Episode 26: Roulette (Lilla)

Lilla was and would always see herself as one of the most notable members of the Caelum. She stood beside her husband, Ulysses, in all things. Together, they would take over the remaining fractions of the world; the fractions her four sons controlled.

Tonight, their primary plan – her daughter Delaney and only child with Ulysses – was up for debate.

“Everyone sit down,” Ulysses demanded.

He had the voice of the leader and power over everyone in the cult with each word he spoke. She sat, because she wanted to but more so because she had to. Everyone sat: Edwin, Leonora, and Janice.

She had more free will under most circumstances, but when he was in a sour mood it was impossible to stretch herself under the confines of his demands.

Leonora was the caretaker of their daughter. She had been given the position and was above Lilla in some regards; she was a shadow leader to Ulysses’ power. Leonora had been in charge of raising Delaney within the borders of the territory the Lavesque boys controlled.

She had abandoned that name long ago. The Caelum was her home.

Ulysses spoke with anger and spite, “I want to know who messed with my daughter’s finding-and-binding spell.”

Delaney had been conceived under a bonding spell. She was bound to Naomi and Sam, two power wiccans. Sam had been killed within an hour of that spell while Naomi’s body was taken by fairies. Her two living sons had been raised in Sylem: Spence and Spaden. Spaden had been conceived for Delaney; a matching set of wiccans with power that would help them conquer the Lavesques. It was meaningful that Spaden had been raised by one. Powerful. Delaney and he would be able to take over the territory easily, which is why the Caelum hadn’t put their full force against the borders. Patience would pay off.

Delaney’s spell had been activated for her sixteenth birthday, and somehow she had been bound to two people instead of one.

She had a feeling Sam had gone behind their backs, hungry for power and desperate for Naomi’s love, but Ulysses was thorough. This meeting would bring Naomi and Sam back for a few moments to address the issue at hand and lay to rest whatever had been done to try and harm their daughter’s future.

Neither Janice nor Edwin spoke up.

“Anyone?” Lilla asked.

One of them would die that night, she suspected. Ulysses had someone in mind for promotion and needed to make an example.

“Have you looked into his dad at all,” Edwin asked. She didn’t like Edwin because he paid too much attention, though he was someone worth aligning with on the side. He told on other members for their transgressions, which allowed her own to slide under Ulysses watchful eye.

Ulysses had once inspired hope, and while he was powerful he had degraded his magic somehow. He seemed weaker in recent months, if not over the past few years. She wondered if it were because he had given up their child and had regrets as her traits began to show. She had come to believe he was sleeping with someone else.

“We only found out today,” Ulysses stated. “Someone added a person to the spell.”

Janice squished her body against the desk, so her chair wouldn’t stick out more than anyone else’s, “Is that even possible?”

Janice was disgusting, and her choice for using in the spell that night, even if Edwin needed to meet his end soon.

Ulysses sat, “You’re right, it isn’t.”

Ulysses had been intimate with Janice, she suspected. It didn’t matter; intimacy with subordinates promoted their loyalty. He would never be so foolish to extend his line with her.

“We have some guests coming today,” Ulysses stated before he activated the spell.

Nothing happened.

“Is he alive?” Lilla asked Ulysses. If he was dead, the spell would have worked. They had sacrificed one of the less promising captives from their latest raid of Baitrene to create the spell. There was no way he could ignore the compulsion.

“Not that I know of; how could he be?” Ulysses asked.

It was weak to show uncertainty in front of other members, even the highest ranking. She had cornered him into it, which was her own fault. She would have to apologize later, after she reminded him of his own weakness.

She sat back in her chair and brushed her blond hair behind her neck, “What about our other guests.”

Ulysses activated the second spell, the one for Naomi, and the pool of liquid resting in the shallow round bowl in front of them shimmered, then settled.

“What is going on?” Ulysses asked, angry and demanding.

“We need a volunteer,” Lilla said to the table, to try and compensate for Ulysses’ lack of control. “Edwin? Leonora? Janice?”

One volunteer to die, one volunteer to sacrifice to bring that person back to life. If Sam or Naomi had visited the realm of the dead, they would be able to find out.

“I’ll go,” Leonora said, before Janice was capable of opening her mouth to volunteer herself.

Good, Janice or Edwin would be sacrificed. Leonora could wait, until Delaney completed school.

Ulysses handed her a thimble of poison and requested she be thorough. His request was laden in controlling demand. At least he still had that aspect of himself in control.

Leonora drank the poison without flinching, her long corn-stalk hair drifting across the table.

“Any other inquiries?” she asked as she awaited the poison’s effects. “Outside of Sam and Naomi.”

“No,” Ulysses said.

He turned to Lilla, to avoid watching Leonora die, and said, “Get Nora. Kill her son if he gets in your way.”

