8. Cori
Cori
C ori knocked softly on Anne’s door later that day after the rain had settled down and the sun was peeking through the trees. The main house had an expansive front porch, adorned with glittering wind chimes singing an eerie song in the breeze.
A crude statue of a gnome urinating into a rock garden flanked the wooden steps. There were two red rocking chairs on either side of the door, still wet with beads of condensation from the earlier deluge.
Her attention shifted to the sky, watching the clouds dissipate. She closed her eyes and felt the stars spinning above her. Sagittarius, Pisces, Pegasus, Cetus . The sea monster in the sky. Fifteen stars, highlighted by three bright giants. She tried to shake the image out of her head as she climbed the front steps.
She desperately needed to get to the lab, to focus on organizing her research and getting her new gear ready. Immersing herself in science had always been an effective way to push away her magic before. It was certainly worth a try.
Anne’s husband, Geoff, came to the door, opening it a crack. “No solicitors!” he yelled menacingly from behind the chain.
“Geoff,” she laughed while rubbing her temples. “It’s Cori.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” he said, flinging open the door. He pushed aside a slobbering bullmastiff trying to force past him. The enormous dog was panting heavily in his pursuit of the intruder at the door as Geoff used his whole body’s weight to keep him at bay. “Moses, for God’s sake, go lie down!” The massive creature bounded to his nearby dog bed, and Geoff threw him a biscuit. “Sorry about the chain. If one more old lady knocks on my door asking me if I found Jesus, I’m going to lose my mind. Do you think I should put a few gargoyles on the porch?”
Cori snorted. “That would probably only provoke them. Is Anne around? I was going to head to the office, but I never got the entry code to the door.”
“Ah yes,” he said, putting on his glasses. He wore a stained white polo shirt and sweatpants, and a sloppily folded Wall Street Journal was tucked under his arm. “Anne is at the farmers market, but before she left, she said, ‘Geoff, here’s the office door code for when Cori inevitably knocks on the door trying to work on a Saturday.’”
She twisted her face and scrunched her eyes in embarrassment. “Well, I guess I’m nothing if not predictable,” she shrugged. If only they knew just how unpredictable she truly was. She took the piece of paper from him. “The code to the door is 1111?” she asked dryly.
Geoff shrugged. “I guess so.”
“And you had to write that down?” she teased.
He pointed at her. “Enough of that or I am going to sic one of my gargoyles on you.” Moses barked deeply in response to his master’s raised voice. She jaunted down the steps, laughing as she strolled toward her car. “I’m serious, I’m going to raise the rent by 100 percent.”
“One hundred percent of zero dollars is still zero dollars,” she reminded him, opening the car door.
“To think I used to be an economist,” he grumbled.
She heard the chain slide into place behind her. Did people in Maine routinely install chain locks on their doors? she wondered. You can take the man out of the city, but you can’t take the city out the man, she supposed .
She was about to put her key to the ignition when her Eye snapped to attention again, this time without warning.
She looked down at her hands, smeared with markers and glue. Her body was trembling, and her skin was all at once flushed and cold. In the coven assembly room, there were about a dozen elders sitting in a circle, gaping at her. Her blurry eyes found her mother’s face, pale with shock.
“Mama?” she asked breathlessly. She attempted to stand up but faltered immediately, nausea bubbling in her abdomen.
“Do you realize what just happened, young lady?” one of the stern-looking elders asked her.
“No.” She needed to breathe. In and out. “One minute I was making solstice signs with you, then all I could see was color. I felt my mouth moving, but nothing was coming out but a scream. All the color faded to black.” She watched what was left of the blood drain from her mother’s face.
“Cordelia, let’s lie down. You need to rest—you aren’t well.”
In an instant she was back in her car, hands clutching the steering wheel with white knuckles. She pried her hands off the wheel and relaxed them, noting the marks that she inflicted with her fingernails during her flashback.
The bombardment of visions and the sudden prodding from her Eye had been bothersome before. But now—reliving that moment—she was thrust into terror. Her breaths quickened, burning her chest with each inhalation.
Adrenaline flooded her senses. She used to keep a paper bag in the car to breathe into when this happened, but it had been so long since she had a panic attack.
The prophecy she had delivered that day had defined who she would need to become for the rest of her life.
Breathe in. Hold. Breath out.
Such a big part of how Cori coped with the prophecy was to continue to run. The doomed twelve-year-old girl from her vision would go down in infamy. She didn’t go by Cordelia anymore. That girl had disappeared. In fact, she doubted she would even look up if someone called out her full name.
Inhale one. Exhale two.
Her own family didn’t know where she lived, or even what she looked like, and she missed them with every ounce of her soul. She wasn’t a witch anymore, certainly not a Celestial witch. She was a harmless Charms witch to anyone who noticed but that was the smallest part of her. A part that had been tamed, groomed, and locked away. Until yesterday.
You’re okay. You’re safe. You’re alone.
But you can’t run from the natural orbit of the Earth, or the convergence of the stars. And no matter how delusional she had become, she knew she could not run from the fact that she had made a prophecy that would change magic forever. And she certainly couldn’t change the fact that there were many witches out there who wanted her dead because of it.