Legacy

by Cochran, Molly

  Peter burst through the doors. “Where’s my tray?”

  “Right here,” Hattie said, and shooed us out.

  Amazingly, the whole dinner went smoothly, and everyone seemed to be in a good mood. The dance floor was packed and the bar was swarming with middle-aged revelers. By nine o’clock, everyone was finished eating. Peter was clearing coffee cups and dessert plates off the tables while I walked around with a pitcher refilling water glasses. Some children were already asleep, including Eric, who sprawled over his high chair like an amoeba.

  He was really too big for that chair, and he’d been fidgeting in it so long that his pantleg was all twisted around his knee and his sneaker was dangling off his big toe. Also, I don’t want to be disgusting here, but I was pretty sure he’d wet his diaper too. I couldn’t do anything about that part, but I thought he’d be more comfortable if I rearranged him in the chair.

  Big mistake. As soon as I came near him, his foot shot out and slammed me in the stomach. I was carrying the pitcher at the time, so water sloshed all over me. I thought I heard a few people—probably kids from school—laughing about it, but mostly no one really paid much attention, at least until Eric started screaming and punching the air like he was trying to kill me.

  Then Peter appeared from out of nowhere, and shoved me halfway across the room. “Get away from him!” he bellowed.

  Everyone looked. Now the kids really were laughing. I could hear them, because no one else was saying anything. Even the band stopped playing except for the trumpet player, who went on for a few lame bars of “The Lonely Bull” by himself before giving up. My only thought was to get back into the kitchen so that I could grab my jacket and get the hell out of that place. Trying to muster the last shreds of my dignity, I pushed my dripping, flattened hair out of my eyes, said “excuse me” to the people standing around me, and hoped my rubber legs would remember how to walk.

  I don’t think they did. There was a thump that knocked the pitcher into my chest with unbelievable force, and then a fireball—yes, a fireball, that’s the only way to describe it—seemed to emanate from the pitcher onto the wall right beside Eric’s head, where it exploded in flames.

  “Fire!” someone shouted, and the whole place burst into pandemonium, with people screaming and crawling over one another to get to the exits as the flames spread with astonishing speed over the wall.

  I knew that it was too late for water, even if I’d had some in my pitcher. The only way this thing was going to be quelled was by suffocating it. As soon as that idea came into my head, I pictured a blanket of blue gelatin moving toward the fire, covering it, wetting it down. Then, once I had the picture, I pushed.

  Somewhere in a corner of my mind I could see Peter pulling Eric out of the high chair, but it was as if he were in a movie I was watching. I was completely with the blanket, smoothing it over the flames, hearing them sputter and sizzle as they succumbed in a haze of smoke.

  It was all over in a minute. The guests who a few moments ago were crazed with panic now just looked sheepish and drained the cocktail glasses they’d hung on to during the melee. A lot of them didn’t even seem to notice that anything had gone on at all. Hattie ran into the room and lifted Eric, who was kicking and screaming like a madman, out of his brother’s arms.

  “What happened here?” she demanded.

  Peter nodded toward the charred half-moon on the wall.

  “She started it,” a girl my age volunteered, pointing at me.

  “Go back where you belong!” Hattie snapped.

  The girl made a face and, with a flounce of her red hair, stomped off. Hattie just shook her head impatiently and hauled Eric away.

  That left Peter and me standing alone and facing each other. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t started the fire, but I doubted that he would believe me.

  More than anything I just wanted to go back to my dorm, although I knew that wouldn’t be for some time. The place was a wreck after the stampede that had broken out after the fire. There was food all over the floor, lots of broken plates and glasses, and pools of spilled liquid.

  “I’ll go . . .” My voice came out sounding like Gollum’s in Lord of the Rings. I cleared my throat. “. . . find a mop,” I finished in a whisper.

  CHAPTER

  •

  TEN

  MAGUS

  At school on Monday some of the kids in Peter Shaw’s inner circle tried to block my way at the top of the stairs.

