Chapter 47
HARPER
With a gasp, I come awake. My heart is racing and for the strangest moment I’m dizzy with doubleness as if I’m both within and outside of myself. My insides twist horribly when I remember feeling like this when Dan spiked me.
What was that? I was myself, but not. Behind eyes that weren’t my eyes.
Susanna, those girls had said, the greenwitch twins. And Elora.
Those names are from the front of our grimoire.
Elora Fenn, 1804. Susanna Fenn, 1847. Their handwriting is similar, as if one had taught the other, but Susanna’s capitals are large and looping.
She takes up space. I always liked that, whenever I tried to picture these long-ago ancestors of mine, and remembered that the book beneath my hands had passed through theirs, too.
I’m so vividly and recently with the girls in the garden, that my mind takes a moment to spool back through the scenes that came before it.
That disturbing one. The old lady, Elora – grandmother, a voice inside me says – lying drugged in the bed, as Susanna removed the grimoire from the wall.
That was our Starcross. I recognised the stain upon the cover. The worn gilt blocking.
And the scene that followed … Susanna taking Ruin.
So I’m not the first Fenn to have wielded the Old Signs!
I’m not uniquely wicked and deviant in my family’s long history, from gentle greenwitch Tobias, to wise old Great-Gramma Serafina, to my our-Gift-is-for-helping-others mom.
There was once another Fenn, like me, who saw power and didn’t accept that we should be denied it.
Something eases inside me. I always tried not to judge myself for being drawn so instinctually to the signs, to what the magical community and the mundanes all agree is the very worst of our magic.
But I’ve long carried shame for it. That’s why I kept my secret from my mom for so long.
And I could see the conflict in her eyes when I did finally show her.
She told me she was proud of my strength, but I know she wishes I’d reached for any other kind of magic.
Lachlan was … Lachlan. He’s a man who’s used unscrupulous magic for unscrupulous ends.
But even he hasn’t gone so far as to cut dark sigils into himself, despite the incredible power they’d bestow, which he could use for his cause.
Yet if what I saw was a true showing, Susanna Fenn did it too.
At Haven. Not Redhaven, just plain old Haven. I think of those webpages that speculate on why the name changed, and shudder.
But was that a true showing or vision? I’ve never had any affinity for clairvoyance or scrying magics.
Maybe it was my Gift giving me the answers I need to end my imprisonment here, in this magic-deadening room?
With a heady rush, I begin to reach inward, to search for the terrible powers that I’ve feared locked up and stifled.
Light is seeping around the shutters already.
Daylight is coming. And with it, will come people with no good intentions.
Breakfast arrives first, pushed too quickly through the door while I am lost inside the pathways of my body, trying to force magic to the surface where I can feel and use it.
The door is locked again by the time I snap out of it and race over, and I yank the useless handle furiously.
The breakfast isn’t the worst: a dish of cut fruit beneath film, a yoghurt, a plastic-wrapped croissant, and a bottle of water.
The fruit is what appeals most, but I’m worried this meal could be laced with sedatives, after I was liberally injected with tranquilliser yesterday.
I’ll need energy, though, so I scarf down the yoghurt and croissant and empty the bottle.
I’m still searching, questing for my suppressed magic, chest tense with effort and fear, when the door opens a second time.
This time it stays open, but there’s no way I’m busting out.
Sandra Ortiz enters first, and beside her a stocky blonde woman in a white lab coat, her hair pulled back in a bun and wearing garish, outsize acrylic glasses – the kind people with no personalities wear to give the impression they’re interesting.
At their back, Okoye and Barr. I glimpsed a security guard, not Koa from the night before, waiting outside.
‘Good morning, Harper.’ Ortiz’s smile is soft and unthreatening. I expect she uses it before kissing babies at campaign rallies. And who knows, perhaps before forcing her son to have his magic destroyed. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Brilliant, thanks. But you made sure of that, didn’t you?
I don’t know who you are,’ I continue, looking at lab-coat lady, ‘but either you’re cosplaying as a doctor or scientist, or you really are one, and in either case you need to know: I was drugged and kidnapped and brought to your facility to be held against my will. ’
The woman nods tightly. ‘It’s understandable for you to be agitated, Harper. But you’re here to do a good thing – the right thing. You’ll be paving the way for us to be able to help many, many people.’
‘Whatever you’re planning, I do not consent to it. And the only way word of what you’re doing is not going to get out, is if I meet with some kind of accident, because I one-hundred-per-cent will be shouting about it as loud as I can when I get out of here.’
‘But we do have your consent, Harper. You gave it yesterday. A biometric signature.’ Ortiz lifts a finger suggesting, what – they took my fingerprint while I was unconscious? ‘And we have witnesses here from the magical community.’
Barr actually grins at me, and I’ve never wanted my magic more than now, to hex him with every ounce of power I have.
Okoye still has that troubled expression.
He’s the only weak point I can see in this line-up.
But before I can appeal to him as the protector of all witches, his phone goes.
He checks the number with a frown, accepts the call, and listens intently.
At one point, he shoots me a burning look that I’ve done nothing at all to deserve.
‘I have to take this,’ he tells the others, curtly. ‘And Sandra, we should talk afterwards. This concerns you too. Can I suggest Dr Delacourt delays proceedings?’
Ortiz lifts a hand as Okoye bangs on the door and is let out. I make a dart for it too, but Barr is faster, grabbing my arm.
‘You’ll know where to find us, Charles,’ Ortiz calls as the door closes. Then all her attention is back on me. ‘Come on, Harper, I know you want to help us to help your kind. A world where witches don’t have to live in fear? That’s what we all want.’
My magic still hasn’t come to my rescue, and I shudder.