Chapter Thirty-Seven
THIRTY-SEVEN
“COME ON. LET’S GO TO the kitchen. If we’re really going to do this, I’m gonna need more than plain old tea in my cup.
” Maureen holds a soft, aged-marked hand out to me, and I take it, her firm grasp steadying the tremor in my own.
Thoughts of the letter twist and turn in my head, just as they have every day since I read it.
Wondering what Gigi would have told me if only she’d woken up that morning.
But even with my racing thoughts, a wave of relief washes over me. I’ve come here for answers, and I am finally, finally, getting them.
I’m led through the living room and into the bright, large kitchen.
Visions of Gigi and Maureen sitting at the table in the middle, round eyelet tablecloth hanging over the edges just enough for me to hide under.
Everything looks the same. From the sage-green cabinets that wrap around the room, to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the white appliances, and countertop microwave.
Maureen catches me staring at the wall of ceramic cats of all shapes and sizes and colors.
“Ah, yes! The collection has grown quite a bit since you’ve last been here, I suppose. You know me, deathly allergic to those little monsters, but Petunia and I like to look at them and think, Boy, wouldn’t it be nice?”
I pull out the heavy wooden chair and sit down, placing my cup in front of me as she wanders over to a cabinet, taking down a bottle of dark liquor. Pouring two healthy tips of the brown liquid into her teacup, she points the neck at me in question.
My eyes widen. “I’m sixteen.”
Shrugging, she returns the bottle and sits across from me.
I fold my arms at the elbows and lean forward, regarding the woman whose love for my grandmother may be the only love left in this world capable of rivaling my own.
Maureen brings her mug to her lips and takes a healthy gulp, the skin around her eyes tensing as she swallows down the burning liquid.
“Tell me what you know about Earnest,” she starts, and at first I hesitate, confused.
“Um, well, we’re in Western North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
The Appalachian Mountains. It’s small. Not too far from Asheville,” I rattle off the things I know.
The facts. I don’t mention how it’s always called to me.
Or how Gigi used to say it was rotting. How more and more, I’m seeing evidence of that.
The decomposing bloodroot, the dirt like moldy apples on my tongue, the sickly sweet scent permeating campus.
“All of that is correct,” she says. “But Earnest is so much more than those things. This town is a very special place.”
I nod. I know that. I always have.
“You know, when I was a child, they had to fight to get evolution taught in schools. People hell-bent on the fact that God just clapped his hands one day and poofed us here. But these mountains, they know the truth. That’s how old they are.
Before Adam and Eve, before dinosaurs, before much of literally anything else, these mountains were here.
In fact, they’re so ancient, there was a time when they connected the land we’re on now to countries that are entire seas away. ”
She smooths back the hair around her face. “Things don’t get to be that old without carrying something deeper within them.”
“Yeah,” I add. “I think I read somewhere that the mountains are older than the rings on Saturn, but… I guess I’m not sure what that’s got to do with anything.”
She chuckles. “Honey, hold your horses, I promise I’m getting there.”
I force a smile to my lips. Though my mind is comforted by Maureen’s presence, my heart hasn’t gotten the message. It still beats erratically, like I’m teetering off the edge of Hanging Rock.
“The world is full of power. Powerful people, powerful places…,” she begins. “Earnest is one of those powerful places. All throughout Appalachia, ancient rivers of power snake beneath the mountains, placed there by the stars.
“These rivers are called ley lines.”
“Oh,” I mutter, because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of ley lines. They’re a common thread in the books and movies Malachi and I used to bond over. Sort of like magical electrical grids.
“You’re familiar?” Maureen asks, eyeing me closely.
“No—no, of course not. But I’ve read about them in books before. Fiction.”
She nods sagely. “You’ll come to realize that the line between fact and fiction is much blurrier than you’ve ever known.
“But here, on this plane, most power is organic. Pure. It’s a gift from the stars that become us, the base of all matter that is made and remade. It is the very essence of all that is. Sometimes these lines connect or converge. And sometimes the power pools. It waits.
“The largest known convergence of this power just so happens to be tucked beneath Black Mountain. Beneath Earnest.”
My knee bounces under the table.
“So is that why I sometimes feel, like, I don’t know, a humming or something? Like Earnest is alive?”
