The bus pulls up at the campus and as soon as I’m off I hurry to Waywood. Part of me expects to see Ilex and Chronicle slobbing around in the living room when I climb in the window, but there’s no one there. No sign of anyone either. The statue has gone cold, as though the glamour on it vanished along with my fellow witches. Cray’s playing cards are on the table and I pick them up carefully, taking them upstairs with me.
Sophia’s room is the same as I remember it; draped in old sheets and bits of velvet, every surface covered in hair products, make-up, cheap figurines of mythical creatures and crystals. Last time I was in here I’d thought it was just her being a scene but now I look at the clutter as something else; a shade pretending to be a teenager.
It’s too dark to see properly, so I pull down one of the old curtains pinned up over the window, letting in some weak sunlight. She, It, had to be keeping a Grimoire somewhere.
There’s no sign of it at first, though I tear the room apart trying to find it. By the time I’m done the sunlight coming through the window has strengthened enough to light up the dusty air. There are draperies all over the floor, half wrapped around broken figurines and mirrors. I’ve thrown books off of piles after flipping through them looking for some sign of Sophia’s writing, but they’re all just cheap books on witchcraft, the kind you get in shops that sell romance novels, five for a pound.
I turn the tables over and look underneath, in case the Grimoire’s taped there. I do the same thing with Sophia’s chair and unzip all the cushions to feel inside. Finally I pull up the rug in the centre of the room and feel around the floorboards, looking for a loose one. Nothing. No sign of the Grimoire. If I hadn’t heard Ilex talking about it I’d be doubting its existence. Of course now I know that Ilex wasn’t even real I can’t be sure his memories were either. I kick out at a pile of glossy coffee table books and shout in frustration.
A draft makes the windows behind me rattle and the door to the room slams closed, making me jump. Behind it, hidden in a corner, is a tiny fireplace probably left from before the house was split into smaller rooms. Given how long I managed to keep my stash hidden from my parents, I know a good hiding place when I see one. I kneel down by the fire place and look up into the dark space. The wind moans down the chimney.
There’s something sticking out, it comes away from the bricks in a snarl of electrical tape when I pull on it. It’s a book, one of those big leather bound ledgers you get from WHSmiths that cost a bomb. It’s wrapped in a plastic bag, which I take off before flipping through the pages eagerly. About halfway thought the ledger I realise that it’s just like my own notebook – full of things about ritual tools and raising energy, nothing like the specific spells in the other Grimoire. It must be the one Ilex was talking about when he told me he and Chronicle had special lessons from it.
I’m about to drop the book in despair, when I notice how bulky the back of it is. I grab a rhinestone covered athame and use it to slit the cover. Pushed between the cardboard backing and the leather there’s another blue exercise book.
Flicking through, I pause on the page marked ‘To Make A Skeleton Key’. One of the few ingredients listed is ‘the finger bone of a thief’. I shudder, remembering Ilex’s skeleton key, the one he used to get us into the halls of residence. Had that really been a human bone?
A few pages later is a note relating to conjuring powder, that to call up the fae to help you take things undetected, you needed the ‘bones of one with the sight’. Underneath that is a list of the kinds of people blessed with the ability to see fairies, top of the list? Unbaptised children. I helped to grind up a batch of that powder, crushed the tiny bones with a granite pestle. Baby bones.
Is this the power I’ve taken for myself? If this is the knowledge that Sophia’s shade was hoarding I don’t want it. I want to go back and stop myself from making that powder, from eating the food we traded it for.
I try to imagine what it was like for Sophia, whether she was conscious of the things she was doing under the influence of possession. I wonder if the shade dug up the bones it needed from one of the many graveyards in Bath, or even the one in the village, or whether it thought nothing of taking lives in pursuit of stronger magic.
I don’t want to keep looking at the book, I don’t want to find out how Cray was made. I’m not sure I can take it if the person I love was born out of someone’s suffering and death. Still my hands turn the pages. I need him back, but the idea of how much it’ll cost is making my heart heavy.
