They were standing in what, many years before, must have served as the Halcyon family’s dining room. As it was now, nothing was left to suggest that the room had ever been grand. A stained and moldy mattress lay on the floor. A thick layer of dust and debris covered everything but the broken grand piano in the far corner of the room. Quinn dropped tiredly onto the piano bench and ran his fingers across the out-of-tune keys.
A gust of wind blew in through the broken window. It whipped Savvy’s blue braids back and forth like flags caught in a storm.
“So what’s the plan?” Gage asked. “How do we get out of here?”
“Out?” Quinn gave an empty laugh. “There is no getting out. Trust me, I’ve tried every possible escape route there is out of this hellhole.”
A feeling of dread washed over Nor: the only door that led to the rest of the hotel had been boarded and nailed shut. “What do you mean?” she asked warily.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you think escaping was possible,” Quinn said. “I’m afraid all I’ve done is delayed the inevitable for you. Your mother’s power may be waning, but that hasn’t made her any less dangerous. If we try to escape, she’ll only kill you, and whatever death she has in store for you will be far worse than anything you’ll experience down here.”
A surge of water suddenly gushed up from the cellar. Savvy scrambled onto Gage’s back. Sena Crowe splashed across the room and attempted to kick down the door. But it was no use.
“Your mother has killed just about everyone else. I didn’t think any of us who are left would want to die alone.” Quinn watched the water rise with indifference. “You know, at first I thought we’d die in a fiery blaze; instead we’ll drown. I find that comforting. I’ve never much liked fire.”
The water was rising so fast Nor couldn’t keep her balance. She toppled over and landed with a splash, banging the side of her hip painfully against the floor and planting her hand on a shard of broken glass. Outside, the wind screamed and howled. The sky had turned a hopeless black.
“She won’t kill me, but at least now she won’t be able to kill you because of me.” He hesitated, then said, “Like she killed my mother and so many people before her.”
Nor looked at Savvy, who was trying to stay on Gage’s shoulders as the icy water inched higher. Sena Crowe was turning his shoulder black and blue by throwing himself against the door again and again.
“There’s no point,” Quinn called. “Even if you do escape, Fern will kill anyone left here if she thinks it might bring back her power. She will make it rain fire. She will make the earth split open and swallow us whole.”
Nor pulled the shard of glass from her palm. She stood and walked quickly through the water. It was painfully cold. The closer it got to her chest, the harder it got to breathe. Where is it all coming from?
She nudged Sena Crowe away from the door. After wedging her fingers behind one of the boards nailed across it, she pulled until she felt the wood give and crack. Splinters pierced the soft flesh under her nails. One by one, she ripped the boards away from the door and tossed them into the water while the others watched, dumbstruck.
“Go!” she sputtered. Gage hoisted Savvy higher onto his back. The water circled them like a beast. Though there wasn’t a hint of weariness in his face, Nor could see that it took everything Gage had to keep himself and Savvy from being swept away. With Sena Crowe’s help, he managed to get through the doorway. Sena Crowe stepped through after them.
“Nor!” Gage yelled. “Come on!”
The water had risen to her collarbone. If it rose any higher, she wouldn’t be able to keep her feet on the floor. Some water splashed into her mouth, and it had a metallic taste, like limestone or granite. Or blood.
Nor looked back at the piano, where her father had been sitting. He was gone. She swam to the piano and groped around under the water until she found her father’s wrist and pulled. “Don’t do this!” she cried when he surfaced.
“Nor, please,” he sputtered. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? A few weeks ago, your mother’s power started to weaken, and I woke up and found years of my life suddenly gone, vanished without a trace or a memory. I found loved ones buried, dreams long dead. Let me go. Please.”
Nor tried to imagine what it was like to drown. Perhaps it was peaceful, as if all you had to do was surrender and let death wash over you, like watercolor paint saturating a piece of paper.
Or maybe it was something else entirely. Perhaps a death by drowning was eerily quiet because the water had stolen your voice. To scream, you had to be able to breathe. Under that serene facade was violence. Under that mask of apathy was terror.
