Chapter 5
HARPER
My dad. Luka Ortiz’s legal team is going to come for my dad – if they can figure out how he did it.
I figured it out. The signet ring he wore ‘for control’, on his pinky – identical to the one on Luka’s hand.
The way Lachlan discarded his after Luka’s arrest, saying he didn’t need it anymore.
His all-but confession when he told me the second victim hadn’t been supposed to die, and that he’d tipped off DI Knight so Bea could be rescued in time.
The question is, did he leave any trail or clues for Ortiz’s defence team to uncover – or is their theory merely conjecture?
What has Luka said about how he received the ring?
Or where he learned the rituals he used in Bittershore, when he believed he was boosting the weak magic he inherited from his father?
It’s bad enough that Mom and Pierre and Bridget and DI Knight will be up there on the witness stand. Is there any chance Ortiz’s attorneys will name my dad as the man they hold responsible?
Where are you, Lachlan Frey?
I kick up the earth as I run, music pumping through my ear buds, setting the pace. I need something faster. To really push myself. If all my energy’s used up on running, I won’t have as much to keep chasing the tail of my own thoughts.
Thoughts like: why hasn’t Lachlan been in touch?
Only the occasional text. I’ve plenty of excuses for him.
He’s protecting me and Mom by keeping his distance in case Ortiz has investigators arrowing in on him.
He’s been working behind the scenes on some kind of response to this bullshit new Witchcraft Registration Act.
He’s expanding the Redhaven resistance network.
But still, it hurts. All I receive from him are vague, affectionate messages.
Never from the same number, so I don’t know where to send my own texts, or whether I can call.
Was I kidding myself that our reunion last year was the beginning of something meaningful?
After all, he was content to be out of my life for the first nineteen years.
Maybe he’ll find it as easy to disappear again.
I can’t believe it, though. I don’t want to believe it.
It had sounded like pride blended with more than a dash of hope when he asked if I was all my mother’s daughter, or whether I might take after him a little, too.
My magnificent daughter, he called me, that last day on the beach, when the three of us walked together.
I’d felt so close to both my parents that day. As if family was its own kind of magic.
Tugging out the earbuds, I turn back toward my car. I want to be there again – at Eafa’s Rock. The last place we were all together. I need to remember that feeling and hold on to it. There’ll be a good reason Lachlan’s gone quiet. I trust him. But it doesn’t mean I have to sit around moping.
Even though it’s a warm, bright early July day, the beach is mostly deserted.
The sand isn’t that height-of-summer gold, yet.
It’s the pale, pretty hue of the posh sugar the bakery sprinkles on everything so they can charge an extra dollar.
Some out-of-towners are shrieking as the small dog they stupidly let off the leash to chase seagulls finds itself being chased right back.
I hunt above the tideline for driftwood.
We’ve had a week of clear, dry days, so I’m sure to find something useable.
Stacked around a central chunky log, the wood catches easily with a whispered charm.
I remember the campfires at Darkening Pine, when Mom and I were on the road after fleeing Sanctuary.
How in the first weeks we’d both spook, me remembering the fire at the party villa where Dan died, and she the time my classmates burned our house.
But this fire’s a comfort. The wood burns clean, save for an occasional flare of witchy blue or green from all the tidal salt that’s soaked in, or a mineral crust of dried seaweed.
Gazing into the flames I think about how to find my father.
Mom would know what to do. She used her pendant to locate Bea and save her from Luka’s fucked-up ritual.
Yes, Sarah Fenn doubtless has all sorts of tracking magic at her disposal, though she’s never used any on me, to give me privacy.
I respect her for that, but right now, I wish I knew some of her tricks.
I don’t even have anything belonging to my dad that could anchor a rite.
Except … The throbbing of my pulse has given me an idea.
My blood.
Blood magic is powerful. Primitive. Dark. Mom isn’t above making a blood offering for especially demanding spells, and hey, I’m the girl who carved a forbidden sigil into her flesh when she was eleven years old. Dark is my brand.
But then I think of how scientists say our red blood cells replace themselves every three or four months.
How literal is magic? My DNA must be half from my Dad.
I guess there are some witch physicians who’d know how to work with …
chromosomes? But I’ve no idea where to begin.
My magic may be strong as a sledgehammer, but it equally lacks finesse.
My magic.
Could that be the answer? My Gift has come from both my parents. Lachlan made that clear. Might it be a thread I can follow back to find him? What if I Command my magic to seek its source? It’s as good an idea as any I’ve had.
I don’t need to draw a sigil or shape a cantrip in the air, as Mom does, because my signs are part of me.
I don’t have charts to unroll and consult, because inked lines criss-cross my torso.
