Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
‘If it isn’t a happy ending, I don’t know if I want to read the rest of the book.’
I pulled back to see his forehead creased with anguish. ‘What happened to “this is meant to be”?’
‘I don’t doubt it for a second,’ Wyn said. ‘But what if “meant to be” isn’t “meant to be forever”?’
It sounded a lot like giving up and I wasn’t ready to do that, not yet.
‘It’s whatever we make it,’ I said. ‘We’re agreed, I love you and you love me. Aren’t we supposed to be heading out to a drive-in movie right now?’
‘Right now we’re supposed to be protecting you from a lone wolf,’ he amended, and while he wasn’t ready to lighten up completely, I felt the shift in him as he blocked out the future and came back to the present.
‘If it is Astrid and she’s injured, it’s going to take longer for her to heal while the moon is waning.
Still another nine days until the new moon. ’
‘Maybe that’s why the Wilcuma takes place on the new moon,’ I wondered aloud. ‘If that’s the safest time, while the wolves are most vulnerable?’
The safe cage of his arms loosened around me.
‘Should you be telling me that?’
‘You’re the one who can’t share secrets,’ I replied, tightening my grip on him. ‘I can’t think of one single reason why I need to keep anything from you.’
Gently, Wyn broke free of my grip, grasped my forearms and held me out at arm’s length. The loss of his body pressed against mine felt like someone had cut off a limb.
‘We should tempt fate,’ he said, his thumb rubbing against the inside of my wrist. ‘All I’m asking is for you to protect yourself.’
‘Protect myself from who?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Are you lying to me?’ I asked and when he looked down at the floor, my stomach clenched. ‘I know there are things you can’t tell me, but I need to know you aren’t lying to me. About anything.’
‘There’s a difference between lying to someone and only telling them what they need to know.’
‘And I thought I’d made it very clear that I don’t think that difference is worth much. Where were you last night? What happened exactly?’
‘I drove back to the house, I looked for the wolf but I didn’t find her,’ he replied mechanically. ‘Like I already told you.’
‘Then why couldn’t I find you?’ I asked, stabbing at my chest with my finger. ‘You’re always here, I can always feel you, but last night it was like you’d turned off your signal or something.’
‘You’re asking me why you couldn’t use your magic to hunt me down like a dog?’
I took a step back, stung.
‘That came out wrong, that’s not what I meant,’ he said, mouth puckered up as though he were about to curse himself out.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why you couldn’t find me, Em, I couldn’t feel you either, but there’s no reason I can think of that would explain any of this.
How she’s phasing, how she’s hiding, what that might mean.
I don’t have any more answers than you do. ’
‘What about your grandpa?’ I asked. ‘What about the rest of your pack?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know or can’t tell me?’
‘Emily, please!’ he exclaimed, raking his hands through his hair. ‘I’m doing the best I can.’
I clasped my hands, one on top of the other, over my heart, as if I could somehow protect it from the outside in, but it was much too late for that.
The mid-morning heat swept over me and all at once, I was so tired I could barely stand.
My sleepless nights, the attack at the beach, Virginia’s truth, Alex’s reaction, it all hit me at the same time.
When I looked up at the house, the sun shone directly on the large picture window on the second floor.
Catherine’s room. It seemed to shimmer with an iridescence, like the glass had been replaced by moonstone.
‘You need to rest,’ Wyn said, catching me as I swooned against the table, my legs wobbling under my own weight. ‘It’s been a rough twenty-four hours.’
‘It’s been a rough year,’ I corrected, confused and exhausted and, above all else, unreasonably sad. ‘Maybe you should go too. We can talk later.’
‘Later today? If the world doesn’t end?’
Pinching my shoulders together in a shrug, I nodded and made my way carefully through the garden, calling on the strength of the hollyhocks and hawthorn bush.
‘Now who’s tempting fate?’ I replied, climbing up the kitchen stairs and leaving him in the garden.
The door to Catherine’s room opened with a long, loud creaking sound, as if to ask whether or not I really wanted to be in there.
I did. I couldn’t say why but ever since I stepped back in the house, there was nothing I wanted more than a long soak in the copper clawfoot tub that sat in front of her bedroom window.
The weather was too warm, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a bath, but the compulsion was irresistible.
It took a little effort to turn the taps, stuck closed from weeks of disuse, but once they were open, the water ran clean and clear.
I let it run until it was scalding hot, holding my hand under the stream until my skin turned pink, then red.
I needed to wash the last twenty-four hours away.
The hotter the water, the better. Without thinking, I tossed in a handful of bath salts from a collection of jars by the brass towel rack, some dried lavender, mugwort, lemon balm and yarrow, then took some of the crystals from the windowsill where they had been bathing in moonlight for a month – tiger’s eye, hematite, obsidian, jade and lapis lazuli – and placed them on the wooden tray that lay across the tub.
When the water was almost to the top, I peeled off my sticky clothes and stepped in, barely even flinching at the scorching temperature.
My hair floated on the surface as I looked around Catherine’s untouched room.
The bed was made, her clothes put away. On the antique dresser, I saw a handful of silver framed photographs, one of Catherine and her husband on their wedding day, a baby dressed in blue and then another, dressed in pink.
My dad wearing a mortar board and a scowling picture of Ashley that could’ve been taken at any point between her sixteenth birthday and two months prior.
Then, at the very front, there was a photo of me and Catherine, kneeling in the back garden, examining plants.
Ashley must’ve shot it, unless there was a friendly ghost lurking in the house with a Polaroid, but she had never shown it to me.
Most likely because we were far from the best of friends when she shot it and yet, she took it anyway.
