ReckoningSweep Series, Book 13Cate Tiernan
Prologue
October 15, 1888
Two days have passed since Mother died. The neighbors do not come by to pay their respects. I watch them hurry past our house and shiver, as if the misery here were like a cold hand pressing then away from our front gate.
My thoughts remain entirely on that fatal night. It sticks in my mind like a nightmare too horrible for any detail to be forgotten.
The house was quiet. It was so still and peaceful that I could feel the gentle pulsing of the waves on the shoreline almost a quarter of a mile away. The cats were sleeping by the fire. Then Mother came rushing in. She was naked, and her hair was wild.
"Máirin," she cried, her eyes glistening, "It is done."
I had experienced far too many strange night since Mother had been ill to be completely shocked. Calmly, so as not to frighten her away, I crossed the room to cover her. When I got close, however, I saw that her hands were covered in blood. She had pricked both of her thumbs, and there were smears of blood all over her body. To be skyclad and to show signs of letting one's own bloodthese are signs of the darkest magick. This was not something I had encountered before.
"What have you done?" I gasped.
She reached up and began gently stroking my face in reply. As I tried to put the blanket over her shoulders, she ran away from me, up the stairs. She moved with unnatural power and speed. As she ran, I heard her yelling out. She was spelling, that I knew, but her voice was crazed and unintelligible.
I had not time to take a lamp to guide me, and I stumbled up the dark steps after her. I found her on the widow's walk, on her knees, calling out to the moon in words I could not recognize. She went limp as I approached and seemed to lose interest in whatever it was she was doing, and I had a terrible feeling that she had just had time to complete whatever it was. Again I begged her to tell me what she had done.
"Soon," she said, "soon you'll know."
She allowed me to lead her back downstairs, where I washed away the blood and dressed her in a nightgown. She kept calling her own name over and over again, "OonaOona," dragging the words along in a pitiful moan until the act of repetition exhausted her.
When I came back to the parlor, I passed by the glass and saw myself. On my face, sketched out in blood, were hexing signsthat's what she had been doing when she touched me. Horrified, I ran to the basin of seawater that I kept in the kitchen for scrying and washed them away as quickly, as I could.. I stayed up half the night, trying to dispel whatever it was that she had done. I burned rosemary and uttered every purification and deflection spell I'd ever learned.
The next morning her bed was empty.
A fisherman found her yesterday. She was about half a mile from the house, washed up on the shore. She had gone out during the night and walked into the water. She still wore her nightgown.
Now the house shudders. This morning the windows broke for no reason. The mirror in the parlor cracked from side to side.
Mighty Goddess, guide her spirit and have mercy on me, her daughter. May I break my voice, lose it forever from my lamentations and weeping. My mother, Oona Doyle, of Ròiseal, is gone, and something dark has come in her stead.
Màirin
1. Omens
June 14, 1942
The ghosts are angry today. They smashed a vase in the front room, and they knocked over a lamp. The lamp almost hit our cat, Tady. He ran and hid under the sofa. Mother told us to be brave and not to cry, so I have been trying very hard. I have not cried once, even though the ghosts started banging the door of my room open and shut. My little sister, Tioma, is not as brave as I am. She hid in her closet and sobbed. She does not understand that we must prove to the ghost that we are not afraid. That is the only way we can get them to leave.
Aoibheanm
Finally, some peace and quiet.
Hilary, my father's girlfriend, is pregnant. Since she'd moved in a few weeks before, I had been more or less treated like a pet or a piece of furniture, just something to deal with or moved around while they were getting ready for the «real» child to come.
Among her many awful ideas, Hilary had major redecoration plans. These included taking up a lot of the carpet, painting all the walls in a color called "aubergine dream" (also known as "scary purple"), and putting our sofa into some kind of white bag. My father was letting her redecorate to her heart's content, and I had to stand back and watch as everything familiar to me vanished. Despite my protests, she'd recruited me to help. All of my free time seemed to be spent helping Hilary with her painting, her relentless scrapbooking, and the wedding plans. It was like being forced to dig my own grave.
