Chapter 20
Cat paced her tiny room, trying not to look at the walls and everything else she would leave behind.
She’d filled most of the daypack with photographs, a single crystal ball, and a few keepsakes meaningless to everyone but her: a friendship bracelet each sister had made years ago, a closed pinecone from her first solo trip overnight to the woods, a pressed leaf from her first winter here, so brittle it was almost dust. It was tucked between the pages of Anne of Green Gables, the first book the twins gave to their foster daughters, as if the story of an orphan from a hundred years ago on an island in Canada might help.
She had pored over the pages, though she could barely read a word of English.
She hoisted both backpacks out her window onto the porch roof and lowered them to the ground with a rope made of her bedsheets, feeling crazy, when a voice cried, “What the—”
Shocked and scared, she flung herself out the window after the backpacks. She hadn’t left the house via the roof since high school, but old memories had her clinging to the wainscoting as she peered over the edge to see a figure in black with a mop of red hair staring at her sheets.
“Annie?”
“Cat?”
“What are you doing?” they asked at the same time.
Then they laughed, because it was obvious. Annie had a big backpack on her shoulders and was dressed all in black, except for her neon hiking boots.
“You, um, inspired me,” Annie said.
Cat’s stomach sank. “I inspired you to do what?”
“They’re never going to change. And I already left him once because of them.”
“Left who?” she asked, but she knew. The wolf in the woods with the homemade clothes and the wild look in his eyes. “Tell me you’re not going to go live with his pack in the woods. They’re insane, Annie.”
“No. We’re getting far away. He’s meeting me at the edge of town. We’re going to camp out for a few days and see if we can get a bus down.”
“Stay safe,” Cat said when she wanted to say so much more.
“Why don’t you do the same? What are you doing here?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cat said after a long moment.
“So you’re not running away with him?”
“What the hell would I do with a wolf pack in New York? And what the hell would he do here? It’s not the same. I’m not just walking away because the twins disapprove. We have bigger problems.”
“He’s your match.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“When he touches you, do you feel a connection? Is your magic stronger?”
Cat gasped. “How do you know that?”
“There’s a connection between witches and wolves,” Annie said.
“Yeah, we made them with a terrible spell, and then we used them, and then we slaughtered them anytime they weren’t killing us.”
“Okay, it wasn’t a great start. But that doesn’t mean it can’t have a great ending!”
“Annie…”
“The witches created protectors for themselves. You have to think they cared about each other enough to make that sacrifice? And yeah, we have abused and denied it and tried to sever and hurt it and never managed it. Maybe instead of avoiding each other forever, we could build on that now?”
Cat just smiled sadly. “I love you, you know that, right?”
“I love you, too.”
“I’m so glad I got to be your sister,” she said, and Annie nodded once before running down the path and away. Cat didn’t want to say goodbye, but she’d said it just in case. She’d learned that a long, long time ago.
Was there a magical connection between her and Mateo? She felt it, didn’t she? But that was terrible ground to build a life on. Centuries ago, her ancestors turned him into a wolf to carry around a chunk of their magic. She could not stay with him just to get it back.
She felt more than heard a chime shake the house from the old grandfather clock and took a breath. No, she had made the right decision.
Before they said goodbye, she could make this one thing right and take the power to hurt him out of their hands. She swallowed and headed for the stairs.
As she snuck down them, avoiding the creak in the third step and a squeaky nail on the first, a thousand days in this house flowed through her mind.
The stairway held pictures of all her sisters, and even though she couldn’t see them in the dark, she knew each one.
How could such a project have gotten so twisted?
On the ground floor, she tried to put it out of her mind as she headed for Siobhan’s room in the back corner of the house next to the kitchen.
She had rarely entered it in her childhood.
For one, the twins barely spent any time in their rooms during the day, always in the kitchen or the living room, or out at some activity with their kids.
If they were in their rooms, it was because they didn’t want to see their family.
She glanced out the back window to see a flickering flame at the edge of the woods. She’d insisted on building the fire for Mateo, not trusting him not to start a forest fire on top of everything else that could go wrong today.