  “Where’re you going, Katy?” The girl who’d accused me at the party stepped forward. I recognized her wavy red hair. Her name was Becca, I think. She’d never spoken to me before. The others—I guess there were around ten of them—slowly gathered around me so that I was surrounded on three sides, with the stairs behind me. I tried to maneuver past them, but the whole group shifted whenever I moved.

  “Maybe you don’t know how we feel here about people who attack little kids,” Becca said.

  “While they’re sleeping,” someone added.

  “Or setting fires in a crowded place.”

  “All our families were there,” another voice put in. It was Verity. She looked pained.

  “You could have killed them all.”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t—”

  “You were the only one there without parents.”

  I looked around. They were closing in on me. The only way out, it seemed, was down the marble stairway. I backed down one step. Two.

  “Did you come here to finish what your mother started?” an earnest-looking boy asked.

  “Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?”

  “What did Eric Shaw ever do to you?”

  “Or to your mom?”

  “Did you think changing your name would fool anyone?”

  “Snake eyes.”

  Three steps. They moved closer. I shuffled backward, teetering. My books tumbled out of my arms, scattering papers all over the stairs below. I was going to fall, I knew. My arms windmilled. The last thing I saw before I lost my balance was Becca’s mouth spread like a toad’s into an expression of malicious satisfaction.

  Just when I was sure I was going to end up smeared across those white marble stairs, someone ran up behind me and broke my fall.

  Peter.

  I don’t know how he managed to keep his balance with me crashing into him. All I knew was that instead of being dead, I was now lying across his arms, so close to him that I could feel the beating of his heart.

  He was looking up at the crowd, his gray eyes incandescent with fury. “Why are you doing this?” he shouted, his voice cracking. “She didn’t start that fire, you morons, she put it out!”

  My head snapped around. He knew?

  “And she saved my brother, while the rest of you were running around like a bunch of scared chickens!”

  The expressions on the faces of my would-be attackers were more bewildered than menacing now.

  “Are you all right?” he asked softly, leaning over me.

  I nodded as he set me down and helped me pick up my books and papers. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely move my fingers.

  “I’ll walk you to class,” Peter said. Then, to make a point, he put his arm around me and led me through the phalanx of bodies at the top of the stairs.

  The late bell rang, and Becca and the others dispersed. As we approached my classroom Peter and I were alone in the hall. His arm was still around me, even though there was no one to protect me from.

  “I guess I owe you big time,” I said.

  “It’s the other way around. I saw what you did Saturday. I should have thanked you then, but I was . . .”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “And . . . I’m sorry I shoved you. It wasn’t what you think. That is . . .” His hands fidgeted uncomfortably. “You didn’t do anything wrong. With Eric. I know you like him.”

  I nodded.

  “And the other thing, at the library. I meant that.”

  I held up my hand
. “You didn’t have to apologize. I told you, it was the truth.”

  “And I told you—”

  “That truth can mean different things to different people.”

  There was a hint of a smile in his eyes. “You remembered that?”

  I felt myself blushing. “I didn’t understand what you were talking about then,” I admitted. “But I guess it’s like how you and Becca both saw what happened Saturday at the party, only you ended up with two different versions of what I did. She thought I started the fire. You thought I stopped it.”

  “I’m right, she’s wrong,” he said.

  This time it was my turn to laugh. “How do you know?”

  “Because you couldn’t have created that fireball.” There was no humor in his eyes now. “Whoever did that had more chops than you could have come up with.”

  It took me a moment to absorb what he was saying. “You mean you think someone shot that thing at Eric deliberately?”

  He shrugged. “There was a lot of energy in the room. Those people . . .”

  “The twenty-seven families.”

  “Yes. Well, they’re . . .”

  “Special, I know. Hattie’s word.”

  “Right. Special.” He chewed his lip and stared at me through narrowed eyes, as if he didn’t know how much he wanted to tell me. “I’m just saying you might not want to look too closely at them. At us.”

