“Yes,” she said. “Ghosts can’t hurt you but Efraim’s not a ghost. He’s a revenant.”
“I could feel how powerful he was,” I said. “I’d never have been able to protect myself. You saved my life.”
“I did,” she said.
I looked at the chain of golden spiderweb charms circling her neck. “I don’t have a marker to give you,” I said.
She touched the necklace. “That’s all right. I know where you live.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it. The weight of the obligation settled on me.
“What now?” I asked.
She frowned. “You need to meet my grandmother.”
“I’ve got a calculus test next period.”
“That’s with Mr. Patel?”
I nodded.
“He’ll let you take a makeup test if you tell her you were with me.”
“Another cousin?”
“In-law. He’s married to my cousin James. And neither one of them has much love for the Wixsteds.” She gave me a pointed look. “Or the Blackwoods either.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And Laine, you need to be respectful when you meet my grandmother.”
“Of course I’ll be respectful of your grandmother,” I said, annoyed.
Jonna just gave me a look like, we’ll see.
*
Ethelene Harrison was a tiny woman stooped over like Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She was actually Jonna’s great-great grandmother, who greeted her affectionately as “Granny Ethie.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Harrison,” I said, noticing that she recoiled when she heard my last name.
Impatient with pleasantries, the old lady put one bony hand on my face and tapped me on my forehead, right between my eyes. I felt a spark and then a prickle of alarm as I saw the look on her face.
It was concern.
“So, you’re William Blackwood’s child.”
I nodded. Hardly anyone called my father “William.”
“And Edward’s niece?”
I nodded again getting the feeling that neither of these family connections endeared me to her.
“This is all new to you,” she said. It wasn’t really a question. She seemed to be thinking out loud. I found myself wondering if everyone in town knew everything there was to know about me. As if reading my thoughts, the old woman said, “Stony Point is a small town Yelena, and your family has long been a topic of fascination.”
Yelena? Nobody has ever called me that except the grandmother I’m named for.
“What’s this?” she said, touching my chest, right above the scar I’d acquired in my encounter with the demon.
“You’re demon-marked,” she observed. Jonna made a little noise that might have been a gasp.
That’s kind of how I feel too.
“Can you get it out of me?”
“Wouldn’t if I could,” Ethelene said.
What the hell?
“It has a purpose to serve,” she said. “A great purpose.”
Okay. I guess I was going to take her word for it.
She reached for my hand and clamped down on my wrist so tightly I could hear bones crack.
“Do you know where the book is,” she asked, the words coming out in a rattlesnake hiss.
“You’re hurting me,” I said, trying to wrench my hand free.
In response, she just tightened her grip.
“No,” I said. “Please let go.”
The old woman continued to hold me in that vise grip.
“Jonna?” I said, about to break my promise to treat her grandmother with respect.
But Jonna wasn’t listening to me, her attention was totally focused on the old woman as some unspoken conversation took place. Finally, Ethelene released me and nodded sharply at Jonna.
“We had to be sure,” Jonna said, which was nothing like the apology I thought she owed me. And then, as if nothing had happened, she leaned over and kissed the old lady on her cheek. “Got to go gran.”
“Did you bring any cake?” the old lady asked.
Jonna produced a to-go box from inside her blazer. I knew she hadn’t had it with her when we left the Deli, so she must have just magicked it up, another bit of craft she knew how to do. That I didn’t. I didn’t care about that. But she’d lured me out here under false pretenses and I was pissed about that.
I left Ethelene’s house without saying goodbye. It took everything I had not to slam the door on my way out.
I was already halfway down the block when Jonna finally caught up to me. “Wait,” she said.
I whirled around to confront her. “You had to be sure? What the actual fuck, Jonna?”
Her face hardened. “Your great-great grandfather killed my great-great grandfather—Ethie’s husband—over a land dispute. There’s no telling what a Blackwood to do in order to possess that grimoire.”
“Let me say it again in one-syllable words. I don’t have the book.”
She nodded, but I couldn’t tell if she was mollified.
“Why would anyone think I have the book anyway? I’m not the head of the Blackwood coven.”
“No,” she said. “But if you don’t know where it is, you still make an excellent pawn and bargaining chip.”
Way to make someone feel important. But I could tell this wasn’t the time to nurse my wounded ego. My language arts teacher had talked a lot about how dangerous grimoires could be in the wrong hands. If something as ancient as the Book of Wix was in the wild, it was not a good thing.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Help me find the book. If we don’t find it first, someone else is going to die, and I don’t want it to be me.”
“No offense, but why would it be you?” I asked. Her expression told me offense had been taken but she answered anyway.
“Because I’m the most powerful witch born to my family in ten generations. That kind of power has put a target on my back.”
Suddenly, my anger drained out of me and left a crushing depression behind. Clearly there was some Game of Thrones-level machinations going on behind the scenes in Stony Point.
“What can I do?” I asked. “How can I help?”
