Chapter Thirteen
It was dark when I came to, no longer in the craft room but lying in Lafayette Square underneath the oak tree that was mine and Wyn’s.
The moon sat high above in a velvet sky, still almost full, only the slightest sliver chiselled away, and I stared up at it from the cold, hard ground, my throat raw from screaming or sobbing or both.
All my nails were broken from scratching at something I couldn’t name.
In the distance, Bell House glowed, her white walls reflecting the moonlight, shining just for me.
‘Emily. I’m sorry.’
Turning away from my home, I watched as the first Emma Catherine came into view, emerging from behind the fountain at the heart of the square.
‘Sorry for what?’ I replied, relieved and afraid and infuriated all at the same time. ‘Disappearing the whole month or what I just saw?’
I forced my aching body into a sitting position, leaning against the tree trunk for support. A single strand of Spanish moss came down to rest on my shoulder, gently brushing back and forth against my cheek. She will return. The repeated refrain from my vision. And here she was.
Emma Catherine knelt down at my side, lifting my hands to inspect the jagged remains of my nails.
The last time we’d met, our hair was the exact same shade of deep, shining red.
Now hers was back to its ghostly white, matching her translucent gown.
She held out her hands for the moss and it moved towards her, allowing the ghost to wind it around my bloody, injured hands.
‘For what has happened and what is to come. None of us want this for you.’
As angry as I was, the sight of her was beyond reassuring. She was here, I hadn’t been abandoned.
‘But there’s no way around it,’ I said as the soft, soothing moss whispered away the pain in my palms. ‘Because someone, somewhere came up with a prophecy and determined the course of my life for me.’
‘Not someone,’ she replied simply. ‘Me.’
I blinked at her surprisingly straight response.
‘You?’
Emma Catherine showed me a sombre smile and nodded. The ground was hot and hard beneath me but I felt like I was floating on an uncertain tide.
‘You’re the witch who made the prophecy?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t Catherine tell me it was you?’
‘Because she didn’t know. There were witches who held the knowledge but it was lost over time. Whoever spoke the words hardly mattered compared to the message itself.’
The moss that had woven itself between my fingers fell away, leaving me fully healed and full of new questions.
‘Please, you have to tell me everything you can,’ I begged. I wanted the truth. I would not leave room for doubt. ‘How do you know? When did it happen? How can you be sure it’s me?’
She gazed over at Bell House, her once emerald eyes cool and distant.
‘There was no one moment, no mystical event. All my life, I bore knowledge I could not explain and never once sought it out. This is a different gift to your visions, Emily, this knowing. It doesn’t come wrapped in fancy language or trapped in a crystal ball.
It’s closer to a feeling, like being tired or hungry or thirsty.
One moment you aren’t, the next, you are.
The knowledge simply is and there is no disputing it. ’
Like my love for Wyn. I didn’t ask for it, couldn’t explain it, but I was beyond certain. Of my feelings, at least.
‘So, it’s like intuition, a gut instinct,’ I said, searching myself for any new awareness. Nothing. Just more confusion than ever.
‘One that leaves no room for doubt,’ the ghost replied.
‘The things I knew took me to the places I needed to be, showed me the people I needed to help. I had to leave my family when I was fourteen years old, I had to travel across England to meet my husband in Wales. I knew he would love me truly, that I would love him in return, and we would travel to the new world together but he would not survive the voyage.’
‘Did you tell him he wouldn’t make it?’
‘No.’ A flicker of sadness passed over her serene visage. ‘It couldn’t be helped and knowing in advance wouldn’t have lessened his pain, only increased his suffering.’
I tried to imagine the burden of knowing the person you loved, the person who loved you, was going to die. Somehow, it felt much worse than wondering whether or not you might end the entire world. My hands were shaking now and the wounds healed by the Spanish moss threatened to open once more.
‘I thought I would understand the blessing better after my Becoming,’ I told her as another layer of uncertainty draped itself around my shoulders, ‘but every day there’s something else, something new to deal with.
Catherine said my connection to the blessing would be stronger and I’d understand everything, but the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know a thing. ’
‘Some would say that is the definition of wisdom: admitting what you do not know.’
‘Wow,’ I gasped. ‘I must be so wise.’
