by Tess Lake
I said goodbye to my cousins, gave Adams a pat (he was still sharpening his claws every day for the eventual showdown, as he called it), and took myself off to work at the library. Since coming upon the murder scene, and perhaps because of the book Hattie Stern had given him, Ollie had been somewhat down over the last couple weeks. He was generally fairly happy, and especially so when he was sorting papers deep under the library. Now he was mostly quiet as he went through them, and even Molly had reported a change in him.
I got to work, but Ollie wasn’t there, so I started myself, still shifting and sorting piles. During a break, I picked up a copy of the Harlot Bay Times and saw the motion to end the free rental program had been defeated. I’d completely forgotten about it! Carter had written a scathing article about Sylvester Coldwell, who was now apparently planning on building a mall in Harlot Bay that would “no doubt destroy the local business community,” as Carter claimed.
The morning rushed by quickly, and it was almost lunch by the time Ollie arrived. He told me he’d been at the police station discussing some of the archives that the library was storing. He’d discovered some records there that were only twenty years old and possibly should not be publicly released.
After that he went back to his glum silence and started sorting papers with me.
I couldn’t stand to see him so sad anymore!
“You know, that journal Hattie gave you might be a forgery,” I said.
“Forgery? It looks genuine to me,” he said, although with a little bit of hope in his voice.
“There’s something you need to understand about Hattie Stern. She is—and I’ll say this as plainly as I can—a stuck-up busybody who values the image of her family over almost anything else. She’s not friendly, and frankly I’m not sure she’s a good person. I wouldn’t put it past her to be involved in the forgery of that journal just so she can correct some imaginary slight against her. Besides, everyone knows it was her relative who was running that house of pleasure. It’s common knowledge,” I said, perhaps going a bit too far in trying to make him feel better. But what did I care? Hattie wasn’t my friend and I certainly wasn’t impressed that she’d given a magical book to Ollie, and I was certainly even less impressed that she had been into my office doing whatever it was.
“So do you think I should still run a retraction?” Ollie asked me.
“If you really want to, you could take the article down and that’s it. But I wouldn’t bother retracting it and apologizing to her,” I said.
Ollie cheered up somewhat after that and soon he was chatting away about the papers he’d found and some of the police records. It wasn’t long before it was lunch, so I quickly washed my hands in the bathroom and went out into the winter wind, thinking I’d make my way to the Soup King for a nice hot bowl of soup, when I saw none other than Hattie herself, walking along the other side of the street, hunched over into the cold wind that was blowing. After seeing how sad Ollie was, I decided to have it out with her. I marched across the street and stepped in front of her.
“You gave Ollie a magic book so you could lie about Juliet Stern,” I said, more a statement than a question.
Hattie frowned at me and pursed her lips in that way she had, but then her expression softened.
“I would have thought your aunt would have taught you better than that,” she said. “There are no spells cast on that journal. Juliet was a witch and it absorbed some magic from being around her. That’s all.”
Given what I had said to Ollie about Hattie, I was somewhat taken aback, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I had another bone to pick with her.
“Why were you in my office when I wasn’t there? Were you trying to cast a spell on me?”
Hattie didn’t seem the least bit surprised that I knew she had been there.
“So that cat of yours finally told you. I wasn’t there to cast a spell on you. I was there because someone has cast a spell on you,” she said.
“A spell on me?” I said. The wind around us burst, suddenly cold, and then dropped away, and I felt the space around us warming. To my shock Hattie reached out and grabbed my hand. For a moment I got a glimpse of her power, a raging hurricane behind six feet of glass, and then it was gone.
“Someone incredibly powerful has cast a spell on you and I can’t undo it, but if you come out to the farm to work with me, perhaps we can undo it together over time,” Hattie said.
“I… um…” I said. All the words I had got stuck in my throat. This reversal was too much. I knew Hattie wasn’t a liar, so she was right about the book, which meant maybe Ollie had been wrong or there was something else going on. I also knew that she was telling the truth about me. If she said that someone had cast a spell on me, then it was true.
