Chapter 15 #2
It took both hands pressed over my mouth to muffle the cry that erupted from me as the waves crashed over her head. Her dark hair floated for a moment on the surface, waving like a flag of surrender.
And then she was gone, and I was staring once again at my own horrified reflection.
The hours ticked by as I sat on the floor of the bathroom, the piece of sea glass clutched in my hand. I felt numb, as though it was my body that had been swallowed by the icy tide. Only the sound of a knock on the bathroom door roused me out of my stupor.
“Wren? Are you in there?”
I tried to answer, but no sound came out. I cleared my throat and swallowed hard. “Yes,” I managed to reply.
“Are you all right?” My mother’s voice was suddenly sharp with alarm, and I knew why. My voice sounded awful.
“I think I’m… sick,” I replied. It wasn’t an excuse. I felt terrible.
My mom opened the door, took one look at me, and her entire face changed into an expression I knew very well.
Nurse-mom had been activated.
All my life, I’d thought of my mother as two different people: Mom-mom, and Nurse-mom.
Mom-mom was softer. She laughed more easily.
She had a delicate slump to her posture and an easy smile.
She hummed to herself while she did things around the apartment.
But Nurse-mom was another being entirely.
Her posture was ramrod straight. She moved with quick, precise, sharp movements.
Her tone was clipped, her nostrils slightly flared, and her eyes sharp.
Nurse-mom closed the distance between us in two swift steps. She pressed first her hand, then her cheek against my forehead.
“Hmm.”
A moment later, so quickly that I thought she must have already been carrying it on her person, a thermometer was pressed against my forehead. It beeped discordantly, and my mother frowned down at it.
“Hmm,” she said again. She stood up and began rummaging around the sink area.
“Were you feeling hot?” She asked in that voice as sharp as glass.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. “And a little dizzy. I tried to do the… the cold compress thing on the back of my—”
Before I could finish, she had slapped the dripping towel onto the back of my neck again. I shivered as several drops of icy water slipped down my back between my shoulder blades.
“What other symptoms, Wren? Nausea?”
“Um, a little, yeah.”
“Headache?”
My head gave a throb in response. “Yup.”
My mom felt my pulse, looked in my eyes as though she could read something inside them, and then nodded.
“Damn it. Stay right there. Don’t try to get up.”
“Mom what—”
But before I could ask her what was going on, she vanished again.
I could hear her clattering around in the kitchen.
When I was little, our medicine cabinet looked much like anyone else’s—Tylenol, antacids, boxes of Band-Aids and rolls of gauze.
But the medicine cabinet at Lightkeep Cottage was a totally different story.
In the first place, it was located in the kitchen, not the bathroom.
Above Rhi’s massive soapstone sink was a treasure trove of home remedies.
Some were labeled in Asteria’s flowery writing, full of flourishes and embellishments.
Other, more recent bottles were labeled with my mom’s neat, compact hand.
Regardless of who had concocted them, each and every remedy was a tried and true Vesper family recipe, developed over the centuries with a considerable amount of magical prowess, and tested repeatedly for effectiveness and reliability.
It actually astonished me, when I saw how plentiful they were, that my mother had gone for so many years without relying on this type of medicine.
“Believe me, it was a struggle,” she had told me when I asked her. “Modern medicine has many fine advancements, but when it comes to common remedies for everyday ailments, witches still do it best. There were a few times when you were little that I very nearly cheated.”
Cheated. That was what she called it when she was tempted to use magic while we were living in Portland.
My mother’s green witch abilities were so strong that she didn’t even like to have house plants in the apartment, as her effect on them would be a giveaway; or maybe she just didn’t want to be confronted by the temptation of flexing those magical muscles.
It was with one of those bottles from the kitchen that my mother came bustling back into the bathroom.
She helped me up off the floor and onto the edge of the old clawfoot bathtub to sit.
She sat down beside me and uncorked the bottle with a satisfying “pop.” Then she poured a measure of the viscous, lavender colored liquid into a small silver cup, and handed it to me.
“Drink,” she ordered.
I wanted to ask what was in it, but another wave of fever-induced shuddering came over me, and I obeyed without further discussion.
It tasted vaguely floral and a little sweet, not nearly as unpleasant as the store-bought medicines she’d forced down my throat as a kid.
Only after I had swallowed it did I ask, “What will this do?”
“Bring down your fever and rebalance your interior scales,” she said.
I squinted at her. “My interior what?”
“Scales. You’re off-balance, honey. It can happen sometimes, when you’re developing your affinity, and you’re trying to develop five at once.”
“So I… what, made myself sick from doing too much magic?” I croaked.
My mom smiled at that, looking a little less like nurse-mom. “Something like that.”
“I didn’t realize that could happen.”
