by Kayti McGee
Imogen, Marion, and I stood in a loose triangle in Imogen’s living room. Tessa’s screams were still echoing in my mind. She had put on a good show, writhing and arching and yowling as if I were actually dragging mental claws through her mind. Of course, I hadn’t needed to do that. I already knew the whole story.
I related the facts to Marion—excluding, of course, my role in Rose’s life.
“Will Rose come for her?” Marion pressed. “Could she be coming now?”
I pretended to consider that.
“I would sense her, unless she is very skilled,” I said carefully. “But she will come if she knows her friend is in danger.”
“She has to know.” Imogen scoffed. “If she could kill Blackmane witches, then she heard her friend’s fear.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know how far away she is.” I turned toward the door. Imogen reached for my arm and Marion moved up alongside me.
“Where will you go?” Marion said. For a moment, she seemed to be as lost and youthful as she appeared.
“Looking for her. Where else?”
“Don’t try to handle her alone.”
I sneered. The suggestion that I could not overwhelm one young witch bordered on an insult. Then again, Rose was stronger than we knew.
“You will be the first to know when I find her,” I said. “I won’t be far.”
True to my word, I remained near Imogen’s house for the next half hour, listening to Tessa. Imogen left her alone; Marion’s presence melted deeper into the house. When I was sure that Tessa was safe and would be kept alive and allowed to rest, I blinked back toward my own home and Rose.
I shivered as I moved through the dark. I had, briefly, considered tearing Tessa away from Imogen that very hour. Marion would make it impossible, though. She was too strong for me to fight alone and she refused to leave Tessa’s side.
I found Rose pacing in my library. She flew into my arms and clutched at my jacket and shirt. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her lips pale. All the confidence she had mustered before my departure was gone and anxiety had taken its toll. I stroked her hair and reassured her that Tessa was fine. That might have been a generous take on Tessa’s situation, but by fine what I really meant was alive.
“They won’t hurt her,” I said. “She’s all they have to get to you.”
Rose peered up at me with fevered hope in her eyes.
“So she’s okay? Why didn’t you bring her?”
“I can’t. The Maven is guarding her.”
“Thorn, we can’t leave her there. Oh... my God.” Rose backed out of my arms and covered her mouth. “No, no, no,” she whispered. “She’s going to die because of me, isn’t she? She’s going to—”
“Stop it. Stop.” I drew her back into my arms. “We’re going to rescue her, I promise you. I was able to comfort her. She remembers me. She’s afraid but unharmed. All I need is a little time to think. I can handle this. You need to trust me.”
Rose was limp. I lifted her and carried her to the couch. I sat with her curled on my lap, her warm body cocooned in my arms.
“Try to relax,” I breathed into her hair.
“I feel like I’m dreaming. Is this happening?”
I made a soft, soothing sound. Maybe it was better, for now, if Rose believed that she was dreaming. Disassociation can be a gift.
We sat like that in the dark for over an hour. I watched a fleck of moonlight move along the rug and I knew that it was the light of a waning gibbous. I had kept Rose locked in my bedroom for... three days, at least. I closed my eyes and dipped into my thoughts as Rose drifted in and out of a restless sleep.
The moon was the answer, in a way. The month was drawing to a close, cresting toward Samhain. Even under the current circumstances, Marion would not shirk one of our highest holidays. We would celebrate and revel as always. Marion would come away from Tessa to preside over the feast. That night was our only chance to retrieve Tessa.
As if she had heard my thought, Rose stirred and awakened. I was already counting the days until Samhain: Three days and four nights if we used tonight. And we needed to use tonight. We needed every second we could get.
“What is it?” Rose said. She must have seen the look in my eyes.
I told her I had the beginnings of a plan.
That night, because I knew we were both too tired and frayed to practice magic, I took Rose to bed and told her everything about the Samhain feast. There would be rituals, dancing, drinking, magic, and sex. It would be a night of wild, unpredictable magic, when witches forgot themselves and behaved like fallen angels.