The other photos were all posed and formal, wedding clothes and smiling babies, graduations, birthdays, but this one was more natural.
Catherine smiled at me with what looked like genuine affection and I was delighted by whatever praise she was lavishing upon me.
It really had been like that, if only for a moment, but those days had truly existed.
I sank down into the water, letting my hair float until it soaked through and sank around my shoulders, only my face breaking the surface.
Around the outside of the tub, a circle of white candles flamed into life and even though it was still early in the day and the sun rode high in the sky, the light in Catherine’s room dimmed until they were the only source of illumination.
The panes of glass in the window turned black and a wave of exhaustion came over me.
I closed my eyes and inch by steady inch, slipped under the surface of the water.
When I opened them, I was in Bonaventure Cemetery.
Wyn lay on the floor before me, cut open, his blood blooming in the dirt.
Seven figures surrounded us in a circle, the same as before, Catherine, Ashley, Lydia, Jackson, Alex Powell, Wyn’s mother and brother, the still unknown man all took one step closer, passing something between themselves.
It was the branch-like sword, its silver blade and gold hilt hungry and rusty with blood.
Each beheld it with reverence as it passed from person to person, Lydia to Ashley, Ashley to Catherine, Catherine to Jackson, Jackson to Wyn’s mother, Wyn’s mother to Alex Powell and Alex to the man I had never met.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard wolves howling, in victory or anguish, I wasn’t quite sure.
‘It should’ve been you,’ the man said when the sword fell into his hands, his voice full of gravel and hate. ‘In time, it will be.’
He took a step forward into the centre of the circle, holding out the blade and I moved backwards, keeping one hand on Wyn’s prone form, but instead of attacking me, he lunged at everyone else, stabbing each of them directly in the heart.
One by one, he moved from person to person and no matter how loudly I screamed and begged them to run, they stood their ground, waiting for their untimely deaths, never once taking their eyes off me.
‘You are death,’ the man declared, slowly sheathing his blade in Jackson’s heart as my friend stared back at me, his face contorted in a silent scream. ‘All who follow will fail, all who love will lose.’
Finally, when they were all bleeding out into the cemetery ground, he lunged at me, but when I tried to run, black roots twisted up from the earth, tying themselves in knots around my feet and ankles.
Even the plants had been turned to darkness in this place, and when I called for my ancestors, I felt nothing.
They were gone. The consecrated ground of the Bonaventure corrupted.
‘No!’ I screamed, delving into the deepest reaches of my magic to free myself. ‘This isn’t real! You aren’t real!’
But it felt real. The black flames running along the Spanish moss kissed my skin with blisters and when the tides roared up from the river, twenty feet tall, I could smell the saltwater.
With black fire immolating every tree, running along the Spanish moss, I turned to Catherine where she lay on the ground, dying but not dead.
‘You must make the choice,’ she whispered, blood dripping from her mouth as she spoke. ‘Save this world or end it. Find your peace.’
Find my peace? When everyone I knew and loved was dead on the floor around me?
A rough, leather gloved hand gripped me by the throat and hoisted me into the air, and as the sword pierced my heart, I awoke with a start, gasping for air as I sat up, water splashing onto the floor around the tub.
‘You changed your future once, you can change it again.’
Right at the edge of the bed, dressed in her favourite blue silk gown, Catherine beheld me with emerald eyes. Her hair was pinned up away from her exquisite face. She twisted her aquamarine ring around and around on her finger as she spoke.
‘He is coming,’ she said. ‘Lives will be lost. Which lives and in what order, is very much up to you.’
‘No one is going to lose their life.’ I clung to the side of the tub, my heart pounding. ‘Who is he? What does he want?’
Still on the bed, she smoothed imperceptible wrinkles out of her skirt with both hands.
‘An end,’ she replied. ‘To magic.’
‘All magic? Not just witches?’
‘Like most men who wish to remove something from this world, he doesn’t truly understand what he desires.’
‘Magic is part of the world,’ I murmured, shivering at the memory of his sword piercing my skin. ‘It’s part of nature, you can’t erase nature. He can’t possibly understand what we are, why would anyone try to wipe out something they don’t understand?’
‘Oh, Emily, that’s the only reason they need,’ Catherine replied with a disappointed shake of her head. ‘Did your father teach you nothing?’
The candlelight pulsed as she stood, walked over to the bathtub and picked a fluffy towel from the brass rack.
‘We miss you,’ I told her, a confession, as she laid the towel on the side of the tub. ‘Me and Ashley. When are you coming back?’
She pushed the wet hair off my face.
‘If and when I’m needed.’
‘You’re needed now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My part is done. I brought you here.’
The flames of the candles flared and I looked over at the pictures on the dresser, flames licking at the photograph of Catherine’s wedding and the picture of my dad, the images burning away under the glass.
‘Protect the blessing and the blessing will protect you,’ Catherine instructed. ‘When the dead fight back. When the earth consumes. A lie becomes the truth. She will return.’
Every single candle in the room guttered at once and when my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, I was alone.
Outside the bedroom window, the sun had set and the sky was dark, pinpricks of stars the only thing illuminating the room now.
The carriage clock by the bed said it was past 9 p.m. Half a day had passed since I filled the bath but the water was still hot enough to turn my skin lobster pink.
Carefully, I climbed out, searching for crucial evidence my grandmother had ever been here, that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.
Had she left the towel on the side of the bath or had I put it there myself?
One thing was certain, the silver frames on her dresser weren’t full of ashes when I entered her room.
At the end of the bed there was a depression in the quilt, as though someone had been sitting there for some time, watching over me.
And right beside it, Catherine’s aquamarine ring.