Always a Witch

by Carolyn Maccullough

  "If you don't mind," Cera begins. "I'd like a word with Tamsin. Alone."

  Gabriel looks at me. I shrug, so he pulls himself from the chair and he and Isobel move toward the door, shutting it softly behind them.

  I turn my head and stare out the small diamond-paned window. The sky is a brilliant clear pink in the east, and the last of the stars are fading. All traces of the storm clouds seem to have blown themselves out.

  The chair creaks softly as Cera settles her weight into it. I turn my head against the pillow, inhaling the scent of lavender and pine and something else I can't identify. "That was a brave thing you did, Tamsin," she says quietly, her hands clasped together in her lap. "A very brave thing."

  I shrug again, but fresh tears begin leaking from the corner of my eyes.

  "A thing that no one else in our family would ever think to do. You willingly gave up your Talent to save us all. I wouldn't have done it. Isobel wouldn't have—"

  "You couldn't," I whisper. "It wasn't in the nature of your Talent. Mine was always ... different. My grandmother told me that it was my choice to allow spells or other people's Talents to work on me. So it's not that I—"

  But Cera holds up her hand. "No. You made a choice that no one else would have been brave enough to make. Your name will be remembered."

  At this I sit up a little farther. "I don't want it to."

  Cera frowns at me. "And why not?"

  "Because," I say, scrubbing the backs of my hands against my eyes. "I don't want people's pity."

  "Pity? I hardly—"

  "I don't want people to whisper about me any more than they already do, already did before I ... before I knew that I had a Talent. I can handle not having a Talent. I just don't want people to know that I used to." I clench my hands around the covers. It occurs to me that there's one other person who might be feeling something of what I'm feeling.

  "I'd like to see Jessica Knight."

  Cera hesitates.

  "She's alive, right?" I say, suddenly alarmed.

  "Of course," Cera says. "She's in the next room. And I think she'd like to see you, too."

  I rustle back the bedcovers and place my feet on the floor, feeling the cool wood beneath my toes. I am surprisingly steady on my feet and shake my head at Cera's offer of her arm. As I follow her to the door, my mind churns with the last images of Jessica Knight and what she must be thinking now.

  We pass into the narrow, empty hallway and Cera leads me to the door next to mine. "Is she—"

  But Cera gives me a little push, and so I knock on the door. After Jessica's "Come in," I turn the knob and enter the room. It's small and narrow, similar in length and proportion to mine. As to be expected, Jessica is not lying in bed. Instead, she is fully dressed in clothes that either Cera or Isobel must have given her, standing with her back to the door, staring out the window. At the sound of my slow footsteps, she turns and opens her mouth, then seems to choke on whatever it was she was going to say. She takes a few steps forward, her face pale in the lamplight, her hair hanging loosely down her back.

  "Are you in pain?" I ask her, feeling that this is probably a stupid question. What else would she be in? She just lost her Talent forever. Like me.

  Jessica touches the tips of her fingers to her heart. She shakes her head. "No. You took care of that. Are you?"

  "No." Then I echo, "You took care of that."

  She regards me for a moment without speaking. "Why did you do it, Tamsin?"

  And even though I know she knows my real name now, it's still something of a shock to hear her say it. "Which part?"

  She flushes a dull red. "Why did you save me?"

  I look at the lamp until my eyes ache. "Because you didn't seem like the rest of your family."

  When I look back, small orbs of light burst across my vision. "Neither are you," Jessica says slowly. "For once in my life I used my Talent for something ... for something that I wanted to use it for. Not for what my mother or my brother told me to do."

  "Is that why you wouldn't save Livie?" I ask, my throat suddenly dry, afraid of her answer.

  She blinks at me. "I did save Livie. Over and over again. At my brother and my mother's insistence. Only the last time, she ... she looked at me and she begged me to let her die." Jessica draws in a breath. "So, I did." She pauses, touches her throat, and suddenly I realize her fingers are unconsciously seeking her missing cameo pin. The one that's been turned into the new Domani now. But Jessica is still speaking, so I let that thought go. "I'm glad it's gone. I feel ... lighter. I feel free." She is silent for a moment as if waiting for a response, and then when I can't find anything to say, she continues. "I take it you don't feel quite the way I feel."

  I shrug. "What will you do now?"

  Jessica smiles at me, a full real smile. "I intend to live," she says quietly. "I suggest you do the same."