“Let me be free of this hell,” he begged.
Nor looked into his pleading eyes. With quiet irony, she noted that out of all the things Fern had told her about her father, she’d never mentioned that Nor had his eyes. “Not like this,” she said.
Mara, the third Blackburn daughter, wasn’t spoken of very often. This was most likely because her Burden had terrified the fellow islanders.
Mara’s mental capacity and disposition had never evolved beyond those of a child, a sweet child who could hold death in her hands as gently as a flower. And like a bouquet, she’d gifted death to ailing neighbors and eased them peacefully into the afterlife. For those in agony, Mara’s Burden was truly a blessing, a gift of mercy. For the mourners left behind, it was more difficult to view it that way. Their lack of appreciation and understanding became clear when sweet Mara was found floating facedown in the waters of Celestial Lake.
No record existed of exactly how this wide-eyed Angel of Death had aided her neighbors’ passings, and Mara wasn’t known to be a particularly communicative or intelligible young woman.
As Nor leaned over Quinn Sweeney, however, she instinctively knew exactly what Mara had done. Tenderly, Nor leaned over her father as if to kiss him farewell and filled her lungs with his last breath, like sipping air through a straw. Then she let him go, and the water slowly pulled him under. The serenity in Quinn Sweeney’s handsome face told Nor with utter clarity that at least in death, her father had finally found some peace.
Nor waded through the doorway and down a hallway. At the end of the hall, she climbed a flight of stairs that was still just beyond the water’s icy reach. It wouldn’t be long, though, before it reached up here, too. Suddenly Nor couldn’t stop shaking. What had happened to the other people in the hotel? Had her mother really killed all of them? Or had they, like her father, simply given up first?
“Well, that sucked,” Savvy said when Nor caught up with them. She shivered and pushed strands of wet blue hair off of her face. Sena Crowe helped her to her feet.
Gage pointed out a window. Nor could see Charlie’s skiff rocking up and down on the restless waves, a tiny beacon of hope. “Thanks to you,” Gage said, “we might actually be able to get out of here.” Instead of making Nor feel better, though, it made her feel worse. Every step they took to reach that boat would be a fight. And even then, there was no guarantee they’d make it back to Anathema in the storm. All thanks to me.
The sky was so dark it was as if someone had extinguished the stars, had wrapped the moon in a shroud and buried it deep underground. The rain pounded against the window.
“You should go,” Nor said to the other three. “Before the storm gets any worse.”
“What about you?” Savvy protested.
“Someone needs to stop my mother.”
“Nor . . .” Gage said quietly, shaking his head. He looked at her and that was when Nor realized that, until now, she’d never seen him afraid. She put her arms around him. He froze, and then he slid his hands around her waist and pulled her closer to him.
“I want to say you’ll be okay,” he said quietly, “but I’m not sure if that’s true.”
“I’m not, either,” she whispered back. His hands moved up into her wet hair, and for a mere fraction of a second, Nor pressed her lips against his.
“I�
�ll go with you,” he murmured.
“No.” She pulled away and saw she’d left a smear of her blood on his neck. “Get the others home. Keep them safe.”
Nor squeezed her fingers together into a fist, and blood bubbled up through the gash in her palm. There wasn’t time to stay and argue. There wasn’t time for her to do anything now but to keep going up — to the roof where she was certain to find her mother pouring her wrath down on the rest of the world like the blood from so many wounds.
But that was the thing: Nor had stopped being afraid of blood a long time ago.
Nor pounded up the stairs to the hotel’s roof. She reached the door and pushed her way into the gale. The storm nearly knocked her back inside.
Fern had her back turned. A black veil was wrapped around her head. “Did you think you had beaten me?” she called to Nor. “Did you think you’d be lucky enough to defeat me?” She turned then. The black veil whipped in the wind like a wild animal. She finally looked like the harbinger of death and destruction that she was. Another roof. Another night of darkness and blood, of pain and anguish, like the one Nor remembered as a neglected little girl.
