Chapter Four
Miraculously, I woke up. Dawn fought through the clouds, but the storm raged on, thundering against the windows of my bedroom. Someone had layered pillows on either side of my body to keep me from falling out of bed. I ached all over, and the smell of burnt hair didn’t soothe my anxious thoughts. My legs were full of pins and needles, and a ringing sound filled my head.
“You’re awake.”
Winnie sat at the desk in the corner. My throat felt like sandpaper. “What happened?”
“Morgan got you back to the house.” She pointed to a glass of water on the table next to my bed. I gratefully drained the contents. “All four sisters worked on you. It was bad, Gwenlyn. You were covered in burns. I almost thought you’d be joining me in the afterlife.”
“Not a chance,” I rasped. “Too much to do here. Is everyone else okay?”
“As far as I know.”
I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, kicking aside the pillow barrier. “Morgan’s going to need help.”
Winnie blocked the doorway. “Whoa! Right now? She told me to keep an eye on you, and I don’t think you should be getting out of bed for a while.”
I limped toward her. “I appreciate the concern. Really, I do. But this is my coven, not yours. If someone’s using dark magic, it’s my responsibility to help Morgan figure out who.”
Winnie pouted but stepped aside. “Fine, but if she asks, I’m telling her that you bullied me. Honestly, Morgan kind of scares me.”
I coughed out a chuckle as I walked across the hall to the bathroom. I balked at my reflection. My neck, chest, and arms all sported evidence of magically healed burns. The skin looked new and shiny, but sparkled with the residual energy of Morgan and her sisters.
“My hair,” I whined, fingering the burnt ends of the black strands. I’d have to cut it shorter to get rid of the ruined bits.
“Yeah, that’s not a good look,” Winnie quipped from the hallway.
I turned the tap on, letting the cool water rush over my heated skin. My head pounded as I splashed my face, so I moved carefully. Even reaching for the hand towel made me feel like I was over-exerting myself, but at least I was alive.
I leaned heavily on the banister as I made my way downstairs with Winnie’s supervision. Morgan, Karma, Malia, and Laurel sat at the dining room table, discussing the storm outside. It was early in the morning. Abandoned scones and scrambled eggs littered the table, and each of the witches nursed a cup of coffee or tea. Laurel noticed my struggle first and surged to her feet to help me the rest of the way down and into a chair at the table.
“Well?” I prompted the sisters. “What are we dealing with here? Is this storm going to stop anytime soon?”
Morgan waved my questions aside. “We’ll get to that in a minute. How are you feeling?”
“I tried to get her to stay in bed,” Winnie said.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Morgan replied. “I never expected her to stay in bed. Gwen?”
Though Morgan’s sisters could not see Winnie, they had enough experience with ghosts over the years that it did not alarm them to watch Morgan speak to thin air. Personally, I always got a kick out of watching them try to figure out where a ghost was standing in the room. They took cues from us, but only Laurel’s gaze came close to Winnie’s actual position.
“I feel like I’m full of bees,” I admitted. There was no other way to explain the buzzing feeling that lingered in my limbs due to the electric surge. “Other than a raging headache, I’m intact. That was a freak accident, right?”
Morgan rubbed her eyelids. She looked exhausted. “We’re not sure yet. You got unlucky, kid. This storm is something else.”
As if in reply, the rain intensified, drumming on the windows of the house. I grimaced at the racket. Laurel conjured another mug. It was full of cloudy yellow tea. Normally, I wouldn’t have touched a drink that looked like algae-infested swamp water, but knowing the positive effects of Laurel’s turmeric healing recipe, I took a long sip and let the peculiar flavor wash over my tongue.
“Thanks, Laurel. What’s the plan?”
Malia rapped her fingertips on the table. “I think our best bet is to wait it out. Keep everyone indoors. We don’t know what kind of power this thing has behind it.”
“Agreed,” Karma said. “What happened to Gwen might not have been an accident. I checked the weather report. The storm targeted Yew Hollow specifically.”