But tonighta reprieve. They'd decided to go out and see a movie. I lived for nights like this one, when they were out of the house. I was supposed to be doing our homework, but I had to savor the time I had one my own. It was far too precious to waste. So instead of doing math, I watched reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I heard the car pull into the driveway, I switched off the TV and pulled my algebra book into my lapthe classic I've-been-studying-all-night trick. No one falls for it, but everyone tries it, anyway.
The door opened, and my dad came in making faces talking baby talk to Hilary, and of course she was talking baby talk right back. It was probably the most awful thing I'd ever seen in my entire life, and let me tell you, I'd seen some bad stuff recently. When they turned and saw me gaping in horror, they looked genuinely surprised.
"You're home," My dad said, suddenly looking embarrassed. "You're up."
Well, hello? It was nine o'clock on a Wednesday. Where did he think I'd be?
"Yeah," I said, reaching for a pencil, which I was considering using to poke out my eyes so I wouldn't have to witness any more of this unbearable cuteness. "Just doing my homework."
"Have you cleaned out your room yet?" Hilary asked.
"No."
"You know we have go get it ready," she said, dropping her spreading butt onto the bagged couch and picking through her crocheting.
Another sore point. Because it was next to my dad'sor their roomHilary had set her sights on turning my bedroom into a nursery. She wanted me to move to the little room at the end of the hall.
"I'll do it when I have time," I said, suddenly finding my factoring exercises totally engrossing. "I have a quiz tomorrow."
"I know you don't want to switch rooms, Alisa," Hilary said with a sigh, "but when the baby comes, I'll need to be able to get to him or her quickly in the middle of the night. This is as much for you as it is for me. The room at the end of the hall will be less noisy."
She had to be kidding. The room at the end of the hall was a glorified closet. In fact, it wasn't even glorified. It was pure, plain closet. It had a tiny window, too small for normal blinds or curtains. It was more like a vent. I looked at my dad for support, but he just folded his arms over his chest.
"Hilary's been asking you about this for over a week now," he said, getting into his stern voice.
"I said that I'll do it," I replied, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. Algebra never looked more appealing.
"You'll do it after school tomorrow," he said, "or you're in all weekend."
I definitely wasn't going to let myself get stuck in the house with Hilary. Rather then say something I would later regret, I nodded, grabbed my things, and got out of there as quickly as I could. At that moment Hilary's pregnancy scrapbook tumbled off the table, scattering photo's and papers everywhere.
"Oh, no!" Hilary said bending over to pick up the scattered contents. My dad swooped down to help her, and I left the room. Fortunately they had no idea I had anything to do with it. I hadn't meant to do it, either. These things just kind of happened to me. Objects fall off walls, fly across rooms, and tumble off tables when I'm around.
See, I'm half witch.
A few months ago I didn't know real witched existed. Even a month or so ago I had been terrified of magick, of Wicca, and of anyone who had anything to do with it. But everything had changed in the last couple of weeks, after I discovered my mother's Book of Shadows at Morgan Rowlands's house. I read it and realized my mother had been a Rowanwand witch from Gloucester, Massachusetts. She was afraid of her power as I wasso much so that she actually stripped herself of her magick in order to lead a normal life. She died when I was three, so she never had a chance to tell me this herself.
A blood witch is the child of two witches, descendants of the Seven Great Clans of Wicca. Since my father was a non-witch, I was only half. Technically this meant that I wasn't supposed to have power. For some reason, I didin abundance. To top it off, I had a whopping bad case of uncontrollable telekineses. Even in witch terms, I was really strange. Because I was such an odd case, I was able to withstand the more serious effects of a dark wave spell that had been cast against our coven Kithic, a few days before. While all of the other blood witches became incredibly ill, I only got a slight headache. I was strong enough to perform the spell that defeated the wave that would have killed all of the members of our coven and their families.
