Chapter 12
12
AFTER THAT, everything is a bit of a blur. All my energy is going into staying upright. Into keeping that easy smile on my face. No one knows what’s going on inside of me—except my coven, who maintain their presence in that open channel in my head.
It’s more comforting than I want to admit.
Zander’s hand never leaves my back. Carol calls an end to the meeting—and I hope she’s furious that she didn’t manage to cut off our ascension bid at the pass. I hope Maeve Mather and her blind pigeon are incandescent with rage, but I don’t dare look any of them in the eye when it feels like my organs are boiling in acid.
We’re being surrounded in the still-overwarm community center room. People come to ask us questions, or maybe they’re just using that as an opportunity to give us quiet support. It’s not everyone. It’s not the muttering masses. It might not even be enough...but like Litha, when this town voted to let us live by a scant three votes, there’s enough. Just enough.
There’s a group of people who want change. Who want something right instead of all these years of a growing wrong too many of us have been pretending we don’t feel.
Emerson has been leading this charge since she got her memories back and refused to fade away into gratitude or whatever it is the Joywood wanted from her back then. But tonight there are people who want to compliment the job I did, and even if I was up to it, I wouldn’t know what to say to this outpouring of support.
I can barely manage a smile and a thank-you.
My mother walks up, takes one look at me, and knows something is wrong. She and Mina exchange a look and put themselves between me and the people who want to talk to me. Jacob’s mother and sister, both Healers, close in too. Soon enough, this little group of determined women is moving me toward the door. Once again I feel like I can’t actually walk, but they’re moving me anyway with their considerable magic. Helping me project a strong image while getting me out of this place.
Still Zander does not let me go.
I’m not reading into that. It’s just a fact. Dimly I hear him attempt that laugh he loves to trot out when he’s bartending.
I also know that the laugh doesn’t land. I know it’s wrong.
Is everything wrong?
I have a hard time concentrating on anything but making it to that door and getting out of here before I collapse, but there is something happening beyond this wash of poison inside me, and it makes the pain easier to handle.
Because the rest of my friends form a loose circle around me, and even I am forced to recognize that there’s a long line of people who want to help. They don’t want to help because they’re the sort of people who always help others, though the North women are certainly that. They want to help me . Specifically.
I know this is true in the same way I know that the poison inside me was put there.
Again.
This little group of people making it seem like they’re casually, happily walking out the door wants me to be okay. They would be doing it whether this was a normal meeting or not, whether I’d succeeded or failed tonight. These same people would be right here, helping me.
How can I keep having such a high opinion of all these people around me and such a terrible one of myself? I decide to ponder that later.
My mom relinquishes my arm to Jacob, and I can feel his magic. That deep, true Healer magic fights its way through me, into the heart of the poison, even as we walk outside and head down Main Street once more.
“I could magic us back,” Jacob tells me in his low, serious way. “I have a feeling the Joywood are watching though. We’re going to have to do it the long way.”
I nod. Or I think I nod. My mother laughs at something Mina says. Jacob’s younger sister, Evie, is talking loudly about tea and acting as if I’m engaged in this conversation with her. When it’s all I can do to keep from succumbing to that dark thing inside me.
Maybe because of that, it takes me a long time to realize that they’re all making it look as if I really am having that tea talk with Evie. Anyone passing by on their own way home—witch or human—will see a happy group of people, comfortably talking about nothing in particular as they walk home on a night that smells of fall, like leaves set to turn and a hint of woodsmoke on the breeze.
The walk goes on and on. I feel the pendant against my chest, a cooling force in all this heat. I feel Jacob’s magic mending and fighting, pushing toward the poison and cleaning up the damage, but it’s slow. As slow as the usually easy walk down Main Street feels to me tonight.
We eventually make it back to Wilde House, the sounds of friendship and merriment hanging in the night air. The minute the front door closes behind us, the complicated glamour of it all drops.
Just like I would if Zander wasn’t holding me up.
Jacob and the rest of his family start belting out orders. It’s like a scene from one of those human medical shows, but we’re in Wilde House, not an ER.
For once, Emerson isn’t the one taking charge. Jacob is. There’s something about how okay she looks with that. It worms its way into me, like I should be paying more attention to the two of them, to who they are, to how they work together—
I’m too loopy to hold on to it. Or to anything else. Because someone pulls Zander away from me, and I want to reach for him. I would if I could. If I was anything but limp.
