Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  “I don’t know.” I frowned, remembering. “It was all a little confusing, to be honest.”

  “Grandma, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Tamsin shook her head. “It was like she was incarnate. She was radiating all types of lights and energies, throwing them everywhere. We escaped into the river, but I thought we were done for sure. She levitated herself a dozen feet above the water and was about to cook us when—” Tamsin paused, looking at me.

  “What happened?” my mother asked gently.

  “Sam did something,” she said, staring at me. “I’ve never felt magic like that before. She made the entire river rise up and smother Gwyneth right out of Margo’s body.”

  “You were helping me,” I protested. “I could feel it.”

  “It was different,” Tamsin insisted. “It was as if you used my magic as a catalyst for your own. And your magic—” She stopped again, as if hard-pressed to put it into words. “It was like we became part of everything, everything around us. We were the earth and the trees and the river and the sky. I felt whole; like I was complete.”

  Both my grandmother and my mother were silent. I started getting nervous. “What does that mean?” I asked. “Isn’t that what you guys do behind the curtain?”

  “No, Sam,” said my mother. “We draw on that magic, but it’s given to us. It’s not that it is us. That’s a very different thing. We have magic. We use magic. But you are magic. It is as much a part of you as it was for her.”

  “Who?” I asked, confused.

  “The blacksmith’s daughter,” said Aurora with an impatient roll of her eyes. “Whose name, incidentally, was also Samantha. That is the origin of all our powers, the inheritance. They came through her to us. And apparently, they have flowed into you unbroken.”

  “Power like that, power that pure,” said my mother, “is power that comes along once every fifth generation, if that.”

  “It’s unheard of,” said Aurora, shaking her head.

  I was getting afraid again. “What do I have to do?”

  To my surprise, my grandmother laughed at me. “Do? You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “With power like that, you can do pretty much whatever you want.”

  “It’s not a bad thing, Sam,” my mother explained gently. “It’s part of you. It shouldn’t feel painful, overwhelming, or burdensome, but natural. It’s been there all along. You just didn’t know it.”

  “I guess,” I said, casting around in my mind to check if anything felt out of place. I felt clean and a little sedate, like when I took painkillers after having my wisdom teeth out; other than that, I felt normal. But something was still confusing me.

  “What does incarnate mean?” I asked.

  “It’s when a non-corporeal being has completely taken the form of the living,” Aurora explained. “Only a very powerful entity can do it, and the vessel must be willing. Then it wears the willing’s flesh like a costume. They become a puppet of the possessor, the puppeteer.”

  I shuddered at the gruesome imagery of Margo having her strings pulled like a human marionette. “Why couldn’t she cross the bridge?” I asked.

  “Our ancestor, Samantha Black, cast a powerful spell on the waters of the river,” said my mother. “It would have destroyed her to touch it. She would have disintegrated immediately.”

  “I’m melting, I’m melting! Ahhhhhh!” Tamsin clutched her throat and staggered around the shop dramatically, imitating the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “Why didn’t it melt Margo?” I asked. “When the water hit her?”

  “Margo is not, nor was she ever, a true witch,” said my mother. “She was more like a pawn being pushed around by Gwyneth. It’s almost as if the water washed her clean.”

  “Wouldn’t being in Margo’s body have protected Gwyneth?” I asked. “Like a human shield?” I described the gray smoke pouring from Margo’s mouth, which I assumed was Gwyneth.

  “It’s possible,” said Aurora, frowning. “We’ll have to investigate the matter, to ensure she can’t return.”

  Most, if not all, of my questions answered for the time being. Reassured that everyone in my family was alive and well, and that Margo would likely survive, I could barely sit still anymore.

  “I’ve got to get back to the manor,” I said impatiently.

  My mother’s mouth twitched, fighting a faint smile.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” she said.

  “But how do you know?” I demanded.

  “Don’t you?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  She had no sooner uttered the words than I found that I did.

