by E J Elwin
“He saw everything?” I asked. They nodded. “So he saw what happened to Connor?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Jessica softly.
The cracks spread throughout my body, but I needed to hear everything. “What did he see?” Jessica hesitated. “Please,” I said. “I need to know exactly what happened.”
“He saw the explosion,” she said. “He saw Connor—” she inclined her head slightly in respect, “he saw him… burn. He saw him die.”
The cracks criss-crossed and multiplied. Harriet took my hand and said something that I couldn’t hear. There was a rushing sound in my ears, the sound of ocean waves. I couldn’t breathe. The kitchen started to go dark, and in the darkness, I saw Connor’s ocean blue eyes… Just as I was about to break into a thousand pieces, I remembered something. Resurrection.
“Arthur, are you okay?” came Harriet’s voice.
I could hear again. I stopped shaking and the kitchen brightened up. In front of me on the table, there was a bottle of whiskey. Jessica opened it and poured some into a glass.
“I know it’s early,” she pushed the glass toward me, “but these are desperate times.”
I looked down at the glass but didn’t take it, continuing on as if I hadn’t just started to have a panic attack. “We can bring him back,” I said. “We’ve done it once already, we can do it again, right?” Harriet only looked at me. “Right?” I repeated.
“Arthur, do you remember what I told you about resurrection the night you came to my house?”
“Yes,” I said. “You said we were good candidates. You said it was good that he’d only died recently, and that he had good energy, and I was bringing him back out of love…”
“Remember what I told you about ashes?” she asked quietly.
“You said I was lucky he wasn’t cremated because— because—” I broke off as I remembered what she’d said: It’s completely impossible to resurrect ashes…
“It’s impossible to resurrect ashes,” she said, echoing her own words in my head.
“But—” There had to be a solution to this. Those may have been the rules before but hadn’t things changed? I was living proof of something previously thought impossible in the world of witches.
“But I remember being on fire.” They stared at me. “I remember what it felt like… and look at me! I’m okay! Whatever my gift is, it healed my burns or protected me from the flames or something! Maybe it can help us bring Connor back even though he was burned!”
“Arthur, it won’t work,” said Harriet plainly.
Frustration flared up in me again. How could she possibly know that unless we tried? “How can you be sure?” I pressed. “We don’t even know how my gift works!”
“There’s something else you need to know,” she said. “It’s a lot to take in, and you won’t fully understand it at first, but you need to know now. I’m sorry, I wish I could give you some time first, but it affects all of us. And it’ll help you understand why we can’t bring Connor back.”
“What is it?”
“You’d better take a drink first,” said Jessica, nudging the glass of whiskey.
“Yes, you should,” said Harriet. It was huge, whatever it was. I remembered their conversation I’d overheard through the door. I thought I’d seen everything, Harriet had said.
I picked up the glass of whiskey and took a sip, savoring the soothing burn. I would hold myself together and listen to what Harriet had to say. I could not, would not, accept that Connor was gone. I would figure something out. I had a gift that saved me from burning to death. Somehow, it would help me save Connor too. Even now, the warmth of the whiskey in my stomach reminded me of being on fire. I had magic inside me.
I put the glass down and looked at Harriet. She took a breath before she spoke.
“There was a story my mother used to tell me when I was a child. Most witches grow up hearing it. It starts with a witch named Ursula who lived in England at the height of the Burning Times in the early seventeenth century. Do you remember about the Burning Times?”
I nodded, remembering her description of the witch hunts that were the worst in history.
“Ursula, like Jasper and my mother, had the gift of Sight, and was considered the most powerful Seer of her time. Many witches today consider her the most powerful Seer of all time. For years and years, witches trusted anything Ursula predicted as indisputable truth, and they were right to. Everything that Ursula ever predicted came to pass— for most of her life, at least.
“There came a time, as she got older, when her mind started to go. She developed what we might now recognize as Alzheimer’s disease. She started predicting all sorts of things that never came to pass. They ranged from the plausible to the outright ridiculous. People soon learned to dismiss anything she said as the lunatic ramblings of a mad woman. Within a few years, no one took her seriously unless they were desperate or as mad as she was.
“So, on the day that she made one particular prophecy, no one batted an eye. It was just another day of Ursula and her delusions. But she had her loving friends and family, who faithfully wrote down and kept records of everything she ever predicted, no matter how outlandish, out of love and respect for her, and also on the off chance that there might still be something there that was genuine. And lucky for us all that they did, because this is probably the most consequential prophecy she ever made.
“On April 4, 1644, Ursula’s fifty-fourth birthday, she jumped out of bed around four in the morning and started shouting about a prophecy. Her family tried to calm her down as they usually did, but she was frantic. She demanded some parchment and her best quill, made from a swan feather, and started scribbling down the details of her new prophecy. They say she sat at her desk writing for four hours straight, stopping only to ask for more ink and parchment. When she was done, she went back to sleep, but not before telling her three daughters to guard the pages with their lives. They read what she wrote and accepted it as her most eccentric and absurd invention to date, but protected it all the same.
