Chapter 2
“Well, what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
We were all seated around the kitchen table at dinner an hour later: my mom, Rhi, Persi, and me, discussing the results of my divination lesson. As I picked anxiously at my pasta, my mom and aunts were passing my notebook around the table and arguing about the meaning between bites.
“I, for one, think it’s pretty obvious what it means,” Rhi said, taking the notebook from Persi, who was trying to examine it upside down. “It’s all about research, right?”
Persi and my mom stared at her.
“Research?” my mom repeated.
Rhi looked at each of us as though we were being obtuse on purpose. “Well, yes. It’s the age-old adage, isn’t it? Knowledge is power. If you want to defeat your opponent, you must first understand your opponent.”
“I’m not in love with this analogy, to be honest,” my mom said. “Opponent sounds like we’re doing battle, and no one here is looking to get into a fight. Right?” She turned to me with the kind of fierce, penetrating gaze that made small children confess to petty wrongdoing.
“Of course I’m not looking for a fight!” I replied, indignant. “In fact, I’d very much like to avoid one, which is why I want to know where he is and what he’s doing.”
“You keep saying ‘he,’” Persi said, a deep frown creasing her brow. “Why?”
“It’s… just remembering how he—it—always appeared to me,” I said. “I only ever knew the Darkness as the Gray Man for most of my life.”
This was only partly true. Yes, I had known the Darkness as what I had simplistically called the Gray Man, but that was no longer how I thought about the entity that was so hellbent on obtaining my magic.
Ever since I fell backward into Sarah Claire’s memories, I had an entirely new, entirely borrowed vision of what the Darkness was, and I couldn’t unsee it.
To Sarah Claire, the Darkness had appeared as a raven-haired young man.
Whether that form was truer to what the Darkness truly was, I couldn’t say; but it was the form it had taken in all of their interactions that she had shown me.
The piercing eyes, the muscular form, the powerful presence—all of that had captivated her.
I had come to understand, from sharing her mind, that Sarah Claire had been powerfully obsessed with the Darkness.
It wasn’t love, though I think perhaps she may have called it that.
I wasn’t exactly an expert in love—in fact, as a fairly introverted sixteen-year-old who had spent most of my teenage years buried in books or in the wings backstage, the most I could claim to have experienced was a fluttery schoolgirl crush or two.
But I didn’t think love—true love—could exist between a person and… whatever the Darkness was.
Whatever the Darkness was…
That really was the question, wasn’t it? Not where, but what.
“Wren?”
“Huh?”
I resurfaced from the deep pool of my thoughts to find Rhi looking at me.
“I said, what do you think about that?” she said, evidently for the second time.
“I’m not… I’m sorry, I sort of spaced out. What do I think about what?”
But before Rhi could answer, Persi jumped in. “Rhi thinks the answer to your divination question is books.” The last word fell from her lips, absolutely dripping in sarcasm.
Rhi looked properly offended as she turned her gaze on Persi. “What is that supposed to mean? You well know the power of books, Persephone Vesper.”
“Of course I do,” Persi said impatiently, batting her elder sister’s words away like pesky insects. “But, come on, Rhi. Do you really think the answer to all of this is sitting in a dusty old book on a shelf somewhere?”
“Answers to endless questions sit in a dusty old book on a shelf somewhere,” Rhi countered. “I’m not really sure why you think this one would be any different.”
But even my mom, who rarely sided with Persi in any argument, was looking dubious.
“Rhi, honey, you have to admit Persi has a point. It’s just so…
unlikely. I mean… any documentation of the Darkness—in books or anywhere else—would be in the possession of the Conclave.
We’d already know about it. It would have been studied to death, by every powerful coven in the Cove since…
well, since there have been covens in the Cove. ”
Rhi looked at my mother with an uncharacteristically piercing gaze. “Do you really think so? Even with Ostara in charge? Kerridwen, I know you’ve been away a long time, but even you can’t have lost sight of what the Claires are like.”
My mother looked stunned, like someone who’d just been blindsided by a checkmate by someone they hadn’t even considered a serious opponent. She blinked, and then looked over at Persi with a helpless sort of shrug. “Okay, well, now Rhi has a point,” she said.
