Witchlore

Chapter Twenty-Eight

At seven o’clock on Samhain morning, I am standing with Kira Tavi, looking down on the grave of my dead girlfriend.

I’ve never been here before. I couldn’t go to the funeral and I’ve not really had the heart to come on my own, worried about running into her parents.

The headstone is bright white marble, so fresh it looks like it’s made of polystyrene.

There are all sorts of mementos left around it, drooping balloons and dying flowers turning brown in plastic wrappers and, a clear sign of witch visitors, a row of small semiprecious crystals and gemstones on top of the headstone.

ELIZABETH TOPPINGS, BELOVED DAUGHTER. It’s weird that it’s the only thing people will know about her in the future.

Not that she loved history and could do backflips on the trampoline and was obsessed with red and green gummi bears.

I feel a flash of mourning for all of those lost tiny things and that one day she’ll disappear in history, just like my shifter’s name.

Beside me, Kira pulls a polished rose quartz out of her pocket and leaves it on the top, touching the headstone respectfully.

“No one’s ever told me why covens do that,” I say.

“It’s a superstition, really.” Kira looks a bit uncomfortable. “It’s meant to … I don’t know, mean her magic goes on through other witches.”

I nod.

“Well, if we get her back she’ll have to redistribute them,” I say, trying to joke, but Kira only frowns.

“No, she’ll keep them. They are well-wishes for her magic. Obviously.”

I glare at her for assuming that everything in witch culture is obvious to a person who isn’t even allowed to be part of a coven.

“I should warn you, every time I’ve touched an ingredient for this spell, I’ve shifted,” I say, pulling a jar for the dirt out of my backpack.

“Well, why don’t I get it, then?” She kneels down to scrape up some dirt.

“Oh. Yeah. Right.” It’s pretty sensible when I think about it, but I don’t want to think about it, because then I’m going to think about Bastian pushing me away from a boggart’s path, pulling me out of the ocean, holding the summoning spell so steady while I reached for the Black Shuck.

“So your shifts, they’ve been because of this spell?

” Kira asks, taking the jar from me. Looking at it reminds me of Shasta’s jar.

I imagine Bastian at Shasta’s grave collecting it, kneeling in front of a headstone by himself.

I feel a pang for him then, lonely and stressed, missing Shasta, searching for a way to get him back.

Then I remind myself I don’t care because he’s a liar.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Interesting.” She drops a handful of dirt into the jar with a frown. “Do you have any other magical symptoms? Dreams? Nightmares?”

I nod mechanically. Soon, however, it will all be over, and then I won’t care about the dreams or the shifter from long ago. I’ll have Elizabeth back.

“What are they about?”

“That’s not important.” I’m not about to share dreams with Kira Tavi. She’d probably make me journal about it.

“It might be.”

I shrug. I can hardly tell her that I’ve dreamed about her great-aunt’s death. I might not like Kira very much but I’m not a dick.

“Do you think it’s possible that your great-aunt’s shifter could have tried the resurrection spell?” I ask instead.

Kira leans back on her heels and stares at me.

“Why?”

“Because I wonder … if that’s how they died.

” I glance at all the headstones around me.

For all we know, they could be buried here, an ivy-covered gravestone with no one left to visit it.

“You said they disappeared after your great-aunt died, but I wonder if they used the spell to try and bring her back and died, just like Bastian’s friend did. ”

Kira stares at me and then screws the lid on the jar.

“Can you expand on that?” she asks. That’s a question that takes me straight back to the hospital, to sitting in a room with Counselor Cooper, and I smile dryly.

“You really do want to be a counselor, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, without a hint of irony. “Can you? Expand?”

“Not really. I just wonder if that’s why I get the dreams.” I fix my eyes on a grubby purple teddy bear that someone’s left.

I wonder why people think everyone would like things a seven-year-old does when they’re dead.

“Because the shifter is connected to the spell. Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it only kills people.”

“We don’t have to do this, Lando,” Kira says, and her voice is so gentle, so pitying, it immediately makes me itchy. I shake my head violently.

