Chapter 27 #2
“The last thing she said was… was a name.”
“A name? What name?” Xiomara asked. On the other side of the table, Ostara’s sisters were leaning in.
“She said… Isabel Kildare.”
The room was silent and still for a full five seconds. Then the arguing began.
“Kildare!”
“What can the Kildares have to do with this?”
“Are they behind it all? Did they lure her there? Set a trap?”
“Of course they did! They’ve been trying to return to the Cove for ages!”
“Ostara would never associate with the Kildares! It must be a warning!”
“Oh, so she would associate with a demon, but not a malevolent coven?”
“She wasn’t associating! She was trying to get information from the—”
“Even to consider conjuring a demon is beyond the bounds of—”
“ENOUGH!”
It was Persi’s voice that carried out over the rest, that rang with such authority that every single person in the room fell silent.
“This girl has not faced literal hell tonight to have to sit here and listen to you all squabble like children on a playground!” she ground out from tightly clenched teeth. “You can argue over all of this nonsense later!”
Xiomara raised a hand to silence every voice that rose in indignation at Persi’s words.
“Persephone speaks only the truth. We do not need to burden the child with this discussion.” She turned to me then.
My whole body was trembling with the effort of unburdening myself in front of all these people.
“Wren, I will ask only one more question of you tonight, and then we release you to seek what rest you can find.”
“O-okay,” I agreed.
“Persephone has told us there was another presence in the woods this evening, something that attacked the demon before it could harm you. She claims, before you went into shock, that you said the Darkness saved you. Do you have any memory of this?”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean when you said that?”
I hesitated, turning to Persi. “Didn’t you see it?”
But Persi shook her head. “I saw the demon fall back, like something had stopped it. I saw it tumble back into the earth. But as to what caused it, I couldn’t say.”
I bit my lip. I had seen the Darkness in his human form as clearly as I now saw the expectant faces gathered around the table.
Could I have imagined it? Surely not. “I… I thought I saw the Darkness as he appeared a long time ago, to Sarah Claire. The Darkness attacked Abaddon and forced him back to where he was summoned from. He… the Darkness… saved me.”
No one seemed to know what to do with this information. It silenced every wagging tongue, every syllable of commentary. I took in every expression around the snug kitchen, from incredulity to fear to awe. Nowhere among them did I see anything that reassured me that I was believed.
“That’s what I saw,” I whispered.
“Very well, mija. You go and rest now, all right?” Xiomara said, in a tone that made me feel like a child telling tall tales.
Recognizing the dismissal, I stood up from the table and made an awkward gesture with my hand, something like a wave, and headed for the doorway.
My mom reached out and caught my fingers.
“We still have more to… I’ll be up as soon as I can, okay?” she said.
“Sure,” I replied, finding that I was past caring. I would have expected to want my mother near me, to shrink down into the safety of her embrace. But I realized now that safety had been an illusion. Mothers couldn’t always protect us. Monsters were real. And sometimes we had to face them.
I crawled into bed with limbs like stone.
Tired as I was, I didn’t think I could possibly sleep.
I dreaded what waited for me in unconsciousness, sure that the memories I’d been suppressing since I’d gotten home would be waiting for me there.
But when my eyelids grew as heavy as my heart, and I gave in to sleep, there was no demon lurking there. No Darkness. Not even Ostara.
But she was there. Because she knew what answer I really needed.
We stood together on the beach again at the base of the cliff. No mirror stood between us this time, no barrier that made me feel like a voyeur with my eye pressed to the keyhole of someone else’s life. This time, we stood side by side, staring out at the ocean.
I looked over at her and saw that her pockets were bulging, heavy with the stones that would anchor her to the sand. She looked at me, eyes deep and dark and knowing, and then reached into her pocket. She drew something out and held it out to me. She didn’t speak, but I could hear her anyway.
Take it. Take it, please.
I held out my hand, and she dropped the object into my palm: a piece of sea glass in the shape of a teardrop. Wonder flooded me like the incoming tide, and when I looked at her again, I understood.
“You’re Isabel. Isabel Kildare.”
I woke with her name on my lips, whispered into the breaking dawn like a wish. And warm in my hand, like the sun had kissed it, was the piece of sea glass.
Sedgwick Cove was draped in bright colors.
Buntings and swags festooned all the shop windows and front porches.
Clusters of lustrous blooms, courtesy of my mother’s greenhouses, adorned front doors and gates.
Bright ribbons hung from naked trees, their tiny silver bells providing constant music as they swung in the bitter wind.
Any person driving through the town would think it some kind of spring festival in the midst of winter, and marvel at the wonder of it.
But that was only because they’d never seen Sedgwick Cove in mourning.
I knew, from my own grandmother’s passing, that somber black was not the way Sedgwick Cove witches marked a passing, and so it was not a surprise to me to see all the bright colors as I walked down Main Street.
Everyone I passed wore an armband in a deep purple color, and the sight of each one raised a lump in my throat until I thought I would choke.
Ostara’s funeral would take place that night on the cliffs.
Already the pyre had been built, the tables laid under great white tents to keep the worst of the weather from the feast that would appear, dish by dish, as people arrived to pay their respects to the head of their Conclave.
Witches with an affinity for air would volunteer their time and magic to lay spells to keep us all warm enough.
The whole of the town would gather; but somehow I didn’t think anyone would be able to muster the joy, or the smiles, or the kind memories they brought when we laid Asteria to rest.
This was not a celebration of a life. Not this time.
In the weeks to come, there would be turmoil.
A new head of the Conclave would have to be chosen.
