by Norah Wilson
“Wow, it’s heavy.”
Brooke peeled the seal off the Grand Marnier and popped the cork. “Lead crystal,” she said. “Here—hold your glasses out.”
Both girls obliged, and Brooke poured them each a small measure before pouring the same for herself.
“So, shall we toast being back?” Brooke asked. “Three casters reunited?”
“I’ll drink to that,” Alex said, and lifted her glass.
“Me too,” said Maryanne.
“To us, then.” Brooke raised her glass.
“To us,” they echoed.
They all drank, Maryanne cautiously, gasping at the heat of it. Alex more comfortably.
“Whoa!” Maryanne put her glass down. “I need pie after that.” In short order, she popped the lid off the container and sliced a piece of pie for each of them, serving them up on Christmas printed napkins and plastic forks she’d obviously packed for that purpose.
Maryanne was right—her father did make the best pecan pie ever.
Between bites, they took more sips of the liqueur. More toasts.
To Connie, their sister caster and the first to fly out in shadow form so many years ago, may she rest in peace.
To justice for that bastard C.W. Stanley, meted out by Connie’s own hand. But not without their hands too…
To the glorious freedom of casting out into the Mansbridge night, which they would do again shortly.
And to legends. Brooke smiled the widest on that last one.
When the pie and their drinks were gone, Brooke offered to pour another.
“Not tonight,” Alex declared. “If we’re going to cast, we need to have our wits about us. You know it’s riskier now, with the snow on the ground. Easier for people to see us.”
“You’re right.” Brooke couldn’t argue with that. It would be another hour yet at the very least before the house was asleep and they could safely sneak up to the attic. The pleasant buzz she had going on would have dissipated by then, but she didn’t mind. The act of casting was intoxicating enough. God, the anticipation was killing her. They’d all made a pact not to do it until they were reunited here. Too risky to do it solo, or in unfamiliar surroundings. “So, is everyone as anxious to get out there as I am? Miss it as much as I did over Christmas?”
“God, yes,” Alex said. “It sure would have helped me deal with the bumpy parts.”
“Yeah, me too,” Maryanne said.
“And nobody cheated?” As she asked the question, Brooke watched Maryanne.
“Much as I wanted to, no,” Alex said, but Brooke kept her gaze on Maryanne.
“Me neither,” Maryanne said, but that dark thing stirred in her eyes again, and Brooke knew she was lying. She’d done it! She’d cast out back there in Burlington, in violation of their pact.
Whether by design or by accident, Alex changed the subject, launching into a story about her and her friend Anika going to a psychic fair in Halifax over the holidays. Brooke was caught up in the tale of the psychic claiming to see angels around Anika when Maryanne leapt up off her bed.
“Did you hear that?” she said.
“Hear what?” Alex said, her comment followed by several long beats of silence.
“I thought…I thought I heard someone say my name.”
“I didn’t hear anything. At least no one calling ‘Maryanne’”
Brooke shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything either.”
“Now that’s spooky,” Alex said. “That psychic would probably say it was your angel talking to you.”
Brooke snorted. “Yeah. And my shrink would tell you you’re very suggestible.”
Maryanne blushed, an improvement over the pasty white of a minute ago. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I must be overtired. I didn’t sleep well last night. Too excited about coming back here, I guess.”
“Well, casting out will fix that,” Alex said. “You’ll sleep like a baby tonight.”
Conversation shifted back to the psychic fair Alex had attended, and more specifically, to a really cool Reike treatment she’d had, and the moment passed. But Brooke tucked it away, like she did everything.
Chapter 3
Majestic in the Moonlight
Alex
It was just past two-thirty in the morning.
Alex’s key still worked in the lock, and the attic door still swung open silently in the upstairs hallway. Despite Mrs. Betts’s many security upgrades since the ‘incident’, as she called it, back in November, getting the caretaker John Smith to change the lock on this door hadn’t been one of them. Alex didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. As badly as she wanted to cast out, the attic of Harvell House had been the place of nightmares for her not once, but twice. Once in September and then again in November. But no way would she let that stop her now, no more than she’d let her claustrophobia stop her from boarding the plane back here.
