Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  We hadn’t gotten very far when I heard crashing through the underbrush behind us, as if we were being chased by a very large animal.

  “It’s her!” Tamsin cried. “Don’t look back!”

  While she was initially sluggish after emerging from her enchanted sleep, she was now outpacing me quite a bit and paused to wait for me to catch up. In spite of myself, I glanced over my shoulder. I immediately wished that I had listened to Tamsin.

  There was now very little trace of Margo Metal left. Only her dark hair remained. Gwyneth was etched across every feature of her frame, her eyes lit from within like a crazed jack o’ lantern. She didn’t seem to be running, but gliding across the forest floor, as if her feet didn’t need to touch the ground.

  It was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. She was closing in on us rapidly, and I saw no way for us to escape unless we spontaneously grew wings and flew.

  “Sam!” Tamsin called to me over her shoulder. “The water! Get to the bridge!”

  I had no idea why but doubled my speed, anyway. Up ahead, I could just make out the outline of the covered bridge. The covered bridge. A memory I never knew I had came back to me. I was small, in a creaky old house that I loved, in a big warm bed in my pajamas. I was with my mother, and she was reading me a story: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

  What if Gwyneth couldn’t cross the bridge?

  It was nearly in sight. I vowed not to look back until we had reached it. Doubling my speed, I reached out and grabbed Tamsin’s hand. She pulled me along. She was inhumanly fast.

  “Is this one of your powers?” I gasped.

  “No, dummy, I go to the gym,” she said, running faster.

  Just when we reached the edge of the bridge, I felt the earth buckle under my feet. Tamsin grabbed me around the waist and threw me to the ground. We rolled down the hill leading to the river bank as the dirt exploded beneath us.

  We came to a stop at the bottom of the hill. I looked up to see Margo, wreathed in what looked like blue flames. Her eyes glowed orange, lit from within. Her entire body seemed to radiate crackling electricity. As I watched, she raised her hand. A fireball appeared in it. She aimed it at us.

  “Sam! The water!” Tamsin grabbed my arm and dragged me into the water with her. I flinched, bracing myself for the shock of plunging into the icy current as she tugged me under the surface. But I felt nothing. I opened my eyes in confusion.

  The fireball hit the surface of the river just above our heads and immediately extinguished. Beneath the water, I looked at Tamsin. Her hair spread around her like a mermaid’s. She smiled at me. I saw then that she had manipulated the water around us, forming an air pocket so that we were protected.

  Tamsin pulled me by one hand, inside the air pocket, across the river. Our heads broke the surface and we crawled onto the opposite bank. Slipping in the snow and ice caked on the ground above the river, we clambered up the short rise toward the old wooden sign that welcomed travelers to Mount Hazel.

  Margo, or what little of her remained, hovered on the other side of the river, a few feet above the ground. She continued to pulse with the energy she emanated profusely like a poisonous ultraviolet light. Neon purple lightening crackled around her in a lurid halo of sinister light beams. Gwyneth’s high-pitched, ringing cackle emerged from her lips.

  “Clever girl, manipulating nature in your favor,” she called. “I might not be able to cross the bridge, nor pass through the water. But that doesn’t mean you can control the very air around me.”

  I watched in horror as she ascended the air around her, her body climbing higher in the sky as if pulled by an unseen cable. She hovered suspended over the river rushing below, then glided towards us, buffeted by an invisible current of air. She was unstoppable.

  She raised her hands, and two new fireballs formed in either one. She smiled menacingly and raised them, with the clear intention of flinging them onto us and torching us to ash.

  On the plus side, she seemed to have lost interest in possessing me.

  I reached for Tamsin’s hand and closed my eyes. I imagined the river changing shape and form, gathering at the place it hit the rocks and headed upstream, and instead rising higher and higher in a powerful wave. As I did so, I felt energy radiating from Tamsin’s hand back into my own. We raised our hands together.

