"I've got some," said Sharon, reaching for her purse.
"Always prepared," said Ethan with a smile, like a Girl Scout' Sharon shot him a look, then gave Robbie two pills, which he took dry.
Our coven had united cool kids with losers, brains and geeks and stoners and princesses. It was interesting to watch people who were so different from each other interact.
"I had a good time on Saturday night," Cal said after a pause. "I'm glad you all came. It was a good way to celebrate the most important Wiccan holiday."
"It was so cool," said Jenna. "And Morgan was amazing!"
I felt self-conscious and gave my knees a tiny smile.
"It was really awesome," said Matt. "I spent most of the day yesterday on the Web, looking up Wiccan sites. There's a million of them, and some of them are pretty intense."
Jenna laughed. "And some of them are so lame! Some of those people are so weird! And they have the cheesiest music."
"I like the ones with chat rooms," said Ethan. "If you get one where people know what they're talking about, it's really interesting. Sometimes they have spells and stuff to download."
"There's a lot about Yule coming up in a couple of months," said Sharon.
"Maybe we could have a Yule party," I said, caught up in their talk. Then I saw the looks that Raven and Bree were giving me: superior, snide looks as if I were an annoying little sister instead of the most talented student in our coven. My jaw set, and at that instant I saw a large, curled maple leaf that was drifting lazily earthward. Without thinking, I caught it with my mind and sent it floating over Raven's head.
I kept my gaze on it, holding it in place while it hovered over her shiny black hair. Then it rested, ever so lightly, on her head, and it became a ludicrous, laughable hat.
I laughed openly, pleased with myself, and Raven's eyes narrowed, not understanding. She couldn't feel the large leaf perching there like a flat brown pancake, but it looked absurd.
Jenna saw it next then our whole coven was looking at Raven and grinning, except Cal.
"What?" Raven snapped. "What are you looking at?"
Even Bree had to bite back a smile as she swept the leaf off Ravens head. "It was just a leaf," she said.
Flustered, Raven picked up her black bag just as the homeroom bell rang.
We all got up to go to class. I was still smiling when Cat leaned over me and whispered, "Remember the threefold law." He touched my cheek softly and then left, heading toward the other school entrance for his first class.
I swallowed. The Wiccan threefold law was one of the most important tenets of the craft. Basically it stated that anything you sowed, good or evil, would come back to you threefold, so always put good out there. Don't put bad. Cal was telling me (1) he knew I had controlled the leaf, and (2) he knew I was being mean when I did it. And it wasn't cool.
Taking a deep breath, I pulled my backpack strap over my shoulder.
As soon as Cal was out of earshot, Raven said nastily, "Okay, so he's yoursfor now. But how long do you think that's going to last?"
"Yeah," Bree murmured. "Wait till he finds out you're a virgin. He'll find that pretty amusing."
My cheeks flamed. I had a sudden image of his hand under my shirt yesterday morning and how I had jumped.
Raven raised her eyebrows. "Don't tell me she's a virgin?"
"Oh, Raven, leave it," Beth said, brushing past her. Raven watched her for a second in surprise, then turned her attention back to me.
Bree and Raven laughed together, and I stared at Bree. How could she reveal such a personal thing about me? I kept my mouth stonily shut and kept walking to homeroomwhich I shared with Bree, of course.
"Come on, Raven," said Bree, behind me. "Anyone looking at her can tell that isn't why he wants her."
I couldn't believe it. Bree, who had always told me I was too negative about my looks, who insisted my flat chest didn't matter, who had worked for years to get me to see myself as attractive. She was turning on me so completely.
"You know what it is, don't you?" Raven sniped on. Did either of them have any clue that I was ready to kill them both? I wondered. "Cal saw her, and it was witch at first sight."
I ran to class, hearing the echoes of their laughter floating behind me. Those bitches, I snarled to myself, u class I sat for ten minutes, trying to calm my breathing, trying to release my anger.
For just a moment I was glad I had been mean to Raven. I should have been ten times as mean. I couldn't help it. I wanted to wipe Bree and Raven out. I wanted to see them miserable.
