Chapter 1
“You’re not concentrating.”
“Yes, I am!”
“If you were concentrating, it would be working.”
“It would be working if you stopped interrupting me!”
My aunt Persephone and I glared at each other. I refused to blink, my gaze boring into hers, until my eyes began to water.
Persi caved first. She broke the glaring contest with a roll of her eyes and a sigh of impatience.
“Fine.”
I returned to my lesson with a sense of smug victory, a feeling that curdled quickly into the cold, smothering insecurity that always filled me during lessons with Persi because, although I would never admit it to her, she was right. I wasn’t concentrating—not well, anyway.
We sat together in her workshop as a fire crackled away merrily in the pot-bellied stove, and the snow swirled against the windowpanes.
The air was warm and heavy with the scent of a hundred herbs, plants, oils, and incenses.
Bunches of dried herbs hung from the low rafters, and firelight twinkled off the dozens and dozens of glass jars and bottles lining the shelves on the walls.
A few weeks ago, I’d never even have dared to knock on the door of this little shed, and now I was having lessons here for hours at a time.
A lot could change in a few weeks. No one knew that better than me.
A few months ago, I was just an average high school theater nerd looking forward to summer vacation.
Then it was like I blinked and I was uprooting my life and moving to my family’s ancestral home in a tiny seaside town because, SURPRISE!
I was actually descended from a long and powerful line of witches, and WORSE SURPRISE!
an ancient evil force had decided that what he wanted more than anything else was my power, specifically—a power he tried to extort from me by kidnapping my mother and offering to trade my power for her life.
So that was fun.
I’d somehow managed to bumble my way into vanquishing the Darkness back into hiding, but that hadn’t meant the end of the danger.
A few weeks later, a member of a banished coven undertook an elaborate scheme to trick me into accessing the Source, the long-hidden and mysterious location from which Sedgwick Cove’s deep magic seemed to emanate.
It was this power that had drawn the Darkness to Sedgwick Cove in the first place, the very thing it needed my magic to acquire.
Luckily, my mother and my aunts had been there to rescue me.
Veronica Meyer had escaped, and the Source itself had since been under careful and constant surveillance.
And then, just a few weeks ago, as Samhain approached, I’d been pulled into intrigue about the Source yet again.
A mysterious young woman named Jess Ballard had shown up on my doorstep with our long-lost family grimoire and a message from my dead grandmother.
Together, Jess and I had determined that the Source was, in fact, a Geatgrima, a sort of crossing point for spirits to enter the spirit realm.
One particular spirit, Sarah Claire, had been meddling with the Source, and her increasingly desperate attempts to somehow crack open its secrets had damaged it almost beyond repair.
Luckily, we were able to restore the Source to functionality again, and get Sarah Claire to Cross with the help of another ghost—Bernadette Claire.
It had been a satisfying kind of vindication for Bernadette, solving a problem she’d created in the first place, by contacting Sarah’s spirit and dragging her back into the mortal world.
But more than that, it had been sad. Devastating, even, and for no one more so than the woman now sitting across from me; and that was the real reason why I was having so much trouble concentrating.
I snuck a glance up at her through my lowered eyelashes, trying to read the expression on her face, hoping something I saw there would answer the question I was too chicken to ask her.
How are you doing, really?
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Okay. Cowardly observation it was, then.
Well, to begin with, there were purplish circles bleeding through the carefully applied makeup under her dark, flashing eyes.
So I assumed that meant she wasn’t sleeping.
Then again, I’d already worked out that much—our bedrooms shared a wall, and I often woke to the sound of her pacing and shuffling around at all hours.
Her masses of black hair seemed dull and lank, hanging like curtains on either side of her face, which looked paler and more drawn than usual.
Her cheeks were sunken, and she definitely looked thinner.
I came to my conclusion and dropped my eyes quickly back to my work before she caught me.
Persi was not doing well. Not at all.
Persi’s relationship with Bernadette had been far from a storybook romance, but nevertheless, they had cared deeply for each other.
