Chapter 44

I frowned. ‘That doesn't make sense. Liv is trying to heal the barrier, that's why you're in Portlock. Why would she try to bring it down?'

Connor looked as shocked as I felt. Liv was the only reason we had a barrier; if she'd gone to the dark side, we were all screwed. And I didn't get why she needed this elaborate game. The gems were hers; she could take them, so why kidnap Mum? It made no sense.

Was someone else involved? Was Liv being coerced? A sudden thought made me go cold. Before she'd handed the gems to the new elemental witches, she had looked after them. Was she under their influence like Wintersteen had been? Did the cursed gems want the barrier down so that they could be released?

‘The gems,' I said to Connor. ‘I think they might have influenced her. When we interviewed Wintersteen's kids, they said that sometimes their mother was totally normal and other times she wasn't. They said it was like a switch had been thrown.'

‘You think that's happened to Liv?'

‘I don't know. Posie Payne had no reason to curse Stan or Sigrid,' I said slowly as I made a few more connections. ‘But Liv was mad at Stan for his dereliction of duty when his gem stone was taken and he wasn't there.'

Connor nodded. ‘She screamed at him.'

‘Right. When she visited him at the hospital I thought she was burying the hatchet, but maybe she lifted the stasis so he went all rampaging bear.' My jaw clenched. ‘And Sig…' I closed my eyes in despair. ‘Liv has always had a thing for Gunnar. Getting Sig out of the way… She was removing her competition for Gunnar's love.'

‘It's like she's giving into her darkest impulses,' Connor said grimly. ‘Maybe she saw Payne's work at the docks and at the market and she couldn't resist doing her own curse work.'

‘I'm not sure it's truly her, any more than it was the real Elsa Wintersteen. It's those cursed gems. We have to do something about them.' I looked appealingly at Aoife. ‘We have to get the banshees out of the stones. Can you help us? Will you help us?'

She looked at me for a moment and winked out of existence. ‘Aoife?' I called. No response. Was that a no?

My hands were shaking and I tried to make them stop; we had no time for nerves. We helped Mum out of the basement and into Connor's truck. Even Fluffy seemed concerned about her, and she wasn't his favourite person. ‘We should go to the hospital,' I said.

‘No,' Mum objected. ‘Liv has contacts there and she'll find out I'm gone. Take me to your house. I need something to eat and drink and I'll be fine.'

I looked at her in the rearview mirror; she needed more than food and drink, but I suspected she was right about Liv. ‘Okay,' I agreed reluctantly.

‘How is my Arabella?' Mum looked scared. ‘Did Liv hurt her?' The concern was real: Liv routinely killed goats and chickens in her line of work, so a dog wasn't a stretch.

‘She's fine,' I assured her. ‘Liv shoved her in your bag.'

Mum frowned. ‘I think that's Good Liv trying to curb the actions of the Bad Liv. She could have easily added a kill curse above me, too – she's talented enough. But she didn't.'

It was hard to argue with that, and if it were true maybe all wasn't lost. Maybe our Liv was salvageable. ‘It was Liv that called asking for you that made me realise you'd been kidnapped,' I said slowly.

‘And Liv has been pushing Gunnar and you to put other plans in place in case the barrier falls,' Connor said suddenly. ‘It's like she's trying to undermine all the gems' actions as much as she can.'

‘I think you're right.'

Once home, I made sure Mum ate and drank, then she went to the bathroom to shower off the experience. ‘What do we do now?' I asked Connor.

‘We do what we planned to do – we wait for Liv to call then go to her. We need to lull her into believing that we're complying with her plan, only we won't let her touch those damned gems. I'll speak to the other council members and warn them about our suspicions. You take care of your mum and be ready.'

‘Okay.' I felt better for having a concrete plan; for the first time in twenty-four hours, it felt like we finally had the upper hand.

He hugged me and gave me a blazing kiss before he left. I took a minute to pull myself together. I was suddenly starving so I warmed some blood and popped a microwave meal in to heat. I might be able to feed on auras but I didn't have the first clue how to do it and now wasn't the time to experiment.

As I ate, I savoured the warmth of the food in my belly and waited for Mum to come out and fill me in on everything she knew about Liv. She was in the bathroom for a long while, but I didn't blame her. She emerged right about the time that the hot water must have run out.

I switched on the kettle the moment I heard her and had a brew ready when she came out. She didn't look like her usual self: she was dressed in my leggings and a baggy top, she had no makeup on and her damp hair hung limply around her face. Looking like that, I saw myself in her for the first time; her outer veneer was gone, and she looked younger and more vulnerable. I couldn't recall seeing her without a full face of makeup, not even as a child.