  “You? I thought I was the freak here.”

  “No, you fit right in. The Ainsworths are one of the twenty-seven families, but you didn’t grow up here, so you don’t really know what’s going on. You don’t know what can happen to you.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. “What can happen?”

  He turned his head away. I could see him wrestling with himself over something. Then he looked at me with his soft gray eyes that seemed to pull me into the center of his soul. “Nothing,” he said quietly. “I won’t let it.”

  I felt my stomach flip.

  “Will you sit with me at lunch today?”

  I think my mouth fell open. I prayed it didn’t, but I think it did. His arm was still around me. I could smell his aftershave . . .

  “Yoo-hoo there!” Miss P was heading purposefully down the hall toward us, her shoes clacking. “Miss Jessevar!”

  I sighed. I figured she was going to yell at us for being in the hall after the late bell. “We—”

  “Please go to the visitors’ lounge at once,” she said. “I’ll notify your instructor that you’ll be late for class.” She cocked her head quizzically at Peter. “Why are you here after the bell, Mr. Shaw?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind. Just get to wherever you’re going. Good day.” She clacked away.

  Then Peter took my hand. “I’ll look for you in the dining room,” he said, giving my palm a little squeeze.

  My feet felt as if they were dancing as I made my way to the visitors’ lounge. In fact, I was so preoccupied with thoughts of Peter (he squeezed my hand!) that I didn’t realize until I was almost at the door how odd it was that I should have a visitor at all. “Dad?” I asked tentatively at the entrance.

  Wrong. Instead there were two women who looked as if they represented the Temperance League.

  One was very old, probably close to eighty, and appeared to be dressed in her Halloween party clothes, all lace and black velvet, with high-button boots and a doily-like object that hung across her head like crocheted dog ears.

  But it was the other one who held my attention. She was in her late thirties, I guessed, and though pretty, not very remarkable except for one thing:

  She looked exactly like my mother.

  The resemblance to the woman I only knew from a photograph was so startling that I felt my breath involuntarily whooshing into my lungs. “Mom?” I whispered.

  “Hello, Serenity,” the older woman said kindly. “I am Elizabeth Ainsworth, your great-grandmother. And this is your Aunt Agnes.”

  The younger woman stepped forward, offering her hand. “Your mother Agatha was my twin sister,” she said.

  She smiled at me with bright green eyes that were gentle and loving and beautiful. Not a monster’s eyes, but an angel’s. My mother’s eyes. My own.

  “We’ve come to tell you about your family,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  •

  ELEVEN

  FAMILIA

  Agnes and Elizabeth Ainsworth, my aunt and great-grandmother, lived together in a rambling old house in Old Town, not far from the school.

  The doors were open, and workmen were going in and out carrying lumber for wainscoting.

  “Watch your step, dear,” Mrs. Ainsworth cautioned.

  The men all tipped their caps in unison. As soon as they saw me, though, all their tools and wood clattered to the ground.

  “Carry on, Jonathan,” she ordered, unperturbed. “She’s one of us.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nodded to me, but his eyes slid immediately toward Agnes as we approached.

  She blushed. “Jonathan,” she whispered, lowering her eyes.

  “Miss Agnes,” he whispered in return.

  Inside, the rooms seemed to spread out in all directions from a central hallway. Our destination was a parlor with wooden shutters over the windows and a stone fireplace above which hung a large glass-framed piece of needlepoint.

  “That was fashioned by a distant ancestor,” Mrs. Ainsworth said. “She was very clever with knots. Shortbread?” She held out a plate of cookies while Agnes made tea in the kitchen.

  I accepted one, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the needlepoint. It was obviously very old, with Ss that looked like Fs, but in perfect condition. There were three lines of text, nonsensical to me, interwoven with flowers and vines:

  In the alban field, the circling mists twist low

  Kith and kin draw the Botte on crafted bow.