“No, we’re doing it, I guess I’d just … I’d like to know what the chances of success are.”

“I don’t know.” Kira sighs and stands up, brushing the damp patches on her leggings. “All the successful resurrections are from pre-Roman times. There’s basically no literature on them.”

“But we have all the ingredients, we have me, that’s a good sign?

” I take the jar from her, holding my breath.

We both stand and wait tensely for a few seconds, Kira’s eyes flicking rapidly up and down me, looking for signs of shifts.

Nothing happens. I let out a sigh of relief.

Kira nods, as if this confirms a theory, and looks pleased not to be on the end of an uncontrollable shapeshifter throwing magic all over the place.

“Intention is important in sacrificial witchcraft rituals,” she says smartly. “So I think it’s best to focus on what you want.”

What I want are all the things I can’t have.

I want Elizabeth to never have suggested we go to the cave and I want her to never have died.

I want Shasta to never have died and for Bastian to never have lied to me.

I want to be normal, like everyone else, and not feel like the person who understands me best in the world is a dead shifter from the Second World War. Most of all, I want it all to be over.

“I want to do the spell,” I say. “I want to make it right.”

We get the bus up to the Edge. The forest is beautiful and it’s an aggravatingly stunning morning, the sky periwinkle blue with fluffy white clouds; the light on the autumn trees makes the leaves glow in an ombré of fading colors, lemon to amber to mahogany.

Even though she died in summer, there is something about the quality of the air, the surprising heat of the October sun that reminds me of that day.

I start to feel anxious. Kira seems to notice as I lengthen my breathing, accidentally thinking about Bastian when he helped me with my panic attacks, stroking my back and telling me to focus on my exhalations.

“It’s hard to be here,” Kira says astutely.

I nod tautly. She is quiet as we smile politely at a single dog walker with a Labrador.

We pass the Wizard Tearoom, decorated with pumpkins and autumnal flowers, ghosts made of sheets fluttering gently in a breeze scented with fresh cakes, and I think how much I would like to be here with Bastian, holding hands and walking through the crispy leaves. Then I hate myself for wanting that.

“She loved these woods,” Kira says, drawing me out of my thoughts and making me feel even worse for thinking about Bastian when she’s clearly remembering Elizabeth. “We used to come and play here when we were kids.”

I wonder if this was part of the reason that Kira was so fidgety in the graveyard.

This place isn’t just the place where Elizabeth died, it’s a place that is full of memories of the two of them together.

I feel remorse now for what Kira lost, imagining for the first time that like me, she’s been wandering around familiar places being stabbed by memories of someone who is no longer here.

“I don’t know why it happened. Bastian thinks it’s because this spell was already woven into the stone, a spell that relied on a shapeshifter, and it had some kind of reaction to Elizabeth’s spell.

…” I sigh heavily, realizing that Bastian could have just lied to me.

He could have said anything. “I don’t know …

maybe he was just saying stuff to make me feel better. ”

“Not this. He’s right, if there’s a spell in the stone, the spell from the grimoire, it would have reacted. It’s entirely unpredictable, that’s why shifter blood is never used in modern witchcraft, it’s too volatile. He wasn’t lying about that, at least.”

I throw her a sharp look of annoyance.

“Why did you tell me about him?” I snap. “About his past?”

“Because I worried that he was using you like he used that other shifter.” Kira looks at me shrewdly. “Was I right?”

I realize I don’t actually know the answer. Bastian said he’d moved on, that he was doing this for me and not Shasta, but I don’t know if he was lying about that, too. I catch sight of the dark entrance of the cave and I stumble.

Elizabeth is tugging me along, laughing in the summer sun.

“Come on! It’s a surprise! Hurry up!”

“Are you okay?” Kira touches my arm gently and I instantly miss Bastian’s firmer grip, but Bastian’s a liar. So I take a deep breath and nod, walking up toward the cave.

