Chapter 13
HARPER
Portland. Tulsa. Flagstaff. Roanoke. Two places in Nebraska and Montana I had to look up on a map. All attacks on registration centres. All with this witchmark they’re talking about that must be some Redhaven sign. My dad’s hand in every one, I’m certain.
Why didn’t you do New Haven? I’d scream at him if I could. Why didn’t you disrupt our registration, so Mom and I weren’t taken? So Pierre wouldn’t have to come to my rescue? So he wouldn’t have …
Have died. It’s still as impossible to say as it is to think.
Why didn’t you call me the minute that summons arrived, Mom, and tell me not to come home?
No. Blame where it belongs. Why did you try magic, Harper, when P begged you not to?
This is the first thought in my head as I wake each morning, each time in a different motel room.
It’s the last thought when I lie down at night on another cheap, lumpy mattress.
It paces back and forth, wearing a furrow in my brain, through the hours that I lie sleepless.
Exhausted. Aching all through my body, because despite what I told Mom, I haven’t the hang of healing magic.
But the hurt’s worst of all in my heart.
And then I think, no, put blame where it really, truly belongs. Not my dad. Not my mom. Not even me. But the people doing this to us – and to all America’s witches. It’s because of them Pierre is dead, and Izzy doesn’t have a dad anymore, and Mom and Bridget’s hearts are broken.
And that’s when I wish Lachlan didn’t merely ‘disrupt’ those registration centres. I wish he’d burned them to the ground – and Sandra Ortiz’s campaign offices, too. It’s when, with hot hate in my heart, I wish that instead of scrambling computers, he could have scrambled Ortiz’s brain.
Maybe he’d do it if I asked.
I need to find him, or his base. All my own attempt showed me was that weird vision of old-timey or cult-y, cosplaying witches. But Starcross will teach me, I’m sure. Mom knows how to track people magically, and she was taught from Starcross by my great-grandmother. I need our grimoire.
But it’s with Mom, in Sanctuary, and I promised her I wouldn’t go back.
I can’t bear the thought of seeing her – of being seen by her, knowing that P is dead because of me. But if I go back to Sanctuary and am caught and taken for registration again, he would have died for nothing. It takes all the courage I have to pick up my phone and dial.
We meet after dark at Serafina’s farmhouse.
I’d suggested someplace anonymous, like an outlet parking lot, but Mom said there’d be security cameras and we needed somewhere entirely private.
She’s confident the cops aren’t staking out our home, to follow her anytime she leaves, and the boundaries of the farmhouse have protected the Fenns for decades.
Our magic is woven into them. What she didn’t say is that if either of us does anything stupid, if we lose control of our magic or our emotions, no one will be around to see.
I’m doing my best to keep mine under tight control as I see her car headlamps pull in, swinging below the boughs of the orchard.
But when she holds out her arms, I can’t help myself.
I run into them. She tucks my head into the crook of her neck and holds me as I cry.
As I say all those things I tried to put into texts, but couldn’t.
My shoulders shudder and shake, and Mom strokes my back.
‘I won’t be able to come to the funeral,’ I tell her. ‘But when is it? I’ll light a candle and speak to the goddess for him when it’s time.’
‘I’m not going either,’ she says, putting me at arm’s length.
The moonlight silvers where her own tears and mine have tracked down her face.
She looks like one of those Japanese kintsugi bowls, the cracks repaired with gold, somehow more beautiful for its brokenness. ‘Bridget and Izzy asked me not to.’
I gasp with the pain of that rejection, and for the pain my friend and her mom must be experiencing to ever say such a thing.
‘Then we’ll say goodbye to him here,’ I tell her. ‘Right now. Just us.’
Wordlessly, Mom nods.
We don’t follow any ritual. Sometimes she takes the lead, sometimes I do.
From time to time the air glows with our magic, the soft luminous grey of grief, the sunset pinks of remembrance, the warm brilliance of love, lighting up the darkness like fireworks – so they’ll appear to anyone glimpsing the sky from a distance, amid these quiet, isolated fields.
Other times, we share stories and reminisce, as if this were any mundane funeral.
Mom recalls how much P loved her mint tisane with honey, when his throat was hoarse and raw from shouting coaching instructions through the winter, and with the Greenmagic I reach down into the soil and feel around for a patch of wild mint, calling and coaxing it to sprout luxuriantly all around us.
As the leaves unfurl and scent the air, Mom smiles and closes her eyes.
Her fingertips brush the serrated leaves.
She tells me all the stories I remember of my childhood, and some I’ve never heard before.
How Mom had been nervous about me learning to swim – ancestral memory of witch-duckings, she explained – and Pierre volunteered to teach me.
How she’d plastered me all over with buoyancy charms, and P had stared at me bobbing on top of the water, more like a cork than a baby, and asked her to please trust him.
How he’d grinned when she’d relented, stripping her magical protections, and I’d begun to splash with gusto.
