Chapter Eleven
The atmosphere in the Summers household grew tense and taut in the days following Camryn’s coup. There was a palpable difference in the way some of the witches behaved around Morgan. The coven divided into two mindsets: those who believed Morgan was and would always be the best leader in recent history, and those who were easily swayed by Camryn’s negative influence. Each group was plainly recognizable. Morgan’s supporters worked tirelessly to combat the effects of the curse. Malia, Karma, and Laurel headed this charge, parsing out duties and tasks for each witch to complete. They fortified the ward, distributed healing spells, and held energy renewal rituals to invigorate each other. In addition, they picked up extra responsibilities to keep daily life running as smoothly as possible. With no mortals to run the fresh market and no supplies going in or out of Yew Hollow, we were running low on food and other necessities. The age old ideas of hunting and gathering weren’t going to help either. The curse had killed all of the vegetation and driven the animals away.
Laurel was the one who came up with a solution. As an elemental witch, her ability was connected to the earth. She spoke with nature in a profound way that the rest of us could not understand. In less than a day, she constructed a greenhouse as close to the edge of the ward as possible, where the sunlight almost permeated the invisible force field to brighten Yew Hollow. Everything inside was fed and fertilized by Laurel’s witchcraft, from budding lettuce bibs to flowering soybean plants. Soon, the Summers coven would embrace a plant-based diet, a thought that made my stomach rumble for a cheeseburger. Of all the things I expected out of this curse, reluctantly becoming vegan wasn’t one of them.
Other witches followed Laurel’s example in order to keep daily life as normal as possible. Our resident water witches constructed a well and a mill to ensure the coven always had something clean to drink and bathe with. The mothers of the coven’s children banded together to create a bizarre home school that encompassed everything from arithmetic and mortal literature to useful potions and witch history. Clean-up crews cleansed the town. It had been over a month since the locals had inexplicably abandoned their homes, which resulted in a lot of moldy laundry and rank refrigerators. The witches swept through like a professional maid service, leaving each home pristine and ready for its family’s uncertain return.
In contrast, the lesser known witches made themselves scarce. They stayed in their homes, tending to the sick on their own. They grudgingly contributed to the coven’s survival efforts, doing the least amount of work possible to guarantee food and fresh water for themselves. Otherwise, Camryn’s followers kept to themselves. Morgan and her sisters hardly noticed their absence, but I kept a wary eye open for trouble. The way they looked at their coven leader had changed. A month ago—before this dreaded curse derailed our peaceful small town lives—every witch in the coven viewed Morgan with respect and admiration. Nowadays, they whispered behind their hands when Morgan walked by, throwing looks of dissatisfaction in her direction.
Camryn herself seemed to have taken Morgan’s warning seriously. She did not make another misjudged public attempt to preach injustice, though I had the feeling she was feeding her followers plenty of misinformation under the table. The shift in perspective had happened too quickly, and I wondered if Camryn was somehow using her supposed “intuition” ability to convince the lesser witches of her leadership qualities. Morgan repeatedly requested that I ignore Camryn. She wasn’t the biggest threat to the coven right now, and we needed to focus on more important things.
My main goal was to find out more about the girl on the horse in Windsor Falls. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded. I was no longer permitted to use the scrying mirror without direct supervision, so I had to make do with a bowl of water, the fickle and commonly mocked crystal ball, or the small pond in the woods behind the Summers house. No matter what visual medium I used, the images were muddled. The most important aspects of the girl’s history remained a puzzle to me. There were no hints that she belonged to one of the three covens in her hometown, which left me wondering who had trained her to hone her aura at such a radiant level. She lived in one of the biggest estate houses in Windsor Falls, which indicated a radically different upbringing than the children of Yew Hollow.
Not for the first time, I realized how selfishly ensconced the Summerses were in their own history. They believed that their rules of witchcraft and way of life were the only rules, but Winnie and the mysterious teenaged healer had taught me otherwise. This was not Morgan’s fault. She was simply raised by women who upheld archaic ideas and traditions. While this was admirable in preserving the Summerses’ rich history, it hindered my research of our super-powered witch. Without an idea of how other covens operated, I had little to no hope of discovering additional information about her abilities. As time passed and I made infinitesimal progress, it became apparent that our plan would not move forward while I was trapped within the ward that encompassed Yew Hollow.
