Chapter 8
Iclosed the door behind Leila twenty minutes later, breathless from our frantic efforts to clear up from her lapse in judgment upstairs.
She waved to me cheerfully over the gate and then hurried off, glancing both ways down the street to make sure Persi wasn’t approaching.
I heaved a sigh of relief as she disappeared from sight around the corner, but not only because she was gone.
When I’d left the house this morning, I’d been wracking my brain over how to find a spirit witch to help me.
And now, not an hour later, a willing spirit witch had basically fallen right into my lap.
I could hardly believe my luck. I tried not to get too excited, but I couldn’t help myself.
I wasn’t used to solutions to my problems presenting themselves so readily. It felt too good to be true.
As I made my way through the store, readying everything to open, I thought ahead to that night.
Leila and I agreed to meet at the bookshop below her grandmother’s tarot studio at six o’clock.
I would have to lie to my mother about where I was, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but there was no other option.
A quick text to either Eva or Zale would give me the alibi I required, but I’d have to be careful about the details if I didn’t want to get caught.
Like many small towns, everyone knew everyone else’s business in Sedgwick Cove, and what they didn’t know, they could use magic to figure out.
I’d really have to think about this, plan for every eventuality.
I looked at the clock and groaned. This was going to be the longest shift of my life, and this time of year, I’d be lucky to get even a handful of customers to break up the monotony.
Then I remembered that my bag was full of the books Rhi had gathered together for me for our research.
On the one hand, it was hard to get excited about having to dig through a pile of dusty books to find a scrap of information about the Darkness, when I was starting to make progress with the much more unpredictable, and therefore exciting, medium of divination.
On the other hand, it was more interesting than banging around in an empty shop, refacing shelves that were already perfectly faced, and dusting things that didn't need dusting. So, I pulled the stool up to the counter, hauled the books up next to the register, and started flipping through them. Within just a few moments, I realized this wasn’t going to be boring at all.
The first book I opened had a faded red fabric cover and a hand-written title scrawled on the first page: A History of Sedgwick Cove by Elizabeth Farley, compiled and written from 1931 to 1946.
I knew there were still Farleys in Sedgwick Cove—one of them worked part-time in the Historical Society, and another one had her own classroom in one of the quaint Victorian houses that made up our local school.
I thought it might just be a collection of notes and disjointed events, but instead I found myself skimming a very detailed, organized history of the Cove, divided into chapters covering different decades.
Elizabeth Farley had included family trees for all of the covens, hand-drawn and extremely detailed.
I lingered over the Vesper one, seeing the place where my great-grandmother’s name joined with a man, John Barrow, and knowing that, if the author had waited just a few more years to conclude her research, there would have been another little offshoot under their names labeled “Asteria Vesper.”
I saw family trees for the Claires, the McDowells, the Marins—so many of the covens I knew.
There was also one for the Kildare Coven, though it was truncated compared to the others; and beneath it, Elizabeth Farley had written, “Additional generations unknown—banished for malevolent magic.” I shuddered.
Unfortunately, I had come face-to-face with exactly what the coven spawned.
This footnote in an old book made me dwell on Veronica Meyers for the first time in a long time.
After everything that happened with Sarah Claire and the Source, my focus had shifted solely to the Darkness itself, and Veronica had fallen to the fringes of my thoughts.
Now, seeing the name “Kildare” created a creeping sense of dread that inched along my skin and burrowed down into the pit of my stomach.
I’d been so convinced, in the immediate aftermath of the Litha pageant, that Veronica would be back to Sedgwick Cove.
The Kildares had spent generations plotting their return to the Cove—I was not foolish enough to believe that they would simply stop trying because Veronica’s plan hadn’t worked.
From what I could gather from her unhinged ravings underneath the playhouse, she believed, as did the others in the Kildare coven, that it was somehow their destiny to unlock the secrets of the Source and present it, rather like an offering, to the Darkness, in exchange for the kind of power they could only dream of.
Destiny wasn’t the kind of thing you just shrugged and gave up on.
So where was she? And what was she plotting next? Because she certainly was somewhere plotting something.
Several minutes of brooding on these unanswered questions began to make me deeply uneasy, and so I turned the page, hoping to distract myself and… bingo. Distraction achieved. In Elizabeth Farley’s surgically neat handwriting was a chapter titled “The Darkness: A History.”
My heart fluttered as I began to read, but sank quickly when I realized the chapter began exactly where my knowledge of the Darkness did: with the story of Sarah Claire and the Covenant.
I skimmed through the familiar details and found that I knew even more about that fateful encounter than she did.
When at last I reached the paragraph at the bottom of the page, I sighed.
Nothing new. Nothing that would give me any further insight.
I turned the page, wondering if it was worth continuing, when I caught a glimpse of the next heading and dove right back in.
The next page was titled, “Sightings of the Darkness.” I pushed my glasses up my nose and began reading:
While the origins and exact nature of the entity known as the Darkness are unclear, I have here compiled what has been known of its nature by the covens who have been unfortunate enough to encounter it.
Not all of these encounters are confirmed to be accurate, as many were passed down by word of mouth over the generations, rendering them more legend than historical record.
Nonetheless, it is important to realize that there may still be truth in them, and therefore, this author decided that omitting them was negligent to the purpose of this tome.
Well, I could see what Rhi was saying about the Farleys having a reputation for self-importance.
This woman sounded as though she were writing an academic thesis rather than an amateur project.
Then again, it wasn’t as though historians of Sedgwick Cove could seek validation or publication outside of the boundaries of the town.
Much of what Elizabeth had so far recorded was information that the covens of the Cove would want to keep hidden from outsiders.
For all I knew, this was the most complete and factual historical record we had. I kept reading.
Over the generations, there have been many reported sightings and encounters that we cannot entirely dismiss.
At least three different covens—the MacDowells, the Boswells, and the Bishops—came to the Conclave for protection against an entity that had visited their youngest daughters.
The entity took the form of a long-haired young man, barefoot and dressed in animal skins, but when discovered, it took the shape of a raven and flew away.
He had been seen, each time, near an open window, crouched over the bed of a sleeping girl.
The Boswells claimed they heard him muttering words in an unknown tongue, though the other two clans did not hear the same.
He did not resemble any known resident of the Cove, nor could he be identified as coming from any surrounding settlements—the covens were very careful to keep a close watch on anyone who lived within an easy distance of the town, for their own safety.
It should be noted that shapeshifting is not a human form of magic—that is to say, it has not been successfully attempted by any witch we are aware of, and there has never been a spell created that can accomplish it.
While witches can produce illusions of this sort, the reality is beyond the reach of our abilities.
Assuming this was indeed a true shapeshifter and not some form of very convincing glamour work, then we must conclude that the being involved was not human.
I looked up from the book for a moment, lost in thought.
The description of the young man, while vague, matched the version of the Darkness I had seen in Sarah Claire’s memories, so it was definitely possible that these covens had been correct.
I shuddered at the thought of the Darkness visiting the room of small children, but then, hadn’t it done the very same with me?
Perhaps it had been searching, amongst the young witches of the Cove, for a pentamaleficus, trying to determine the powers of those who had not yet fully stepped into them.
I wondered how he had known what my powers would become.
Did the Darkness have some sort of sixth sense?
It seemed likely. I breathed a sigh of relief for each of those long-ago children the Darkness had passed over, spared because they were not what it was looking for.
I only wished I, too, could have been so lucky.
I shoved those childhood memories of the Gray Man to the back of my memory, so I could concentrate and return my attention to the page.