The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  Later that morning, the office tracking my case received a flustered call. The call was from one Mr. Julian Pike, who’d only just heard about the death of his older sister, whom he’d lost contact with, and the eight-year-old niece in desperate need of a place to stay. He said that he owned an antique shop with his partner, and he could have everything ready in a week, could fill out whatever forms they needed of him, could make cookies and buy school supplies and, oh God, anything that kid might need.

  I moved in with him that Tuesday.

  The only thing I brought with me was the book.

  I must have been half dead last night, because I’d taken the book from Boris and went directly to bed. No investigation. Nothing. My head hit the pillow and my lights stomped out. I didn’t even dream.

  Now, in the lucid light of morning, I could behold what Boris had bought me. The looping snakes. The bloody leather. The clasps like hands on a gargoyle. The way it tossed spears in me and flipped on all my switches. I rubbed my thumb over the spine, and it was electric. The snakes pulsed against my skin like they were breathing, crawling under the surface, and my nerves lit up like live wires.

  I popped the latch, cracked the book open.

  VADE MECVM MAGICI, VOL. II.

  “Boris. Dad. Where the fuck did you find this, exactly?”

  I’d found Boris in the FASHIONS PAST segment of the store, a bordello-red closet lined with half-dressed mannequins. He was in the process of lacing a corset over a Venus de Milo dress form, humming a tune under his breath. The corset boning wound up crooked. The humming abruptly stopped. Boris paused, said something nasty in a language I didn’t know, and unlaced the corset. He sighed, started over. He barely cocked his head when I spoke.

  “The spell book? At the annual Delacroix House

  “It’s fine,” I said. I stepped between Boris and the dress form. “Who was selling it? Was it in a set?” I clamped the Vade Mecvm to my rib cage and tried not to sound as thoroughly freaked as I was. It beat against my chest like a second raging heartbeat. My blood rushed quick.

  “There was a set on display, but they only let me bid on the one. Pissed me off, you better believe. I wanted to get you the full set. It’s like that one you’ve always had, isn’t it? The pretty one? I hope so, otherwise you’ll be missing the first volume. They didn’t have the first one. Bizarre. There were a lot of volumes in the set, nine or ten, easy, and you’d think they wouldn’t display it if it wasn’t complete. Anyhow, the binding is so lovely, isn’t it? I’ve never seen anything like it. Maurice—Maurice Delacroix, he owns the House—he said that the books were permanent fixtures in their archives and wouldn’t be for sale anytime soon. Which I understand. You know how I feel about those Mapplethorpe prints I found last year—I could never put those in the shop. They’re going to live in my bedroom forever, where they’ll be safe and I can gaze at them every morning when I wake up.”

  A giddy, sour something bubbled up inside me.

  There were more.

  The book in my arms felt suddenly hot, like there was a canary trapped between the pages that desperately needed to crash out the window and fly back to its roost. Like Boris had touched a nerve, and now the book was livid. Livid and lonely and disastrously alive. Like it was me.

  “Sideways, did you just wake up? It’s nearly three. That’s impressive, even for you.” He put a hand on my shoulder, gave me a nod. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or concerned, and I was thankful for that. I was in no mood for pity.

  “I’ve been up since noon. Couldn’t stop reading this.” I ran my fingertips over the cover like it was made of rosary beads. I was in love with the texture. It tickled my palms, made me itch. My heart was overstuffed; it was busting the stitches that held it together. “Thanks. Like. Thank you so fucking much, Dad. I needed this.”

  “Thought you might,” he said.

  I kissed his cheek. “Gonna go steal some candles from the display case. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Don’t take the big ones.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  Volume two lacked foreplay. It skipped to the jugular. I opened it, and I was instantly consumed.

  The first page bore a single word, with finely printed instructions just below it. SPECTER: touch and unveil. Curious, I traced the lines of the S with my forefinger, then jerked back my hand so fast that my wrist ached. The word SPECTER lit up in violent red. Red like candy. Red like rage. Slowly, like a napkin sucking a spill, it washed back to black. I touched it again. Red as hell. Red as the mimic last night.

  I turned the page.

