Chapter Three
Morgan was right. Ignoring Winnie wasn’t an option. It wouldn’t help her move on to the next life or banish my lingering jealousy of the difference in our upbringings. Everything had turned out all right, and it was petty of me to be envious of a dead girl, especially one that had thoroughly suffered for the past four years.
We strolled along the sidewalk, heading into town. Yesterday’s storm was gone. The blue sky stretched on for miles as the breeze coaxed brown leaves from the trees. The coven children bounced alongside us, hopping over puddles of rainwater and singing gleeful songs absent of musical prowess. I counted heads. All seven children were my responsibility for the day. Keeping track of them wasn’t usually the problem. The bigger challenge was ensuring that they didn’t use any witchcraft in front of the locals.
One of the kids tripped, sprawling in front of Winnie. She gasped, kneeling down to help the little witch to her feet, but Winnie’s hands passed right through her. The girl, Sandra, shuddered, popped upright like a jack-in-the-box, and sped off to rejoin her friends.
“They can’t see you,” I reminded Winnie when I spotted her dejected expression. “She didn’t mean anything by it. When a ghost touches you, it’s like being doused in ice water.”
She gazed longingly after the kids. “I don’t mind spending time here, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the supposed perks of ghostdom.”
“I know it’s tough,” I agreed. “Neither here, nor there. The worst part is being disconnected from the world. You can see it, but you can’t touch it.”
“Why does it sound like you know from firsthand experience?”
I shuffled through a pile of damp leaves, kicking them up to expose their colorful undersides. “I don’t. I’ve met hundreds of ghosts though. They all tell me the same things.”
“How long does it usually take to pass over?”
“It depends,” I answered. “Sometimes it’s short and sweet. I once met a single mother who died in a car crash, and all she wanted was to check on her kid to make sure he was okay. It only took two hours to track him down, and she disappeared right after.”
“That’s so sad.”
Up ahead, Amelia and Sandra fenced with fallen tree branches resembling sabers. I sent a surreptitious jet of magic to race between them. The makeshift weapons morphed into rubber snakes. The girls groaned then promptly resumed their battle by whacking each other with the new toys.
“Circumstances like that are the worst,” I said to Winnie. “But in my experience, selfish people are the ones who stick around the longest.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They don’t want to die. They care too much about all of the things they never got to have. Once, this old business tycoon haunted me for three months because he wanted to be buried in his Maserati, but his brother took it instead.”
Winnie laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was,” I said. “Some people hang around for the most ridiculous reasons. Others don’t know why they’re here at all.”
“Like me.”
I glanced her way. “We’ll figure it out. I’m well practiced.”
The town hall marked the top of the high street, which bustled with activity. The mortals were out in full swing, taking advantage of the beautiful day.
“Look alive!” I called up to my brood of kids before they charged into town. “Don’t use your craft until we get back to the house.”
The eldest witch, thirteen-year-old Ariana, gave me the thumb’s up. “Don’t worry, Gwen. I got this.”
As Ariana collected the rest of the crew and herded them toward the town square, I returned my attention to Winnie. “Why don’t we start with the cancer? It might have something to do with all of this. Do you mind telling me about it or is it kind of a sore spot?”
A cool wind rustled my hair, but Winnie’s remained untouched. “It’s fine. Basically, my love for the sun caught up with me. I was outside constantly. I taught sunrise yoga classes, and I loved to hike nature trails. My skin always tanned but never burned, so I didn’t put a lot of thought into protection. The sun made me feel alive.”
She took a deep breath and tipped her chin up to the sky. I knew that she couldn’t feel the warmth of the sun without a living body, but the memory remained. I was thankful that ghosts could assume whatever appearance they liked best rather than what they looked like at the time of their death. Winnie wore a summery dress patterned with sunflowers. She had freckles on her cheeks, across her nose, and on her shoulders. Though the air was chilly, she made me feel like it was the height of summer.
“One day, my boyfriend found a mole on my back,” she continued. “I’d had it since I was a kid, but it started to change shape. We caught it early, and I figured that would be the end of it. I started using wards to protect myself from the sun. It wasn’t enough.”
“So what happened?” I asked her. I had never met a witch with cancer before. “Did you go to a mortal doctor?”
