33. The Knowing
33
THE KNOWING
And they dream of the weird of kings,
And tyrannies moulting, sick,
In the dreadful wind of change.
— JOHN TODHUNTER, “THE BANSHEE”
T he bread is almost done rising. Puffy and bubbling around the crown, it nearly crests the edge of the proofing basket. A mild scent of fresh yeast and flour permeates the kitchen in Manzanita, layered over decades of settled sage, juniper, and cedar smoke.
Penelope O’Brien, a silver-haired witch in a billowing red skirt, turns to preheat the oven, then sniffs the dough and pokes its center with two fingers. It bounces back slightly, but not too much. Perhaps fifteen more minutes, no more. Enough time that she might call…
She frowns, then sets the bread atop the stove, where it will continue proofing over the warmth from the oven. Who was it she wanted to call? And about a…something? She can’t quite say.
There’s a girl in her mind, grown, but faceless. Blurred features, though she can still make out the red hair. And then black.
Penny smiles at a job well done. She hasn’t lived this long to ignore the signs of her own memory tampering. She’d been doing it here in the village since she had arrived many years earlier. Day in and day out, doing what was needed to keep them safe. Sure, and she misses them. Like she’s missing her own ribs, though she doesn’t know who exactly they are.
That name, O’Brien. There was another she used to use, but she can’t remember it anymore either, no more than she can recall who used to sleep in the bedrooms at the end of the hall, whose faces dance at the back of her dreams. Two women she knew well. Two women who belong in her heart, her soul, even if they no longer occupy conscious parts of her mind.
One powerful. So powerful. But so young all the same.
She sits on a stool at the counter and stirs her tea, sinking into memories she hasn’t stolen from herself yet. The ones that wouldn’t hurt anyone, because the people in them are long dead and gone.
A sunbeam flashes through a prism hanging in the kitchen window. Ciarán’s face flashes with it.
Oh, Ciarán with his brash looks and dark hair. A merrow’s mane that looked wet even when dried in the sunlight. His fresh scent of kelp and salt water. His voice, the deep, old Irish that no one speaks anymore, not even in the farthest corners of the Gaeltacht.
“My love,” Penny murmurs. “Oh, my love, I shall see you soon.”
A sudden gust of wind flies through the grass dunes in front of the house. The rooster-shaped weathervane on the deck squeals.
Penny presses a hand to her heart. Can it be here already? She sniffs the air and looks around. The bread. The sun. The crystals.
Ciarán’s face. Oh, her darling man.
Yes, it’s today.
In she breathes deeply through her nose. Then out again, channeling calm through her chest. Everything has been taken care of. She has been preparing for more than forty years. That she knew for sure. Now it was time to face it.
She turns off the oven and puts the bread in the bin .A shame, too. It had the makings of an excellent loaf, but there’s no point in keeping it now.
To her left, the front door opens.
“Hello, Caleb,” she says as if she’s greeting the postman. “I thought you might drop by today.”
Caleb Lynch’s tall, thin form shuffles into the house while he mutters a spell under his breath. Bent like a tree with too much fruit on its branches, he reminds Penny of the reaper, dressed all in black, but with a fedora to cover his gaunt face instead of a hood.
A few more words spew from that wrinkled maw, and the door swings shut behind him. Around Penny, the air chills and thins.
“Is that all?” she asks. “Last I remember, you enjoyed making an entrance. Has that dulled in your old age?”
He hobbles into the kitchen with a sneer. One of his gnarled hands, curved like talons, knocks on the stone counter.“Penelope. How long has it been? Sixty years? Seventy?”
Penny shrugs. “Give or take.” She honestly doesn’t know anymore. Time stopped when she came to Oregon.
“Well, if I didn’t know why you left then, I do now,” says the sorcerer. “Aged a bit, haven’t we?”
“We certainly have. You don’t look well, Caleb. Like you need a doctor, I’d say. Or four.”
Lynch’s papery skin crinkles when he scowls, but he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Both of them know he’s knocking on death’s door.
“Either way, it seems I was right,” Penny says. “Sure, and the arrow comes for us all in the end.”
Lynch seems to cringe. “I wouldn’t call it that. But I can’t fault the metaphor of Cupid and a weapon.”
“Surely you haven’t real regrets, have you?” Penny prods. “After all, Cupid gave you a son, didn’t he?”
“I have no son.” The words seem to shake Lynch’s frail body.