CHAPTER 6Searching
January 9, 1980
They found Morag Sheehan's body last evening. Down at the bottom of the cliffs, by old Jowson's farm. The tide would have taken her away and none of us the wiser, but it was a low tide because of the moon. And so she was found by young Billy Martin and Hugh Beecham. At first they thought she was the charred, rotted mast of a ship. But she wasn't. She was only a burned witch.
Of course Belwicket met before dawn. We hung blankets over the shutters inside and gathered around my folks' kitchen table. The thing is, Ma and I had out that powerful protection on Morag last year, and since then nothing had gone amiss with her. All was right as rain.
"You know what this means," said Paddy McTauish. "No human could have got close to her, not with that spell on her and all the wardevil spells she was doing herself."
"What are you saying?" Ma asked.
"I'm saying she was killed by a witch," Paddy answered.
When he said that, of course it seemed obvious. Morag was killed by a witch. One of us? Surly not. Then is there someone in the neighborhood, someone we don't know about? Someone from a different coven?
It makes me cold to think of such evil.
Next circle we're going to scry. Until then I'm keeping a weather eye on everybody and everything.
Bradhadair.
The first chance I had to tell Cal about my research was after school. He walked with me to Das Boot, and we stood by my car and talked. "I found out about Maeve Riordan," I said bluntly. "A little bit, anyway."
"Tell me about it," he said, but I saw him glance at his watch.
"Do you need to go?" I asked.
"In a minute," he said apologetically. "My mom needs me to help her this afternoon. One of her coven members is sick, and we're going to do some healing."
"You can do that?" It seemed every day I learned of new magickal possibilities.
"Sure," Cal said. "I'm not saying we'll definitely cure him, but he'll do a lot better than if we weren't working for him. But tell me what you found out."
"I ran a search on the computer," I said. "I hit a lot of dead ends. But I found her name on a genealogy site, which led me to a small article from the Meshomah Falls Herald. So I looked it up at the library."
"Where's Meshomah Falls?" asked Cal.
"Just a few hours from here. Anyway, the article said that a burned body had been identified as Maeve Riordan, formerly of Ballynigel, Ireland. She was twenty-three."
Cal wrinkled his brow. "Do you think that's her?" he asked.
I nodded. "I think it must be. I mean, there were other Maeve Riordans. But this one was close to here, and the timing's right. When she died, I would have been about seven months old."
"Did the article mention a baby?" asked Cal.
I shook my head.
"Huh." He stroked my hair. I wonder if there's somewhere else we could get more information. Let me think about it. Will you be okay? I don't want to leave, but I kind of have to."
"I'm okay," I said, looking up into his face, relishing the fact that he cared about me. And it wasn't just because I was a blood witch like him. Raven and Bree were just jealousthey didn't know what they were talking about.
We kissed gently, then Cal headed toward his car. I watched him drive off.
Motion caught my eye, and I glanced over to see Tamara and Janice about to get into Tamara's car. They grinned at me and raised their eyebrows suggestively. Tamara gave me a thumbs-up. I grinned back, embarrassed but pleased. As they drove off, it occurred to me that the three of us should try to see a movie soon.
"Skipping chess club?" came Robbie's voice.
I blinked and looked around to see Robbie loping toward me, sunlight flashing from his glasses. His choppy brown hair that only last month had looked so awful now seemed to I have a rakish trendiness.
I considered for a moment "Yeah. I am," I said. "I don't knowchess seems kind of pointless now."
"Not chess itself," Robbie said, his blue-gray eyes serious behind his ugly glasses. "Chess itself is still really awesome. It's beautiful, like a crystal."
I braced myself for one of Robbie's chess rants. He's almost in love with the game. But he just said, "It's just the club thing that's pointless now. The school thing." He looked at me. "After you've seen a friend of yours make a flower bloom, school and clubs and all of that seem kind of silly."
I felt proud and self-conscious at the same time. I loved the idea that I was gifted, that my heritage was showing in my ability. But I was also so used to blending in with the woodwork, not making waves, standing happily in Bree's shadow, it was hard to get used to being noticed so much.
"Are you going home?" Robbie asked.