“This is an intensely magical spot, I’ve read about it,” Elizabeth says. Above us, the trees whistle gently, full of green leaves; the air smells like hay and pollen, thick and bright.

The entrance of the cave is a black mouth in the gray stone all around it.

My feet are hesitant, dragging, wanting to run away rather than keep walking toward it, but I have to.

Kira pulls out a flashlight and I can’t help rolling my eyes, because of course Kira is the kind of person to have an actual camping flashlight the size of a cucumber.

“Come on, then,” she says briskly. “The wizard’s cave is supposed to be at the back.”

She switches the flashlight on and walks into the cave, ducking under the lip.

I stare down at the entrance to the cave, looking for the bloodstained piece of slate that killed Elizabeth.

It isn’t there. I’m absurdly affronted that something as uncaring as the weather may have washed away all evidence of the thing that crushed her skull and took her from me.

“We need a bit of your blood to open the cave,” Kira says.

I follow her into the darkness but hang back in the entrance, trying not to think about how this was the last place Elizabeth kissed me.

The coldness of the damp, the smell of the moss, it brings it all back.

Her hands, her netted fingers for the Web of Wyrd, the pressed finger knuckles together with thumbs upraised for Woden’s Power, and the chanting of her voice as the spell began. Breathe, Lando, I tell myself.

“Come on, Lando!” Kira calls, and I pull myself out of the past, pushing forward, crouched over. The cave becomes narrow and dark at the back, impossible to stand up in.

“There cannot be another cave back here,” I mutter.

“It’ll be marked. Check the stone for anything that feels like a rune or a gramarye notation. That’s where your hand needs to go.”

“Okay.”

We run our hands over clefts in the stone, feeling furry moss, slimy crevices, and engraved graffiti until finally, when I think my neck is going into a spasm from being crooked at this angle, Kira says, “Here. The notation for Merlin.”

I shuffle until we’re both crouched like frogs staring at the tiny slot of back wall, Kira’s flashlight casting a glow on the gray stone. I see a rough, familiar symbol etched there. I tilt my head to the side.

“I suppose it could be, at this angle.”

“We need to put a little bit of your blood on it,” Kira whispers. “If it’s real, it will open.”

“Do you have a knife or something?”

Kira produces one from the pocket at the front of her dungaree dress.

I briefly wonder what else Kira Tavi packed in anticipation of this expedition, but then I stare as she flicks open the shining blade.

I’ve shed a lot of blood to get to this point and, honestly, it’s brought me nothing but trouble.

But this is the end, I reason with myself. Nearly there.

“Here goes nothing,” I mutter, and press the knife tip into my thumb, just like I did when Bastian and I unlocked the journal in The Witchlore of Bodies. I press my bloody thumb against the mark and hold my breath. The flashlight shakes in Kira’s hand.

“Come on,” she whispers. “Come on, come on—”

“Should I bleed some more?” I ask, pressing my thumb harder into the surface.

“Maybe wiggle it around a bit—”

“I am wiggling!” I protest, slightly hysterically, wanting to laugh and cry, wanting to run and also to punch something, really hard. Unhelpfully thinking, God, I wish Bastian was here. “What else should I do, a little dance?”

Then, suddenly, there is a grinding sound, getting louder and louder, and I pull my thumb away, my heart thundering.

“Is that good?” I ask.

“Either it’s working or it’s going to collapse on us!

” Kira says, her voice getting louder over the monstrous grinding sound.

I wince, reminded of the way the cave rumbled when Elizabeth died, the feeling of magic surging through me and turning the world over.

The ground shudders under our feet and the rock begins to split.

The back of the cave opens into darkness, and through the dislodged sand and trickle of pebbles falling from the ceiling, I see with a lurch that it’s just tall enough for a person to stand inside, a coffin in the earth.

“This is it,” Kira whispers, when the grinding finally stops. As Kira flashes her light around the space, I see there’s a pentagram drawn on the floor in salt. My stomach flip-flops queasily and I can’t help thinking, It’s waiting for me.