  Hello, reader. You are a witch. That color that swirled over the word matches your soul, and all your magic will be that color. Revere and defend it, for it is the essence of you. Witch souls are rare. We call them specters. They differ from the souls of non-witches in that they possess a higher tolerance for, or even an inclination toward, spell casting and incantation. Magic seeps into reality’s cracks and makes it strange, breeds impossibilities in everything. It is antithetical to the great governing apparatus of society as we know it. Specters tend to form in people who don’t fit neatly into roles of established power, which opens them to powers less comprehensible. Those who touch this page and see nothing do not have a high enough capacity for magic to constitute witchery. They may be capable of minor magics, enchantments that are stolen or taught to them, but they are not casters.

  Those who receive the second volume of this text have generally read the first and experimented with the sample incantations provided inside. Reading this means you are capable of magic. If you’re going to live as a witch, you’ve got to know what’s coming for you. Witches frighten the masses, and, more pressingly, people who presume themselves to have unquestionable power over said masses. Witches don’t bow to the laws of nature or man. We admit to ourselves what we want, and then create that thing for ourselves, not by some force of industry, but with word and the joint intention of our sisterhood. We don’t depend on organized structures. We can simply help each other, and the masses as well, if they so desire. Those that manage the architecture of everything cannot abide witchcraft because of this fact. Our talents are outside of their comprehension, much less their control. Now, while it’s possible that some people murdered in European witch-hunts had specter souls, the vast majority of persecuted victims likely did not. Nevertheless, the genealogy of contemporary witchfinders has a specific origin point in the witch-hunts. It is a vital history for new practitioners to understand.

  In 1472, a priest by the name of Abner Grier encountered his little sister, Fortune Grier, in the midst of magic revelry. It has been documented that he spied Fortune dancing naked and laughing with flowers in her hair, and knew at once that Fortune was practicing maleficium. She sang over a nursing sow in Greek and Latin, neither of which were languages she should have known. Fortune was illiterate, and had never received any ecclesiastic education, so Abner concluded her knowledge must have been acquired by infernal means. He dragged her by the hair to his chapel, lashed her to his altar, and doused her writhing body with holy water. He then summoned the wealthy men of the village and gathered them around her, instructed them to observe. Over the course of his torture, Fortune surrendered accurate information—the existence of covens, the nature of specters, her methods of casting—and the men, horrified by her confession, vowed to seek out all spectered witches and, for the good of the people, extinguish them. Fortune supposedly taught the witchfinders two spells during her confession: how to make a spectral mimic, and how to extract a witch’s specter. They enacted said extraction spell upon her. She died within the hour.

  This was the genesis of several witchfinding families, many of which are still active today. While they’re predominantly located in England, where Grier’s village was, and America, where many of them migrated in hopes of breeding witchless colonies, it is notable that Grier’s methods were adopted by French, German, and Spanish witchfinding groups who, via their adjacent co
lonial projects, spread these methods across the globe. The success of Grierian witchfinders has largely hinged on their use of stolen magics. In the winter of 1892, a group of witchfinders discovered a sizable coven in New York City. It was a massacre: Not a single witch survived. The deaths were officially listed as the result of smoke inhalation, as the coven’s mansion had been burned to the ground. Whatever the witch hunters stole from the Manhattan coven, it made them massively successful. We stopped being able to scry for them. They became effectively invisible. These methods enable them to find witches before we do and destroy them before they even know who they are, what they’re capable of.

  I slammed the book shut. The timing of this was uncanny. Why would this book fall into my hands now, after I’d barely escaped the Chantry clan? Why was this aligning so closely to my life? It was eerie and I was nauseous. The word Chantry flipped itself around in my skull so many times it stopped sounding like a word. The book was like a looking glass, and all the ugly things in my head spilled across the page and were given definition. The awful and the lovely.

  Witch souls are rare.

  I was something rare.

  I took a sharp breath, crossed my legs, and opened the book again.