‘He always said you were a natural,’ she says now. ‘But I think it was his confidence that was contagious. He was always so calm. So steady. He loved being in the water with you.’
It’s only when I make a choking sound that she realises what she’s said.
I tell her everything that happened at the reservoir.
Second by second – or minute by minute, as it felt, though it can barely have lasted even one.
At the end of my story, I claw off the cardigan I’m wearing.
It was the one I had on when we fled. When we drowned.
I remember how it dragged at me, a sodden weight, as I kicked desperately for the surface.
Like it was trying to hold me back for one last try, one final effort to free Pierre.
Apart from the skin of my hands, it was the last thing to touch him.
I cradle it in my arms now, as if it’s the man I couldn’t cut free.
Like a lonely child, I pull its sleeves around me.
And then Mom is there, gathering me to her, the cardigan pressed between us like P in the middle of one of our hugs.
‘Izzy deserved him for longer,’ I sob. ‘He deserved longer. Can you imagine him as a granddad? He would have been the best.’
Mom can only nod. She’s as choked-up as I am.
And I suddenly love her so much for not saying some pacifying bullshit like ‘It’s the choice he would have made’, or ‘He died keeping you safe’.
Pierre’s death is the worst thing that has happened in my eighteen years of life – years that have not exactly been free of heavy and horrific incidents.
He and Izzy are the best and kindest people I know, and P’s all the rarer for having made it to adulthood with that core of him intact.
I scrape the soil with my bare hands. Mom watches, her brow wrinkling.
When I’ve scooped a shallow hole, I lay down the cardigan as reverently as if it’s the body I’ll never get to give a final kiss, or toss a handful of earth over.
Suddenly understanding, Mom draws off her wrist a tattered friendship bracelet she’s worn since her school days. I’d always assumed Bridget made it.
‘It was Bridget’s idea,’ she says, as she lays it on top of the garment.
‘She picked a colour for each of us. Green for her, because she loved nature; red for me, the colour of blood and magic; and for Pierre, yellow like sunshine because that was what he was, in human form. But Bridge was always fingers and thumbs, so P ended up braiding them.’
Some people might find our homely effigy peculiar, but witches understand how love can imbue anything with meaning and potency.
We hold hands above it and ask the goddess to watch over Pierre in whatever form he now exists, whether a soul journeying onward, as some believe, or as cherished memories from which time will purge pain until only love remains.
We tell him how much we love him, and how we’ll miss him always.
How grateful we were, and how lucky, to have had him in our lives.
Then when all our words are used up, our magic unites and sparks, and the cardigan and bracelet ignite.
Mom and I sit there, holding our palms up to the warmth and brightness that was Pierre, until it is all burned away.
Mom wipes her eyes. ‘I’ll come back and plant another tree here for the orchard. P always said Serafina’s apples were the best, and the ash will do the roots good. But none of this is why you wanted to meet, is it? Why did you ask me to bring Starcross, Harper?’
Her voice isn’t sharp, exactly, but the softness of the past few hours has gone. I flush, as if I’ve been caught trying to deceive her.
‘That’s not why …’ I begin, guiltily. ‘What we just did, I didn’t know how much I needed to. That was real.’
‘I know,’ she says, more gently. ‘But tell me why you need Starcross, Harper. Assure me you’re not thinking of anything reckless.’
‘Like carving forbidden sigils into myself? Why would you think I’d do anything reckless?’
That raises a smile. And I tell her the truth – mostly. That I need to learn more about my magic. That I’m still so raw and untutored and wild. That if it’s not safe for me to be with my mom right now and learn from her, I want to find my dad and be with him.
I omit the part about intending to help Lachlan blow up registration centres.
But she understands he’s the last person likely to let me be taken for registration, and by the time I’ve finished stating my case, she’s nodding.
Returning from the car, she brings our precious grimoire in an ordinary backpack.
The sort of thing any college student would carry her books in.
Only my witchy senses detect something deliberate in its ordinariness, like a rich girl slumming it in a grungy nightclub, or a beautiful boy trying to hide his looks in an oversize hoodie and sweatpants.
No mundane would give this bag a second glance.
‘Don’t forget,’ Mom says, holding it out. ‘This Starcross is yours, Harper. Ours. Part of the Fenn bloodline inheritance. It’s not one more book for Lachlan to plunder for powerful magic. Promise me.’
I wait to see if she’ll sketch a pledge sigil in the air. One for me to trace over with my own magic, binding me to my promise. But she doesn’t.
She trusts me. And I vow that trust will bind me tighter than any enchantment.
Clutching Starcross to my chest, I watch as her car taillights dwindle into the blue darkness, then wink out.
I can feel my heartbeat where it presses against the ancient leather-bound cover that holds all the wisdom and hope and power of my ancestors.
I know the names listed in the front and whisper them now.
Artemis. Tobias. Jennet. Elora. Susanna. Maia. Lilian. Serafina. Sarah.
I’m on my own, but I’m not alone.