Gathering Black (Devilborn Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

  Wendy frowned at that. “Have you ever actually tried writing one during a car chase? For starters, you should fill a pen with some of your spell ink and keep it on you at all times.”

  “I could try,” I said. “But I’ve always gone somewhere quiet and isolated to write them. I don’t know if they’d work if I couldn’t concentrate like that. Plus, they usually need some time to do their thing. They don’t just work the second the ink’s dry.”

  “Well, maybe that’s all stuff you could work on,” Wendy said. “And as for expanding your skills beyond stories, Granny’s coming to our house for a cookout on Saturday. Why don’t you come? See what she thinks?”

  I accepted that offer with gratitude. Wendy’s Granny was the most skilled witch I knew. If anyone could guide me in increasing my power, it was her.

  In the meanwhile, I had plenty to keep me busy, although I still found ample time for helpless worry. I sat up late each night writing spells, hoping they could help protect Cooper from afar.

  I heard nothing from him for the first few days, but that didn’t mean anything. We’d agreed to keep communication to a minimum, since we still didn’t know how Talon had found us the last time.

  I did hear from the Bristol Garden Club, in their usual passive-aggressive fashion: Jessica Glass and her friends, glaring at me from a corner table in The Witch’s Brew; Asher, slowing down in his police cruiser as he passed; Elise Minnow, beeping from her minivan.

  But I didn’t see hide nor hair of Marjory Smith herself, and none of them, as far as I knew, came to the hotel. I had too much going on to reflect much on their little performance with the chanting and the holy water, but I made a mental note to ask Granny about it, when I saw her.

  On my fifth day back, I received a single postcard, from a town in Pennsylvania that boasted a building shaped like a coffee pot. There was nothing written on it, only a kiss in pink lipstick. Arabella’s lips.

  So Arabella, at least, was safe. I just had to trust that Cooper was likewise fine.

  When Saturday came around, I arrived at Wendy and Caleb’s house with two bottles of wine, a bunch of daisies, and my ever-growing list of questions for Granny, which had gotten so long I’d actually written it down. Luckily, I’d met Granny before, and I knew she wasn’t the sort of lady who had a problem with getting straight down to business.

  I poured wine for everyone, while Caleb started up the grill. It was a lovely October day, a better month for cooking out in the Carolinas than August tends to be, and we all clustered together on the tiny back patio to enjoy it.

  Granny was an uncommonly small woman with an uncommonly big smile, and a laugh that was a true witch’s cackle if ever there was one. She exercised the latter liberally as she listened to the stories of my travels, and my reason for being there.

  “So basically, you want to know how to become a bad witch,” she said. “Or a devil, like your father.”

  “No,” I said. “Believe me, I’ve got all the bad I need in my family tree. But since you mention my father, he’s a good example of what I’m talking about. They say he could set just about anything on fire, without an incantation or ritual or anything.”

  “If by they you mean Lydia, she would know,” Wendy said.

  “The Wicks can move things,” I went on. “No matter how big those things are, I might add. Talon threw a whole car at us. And Wendy, you’re really good with poppets. We all specialize.”

  “As do you,” Granny pointed out. “You tell stories.”

  “They’re not good enough,” I said simply. “I need to find another strength. How do I do that?”

  “You don’t need a new one,” Granny said. “You just need to keep expanding on your current one. As you’ve been doing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tell me again about the barn.”

  I went over it again, everything I’d felt about the place, the way it was almost like talking to it.

  “And the trees,” Granny said when I finished. “That started with a black walnut you personified.”

  “Cordelia,” I agreed.

  “And the sanctuary spell?” said Granny.

  I frowned. “That’s totally different.”

  “Is it?”

  I glanced uneasily at Wendy, not wanting to bring up an uncomfortable subject—she was convinced that the soul magic I’d used for that spell was dark magic that should never have been messed with—but she looked perfectly at ease. “I used a story for that, and a ritual and an incantation, and then of course there was the piece of my soul.”

