“Christ almighty,” Josiah muttered in disgust.
Henry rubbed his jaw with the side of his thumb as he stared at a vista only he could see. “I like it.” His gaze snapped to Josiah. “But what if that fails too? What then?”
“She and I haven’t discussed the details of what comes next.” Other than the most important things of all. Her first ultrasound. Their first date. “But I’m putting her first. That means if she needs me to pull out of the coven, I’m going to pull out. I’ll set up a trust fund so you can keep going.” He gave Richard a hard look. “I won’t leave you in the lurch like some of you seem to think I might.”
Richard started to look somewhat mollified.
Then Steven spoke up with a smile. “I think we should break into Sherman & Associates. Or Russell Sherman’s house. Or both.” Everyone else fell silent and stared at him. “What? I’d love to get a shot at what they’ve got on their servers.”
If they did break in, nothing they found would be admissible, but pursuing a successful legal strategy had always been just one potential plan they might use to get at their opponent. And this would give them the opportunity to harvest a list of the firm’s real clients, not the bogus, partial list someone had planted in Sullivan’s office for the police to find.
“That’s perfect,” Josiah said. “Let’s do it.”
Safe, he texted at eight o’clock that evening.
Safe, she replied.
In Everwood, after the incident with the labyrinth, Sarah called Sam to tell him they’d had a “magical mishap.” He whistled when he stopped by the next week to check out the lawn.
“I’ll pay whatever it costs to fix it,” Molly offered, heat washing over her face.
Both Sam and Sarah looked at her, amused. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. “Sarah’s got a lot of social collateral in Everwood. I’ll round up some volunteers.”
Sarah underwent her next chemo treatment. Sam took her and stayed with her for the four-hour appointment. Afterward, Sarah took to her bed for three days. Unable to keep solid food down, she watched TV and napped while Molly brought her cups of tea made with turmeric, ginger, mint, and magic.
Molly’s pendulum began to respond properly after two more days of practicing. As she suspected, it spun widdershins as her positive answer and clockwise as her negative. She started using it to figure out which meals would be the most advantageous for Sarah to eat and focused all her energy on cooking those. After only a week, Sarah began to look and sound as robust as she had before the treatment.
“I’ve never recovered so quickly before.” Sarah gave her one of those smiles that lit her face. “And I have you to thank.”
“Truly, it’s my pleasure,” Molly said. “I’m so glad I can help.”
After her experience with the labyrinth, she had been afraid she might be imbalanced, but with Sarah’s direction, she began to learn how to cook foods, healing potions, and cast healing spells with her right hand, and to practice offensive spells with her left. The more she practiced with both, the more even and balanced her Power became.
“Because you’re both things,” Sarah told her, smiling. “Both healer and fighter.”
When Sarah grew strong enough to walk up the stairs again, she took Molly up to the attic, and Molly got the chance at last to see what Sarah’s workroom looked like.
The attic floor ran the length of the house, and it was massive, airy, and well-organized. The smell of herbs was pervasive, all coming from a tall set of shelves that covered half the room on one side. On the other side, bottles of unknown substances lined the shelves, some of them carrying liquid that seemed to swirl and twist restlessly within the glass.
An extensive library, along with cabinets that were closed and appeared to be locked, covered the shelves in the other part of the workroom. A large fireplace dominated one wall in the middle of the space, and a few Bunsen burners sat neatly to one side of a long table.
As Molly stood in the middle of the room, sparks of magic came from every direction. She felt drunk with possibility as she turned, soaking everything in.
Watching her, Sarah laughed. “I have no cauldron, as you can see.”
“It’s all so perfect.” She gave a happy sigh. “I love how organized you are.”
“I don’t like confusion in any state, not mentally or emotionally, and certainly not physically.” Sarah walked over to the shelves that held potions and candles. “See how I have everything marked here?”
Molly walked over, noting the labels on both the shelves and also on the items themselves. “Yes.”
“Think you can find anything if I send you up here on your own?”
She grinned and nodded. “Oh yes.”
“Good. The cabinets are the only thing off-limits for now, and those are locked with a separate key. We’ll get to what’s inside them eventually.” Sarah led the way back down out of the attic. Molly followed, and Sarah carefully locked the door behind them. “Always lock this door behind you when you leave. Most of the dangerous things are in the cabinets, but to be on the safe side, I don’t want anybody up here I don’t trust.”
That sent a small glow of pleasure through her. “I understand.”
After that, she began to run errands for Sarah, delivering herbs, simples, and unguents to nearby residents. On her errands, Molly met Alyssa, a young single mother with a five-year-old boy named Evan who suffered from a rare lung disease. The potion Molly delivered helped Evan breathe almost normally from full moon to full moon.
She also met Charles and Bertrand, a retired married couple from San Francisco. Charles’s muscular dystrophy was held in check by Sarah’s simples and unguents. And she grew acquainted with seventy-five-year-old Homer, whose rheumatoid arthritis was eased by one of Sarah’s ointments.
And when she stopped to buy gas from Colin’s gas station, he came out to chat. He told her that Sarah had saved his daughter Tallulah’s life while his wife Sonja was still pregnant with her. Tallulah was a bright, healthy young woman now because of her.