Halfway through the slim book there’s a handwritten version of the fetch ritual that I performed to make my own. On the opposite page is the same ritual, but with large portions of new directions added in between the steps. There are substitutions next to crossed out ingredients; the incense that represents air has been replaced with a mixture of herbs and hair. Human hair.
I frown as I read through the ritual. Why would the shade use Sophia’s hair? I’d read that hair was linked with the thoughts and so with thought control. If it was being used to represent air, as it was here, that meant it was definitely connected with the thoughts of the person who...
I re-read the ingredients list. Nowhere does it say that the witch’s own hair is used. A chill prickles up my spine and even though I know I’m alone in the room I look up all the same. Hair, human hair to bring thoughts to a fetch, an ingredient that couldn’t be taken from a dead body – thoughts were living things, not held onto after death. The shade had clipped hair from a living person. Likewise, where the ritual called for blood to represent water and emotions, a heart to represent fire and passion and a hand to tie the whole to the physical plane, to earth; those were not things that could be taken from a dead body. A note at the bottom of the page says, ‘To give life, life must be given’.
All of them had lived. Their thoughts, their passions and emotions had once belonged to living people. To remake them as ‘witches’ she’d cut out their hearts, severed their hands and performed her ritual to tie their spirts to her cloth replicas, their bodies magical ones of spelled skin that she could take away as easily as snuffing out a candle.
I feel the hope drain out of me as I take in the full meaning of the ritual. There’s no way to get Cray back. Even if I could find his body, his real body. Even if I could bring myself to find and open his grave, taking his hair and hand would be useless when there was no heart left to use and no blood to take. Even if there was it wouldn’t be the same, the magic wouldn’t work.
I sit down on the dusty floor and drop the Grimoire, I can’t bear touching it a moment longer. Without the drive of my desperation to revive Cray I crumple, the full weight of the last twenty-four hours crashing down on me. Cray is dead. Campion, Ilex, Nara and Chronicle are dead. Sophia is dead, I am the one that killed her. I have killed a shade from another world and absorbed its power. There isn’t a person in the world that I can turn to with this, no one who can tell me what it means to possess the power of one full blooded shade, and thirty-nine shade descendants. I am completely alone.
Something trembles in my pocket, like my phone’s on vibrate. I’m already reaching for it when I remember that I binned my phone days ago. I pull out the piece of fabric that was once the face of Cray’s fetch; inside it the crystals that Sophia used for eyes are shivering with power.
Two of the black crystals jump from my palm and skitter across the floor. I get to my feet and go to pick them up, but they escape my fingers and roll out the door. I follow them, half hoping that it’s Cray leading me. The crystals roll against the closed bathroom door and stop. As soon as I open the door they roll inside and come to rest in the corner, right beside Campion’s old saucepan, the ‘cauldron’ she’d used to make the mistletoe brew.
“Cray?”
The stones jump into the pan and rattle around.
“Is that you?”
The rattling intensifies, wobbling the pan across the boards. I pick it up and the crystals still, as if they’re waiting.
“The c
auldron?” I don’t understand. The ritual in Sophia’s book doesn’t even mention a cauldron.
The stones jump inside the pan.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me!” I snap. “I don’t even know who you are and now you’re-” my mouth twists downwards and I start to cry embarrassing, gulpy sobs. Cray is gone and I can’t get him back. If it wasn’t for me asking questions and poking around where I wasn’t wanted, Sophia would have had no reason to kill him. I know that means that I’d have gone to Bristol and been murdered, but maybe that would have been better. After all, I am related to a shade, somehow. Cray was just some kid who got killed because Sophia needed his parts for a spell – he might as well have been a sacrificial lamb.
Now I’m being haunted by something that might be Cray’s spirit, trying to work out what he wants from me and what that has to do with an old pan.
Cauldron.
“Same difference,” I say aloud, before realising that it was the voice again, Ceridwen’s voice. “What does it mean?”
