Chapter Twelve
An hour later, the Summers house was full to bursting with nearly every member of the coven. The storm raged on, the worst one we had witnessed since the initial downpour that had left me with a witch’s mark and the lingering effects of electrocution. Water poured off the roof in buckets, constant thunder made a deafening racket, and lightning flashed so close to the windows that the children were hiding under the dining room table out of fright.
The witches were panicking. Their health deteriorated by the minute. All of the work we did to hold the effects of the curse at bay was meaningless. The house now resembled a makeshift hospital ward in the middle of a war zone rather than actual living space. I had vanished all of the furniture on the first floor and replaced it with a number of twin-sized beds. Each one was occupied. Auras flickered and trembled like dying embers, a sight that ate away at my heart. It seemed impossible that one dark hex could reduce a once-ferocious coven of witches to the quivering helpless collection of women before me.
I did my best to tend to everyone, but even though the curse didn’t affect me, I didn’t have enough energy to go around. I rationed myself off to the best of my abilities. The witches were in pain, and it hurt me to see my family so afflicted. I gave as much as I could—soothing muscles aches, clearing clogged airways, and guiding witches into unconsciousness—until I felt woozy and unsteady on my feet. As I mixed an anti-itch healing salve in the kitchen to combat the nasty red rash on some of the witches, vertigo overtook me. I dropped the bowl of salve and gripped the edge of the counter, trying my best to make sense of the world around me.
Just as I went spiraling toward the floor, someone caught me from behind and lowered me gently to the cool tile. I recognized Morgan’s gentle aura through my haze. She propped my head in her lap, and I closed my eyes until the room stopped spinning.
“You know, wearing yourself out isn’t going to counter this curse,” she murmured, wiping sweat off my forehead with a damp dishtowel.
“They need help.”
“I know.”
She fell silent, rhythmically combing her fingers through my hair. I’d finally trimmed off the burnt ends, which left the style shorter than ever.
“Gwen?”
“Hmm.”
“My pride has cooled down.”
I wearily opened one eye, catching an upside down glimpse of Morgan. All night, I’d only seen her from across the room as we triaged the witches and did our best to treat them. Now that she was so close, I could see how badly the curse was affecting her too. Morgan had died once. She’d been to the otherworld and back, and she had looked better then than she did now. Morgan was a living corpse, the stuff of nightmares, with sunken cheeks, haunted eyes, and pallid skin. No one could fight a curse looking like the living dead.
“We have to go to Windsor Falls,” I said, closing my eyes again to ward off additional images of Morgan’s frightening features.
I felt her nod in agreement. “We need to wait for this storm to pass, and you need to get your energy back up. I want you to go upstairs and sleep. You’re done helping for now. We can hold on through the night. Tomorrow, we’ll figure out a way to open a door in the ward. Laurel?”
“Yes?”
I peeked through my eyelids as Laurel came into the kitchen. She fared slightly better than Morgan, but the curse took its toll on her as well.
“Help Gwen up to her room,” Morgan said. “Make sure she gets to bed.”
With Laurel’s help, Morgan and I stumbled up from the floor. Laurel and I leaned on each other as we made our way through the dining room. At the bottom of the stairs, I turned to look at Morgan, who had already returned to aiding the other witches despite her wearied state.
“Are you sure?” I asked her. “I can stay.”
Morgan shook her head firmly, pointing up the stairs. “Go. I need you at your best.”
So Laurel took me upstairs, lay me down in bed, and tucked the duvet around me. As she left, I noticed Winnie glimmering like a night light in the corner of the room. She was hiding. I knew why. There were people in pain downstairs. If she were alive, she would be able to help them. Instead, her death rendered her useless. At some point, she couldn’t take it anymore. Neither could I.
“Tomorrow,” I muttered to her, my face mashed against the pillows. “Tomorrow, we fix this.”
