit bedroom, my body chilled despite the hot summer night. I’d never really feel warm again while he was trapped beneath all that cold water. I’d never love anyone if I couldn’t love him.

  ONE

  One of the perks of academia—the part that was supposed to make up for the low salary, living in a hick town a hundred miles from a good shoe store and a decent hair salon, putting up with demanding, entitled eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, and navigating departmental politics—was getting summers off. I had always imagined that once I was established in a tenure track job I would spend my summers abroad. Sure, I’d pin the trip on some worthy research goal—reading the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë at the British Library or researching the court fairy tales of Marie d’Aulnoy at the Bibliothèque Nationale—but there was no law that when those venerable institutions closed at dusk I couldn’t spend my evenings catching a show on the West End or listening to jazz in a Left Bank café.

  What I had not pictured myself doing during my summer brea
k was swatting through the humid, mosquito-infested woods of upstate New York in knee-high rubber boots.

  I had known I was in trouble when I opened my door that morning to find Elizabeth Book, Dean of Fairwick College and my boss; Diana Hart, owner of the Hart Brake Inn; and Soheila Lilly, Middle Eastern studies professor, on my front porch. The first time these three women had shown up on my doorstep together had been last year, the night before Thanksgiving, when they’d come to banish an incorporeal incubus from my house.

  Only then they hadn’t been tricked out in knee-high rubber boots and fishing tackle. Fairwick was big on fishing. The town had been plastered with FISHERMEN WELCOME! signs since Memorial Day. There was a “Small Fry Fry-Up” at the Village Diner, an “Angler’s Weekend” at the Motel 6 on the highway, and a “Romantic Rainbow Trout Dinner for Two” at DiNapoli’s. Out-of-town RVs with airbrushed vistas of rushing streams and leaping trout had been clogging Main Street for the last few weeks. Our part of the Catskills was apparently the fly-fishing capital of the Northeast. Still, fishing seemed like a mundane activity for these three women. The dean, as I’d learned this past year, was a witch; Diana was an ancient deer-fairy; and Soheila was a succubus. A reformed, nonpracticing succubus. But still. A succubus.

  “What’s up?” I asked guardedly. “Is this an intervention for my plumbing? It has been making some strange sounds.”

  I was only half joking. One of the reasons I had opted to stay home this summer was to get some work done on Honeysuckle House, the lovely—but time consuming—Victorian I’d bought the fall before. Since I’d been forced to banish my boyfriend four months ago I’d thrown myself into an orgy of home repair. I’d been breathing dust and paint fumes for weeks. Today I’d been waiting for the arrival of Brock, my handyman (who also happened to be an ancient Norse divinity), to fix some broken roof tiles, when the doorbell rang.

  “No, dear,” Diana said, her freckled face breaking into an awkward smile. When the three of them had come to banish the incubus from my house I’d joked that they were there for an intervention, but when four months later Diana and Soheila had come to break it to me that my lover, Liam Doyle, was that same incubus and that he was draining not just me but a dozen students of our life force, the joke hadn’t seemed so funny. I think they all felt a little guilty when we found out Liam was innocent of attacking the students. But he’d been an incubus and you couldn’t go on living with an incubus. Could you?

  “I’m afraid we have a problem that only you can help us with,” Liz said.

  “You need me to open the door?” I had learned in the past year that I was descended on my father’s side from a long line of “doorkeepers”—a type of fairy that could open the door between the two worlds. By a lucky—or perhaps unlucky, depending on how you looked at it—coincidence, the last door to Faerie was here in Fairwick, New York. So far my unusual talent had brought me nothing but grief and trouble.

  “Yes!” they all three said together.

  “What do you want me to let in?” I asked suspiciously. The last creature I’d let in from Faerie had tried to eat me.

  “Nothing!” Diana insisted, her freckles standing out on her pale skin the way they did when she wasn’t telling the whole truth. “We want you to let something out. A lot of somethings, actually …”

  Liz sighed, squeezed Diana’s hand, and finished for her. “Undines,” she said. “About two dozen of them. Unless you can help us get them back to Faerie they’re all going to die.”

  “It’s their spawning season,” Soheila explained as we tramped through the woods that started at the edge of my backyard. “It only happens once every hundred years. The undine eggs …”

  “Eggs? Undines come from eggs?” I asked, appalled. The only undine I knew about was the water nymph in the German fairy tale who marries a human husband and then, when he is unfaithful to her, curses him to cease breathing the moment he falls asleep.

  “Of course, dear,” Diana answered, looking back over her shoulder. The path obliged us to walk in twos and Diana and Liz were up in front. “They have tails at this stage so you couldn’t very well expect them to give birth …”

  “Okay, okay,” I interrupted. Although I’d written a book called The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know about the sex lives of fish-tailed undines. Thankfully, Diana took the hint and left out the more graphic details of the undines’ sex life, concentrating instead on the life cycle of their young.

  “The eggs are laid in a pool at the headwaters of the Undine …”

  “Is that why the stream is called the Undine?” I asked. I’d heard of the stream. The lower branch, south of the village, was popular with fishermen, but the upper branch, which had its headwaters somewhere in these woods, had been declared off limits by the Department of Ecological Conservation.