"I don't know. I don't really feel like it," I said. In fact, the thought of facing my parents made my stomach knot up. Then I had a better idea. "Hey, do you want to go to Practical Magick?" I felt a mixture of guilt and pleasure as I suggested it. My mom definitely wouldn't approve of my going to a Wicca store. But so what? It wasn't my problem.
"Cool," said Robbie. "Then we'll hit Baskin-Robbins. Leave your car here, and I'll bring you back to it."
"Let's do it." As I was walking up the street to Robbie's car, I caught a flash of Mary K.'s straight auburn hair.
Glancing over, my eyes locked on Mary K. and Bakker plastered together against the side of the life sciences building. My eyes narrowed. It was the most bizarre feeling, seeing my fourteen-year-old sister making out with someone.
"Go, Bakker," Robbie murmured, and I punched his arm.
I couldn't help looking at them as we approached Robbie's dark red VW Beetle. I saw Mary K., laughing, squirming out of Bakker's arms. He followed her and caught her again.
"Bakker!" Mary K. squealed, her hair flying.
"Mary K.!" I called suddenly, without knowing why.
She looked up, still caught in his arms. "Hey."
"I'm getting a ride with Robbie," I said, gesturing to him.
Nodding, she motioned toward Bakker. "Bakker will take me home. Right?" she asked him.
He nuzzled her neck. "Whatever you say."
Suppressing a feeling of unease, I got into Robbie's car.
The drive north to Red Kill took only about twenty-five minutes. After Das Boot, Robbie's car felt small and intimate. I noticed Robbie squinting and rubbing his eyes. "You've been doing that a lot lately," I said.
"My eyes are killing me. I need new glasses," he said. "My mom made an appointment for tomorrow."
"Good."
"What was Bree talking about this morning?" he asked. "About your parents' new reading material?"
I wrinkled my nose and sighed. "Well, Bree is really angry at me," I said, stating the obvious. "It's all about Calshe wanted to go out with him, and he wanted to go out with me. So now she hates me, I guess. Anywayyou know I was keeping my Wicca books at her house?"
Robbie nodded, his eyes on the road.
"She dumped them all on my porch yesterday morning," I explained. "My mom went ballistic, it's all a big mess," I summed up inadequately.
"Oh," said Robbie.
"Yeah."
"I knew Bree liked Cal," said Robbie. "I didn't think they would be a good couple."
I smiled at him, amused. "Bree would make anyone into a good couple. Anyway, let's not talk about it. Things have been kind of awful. The only good thing is that Cal and I got together, and it's really great."
Robbie glanced over at me and nodded. "Hmmm," he said
"Hmmm, what?" I asked. "Do you mean, hmmm, that's I great? Or hmmm, I'm not so sure?"
"More likehmmm, it's complicated, I guess," Robbie told me. "You know, because of Bree and everything."
I stared at him, but he was watching the road again, and I couldn't read his profile.
I looked out the window. I wanted to talk about something that we hadn't really hashed out. "Robbie, I really am sorry about that spell. You know. The one about your skin."
He shifted gears without saying anything. "I won't ever do it again," I promised once more.
"Don't say that. Just promise you won't do it without telling me," he said as he parked his Beetle in a tiny space. He turned to me. "I was mad that you did it without telling me," he said. "But I mean, Jesus, look at me" He gestured to his newly smooth face. "I never thought I'd look like this. Thought I'd be a pizza face forever. Then have awful scars my whole fife." He glanced out over the steering wheel. "Now I look in the mirror and I'm happy. Girls look at megirls who used to ignore me or feel sorry for me." He shrugged. "How could I be upset about that?"
I reached out and touched his arm. "Thanks."
He grinned at me and swung open his door. "Let's go get in touch with our inner witches."
As usual, Practical Magick was dim and scented with herbs, oils, and incense. After the chilly November sunshine, the store felt warm and welcoming. Inside, it was divided in two, one half floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the other half shelves covered with candles, herbs, essential oils, altar items and magical symbols, ritual daggers called athames, robes, posters, even Wiccan fridge magnets.
I left Robbie looking at books and went over to the herb section. Learning about working with them could take my whole life and then some, I thought. The idea was daunting but also thrilling. I had used herbs in the spell that had cured Robbie's acne, and I had felt almost transported in the herb garden of the Killburn Abbey, when I'd gone there on a church trip.
