by Robin Hale
Jean’s eyes took on the watery quality of grief and my heart clenched at the first swell of pain for my mother I’d felt in years. I’d thought I was past it.
“And I think it would be a good idea — for all of us — if you would consider joining Greenhollow.” Jean made the recommendation with the same matter-of-factness she’d told Rhea that I needed food and rest. It wasn’t a request but a healer’s prescription. “You could meet some of your mother’s friends. And I think that having grown up away from magic, you would benefit from having an established coven to learn from.”
I realized, belatedly, that Jean was making a pitch. She thought I might say no. She thought I hadn’t come to Cincinnati in search of a community to belong to.
“Yes!” I blurted. “Yes, I would love that.”
Relief flooded Jean’s face. “Great! I’ll add you to the calendar.” Her mouth quirked in an ironic smile. “Witches of the 21st century, here.” Her thumbs tapped over her phone screen and I felt an answering buzz in my pocket.
“Rhea said that witches usually specialize.” She’d sounded uncomfortable when she said it, but I couldn’t fight back the curiosity about what possibilities I would find in that strange new world.
The blonde nodded. “That’s right. I’m a pretty good hand with healing magic — you’re welcome,” Jean said with a grin. “Your mother was more into divination. We’ve got some herbalists — kind of like potion-makers? A few enchanters — witches who make things like the charm above the door or the ones keeping tourists out of the more magically-relevant section of the store. Magic is like Star Trek, y’know? ‘Infinite diversity in infinite combinations’.”
“And the covens — Rhea said that she’s a hedge witch? Is that...how does someone become a hedge witch?” I leaned forward on my stool, hands sapping heat from my mug, and burned with unrelenting curiosity about the woman who had saved me in the woods.
“That’s, ah, a bit more complicated.” Jean grimaced. “I really think that you should direct questions about Rhea’s background to her, you know? It isn’t my place to say. There are a few hedge witches in the community and they all feel very differently about it.”
Disappointment settled in around the excitement of learning anything at all about my mother, but I couldn’t fault Jean for the decision. It wasn’t fair of me to try and figure Rhea out behind her back. But I was in that first full rush of feeling about someone compelling — I wanted to know everything there was to know about her.
And maybe it was disloyal of me, but I wanted to know about Rhea almost as much as I wanted to learn about my mother and the world she’d left behind.
Checking my mailbox was usually an exercise in frustration. It involved fighting with an ancient lock that stuck more than it turned, yanking a pile of mail out of a too-small space, and sorting through massive amounts of strange-smelling paper, looking for something that was actually addressed to me not ‘or current resident’.
In my time in Cincinnati, I’d received three pieces of intentional non-junk mail. They were all bills sent before I’d switched to online bill payment. The rest of it was advertisements or store circulars or credit card offers. Things you apparently couldn’t convince the postal service you didn’t want to receive.
But that night? That night was different.
I fought my way into the mailbox as usual but this time, in amongst the specials on organic salad greens and value-packs of chicken thighs, was a box.
The front of the package, wrapped in simple brown paper, simply read ‘Laurel’. No return address. No destination address. It clearly hadn’t been sent through the post office or a private carrier. But there it was all the same.
I’d scarcely gotten into my apartment before I was opening the little package. Brown wrapping paper and lightweight tissue fell to the floor in soft, fluttering glides and I stood in the middle of the room holding a silver pendant.
A charm. It was a charm. I could feel the lingering tinge of magic on it like the pendants at the Wyrm, could see the glow of it like the piece Rhea wore around her neck —
Rhea. It felt like Rhea.
Something about her had always reminded me of sitting inside in the middle of a thunderstorm, and the charm radiated that same feeling.
I picked through the detritus on the floor until I found a card. No signature, no salutation. Only the typed message ‘To guard your window’.
Warmth flooded my chest and I couldn’t have fought the smile off my face if I’d tried. Rhea had sent me a charm to help me feel safe. The magic that flowed through the charm felt like calm, like relaxation. It felt like receiving a message from a far-away loved one.
And if it also felt like a cloying, nervous rush — was that really so different from feeling butterflies in my stomach?
I hung the charm next to the window where I would be able to look up at it from my pillow, think of Rhea, and fall asleep in the scent of her magic.
For the first time, opening my eyes in a dream was fraught with something other than simple curiosity. There was the tension of possibility in it, the possibility that what was about to happen was in some way prophetic. Had my mother dreamed the way that I did? Had she known that car wreck would take her life?
I was in the park again. In the park where the coyote had bitten me. Bit me and transported me from the world I’d always known into one with witches, vampires, and shapeshifters. It was years before my time there — dream certainty flooded me in the absence of proof. And then I saw her.
My mother.
She stood in the clearing with the man I’d met at Barleywick. There was pain on his face, regret on hers.
The world whirled around me.
I was low to the ground, running through the woods, my paws striking the hard dirt and moving deftly through the fallen leaves.
Another shift.
I stood on the front porch of the house at Barleywick, rich, dark wood taking my weight easily. I watched my hand stretch out, take hold of the door. The body I rode along with hesitated for a moment, but we pulled the door open and stepped inside.
