Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
Evie, Now
After finding her mother’s journal thirteen years ago, Evie had turned Honeysuckle House upside down searching for more of her things.
Where Florence had avoided any run-in with their shared trauma, Evie was desperate for an explanation, a reason for all the pain they’d gone through.
Yes, their mother had hurt them. Yes, Evie still carried the effects of that hurt in the way she flinched at Florence’s anger.
At how she sought to make everything just right for a disgruntled guest and agonized over guiding Clara too much in her magic or too little or really at all in fear she’d get it wrong.
But if she could piece together her mother’s life before she had come into it, maybe she could find some sort of peace with the broken parts of her, or at least uncover enough to patch the holes.
She stared out over the room. It had been hidden just beyond where Evie worked her own magic. Had her mother cast some sort of spell to keep Evie from finding it?
Evie wouldn’t put it past her. Linda Caldwell had used magic to keep the curse from Evie and Florence for years, leaving them unprepared for their father’s death back in the 90s.
After that, once they were old enough, the sisters had looked everywhere for answers about the magic that haunted their family.
But there was little to be found beyond a few newspaper articles about the past victims—their grandmother, their great-aunt, and a woman who must’ve been a friend of the family long before their mother came into the world.
After their mother’s death, they still had little to go on with only tarot to guide them.
But now? Maybe the answers Evie needed had been hiding in the house all along.
She wanted to flip through each of the leather-bound journals, to collect the crystals and cleanse them in water and moonlight, to run her fingers over the candles her mother had dipped. She wasn’t foolish enough to light them, but she wondered what magic lingered in the wax.
Clara was way ahead of her. Already she’d crossed over to her mother’s altar, lifted the large wooden box containing her tarot cards; the deck was a sister to Florence’s, but where Florence’s card backs were green, these were black.
Evie recognized her mother’s deck from her childhood.
She’d searched for it after her mother had died, but she’d come up empty-handed.
When Evie took the cards from Clara, her daughter looked up at her, tears still glistening on her cheeks.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“It was my mother’s,” Evie said. “I didn’t know it was here.”
“Are we going to take the wall all the way down?”
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” Evie said.
“But not yet,” Angela said as she followed them through the hole. Evie raised her eyebrows, and Angela shook her head with a smile. “I see that look in your eyes.”
Evie laughed softly. She was tempted to go get her sledgehammer and have at it then and there.
“Fine,” she said, “not yet.”
She crossed over to her mother’s altar and rested a hand on the top of Clara’s head, ruffling her hair as she looked over what Linda Caldwell had left behind.
The candles were curious, but Evie was more interested in the journal laying open in front of them, dated thirteen years ago.
She ran her fingers over her mother’s handwriting, likely the last time the woman put pen to paper.
“Is that a spell?” Clara asked.
Evie blinked away thoughts of her mother, focusing instead on the words scrawled on the open page in front of her.
Something offered
Black candle
Brown candle
Tourmaline, obsidian, and quartz
An anchor
Objects belonging to spell subjects
String
Magician card
Temperance card
Dip the candles with the intention of the spell infused into the wax.
Create a spell circle, placing each crystal to form a triangle.
Tie the anchor to the objects, bind them with string, and place them in the center.
Make the offering. Light the candles. Use the flame of the black taper to burn the cards.
Once the wax finishes melting, the spell will be sealed.
Evie looked from the book to the pooled wax to the tied objects. With Caldwell magic, candle and flame and occasionally a circle of salt were enough for most spells. This went far beyond that. Only the most difficult work required ritual.
“It looks like a spell,” Clara said, when Evie didn’t answer her question.
“You have a good eye, honeybee,” Evie said. “I think it’s a binding spell.”
The anchor, the black candle, the string.
She wasn’t quite sure how the brown candle—a color for home—or the temperance card fit in, but the rest seemed clear.
Such spells were difficult work. Evie had avoided them because to bind was to enforce your will on someone else, most often to cut a witch off from her magic.