I was looking through a guide to magickal plants of the northeast when I felt a tingling sensation. Glancing up, I saw David, one of the store's clerks. I tensed. He always put me on edge, and I could never pinpoint why.
I remembered how he had asked me what clan I was in and how he had told Alyce, the other clerk, that I was a witch who pretended not to be a witch.
Now I watched him warily as he walked toward me, his short, gray hair looking silver in the store's fluorescent light.
"Something about you has changed," he said in his soft voice, his brown eyes on me.
I thought about Samhain, when the night had exploded around me, and about Sunday, when my family had blown apart. I didn't say anything.
"You're a blood witch," he stated, nodding as if he were simply confirming something I'd said. "And now you know it."
How can he tell? I wondered with a tinge of fear.
"Were you really surprised?" he asked me. I looked around for Robbie. He was still over by the books.
"Yes, I was kind of surprised," I admitted.
"Do you have your BOS?" he asked. "Book of Shadows?"
"I've started one," I said, thinking of the beautiful blank book with marbled paper that I had bought a couple of weeks before. In it I had written down the spell I had done for Robbie and also about my experiences on Samhain. But why did David want to know?
"Do you have your clan's, your coven's?" he asked. "Your mother's?"
"No," I said shortly. "No chance of that."
"I'm sorry," he said, after a pause. Then a bell tinkled, and he moved off to help another customer choose some jewelry.
Glancing down the aisle, I saw that the other clerk, Alyce, was on the floor way at the end, arranging some candleholders on a low shelf. She was older than David, a round, motherly woman with beautiful gray hair in a loose bun on top of her head. I had liked her the first moment I had seen her. Still holding my herb book, I wandered down the aisle closer to her.
She looked up and smiled briefly, as if she had been waiting for me. "How are you, dear?" There was a world of meaning in her words, and for a moment I felt like she knew about everything that had happened since she had helped me pick out a candle, a week before Samhain.
I didn't know what to say. "Awful," I blurted out. "I just found out I'm a blood witch. My parents have lied to me all my life."
Alyce nodded knowingly. "So David was right," she said, her voice reaching me alone. "I thought you were, too."
"How did you know?"
"We can recognize them," she said matter-of-factly. "We're blood witches ourselves, though we don't know our clans." I stared at her.
"David in particular is quite powerful," Alyce went on. Her plump hands made neat rows of candleholders shaped like stars, like moons, like pentacles.
"Do you have a coven?" I whispered.
"Starlocket," said Alyce. "With Selene Belltower."
Cal's mother.
Robbie appeared at the end of the aisle, thirty feet away. He was talking to a young woman, who was smiling at him flirtatiously. Robbie pushed his glasses aside, rubbed his eyes, then answered her. She laughed, and they drifted back over to the book aisle. I heard the murmur of their voices. For a moment curiosity made me want to concentrate on hearing their words, but then I realized that just because I could didn't mean I should.
A sudden idea sparked in my head. "Alyce, do you know anything about Meshomah Falls?" I asked.
It was as if a snake had bitten her. She literally drew back, anguish crossing her round face. Frowning, she got slowly to her feet, as if troubled by a great weight.
She looked into my eyes. "Why do you ask?" she said.
"I wanted to know more about a woman named Maeve Riordan," I said. "I need to know more." For long moments Alyce's gaze held mine.
"I know that name," she said.
CHAPTER7Burned
May 8, 1980
Angus asked me to marry him at Beltane. I told him no. I'm only eighteen and have hardly ever been out of Ballynigel. I was thinking of doing one of those tours, you know, with a bus and going through Europe for a month. I do love Angus. And I know he's good. He might even be my muirn beatha dan, my soul mate, but who knows? He might not! Sometimes I feel like he is, sometimes I don't. The thing is: How would I know? I've met precious few witches in my life that I'm not related to. I need to be sure. I need to know more before I can decide to stay with him forever.
"Where will you go?" he asks me. "Who will you be with? Someone not your kind, like David O'Hearn? A human?"
Of course not. If I want children, I can't be with a human. But maybe I don't want children. I don't know. There aren't that many of our clan. To go outside our clan to another would be disloyal. But to seal my fate at eighteen seems disloyal toodisloyal to me.