I find myself in my room, now containing only my bed and no conjured monstrosity with a canopy and a ghost. I think, to my surprise, that I’m going to miss Elizabeth after all. That thought leaves as quickly as it comes, and what I notice then is that the lights are lowered. That it’s nice and dim. My mother puts me to bed like I’m five again, then moves out of the way so the Healers can take their spots around me.
I know they’ve already done some work on me, but that they’re settling in to do more. They’ll fix me. I know this because it isn’t the first time this has happened.
“Did we do okay?” I ask Jacob, because everything is fuzzy and spinning now.
“You did everything you needed to do,” he assures me. “The ghosts did great. The Joywood were pissed. Emerson can brief you on the details when you’re a little stronger, but everything went the way we wanted it to. Except this.”
There’s no arguing or getting more information. Not the way he says it. Healer declarations are what they are.
Evie is at the foot of my bed, playing the part of a bouncer, but it’s no surprise to me that she doesn’t see Elizabeth or Zachariah when they appear in the room, then move right through the other witches surrounding me.
Elizabeth leans in close, and I can feel her hand on me when—once again—that shouldn’t be possible. “Tell them to let Zander in.”
The Healer spellwork surrounds me. I can’t think of a single reason I shouldn’t do what this ghost is telling me. Not when Zachariah’s gray gaze looks just like Zander’s, like he’s concerned too.
I turn to Jacob’s mother, not Jacob. Because this feels like girl stuff. “If you’re going to check the baby, Zander should be in here.”
“He can come in eventually,” Jacob’s mother, Maureen, assures me in her calm, earthy sort of voice that makes my whole body feel like a sweet, cool rain is moving over me, quenching poison fires wherever it touches. “Once he calms down a bit.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Elizabeth insists. “Just let him in.”
“He’ll be okay,” I say, not sure why I’m listening to this ghost or taking up for Zander when what I’d like to do is lean into that blessed rain and maybe sleep for a week.
Maureen nods over at Evie, and she does something with her hand that lets the door fall open. The moment it does, Zander is right there . All fury and fire and hot .
Hot and not poisoned. So hot I shouldn’t notice, not in this state, but I do.
Before he can say or do anything, Elizabeth puts a ghostly hand on him. Zachariah frowns sternly at him, as if the two of them are working together.
Hush.
He blinks once as that word seems to dance in the dim light, then says nothing. I’m not sure if it’s a spell—another thing Elizabeth shouldn’t be able to do—or reasonable astonishment at being told what to do by an ancient ghost.
Who isn’t supposed to be here, but still is.
“Sit, my child,” she tells him, and Zachariah points him to the armchair by the window. Then Elizabeth perches next to him on the arm of the chair, and Zachariah takes his place like a sentry behind them both. I can’t hear what they say to Zander, but it seems to calm some of the fury radiating from him.
I can see it, and I don’t ask myself how that’s possible either.
“Baby is just fine,” Maureen says in a voice that is filled with both Healer and mother assurances as her hands move over my bump, and I can feel that rain wash deep into me, then all over the baby too. “We’ve got to make sure all the poison is out, and then we can do a little projection.” She must read my confusion at that, because she smiles. “Consider it a witch’s ultrasound.”
Ultrasound. I’ll get to see my baby—
But.
She said poison .
“Poison.” I say it out loud, though it’s a raw scrape against my throat, like all that acid ate away at my insides. There’s something we all need to know, and I need to say it before it slips away like everything else tonight. “The Joywood keep trying to poison me.”
I attempt to sit up in my bed at the truth of the revelation, but Jacob shakes his head, and his mother holds me in place with an easy murmured word. “You’re not to move yet,” she tells me gently.
I want to argue, but I don’t. Not while Jacob’s Healer magic does all sorts of things inside of me that hurt—really hurt —but then feel much better.
I look at her, then over at Jacob. “It’s like Beltane prom. Only worse.”
Jacob lifts his gaze to mine, and his eyes glow with all that power and focus, but he nods. “Yes. Much worse.”
“I don’t understand.”
He shares a look with his mother. Like they understand.
“What?” I demand, looking back and forth between them. Zander and my mother ask that question too, in tandem.
“We have a theory, but let’s fix you up first, okay?” Jacob spares Mom and Zander a look. “Go on and sit down now.”
I’ve never once seen my mother obey an order so quickly. The ghosts and Zander stay in their chair. Tanith sits on the small chest in the corner. At the foot of the bed, Evie starts to lay out spellwork, like she’s acting as an extra magic generator for her brother and mother tonight.
