Chapter 61
MAGGIE
Sarah and I have alternated watches on Harper through the night, each snatching sleep when we can on the couch in the suite. Just before seven in the morning, Sarah shook me awake.
‘Her breathing’s normal now,’ she says. ‘And the sleep-talking has stopped. It looks like natural rest. Can you stay with her? There’s something important I need to do, and it’ll take a while. I hope Harper will understand.’
With instructions about her daughter’s breakfast preferences, and to fetch Naomi if Harper senses anything off about her magic, one harassed-looking Moot President is out the door.
It’s about an hour later, when I’m pouring inadvisable quantities of half’n’half into my coffee and wondering whether IHOP can deliver to magical premises, that Harper stirs.
She blinks groggily, before coming bolt upright with a gasp.
She hardly spares me a glance, instead patting all over her body.
She’s still in the hospital gown, beneath the coverlets which pool at her hips, but her mom sent some Moot flunkey to buy basic clothing in her size.
I set the folded pile on the end of the bed with a soft hey, but she’s still patting, frowning.
Is she checking for physical injury? Broken bones?
A little bubble of panic inflates and rises within me. Was there something we missed?
It’s only when she closes her eyes, lifts her hands, twists them at the wrists and an ugly vase on the windowsill explodes that I realise what she was really checking for – her magic.
‘It’s still there,’ she says to herself as much as to me, her face lit by an expression as close to uncomplicated joy as I’ve ever seen on this girl. ‘They didn’t break it. Just as well, because killing people the mundane way is a lot messier and more painful. Unless my dad killed them for me?’
‘He did not. Neither did your mom. And as an officer of the law I need to caution you that killing people is viewed very dimly.’
She huffs a laugh, then sobers faster than a drunk who’s just thrown up.
‘Where are my parents?’
‘Your father, no idea. He got away from Montreal’ – So that’s where it was, she hisses – ‘in one piece. Your mom and I and Naomi Yamakawa brought you back here. We’re at Moot HQ in Salem.’
‘The Moot?’ She gags like a cat whose latest furball is a biggie.
‘Yeah. Your mom’s running it now. Moot President.’
‘Jeez. Was I out for a few hours, or a few years? How did that happen? No, don’t give me the whole story yet. There’s something I need, first.’
‘Clothes are right there. The only person in the building under the age of thirty bought them, so don’t shoot me if they’re not to your taste.’
‘Not clothes. Well, obviously yes, clothes. But I need Starcross.’
That damn grimoire. The first thing Sarah thought to save after her house burned down. Is there something about near-death experiences that makes witches itch for their spellbooks?
Well yeah, Maggie Knight. It’s probably a little thing called security. Or revenge. Both understandable.
‘Where is it? Can I go fetch it while you take it easy? You were sedated pretty heavily and have been out cold for much of the night.’
But she’s already out of bed, wriggling into the clothes, grimacing at the kitsch, faux-1980s sweatshirt bought by someone who’s never met Harper Fenn. Out of her usual black she looks young. Vulnerable. And I realise her previous wardrobe choices were as much about armour as style.
‘It’s with my dad. His place is about four hours from here. I guess if I’ve still got sedative in my bloodstream, you’re driving.’
I don’t want to take Harper anywhere without telling Sarah, because she’d rightly go frantic, for all that Harper protests she isn’t a child and doesn’t need her Mom’s permission. But when I check in with Naomi she informs me Sarah left Salem an hour ago.
‘Do we know why?’ I ask. ‘She told me she had something important to sort out, but didn’t elaborate.’
‘She said the same to me. That she’d come straight back when she was done, and for me and you to ensure Harper stays safe and is recovering.’
We both look out the window to where Harper is impatiently kicking my car tyres in the parking lot.
‘I’d say she’s recovered,’ I tell Naomi. ‘This trip is important to Harper. We can’t keep her here. If I don’t drive her, she’ll hex me unconscious and find some wheels herself.’
Naomi nods. ‘Fenns,’ she says with feeling, and we both laugh.
We’re heading to Maine, Harper issuing directions and filling the space in between with furious, disjointed sentences about everything that happened after Whitman and Theodorou hauled her away. I apologise for inadvertently leading them to her, in my search for Luka.
‘I had no idea you’d be with him. And I had no idea they were tailing me. I’m so sorry, Harper.’
‘I was going to turn Luka in,’ she says. ‘That was my plan. Get him away from Dad’s base at Redhaven, then incapacitate him and call the authorities. So I should be glad you all showed up, because otherwise I would have been the one responsible for handing him over so they could … do that.’
Emotions are passing across her face as fast as clouds in a storm. She swipes a palm down her cheeks and stares out of the window.
‘He was so devastated, Maggie. Just broken. Okoye looked haunted when I was brought into the room, so I guess he was the one who performed the ritual. Bea Garcia watched it all, if you can believe that. Even she wasn’t smiling, and she’d have most reason to.
‘And I still can’t decide if what happened to him was better than what they tried to do to me.
To have your magic ripped up at the roots, screaming, but done by another witch, someone who knew the cost and would grieve for it after, like Okoye?