My father didn't know about any of this, and he certainly wouldn't believed me if I had told him. He probably would have sent me to a therapist, claiming I was making a really weird cry for attention.
Once safely in my room, I switched on my computer to check my e-mail. There was a note waiting for me from Mary K., Morgan's younger sister and my good friend.
Hi, A.,
What have you been up to? You seem kind of out of it lately. Anything wrong? We should hang out. Gimme a call or send me a note.
M.K.
I'd been wondering for a while what to do about Mary K. She's Catholic and completely turned off by Wicca. Just a couple of weeks before, I'd been trying to help her persuade Morgan to give up magick. Everything was different now. I was a witch; I had powers. And I'd seen the good that magick could do, how it could be used to fight evil.
I knew I'd have to tell her the truth at some pointthat I was back in Kithic, that I was a Wiccan, that I was a blood witch. Mary K. was going to freak, there was no question about that. I was going to have to do it, anyway. I sent her off a note, suggesting we meet after school at her house the next day to hang out. It was a ruse, of course. Devious of me. I would have to think of some way to break the truth to her once I got there.
I switched off the computer and climbed into bed. I took out my mother's Book of Shadows and the collection of letters written to her by her brother, Sam. I paged through these every single night before going to sleep. It was reassuring. Here was her entry about Sam putting her bike up on the widow's walk of the house. Here was the one about looking at the lilacs in the window of the flower shop and the one about passing her driver's exam. Except for the magick parts, my mom's life sounded so nice and normal, so fununtil the later parts of the book, when her brother performed a spell that accidentally produced a deadly storm. I usually didn't read that far in. I stayed near the beginning.
Sighing, I put the book and the letters in a big pile by the side of my bed and turned over to go to sleep. A strange dream overtook me instantly.
The sky was yellowish green, pulsing with energy of a storm about to break loose. I was on a rocky shore. There were buildings just behind me. This was a town, not a desolate stretch along the water. Somehow I understood at once that this was Gloucester, Massachusetts, my mother's hometown.
The weather had whipped the ocean into a frenzy. High, dangerous waves were crashing down just a few feet from where I stood. Any one of them could have snapped me up and taken me out to sea, killing me in a moment. Instead of running for cover, though, I was looking at something far down the beach a woman, sitting calmly on a large rock, waving to me. I started to walk closer to her, and I could tell as I approached that she was not an ordinary woman. The top half of her body was normal, though unclothed. The bottom half of her body was a steel gray finned tail, which flicked and twitched whenever the water lapped against it. She was a mermaid.
The distance between us sometimes grew when I should have been getting closer. Finally I was just close enough to be able to see her face, but she spun around to hide herself with her long hair and dove straight into the water, vanishing from my sight. At the same moment a wave hung above my head, poised to crash down on me.
And I woke up. My alarm was going off.
Shivering I crawled to the bathroom for a shower. The water reminded me of the rain shower on the beach, and I swore I could still feel the cool sand under my toes. I'd heard that witches' dreams could sometimes be very powerful. Sometimes they were signs, visions. I started to think about this.
I'd stumbled onto my mother's Book of Shadows: the chances were one in a million that it would turn up at Morgan's house, yet it had found it's way to me. I'd discovered my uncle's letters that had been hidden for years in the trap compartment of my mother's old jewelry box. And now I was dreaming of Gloucesterand dreaming so vividly that I could taste the salty breeze. Sky Eventide, one of the blood witches in Kithic, always says that there are no coincidences. What if that was true? The things that had been happening to me were so strange, so unlikely. What if this was all a series of signs, telling me to do something?
Like what?
Well, there was my uncle, Sam Curtis, for a start. I hadn't even known I had an uncle. But now, I'd found the letters, and now I knew he existed. I also knew he loved my mother. Maybe he would want to know about me. Maybe I could write to him. Unfortunately my mother only kept the letters, not the envelopes with the return address. There was a mention of a post office box, but that had been set up in the early seventies. I doubted that Sam had kept it after my mothers death.
E-mail. Maybe he had an email address.