Lilla would have loved to kill Nora’s son for what she suspected Sam had done. She hoped he was home and he could be sacrificed for something useful, something powerful. Sam’s magic… she could taste the effects of it and feel the power dance across her fingertips as she used it.

She transported to the wasteland of Clovercrest, the town Nora had holed up in after Sam’s death. A half dozen houses across the street still smelled like ashes; their corpses stood as reminders to how insignificant they were. The remaining houses, Nora’s included, were falling apart boxes with dim lighting and, if you were lucky, functioning pipes. The faces of each dirty earthen house varied in what remained, and the steps had weeds breaking through the uneven cement.

It was a filthy dump. Those with destroyed houses should be thankful they no longer had to live there, where the smell of the sewer permeated the air and Lilla’s eyes burned.

She covered her mouth with her arm as she entered the house.

“Elinor,” she greeted the frumpy brunette whose hair was braided by someone else. The woman clung to her blankets. She was a shell.

“Lovely to see you this evening,” Lilla continued. “I need you to come with me.”

Nora’s body unfurled and she stood on toothpick legs, her frame hardly supported. She had a straight spine and a defiant chin, though.

“You can’t have the baby,” Nora declared, her body rooted in the ground and an empty bundle of blanket clutched in her arms

“I don’t want some baby,” Lilla sneered. “I want to know what Sam did to my daughter and I want to know where he is.”

She ripped the blanket from Nora’s arms and tossed it onto the sunken blue recliner she was perked in. At least it didn’t look like a maggot infested cess pool like the couch.

Nora gasped at the blanket and her hands shook, “Who? You have four sons.”

Lilla grabbed her arm, “Delaney.”

She transported Nora before she could screech about some other delusions that filled her wrecked mind.

Ulysses watched as she led Nora to one of the three empty seats, the furthest from Leonora’s lifeless slouched body.

Lilla sat in her chair beside Ulysses.

“Have a drink, Nora,” Ulysses said as he reached around Lilla.

Nora bounced in her chair, the foreign cushion of their cheap office chairs a comfort to her self-sentenced purgatory.

She spun in a circle and stopped, facing Ulysses. “Thank you.”

She drank the truth serum without complaint, a look of delight on her face at receiving attention from someone. Nora had been without a man for sixteen years. Lilla slipped her hand onto Ulysses thigh, letting it slide around the curve of his thigh.

Ulysses examined her clothes; cheap cotton riddled in holes and a tattered knit shawl.

“Why did you refuse Sam’s assets?” he asked, tempted by curiosity and swayed from what mattered.

“So you wouldn’t find me,” Nora replied.

“Why?” Lilla asked, to hurry the conversation along.

“So you wouldn’t take the baby.”

Enough with the stupid baby.

“What baby?” Ulysses asked, the tenderness she saw as his deepest flaw echoing through his question. “We don’t want any of your children; they’re not powerful enough to interest us.”

He wanted children though; his little princess Delaney. His angel from heaven as the name implied.

“Her baby,” Nora replied.

Lilla’s eyes met Nora’s. She was a bumbling fool; there was no way she knew Lilla was pregnant or that the child was a secret kept from Ulysses. It was a weapon she hid from everyone. Even the child’s sire didn’t know. She avoided eye contact with Edwin.

“We don’t have time for this,” Lilla declared. Either Nora was too intelligent or walking a fine line if insanity. Lilla was unmoved to explore  which. “Who did Sam bind our daughter to?”

“I don’t know,” Nora insisted, her body swaying from side to side in the swivel chair. She smiled at Ulysses, “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“Where is Sam?” Lilla demanded.

“He’s dead,” Nora replied, her head looking at her hands and a tear in her eye.

Lilla met Ulysses gaze, and Ulysses rolled his eyes.

“This is why we don’t deal with stupid people,” Ulysses declared.

“When did you last see Naomi?” Lilla asked, since talking of Sam seemed only useful if you were a tissue box.

“When she came to see the baby. It was in December, seventeen or eighteen years ago.”

“Is it her baby?” Ulysses asked.

“Yes.”

Lilla sighed, relieved the baby was only a memory etched into her destroyed mind.

“Spence is eighteen. He must be the baby,” Lilla reasoned.

“He must be the second person for Delaney,” Ulysses guessed. It was a fair guess, since Nora felt the baby was important.

“We can work with him,” Ulysses continued. “Let’s see what Leonora learned.”

Ulysses turned his gaze toward Edwin and Janice. Lilla knew expressing preference would serve no purpose except to raise concern; Ulysses had decided while he was fetching Nora, most likely.

Lilla waited for him to announce it.

He pulled out the ingredients for the spell behind him.

Lilla took the cue and arranged Leonora’s body on the table, Ulysses at head, Janice and Edwin on one side, and her and Nora on the other. Lilla stood, and removed a blade from the wall. The sacrificial blade, as it had become known. She walked around the room and paused at each option: Nora, Edwin, Janice.