  “You just want to see him really bad,” said Tamsin knowingly. “Like, really bad.”

  “So?” I practically shouted. “Is that such a big deal?”

  “It is to you,” said Tamsin. “Clearly.”

  “Go with her,” my grandmother ordered her. “Just because Gwyneth and her followers are gone doesn’t mean the Dark Horse Inn is entirely safe for anyone. The dark spirits of the woods still lurk. Make sure everyone is safe. Isadora and I will help Minerva tend to the girl.”

  Aurora herded us to the door even as I craned my neck over my shoulder to look at my mom.

  “Go on,” she said. “It’s fine.” She smiled at me. Her eyes were filled with pride.

  The night air hit us full in the face and I felt invigorated in a way I never had. “Wow, it feels great out here,” I said. “I feel alive, you know what I mean?”

  “It’s a side effect,” said Tamsin, “of practicing extremely powerful magic.”

  I followed her, still babbling excitedly, as she cut around the side of the shop, ducking into a narrow alley between the building and an overgrown hedge.

  “But I mean, like, more alive than I’ve ever felt before, you know? As if I was asleep, and I’ve always been asleep, but then tonight, I woke up. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure,” said Tamsin, poking around in the hedge. She was clearly not paying attention to me. I poked her in the back.

  “This is important! This has never happened to me before. And anyway, how are we supposed to get all the way to the manor? We don’t have a car. It’s at least eight miles from here. Unless—” I gasped as something occurred to me. “Tamsin! Have you been holding out on me? Can we ride brooms?”

  Tamsin didn’t answer me. Instead, she stepped inside the hedge and vanished.

  44

  The End of the Eclipse

  “Tamsin!” I shouted. I plunged into the shrubbery after her. Swatting a mess of pointy branches and dead leaves out of my way, I broke through to the other side. Instead of coming out on the other side, I found myself at the bottom of the hill looking up at the manor.

  “What was that?” I turned to look at the hole in the hedge at the edge of the manor grounds. “How did you do that?”

  Tamsin, a few feet away, only shrugged. “I didn’t really do anything,” she explained. “It’s always been that way.”

  “You mean that hedge?” I demanded, trotting to keep up with her as she climbed the steep hill to the front door. “The hedge has always been that way?”

  “Certain spaces have different boundaries than others,” she said. “Some are weak as water and others are solid as walls. Sometimes, what looks like a solid object only appears that way. But it exists at more of a bend in time and space.”

  I was getting that familiar dizzy feeling I got whenever one of them tried to explain something completely beyond my comprehension. “Wait.” I grabbed her arm. “Should we just go barging in? What if they’re still, you know…”

  “Possessed?” Tamsin looked up at the manor contemplatively. “It seems unlikely. But you’re right, we should be careful.”

  We crept quietly up to the front door, trying to make as little sound as possible. The door was slightly ajar, and I nudged it open. Candles on the brink of going out flickered and guttered, casting eerie shadows onto the wall. The manor was quiet. Or at least, I thought it was. Distantly, down the ha
ll, I thought I heard what sounded like wailing.

  I gripped Tamsin’s arm and we shuffled slowly down the hallway. I peered into the ballroom, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. All the black candles on the floor had gone out. The parlor was equally empty, the wall with the fireplace sealed. This was a relief. If anything bad was still happening, it seemed logical to assume it would be in the pentagram room.

  The noise came from the direction of the kitchen. We snuck down the hallway. The kitchen was in shambles. It was covered in empty wine bottles, some of them shattered on the floor. Candle wax oozed onto the table, coating it in a hardened shell. Someone had thrown up in the sink. I wrinkled my nose as we eased past the mess.

  “It’s coming from the backyard,” whispered Tamsin. The sliding door was wide open. The torches just beyond the patio were still lit. Through the glass, I saw a semi-circle of people, still robed, gathered in a rough configuration among the flames. I clutched at Tamsin.

