“Wait until spring,” my mother said, as if reading my thoughts. “Those lilac bushes will blossom, and it’ll smell wonderful.”
“Do they have violets here?” Delia had given me a bottle of Marc Jacobs Violet for Christmas the year before, and I’d fallen in love with the delicate sweetness of the flower’s fragrance.
My mother got up and sat down on the steps beside me. “Yes.” She pointed to a clump of green at the base of an oak tree. “Those are roundleaf violets. In the spring they’ll be all over the yard.”
“You can tell that from here?” I said.
She smiled. “Ned left a detailed map of the yard plantings. There are four or five different kinds of violets scattered around.”
“That’s very organized of him,” I said, not sure if I thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. Who keeps a map of their garden?
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Never met him,” she said absently.
“You said he was trying to make up for something he did to dad,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’ll have to ask him about that,” she said. “It’s not my story to tell.”
So, there was a story. And she knew it. I knew from experience that wheedling wouldn’t get anything out of her. She’d tell me or she wouldn’t and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
My phone buzzed with a text from Mikayla. It was so filled with emojis it looked like a coded message.
Seeing it made me sad. I swiped the message off the screen. Feeing restless, I stood up.
“I’m going for a walk,” I announced.
“Have fun,” my mom said.
*
There were at least three more hours of daylight left, so I headed east to explore the little creek I’d spotted on an earlier walk.
It cut a path through a sun-dappled forest of birch and maple and then cascaded in a tiny waterfall that fed a small lake. It looked so inviting. I wondered if anyone ever swam there.
The very moment I had that thought, a swimmer surfaced like a dolphin spy-hoping, and I realized the water was deeper than it looked.
I also realized the swimmer was nor just about the handsomest guy I’d ever seen in person—and that’s saying something when you’ve lived in Los Angeles your whole life—he was also stark raving naked.
He saw me at almost the same time I saw him, when it was too late to pretend I’d somehow not seen him. He didn’t turn away, just treaded water and looked at me calmly. He inclined his head invitingly. “Join me,” he said.
I shook my head. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”
“I won’t mind.”
It was such a cheesy thing to say that I laughed and waved off the invitation. “Maybe next time.”
I was still smiling when I turned onto the street where I lived and saw the thing crawling out of the underbrush.
At first, I thought it was a coyote. I’d seen plenty of them in Los Angeles, trotting across Beverly Glen Canyon, totally oblivious to the traffic. Uncle Ned’s house backed up to one of the hiking trails that wound through Stony Point and I’d seen them skulking there, hoping to make a meal of a young deer or a fat raccoon or one of the many feral but friendly cats that roamed the city.
Coyotes won’t usually attack humans, but anywhere humans and wild animals live in close proximity, there’s always the potential for something bad to happen.
It had appeared out of a thicket lining a side street running perpendicular to the street where our house was. I quickened my pace, wanting to put as much distance between me and it as I could.
It sped up too, and as it got closer, I realized the thing pacing me wasn’t a coyote. Wasn’t any kind of animal I recognized at all, but some kind of mutant thing. Some horrible, mutant thing.
What looked like a pair of vestigial paws hung from its chest, limp and boneless and disturbingly like human hands.
I saw this as it passed me, trotting ahead as if on its way somewhere important. I breathed a sigh of relief that caught in my chest as I saw it turn and plant its four feet squarely in front of the steps leading up to our front door.
We contemplated each other. Its compact, muscular body was more pig-like than canine, but its head was almost triangular—wide at the top with a pointed chin. It seemed to have no nose at all, just slits, like a pit viper. There was a sickly green haze leaking from those nasal orifices, and that was scary enough, but then I saw his eyes.
They were red. As red as taillights.
It snorted and pawed the sidewalk. Where its hoof—when did its paws become hooves? —struck the concrete, sparks flew. It began to huff short breaths and the green mist spread out like fog. It smelled bad.
I considered my options. They weren’t good. There was no one else on the street, and only a few parked cars. The only neighbors I’d met lived on either side of us and the thing was between me and them. I started edging toward the nearest car, figuring I could jump on the bumper and be on the roof before the thing could rush me.
I moved slowly, praying my heel wouldn’t catch on the uneven pavement. The thing curled its lip in what looked like an almost human smile and took a leisurely step towards me.
Shit!
I took another sideways step and somehow, it’s movements a blur, it was suddenly right in front of me. Close enough for me to pet it. Close enough for it to do whatever the hell it wanted to do to me.
It opened its mouth and I almost gagged at the stench—the worst stopped-up toilet smell ever mixed with the sulfur stink of hard-boiled eggs. I could feel its breath on my skin like a sticky film.
I wondered what part of me the thing would attack—my throat or my face. I was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt that wasn’t going to provide much protection if it went for my torso. Its mouth gaped wider, showing me multiple rows of serrated teeth.
Like a shark’s, I thought with a shudder.