Once behind Janice, Ulysses nodded, and Lilla sliced her throat as the incarnation began. She pushed her body toward the table.so the blood spilled onto Lenora and her life energy slipped between the bodies

Nora gasped, like a fool that desired death with her near-success at ruining the spell.

Leonora gasped, as she returned from the dead.

“Well?” Ulysses asked.

Leonora took her first voluntary breath as Edwin cleared the table.

Nora rocked incessantly in her chair.

“Sam is not dead,” Leonora declared. “Naomi is not either. Selena had things to say, however.”

Selena, Naomi’s dead mother, didn’t deserve to have her voice heard. She had earned her death through stupidity and emotional vulnerability when she tried to rescue Naomi from the fairies. Her own son had been part of Selena’s death.

Leonora ignored Lilla’s unspoken preferences, “For instance, Zach Lavesque is notably absent as well. Spence Lavesque recently died, about two years ago, for a brief period of time.”

“Zach Lavesque” Ulysses repeated.

Only fools required repetition.

“What’s the baby’s name?” he asked Nora.

“What baby?” she asked through snotty tears.

“The baby you don’t want us to find. What is his name?”

She mouthed a few things, then said aloud, “It’s not Sam… Sam is gone.” she continued to fidget with the rusty workings of her slow mind. “Rhyss? It’s Rhyss.”

“A useless weak baby,” Ulysses declared; an under-evaluation. Any child of Sam’s would have had power. Ulysses had no grasp of who Sam was anymore.

“How did Spence die?” Ulysses asked Leonora. “How did he leave? I thought Zane was against powerful magic.”

“Someone brought him back,” Leonora replied. “A change of heart? Maybe he has Sam and Sam did it. Maybe Sam is conspiring against us.”

Maybe if you stopped ignoring Sam as a possibility in all of this we could save the entire evening and do something useful, she thought.

“Your job is to get Spence. If Zane has Sam, Spence will know. And we can either keep him for Delaney or kill him and cripple his family.”

Lilla assumed they would keep him if Delaney begged.

“I’ll retrieve him as soon as I can. Am I free to go make the necessary arrangements?” Leonora asked.

For someone who had just died, she was well kept together. Lilla wondered if she saved her fear for privacy, didn’t feel fear at all, or had so much faith in Ulysses that she didn’t find fear necessary.

“We want to meet Delaney tomorrow. We’ll be at Edwin’s at 11 in the morning.”

“I’ll bring her,” Leonora said. She let something fall to the ground near Lilla’s foot. No one else seemed to notice; Ulysses was distracted by some blood on his shirt.

After Leonora left the room, Lilla turned toward Ulysses, “What are we doing?”

“Sending Nora home with a monitor to see what she does. Maybe she’ll contact Sam.”

Ulysses didn’t move to do the spell; Edwin did. Some days she doubted his ability to do strong magic with the rate he forced others to.

He had made the truth serum, and it should have been a flawless serum.

“You don’t trust your truth serum anymore?” she asked, in front of Nora and Edwin.

Ulysses slammed his fist onto the desk, his face red; humility or frustration she assumed. “I want that damned book. I don’t trust anything until I know Sam doesn’t have it. And none of your boys have it.”

She found a tracker in a cupboard drawer and brought it over to Ulysses. He peeled it open and handed it to her like a gummy worm.

“Maybe it was destroyed. Sam seems likely, though,” Lilla replied. She glanced at Edwin for a moment then back to Nora as she ate the tracker as though she didn’t know any better or she knew not to resist.

“It doesn’t make sense that he’d leave her here,” Ulysses sneered.

Lilla ran her fingers across Ulysses shoulders as she walked behind him, to join Nora on her side of the table. She stood behind Nora, her hands braced on the back of Nora’s chair.

“I’ll take Elinor home,” she stated. She would use the time to discover whatever Leonora had given her. In Sylem, she could pay a visit to Leonora if necessary.

She turned Nora’s chair so she could stand, “Back to your shack.”

To prove her use, something Ulysses required every so often, she said, “You’re going to sign Sam’s assets over to us. Do you understand?”

“Sam is dead,” she restated.

It was worse than talking to a child, but at least she wasn’t hiding anything and being coy and deceptive.

“Yes, I’m sure you think so,” Lilla said as she tilted the chair so Nora was forced to stand. “He will be soon.”

“I don’t want the baby. Will you take the baby?”

Lilla glanced at Ulysses and Edwin, then transported Nora to her molding hole.

“Where is it?” She asked. A baby wasn’t useless, she could derive some magical use from it.

“I don’t know. He goes out in his car.”

The son.

Lilla looked for any sign of him, but the house was empty, “Why don’t you tell him he can’t live here anymore. Ward him from entering.”