Laurel’s tea was a lifesaver. My headache began to subside, but I massaged my temples to further release the tension. “It’s been relatively quiet for ten years. Who has the gall to start something now?”
All at once, the storm stopped. The pounding rain ceased so abruptly that the sudden absence of sound made the dining room feel like a vortex. I looked to each sister, but none of them, not even Morgan, appeared confident that our worries would vanish with the rain.
“So,” Laurel whispered, as though afraid to break the seal of quiet. “When will the real storm break?”
On cue, the front door burst open, and Yvette, one of Morgan’s many aunts, appeared in the dining room. She was soaked through, her pale blonde hair pasted to her forehead and the hood of her raincoat limp against her back as though it had fallen off in her haste to reach us.
“Morgan!” she gasped, dripping water across the wood floors. “I think you need to see this.”
Morgan stood up from her seat at the table, in full coven leader mode. “What is it, Yvette?”
“The whole town is gone.”
Morgan assigned her sisters to check on the rest of the coven while she inspected the square. Though Winnie begged me to stay behind and rest, I chugged the rest of my tea, donned my raincoat, and followed Morgan and Yvette into town. Morgan didn’t argue. Over the years, an unspoken agreement was forged between us. In any given situation, I went where she went. The coven was as much my responsibility as it was hers, and we worked better as a team than as individuals. As we hurried down the road after Yvette, she linked her arm in mine. Whether it was for her own peace of mind or to help me stay upright, I didn’t know. Laurel’s tea usually worked within minutes to heal any plight, but recovering from a heavy voltage shock was a different type of injury. I wobbled along, willing my legs to work properly, but I had yet to regain full feeling in all of my extremities.
The storm left utter destruction in its wake. The power line outside the Summers house wasn’t the only victim. Others hung like limp laundry lines from askew telephone poles. Thankfully, none of them were live. The power was out to the entire town. Debris littered the ground. The wind had ripped shingles from roofs, uprooted entire trees from the ground, and scattered trash everywhere. Clouds lingered overhead. They weren’t normal storm clouds, but rather an unbroken sheet of solid gray. In the distance, a distinct curved line separated the gloom from an exquisite blue sky, a sign that the weather outside Yew Hollow was as fine as it should’ve been on a day like this. The ominous acidity of the air had not dissipated either. The wind tasted bitter and smelled faintly of vinegar.
When we reached the town square, Yvette’s words became reality. Not one of the locals had ventured out to assess the damage. There was no one left to do so. The streets were empty except for evidence of the disaster. Cars lay abandoned in the middle of the road. Doors to houses and businesses were left wide open. The police station was quiet, despite the fact that the chief should’ve arranged a clean-up party to help the residents by now. There were no residents to help. Yew Hollow was deserted.
“What the hell is going on?” I muttered, gazing around at the empty town.
Morgan dropped my arm to check the police station. She disappeared inside for a minute or so before emerging again. “It’s empty,” she reported. “Chief Torres is gone. The place is a wreck, like everyone panicked and left as quickly as possible.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
Once, Morgan had worked as a paranormal detective for Yew Hollow’s police force. She planted
her feet, spreading her shoulders as she transferred into command mode. “Spread out. Check the nearby houses and businesses for anyone who might’ve stayed behind. Meet me at the yew tree.”
Yvette and I hustled to obey. I took the lefthand side of the square, sweeping through the daycare, Dover’s Fresh Market, and Ms. Winning’s Antique store. Every building was hauntingly desolate and showed signs of hurried evacuation. Winnie floated along as I stumbled through a row of vacated houses, looking on in concern every time I paused to catch my breath or stomp feeling into my toes again. I was grateful for her presence, however ironic it was that I found a ghost’s companionship less eerie than our desolate township.
As I checked under the bed of a child’s room in one of the houses near the yew tree, Winnie scoped the closet. I jumped when a pair of glowing eyes peered back at me from beneath the bed, but it was just a gray tabby cat. It tore out of the room, its paws windmilling to find purchase on the smooth wood floor and down the stairs before I could react. I glanced out of the window in time to see the cat shoot across the square toward the woods.
