Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  She trailed off, but I wanted her to keep going, so I asked, “What happened when you told them you wouldn’t do it?”

  Bitterness crept into her voice. “About two weeks later? My mom had this accident out of the blue. Somehow her blow-dryer electrocuted her when she was getting ready for work in the morning. I was the one who found her on the bathroom floor, and the whole time I was on the phone with the ambulance, I could hear them in my head saying Brianna’s name over and over again. My mom’s doctors said it was a miracle that she didn’t have any kind of brain damage.”

  “This is the part I don’t understand,” I interjected. “Why would they hurt your mom and not you? If they’re really the spirits of your sisters, then she’s their mom too.”

  “I really don’t know,” Violet admitted. “My mom had a lot of fertility problems before I was born. Before she died, my grandmother told me that she had started to worry about my mom’s state of mind by the time she lost the third baby. I mean, giving birth to three dead babies in a row. That’s… you know. I can’t even imagine.”

  Inspired, because this was the part of the story that overlapped with Trey’s mom’s history with the Simmons family, I asked, “Is there any chance that someone might have done something to help your mom through the pregnancy when she was expecting you? Like saying a special prayer, or… casting a spell?”

  Violet shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably lots of people were praying for her, or at least said they were.” She hesitated and then brightened. “My grandmother, the paternal one, the one who lived here in Willow, was really into herbs and tarot cards and stuff like that. She used to keep small sachets of dried parsley around the house for good luck. In fact, she planted a rosebush in her garden for each of the stillborn babies my mom had as some kind of new age–y way of honoring each of their spirits.”

  The five rosebushes. The night of Violet’s New Year’s party, my scalp had tingled so strongly when I’d walked past them; I should have guessed that they were part of whatever spell had been cast on Violet’s mom.

  “And right around this time, your dad was teaching in Chicago,” I said, not wanting to raise a sore topic but yearning to know how much she knew about Trey’s background.

  Violet rolled her eyes and wiped away a tear. “Yeah, well. Parents aren’t perfect people, you know. Women throw themselves at my dad everywhere he goes. It’s embarrassing, honestly. Waitresses flirt with him, like, right in front of me. I didn’t know anything about Trey until my grandmother died and we moved here. Then my dad figured he’d better tell me before I heard rumors and figured it out for myself. I guess they met on campus and had a connection because they’d both grown up in this town.”

  “Why did you move here?” I asked. It seemed to me that Michael Simmons would have wanted to keep his wife and daughter as far away from Willow, Mary Jane Svensson, and his illegitimate son as possible.

  She looked at me in confusion and replied, “My grandmother left everything to me. The house, the land, all of it. My father’s brother took us to court to try to get some of the inheritance for his kids. I really didn’t want all of it, you know? It’s weird to have your cousins hate you. But my dad’s attorneys recommended that we move here and occupy the house because residency would strengthen my claim.”

  All of that seemed very odd to me. Who would leave an estate and a fortune to a sixteen-year-old girl? “Why do you think your grandmother left everything to you?”

  Violet fell silent and stared down at her hands in her lap for a long time before saying, “I think she felt sorry for me. Because all of this.” She waved her hand around. “Having to predict someone’s death every month? Before she died, my grandmother was the one getting sacrifices for them. She wrote me a letter explaining how all of it worked and what would be expected of me. And she apologized, like, fifty times in it. But the letter was tied up with the rest of her legal affairs, so her attorney didn’t give it to me until about six months after she’d died. I’d already figured out what was expected of me by then, I just didn’t know why I was being ordered to kill people. The letter explained that the obligation was part of my inheritance.”

  She choked back a sob in reaction to her admission that she’d killed people. Back in the fall when we’d confronted her on the track at school, she had vehemently denied ever having killed anyone, but now she was owning up to the severity of her actions. If we’d prevented her from killing anyone during the last lunar cycle, that was still fourteen sacrifices.