  Jessica, Gabriel, and I stand in silence across the street from the Knights' house, staring at the shattered windowpanes on either side of the front door. Although the street bustles with the usual amount of afternoon traffic, the house seems frozen and still. I have an eerie sense of having been here before. Then it hits me. This is a reverse echo of my grandmother's vision of what could have happened to my family's house in Hedgerow.

  "Are they in there?" Jessica asks finally, glancing at us.

  Gabriel nods. "Every last one of them."

  Then he pauses. "Except for Alistair."

  I draw in a shuddering breath. "What do you mean?"

  "I can't find him at all." He glances down at me. "He's dead, Tamsin. His body's there, but he's not anymore."

  A horse-drawn carriage clips past us, temporarily obscuring my view of the Knights' house. Wrapping my arms around myself, I digest Gabriel's words for a minute. I would have thought this news would come as a relief, but I actually feel numb. "And the rest of the Knights?" I finally ask. "Their Talents?"

  Gabriel nods again. "Also gone. All of it." He touches his hand to his temple and I step closer to him.

  "How can you be sure?" Jessica asks, giving him a curious glance.

  "Because it's the thing that they all desire the most. It's coming out of the house like a tidal wave," he says quietly.

  I turn to her. "You don't need to go in there," I say. "I—"

  "I'm not afraid of them anymore," she says quietly. "They can't hurt me now."

  I arch an eyebrow. "I don't know. La Spider seems pretty handy with a gun."

  Jessica's forehead wrinkles slightly. "La Spider?...Oh." One hand flashes up to her mouth to conceal a smile. "My mother." She nods, considering.

  "William Finnegan will be glad to see you no matter what," I say softly.

  For a long moment, Jessica stares at the broken shell of her family's house. Then she nods, brushes her hands down the skirt of her borrowed dress. "That's true," she says, and her smile breaks free again, lighting her face in a way that makes her almost pretty. She looks at Gabriel and me for a long moment and then says simply, "Goodbye," before turning away and walking down the street.

  I wait until she has turned the corner and disappeared for good before saying, "Can you get us home? Is there a home?"

  He nods.

  "Is it still in Hedgerow?"

  "Afraid so, Tam."

  I sigh. "Couldn't that have at least changed?"

  "Are you sure you don't want to go visit Coney Island while we're here? Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge or something?" Gabriel asks, smiling down at me.

  "You're on borrowed time, Gabriel." Then I stop and consider something. So am I, at this moment. And all at once the pain of losing my Talent floods through me again. Blinking back tears, I say lightly enough, "Besides, has the Brooklyn Bridge even been built yet?"

  Gabriel rolls his eyes. "Your lack of knowledge about the city you live in is embarrassing. It was built in 1883." Then he grins at me. "I studied up on a lot of nineteenth-century New York facts. I had to do something while I was waiting for you to let me find you."


  Sunlight edges across the cobblestones. "Yeah, well. Guess I won't be stopping you from doing that anymore."

  "Tam," Gabriel says, but I shake my head.

  "Forget it. I'm ready."

  He looks like he wants to say more, but he takes my outstretched hands in his and looks inward. I curl my toes in my too-big boots—at last I can wear some other shoes—and turn my face away from the Knight House, up to the sky. I keep my eyes wide open. Who knows if I'll ever see any of this again. Colors swoop in and out of the darkness surrounding me, and I hear my grandmother's voice. Your daughter will be one of the most powerful we have ever seen in this family. She will be a beacon for us all.

  And then we are standing in a familiar driveway staring up at the outlines of my family's house in Hedgerow. Light is blazing from every window and the sound of voices and laughter reaches my ears. Snowflakes drift lazily through the air, the kind that are round and fat and melt so fast.

  "You did it," I say to Gabriel, giving his hands a quick squeeze before letting go.

  "You doubted me?" he answers, one eyebrow arched.

  "Well..."

  Come on, he says.

  But I can't make my feet move. After a second he turns, his arms swinging a little with the motion. "I can't," I whisper. "I'm..." I turn my face skyward, letting the snowflakes land on my cheeks and eyelashes, taking deep breaths of the frost-tinged air. "I'm not me," I finish.

  And then Gabriel is holding me by the shoulders, forcing me to look at him.

  "You're exactly you. No, don't shake your head, listen to me," he says, flexing his fingers on my shoulders. "My Talent doesn't make me who I am. Your Talent didn't make you who you are. You're the same person you've been all along. what you did last night, for your family, no one else would have done. That's you, Tamsin. That's who you are."

  I consider this for a moment. Then, not trusting myself to speak, I nod.

