Chapter 66
HARPER
I’m trembling and my hands are up in front of me – twisting, writhing. A swift rising panic screams at me to stop! I shake my shoulders, as if an imp crouches at my ear whispering wickedness.
‘Harper?’ I hear a frantic voice, pleading. ‘Baby? Look at me. Look at your old pa.’
Slowly, I look down at my hands as if they’re going to be gloved in blood and holding something unspeakable. A strangled baby. A warm and still-beating human heart. A few wisps of a girl’s cloudy white hair, torn from her scalp.
I’m just a few strokes away from casting Ruin at Lachlan.
Horrified, I drop my hands. Plead, ‘What’s happening, Dad?
’, and he comes to me unhesitatingly, arms wrapping tight and crushing me against his broad chest. I can feel his hammering heartbeat against my cheek.
My legs won’t hold me up, and I somehow know there’s only one thing that can make me feel normal—
Mom races into the room clutching Starcross, and I all but lunge for it, writhing as Dad tries to hold me back.
‘Give it to me,’ I plead, and I only calm once Mom has pressed the grimoire into my arms.
What the fuck is going on? What’s wrong with me?
‘Harper,’ Mom says carefully, watching me hug the book. ‘Can you tell us what’s happening?’
‘Actually, I think I can,’ Dad says. ‘But Harper, you go first.’
And so I do, sat safe between my parents. I tell them everything weird that’s been happening, all the way back to that bonfire on the beach. My first glimpse of what I’ve called Redhaven-that-was. The strange memories that aren’t my memories. Elora – and Susanna. And this compulsion for Starcross.
‘Compulsion?’ Mom says, frowning. ‘Is that why you asked me for it? Came back to get it?’
‘I guess,’ I say. ‘The wanting didn’t feel so strong, then. I thought, of course I should have it, so I could continue my studies. Research how I could find a way to Dad. But now it’s this need. Did you never feel the same, when you were apprenticing and learning from it?’
My mother is shaking her head. She looks almost wary. ‘It’s our heritage, Harper. The most precious thing we own. Our family has been its custodian for centuries. But it’s also only a book.’
‘Are you able to put the grimoire down, Harper?’ Lachlan asks. ‘So we can look at it?’
I grip the book reflexively, then force my fingers to uncurl. There’s one more obstacle, though. The lack of a single inch of space in which to place my precious Starcross.
We’re in Lachlan’s study. His man cave. Under any other circumstances, I’d be grinning, because here’s all the stuff he never had with him at Green Point, or on the road.
Books in piles, his scuffed motorbike helmet wobbling on top of a stack like a Roman bust on a plinth.
Engravings and paintings covering the walls, including framed pages of ancient-looking magical texts from which your glance slides away when you try to look more closely.
A dusty pine bookshelf filled with yellowing journals, magazines and offprints, perhaps all part of his sleuthing for Redhaven.
On the top shelf is a dish carved from the cross section of a tree, like something a Viking ate out of, now piled high with silver talismans, small tokens of horn or antler etched with Norse runes.
Amid all the heaped witchy junk is a top-dollar, brushed-aluminium, wraparound computer screen like spies and scientists have in the movies.
Yeah, my dad, the magical criminal mastermind.
Oh god, is that Mom?? Clearly people still printed photos out in the early noughties, because there she is, sat by a window, laughing, the image faded from the sun and hazy anyway, tucked into the corner of a nineteenth-century botanical print – perhaps to remind him of the beautiful witch he met one summer. The one who turned out to be a Fenn.
‘Sorry,’ Lachlan grunts, lifting piles off the desk to make space for Starcross. He blows on the leather top, which disturbs the dust and makes him sneeze like a lion, and brushes fretfully at floating particles as they settle back down again.
‘Tell us,’ he says, once we’ve balanced the grimoire stably, ‘all those years ago, how did you get the idea to use Obscurity? Why did you tattoo the other Old Signs into yourself even though your mom never spoke about them other than to say how wrong and dangerous they are?’
‘The idea for Obscurity? And the others? I don’t know where. I mean, I studied Starcross. It was always there in our house, Mom never tried to hide it from me. She trusted me.’
I flush with shame, still, when I think about how often I betrayed her trust by studying the grimoire alone, something she told me no young witch should ever do.
‘And these pages,’ he says, opening up the grimoire to the two blank pages toward the back. ‘Did you study these?’
I’d always assumed they were for the book’s owner to make her own notes. I’d run my fingers over the ivoried paper, imagining what wise insights or clever new spells or theories I’d write there one day.
‘I used to wonder why they were blank.’
Lachlan makes an approving noise, like a man going on vacation who’s checked the weather forecast and seen an entire week of sunshine.
‘Here’s the curious thing,’ he says. ‘In every other copy of Starcross I’ve seen, these pages aren’t blank. They contain simple herbal charms.’