  “My grandmother was smarter about all of it than I’ve been. She told me in the letter that she volunteered at nursing homes and the children’s hospital so that she could bargain with the lights and make suggestions about who to sacrifice. She only told stories for people who had terminal illnesses and were going to die anyway. But they’ve never let me choose who I take. They always tell me instead who they want.”

  “Wow,” I said. The grandmother. If I had to guess (and I did), it must have been Violet’s grandmother who had put the original spell on Violet’s mother.

  “You can’t tell my mom any of this, okay?” Violet said, wiping her cheeks dry with the backs of her hands. “She doesn’t know any of it—not about Trey. It would kill her if she found out about him.”

  I found that very hard to believe. Mrs. Simmons had sat in the courtroom back in November. Surely, she must have noticed the strong resemblance between Trey and her husband.

  Even though she had just shared more with me than I ever would have expected about the origin of the curse that had killed my friends, I still didn’t trust her enough to tell her all I knew about the contractual arrangements between her father and Trey’s mother. I still didn’t know exactly what Trey’s mom had agreed to do, and how she’d violated that agreement, and I had to accept the fact that there was a chance I’d never know. “It would mean a lot to me if you could talk to your dad and have the judge in Suamico ease up on his sentence. Or at least make sure he gets released on his birthday in July. I mean, if you’re truly sorry about everything you’ve done, that’s one small way you could make things right.”

  She thought this over, and her lower lip wrinkled as if she was going to start crying again. “I’ll talk to him. I swear. I can’t promise he’ll do anything, but I’ll ask.”

  “Violet,” I began, wishing the history between us were different so that I could really put faith in her answer. “Do you think the spell is broken? Does anything feel different to you?”

  “Pretty sure it’s broken,” she replied. “Did you look at the sky last night? Crescent moon. That means a full cycle of the moon passed and no one died.”

  She lingered in my doorway after telling me she had to get back home because she was supposed to be resting and said, “I really don’t know how to thank you, McKenna. I know you probably would never consider me a friend at this point, and that’s… beyond understandable. But I never thought I’d be free of this thing, and you even found a way to end it and still protect my mom. So thank you. It’s the most anyone has ever done for me.”

  Although her gratitude seemed authentic, my heart remained hardened. My dad had always told me that carrying a grudge and refusing forgiveness was the most powerful form of stress a person could hang on to, but I didn’t think I could ever bring myself to forgive Violet for the way in which she had so cheerfully suggested we play a game of Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board at Olivia’s birthday party. Memories of that night were going to haunt my dreams for the rest of my life. I felt justified in clinging to at least part of my hatred for her, even if I pitied her for the terrible inheritance she’d been given by her grandmother.

  Not long after Violet left, Kirsten finally returned my call. “Sorry it’s taken me so long to call,” she apologized. “Is your phone cool? Any chance the cops bugged it?”

  “It’s been here in Willow for the entire month of January, so I don’t think anyone’s done anything to it,” I said. My mom had given it back to me when I’d gotten home on
Saturday, and as far as I could tell, it had been in a drawer in the kitchen since I’d left for Sheridan on New Year’s Day. “What in the world did you do to Mischa?”

  Kirsten chuckled. “It was actually her idea. We couldn’t come up with any story to explain where she’d been for the past month that wouldn’t lead the police directly to my apartment, and honestly, between student loan collectors and my ex-boyfriend, I don’t need that kind of drama in my life. Mischa said she had the biggest mouth on earth, so she suggested that I put some kind of spell on her to just wipe her memory completely clean.”

  “You must have mad skills,” I complimented her. “I’m impressed.”

  “I can’t take all the credit. My boss helped. That kind of spell casting is next level. Way over my head,” Kirsten explained. “You guys didn’t pick up on Friday when I called!”

  “Yeah, it was kind of a bad time,” I said. I’d been hearing the rumble of the avalanche in my dreams at night, and even though conquering Violet had been nerve-wracking, completely recovering from the horror of being buried alive in snow was a new source of nightmares. “Sorry about that.”