Jacob and his mother put their hands on me and weave their magic together as they go back inside, deeper this time. Maureen is a soothing rain. Jacob is warm, rich earth. Slowly, slowly, they repair me.
I’ve been healed before, many times, but this is something so deep, so gross and so wrong , it takes time. Energy.
High-level magic.
After what feels like forever, and maybe it is, both Jacob and Maureen take their hands off me and slump a little as they sit there on the bed beside me. They look almost as wiped out as I feel.
“Jacob.” Zander might be sitting still in that chair, but his voice is as intense as if he’s spent the last few hours punching holes in walls. Or people. “You said you have a theory.”
Jacob rubs a hand over his face and nods gratefully when I magic in three mugs of steaming tea, filled with a special blend I keep on hand for Healers and anyone else who has to fight off the truly dark shit. On or off the bricks.
I might not be able to lift my head from my pillow, but I can still do the one thing I know I’m good at.
“My family and I have been treating a number of witches over the years for a mysterious illness. You all know this.” Jacob looks even more tired than his mother. Beat all the way through, but he doesn’t ask for time to recover. He takes a pull of his tea and carries on.
That’s Jacob.
“You think this is the same illness?” Zander looks stricken. Because he not only lost his mother to it, he made a vow to get to the bottom of what killed her. But there have been so many other things in the way of that vow, and nothing gets to me more than when Zander can’t find his mad. When he can’t hide there.
I have such a lump in my throat that it takes me a moment to fully understand the implication. That whatever I’ve been poisoned with—twice now—is the same thing that killed Zelda.
As well as seven other witches the day of the Litha celebration. Eight Summoners total. Like there’s something in particular about us that poses a threat to the Joywood.
“Yes and no,” Jacob is saying. “What happens to Ellowyn has all the same characteristics of what Zelda had. It’s also a good match to what we know has been hurting a great number of Summoners for the past year or so, but it doesn’t function in Ellowyn the same way. Not at Beltane prom. Not tonight.”
“Let me guess,” I manage to croak out through my suddenly too-tight throat. “I’m special.”
I shrug as my mother glares at me, but when Jacob turns to me, I hold his patient gaze.
“You fight it off. It hurts you, yes, gets around your protections, because that’s good magic,” he says, nodding toward Zander’s pendant, visible to everyone. “This is dark magic. Still, after some time, after some healing, something in you...eradicates it. A lot like when Emerson broke Carol’s obliviscor.”
That nasty spell the Joywood subjected Emerson to for ten years, taking all her memories of magic and her true witch heritage from her. But sure. Those people back in the meeting who think she needs to be humbled are so right.
This is not the time to rage about the way people talk about one of my best friends. “How?”
Jacob takes another big swig of the tea, and immediately looks a little less gray around the edges. “Well, here comes the theory. We don’t know for sure, but based on what we’ve seen, the people who’ve been affected, who’ve died...” He glances at his mother, who nods. “We think it’s your blood, Ellowyn.”
“My blood,” I repeat. I look at my mother again. At Elizabeth. “Is it that troublesome Good blood making waves again? The way it has been since Salem?”
Both Mom and our ghostly ancestress make a noise at that, but Jacob shakes his head. “It’s your human blood.”
It sits there in the middle of the room like those smoke spells they teach us when we’re kids, a small explosion of pink light and fragrance that takes over everything for a solid ten minutes.
This feels at least that long.
“It also explains the pregnancy,” Maureen says after a moment, when no one else seems capable of speech. “Your magic is what’s being targeted. They can’t touch the human part of you, but they can mess with your magic and warp it enough that they can, eventually, use it against you if it takes hold. A full witch is too much magic to withstand it, but you’re not a full witch. You have weapons. You fought this off on Beltane, enough to feel better. You survived, but we think your magic wasn’t at full strength to act as birth control the way it normally would.”
That all of this is a topic of conversation is so embarrassing that I have no choice but to pretend it is fine .
“You think her human blood is an asset?” Mom asks softly, her voice laced with wonder. I listen for the bitterness. I look at her face, watching for that little twitch I usually see when she thinks of my father.
I don’t see it. Not the faintest trace of it.
Jacob is nodding. “It’s the only thing that sets her apart from the other Summoners we’ve dealt with.”
“You’re not a Summoner, Ellowyn.” Elizabeth’s voice is very stern and serious.
I sigh at that, happy I can rest my head back against the pillows. “We don’t have Revelares,” I mutter at her. “Not a one. No one’s even heard of it, not really.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the ghost shoots back. “You are one. Your mother ought to be one too. I don’t know why she isn’t, but you’re much, much stronger. Don’t you see?”
