Sanctuary

by V. V. James

  “I do,” I say. I find that I want to be bold after all, and lift myself on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “You take care of yourself, Pierre. And do what you can to help this little town put itself back together.”

  “Putting things back together is what I do.”

  He gives me that gappy grin, then disappears out the door.

  I throw the T-shirt down. Their damn necklines never fold straight anyhow. I stuff the lopsided heap into my duffel.

  How is this town gonna fix itself after this? It’s like it really was bewitched, but by fear and paranoia, not by magic. By the time I met with Chester last night, emergency services had cordoned off the ruined stadium. Forensics will go through the ashes for human traces—the remains of Abigail Whitman. The body of Chief Bolt had been hauled into an ambulance.

  Chester told me that Cheryl Lee discharged herself from Michael Whitman’s hospital, saying there was nothing wrong with her except a crippling migraine. In the isolation room alongside hers, she had heard the three Spartan boys laughing and joking. Her hunch is that there was never anything wrong with them, and they were faking under Michael Whitman’s instructions.

  And the cops? Well, maybe that really was spoiled chicken wings—or perhaps Michael had a hand in that, too. Either the cops were also faking, or the not-so-good doctor’s “treatment” for a simple bout of food poisoning ensured they stayed sick as long as was useful.

  What will an autopsy find Jake Bolt died of? My hunch is something that can be labeled “medical error.”

  So it’s plain the supposed “sickness” wasn’t witchcraft. And given Izzy Perelli’s confession, neither was Dan Whitman’s death.

  And what went down in the stadium? There’s an explanation for all that too, of course.

  The stage went up in flames thanks to some faulty wiring. Those speakers had been rigged up in a hurry, after all. Sparks must have drifted to the bleachers.

  Abigail Whitman cracked because her son had died in a fire, and the blaze triggered her trauma. She’d probably watched Dan die a hundred times in her nightmares. No wonder she seemed to see him there, twisting in the flames. No wonder, in her desperate grief, she tried to save him.

  Chief Bolt got electrocuted by a dodgy microphone clasped in sweaty hands. Or maybe it was simply a heart attack—it’s pretty well documented that bereavement raises your risk of cardiac arrest.

  This is what I’ll be telling Remy, and whoever else needs to hear it as this whole case is investigated: A boy lost his footing at a party, and a town went mad with grief. Every cop knows that the simplest stories are usually the correct ones.

  I zip up my bag. Carry it out to my car.

  I won’t be telling anyone about Harper Fenn’s tattoos. The ones she did herself, in the shape of marks that churned the air in the ruined party house and terrified me like no perp with a gun or a knife ever has.

  I’ll be trying to forget her smile as I set her free.

  One Hundred Nine

  Harper

  The first thing I did with my magic was kill a boy.

  The second thing I did with my magic was hide it.

  It was six years ago. Our parents had been drinking, and their dinner party was loud on the terrace below. Upstairs in the spare room, Bea and I lay side by side in sleeping bags, the movie on pause while Dan was gone. I was bored of her chatter about how San Diego was so much more exciting than Sanctuary, so I told her I needed the bathroom and went to prod Izzy awake.

  But my friend wasn’t in bed. She was standing in the middle of her room, and Dan was all over her. She’d gone limp in his arms, like a rabbit that’s tight in something’s jaws.

  “Hiya, Harper,” Dan said.

  He slipped his hand from under Izzy’s nightgown. Her eyes were rolling wildly above his other hand, clamped over her mouth.

  “Nothing to see here,” he said, tipping his head. “Bathroom’s along the hall that way.”

  Which was when my magic came in.

  All my childhood, I couldn’t wait to be a witch. To be strong and powerful like my mom and her gramma. So many times Mom and I had “the talk” about what Determination felt like—the wonder of seeing your gift light up your whole body. Of finally connecting with your ability.

  She was right. It was the most amazing moment of my life. You couldn’t see it, of course. No burst of light—that only happens during the rite. Which was just as well, as even our boozed-up parents would have noticed a magical supernova shining out of Izzy’s bedroom window.

  There was no light. But there was power. So much of it.

  Enough to blast Dan away from Izzy and send him out the window.

  Iz and I were still reeling when the first scream came from below. She started over to look out, but I grabbed her arm and held her back. If the adults knew we were there when he fell, the questions would begin.

  Why? And how?

  Izzy wouldn’t want to answer the first one, and I didn’t want to answer the second.

  So we huddled against the wall, under the swinging pane, and listened. Listened as Abigail screamed and sobbed, and Michael Whitman ran through the medical checks for a response from Dan, then ran through them again, his voice more desperate.

  Bea burst into the room.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Shh!” I put a finger to my lips, then reached to pull her down. “The three of us were eavesdropping on our moms, only we couldn’t hear properly. Dan wanted to open the window so we could hear better, but the catch was stuck. He shoved it with his shoulder and it swung open and he fell.”

  Bea’s eyes went wide. She huddled against me, too, and we all listened.

  “He’s dead,” Bea said, in a breathless voice. I could imagine her telling the story at school the next day: He fell. He died. I saw it.