That’s horrific. But what they were doing in that clinic?
Lab coats. White walls. A needle. All the humanity gone.
Simply a process. A procedure. Clinical and industrial.
I was terrified for myself and for every magical person in the world.
And for the world, without us. How easily something infinitely precious could disappear forever, just because one day someone, somewhere, decides it’s safer that way. ’
Harper’s right, made wise beyond her years by all she’s gone through.
I’ve been focussing on the individuals involved.
Luka. Harper. Ortiz, whose campaign I initially presumed was a cynical platform for political advancement, but which it’s now painfully apparent is as personal as causes come.
But the stakes are so much bigger. They’re vast. If you’d told me amid the chaos of Sanctuary’s messed-up witch-hunt that twelve months later the idea of a world without witchcraft would be considered scientifically achievable and politically desirable, I’d’ve laughed. And yet here we are.
Silence lapses between us and I let the car wheels do the talking.
Harper watches the Montreal livestream over and over.
When her curiosity is finally exhausted, she fiddles with the radio.
I insist on a pit stop for breakfast, as my eyelids are still heavy from a night of broken sleep, and I’m damned if we rescued Harper yesterday only for me to risk her in a vehicle smash today.
Hours have passed and we’re well over the state border into Maine by the time she starts jiggling in her seat.
‘It was right about here – yeah! This is where I met the moose.’
‘The moose?’ I ask faintly, though by now I should be prepared for anything where the Fenns are concerned.
‘Yeah,’ she says, suffused with warmth. ‘The guide my magic sent. Don’t worry, though. I’ll be your moose. I went in through the woods, but I came out this way with my Dad and then with Luka, so I know the route.’
It’s going well, as she directs me down increasingly smaller and more poorly surfaced roads. But I kill the engine when she indicates a woodland track.
‘That’s a no-access forestry trail, Harper. The Satnav reckons we’re heading toward Hundred Mile Wilderness.’
‘Oh, the satnav is working, is it?’ she smirks.
She’s right, the screen has died. But I don’t need it to show me the dead end, nor the wooden beam barrier up ahead.
‘Keep going,’ she says. ‘Trust your moose.’
Sceptical, I put the car back into drive and as we roll forward slowly Harper puts a hand on my shoulder. A shudder runs through me and there’s an ache behind my eyes that sets me blinking. When my vision clears, there’s no more barrier. No more dirt trail, but a gritted track.
‘How?’ I gasp.
‘A nice old guy called Eugene,’ Harper says cheerfully. ‘Face like a crochety grandpa, but he’s really great at this sort of thing.’
This sort of thing. As if she was talking about painting a picket fence or weeding the driveway.
‘Take your hand away,’ I tell her.
She does, and immediately I’m back on the overgrown dirt trail, forest pressing in close all around and a barrier ahead. My stomach flips and I let out a long exhale. Harper looks tolerantly amused.
‘Queasy?’
‘Struggling to adjust to the fact that my eyes, my senses – you know, all I’ve got to understand the world with – can’t be trusted. Can you see how messed up that is?’
She grimaces and mouths sorry, but I’ve learned a lesson.
I’ve gotten so used to seeing Harper as someone who needs protecting and rescuing, I’ve forgetten how powerful she is – and what magic can do.
I’ve stopped myself from thinking too hard about Abigail Whitman’s death at the Sanctuary stadium, how she threw herself joyfully into the fire imagining she saw her dead son.
My official conclusion was derangement from grief, but what if it was another time witchcraft scrambled someone’s sense of what’s real and what isn’t?
Okoye isn’t the Fenns’ favourite person right now, but is he so wrong in urging witches to toe the line, because the rest of us would utterly freak if we knew what they could really do?
Harper puts her hand back on my shoulder as I continue to drive, and there are no more dislocating shifts in reality.
Up ahead, a house comes distantly into view, and moments later my skin tingles all over.
Wards, Harper confirms. Casting deep shadow beneath the midday sun is a large, handsome homestead with outbuildings.
A group of kids chase each other around outside, and it could be any hipster communal living project, were it not that as I watch, one of the kids jumps into the air – and stays there a little too long before she lands, giggling.
(Yeah, there’s a reason witches are banned from sporting competitions, too.) A trio of women are sitting round an honest-to-goodness cauldron.
The air is all wavy above a bursting market garden, and I can’t tell if I’m seeing magic or simply heat-haze.
It looks so Instagram influencer-wholesome.
But I can’t shake my unease, because I must be looking at …
‘Redhaven,’ Harper announces. ‘A.k.a. my dad’s place. Pull in here.’
‘What the heck?’ I hear, as Harper jumps out. She’s looking at a parked vehicle all aggrieved, like it rolled over her foot. ‘Mom?’
Is this where Sarah Fenn headed in such a hurry this morning?
I guess she needed to talk to Lachlan about how the Moot and his outfit are going to work together – or not – going forward.
Someone won’t be winning a Best Babysitter badge when she finds out you’ve driven her convalescing daughter all this way, Margaret Knight.
I can hardly keep up as Harper hurtles towards the farmhouse. But I’m close enough to catch her when, right by the porch, she staggers and collapses.