I slept soundly through the night, and by the time morning broke, my craft had restored itself to full strength. I slid out of bed in last night’s clothes and looked out the window. The storm had wreaked havoc on Yew Hollow. Dead branches, leaves, and debris were scattered throughout the yard. In the distance, a fallen tree rested on the roof of Laurel’s greenhouse. It would need repairs. The water mill had most likely taken damage too. I sighed heavily. The witches were in no state to clean up the town after this storm.
I showered, got dressed, and trod downstairs. Most of the witches were asleep, recovering from yesterday’s fallout. They were united in unconsciousness. No one argued about coven leaders or Yew Hollow’s fate. Even Camryn was quiet, sitting on a cot in the corner of the living room and gazing out at the side yard in contemplation. I tiptoed through the slumbering witches, following leftover wisps of Morgan’s aura to locate her. She was sitting on the back porch with Laurel, rocking in one of the wooden chairs as she sipped a potent-smelling concoction from a coffee mug. Laurel sat on the porch steps, her bare feet resting in the dead grass of the backyard. She looked solemn. Yew Hollow’s lack of greenery was wearing thin on her.
“Morning,” I said, careful not to let the screen door slam and wake the others as I joined them. “How are you feeling?”
“Slightly better,” Morgan replied. She tipped her mug at the empty chair, gesturing for me to sit down. “And you?”
I ignored the chair and propped my ankle up on the railing of the porch to stretch out the back of my leg. “Fully rejuvenated. I think we should get going as soon as possible. I just need your help to get through the ward. Then I’ll be there and back by the end of the day, hopefully with this healer in tow.”
Morgan shook her head. “No way.”
My sneaker thunked to the wood planks of the porch. “Seriously? You changed your mind already?”
“I mean you won’t be going alone,” Morgan said. “Laurel and I are coming with you.”
“Oh.” I looked between them in consternation. “Is that a good idea? You said yourself that the ward might be the only thing preventing this illness from getting worse.”
Laurel trailed her fingers through the dirt at her feet. “Morgan and I are the healthiest out of the coven. If we keep our venture short, we should be fine.”
“Why risk it?” I asked. “Stay here. Save your strength.”
“Gwen, we don’t know anything about this girl,” Morgan pointed out. She wiped a droplet of spilled potion from the side of her mug. “I can’t send you to find her on your own.”
“I won’t be on my own,” I countered. “I’ll have Winnie with me.”
“While Winnie gives excellent direction and advice, she won’t be able to help you should you find yourself in a sticky situation.” Morgan beckoned me over to her, so I finally sat down in the chair opposite her. “We’ll go together. We’re stronger that way.”
I had not been to the edge of the ward since it was constructed, so when we reached the line between Yew Hollow and the rest of Massachusetts, I was alarmed to see that the curse had somewhat bled out beyond the borders of the town. It was nothing in comparison to the gray world in which we lived, but the trees that lined the road leading to the interstate showed unnaturally early signs of frostbite. Even so, I relished the color outside of the ward. I forgot how beautiful the world looked in the fall. The red, orange, and yellow hues warmed me from the inside out, and I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet in anticipation. Today’s excursion would be a welcome respite from the monotony of the last month.
It was no easy task to open a trapdoor in the ward. Lay
ers and layers of witchcraft made up the magical force field, and it was so well fortified that it took two hours for me, Morgan, and Laurel to punch a tiny hole in the surface of it. We widened it just enough to scramble through to the other side. I went first, flattening myself out and crawling military style through the narrow opening. It was like navigating a clear glass tunnel. I could feel the ward, but I couldn’t see it, which made moving through it all the more peculiar. Winnie followed behind me, her icy presence biting at my heels, and we waited on the other wide for Morgan and Laurel to worm their way through.
I inhaled through my nose, savoring the scent and feeling of fresh air through my lungs. It was a brisk cool morning, and the chill already permeated the fluffy liner of my green bomber jacket. I cherished it anyway, knowing that the feeling of freedom would vanish when we returned to Yew Hollow later that day.