  And then I heard my mom’s voice, strong and clear. I’ve never been prouder of her than I was at that moment.

  “There’s something—something I could try. But…”

  Abigail fell on her, begged her.

  “Do it,” Izzy’s mom said.

  “Whatever you need us to do, we will,” Bea’s mom said.

  “But he’s dead,” Beatriz hissed.

  “Shut up,” Izzy moaned. “Shut up, shut up.”

  Izzy curled into a ball and pretended it wasn’t happening. But Bea and I went up on our knees and peeped out the window as my mom and her coven brought Dan back from the dead.

  Bea looked sick at each step of the rite. The blade and the blood. She put her hands over her ears as Mom whispered things that sounded like the worst words in the world and crooned something that could have been the purest love song. She screwed up her eyes as black mist poured out of Dan’s mouth, as it gradually turned white, then golden.

  I didn’t take my eyes off it all for a single second. I don’t think I even blinked.

  When we heard Dan cough, then moan, Izzy turned her head and threw up on the carpet.

  “But he was dead,” Bea insisted. “Witches can’t bring people back from the dead. It’s illegal.” Her voice had that breathless thrill again. “Your mom could go to prison.”

  Which was when I first felt afraid.

  “Izzy’s right, Bea,” I told her. “Shut up. Besides, your mom was part of it, too.”

  “She’s not magical. It’s different for witches.”

  It was when a cop came calling that I realized I had to do something. Sure, our parents made up a story. Dan slipped on the stairs getting cookies, Pierre told us when he came to check we were all okay. If anyone asks, you tell them that.

  But I searched on the internet the next day, using the computer in the public library so no one could trace it to our home. It was even worse than Bea had said. Any witch raising someone from the dead would never again be allowed to use their magic.

  And any witch
who killed by magic was locked away for life.

  I made Izzy swear never to tell a soul what really happened. But I was still scared—and the fear got worse every day. I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I’d lie there imagining the cops coming for us, Mom and me being stripped of our magic and sent to jail. I was afraid of the magic within me, but I was even more afraid to lose it. I stopped talking about anything magical. I know Mom noticed that.

  It took about two weeks to make my plan. No one other than Izzy knew my power had come in. I needed to hide it. You can’t kill a boy with magic if you don’t have it. And witches don’t always have witch kids. It’d happened with my mom’s mom.

  But how do you hide magic? I couldn’t ask my mother. So I went to the best authority I knew—our family’s Starcross grimoire. I already knew how to craft a rite. How to navigate a chart, choose the best objects and blend ingredients. So I drew on Starcross, and on everything I’d learned from watching Mom, to devise a ritual of concealment.

  To make it as powerful as possible, I decided to use one of the Old Signs. Yes, I knew the sigils were dangerous and not something that any modern witch should turn to. But I was twelve years old and I was desperate.

  On the night itself, I worked through the rite I had devised. After several hours, it was time for the final step. I prepared the razor blade with a sevenfold purification before I cut the sigil for Obscurity into my stomach. The pain was awful, but even worse was the horror of seeing my own hand slash a bloody seam in my skin. Biting my lip, I thought of the times I’d watched Mom cut herself to make an offering—how much she’d given the night she brought Dan back. Great acts require a great price to seal them.

  By the time I’d finished, my whole body was burning from the inside out, as if my blood had turned to fire in my veins. I was terrified that instead of hiding my magic, I had somehow purged it out of me. I cleaned myself, wound bandages around my middle, and crept home shaking with terror and pain.

  It was on the iron bridge over the Accontic channel that I saw it. A car must have hit it—a huge gray-and-white seagull that flopped and screeched, one wing mangled. I hardly knew what I was doing when I crouched down and put my fingers to its neck. A moment later, I felt the power flow through me, and the bird jerked beneath my touch.

  I could have tried to heal it, I suppose. But I wanted to know if my ability was still there, so I intuitively used it as I had that first time. The gull’s soft feathered head, with its heavy beak, fell limply away from my hand. Its wing ceased flapping. My magic had killed it.

  And I was glad.

  When Mom performed my Determination a few months later, I was fearful she’d discover my ability despite the sigil now scarred into my flesh. Maybe she’d even be able to tell what I had used it for—because she was my mom, after all, and every child thinks their parents have supernatural powers of detection, witch or no.

  I hid my body from her as I changed into the white ritual robe. (At home, she now only ever saw me in a T-shirt or vest, and took it for the natural shyness of a girl becoming a woman.) And when Mom performed my Determination, we saw—nothing. She was distraught, convinced I was giftless, and it was all I could do to keep myself from telling her the truth. But by that time, I’d come to love that my magic was my secret.

  Starcross became my teacher. Instead of in a dark workroom, I practiced my craft in the open air. I discovered Green Point and got to know the folks there, who never looked at me with pity as the witch’s giftless daughter. On my sixteenth birthday, Jonny Maloney gave me my first tattoo. And as I watched him etch my skin, I realized that instead of a blade, I could use a needle.

  A magical design only possesses magical properties if made by a witch. And I was a witch.

