by Keary Taylor
Mary-Beth made a face and shrugged. “Maybe it will help us tap into something. Unleash whatever is locked up in me. Maybe it will be some magical place for me.”
She was kind of trying to be funny, kind of not joking.
“Maybe,” I said, because I wanted her to feel better.
We ate our lunch, and then we all trekked back to the car.
It was a fifty-minute drive from Boston to Salem. No one said much of anything. We were all lost in our own heads, overwhelmed with the task at hand.
Would we just spend our lives knowing a couple of tricks that helped us out every now and then? Had we been thinking we would become something more than what we ever could? Maybe we were just being arrogant, thinking we were special, different from all the other people around us because we had special blood.
Really, we were just a couple of college kids who could make things float and alter people’s memories.
We pulled into Salem at two o’clock. It was an exceptionally sunny day, I was grateful for that at least.
The public library was a nice-looking red brick building. The sign out front said it had been built in 1887, so like the Boston Public, it really wasn’t that exceptionally old, considering how old the towns themselves were.
But determined, we walked inside.
I felt defeated already. This looked like any small-town library. There were rows of books scattered throughout the building. There was a stairway that went up to a second floor. The building really wasn’t that big, and I wondered if it had even been a home at some point, because it wasn’t any larger than any of the houses around it.
I could tell everyone felt the same way I did as we all broke off in different directions. Their heads hung low, shoulders slumped.
I ended up in the children’s section. As I looked at the spines, I could tell that most of the titles were recent. If I had to guess, I would have said most had been published in the last twenty years. Considering Mare McGregor was killed in 1693, I wasn’t hopeful.
But still, I ran my pencil along the spines, one by one, being thorough and dutiful.
One shelf. Two. I reached the end of the children’s section, and then moved on to the teenage section.
Shelf after shelf, I checked books, running my pencil along.
I nearly leapt out of my skin, when my pencil glowed blue.
My heart was in my throat and I sucked in a wary breath. With shaking hands, I reached forward, and plucked the volume from the shelf.
I opened the book to the middle and I watched as the words shifted and rearranged themselves. This glamouring was different from the telekinesis book. Just the movement was different. Shimmering and rippling, it was like water. But one moment it looked like a typed, ordinary book, and the next, handwritten words filled the pages.
My eyes scanned down the page, and my heart started beating faster and faster.
It was told from the perspective of a young woman who met a charming young man back in Scotland. They married, and after the birth of their three children, made plans to move to America. And at the bottom of what I realized was a journal entry, it was signed Mare McGregor.
Tears instantly pooled in my eyes and I clutched Mare’s journal to my chest. I’d heard history and stories about my ancestor for my entire life. We had the journal account of her son, Tavin. But to read Mare’s own words… to hear it in her own voice—hand? Goosebumps washed over my arms instantly.
Out of curiosity, I opened the front cover of the journal.
There was an envelope pocket glued there, as well as a check out card. But it hadn’t been stamped even once.
Either they had just barely gotten this book, or it was somehow glamoured in a way that no one ever noticed it.
My bet was on the latter.
I smiled and pulled my wand out again and finished making my way through these titles.
There wasn’t another mage book in this section. But as I walked out into the hall, Borden walked down the stairs, holding a book.
“You found something?” I asked in a breath.
He nodded, a hopeful smile pulling in the corner of his mouth. “Looks like it’s a journal.”
“Mine too,” I said excitedly. “From Mare McGregor, my ancestor.”
Borden actually smiled, something he so rarely did. But he didn’t get a chance to say anything else, because just then, Nathaniel stepped up, looking disappointed. Until Borden and I held up the journals we’d discovered.
We collected Mary-Beth, who didn’t find anything. We checked out the journals, with no intention to ever return them.
This time as we walked outside, we each felt a little lighter.
“Guess we should have had a little more faith in Salem,” I said, holding the book tight to my chest.
“Mare’s actual journal,” Nathaniel said in disbelief. “I can’t… That’s… This is incredible.”
“Yes, yes,” Mary-Beth said. “We’re all very impressed. Come on. I wasn’t kidding about that site.”
So down streets we walked. We wound our way around streets with homes, and then down a trail, until we popped out onto a ledge.
We were surrounded by houses and trees. Through them, since they were still bare in the winter, we could see out across town.
Goosebumps rose up on my arms and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Nineteen people died here. Over two hundred people in this town were accused of being witches, but in the end, nineteen people lost their lives.
Two of them were exactly what they were accused of being.
I think of Mare and hug her journal closer to my chest. She wasn’t much older than I was when she was hanged. Just a few years older, she should have had so much more life ahead of her.
Just then, I wished I could talk to her. To learn what she knew. I wished I could warn her, tell her to get out of Salem. To warn her to be more careful with her magic, to not expose herself.
But I couldn’t do that. And it made me all the more grateful to be holding her journal in my hands, like a thread from the past stretching between me and her.
“It feels different here,” Mary-Beth said. “Some places just have a feeling, you know? This place…it feels dark.”