“And we masquerade,” I told her. “That works to our advantage. I need you nearby. If you’re warded and in costume, no one will think anything of you, even if they see you. Which they won’t.” I frowned and stroked my fingers down her back. She shivered in response. I hated to bring Rose close to harm, but I couldn’t accomplish Tessa’s rescue without her. I wasn’t even sure I could accomplish Tessa’s rescue at all. If I knew Marion, she would move Tessa closer to the feast in order to keep tabs on her. One or more witches would probably be guarding her.
“If it comes to a confrontation...”
We die, I thought. Rose covered my lips with her fingers. She had regained her calm confidence.
“We fight,” she whispered.
I smiled slightly and nodded. There would be no running from the Blackmane Coven. We would fight and die.
“Or we try to leave tonight,” I said. I shifted until I was sitting up against the headboard. By now, the coven would have cast entrapments and lines of protection around the entire valley. I knew witches were patrolling the woods. Marion left nothing to chance. Still, attempting to escape tonight was our best chance at life.
Rose climbed onto me and frowned. She shook her head.
“No.”
I touched the side of her face and gave her an anguished look. She was still so human and so good. I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to care as much as she did for her human friend. I also knew that I couldn’t convince her to leave Tessa. I supposed it would be like asking me to leave Rose.
“Do you know what you’re risking?” I brushed my thumb over her bottom lip.
Her brow wrinkled. “Thorn... there’s no other choice.”
We made love that night with no magic and no frills. We made love like humans, I suppose. My worries drifted away as I moved over Rose, pressing into her again and again. She gripped my shoulders and wrapped her legs around my waist. She whimpered my name each time I filled her, and I could almost forget that we were going to war.
Twenty-Two
Rose
After Thorn and I finished, I regulated my breath into the pattern he’d assume was sleep. All the time in Summerland had taught me how to control my autonomic functions almost without thinking, from temperature to heart rate. All that time I’d spent learning, time that didn’t exist to anyone but us.
I had royally fucked up.
By ignoring my parents, ignoring Tessa, I had put them into danger even the cancer didn’t touch. The worst part was that I had hardly even ignored them on purpose. If that were the case, I could have told myself I was protecting them. Keeping them out of all of this. But the truth was that I was selfish. And scared. Fiercely protective of this magical secret that had quickly become my entire world, and terrified someone would take it away from me. If I’d gone back to Missouri when Thorn had told me to, I knew what would have happened.
I’d have gone to the occult shop and spent all my money on shiny new tools and every dusty book on the shelf. Then I would have remembered I had nowhere to live and gone to my parents house, rolled a sleeping bag out on the treadmill that had replaced my childhood bed about ten minutes after I’d gone off to the dorms. All my new magical purchases would have stayed in the bag as I reacquainted myself with doctor’s appointments and cover letters. They’d have grown dusty as I fielded happy hours with casual girlfriends and make-up/break-up sex with Joe. Eventu
ally they’d have become a very interesting, if half-forgotten box in some future basement.
And if I was being completely honest with myself, pretending the Midwest no longer existed meant never having to consider what Mother’s death would mean for me if it happened. Being both motherless and an orphan was a special kind of early-life crisis I wasn’t sure I had the capacity to deal with. So I just hadn’t.
I hadn’t stayed here for Rune. I’d stayed for me. And now my friend could die because of that. My mother could die never knowing what happened to me. Though I couldn’t think of any way to tell her that what had happened was narcissism and amazing sex with a hundred-year old witch.
Somewhere along the line, I hadn’t lost my humanity so much as put my fingers in my ears and “la-la-la”-ed at it.
Once the effort of holding in my long, self-loathing sighs became too much, I pretended to wake up, only to find Thorn’s green eyes gazing at me in amusement. Maybe I hadn’t fooled him after all. It was weirdly comforting, even for a girl who used to hate feeling seen by other people.
“Tell me you have wine,” I said.