And after all that's been happeningMorag's murder, the bad luck spells, the bespelled runes (Mathair calls them sigils) we've foundI just don't know. I want to get away. Only three more weeks and I'll take my A levels and be done with school. I can't wait.
Now it's late, and I have to do a warding spell before I sleep, to keep away evil. We all do, nowadays.
Bradhadair
I waited while Alyce cast back her mind. There was a tall stool nearby, battered and blotched with multicolored paint spills. I perched on it, my eyes on Alyce's face.
"I never knew Maeve Riordan," Alyce said at last. "I never met her. I was living in Manhattan at the time all of this happened. I really only learned of it years later, when I moved here. But it was big news in the Wiccan community, and most witches around here know about it."
It was shocking to me that many people knew the story of what had happened to my mother while I knew virtually nothing. I waited, not wanting to disturb Alyce's thoughts.
"The way I heard the story is this," Alyce said, and it was as if her voice were coming to me from a distance. "Maeve Riordan was a blood witch, from one of the Seven Great Clans, but we aren't sure which one. Her local coven was called Belwicket, and she was from Ballynigel, Ireland."
I nodded. I had seen the words Belwicket and Ballynigel on Maeve's genealogy site, the one that had shut down.
"Belwicket was very insular and didn't interact with other clans or covens much," Alyce continued. "They were quite secretive, and maybe they had cause to be. Anyway, back in the late seventies, early eighties, as I understand it, Belwicket was persecuted. The members were taunted in the streets by the townspeople; their children were ostracized at school. Ballynigel was a small town, mind you, small and close to the coast of western Ireland. The people there were mainly farmers or fishermen. Not worldly, not overly educated. Very conservative," Alyce explained. She paused, thinking.
In my mind I saw rolling hills as deep a green as a peridot. Salt air seemed to kiss my skin. I smelted tangy, brackish seaweed, fish, and an almost unpleasant yet comfortable odor my brain identified as peat, whatever that was.
"The villagers had probably always lived among witches in peace, but for some reason, every so often, a town gets stirred up; people get scared. After months of persecution a local witch was murdered, burned to death and thrown from a cliff."
I swallowed hard. I knew from my reading that burning was the traditional method of killing witches.
"There was some talk that it had been another witch, not a human, who had done it," continued Alyce.
"What about Maeve Riordan?" I asked.
"She was the daughter of the local high priestess, a woman named Mackenna Riordan. At fourteen Maeve joined Belwicket under the name Bradhadair: fire starter. Apparently she was very powerful, very, very powerful."
My mother.
"Anyway, things in Ballynigel grew more and more intolerable for the witches. They had to shop in other towns, leases expired and weren't renewed, but they could deal with all that somehow."
"Why didn't they leave?" I asked.
"Ballynigel was a place of power," Alyce explained. "At least it was for that coven. There was something about that area, perhaps just because magick had been worked there for centuriesbut it was a very good place to be for a witch. Most of Belwicket had roots in the land going back more generations than they could count. Their people had always lived there. I imagine it was hard to fathom living anywhere else."
It was hard for an American, with family roots going back only a hundred years or so, to comprehend. Taking a deep breath, I looked around for Robbie. I could hear him still talking to the girl on the other side of the store. I glanced at my watch. Five-thirty. I had to get home soon. But I was finally learning about my past, my history, and I couldn't pull myself away.
"How do you know all this?" I asked.
"People have talked of it over the years," Alyce said. "You see, it could so easily happen to any of us."
A chill went through me, and I stared at her. To me, magick was beautiful and joyful. She was reminding me that countless women and men had died because of it.
"Maeve Riordan finally did leave," Alyce went on, her face sad. "One night there was a huge decimation, for want of a better word."
I shivered, feeling an icy breeze float over me, settling at my feet.
"The Belwicket coven was virtually destroyed," Alyce continued, sounding like the words were hard to say. "It's unclear whether it was the townspeople or a dark, powerful, magickal source that swept through the coven, but that night homes were burned to the ground, cars were set on fire, fields of crops were laid to waste, boats were sunkand twenty-three men, women, and children were killed."