“Is the spell still on me?” I eventually managed to say.
“I can’t tell now. I only saw a hint of it. It’s so strong it hides itself. But I would suspect it is still there. Perhaps if we work together we can discover the truth,” Hattie said.
For a moment it felt as though all of Harlot Bay vanished and it was just me standing there with Hattie holding my hand. When she said the truth it felt it stretched back over decades, echoing through time. I had a sudden desperate desire to agree with her, to rush off to Stern Farms right this instant and discover what spell had been cast on me. But then the moment faded as I remembered the creepy house out on Truer Island. How was I to know who would cast such a spell? Aunt Cass and Hattie appeared to be mortal enemies, and for all I knew Hattie might have been the one who’d done it. The world returned and so did the cold as I gently disengaged my hand from hers.
“I have to go now,” I said, not giving her an answer either way.
“Very well,” Hattie said, snapping back to her regular self. She stepped away from me and marched off into the cold.
Chapter 23
“Mom, I really can’t talk about my thighs any longer,” I said and tried to rub the tiredness out of my eyes.
“Okay, fine, you know it’s not in my nature to meddle,” Mom said, the weight of the lie she told threatening to pull a black hole into existence to consume the entire earth.
“So did I tell you Jonas and Peta are going out?” I said, desperately trying to change the topic.
It was midnight, freezing cold, and I had made the serious mistake of talking to my mother about my personal trainer and my attempts to get into shape. Despite the fact that my mother ran a bakery and could probably do with a few laps up and down Scarness Beach herself, she had—unsurprisingly—quite a few strong opinions about this topic, as I’d discovered over the past hour and a half as we sat in her car waiting for something to happen.
“Do you think they’re going to get married?” Mom said with a sort of mad gleam in her eye.
Although Peta had a perfectly serviceable mother and father, Mom had always considered her as one of the family, a sort of second daughter who, despite the fact she was wrapped up in most of the things we had been involved in as teenagers, always got let off scot-free.
“Why do you always go straight to marriage? They only started going out,” I said, fiddling with one of the crystals that I had sitting on my lap.
“Imagine if she gets married and has a baby. Please don’t tell me she’s going to do that before you,” Mom said.
“Oh my goddess, I’m going to get married when I want to get married and I will have a baby when I want to have a baby, and no sooner,” I said. What was promising to be quite a long rant was interrupted when my phone rang. It was Jack, which was a bit unusual at midnight.
“Harlow, I found one of the teenagers and I’m outside the house where they’re staying. I think all the stolen goods are inside too,” Jack whispered.
“What? What’s the address?”
He told me and I grabbed a loose piece of paper to write it down.
“There’s something weird going on in there. I think they’ve got a woman running the show. She has dark hair, and I saw these two boys going in
and I’m fairly sure they were carrying stolen gold watches,” Jack whispered.
I frantically flapped the piece of paper at Mom and pointed at the address, trying to indicate to her that we needed to go right now. She got it in a second and started the car, and we began racing through the cold dark night.
“Don’t go in! It could be dangerous,” I said.
“But I think they’re—” Jack began before the call ended. I looked at the phone in my hand. It wasn’t mine that had died. He’d hung up on me. The crystals sitting on my lap started glowing like crazy.
“I think Jack found the thieves! We need to hurry!” I yelled to Mom. It was snowing so heavily she couldn’t drive as fast as I wanted her to, but we took still some of those corners at high speed, sliding around them, pushing up a great wave of slush and snow as we did.
“Do you know how to seal this thing, Slink, back into rock again?” I said to Mom as we careened around another corner.
“It’s like riding a bike,” she said. We raced down the street and around the corner and I heard a siren start up behind us. It wasn’t long before we were being pursued. I looked back through the darkness and managed to make out a figure following us.