I nodded, because I could feel it, too. Kind of like a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt uncomfortable. Really, I didn’t want to stay here long.
“We need to be careful,” Nathaniel said. His eyes were narrowed as he looked around. Not just at the site and the trees, but the entire town. “The last known practicing mages were killed right here. Let’s not end up like them.”
We each nodded in agreement.
“Okay,” Mary-Beth said, taking in a big breath. “Let’s see if there’s anything special about this place.”
She took up a wadded tissue from her pocket and laid it down in the dirt with some withered leaves. She took a moment, calming and gathering herself with her eyes closed.
I prayed that this would work. I knew how badly she wanted this to work.
Her eyes opened. She rubbed her hands together, far longer than the three of us needed to.
She snapped her fingers, her eyes fixed on the tissue and the leaves.
Something prickled along the back of my neck.
I could feel magic here.
I could feel pain here.
I could feel fear here.
But as Mary-Beth stared at the tissue and the leaves, nothing happened. They didn’t start on fire.
She looked up with a vacant expression on her face. I could only imagine how she felt, the hollowness in her stomach. The sick bile in her throat.
But she didn’t cry. She didn’t get angry.
I reached out a hand and touched her shoulder, trying to give what little support I could in her moment of frustration.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, offering me a thin-lipped smile. She reached out, grabbing a tree to hold her steady as she stepped over another fallen one.
And suddenly I was bl
ind.
One moment I could see the trees, and the next, it was dark. I blinked, over and over, trying to clear my vision.
And then it was all there. The hillside. The grove of trees.
But the houses in the distance were different. There were fewer of them. There was smoke filling the air. Heavy clouds covered the sky.
A row of people stood in front of me, wearing old clothes and solemn expressions.
A chill went down my back. Fear spiked in my blood.
I turned to look at what they were staring so intently at.
There were bodies hanging. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I saw them hanging lifelessly.
And there among them, in the very center, I felt her.
I had no logical reason why I knew it was her. But I did. Mare McGregor hanged before me, her eyes staring blankly at the ground, a noose around her neck.
Nineteen bodies dangled from ropes, hanged for witchcraft.
“Margot,” a voice echoed from the back of my mind. A whisper, desperate and pleading. “Margot!”
I sucked in a gasp and blinked, and instantly, it was daylight once more and Nathaniel was standing before me, shaking me and shouting.
I blinked, trying to get my bearings. “Did you see that?”
Nathaniel looked at me in confusion.
“Was that…was that…” Mary-Beth’s fingers dug into my arm, and I looked over to meet her eye to eye. She was white as a sheet.
I looked around, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “You…did either of you see that?” I asked, looking back at Nathaniel and Borden.
“See what?” Borden demanded, looking nervous and confused.
“The hanging!” Mary-Beth said as tears started welling in her eyes. She hugged her arms to herself, looking around at this cursed space. “Mare McGregor was hanging right there!” She pointed to the exact spot.
“What…” Nathaniel started, shaking his head in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“As soon as I was touching Mary-Beth and she touched that tree, everything went dark,” I said, attempting to explain. “And then it was all there. The townspeople watching. And everyone…” My stomach rolled and I had to take three slow breaths to keep from throwing up. “I saw Mare hanging, dead.”
Suddenly, Mary-Beth took off down the hill. She was crying, shaking from head to toe.
She couldn’t do any magic, but it was undeniable that she had a connection to magic, to Mare McGregor.
“I want to leave,” I said, feeling all my insides shaking with fear. “I don’t ever want to come back to this place.”
My legs felt like trembling stumps as I set off after Mary-Beth. I could feel the evil and the dark coming out of the very ground. I could swear there were screams seeping up from the dirt.
Nineteen people died here because of mass hysteria. Two were really witches. My actual ancestor died because of what she could do.
I wanted out of Salem.
I felt better once we’d left the immediate area. I still couldn’t explain what had happened, but the overwhelming feeling of darkness lifted from my chest once we were back on the main road. We still had work to be done here, so we stayed.
We had dinner at an old pub. We were worried they wouldn’t let us in, considering I was nineteen and Mary-Beth twenty. But they seemed the type that didn’t care, and we didn’t order any alcohol anyway. The food was excellent and when we were finished, we wandered out onto the beach.
Nathaniel wrapped his arms around me as we faced the ocean and the nearly nonexistent light. It was pushing seven o’clock, and considering it was only the beginning of March, there wasn’t much of anything to see anymore.
But we all lingered there, staring at the ocean like it could give us answers.
“I don’t think we’re going to find much here,” Borden said. He kicked the toe of his shoe into the sand, sending it spraying out toward the small waves.
“There’s still the bookstore,” Nathaniel pointed out. “We might find something there.”
“I mean here, in the entire United States,” Borden clarified. “If you think about it, this country was only occupied for a short amount of time during the surge. There could only be a small number of mages who even came to America. Unless some of the Native Americans were mages, and we know they didn’t keep much of a written record, so that’s not going to help us.”
