Chapter 27
HARPER
Dad got back two days after my arrival at Redhaven. He emerged through the orchard in slanting late afternoon sun, with a young couple and their kid in tow.
‘Emma, Marek, and their son Jakub,’ Lachlan says, with an expansive gesture. ‘Escaped registration in Cleveland and chose to come with me after Emma blew out the walls of the medical suite when they tried to sample Jak. Make them welcome!’
The man is holding their boy, and his eyes fill with tears as Redhaven’s residents applaud their arrival.
My father disappears inside the farmhouse as the guy’s wife wraps an arm comfortingly around him and kisses their son’s head.
Not half an hour later, two huge BBQ grills are going and ice tubs are overflowing with beer and juice.
I’m reaching for one, when I’m bear-hugged from behind.
‘Someone isn’t old enough to be drinking beer. Ahaha, only kidding! Don’t glare like that at your old dad.’
Lachlan backs off, hands raised comically, as I spin with a bottle in my hand.
‘Dad?’ At his side, Yara gapes. I’m petty enough to smirk as Lachlan ruffles my hair like a goofball. ‘Guess that explains the absence of a token,’ she says. ‘Still, only one of us is old enough to drink.’
Yara tugs the beer from my hand and smirks right back, and I find I like her a lot more than I did.
As she waltzes off to greet the newcomers, Dad plucks two more cold-pebbled bottles for us and pops off the caps by magic, with a sound like champagne corks. We clink the glass necks together in a toast.
‘Drinking under parental supervision,’ Lachlan says with a wink, ‘is absolutely allowed. Now tell me everything.’
We sit on the porch stoop, knees pulled up, as I begin with the moose. But then my journey unspools, and as the sun’s setting and another couple bottles lie empty at our feet, I’m sobbing all over again about Pierre.
‘No shade,’ I hiccup through my tears, ‘but he was the closest thing I ever had to a father. So good I never even knew I needed you, until I met you. He was the best.’
Lachlan holds me tighter as my snot slimes his plaid shirt. ‘I hardly met Pierre,’ he murmurs, ‘but his love for your mom and for you shone out of him. I probably would have had to duel him for you both eventually.’
I sob-cry and beat my dad’s thigh with a fist. ‘Don’t! That’s so … patriarchal.’
‘He might have won. Even with all my magic.’
‘He would have,’ I huff. ‘I wish I could have had had you both.’
‘Me too.’ Lachlan rubs my back comfortingly. ‘Me too, Harper.’
Later, when I’ve pulled myself together, he takes me round the farmhouse and opens every one of the doors that have been closed to me.
I see the computer room where a guy with blond curls and a baseball hat on backwards introduces himself as Bo.
Lachlan cracks a cheesy grin and says, ‘Our resident tech wizard’, and my heart melts at his dreadful dad joke even as I cringe.
Bo is magical, but the work he does at Redhaven is entirely mundane.
He’s looking for backdoor routes into the databases and servers supporting the Witchcraft Registration Act.
‘Sure, it’s a federal programme,’ he says. ‘But it was a rush job. There’ll be some weaknesses somewhere. I’m not alone working on this, we’ve folks all over at other secure locations.’
Dad shows me the magical library. ‘Want to add your Starcross to the shelf?’ he asks, and my pulse does a little hop-and-skip of alarm until he guffaws again and shuts the door. ‘No, I sincerely hope that’s safe with your mom.’
He tells me the history of the house as we go. It was built in the 1940s, and by his reckoning is on the site of the old Redhaven homestead that was destroyed in the 1860s. It took years of research to figure out where it was.
‘And you turning up here confirms I was right,’ he says, with a scholar’s satisfaction.
‘You mean a Fenn connection to this place?’ I ask, and explain to Lachlan how I got here, how I’d thought I was following him, but his absence made me think I must have been following something else entirely.
‘Exactly!’ He’s thrilled that I’ve made the connection, my clever dad delighted to have a clever daughter.