I realized I was panting, my stomach in knots. I felt ill and dizzy and panicky. I couldn't bear hearing about this.
"But not Maeve," Alyce whispered, looking off at some faraway sight. "Maeve escaped that night, and so did young Angus Bramson, her lover. Maeve was twenty, Angus twenty-two, and together they fled, caught a bus to Dublin and a plane to England. From there they landed in New York, and from New York City they made their way to Meshomah Falls."
"Did they get married?" I said hoarsely.
"There's no record of it," Alyce replied. "They settled in Meshomah Falls, got jobs, and renounced witchcraft entirely. Apparently for two years they practiced no Wicca, called upon no power, created no magick." She shook her head sadly. "It must have been like living in a straitjacket. Like smothering inside a box. And then they had a baby in the local hospital. We think the persecution began right after that."
My throat felt like it was closing. I pulled my sweater sway from my neck because it was choking me.
"It was little things at firstfinding runes of danger and threat painted on the side of their little house. Evil sigils, runes bespelled for some magickal purpose, scratched into their car doors. One day a dead cat hanging from their porch. If they had come to the local coven, they could have been helped. But they wanted nothing to do with witchcraft. After Belwicket had been destroyed, Maeve wanted nothing more to do with it. Though, of course, it was in her blood. There's no point in denying what you are."
Terror threatened to overwhelm me. I wanted to run screaming from the store.
Alyce looked at me. "Maeve's Book of Shadows was found after the fire. People read it and passed on the stories of what was written there."
"Where is it now?" I demanded, and Alyce shook her head.
"I don't know," she said gently. "Maeve's story ends with her and Angus burned in a barn."
Tears ran slowly down my cheeks.
"What happened to the baby?" I choked out.
Alyce gazed at me sympathetically, years of wisdom written on her face. She reached up one soft, flower-scented hand and touched my cheek. "I don't know that, either, my dear," she said so quietly, I could barely hear her. "What did happen to the baby?"
A mist swam over my eyes, and I needed to lie down or fall over or run screaming down the street
"Hey, Morgan!" Robbie's voice broke in. "Are you ready? I should get home."
"Good-bye," I whispered. I turned and raced out the door, with Robbie following me, concern radiating from him in waves.
Behind me I felt rather than heard Alyce's words: "Not good-bye, my dear. You'll be back."
CHAPTER 8Anger
November 1, 1980
What a glorious Samhain we had last night! After a powerful circle that Ma let me lead, we danced, played music, watched the stars, and hoped for better times ahead. It was a night full of cider, laughter, and hope. Things have been so quite latelyhas the evil moved on? Has it found another home? Goddess, I pray not, for I don't wish others to suffer as we have. But I'm thankful that we no longer have to jump at every noise.
Angus gave me a darling kittena tiny white tom I've named Dagda. He has a lot to live up to with that name! He's a wee thing and sweet. I love him, and it was just like Angus to come up with the idea. Today my world is blessed and full of peace.
Praise be to the Goddess for keeping us safe another year.
Praise be to Mother Earth for sharing her bounty far and near.
Praise be to magick, from which all blessings flow.
Praise be to my heart' I follow where it goes.
Blessed be.
Bradhadair
Now Dagda is meowing to go out!
"What's wrong?" Robbie demanded in the car.
I sniffled and wiped my hand over my face. "Oh, Alyce was telling me a sad story about some witches who died."
His eyes narrowed. "And you're crying because" he prompted.
"It just got to me," I said, trying to sound light. "I'm so tenderhearted."
"Okay, don't tell me," he said, sounding irritated. He started the car and began the drive back to Widow's Vale.
"It's just I can't talk about it yet, okay, Robbie?" I almost whispered.
He was quiet for a few moments, then nodded. "Okay. But if you ever need a shoulder, I'm here."
It was so sweet of him that a wave of warmth rushed over me. I reached out to pat his shoulder. 'Thanks. That helps. Really."
Darkness fell as we drove, and by the time we got back to school, streetlights were on. My thoughts had been churning around my birth mother's fate, and I was surprised to recognize the school building when Robbie stopped and I saw my car sitting by itself on the street.