“Why isn’t my mother sick?”
“We have a theory on that too,” Jacob says as if I was asking him. Because he doesn’t see or hear Elizabeth. They must think I’m still loopy from what happened tonight, and I’m happy to let them think that.
“All sorts of theories I’ve never heard about until today,” I say, but I keep my eyes closed for an extra moment or two because even my eyelids feel weighted.
“Sometimes it takes a while to put together things that are happening in real time, and then to make sense of the data,” Maureen tells me. “Particularly when the Joywood are involved.”
“We started a database,” Evie says from the foot of the bed, then looks startled when we all look at her. But she’s a North, so she sits straighter. “Of everyone who’s been affected, no matter how. From worst-case scenarios to the best-case outcome, that being you. It doesn’t seem to hit one nuclear family more than once.”
“They’re weakening the link,” Elizabeth says then, looking across Zander to Zachariah. “They’ve changed things that should never be changed.”
“It’s like the crows.”
Elizabeth’s face gets a pinched sort of look. “Don’t start with the crows, Zachariah.”
I close my eyes against a new wave of exhaustion, so big and dark it’s almost like pain. I can’t take ghost fights right now. I can’t take databases and theories. I suddenly feel that I can’t take any of it , and I want to cry, but there are too many damn people—living and dead—in here.
And I don’t let myself cry in front of anyone.
“Are you sure it’s gone?” Zander asks, still sounding stricken. “Because I already know where this is going if it’s not. That can’t happen.”
“This isn’t like Zelda,” Jacob says at once, and he holds Zander’s gaze so intently it’s like a physical touch. “Ellowyn doesn’t have the symptoms. She fights it off when it tries to take root in her, and it can’t get any purchase. We’re certain.”
Zander nods, jerkily, then looks at me with other ghosts I know in his thundercloud gaze. I feel another wave like pain go through me, though this time it’s something far more complicated than exhaustion.
“The problem is the Joywood clearly aren’t giving up,” Maureen says gently, looking down into her tea mug. “They’re escalating.”
“If they keep escalating, it could kill me,” I point out, though, probably, no one needs me to make this announcement. “Especially if they discover why I’m the only one who’s immune to this thing.”
“Yes,” Jacob agrees, turning that intensity on me again.
No equivocations. Great.
“But,” he says after a long while, “we know how to fight it off. We can use that for a protection spell. Not just for you. With the right ritual, your blood could help everyone who’s been affected, even against dark magic.”
I want to make another crack about being special, but this doesn’t feel like the moment for that. Also, my throat feels too tight again.
“Would that be safe?” Zander demands. Once again in near-perfect unison with my mother. They look at each other, each wearing their version of a vaguely puzzled frown, but then focus on Jacob.
“There are risks, of course,” Jacob says in his calm way, but none of us mistake the steel beneath it. “We’d do everything we could to mitigate them.”
“But no fucking guarantee?” Zander demands.
“If you’re going to swear, young man,” Maureen retorts coolly, like we’re all still eleven years old, “you’ll have to leave until you can get control of yourself.”
“She’s not fu—She’s not doing it. She’s not risking that. What the hell is wrong with you?” Zander looks like he’s about to get to his feet, clearly back in his anger in a big way, but Elizabeth puts a hand on his shoulder, and he stays put.
Furious, but he stays in that chair.
Jacob eyes him for a moment, then turns to me. “We’ll go over the pros and cons and weigh them all, but not tonight. I’m going to go down and fill everyone in. Mom’s going to show you some baby projections you’ll want to see, and then you need to rest.” When I start to scowl at him, he keeps going. “You’re better now, and you’ll keep feeling better, but your body, your magic—and that baby—need rest, Ellowyn.”
He starts to get up, but I impulsively grab his hand. Healers don’t expect thank-yous, and I’ve never been very vocally grateful about anything , but this isn’t only about me.
I know I have to say something.
“You keep saving me.”
He shakes his head. “I’m just helping the healing process along. It’s you doing the saving.”
I smile. “I said you keep saving me, so you must be.” He frowns a little at that. I guess I’m not the only one not sure what to do with praise, so that makes it easier to give. “Thank you, Jacob.”
He gently pulls his hand out of my grasp, gives a faint nod, then turns and marches from the room as if pursued. I let myself smile a little wider as his sister follows him out.