“For starters, you can quit making a scene in get in my car,” she said.
I was putting on my seatbelt when a thought occurred to me. “Are the Wixsteds looking for the book too?”
“Most definitely.”
“Remi?” I said. “Wix?”
“Remi’s a wild card,” she said. “Power radiates off him like a sunlamp, but it’s not really focused yet.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” I said, thinking of Remi and his binge of transformation at the lunch table. But if he hadn’t revealed his talents to the wider world, that was not my secret to share.
“What about Wix?” I asked. “Remi would do anything for Wix.”
“Say away from Wix,” she said, fingering the chain of gold spiderweb charms.
That sounds personal.
“I’ve been in school with him for twelve years and every year, he’s gotten more powerful. He can do things I can’t even dream about.” She leaned toward me to emphasize the next part. “And I can do a lot of things.”
I nodded to show I understood Wix was a powerful guy.
“His father has prostate cancer, and it’s inoperable. Wix is his youngest, but he’s also his heir, which has pissed off his sister.”
I thought about Remi telling me that women weren’t important in the Wixsted coven.
“She’s everything bad about the Wixsted family distilled into one nasty little package. Her father has been playing her against Wix since they were children.”
I felt a pang when I heard that. Jonna must have seen my face change. “Don’t waste your sympathy on Wix,” she said. “He doesn’t deserve it.”
“It’s just kind of sad, don’t you think?”
Jonna shook her head dismissively. “You’ve got a lot to learn. You have potential, but your powers haven’t m
anifested yet and until they do, you’re vulnerable. Any time he wants to, Wix can crush you like a bug. And walk away laughing. The last person we want to get his hands on this grimoire is Wix.”
6
Complications
My parents had finally stopped arguing but were essentially living separate lives. Mom would head to the media room after dinner and watch movies until after midnight. Sometimes, she didn’t even bother going upstairs to bed, just slept on one of the comfy, squashy leather couches scattered throughout the room.
Without us ever discussing it, it was clear that when the school year ended, my father would be resigning his position at the school and devoting himself full time to coven business. I wasn’t totally clear on what kind of business that would be, but I was beginning to sense that witch families operated much like organized crime syndicates, exerting political pressure here and financial pressure there running things from behind the scenes. There was money in witchcraft, and though my mother liked the money just fine, I could tell she wasn’t crazy about the gray areas Dad was suddenly operating in. She didn’t like all the time he was spending away from home. And she definitely didn’t like the idea that there people in the city who could conjure up demons like the one that had attacked me.
But there was one other area that was a sore spot with my mother, and one afternoon I ran into my father leaving the house as I was coming in.
“I’m going over to Mariah’s,” he said over his shoulder to Mom. “Don’t wait up.”
Who’s Mariah? I thought as he practically knocked me over to get out the front door.
“What the fuck, dad?
As I came into the living room, my mother was lighting a cigarette.
She saw my shocked look and waved it away with the hand holding the cigarette. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It’s just one.”
Maybe, I thought, but if there was one cigarette, there was a whole pack of them she’d been hiding. I wondered where she’d stashed them. It’s not like I go through the drawers of the side tables, but the idea that she was a secret smoker kind of freaked me out.
I was learning a lot of things about my parents lately and none of it was good.
“Who’s Mariah?”
At first, I didn’t think she was going to answer me, but then she said, “Sit down Laine.”
“No,” I said “Let’s go outside if you’re going to smoke. It stinks in here and I don’t want to have to breathe your second-hand smoke.”
She gave me a look but walked to the French doors and flung them open. I followed her out onto the little wrap-around porch, one of the features I loved about the house.
I’d put up a windchime I bought at the Studio City spring crafts fair the spring before we moved, but it had blown down in a windstorm just days after we arrived. Even though the pieces had been tempered glass, they’d been broken beyond repair.
I couldn’t help but think the broken windchimes were somehow symbolic—a physical representation of the shattered shards of my old life. shattered.
I’d been more upset than I should have been about the wind chime, something that was just a thing. But while I thought I’d been a pretty good sport about everything, my life had been disrupted.
My mother took a few more drags of her cigarette, then crushed it out on the wooden floor of the porch. Gross, I thought, and made a mental note to bring the dustpan out later.
“Mariah was your uncle’s girlfriend,” she said.
I remembered the pregnant woman at Ned’s memorial service. I’d wondered who she was.
“The woman in the green dress at the memorial service?” I remembered my father going over and speaking to her but hadn’t thought any more of it at the time.
“Yes,” my mother said. “That was Mariah.”
“Why’s dad going over to see her?”
“Because she’s a complication,” my mother said, and the words came out hard and flat. She was angry, and I wasn’t sure who she was angry with.
“She’s a Wixsted” Mom said.
Uh-oh.
“Did you know any Wixsteds at school?”
“A couple,” I said. “A guy my age named Wix and an eighth grader named Remi.”