“Ah, Mom, I think that’s Sheriff Hardy,” I said.
“It’s fine, he’s going to find out we’re witches eventually,” she said through gritted teeth.
I turned back around in my seat, praying to the goddess that I wouldn’t slip or have anything else dangerously magical happen. As my powers were still somewhat on random, I still had the ability to conceal myself with barely any effort, so I guessed if it came to it tonight I could always vanish into thin air.
As we raced across Harlot Bay, Sheriff Hardy eventually shut off his siren as he must have figured out we were on our way somewhere important.
Mom slammed the brakes on and we slid to a stop out in front of a three-story house. I saw Jack’s car down the block but he wasn’t in it.
We leapt out of the car and as we did I looked up and saw in the top windows the first flickering of fire.
“It’s going to burn down, Mom!” I yelled. I ran to the front door, afraid that Jack was in there somewhere and he would burn to death too, but Sheriff Hardy and Mom stopped me before I could get the door open.
“We need to be careful, Harlow,” Sheriff Hardy said, stepping in front of me.
“You need to be careful and follow me,” Mom said. She reached past him and I felt the small push of magic as she unlocked the front door. We stepped into a dimly lit entranceway and found Jack crouching down, waving at us to close the door and be quiet.
“Bishop, what are you doing here?” Sheriff Hardy whispered.
“I think they’re going to burn someone to death,” Jack whispered back. There was a surge of magic then, and from somewhere above us Mom and I both felt the hole that had been cut in reality and then closed again. It felt jagged and sharp like a broken bottle. The magic pushed again and the door behind us made a clunking noise as the lock welded itself into place. I knew without having to look that there was no way we would be able to get out that door again.
“Dalila, what do we do?” Sheriff Hardy said.
Jack looked at him in confusion at seeing the sheriff asking my mother what to do, but there was no time for explanations.
“Everyone follow me,” Mom said and marched on ahead. As one, the four of us went out through the entranceway and into where the rest of the house should be… except it wasn’t. There was a dividing line between the polished wood floor of the house and then dirt as we entered into what appeared to be a large cave. There were wooden struts up the side and across the roof like you might find in a mine, and all around the place were flaming torches that lit up the area. It was far larger than it could have possibly been to fit inside the house, and I knew we’d stepped across some kind of barrier into some kind of other dimension.
“What is going on?” Jack muttered to himself, looking around.
I wanted to tell him, to let him know things would be okay, but honestly I had no idea if they would be. I could sense magic in this place, and it was unlike anything I had experienced before. It was that jagged sharp magic, the one that would cut holes in the reality of the world. Just being here made my bones start to ache.
From somewhere above us, we heard a low chant begin. As it increased in volume, the torches in the room brightened, and we saw piles of stolen goods scattered around the walls. There were televisions and toasters, refrigerators, piles of silver earrings, another pile of cans of food. I saw one of the coffee machines and didn’t know whether it was Luce and Molly’s or belonged to the Donaldsons. As the light in the room increased, I saw Luce’s catapult against the far wall, still covered with its tarp, with grass and mud stuck to its wheels.
The chanting above us increased in volume, and then there was another jagged sharp spike of magic, and from somewhere over to the side, a dark-haired woman appeared, followed by two teenagers. I vaguely recognized one of them—maybe I’d seen him at the party—but I didn’t know the other. They were thin and sallow with pockmarked skin, and I realized in a moment that we had been on the wrong path entirely. We had been searching for teenagers displaying sudden wealth when we should have been looking for ordinary teenagers and going through all of them. There was nothing special about these two, nothing that would differentiate them, so we had spent our time looking at teenagers who were flaunting expensive jewelry.
The two of them were chanting, repeating some nonsensical sound over and over. They were both carrying stolen gold jewelry in their hands—their takings for the night.
“Marla, you need to stop this now,” Mom said, her voice booming out across the room.