  “Listen. Remember when we last spoke, you were asking me if there was a way I could find out all of the different spells that had been cast on that girl Violet? Like to try to peel them back and figure out what had been mixed together?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think we figured out most of it. Violet’s grandmother cast a fertility spell on her mom, and then whatever Trey’s mom did out of spite probably subverted it.”

  “You’re on the right track,” Kirsten said excitedly. “I had to do a ton of research to figure out how to do this because it’s pretty out of the ordinary. But I put a spell on a pair of glasses and asked them to show me all of the magic involved. And here’s what I got. The grandmother cast a very basic spell asking the souls of the three daughters who had died before Violet was born to safeguard her life. To honor those souls, she planted three things—”

  “Rosebushes,” I clarified.

  “Yes, that makes sense,” Kirsten said. “I couldn’t make out what they were, but that sounds right. So check this out. When the interacting spell was cast, presumably the one that your boyfriend’s mom put together, those three rosebushes were turned into, like, portals. So it wasn’t the souls of the daughters who were demanding sacrifices. It was whatever evil thing had passed through the portal, all of which was made possible because your boyfriend’s mom dabbled in witchcraft while she was angry, which is a big no-no.”

  “But…” I tried to wrap my mind around all of this. “There were five of those things, whatever they were. I saw them.”

  “Sure. The grandmother planted two more at some point. Spells aren’t just a thing that you say once and then they’re over. A spell can be like a living entity if it doesn’t have a defined end point. Once it’s put into play, it just keeps growing however it was designed to grow. So probably if you planted another rosebush in the same place as the other five, then you’d have six of those things demanding a sacrifice every month. It would have been different if it had been a love spell or something, where the person falls in love and then the desired outcome has been achieved and then it’s over. The spell your boyfriend’s mom cast was pretty open-ended.”

  I shuddered at the memory of seeing those five otherworldly things in the reflection of Trey’s ski goggles. “Well, luckily, we ended it. Violet was just at my house, and we were talking about it. The new moon passed and no one died, so it’s over.”

  Kirsten was quiet for a moment, long enough to stress me out. “That’s why I called you on Friday. God, I wish you’d picked up. If those rosebushes are still in the ground, growing and receiving moonlight every night, then the spell may have changed, but I don’t think it’s over.”

  I refused to believe that after the lengths I’d gone to, the spell still wasn’t broken. “Impossible. We saved everyone Violet predicted deaths for, her mom’s still alive, and she’s still alive. It’s over,” I insisted, even though my fingers were going numb with fear.

  “I really think you guys need to uproot those bushes. At a minimum,” Kirsten insisted. “And even that might not be enough. Spells cast with serious intention are durable. I know this isn’t exactly good news, but you’re just gonna have to be kind of vigilant for a while. Keep your eyes open and your ears peeled for weirdness, because if I’m right, that magic is going to continue to thrive one way or another.”

  I thanked her for taking such good care of Mischa and sat down on the edge of my bed with a heavy heart. I called Violet, and she didn’t answer, so I left a garbled and rambling voice mail asking her to have her landscapers uproot the rosebushes in her garden. When Mom arrived home from Green Bay with the great news that she’d landed a meeting with the judge the next morning, it was hard to pretend I was excited.

  Violet texted me later in the day and promised that she’d deal with the rosebushes. Even though I believed her, I tossed and turned that night because of Kirsten’s suggestion that that still might not be enough. I couldn’t bring myself to share this development with Henry, Trey, or Mischa. I hoped I wasn’t being reckless or selfish by deciding to wait and see if there were signs that the curse wasn’t yet completely broken.

  It just seemed too cruel to inform them that there was a chance we still weren’t done.

