No––I was in this by myself.
It was winter finally, fully and completely. For the past six months, since I had been on the mainland––first in Paris and then traveling down through the oddly-shaped boot which formed the Italian Peninsula, where I mostly stayed––I had grown used to what I referred to as the Mediterranean lifestyle, easygoing and rich in sensory stimulation, funded of course by my vast financial resources. I was independently wealthy––but you could’ve fooled me. For the first seventeen years of my life I had been raised in New England, in an all-girls’ school, the kind most parents would be horrified to send their children to. St. Martley’s Academy for the Gifted was a school for freaks. I didn’t know why, but I would probably always think of St. Martley’s that way. As a place I had escaped from. And now I was free.
It was cold being free. Rome was as inhospitable as it had ever been––at least climactically; on a personal level, it was icy, windy and chill-inducing. That’s really where our story starts, on my eighteenth birthday, when I was altogether lonesome for an entirely different reason. Oh, I had friends, all right. In fact, two of them were getting married. As Lia said, there was no point postponing the inevitable. Her heart’s joy was found in Gaven. The King of all who were werewolves.
My heart was lost.
I got up from my bed, because I always wrote supine. It helped the blood flow, you know?
The lavender hangings around my four-poster reminded me of the one I seemed destined to live without. Since scrying Lennox, he had shut me out completely. Why had I fallen for him so hard, when it didn’t even make sense? Lennox was of immortal make and I-I was not. How could I ask him to love me when he would just have to leave me, whether through age or some other mishap? And then, if I did die (if? I asked myself), would I really want him seeking out the kind of happiness we might have shared together, in someone else? The answer was most definitely not. I didn’t care if that made me selfish. And then, for my own morbid amusement, I thought about it: of me dying and him and everyone else being left behind. In particular, I liked the grief and devastation, with regards to other people mourning me. I saw Ballard punching a wall––but then Liesel, this really hot older werewolf hamrammr chick walked by, and he forgot his grief. Lennox, in the dream-revery, didn’t show any emotion, just remained sullen: something I intuited to mean his sense of guilt at dragging me into this world. But I had dragged myself. My pink and wigglies squirmed pleasurably. Maybe, I thought, he would light a candle––two candles––the Iron Roses––keeping an eternal vigil over me, or at least on my birthdays, as years became centuries and we––that is to say, he and I, or the memory of me, at any rate––passed into the millenniums untouched and together.
It changed suddenly, and my eyes were like his, or like his family’s, Dallace and Camille’s; like colored planets of raging storms, or swirling tempests: the eyes of the lamia. The Latin for vampire made me think of something else, maybe because I had been studying orchids.
Could two people walk through a world eternal and unchanged together and forevermore and really have anything to talk about, or would it all seem like one long burdensome journey?
I had to get this down in my diary, before I forgot it, but my diary was already full.
Two of them were. I put the now-finished second volume beside its sibling, on my small wooden bookshelf, I had purchased from an antiques shop down in Via dei Condotti, on the strada where I lived, with, of course, my landlady’s permission (she wouldn’t approve a refrigerator, and now I had a melted half-tub of rocky häagen-däaz I had been dipping into the last twenty-four hours with increased lethargy, the name of which was Sundae Mooning. I figured that fit me to a T, or an H, as the case may have been). True to her word, my landlady had kept everyone––including herself––from entering my room, for the two or so months since I had been gone, figuring out what I already knew: that there were some people in this world who could do extraordinary things.
I didn’t say good things. Just things. And sometimes, magical things.
Thinking the thought made my skin tingle all the way down to my Wiccan Mark. I had been persistently, failingly obliged to try not to look at it, every possible second, but had failed miserably in my self-imposed abstinence. It was an itch too easy to scratch. It was so unlike me to have this physical proof, this everyday, full-time reminder of what I had the potential to become: someone in this world who could do extraordinary things. I felt that potential like a solid mass in the pit of my stomach. As for the Mark, it was docile now, but an hour ago it had been raging unchecked inside of me, writhing and twisting up my arm. Orchis halsey or whatever.
It had been so bad I had felt like there was another part of me I didn’t entirely understand yet that sometimes had control over me. Like there was someone else––or something––inside me; a submerged part of my identity, like a stalk, almost, which puts out leaves, and then one day, bam, there’s a flower there. My Wiccan flower.
My orchid.
I looked up what it might be called, its genus and so forth––but whereas Vittoria, who was my nemesis, could be said to have nightshade, I had no real clue what my orchid was. I just knew that it was a flower-Mark and therefore that my virtue was either Grace or Goodwill and that it looked badass; and as I didn’t want others to know what it looked like, I showed no one. But my landlady wasn’t any ordinary person. In fact, she was extraordinary. She could tell there was something different about me the first time I returned and she threatened me.
She said “Hmph!” and “Snrgh!” And then looked down her long, pointed nose, at me. “I’m watching you,” she said to me.
She jabbed at her own two eyes with her index and middle fingers. Instinctively I looked for her Wiccan Mark, but there was none.
I couldn’t meet her gaze lest she penetrate my inmost thoughts, but I nodded. “May I go to my room, now?” I said, as straight faced as I could manage.