“Of course not,” Winnie replied. “My mother and aunt treated me, much to my father’s dismay. I outright refused chemotherapy. It was the one time he ever got upset over the fact that we were witches, but I figured if magic couldn’t fix me, how could science? We used the most intense healing spells out there. It went back and forth for a while. Sometimes, we thought we had finally beat it down, but it kept coming back. When it spread everywhere, no spell in the world could’ve stopped it from killing me.”
We passed the local pharmacy, where I waved to Mrs. Raleigh. It was harder to talk to Winnie now that we were in the thick of things. More than once, I’d made the mistake of holding an audible conversation with a ghost within earshot of a non-witch. Word spread quickly in Yew Hollow, and as a result, I was considered a polite but peculiar girl. To me, that was far more agreeable than being classified as insane. The town excused the Summerses’ oddball behavior on principle, but the occasional whispered comment reminded me of the therapy reports from my youth. I was grateful when we reached the square, where the shadow of the trees protected us from prying eyes and listening ears.
“Wow.” Winnie stopped short, staring up at the large tree in the direct center of the humble park. “Is that a yew tree?”
“It’s the yew tree,” I confirmed. The kids had already climbed the trunk, perching in the branches like weird birds as they picked desiccated streamers out of its needle-like leaves. “Yew Hollow was named for it.”
“I heard yews have all sorts of magical protection properties,” Winnie said, circling the trunk to examine it from all sides.
“They do.”
I ducked beneath the lowest layer of branches, where the tree sheltered me from the view of onlooking mortals. The air was frigid and damp. Trash rained down as the children reverently combed through the needles above. I vanished the debris before it tangled in the grass. No one would notice the subtle green flashes of witchcraft through the thick needles. I grew warm as we worked and rolled up the sleeves of my sweater to my elbows. The long scar on my forearm flared, and the yew tree responded with a quick pulse. The leaves shook, the children shrieked, and Winnie looked around in alarm.
“It’s just me,” I called up to the kids. “Sorry about that.”
As they settled down again, Winnie tracked the jagged blue line on my arm. “That’s ancient magic, isn’t it? You’re connected to the tree.”
“So is the entire coven,” I said, warding off questions. “It’s a long story.”
“What about the other scars?”
I ignored her, ripping streamers from where they were wrapped tightly around the yew’s trunk.
Winnie pressed on. “You were upset earlier, when I asked you about your family. What really happened with your foster parents?”
“Which ones?” I asked in a biting tone. “I went through about thirty different homes.”
“Thirty?” she repeated in disbelief. “Why so many?”
I balled up the streamers in my fist. “Because I was th
e little kid from the Sixth Sense, except way worse. Ghosts followed me everywhere, and I had no idea why. They diagnosed me with schizophrenia when I was five years old, and it went downhill from there.”
“But you weren’t schizophrenic!”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “When every adult tells you that the spirits haunting you are just the voices in your head, you start to believe them. It drove me nuts.”
“When did you start cutting yourself?”
I looked into the tree to make sure the kids weren’t listening in on the conversation before I answered. “When I was thirteen, I was assigned to a particularly nasty set of foster parents. There was an incident. I won’t go into the details, but it ended with the police finding me standing over their unconscious bodies. I was committed to a children’s psychiatric ward.”
“And then?”
“As it turns out, psychiatric wards have more ghost stories than actual patients,” I told her. Memories arose, but I pushed them down. I straightened my shoulders and stood tall. The past was in the past. “That’s when I started cutting. Then I realized if I was going to survive, I needed to get out of there.”
“What did you do?”
“Jumped out of a third-floor window in the middle of the night.” I grinned, recalling the rush of wind through my hair as I hurtled toward the ground. “Didn’t break a single bone. I figured it was dumb luck since I didn’t know what witchcraft was at the time. Looking back, I know I conjured a ward at the last second before I hit the ground. I outran the night guard, jumped clean over a fifteen-foot fence, and got the hell out of there. That was the first time I realized that I wasn’t crazy. Something else was at play.”
Winnie took a deep breath and blew it out. “When did you find out you were a witch?”
“Not until I met Morgan,” I answered. “I was on the streets for a year or so before I got picked up and placed in another foster home. When I was sixteen, I saw a news story about Yew Hollow, ran away, and never looked back. This has been my home every since.”
“So you finally found your place.”