Oh god. I’d been there before. Stretched out in front of me was the house I’d dreamt of since childhood. Every rug, every photograph was etched indelibly into my mind and, at once, I was consumed by horror at the thought of this body walking through it. I didn’t know them, didn’t have any idea why they were there but it felt wrong, wrong, so wrong…
My vision warped sideways.
And I saw Rhea — gorgeous, strong Rhea — standing in her workshed, jacket cast off, arms bare in the lamplight. She was working on something I couldn’t see and the air around her was filled with the light of her magic. It swirled in pearlescent white clouds out from her body — then all at once it was tainted. Black tendrils invaded the light, pushed in from beyond the reach of her power, swirled and darkened the space around her and I wanted to scream, to cry out for her to run, to defend herself, but —
The scene changed.
Rhea stood in front of me again, but she was not the stalwart, calm witch I’d seen in her place of power. Instead, every line of her body was etched with agony. She strained at unnatural angles, back bent and limbs twisting behind her as —
As she was engulfed by a storm.
Her scream echoed throughout the dreamscape, clanging in my bones and overwhelming my senses. It built, built in a terrifying crescendo and then, flipping a switch, it stopped.
And the world was darkness.
10
Rhea
The canvas cover that lived at the top of the greenhouse was supposed to release on a pulley system. I’d worked with my aunt one summer until the thing flowed down the roof as smoothly as melted butter and it had been the pride of my young life when it was put into service. It was supposed to be simple.
Supposed to be.
The fact that my life actively and vigorously rejected ‘supposed to’ like a healthy immune system rejecting a virus meant that I was on a ladder fighting with
the suddenly-tangled rigging rather than inside the greenhouse repotting plants. Working the tangles out of the knots was a slow, painstaking process that left my brain entirely too much time to roam.
And it roamed where I least wanted it to.
It was inevitable. I couldn’t get Laurel off my mind for more than minutes at a time. And while I worked the rope through its series of loops and switchbacks, my mind helpfully replayed the exact sound of Laurel’s tiny gasp when she’d lifted her face to me. It stood in the snapshot of that moment and highlighted the heat of her mouth, the whirl of color in her eyes, the softness of her body as it pressed against mine in a hug that had been the best option I’d had at the time — but had gone sideways almost immediately.
It wasn’t useful.
I pressed the heel of one of my hands against my eye and scowled at myself. She was attractive, yes. She was interesting, yes. And she looked at me like I was someone that she could rely on and I — goddess, I craved that. But I didn’t deserve it.
And it came along with too much risk.
I tightened my grip on the rope and jerked the next length of it through the switchback harder than I should have.
Being around Laurel strained my control.
My magic felt closer to the surface around her and I didn’t need to test my limits any more than I already was. The Council would be waiting for me to slip up — Absalon made sure of that — and I didn’t want to give them an excuse to bind the powers of the last member of the Barleywick coven.
Besides, with that were that attacked Laurel? She was clearly in the crosshairs of a vampire. It was the only explanation that made any sense. I knew that Jean wanted to protect her from that, wanted to keep her from having to know too much about the dangers of our community before there was something concrete to tell her — but it wasn’t fooling me.
Pretending it wasn’t true wouldn’t make it so and the last thing I needed was the attention of a vampire on top of the rest of my problems.
It would be fine. Laurel would join Greenhollow, meet more witches, and she’d point those pretty hazel eyes someone else’s way.
She probably wouldn’t even show up at Barleywick again, now that she had something more interesting to focus on.
“Shouldn’t someone be holding that for you?”
The sound of Laurel’s voice breaking through my silent thoughts nearly sent me toppling off the ladder. My stomach lurched — embarrassingly, not only because of the sudden shock of adrenaline — and I caught myself by the edge of the roof and sent a scowl Laurel’s way.
“Wasn’t a problem until someone decided to startle me,” I groused.
Those pretty features, dusted with freckles, twisted into a wince and part of me wished I could take the sharp words back.
“Sorry,” Laurel said. “I just…ladders make me nervous. Here, I’ll come hold it.” She picked her way across the ground cover that lined the path and stopped with her hands stretched out toward the ladder. “Oh, is that a charm?”
What had she been doing since I’d left her that she could already read magical auras that clearly?
“Yeah,” I said roughly and dropped down from the ladder. It was a stupid, boastful move, but I didn’t want to see Laurel looking up at me even a second longer than I had to. “It’s self-stabilizing.” I shrugged. “Ladders are dangerous.”
The delighted laugh from Laurel caught in my chest and threatened to flood my system with an irrational warmth. Not useful.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked, wiping my hands on a towel at my belt. “If you’re not careful, your GPS is going to start thinking you live here.”
“Oh.” Laurel’s face went pink and she bit down on her lower lip. “If you’re busy, or you want me to go, I can —”
Damn it. “It’s fine.” I turned from Laurel and headed into the greenhouse to check the canvas cover, waving behind me for Laurel to follow. “Eventually, you’ll notice that you’re the only one who does it. I’m out of practice.”