Maureen is still sitting next to me, but she’s looking at the other people in the room. Well, the living ones.
“Tanith, Zander, you can both stay.” She fixes an eye on Zander. “If you’re calm.”
My mother stands, and her smile is wobbly. I don’t know what to do with that. Tanith Good wobbly ? “No, that’s all right,” she says quietly. “I’ll head downstairs.”
“Mom—”
She shakes her head. “You’ll show me and tell me everything after, but this moment? This is for you two.”
She smiles at me reassuringly, even though her eyes sparkle with unshed tears. She slides Zander a glance, notably dagger-free, and then she’s leaving.
Maureen nods at the space Jacob vacated, and Zander comes over to slide into it. He looks pale, and there are so many reasons he could be feeling pale tonight. I think about taking his hand, and I automatically start talking myself out of it, but I catch sight of Elizabeth out of the corner of my eye. She gives me a little nod.
I take his hand. He doesn’t resist—I’d have to punch him if he did.
I forget about punching things when Maureen settles her warm hands over my stomach, because this is suddenly much more real. She closes her eyes, whispers some words, and then a picture appears above me that looks like a little blob...
With a head, and arms, and legs.
A baby.
Our baby.
“As I said, everything is perfectly healthy. There’s no evidence of any poison breaching the walls that protect the baby. Mother’s magic, right there, and your protection pendant. Now, beyond that, I can tell you both a lot from this picture,” Maureen says. “Or it can also be a surprise. That’s your choice.”
“I want to know.” I want to hold on to whatever’s coming like a promise. Like an oath. We will fight, tooth and nail, come ascension—and I will fight even harder if I know what’s on the other side. I look at Zander.
He nods.
Maureen hums a little, and I can’t tell if that’s spellwork or her own happiness showing through. “Your baby is measuring just as she should. She’s got everything she’s meant to have and is developing right on target.”
“She,” Zander and I both manage to get out.
Maureen smiles at us. “Yes. Your baby girl will be born in March. Likely the twentieth or twenty-first.”
“That...” I swallow. “That seems longer than usual?”
“Oh. Witch babies take their time,” Maureen says reassuringly. “Jacob was near to twelve months before he decided to join us. You know what they say. The longer within, the more powerful without.”
I did not know that. Tanith does not sit around discussing gestation periods.
Maureen carries on. “An Ostara baby, I imagine, because that would make sense. I’ll have a better idea in the next moon phase, when I’ll insist you come in for another checkup. Babies conceived on a festival day are more likely to be born on one, though.”
“My mother...” Zander’s voice is raw. His grip on my hand tightens. “The twenty-first is... was her birthday.”
Maureen smiles over at Zander. “That, too, makes sense. Love is powerful magic, passed down.”
Love.
I can’t find words. The baby growing inside of me is projected right there . I can’t touch her— her —not yet , but I can feel her. She’s already here, with us.
Growing. Measuring.
Safe.
“Here,” Maureen says. The projection fades, but she holds out two pictures. One for me. One for Zander. “These will pass in human circles too, if they need to. And once the baby is born, of course, humans will only remember a typical human, nine-month pregnancy. It’s a blanket spell on all witch births.”
She’s talking about blanket spells, but I’m looking at a picture of my baby. Our baby. Our daughter . I hold the picture in one hand, Zander’s hand in the other.
I barely hear Maureen when she speaks next. “I’m going to give you two a few minutes of privacy, and then, as Jacob said, it’s time to rest.”
I don’t hear her leave, unable to tear my eyes from the pictures she gave us, but somehow I know when she’s gone.
Leaving us alone with a baby we can expect to meet in March. That seems far away to me tonight. Far, far away, on the other side of ascension. Far off in a future we somehow have to save.
For her , if nothing else.
I look over at Zander. He’s staring at the picture. His hand is still in mine, and he looks as awed as I feel. The only reason I look away is I hear a shuffle.
Down at the end of my bed, Elizabeth and Zachariah are standing there. Right next to each other, but even more astonishing, Zachariah has his hands wrapped around Elizabeth’s shoulders. I almost comment on how this baby really must be magic—
But I see a strangely sparkly tear slide down Elizabeth’s cheek. Then she poofs . Not gone, I don’t think. Just out of here.
“We couldn’t have children,” Zachariah says softly in the wake of her departure. He sounds as if these words hurt him. “A curse from her parents, as a wedding gift.”
Then he, too, disappears.
Leaving Zander and me to hold on tight to each other, and the part of me that isn’t cursed, after all.