by Robin Hale
“My mom.” I needed to remember to ask someone in Blackthorne for a dust charm. My throat was tight and my eyes burned with the threat of tears against what we’d stirred up by re-entering the space. “But nobody lives here anymore.”
Laurel looked up in surprise from where she’d been examining a photograph. “Oh,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
I shrugged and shoved my hands deep into my pockets. “We all die someday.”
“I guess I…well, I don’t know what I’m doing yet but it doesn’t feel like death here. To me.” That distance came into her eyes again and a smile spread across her lips. “There’s…the smell of something burning. Nutmeg and laughter. A lot of laughter. And someone trying to get a younger girl to drink hot chocolate, but there’s something in it she doesn’t want…”
My breath came more shallowly as Laurel spoke. She talked about it like she could see it. Like she was watching that winter solstice as it happened instead of getting impressions of it years after the fact.
“Peppermint schnapps,” I said. “My grandmother was trying to get me to drink her hot chocolate, but it always…she always put peppermint schnapps in it.” I tried to unclench my hand from where I’d buried my fingers in the upholstery of Nana’s favorite chair. I was only moderately successful. “It made her laugh when I cringed at the taste of alcohol.”
‘Leave her alone,’ my mother had said. ‘Or if you aren’t careful, she’ll get a taste for it!’
‘Nonsense! She’s a Barleywick, she’ll get a taste for it anyway!’ Nana had retorted, winking at me and sneaking me another spicy sugar cookie from the plate at her left.
My throat grew even tighter, threatening to choke me where I stood.
Laurel drifted from the living room, the kitchen. She made her way through the formal dining rooms — which she knew immediately had rarely been used for meals.
“Your aunt,” Laurel said, evidently more comfortable with reading the origins of memories the longer she worked. “She used to cheat at cards.”
I sputtered, surprised into laughing outright. “She always lost!” I protested.
Laurel turned to me with a warm, sly grin on her face and I was helpless to do anything but return it. “She was making sure you won.”
Then she was moving on again.
I bit back the beginning of a sob and willed myself not to give in to tears. It wasn’t the same as having my family, my coven back again. Nothing would ever be that. But it was the closest I’d felt to them in years and that damned spark at the base of my skull grew brighter, stronger and called out for Laurel like she was a miracle.
Maybe she was.
I followed Laurel down the hallway toward the back hall, back toward the rear entrance, the storm cellar, and the laundry room.
She lifted a hand to a black mark on the floral wallpaper, frowning while she did it. “There was something here — maybe a charm?” Her eyes were focused on something that wasn’t there anymore. Hadn’t been there for years.
And she was right, of course. There’d been a charm there. Some ridiculous air freshening charm that my aunt had made when she’d been dating a Blackthorne and wanted to try her hand at enchantment. It only worked half the time, but when it did the whole back of the house smelled of spring breezes and lilac blooms.
And when I’d lost control it was reduced to a black mark on the wall, the same as almost every other magical object in the house.
“Yeah,” I said gruffly. “Air freshener.” My shoulder lifted in a casual shrug to try and deflect her curiosity. “That happened right around the time my family...you know.” I shrugged again. There was no casual way to say ‘Oh that? That happened when my entire family was murdered. Don’t worry about it.’
But Laurel let me drop it anyway. Affection heated the back of my neck when she didn’t even look at me pityingly. She just let me stop talking about it and didn’t push. After a few moments — moments in which I couldn’t even guess what she was reading off that blackened soot mark on the wall — she continued on her circuit of the ground floor. I was anxious to see her go upstairs, to read memories off of my grandmother’s room, my mother’s. Would she see the nights I’d stayed up with Nana watching old reruns on her little TV? Would she see how we’d shared ice cream and laughter long past the time we both should have been asleep?
All at once, Laurel came to a complete stop. The warm, gauzy look in her eyes fled and they widened until they were nearly perfectly round. From my vantage point — shy of crashing into the back of her — I could see the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
“There’s something —” she began, then swallowed hard. “There’s something dark here. Something…hungry.” She cocked her head to the side, still looking into the past where I couldn’t see. Still looking into whatever memory the place might hold or magic might keep.
I’d never understood divination magic.
“Is it…is this what a vampire feels like?” She asked. “Someone…it’s dark. Malevolent. God, they’re here to destroy, they —” Laurel sagged against the wall and I wrapped my hand around the ball of her shoulder.
“Shh,” I whispered into her hair. “Let’s get outside.”
I led her through the back door and shut the darkness that had shocked Laurel’s system back into its tomb where it belonged.
“Was that a vampire?” Laurel asked again. Her voice was shaking, her brows furrowed in an attempt to get herself under control.
“I don’t know.” It wasn’t quite a lie. I couldn’t exactly be sure that she was feeling her. I couldn’t know for certain that the dark energy that had disrupted Laurel’s wistful retelling of happy memories was from Zora.
I could only suspect.
The familiar twist of guilt and shame and hurt and loss writhed in my gut in a knot of hissing vipers. Any one of them might kill me, it was only a question of which one would manage it first.