  “What are they doing?” I hissed.

  The wailing was coming from one of the figures on the ground. I crept closer, careful to conceal myself in the shadows of the enclosed porch. The figure, prostrate on the ground, sat up, face twisted out of recognition. It was Kimmy.

  “This album was supposed to make me famous,” she wailed. “Where’s Margo? Those hill people freaks came out of nowhere, and she just disappeared!”

  “Margo does this all the time,” one of the other robed figures admonished her. It was Ferrari. “She has some big plan to make us all even more famous, then at the last minute, she goes to Miami with Les or vanishes to collaborate with some hill people so she can pretend to be more authentic and ruins everything.”

  “What were all those weird lights?” Her back was to me, but I recognized Tapia’s phony accent from a mile away. “I was awfully drunk when the shadow people appeared and started screaming, but really, the lights were quite strange.”

  “Special effects,” said Bridget knowingly. “I think she was shooting a video out there, without telling us, like a concept thing? So our reactions would be real, like performance art. I think she had Pandora out there with her video crew, doing things with the lighting and stuff. Like the other one we shot.”

  “Well, this is just crazy,” said Ferrari, shaking her head. “I mean, she could have at least told us, you know? Not that it hasn’t been super fun pretending to be witches for the album, but I would have liked to have been prepared. I was actually kind of scared for a minute.”

  “I wasn’t,” Kimmy declared. “It was clearly bogus.”

  “They think they were shooting a music video?” Tamsin hissed in my ear. I jumped. I’d forgotten she was there.

  “I guess so,” I murmured. I was so fixed on watching the group in the yard, I didn’t hear footsteps approaching behind us. I didn’t realize there was anyone else there but Tamsin and me until a pair of hands encircled my waist.

  I screamed. Tamsin jumped about a mile and the semi-circle in the clearing glanced up simultaneously like startled birds. My attacker flinched. He picked me up and turned me around to face him.

  “Peter!” I threw myself in his arms. “I thought you were dead!”

  “Why would I be dead?” He held me at arm’s length to study me. “And what are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were with your family.”

  “She is with her family,” said Tamsin, stepping from the shadows.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Peter. He sounded personally affronted. “Where have you been? Did Margo kidnap you? Hang on. I need a drink.”

  Peter went back into the kitchen and we trailed after him. He rummaged through the boxes on the counter, most of which were empty, and picked through all the bottles until he found one that was still half-full. Glass crunched beneath his feet.

  “Where’s your friend?” I asked.

  “I spent half the night trying to convince my oldest friend that I was not making up a potential cult in the woods that might be murdering people and that he wouldn’t lose his badge for conducting an off-duty investigation,” he said, pouring the wine into three glasses arrayed haphazardly across the wax-encrusted table. “Needless to say, he refused to believe me. I came back here to see if I could catch them in the act, but none of them knew what I was talking about. They claimed that everything in that devil-room behind the fireplace was part of their upcoming album. None of them seem to know where Margo went. In fact, everyone who could have potentially been involved with the disappearance of Colin and therefore Martha seems to have conveniently vanished.”

  “Where’s Les?” I asked. I realized he was the only one I hadn’t seen, naked and screaming or otherwise.

  “I haven’t seen him, either,” said Peter, frustrated. He turned to Tamsin. “Where have you been? Did they do something to you?”

  “Who?” she asked, staring at him blankly.

  “Margo!” he said. He looked ready to tear his hair out. “Did they kidnap you? Have you hidden somewhere? We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “Nobody kidnapped me,” said Tamsin, sounding puzzled. “You know me, Peter. Sometimes I just like to go out on my own.”

  He looked like he wanted to kick her. “Are you kidding me? Are you insane? With everything going on, you just decided to ‘go out on your own’? Your family has been worried sick about you.”

  Tamsin looked appropriately chagrined. “I know, and I’m sorry. I feel bad about it, really I do. But I just want to go away to college, and they’re stifling me. I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s like they have to keep track of my every movement, you know?”

