Chapter 4
The air in the room was so thick with tension, I felt like I couldn’t breathe it.
My head was absolutely spinning with the events of the last sixty minutes.
My mother and my aunts, whispering and gasping and running around digging through family records.
The interrogation, all three of them asking the same questions over and over again, and me repeating the same bewildered answers.
Where had the book come from?
Who was the woman?
What did she look like?
Where did she go?
What did she say?
No matter how many times I replied, my answers never seemed to be good enough, and they would repeat the questions again, as though I would somehow answer differently.
Then they all left the room and huddled together out on the porch, whispering frantically to each other, their voices only occasionally rising to a volume where I could catch a phrase or two:
“…can’t possibly be the same book, there’s no way…”
“…it must be a trick…”
“…but didn’t you feel it?!”
After that, Rhi took her phone out into the garden and paced back and forth between the riotous hydrangea bushes, arms gesticulating wildly. Finally, after about fifteen minutes she joined Persi and my mom, and after a quick whispered conference, all three of them came back into the kitchen.
“Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?” I snapped, the stress and uncertainty finally fraying my patience.
Rhi leaned forward, taking the corners of the velvet wrappings and covering the book with them, being careful not to touch it. Once it was completely enclosed, she lifted it gingerly from the table and said, “Back up from the table, Wren. Go ahead, Persi.”
I slid back from the kitchen table, my chair legs squeaking across the wood floor, as Persi reached down and took a hold of the tabletop.
It was a round table, with a blonder wooden circle inset within a darker wood border that was carved and painted with flowers and vines and birds.
I’d always assumed the design was merely decorative, but now I watched with astonishment as Persi reached beneath it and, with a couple of faint clicks, caused the entire center circle of the table to drop and flip over.
Then she engaged some sort of crank and the center circle rose into place again, revealing some kind of intricate circle carved into the wood.
“Permanent protective circle,” Persi explained as I gaped. “A Vesper is always prepared in her own home.”
“It was our grandmother’s invention,” Rhi added with a hint of pride in her voice. “She had it specially made.”
Once the inner section had clunked into place, Rhi set the book down once more, this time at the heart of this hidden circle, and carefully pulled the wrappings away.
Wordlessly, my mother and aunts spread out around the table naturally, taking up places at the south, east, and west directions.
Persi looked pointedly at me, and I jumped up from my seat to stand at the section of the table that pointed north.
As I watched, Rhi pulled two stones from the drawer behind her—citrine and tiger’s eye, I thought—and placed them in a little mesh pouch on the end of a string, all the while muttering under her breath.
Persi and my mom began to mutter, too, as Rhi lifted the little bag so that it swung like a pendulum over the book.
She swung it first in a counterclockwise, and then a clockwise motion.
Then she went still, all muttering stopped, and her sisters did the same.
I felt frozen with anticipation, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did.
After about half a minute, Rhi let out a long breath. Her shoulders sagged with relief, and she lowered the mesh bag to the table.
“It hasn’t been cursed. So it’s safe to handle, at least,” she announced.
I felt afraid instead of relieved. Could it really have been so dangerous simply to touch the book? Even though I now knew it was safe, I had a sudden desire to wipe my hands on my shorts, feeling contaminated despite Rhi’s reassurances.
“What do we do with it?” Persi asked. “It can’t possibly be that book. Can it?”
My mom sat down, pulling the book toward her while the rest of us took our seats around the table.
Despite the fact that Rhi had pronounced it safe, my mother was extremely careful as she opened the cover of the book.
There she spotted the same strange words I’d read earlier: In sanguine tuo, clavis ad vim occultam.
Unlike me, however, she understood exactly what they meant.
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” my mom said. She reached into her gardening belt, dug out a pair of garden shears and, without any kind of warning, dug the tip of one sharp blade into the callused pad of her thumb.
I cried out, but she silenced me with a look. Then, using the hand that wasn’t currently dripping blood, she flipped through the book until she found one of the many blank pages scattered throughout. With one swift, serious look at her sisters, she pressed her oozing thumb to the paper.