The town would have to be informed, at least in part, of the circumstances that had led us here.
We would need to investigate what had led Ostara to that showdown in the woods, how she had learned as much as she had, and what else remained to be uncovered.
The Claires would be subjected to a kind of scrutiny they hadn’t faced since the time of Sarah Claire.
It would no doubt be ugly. I only hoped it wouldn’t tear our town apart at the very moment we needed to band together.
Divided, we might fall, and the Darkness was waiting in the wings for that very moment.
The Darkness. I was not Sarah Claire, swept up in the chivalry of a handsome rescuer.
I had had time, night after night, to relive those moments in the clearing, when the Darkness had saved me from Abaddon, and I knew why he had done it.
I knew why, after months of hiding, he had appeared just then, and chivalry had nothing to do with it.
He needed me. Abaddon had known it. The Darkness knew it.
He couldn’t let me die, not at the hands of another.
He had waited hundreds of years for another pentamaleficus to be born in Sedgwick Cove, and if the demon had killed me, he may have had to wait a few hundred more.
And now that he had nearly lost the opportunity to use me, I doubted very much that he would stay in the shadows as long again.
Perhaps all these hundreds of years of life had made him forget that we mere mortals were fleeting things.
He would surely act again soon, and I would need to be ready.
The thought should have scared me. But my fear, for the moment, anyway, had run dry. In its place was a wild current of curiosity about Isabel Kildare.
I carried the sea glass in my pocket everywhere I went.
Where once I had dreaded the sight of its return, I now felt comfort at the thought of its weight in my pocket.
How had Ostara found out about Isabel? How did she trace who she was?
Did the Kildares know what I now knew, what Ostara had uncovered, about the history of their coven?
Because, while I did believe in coincidences, I didn’t believe in this one, which meant that, sooner or later, I would have to reckon with Veronica Meyers again.
Her claim on Sedgwick Cove was deeper than perhaps even she realized.
But if Ostara had discovered this connection, then it was surely only a matter of time before Veronica did, too.
Perhaps she already knew. Perhaps she was already planning her return, the descendant of the real first daughters of this place. I looked for her face everywhere now.
That evening, the Durupinen would arrive.
Jess and Celeste were coming to the funeral to pay their respects to Ostara.
It was ironic, since her mistrust of them had driven her to confront Abaddon in the first place; but Jess told me it had been important to Celeste to show the other Conclave members the Durupinens’ support.
I didn’t know how anyone else was feeling about it, but I was looking forward to seeing Jess again.
She felt like one of the only people who might have an inkling of what I was feeling—the constant shifting, bubbling stew of guilt and anger and confusion and fear, the things I was afraid to speak aloud to anyone else.
Well, except for Nova. I could tell her, I was sure, when she was ready to talk.
I would see her that night at the funeral, though I doubted there’d be a moment for us to get away.
She would be surrounded, forced to accept smiles and tears and stories and lamentations piled on top of her, a smothering pile of good intentioned weight that she would struggle not to be crushed by.
Nova loomed so large in my thoughts that when I saw her sitting on the steps of Shadowkeep, I thought my imagination had conjured her there. I stood there blinking for a few seconds before I decided that she was, in fact, real, just in time for her to raise her head and meet my eye.
I walked through the gate, up the walkway, and sat beside her on the steps.
We sat in chilly silence, shoulders pressed together.
After days of wanting to see her, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that didn’t sound trite, or lifted from an uninspired greeting card.
Luckily, she didn’t wait for me to speak.
“I couldn’t stop her,” she said, in a broken husk of a voice.
“I know.”
“She hexed me almost as soon as she saw me standing there.”
“I know.”
Nova shook her head. “Seventeen years of warning me against malevolent magic every single day, and…” The sentence was choked off, but I understood.
“She was trying to help. She thought she was… was saving the Cove.”
“It was reckless. Reckless and insane.”
“Yeah.”
Nova sniffed. I wanted to hold her hand, but I thought she might shove me away, so I kept my fingers tightly clasped together on my knees. The silence spiraled. Finally, unable to stand it anymore, I broke it.
“Can I do anything, Nova? For you? Like, literally anything?” It was something of a selfish question, and I winced after I said it.
I wanted to do something for her to make myself feel less helpless, and it wasn’t her job to ease my guilt.
I braced myself for her to tell me there was nothing I could do, that nothing could help.
But to my surprise, she turned her swollen red face to me, and nodded.
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here.”
“Anything,” I told her.
“Let me help.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“The Darkness. The Kildares. I know it’s on your shoulders now.”
It always had been, but I nodded.
“My mother should have been helping you instead of getting in your way. She always had that… that insane competition that existed only in her own head. The First Daughters versus the Second Daughters. She spent her whole life trying to rewrite the past. But that dies with her.”
I swallowed hard at the pain in her voice.
“So now I’m asking. Let me help. Let’s end this together.”
I held her gaze. And then I nodded. “Yes. Together.”
She looked startled, like she’d expected me to refuse. But I didn’t want to. We had a chance to heal something here, and I was going to take it. No more coven pride. No more secrets and lies. Just a sisterhood protecting their home, like it should have been from the very beginning.
“Thanks,” Nova said.
“I should be thanking you,” I said. Then, because I felt like I had to, I added, “It’s not going to be easy.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“I know that, too.”
It was Nova who reached out, then. Nova who took my hand with a question in her eyes. And it was I who answered it with a squeeze of her fingers. We stared out over the sea. Clouds were gathering low over the horizon, promising a storm.
But at least we wouldn’t have to weather it alone.