The Catalain Book of Secrets

by Jessica Lourey

  Ren had fixed the grandfather clock ahead of Katrine but had made a point of saying goodbye before he left, his gorgeous smile as open as a door. Thinking about a person like him in the world made her happy. If she was honest with herself, she also felt disoriented, as if she’d developed the bends from descending into her past life too quickly. Still, discombobulation was more fun than self-pity, and she rode the sensation all the way to Jasmine’s house.

  She felt awful about how she’d treated Tara at the movie theater the other night. Looking back, she couldn’t remember what had made her so upset. But even more than apologizing to Tara, she had to connect with her sister, despite whatever was making Jasmine push her away. She craved the bond like oxygen.

  As children, no one had been closer than the two of them. When they hit the double digits—Katrine couldn’t pinpoint the exact age—they’d grown apart a bit, but still been each other’s closest friends. She understood she’d taken that for granted when she moved away, and she’d gotten self-involved and lazy in maintaining their relationship. She wanted to fix that, starting now.

  She’d waited after Ursula’s party for Jasmine to come to her, for her to smooth everything over the way she’d done when they were children, but Jasmine hadn’t. And so, Katrine was going to her.

  Her stomach clutched and tumbled as she pulled into her sister’s driveway, same as it had when they’d driven in the day before. There was something horrible about the normalcy of the little box house, with its brown grass, dingy paint, and plastic flowers in the window boxes. Everything about it said “I’ve given up,” and it made her sad for the person her sister used to be. What had happened to them?

  Katrine punched down those thoughts and turned off the car. She should have called first, but Tara was homeschooled and Jasmine didn’t have a life, so where else would they be? She rang the doorbell. It echoed inside, and then the house became as quiet as a grave. The waiting silence was followed by a puppy rumble of footsteps tumbling down stairs.

  The front door was yanked open. Tara stood in the entryway, a cheap oak closet door on one side of her, a key rack on the other, and a carpeted living room decorated with matchy, scratchy Midwestern furniture in graying pastels behind her. Her face lit up at the sight of her aunt, and that made Katrine feel even worse.

  “Hey,” Katrine said, trying on a tentative smile, “I wanted to stop by and say I’m sorry for how crazy I acted at the theater the other night.”

  Tara grinned like she’d just been handed a present wrapped in blue paper. “It’s okay. Helena and Xenia taught me how to PINC.”

  Katrine wrinkled her nose. The term sounded familiar. Then she remembered where she’d first heard it. Back when Katrine was in high school, Helena had caught the tail end of a documentary on orphaned red pandas. She’d decided on the spot to sponsor all seven that the San Diego zoo had adopted, sending the zoo regular checks and even flying out to visit the pandas two different times. Katrine had asked Xenia if Helena was crazy, and Xenia told her about PINCing. Katrine laughed at the memory, and then at the thought of being on the receiving end of her first Catalain PINC. She was sure she’d earned it.

  “I brought this for you,” Katrine said, handing her niece a plastic bag containing clear lip gloss and mascara the same brown shade as Tara’s long lashes. Katrine had picked up both from the Apothecary on her way to the bead shop. She’d also brought along a book she’d brought from Europe, a guide containing color photos of the best restaurants, museums, and nightclubs in London. She’d topped the bag off with a peach-colored silk camisole that she’d never worn but had loved too much to leave behind. “You might want to hide it. Is your mom home?”

  Tara accepted the bag and peeked in, her large eyes growing wider. “Yeah!”

  “She’s probably busy, and I—”

  Jasmine appeared at Tara’s side, her eyebrows arched. For the briefest moment, Katrine thought she saw happy surprise in Jasmine’s expression, but it might have been the lighting. In any case, it had been fleeting. Tara closed the bag and hid it on her opposite side, but Jasmine was too focused on her sister to notice.

  “We’re just sitting down to eat,” Jasmine said. “Why don’t you come join us?”

