by V. V. James
“Right now,” I tell her, “your safety is the thing that matters. Abigail’s on a knife edge. Unstable. Unpredictable. If she thinks you’re attacking Dan, she’ll go for you even harder.”
“Yet she’s attacking me, and you’re not going for her?”
Her accusation is like a slap.
I would fight for Harper. I will, if it comes to it. I’d do anything to save her.
But what my giftless girl doesn’t understand is that witches can never strike first. They can barely even strike back. Gramma always told me that tolerance of us is a rickety bridge over a deep pit of fear and suspicion. We witches have to watch every step we take, in case there’s a loose plank underfoot. I’ll do this my own way.
“It’s not…” I start, but Harper is wrenching the lock. I don’t want to give the TV crew anything by dragging her back in or calling after her. So, I just watch, feeling sick, as she bounds down the steps.
Across the road, the WCON-TV guy scrambles to pick up his camera again, but he’s too slow, and with a flip of her ponytail, Harper is around the corner and gone.
Forty-Seven
Abigail
“It’s the right thing to do,” Bridget says, rummaging in cupboards so filthy, so disorganized, that I wonder she can find anything. They’re all full of brightly packaged, sugar-laden cereals, and she grabs an armful and piles them in the center of the table.
I stayed here last night. After that awful scene with Sarah, I couldn’t bear to be alone, so I let Bridget scoop me up and bring me to her house. I thought it would be comforting, but being in what is so unmistakably a family home scrapes at the open wound of my loss.
The fridge door is covered with papers and letters all bearing the Sanctuary High insignia. There’s a Spartans pennant jammed over one curtain rod. The windowsill is cluttered with photographs, and somehow my eyes go unerringly to the one that shows the four of us—the witch and her bitches, as we’d joke—with our kids down on the shore. I look away.
“Izzy? Iz! Breakfast?” Bridget is bellowing up the stairs.
“No need to yell, honey.”
It’s Cheryl, in a tailored suit and holding a smart Gucci bucket bag full of files. How can she bear to live in this house of cats and chaos? What on earth does she see in Bridget? Not for the first time, I wonder if Sarah had a hand in that. Love potions are a heavily regulated area of witchcraft. They’re permitted when taken consensually within existing relationships. Husbands and wives who’ve lost a bit of sparkle but want to stay together. But magic isn’t allowed to win someone’s affections, or to end them.
Cheryl doesn’t seem to need any encouragement as she pats Bridget’s ass and plants a kiss on her cheek. She pats my arm, too, as she leaves, and tells me I’m welcome to stay as long as I like. Then, brushing cat hair from her sleeve, she’s out of the door.
“Izzy!”
Bridget’s exasperated bellow is cut short as her daughter appears. Isobel is in a slovenly onesie. The girl sees me and shrinks back in the kitchen doorway. That shouldn’t hurt, but it does. It’s happened countless times by now. For every person who crosses the road to hug me and offer their sympathy, someone else looks away to avoid eye contact or hangs back to prevent our paths crossing.
I know that it’s embarrassment, or a desire not to hurt me further by saying the wrong thing. But how could anyone feel that an awkward word would inflict pain, after the agony of Daniel’s loss? I want people to talk to me about him. To praise his talent, his good looks, his kindness. To never stop talking about him, as if he’s just upstairs, or out at practice, and will be home soon.
Bridget corners Isobel before she can slink back upstairs. “It’s okay,” I hear her saying quietly. “Come and chat. She’s lonely.”
She pities me. Bridget pities me. And I know that I’ve toppled from the top of our friendship group to the bottom.
“Just do it, young lady.” And Bridget practically pushes her daughter into the kitchen.
Defeated, Isobel slinks in, tucking a strand of stray hair behind her ear. It seems impossible that she’s only a year below Daniel at school. There were rumors that Beatriz bullied her, and things got tense between Julia and Bridget for a few months, but it must have gotten resolved eventually. I always felt proud to be the mom of a boy—they’re so much more straightforward and honest. Girls can be sly, slinking things.