“Want me to go first?” Maryanne whispered.
Alex’s answer was to take the lead as they climbed the attic stairs. Brooke brought up the rear and the latch clicked closed behind her as she shut the door again.
Maryanne was close behind her, vibrating in her eagerness. It was a good thing their key still worked. Otherwise Maryanne might have ripped the door off its hinges to get up here. To get to that stained glass portal where they’d first cast out. Where they had learned that they could.
They could cast from any window now, a fact they’d discovered when Alex was comatose in the hospital after being attacked by C.W. in this very attic. Alex shivered, knowing she might still be trapped in that drifting, endless coma, but for Maryanne conceiving the crazy, desperate thought to try it. Maryanne had pushed Alex’s hospital bed close to the window, taken her limp hand and helped her to tap on the glass, and said the words for her. Alex’s cast had shot right out the hospital window and she’d hovered, looking in at her inert body in the hospital bed. God, that had been so scary, seeing her comatose self lying there, helpless. Frantic, she’d tapped the window and shot back into her body. The impact of her re-entry had jolted her body back to consciousness.
Alex was sure Maryanne had used another window over the holidays, despite their pact to never cast out alone. The girl made a lousy liar.
But this window—the one with the Madonna staring down from the upper part of the glass—was where it had all started for them. This particular window was the reason it had all started. Like it had started for Connie Harvell when she’d cried on this attic floor, and written in her diary about her horrible confinement.
Alex tightened her hand around that same diary in her hoodie pocket as she climbed the final few steps. Of course she’d taken Connie’s diary to Halifax with her over the break and guarded it like a hawk. She hadn’t even packed it in her luggage when she’d flown back, opting instead to shove it in her carry-on. She’d hated having to stow it beneath the seat in front of her on the flight back, but knowing it was within easy reach had made it bearable. So far she hadn’t found a chance to stash the diary back under the floorboards next to her bed, but she’d do that as soon as she could. She’d hide Connie’s copper doll with it.
As they reached the landing, the other girls fanned out on either side of Alex. She heard Maryanne’s gasp and she felt Brooke go still. Not in fear, but in wonder. That same wonder washed over Alex as she stared across the attic at the beauty of the stained glass window. She’d seen it a hundred times, but still it made her breath catch in her chest.
Beautiful in the moonlight, the woman in the colored glass stared back at them. With her baby in her arms, she stood amongst thorns and roses, her feet bare and bleeding. Those bleeding feet always drew Alex’s gaze first. Then she looked up to her eyes. The Madonna’s blue eyes shone as if reaching out toward them. It was more than the visual impact that held Alex transfixed. It was the feeling that emanated from that window. It was as if the Madonna was anxious to see the three of them. Happy to see them back where they belonged. Calling to the girls somehow: Come, ca
sters.
“Candles?” Brooke asked, automatically. Then she answered her own question. “Right. No diary to read.” They wouldn’t need a flashlight either, thanks to the moonlight streaming through the window. Not that they needed even that pale light. They were so familiar with this place, they could find their way around with their eyes closed.
“Yeah, too bad,” Maryanne said. “I wish we still had the diary.”
Alex turned away.
As far as the authorities knew, C.W. had destroyed Connie Harvell’s diary with its incriminating tale of her abuse and death at his hands. And later, after Alex had gotten out of the hospital and Maryanne had given it back to her, Alex had told her two friends that she’d destroyed it herself. The diary was gone forever, she’d said. She’d sworn it, insisting that the story ended with Connie and that the diary was a liability to them now.
They’d been supremely pissed. And Alex couldn’t blame them. After all, that precious book was what had led them to discover that they could cast a piece of themselves out into the night, leaving their problems behind. It had led them to Connie Harvell, that lost soul locked out of her body decades earlier. And it had led them to the basement of Harvell House, where they’d unearthed poor Connie’s remains. That’s where C.W. Stanley, Connie’s tormentor from all those years ago—and Alex’s assailant from mere months ago—had found Maryanne and Brooke, at Connie’s graveside. But before C.W. could silence her caster sisters forever, Connie had cast back into her remains, reanimating them long enough to destroy C.W.
