By Any Other Name

by Kayti McGee

I took a step toward her. I told myself to get rid of her.

  If the girl hadn’t deserved death before, surely she did now, armed with the knowledge—as she was informing an audience of constellations—that magic is real!

  No sooner had I moved toward her, though, than she collected herself and returned to the car. I hesitated. So did she, remaining in the car for several long minutes. Then, finally, I watched her tail lights disappear down the dark highway.

  “Be safe,” I whispered, and be gone, I thought.

  My spirit wanted to go after her; it pulled against my body with powerful wing-beats. Instead, I returned to the spot in the forest where Rose had spilled her wine and I had felt that strange, strong pulse of magic. As I approached the stone table, I sensed a presence. I was weary from casting and from working around Rose’s ward, but I guarded myself nonetheless, speaking a word of power and tracing runes for protection in the dark.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  No answer came, nor did I see anyone or anything in the clearing. A weighted silence filled the wood. The silver-white bark of the aspens reached skyward and their leaves held perfectly still, as if waiting with me. I cocked my head and listened. The fact that I couldn’t see someone didn’t mean I was alone.

  “Show yourself,” I commanded.

  Nothing happened. I frowned and turned in a slow circle, my gaze sweeping the woods. The presence, and the sensation of surveillance, grew sharper as I searched.

  “Marion?” I ventured. Only Marion could cloak herself from my sight. My third eye never closed. I should have been able to easily see any spirit in the woods—any witch, fae thing, or demon. The empty clearing jeered at me.

  I closed my eyes and moved toward the presence.

  I crouched and touched the damp earth where Rose had first poured her wine. As my fingers sifted through the loam, something touched me back. A muddy, cold palm pressed against mine. I kept my eyes closed for fear of breaking whatever spell had awakened the dead, for such a feat was not in my power.

  A papery voice entered my mind. “Why have you called me up?” it said. Eternity tore at the words, dragging them down.

  “Who are you?” I countered.

  “Don’t you know? Haven’t you called me? I heard my daughter’s voice...”

  Rose. She must have cast some broken half-spell by splashing a bit of cheap wine into the earth. Impossible—and yet here was the proof, touching my hand.

  “Your name is Luna.” I spoke with authority. “Your daughter is Rose.”

  “Who are you?” The voice in my head flared suddenly. The cold fingers in the earth laced through mine and gripped with biting force.

  It is a point of pride with me that, having seen so much of the weird, I am not easily unnerved. That accomplished it, though: the grip of the dead. I yanked at my hand. It would not come free.

  “I am Thorn Blackmane,” I growled. “This is my land, and you will release me.”

  Guttural laughter echoed around my skull. “You are no Blackmane,” said the voice. “And even if you were, this would not be your land.”

  The dead play tricks, as do all the spirits. The older they grow, like the gods of the Grecians, the more deceit they sow. I was beginning to suspect that I had fallen prey to the practical jokes of a bored wood nymph.

  I tugged at my arm, but the corpse would not relent. Another of its turgid hands seized my wrist and began to pull.

  “What do you want with my daughter?” the voice shrieked.

  “Nothing. I spared her life. I sent her away. Now release me!” The earth had swallowed my forearm to the elbow. I had no threat to wield against the dead, no spell to slay that which had already been slain. I scrabbled vainly against the dead leaves.

  At once, the grip on my hand yielded and I tumbled backward. A spray of loose dirt sprinkled my face. I shook it off and disappeared into the woods.

  I won’t say I ran. Mortals run. Rabbits run.

  Neither did I stay, though, to exchange riddles with the voice in the ground. Her clammy touch had left my whole arm cold. I imagined myself in her place, clods of earth filling my throat and darkness all around. I made myself laugh about it. If the gods were watching or the spirits were listening, they would see my bravado.

  I should have gone to Marion at once, perhaps even before visiting the stone table, but my thoughts were a jumble. Marion would sense my disquiet and see my disobedience. It is difficult to lie to a witch. I needed time to collect myself.