It’s my cauldron, where wisdom and knowledge were born.
The potion from the story Campion told me – the one that Ceridwen ordered to be made to give her son wisdom. Three drops would give you knowledge, but any more would kill you. Cray had told me the rest of the story, that the blind man Ceridwen ordered to stir the potion burnt his thumb when some splashed out. He put it in his mouth and received the wisdom Ceridwen had intended for her son. Enraged, the Goddess chased him, and though he changed forms many times he could not outrun her. Finally he became an ear of corn, and Ceridwen changed herself into a hen and ate him. Cray said that the power couldn’t be destroyed, so after Ceridwen ate him, she then gave birth to another son, which was the blind man reincarnated.
Do you see now?
The cauldron of wisdom. That was how I’d seen it referred to, but hadn’t Cray called it something else? The cauldron of rebirth?
I turn the pan in my hands, thinking. Inside me, the place where the voice of Ceridwen comes from is tense, expectant, like a teacher waiting for an answer from a stupid pupil. Well, I’m not stupid. I figured out what the fetches were, I escaped Sophia, I can work this out.
The ritual in the Grimoire is to create a fetch from a spirit – the spirit takes physical form and the spell ties it to the fabric copy. When Sophia destroyed the fetch, was the spirit destroyed too? From the way its eyes led me here, I’d say something of Cray is still hanging around.
Apparently I’m not going to get any more help from Ceridwen. I’m on my own.
Each time I’ve done magic I’ve been following someone else’s directions; Cray’s, Campion’s, even Sophia’s. All the spells and rituals were from their Grimoires, but now their books can’t give me what I want. I look through all of them, feeling like the worst kind of heartless bitch; Nara’s written about her dreams, Chronicle about her past, and Ilex has written a spell in cramped handwriting to make himself ‘normal’. They’ve let their demons out in these pages, but I can’t respect their privacy as long as Cray’s trapped somewhere close by.
Once or twice I have to stop my frantic page turning as a line jumps out at me, prayers and observations scribbled down fast like the person writing didn’t want to think about them;God and Goddess please help me to stop drinking so much, I hate how they look at me. I wish I could go back and shake myself awake and tell myself one day I’d have the power to destroy him. Cerdiwen, I had a dream about you, and Michaela - I don’t know what it means but it was good, it felt right. Please don’t let her get hurt, I know something’s wrong.
Cray wrote those words.
I sit back and look at his scratchy handwriting. He cared about me, enough to ask the Goddess to look after me. I wonder what he’d dreamt about me. I have to stop myself reading more. I can read his Grimoire a hundred times and I will if it’s the only part of him left, but if there’s the tiniest chance that I can have him back I’m not going to waste any more time. There’s no spell in the Grimoire, that doesn’t mean I can’t write my own.
It’s not easy. Once I start I can’t stop writing, until my spell sounds less like magic and more like begging. I rip up the pages and try again, until I have one page with what sounds like a fairly decent spell on it. It’s a spell I know very well might kill me; my new power is too strong for me to gauge – it scares me, but I have to try.
Since I sat down to read the notebooks my head’s been throbbing with the start of a headache. I have to keep rubbing my temples as I look for the right herbs and crystals that are mixed in with Campion and Nara’s stuff. It feels right to do the spell in the room we shared, and I lay Cray’s clothes out on the floor ready for him, a dark green shirt and a pair of jeans that he must have glamoured into countless things. They’re old and worn through at the knees, marked all over with dirt. Sophia must have taken his things when she killed him and brought them so he’d have something to wear.
How had Cray appeared that first time? In Sophia’s Grimoire it said to bury the heart, hair and hand under a yew tree, watering them with blood; had she gone back and dug up the body formed from his spirit? Had she left him to dig his way out and come to her?
I make the cloth double that will contain my spell once it’s complete. It’s nowhere near what Sophia and her shade put together – just one of Cray’s socks with herbs for healing and rebirth stuffed inside with some blank pages from his Grimoire. I’ve drawn his face on it and pinched one of his playing cards in two hair grips, the King of Hearts, attaching it to the arms I’ve made from the cord tying off the head shape. It’s not a work of art, but it’ll have to do.
