Chapter 6
Shanna ran to the playground, spotting Leanne’s bouncy black hair at the swing set. “Leanne, Leanne! I brought Gran’s pack of herbs, like I said I would! Now we can be witches togeth—”
Leanne punched out instinctively, sending Shanna stumbling into the sand.
Shanna blew her hair off her face. Why didn’t Leanne let her hug her? They’d been friends since Shanna could remember, and she’d only been gone for a week with Mommy and Granny.
“Go away,” Leanne said.
“But—”
“Mommy!” Leanne ran toward a group of adults. “There’s a strange girl here.” She hid behind one of the women, looking at Shanna as if she’d fallen from the sky to attack her.
Shanna drew her scratched, dusty knees up to her chest and sniffled.
Why was her best friend suddenly acting like she didn’t know her?
***
“Poor thing. You must have been starving.” Gran patted Chris on the back as the girl dug into her plate of eggs and bacon.
“Gran has finally found someone who eats copious amounts of food without complaining,” Shanna murmured to Simon.
They’d settled down on the couch in the living room while Gran served breakfast to Chris.
The two of them said they weren’t hungry—at least for Shanna, the stress of the past few hours had been too much—although surely they couldn’t escape food for long.
“So, you two.” Gran walked into the living room. “I did some research on Hel’s bond last night.”
Simon perked up. “And?”
“You want the good news or the bad news first?”
“Good,” Shanna said.
“Bad,” Simon said at the same time.
Gran looked from one to the other and waved her hand in the air. “It can be broken, but we have a small problem.”
“Is that the good part or the bad part?” Shanna asked.
“It’s a summary of the whole thing.”
“So?” Simon prompted.
With an exaggeratedly tired sigh, Gran sat down across from them.
“There’s a ritual that can be done to break it, one that you shouldn’t have a problem performing,” she said to Shanna.
“But we need ingredients, and there are a few steps to be done first, too. On the steps, I still have to find clear instructions. There’s a book I’ll need to dig up, but don’t you worry about that. I’ll take care of it.”
“She doesn’t mean literally dig up, right?” Simon whispered to Shanna.
“Which might take a few days or a week,” Gran continued.
“That’s fine. I can wait a week,” Simon said.
Gran pursed her lips, causing Shanna to wring her hands in her lap. She knew that look—the “Oh boy, it’s not that easy” look.
“And the ingredients?” Shanna asked. “What will we need? Crystals charged at a full moon? Water left outside for a month?”
“I have everything except for one thing. A Mercurial Crystal.”
“What are those?” Simon asked.
Shanna looked to Gran. “A crystal attuned to the planet Mercury?”
“Not the same, and not necessarily a crystal. It can be any sort of object, as long as it’s correctly charged,” Gran explained. “They’re called so because they’re mercurial. Changing. They can either bond or break, and their focus is really, really strong.”
“That’s good for spells or rituals,” Shanna told Simon. “You want something that can focus energies.”
Gran nodded. “The problem with Mercurial Crystals being, because they’re so strong, they’re also finicky to create.
They require a heavy investment of soul and heart from at least two people, who must already share a bond—usually family members—and it’s ideal if they’re both practicing witches.
If even a small thing goes wrong in the process, the crystal will backfire and become charged with dark magic instead. ”
“Bad, I take it?” Simon said.
“Very. A gruesome accident happened a decade or so ago, using a poorly made Mercurial Crystal. The last ritual for that poor witch.” Gran shook her head, her mouth grim. “That’s why they have, shall we say, a soft ban on them now.”
“Who does?” Simon asked.
“Our community. We don’t have strict rules forbidding their use, but there’s a general agreement that no Mercurial Crystals should be made anymore.”
Without one, they couldn’t break the bond.
Simon would have to stay with her. Shanna bit her tongue, ordering the thought away.
Did she really want to be chained to a man who didn’t want anything to do with her?
And how would that work? Would she always follow him a hundred feet behind, lurking like a shadow as he moved on with his life?
Watch from a corner as he went on dates and smiled at other women?
Wait outside his office until he was done with work, like some sad puppy?
Because she wasn’t going to get anything more. The curse had run its course, and they were done for.
“But they existed before the ban,” Simon said. “Would any still be around?”
Of course! Why didn’t she think of that?
Gran nodded approvingly, her eyes glinting. “I was getting to that. There’s only one I know of. If it can be found, there’s a good chance it’s still working since, at the time, it wouldn’t have been caught in the whole debacle.”
Shanna breathed a sigh of relief. She could always trust Gran to have a solution.
She was a little more annoyed at Gran’s clear approval of Simon, though.
In any other case, she’d love her support of her potential romantic partner.
In this one case, she certainly didn’t want her to matchmake, though.
“And? Where is it?” Simon asked.
Gran’s pale eyes penetrated Shanna. “Your mom had it.”
Shanna’s heart dropped into shadowy depths.
Simon looked from Gran to Shanna. “What does that mean? Is that bad? Is she an evil witch?”
“I don’t know,” Shanna squeezed out.
“Well, where is she?”
“I don’t know!” She fought hard not to rush out of the room like an angry teenager, but she still couldn’t stop herself from sniffling.
Mom. A name that was just that. No longer a title, a role, not even a memory.
All Shanna knew was that she used to have one and that her leaving dropped a fuzzy fog over Shanna’s childhood.
Shanna had been forgotten many times, but she’d been on the receiving end only once; just enough to know how it felt.
It was strange. In a way, the absence of the memory was a memory in itself.
Shanna knew something had happened simply because she didn’t have memories of what exactly had happened.
“Isabel had a silver bracelet with three onyx stones. That was our family’s Mercurial Crystal, forged many generations ago.