  Katrine followed without complaint. The interior of the house was as bad as the outside. It felt empty and repetitive, like a sitcom stage set between takes—plain furniture, knick knack shelves, everything done in soft colors. The dining room was painted beige, and the table at the center lacked any decoration save for the salt and pepper shakers shaped like the front (salt) and back (pepper) of a pig.

  “It’s lasagna,” Jasmine said.

  “Great! Is Dean here?”

  Did Jasmine’s face stiffen? “He’s on the road.”

  Katrine felt rather than heard the pain in her sister’s voice. Was that why Jasmine was so distant, because she was having problems with her marriage? They had always kept in contact through letters and occasional phone calls, and Jasmine had never let on that there was trouble. Wait—when was the last time Katrine had called her sister?

  Katrine took a seat at the dinner table across from Tara. “Did you two have a nice date night?” she asked.

  “We did.” Jasmine’s lips were tight. “I cooked, and then we went out and saw the town orchestra play at the city park. It was fun. You enjoyed the movie?”

  Katrine glanced at Tara. The girl must not have mentioned Katrine’s meltdown. Her heart warmed to her niece even more. “It was fine.” She held out her plate for a square of lasagna and pointed at a pile of green and blue fuzziness, about the size of a loaf of bread, at a side table. “What’s that?”

  “Mom and I are learning to make felt,” Tara said. “Those are supposed to be slippers.” She hadn’t taken her eyes off of her aunt.

  Katrine’s lip quirked. “They look partially digested.”

  Tara laughed, and then swallowed the noise as she glanced nervously at her mom. Jasmine and Katrine stuttered through small talk about the weather and Katrine’s new job at the Gazette as Katrine choked down her meal, moving bits around so it’d look like she’d eaten more than she had. It wasn’t that it was bad. The gummy plainness of it, though, when compared to the majesty of the feasts Jasmine used to create, was hard to swallow.

  “Dean on the road a lot?” Katrine asked.

  “Six days a week,” Jasmine said. “Sometimes more.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Yes,” Tara said.

  Katrine nodded. She cleared her throat and directed her attention back to Jasmine, reaching out again for a connection. “I visited Ursula.”

  “Aren’t you living there?” Jasmine asked.

  “You know what I mean. She’s always out in her shop, just like back in the day. Taking care of the whole town, unless they happen to live under her roof. I should be grateful. The last thing I want right now is to talk. I already feel like I’m going crazy.”

  Katrine was washed with a wave of dizziness. It was the speed required to navigate between the closeness she used to share with her sister and the reality of the distance between them now. It hurt.

  Jasmine only shrugged.

  Katrine wondered if they’d ever be on the same side of the river again. She studied her sister, worried by this new version of her, this angry, deflated shadow of her sister’s previous self. How long had she been like this, and Katrine oblivious to it? Jasmine’s best features were her liquid eyes, and even these looked different. Katrine had teased her growing up that they were cow eyes, they were so big. It was a lighthearted joking, though. They had been everything to each other. Ursula had been working. The aunts were around and had plenty of love to offer, but everyone was tertiary in their universe.

  Katrine knew that she had a reputation as being popular in high school, but the truth was she and Jasmine had both been teased for being Catalain witches. Heather had led the worst of it, but they didn’t fit in well with any group. Katrine’s job at the theater had bought her a handful o
f friends, and her looks garnered dates and a nomination for whatever school pageant was happening, but at the end of the day, the two of them had only each other.

  They’d been best friends, protectors, united. They’d promised each other they’d always be that, and Katrine had assumed that bond was unbreakable, even after she had fallen in love and gone off to college. She’d figured Jasmine would break up with her high school sweetheart and see the world, too. She hadn’t. She’d stayed in suffocating Faith Falls, a town Katrine couldn’t bear the thought of returning to. Katrine grew ashamed, realizing she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a meaningful conversation with her sister.

  It was time to fix this. Katrine glanced at Tara. “Will you clear the table, honey?”