‘Mariah is Wix’s older sister.” The sister Jonna said resented Wix’s role as heir apparent.
Yikes. What was it with Blackwood men and Wixsted women? “Wasn’t Uncle Ned a little old for her?”
My mother gave me a look like I’d just said the stupidest thing in the world. “Ned was head of the Blackwood coven. She probably considered him a good catch.”
I wondered if witches ever married for love.
“Let’s go back in the house,” my mother said. ‘It’s cold out here.”
She’d been complaining of the cold since we’d arrived. I didn’t blame her. It had been a triple digit August when we left L.A. and here it was rainy, gray, and in the 50s most days. The autumn foliage was spectacular, but pretty leaves can’t keep you warm.
I followed her into the kitchen where there was a snack waiting for me—a plate of graham crackers with peanut butter spread on them. Like I was a first grader who couldn’t hold out until dinner time. “What, no juice box?” I said.
My mother sighed.
“I don’t want to eat dinner until your father gets back,” she said.
My mother had a thing about the family always eating dinner together. Both her parents had worked, too, and she’d rarely had both of them at a meal at the same time.
“Okay,” I said, and picked up one of the graham crackers. I was hungry.
“Why is Mariah a complication?”
My mother picked up a graham cracker and took a tiny bite. “I don’t know how much you’ve picked up about the hierarchy around here—"
“The Wixsteds run everything,” I said.
“Not everything.” She took another bite. “Here’s the thing. Stony Point is kind of a hot house of intrigue. Everyone here is either witchblood or witch-kin.”
“I know,” I said.
“I forgot,” she said. She looked at me apologetically. “Your father and I got too good at keeping secrets.”
Yes, you did.
“Mariah says she’s pregnant with Ned’s baby,” mom said, taking another cracker.
“That’s sad,” I said.
“If it’s true,” mom said.
“She’s obviously pregnant.”
“Yes,” my mom said, “but who’s the father?”
Why would there be any doubt, I wondered.
I let that settle. “Does she need money?” I said. “There’s so much money—”
“Mariah doesn’t need money,” mom said. “The Wixsteds take care of their own.”
I still wasn’t seeing the complication here.
“She says she and Ned were married,” Mom said.
And that’s when I got it. My uncle had died without a will, so everything had come to my father—to us—because he was Ned’s last surviving family member. But if Mariah was his wife—
“If she can prove it,” my mother said, echoing my thoughts, “she’ll inherit everything, including the leadership of the coven.” As an afterthought she added, “And this house.”
I watched her lick peanut butter off her cracker, then finally asked, “What does she want?”
Mom blinked as if coming out of a trance. “Right now? She wants protection.”
“From what?”
“From everyone,” she said cryptically. ‘You’ve seen the Wixsteds are powerful, but they’re not the only witch family in town. The other families—the Harrisons, the Lis, the Riquelmes—”
“The Blackwoods,” I finished for her.
“The Blackwoods,” she echoed. “They’re all powerful in their different ways. The child of a Blackwood and a Wixsted would be a very powerful child indeed.”
“You said what she wants right now is protection. What does she want in the long term?”
“Everything,” my mother sa
id.
We need to find that grimoire, I thought.
*
Dad didn’t come home until sometime around three in the morning, so we never did have dinner. But it wasn’t long after that conversation with my mother that I realized there was another witch family in play, one that had been virtually ignored by the town’s founders—the people who had been on the land when the invaders arrived.
When I’d first met Jonna, she’d told me that history teacher Leon Markham was going to love me. I’d found out why the second week of classes. A distant relation of the Blackwood family that stayed on the East Coast, Markham was a racist who called himself a Libertarian. He made no secret of his contempt for students descended from families not his own, and he seemed particularly annoyed by the presence of Geo Youckton, a Native America whose clan name translated to “People of the Sands.”
Geo and Jonna were close and she told me his father owned a casino where Mariah Wixsted worked. Geo wanted to find the Book of Wix too. “Not that I care what happens to you colonials,” he said to me one afternoon as we were methodically going through the shelves of musty paperbacks in one of Stony Point’s used bookstores, “but someone could do a whole lot of mischief if they got their hands on those pages.”
He wouldn’t get any disagreement from me. Hence the bookstore search. Jonna’s operating theory was the grimoire was hidden in plain sight, disguised as an ordinary book.
“But if it’s disguised, how will we recognize it?” I’d asked her.
“Because witches can sense glamor.”
“Then why disguise it?” I asked. “If a witch can just sense that something’s been hidden, what’s the point?”
“She’s got you there,” Geo had said laughing. Jonna scowled.
It took us nearly three hours to pull out every book in the store and put it back. We disturbed a number of spiders and I’m pretty sure I’d heard a rat scuttle by.
By the time we were through, I was dusty and thirsty and sure we’d just wasted three hours we’d never get back.
We headed over to the Strawberry Street Deli so Jonna could have some cake, and I ordered blackberry ginger ale to cut through the grit coating my mouth.
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