by Katie Cross
Finding the temperature of the water to his liking, Bartie tilted his head back and drained the whole cup in a heavy swallow. My own steamed in my hand. Just to be polite, I took a sip.
“Then why did he tell the world that he’d found the Book of Spells?” I asked. “He must have known it would draw unwanted attention.”
“Because he was also a man of the truth,” he replied with reverence in his voice. “He worried that such a powerful book could fall into the wrong hands. If he just let it go, it could mean the end of everything.”
I watched Bartie carefully, and in just the few minutes we’d been conversing, I could tell that he really believed the Book of Spells had been in his father’s possession. My eyes darted around the little alcove. But why would the Book of Spells have been here of all places? Surely this house couldn’t be older than a hundred years, while the Book of Spells had existed for millennia.
“Can you tell me everything you remember?” I asked.
He hesitated again. “You must have some idea of who has the book or else you wouldn’t be here asking all these questions.”
I set aside the hot, flavorless water.
“Yes,” I admitted, wondering how open I could afford to be. Seeing the burning intensity in his eyes, I decided to be as honest with him as I wanted him to be with me. “I do believe I know, but I need a few details to confirm it. If it is the woman I believe it to be, we have a real problem on our hands.”
“How old are you?” he asked, reaching out to pour himself another cup of hot water. I noticed his lack of magic and wondered.
“I’ll be eighteen this summer.”
“I never said it was a woman,” he said, taking me by surprise. “The witch who took the book, I mean.”
“Pardon?”
“You said you thought a woman took the book from my father,” Bartie replied, blowing on the water but keeping his eyes on me. “I never said it was a woman.”
“If it’s not a woman, that muddles my suspicions,” I retorted with a wry grin that seemed to set him at ease. “Was it?”
Instead of replying, Bartie downed the nearly boiling water again, wiped the back of his hand across his lips, and leaned back in his chair.
“I was seven years old, and had just finished milking the cows.”
Bartie was an only child. His mother had just died of sickness, and his father could barely handle the day-to-day work on the farm in his grief. The two of them managed to keep the farm running, but the house fell into disrepair. One day a spark from the stove fell onto the floor, igniting a dry patch of wood. They stamped it out, but not before several boards burned. Willard pulled the boards up to find an old book with a moldering leather cover and cracked binding.
“Father couldn’t read,” Bartie admitted, blinking rapidly, “but I could. Mother taught me. He showed me the book, but I didn’t recognize any of the words. I don’t remember any of them now, either, but I do remember…”
He trailed off, appearing uncertain, maybe even shaken. I raised my eyebrows in what I hoped he would interpret as an encouraging gesture.
“This may have been a figment of my imagination because I was quite young at the time, but when I read a few of the words out loud, I felt … heavy. Darkness seemed to surround the words.”
I sucked in a breath. He’d just described, word for word, the way I felt during the fire in Chatham City, and most frightening of all, in my dreams.
Bartie stopped speaking and studied my face with concern. “What?” he asked. “What is it? What did I say?”
“I know what you’re describing,” I said, remembering my determination to be honest with him. “I’ve felt it myself. At least I think I have.”
He seemed skeptical but continued. “Father tried to burn it, but it wouldn’t burn. We set it in the middle of a bed of coals and nothing ever happened. That’s when he knew it was something bad. Really bad.”
“Did he suspect it to be the Book of Spells then?”
“Not until later.”
After their botched attempts to destroy it, Willard confided in a trusted friend that turned out to be not so trustworthy after all. Despite his refusal to show his friend the book, word spread like wildfire through the town, catching the ear of a visitor who took news back to Chatham City, telling the story along the way.
“Nothing happened for a while,” Bartie said with a shrug. “Father’s friend advised him to just get rid of it, to throw it into the woods or the lake and forget about it, but Father couldn’t. Someone else would find it then, and who knew what could happen? He went to the High Witch, the Coven Leader, and the Council Member, but they just laughed at him or ignored him.”
Bartie sucked on his front teeth for a second. “To be fair, it did seem outrageous that the Book of Spells would appear in the floorboards of a poor, illiterate farmer, but Father had never lied. I’d never seen him so uncomfortable. He couldn’t sleep at night, could barely focus during the day. We put the book in the floor of the corner room and never went back for it.”
“When did she come?” I asked. “The witch who took it?”
“A year or so after we found it. The rumor had circulated through the Network by then, and the Chatterer had already written its first article about it. They kicked me out of the common school after it was published, saying we were mad.”
My heart sped up. “What was she like?”
He grimaced. “Quiet. Intense. Cold as ice. Just showed up on the porch one day. Not even the dogs detected her until she spoke. They slunk away and wouldn’t even look at her. I was sitting at the top of a tree. It was afternoon, and I’d just finished my chores. When she transported onto the porch, I looked down on her from a bird’s eye view. Her hair was dark as pitch, with wide curls. She wore the finest dress I’d ever seen. She frightened my father, I could tell. She never went inside the house either. Never strayed a single step off the porch.”
Bartie spoke as if he were in a trance, reciting it verbatim from the depths of his memory.