  TEN

  GATHERING TONGUES WITH WHICH TO SPEAK

  Magic’s in the invocation, yeah? Well, really cool candles fucking help. It’s touched on in both volume one and volume two, and there’s a reason why every cheesy Medieval grimoire you see in movies requires fifty-something props. Feeling witchy is a large part of successfully being witchy, and nothing makes you feel powerful like surrounding yourself with gigantic dripping candles. Maybe it was some weird anti-Freudian destruction of phallic symbols thing. Didn’t matter. Lucky for me, we at Rothschild & Pike sold them by the dozen. Thank God for Dad and Dad.

  Julian had found a strange, Ren-faire-type pair of sixty-somethings who worked as beekeepers and candlemakers, and their candles looked like set pieces from Hocus Pocus or Practical Magic. Long, fat, oozing candles. Witchy candles. Candles that’d make you feel gother than Wednesday Addams at a Bauhaus concert. I took a few red ones and stuffed them into my pockets.

  If I was gonna attempt a stay-off-my-fucking-back spell, I’d need to feel maximum amounts of goth.

  Delacroix House. What the fuck was Delacroix House? Like, was it something that I could Google? Boris and Julian find themselves in some weird circles, and it was possible that this place only existed to the devastatingly weird. I mean, my dads once went to an auction where the only things on the block were “experimental taxidermy art.” Most of that auction was apparently too esoteric even for Boris, but they did settle on a Rat King, which now proudly sits atop a refrigerator circa 1952. (The fridge doesn’t work, so Boris gutted it and filled it with a stack of retro skin mags that I maybe borrow sometimes.) Point is, it was possible that I wouldn’t be able to locate the Delacroix House without interrogating Boris and Julian, which really wasn’t what I wanted to do. If I asked about it too much, they might offer to take me. I needed to go, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to do with my parents. Magic was my independence. Going with my dads would feel like some sort of submission, like, Yeah, mysterious Vade Mecvm people, I had to bum a ride off my dad. That’s totally cool. Yeah, no. Unless I couldn’t find another way, I’d be doing this myself, thanks.

  Maybe I could scry for it. Scrying, that was something new. It hadn’t been in the first volume, and while it was mentioned in the other spell books I’d gotten my grimy hands on, the pragmatics of it were never discussed. Mostly, scrying was described as staring at a reflective surface until your question was answered, which is every bit as effective as it sounds. Volume two had actual instructions. Now that I knew it was legitimate enough for a slot in the VMM, I had a dire need to try it.

  If I had enough spell books, nobody could touch me. Nobody.

  Would Boris be pissed if I took a big candle after all? They were so damn badass. I think it was technically stealing, what I did. Taking merchandise and using it without paying is stealing, after all. But it’s not like my dads didn’t know about it, and it’s not like they ever did anything to stop me. I only ever took stuff that was easily replaced or not terribly valuable, and if I took too much, I’d work the cash register to make up the difference. But I mean, this was just one candle. He might not even notice. I’d buy him Starbucks later to make up for it.

  “Boo.”

  Jesus! My heart slammed against my throat, and I whirled around, fists ready.

  Standing behind me was Daisy Brink.

  Yates was living morphine. Her arms were around my rib cage and suddenly I wasn’t pissed at Daisy for scaring me anymore. I wasn’t anything. I was just in awe of her and how soft her cheek was against mine. It sounds stupid, but I hadn’t realized how much I could seriously use a hug. I gave her a squeeze and tried to focus.

  “We thought you were dead!” Her hair floated free, dark and thick as storm clouds, and it tickled my ear and the side of my neck. “You can’t just call us and say that you’ve been kidnapped and then hang up! Sideways! There was all that blood on the floor. And all the glass? And the deer were gone? And then when you didn’t show up to school today, I thought you legit might have been axe murdered. I made Daisy skip cheer so that we could all make sure you were alive. I know that I called the shop a billion times today—well more like twice—and that Mr. Rothschild said you were fine both times, but still! I was so worried!”

  Jing, sporting heart-shaped glasses and a black romper, crossed her arms. “Could’ve called one of us again from your shop phone, you know,” she said, eying the candles that I was gathering up. There was something metallic about her tone that I couldn’t place. “I was having a fucking panic attack intermittently all day. Just freaking the fuck out. All. Day. Nice candles. Going for girth, I see. Good girl.”