Peals of laughter echoed from above, resonating in the secret space beneath the yew tree. I smiled and counted heads again, just to be sure none of the kids had run off while I wasn’t looking. “I did. Morgan officially adopted me before I turned eighteen. It was the first time the Summers coven ever accepted a witch outside of their bloodline.”
“That must’ve been a big deal,” Winnie said.
“It was. Some of the witches still don’t accept me as one of their own.”
A fat raindrop navigated the needles of the tree and splashed against my cheek. I ducked out from underneath the yew. The blue sky was gone, replaced by a blanket layer of gray clouds.
Winnie turned her hands up and watched the drops fall through her palms. “That’s weird. I wasn’t expecting rain today.”
Neither had I. Something was off. The weather had changed too quickly. In Yew Hollow, that wasn’t always a bad sign, but the wind accompanying this storm had an acrid scent to it. A bolt of lightning scattered across the sky.
I clapped my hands together to get the attention of the kids. “Arianna! Get everyone down here. I don’t need any of you up high when this storm breaks.”
We ended up haphazardly sprinting back to the house through a torrential downpour. This was not one of the storms I cherished. It was scary and violent. Thunder boomed so loudly, I half-expected Zeus to drop out of the sky to smite us all. I toted one kid on my back and dragged another two by each hand. Arianna handled the others, but I could tell that she was stressed too. They were all frightened half to death and soaked from head to toe as I ushered them up the hill. Winnie ran alongside us, looking upset that she couldn’t assist.
“Go, go, go!” I shepherded the kids up the front porch and into the safety of the house. Winnie followed them inside, and I shoved the door shut to drown out the mayhem of the skies. As the kids shivered in the living room, I heard the screen door of the back porch slam. Morgan and Karma appeared, just as drenched as we were. “What’s going on?” I asked them. “I tried to conjure a weather ward, but it wouldn’t work.”
“Neither did ours,” Morgan said.
Karma’s lilac essence bloomed as she conjured hot tea and towels for everyone. A plate of warm cookies appeared on the coffee table as she helped the children dry off and get warm.
I pulled Morgan out of earshot of the kids. “Something’s wrong, Morgan. This storm came out of nowhere, and now you’re telling me it repels wards?”
“I know,” she replied grimly. “It’s not natural, and it stinks of dark magic.”
“I smell it too,” I said. “Who would do this?”
Morgan glared through the windows at the raging storm. “I’m more worried about what’s coming next.”
Lightning struck a telephone pole down the street. It splintered in half and fell over, taking the power line with it. The lights in the house went out, and the kids howled in protest. Karma cast another spell, and purple glowing orbs appeared to illuminate the house.
“Great,” Morgan muttered, watching as the power line sparked. “Let’s go deal with that before the fire department shows up and makes a complete mess of things.”
“This isn’t messy?” Winnie murmured in my ear.
“Stay here,” I told her, forgetting that falling trees or power lines wouldn’t affect her anyway, and followed Morgan out into the insanity.
I leaned steeply into the wind as it buffeted me about, guarding my head with my hands against flying debris. Morgan attempted another weather ward, but her blue craft flickered and died as the rain battered against it. She gave up, focusing instead on the fallen power line. It sparked with live electricity.
“You take that side,” Morgan yelled over the noise, pointing to the far end of the splintered telephone pole.
I jogged over. Morgan was barely visible through the gray sheet of rain, but I saw her witchcraft gleam as she began the spell to repair the power line. I joined in, muttering Latin phrases under my breath to strengthen the enchantment. In this storm, we would need all the help we could get.
My green craft collided with Morgan’s blue. Together, we raised the telephone pole and fixed the splintered pieces together again. I gasped for breath as we planted it firmly in the ground. My energy was already petering off, a sure sign that the supernatural storm was weakening our abilities. Morgan called out to me, but the rain carried her voice away, and my hands trembled as I aimed at the live power line.
A jolt of power ripped through me without my consent. The power line rose into the air, connected to me by a thin electrified line of my own energy. My feet remained rooted to the ground, no matter how much the wind pushed and pulled at me.
“Gwenlyn!”
Morgan’s anguished warning cry was the last thing I heard. The live end of the power line punched me in the chest. At the same time, a bolt of lightning flashed overhead, making contact with the live wire. Thousands of volts surged through me. I convulsed, rocketed away from the power line by the force of the blast, and blacked out before my body hit the ground again.
Witch Myth: Wildfire- The Beginning Page 3
