Katrine and Ursula watched her from the bottom of the stairs, open-mouthed.
Jasmine returned to the basement wall, going at it with the strength of a mother, pounding, scraping, prying, pounding, scraping, prying, every rare few minutes finding a harmony. She didn’t notice Katrine had taken up the sledgehammer and Ursula a pick and both were swinging at the wall, too. Swing, pound, pry, pound, swing, pound, pry, pound.
And then, an opening in the brick. It was no larger than a plum pit, a lucky crowbar strike on soft brick. Wood appeared on the other side. The wood was the first layer that Dean had constructed when they’d bought the house, and behind that was the original tunnel door. Jasmine scrabbled to make it wider, clawing, her fingers bleeding. Katrine pushed her aside and stuck the end of the crowbar into it. With a pop, she released a whole brick.
Jasmine’s eyes widened. One brick gone, and the hissing had quieted one measure rather than grown louder, and the horror of Tara alone with the monster had receded a hair.
Yanking the crowbar from her sister’s hands, she worked with a ferocious intensity. Katrine lent her strength and together, they widened the hole.
They were surrounded by dust and mess, shards of cement, and with every brick smashed, the hissing grew fainter. When Katrine returned with Dean’s chainsaw, Jasmine laughed and clapped. Together, they held it against the exposed wood, and they let the saw scream, slicing through the wood wall that Dean had built. Sawdust filled the air along with the scent of moldy earth. The original tunnel door on the other side of the fresh wood was so mildewed that Jasmine could push through it with her hand. The earth exhaled a breath of underground air into the basement.
She jerked her hand back and shoved her eye against the hole like an animal trapped under river ice. It was bottomless black on the other side, the ultimate screen against which to play the hissing movie that had consumed her mind. She’d been burying it for two decades plus, rarely letting down her guard, only allowing bits of it to escape, dulling these visions with medication. She couldn’t keep it down any longer, and so the movie played, her eye serving as the projector displaying the image into the deep:
Ten-year-old Jasmine, flushed and pretty, leans over a simmering pot of avgolemeno soup. Her dark hair is pulled back into a pony tail, her focus complete. A honeybee buzzes lazily into her line of sight. She waves it away, but it is drawn back to her sweet breath. Smiling, she lowers the burner under the soup and turns to usher the bumblebee out through the open window.
The rich, enticing smell of her soup—tender morsels of chicken bubbling in the rich, bright broth—wafts outside, but the bee stays. Jasmine doesn’t mind. She is in the perfect spot at the ideal time, doing what she loves. She begins kneading bread dough, the floured ball giving way under her palms like warm flesh. She presses rhythmically, pouring her love into the dough. It’s Katrine’s favorite, and her face will light up when she smells it baking. Jasmine smiles at the thought, and at the image of Katrine coming back proudly holding her cucumbers, but then her neck prickles. She turns.
He is standing just inside the door, his face grim. At first she thinks he is a ghost, so dark is his form, but then he darts forward, slapping one rough hand over her mouth and sliding the other around her waist. She struggles, and her leg kicks the pot of soup to the floor. It clatters loudly. She twists, but he’s too strong. He drags her into the pantry. He tightens his grip on her mouth, pinning her against the wall so he can unzip his trousers and yank down her underpants. He enters her forcefully, grunting in her ear, telling her how good she feels. The pain burns through her, splits her in two. It also makes her still. The bee has followed them. It buzzes, buzzes softly in her ear, begging her to come and play.
The man releases her. She slides to the floor. He zips his pants He laughs as he speaks the words that have introduced her nightmares for the past 25 years: I will take your power when the snakes rise. Your children will pay for this, and their children. I will return to make you pay. Not one of you can stop me.
He disappears. She lies there for minutes before straightening her panties and then her dress, pushing herself to a standing position, and limping back to the kitchen. She cleans up the soup on the ground and then she begins cooking in earnest. It keeps the horror at bay. Katrine must never know. Nobody must ever know. Because in her heart she understands it is her cooking that drew him to her. And so she will use her magic only two more times, first to hide her shame from her family and second to push her loving, curious sister away as soon as she’s old enough to leave so that the man can’t find her and do this to her, and then she will never use it again.