“Let me build a door,” I insisted to Morgan one morning over a breakfast of homemade wheat toast and fresh peanut butter. “It doesn’t even have to be a door! It could be a window or a tunnel or whatever, something just wide enough for me to pass through.”
Morgan wearily sipped black coffee. She was in need of another dose of healing energy. I was beginning to think that the dark circles under her eyes were permanent fixtures on her face. “Out of the question. The ward is the only thing keeping us safe right now. I can’t have you poking holes in it.”
“The coven isn’t getting any better, Morgan,” I reminded her hotly. “You’re getting weaker every day. Your sisters too. And has anyone checked on Alana lately? Is she even still alive? How much longer can we survive in this perpetual quarantine?”
“Yvette and Yvonne have assured me that Alana’s condition is severe but stable,” Morgan replied, kneading the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “They’ve seen no distressing changes in her.”
“They haven’t seen any good ones either.” My toast lay cold and abandoned as I tried to get through to the older witch. “Come on, Morgan. You’ve always said that you trust my judgement, and my judgement is telling me that what we’re doing isn’t working. Not well enough, anyway. I need to find this girl, and I can’t do that if I’m stuck in Yew Hollow.”
Morgan set down her mug. It left a tired ring of coffee on the mahogany tabletop. “I do trust you, Gwenlyn, but you’re also young. This ward keeps us safe. If we open a rift, we open ourselves up too. The ward doesn’t just keep the curse from progressing. It prevents the culprit from locating us. I can’t risk that. We’ll find another way without the healer.”
“What if there is no other way?” I asked. “What if we waste away under this glorified circus tent because we decided that it was too dangerous to venture outside? I’m not asking anyone to go with me, Morgan. No one else has to risk their health, but I’m not really a Summers, remember? I’ll be safe outside the ward.”
“No,” Morgan growled.
“You’re being stubborn—”
“I said no, Gwenlyn!”
Her voice boomed through the dining room, echoing to the far corners of the house as she magically amplified the sound waves to get her point across. Her aura slammed me against my chair, stunning me into silence. As her power settled, Morgan rested her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands, staring straight down into her coffee to avoid my gaze.
“Fine,” I said quietly. “Let me know when your pride cools down and you realize that I’m right about this. I’ll be in my room.”
I left her to stew in the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Winnie was waiting for me, lounging on my bed as she watched some famous chef whip up a pot roast.
“Wow,” she said as I collapsed face down into the pillows next to her.
“You heard?”
“Who didn’t?”
I flipped over, giving the pillows a frustrated thwack as I maneuvered them to sit against the headb
oard. “She’s being ridiculous. Ignoring this won’t make it go away. We can’t manage a curse. It’s like living in purgatory. Eventually, it’s going to escalate and catch up to us, and when it does, we won’t have a damn clue what to do.”
Winnie stretched and rested against the pillows with her arm behind her head. “I think Morgan is doing what she thinks is best for the coven.”
“Oh, so you’re taking her side? Great. So much for support. What kind of twin are you anyway?”
“I didn’t say I agreed with her,” Winnie retorted, swiping her hand through my head and causing my brain to momentarily freeze over. “Actually, I think her anxiety is affecting her judgment. Even the best leaders fall prey to self-doubt sometimes, and when they do, it’s often up to their second-in-command to step up to the plate.”
I wrenched my eyes from the chef’s hypnotic onion dicing to study my sister. “What are you suggesting?”
A line appeared between Winnie’s eyebrows, the same line that appeared on my own face whenever I was deep in thought. “You can open a portal in the ward on your own, right?”
“It wouldn’t be easy,” I answered. “But I could do it. Yes.”
“Far be it from me to encourage you to disobey your coven leader,” Winnie said, shifting into a more active pose as her ideas took over. “But I agree with you. I think the only hope of saving this coven is to find the healer. Morgan may not approve now, but she might change her mind when she sees how much a super-powered witch can flip the advantage.”