  Arise, great Arrow—swift as sparrow, sprung from below.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  The old woman glanced over her shoulder at it. “It’s a spell,” she said. “A community spell. Nine families of the twenty-seven have been given these three lines to memorize through eternity. Nine others remember another three, and so on. There are nine lines in all. When all the lines are spoken, the spell is cast.”

  I swallowed. “Spell?” I croaked.

  So she was one of them too. A “special” person.

  We stared at one another blankly for a moment. Then Mrs. Ainsworth coughed and fluttered a handkerchief in her hands. “Good gracious, you’re not cowen, are you?”

  “Of course she isn’t,” Agnes said, hurrying in with a tray of tea things. “Hattie was quite certain. Nevertheless, Katy is new here. There are many things she doesn’t understand.” She poured a cup of tea and handed it to me. “Please don’t be alarmed if we seem . . . odd to you. We are an ancient family. Some of our ways may seem quaint.”

  I nodded. “I’m happy to see you,” I said, relying on form so that I wouldn’t have to try explaining the jumble of thoughts swirling inside my head. “Until today, I never knew I had any relatives. Any family at all, except for my dad.”

  Mrs. Ainsworth sniffed. “Your father did not understand our ways,” she said. “It is always a mistake for our kind to marry cowen.”

  “Our kind?” I asked.

  “Witches,” she said.

  “Oh.” I looked to Agnes. She’d said it. Actually used the word. “Grandmother, please,” Agnes hushed. “That is not a term we should use.”

  “Not with cowen,” Mrs. Ainsworth clarified. “But Serenity surely—”

  “She goes by Katy,” Agnes said crisply. “And that in itself should tell us that she is not ready to hear—”

  Mrs. Ainsworth looked pained. “You were so dear to us.” Her teacup rattled in its saucer. “And we’ve missed you . . . so much . . .” She had to set the cup down and cover her face. This was my great-grandmother, I realized. Batty or not, she was my legacy, my blood. I moved to sit beside
her, and she threw her arms around me with a little cry and the soft scent of powder.

  “Oh, my precious child,” she whispered, her eyes filled with tears. “Do you really not remember us at all?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really don’t remember ever being here before.”

  She took my hand. “Darling Katy,” she said. “How difficult it must have been for you all these years.”

  “Perhaps it was better, under the circumstances,” Agnes said. “Her father was cowen. She may not have manifested at all.” She looked at me curiously. “Or did you?”

  “Did . . . did I what?” I stammered.

  “Display some unusual ability before you came to Whitfield. Something that you may have felt wasn’t quite . . . well, normal.”

  I inhaled sharply. I’d never told anyone about the pushing before. “Well, sometimes I think I can make things move. Actually, I don’t know if I can or not. It’s probably just my imagination.”

  The two women exchanged a glance between them.

  “We heard about the party,” Agnes said. “And the fire.”

  “I didn’t set the fire,” I said stolidly.

  “No, of course not.”

  “I put it out. I pushed. Made something move. Only this time it wasn’t a real object. I used a blanket. But the blanket was only in my mind.” I shook my head. “I’ll bet that sounds completely crazy.”

  “Not to us, dear,” Mrs. Ainsworth said.

  Agnes looked stern. “We don’t care for that term, either.”

  “Oh, stop it, Agnes!” The old woman waved her handkerchief agitatedly. “One mustn’t say ‘witches’. One mustn’t say ‘crazy’. For heaven’s sake, why can’t you just let people say what they mean!”

  Agnes was silent for a long moment. Finally she said, “Of course, Grandmother. You’re right. The name-calling hasn’t done us in yet.”

  “And it won’t, as long as we don’t let it,” Mrs. Ainsworth said stubbornly.

  “Is it because of my mother?” I asked. “The name-calling, I mean.”

  “Only the crazy part,” Mrs. Ainsworth said, shifting in her seat. “People have been calling us witches for centuries.” She raised her eyebrows. “Ourselves included.”