  Granny waved all that away. “I’m not talking about the trappings of the spell, I’m talking about the spell itself. It’s essentially a great escalation of place-magic, when it comes down to it.”

  I nodded. “So it is. That’s more-or-less how I came to the idea.”

  “Because you’ve used place-magic before. You studied it as a kid, when you were learning magic. At the same time you were learning your story spells.”

  I nodded again, still not quite seeing where she was going with this. “So you’re saying place-magic is my strength? Obviously the barn was a place, but the trees are—”

  “Characters,” Granny interrupted. “The trees are characters. The barn was a setting.”

  I frowned at her. “So back to stories, then. You want me to make them up as I go, without writing them down?”

  Granny nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Well, maybe you’d better give me all the ways of looking at it you can think of,” I suggested.

  She cackled again. “Here’s a way you won’t like: magic is a matter of imposing your own will. The strongest will wins.”

  “We all know that much, Granny,” said Wendy.

  But Granny shook her head. “It’s a matter of imposing the strongest will, for everyone but Miss Verity Thane, here.”

  “Okay,” I said, although in reality I had no idea what she was saying. “So what’s it a matter of for me?”

  “For you, it’s a matter of joining your will. Your power is in connecting with the world around you. You didn’t make that branch fall behind this Talon person. You didn’t make the field tear down that barn. You convinced them to.” Granny held out her wine glass, and waited until I finished refilling it before she said, “You’re a storyteller, Verity. And the magic of stories is two-sided, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head. For a second, when she was talking about convincing things to bend to my will, I thought I was following her, but she’d lost me again.

  “Stories told to a void don’t matter much, do they?” Granny went on. “They need an audience. They need to be accepted. Believed in, if you want to get new-agey about it.”

  “So instead of imposing my will on things, I’m… getting them to agree to be in my stories,” I said. “Or maybe just figuring out their stories. Like with the barn, all I really did was encourage the field to tell its own story, in its way.” I shrugged. All this talk of storytelling was an interesting way of viewing my magic, I supposed, kind of flowery and poetic. But I didn’t see how it changed anything. Or gained me anything.

  But Granny gestured widely with one hand, a magician’s gesture, as if I’d just summarized the solution to all my problems. “Your great power,” she said, “is collaboration.”

  Wendy and I both burst out laughing at the same time.

  “Granny, have you met Verity?” Wendy asked. “She is maybe the least collaborative person I know.” She glanced at me, still smiling. “No offense.”

  “None taken, because I was about to say the same thing,” I said, and looked at Granny, who didn’t seem the least bit put out by being laughed at. “Up until recently, I’ve spent most of my time either alone, or longing to be. All I ever wanted was a pile of books and a place of my own to hole up with them.”

  “That doesn’t seem to describe the Verity I know,” said Granny with a shrug.

  “Only because circumstances required me to change,�
� I said.

  “Reluctantly change,” added Wendy. “I only got her to let me help with the Wicks last spring by cornering her and yelling at her.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Granny. “You wanted my opinion, and I’ve given it to you. Introvert you may be, but if you want to come into your full power, you will need to learn to embrace connecting to the world around you.”

  I sighed. “A living story, huh?”

  “Consider it a transition from written stories to theater,” Granny said. “You aren’t just the author anymore. You’re the director.”

  “Maybe you could practice by directing the scene where everyone sets the table,” Caleb interjected. “These kabobs are just about ready.”

  Theater.

  I thought about that word a lot, and everything Granny had said, in the days that followed. And about what Cooper had said to me once, too, back when he was still trying to get me past my aversion to causes.

  You have to connect. You have to engage.

  Engaging was not in my nature. Or maybe it was, and I’d just spent most of my life fighting against it. Because it was dangerous. Because it got you hurt.

  And because nobody wants the devil’s daughter.