“Tell me, daughter,” Fern asked darkly, “do I seem defeated to you?”
She lurched at Nor and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Look at me!” Fern screamed. “Even the almighty Rona Blackburn would bow before me. She would tremble at my feet! I can bring the dead to life. I summon the shadows, and the shadows come! I am Hecate, Goddess of Storms, Lady of the Underworld, Enemy of Mankind. I am doom and death, misery and blame! I am the thing even the darkness fears!”
Fern’s tattoos crept across her skin like barbed wire or broken capillaries. Blood seeped from wounds crisscrossing her skin and trickled onto the wet roof. Her head and neck were squeezed into an unnatural shape by tight black vines.
“Then what does that make me?” Nor asked.
“You?” Fern cackled. “You are nothing! You are no one!”
Blood dripped from Nor’s injured hand. It mingled with her mother’s blood on the wet roof until it was just one dark red stream.
“But you said it yourself. I’m your daughter,” Nor said, raising her voice above the howling winds. The storm raged with renewed fury. Fern took a step back. She screeched when the wind tore a ribbon of skin from her cheek. Then another from her arm.
“I am Hecate,” Fern wheezed, “Goddess of Storms.” Her voice whistled through the holes in her face.
“That may be true,” Nor cried. “You may be doom and death, misery and blame, but none of those things frighten me. I know what misery is. I know what blame is. There is no pain that you can cause that I haven’t already felt.”
Another strip of skin was ripped from Fern’s cheek and carried off by the wind. She shrieked in confusion.
Nor started to laugh. “Don’t you understand?” she screamed. “Death and I are now friends! And you can’t hurt me or anyone else ever again. I won’t let you.”
The sky above them had become a black hole, an insatiable beast with its mouth open wide in a cry of terrible torment. Fern fell to her knees as her skin cracked and flaked like ancient porcelain. “I am the thing that the darkness fears!” she croaked before her jaw unhinged and fell away. Nor closed her eyes, preparing for the black sky to swallow her and her mother whole.
But then a memory pierced the darkness. Warm yellow light flowed through Nor’s palms as she remembered another glow, growing larger and larger until she recognized it as the lit bowl of a pipe: the pipe of her grandmother, who had spent all that time quietly waiting for her to return home. Nor pictured Apothia’s smile and recalled Savvy’s laugh. She remembered the feel of Reed’s hands on her skin, Bijou’s happy dreams, and the fact that alpacas hummed when they were content. She pictured Gage, battling those storming seas below, and her scars, evidence of all the times she’d battled death before and won. Nor held out her brilliant shining hands, and their light vanquished the shadows and black holes that surrounded them.
The rains stopped, the clouds broke, and the moon reappeared in a night sky no longer beastly with rage. The winds ceased howling. The ocean calmed.
“You’re wrong, Mother,” Nor said quietly. “I am the thing the darkness fears.”
And the rest of Fern Blackburn, unfurled like a spool of frayed ribbon, was swept up by the wind and hurled into the sky.
When Nor arrived back on Anathema Island, she wasn’t sure if whole days had gone by or merely hours. Sunlight sparkled off the water, and the ocean lapped softly against the shore. Nor tied up the dinghy, grateful the old boat had managed to stay afloat.
The island’s plant life seemed to be recovering. New buds and leaves bloomed where once there had been only thorns. For Nor, however, it wouldn’t be that easy. No amount of soaking her clothes would ever completely lift away the stains of her mother’s blood, her own blood, the blood of her friends. Some things could not — would not — be washed away.
Nor made her way down Meandering Lane and stopped at the island’s small cemetery. Kikimora, the cat, was sitting outside the black iron fence. She stared at Nor and then padded through the open gate. Nor followed.
Most of the graves were old, their epitaphs worn smooth with age. Nor walked to Rona’s headstone. Though there had always been much speculation surrounding Rona’s death, the truth was that she had died of natural causes. According to the diary she kept, Rona never cast another spell after her daughter, Hester, was born. Perhaps out of guilt, or perhaps she’d simply had enough of the magic in her blood. Nor wondered if peace was something that she, burdened with so many “gifts,” could one day find as well.