It didn’t surprise her that her mother would use one, but by the look of it, this was the last spell she cast before the curse took her.
Who, Evie wondered, had her mother spent her final moments trying to bind?
Clara lifted her head up, looking right at Evie. “What’s a binding spell?”
“It’s tricky magic,” Evie said. “When you bind something, you’re changing it, stopping it from doing what it wants to do.”
“That’s against our rules,” Clara said.
“Which is why I’ve never taught you about them,” Evie said. “My mother never taught me about them, either.” All Evie knew about binding spells and other sorts of manipulative magic came from books and speculation. Spells written but never cast.
Clara looked from her mom to the table and back again. She reached for the bound objects in the center of the circle and plucked out a tarnished brass sphere with a honeysuckle engraved on the front. “This looks like the doorknob to my bedroom!”
A string had been knotted around it, tied to a pair of necklaces, each one half of a heart.
They’d been a gift from Evie’s father—one for her and one for Florence.
They’d stopped wearing them by the time Florence went to high school.
Evie thought she’d lost hers. It hadn’t been in her jewelry box when she and Florence moved out of Honeysuckle House on Evie’s eighteenth birthday. It seemed her mother had taken it.
Clara glanced up at Evie and asked, “Was grandma trying to bind the house?”
The pipes started to groan, a low sound that echoed through the attic.
Evie stared at her daughter, her eyes going wide as Clara’s suggestion sank in.
Evie had been so focused on trying to break her family’s curse for the past thirteen years—and to prove her sister wrong—that she hadn’t stopped to think about the possibility that it wasn’t the family that was cursed at all.
The house had been the one who showed Evie the journal.
The house had been the one who tried to convince her she was safe within its walls.
This spell called for an anchor, and what more powerful anchor was there than two Caldwell witches?
Yes, Evie knew her mother had hurt her over and over.
Yes, the wounds lived on. But what if she had been on a path to redemption, to finally making things right for her family?
Perhaps she had been trying to bind the house, and if so, what had stopped her?
Evie glanced around the room, looking for something she missed.
She stepped past her mother’s altar, stopping in front of the bookcase where several journals lay as if they’d only just been dumped off the shelf.
There among them sat her mother’s diary from 1986, the same one Evie thought she’d lost. If the journal was in this room, then it couldn’t have been her mother who put it there.
She knelt down and started stacking up the fallen books.
“Find something?” Angela asked.
Evie tilted her head back, but before Angela came into view, Evie’s eyes landed on a broken rod and chain hanging from the ceiling, the edge of the metal jagged from where it had snapped from an old lighting fixture.
The day of her mother’s death flared bright in Evie’s memory.
The honeysuckle vines that had attacked Florence the moment they’d stepped on the property.
Evie’s inability to stop them. The fear that the curse had claimed her sister.
And then, a crash had echoed from somewhere deep inside the house, and with it the cracking of wood and metal and glass.
Evie could still hear her mother’s scream if she closed her eyes.
When they’d found her, her mother was already dead, her body pinned beneath the chandelier.
A sense of unease tapped its fingers along her spine, but Evie forced her voice calm.
“Mommy?” Clara asked.
“That is a very interesting theory, honeybee,” Evie said slowly. “But she would have no reason to bind the house. The house is our friend.”
“And our family!” Clara said brightly.
At their words, the house’s moaning stopped. Though the attic grew quiet, Evie’s pulse quickened.
“Right,” Evie said, something in her heart breaking. Because despite everything, the house was their family. Even if it had deceived Evie, she couldn’t blame it. She wouldn’t want to be left alone, cursed to hurt the ones she loved.
“If it wasn’t the house, maybe Grandma was trying to bind the curse,” Clara said before she turned her attention back to exploring the rest of the room.
“Now there’s an idea.” Evie tried to keep her voice light and thoughtful.
Angela saw right through it. She came to stand beside Evie, close enough for her to whisper, “Are you alright?”
Evie brought her mouth the Angela’s ear. “I think Clara was right.”
“You can bind a curse?” Angela asked.