And so she cooks the feast of a lifetime, puddings and pies and meats and salads, stirring feverishly, desperately, until she has enough food to bewitch her mom, and her aunts, and most of all, her sister. Jasmine is cleaned up when they enter the kitchen, and they are enchanted by the smells of her magical food, and they walk past her, and they eat, and they turn blind to what has happened to beloved Jasmine. Her later spell, the one she casts when Katrine is 18, is so strong that it begins to push her sister away even before she finishes eating it, and before Jasmine knows it, Katrine, the only friend she’s ever had, is gone from her life, living halfway across the world.
She has never known what the man’s words meant, but she has lived her life around them, first sending her sister away so that she could not be hurt, and then keeping her daughter close. She’d kept the secret and the shame of it even closer, and because of that, her daughter was out in the world, in danger, as the snakes returned. It was Jasmine’s fault that the man had come for Tara.
“Help me. Please,” Jasmine rasped, her eye wide against the cold wood of the tunnel door. Her breath sliced her throat. The movie was playing on an endless loop. She was weeping but too numb to feel it.
Katrine gasped. She dropped her tools, pushed Jasmine aside, and began to yank barehanded at the rotting wood with a crazed intensity. Ursula joined her, the two of them working until they had cleared a hole to the tunnels large enough for Jasmine to crawl through. Katrine hoisted her up. Jasmine went feet first and dropped to the ground on the other side into the deep, into the dark recollection of it.
She was finally, completely, in the memory.
She was no longer hiding from any of it, no more clutching her guilt and shame. The secret was writhing in the confession.
Whatever it was going to do to her, it must do now. She heard Katrine crawl through the hole and felt her presence behind her. Her mother came next and held her. She wasn’t going to have to face this alone. It might kill her, eradicate the last bit of Jasmine that was left, but she wasn’t going to run anymore.
“Did you see it?” Her voice is a husk.
“I saw it,” Katrine replied. “I saw the whole movie play.”
“I did too, baby,” Ursula said.
“I’m not going to hide it from you anymore. Not from anyone. I’m sorry.”
Katrine and Ursula held her, all three of them shaking. It took Jasmine’s eyes a minute to adjust.
When they did, she saw her daughter and a boy standing there, out of breath as if they’d been running. They both appeared scared, and hopeful. Cords of snakes slithered around their feet, kissing the air with their tongues. The boy held a dim flashlight pointed at the ground. Snakes began to melt away, disappearing into the walls like water down an opened drain.
“Tara.” Jasmine heard herself say through a thundering quiet.
The hissing was gone.
Jasmine fell to her knees and wept, her mother, daughter, and sister holding her. The three of them were still clinging to each other when Xenia and Helena arrived moments later. Dean, when he discovered them all on a heap on the other side of his basement wall, clung to his wife and child like a saved man.
The man in the cowboy hat faded into the shadows.
The snakes would be here for 24 more hours. He was patient.
Chapter 46
Ursula
Ar
ound steaming cups of tea in the Queen Anne kitchen, Ursula told them everything. After all these years, it turned out it wasn’t much of a story at all. It came into the world with the force of a burp: Henry had beaten Velda, and she’d borne it, would have kept bearing it, if he hadn’t set his sights on Ursula. Because he wasn’t a man you left, Velda had Ursula mix the hemlock. Henry Tanager had died gruesomely, setting the curse that had cost Jasmine and Katrine their belief in their power.
Ursula should have guessed that her sisters wouldn’t be surprised by the story. Xenia and Helena had simply always known and never questioned, just as they had never questioned the color of their hair or their height. Katrine and Jasmine believed the story, took the news grimly, but it was harder to convince them that the same savage spirit that had inhabited Ursula’s father controlled the two men who’d come after them. Ursula knew this could happen, that evil could sleep but never died. Before she’d been forced to, though, she’d been unwilling to consider that by murdering her father, she’d released rather than destroyed whatever corrupt spark had been driving him.