  Jonny’s first design was a butterfly on my thigh. Then I asked him for coiling vines across my midriff to cover my scar. I’d told him it was from when I’d self-harmed as a child after a traumatic event, which in a way it was. And once the vines were complete, I started adding my own, small fruit: Starcross’s Old Signs.

  I marked myself with Ruin. With Command. With Undoing.

  With each one, I felt my magic pulse within me. I felt—I feel—as powerful as a walking bomb. Yet I went to school, goofed off in Green Point, or curled up on the couch with Mom for movies and ice cream, and no one knew a thing.

  Why did I get involved with Dan, knowing what he was really like? I’ve asked myself that. I figure it was unfinished business from that night all those years before. He was the other person involved in the best moment of my life. Sometimes, when we fucked, I’d reach up to feel the pulse hammering in his neck and remember the broken seagull on the bridge, and his own smashed body on the terrace below the window.

  But the thrill wore off pretty quickly. He had a power all his own—his good looks and popularity—but unlike us witches, he abused it. I knew he was fooling around with other girls, and when I heard that at some dumb party I’d skipped, he’d finally given Bea the attention she’d been craving for years, I broke things off.

  I should have known his pride wouldn’t stand for it, but I always imagined I’d be able to defend myself. When no one knows you have magic, it’s easy to use a little now and then without anyone noticing. I couldn’t have guessed he’d drug me first. It made me too confused and uncoordinated to use my ability.

  I still hadn’t figured out the best way of paying Dan back—should I use my craft, or simply report his crime?—when Izzy settled the matter by pushing him over the balustrade at the party. The fall killed him. I didn’t lie to the cop about that. But I called upon Ruin and burned the villa.

  Dan wasn’t getting a second second chance.

  I know Jake Bolt caught me on camera, but I wasn’t worried. I never learned the regular, precise ways of witchcraft—the gestures and the sticks. No one watching me work magic can say for sure that’s what it is.

  “Thanks for waiting, ma’am,” the heavyset doorman says, interrupting my recollections. He waves me forward.

  It’s a warm night here in Atlantic City, just four hours’ drive south of Sanctuary, but a world away from its fancy suburbs. I’ve been lined up at the casino entrance for fifteen minutes.

  “Routine screening,” he says. “Though from the look of you, it’s your age I’m worried about, not magic. You over twenty-one, ma’am? Got an ID?”

  “Of course,” I say, holding up my drivers’ license and laying a light Command upon him. “You can see right here that I’m twenty-two.”

  “Crystal clear, thank you. Please step over to my colleague. And enjoy your night here at the Silver Dollar.”

  Witches are banned from casinos—indeed, from any form of gambling—as we might bend the odds unfairly in our favor. And obediently, we stay away. Stiff jail terms for even stepping through a door are an effective deterrent.

  The doorman’s colleague is an elderly Mexican lady—a witch—whose job is to check over patrons for any magical artifacts or enchantments that might enhance their luck. From the look of her, she’s paid peppercorns. Her wrists are scrawny, the skin shiny and smooth over large-knuckled hands that reach for mine.

  Witches like my mother are the lucky ones, born into a recognized tradition with an ancestry as “respectable” as that of any Mayflower New Englander. And even she only made enough money to give us a normal life. This country is full of magical practitioners forced to eke out a living in the margins.

  The witch drops my hand almost immediately, baring her few teeth in a wide smile. A career in black-market magic rarely comes with health insurance.

  “All clear, nenita. But watch yourself in there.”

  “Don’t you worry,” I tell her. “I can look after myself.”

  Mom will be sleeping, back in our cheap hotel room. She’s already worrying about money, and how we’ll live. I’ll win here tonight, but not so big that the managers will get suspicious.

 
And if Mom suspects, I’ll finally tell her. I’m done with keeping my secret.

  Because despite the centuries since Salem, despite the Moot and laws and “human rights,” we’re still feared and hated. Still policed and persecuted. And we go along with it. Accept it.

  Why should we? I’m done with that, too.

  I am the girl who hid her scars. Who hid her pain. Who hid her magic.

  But not anymore.

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Is there a character in Sanctuary that resonates strongly with you? Which one, and why?

  2. Sarah attaches herself to three women not just for friendship, but also for their power. As a coven, what does each woman bring to the table when it comes to their personalities and energies? What qualities would you want in your own coven?

  3. Considering what we learn about Daniel, do you believe his ending was deserved? Did you feel sad, triumphant, or something else altogether at Abigail’s fate?

  4. Did you believe that this small town could become so fearful that its inhabitants excuse murder? Can you think of any real-life parallels?

  5. The witchcraft in Sanctuary is fictional, though inspired by various traditions. Why do you feel it was important for the author to create a system rather than using contemporary Wicca?

  6. America has a rich magical heritage beyond that connected to the Salem witch trials. What other cultures and people are represented in this book, and in wider magical pop-culture, that are not specifically white or European?

  7. The existence of magic could change the world—for better or worse. What did you think of the regulation of magic in Sanctuary? How would you amend these laws?

  8. If your town had a witch, what requests would you make of them?

  9. If you were a witch like Sarah, how would you put your powers to use?

  10. Have you ever had a magical experience? What happened, and how did it diminish or expand your beliefs and outlooks?