Chapter 6 #2
And I know, just as sure as I know Dr. Sutherland wasn’t born a demon, that I’m seeing a real moment in time. This happened. My mother was here. My mother cared about someone other than herself.
Maybe it should upset me—the flowers, the kindness.
After all, how could a woman so dutifully tend to the grave of a dead girl when she couldn’t be bothered to care for her three living ones?
But it doesn’t. If anything, the sight of her—bent and reverent, her touch light against the stone—humanizes her.
More than anything else, that’s what angers me.
I can’t think of her as human. I need her to remain a fucking monster in my mind, because rage is easier to live with than rejection, than grief for the loss of someone who never wanted you in the first place.
The anger recedes, but sadness tries to rise up in its place. I shove it straight back down, crushing it into a hard little lump. A piece of coal that smolders with old, familiar pain, but doesn’t ignite.
Better.
Dropping the bloom, I rise to my feet and dust off my hands. The fog thickens around us, drifting across our feet.
“How did they know Calista was a witch?” I ask, keeping my voice low, as if the hunters are hiding out in the mist, waiting for a chance to pounce.
“They didn’t. Because she wasn’t.”
I turn to look at him. “But you said she was the first of the line.”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. Calista Bonnivarde was just a girl.
Full of dreams and hopes, like anyone her age.
” He holds my gaze for a beat, then sighs, his eyes dimming.
“As the story goes, she turned down some aggressive advances from a boy in town. He didn’t take it well.
She fought back—viciously enough to draw blood and scare him off before he could cause any serious injury. ”
“Good.”
“At first, she thought the same. Days passed, and he left her in peace. She assumed it was over, when in reality...” Dr. Sutherland brushes an errant leaf from the headstone.
“He and his father, a wealthy merchant and town council chair, corrupt as you’d imagine, were prominent members of an international society known as The Wielders of the Righteous Flame. ”
“The hunters,” I whisper, disgust robbing my voice.
“Fear-mongering around witchcraft was already sweeping the world, the trials well underway in Europe and the colonies, hundreds of thousands of innocents being accused, tortured, and executed. The Wielders leveraged this fear to create panic—a panic they could then allay by hunting down the so-called witches who’d infected their communities, and basking in their self-appointed heroism.
But what they were really after was the magic itself. ”
I feel like I’m going to puke. “The magic they were trying to rid the world of because it was so dangerous and evil? Sure, that makes sense.”
“They believed that by sacrificing innocents, they could unlock the key to the demonic realms and the power within. The accusations of witchcraft were just a convenient cover; no one would question their actions—not even the victim’s family members, lest they be similarly accused—so long as the victim was painted as a threat. ”
“So these guys just came out of nowhere and accused Calista of witchcraft? Just because she wouldn’t sleep with the dude?”
“Yes. He concocted a story, with his father’s encouragement, about an unprovoked attack by a girl who was clearly possessed by demons.
How else, they reasoned, could she have overtaken him?
They weren’t even loud about it, either.
All it took was a single accusation, a few whispers that caught like wildfire, and she was branded.
The hunters cornered her later that evening as she fetched water for the family meal.
They chased her deeper into the woods. Captured her. ”
Dr. Sutherland closes his eyes, his voice lowering to a defeated whisper I can barely hear over the pounding of my heart.
“In their haste to claim the magic, they didn’t waste time torturing or tormenting her, which I suppose was a saving grace.
In the end, death came quickly. A blade across the throat, blood spilled upon the earth.
The burning of the body. Historians assume some sort of ritual was performed, though the details are lost to time. ”
A soft breeze stirs the fog, and I look out over Calista’s grave, feeling like I’m trudging through a thick white sea, wishing I could swim backward in time and save her. It wasn’t enough that they slit her throat. They burned her too. That’s why her dress was charred.
“Forests are hallowed ground,” Dr. Sutherland continues.
“Sacred energetic centers that connect this realm to the demonic. When those monsters spilled the blood of an innocent girl, a great power was indeed summoned forth, just as they’d hoped.
But most demonic entities are unaligned.
Drawn forth by the sacrifice and whatever nonsensical ritual the Wielders performed, in the absence of a proper spell and witches to bind them, these entities granted power not to the murderers, but to the victim. ”
“I mean, I love that for her? But also… too little, too late. Calista was already dead.”
“Too late for her, yes. But as her blood was the key to summoning that power, her blood became the vessel for it. The magic flowed through it, to all who would ever be connected to it. Her heirs.”
My own blood warms in response, buzzing through me on some new electric current, like the best double-espresso caffeine jolt ever. “But how? If Calista was murdered before the demons granted her magic, presumably she didn’t have any witch-babies after that. How did the rest of her line come to be?”
“Ah, but there was a child,” he says, a new tenderness sneaking into his voice.
“In the year before her death, Calista became pregnant by the boy she loved. As you can imagine, that sort of thing was quite scandalous in those days. Her parents were overjoyed—they didn’t care about the laws of propriety.
But they wanted to protect her from the fallout such a scandal would inevitably cause.
Her mother took her to a relative’s home in Pennsylvania, where the two women lived for the duration of the pregnancy under guise of apprenticing Calista’s aunt as midwives.
Calista gave birth to a daughter, Davina, and when they returned home, baby in tow, her parents claimed they’d found her abandoned in the woods. They raised her as Calista’s sister.”
“So the baby survived? The hunters didn’t go after her?”
“They didn’t know about her magic, only that their own power grab was a failure.
They blamed Calista, said she wasn’t a worthy sacrifice.
Again, we only know bits and pieces here, from testimonies and rumors documented decades later.
But the Wielders also didn’t realize Davina was Calista’s child.
By the time her powers came in, it was too late.
The hunters had, for the time being, moved on in search of easier prey.
Davina, in the meantime, only grew more powerful as she aged.
She learned how to connect with the demons who first granted the magic, and they taught her how to summon and bind chaotic entities, to channel their magic and fuse it with her own. To become who she was meant to be.”
“Just like you and me.” My smile finally breaks, my heart feeling lighter. A miracle, all things considered. “A full circle moment, Professor.”
“Yes, well… teaching is a great responsibility. Almost as great as learning.” He turns the color of a ripe apple, whips off his glasses, and furiously begins to polish. “I don’t take either lightly, Miss Bonnivarde. Nor should you.”
I nod, and here in the place of the dead, it feels like I’m making a promise. One I intend to keep.
In the silence that follows, I think back on the conversation with Helena. She mentioned witch hunters too, but before she got to the good part, Rachel had her little meltdown.
God, there’s still so much I don’t know. Are my sisters and I in actual danger over all this stuff? Was my mother? Can we trust Helena?
Can we trust Dr. Sutherland?
“Are the Wielders of the Righteous Flame still active?” I ask. “Do I need to watch my back?”