By the time I had finished drying myself off, I had a plan. I went straight back to my room and switched on my computer. I knew that my mother's coven's name was Ròiseal, so I did a search. To my amazement something popped right up. It was a Web page for a magick shop called Bell, Book and Candle, in Salem, Massachusetts. The person who made the page listed himself as a member of Ròiseal. At the bottom was a link to contact the Web master. I clicked on it, and a black e-mail popped up. What would I say? I had no idea who this person was or how well he knew my uncle. I had little to say, so I had to keep it very simple.
Dear sir or Madam,
I'm trying to get in touch with my uncle, Sam Curtis. If he is still a member of Ròiseal, could you forward this note to him? I would really like to meet him or speak to him, but I do not have his address or phone number. This means a lot to me, so I would really appreciate the help.
Many thanks,
Alisa Soto.
Turning off the computer, I had a huge sense of satisfaction, a deep feeling of release. It was really strange, since all I'd done was act on an impulse. Of course, this pleasant feeling evaporated quickly if I didn't get to school in the next eighteen minutes. I pulled on my clothes and ran for the door.
2. Contact
December 17, 1944
The ghosts have been getting more and more wild. They break things regularly. Mother and Father wrote to some specialists from Boston who came last night to examine the house for signs of haunting. They did seem to detect a strange energy, but they couldn't pinpoint anything that could help us identify or deal with our poltergeist. Some experts!
When I am initiated in a few months, I will have access to the family library. Right now I don't even know where it is it's carefully protected by layers of spells. Our store of knowledge is said to be most impressive of any coven in the area. Surely we must have something there that would help guide us and solve this problem? I feel strongly that this is so I can barely explain it. My anticipation grows everyday.
Aoibheann
Mary K. and I had settled ourselves in her bedroom after school (with a huge assortment of snacks, of course), she gave me all the latest on Mark, the current object of her affection. She'd finally worked up the courage to ask him out, and of course he had said yes. Mary K. is perky and adorable, and she drives the menfolk crazy, unlike myself. They had a date set up for Friday. I listened distractedly as she ran through all the possible options for the location of the big event.
"So," she concluded, "what do you think?"
Oh, man. I hadn't been paying attention. I vaguely remembered hearing something about going to Colonel Green's, the new there restaurant that had just opened near the mall. It was supposed to look like and old sportsmen's club, and it had a handful of little secluded tables with curtains around them, perfect for a first date.
"Dinner," I said, grabbing a handful of chips. "Good idea. Colonel Green's."
"You were completely tuned out," she said, but not angrily. "Weren't you?"
"Kind of," I admitted. I took a deep breath. "I need to talk to you about something."
"What's up?" she said, concerned.
"You asked me what's been going on recently, why I've been so distant."
"I've been worried about you," she replied, popping the top of a bottle of iced tea and setting the cap on the ground for Dagda, Morgan's kitten, to bat around.
Okay. Just come out and say it.
"I'm a witch," I blurted. "Just like Morgan."
Mary K. flinched just a bit, then seemed to try to ignore what I was saying by going through the contents of her bag. "I know you were in that thing she goes to that Kithic thing."
"It's more than that," I explained. "My mother was a witch. I'm a blood witch."
She looked up at me, frozen.
"What do you mean, your mother was a witch? What's a blood witch?"
"Do you remember that book Morgan had here the other week?" I asked. "The one I kept staring at? That book was my mother's Book of her diary."
"How could Morgan get your mother's diary?" she asked shortly. "That is ridiculous. Do you hear what you are saying?"
"I know what I'm saying," I said with a sigh, "and I know how it sounds. But it's true. My mother was a blood witch. I can do things"
"You're trying to tell my that you have magickal powers?" she said. "Is that it?"
Oh, God.
"You've been sick," she said agitatedly shaking out the entire contents of her baf onto the floor. "You're stressed out about what's happening with your dad."