“But he’s not done with us,” Katrine said, when Ursula was done talking. She glanced at Tara, who appeared to be in shock but otherwise not worse for the wear. She had confessed to the fact that the cowboy had found them in the tunnels, had almost had Tara in his grasp before Jasmine broke through the wall. “Right? He’ll just keep coming back.”
Ursula repeated the curse that had been tattooed on her heart. “I will take your power when the snakes rise. Your children will pay for this, and their children. I will return to make you pay.”
Jasmine and Katrine joined in at the same time. “Not one of you can stop me.” They wore identical expressions of despair.
The words had the opposite effect on Tara. “Not one of us. All of us!”
Ursula didn’t understand at first. It was Leo who made it clear. “All of the Catalain women together. If everything you said is true, you have to join together to stop him.”
Dawning shone across the women’s faces, starting with Ursula and ending with Katrine, who had a gleam of hope to her. Even Dean nodded.
“I’ll only do this if we promise no more secrets between us,” Jasmine said, grabbing her daughter’s hand.
Ursula sighed from the depths of her soul. “I have something to show you.”
The Catalain Book of Secrets: Scrying
The commonly-held principles of magic are that it requires effort, it must harm no one, it must not be performed for selfish reasons, and it’s a divine art. Lesser known is the fact that magic and love derive from the same element. This knowledge is essential to the art of scrying.
Gather a tablespoon of mugwort or wormwood. Crumble it between your palms until it is a fine powder. Next, pour it into a square glass pan. The mind must be free from distraction in all acts of divination, and so release any thoughts except for loving ones.
Rest the tip of your pointer figure into the glass pan. With your eyes closed and your body holding visions of love, allow the finger to move at will. If you wish to ask a specific question, hold it firmly in thought, never releasing the sensation of love. Allow your finger to move until it stops.
Open your eyes. The message you seek will be inscribed in the herb powder.
Chapter 47
Ursula
“It just opens to a page like that?” Katrine asked. She’d tried opening the book to a different page several times, but it kept returning to the scrying spell.
Ursula nodded, placing her hand over the book. It fell open to the curse page. She leaned forward, her chest tightening. She didn’t know if it was excitement or fear. “Read this.”
Xenia and Helena crowded behind Katrine, Tara, Dean, Leo, and Jasmine behind Ursula. Together, they read the spell, their lips moving as they moved from one word to another. It was Xenia who broke the silence that followed, speaking matter-of-factly. “We need to call Velda.”
Ursula’s organs shrank. On some level, she’d known this stand-off with her mother was coming. She’d hoped it would not be tonight. She forced herself to stand tall. “We don’t need her.”
Tara pointed at the curse-breaking spell, her fingers dancing over the intricately-inked instructions. “We need all of us, and then some, if we can get them. It says so right here. We need three times as much power as the curse itself to undo it, and that curse has been around for a while.”
Katrine nodded. “She’s right, mom. We need Velda here.”
Ursula shook her head, her lips drawn with a thin, colorless line. This was her cottage, her safe place, but she still couldn’t find her voice. This evening, she’d broken her promise to Velda, shared the secret she swore to keep to her grave. It had been necessary. She should have dragged that demon into the sun many years earlier. That didn’t mean she wanted to face Velda, though, and the disappointment that would be in her eyes, that certain feeling like the setting of a sun as Velda closed off her love forever.
Xenia grabbed one of her hands, Helena the other. They understood, as much as a person could, but they didn’t know. They’d always had each other and so a steady diet of love. They hadn’t been starved for it.
“Mom.” Jasmine and Katrine spoke as one. “We need to get Velda.”
Still, she hesitated.
“Grandma,” Tara said, “he’s coming for me.”