She nodded, slowly, and like I had done something wrong. And, leaving her, I felt like I had. Why did she hate me so much? And why didn’t I just move out? I had crossed an ocean by myself. I could do anything.
It may have sounded weird, but in that moment, I realized, anywhere else and I wouldn’t have been as safe. She was... watching over me or something... I couldn’t explain it. It was almost like my landlady was one of my Four Protectors.
* * *
Eighteen and Wicca.
No, that was no good.
The Diary of a Teenage Drama Queen.
Too melodramatic.
Halsey Rookmaaker, Teenage Witch.
It sounded like I should have pom-pons or something.
I settled on The Wiccan Diaries. Volume III.
Being one year of the life of an of-age witch, I wrote. For so now I was. It was December 21st. My birthday. I put the pen down and thought about that, and my Diary.
I must become Adept, I told myself.
I did not forget that it was in this year, those who had the Craft passed the particular milestones (which, I had no idea what those were) enabling them to matriculate––a funny college word for go on––to the next level. After Adept, it was up to the individual, I was told, to become Fledged, but I had a problem. A big, big problem. And it wasn’t going away. Every day it got nearer. What to do about Ravenseal?
What to do about the Wiccan House that I had been selected to attend?
And the fact that, if I didn’t go with them, I would have no House.
I ran my hand over the notebook I had constructed. I had built it by hand, with absolutely no help from the tracery of veins which carried magic into my fingertips, out of binder’s needles, bees wax and thread, sewing the signatures together, finishing the boards off in a plum-colored cloth with the help of my PVA (polyvinyl acetate). I absolutely adored the written word––I almost wrote Wiccan Word, wondering if there was one, some all-powerful phrase which could point me to all the aforementioned milestones––and had a very practical reason for keepin
g the Diary. It helped me with all of the thinking of things. I could go back and look at this, that, whathaveyou, and analyze trends.
Was it not like the book of magic, the codex given to new practitioners, as they wrote down their discoveries? Except my Diaries were for me alone. I would not be passing them on. Unless...
Only a second-degree or greater Wiccan could Initiate someone. One of the ardanes, or rules, which governed all of Wicca.
I was not yet even able to do that––Initiate someone––to say, “Hey, you should come check this out! I’ll show you The Way!”
Which was kind of the point.
I did not yet know The Way.
I had been so adamant about following my principles I had alienated myself from the only people who could instruct me in the Art of becoming more than I was. And I had not yet told Ravenseal of my choice to reject their invitation, so-called, which was obviously a summons. Veruschka, its Head, had told me she would be sending someone from Ravenseal to fetch me. Thinking about it made me shiver. “Blessed be. Or something,” I wrote in my diary.
I couldn’t think. I gave it up as a bad diary entry.
Was it Lux? Was that who was coming? Or I know. The Master House. Was Veruschka already a part of them? It was said they coveted her. Which, I couldn’t see why. She had candy-colored blue hair and was two-faced, Veruschka: appearing friendly, charming, and then selfish and mean-spirited. I still remembered the trick she had played on Vittoria. I had to stop right there. I didn’t like thinking about Vittoria, especially as she had so thoroughly, and awesomely, emancipated herself from any Wiccan Household. While I––I was behaving like a coward. I couldn’t even make up my mind. About Vittoria. About anything.
What I really needed was someone to talk to, a kind of magical guide––someone who had been through all of the steps and could instruct me as to how to avoid this or that false step, or whathaveyou. Someone who could rhapsodize about Wicca, about what to expect; instead, there was only me, and Lia, if I included her, but Lia was twenty-four going on thirty-five and married with kids. You could see it in her eyes. She didn’t need Wicca the way I did. And then I realized.
She was outgrowing me, she was outgrowing magic.
Of course, Lia was no stranger to losing things.
She had lost her animal. When she became Wiccan she could no longer transform. Apparently being Wiccan precluded being a shape changer, and vice-versa, one or the other. Witch- or Wizard-Shifters, those who could do both, were very rare. So rare that there had not been one in over a century. Rhea Silva, whoever she was, was the last. It was said she could transform into the shape of a wolf and also do castings. Which I guessed meant her paw must’ve had a Wiccan Mark on it, or something.
I sighed and watched the inflamed candles whip about in the draft coming from my open French doors, half expecting to see Lennox standing there. But he hadn’t shown.
Not that I had expected him to. After all, I was me, and he was who he was––entirely out of my league, vampire hottie person.
What would he need with me when he had all the world, what with his new superpowers and everything? All that I could offer would be to hold him back.
Part of me wished for him to be standing there, to experience the raw awesomeness of his presence, while the other, unknown part of me, said: whatevers. You have work to do, kiddo. And, yes, I did.
Moreover, I felt a kind of destiny, when I considered that it was up to me to re-open––if that was even the right word––my parents’ House.
I had kept the knowledge of their Wiccan House absolutely secret, telling no one of House Rookmaaker––for, so I thought, Selwyn would have wanted it of me. He was a false mage. A roughly-fledged, unschooled guy. Thinking about him was painful. I didn’t like not knowing where he was. Selwyn was my only other Housemate. A fellow Rookmaaker. A fact which I had not really thought about before.