“He makes my food.”

Lilla was losing opportune time to sort out whatever Leonora wanted with her. “Do you want him or not,” she snapped.

“No.”

“Then make your own food.”

Lilla pulled a small jar from a pocket and handed it to Nora, with any luck Nora would mess the spell up.

“Add some of his hair and sprinkle it around the perimeter of the house. He won’t be able to enter.”

Lilla left as soon as Nora took the jar, her hands holding it like the precious last candle in an eternity of darkness.

She transported just outside the house and pulled out the small piece of paper.

Unfolded, she read the elegant and hard to read script of Leonora’s that said There’s a group saving interesting souls from death.

She mulled it over as she transported home. She had asked Leonora to look into what happens after death for her, though she hadn’t shared her own desire to leave the Caelum in the only way possible. She tossed the paper into the trash. A maid would empty it in the morning and if Ulysses somehow found it she would blame one of them.

She turned the stove on and heated the kettle with water. While she waited, she took a glass out of the cupboard and added a small teabag of the pregnancy preventing tea, not that she needed it anymore. She filled the glass and drank it as she considered the paper more. As long as they both lived, Ulysses would have power over her. It was part of being Caelum; loyalty to your superior.

Whatever Ulysses had been up to lately, she assumed it had to do with changing loyalties. He had, from what she had gathered, been having a romantic relationship with another woman.

It didn’t bother Lilla, but it did give her an idea. Leonora wanted her dead, for some soul poaching plot. She just needed to convince Ulysses to kill her. If he was the one to do it, he wouldn’t bring her back.

She hand washed her cup and placed it back in the cupboard. She took the stairs up to their bedroom and walked in.

Leonora was someone she trusted with this. Death didn’t scare her and was a gamble to break free of Ulysses control.

He was alone in the bedroom.

“If they’ve screwed up Delaney we’ll have to kill.her and start over,” he stated.

It was an interesting way to greet her. His emotions were out of balance; it would be an ideal evening to push him.

“You have spent almost two decades putting all your future in one possibility and now you’re not sure? We can force her to behave.”

She undid the buttons of her skirt and stood in front of her vanity where she began taking her jewelry off for the night. She looked at his reflection in the mirror.

“I don’t want anyone younger who can stake a claim. We can force her to behave, but force won’t make her a good leader. I want to nurture her in the right direction, and if that doesn’t seem possible then we kill her,” he said.

Again with the nurturing. She had half a mind to suspect he had already started a new family or would soon.

While she set her bracelets into a bowl she felt his hands grab her waist and pull her against him, wanting and vulnerable.

“We should have raised her. Not Leonora. She’s poisoning Delaney with some ideology she hides from us,” Lilla said, hoping to plant the idea that she had regrets in his mind.

“Delaney is growing up in the heart of the nation she’ll need to defeat. If she understands them, she can win against them.”

She turned out of his embrace and walked toward the bed, where she sat and rolled down her stockings. That would irritate him, she hoped.

“Whatever you say, Ulysses.”

“You think I wanted to give my daughter up?” he yelled, his feet stamping toward her.

“I think sylem should be destroyed not over powered. Its corrupted too many. You’re too soft.”

He stood still for a moment, and she saw the thought to kill her swirl in his mind, “Propose a spell that can do it and show me how it works.”

She tried to sort out what he wanted in the spell. He wanted to mess with the fairies.

She thought of a spell that would create more heirs to their line, and more heirs to the fairy line. If she could manage to spawn a replacement for herself independent of Ulysses, she would have a legacy as well. She formulated in her mind the spell. If she played it right, her own child would be thrown into the mix of chaos.

While they conversed over the spell, he had started to kiss her neck and run his hands down her exposed skin.

“I haven’t had tea, so we shouldn’t risk anything tonight,” she lied.

Planting the idea was easy.

“Then have some tea,” he demanded.

She had no choice but to have tea, though she circumnavigated the order by asking, “Would you get it for me?”

“No,” he said. He called a maid to do it.

She waited, and soon the maid had a fresh cup of tea in the same.mug she had used before.

She drank it as Ulysses watched, paranoid she hoped.

“Better,” he appraised as he handed the cup back to the maid. He ran his hands down her arms again and pulled her waist against him.

“Get out,” he yelled at the maid.

He began kissing down her neck. “Stop forgetting tea. It’s irresponsible.”

She coaxed him into one last argument for the evening, one last push to make him feel undesired by her and to make him.want whoever he was imagining. She insulted his strength by calling him weak, told him he was running the Caelum into the ground, and insisted she didn’t wish to be intimate with him.

The plan would work, she could sense it when he insisted he knew she would always give the Caelum what they needed.

Perhaps, if he had the ability to see past his own desires, he would realize he was giving her more than she could ever ask for.

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