“Good morning, Abigail. I’m sorry for your loss,” Isobel mumbles robotically, as if someone just pressed a button in her back. Bridget gently maneuvers her into a chair and pours her a large glass of orange juice. Dan never drank OJ—it’s pure sugar.
“Have something to eat, darling,” Bridget coaxes, selecting a cereal and tipping what is plainly twice the recommended portion size into a bowl. The chocolate dusting on it turns the milk brown as she pours it in. “Izzy’s finally getting over her mono—aren’t you, sweetie?”
The girl listlessly spoons cereal into her mouth, and for a few minutes the only sound in the kitchen is the wet noise of her eating, and the mewing and scraping of cats underfoot. I’m relieved when the girl trudges back upstairs and Bridget suggests we sit outside on the terrace. It’ll be good to escape the stink of cat food and litter trays.
Except as soon as we step outside, I freeze up. My heart takes off at twice its normal speed, and I grip the doorframe.
“Abi? Are you okay?”
Bridget’s face looms in front of me as she asks her foolish question. Of course I’m not okay. And then realization dawns on her.
“Oh god, here, where we all… Abi, are you having a panic attack? Let’s go back in.”
It feels more like I’m having a heart attack. Bridget’s voice is reaching me over the deafening sound of my own frantic pulse.
But it’s not that, either. My long-ago therapist training taught me what this is. It’s adrenaline: the fright, flight, or fight response to a threat. Only the threat isn’t to me; it’s to my boy, and I’m powerless to help him because it’s already too late.
This is where Daniel died the first time.
And this is where I sat just a few weeks ago, in the last moments I was happy, while we all ate dinner and drank wine as our kids were fleeing for their lives from a burning building. Only my son was already dead.
Bridget is trying to coax me back inside. Instead I unclaw my hand from the doorframe and step out. The outdoor table and chairs are still in the exact same place. They rest on decking now.
I glance up at where he fell—and see Isobel’s bovine face watching me from the window, confused by what her mom’s making all this fuss about. Bridget gestures at her impatiently and she steps away, pulling the curtains.
“Abi? if you won’t go back in, come and sit down?”
I let Bridget steer me to a chair. I feel dizzy, as if I’m in two places at once—or two times. Then and now.
If losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to you, what did I do to deserve losing mine twice?
“Do you remember that night?” I ask her. “Do you remember what happened?”
Forty-Eight
Abigail
Daniel fell without a sound.
The kids had been messing about, playing. It was past their bedtime and we’d blithely assumed they were all asleep. Beatriz’s older brothers had stayed at home—they were about to start their senior year and found our tribe of twelve-year-olds too “babyish.” So it was just Daniel and the girls upstairs, and us moms downstairs. Michael and Pierre were there, but Alberto was away in the city.
Dan hit the ground right there. Just a few feet from us.
And I can’t help it. I get up and crouch and touch the spot. I stroke the smooth decking, imagining that beneath it a tiny speck of my son’s blood seeped down between the original paving and into the ground. That it’s still there, warm within the soil. Living.
My recollections
of what happened next are a mess, though we worked out later that the whole thing took no more than twenty minutes from beginning to end—or from end to beginning. From the moment my boy lay dead at my feet, to the moment we carried him inside to the sofa, his heart beating again and his chest rising and falling.
Michael got to him first. I’ve never loved my husband more than in that moment as he knelt by our son’s motionless body.
It had only been a second-story window. Kids fall from that height and merely break an arm or an ankle, or even walk away unscathed. But we could all see from how Dan fell that it was bad. He’d landed head first. The paving was stained dark beneath him, and blood was trickling from his nose in a thin, red stream.
Michael did all the checks, but our son’s eyes didn’t open; he gave no verbal reply. His body didn’t even make a reflex response—I think that’s when I finally screamed.