“I do. Why?” Thorn asked. So I showed him exactly what we could do with the hour we’d saved on finding a liquor store until we ran completely out of time and had to scramble into our jeans and sweaters, giggling as though we weren’t facing down the end of the world.
Although if my vision was to be believed, we weren’t quite yet.
He sobered to his usual self as we donned our jackets, and I collected my grimoire. Once I had everything, he piled on wards and whispers until I was as heavy with protection as a toddler headed out to ski. On top of everything, I slowed my heart and matched my temperature to the ambient air of the forest. It was a cheap trick to blend in, but an easily accomplished one for all that. Any magical gaze would ideally skip right over me, just another blank spot in an otherwise blank wood.
I wasn’t too nervous. We had prophecies to fulfill. This would work, and if it didn’t, the coming battles were evidently unimportant enough not to register on the magical AP wire I was tuned into. It only took a moment’s description of the clearing for Thorn to smile in recognition.
“It’s the ritual space,” he told me. “You’ll see it again in a few days. As the sabbat approaches, the veil between the worlds thin everywhere. But in certain areas, it very nearly disappears entirely. That particular glade is practically a doorway. It’s so sacred we normally only set foot there for Samhain and it’s mirror twin, Beltane. You’ve certainly got a knack for choosing a good setting for drama, Rose.”
I rolled my eyes as he opened the door and led us forth. But of course I was pleased even with that faintly damning praise. And I was ready to claw my own skin off at the thrilling certainty that the rites we’d perform soon would bring Luna forth.
For all my smug mastery of my body, I found myself needing to spend the entire walk focused on keeping my heart under control. Left to its own devices, it wanted to leap for joy and shout to the magical world. And if we survived the night without my second vision coming to pass, I wouldn’t mind a little leaping and shouting myself. Onward we walked. One slow step at a time. Shadow to shadow.
Only about half an eternity passed before I recognized the place where undergrowth gave way to a small dell. The season’s early snowfall had given way to dead leaves that no longer crunched underfoot and dirt that wasn’t quite mud, but clung to my boots nonetheless. There was an extra hush that fell inside. Like the way snow muffles sound, but this place seemed to quieten even our footsteps so that twigs didn’t crack. Thorn was right. It was a magical place. Even the most devout atheist would have recognized that.
Neither of us spoke as he began to cast a circle around me. Beginning in the east, this version of the Lesser Banishing Ritual called for his athame to banish chaotic elementals while his vibrato invoked the cardinal spirits. I hummed along as I uncorked the wine and flipped through my grimoire. The spell we needed was one I’d done intuitively before. Frankly, that was all it needed to work, but Thorn had impressed upon me the need for opening and closing rituals, to use what he called “spiritual hygiene” to ensure that the castings remained inside the container of where and when they were done instead of reverberating along and disrupting everyday life.
My fingers called it up almost immediately. The grimoire and I were as intimate as lovers by now.
Pour ye a measure of goode wine (Thorn hadn’t lost the opportunity to mock my taste)
Paint ye a picture in thy minde (the photograph of Luna helped)
Call to thee the lost by name
Meet them somewhere in betweene
I took a single sip, then poured out the entire bottle, just in case more offerings meant more time with the soul I was calling. In my mind, I imagined the woman who bore me. She was on Rune’s couch, leaning against the afghan, smiling. My eyes closed. I remembered the feeling I had when she called to me in my trance, and let it grow to fill me.
Then I was silent.
At the edges of my hearing, a rustle.
Beneath my feet, a rumble.
The world held its breath. And then I heard a familiar voice in my head.
“Why have you called me up?”
“Mother.” It was more of a sigh, carrying all my hopes and regrets down into the cold earth where atoms and cells were even now arranging themselves into a semblance of Luna.
I held my hand, palm-down above the soil, hesitating. Remembering what I had felt in Toil & Trouble that first day.
the blackness driving me to madness
the fading memory of who I was
envy, then anger, finally amusement.