Just then my hand began tingling. It had been doing this off and on for the last few hours. It would burn with heat, like at its Forming, and then the heat would subside; it wasn’t painful, just alarming. And I think it meant something. But I couldn’t be sure.
That was like everything in my life that may have meant something. I had been kept so in the dark about everything to do with my past, I didn’t even know what was real anymore and what wasn’t.
I wasn’t delusional or anything. Just a bit confused.
I looked unwillingly at my writing desk I never used. It had my laptop on it, but there was also an unopened letter given to me by my indefatigable landlady who watched the comings and goings of all. She was as steadfast as the alarm I felt every time I looked at the letter on my desktop. I had been avoiding reading it for days. Mostly because I didn’t want to know what was in it. But in a way I kind’ve already did know, or so I thought. If I had learned one thing from Mistress Genevieve, people have a way of surprising you––she certainly always did. I didn’t even know how she knew I was even here. But she did.
She knew it as certainly as she knew everything else in this uncertain world.
I was scared to read the letter she had sent me. Would she be angry, upset, if she knew what I was up to? Had she just grown tired of the other students at St. Martley’s, and so reached out to scold me one last time, her most disappointing pupil ever?
It sat there, the letter, looking like the underbellies of some spiders I have seen, warning me against it; but I had to know. I weighed the likelihood of the letter containing anything good against the reality that I had run off, quit St. Martley’s, and abandoned my mistress. Which was Genevieve.
Coward, I chided myself. Pick it up and read it.
I came to the letter, managing the first part.
Her letter felt like a paving stone in my hands. I felt the weight of her judgment and it terrified me.
Something about it made me think she had written to me in all caps, like she was screaming, or worse, like whatever she had to say was so spot on I wouldn’t be able to countermand it. If she said come back, I would come back. And then where would I be?
There were ten days left until the Turning. When invented Time turned over and the world got to start over again. I lived surrounded by change. The only one who stayed the same was me. Essentially, what had magic accomplished for me? If I were being honest with myself: not much.
And still a part of me thought: He didn’t come...
The rest was busy with this letter, a letter which could disillusion and disenchant, not to mention, disenfranchise, me––and probably, though I didn’t like to admit it, perhaps pull me back from the precipice; for so I was about to go over, cross a line, take a stand, announce myself to European witchcraft and wizardry: The girl who was chosen has selected to be un-Chosen.
An anagram of Rome was More. And my struggle with wanting to know more was at odds with a small part of me which missed St. Martley’s, missed going on, matriculating, Graduating.
This letter was my Graduation. I had to open it. To stare its contents down.
I slit it with my fingernail and gave myself a paper cut––and I pulled out the letter, watching as my blood darkened and stained the fibrous material. Halsey girl, it said. And I knew I would be all right.
Your Mother and Father––rest their souls––elected me your Guardian. We go on, when we are through, we graduate––and so now you are Eighteen. Something happens to a witch when she turns eighteen. It is said that if she does the thing right, she will come into her inheritance, whatever that may be. Oh, do not look for your inheritance in a letter, young girl. Do, however, please find enclosed––and it’s long overdue––something which (I almost wrote witch) you have earned, which is Your Diploma. We go on. We graduate. We Come Into our Powers. Which I’m sure you know, if this letter finds you well. I wonder what your band of Wiccan purity and innocence looks like. For so I have struggled to keep you Innocent and Pure.
Do not say NOTHING HAPPENS, for Life is a gift. As is our Marks.
You are Ma
rked by the love of your family, and if, for whatever reason, you should ever find yourself in a hard place, just think of them, and what they would do. The answer is in your soul, Miss Rookmaaker, as I hope St. Martley’s is. You are with us, as we are to you. And if your family won’t help you, then I will. Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe even Maximilian (whose name means “greatest,” btw) Marked you in ways so innocent and profound, that your father knew would be needed––he even saw fit to elect me
Your Godmother.
One last thing. I have observed the Past comes back to us when we need it most. When you were under my roof, you needed some sense put into your head. I foresee that good taste is not your problem. Rather, you feel too much. Let go, Halsey girl. Be like the satellite, which tumbles free from the confines of the earth. Magnetism pulls us back to the beginning. You to yours is a powerful tug. Embolden your heart and remember that I love you.
Genevieve
P.S. Becca is becoming really problematical. I tried to show her how to make a proper Wiccan W and she made a Q instead. Q for quiddity.
P.P.S. Don’t tear your Wiccan diploma up. It may come in handy. It’s time you forgave me for being so hard on you: when I see potential all I want to do is whip it into shape, fledge it. You possess all the hallmarks of a truly great witch. Remember to practice the four D’s: Desire, Dedication, Determination, and Discipline. And, above all, follow your Mark. Some witches have road signs laid out for them. Others do not. Open your eyes! Because... Those who remain Adept stay that way forever. While the truly Fledged––well, hopefully, you’ll see.
This thing last. Be reckless in your affections. Think what you yourself would tell your younger self and listen to her. Be external. Create lots of yous. Life ends or it never begins. G.