“No,” Bridget says. She’s lowered herself beside me and is holding my hand. “No, you were screaming from the moment he fell. You sounded like a stricken animal. Pierre was the only one of us strong enough to hold you.”
As she says it, I remember. Pierre’s arms so tight around me that I couldn’t move, couldn’t go to my broken boy.
“Michael wanted you to keep back,” says Bridget. “He said that with head trauma, the slightest wrong movement of the patient could be fatal.”
I remember Michael performing the checks again with crisp precision: fingertip force. A pinch to the collarbone. A touch above the eye.
We could all tell from his face that he wasn’t getting the response he needed.
“That was when you turned to Sarah,” Bridget prompts me. “You begged her. You sort of slumped in Pierre’s arms, and he told me afterward that he thought you’d fainted, but you were actually trying to get on your knees. Literally begging on your knees. Oh god, it was unbearable.”
She’s crying. My friend is sobbing as we sit on her deck reliving it all. Now I’m squeezing her fingers and comforting her.
Because there’s no reason to cry about that night. It ended with my son whole and alive in my arms.
“I remember what you said,” Bridget gulps. “I’ll never forget it. You said: Will you offer them me instead? I’d never heard anything so awful or so beautiful.”
I remember it, too. I didn’t know who they were. Angels. Demons. I didn’t care. I would have let them peel off my skin and bottle up my soul in exchange for my child’s life.
But of course there is no them. There was only Sarah.
She told us it was impossible. Then she told me she’d try anyway, and that it was the web of our love, the coven’s strength, that made her even consider it.
“I got the knife from the kitchen,” Bridget says. The flesh beneath her chin quivers as she wipes at the tears streaking her face. “It was the sharp one we keep for special—Thanksgiving turkey, birthday cake.”
We both laugh, a hiccupping, despairing sort of hilarity.
“I sprayed it with hand sanitizer and brought it out.”
And then Sarah did it. All four of us did, Julia joining in for the very first time. The ritual that brought Dan back to me.
The disbelief of the moment when his body jerked upward, as if magic had dropped a hook into his chest and fished him back up from the depths. That tiny moment of almost not wanting it to be true, because if it was, it meant hope, and if that hope was false, it would have been the end of everything.
How the four of us, utterly drained, watched as Michael repeated the checks. How Dan’s eyes opened, and he nodded in response to a question. Then Pierre scooped Daniel up—my son was much taller and heavier than me, even at age twelve—and carried him indoors to the sofa.
“That was when we heard the police siren,” Bridget interjects. “Someone had heard you screaming.
“Pierre and I were on the rocks by then, and we both knew some folks were taking a more than neighborly interest in our business. There was one old busybody who’d never liked having a black guy live across the street. Well, she got an Asian lesbian in exchange. I think the shock finished her off.”
We laugh properly at that, and it feels good—honest and cleansing. It’s the first time I’ve laughed since Daniel died. And although that thought brings a wave of guilt crashing down on me, I somehow don’t drown. Bridget’s hand anchors me. She was there for me that night. They all were. Sarah most of all.
It was Sarah who took command again when we first heard the siren. She knew that what we’d all done was illegal. I remember insisting that it was worth going to jail for the rest of my life for, whereupon Julia slapped me to snap me out of it. Daniel would need me. All our kids needed us. All it required was a simple story.
Sarah knelt by Dan and told him what to say—that he’d come downstairs for cookies, hadn’t switched the light on so as not to disturb the girls, and that he’d slipped on the unfamiliar stairs. She made him repeat it over and over.
“She was insistent,” Bridget adds. “And I remember you getting angry with her. But it was the right thing to do. Then she just collapsed into the chair. We were all exhausted from that spell…” Bridget shudders, and I remember the bone-deep weariness that didn’t shift for weeks afterward. “Pierre went upstairs to check on the girls. Told them to tell anyone who asked that they’d been asleep when it happened. Then the cop turned up. Thank goodness we’d gotten our stories straight.”