“Over the next few days, Ursula talked of nothing except the new prophecy, and even painted some illustrations to go along with her words. On the fourth day, she cast a spell on the pages to protect them from ever being damaged, a spell she created herself that very day and which is still used by witches today— the Permanent Prophecy Parchment Preservation Spell.”
“The Permanent Prophecy what?”
“Permanent Prophecy Parchment Preservation Spell,” Harriet repeated. “Ursula was big on alliteration,” she said, in answer to my quizzical expression.
“The Wackiest Wordiest Witch of the West,” said Jessica. “True trailblazer.”
“Anyway,” Harriet said, “she insisted to her daughters that it was a real prophecy, and made them swear to protect it and pass it down to their own daughters. They agreed and bound the pages together into a book, giving it Ursula’s chosen title: The Secret of the Sacred Four.”
“The Sacred what?”
“Four,” said Harriet, “as in four witches. This brings us to the prophecy itself, and to the part of the story that I’d always believed to be fiction, just like Ursula’s own daughters did and just like most witches who have ever heard it.
“Ursula prophesied that one day, hundreds of years in the future, there would be four witches who would be destined to preserve the existence of magic in the world, to defend witch kind against a new threat, and to save us all from extinction. These four witches would be gifted with extraordinary powers the likes of which had never been seen before, powers that would derive from the energy created over the many years of witch hunts, from the countless murders of both witches and non-witches.”
“Energy?” I asked blankly.
“Magic,” she said, “like everything else in the known universe, is energy. During the Burning Times, when so many thousands of people were tortured and murdered, an immense amount of energy was generated— out of their pain, out of their fear, out of the injustice
and the tragedy of their lost lives. This energy rose up and out into… the ether. Scattered around and inside the earth. According to Ursula, the energy would churn and gather, slowly over hundreds of years, developing into something more complex, becoming more and more powerful, until finally coalescing and landing into the blood of four witches, split equally among them, manifested in multiple gifts.
“The secret of the Sacred Four, so-called, would be their ability to defy death by execution, to spit in the executioner’s face, as Ursula put it. She had titles for each of them: The Hanged, The Drowned, The Stoned, and The Burned, all methods of execution used during the Burning Times and in witch hunts throughout history.”
“The Burned…” I murmured.
“You can see,” said Harriet, “why everyone around Ursula thought it was just another one of her many delusions. That she could see so far into the future was a stretch, first of all, even for a Seer as gifted as she was. The idea of four witches powerful enough to protect all others from persecution and to save our entire race, sounded like a child’s daydream. A magical immunity to being executed also sounded like pure fantasy. She went even further with another little detail, one that left no doubt that her prophecy was anything more than a fanciful fairy tale: the Sacred Four would be comprised of four young witches, three girls and one boy.”
I reached for the glass of whiskey and took a sip as the word boy hung in the air.
“No one had ever heard of such a thing,” said Harriet. “Witchcraft belongs to women, it always has. Only women can be born with magical blood. Until last night, when you appeared in front of the fireplace, I would have said a born male witch was impossible.”
“So this means— you think I’m—?” I began.
“Yes,” she said. “We believe you are The Burned Witch from the prophecy. That’s how you were able to survive the flames from the explosion. That’s why you can remember burning but are completely unhurt. You defied death by fire. You’re one of the Sacred Four.”
“Defied death?” I repeated. “Does that mean… I can’t be killed?”
“No, you definitely can,” she said quickly. “That’s very important. You are not immortal and can still be killed in every other way imaginable, just not burned at the stake, or in any other way that involves fire, like an explosion.”
I was speechless. It all sounded crazy but it explained what happened in Portland. I could still feel the explosion, the flames licking my insides, consuming me… I looked down at my hand holding the whiskey glass, at the smooth skin free of any burns. That was my gift. I couldn’t be killed with fire. But if it was true, it also meant that Connor really was…
No. There was something else that didn’t make sense. “So if my gift is surviving fire,” I said slowly, “that still doesn’t explain how I got all the way here from Portland.”
“That part was a little mysterious to us too,” Harriet began, “but—”
I seized on her words, on her uncertainty. “Then Connor might still be fine! You don’t know for sure that my gift didn’t save him too! He could be somewhere else, he could be—”
“Arthur,” said Harriet quietly. “We are sure.”
“What— how?”
“Because when you came to us,” she said, “you came to us in ashes.”
“Ashes?”
“We thought it was a cloud of dust at first,” said Harriet, “or a swarm of moths. It came in through the front door, flew through the air, then settled on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then it was you. It formed into you right before our eyes.”
“Ashes,” I repeated, stunned. “Does that mean… did I die?”
“No,” said Harriet. “The prophecy is quite clear about the ability to defy death. The Burned Witch cannot be killed by fire. Near as we can tell, it was a kind of teleportation. You changed form and your magic moved you away from the explosion and through the air to a place where you would be safe, to the place you had last believed would be safe, at least.”