Two men walking a corgi passed by without so much as glancing in our direction but the dog’s head turned sharply towards us and gave a short, sharp bark. I pulled back, holding my breath, but my companion merely watched then held out her hand when the dog came forward with an inquisitive sniff.
‘Oh, Millicent,’ one of the men said, letting go of his partner to tug on the leash with both hands. ‘Why did we spend all that money on obedience training if you’re going to bark at nothing?’
‘The men can’t see us,’ I said in a whisper, my back pressed against the tree.
‘They don’t want to see us,’ Emma Catherine replied. ‘We don’t want to be seen. The blessing obliges us all.’
‘And the dog?’
‘Who wouldn’t want to be seen by a dog?’
Millicent growled happily as a ghostly hand passed over her fur, then barked once more and raced away, running after her owners with her tongue hanging out.
‘There are so many things I need to know,’ I said. ‘If I ask you direct questions, will you give me straight answers?’
She inclined her head in agreement. ‘I will speak to the things I can, but please know that it does more harm than good, expecting quick and easy answers.’
‘Well, I’m pretty used to getting them instantly,’ I said, instinctively reaching for my phone but it wasn’t in my pocket. No, it was still drying out in a bag of rice in the kitchen.
My ancestor tilted her head towards the moon, her translucent profile etched in pale and milky light. ‘Answers, yes, but not the truth. One is more easily obtained than the other.’
I studied her face as she moonbathed, the fine, delicate features I saw softened in my own reflection, echoed in Catherine and Ashley and even my father. Where to start? What to ask? I had a million questions and I knew she wouldn’t, couldn’t, answer them all.
‘Why me?’ I said eventually, settling on the one thing I truly couldn’t make sense of. ‘Why is this happening to me and not any of the witches before or after?’
‘Why not?’
OK, perhaps not the best place to start.
‘Why is one person a talented artist and another good with numbers?’ Emma Catherine said, oblivious or indifferent to my frustration.
‘One person is a natural leader, another a born caregiver, the next a problem solver. No one asks for the gifts they are born with, all have a choice as to whether or not they will honour them.’
‘But I don’t have a choice,’ I pointed out. ‘This is happening to me whether I like it or not.’
‘Everything is a choice. Talking to me now is a choice. Walking into the craft room was a choice. What you do next, it will all be your choice, Emily. Sadly, our choices aren’t always as simple as deciding between something we want or something we don’t.
Sometimes it’s what’s best for us or best for others.
Oftentimes, we must select what we consider to be the lesser of two evils.
The idea that the right decision is always the one that makes you happy is an optimistic fantasy. ’
Strangely enough, I did not feel better.
‘Do you have another question?’ she asked, casting her eyes upwards to the sky, and though I couldn’t see it, I could feel dawn beyond the horizon.
‘Why can’t I see ghosts anymore?’
She cocked her head a little, a bemused, upward tilt to the corner of her mouth.
‘Obviously I can see you right now,’ I added for clarification. ‘But ever since my Becoming I haven’t seen any others. Did they leave Savannah or did they leave me?’
‘No one left anyplace,’ she replied, her eyes roaming the square as though she could see things I could not.
‘Ghosts are still the people they were before they passed and sometimes people do not wish to be perceived. The whispers of your destiny are louder where we are. Until the ghosts are certain of your intentions, they may not consider you a friend. Try not to take it personally.’
‘What about you?’ I pushed. ‘Where were you?’
‘I’ve been here.’
‘If that’s true, why couldn’t I see you?’
‘Because you didn’t need me.’
‘Of all the absurd things I’ve heard in the last few months that might be the craziest,’ I replied, uncontrollable laughter bubbling up out of me. ‘No, I think you’ll find I definitely needed you.’
‘You needed time,’ she corrected me kindly, ‘to find your own feet and your own feelings. There comes a day when we all have to learn to fly.’
‘So you kicked me out the nest and hoped I wouldn’t come crashing to the ground?’
Crouching down in front of me, her white gown billowing around her, she nodded.
‘And look at you. You’re soaring.’
Nothing about the past few weeks felt like a success to me. No Wyn, no Catherine, no closer to understanding the prophecy or interpreting my visions and nightmares, and every day it felt as though the danger around us grew.
‘There’s only so much I can do without guidance,’ I said, terrified she would vanish again if I so much as blinked. ‘And I have no one to guide me. Do you know how frightening it is to go through this alone?’
‘Very much so.’