  As we did, a curious thing happened: the river in my mind’s eye was replaced by a series of memories, flickering across my brain like a projector sped up in fast forward: being small again, before the time I thought my memories started—running through a field behind the cuckoo clock house while my mother laughed and chased me, a dog I’d never met barking and wagging its tail. Aurora looking younger but no less imposing, pouring something from a kettle while I watched her from under the kitchen table. Cherry blossoms outside the kitchen window.

  The kitchen, warm and inviting. Aurora’s voice, murmuring: manifest in fire and flame, borne of smoke and ash. A distant hearth I’d never seen, the clang of metal on iron. My father’s voice: You’re Samantha Hale, and you know what you want from this life.

  The memories sped up and went by even faster: Peter in the white gazebo gazing at me with snow in his hair. The apothecary, lit by the sunlight outside pouring through the window, illuminating my mother in a halo of light. Sometimes, we don’t choose our magic. Sometimes, the magic chooses us.

  As Tamsin’s power spread down her arm and up mine in waves, I felt overwhelmed as if by a warm tide. It was as if I had become part of everything around us. I was the river that rushed by and the wind that blew. I was the branches of the tree, I was the root and the bark.

  I opened my eyes. The river had formed a wall that towered over Gwyneth, whose eyes widened with fear. The water crashed down around her, extinguishing the flames. Margo’s mouth opened in a silent scream, and a long plume of gray smoke shot from her mouth and dissipated in the night sky. Her frail body plummeted into the raging current below.

  My vision went white around the edges. I fell back on the bank, my eyes sliding out of focus, and then I saw no more.

  43

  The Only Light in a Dark Place

  “Sam! Sam! Wake up!”

  I thought I was back in the office in the city and Coco was looking for me, under my desk. I stayed in the darkness. Just a minute longer, I thought. Then I opened my eyes. I saw Tamsin hovering over me, looking worried.

  “Are you dead?” she asked me.

  “Margo,” I said.

  “She’s gone,” said Tamsin. “She fell in the river. Sam, what just happened—”

  I jumped up and ran down the river bank, sliding on the muddy snow, tripping over exposed roots and stones. Tamsin followed me. “Sam, what are you—”

  I ran alongside the river, looking frantically at the frothing white water as it rushed past. It was dark and I could hardly see anything. We were still deep within the permanent midnight of the lunar eclipse.

  “Are you crazy?” panted Tamsin, who was now struggling to keep up with me. “What if she still has powers? What if—”

  I ignored her, scanning the water for Margo. I knew, without knowing how, that Gwyneth was gone. I believed that any power Margo had was extinguished along with her and that Margo, manipulated from the beginning by Gwyneth, was now in danger of drowning.

  “There!” I pointed. Margo clung to a rock at the center of the river, her head barely breaking the surface of the rushing water. As I watched, her grip slipped from the icy stone and she gave a cry as she was sucked downstream.

  “Margo!” I ran along the river after her as she was swept to the side and just barely caught hold of a gnarled tree root that protruded from the bank. “Tamsin, help me!”

  I could feel doubt radiating from her in waves, but she dutifully followed me to where the root protruded and grabbed my hand, anchoring herself with her free arm to the tree above Margo. I leaned over as far as I could and reached for her.

  “Grab my hand,” I shouted over the roar of the river.
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  Wet, bedraggled, and terrified, Margo raised a shaking, drenched hand to mine. Her outstretched fingertips barely grazed my own. I leaned out farther, Tamsin grimacing as she supported my weight. My hand wrapped around Margo’s. She clung to it. I leaned back. I felt Tamsin’s strength traveling down her arm and up mine. When we lifted Margo from the river, she was light as a feather.

  We supported Margo between us as we walked the road above the river. She was small as a child. Tamsin watched her intently when we arrived at the covered bridge, scrutinizing her closely when we took our first steps onto the wooden blanks, but Margo didn’t react. She sagged between us, limp as a doll, as we walked the length of the bridge.

  “How are we going to get back through these woods?” I said. “I barely remember how we got out of them.”