I chewed anxiously on my lip, considering the possibility. “She would kill me.”
“Probably,” Winnie agreed nonchalantly, “but then she’d most likely thank you for doing what she couldn’t.”
I groaned and tossed the TV remote across the room out of frustration. It collided with the image of the steaming pot roast, and the batteries toppled out. “I don’t feel comfortable with sneaking out. It would be blatantly betraying Morgan’s trust.”
“You know what they say,” Winnie said with a shrug. “Better to beg for forgiveness than—”
“To ask for permission,” I finished. I already felt queasy at the thought of directly disobeying Morgan’s orders, but something needed to be done. “I’ll go tonight. Will you come with me?”
Winnie answered with a warm smile. “Of course.”
As she returned her attention to the television screen, I subtly studied her from the side. It had been well over a month since she’d first appeared in my bedroom. It was one of the longest hauntings I’d ever experienced. Part of me felt guilty for not doing more to convince her to cross over. Ghosts who lingered on earth for too long eventually found themselves unable to venture into the otherworld at all. I didn’t want to condemn her to such a fate. She had suffered enough in life, and she deserved a peaceful one after death. On the other hand, I cherished the time we spent together. Somehow, between the research and the coven’s feud and the hunt for the healer, Winnie and I managed to laugh, share stories, and connect with one another. She told me about growing up in a small coven in the southwest and I filled her in on all the quaint chaos of Yew Hollow. I grew accustomed to her presence, and in the long run, I realized one selfish fact about myself: I didn’t want Winnie to go.
“Stop staring at me,” she instructed without straying from the television.
“Sorry.”
“It’s all right. What’s on your mind?”
I sighed wistfully. “You.”
Winnie glanced over at me, saw my distressed expression, and stretched out to face me instead of the TV. “What about me?”
“I feel like I’m letting you down,” I mumbled, picking at the pattern of the purple quilt. “I’ve been so focused on the coven that I haven’t spared even a minute to think about getting you to the otherworld.”
Winnie chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You,” she replied. “And Morgan, by extension. See, you keep going on about how you’re supposed to help me, but I told you already, Gwen. I have no debts to settle or goodbyes to give. You don’t have to help me do anything.”
“There has to be something,” I insisted. “Otherwise, why are you here?”
She tapped my nose with the tip of her finger. “To help you, silly.”
“What?”
Winnie rolled her eyes, as if my bewilderment was endearing. “Here’s the problem with you and Morgan being so alone in your psychic medium education. In your experience, every single ghost you’ve encountered has come to you for assistance. That’s understandable. Most people are inherently selfish, especially in death. But did it ever once occur to you that maybe—just maybe—each ghost that appeared to you taught you a valuable lesson?”
“Every single one of them?” I asked skeptically. “Because I’d really like to know what I learned from the eighty-year-old grandpa that tried to hit on me before I could throw him into the next dimension.”
“All I’m saying is that you should stop worrying about me,” Winnie said, smirking at my anecdote. “It’s no coincidence that I showed up here on the exact same day Yew Hollow experiences its biggest disaster in ten years. You want to help me cross over? Focus on saving the coven. That’s why I’m here—to help my sister.”
Before I could agree or disagree, a rumble of thunder shook the house. I scrambled to my feet and looked out of the window.
“Crap,” I said, squinting up at the gathering black clouds.
“What is it?”
“There’s a big storm rolling in.”
These days, the only weather Yew Hollow got was rain. It pelted the town regardless of news reports or radar readings. I was not naïve. Each bout of rain stank of the same acrid smell as that of the first. The storms were part of the curse, and every time another one swept through the area, it left the witches weaker and sicker than they had been before.
Morgan’s voice echoed up the staircase and into my bedroom. “Gwenlyn?”
I momentarily forgot about our tiff from earlier. Any moment now, the skies would open up, showering the town with more bad luck. Morgan needed my help. I abandoned the sickening sight at the window and hurried into the hallway.
“On my way.”