The moment hung between us. And then I heard a screen door bang open and my father’s voice, shouting something in a language I didn’t recognize. His voice was stern, steady, authoritative—like a cop.
The thing in front of me cringed but did not retreat.
My father approached us, his posture erect and alert, not at all his usual dad-like slouch. He was shouting a mantra or prayer or something, his words full of extra vowels and liquid syllables. The creature snapped at me but before he could make another hostile move, my father hit him with a bolt of pure blue energy.
The thing shattered as if made of porcelain and not flesh and blood, the fragments hitting me like sharp rain.
The next thing I knew, my father had picked me up and was running toward the house. He must have been totally jacked up on adrenaline because I’m five-eight and weigh one-forty-five and he wasn’t even breathing hard.
“Dad?”
“Not now Laine.”
Mom was already at the stove when my father finally put me down in a kitchen chair. She was brewing up an evil-smelling concoction heavy on tea tree oil and valerian root. Dad fetched the first aid kit from the hall closet and meticulously started picking piece of dead thing out of my skin as if what he was doing was as normal as extracting a splinter.
“Dad,” I said. “I can feel some of the pieces moving.”
“Hold still,” he said.
But I couldn’t. I could feel a big, sharp piece burrowing into me like a worm.
“Get it out, get it out, get it out,” I yelled.
My mother moved in to dab the hot medicinal brew on all the little bleeding cuts I had on my face and arms.
Everywhere the liquid touched, it burned. Not just a little—like the spark of hot bacon fat—but what I imagined it would feel to have someone burn you with a cigarette.
My father kept digging at the shards, sometimes going deep to grab a piece. As he worked, he flicked each piece onto the floor where it disintegrated with a soft hiss.
Finally, he leaned back.
“There’s still one piece left,” I said, “I can f
eel it.”
“No, they’re all out.”
“Dad, I can feel it. It’s burrowing in my heart.”
I had the weirdest thought. That this thing was under my skin like the Ice Queen’s shard of cold in the Tin Soldier’s heart.
“Where do you feel it?” mom asked.
“Here,” I said, showing her a spot on my left breast.
She swabbed the area with the nasty-smelling concoction.
“It’ll penetrate the skin,” she said. “It’ll kill anything that’s under there.”
I didn’t really believe her but calmed down when I realized I didn’t feel any movement. After a minute, my breathing was back to normal.
“Okay?” Mom asked.
“No, I am not okay,” I said, turning to my father. “What. The. Fuck. Was. That?” I never swear in front of my parents, so I knew that would get his attention.
At first, he looked almost mad. He started to say something, but I cut him off. “You don’t get to be mad at me,” I said. “That thing was going to kill me. I want to know what’s going on in Stony Point, and I want to know now.”
There was a long silence before he finally said, “Okay.” He pulled out a chair and turned it around so he could lean his forearms on the back. “Remember when you asked me about the tingle you felt in the air?”
Of course, I remembered it; it had only been a day or two ago.
“What you were feeling was magic. The whole town is filled with it.”
“You mean like Sedona?” I said.
“Not exactly,” he said. “The magic here is human in origin.”
“Okay,” I said, still not quite getting what he was trying to say.
My mother spit out a curse in Russian; something she does when she’s really irritated. “What your father is trying to tell you is that Stony Point was founded by five witch families and over the centuries, the magic they’ve worked has leaked out.”
She gave me a look. “Like radiation.”
“Witch families,” I said. “Like who? The Wixsteds?”
“Them,” my father said, “and the Harrisons. And the Riquelmes and the Lis. He paused for a moment. “And us.”
“Us?” I echoed. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it—I’d just seen my father do something that should have been impossible—but it seemed so strange.
“So you’re a witch,” I said, just to clarify.
“I am,” he said.
“What about you?” I asked, turning to my mother.
“I have some skill,” she said, “but no real talent. I couldn’t have saved you today.”
“I turned back to my father. “Thank you for saving me. What was that thing?”
Again, there was a long pause. And then he said, “a demon.”
Of course it was.
“Are there more of them?”
“I haven’t sensed any.”
That did not give me much comfort.
“They have to be summoned, Laine, they don’t just walk through a portal and onto the streets.”
“So, who would summon a demon to come after me?” I asked.
“You weren’t the target,” he said grimly.
As it turned out, he was wrong about that, but I wouldn’t know it until much later.
3
Paradigm Shift
It turned out the private school I would be attending was not just any kind of private school. From eight until noon, students took classes in normal subjects like math and science and languages, but after lunch, the day was devoted to studying magic.
“Like Hogwarts?” I’d asked when my father first explained it to me.
“No,” my father said. He’d said that while almost everyone in the city had witchblood, not all had talent and kids that weren’t “talented” went to the public high school while the others attended Wixsted. There was an entry exam, and if you failed it, you were shunted along one track of study with no recourse.
“That sounds democratic,” I said. “Kids at Chief Seattle must hate the Academy kids’ guts.”