‘Your magic would have followed your family bloodline. It was your great-great-grand-whatever Elora who created Redhaven around the early 1850s – I could never find an exact date. My best guess is that she was worried about political volatility, what with the push for the West, into Texas and Oregon, and the first rumblings of tension between North and South. She must have worried that witches would be conscripted, or weaponised in any coming conflict. That was the same decade the Seneca Falls Convention saw the beginning of the women’s rights movement.
It was a good time to be angry and defiant, Harper, though it was still a bad time to be a witch.
’ He laughs, without his usual humour. ‘It’s always a bad time to be a witch. ’
‘So Elora really was Redhaven’s first Adept,’ I say, wonderingly.
Her name is in the front of Starcross, written in a lean, sloping hand.
A bold, two-stroke curling E. Alongside, scratchier, as if the pen was running out of ink and she was in too much of a hurry to re-dip it, the date of her Determination: 1804.
‘Its first and its last. My pet theory, for which I’ve really no evidence, is that the body which became the Moot – at this point, a network of branches of the charmingly-named Association of Gifted People – betrayed Redhaven to the authorities.
It wanted to clear its own path to power and had a different vision for witchcraft.
Redhaven was always separatist, which could easily be twisted into “supremacist”, whereas the Association was all about collaboration.
My hunch is that despite its swaggering name, the Association was run by weak magicals who knew they’d always have to ride the tail-coats of mundane authority.
I think the same about the Moot today, which is why I decided years ago that Redhaven needed to return. ’
‘And you’re its new Adept.’
‘Yes,’ Lachlan says. ‘I am. Only this time, we won’t be stopped.’
His fists are tight upon his knees. There’s no joking in his voice now.
‘Lachlan?’ It’s Eugene, the old ward witch. ‘Someone out there is looking for us.’
‘And before you say no shit,’ Yara adds, because of course she’s there too, ‘they appear to have a pass-key. Okay, I get that she didn’t need one, but can you tell me when you’re handing them out like candy on Halloween? It’s helpful for me to keep a record.’
‘I haven’t handed any out. Or even given one, with great caution, to a trusted ally.’
My dad jumps to his feet, frowning, and the four of us make our way through the orchard to the wards. Tavi’s there waiting. Approaching from behind, I see the gun holstered at her back. I guess it was there even as she welcomed me.
‘Their magic’s weak,’ Eugene reports. ‘They won’t make it through the wards. But they must have something of yours that got them even this close.’
‘I don’t have things,’ my father says, ‘for exactly this reason.’ And I remember the tiny knapsack in the hallway of the Green Point cottage where he stayed. How the place never showed any trace of him living there.
‘Any other secret children we should know about?’ Yara says, and I revise my revision of her likeability.
‘Let’s run it backwards,’ my father tells Eugene, and the two men stand facing each other performing hand-gestures akin to cat’s cradle.
The two women stand behind, Tavi with a hand on my father’s shoulder and Yara touching Eugene.
They’re sharing magic, I realise, with a sudden fierce happiness.
Doing it as easily and naturally as you’d pass someone a spanner while they mend a car, or pick up a towel for drying as they wash dishes.
This is how magic is supposed to be done.
This is how witches are meant to live.
Then I see it, shimmering in the darkness, a faint gleam like a hairline fracture in the world.
About waist height, it crosses the track where that forestry-style barrier lies.
I’d bet it loops around the entirety of Redhaven.
It’s only when I blink that my eyes catch a thread of light fine as cotton trailing from that perimeter and unspooling into the darkness.
Rather more straightforward than my weird shit with shadows and animals.
‘You’ll have to teach me how that works, Dad,’ I say. ‘Would have saved the local wildlife a lot of inconvenience.’
‘Any time.’ He’s smiling at me, but his brow is still furrowed. ‘Our would-be visitor is still a way off, but Eugene’s right, there’s no strength to their Gift. They’re not a threat, so once it’s light, come with me to find out who’s looking for me, and I’ll show you how our wards work.’