‘Are you feeling all right, Mum?' I asked quietly. She nodded but slumped onto the sofa, exhausted. I brought her a cup of tea and she sipped it gratefully. ‘I know this is tough,' I said gently, ‘but I need to know what happened. Are you up to talking?'

She sighed. ‘Yes, it's important.' But she sat a while longer, staring into her cup.

‘Liv came to the door and said we were meeting with the other witches. I didn't think anything of it and I left with her.' She sipped again. ‘But when I got in her car, she locked the doors and took Arabella. It was like she changed – one moment she was her usual brusque self, then suddenly she was her evil twin.' Mum shuddered.

Definitely the gems,I thought grimly. ‘Did Liv seem to know what her evil half was doing?' I asked.

‘I really don't know. She took me to the funeral home and tied me up. She said she'd kill me if you didn't bring her the gems. That confused me, because she already has access to them. That's when I realised she was being controlled by something. She must be fighting it, or her personality has split and one side doesn't know about the other.' She looked spooked and I felt the same.

‘So there's a good chance she doesn't know what she's doing when her switch is flipped, or that whatever is possessing her can't control her for long?'

‘I don't know for sure, Elizabeth – Bunny. But she's very strong. I've never seen a necromancer as strong as her. She subdued me with almost no effort, and I'm one of the strongest witches in the world. I'm not dead, so she shouldn't be able to control me like she did.'

‘It's because the gems are controlling her,' I mused. ‘Maybe she used the fire gem to control you.'

Mum looked unnerved. ‘How can the gems be that strong? Liv said they were possessed by banshee spirits but banshees, even the strongest like your little friend, haven't got a fraction of my strength.'

‘The banshees in the stones are the strongest ones of all time, and the gems themselves weren't normal to start with. They had huge power before the banshees were forced into them. Apparently they were wielded by the archangels themselves.' No one was supposed to know that, but she was my mum, and we had to fix this somehow; she needed to know the full force of what we were facing. ‘I think one of those stones might have given Liv immortality,' I admitted.

Her jaw dropped. ‘Good Lord, Elizabeth. She might be unstoppable.'

‘Nobody's unstoppable,' I said. ‘Everyone has a weakness. Even Superman had kryptonite.'

‘Superman was fictional, darling,' she pointed out condescendingly.

‘Yes, I know that.' I suppressed my eye roll. ‘I mean that Evil Liv must have a weakness, and I think it is probably Good Liv. The gems want to be together and they made her kidnap you as a bargaining chip, but they didn't understand that Liv has had access to the gems all along. She's kept that from them. We can't allow the gems to come together – somehow we need to block their control of Liv. Any ideas?'

‘What are the gemstones in now?'

‘Foot-square iron boxes.'

‘Iron?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Let me think.' She took out her phone and began to scroll. I hoped it was a powerful ancient grimoire that had been digitised and was ready to be used. That gave me an idea. ‘Mum, that grimoire you bought, do you think it has anything helpful in it?'

Her eyes lit up. ‘I totally forgot about that. Oh my goodness, it might have.'

I ran into her room and retrieved the dusty tome from her dressing table. It was open – she'd clearly been reading it in her spare time. I gave it to her: she'd understand it better than me. I had passed Latin in school but I wasn't as proficient as she was, plus she understood witchy stuff.

‘Elizabeth, I'm going to skim through this – I was halfway through it already. In the meantime, we're going to need new boxes for the gems. What kind of fragrant wood grows here?'

I thought it all smelled nice so I texted Connor. No one would know wood like a lumberjack, right? He texted back quickly: Yellow cedar would work best. Have warned the others. On my way back.

‘He said we have yellow cedar.'

Relief washed over her. ‘Perfect. That's in the cypress family and cypresses are guardians of boundaries. Have your lumberjack prince get to work on four boxes. They need to be the same size as the current ones, and we'll need to enchant them before we add the gems.'

‘Okay, on it.' I was about to text Connor again when I heard his truck outside.

I ran out of the door and caught him before he got out. ‘You've got to go to Kamluck. Mum needs four yellow cedar boxes, same size as the current gem boxes. We have to get the gems into those after they've been enchanted. Mum is still searching for a way to protect Liv from the influence of the gems – she thinks Liv is splitting into two personalities. Subconsciously she's fighting the possession, but she'll be too strong for any of us if her dark side wins.'

‘I'm on it. Four boxes coming up.' He roared off.