She gives me a soft smile, but it doesn’t meet her eyes. “Could be, yeah.”
“But why? Why am I the only one who seems to feel that way?”
“Well,” she sighs, “I reckon you’re not the only one who feels drawn here, actually.”
My stomach sinks.
“Power has a pull, like a magnet, each atom of that power hopelessly drawn together. So just as you feel led here, just as you believe you are connected to this land, so too do others that contain a power of their own, whether they realize it or not. Which leaves us in the peculiar position of being in a place where beings that are normally separated by territorial lines and thousands of years of settling into one place or another are brought together in ways that some might deem unnatural. All in pursuit of this calling. This desire to tap into that well of power.”
The sound of her voice begins to fade beneath the buzzing in my ears.
“There are others? Like me?”
“Like you, and not like you.”
I blow out a breath, growing frustrated. “Okayyy…,” I draw it out. “Then what am I?”
She ignores my question.
“Now I can’t claim to know everything there is to know about the unseen world or the paranormal, but legends around these parts have a habit of being truer than not.
Legends of shape-shifters, of men who turn into wolves, of strange, monstrous creatures that wander the woods, mimics and demon tricksters, oracles and spirit walkers, magic devourers known as syphons, and of course, witches.
Folk witches that create magic from spells and earthwork, bloodthirsty witches who’ve made deals with malevolent spirits…
“And then there’s you.”
Me.
“You, my dear, are a very special girl from a very powerful people.”
Blood rushes through my head, the static, increasingly familiar with each surge, wrapping me up so tight, I can barely breathe.
“Long before this strip of land was here, the mountains—and the ley lines within them—connected what we now know as the Americas to the western edge of Africa. When the lands split, so too did the lines, but magic and power, like stardust and people, are inextricably connected.
“You, Harper, feel such a strong affinity for Earnest, for the power lines that converge here, because you are of it, and it is of you. Of us.”
I stop breathing altogether.
“You… you’re like me? Was—was Gigi? My dad? Is my mom like us?”
“Slow down,” Maureen murmurs. “I promise you’ll understand soon enough.”
But I can’t stop the reeling in my mind. Stop myself from feeling anything but the fizzing of my magic bursting like fireworks inside me.
Maureen continues, “I’m sure you learned in the letter from your grandmother that we come from a people—from a person, a woman called the Mother. Through the Mother’s sacrifice, we became legend. Lore. Myth.” She pauses, and then, “We became witches of the Zodiac.”
“… What?”
My temples throb in time with my heart. What she’s saying should be impossible, but…
Of course.
It feels right even before I know what it means.
She reaches toward me. “Take a deep breath, don’t pass out.” She scoots closer and rubs her hands up my arms, humming quietly like she’s shushing a baby.
I picture a dozen women standing around a blazing fire, chants like a prayer falling from their lips.
I think of that moment in the maze when the cloaked figure called me little witch, and how I’d known, somehow, in my heart, they were right.
In the corner the gentle sound of flowing water pierces the silence between us, smothers my panting breaths as it runs over a bed of rocks in a small electric fountain, miniature fae sitting among bright red mushrooms.
“You know,” she says, “I never did have a daughter of my own to pass this knowledge down to. That’s the only way we’re able to keep our history alive when religious zealots and colonizers have such an affinity for making sure certain people forget who we are.
Where we come from. Especially here, in this melting pot of a country.
It’s much easier to abandon your identity when you were never too sure of it in the first place. ”
The pit in my chest grows. I’m grateful to Maureen for doing this. For telling me. For taking the place of my grandmother. But holy shit, I’d so much rather be hearing all this from Gigi instead.
“But, what does it mean? To be a… Zodiac Witch?” I ask.
“As you know,” Maureen says, running her hand over her poof of hair and adjusting the large yellow stone on her finger, spinning it and spinning it before taking a deep breath, “the Mother was faced with an impossible decision.
She had to figure out a way to save our people.
It was told back then that there was power to wield, just as there is here.
“But to be gifted balanced magic, one must first give to the stars to receive their blessing. The Mother knew this would be the only way. So on the night of a star shower, when the innate power of our gods was a sticky, palpable thing, twelve women, one from each season, made a sacrifice.”
My blood runs cold.