"I wish that was it," I said. "I wish I was just imagining all of this. But I'm not. This stuff is real. It's not some dumb high school trend or some kind of Ren Faire spin-off club. Witches are real. I have the book here. I'll show you."
I reached into my bag to get my mom's Book of Shadows. I always carry it with me. She held up her hand, indicating that I shouldn't bother.
"I don't understand," she said, her brown eyes blazing. "We were going to write that letter to the paper. Now you're telling me that you're back into this witch stuff, just like that, and that somehow Morgan had a book that said your mother was a witch?"
"Look, I didn't mean to upset you." I hung my head. "I would give anything for this not to be true. It's not a choice."
We were both silent for a few minutes. The only noise came from Dagda trying to chomp in the bottle cap.
"Alisa," she said sadly. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what to do with this."
"Neither do I," I replied, running my finger along the seams of her lemon-colored comforter. She took a pretzel out of the bag and dropped it on the floor. Dagda pounced in excitement. "I should probably go," I said quietly.
Mary K. looked unhappy, but I think we both realized that our conversation was over. There was just a lot of dead air between us, and it was making both of us uncomfortable.
"My parents aren't home yet," she said. "Neither is Morgan."
"It's nice out," I said. "I'll walk home."
We looked at each other; then she turned her attention to her books, her face drawn. I quietly let myself out.
Morgan drives the weirdest car I have ever seen in my life, some kind of monster from the early seventies. It's huge and unbearably ugly, with a white body and a blue hood, and she treats it as if it were her very own child. She was docking this scary ship into the driveway when I came out of her front door. I stopped, and she stepped out of the car and looked at me.
"What's wrong, Alisa?" she said, eyeing my slumped shoulders.
"I just told Mary K. the truth," I said flatly. "That I'm a blood witch like you."
She exhaled loudly and leaned back against the car.
"How'd that go?" she asked.
"It sucked."
She frowned. At least she understood what it was like for me. I knew that when she'd told her family, it had ended up being a royal mess. Things had improved for her, though maybe they would for me too.
"How about a ride home?" she asked. I nodded my thanks. She climbed back into the car, and I got in on the passenger's side.
"Mary K. will come around," she said, trying her best to cheer me up.
"No, she won't," I said, playing with the window crank. "You know as well as I do. This isn't something that people come around to."
"Want to have an informal circle?" she asked. "It might clear your mind a bit. How about we go to Hunter's?"
Morgan's boyfriend in Hunter Niall, the leader of Kithic. Hunter had really intimidated me until very recently. He's an imposing guyvery good looking and tall, with chiseled features and piercing green eyes. He's always, always serious. To top it all off, he's British, with this exacting accent. But I had gotten to know Hunter a bit better recently, and I'd seen that he wasn't so scary after all. Even if I'd wanted to go and have a circle with them, though, I couldn't.
"It's all right," I said wearily. "I have to pack up my room or I'll be grounded until I'm twenty."
"Pack up your room?"
I explained Hilary's master house-arranging plan, and Morgan gave me a sympathetic look.
"This hasn't been a great month for you," she said.
"For you, either."
"No," she agreed. In the process of dealing with the dark wave, Morgan had confronted her fathera very powerful, and apparently evil, witch named Ciaran. Morgan had assisted Hunter and some others in catching him and stripping him of his magickal powers. From what I'd heard, that had been pretty awful. "I guess not," she said with a sigh. "Maybe it's never easy to find out you're a blood witch. That's something Hunter and the other witches can't quite understand. They don't know what it's like to have a regular family members and witch blood. We're unique."
How about that? Morgan and I, two of a kind.
"So," she said, pulling up to my house, "see you on Saturday for the circle? I can pick you up at seven-thirty if you want."
"That would be great," I said. "Thanks."
I ran through the door and straight to my room, trying to avoid contact with the Hiliminator. While I didn't see the woman herself, she had left a stack of folded boxes, tape, and markers by my door as a sign of her presence. How very kind it was of my stepmonster-to-be to provide me with moving supplies. It made me feel warm all over. I pushed the pile through the door and shut it behind me.