“Even the animals are spooked,” I murmured as Winnie joined me at the window. “Have you noticed they’re all gone too? No birds, no squirrels. I haven’t seen so much as a housefly this morning.”
“Have you ever witnessed something like this before?” Winnie asked, her eyebrows knitting together worriedly.
I shook my head. “No, but this isn’t worst thing we’ve been through. Morgan will figure it out.”
Winnie peered at me sideways. “What was the worst thing?”
I unconsciously scratched the blue scar on my forearm. “When I first got to Yew Hollow, a warlock commanded an army of demons to rise from the dead. That was bad. This is just weird.”
Winnie looked astonished at my nonchalance. “Warlocks? Demons? What is this place, the setting of a Charmed reboot?”
“Dibs on Piper,” I quipped. Outside, Morgan stepped out from a house down the street and headed to the next. “Let’s get moving. Morgan will be finished soon. Didn’t your coven ever have to deal with an uprising?”
Winnie glided out of the bedroom and followed me out to the front porch. “We lived in a tiny town in New Mexico. My coven included me, my mother, my aunt, and my dad, if you count mortal men as honorary members.”
“We don’t,” I replied shortly.
“I’ve never seen anything like the Summerses before,” Winnie said. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen a place like Yew Hollow before. An entire town run by witches?”
“It’s more common than you think. Ever been to New Orleans?” I tripped off the curb. Without thinking, I reached out to Winnie to steady myself. My hand sank through hers with a wintry chill, and I sprawled across the grass. Groaning, I picked asphalt out of my palms.
Winnie grimaced in solidarity. “I still think you should’ve stayed at the house. You shouldn’t take electrocution so lightly.”
My head swam as I pushed myself to my feet. “I told you. I won’t lie around while the coven might be in trouble. We pull our weight here. We don’t have a choice. This isn’t New Mexico.”
When Winnie pursed her lips and looked away, I realized that the statement had come across with a bitter tone behind it.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I added hurriedly. “You said it yourself. You’ve never seen a coven like this, and it’s true. We’re one of the biggest in the nation. Your family flew under the radar because of how small you are, but the Summerses are allied with a lot of the larger covens throughout the country. We operate differently. That’s all I meant.”
“I get it, Gwen.”
She drifted off, leaving me to meet with Morgan and Yvette under the yew tree alone. I sighed, watching Winnie as she scouted the square. We would never find out why she was lingering on earth if my pride kept getting in the way.
I beat the other witches to the tree, settling on one of the white stone benches that bordered the area with a relieved moan. It was good to sit. The sole of my right foot prickled uncomfortably. I kicked off my tennis shoe to dig my thumbs into the arch but froze at the sight of my skin. A black Lichtenberg figure snaked up my ankle and the back of my calf. I rolled up the leg of my jeans for a better look. The marks didn’t extend past my knee, but I worried all the same. It wasn’t the tree-like pattern that concerned me though. If I were mortal, that kind of scar would be a common after-effect of a lightning strike, but the color should’ve been pink or red, not jet black.
“That is an aura.”
Yvette’s voice caused me to jump. She was what we called a wind warrior, able to manipulate the air around her. As a result, she was stealthier than a falcon. I hadn’t heard her approach. “How could it be?”
She knelt down to examine the scar. Now that she mentioned it, I noticed it sparkled just like a witch’s aura. She traced the peculiar pattern with her finger. “It’s a witch’s mark. Dark magic. They’re unintentional, but if a witch casts a curse too big to handle, it leaves leftovers.”
“I’ve never met a witch with a black aura,” I said.
“That’s because they don’t exist,” Yvette replied. “If a witch consistently uses dark magic, her aura darkens over time. Whoever created this storm is too far gone to save.”
“On the upside, at least this means that no one in the coven betrayed us.” I rolled my pant leg down to cover the marking. “None of the Summerses have black auras.”
“You need to tell Morgan,” Yvette said.
Before I could reply, Morgan herself appeared from the opposite side of the yew tree, one hand perched on her hip.
“Tell me what?”