  Peter studied Tamsin, apparently failing to detect any sign of falsehood on her part.

  “I know,” he finally sighed. “I felt the same way about my family. But eventually, you’ve got to make amends, you know? You’ve got to come to terms with the difference between what your family wants and what you want for yourself. You can’t just run away.”

  I thought of my father. I hadn’t spoken to him once since I came here. He still thought I was on a business trip with Coco. I felt ashamed.

  “Look, Peter,” said Tamsin calmly. “I know you’re after this white whale of a story that’s gonna get you out of Mount Hazel forever, but you’ve gotta do that for yourself. You’re not going to find it here, you know? You’re making mountains out of molehills. I mean, I thought these people were weird, too, but pop stars committing ritual murders in order to score their next hit? You have to admit, it’s a little far-fetched. It sounds like something out of the Enquirer, not the Inquirer.”

  Peter slumped over his glass. I was startled. He was like a rabid dog with facts; I’d never been able to stay more than one step ahead of him. But Tamsin, perhaps as the result of knowing him for a much longer time, seemed to know what buttons to push. I didn’t like seeing her manipulate him this way. She sensed this and sent me a thought indicating it would be more dangerous for Peter to know the truth than it would for him to believe he might have imagined the whole thing.

  “Why don’t you just admit it, Peter?” she asked. “You wanted to impress a city girl with your hotshot ace reporting. You didn’t want her to see you as some bumbling mountain townie. You’re bored here and you’re afraid you’re never gonna get out. You hated the music people and were suspicious of them from the beginning. You thought if you solved Martha Hope’s murder, you’d win the Pulitzer and be set for life.”

  I realized she was pulling these facts directly from Peter’s mind and remembered what she’d said earlier about some of my powers transferring to her.

  “You want to see things that aren’t necessarily there,” she continued. “I wasn’t kidnapped. No one took me. Which, according to my mother when I spoke to her earlier, is exactly what she told you in the first place. And Sam likes you, anyway. Even if you’re not…I don’t know. I don’t know any famous reporters.”

  “Ida B. Wells,” he said morosely.

  “Yeah, her. If you want to move to the city, just go.
You don’t need to prove yourself first. You know? And neither do I. If our families don’t like it…” She shrugged. “Too bad.”

  “You’re moving to the city?” I asked Tamsin.

  I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was convincing Peter of—that he’d imagined the whole thing—but I trusted that she had the coven’s best interest, and his, at heart. And if Tamsin, who’d only hours before faced imminent possession by a ghost at the hands of a dark witch after being kidnapped and hidden in the woods in an enchanted sleep could be this blasé about her true whereabouts, she’d clearly been playing the pretend-game for far longer than I had.

  Maybe Gwyneth was still out there. Maybe she was still dangerous. Maybe sleuthing around this place and the people in it was inviting a world of trouble. I didn’t like lying to Peter, but I’d rather he was safe.

  She shrugged, sipping her glass of wine. “I have this cousin who I heard has a pretty dope place. I think I might go to art school.”

  “Ohhh, okay,” I said. “I see how it is.”

  “Peter?” said Tamsin. “Are you coming?”

  “I can’t just pick up and run off to the city,” Peter protested. “I have the bar, and my dad—”

  “Peter, he can get somebody else to run the bar, it’s not rocket science,” said Tamsin. “It’s not like you want to work there. Why don’t you find a place in the city with me? Then I won’t have to leech off of Sam forever.”

  “I cannot imagine anything more annoying than living with a teenaged girl her first semester of college,” said Peter. “No offense, but you’ll drink all my alcohol and break all my furniture and otherwise drive me insane. You’re going to have to find a place of your own.”

  “As opposed to the place you’ve unofficially agreed to look for?” Tamsin prodded him.

  He met my gaze. I glanced away and made a big point of drinking my wine.

  “I’m not doing this because of you,” he said.