  I returned home and burned mullein and chamomile for peace of mind. I peppered my bathwater with cinnamon and clove. I went under the surface and came up and washed off every speck of dirt, but my mind returned continually to the iron hands of the dead.

  You are no Blackmane.

  No Blackmane.

  I lay in the water until it grew cold and my candles guttered. I thought of Rose with her wine and her aborted spell. No forest sprite would have known enough to call Rose daughter, nor would such a creature have had the strength to hold me. I had spoken to none other than Luna... and she had called me a fraud.

  Twists of smoke filled the air, settling my thoughts. The girl was gone. If our fates were tangled, she would return, but I doubted I would see her again. I had sent her away—for good. With that knowledge came a startling pang. I sneered and climbed out of the water. I snuffed my candles, their flames dying with a sibilant hiss.

  Was I so bored, and so lost on the path, that a simple girl could turn my head?

  But it was more than that. She was more. When I had cloaked her in the forest, when I had seen her shivering in the stream, I had wanted her. She was the first true mystery I had encountered in all my years. More, her dead mother had claimed that I was no Blackmane and that our land was not, in fact, our land. That mystery had disappeared with Rose and the voice in the ground, but I would not soon forget it.

  I wrapped a towel around my waist and went to the northernmost room in my home, which was my ritual room. I closed the door behind me and lit a candle in a holder on the wall. A large, inverted pentagram was graven into the hardwood floor (the same marking that was inked on my back) and the vegvísir. Over the years, I had carved the Elder Futhark around the outer circle of the pentagram.

  My altar stood at the center of the symbol. Tools lay strewn around it and my grimoire hung on the wall in the form of a mask. I wouldn’t need it tonight.

  I cut a thin stripe into my palm and consecrated the altar and the ground with a smattering of blood. I knelt in the center of the pentagram, lit a black sage bundle, closed my eyes, and focused my thoughts on Rose. Against the wound in my palm, I gripped a citrine point

  “Visium, expedio, aspectu, scrutatio, indago,” I chanted.

  If only I had taken a strand of the girl’s hair or even one of her socks, my scrying spell would have proven simpler. Finding her now would be tiresome, tedious—and I was already exhausted. I repeated the words of sight and searching until they became a hum. The sigils inked in my skin tingled. My senses lifted to the astral plane, swirled and collected, and then screamed toward the highway, bursting apart and scouring roads and parking lots.

  Rose’s thoughts called to me immediately. In the bleak cold of astral space, she was a summertime wood; she was sunlight on fur, a garland of lilies, moss-covered rocks around a motionless pool.

  She was thinking of me.

  No, she was summoning me, probably unbeknownst to her.

  The wisps of my senses converged on her clarion aura. My inner vision cleared around the image of Rose reclining in a bathtub, suds up to her chest, dark ropes of hair coiled around her shoulders. Where was she? Why wasn’t she on the road? If I studied her surroundings, I might be able to determine her whereabouts, but I couldn’t look away.

  I drew a sharp breath. She was staring directly into my eyes.

  The pulse in my wrist feathered strangely. A low crack and a stab of pain broke my trance. Rose swirled away. I had snapped the citrine in two.

  I
visited Marion in the early morning hours. The world was asleep, except for the witches. A thick veil of darkness concealed Juniper Hollow. To go into the forest was to go blind. We had Marion to thank for that. She had used her pull with the town council to nudge them toward dark sky certification, and Marion had a lot of pull. We all did.

  The Blackmanes were the humble benefactors of every charity and civil service in the valley. We gave liberally to the local police and firemen. We backed the building of schools, courthouses, veterinary clinics, homeless shelters, and parks. We were responsible for the ostentatious county hospital and emergency room. No college within a hundred miles lacked a scholarship in our name. We were patrons of the arts. We were supporters of small business. We were conservationists, research enthusiasts, and humanitarians. We were malignant; we were beyond the reach of the law. To hold us in jail or even bring us to court was impossible. We had entrenched ourselves so firmly in the valley that its social, civil, and economic structures would collapse without us.