  “Sure.” Tara nodded and disappeared into the kitchen with a stack of plates covered in half-eaten lasagna.

  Katrine glanced at Jasmine and Jasmine stared at the table. “What’s up, Jazzy? Why are you so distant? I feel like I don’t even know you. I know I’ve been gone for a while, but I’m back, and it was you who called me home. Let’s make up for lost time.”

  Jasmine didn’t respond. Katrine wished for river agates but lacking those, decided to coax her with a story to pull her out of the sad temper, just as she’d done when they were children. “Remember when I came down with the chicken pox in eighth grade?”

  Jasmine patted her mouth with her napkin, still not making eye contact. “It was terrible.”

  Katrine nodded in agreement, pulling out details in the hopes of finding where the sister she remembered had gone. “I was covered in the bumps, and they were all full of pus. Then they blistered and scabbed over and itched so bad I wanted to cut off my skin. You took care of me, cooking garlic chicken soup for me, dabbing me with calamine lotion, telling me I’d be pretty again. I thought it’d last forever, but then I woke up one morning in a bed of scabs that I had sloughed like snowflakes.”

  Jasmine smiled, but it was a smile that hurt to look at.

  Katrine felt the pain emanating from her sister, so sinister and complete that she found it difficult to breathe. She indicated the house, and the felt slippers, and the congealed pan of lasagna. She couldn’t take it any longer, and put her hand over Jasmine’s, their first physical contact since Katrine had left. “What’s happened to you? What’s happened to us?”

  When their hands touched, she caught just a lick of the memory that Jasmine was trying to bury, had been trying to bury since she was ten, now with the help of those bitter smooth capsules. And that was the price Jasmine was willing to pay ten times over so she didn’t have to remember the burning soup, and the snakes, and the man, and his words like knives (Every time the snakes rise, I’ll be here to take the power away from every one of you goddamned witches. You will never have a better man than me, not one of you Catalain women down the line. Not one good man).

  Katrine was falling into the horror of the memory, grabbing flesh, hoping not to sink too deeply, her stomach in her chest, when Jasmine slammed the door on her thoughts with such force that Katrine’s chair almost tipped over. She had to pull her hand from her sister’s to catch her balance. Her breath burned in her lungs.

  “What was that?” Katrine’s voice was hoarse, a razor whisper.

  Jasmine appeared startled before hooding her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That memory!” Katrine couldn’t catch her breath. “What happened? And why haven’t you let me see it before?” Everything that had been in Katrine’s head before—Adam, flirting, Faith Falls, apologies—left to make room for the horror of the snakes, but the scrap of thought kept slipping from her vision.

  Jasmine blinked rapidly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  A horrible thought, almost darker than the slip of memory she’d witnessed in her sister, entered her mind. The lasagna pushed back against her throat, a bloody, gluey, meaty mess. She gagged against it. “We used to know everything about each other, Jasmine. Everything. Why don’t I have this memory of yours? You looked young. That means we were still living at home. Together.”

  Tears slid down Jasmine’s face, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

  “You took it away.” The reality fell on Katrine like gravedigger’s dirt. “You fed me something that took away my memory of someone hurting you, and then you pushed me away, halfway across the world. Away from my family. Away from you.” Her voice was a whisper. “How old were we?”

  Jasmine shook her head, her hair falling in her face.

  Katrine fought so hard for the vision that sweat broke out across her temple. Too-serious Jasmine, who’d entered the world ready to sacrifice for others, who loved her sister more than she loved herself, had been ten, Katrine eight. But then the memory wriggled loose again. “What happened?”

  Jasmine wiped at her tears, her hands vibrating like hummingbird wings. Her voice sounded high and unnatural. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The blatant lie, the thought of Jasmine cooking food designed to banish her from her hometown, Jasmine’s unwillingness to face the horrible memory, share it with her sister, free herself from it, all of it pushed against Katrine’s throat. “Someone attacked you, didn’t they? And you cooked your magic so none of us would know what had happened to you, and you…” Katrine’s voice rose. “You made me eat something that drove me away, so I’d never know.”