Had Laurel felt my regret when she’d heard the laughter of my grandmother, my family? Had she known how I had betrayed the occupants of that house? How I’d damned them and myself?
Could she feel the riot of lust and longing and affection I’d felt for someone who would prove to be the scorpion on my back?
Shame. Evidently shame would win.
I walked Laurel back to her car at the edge of the property, strangely reluctant to end the evening and let go of the tenuous connection I’d felt to the rest of my coven. Laurel, too, seemed reluctant to say goodbye. She lingered by the door of her car, hand on the frame, indecision in her eyes.
“Greenhollow is doing this thing,” she said in a rush. “A welcoming, Jean called it. My first, uh, my first coven ritual.” She looked up at me, squinting against the setting sun, and bit her lip before soldiering onward. “Would you come with me? It’s…it’s going to be a lot of people who I don’t know, and I know you’re probably busy and you probably don’t want to get involved with someone else’s coven — I get that you’re a hedge witch and I respect that, I do — but it…it would mean a lot to me for you to be there.”
At some point, I was sure that Laurel would lose her ability to surprise me. But it hadn’t happened yet.
A welcoming rite. A group casting. Fuck, I hadn’t been involved in a group casting since — since I’d had a coven of my own. Letting my magic out, letting it be free, amplified and contained by the magic of a circle of witches I could trust implicitly…I wanted it with the intensity of starvation.
And for Laurel to invite me to accompany her, to cast with her at her coven’s circle? She couldn’t possibly have known what it would mean.
No, she was just looking for a friendly face. And her coven would be full of those as soon as she let herself meet them.
One of us had earned her loneliness but the other didn’t have to be trapped like that. I wouldn’t let her risk what she might have with her coven by dragging her down with me.
“I can’t,” I said brusquely, coughing a little to gentle my tone. “I’
ve got a lot of work to get done, and…and you should really spend that time bonding with your coven-mates. It’s not a time for people outside the circle.” I shifted my weight, eased back onto my heels and hid my hands deep in my pockets.
“Oh,” Laurel said, offering a thin, weak smile. “Yeah, I get that. I just thought…never mind. Thanks for letting me see the house, I’ll — see you, I guess?”
“Drive safe.” I offered a curt nod. As Laurel climbed into the cab of her car and made to pull away, however, I lost control of my tongue. “Laurel —” I waited while she opened the window. “I…I shouldn’t be your closest friend in the community.” The words reached her face with the force of an open-handed slap and an acrid taste filled my mouth. Bile and regret and shame. “It’s asking for trouble. Stick with Jean.”
With that I ducked my head, turned back toward the greenhouses, and fled.
I listened to the crunch of the gravel on the drive beneath the tires as Laurel left and tried not to remember the look of hurt on her face. It only hurt her because she didn’t know enough yet to know that I was right.
She was new. She’d have her welcoming, meet her coven-mates, and she wouldn’t think of me again.
Eventually my own feelings, my own magic would calm down, too. Everything that had been churned up when Laurel had blown into town would settle once the storm had passed.
I just needed to let the storm pass.
11
Laurel
Book club nights at the Wyrm had never been quite so looming before. Where I used to sweep and pull chairs together and make sure that the coffee maker and kettle were ready for the bustle of up to a dozen women of varying ages — the full club was almost never in attendance, so I wasn’t clear on their total numbers — who wanted to sit with their friends and gossip in between chatting about the book they’d read, I now knew better.
Now, I swept and pulled chairs together, prepped the coffee maker and the kettle, and thought about the fact that every woman I would meet that night was there to welcome me into a community I never could have imagined.
They were witches.
And not only that, but they were going to be my witches.
These women — some of them, anyway — had known my mother. My father. They’d shared magic with them, laughed with them. They would have stories to tell, expectations about what Olivia’s daughter might have become.
Suddenly, the floor seemed not at all clean enough. And the tea bags? We didn’t have the right kinds. I needed to head out to a grocery store, restock. Rent a steam-cleaner. Maybe we needed to reschedule the event entirely.
“It’s going to be okay,” Jean said with a soft smile. She was scanning inventory like it was any other Tuesday and the world wasn’t about to end.
“What if they don’t like me?” I asked quietly, without looking up from the tea bags I rearranged for the hundredth time.
And wasn’t that the crux of the thing? What if this community, this literally magical group of people I’d been led to by my mother’s power, this fated home for me…what if they met me...and found me lacking? What if there wasn’t a place for me? Not even the one that was supposed to be pre-ordained?
“They are going to think you’re great.” Jean’s voice was firm. “I wouldn’t be doing this to you if I thought there were a fraction of a chance it might go badly.”
I heard the sound of Jean’s footsteps across the floor and a friendly hand squeezed my shoulder.
“Besides, not one of them would risk the wrath of the ghost of Olivia Bradley for making her baby girl feel unwelcome, okay?” Jean chuckled and stayed near until I found my smile again. “Come on. Meg is usually early and once you meet her you won’t have any doubts. And you’d better prepare yourself. This is your last half hour without a coven.”