Ursula crumbled. “Call her.” She reached for a courage potion. It was time to stand up to her mother, once and for all.
***
“What do you mean Henry is back?” Velda was scowling, her hair in disarray, her face free of make-up. She’d been sleeping deeply when Xenia pulled her out of bed and drove her to the Queen Anne. She’d found her family, including her granddaughter’s husband, crowded around the Book of Secrets in the garden cottage.
Ursula caught Velda up to speed, outwardly confident but trembling like jelly inside. She would do this for her daughters and for Tara, even though it was opening a wound she’d thought had healed over decades before.
Velda’s expression did not shift as she listened, and Ursula wondered if the woman had ever loved anything but herself. The thought was freeing. “And he will keep coming back,” she finished, “unless we deal with him tonight, before the snakes disappear.”
“What kind of potion did you mix for him back in ‘65? A halfway one?” Her words were dipped in accusation. “I thought it was clear that I wanted him dead. Forever.”
The blue bottles lining the wall of the cottage began to quiver, their molecules dancing. A faint burning smell emanated from the apothecary drawers, the odor of a forest fire right before the spark hits the pine needles. Dean and Leo glanced around, alarm written on their faces.
“She was twelve years old,” Katrine said, her voice level. She ignored the vibrating bottles to focus on her grandmother. “You shouldn’t have asked her to do that.”
The glass jar housing Ursula’s heart grew a hairline crack. She’d never had anyone stand up for her before.
Jasmine brushed Tara’s hair back. “She was only a child, Velda. Not even Tara’s age.”
The crack grew, meeting the newest hairline crack, the two of them joining to connect with the other crack that had started when Katrine had returned from her banishment. Ursula began to smell scents she hadn’t encountered since she was twelve: strawberries, lemon drops, mint. Her children were standing on her side, against her mother. They were breaking her free of the bottle of poison she’d lived in for the past five decades.
Helena and Xenia still held Ursula’s hands, which were now glowing blue.
“That was wrong, Velda,” Xenia said.
Helena finished her thought. “No one should ask their child to do something like that.”
The glass around Ursula’s heart was now shivering like the bottles on the wall, a thousand tiny cracks shooting like fevered lightning, singing through the glass.
“You should tell her you’re sorry,” Tara added.
A bundle of sag
e spontaneously burst into flame, singing and tossing orange sparks. Dean doused it with water. Velda watched it all, still scowling.
“We’re wasting time,” she finally said, ignoring Ursula’s tender pain. “How do we kill him once and for all?”
The glass around Ursula’s heart held, but barely. The Book of Secrets sighed. It was a sad, papery sound.
Chapter 48
Tara
Her mom was nearly catatonic, but they all agreed it was the only way. Tara would have to lure John to the Queen Anne. Dean and Leo would shadow her as she walked past his apartment. She was to holler up to his window (under no circumstances do you go inside, Katrine kept repeating, her face drawn) and convince him to come outdoors. Once he was by her side, she was to feign interest in his music, asking him if he’d come back to the Queen Anne to teach her to play the guitar. She was to tell him her whole family was away for the weekend.
“How can that work?” Katrine asked. Tara could see her aunt didn’t want her near the apartment.
“It’ll work,” Tara said. When she’d first laid eyes on John caroling, she’d recognized him for what he was: empty, a puppet that would go where led. A black spirit was holding the strings, and that spirit wanted Tara, could only get her while the snakes still ran. He’d been forced to melt into the shadows when Ursula, Katrine, and Jasmine burst through the wall into the tunnel, but that had only flamed his hunger for the girls’ flesh. Of course he’d follow her back to the Queen Anne.
Still, she couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering as she waded through the snakes under the sliver of spring moon, humming to keep from thinking about what she was stepping on and thereby losing her marbles. The smell was bad, the whole world reeking so powerfully of urine and glands that it was as if Faith Falls had been sealed in a jar with the snakes. Despite the unusual heat of the spring night, she was cold to her bones.
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