And despite the very short amount of time I’d known the Claires, I understood exactly what my Aunt Rhi meant.
The only other coven with nearly equal claim to the history of witchcraft in this place was the Claires.
Known as the Second Daughters, our fates had been intertwined for hundreds of years, since Sarah Claire herself had walked the cliffs.
The difference was that while the Vespers revered our own history in this town, the Claires had a troubling tendency to try to rewrite theirs.
Sarah’s betrayal had left a stain that not even four hundred years of atonement could erase.
Ostara and the other matriarchs before her ruled the Claire coven with an iron fist, stamping out any and all deviancy or curiosity that might lead one of their members to stray from the straightest and most righteous of magical paths.
Ostara’s obsessive control had certainly contributed to Bernadette’s demise, as much as she would never admit it out loud.
She had feared Bernadette’s visions so much that she had strangled them—stifled them until Bernadette, desperate to free herself, had contacted Sarah Claire herself, and unleashed a whole new wave of trauma and mistakes.
All Bernadette had hoped for was that Sarah had been misunderstood.
She wanted to heal that wound, not just for Sarah, but for every Claire that came after her.
Because the truth was that the Claires had been punishing themselves for Sarah’s misdeeds for generations.
I thought about Nova Claire—my friend, for want of a better term.
Our relationship began with bitterness. Nova resented the legacy I stepped so seamlessly into, despite the fact that I didn’t even know magic was real, let alone that I possessed any.
The Vespers stood as a constant metric of comparison, and she had measured herself against it her whole life.
She resented me, and it had taken great effort for her to overcome that resentment and become anything like a friend of mine.
And even now, every time I thought we might be overcoming the barrier, she’d build it right back up again, keeping me firmly on the other side.
Knowing all of this, did I think it was possible that Ostara and the Claire coven matriarchs who had come before her might hide details or information about the Darkness, purely to protect themselves?
The realization seemed to hit Persi at the very same time it hit me.
“Oh.” She blinked, obviously just as surprised as my mother had been. “I… actually, you’re probably right, Rhi.”
Rhi popped a bite of pasta into her mouth, looking smug. “I’m right much more often than anyone gives me credit for,” she said.
“Okay, well, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this is one of those moments, and that there’s some cache of secret information about the Darkness that Ostara and the rest of the Claires have been hiding from us,” my mom began.
Persi made a sound like a feral cat, and shoved half a dinner roll in her mouth.
My mom went on, “If that’s the case, then how do we even begin to find it? Ostara would never admit to it, and even if somehow we managed to make her, she’d never give it up. She’s too…”
“Stubborn?” Rhi suggested.
“Controlling?” I tried.
“Generationally traumatized into an unyielding and relentless control freak?” Persi supplied, after an enormous swallow.
My mom smirked. “I was going to say inflexible or something, but yeah, that works.”
“We can’t go directly to Ostara,” Rhi said. “Just like with the grimoire, it will be like trying to negotiate with a brick wall.”
“I can’t ask Nova,” I said at once. “She stuck her neck out for me over and over again when Jess was here, and I can’t keep asking her to do that. One of these times she’s going to get caught, and I’m not going to let her get in trouble on my account.”
Returning the Claire grimoire to the Manor had been easier than any of us had expected.
After Sarah Claire had Crossed and the Source had been healed, we’d had to tell the entire Conclave about what had happened.
We asked that a meeting be held at the Manor, and when we arrived, I slipped away and passed the grimoire back to Nova, who returned it to its cabinet before anyone could notice it was missing.
Unknown to me, she had placed a glamour on the cabinet so that anyone who happened to walk by during those few hours the grimoire was missing would see a replica behind the glass.
As long as they didn’t open the door and try to touch it, they’d never know the grimoire was actually gone, and, fortunately for all of us, nobody had.
“There’s got to be someone else. Someone who might be willing to defy Ostara,” Rhi said, gnawing thoughtfully at an already bitten fingernail.
“Well, I certainly can’t think of anyone,” Persi said. “There was only ever one Claire who dared to step out of line, and that was—”
She froze. The rest of us froze in response. No one so much as breathed.