Nor found a small piece of cedar plank on the ground. Using her fingernail, she roughly carved Madge’s name into the soft wood. After examining her work, she propped it up against Mara’s headstone and followed Kikimora back out onto Meandering Lane.
That evening Nor stood on the Tower’s front porch. Kikimora sat beside her watching the silvery flicker of fish swimming in a pond the storm had left in the front yard. The limbs of the apple trees hung upside down, like broken fingers; the pebbled walk that had once shone like a stream of molten lava was scattered across the lawn.
Nor made a mental note to rescue the fish trapped in the pond and realized that the beehive, the one that had sat along the side of the yard since the days of Rona Blackburn, was oddly quiet. Nor suspected the bees inside had drowned.
“Everyone’s looking for you,” Reed said, coming up behind her on the porch. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her against him.
A few moments before, Pike — his arm around Charlie, whose leg had been mended — and a newly healed Sena Crowe had proposed a toast in Nor’s honor. They had all somberly held up their plastic cups of frothy beer or tumblers of scotch, and Nor’s face had burned with embarrassment. It felt wrong getting credit for doing something she wasn’t sure she should have been able to do. Plus, there was no vanquished beast, no conquered villain to display.
Nor stared down at the blackbird tattoo etched onto Reed’s arm. She thought of the blood that had dripped from Gage’s ears and the puckered pink scar that would forever mar Pike’s face because she hadn’t been able to heal him. She thought of the inexplicable light that had poured from her hands, and the way her mother had unraveled before her eyes.
Above them, two blackbirds fought over a strand of algae tangled in the branches of an apple tree. “I should get Grayson home,” Reed said after a moment. He leaned down to kiss her. She raised her lips to his and wondered if he knew, like she did, that it was likely for the last time. She had to break up with him. Like it or not, whatever path she was on would continue to be a dangerous one. He deserved to be protected from her, from what might yet come.
Nor watched him leave, prepared to bite her tongue hard to keep from crying out. But though it felt like her heart had been punctured, she was startled to find she no longer felt the impulse to spill her own blood or to taste it. Even the scars on her
wrists, ankles, and arms were silent.
This pain seemed content to remain where it belonged.
Inside, Nor found an idyllic scene, so contrary to the mess still left outside. In the parlor, Dauphine and Everly shared the last few pulls from the bottle of scotch. Wintersweet sat next to the fire crackling in the hearth, quietly combing burrs out of Burn’s thick pelt. Gage and Reuben sat on one of the tufted Victorian couches with their muddy boots propped up on the coffee table.
“You missed some when you washed up,” Apothia said, reaching over to wipe a bit of blood from Nor’s cheek with the sleeve of her sweater. She motioned upstairs. “Your grandmother wants to have a look at you.”
Nor climbed up to the Tower’s second floor. Along the walls hung portraits of the Blackburn daughters. Nor felt their scrutiny and imagined their gazes alternating between pride, sympathy, and disappointment.
As revealing as portraits could be, there was also much they could conceal. The color of Greta’s wild red hair was lost in her black-and-white photo. In a Kodachrome snapshot, Fern looked like a nice girl without a care in the world. Nor wondered what her own portrait might hide from the innocent viewer.
She stopped into the bathroom and splashed cool water on her face. She looked in the mirror. Her hair was tangled and singed. She tried to pull her fingers through the knots, but strands broke off and fell to the floor like dried straw.
She gathered her hair — what was left of it — against the nape of her neck and began rifling through drawers until she found what she was looking for.
“Are you sure you want to chop it off, just like that?” Gage was standing in the bathroom doorway.
“Yes, I am,” Nor said defiantly, then reached back and hacked through the thick ponytail with the scissors. Triumphantly, she held it up, then dropped it into the sink. She turned her head and examined her handiwork. The left side seemed to be a bit shorter than the right, but it would have to do for now. At least Judd couldn’t accuse her of hiding behind her hair anymore.
The Price Guide to the Occult Page 18