And in an instant, that uncertain frown was replaced with a blindingly bright smile. “Oh, I don’t mind that.” She paused a moment. “There was that guy outside the shed the other —”
“He doesn’t count.” I bit the words out from behind clenched teeth. I didn’t want to talk about Absalon.
I could see that Laurel wanted to ask. It was painted on every inch of her wildly expressive face, but I hadn’t exactly made it a secret that I didn’t want to talk about it, and I watched her rein the impulse in. Guilt swelled at taking advantage of her nature that way, but I couldn’t see any way of explaining who Absalon was and why he had been in my shop without having to unravel the whole damn sordid story.
I wasn’t ready for that.
Something small, that spark that I couldn’t quite extinguish niggled in the back of my mind and suggested that I wouldn’t be able to keep it from Laurel forever.
I could damn well try.
“So what’s with the tarp?” Laurel asked.
“Temperature control. It’s a greenhouse, but it’s still Ohio in the summer. I need to be able to open it up in winter but keep the worst of the sun off it in the hotter months,” I explained.
“I can’t imagine what must go into keeping all of this going,” Laurel murmured, reaching out with one soft hand to stroke along the leaf of a seedling. “So you must be an herbalist, right? A potion maker? Jean was telling me about specializations. With the greenhouses, I figure that must be it, right?”
The question, innocent though it was, was a punch to my unprotected gut. “No,” I said as gently as I could manage. It wasn’t all that gently. With luck, it had sounded more cranky old housecat than rabid, wild thing, but I wasn’t good at ‘gentle’. “I only grow them. My magic has never been compatible with living things.”
Understatement.
A contemplative quiet hung in the thick, fragrant air of the greenhouse and I watched Laurel trail her fingers along the temporary seedling holders, weighing the words she would use to break it. For someone who had the capacity to be the most impulsive person I’d ever met, Laurel sometimes approached her words with a surprising amount of care.
“Jean said that my mother was a divination witch.” She raised her hazel eyes from the plants and met my own. “She thinks that I am, too.”
“Jean’s usually got a pretty good sense of these things,” I offered while the weight of Laurel’s look started to bear down on me. I wanted to shift my weight, break eye contact. All the awkward, prey-response things I had promised myself not to do anymore.
“I had a dream about Barleywick — I don’t know what it meant or if it even meant anything. But I had a dream and I’m worried that — well. I’m worried that either something is going to happen, or something did happen that I’m supposed to…to fix.” Laurel’s jaw was set, determined and she shifted her feet to plant them more firmly. “Can I take a look at the house? I won’t touch any of your things.”
I barked a humorless laugh. “You won’t find any of my things in that house.”
A brief look of surprise flickered through Laurel’s eyes but she quickly recovered. “So, can I? I’m — I’m afraid for you.” The words sounded like they’d hurt her, and I wondered again at what she’d meant when she’d said she dreamed of me.
I scowled. The idea of opening up the house, of stepping foot inside that place again horrified me. I wasn’t sure there would be a house left standing if I tried it. But I also couldn’t imagine what my mom would’ve said if I ever turned away a seer who’d had a dream.
Unfortunately, she had managed to raise me better than that in the time she’d been given.
“Fine,” I said after a long, painful silence. “But be careful in there. It’s — there’s potentially a lot of restless magic and I don’t want Jean coming after me if you get your ass blown up.”
Laurel swallowed, mixing nervousness with her obvious joy at being permitted to go look. “Is that…common?”
A
soft snort punctuated the shake of my head and I waved for her to follow me. “This way, Pearson.”
Opening the front door of the house was one of the more surreal experiences of my life, even as I stepped back to let Laurel cross the threshold ahead of me. I felt the memories inside the house, the echoes of power, the weight of regret that I knew was only my own — the dead have no time for regrets — against my face as distinctly as I might have felt the wind.
“Oh, Rhea,” Laurel breathed.
All the muscles in my back tensed and my shoulders began to bunch up closer to my neck. Suddenly, I didn’t want to hear how sad the place felt. How much pain and fear lingered. I didn’t want the place where I had once been happy to become something that caused Laurel Pearson to look at me with pity.
“This place…it’s beautiful.”
I jerked out of my spiral of fear and shame and turned to look at Laurel again. She walked carefully through the space, treading softly somewhere sacred. Somewhere she didn’t want to risk any disrespect.
Seeing her there, this modern fixation of mine standing among things I’d only let find space in the memories I couldn’t escape, the ones that took up time in my dreams, made my chest clench painfully.
There was Laurel standing on the rug I could remember burning my knees when I played too vigorously with our dog. There she was trailing her fingers over the shade of a lamp that my mother had bought to annoy my aunt. She looked…right among the photographs of our family and the things that I hadn’t had the heart to give away. I’d sealed them away, making my childhood home into a mausoleum.
“I’m getting…this is going to sound ridiculous but does someone live here who loves Fleetwood Mac? I can almost hear a song. It’s been played over and over.” Laurel’s gaze was glassy, unfocused and her hand was suspended over one of the tall speakers that sat in the corner of the room. Its face was covered in soft, stretchy fabric that I used to love to pet when I was small. I’d feel the vibrations of my mother’s music and pretend that I could touch the sound.