I don’t really remember the cop, only that she kept suggesting that Dan go to the hospital to be checked over. I was sitting on the sofa with him, holding his hand, and you would have had to possess the strength of ten Pierres to pry me away from him.
Michael handled all that. Pulled the Yale-medical-faculty card, and the cop backed down soon enough.
And that was that. No police follow-up. No questions. Just my boy, given back to me thanks to the love of my friends.
My tears start up again. Quietly at first, but soon I’m hunched over bawling my eyes out. And these tears are something new. It’s not heartbreak and loss over Daniel, or contemptible self-pity.
It’s shame and remorse for how I’ve treated Sarah. The threats I’ve made against her.
“I’m a monster,” I gasp, curling away from Bridget’s comfort that I don’t deserve. “What I’ve said to Sarah, and what I’ve done. Oh god, what am I?”
“You’re a woman who’s suffered something none of us can imagine,” Bridget says. “And whose friends love her.”
“How can you? I threatened Sarah. Told her that I believed what Jake said about Harper. I did believe it. But it can’t have been Harper, can it?”
“No, it can’t,” Bridget says.
“Sarah must hate me.”
“She doesn’t. Shhh, she doesn’t.”
My friend gathers me in almost as tightly as Pierre did that night and rocks me.
“We understand. Sarah understands. It’s all going to be all right.”
Will it? I’m torn in two. I know Dan’s not coming back.
I know Harper couldn’t have killed him by magic.
I don’t know where we go from here.
But in this moment, my friend’s strong arms and her comfort are enough.
Forty-Nine
Maggie
Chester reacts first, dragging Rowan backward to the doorway. I hawk and cough blackened spittle into the ash, then wipe gritty gobs from my eyes.
When I can see clearly again, I make my way unsteadily outside. Rowan is squatting in the churned dirt, coughing. I’ve never been so relieved to hear someone sound like they’re regurgitating lung.
Chester scuttles back to the witch’s side with their satchel, and Rowan fumbles for a water bottle. It’s a good few more minutes until they stand up, and when they do, it’s by leaning on Chester’s shoulder.
“So, the answer to your question is pretty obvious,” Row
an says. “Yes, magic was used in that house. And it was powerful. So much so, that even its traces have power.”
“You mean the villa is still under a spell of some kind?”
“Not actively bewitched. Think of a bonfire. Even long after the flames have burned out, the embers are still hot. Well, this villa is still magically ‘hot.’ Whatever happened here was done by someone extremely gifted.”
I look back over my shoulder at the villa, half-fearful that those smoky symbols might swirl out the gaping window and choke us, clogging our every breath. What we felt in there was…wrong. The mere memory of it makes the house somehow obscene.
But what did I tell Chester? It’s our job to break this down into something that makes sense.
“Is there any way you can identify who did it? If I introduced you to a person, or gave you a thing belonging to them?”
“That’s an ethical gray area, Detective, like obtaining a DNA sample without someone’s consent. But in this instance there’s something else. How can I put it? Magic is personal, like fingerprints or handwriting. But this? It’s like something typed instead of handwritten. Like fingerprints without any whorls. It’s just magic. I got no sense of where it came from or whose it is.”
“What if it was done by more than one witch?” suggests Chester. And I’m impressed, because that’s a smart idea. But Rowan is shaking their head.
“I don’t think so. It’s illegal for witches to craft magic with another magical practitioner. We have to work alone with nonmagical assistants—that’s how Moot defines a coven.
“I saw it once down in Kentucky, though. Triplet witch sisters, fourteen years old, who were their own illegal coven and got their kicks by hexing livestock on farms belonging to their daddy’s rivals. Unpicking it was tough, but I figured out that even though it felt like one spell, there were three separate sources. Here, it’s almost as if there’s no source at all.”