  My hands rolled themselves into fists against Yates’ back. “Sorry. I should’ve called or something. Messaged you. I’ve just . . . my head’s been in a weird place since I got home.” I’m not too good at apologizing. That’s one of those nice-kid things that was lost on me.

  Daisy had been skimming a Playboy that she’d pulled off a shelf, but she looked up long enough to snort. Her eyes flashed like a cat’s on film. “You can tell us now, can’t you?”

  I let go of Yates, which felt like ripping off a Band-Aid, but I fought to keep the hurt off my face. There was a voice in my head that didn’t want to tell them, that irrationally wanted to pretend that it had happened differently, that it wasn’t a huge deal and that I hadn’t been completely defenseless, that I hadn’t lost control and nearly died. Witches are powerful because they help each other, the book had said. This wasn’t the time for my weird internalized faux-macho scaredy-cat bullshit. I put the candle in my pocket and cleared my throat. “My room. Not a shop kind of conversation. Follow me.”

  Jing sat at the foot of my bed. She was mask faced and motionless. There was something direly wrong with her, with how tightly wound she was. She felt volatile, like any sudden movement would pull the pin out of her grenade and she’d bust open and kill us all.

  I was done talking. Near tears, but they hadn’t spilled out, thank my lucky stars and whatever else. Yates had been appropriately appalled, and she’d spent most of my story curled up with her head on my lap, patting my thigh, wincing when I was too detailed. She took the lulls in conversation to put all their numbers on my phone, like it would retroactively safeguard me against any of this, even though we both knew that it wouldn’t. When I talked about Levi, she tensed up against me, and my hands found her shoulders and stayed there. Her empathy was like a low dose of opium—enough to take off the edge and make the world fuzzy, but not enough to kill the pain. Daisy talked the whole time, cussing and spitting, mean as a stray cat. Dirty pigs. We should burn their house down. I want his head mounted on my wall. I’ve been needing a new dartboard. She knotted her fists in my pillow so tightly that the pillow threatened to bust, an
d when that stopped being enough, she took to beating it, with better form than I would’ve given her credit for. Probably says more about me than her.

  Jing didn’t say a word, until she did. “Sideways,” she said. She pulled her sunglasses off her forehead, shook a hand through her hair, and slid the shades back on. “Let me see this spell book.”

  My gut wrenched.

  “Why,” I spat out, my voice flat as I could muster. I don’t show people my VMM, and that’s a dead rule. It was horrifyingly intimate. My VMM was a sizable slice of who I was, and it was a lot to fucking ask, wanting to see inside it. We were practically strangers.

  But there was something in the look on Jing’s face. There was a sharpness, a nastiness that I admired. Something relatable. She looked feral, just like me. Well, not just like me. I’m an ugly, awful, nasty-looking hatchet-faced bruiser, and Jing could be Helen of Troy. But even so, her face felt like a mirror, and I saw myself more clearly than I ever had with glass. Her expression was brittle, jagged, practically begging to snap in half and cut someone.

  Despite myself, my stomach in knots, I pushed the book in her direction.

  Jing pulled volume two toward her and ran her fingertips over the cover. It felt it sympathetically like she’d brushed my inner arm.

  “Open it,” Daisy commanded. There was something wildly inappropriate about her tone. My cheeks felt hot. No one noticed, or maybe just Yates, who didn’t mention it.

  Jing opened to the first page. I watched her eyes trace the S-P-E-C-T-E-R and the phrase just below it. She poised her fingers in the air, hovered them just above the printed word.

  Fuck. Abort. What if it doesn’t work? What if I’m the only magic one? If it was only my magic at the party, and they were just conductors? The mimic was red, after all. Red like me. Would they stop being friends with me if I was a witch and they were specterless? Hell, if Jing was specterless and the letters stayed black, would she label my magic a fraud? Would the party retroactively seem like a sham? Would it discredit all that we’d done? Or, even worse, would they stop being friends with me if they stopped needing me as their magic toy? If they could do it themselves, would I be obsolete?