“Probably,” my father said, though he didn’t seem too upset about the elitism.
“I didn’t take a test,” I said.
“You didn’t have to,” he said. “I had it waived for you.”
“Wow,” I said. “And you were going to tell me about this when?”
“Don’t take that tone of voice with me, Laine,” my father said.
“Seriously dad?”
He slammed his hand down on the table. “Yes, seriously, Laine. The way you’re behaving now tells me I was completely right in keeping this knowledge from you.”
“You mean lying to me.”
The look my father gave me when I said that chilled me to the bone.
“You’ll be eighteen in June. You don’t have to stay here after that if you don’t want to.”
With that he left the kitchen. I looked at my mother. “What just happened?” I said.
“He’ll calm down. Just apologize and—”
“I am not going to apologize,” I said. “He’s been acting weird since we got here, and he finally comes clean and I’m supposed to be okay with finding out I’m freaking witch-spawn?”
My mother let me rant. I went on for some time.
“And how does this place stay secret, anyway? It’s a pretty place, what if a non-witch wants to live here? What about the tourists that come in the summer to go antiquing?”
“The magic keeps them from staying long.”
‘How?”
“That tingling you’re feeling? That’s all anyone who’s witchblood feels. But if you aren’t witch-kin, it’s much, much worse. So bad they can’t stand it. No one who isn’t a witch can stay long in Stony Point.”
“This is crazy,” I said.
Mom shrugged. “You get used to it.” She gave me a sharp look. “And you’d better get used to it. Your father’s an important man, now, with responsibilities that go beyond us.”
“To his what, his coven?”
“Yes,” she said calmly, “to his coven.”
This is so effed up. “And I’m going to witch school?”
She nodded.
“With people who’ve known they’re witches since they were little kids?”
“You’ll be fine. You were bred to be—”
“Bred to be?” I interrupted. ‘Like some kind of Bene Gesserit DNA experiment?”
She sighed. “I meant to say, ‘born to be a witch.’”
“But you didn’t say ‘born,’ you said ‘bred.’”
“All I meant was that you’re heir to magic through both your father and me, and even if you don’t yet know how to wield that magic, you will one day. And when you come into your talents, you’re going to be very powerful. You need to be trained.”
I wished the thought of that made me as happy as it apparently made my mother. I stomped off to my bathroom and took the longest, hottest shower I could manage. I couldn’t feel the demon shard in my chest, but I knew it was there, like a cancer cell.
*
I have to say, the Wixsted Academy was impressive. The main building had been built as a family home by the Harrison family, green grocers from Chicago who’d come west after the Civil War and eventually established a chain of supermarkets with stores spanning the Pacific Northwest and Idaho. They’d established the public school—the one my father had attended—in their patriarch’s name and gifted it to the city. I wondered why the city had sold the school to the Wixsted family. I wondered if the sale had been the result of some sort of power struggle between witch families. There was a lot of information about the Wixsteds and the Harrisons and the Blackwoods but the other two founding families seemed to operate beneath the radar, like the Wallenberg banking family in Sweden.
I’d done a fair amount of research on the Wixsteds but hadn’t run across any mention of Ophelia Wixsted and whatever tragedy had haunted her life. There hadn’t even been a picture.
Nor had I found any mention
of trouble between my father and my Uncle Ned, though I had scoured the newspaper archives for the entire sixties and seventies. I had, however, found some information that dovetailed with what my father had told me of the town. The town had originally been named “Witchwood,” but sometime in the early 20th century, it had been renamed, probably to make it more anonymous. Washington state is full of place names like Maple Falls, Birch Bay, Mill Creek, South Hill. “Stony Point” fit right in.
I wondered if I was going to “fit in” at Wixsted Academy.
I took a deep breath and pushed open the doors.
*
My first stop was the guidance office. My father had obviously told them to expect me, and they already had copies of my transcripts and other paperwork. I was ushered into a small office—barely bigger than a cubicle—where a severe-looking woman named Ms. Tassin informed me she’d been my father’s guidance counselor back in the day. “He was such a gifted student,” she said. “I always thought it a pity that he didn’t go on and get his doctorate.” She glared at me over the top of her stylish glasses as if I were personally responsible for my father only getting a Master’s.
To be fair, I probably was. I’d been born just four months after my parents married.
She rifled through the papers on her desk. “Since you’re a transfer student, we’ll be starting you out in remedial classes.”
What?
“I’m an honors student,” I said. “I am a National Merit Scholar.”
She looked annoyed. “I’m not talking about your academic classes—you’ve been paced in Honors English, history, botany, and advanced calculus.”
“Then remedial what?”
“The Magic Arts, of course.”
Of course. The Magic Arts.
She softened a bit when she saw how dismayed I was. “We’ll start you out with the remedial classes and then reevaluate at the end of the semester. If you feel you can handle more challenging work, with the permission of your instructors, you’ll be allowed to change courses.”
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