“Happens quite a bit, actually. I heard Xiomara mention that Eva had a mild bout of it in the lead-up to her testing to become a waterworker. I’m sorry, I should have warned you about it, but… well, I guess we were focused on some more pressing issues.”
I laughed, one low, humorless chuckle. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
“What’s that in your hand?”
“Huh?”
I looked down and saw that the sea glass was still sitting in my palm. I hadn’t thought about it at all since the vision had begun, but now I stared down at it, smooth and heavy and sliding against my sweaty skin.
“Oh, uh, it’s a piece of sea glass,” I said. “I found it on the beach.”
“Oh. It’s a nice one. Pretty. Maybe put it on your altar.”
“Good idea,” I said automatically. There was no way this thing was going on my altar. I had half a mind to chuck it right out the bathroom window, now that I’d remembered I was holding it. Then again, that probably wouldn’t stop it from appearing again wherever it damn well pleased.
My mom placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it gently. “Let’s get you back to bed. You should feel better after a couple of hours of sleep. And let’s take a break from divination today.”
I pressed my lips together. I would certainly try to take a break from divination. The question was whether divination would take a break from me.
Back in my bed, tucked under my covers and with my mom’s concoction already smoothing away the unpleasantness of the episode, I had time to think.
I didn’t understand this vision. There had been no sign of Ambrose.
No sign of the creature he had indebted himself to.
No hint at the Darkness as I had ever experienced it.
No sign of the forest clearing, although there was the same, ineffable sense of being in a long distant version of the same place I was now—I recognized the cliffs, the beach, the energy that ran like lifeblood even now through Sedgwick Cove.
But I didn’t recognize the woman. At least, I didn’t think I did.
She looked vaguely familiar, like she reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place who.
And yet, despite her being, as far as I could tell, a stranger, my journey to understand the Darkness had shown her to me. Why?
I knew I could do nothing to help her, that I was witnessing something that had happened long ago, and yet I ached with a helplessness that was hard to master.
It had been agony, watching her walk into the ocean so slowly and calmly.
What had possessed her to do it? And there was another reason it had been so difficult to watch: because I had once done the very same thing myself.
When I was just a toddler, the Darkness had tried to take me by the hand and walk me calmly into the sea.
If Asteria had not found us, I would have done exactly that.
Then years later, when the Darkness held my mother’s life as leverage, I had done it again.
In my mind, I had had no choice. I couldn’t let my mother die.
I had to sacrifice myself. It had been inevitable.
There had been an inevitability in the woman’s actions as well, and yet it was different.
She wasn’t being pressured. There was no malevolent presence forcing her hand.
I knew that instinctively, because I’d experienced it myself.
I knew that, if the Darkness had forced her hand, as it had mine, that I would recognize it.
So I ruled it out, and accepted that she had been acting under her own power, not anyone else’s.
She wasn’t struggling with her choice. It was made.
Inescapable. I had watched it crystallize almost instantly in her eyes, the kind of decision that could not be reversed.
I believed that, even if an army of people had tried to pull her back, she still would have found a way to walk into the sea and embrace her death.
But why. Why?
I thought about the injury to her cheek.
The grief in her eyes. The cloudiness of disbelief crystallizing into understanding and then, resolve.
I could think of nothing worse than watching a person choose death—choose it with a resolve that would brook no argument.
I knew it would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.
As my fingers tightened around it, I realized that I was still holding the piece of sea glass.
I sat up swiftly and looked down at it, glimmering faintly in the dim light of early morning, now filtering through my curtains.
What should I do with it? Instinct was telling me not to take my mother’s suggestion to place it on my altar.
Something about that idea made me feel uncomfortable.
I didn’t want whatever power this sea glass had to seep into the rest of my magic.
But obviously, I couldn’t just get rid of it.
It had reappeared twice now, as though from thin air.
Was Granny Nightjar sending it to me? Was someone else?
The questions inside my head were starting to blur at the edges, converging into an uneasy jumble as a wave of sleepiness swept over me.
I couldn’t solve this now, not with a pounding headache and a fever raging through me.
I had to sleep and tackle it in the morning.
I reached over into my bedside table, and found the little pouch Asteria had made for me.
It was empty now. I placed the piece of sea glass inside, and pulled the drawstring.
Then I placed it back on the nightstand and looked over at Freya, who was watching me with a curious gaze.
“Keep an eye on that,” I told her.
She blinked at me, and then turned and looked at the pouch as though she’d understood exactly what I’d said.
Freya, standing sentry, gave me just enough peace of mind to finally give in to the sleep tugging at the edges of my consciousness.
With a sigh of resignation, I let my eyes flutter closed, and settled into a strange, unsettled sleep full of mirrors and crashing surf and piles of round, smooth stones.