  EPILOGUE

  THE COURT HAS JUST ABOUT had enough of your outlandish antics, young lady,” the judge told me on Tuesday morning. I kept my eyes focused on my hands folded in my lap, too tired and grateful to have gotten to spend the weekend at home at my house to challenge him. “This latest little escapade caused by you and your lover boy has cost the state of Michigan quite a pretty penny, and authorities there would be delighted to have me lock you up as an adult and throw away the key for a few years.”

  Mr. Whaley, the attorney that my mother had hired, a balding, potbellied guy she’d found in Suamico, cleared his throat to speak. We were in the judge’s private chambers instead of in the courtroom, negotiating the next phase of my punishment in private. “Your honor, we would like to propose that Miss Brady be entrusted to the care of her father in Tampa, Florida, until her eighteenth birthday.”

  The judge reviewed the proposal that Mr. Whaley had put together with input from my mother while I sat in respectful silence. He clucked his tongue and stroked his chin, considering my fate. My mom’s boyfriend, Glenn, had insisted on coming with us, and he squeezed my mom’s hand tightly. I was happy that she’d found someone to support her throughout the chaos I’d inflicted on her life. I didn’t believe for a second that the judge was going to go for the Florida proposal, and was prepared to be delivered back to my dank room at Sheridan the next day. Whether I spent the next few months at a reform school or in Florida didn’t matter much; both would feel like prisons because I wouldn’t be able to see Trey. If we were separated, geographic distance between us wouldn’t matter. If he was going to be in northern Wisconsin, I might as well be sent to Charon, the largest moon of Pluto.

  “We’ll give this a limited trial,” the judge finally said, not sounding convinced that he thought it was a good idea. Mr. Whaley had communicated to me and my mother that Sheridan wasn’t particularly interested in taking me back, which surely had to have been a factor in Judge Roberts’s ruling. The judge turned to me and continued, “You’ve got until the end of the school year to prove that you can conduct yourself in a responsible fashion and uphold decent grades living in your father’s community.”

  A sob of joy escaped from my mother. She smiled at me and exclaimed, “That’s great news, isn’t it, honey?” I nodded, overwhelmed by the idea of being a new kid at a new school in a new state within a matter of days. It would be temporary, I reminded myself. I was still putting a lot of hope into the idea that we’d broken the curse and Mischa was back in school at St. Patrick’s, so whatever I’d have to endure for the next few months would be worth it.

  The judge ran us through the detail
s of his decision. My mother would have to sign paperwork that afternoon granting my father temporary full parental custody of me. I would have to fly to Tampa before Friday and get the heck out of Wisconsin; no dillydallying around Willow would be tolerated. My father would have to meet me at the airport and sign for my release from the airline staff, Mom would have to register my enrollment at the local high school in Tampa with the court in Shawano County, and my new high school in Tampa would have to be made fully aware of my history. The court was retaining the right to check in with the administrators at my new high school at their discretion, and could request to see my performance and behavioral records whenever they wanted.

  “You’d better be planning on maintaining perfect attendance,” Judge Roberts warned me as I stood up from my chair. “Don’t give me any reason whatsoever to suspect that you’re up to no good down there.”

  My mother was bubbling with excitement as we left the judge’s private office. Although she was still furious with me, the statement that Violet had written and presented to the judge in defense of Trey and me seemed to have convinced my mom that maybe there was a good—if perhaps kind of incredible—reason for our high-stakes adventures over the last three months. Since Judge Roberts had announced that he’d reviewed a statement written by Violet Simmons, I’d wondered just exactly what that girl had put in her letter. It was crazy to think I’d ever be allowed to read it, or that I’d see her anytime soon enough to ask her, myself.

  As we stepped into the cool hallway of the courthouse, my breath caught in my throat when my eyes landed on Trey. I hadn’t known he was going to be there that day, presumably also meeting with Judge Roberts about revising the punishment he’d been issued back in November. Miserable, he sat in between his mother and Walter. When he looked up and saw me, I fell into the aquamarine pools of his eyes, and the rest of the world dropped away.