So yeah, they all had a strong attachment to the diary. When Alex had told them she’d destroyed it, Brooke had cursed like a sailor. Maryanne had just looked at Alex long and hard. Though she’d said nothing, Alex knew Maryanne didn’t entirely believe the lie. Maryanne had read all of Connie’s words for herself, while Alex had lain in that coma. And how much of Alex’s own raw words, scrawled on those yellowed pages at the back of the diary, had Maryanne read?
Alex didn’t want to think about that. Even if Maryanne had read every word in that diary—Connie’s and Alex’s—there was no way that she knew the whole of Connie’s tale. There still remained one secret just between Connie and her. Alex had only found the rest herself, late on Christmas Eve.
She’d been up in her bedroom at home in Halifax, lost in thought as the sounds of It’s a Wonderful Life filtered up the stairs. Her parents and Eva loved that hokey old movie and watched it every year. Alex had opted to be alone, sitting on her bed and thinking over the last few months, wiping away angry tears as she read through Connie’s diary once again. And when she’d set the diary down and picked up the doll she’d so carefully packed for the trip, it came apart in her hands.
Alex had freaked. To Connie, that doll had represented her daughter, Lily Michelle, the very real infant who’d been torn from her minutes after her birth in that awful attic. The baby whose tiny skeleton the cops had found buried in the basement, not far from Connie’s unmarked grave.
As she’d worked frantically to put little Lily Michelle back together again, she’d seen something that made her hands go still. There were words scratched on the inside of the doll’s back—a crude script carved by Connie. A warning.
One more thing Maryanne and Brooke didn’t know. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t anything they needed to know, in the sense that not knowing wasn’t putting them in any jeopardy. But they would want to know.
Hell, they didn’t even know she had the doll. After Connie had reunited with her skeletal remains, finding rest at last, Alex had gone out to Connie’s nest and recovered her friend’s copper ‘baby’. At the time, she’d still been grieving for Connie, still struggling with her own emotions, and she couldn’t bring herself to share it. Now, after all this time had passed, she couldn’t tell them. Not without the backlash, anyway. They’d be upset that she’d kept it to herself.
She could deal with the fallout, if it were that simple. But Alex knew that as soon as they saw Lily Michelle, they would know she hadn’t destroyed the diary. That she’d been keeping both those things to herself. Bottom line, Alex just wasn’t ready to share the diary. Not yet. She’d bared her soul on those pages, adding her words to Connie’s. The thought of it made her chest tighten.
Maryanne had doubts. That much was clear. And sometimes Alex wondered about Brooke. Did Brooke truly believe the diary was gone? Or did she just want to believe Alex wouldn’t lie to them after all they’d been through? Or more specifically, that Alex wouldn’t lie to her.
Damn, she hated lying to these two. Freakin’ hated it.
But it wasn’t like they didn’t have their own secrets. Their own need to escape.
“Oh, I am so ready for this!” Maryanne said. The first one to the window, she glanced over her shoulder. “Come on, you slowpokes.”
Slowpokes? Yeah right, like Alex wasn’t itching to cast, to soar free out there.
Still, she bit her lip. Every time she’d cast out last semester, she’d been able to regain a painful piece of her lost memory. Flashes of the attack, clues that eventually told her the truth about her attacker. What if more memories followed her back in again?
They won’t, she told herself. She’d already remembered everything there was to remember about both times she’d been attacked. And she’d cast out several times after getting out of the hospital, with no more memories trickling in. Nada.
Still, worry niggled and nudged. What if there was still a price to pay?
“Geez, a little eager, Maryanne?” Brooke asked.
“Darned right I am! So get your butts over here.”
Alex grinned. This was the girl who wouldn’t have said ‘boo’ when they’d all first met. Now she was commanding their butts into place. She was changing. Casting was changing her. For the better, Alex thought. Casting was changing them all.