“I didn’t make a sound because I was too scared to move,” he continued. “She put some kind of incantation on my father. He disappeared into the house, then returned with the book and handed it right to her. After that, she evaporated into thin air.”
When young Bartie scrambled down from his perch in the tree, his father had a dazed expression on his face, and his eyes were foggy, like they’d been filled with mist.
“He was like that for several days,” Bartie said, shaking his head. A few drops of water lingering on his beard scattered on the table. “When the fog disappeared and he stopped walking into walls, he didn’t remember the book. Every time I brought it up it gave him a headache. That’s when I got really scared. I asked him about the book every day. Sometimes I’d talk about it so many times he’d box my ears. But in the end, it seemed to wear the magic down. By my ninth birthday, two years after he found the book, he began to remember it again. He remembered the lady, though not much more than her dark hair, and started squawking about it in fear. The Chatterer came back down for another interview, and Father told them the book was stolen.”
My heart hammered. The details, the circumstances were all too perfect. “I read that article,” I said. “That’s what brought me here.”
He snorted. “Everyone read that article.”
“Did you ever see her again?” I asked, taking care to control my eager tone. He shook his head. “If I showed you a painting of her, would you remember?”
He shrugged. “I only saw the top of her. Not her face. Father was murdered shortly after that article was published anyway, so he’s no help.”
My heart caught in my throat. “What?”
“Witches hated us after Papa brought it up again.”
“So they killed him?”
Darkness flittered across his eyes. “I think that witch came back in the night and killed him when he started making a racket again. Luckily I wasn’t there at the time. I slept in the barn because it was c
ooler. One day I woke up, went in the house, and he was dead.”
“My mother was murdered when I was sixteen,” I said with a pang of sympathy. “It rots.”
He managed a brief smile. “Yes,” he said. “It does.”
I glanced outside to see where the sun had moved, for I saw no clocks in his house, and judged myself to have been there at least an hour, if not more.
“Thank you, Bartie, for answering my questions. You’ve been extremely helpful.”
He nodded, his lips pursed. I stood, thanked him again for the hot water, and started to the front door.
“Think you can get her?” he asked. “Whoever it is that you’re looking for?”
I hesitated. “The witch that I believe took your book is dead already, but she has a daughter.”
“Passed it on?”
“I think so, but I don’t know.”
“I hope you do find her,” he said, pouring another glass of cooling water. “She was a nasty witch. Never seen anyone like her in my life.”
You have no idea, I thought, transporting away before the dog could growl at me again.
“So?” Marten asked, glancing up from his desk when I strolled in. “How did it go with Willard’s son?”
I had stopped by my bedroom to sift through Mildred’s Resistance before returning to Marten’s office, troubled by all Bartie had told me. I couldn’t prove the reliability of Bartie Stacey’s story—perhaps he’d been a frightened little boy stricken with grief and a strong imagination—but I couldn’t deny the correlations between his story and what I knew of history.
“It went …” I trailed off, not sure how to articulate my grim thoughts as I sat on a chair and rested Mildred’s Resistance on my lap. “Well, let’s just say I didn’t quite expect it.”
I recounted everything. Marten listened intently, and when I finished, fell into a silence similar to mine.
“It is interesting,” he murmured, and I felt a wash of relief. He motioned to the book. “Correlations?”
“Yes,” I said, sending the book to him with a floating incantation. I had dog-eared the two pages in which May spoke of the Southern Covens. He sent me a chastising look, and I blushed, mumbling sorry under my breath. He straightened the corners and perused the pages, staring at them, unblinking. I let him drift in his thoughts.
“I’m glad you pursued it,” he said. “We may not have concrete proof, but it’s as solid as a story as I believe we’ll ever really find. You believe Bartie?”
“I have no reason not to,” I replied, grateful that Marten didn’t seem skeptical. “What does he stand to gain by lying about his deceased father? Why would he lie? Besides, he described it in a way that I couldn’t help but believe.”
Marten hummed under his breath, eyes tapering in thought. “Why would the most powerful book of dark magic in all of Antebellum rot in the floorboards of a farmhouse, do you think?”
“Why not?” I countered, answering the same question that had haunted me. “Who is to say that it hasn’t bounced around across all these years? It could have been hidden, lost, or found its own way there. The possibilities are limitless.”
He nodded absently. The idea that a single book threatened to destroy all I loved was nearly too much to comprehend. How did one fight something that wasn’t supposed to exist?
“If this story is true,” Marten mused, head tilted back to stare at the ceiling, “and May did steal the Book of Spells all those years ago, then we …”
His thought lingered, unfinished. We’ve been wasting our time.
“We’re in big trouble,” I whispered, my voice hoarse. “But how do we find out for sure? I don’t want to panic until I have to.”
Marten set the book aside and straightened. “We ask the one witch—aside from Angelina—who would know.”
“Who?”
“Mabel.”
My stomach clenched. Miss Mabel. I hid my irrational explosion of fear at the thought of seeing her again.
“Talk to Miss Mabel? Papa won’t allow it.”
“I think I can convince him. We need to explore this story more, and she’s our best shot.”
“You know how careful he is about anything to do with her ever since those two West Guards snuck through the dungeons to set her free two months ago. Not to mention the latest attempt to break her free with the servant.”