  I’d barely spoken the words when a luminous glow appeared ahead. I froze. Was it the witch lights that indicated Gwyneth’s followers? Had they overcome our family during the fight in the clearing and followed their master to dispose of us?

  It was only Martha. She bobbed toward us through the dark woods, the only light in a dark place. When she got close, her eyes were large and sad.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I only wanted to live again.”

  “Sorry about what?” Tamsin looked at her inquisitively, her head cocked. I decided not to enlighten her just then about Martha’s plan for taking over her body while she was deep in her enchanted sleep.

  “You can see her?” I asked instead.

  “I think you transferred some of your powers to me,” she said, shaking out the arm not supporting Margo, who groaned. “I have pins and needles everywhere.”

  “I’ll light the way for you,” said Martha. She turned and glided along ahead of us, casting a thin glow in the woods for us to follow.

  When we reached the clearing, it looked like it had been blown apart. Entire trees were uprooted, lying on their sides. Bushes had burned and shriveled to nothing. All around us was the smell of fire, smoke, and ash.

  “I’m sure they’re okay,” said Tamsin, reading my fear. “They were never physically here.”

  “What about Gwyneth and her followers?” I glanced around, paranoid.

  “They almost certainly dissipated when Gwyneth did,” said Tamsin. “Her power was their power. There can be no one without the other.”

  I found this more than a little cryptic but accepted it, anyway. I looked for any remaining members of Margo’s would-be coven: I saw no sign of them, Les, or most importantly, Peter. On the plus side, I didn’t see any bodies littering the clearing, either. All that was left of the earlier gathering were dozens of footprints in the snow, all crossing one another and going every which way across the clearing, as if a minor stampede had occurred.

  “It looks like most of them ran,” Tamsin observed as we struggled through the clearing in our strange, three-legged marathon, led by a ghost. “If not all.”

  I glanced toward the underbrush where I’d thought I’d seen Peter. It looked like someone had incinerated it. I turned away from it, awash with fear. Had he showed up, wanting to protect me? Was he okay? Or had one of them blasted him to smithereens? I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

  “Should we get her to a doctor?” I huffed to Tamsin. Margo had gotten much heavier now that we were no longer magically moving her across time and space.

  “Minerva,” she said. “She can heal her.”

  “There’s a shortcut into town,” called Martha, drifting ahead of us. “I used to take it all the time.”

  I thought of Peter again. I wanted nothing more than to go running up to the manor to see what had happened to everyone, especially him, but I was afraid Margo would die if we stopped or took any detour. I would just have to hope for the best where the others were concerned.

  Martha’s shortcut came out at the bottom of Main Street, just beyond the alley that sheltered the apothecary. A new fear rose up in me: what if they weren’t there? What if Gwyneth’s followers had somehow managed to destroy them, even if they weren’t there physically? Tamsin kept saying it wasn’t possible, but what if she was wrong?

  I was so eager to see my mom and make sure she was okay—Tamsin equally eager to see everyone since she’d been taken—that we practically ran up the road, juggling Margo between us. I almost dropped her on the ground when we got to the door. I threw open the door with my free hand.

  We set Margo gently on the carpet and left her, moaning, as we stumbled down the hallway toward the curtain. It was already rustling with its unseen breeze, and we’d scarcely gone two feet when Minerva appeared from behind it, rushing forward and embracing Tamsin wordlessly in her arms.

  My mother was right behind her. She held me tighter than anyone ever had. “I’m so proud of you,” she whispered into my hair.

  “I knew you could do it,” Aurora declared, emerging from the curtain behind her.

  “What?” I pulled away from my mother to stare at her. “I thought you told me to keep out of it!”

  “When have you ever taken my advice to stay out of anything?” asked Aurora logically.

  “Oh,” I said, realizing that she already knew me better than I knew myself.

  Minerva hurried into the front of the shop, still holding Tamsin’s hand. “Oh dear,” she said when she saw Margo sprawled on the floor. She crouched by Margo’s side, hovering a hand over her face and then chest.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “She’s swallowed about half the river, for one thing,” Minerva clucked, passing her hand over Margo’s throat. Her head fell to the side and a stream of water gushed from her mouth as she spluttered and choked.