Penny closes her eyes a moment, recalling Jonathan’s sweet face as a child. “Oh, don’t I know it.”
“A seer’s intuition.” Lynch’s lip curls. “You know, I’ve always wondered about that. If you knew I was coming, then you know why I’m here. Which then begs the question…why not stop me?”
Penny shrugs. “No sense in making a scene. If I didn’t let you in, you’d have done that voodoo you love so much and probably burned the house down. I actually take the laws of secrecy seriously, unlike you, flapping your wings all over the place.”
Lynch’s face flushes the color of a new holly berry. “I do not ? —”
“Yes, you do. Do you think the only thoughts I can See are human?” She points a finger toward the window and the bird feeder where several sparrows peck away at the seed. “Gossipy little creatures. And they don’t like strangers. Especially nasty big ravens that swoop overhead like a demon.”
Lynch looks like he wants to be sick. “That’s enough chitchat. You know what I want. I’m not leaving until I get it.”
Penny blinks. Once she knew. Now, no more. But she does know one thing. “It’s not here. It never was. And you’ll never find it now.”
This she knows to be true down to her bones, though she has no clue what she’s talking about. Not anymore.
The wrinkled folds of Lynch’s ancient face quiver, slowly flushing the color of a newly formed bruise as anger rushes in.
“Are you sure about that, Penny?” he says in a voice as low as the wind. “Last chance.”
“We can’t escape our fates, Caleb. And this was always mine.”
“Have it your way. Audi me lapisis !”
Out of the stone counter springs a pair of hands that clamp Penny’s arms and slam them to the hard granite. The hands grow, ghosts of their mother stone, but no less powerful as they slide around her back, her neck, even her stomach, binding her in place.
And then, they squeeze.
“Caleb,” Penny chokes. “Please! I cannot breathe.”
“You just have to tell me, Penny.” The sorcerer hobbles beside her and sets his palm on the back of her head. His eyes,once blacker than night, blaze as bright as a fire as he removes a vial from his jacket and sets it on the stone.
Penny feels some nameless part of her brain, her spirit, her soul tear open.
The hands around her neck tighten, and the other at the back of her head throbs with power.
Lynch begins to speak in a different tongue, an old tongue from memories that Penny once knew but hasn’t heard for uncountable years. Her mind is a wardrobe that’s been torn open, clothes tossed about, ragged and rumpled all over the floor. Then, one by one, each article of clothing, each memory she has kept for herself, changes somehow. Every solid sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch morphs into something liquid. Lynch continues his horrible chant, and the memories slither across the stone, dripping to the floor like melted wax, then vanishing completely.
“Where is it?” Lynch hisses. “Give me the Secret, you horrid witch! I need the Secret!”
Faces Penny once knew. Oh, that girl. With the red hair whom she loved so much. Another with black hair and eyes like water. Built from her own heart, she was.
They fall to the cedar floors too, exploding into vapor, unwilling to be caught.
Lynch roars.
Ciarán, I’m coming.
“You’ll never find it,” Penny chokes out. And then, from the depths of her subconscious where not even her magic could reach: “No one is supposed to live forever.”
The sorcerer rages. His grip turns to steel.
The memories flood the floor.
The witch’s eyes roll back into her head.
Oh, Ciarán, she thinks as her lover’s strong face floats out and away. I shall see you soon, my love.
And then she knows his name no more.
She knows nothing at all.
Not even the name of Death.
The vision disappeared as soon as Sybil dropped my hand, and I released Jonathan’s as well. My mother, on the other hand, stared up at the ceiling, eyes turned milky white as she keened softly toward the recessed lights.
“Christ,” muttered Jonathan as he watched her, then surreptitiously crossed himself.
“Really?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Habit.”
“I told you it wasn’t pretty.” Sybil was watching us both with that same jaded gaze that I’d seen after my father’s death. “If you didn’t want to See it, you shouldn’t have come.”
“And you’ve Seen mine,” I said. I didn’t need to ask. I already knew. “How about Jonathan’s, for that matter? Your clients? Do you See every person’s death you pass on the street?”
My limbs were tensed like springs.
She didn’t answer, instead looked down and toyed with her rings. Her nails were bitten to the quick, just like mine. For Some reason, that made me even angrier. Everything about her was making me angrier.
“What kind of power is that?” I demanded with a shaking voice. “What good does it do? Why didn’t you do anything?!”