  And where money wasn’t enough to curry favor, we used magic and sex; we used murder and deceit. The mortals in Juniper Hollow spoke of the valley’s origins with reverence. They told one another that it was an ancient place of peace, a meeting ground where warring tribes put down their weapons and prayed and healed. Those histories made me laugh. I had seen the ghosts of Navajo soothsayers, their faces painted with blood. I had heard death cries echoing forever from the places where shamans cut their own throats in offering.

  We were the schattenseite—the shadow side of the waking world—and the second face of Janus, which looks into the past.

  Beneath my feet, the forest earth became the tiles of Marion’s greenhouse. Mint and lavender filled the air with perfume. I had put Rose far from my thoughts. I had set her like a sparrow in a cage and locked the cage and left it covered in the attic of my home.

  “Is it done?” Marion said.

  I could not see her. Overgrown planters and shelves blocked my view. The silvery snip of her scissors bit at the silence.

  She rarely cut to the chase.

  I skated a hand up the glass wall and wondered at the urgency of Rose’s death.

  “No,” I said.

  At that, Marion emerged from behind a shelf. Her skin was almost pellucid. Blue veins forked along her neck and forehead. Her eyes were pale, serene, and she wore her long blonde hair in a braid. A few wisps straggled over her brow.

  In a beige linen frock, the costuming of another century, she looked like nothing more than a malnourished country girl. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly. She was plain. She came to me and touched my arm.

  “What happened?”

  “Did you know she was a witch?” I said.

  Marion’s hand leapt off my arm. She set her basket on a stool and began arranging and rearranging her cuttings.

  “I knew. I know. Are you questioning me?”

  “No. I tried. She went to see Rune Underwood.” I watched the Maven for a sign of recognition, but she betrayed nothing. “I tried calling her into the woods as she was leaving. It didn’t work.” I narrowed my eyes. That memory was a sore spot. “I stopped her anyway, on the road, but I couldn’t control her. She was warded.”

  Marion’s eyes jumped to me and back to her plants. “Go on.”

  “Powerfully warded. Nothing I could work around quickly. Then Imogen showed up with blood all over her hands and clothes.” I scowled with legitimate disgust. “The girl got spooked and gunned it.”

  “And you couldn’t throw her car off the road?”

  I was prepared for Marion’s questions. I met her gaze with a level stare.

  “Of course I could have. I hesitated. If she’s a witch...” I let the rest go unsaid, an implication hanging between us. If she’s a witch and our covens aren’t at war, she’s off limits. “I wasn’t sure you knew. And her name is...” I turned away. “Rose.”

  “What about it?”

  “I heard her talking to Rune. Rune and Rose. Her mother’s name was Luna. They’re witches’ names. I couldn’t do it. What do you want to hear? I couldn’t kill a witch named Rose in good faith. I felt I would be cursed.”

  I expected my aunt to laugh. We shared a distaste for delusion and artifice. She didn’t laugh, though. She only asked, “Where is she now?”

  “Gone. I followed her to the town limit.”

  “Do you think you can find her?”

  “I doubt it. Maybe I could get her whereabouts from Rune, but leaving our land to kill another witch?”

  “No, no... you’re right.” Marion wiped her hands on her dress. I had never seen her uneasy. “Enough. I’ll know if she comes back.”

  “Witch or not, and warded or not, she’s untaught. She knew nothing about her mother. She was adopted.”

  Marion came to me again and took my hands in hers. Her fingers were small and cold. She peered up at me. “Was she strong? Could you tell?”

  I shook my head. “I doubt it,” I said. My allegiance was still here, with my family, and I felt obligated to comfort Marion, though I couldn’t begin to understand her distress. “Who is she?” I finally asked.

  “Oh... I didn’t want to complicate this for you.” She squeezed my fingers.

  “Please, complicate it.”

  “Our family is an unbroken chain. A very long time ago, Rose’s family tried to break us. Her coven, her mother’s coven, came through the valley and cited a claim to it. It was a false claim, but they went to war with us nevertheless. We’ve spoken about this before, when you were a boy. When you didn’t understand.”

