Witchtown

by Cory Putman Oakes

  Just as I hoped she would.

  The second her fingers touched the switch, the circle of candles she had stumbled into lit up with a blaze of yellowy orange light. Beside me, Talya raised her hands and stepped forward to seal the circle.

  I could barely hear the words, even though Talya was shouting them. I was too busy watching my mother’s face. Her expression went from terrified to confused to livid in a matter of seconds.

  By the time she realized what was happening, it was too late. Talya had completed the circle and my mother was trapped inside. We had encircled the space with rowan branches, just to be extra cautious. I had left one quarter of the circle open so that she could enter, but I closed it now by kicking the branches back into place.

  “Thanks, Bradley,” I said, giving the ghost an appreciative nod.

  He nodded back, gravely, then floated up to the corner of the Depot and disappeared.

  Below me, Kellen flipped on the lights for real and then leaned against the wall, arms folded over his chest.

  Aubra glared at me from the center of the circle.

  “I should have known you wouldn’t give up so easily,” she said ruefully.

  “Darkness and clouds, Mother,” I singsonged. “You have always underestimated me.”

  She ignored me and closed her eyes. I could tell by her breathing that she was trying to channel. But after a couple of seconds, her eyes flew open and she fell forward onto her knees, gasping for breath and grimacing in pain.

  “Hello, Ms. O’Sullivan,” Talya said formally, striding forward until she was standing a few feet in front of the circle she had used to ensnare my mother. “You seem to have stumbled into what is known as a Thief’s Trap. One of Reginald Harris’s favorite spells. The breathlessness you’re experiencing, that squeezing sensation around your neck? You’re feeling that because you’re in possession of something that isn’t yours. That’s what is causing the trap to collapse in on you. All you have to do is give up what you have stolen, and the trap will set you free.”

  My mother shot Talya a haughty look and closed her eyes again.

  “Attempting to channel will make it worse,” Talya warned her, her voice chillingly calm. “Particularly trying to channel with stolen power.”

  My mother gasped again, louder than before, and brought her hands up to claw at her throat.

  “Let. Me. Go,” she wheezed.

  Talya had explained the gist of the spell to me earlier, but only now did I see the true brilliance of it. This was probably the one spell where my mother’s strength, stolen or not, couldn’t help her. In fact, it was working against her.

  Talya was kind of a genius.

  My mother seemed to be thinking along the same lines. She glowered at the black-clad girl standing in front of her. Then she closed her eyes again, but this time I could tell that she was trying to force herself to relax. She took a very deliberate deep breath. She was trying to buy time.

  I stepped forward.

  “The trap is sprung, Mother. Only you can get yourself out of it.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “How could you, Macie? I’ve protected you for years. It’s been you and me. And this is how you repay me? By letting your friend hold me hostage?”

  That made me pause for a beat. Doubt flooded in. I shook my head to clear it, but it was still there. The pull, the power she had over me. It was like she had me on a leash.

  I looked down at the moonstone. Then quickly, before the pull could get any stronger, I undid the clasp and let the necklace fall to the floor.

  It hit the polished cement just outside the boundary of the circle, out of my mother’s reach. Her eyes widened as she watched it fall, and I waited until she looked back up at me before I answered her.

  “I want what is mine.”

  She cleared her throat. The calm that she was always so good at summoning settled over her face, and she sat back on her heels.

  “What makes you think that I have something that belongs to you?”

  “I don’t think that the power you’ve been wielding all these years is mine,” I informed her, surprised at how strong my voice sounded. “I know it is. And I want it back.”

  My mother laughed. At least she tried to. The trap was holding her tightly enough that she made a little choking sound.

  “Yours? You’ve never done anything to deserve it. Real power, true power, comes only when you’ve earned it. And you haven’t.”

  “You have?” I asked coldly.

  “Absolutely.”

  When all I could do was stare at her incredulously, she went on.

  “So you were born a Natural? Who do you think was responsible for that? I birthed you. And after your father left us, I raised you. I could have left you at the nearest Haven. You would have been just another Natural orphan. But I didn’t. I kept you. I gave up everything for you. If that doesn’t entitle me to the power you happened to be born with, I don’t know what does.”

  Really? That was it? I was certain there had to be more to the story than my mother’s ego and her entitlement.

  Next to me, Talya scoffed. “Seriously?” she said. “You think you deserve some sort of reward for not abandoning your child?”

  Her words had some bite to them. I knew that her parents had essentially done just that—​dumped her off at Witchtown when they didn’t like what she had turned out to be.

  We’re all misfits here. Refugees from the real world, Gayle had said.

  My mother rubbed her throat with one hand, then raised her chin proudly into the air.

  “I don’t need to justify myself to either of you,” she said haughtily. “I found a way to survive—”

  “By stealing from me!” I interrupted her. “By lying to me! By making me think, every single day of my life, that I was some awful thing that had to be hidden!”

  “It was necessary. You can’t be trusted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Seattle.”

  I blinked. That day, that image, had always been cloudy inside my head. But not now. Now that I wasn’t wearing the moonstone, I could see it clearly, in a way I had never seen it before. There was far less to the memory than I would have thought.