” Gran’s voice drifted over as if she were far away, separated from Shanna by mountains of regret.
At least she was addressing Simon, not her.
“But she left twenty years ago and took the bracelet with her.”
“Left?” Simon asked.
“Her lover, Shanna’s father, had forgotten her.” Gran’s voice had dropped low, overcome with memories.
How did she still know it? Had she written it down?
“They managed for a long time. Longer than I ever did. Longer than I imagined possible for any of us. But at last, the curse caught up with them. There was some silly mishap, an accident that separated them for a few days too many. And she was gone from his memory.”
“But couldn’t she tell him what had happened? She had—they had you,” Simon said to Shanna.
“It gets worse after the curse takes effect.” Shanna wasn’t sure why she was explaining, but somehow, she dragged out the words.
“It’s harder to re-establish the relationship once someone has been completely forgotten.
Imagine we’re a disease, and the curse is the vaccine.
It doesn’t matter if the disease comes back once you’ve been vaccinated. You won’t care about it anymore.”
Simon blinked, staring down at the carpet.
She supposed she didn’t have to explain further.
Gran looked at her with a light smile of compassion. “Isabel left because of a broken heart,” she told Simon. “She didn’t want to go through anything like that again, so she said she’d go somewhere where she had no one to care about. Where she could get lost. To the end of the world.”
Shanna frowned. “Maine?”
“Alaska?” Simon tried.
Gran snorted. “New Zealand.”
“New—” Simon bent over, wheezing. “She really meant it with the end of the world.”
“You don’t remember Mom, do you?” It wouldn’t be possible. Gran couldn’t have found a loophole in the curse or somehow escaped it, and they knew the solution to it was impossible.
Gran came over to Shanna, enveloping her in a hug. “No, dear. Everything I know is from what I wrote down. A few pictures I have. But looking at it is like reading a book or watching a movie. It’s something I objectively know happened, but it feels like it didn’t happen to me.”
They stayed like this for a bit, Shanna snuggled in Gran’s embrace, until Simon shifted. “Sorry,” he said. “If you brought this whole thing up, does that mean …?”
“That this is your only hope.” Gran straightened up from the hug. She smiled at Shanna and tucked her hair behind her ear—like she’d always done when Shanna was little. “If you want the Mercurial Crystal, you’ll have to go find your mom, sweetie.”
Shanna’s head swam as she slowly shook it. “To New Zealand? Is she even still there?”
“She could’ve gone anywhere,” Simon said.
“Except she didn’t,” Gran said. “I never told you because you’d forgotten her, so there was no use, but she’s gone.”
“Dead?” Shanna squeaked.
Gran nodded. “One day, about a year after she left, I tried a spell—not to locate her, just to sense her energy. See how she was doing. It was a tricky one. I’d completely forgotten her at that point, so I had no personal connection.
But I managed to put the spell through anyway—only to find her gone. ”
Shanna thought she’d be sad, but aside from a minor disappointment, she felt nothing. All of her anger and bitterness had already been swallowed by Mom leaving in the first place. She’d chosen to forget Shanna and Gran. She’d decided to never come back.
So who cared if she couldn’t?
“It was so long ago,” Simon said. “Even if the bracelet stayed with her, if it’s somewhere in New Zealand, how are we going to find it?”
Gran pecked Shanna on the forehead, as if to say to cheer up. “A little bit of witchcraft, Mr. Montague, and a little bit of snooping.” She headed over to a cabinet by the wall and brought back a flat wooden box.
“Isabel sent these from New Zealand. They’re the last things I have of her.” Opening the box unleashed a sweet smell of varnish and revealed a set of postcards bound by a blue satin ribbon.
Shanna reached for them, undoing the ribbon with shaky hands.
“If you’re going to follow her trail, that’s where you start.”
There were four postcards in total, showcasing sapphire seas and golden, sandy beaches and blueish-green mountains.
Shanna shuffled to the bottom one, joining four smaller pictures—different views of the same hilly city in a bay—with the words “I love Wellington” written in a funky font in the middle.
She flipped the card. A handwritten message on the back, holding up well despite its age, said, “It’s really blowing me away. ”
“This was the last one sent, so possibly her final stop,” Gran said. “It’s the best place to pick up the trail.”
“I can’t go all the way to New Zealand,” Simon said. “I have things to attend to! My company! Everyone thinks I’m dead while somebody is actually trying to kill me.”
“Precisely why you should take a break,” Gran mused.
“She has a point,” Shanna said. “Not about the break, but if the person who wants you dead sends another assassin, it’ll be much harder for them to reach you halfway across the world. If they even find out you went there! Disappearing might be a good thing.”
“Besides, both of you have to go, or neither,” Gran said. “You can’t break Hel’s bond without going to New Zealand, and Shanna alone can’t go there without first breaking the bond.”
Simon clenched his fists. Shanna could only imagine how helpless he must feel—trapped with her and with no other way out but to go to the other side of the world on a wild-goose chase.
If she didn’t already hate herself, she’d probably start now.
“Fine, then. We’ll go,” he said.
Nice to know that a crazy trip in the middle of an emergency was still preferable to being eternally bound to her.
“Hey, Gran Dolores.” Chris came to the living room, mumbling through a mouthful of food. “You got any more apple pie? This is the best thing I’ve eaten, ever.”
Shanna looked at Simon, the sudden widening of his eyes mirroring hers. What did they do with Chris? She still had to help them find the assassin.
“By the way, really appreciate you not turning me in,” Chris added toward Simon. “So, how are we progressing with this? What are the next steps in the plan?”
Oh, shoot.
Simon rubbed his face before he turned to Chris. “Ever wanted to go to New Zealand?”