The effect was instantaneous. The paper sucked up the blood like a desiccated sponge, and from the place where it disappeared, lines began to appear, swirling and spreading across the surface like veins.
The lines curved and looped into words and soon, the formerly blank page was covered in writing.
The heading at the top read “A Spell for Concealment.”
“Oh my goddess, it is,” Rhi whispered. “It is. It really, truly is.”
“Really is what?” I finally burst out. “Is anyone going to tell me what’s actually going on here?”
My mom tore her eyes from the book with difficulty. She opened her mouth, as though struggling for the right words.
“Mom, can you, like… take care of that?” I asked weakly. “It’s dripping down your whole arm.”
“Huh? Oh!” My mom pulled the blue bandana out of her hair, and wiped the snaking trail of blood from her forearm and wrist before wrapping the cloth hastily around her thumb. I didn’t bother mentioning that it was filthy—I was too eager to hear her answer.
“Well?”
“We’ll… we’ll have to perform some more tests, just to be sure—”
“Oh, come on, Kerridwen! What other tests do we need?” Persi cried. Her eyes were bright with a wild, enthusiastic light.
“I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions,” my mom began defensively, but Persi cut her off again.
“Jumping? Who’s jumping? The conclusion is right in front of us. What else can it be but the truth?”
“The Conclave will want to—”
“Oh, screw the Conclave!” Persi snapped. “We don’t need them to quaver and argue over what we can already see with our own eyes!”
“Which is WHAT?!” I shouted.
Persi turned her sparkling eyes on me. “That after being lost for centuries, the Vesper grimoire has finally come home!”
Her words crackled in the air like an incantation of their own.
“I don’t understand. We already have a grimoire,” I said, gesturing over to the kitchen counter where a huge leatherbound book sat propped on Rhi’s cookbook stand.
It was the same spellbook we’d been using for all of my lessons, the book Rhi cracked open every time she was baking or looking something up.
“That is a grimoire, Wren. Not the grimoire,” Persi said, as though that clarified things.
“Huh?”
“Oh, come on!” she snapped impatiently. You know the story, don’t you? Rhi, have you been neglecting to include the family history in this so-called education?”
“Of course not!” Rhi retorted, looking offended. “Don’t you start criticizing me when you keep flaking out on her lessons to go off galivant—”
“Then you know the story of Sarah Claire and the night of the Covenant,” Persi interrupted, ignoring Rhi’s criticism.
Yes, I knew it. We’d been discussing part of it just that morning, when Rhi, in her explanation of familiars, explained about Diana’s role in our coven’s history.
I tried to remember the story—Sarah on the cliff top, frantically trying to complete her spell before she was discovered, and Diana’s arrival just as she began the incantation.
An incantation in a stolen book…
An incantation summoned with blood…
“Holy shit!” I gasped, as the pieces finally clicked together in my brain. “Is that… that can’t be the same book!”
“I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if I hadn’t just watched your mother prove it,” Persi replied. She reached forward and pulled the book toward her.
“Be careful!” Rhi complained, as Persi flipped none too gently back through the pages until she found those mysterious words again.
“In sanguine tuo, clavis ad vim occultam,” she read out loud, her voice vibrating with barely suppressed triumph. “In thy blood, the key to hidden power.”
“That’s what it means?” I whispered.
“It’s Latin. The Vesper grimoire was coveted by every witch who ever encountered its magic, but the book was protected. There were lesser spells that any reader could find and perform, but only a Vesper’s blood could reveal the most powerful spells contained within.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “If this book is so powerful and important to our family, why have we never seen it before? How did we ever let it out of our sight?”
It was Rhi who answered, dropping into the chair in front of her with a weary sigh. “That’s just it, Wren. We’re not sure.”
“You’re not sure? How can you not know?” I asked, incredulous.
“The fate of the book is one of the most mysterious chapters in our coven’s history, and one we’ve been trying to find an answer to for ages. You see, it disappeared on the very night of the Covenant.”
My mother also took her seat at the table, and we all looked at Rhi, expectant.