My first thought was to check my e-mail. I expected nothing, but there was a little envelop on the corner of my screen when I logged on. I quickly opened the note. It read:
Alisa,
Sam Curtis is indeed a member of Ròiseal. I forwarded your note to him. He seemed very excited to hear from you. You should be getting a response soon.
Blessed be,
Charlie Findgoll.
At last, one single piece of good news.
That night I dreamed of the mermaid again. The dream was almost identical to the one the night before. This only increased my conviction that there was something going on in Gloucester that I needed to find out about.
At school on Friday, Mary K. seemed standoffish, so I ended up eating lunch alone and going home by myself. When I got there, I found that Hilary had bought rattan boxes for diapers, new sets of shelves, and a lamp shaped like a baby giraffe. I noticed there was nothing new planned for the closet down the hallno swatches, no carpet sample, no new pieces of furniture. She had gotten me some more folded boxes though.
After taking these to my room, I hurried to my computer and got online. There was another note. I saw that the sender was Sam Curtis. I couldn't even open it for a moment, and I just sat there, staring at the name. Then, my hand shaking slightly, I clicked on the note.
Alisa,
I could barely believe it when Charlie sent me your note. I usually don't like e-mail, but this was a major exception! I am so happy to hear from you! I think about you often, and I want to know all about you.
I only have a computer at work, so here is my phone number and address. Write, call, visit or all three.
Sam
I didn't know quite how to respond. I'd acted so quickly in sending the not that I hadn't really come up with a concrete plan about what to do if Sam actually wrote back. If I called him, my father would question the long-distance charge. Visitingthat sounded great, but how was I going to go to Gloucester, especially without my father knowing?
Quickly, hands shaking, I printed out the note and tucked it into my mom's book. Then I trashed the note from my inbox. I didn't want anyone finding the letter by accident when they were going on-line. My father didn't know anything about my mother's heritage, and Hilary certainly didn't, either. This was private, between my uncle and me.
At dinner (a pregnancy blue plate special: cold soba noodles and baked lentil burgers) Hilary actually looked worried about me when I left my plate untouched. She offered to get me whatever I wantedpizza, burgers, anything. It was my father who said that he wasn't going to give in to my "moods". When he ordered me to stay in for the night and work on my room, I went along with it quietly. I was too preoccupied, and too afraid of being grounded, to argue.
The next morning, the beginning of spring break week, I was still fully engaged in this process. Admittedly, I spent most of my time unearthing old magazines and reading them, sorting out old piles of letters and birthday cards, sifting through clothes and shoes I didn't wear much and moving them around. The boxes sat in the corner, still folded.
I could tell Hilary had no idea what to say to me. She was starting to lose her patience, and she made frequent passes by my door. On the one hand, every time she looked, I was working. She saw me shuffling things around. On the other hand, nothing was really being accomplished. All of my posters and pictures were still on the walls, and the contents of my drawers were spread all around. In fact, my cleaning had only resulted in a huge mess. By six o'clock that night all I had managed to do was put my socks into a laundry bag and move them to the other room. I was dressed and ready for Kithic's weekly circle a half hour early, though.
"You know," said Hilary, leaning in my door and staring at the massive pile of magazines and loose papers at the foot of my bed, "we're going to need to start moving this furniture on Monday. Things don't quite look ready."
"Oh," I said, thanking God as I heard Das Boot's engine, signifying Morgan's approach. I grabbed my purse and headed for the door. "They will be. I just had a lot of junk to go through. It will all be in boxes tomorrow. You'll see."
3. Flood
April 14, 1945
Today is my fourteenth birthday, and I will be initiated tonight. I've worked hard and I've studied all my lessons. I know I am ready. Still, it's hard to sit and wait until evening comes. I guess I am a little more nervous than I would like to admit.
I spent the morning arranging all of my books perfectly on my shelves, but the ghosts came and pulled them all down when I stepped out of my room. They must know I am looking for a spell to make them go away. It makes them angry.