I’ll follow her example of a blood offering, because magically, this is a big ask.
I’m trying to find a man who might be on the other side of the country.
Stifling a gasp, I sink my little silver pocket knife into my palm and cut deep.
Circling my clenched fist over the fire, I sprinkle the dripping blood, which flares then burns black.
A pulse is beating in my neck, through my wrists, everywhere I am porous and vulnerable. I feel each spurt squeezed out from the chambers of my heart. Sense the tickling rush of its passage through my veins.
Eyes defocussed, I stare into the flames.
They no longer appear black. Rather, their flickering depths hold a kaleidoscope of colours.
Movement dances and shimmers, both shadowy and bright, like those faded old reels of the earliest colour film.
Intuitively, I know I’ll see more clearly not by sharpening my focus, but by letting it blur altogether.
My eyes roll back. I tip up my face and the fire warms my throat.
No, not the fire. The sun.
My lashes fly up and I stare.
The warmth is the same. And the sun, with me sat cross-legged beneath it.
But everything else is changed. I’m in a garden, expansive and lush.
Ripe fragrances drift on a light breeze – blowsy rose and tart apple.
It reminds me of the garden at Serafina’s farmhouse, and I twist to check.
Dad met me there when I demonstrated my magic to him.
Maybe he’s using it as a local base? The thought comes with a bruise of hurt that he might be so near and not have told me.
But this isn’t Serafina’s. A different house stands at my back, a broad two-storey clapboard farmhouse with a porch wrapping all the way around. It’s been recently painted a practical dark grey, yet the window frames are a cheerful canary yellow that makes me smile.
Laughter turns my head again. The note of one child’s in particular, boyish and young.
A row of children sits along the porch balustrade, legs dangling, heels kicking the posts in delight.
They’re watching an older boy who moves his hands fluidly in the air.
He’s conjuring strange shapes, light as gossamer, airy as cloud, in the forms of fantastical creatures.
Moved by his left hand, a sinuous blue dragon faces off against a lumbering troll animated by his right.
It’s amazing illusionwork – a form of magic described in our Starcross grimoire, but not practised by my Mom, or any witch she’s ever told me of.
It’s seen these days as old-fashioned. Black-and-white TV magic in an era of streaming-on-phones magic.
My eyes return to the boy whose laughter first drew my attention, and as I look at his freckled face – he’s no more than four or five, barely big enough to balance on the balustrade, and held tight by a friend’s arm around his waist – I feel a rush of warmth.
A prickle of love. How strange! Who is he to me?
Could he be my dad, as a boy, is that why my Command has shown me this scene?
But as I shade my eyes and peer, I see he doesn’t look much like Lachlan.
His hair is a light tawny, his eyes might be hazel.
With those freckles, he’s all the soft, sweet tones of a small animal.
A puppy or rabbit. And I can’t imagine that ever being my dad’s vibe, even when he was little.
A gasp turns me one more time, toward two girls in their late teens standing hand-in-hand where the mown grass of the yard turns to orchard.
The tree they stand beneath – source of that amazing fresh sharp scent – is heavy with scarlet apples.
Each has her free hand pressed to the trunk, so that together girls and tree are like three friends in a circle.
And then, because even I know apples don’t ripen the same time of year roses bloom, I see what they’re about. It’s the Greenmagic.
That’s not the weirdest thing about them, though.
They’re wearing old-time dresses, with high narrow waistbands and full skirts, like they’re cosplaying Little Women.
Both skirts have a wide band in a different pattern at the hem that at first I think is fashion, until I realise it’s likely an economical way to lengthen the skirts as they’ve grown.
I look back at the kids on the porch and see it in their clothing, too – britches for the boys, folksy frocks for the girls.
All the girls have neatly parted hair, braided and looped up the back with ribbon.
Are they some kind of cult? One of those religious denominations that rejects modern living?
There’s no way Lachlan Frey, my motorbike-riding, burner-phone juggling dad, would have anything to do with a low-tech or no-tech cult. Why the heck has my magic shown me this place?
I yelp with pain and look down to see a large ember on my bare arm.
It’s floated from the fire in front of me, where driftwood burns and crackles on a sugar-pale Connecticut beach near the shadow of Eafa’s Rock.
And like that, the scene is gone. No farmhouse, no garden, no kids.
Not even a drifting trace of rose-and-apple on the breeze.
Just sea salt and mineral ash that I can taste on my tongue.
Licking my finger, I rub the little red spot the ember left. I’m not gentle. I’m pissed off. My dad still eludes me.
Maybe I need some advice from Mom after all. I kick over the remnants of the fire and bury the ashes in sand.