I lent Morgan and Laurel a hand as they emerged from the ward. They took great gulps of the refreshing autumn morning. As a bit of color flushed their cheeks, I wondered if creating the ward hadn’t been the best decision after all. Morgan and Laurel looked healthier outside the barrier than they had in the past several weeks. Maybe we should’ve followed the locals’ lead and evacuated Yew Hollow instead.
Since there was no way to get a car through the ward, we walked to the highway, lured a friendly man driving a passenger van to the side of the road, and lightly spelled him to pass out. I took over the steering wheel as Laurel and Morgan belted him into the backseat, and just like that, we were on our way to Windsor Falls. We reviewed what little information I had gathered about the super-powered healer and formulated a rough plan as I piloted the van through upstate Massachusetts.
“We’re just looking,” Morgan said from the backseat. “All I want to do is check this girl out. We don’t even know if she’s the one we’re looking for.”
“It’s her,” Winnie confirmed, riding shotgun. “I can feel it.”
“We have to be cautious,” Morgan replied, as if she hadn’t heard Winnie. “Gwen, you’ve spent a lot of time scrying the town. What’s the least conspicuous way for us to go about this?”
I caught a glimpse of Morgan’s drawn features in the rearview mirror and steered the van around a snail-paced sedan. “From what I could tell, she lives in one of the big estate houses. I would recognize it if I saw it. There’s a lot of land around, including a pretty dense forest. She rides her horse through the nearby meadow almost every day. I think that’s our best bet. If we snuck through the woods and waited for her to ride out, we could get a pretty good idea of what kind of power she’s wielding.”
“And what about her family?” Laurel asked. “Which coven does she belong to?”
“From what I can tell, none of them,” I answered. “I guess that’s why we needed this trip. She doesn’t operate like a normal witch, and I couldn’t scry the people around her. I tried multiple times. All I got was a tiny hint of a yellow or orange aura, which could simply be residual energy from someone else—”
“Or it could be her coven leader disguising herself as someone of lesser importance,” Morgan finished. “Whoever she is, we can’t risk her or anyone else discovering us. None of the covens in Windsor Falls are part of the alliance. We overlooked them because they were smaller in number, but that doesn’t mean we should underestimate them. I want you all to treat every single witch we may come across as a suspect. Understood?”
Though I nodded, I couldn’t help but question Morgan’s paranoia. I caught Winnie’s eye and quickly looked away, but I could tell she was thinking along a similar train of thought. If we couldn’t speak to any of the covens in town, how were we going to figure out which one the super-powered hero belonged to?
We dumped the van and its driver on the shoulder near the exit sign for Windsor Falls. We would go the rest of the way on foot to avoid attention. Together, the three of us cast a silencing spell. I pushed my craft past Morgan and Laurel’s, saving them from expending more energy than necessary, until the space around us was eerily quiet.
Morgan naturally took point as we slithered into the woods and disappeared amongst the trees. I directed her from behind, allowing instinct and memory to guide me toward the girl I’d spent hours upon hours scrying. Laurel spoke to the trees in soft Latin as we walked, trailing her fingers over the bark in reverent awe, and the trees whispered back in breezes and rustles. I caught every few words of Laurel’s side of the conversation. What I heard was unsettling. The trees deeply mourned their lost sisters in Yew Hollow. They did not expect the nature in our hometown to recover. I pursed my lips at the daunting thought but stayed quiet.
Golden light filtered through the trees as we neared the edge of the forest. In the distance, the outline of a massive house loomed on the horizon. I almost stepped beyond the shadows of the woods for a better look, but Laurel caught my shoulder and drew me back, shaking her head a fraction of an inch. The whispers of the trees grew louder, and I wondered why Laurel had stopped me. Then a slender rider on a golden mare galloped right past our hiding place.