  Gabriel pauses, then continues with, "And I love you. I know that doesn't fix anything you're feeling right now, I know that doesn't help, but—"

  "It doesn't hurt," I interject, pleased that my voice only cracks a little at the end.

  He smiles, cradles my face with his two hands, and kisses me as the snowflakes fall gently all around us.

  At last we pull apart. I take a deep breath and say, "We changed so many things in the past, Gabriel. What if everything's so different now?"

  "Only one way to find out."

  I nod. "I know. Let's go in."

  Hand in hand, we climb the hill of the driveway toward the house.

  Epilogue

  CLOMPING UP THE PORCH, I reach out for the screen door only to have it flung open from the inside. Rowena is standing just inside the doorway, the light shining through her hair. "Finally," she cries gaily, and flings her arms around me.

  "Ooof," I mutter in response, but she doesn't seem to notice. Instead, she pulls both of us indoors into the crowded kitchen. It seems that all my family is packed inside, spilling in and out of rooms. Everyone seems to be talking at once, laughing and shouting, but before I can focus on any one thing, Rowena is babbling away in my ear.

  "Oh, Agatha called. She said she couldn't get you on your cell. She's coming up tomorrow on the ten a.m. train, not the eleven, so we have to remember to get her at the station, and also, you got a letter from Stanford that is very, very thick." She gives my hand a little squeeze. "I think this could be it, Tam. Aren't you excited? You got into Stanford! It's what you always wanted!" She's smiling so genuinely at me that I can't help but frown. Luckily, she doesn't seem to notice as she babbles on. "Oh, and I want you to tell me what you think of—"

  "What?" I manage to say. "Wait a minute. Agatha's coming here? Stanford?"

  My sister gives me a quizzical look. "Yes. She's coming for my wedding. Remember, we invited her last month?" She leads me through the living room, where more of my relatives are clustered.

  "Ah, the city girl is back," Uncle Morris says, popping into the air next to me. I jump a little.

  "Tamsin," Uncle Chester calls from the corner, where he is juggling pieces of a broken plate through the air. My mother looks up from the couch, smiling at me, before narrowing her eyes at Uncle Chester.

  "Okay," I murmur, trying to steady myself against this onslaught of information. "I need a minute here," I mutter to Gabriel. Before anyone can say anything else, I slip out the side door into the backyard.

  Where it was snowing just a few minutes ago, a soft breeze scented with jasmine is now blowing and the air feels practically balmy. In spite of everything, I smile and look toward the greenhouse, where one light shines. Typical of my father to call up spring in the middle of December. I wander past my family's altar, which is bedecked with red and gold leaves and a basket of apples and sweet herbs. The apples are so deeply scarlet that they're almost glowing in the moonlight. And then my feet take me a little farther out into the meadow and I'm drawn to a simple stone marker adorned with a wreath of dried purple flowers. Crouching down, I gently push the wreath aside to read the engraved words: thom greene.

  "They came here in 1899. Isobel and Cera, Philben and Phineaus. A few of us stayed in the city and bought the house on Washington Square that you well know. But those four wanted the peace of the countryside, where they could live unhindered."

  Turning my head, I regard my grandmother, who has come to stand beside me. Her breathing is light and shallow, but the moonlight is kind to her, smoothing out the wrinkles from her face until she almost seems like a young girl again. Like the girl I met in another garden in 1939. Her eyes shine at me. "Well done, Tamsin. No one else could have accomplished it."

  Shrugging, I clamber to my feet. There are a hundred things I could say, but I say the only one. "It's really gone, isn't it?"

  My heart beats painfully in my chest until my grandmother bows her head and says one word. "Yes."

  I draw in one breath, then another as a sudden realization floods through me. At last I understand why my grandmother raised me the way she did. For seventeen years she let me think that I didn't have a Talent so I would understand just how to live now that it's truly gone. I press my hands to my eyes. "But what am I now?" I ask her, my voice a thin thread under the star-filled sky. "I'm not a witch now. And I'm not an ordinary person? Am I?"

  My grandmother is watching me steadily. Slowly she takes my hand. "You are a beacon for us. One of the most powerful."

  "I'm not," I say softly. "Not anymore."

  Smiling, my grandmother presses my hand. "Always, Tamsin. Because of you, we have a future. That's why you will always be a beacon for us." Still holding my hand, she turns toward the house, toward the sound of laughter and music spilling out from the lit windows.

  Looking back at her, I smile, close my eye in her trademark wink, and say, "Ah."