Chapter 9
SARAH
Pierre is so big – his heart, his personality, his broad shoulders and wide smile – that it doesn’t seem possible to draw together the edges of the world after he’s been cut out of it. How can that wound be stitched up? How can it heal?
How can I ever get over this?
Aira hasn’t stopped kneading my lap. Her firm, gentle paws trying to work the ache of misery out of me as I sit here in the house he built for me. The chair he honed and worked over until every line of it was a perfect replica of Gramma Serafina’s.
I try not to let my mind circle back to Harper. I’d know, I am certain, if she was lying at the bottom of that reservoir, rocked in a cold green cradle of water. How can you lose your only child and not know? No witchcraft required.
The photo on the table in front of me I flip up and turn face down.
Flip up and turn down. Pierre isn’t even in it.
But he took it. It’s the one of me and Bridge and toddler Izzy and Harper at the beach, that he’d set here for when I came back to Sanctuary.
The one where I glimpsed the truth of his heart more clearly than in any stumbling words, any bashful appearance with pizza and wine, any warm, encircling arms. I’m right at the front of the frame, sunlight firing my hair to flame, Bridget just half a face and a raised soda can beside me.
Even our daughters, his and mine, are out of focus behind, like I’m the only thing he sees.
Pierre. Pierre. My oldest, dearest friend.
We should have watched our kids grow up.
Taken our grandkids on playdates together.
I remember our own first days at school.
When every lunchbreak for a week my new classmates played chasing games and always made me ‘It’, fleeing shrieking that I had witch cooties.
How on the Friday, Pierre had said ‘Make me It, I don’t mind,’ then chased after every mean girl in that class and tackled them to the grass.
Rolled all over them crowing about how he was covering them with witch cooties.
How when the teacher scolded him in front of everyone, a sweet-faced girl with badly tied pigtails – I wasn’t sure of her name, but thought it might be Bridget – told the teacher he hadn’t done anything wrong, and everyone had deserved it because they’d all, herself included, been very mean.
There were no chasing games the next week, and Pierre, Bridget and I had formed an unbreakable unit.
It’s broken now.
Even though I know a draught of tranquillity is false comfort, I’ll take any comfort I can get.
I try to brew it with what I have in my kitchen, but the tools are stainless steel, not silver.
I’m using a saucepan and a gas ring, not my cauldron.
That must be why it doesn’t work, because even when I drink down the sickly potion, I don’t feel tranquil in the slightest.
At some point there’s a knock on the door. More cops, doubtless come to tell me my daughter is believed to have been in a vehicle accident. That Pierre Martineau is dead. But I already know. I don’t answer, and they don’t try to force a way in.
I sit there hours longer, thoughts of Harper irresistible after all.
Memories crowd my mind. Her clear, guileless eyes and the pudgy baby limbs Gramma Serafina had squeezed so lovingly.
Small Harper sitting at my workbench while I brewed, rigid with attention.
Bent so close over Starcross her nose almost touched the pages.
Harper the night of her Determination, in the long white ritual gown, blinking back tears as we embraced and grieved her absent magic – or so I’d thought.
Teenage Harper tattooed and defiant, slamming the door as she stormed out to spend time with anyone but me.
Harper bruised and furious and so vulnerable as we stood bound in Sanctuary’s sports stadium.
The fascination with which her pale eyes stared at the burning stage as Abigail rushed into the flames, chasing the vision of her son.
Her pale face bathed in kinder light from the campfires at Darkening Pine, where for a while we found refuge.
Her astonishment and wonder the morning she came home to Sanctuary, when Lachlan appeared on the stairs and Harper saw her father for the first time.
I press my fingers to the blood beneath the thin skin of my veins.
The same blood beats in her. I’d know if that beat had stopped.
I’d know. I don’t cast a spell to track her.
I promised her once I never would and have kept that promise.
But every part of my power reaches out yearningly with a single question – does Harper live?
– and the answer returned by every sense is yes.
Later, I doze off in my chair. Too tense. Too numb. Too overwhelmed.
When evening has fallen I rouse from my stupor. They would have had a visit from a cop by now. I can’t put this off any longer.
At Bridget’s, Bea Garcia opens the door.
‘You’re the last person they’ll want to see,’ she tells me.
‘Stay out of this, Bea.’
But she’s right. Oh goddess, she’s right. Bridget comes to the door, face swollen like a hornets’ nest of grief has been dropped on her. Izzy presses at her mom’s back. The girl’s eyes are glassy. Her lips all bitten.
‘Go away, Sarah,’ my friend tells me.
Something twists in her face, ugly and almost hating when I don’t move.
Whatever Bridget’s about to say will be the hardest words I have ever had to hear, I think.
But that doesn’t protect me from the pain that comes.
Agony like she took my tiny silver ingredients-scissors and is snipping off my skin, inch by careful inch, until I’m left all raw and bleeding.
‘Pierre’s dead because he put you and Harper first. As he always did.
’ At Bridget’s back, Izzy whimpers. ‘All because you didn’t want to obey a law that every witch in America is complying with.
You think you’re special and you bewitched Pierre into thinking it, too.
What you and your daughter do, Sarah, is cause chaos and disaster, and the people who get hurt worst are those who love you most. I’m sure that’s not what you intend, but that’s how it is.
Maybe witches can’t help it. Maybe Sandra Ortiz is right, and Beatriz, and there’s something rotten about the whole lot of you. ’
She starts to shut the door. Reflexively, I raise a hand to arrest it – this can’t end here.
She needs to know how sorry I am. That my grief is as great as hers.
That the only way we’ll not stagger under this worst blow of our lives is if we support each other.
But instead of stopping the door with my palm, I’ve done it with a charm, and Bridget hisses like I slapped her.
‘Leave us alone, Sarah,’ Izzy begs. ‘Please? Harper was with my dad when … when he … and I wasn’t. I always wondered if he wished she was his daughter and not me.’
‘Izzy. No. You were his everything.’
I reach my arms out. I want to explain to her that if Harper was like a daughter to P, then she is as dear to me. But it’s Izzy who motions her mom inside, and Izzy who closes the door in my face.
Their grief will destroy me. I stand numbly on their doorstep for a few moments, before fleeing back to my car.
Locking myself in, I scream and beat the wheel.
Why didn’t Harper and I arrange for her to go into hiding the minute we heard about Ortiz’s Registration Act?
Why didn’t I hex the cops who came to take us? Why?
The phone in my pocket buzzes. Distracted, I pull it out and toss it onto the seat next to me. But on the screen, a text notification is popping up. Then another. And despite myself, I look.