  “There, there,” said Minerva. “Get it all out now.”

  Margo coughed up another gallon of water along with what looked like a considerable amount of mud.

  “Ewwwww, what is that?” asked Tamsin, fascinated.

  “She’s been poisoned,” said Minerva grimly.

  “Who poisoned her?” I exclaimed.

  “Gwyneth,” she said.

  “She poisoned her?” I asked.

  “Not literally,” she explained. “Being inhabited by Gwyneth has poisoned her. She’s been under her control for at least a full lunar cycle. It erodes the soul.” I thought of the smoke escaping her mouth over the river.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Eventually,” said Minerva, standing and waving a hand over Margo. She rose a few feet off the ground, and drifted, still prostrate, into the back room behind the curtain. “It will take a powerful spell, but I can heal her. Physically, anyway. I can, at the very least, cure her so that no scars from Gwyneth’s malevolent presence and her dark magic remain. I imagine she will have a considerably more difficult time healing psychologically from her experiences in that house.”

  Minerva regarded Tamsin. “Are you okay?” she asked her imploringly. “Does anything hurt?”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” said Tamsin. “You can help Margo.”

  “Margo is not my priority right now,” Minerva responded. She turned to me. “Are you okay, Sam?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Honestly, we’ll be fine.”

  “All right, then,” she said, eyeing each of us shrewdly once more before she disappeared to the back to tend to Margo.

  “What happened out there?” asked my mother. “We looked up and you both were gone. So were Margo and Gwyneth. We were terrified. But Gwyneth’s followers had us surrounded.”

  “I wasn’t terrified,” said Aurora dismissively. “I knew you girls could handle yourselves.”

  “Well, I was,” said my mother, annoyed. “But if we left the clearing—”

  “They would have blown those people to kingdom come,” said Aurora. “Just because they could.”

  “But I thought they needed their bodies,” I said.

  “All human life is disposable to entities such as they, Samantha,” said my grandmother. “If it hadn’t been them, it would ha
ve just been another group of unsuspecting women. They prey on them, vulnerable and wronged in the world, and make them feel strong and important again. Then they manipulate their will to do their bidding. It’s how they’ve always operated, and likely always will.”

  “We immobilized them,” explained my mother. “It required a very complex shield charm that required all three of us working in conjunction. Then we freed your friend, who ran off naked and screaming into the woods.”

  I found it took little effort to picture Les, screaming without clothes, sprinting through the forest for his life.

  “What about Peter?” I asked, my heart clenching with fear.

  Aurora raised her eyebrows. “Prince Charming? I didn’t see him anywhere.”

  “Peter wasn’t in the woods,” said my mother, looking puzzled. “Where did you see him?”

  “Maybe I didn’t,” I said, trying to give shape to the form I had seen in my memory. “I just thought I saw something.”

  “Well, we didn’t see him,” said Aurora. “I wouldn’t have minded giving him a little zap if I had.”

  “Mother,” scolded my mom impatiently. “You cannot zap Sam’s boyfriends just because you don’t like them.”

  “I like him,” she said innocently. “I like him just fine.”

  “What about the pop stars?” I asked. “And Kimmy, and Bridget, and Paulina?”

  “They ran,” said my mother. “I’m afraid Margo misled them about what exactly they were in for. I don’t think they were prepared to deal with what they saw.”

  “I have to get back to the manor,” I said, imagining the damage control that lay ahead of me. This time, instead of protecting some pretentious celebrity, I’d be protecting my family.

  “Not so fast,” said my grandmother, fixing me in her steely stare. “Don’t worry about them now. Human beings have an amazing capacity for explaining away everything they don’t understand. They all looked pretty drunk to me. I’d be surprised if they remembered any of it in the morning. What happened to you and Tamsin? How did you exorcise Gwyneth from Margo’s body? This is important. We need to know that she’s gone forever.”