  I scanned Marion’s strange, pallid eyes. At last, I understood the significance of Rose turning up in Juniper Hollow. When I was young, when I couldn’t understand why my father and mother had never existed in my memory, Marion used to tell me how they had died fighting for our land. The Blackmane Coven had barely survived that feud. Marion, my mother’s sister, had raised me.

  So Rose, that naïve and beautiful young witch, was the direct descendent of my parents’ murderers.

  No wave of wrath attended my realization. I did not feel compelled to charge into the night and avenge the parents I had never known. In fact, only an eerie sense of doubt settled on me. It is difficult to lie to a witch, as I have said, and Marion’s words lacked the ring of truth.

  I nodded and turned away from her. We were lying to each other. I knew it with almost perfect certainty. And if I could tell that Marion was lying to me, then she surely knew that I was lying to her.

  “Why have we left Rune alive,” I said, “if he was a part of all this?”

  “He wasn’t. Not really. His sister was the witch. He never practiced.”

  “And if Rose doesn’t practice?”

  “He’s only been spared to draw the girl back. We lost Luna’s daughter. Now we’ve found her.” And you let her go. I could all but hear Marion’s unspoken frustration. “She is the last ember of a fire that must be crushed out. Thorn, if she returns—”

  “I will,” I said. “I want to.”

  Eight

  Rose

  I woke up with renewed purpose, a list of questions, and only the merest hint of a hangover. Tessa had refused to take the day off (“for heaven’s sake, Rose, you’re taking all of this way too seriously”) but she’d left me with a house key and the address of a store she swore would get me all broken in. As though I were a naughty puppy in need of training.

  I left her house far too early, nervous I’d get myself lost. I shouldn’t have worried. Toil and Trouble was a little black-painted brick building on the less fashionable end of Pearl Street. It was still closed, but I settled in across the street at a hip little cafe. There were more homemade flavor syrups available than I had time to read before the impatient guy behind the counter started sighing loudly, so I picked lavender, remembering last night. It was good. Really good. Maybe not a dollar’s upcharge worth of good, but just like it had in the bath, the floral aroma soothed me. I looked up at the sky and made a sol
emn vow that I was not going to join an essential oil cult just because they might have had a point.

  I took my time over my coffee, waiting eagerly for time to pass and the store to open. Just staring. Thinking. Wondering. There was a strange sense of deja-vu around the whole scene, even though I knew I’d never been here, done this.

  Just as my musings had begun to wander in the direction of the pastry case, a light snapped on across the street. I hadn’t even noticed a car pull up, but sure enough. The sign on the door window now said open.

  I rushed across the street, coffee in hand, scarf flapping in the wind. I flung open the door to the store. “Magic is real!” I announced to the two identical women behind the counter. They blinked back at me, entirely unfazed. “Well, I’m new. I didn’t know. So I just have a few questions.”

  One of them nodded as I set my coffee down in front of them and fumbled in the pocket of my parka for the list I had scrawled out this morning. The other began dusting a display of animal bones.

  “Okay. So. How? Why? Can crystals be used as two-way mirrors? Can you teach me how to dissolve stuff? What happens if you think maybe you made a magical enemy and you don’t know how? What if he’s really hot, would it be a bad idea or a great one to try seducing him? Why did I zap him when he got too close to me? How come the creek water in Juniper Hollow was supposed to mask me? I woke up without pneumonia from polar-plunging in it, so it’s magic water, right? Oh, hey, those little symbols carved on that skull—what are those guys? I’ve seen them before.”

  I looked up, dimpling like crazy, and found the twin proprietors frozen and staring.

  “I believe it’s your turn with the infant, Sage,” said the duster.

  “All the last one wanted was a pretty necklace, Rosemary,” said the nodder. I couldn’t tell them apart. They were dressed identically, despite being on the far banks of middle age. Creepy, when grownups do that sort of thing. Also impressive, when it involves as many items of jewelry as they sported.

  “I’m almost twenty-three,” I offered. Not an infant.