I tried to wrap my head around the image of me shooting through the night sky as a cloud of ash. I started to shake again, but clenched my fists, determined to find a solution to Connor being gone, like it was all a big riddle that I had the answer to on the tip of my tongue.
“Arthur,” said Harriet, “there’s something else.”
I looked up at her. More?
“Now that you’ve risen, so to speak, now that you’ve come into your gift, you’re in a lot of danger. The new threat that Ursula speaks of in the prophecy, it has risen too. It will know about you, about the Sacred Four. We need to find the other three, the three girls who are The Hanged, The Drowned, and The Stoned. The sooner we get the four of you together, the sooner we can prepare you to face this threat.”
“Threat?” I repeated. “You mean the Brotherhood?”
“It’ll be much bigger than just them,” she said. “Whatever it is, it has the potential to wipe us all out. It’s the reason you have your gift. It could be a new wave of witch hunts, a new Burning Times… It could be something else altogether. Do you remember what those men in the Brotherhood said when they attacked us at my house? About wanting my heart?”
I nodded, feeling as queasy as I had when I’d overheard those men in the Brotherhood talking so casually about killing Harriet while being careful not to damage her heart.
“That has to be part of it,” she said. “Their leader, the Patriarch, is the one ordering them to do it, but a witch is doing the dark magic for him. Who knows how many other witches’ hearts they have by now and what they’re doing with them…”
“By the way,” Jessica chimed in, “that thing that happened with the lanterns? The way they tracked you right to your exact spot in the crowd beneath that red light?” I didn’t have to ask how she knew. Her brother Jasper had seen everything that happened in Portland and must have described all the details. “That was definitely the work of a witch. There is absolutely no way the Brotherhood would have been able to do that. It was the traitor, the one who’s been helping them, who’s responsible for the recent rise in witch killings. She was very near you last night…”
“How did she do it?”
“Blood,” said Jessica. “Or hair. That’s how tracking spells work. Some detect magic and can track down a witch, but the standard one to find a person is done with a bit of blood or hair.”
“But she didn’t have any of my blood or hair,” I said, confused.
“The glass,” said Harriet. “The glass on my living room floor when they shot out the windows. One of you, Connor or you, must have cut yourselves on it and left a little blood.”
I looked down at my hands, expecting to find a dried-up cut, but there were none. “It must have been Connor,” I said quietly. I hadn’t noticed him bleeding or hurt in any way, but the cut must have been small. He wouldn’t have complained about something so small…
“After you all left,” said Jessica, “the Brotherhood would have scanned the place with one of those UV lights they use at crime scenes to detect bodily fluids. They have stuff like that.”
I sat there, reeling. It was all so much, the lengths those people went through to try to kill us. They did kill one of us… I shivered and my heart contracted painfully. I had to fix this.
“We have to get Connor back,” I said. “Then we can figure everything else out.”
Harriet and Jessica looked at each other. “Arthur, we can’t resurrect ashes.”
“But if I turned into ashes and came back from it, why can’t Connor?” I asked pleadingly.
“He didn’t have your gift,” said Harriet. “That’s just it. Your ashes weren’t resurrected. You weren’t brought back from the dead because you didn’t die… He did.”
Her words sliced across me like a knife. “But there has to be some way, some new magic that I have, some spell—”
“Arthur, I know how much you hurt, trust me,” said Harriet. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this all at once, but you are going to
have to deal with it. The rise of the Sacred Four is paired with the rise of a dangerous opposing force. The Brotherhood must know you’re alive. The traitor witch who detected the resurrection spell in Wineville, I’m sure she sensed the use of your gift last night, since you were out in the open and without a Cloaking Crystal. Jessica and Jasper have powerful enchantments in place to protect this house but at the very least, they’ll track you to Seaside. They already knew that you were coming here, based on what Jasper told us happened at the bus station in Wineville…”
I glanced at the sliding glass door across the room, out at the ocean and the bright blue sky, imagining the Brotherhood with their guns and black masks prowling around on the shore.
“The traitor witch will know all about the Sacred Four,” Harriet continued, “which means the Brotherhood knows now too. The prophecy says that the four of you will converge in the same place when the times comes, that you’ll be drawn together, which means the three girls, your sister witches, most likely live here in town, and that means their lives are also at risk.”
I felt like I was being pulled in opposite directions. On one side, I was flooded with questions about the Sacred Four. On the other, dragging me down like a heavy steel anchor, was the searing pain of having lost Connor… again. I couldn’t believe it was happening a second time. It was like a newly healed wound being ripped open and smeared with salt.
“How am I even supposed to fight the Brotherhood?” I asked finally. “So I can’t die by fire. They’ll machine gun me instead!”
“You have more gifts than just that one,” said Jessica. “You think there would be all this hoopla about the Sacred Four if that was all you could do?” Her bright green eyes sparkled and there was a hint of a smile on her lips. She must have mistaken the expression on my face as a sign that I was ready to commit to the Sacred Four. My new pressing questions, however, were: what are these gifts and how can I use them to bring Connor back?