At last I have all the ingredients ready, the only thing I don’t have is mistletoe, which Campion told me had to be cut fresh. That means waiting until its day so I can go out to the woods and find some. I need it to recreate Ceridwen’s cauldron.
Here.
The cauldron rattles and from the dented base, between the black crystals, sprouts a long, green stem. It spreads as it grows, until there’s a perfect sprig of mistletoe growing from the pot, its berries glowing slightly, like pearls.
“It’s you…isn’t it,” I say, “you’re the shade in my family.”
There’s no answer, but I’m not stupid, I know there’s only one reason Ceridwen would be helping me without me so much as casting a circle or praying to her. I think about the story of the potion, how the blind man stirring it splashed some on himself and accidently stole it’s power; Ceridwen ate him and gave birth to a son, was that the start of my family line? I shake my head. I can’t think of that now, I need to save Cray, that’s all I want; to bring him back.
Chronicle taught me that the body is made of the five elements; air, water, fire, earth and spirit. The potion I’ve made so far is almost the same as the one Campion made, ‘Ceridwen’s Cauldron’ the cauldron of rebirth. I’ve added yew to represent the birth of Cray’s last body, mistletoe for its rebirth. The crystals that were his eyes are contributing the spirit part of the ritual – the rest of the elements will have to come from me. In the original spell hair, a heart, blood and a hand were taken from Cray’s living body to create a new one capable of using magic – a body formed from Cray’s spirt.
Living flesh is what will make him again.
The pot boils on the stove as I summon up my memories of Cray. A lock of my hair transfers those thoughts to the potion. Air. Steam rises in a thick sheet, twisting down over the clothes on the floor. I hear someone sucking in a breath as if they’re in the room with me.
Hope makes my hands shake, but I manage to prick my finger and squeeze a few drops of blood into the pot, sending my love, my grief, my hope with it. Water. Keeper of emotions. I watch the clothes on the floor for signs that the spell is working, but aside from my own blood pounding in my ears nothing’s changing.
I hold my breath as I go on, forcing myself to remember every moment that I’ve known Cray, from the bus station café to the Yule Ball to the last glimpse of him I took in the ab
andoned house. I can’t hack out my own heart – but I can break it, and maybe that’s enough. All my passion, the ferocity of my need to have him back. Fire.
It must do something; the pot shivers and the potion seems to solidify for a second, twitching like a living thing before bubbling like before. The circle sings with power. It’s working, it has to be. I look into the murky, roiling water. Even with the energy humming around me I almost back down. What comes next, when it had popped into my mind as I wrote the spell, scares me. There might be a substitute for a human heart, but there’s none for flesh. I can feel him though, as if he’s in the room already. One more element to go – Earth.
I reach across and push my hand into the boiling potion. A scream bursts out of me as the scalding liquid touches my skin. My hand feels burning hot, then frozen, then scorching again. I bite my lip so hard that blood fills my mouth and my eyes water helplessly. I screw my eyes closed and see the white lights inside of me buzzing around like a hive of bees, they grow brighter and brighter and the red orb, the shade’s energy, feels like it’s burning a hole right through me.
Before, working magic always felt like gathering energy close before shaping and releasing it. I’d been the one in control.
I’m not in control anymore.
The power rips through me as if I’m just a piece of copper, a conductor for the white hot energy pouring out of me and into the potion. The pot is shaking, the steam is rising thicker and thicker, shining like a cloud in front of the sun. It falls over the clothes on the floor and the whole room shudders, a high pitched whine filling my ears. My hair stands up on end, I open my mouth to scream but only light comes out. The buzzing of the energy rises to a roar and I can’t move to break the circle, or even to take my hand out of the boiling water, my skin feels like molten metal. I give up the struggle and prepare to die as the last of the power flies free and I fall in a heap on the floor.
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