  “No,” Jasmine mumbled. Her face was swimming in tears so thick she appeared to be underwater. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. You can’t understand.”

  “No, I don’t, Jasmine, because you didn’t tell me.” Katrine continued, well past the point of hearing. “I missed your wedding, and my niece being born, and my family because of you.”

  Jasmine paled, her eyes suddenly so dark that she her face looked like a skull. “You could break it when you wanted to,” she whispered. “You could have come back, if you wanted to see us bad enough because look. Here you are.”

  Something deep and elemental rumbled underfoot. It felt like the shifting of a giant, hibernating animal. Katrine ignored it, her words flying like darts. “I’m only here because you called me home. And now you’re jerking me around.”

  All the pain Jasmine had had to face alone, all the years that Katrine had lost with her family, it was too much. She scrambled toward the bathroom, but she didn’t make it. She threw up the red lasagna all over Jasmine’s plain gray carpeting.

  Jasmine rushed to her side, trying to hold her sister and stay apart from her all at the same time. “I’m sorry. I thought it was the best thing.”

  Katrine wiped her mouth. “You were wrong.”

  She couldn’t stay in this box of a house even a moment longer. She left her sister, again, but this time without the push of Jasmine’s magic. She felt more alone than she had her entire life. What meal was it that her sister had cooked for her to make her forget, all these years? It must have been quite a feast. She could almost taste the roasting caramel pork, crusty, chewy sourdough, spiced green beans, cucumber cups filled with a delicate salad of watercress and mint. The shrapnel of the reclaimed memory left ash in her mouth, and she fought to keep her remaining bile down.

  Still, she thought back, desperate, trying to hang onto the slipperiness of the memory buried under all the power of Jasmine’s cooking magic. It was a terrible secret Jasmine had hidden from them all, an act so horrible that Jasmine had pushed her only confidant away. Surely Jasmine had done it to protect her sister, out of habit, without even knowing what she was doing. But she should have known. She should have been brave enough to tell Katrine, and to let her stay and help.

  Panic was threatening Katrine from the edges. She tried to outrun it in her car and found herself outside a familiar building, about to ask out a person she’d never thought she’d go to willingly.

  The Catalain Book of Secrets: Protection Spell

  Use this spell if someone in your life is wishing you harm, trying to in
jure you, or introducing dark energy into your life. First, step inside a circle. You can create this circle with anything handy: towels, string, scarves, salt, etc. Once inside, envision white light surrounding you.

  Next, picture the person meaning harm as being trapped inside a clear, soapy bubble. Hold this image in your head and chant the following three times:

  Any bad you do will return thrice to you.

  All words of hate become your own fate.

  Likewise, all good you do will reflect back true.

  Any kindness you create will heal this strait.

  Chapter 22

  Ursula

  “Ursula, this is Leslie. Leslie, Ursula.”

  Ursula held out her hand to the latest of Xenia’s lovers. Most of them hailed from the surrounding towns, as Xenia claimed that all the women in the Faith Falls’ pool were too uptight. Leslie looked anything but. She was twenty-five if she was a day, with caramel-colored skin and eyes like toasted almonds.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Ursula said.

  “And you.” Leslie had a slight Mexican accent.

  “We’re heading to Fargo to dance,” Xenia said, tossing Ursula a wink. “And we have a hotel room, so don’t wait up.”

  “Have fun.” As Ursula watched them walk out the door, she realized she didn’t want to be alone tonight. She made her way to Helena’s room, stopping on the other side. Her hand was poised to knock when she heard the singing. It was a light tune, happy. Helena was reaching a crescendo when the doorbell rang.

  “I got it,” Ursula said loud enough for Helena to hear. She made her way back down the stairs and was surprised to discover Artemis on the other side. “Hello?”