Molly said, “The more I meet and talk to people, the more I realize how important Sarah is to this community.”
“That she is. Heard she’s taken a shine to you.” Colin squinted in the bright morning light as he leisurely washed the windows of her Subaru. The sun highlighted the gray threading through his short, curled hair and the good-natured lines that marked the mahogany landscape of his face. “It’s going to be a hard day when she leaves us.”
Sam rounded up a group of high school students to gather the labyrinth stones and rake the lawn clear of the scattered gravel. Once that had been done, Sarah taught Molly how to set the labyrinth, beginning with the portal stones, which acted as reservoirs to hold the actual magic. Walking through the portal activated the spell, but if someone stepped into the labyrinth at random, the magic remained quiescent.
Re-creating the labyrinth took multiple volunteers and a long, sweaty day of work. Sam showed up along with Colin and Tallulah, Bertrand, Alyssa, three students, and several witches from the local coven—Delphine and her younger brother Remy, Lexie, Sylvie, Tasha, Cara, and Lauren.
Bertrand’s husband Charles couldn’t contribute in physical labor, but he kept everyone supplied with cold drinks, watched Alyssa’s son Evan, and laid out the lunch Molly had prepared ahead of time.
When they finished, the labyrinth sprawled across the lawn as pristine as before, and Molly felt she had made friends with almost everybody present except perhaps for Sylvie, who was skittish as a feral cat and avoided direct contact with her.
Molly especially liked Delphine and Remy. The family resemblance between them was unmistakable in their regal bearing and long-limbed, muscular bodies. Delphine let her dark hair flow free in corkscrew curls and wore a pentacle on a leather thong at her neck while Remy had a spiderweb tattoo that covered most of his muscular back. Molly had come to realize how difficult it was to guess a witch’s age, but even so, she thought they might be
in their late twenties.
What she mostly noticed, however, were the closed, wary looks they gave her that gradually melted into friendliness as the day wore on. By the time everyone left in a flurry of good-nights, Molly felt exhausted but happy.
She belonged. In under a month’s time, she had managed to fit in here better than she had in nearly forty years back in Georgia. There was something depressing about that, or maybe it was uplifting for what it said about the future. As she fell asleep, all she knew for sure was that her life felt better now than it ever had. She wanted to grab hold of it with both hands and never let it go.
The more she saw of Everwood, the more she loved it. It was a small town with a population of around fifteen thousand with a greater population in the swirl of neighborhoods and shopping areas that sprawled farther outside the town limits. She loved to walk the boardwalk and shop in the small boutiques by the water.
There was only one vital piece missing. Countless times she struggled with the urge to call Josiah to tell him something. But no. She was the one who had made the rule, and she needed to abide by it.
So every day at five o’clock, she texted the one word they had agreed upon.
Safe.
Safe, he replied.
In Atlanta, Josiah and his coven prepared painstakingly to break into Sherman & Associates.
They expected to run into complications, possibly even magical traps. Josiah let them decide how they wanted him to help. For his part, he would just as soon stay on the front line, but if something happened and he was caught committing a crime, he would lose his position as DA.
After some deliberation they decided the power of the district attorney’s office was still too useful and he should work with Maria to provide backup surveillance. Steven, Henry, Richard, and Anson would do the actual breaking in.
They would execute the break-in on a Sunday night. After they had finalized the plan, Josiah worked with Anson on where to leave the Camry so he could pick it up when he ditched his Audi in another public place.
“I’m starting to feel uneasy about this,” Anson muttered. “You’re vanishing too much. If you had no idea someone was trying to track your movements, you wouldn’t be disappearing at all.”
“We always knew this would come down to violence and risk.” Even as he said it, he frowned. Like his old ambitions of political power, violence and risk no longer felt as acceptable as they once had.
If this were just a matter of revenge, he would have already given it up, set up the coven trust fund, and headed to California. But revenge was the simplest part of this. He could even give up the possibility of ever getting justice for what had happened to him. But Rasputin would keep victimizing witches, destroying not only their lives but the lives of their families, unless he was stopped.
He almost missed the eight-o’clock exchange that night, but at the last moment he whipped out his phone to text.
Safe.
She replied, Safe.
Back in Everwood, Sarah wanted to have a gathering on the summer solstice. “At first I didn’t think I’d be up for it, but I feel different with you here. Do you mind helping?”
Even with Molly’s gifts of energy and healing, they both knew this summer solstice was likely going to be Sarah’s last.
“Of course not,” Molly told her instantly. “I’m happy to do whatever I can.”
They worked hard to prepare. Molly found a blessing in a grimoire she’d been studying. With Sarah’s approval, she said the blessing over the food dishes she prepared the night before. It sank in over the night to provide extra nourishment and luck to anyone who ate the food.
When the day itself dawned, over three hundred people showed up to visit, eat, dance, walk Sarah’s labyrinth, and take turns sitting in on a drum circle that played for hours. After enjoying a bonfire that lasted late into the evening, Molly was pleased to see Sarah’s evident happiness as she said good night to the last of the visitors.