There was every chance that what we had called up was no longer the woman who had grown me inside her with hope and plans. She could be in the final stages of the delirium that descends before a new incarnation. She could be the kind of dangerous that comes with the loss of empathy towards mortals. But she would still, in some small way, be Luna, and so I lowered my hand to the ground and let the frigid earth remind my own skin to warm.
Where is my love?
It was the last thought I had when I was in her mind, and I prayed to the gods I barely knew that she meant me.
“Daughter.” Her hand broke the dirt to clasp mine, icy white fingers interlocking, and I put my other hand down too as relieved tears fell unbidden into the circle. I could practically hear Thorn telling me that I was adding to the spell in an unexpected way that could bring unexpected results, but he didn’t stop me. It was also possible that during ancestral rites, tears were so expected as not to warrant mention in the grimoire. As though he could feel my thoughts, Thorn knelt beside me and leaned his head against mine. His hands flattened too. I could see him stiffen when a second set of fingers grasped his. We held each other’s free hands and if I were hovering above the scene, I knew I’d see my second vision fulfilled.
“We need help to keep the Maven from killing me.”
“We need to kill the Maven,” Thorn says, and I look at him in shock. Of course, it made sense, but for some reason I hadn’t thought of that. My thoughts had run to sapping her power, or blocking her memories of me. Expelliarmus types of spells.
But this was no children’s novel.
“You would kill the woman who raised you as her own?”
“I would,” he said.
I wondered if Luna, like me, could hear the anguish in his voice.
“You would kill the magpie who stole you from your own mother.” It was no longer a question, but it did raise many. Her voice still echoed in our minds, but it grew louder, stronger.
“When the Blackmanes came to the Hollow, they were buoyed by their victories over several smaller covens. Among them the Parsons cult, from whom they claimed power over fire. Among them the Northstone clan, from whom they claimed power over the waters. Among them many Ojibwe shamans, from whom they hoped to claim the power of the wendigo, but whose bodies they left broken in their wake as have so many power-s
eekers before them. Among them the Morgan family, from whom they claimed a powerful shadow-witch. A baby boy. A child they raised Blackmane, even as they ripped the Hollow from the Brennan coven. A man who some say has the same earthly power as the wendigo, a monstrous killer who feeds on the energy of the dead. Thorn, the one who would steal my air-born daughter from two mothers.”
“To save her.” Thorn’s voice didn’t waver, though his world must have been as torn as mine. Perhaps more so. After all, it was no secret I had been adopted. Thorn thought he’d at least been raised by the person as close to his parents as anyone could have been. Now he was as adrift as I had been before my DNA test.
So when his hand left mine and he stood behind me in the circle, staring into the forest, I understood. And I knew he needed me more than ever. So even though it hurt me to do it, it was an easy decision to let go of the animated clay that was also, somehow, Luna, and go to him.
But she wouldn’t let me.
My fingers felt as though they were trapped in a frosty vise as she pulled me in close. My entire arm disappeared belowground and my face was pressed into the decaying leaves. My neck craned to keep my head from going down too. I lost control of my heartbeat as real fear set in.
“Hear this, daughter. The Blackmanes have killed many for their power. Power that is far greater than most living witches possess. But the dead have not yet forgotten. The dead seek vengeance. I seek vengeance. You will be the instrument through which we right the wrongs of the Blackmanes.”
“What do I do?” I could barely force the words from my chattering teeth. All the frigidity of the night had rushed into my body alongside the heart-pounding terror of my proximity to the underworld.
“Purge yourself of this fear. Make your peace with death. When you call, we will be waiting.”
And with that, she was gone, faster than she’d come. I lay on the ground as Thorn closed the circle, ashamed at how scared I was, ashamed that I couldn’t jump to his side with these trembling legs. Surely he would understand. I hoped. But he’d watched my selfishness in leaving my adoptive family, in ignoring Tessa, in eating fucking painted rabbits. So how could he possibly believe that I wouldn’t ignore his pain for mine now? Forever passed before I quelled the shaking enough to stand. He was as cold as the dirt I’d been laying in. My arms around him generated no warmth, and my words sounded empty.