She took a deep breath and got out the flashlight to shine out the back window of the kitchen to warn Mateo she was there.
Cat thought she could walk in, grab the books, and leave, but Mateo had pointed out that she was facing a force witch that could throw her across the room. The idea had been so alien, she could barely countenance it, but he wasn’t wrong.
A witch with receptive magic was basically defenseless, and all the scrying she had done in all the water glasses she could get her hands on in the dark of night just showed a future absolutely roiling, ending in that bright white explosion that had haunted her dreams for weeks.
She stood frozen before she flashed the light. Even thinking about the vision brought it on again for a moment, burning an afterimage into her eyelids. Was this some kind of defensive spell the twins had never told them about? Was it a metaphor?
Whatever it was, it felt closer now. Sometimes visions took on a flavor as they approached. It itched at her hairline and shivered down her spine.
Enough. It was coming whether she stood frozen waiting or moved. She took a deep breath and flashed the flashlight through the back window. This had been the plan Mateo came up with, insisting that if Siobhan was going to throw someone around, it was going to be him.
She hated that she was putting him in the line of fire, but if Siobhan had hidden the book somewhere in her room, she needed time.
She’d brainstormed several ways to get her out of her room when he just shrugged and asked what would happen if a werewolf stepped on the lawn.
Alarming whoops and multicolored lights blasted from nowhere through the kitchen.
Cat closed her eyes with a groan. “This.” They’d gotten even louder than last time.
She realized she was standing three feet from Siobhan’s door, cursed, and ducked into the pantry just as her door burst open.
This was the whole of their plan. He would run a diversion long enough for her to get the books and throw them immediately into the fire so everyone knew they were gone, and no one would be tempted.
Witches filled the kitchen, and Siobhan demanded, “Don’t tell me Ducky wandered into the library again, or are we actually under attack?”
Just then, Ducky started barking at the back door.
Cat repeated the mantra she told him, First there are spikes, then there are trenches, then there are projectiles in every bush. Stay back.
“Do you see something, boy?” Siobhan asked.
Cat hunched her shoulders. Neither of them had considered that a dark wolf in the dead of night at the edge of the lawn wasn’t even visible.
Ducky yipped, and then the back porch light went on.
“It’s here!” Siobhan screamed.
The other problem Cat hadn’t foreseen was that sending Mateo to the backyard would mean everyone would gather in the kitchen, blocking exactly where she needed to go. She hadn’t wanted him in front because it was a residential street surrounded by houses.
“It’s real!” Niamh screamed. “They’ve come.”
“I hate plans,” Cat muttered. “Planning is stupid.”
She was going to have to make a move. The longer she gave them to get organized and arm themselves, the more likely someone was going to get hurt. If Mateo got a crossbow to the flank, she would never forgive herself.
She slipped open the pantry door to see both Siobhan and Niamh at the back door, while Dylan crouched in the sink, looking out the back window.
Alarms still blared and lights still flashed, and she counted on that as she slipped sideways, trying to make it look like she had just arrived in case someone looked back at her before she dashed through Siobhan’s door, which was fortunately still hanging open.
She crossed the threshold and held her breath, but either the alarm was indistinguishable from the ones already going off or the threshold wasn’t a trigger.
She risked leaning backward to slide the door slowly closed and then turned on the flashlight. The room was dominated by a bed in the center with disturbed black sheets. Around the bed against the wall, Siobhan had put a vanity, a chest of drawers, and a small desk. Everything was dainty and dark.
If I were a stolen grimoire, where would I live?
She opened a drawer in the vanity not big enough to hold one regular book, let alone two. She slid it home and rolled her eyes. She had one talent that was useful in one situation.
She looked at the mirror in front of her and angled it so she wasn’t in view and softened her gaze.
She called upon her magic.
This wasn’t exactly what divination magic was for, but she’d adapted it a long time ago.
I find things. It’s what I do.
If she could find three kids lost in a snowstorm, she could find two books hidden in a tiny room.
She didn’t go searching for the object but searching for the time when the object was already found, because everything lost is found again by somebody. No secret stayed buried forever.