  The thought struck me, as I was hiking through the woods one afternoon. I’d left the hotel in a reasonably good mood, having just received another postcard that morning. This one was undeniably from Cooper, not Arabella. He’d drawn an obscene little doodle on it, which made me smile. And made me miss him.

  He wanted the devil’s daughter. Cooper Blackwood, who could have had anyone’s daughter he wanted, pretty much. So I had that going for me, or would have, if I was the kind of girl who based her self-esteem on being desired by men. Which I definitely was not. Mostly was not.

  Except, of course, when he didn’t want me. When he thought I was a liability. For the life of me, I just could not get past that word. And why not? It wasn’t like it was such a cruel thing to say; we’d said worse to each other, I was sure, during fights.

  But we hadn’t been fighting. He hadn’t said it out of anger. It was merely, for Cooper, a statement of fact.

  I can’t afford any liabilities.

  Nobody wants the devil’s daughter.

  I was not generally given to great long fits of navel-gazing. Nor was it necessary; I wasn’t all that hard to psychoanalyze. I’d grown up an object of derision and suspicion, bullied and, after my mother’s death, unloved by a single soul. Merely tolerated by those who supported me. And burdened by the knowledge that I was the offspring of a devil, born of evil itself, which can certainly wreak havoc on a girl’s sense of self-worth.

  So I’d gone the sour grapes route: I would want nothing from a world that wanted nothing from me. And I’d lost myself in my stories.

  But now, according to Granny, I was going to have to learn to merge those stories with the reality I’d rejected. I was going to have to tell them for real, with a willing, participating troupe of… what? Trees? Rocks? Barns? Maybe it didn’t matter, as long as I was, to use her word, collaborating.

  You have to connect. You have to engage.

  “All right,” I said out loud, and turned up the path toward Greyhill. It was a weekday, and still early. The old ruin that had once belonged to my long-dead half-sister would be deserted without the teenagers who liked to hang out there. And because Letitia had lived there—and left a piece of her own soul behind, much like I’d bound a piece of mine to the Mount Phearson—I felt a certain connection to it. It seemed like a good place to practice.

  Not that I had any real clear idea of what practicing would mean. I considered it, and all of Granny’s suggestions, as I walked up the rise. This wasn’t about imposing my will, telling an air freshener to move in an imaginary breeze. I couldn’t really decide ahead of time what I wanted.

  I just needed to get the place and the things in it to respond to me. To fathom what my settings and characters wanted, or what they might be predisposed to do. Find latent energies, and tap into them. Like I’d always done with my hotel, nurturing its protective instincts.

  But Greyhill won’t be protective.

  No, that much was true. It was a dark place. Its natural inclinations were likely to be hostile. But that was fine, too. If the whole point of training and increasing my power was to make myself more useful in a fight, encouraging hostility wasn’t a bad place to start. If the place wanted to become violent, even bloodthirsty, perhaps I could let it. Perhaps nurture it.

  Perhaps even direct it.

  Such thoughts probably would have horrified Wendy, who was entrenched in the harm none philosophy of all good witches, and like me, used magic mainly for protection and other peaceful purposes. What I’d done with the barn was no more than I had to do to survive in the moment, but deliberately encouraging bloodthirst was something else, something colder. No doubt she would consider it more dark magic.

  But I didn’t really believe in lightness or darkness, when it came to magic. Only when it came to people. To call a spell itself evil was, to my mind, a copout, a way to shift blame from its caster. Power was all in how you used it.

  And besides, I needed to get stronger. I needed to become an asset instead of a liability. If that meant getting a little bit dark—a little bit, to use Caleb’s word, badass—when the occasion called for it, so be it.

  I rounded the last bend and came up to Greyhill, a long, overgrown lot dominated by a makeshift fire pit surrounded by litter, and a crumbling stone house a short distance beyond.

  As I approached, someone emerged from the house: an older woman, with dark gray hair pulled back into a severe bun.

  I smiled to myself.