They got situated, standing together in the welcoming, soft glow of moonlight shining through the Madonna.
Alex stood at Maryanne’s left; Brooke flanked her other side.
“Ready?” Alex asked.
“Born ready,” Brooke said, laughing. “Let the legend continue.”
Maryanne was silent. Strangely so. She was the hardcore caster—the one least likely of all of them to hesitate. She wasn’t just strangely silent; she was strangely still.
“Did you…hear it this time?” Maryanne asked.
“Hear what?” Alex asked, but when Maryanne turned to meet her eyes, she only shook her head slowly and chewed her bottom lip.
“Okay, well, I’m ready,” Brooke said. “And I’m going.”
“Amen to that!” Alex’s fingertips joined Brooke’s in touching the window.
Then so did Maryanne’s.
But before they started, Maryanne said, “Oh, such a little one…” No one had to ask who it was that Maryanne meant. Nor did any of them have to answer. Alex followed Maryanne’s upward gaze to the child in the mother’s arms.
Funny how differently they all saw the same picture. For Alex, it had been the blood at the Madonna’s thorn-stabbed feet. That was what she’d found herself drawn to most of all when she’d stared into this stained glass those few months ago, not the infant in her arms. The connection to this window went deep for all of them, she guessed. Deep, but different.
Alex touched her fingertips to the window. “I want out,” she said.
On the very next beat, the other girls joined in, tapping the window and chanting the familiar refrain. “I want out. I want out. I want—”
Out.
Just like that, the dark part of her shot out through the window. The night closed around her caster body with a familiar, exhilarating thrill. Yes! She’d been missing this.
Inside the attic, her body slumped back onto the pillows, landing between her two friends like a ragdoll. She was the last to fall, and she felt her left hand land on top of Maryanne’s arm and her right on Brooke’s hip. Way to sprawl, Robbins. She’d move them if she could, but until her cast fused with her body ag
ain—her original, as they called it—that wasn’t happening.
As she looked at her body there on the floor, she was acutely aware of her original gazing wide-eyed at their dense, shadowy forms outside the window. Dual consciousness. Even if she did this a freakin’ million times, she’d never fully get used to that. Both her original and her cast were completely aware of what the other was experiencing. And a good thing that was. If Alex hadn’t been aware of what was happening to her original during that second attack by C.W. Stanley back in November, she couldn’t have made it back in time to thwart the attempted sexual—
“Wahoo! We’re out!”
Maryanne’s delighted cry dragged Alex from her less-than-happy thoughts. She turned in time to see Brooke and Maryanne high five each other two stories in the air, their shimmering hands smacking together soundlessly.
They laughed, the sound ringing out clear and joyous to Alex’s ears, but fortunately no one else could hear it. Only another caster could hear a caster’s voice. Except, of course, for that primal scream—so terrifying, so…awesome! People could be made to hear that, made to cower from it.
Brooke moved close to the glass to peer in at her body on the floor. “Whoops, I kinda missed my pillow a bit. I’m going to have a bruise on my butt.”
“Quit complaining, Saunders,” Alex said. None of them had landed gracefully, but at least she and Maryanne had managed to fall more squarely on the cushions. “You could have landed on that tattooed hip.”
“Ouch. You’re right.”
“Yeah,” Maryanne said. “Wouldn’t want that dragon tattoo…blurring.”
Brooke laughed again. “First of all, they don’t blur. Second of all…good guess, but it’s not a dragon. I told you, I’ll show you when it’s completely healed.”
They moved quickly now, soaring away from the window and toward the bit of shadow provided by the oak near the river. Alex stared at a particular branch as she approached the tree, a guided missile homing in on its target. She wanted the copper bracelets they’d hung there weeks ago. God, she hoped a storm hadn’t knocked them down. And thank God this tree hadn’t been struck down in that freak December lightning storm that had taken out the big oak in the old cemetery over by the Miller place, just upriver. The whole town was still buzzing about that, mainly because when the tree burned and toppled, its roots actually yanked coffins to the surface when they tore out of the ground. Only in Mansbridge.