  I had been standing in front of a window, shaking with rage. I had called up to the sky and the rain had come. Just like that. As easy as breathing. And my anger had vanished.

  “I did make it rain that day,” I muttered.

  “You made it flood that day,” my mother corrected me. “You were angry at me. You asked me about your father, I refused to talk about him, and you threatened me. You said that you would make it rain until I told you more about him. And you did. Our whole street was under water. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage; it was a miracle that no one was hurt.

  “After that, I knew I had to do something. We couldn’t live on the outside anymore, not with you out of control like that. People were asking too many questions. So I brought us to a Haven. I learned how to channel. And I met Pendle Bishop. She made our necklaces and arranged for the . . . transfer, of your power to me. So that I could use it for both of us.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said sarcastically. “It was a selfless move on your part. You did it for me. It was all for me.”

  “It was for us,” she said evenly. “It has always been the two of us, Macie.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me?” I asked her. “Were you ever going to explain things?”

  When she didn’t answer, I inched up as close to the circle as I dared.

  “Were you ever going to give it back?”

  My mother raised her eyes to mine. I expected a lie. An elaborate, made-up story. But instead, she shocked me with what could only have been the truth.

  “No.”

  I drew back from the circle.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” I muttered, half to myself. “You’re a thief. I guess I just never thought you’d steal f
rom me.”

  My mother said nothing.

  “You’ve made me into a thief too,” I went on. Not accusing her, not getting angry. I was past all that. “You made me think that the world was out to get me, that I had no choice but to steal what I needed.” I shook my head. “It was never the world, Mother. It was you. You wronged me. Me and so many others. And you did it all using my power.”

  I winced. That was the hardest part to stomach. The power that had altered all those memories, in town after town; the power that had nearly choked Rafe to death—​it had all been mine. Stolen, misused. But mine.

  “It’s time for me to take it back, Mother.”

  She smiled. A weirdly out of place, strange smile.

  “And how do you think you’re going to do that?”

  She casually undid the clasp of her necklace with one hand and laid the necklace on the floor in front of her.

  “You think that’s all it takes? All this time we’ve spent in Havens and still you’ve learned nothing about magic? These necklaces are the mere artifacts of a spell, worked over ten years ago by Pendle Bishop. Funny thing about people who do spells for money; they always make sure they’re the only ones who can break them. And now she’s dead. There’s nothing your silly Thief’s Trap can do about that.”

  “Did you kill Pendle Bishop?” I demanded. I had asked her that once before, but I had never been satisfied with her answer.

  “What if I did?” my mother asked. Coolly, calmly. Like we weren’t even talking about a person. “Whether by my hand or not, she’s still dead.”

  “You’re a monster,” I said, staring hard at the floor. My moonstone lay there, just on the other side of the circle from my mother’s. I was free of my chains. And yet . . . it made no difference.

  I looked over at Talya.

  “What do we do?”

  She spread her hands, and I noticed they were shaking slightly. The effort of holding the spell for so long was taxing her. The trap had been the extent of our plan. And I wasn’t sure how much longer she could go on.

  My mother was watching Talya too, and the sight of my friend’s struggle brought a smile to her lips. She settled back into the center of the circle and sat cross-legged, content to wait us out.

  “It’s a shame you can’t ask Pendle for help,” my mother mused. “But unfortunately, I think you’d find the conversation a bit one-sided.”

  “Maybe not,” came a voice from the back of the Depot.

  Kellen stepped forward from his place in the shadows. He was holding a small brown earthenware jar. It was caked in dirt, as if it had recently been buried.

  My heart skipped a beat when I recognized what type of jar it was: an urn.

  Kellen held it up so that my mother could see.

  “Why don’t we find out what Pendle Bishop has to say?” he asked. His face was grim, worryingly devoid of even a hint of his usual humor. He started to chant.

  I exchanged a glance with Talya, who had begun to go a little bit white in the face. I couldn’t understand most of Kellen’s words—​they sounded like they might be Latin. But I knew what he was going to do when he reached his hand into the jar and stepped up beside me, right to the boundary of the circle that held my mother captive.

  “Pendle Bishop, return to us!”

  He tossed a handful of Pendle Bishop’s ashes into the circle at my mother’s feet. A cloud of ash dust flew into my mother’s face and I blanched. Beside me, I heard Talya make a gagging noise.

  My mother looked disgusted as well. She covered her mouth and scrambled backwards, but the cloud followed her. Instead of dissipating, it rose up and started slowly taking on form until there was a specter of Pendle Bishop looming over my mother, complete with messy braids and multiple layers of threadbare clothing.

  “Pendle—” my mother began, but the specter cut her off.

  “Give it back to her,” the old Natural growled.

  My mother went to speak. I don’t know if it was to argue or agree, but Pendle Bishop didn’t wait to find out. She reached out, grasped my mother’s jaw, and used her other hand to reach inside my mother’s mouth.

  My mother screamed as the specter drew something out of her. It was light, it was dark, and it appeared to be stuck. Pendle Bishop yanked hard, once, twice, a third time. My mother screamed even louder, especially when, with the last tug, it came free.