Sybil just eyed me placidly. “We’re not given this gift to change things, Cassie.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Cassandra, then.” She took a breath, pulled off one silver ring with a large turquoise stone and replaced it on her other hand. “Named for what you are, and what you’ll be. Fate gives me a glimpse and a chance to prepare. That’s it.”
“Go to hell,” I growled through choked, angry breaths. I had nothing else to say but that.
Sybil stood with a screech of a chair leg, as passive as ever. “Oh, don’t you worry, little blackbird,” she said, resentment dripping from each syllable. “I’ve been there for a long, long time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need some dinner. Stay if you want. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Without a word, I got up and stomped to the front room, barely listening to Jonathan make our excuses as I pulled on my jacket, then headed out into the night mist of fog and rain. My breath clouded the drizzle. I could barely see and found it was to my liking.
“Cass!”
Jonathan jogged out of the little orange house while zipping on his own coat. I waited for him on the front walk, halfway between the house and the sidewalk.
“I don’t know what Penny was thinking when she wanted me to come here,” I said bitterly. “The entire world already felt like a minefield, but she sent me right into the center of it all over again. First, her death, watching my dad leave me again, then I have to See her attacked how many times over? What’s next in Ireland? The rest of her childhood trauma? I just want to go back to my own life, back to my home.”
Even as I said it, the truth rattled.
I had no home to go back to. My life in Boston was over, my job deferred, and my childhood home burned to the ground.
There was nowhere to go but forward. And at the moment, it seemed all but impossible.
Jonathan shifted between his feet and gave me a half-smile that seemed twisted between two ends of remorse and relief. “I don’t know what’s waiting for you in Ireland, but I do know you’ll be safe. That I can promise. Perhaps this was Penny’s way of helping you cut ties. She was good at that, you know. She had some practice.”
I looked back at the house, where Sybil’s silhouette bustled around as if she hadn’t just broken my heart all over again.“What about her? Do I have to bring her too? She deserves to know who her mother was, doesn’t she?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Sybil should stay here.” His eyes blazed as he looked around the yard. “You Saw what he Saw. Penny had already wiped almost all her own memories of the two of you, and I suspect she has taken a lot of your mother’s too. There was nothing to give you up, even though people have been looking for an heir. Your mother is safe. And she needs to stay that way.”
I shivered, but not just because of the cold.
“Go to Ireland, Cass.” Jonathan’s words were soft as he looked up at the trees surrounding the yard and brushed away some of the drizzle on his brow. “No one knows who Sybil and you are but me. I’ll keep her safe. I’ll protect you both.”
I gritted my teeth. “I never want to see her again.”
“And maybe you won’t. But it’s like you said. She knows , Cass. We’ll need her if and when Caleb Lynch is ever brought to justice. No one will believe us, but they will believe a banshee. She can’t lie about a death. To do so would be to kill herself.”
I recoiled. “Seriously?”
He nodded. “It’s their purpose to their very core. When we deny the calling of our power, we deny our very existence.”
Our eyes met then, and for a moment, I was taken back to the night by the fire. The night when I’d kissed him.
Why, I couldn’t say.
Ridiculous. That’s what I was. Trouble with my mother, and all I wanted was for the handsome boy I liked to give me some solace.
I sighed. He was right. Sybil was the last available link in finding justice for Gran—wherever such justice might be found.I couldn’t afford to alienate her completely.
The blur of Sybil’s curly red hair bobbed behind the condensation-clouded windowpane. In some ways, she was like a child—a jaded, cold-hearted child unable to deal with the hardships she’d been given. And yet, I still couldn’t help but feel that she should have told us what was going to happen.
“I don’t want to go back in there,” I admitted, shaking all over again. “Please don’t make me go back in there.”
Jonathan pulled me to him, pressing my head on his shoulder so I could feel pulsing currents of sympathy, fondness,overlayed with a strong protective urge that surprised even him with its intensity.
“You’ll go back in,” he said. “You’ll apologize for shouting because it’s the right thing to do. And then you’ll say goodbye to your mother because you’ll never forgive yourself if the last words you shared with her were in anger. After that, I’ll take you away, and you can choose the rest of your life for yourself.”
I pulled back to look at him. “Promise?”
His eyes drifted to my forehead. For a moment, I thought he might kiss me there.
But he was shielding enough that while his emotions were clear as day, his actual thoughts were muddled behind a veil. He didn’t want me to know what he was thinking. Maybe that’s because once again, it would disappoint me.
I decided I’d had enough of that and pulled away before he could release me.
“I promise,” he said and let me go.