  Liz Book sighed. “The locals started calling it that because of a legend about a young woman who lured fishermen into the depths of the trout pools and then drowned them.”

  “They probably just fell in after a few too many drinks,” Soheila said. “It’s true that undines seduce human men—if they get one to marry them, they get a soul—but they don’t kill them unless they’re betrayed.” Soheila pushed back a vine and let it snap behind her, nearly hitting me in the face. Since she was normally the most charming and sophisticated of women, I had the feeling that the subject was sensitive for her. I’d learned this past year that Soheila had become part human when a mortal man fell in love with her, but he had died because her succubus nature had drained the life from him. Since then she’d scrupulously avoided any physical contact with mortal men, even though I suspected she had a crush on our American Studies professor, Frank Delmarco. A suspicion confirmed by how melancholy she’d been since Frank had gone away a few weeks ago to a conference called “The Discourses of Witchcraft” in Salem, Massachusetts.

  “Anyway,” Diana continued in the strained, cheerful voice of a grade school teacher trying to keep her class on subject, “the eggs hatch into fingerlings that stay in the headwaters until they’re mature—we think it takes close to a hundred years—then, when they’ve matured into smolts, they begin the downstream journey to the sea.”

  “The sea?” I asked. “But we’re hundreds of miles from the sea.”

  “Not the Atlantic,” Liz said. “The Faerie Sea. The upper branch of the Undine flows through an underground passage into Faerie before it joins the lower branch.”

  “I thought the door in the honeysuckle thicket was the only way into Faerie. You told me it was the last door.”

  “It is the last door,” Liz said, “but there’s also an underwater passage to Faerie in these woods … or at least there used to be. It’s been growing narrower over the years, just as all the other passages to Faerie did until they closed. This passage was only big enough for a juvenile undine to slip through the last time they migrated a hundred years ago. We’re afraid that it’s clogged now, and when a passage to Faerie clogs it’s like when an artery to the heart closes—smaller veins open up around it. Unfortunately many of these smaller veins lead to the Borderlands instead of Faerie. If they don’t get through to Faerie they’ll die, but if they get stuck in the Borderlands …”

  Her voice trailed off and I shivered, recalling my dream from last night. To be caught in the Borderlands meant death or an eternity of suffering.

  “So,” Liz continued, “we thought with your doorkeeper powers you might be able to open the passage wide enough for them to go straight through to Faerie without getting lost in the Borderlands.”

  “But I have no idea how to open an underwater passage,” I said. This was true, but I was also thinking of the dream. It had started seductively enough but had ended with my demon lover trying to drown me. He had been angry with me for trapping him in a watery hell. If that were true, I didn’t much like the idea of taking a dip into any body of water that might be connected to the Borderlands.

  “Would I have to get in the wate
r?” I asked.

  “We don’t think so, dear … Wait … Do you hear that?”

  Liz tilted her head and held up a manicured finger. At first all I heard was the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies in the heavy humid air. Even the birds were too tired to sing in the midday heat. I wiped a trickle of sweat away from my eyes and was about to tell Liz I didn’t hear anything when I became aware of a soft burbling beneath the drone of insects. A breeze stirred the heavy underbrush, bringing with it the delicious chill of running water.

  “We’re at the headwaters,” Soheila said, sniffing the air and lifting her heavy dark hair off the nape of her neck. “The water bubbles up from a deep natural spring—the coldest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. Not many ever get to see it because it’s carefully hidden.”

  Although I was still disturbed by the idea of going anywhere near a watery passage to Faerie, the sound of the stream was making my parched mouth water and my sweaty feet ache for a cold dip. If I could help the undines without getting into the water I wanted to do it. After all, they were harmless juveniles.

  Only when I’d agreed to follow the three women farther into the woods did I remember just how volatile teenagers could be.

  We scrambled through tangles of shrub, following the sound of water deeper into the thicket. Pushing the vines aside, we dislodged the bones of small animals and birds. I’d seen remnants like these around the door to Faerie, the remains of creatures who had gotten stuck in the Borderlands and died there. I felt the pressure of the vines on my skin as we passed and heard the creak of fiber and pulp as the thicket contracted around us—like one of those Chinese finger puzzles.

  “Are you sure we can make it through this?” I asked, struggling to keep my mounting sense of claustrophobia at bay. It felt like we were in a wicker basket that was shrinking around us.

  “Don’t worry,” Soheila said matter-of-factly. “Liz knows a spell to keep the thicket from closing in on us.”

  That’s when I noticed Liz and Diana were silently mouthing words as they walked through the woods and that the vines were curling away from us as we approached. I felt reassured until I looked back and saw that the vines were also intertwining behind us. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the claustrophobic woods another second we emerged into open air: a glade encircled by ferns. I felt and smelled the coolness of water before I saw the pool, which was the same deep green as the surrounding woods. When my eyes adjusted to the murk, I realized that the burble that had drawn us came from a spring bubbling up from a cleft in a giant boulder and falling into a wide basin hollowed out of gray-green granite. The women formed a circle around the basin and then crouched down beside it to scoop handfuls of water to their mouths. In this age of bottled water and rampant pollution it went against most of my instincts to drink from a hole in the ground, but thirst overcame my reservations. I knelt beside Soheila, cupped my hands beneath the ice-cold trickle, and brought a handful to my lips …