Page 12 of Redhaven
I omit the part about intending to help Lachlan blow up registration centres. But she understands he’s the last person likely to let me be taken for registration, and by the time I’ve finished stating my case, she’s nodding. Returning from the car, she brings our precious grimoire in an ordinary backpack. The sort of thing any college student would carry her books in. Only my witchy senses detect something deliberate in its ordinariness, like a rich girl slumming it in a grungy nightclub, or a beautiful boy trying to hide his looks in an oversize hoodie and sweatpants. No mundane would give this bag a second glance.
‘Don’t forget,’ Mom says, holding it out. ‘This Starcross isyours, Harper.Ours.Part of the Fenn bloodline inheritance. It’s not one more book for Lachlan to plunder for powerful magic. Promise me.’
I wait to see if she’ll sketch a pledge sigil in the air. One for me to trace over with my own magic, binding me to my promise. But she doesn’t.
She trusts me. And I vow that trust will bind me tighter than any enchantment.
Clutching Starcross to my chest, I watch as her car taillights dwindle into the blue darkness, then wink out. I can feel my heartbeat where it presses against the ancient leather-bound cover that holds all the wisdom and hope and power of my ancestors. I know the names listed in the front and whisper them now.Artemis. Tobias. Jennet. Elora. Susanna. Maia. Lilian. Serafina. Sarah.
I’m on my own, but I’m not alone.
14
HARPER
I spend several days scouring Starcross for clues to crafting a locating charm for my father – and find them almost effortlessly. It’s as if the pages move beneath my hands in response to questions only half-formed in my mind. It’s always been like this, even when I was a child. Especially after my magic’s explosive arrival, age eleven, sent Dan Whitman fatally flying through a window, and I turned to Starcross in terror.
That was when the grimoire showed me the Old Signs. Sigils considered so dangerous no modern witch would countenance using them. Symbols banned by secular authorities, which forbid them even to be copied or photographed. Every time I consulted Starcross, in those frantic few days after Dan died in Bridget’s garden and my mom spilled her blood and called him back, it flopped open at the same pages, the spread of Old Signs. And the one that glowed at me from the page? Obscurity.
From watching Mom use our grimoire, I could never tell if it responded to her in the same way, or if she simply knew every page, every line of it so well her fingers went automatically to what she needed. But as I sit cross-legged on the shiny, cigarette-burned coverlet of yet another motel bed, the pages turn from a section on hunting magic (trackingenchantments that may be among humanity’s earliest uses of our craft), to a charm for determining the legitimacy of a newborn infant (unusual, because that’s a pretty patriarchal concept to find in a witch text), to a compass sigil. I can see how elements of all three – pursuit, bloodline magic, and wayfinding – can be assembled into a conjuration for seeking my father.
Figuring out how to anchor it keeps me awake. I find I’m weirdly enjoying the challenge of building a spell, rather than simply using the brute strength of my dark sigils. It’s like trying to solve a math equation from an incomplete set of variables. Making an educated guess at a word or verb conjugation in a foreign language, based off the scraps of it you do know.
I won’t use my blood as an anchor, I decide, remembering the weird vision of the culty-looking commune I saw during my attempt at the beach. But why not another strong, primitive form of magic? I remember the lines of power I saw pulsing through the contaminated soil during the purification ritual at Stoneacre. Why not Greenmagic? If I can blend the three elements Starcross has shown me, and pour that into the soil, could it lead me to my father?
That night, I drive to the nearest woodland. Crouched over the twig-and-bracken-strewn earth, I weave the three spell forms into one ball of magical energy pulsing between my fingertips. Then with a single powerful motion, I thrust the ball down into the earth. The ground ripples and shudders. Somewhere nearby a nightbird shrieks. Wings beat. Animals move uneasily. A breeze stirs the leaves. A pressure hangs in the air. And I wait, expectantly, for something to light up the night. A golden thread to materialise before me. Theseus’s string in the labyrinth. Donnie Darko’s time streams.
Nothing.
Nothing!
I wait a little longer, scuffing the dirt, looking all around as if a big neon arrow might materialise. Only once the forest has stilled around me do I give up and head back to where I parked. Dipping the headlights so as not to disturb the wildlife further, I turn in the pullout, figuring I’ll head to a nearby drive-thru for some consolation fries.
Which is when I notice a flapping in the undergrowth a little further along the roadside. Sounds horribly likely it might be a deer or other wounded creature, hit by some speeding asshole. I drive carefully, ready to switch on my hazard lights, but as I get closer the disturbance stops.
No – there it is. Up ahead. I picture an injured animal staggering in distress through the low branches, and continue my careful, slow drive. Thankfully I’m on an out-of-the-way route and there’s barely any traffic. This continues for half a mile, and I’ve just decided, as an intersection approaches and I’ve the opportunity to U-turn, that the animal can’t be that badly hurt if it’s keeping pace with me, when an owl flies across the road from the other direction, straight toward my car. I shriek and jam on the brake – the bird isso low– but instead of swooping up and away into the higher canopy, it curves and glides up the highway ahead of me. Almost as though …
… as though it’sleading me.
I follow the owl for mile after mile, as it flies unnaturally straight down the highway. Then, when it lifts into the trees I chide myself for being an idiot. For following – and likely stressing – a wild animal living its best nocturnal life. Which is when I see the moonlight casting shadows of trees unnaturally bright, unnaturally long, all pointing away along the road.
When, eventually, at some deep hour, the moon goesbehind a cloud and the shadows disappear, again I berate myself for being an idiot. For thinking for a moment this might be really happening. Until my dipped lights catch the tawny-grey fur of a coyote, standing at the side of the road. I wait to give it time to cross in front of me, or whisk back into the undergrowth, but it starts cantering along the shoulder. Heart racing, I follow. At the next intersection it casts a look back and curls its black lip in a barking yip, before bounding decisively across to the right fork.
Which is when I finally give myself up to the magic I’ve called, and drive to find my father.
15
SARAH
It’s many years since I’ve been to Salem. My first stop, as always, is Proctor’s Ledge, to honour the women and men who died there. The great irony is that only a very few, and perhaps even none, of those who first perished in Salem were witches. They were non-magical victims of the fear and unreason that stalks our existence, and which snarls at us once again today.
The grove on Gallows Hill is always quiet and tranquil, the city bustle muffled by trees and by charms. It’s overspilling with flowers, and sunshine filters through the leaf canopy to splash brilliance across the names every witch in America knows, for they died for us. I sit with my thoughts and watch a young witch braiding a daisy chain – the flowers here are no respecter of season, blooming year-round thanks to the Greenmagic. When she’s done, she walks from memorial stone to memorial stone looping the chain around each one, saying the victim’s name and murmuring words of apology. Vividly, the memory of a conversation with Lachlan from twenty years ago comes back to me.
Why should we kneel at that memorial and apologise?he’d demanded, rare anger breaking through his usual buoyancy.Was it witches that put the noose around their necks? That pressed them under a board and loaded rocks on top?
It’s only showing respect, I’d murmured, taken aback.
There’s not a year of human history our entire community hasn’t suffered.His sun-kissed skin was flushed beneath the dark stubble.We shouldn’t go to Salem and mouth ‘sorry’. We should look on that memorial and be enraged. Want to burn things to the ground.