Meg might’ve been known for being early, but none of the women in the coven were willing to risk being the last one there.
As soon as regular business ended for the day, the Greenhollow coven showed up en masse. It felt like a reunion. They welcomed me home with rock-solid certainty I had been someone they’d known and lost. Like I’d finally returned to them.
If it weren’t for how diligent they were about trying to make me laugh, I might’ve spent the entire evening crying.
“Now come on, come on. You all know the drill.” Harriet — Jean’s mom and one of the matriarchs, though she insisted she wasn’t Greenhollow’s leader — signaled for the other women to gather into the circle and light the candles.
“Meg, the front windows, please?” Jean asked.
Meg, the resident expert in physical charms and enchantments, muttered a phrase I didn’t quite catch and a blue wave flowed down from the tops of the windows where subtly painted runes lurked unassumingly.
“Oh, wow.” The exclamation was involuntary, but none of the women around me seemed to get tired of my fascination with even the smallest examples of magic.
“If you think that’s impressive, hon, you should see her mix a sangria!” A woman to my left, clothed in shades of gray and purple and wearing silver jewelry on every possible surface, laughed and dropped a light touch onto my knee.
It was ridiculous to think that anything other than the literal magic might be the most incredible part of the night, but I would be lying if I said that Greenhollow’s easy physical affection wasn’t the greater miracle.
It finally hit me how lonely I’d been.
“Palms up, energy into the center of the circle,” Harriet continued. “And don’t worry, Laurel. You’ll feel a call and all you have to do is answer.”
I didn’t know what that meant and I was enough of a worrier that I would’ve preferred some sort of study guide before all this, but I recognized that a detailed manual for ‘using magic’ probably wouldn’t mean anything to me until I had some experience. It was an unfamiliar sense, a part of myself I didn’t know how to use or control. It would be like trying to actively engage my liver. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
But Greenhollow knew.
The change in the air was immediate. It became thick but not oppressive. I could taste the power that flowed through the room. Jean had told me that the shimmer in the light was my own power. Divination made it easier to see magic when it happened and I could see auras of varying color and intensity glowing around the circle. They sent soft, beckoning tendrils into the center of the floor.
Those colors, those tendrils…they didn’t merge. They didn’t become one thing. They…braided together. Every source maintained its independent strand and wrapped itself around its companions until there was a woven ball in the middle of the circle — a Gordian knot of different colors and strengths. And around the rim of the circle, power flowed to me. I watched waves of magic lap at my skin. I could feel every person in that room: I was aware of them, of their power the same way I was aware of the position of my own body.
It was incredible.
I choked back a sob and felt my magic long to answer. It was a physical push at the base of my skull. There was something aching to be free and I had to let it out. I relaxed the tension in my shoulders, my jaw, and focused on letting go. The women beside me — my sisters, these were my sisters, I could feel it — coaxed open the vault that had kept my magic separate from me and I watched, amazed, as the thinnest thread of golden light trailed forward from my body. It drifted through the air, swaying, caught on currents I couldn’t see and finally, finally joined the knot in the center.
Then the world…bloomed. It transformed, expanded. In between one breath and the next I’d gained another sense. The power of every woman in that room wrapped around my own, strengthened it, supported it — folded mine into the strength of the coven and let me see dimensions of the world that I had never thought to be curious about.
I could feel more kinds of magic that I could have imagined. I knew the hearts of the women around me the way I knew my own. It was the closest I had ever felt to another person and there was a whole room full
of women who had invited me to share in that closeness with all of them.
As the ritual ended and the last vestiges of the knot in the center faded from view, that sense of closeness remained and the first of my tears began to fall.
Then came the socializing. It would’ve fit in with every reception held at the Methodist church where I grew up, modulo some witches. There was punch, cookies, cubed cheeses, and coffee cake. Tea flowed liberally and the coffeemaker was getting an unusual workout for after eight at night.
It was a wake for the woman who had given birth to me. For the first time, everyone in the room knew that Olivia Bradley was dead and not just gone. And they shared stories about her through tears and peals of riotous laughter.
It was beautiful. Unlike anything I’d expected. But even as I basked in the warm glow of these incredible women, these women who considered me to be one of their own, I found my thoughts drifting to Rhea.
I wished that she would have come. The thought of joining magic with her, feeling her around that circle sent a thrill through me that defied definition. It was a ridiculous thought. She’d made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t interested in pursuing the kind of connection with me that I wanted with her…but I couldn’t shake the wistful daydreaming. I wanted to have her sitting next to me listening to these stories. Maybe feeling her leather-jacket-clad arm along the back of my chair as she chuckled low and throaty at some anecdote. Leaning forward to whisper commentary in my ear, teasing my neck with her breath…
“And then she says to him, she says ‘Officer, I just don’t want you to have to explain why you were in this neighborhood instead of that AA meeting you told your wife you were going to’.” Tight red curls bounced around — Rhoda? The names were slow to stick in my mind — my coven-mate’s head as she shook with laughter. “And he turned bright red and he let us go! Can you believe that? Goddess, Olivia could talk her way out of anything.”