“You let me convince your father. Working with strong personalities is part of my job. Derek trusts me and will understand. If the Book of Spells has already been found—if it even exists—it changes everything.”
Miss Mabel
That evening, after Marten left to convince my father, I escaped to the Witchery, grateful to set aside all thoughts of Miss Mabel, Bartie Stacey, and the Book of Spells. Camille and Leda were climbing the Witchery steps when I jogged up behind them.
“Merry meet, Bianca,” Camille chirped, her hair bouncing as she ascended the stairs. “How were things at work?’
“Fine,” I said, planning to tell them everything later once I’d sorted through my thoughts on Bartie and Angelina and May. “How was your day?”
“Wonderful!” Camille cried. “Thanks to Priscilla I finished my classes early and went to see Brecken’s mother. She needed help with a baby quilt.”
“How is Tabby doing?” I asked to steer Camille away from the dangerous topics of family and marriage. Once she started, she never stopped.
“She’s good,” Camille said with a warm smile, pulling her cloak closer around her to ward off the chill. “It’s so easy to spend time with her. She’s nothing like my old aunts Bettina and Angie. She’s very … soft.”
She prattled about the quilt until we reached the top of the turret. A bright winter sun sparkled off the thin windowpanes. Despite the sunshine, the air felt frigid. Leda commanded a fire the moment she stepped into the circular room and drifted over to a stack of books waiting on the table. She read a note on top of the stack, then smiled and stuffed it into the book on top.
“A present for you?” I asked, my breath fogging out in front of me as I dropped onto our old divan and closed my eyes.
“Yes.”
Though she tried to hide it, I heard a sudden guardedness in her tone. My eyes popped open as she opened a lovely blue leather book covered in gold trim.
“Rupert sent them to me,” she said with the slightest hint of a smile, as if she were revolving through emotions too quickly to decide on just one. “He thought I might enjoy a book on the scholarly dissertations of Sybil that I haven’t been able to locate.”
I groaned at Rupert’s name. Camille and Michelle were already too far gone into their romances for me to save them, but Leda? I could try to keep her with me for a few years.
“Sybil?” Camille asked. “Wasn’t she driven mad or fell in love with a horse or something?”
“Neither,” Leda snapped. “She was one of the most brilliant witches that has ever lived. She was taken before her time.”
Sybil had been an eccentric witch. She loved education, books, and anything to do with herbology, and scholars considered her to be one of the most intelligent witches in the history of the Central Network. Like all the greats, she died in a tragic accident: drowned in a pond while conducting an experiment. Leda idolized all the essays Sybil left behind.
The divan felt cold and hard as a rock behind me, but I didn’t mind. All I needed was a place to close my eyes and think for a while. The added bonus of Camille’s chatter in the background—“Do you think Tabby would like this light pink dress? I’m going back tomorrow evening for dinner.”—helped me focus my thoughts on nothing.
I drifted into a pleasant half-sleep, aware of the warmth of the fire on my face and the cold nip of the air above me. Camille’s voice faded into a pleasant breeze, and suddenly I lay in the warm grass outside Grandmother’s cottage. The smell of honeysuckle and fresh soil floated on the wind. Grandmother hummed as she hung the laundry on the line with her arthritic hands. Mama stood in the house, star
ing at me from the window with her queer gray eyes and wild black hair. I smiled.
Bianca! Mama called, leaning out the window and laughing. Bianca, can you hear me?
I pushed onto my elbow in the grass, confused. Mama’s lips were moving, but the voice wasn’t hers. The warm kiss of the sun faded, darkened by a bank of broiling clouds.
Bianca, sang the now-cold voice. We need to talk.
I shot to my feet. Grandmother disappeared, the cottage grew dark, and a terrible storm swept overhead, dimming the sunshine. Mama’s gray eyes faded. Her hair grew, blowing off her neck in the wind, until a narrow nose and an attractive, superior face emerged from the distance. I didn’t know her by sight, but as the darkness fell over my mind, I had no doubt.
Angelina.
She stared at me with chill, unnerving eyes of the brightest blue. Bianca, let my daughter go.
A crash of thunder shook the air. The cottage began to rip apart in the wind, blowing away in chunks. The storm brought an unusual darkness: a palpable one. It weighed so heavy on my chest that I felt as if I could stroke it.
Let my daughter go.
I jerked awake with a cry.
Leda and Camille were staring at me, wide-eyed and frightened, from the other side of the room. The banging in my dream had been real; someone thumped on the Witchery door far below.
“Sorry,” I panted. “S-sorry.”
Grateful for an escape so I didn’t have to explain, I leapt off the divan and rushed down the stairs, fleeing the horrific nightmare. When I yanked the door open, Merrick stood outside.
“Derek needs you,” he said, tilting his face to one side in concern. “You all right? You look like—”
“Yes, I’m fine. What’s wrong?”
“Another dream?”
My mouth dropped open. “How’d you know?”
“I know more than you think,” he retorted. His hand twitched as if he wanted to reach for me but didn’t dare. “Come on, I’ll walk you there so you can pull yourself together. He wants to see you now.”