Persi had had to watch Bernadette spiral deeper and deeper into madness, knowing there was nothing she could do; and there was no Persi more dangerous or volatile than a helpless Persi.
It was one of the reasons she had been so hostile when my mother and I had first arrived in Sedgwick Cove—though I had learned since that hostility was a regular component of Persi’s stormy personality.
I felt the intensity of her attention shift to me just in time to lower my eyes to the work in front of me and, giving up on my analysis of my aunt, returned my concentration to the thing I should have been concentrating on all along—a shallow wooden bowl full of tiny animal bones and rune stones.
Ever since the block on my spirit abilities was lifted with the healing of the Source, we had been exploring the various kinds of witchcraft a spirit witch might practice, in an effort to determine where my strengths might lie.
Despite my grumbling insistence that I didn’t have any, we had been doggedly moving down the list anyway.
“Of course you have strengths,” Persi snapped. “You’re a Vesper for goddess’ sake. You think the Darkness would pursue you if your powers were feeble?”
No, was the real answer, but it was hard to feel otherwise.
I knew my powers were in there. I’d been able to communicate with the ghost of my grandmother, after all.
And that night on the beach, I’d called every element to my aid, and they had answered in terrifying force.
Still, it was hard to attribute that force to myself when the things I had been controlling were, in themselves, so powerful.
Had I really controlled them, or had they simply answered my call and wreaked their own havoc?
I was too scared and pumped full of adrenaline at the time to have any real understanding of it all.
All I knew was that, ever since, my attempts at witchcraft, while improving, had felt rudimentary.
Now, as I sought the right channel for my spirit abilities, we had moved steadily through mediums in the hope that something would “feel right.” Tea leaves had been an utter disaster, though mostly because I second-guessed myself so much.
Zale’s grandmother, Davina, had been kind enough to try to help me; she wasn’t a spirit witch, but her affinity to earth had always manifested in a strong connection to herbs and plants, and so she had always had a knack for tea leaves, whereas none of the Vesper witches had ever had much luck with it.
I had drunk cup after cup of every kind of tea known to man—or at least, known to Davina and her vast store of herbal concoctions—and rotated cup after cup until I felt sloshy and dizzy, and still nothing ever seemed to reveal itself to me.
No image felt clear, no shape undeniable.
Finally, after two solid weeks, I never wanted to see another cup of tea ever again in my life, and Davina released me with a sigh.
“I dinnae ken what your path is to your spirit guides, lass, but it’s nae tea leaves, that’s for sure and certain,” she announced.
Tea leaves, it seemed, were not my cup of tea.
After my experience with Xiomara and the birdbath, I was very wary of trying any kind of scrying, despite the fact that it had worked in the past. After all, there was a big difference between possibly seeing things on a reflective surface, and falling headlong through that surface into a nightmare.
When I expressed this fear, my family was divided in how they responded.
My mother and her sister, my aunt Rhi, to no one’s surprise, leaped right into protective mode.
“Of course, we don’t need to try scrying again. There are lots of other perfectly simple methods we can try first, and I’m sure one of them will work for you,” my mom said.
“Are you insane?” Persi snapped at her immediately. “The fact that she had that experience is exactly why scrying is the first thing we should try!”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Rhi said, clearly hedging. “It… it doesn’t necessarily mean she has an affinity for scrying. It could have been merely a coincidence that Asteria reached her that way. The communication was being interrupted, it was unpredictable, it was—”
“It was successful!” Persi replied. “It was the only way she ever managed to break through, and you think we should abandon it because it was scary?” The final word dripped with such disdain that I could feel the color rising to my cheeks—a bright red flush of embarrassment that also seemed to shrink me where I sat, until I felt like the toddler I’d been the first time I’d encountered the Darkness.
“If she was scared, she had every reason to be!” my mother snapped. “Scrying is not a one-way communication!”
I frowned at her, piping up for the first time since the argument began. “What do you mean?”