  A little bit dark, you say? And wouldn’t this be a lovely place to start?

  “Why, Marjory Smith,” I called out. “Fancy meeting you here. Again.”

  This was not the first time I’d found Marjory Smith skulking around the ruins of Greyhill; she’d have said the same of me. Both of us, it seemed, were trying to fathom the mysteries of the place.

  To what end, in her case?

  I considered this as she strode toward me, her pinched face disapproving. “I heard you were back,” she said.

  “Of course you did. Asher must have been awfully angry about it.”

  She raised a thin, sculpted brow. “Asher? Why would Asher be interested in your comings and goings? He’s got a family now, you know. Isn’t it about time you outgrew your schoolgirl obsession?”

  I ignored that. For an ostensibly dignified lady, old enough to be my mother and then some, Marjory Smith had the oddest tendency toward mean-tween talk from time to time. “What are you doing here, Marjory?”

  “I wasn’t aware my hiking habits were any of your business.”

  “You were inside.” I nodded toward the wrecked shell of what had once been my half-sister’s house. “Not much of a hiking spot. Having a little picnic?”

  She gave me a speculative look, and I had the sense she was deciding whether she wanted to keep on being evasive, or actually tell me her purpose there. Or some version of it, anyway. I waited politely while she no doubt chose the course of action she thought would unsettle me the most.

  Finally Marjory said, “It’s an interesting house, Greyhill. So full of secrets waiting to be uncovered. And analyzed.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, it’s not precisely haunted, is it? But I get the sense of your departed sister’s presence, nonetheless.”

  I kept my face as blank as I could. “Do you?”

  Marjory tilted her head to one side. “Madeline Underwood was very close with your father.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “And of course, she was close to me, as well.”

  I drew my sweater more closely around me, as if it was the wind I was losing my patience with. “Is there a point somewhere in our future?”

  Marjory scowled. “Your years up north did away with what little manners you had.” She took a step toward me, and it was
a struggle for me not to take a step back in turn, remembering the last time she’d touched me in this spot. Her bony hag’s grip, the face that had briefly looked inhuman, monstrous.

  But her face only looked amused this time. “Very well. If you’d like to know my point, I’ll give it to you directly: I know things about the sanctuary spell that kept your father safe in Bristol. Things that nobody else in this town knows.”

  Come on, Verity. A little bit dark, remember?

  I didn’t step back. I stepped forward.

  “Nobody else?” I asked, trying to match her amused, superior expression. “Is that so?”

  “I know it was Letitia who cast it.” Marjory gave me a tight smile and looked back at the house. “And I think I know a bit about how. I feel I learn more every time I come here to meditate… and analyze.”

  “Congratulations on plumbing the depths of a spell cast by a dead woman, for a dead man, and broken long ago,” I said. “It sounds like a terribly relevant victory.”

  I was doing my best to sound bored, but on the inside, I was panicking. Analyze. She’d emphasized the word, twice. I knew the Wicks had people who could analyze magic in an attempt to discover (with varying degrees of success, depending on how complex it was) something of how it worked.

  Had they taught Marjory how to do that? Did she know about the soul magic? And that I’d used it, as well as Letitia?

  The chanted prayers, the holy water. Maybe Asher and Jessica really had been trying to exorcise my soul from the Mount Phearson, after all, when they’d come to the hotel while I was gone.

  Did Marjory think that would break the sanctuary spell?

  Would it break it?

  “I know what you did.” Marjory spoke softly, slowly. “And I will figure out how to undo it. Wait and see, child. The only safe place left for you will be your grave.”

  Well. Full marks for getting directly to the point as promised, I supposed.

  I almost made a wisecrack about my father, then. Would this be what he wanted, from his once-faithful servant? That she should be so obsessed with destroying his only living child? Luckily, the urge passed before I opened my mouth. It would sound too much like a plea. And maybe, beneath my sarcasm, it almost would be.