“You think everything we need is in Europe?” Mary-Beth asked. “In the UK?”
Borden nodded.
And something dawned over me that I had never considered before.
He was right.
“Think about it,” Borden pointed out. “Every one of us traces back to the UK. Scotland and England, and who knows? Maybe you have mage blood on both sides, Mary-Beth, and it’s Ireland, too. Most likely. And we know there were plenty of mage families in Germany.”
“Where would we even start?” Nathaniel asked. But I could hear the excitement in his voice at the prospect of what we might find.
“You know the history,” Borden pointed out. “We start with those regions. We trace back through our family history. And then we talk to locals. Go from there.”
I glanced over at Nathaniel and watched his brows furrow together as he considered it.
“It makes sense,” Nathaniel said, and it kind of felt like it was meant just for me, to help calm my nerves.
Borden nodded. “Flights to Europe are long,” he said. “This wouldn’t exactly be a quick weekend trip like this one. And even Spring Break isn’t going to give us enough time.”
“Summer is the better time to go anyway,” Mary-Beth pointed out. “The UK is kind of a miserable, gray place in the winter.”
Nathaniel and I looked at each other. They talked about extravagant vacations, places that Nathaniel and I could never, ever afford to go to.
“Don’t worry, you guys,” Mary-Beth said with a smile as she walked up the beach and looped her arm through mine. “I’m not going to leave you behind. What are trust funds for, if not to bring your friends across the Atlantic Ocean?”
“I could also use a new pair of boots,” I said dryly. “These ones got a little scuff on them.”
“We’ll hit the shops in the morning,” Mary-Beth said without hesitating.
“I was kidding!” I declared, shaking my head at her ridiculousness.
“We should head in,” Nathaniel said, squeezing me a little tighter and shifting to my side, taking one of my hands. “It’s getting darker by the minute.”
Our hotel was only two blocks away and it didn’t take us long to get there. We’d already checked in earlier, so with a quick goodnight and plan to meet for breakfast in the morning, we went our separate ways, Mary-Beth and Borden to their separate rooms, and Nathaniel and I to our shared one.
I was frozen to the bone from standing out on the beach, so I showered, turning the water as hot as it would go. I brushed my teeth while Nathaniel changed into sleeping clothes. I pulled my hair up into a knot at the top of my head and then changed as well.
And as we both slipped into the bed, I let out a long sigh. I curled into Nathaniel’s chest, wrapping an arm tight around his chest.
“Are you going to bed feeling exceptionally disappointed as well?” I asked.
Nathaniel snaked his arms around me, and in the dark, we clung to each other tightly. “It wasn’t what I expected,” he said. “But three books are better than none. Even if we can’t read a third of what we found.”
I chuckled at his professor-like wording. He was always talking like he was teaching a class, and it tickled me through and through.
“Poor Mary-Beth,” I said. “Why do you think she can’t do anything? She isn’t doing any of it wrong. And we know she has to have mage blood. With the telekinesis book and the wands, and now that vision? We’ve seen her genealogy tree.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “I really don’t know. There’s so much about ourselves we don’t understand yet. But…maybe t
his trip to the UK will reveal some secrets.”
I could only hope so, if for Mary-Beth’s sake alone.
Nathaniel turned his head and pressed his lips to my temple, letting them linger there. “Get some sleep. We’ll figure it all out in the morning.”
I let my eyes close and let out a relaxing breath. It was ridiculous, what he’d just said. But there wasn’t anything else I could do today. We’d accomplished so much already.
“I love you,” I said softly as sleep gripped me.
“I love you too, Margot.”
Chapter Thirteen
We headed home Sunday afternoon. Saturday turned out to be a bust. We visited the bookstore and didn’t find a single thing. We went to every library within a twenty-mile radius. And we found nothing.
This trip was supposed to give us hope, but in the end, we all rode home in silence feeling defeated. We were reaching for the stars, doing something impossible. Trying to resurrect a dead race with no basis of how to do this.
We all drove home in silence.
We dropped off Mary-Beth and Borden at their dorms. And when we got back to my house, even Nathaniel had to go back to the solarium and get some homework finished.
Alone, I walked back into the house, my bag in one hand.
Dad was in the kitchen when I walked in, humming as he started something for dinner.
“Margot,” he said with a smile. “How was your trip?”
I grunted a sound of defeat and annoyance. I dropped my bag on the floor and then walked into the kitchen, moving over to the dining room to sit at the table. “Not what I was expecting. We found two journals and one book, but the book is written in Sanskrit, and according to Nathaniel, no one speaks it anymore.”
“True,” my father the history professor said. “Sanskrit died out in the twelfth century and only a small sector in Nepal still speak it.”
“Know anyone from Nepal that can come translate for us?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“That would be a no,” Dad said. And he still wore a smile as he continued chopping vegetables and putting them into the pot for soup. “But I do have some exciting news to share.”
I perked up at that. I sat up a little straighter.