Chapter 80
BEA
And just like that, everything’s turned on its head. Frey’s grandstanding speech, Sarah Fenn’s jaw-dropping press conference, and suddenly Sandra is the bad guy.
Three days ago, witches were a danger to the nation. Today, those raising concerns about witches are bigots.
I’m a bigot, apparently. Comments have started appearing under my posts about working Sandra’s campaign this summer. Not complimentary ones, like when I first shared the candid pics, the carefully professional selfies, but new comments.
Shame on you. Take this down.
U work for a hatemonger.
Better a witch than a bitch.
And over and over, like I’m being spammed with it, #NoMoreSalems. I delete. Block. Report. Switch off the comments.
‘I’ll probably have to delete this profile,’ I tell the aide who spots me on my phone and asks what I’m doing. ‘I can’t have future employers checking me out online and seeing half my college and complete randoms calling me a bigot.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says airily. ‘Hate from the libtards is a badge of pride in certain circles. Wear it right, and it could fast-track you to staffer with some of the big guns.’
She reels off a few names. Party high-ups. Outspoken. Combative. But not people I could ever see myself working for. Some of them politicians whose views I’ve critiqued and picked apart in term papers and class debates. One or two with opinions – and worse, policies – I find downright distasteful.
Sandra isn’t like them. She’s moderate. Has the right position on issues close to my heart, like women’s rights and healthcare. I turn that word libtard over in my mouth and find it sour and unpleasant, a rotten cherry stone to be spat out.
Have I let my feelings about witchcraft carry me too far from myself? Has Sandra? Horror still prickles beneath my skin when I think of Luka’s desperate sobs as they wound his magic out of him like a tapeworm.
I think of Lachlan Frey’s shameless speech, the crass slogan that’s suddenly all over my timeline, and my blood boils that he’s being given a hearing.
But then I recall every excruciating minute of Sarah Fenn’s press conference, the horror on her face when she couldn’t even light a candle, and unwanted pity trickles through me even though she messed up my dad with her holier-than-thou magic and nearly smashed my family into pieces.
Her magic saved my life that night in Bittershore. Now it’s gone.
‘Come on,’ the aide says, impatiently. ‘Sandra needs us. We’ve got to figure out how we stop this ship sinking – or if it does, how we make sure Sandra’s career doesn’t go down with it.’
I feel as though I’m floating free as I listen to the debate around the table. Over the past couple years, Sandra’s built her entire political identity around her witchcraft campaign, and she’s talking even faster than usual as her team works through various scenarios.
‘We say the Redhaven Files documents are fabricated,’ says the aide.
‘Go on the attack not only on Frey but the Fenn woman, too, and that unstable-looking daughter. There’s plenty of shit slopping around them from the Sanctuary madness last year.
Lay into the Moot. A basket-case outfit with no credibility.
On its third leader in as many months – and that’s a Japanese trans woman.
Wokeness gone mad. And then we make clear we’re not the guilty party here.
Every single action we’ve taken has been to protect the American people. ’
‘DARVO,’ Michael Whitman says, drily. ‘Deny. Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.’
‘Exactly.’ The aide beams, glad her clever strategy has been understood.
‘Yes,’ says Sandra, fingertips white where she’s pressing them against the tabletop.
‘Notorious as a perpetrator strategy, particularly for abusers and sex offenders. Gaslighting on steroids. I don’t think so.
There are things in those files that can’t be denied.
Emails with my name on them. We should reframe them aggressively, yes.
But deny them? No, that’s a line I won’t cross. ’
I’m about to exhale with relief that Sandra’s just confirmed my faith in her, when she continues.
‘Sarah Fenn, though. The fact she’d do that for Frey.
There must be something to it. We’ve never yoked them together before, but we’ve been missing a trick.
Luka’s lawyers have been preparing a defence case that Redhaven, or Frey, targeted Luka and manipulated him into the Bittershore crimes.
It always seemed a strange chance that Sarah Fenn found him that night in the woods.
What if the pair of them were working together all along?
And that cop Knight was in on it? Fenn brought her along to shoot Luka, to make him appear aggressive and dangerous. ’
‘No,’ I say, before I can stop myself. ‘Appear aggressive and dangerous?’
My heart’s racing, beating right out of my chest, and with those few spoken words my mouth has gone suddenly dry.
I’m back there, trussed on the forest floor, bruised and gagged and terrified, staring at the knife Luka twirls in the dirt, expecting at any minute it’ll plunge into my guts.
I see again the supernova of star-white fear when he lifts the blade to my face.
Shudder at the precision with which he nicks open my forehead and my blood begins to spill.
Feel the jerking, jolting pain right through me, my skull bumping across the root-knotted earth, as he hauls on the rope and hoists me into the sky.
Yours will be the sacrifice and mine will be the harvest, he’d crooned.
‘Sarah had nothing to do with what happened at Bittershore,’ I say, convinced of it with every bone in my body. ‘Absolutely not. She saved my life that night.’
Sandra’s gaze cuts to me, sharp.
‘You’ve been unusually quiet this afternoon, Beatriz,’ is all she says. ‘And now this is what you bring to the discussion?’
‘I’ve been thinking.’ And once I loose those three words, the rest come tumbling out.
‘I was convinced we were right. I believed Harper Fenn tried to drown me with magic. I probably still do. Sarah Fenn messed up my dad, and I certainly know what Luka did to me. You suffered so much at the hands of your magical ex-husband, Sandra, and believe Lachlan Frey twisted Luka. And Michael, I know you’re still convinced Harper caused Dan’s death by magic. Maybe all these things are true.
‘But what if we were wrong to think controlling and destroying magic is the answer. Perhaps witches shouldn’t be singled out, but simply held accountable when they do wrong, the same as anyone else. Maybe magic isn’t a crime. It’s only a weapon.’
Sandra’s brow pinches in surprise. Michael leans forward, his face all twisted up with fury, and I recoil from what I see there. A man consumed by revenge. A man capable of anything.
‘Showing your true colours, eh, Bea?’ he snarls.
‘Seems to me Sarah Fenn’s timing at Bittershore was convenient for you most of all.
Are you part of this, too? I mean, you moved on from grieving for my son and targeted Luka quickly enough at Cawden.
I assumed you were simply doing what girls like you have always done, using sexual wiles to get a leg up on your ambitions.
But were you playing us all along? Did you lead Luka into the woods that night?
Did you tell him he could do anything to you? ’
‘Are you kidding?’ I’m too astonished for anything else. My whole body is shaking with shock at Michael Whitman’s attack, and disgust at his words, and fear. That white-hot fear again.
Sandra’s eyes are glassy. But glass is hard, and I see only suspicion as she looks at me.
‘Did you release the files?’ she says. ‘We know they were downloaded from my computer.’
‘No, that was me,’ says another voice from the doorway. We’ve been so caught up, no one even saw him come in.
‘You?’ Emotion is there now as Sandra’s voice trembles, wavers. But doesn’t break. ‘Luka, why?’
‘Why couldn’t you love me as I was?’
His mom stares, appalled. The way you might stare at your child if you were powerless to stop an oncoming car heading right for them.
Then she howls, like she’s only just realised she’s driving that car.