Then they called the day done. Right before Molly fell asleep, she whispered, “I love my life.”
The house seemed to be listening, because it gave a sigh and settled around her like a worn, much-loved jacket.
Molly kept delivering herbs, simples, and unguents to people in the surrounding area, and Sarah began to teach her how to create uncomplicated medicines.
At first Molly didn’t understand why certain medicines were better as a “simple”—which included tinctures—as opposed to an unguent, which was a thicker substance like an ointment or lotion that could be used for lubrication, because they weren’t categorized in a way that she could recognize.
“Magic is an entirely different ecosystem from what we’ve created through science,” Sarah told her. “Just because Tylenol and ibuprofen need to be taken orally, that doesn’t mean the magical equivalent for a headache medicine will be the same. Certain spells are only effective in combination with certain herbs. And some of those herbs can only be taken orally, and others can only be absorbed through the skin. In a modern drugstore you can find pills to take for an upset stomach. In magic, you can rub a tincture on your abdomen and the magic is absorbed through your skin. Different systems mean different ways of delivering relief for the same ailment.”
Once Molly understood that, her lessons on healing went much faster. She loved those, because they called out a nurturing side in her that blossomed and grew—but she studied offensive magic with the same single-mindedness that she had practiced back in Atlanta, as if her life depended on it, because one day it very well might.
Just as every witch had a positive and a negative, they also had a greater affinity for certain elements than others. Molly’s two strongest affinities were to the moon and the ocean. At Sarah’s direction, she went down to the beach to gather fresh, foaming ocean water under the light of the full moon, whispering over the jars until they glowed with Power.
There were defensive and offensive spells she could memorize. The most Powerful spells would be ones she created for herself. Most of those took at least a few minutes to cast, so if she became embroiled in an actual battle, her two main weapons were the telekinetic blasts and her Power whip that came out of her left palm.
She practiced spellcasting on the lawn with Delphine, who smiled with sharp-eyed pleasure as their combined Powers called in thunder and lightning while below the cliff, the ocean surf roared.
For practice with the telekinesis and the whip, she spent countless hours with Lauren, one of the Everwood coven witches who owned a yoga studio in town. Lauren looked like she had come into her Power around menopause, but her body was in immaculate condition, and she could spin and kick like a ninja.
“You’ve got one of the strongest Powers I’ve ever met,” Lauren gasped once after a long session that left them both streaming with sweat.
Molly nodded, unsurprised. Josiah and Sarah had each told her the same thing. She muttered, “I hope it’ll be enough if I run into trouble.”
When I run into trouble.
Because as Sarah had once said to her, witches were lightning rods for interesting and unusual events. And she intended on living a very long and interesting life.
When they sat to drink some water, Lauren gave her a sidelong smile. “You know she’s grooming you, don’t you?”
“What?” She shook herself out of her preoccupation. “Who is?”
“Sarah. She’s grooming you to take over running the Everwood coven when she… You know, when she passes.”
“She is?” Astonishment threatened to floor her. “You must be mistaken. I’m the least experienced witch in Everwood.”
“Delphine and I’ve talked about it. We both think you have the kind of combination that would matter most to Sarah—the healer side and the fighter side, and you’re extraordinarily strong in both. Everwood is a sanctuary to some people who really need it, and the leader of our coven has to be strong enough to protect it. But the healing matters too. And I’ve known Sarah for a lot of years, and she’s n
ever invited any of her students to live with her.”
Molly blew out a breath. “I thought she let me stay there because I offered to help, and because…” She had as much difficulty saying it as Lauren had. “Well, because time is short.”
“Before you arrived, each witch in the coven was going up to help out a few hours every day.” Lauren laughed. “Don’t look so crestfallen. Your magic-infused foods have done far more for her than any of us could. But… yes, you should give it some thought, because sooner or later, I think Sarah’s going to have The Talk with you.”
Next to Sarah, Lauren was the most senior witch. Pursing her lips, Molly asked with care, “How would you feel about that?”
“I think you’d be a good choice, Molly. You have a lot to learn, but you also have a solid head on your shoulders. I like the fact that you’re not too young but you’re still willing to learn and cooperate with others. I also appreciate the kindness you’ve shown to Sarah, but more importantly, to others who don’t have any way of paying you back. If the coven has an overwhelming objection, you might find the position hard to hold on to, but I’d back Sarah’s decision. I’ll be here to support you if you choose to take us on.”
She was thoughtful when she drove away from Lauren’s studio. How ironic that she might be in a position to acquire power after all. Not that it mattered to her. But she did like the idea of investing in her new community. She loved helping people who needed it, and if they needed her protection too…
She could see herself doing it.
The alarm on her phone went off. It was five o’clock.
Pulling over to the side of the road, she almost called Josiah to tell him about it and see what he thought. She was pretty sure she knew what the Josiah she had first met would have said.
But, no. That’s not what they were doing.
So she texted, Safe.
And he replied, Safe.
In Atlanta, the Sunday-evening B & E didn’t go off without a hitch.
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