Chapter 6
Rowan mentally counted through his siblings yet again as the rain continued. He needed to keep track of them, be sure everyone was safe. Family first. Still, as he checked his list, he looked down the mountainside where he’d grown up.
Ford was out looking for strays. Heath and Sawyer were safe out of state.
Alder was at work at the hospital in Richmond.
He’d already called to check on them. Indie was somewhere tucked into a corner, probably reading.
And Jasper was in the other room—Rowan’s second oldest brother, he had a house on the other side of the hollow, closer to Richmond.
He’d come over to keep Mom company, then was stuck.
He was old enough to clearly remember the last time the rain had come down and Belle Hollow had acted as a funnel, siphoning all the water to the people at the bottom.
Back then, the Velascos had been the people at the bottom. Next to him, his mother stood, also looking out the window, fingers worrying the rosary that she always wore and sometimes clutched. Or was it the rosary? It looked different. He didn’t get to check, because she murmured under her breath.
"Ford.” She said it as if knowing he was taking stock of the family.
Neither of them mentioned his father or the fact that it was the last flood that had changed everything for them. Vienna Velasco wouldn't admit that. It had been terrifying at first, but in the end, they had been better off.
"He'll be okay, Mama," he told her.
They stood like that for a few more moments, each lost in their own thoughts. She murmured her prayer beneath her breath, and he didn't think anything of it. Arms crossed, he stared into the gray, drowning rain and hoped everyone lived through this one.
He truly did think Ford would be okay, and he told himself not to worry about the Lockhearts. They weren't his concern anymore.
It wasn't until his mother had made it through the prayer the third time that he turned and looked at her. "Mama. What are you doing?"
“Shhhhh,” she told him, brushing him off as her hand moved in front of her, aimed toward the window and the flooding, making a small circle as she recited the words again too softly for him to make it out.
"Mama, no."
It had been at the heart of old family feuds.
He'd heard his grandmother telling her sons they'd only survived because the family put the old ways away. Grandma Velasco couldn't be clear enough: The family was not practicing magic anymore. His Grandparents only condoned his father marrying his mother because she wasn’t following the craft. But his mother’s family did have roots in the hollow—and in the hollow's deep, dark magic. So what was she doing now?
"It's Ford. There’s danger," she told him.
"Mama, how would you even know?" They had no magic. His great-great-abuela Astra and her sisters had made the pact with the town.
“Shush,” she told him again, brushing him off with her left hand while her right still stayed aimed toward the window, the small circles never stopping.
A few years ago, he'd sent her and her sister Paris to Europe to see the cities of their namesakes.
The women had never traveled before—not in any real capacity.
He wanted her to see the world, to see the dreams their mother had pinned on them with their worldly names.
The trip was too late for his father to attend, but Rowan had needed time to have enough money to be able to do it.
He’d been proud of it. But his mother had come back a little bit different, as if she and Paris had some kind of reckoning with their history while they’d been gone.
Not that any of it was in Europe. The Velascos came from some part of Spain, probably.
But his mother was born an Elborn and all their history was in the Blue Ridge Mountains if not the Hollow itself.
The Velascos had arrived later, though still generations ago. Rumor was, the first had brought their own craft with them. It rooted into the pine trees. Flowed with the creek that fed into the river. And it was tied together with what Rowan understood was the darkest of magic.
His great-great -grandmother Astra had been the healer everyone went to when the other witches failed.
When a family was so desperate they were willing to make a sacrifice.
But when the town cried out against it, she and her sisters fought back, eventually cutting a deal.
They carved the family a secure place in the hollow, made them a real part of the community.
Not as outcasts and skilled craftswomen to be used and shunned.
Together they turned the family against the dark magic—and, in fact, all magic.
His mother knew that when she married into the Velasco family. So why was she doing this now, and where had she learned it? "I'm sure Ford's fine, Mama."
"Something is wrong," she told him, conviction he wasn’t used to in her tone.
Her hands finally dropped to her sides as she turned to look at him and said, "But he will be. Something new is coming to Belle Hollow with this rain, and it will change everything."
She turned then, walking away, leaving him stunned. When did she make heady predictions? Who knew if she was even right? She wasn’t the town witch. They already had plenty of those.
Abandoning him to watch the rain alone, she moved to the back of the house where Jasper still thumped around the kitchen, completely ignoring the fact that the world had gone to hell beyond the double-paned windows and thirty-year shingles and manicured yard that Rowan had worked so hard on.
The magic had never left Belle Hollow, he knew. But he couldn't do more than frown at his own mother’s sudden proclamation and wonder how long she'd been at this and just what shade of magic she was practicing now.