The woman, Marla, looked at Mom with an almost feral expression, and it was then that I saw that she had burn scars running up the side of her neck onto the edge of the side of her face. She had been in a fire many years ago.
“You took him away from me once, but you’re not going to do that again,” Marla yelled out. She turned to the teenagers. “Take it, quickly,” she said. The teenagers ran to the middle of the room, dropping some of the gold as they went. There, sitting in a small depression, was what looked like an ordinary small grey boulder made of slate. It had a large crack running down from the top of it into the middle. It was surrounded by gold watches, bracelets and anything else shiny and valuable.
Mom waved her hand and I felt the ripple of a spell that knocked one of the teenagers flying, but the other one kept going and threw his stolen goods into the depression. They clinked against the stone, and as it did the crack grew wider.
Sheriff Hardy had his gun out and was pointing it at Marla.
“Dalila, what do I need to do?” he asked again.
“Keep those teenagers away from the rock,” Mom said.
“Harlow, what’s going on?” Jack asked with more urgency in his voice.
“You’re all going to burn to death, that’s what’s going on,” Marla screeched. She waved her hand and we felt that tearing magic, and suddenly she was in front of Mom, swinging a fist at her. It connected, and then there was that tear again and Marla was on the far side of the room gathering the fallen gold. Mom stumbled and then righted herself, wiping a streak of blood away from her nose.
“I changed my mind, shoot her in the leg,” Mom said.
“Put the jewelry down and lie on the ground,” Sheriff Hardy instructed. Marla wasn’t listening. She threw the gold into the pit and there was an enormous crack as the stone split in half, a black liquid trickling out, flooding around the gold jewelry.
“We’ll be okay, Jack, I promise,” I said, although I knew no such thing. My fingers were twitching, urging me to throw a fireball or do something, anything, to stop what was going to happen next. That jagged feeling, that rip in the hole of reality, the aching of my bones were all coming from that pool of black liquid, which was now rising up from the floor, forming the shape of a man. For a moment it was black ink, a man st
anding with his legs and arms out, and then it shimmered, and I saw Grandma standing in front of me.
“Jonas?” I heard Jack say.
“Ro?” Sheriff Hardy said.
“I put you in there once, Slink, and I’m going to do it again,” Mom said. With this hideous abomination in front of us, the feeling of the ache of it pushing through us, neither of us felt the rip in reality as Marla tore another hole and appeared beside Mom, this time swinging a piece of wood. She hit her across the side of the head and Mom fell to the ground, unconscious. Then Marla vanished, reappearing next to what I saw as Grandma.
I ducked down to check Mom. She was covered in blood but still breathing.
“It has been too long, Torrent,” Slink whispered. The hiss of his voice seemed to echo up from the ground itself, and as he spoke, the temperature in the room increased. I looked up at the ceiling and saw smoke beginning to curl through the wood. That house back in Harlot Bay where they’d started the fire was obviously connected to this place, and the fire was starting to burn the house down. Marla saw me looking toward the roof.
“Two boys and a girl,” she said. “You’ll do fine for the sacrifice.”
“Harlow, what do I do?” Sheriff Hardy repeated.
I looked at the image of my grandma and felt the wrongness of it. The wrongness of this creature. With that feeling came a sudden fury.
“Like my mother said, shoot her in the leg.”
Sheriff Hardy fired, but Marla was no longer where she had been. She was beside him, struggling with him, and then was gone again, and so was his gun. The two teenagers were circling around to the sides of us, perhaps obeying some silent instruction from Slink.
“Jonas, why are you doing this?” Jack asked.
“It’s not your brother,” I said.
High above us, a chunk of the roof fell away to reveal flames roaring above. There seemed to be some overlapping of realities. I could see the stone roof of a cave, but at the same time, I could see wood burning with flames, and I could certainly feel the heat beating down upon us. Soon it would be all around us, and I knew there was no way that I alone could defeat this hideous monster.