  Pendle Bishop threw it behind her and it hit me in the center of the chest, knocking me backwards.

  I hardly noticed when I fell to the ground. The jolt from hitting the floor was nothing compared to what was going on inside me. The thing that Pendle Bishop had thrown burrowed and expanded until it filled every square inch of me. I gasped, and for a moment I thought it might burst right out through my skin. But as it reached its limit, it stopped and receded, curling back into itself and waiting, like a coiled spring, somewhere just below my heart.

  I sat forward, shaking.

  “Are you okay?” Kellen reached down and hauled me to my feet. I reeled for a minute, but then found that my feet were quite solid beneath me. I let go of him.

  Is this what it felt like to be whole?

  “I think so,” I said. “What was that?”

  “Part reverse exorcism, part summoning spell, I think. I was pretty much making it up as I went along.”

  “Great,” came Talya’s voice from just beside us. “But do you know how to turn it off?”

  She pointed toward the circle.

  Pendle Bishop was still standing over my mother, glaring down at her with a fiery intensity that had my proud mother quivering at her feet.

  “I should have seen you for what you were,” the old Natural snarled. “I have to make it right. I will make it right.”

  Even as she said the words, she was fading. She was almost see-through when she threw her arms into the air and said a word I couldn’t quite catch. The rowan branches all around her exploded in flames, just as she disappeared completely, leaving my mother trapped, alone, inside a circle of fire.

  Talya gasped. My mother screamed, but the sound was cut off as she started choking and coughing. I stared helplessly at the flames. I saw myself, when Bradley had tried to kill me. And I tried to remember what Kellen had told the kids about channeling wind to put out fires. Could I do that now?

  I raised my hand, but whatever it was that had tucked itself inside of me remained stubbornly coiled up. Dormant. The wall was still there. Even without the moonstone, without my mother, the wall was still there. What did that mean?

  My mother screamed again and I was about to start panicking when there was a sudden burst of compressed air. Kellen was no longer at my side. When he came back into view, he was holding the fire extinguisher, the white bow still stuck to its side. He sprayed it slowly back and forth until most of the fire had been smothered beneath a blanket of white foam.

  “Well, what do you know?” he said. “It did come in handy.”

  My mother was coated with a layer of white as well. I kicked aside a bunch of smoldering rowan and stood over her.

  Wall or no wall, I was no longer her pale, empty shadow. I would never be that again.

  I was the strong one now.

  “I want you to leave here,” I told her gruffly. “And never come back. You say you don’t want to settle down, don’t want to be stuck in one place? Fine. Don’t. You can have the whole world to wander in. But leave me Witchtown. This place is mine. I never want to see you here again.”

  I was expecting a scene. Yelling. Cursing. Threats.

  But all she did was glare at me through lowered lashes, and give a barely perceptible nod.

  I stepped back, giving her room. She rose to her feet, and I thought I saw a trace of the Aubra I knew in the way she set her chin and marched determinedly out of the door.

  I followed her as far as the doorway. I couldn’t help it. In spite of everything, it was surprisingly painful to watch her walk away. It had always been the two of us.

  She stop
ped a few yards away and turned to look back at the Depot.

  “I can see what this place means to you,” she said. “I’ve always wanted you to have something like this.”

  I swallowed. I opened my mouth to tell her . . . I’m not sure what. Goodbye? Please stay? I forgive you? I hate you? I’m not sure what I wanted to say. But before I could say anything, her eyes narrowed.

  “And now that you have it, I want you to watch it burn.”

  She closed her eyes and channeled. It wasn’t much—​not nearly what she could have done before. She was only a Learned now. She had no power of her own. But she was able to channel enough to send a spark up toward the Solstice wreath that Percy had hung on the front of the Depot.

  As soon as the spark touched the garish, reddish yellow flowers, the wreath exploded.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The blast from the explosion threw me back inside the Depot. From flat on my back, on top of a pile of ashy rowan, I could see that the entire front of the building was on fire and the flames were spreading fast.

  Kellen threw the empty fire extinguisher aside and hauled me to my feet. I was still a little stunned, so I didn’t understand why he suddenly shoved me toward the front door. The frame was on fire, and there was a curtain of flames between us and the outside.

  I couldn’t see my mother anymore, but I knew better than to expect her to have stuck around.

  Finally, after all these years, you’re willing to face the truth about her.

  “Cover your head and run!” Kellen yelled, pointing at the door as he pulled a coughing Talya to her feet.

  I shook my head to clear it and looked appraisingly at the flaming door. Kellen was right; it was the only way out. I steeled myself to run through the flames, but then there was a high-pitched scream from upstairs.

  “Aimee!” Talya yelled, throwing Kellen off and running for the stairs.

  My little shadow.

  I felt Kellen at my heels as I raced after Talya. In my mind I was kicking myself. I had no idea how Aimee had gotten into the Depot, and all the way upstairs, without any of us noticing. But I should have known that my mother was never going to just slink away without a final parting blow. If Aimee was hurt, I would never be able to forgive myself.