It wasn’t really a question, but for a moment uncertainty filled her eyes. And that was horrifying on several levels. Then she glanced at me and smiled. “He makes me laugh, and is so kind.”
I sank down into a chair. Fought not to put my face in my hands.
Ben laughed and shot me a look of incredulity.
“Here, Will.” Mom set the water down in front of me.
“Thanks,” I managed.
Dad sighed. “Drink up so you can be on your way.”
My head jerked up. “You’re letting me go?”
“The doctor said there’s no immediate danger, if you’re feeling up to it. And we aren’t going to punish the young lady for your inconsideration.”
“I am so sorry, Mr. Sanger.” Mab’s hands tightened around her glass and her eyes drooped. Where had she gotten to be such a good liar? “Like I said, we were out in the orchard and the time just flew by before we knew it.”
Dad grumbled but nodded.
I downed my water and ran upstairs before they could change their minds.
MAB
While Will dashed to get his shoes, I offered the Pink House phone number and told them a little about Donna, as if she were officially my stepmother. She’d done my hair for me, combing it wet and plaiting it into some semblance of order. And reminded me that I should put on a bra and wear sandals instead of galoshes.
Mrs. Sanger took the number down in a delicate, swooping hand. Her fingernails were painted a very soft pink, and I noticed that she wore a ring next to her wedding band that was lined with tiny emeralds. A gem for powerful love and positive energies. She had an easy smile like Will’s, but something about the way she held herself reminded me of Granny Lyn in the last months; like something inside her hurt so much she had to be deliberate and move only when necessary.
Will’s Dad was more of the pillar holding up the ceiling. Strong and solid like Will, and with the exact same haircut, but his edges were sharper. He would keep down a storm with one hand. I liked him.
But Ben reminded me of Silla: forcing himself into the world so hard because there wasn’t anything but a big hole in his heart. He was the one who grilled me on the land and my family and the way homeschooling worked. I told him mostly truthful answers, keeping my voice light.
Will came back downstairs in a different shirt, with thick black and white stripes. It said NORTHERN ROCK on the front and S. TAYLOR 27 on the back. I stood up and took his hand. “Ready?”
He wove his warm fingers with mine and nodded. To his parents he said, “I’ll call if it gets late. I promise.”
“Make sure you do,” Mr. Sanger said.
“It was lovely to meet you, Mab,” added Mrs. Sanger.
I smiled at them, and at Ben, who offered me a painted-on smile exactly like Will’s. It made my own smile wider.
Will took me outside, and we got into the station wagon. I’d left all the windows rolled down, and Will leaned back in the passenger seat with his arm hanging out. His brow pinched as if he was in pain. I backed out, twisting around to look behind me, and said, “I like your family.”
He seemed startled, and stared openly at me until we were a block away. The sun was bright all around us, and I could see the freckles under his eyes as well as the red burning in them.
“What?” I asked lightly.
“Just … nothing. I’m glad you like them. I do, too, most of the time. Do you have a radio?” Will reached toward the dash.
“It’s been broken since nineteen eighty-seven.”
Will laughed, releasing the last of the tension he’d carried out of his house, as if it had its own voice. “Damn. How’d you know where I live, anyway?”
I gestured to the map and silver hand mirror in the backseat. “I used the last drop of your blood for a location spell.”
“Of course. That explains everything.”
My fingers tightened on the huge steering wheel, but he was grinning wryly at me. Relief spilled down my arms and I slid one of my hands onto my thigh.
Will reached over the gearshift and carefully wove his fingers through mine, stroking my thumb with his. It sent tiny shivers that felt almost like blood magic tingling under my skin.
We drove in silence through the sticky afternoon, the tires splashing water from the highway, until I pulled off the county road and through the gateway to our land.
“I still didn’t see it,” Will said as we started along the pebbled drive up the hill. I smiled and started to tell him about the wards that kept the gateway hidden, but his hands suddenly gripped his own knees. “Whoa.”
I stopped the station wagon and pushed it into park. “Will?”
His eyes squeezed tightly shut and sweat beaded at his hairline. I clambered out of the car and ran around to his side, jerked the door open, and knelt with my hands flat on his thigh. “Will!”
“Just … just massively dizzy. Give me a sec.” His voice was breathy, and he pushed one hand flat against his chest. “My heart is, like, burning.”
I pried his hand away from his heart and put it against my cheek. He was on fire.
Out of nowhere, the crows dropped down and landed on the roof of the station wagon. I gripped Will’s hand, closed my eyes, and imagined strength from inside me flowing out through my skin and into his hand. It would run up his arm and feed his heart. With my free hand, I dug through the glove box for my emergency pocketknife. I unfolded one of the blades with my teeth and pricked the tattoo on the wrist of my hand that held Will’s to my face. Dropping the pocketknife, I smeared the blood over my other fingers, then put that hand against Will’s cheek to complete the circuit of energy. Face to hand to face and back around, magic tingled in pulses of heat.
Will sighed through pursed lips, and his eyelids fluttered. “That’s better,” he whispered. “It was, like, I don’t know, Mab, something was pulling at this bruise. That wouldn’t happen if it was a tumor.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “Ugh, I am so glad we’re getting rid of the curse.”
I pressed his hand to my cheek. “We are. Today. I need to know, though, if it’s been building all day, or if it just happened when we crossed onto my land.”
“Definitely just now.” He sat up farther and gazed out over my shoulder at the trees. “It’s been itching, and my head hurts. But it was just now that I got dizzy and it all tightened up.”
I released him, reluctantly, and stood. “Come on.”
Dashing into the woods, I found a redbud tree with low enough branches I could use it as a ladder into one of the taller cottonwoods. After taking too long to unbuckle my sandals, I scrambled up. Drops of water rained down on me as I shook limbs, and when I leapt across to a gray branch of the cottonwood, I heard Will call out in shock. I was only about ten feet high, but off the ground and in the lattice of trees like this, the forest came alive in a myriad of new layers. Birds fluttered everywhere, and butterflies, too; squirrels ducked into their nests when they saw me, tails twitching; a raccoon stared from a hollow halfway up an elm. The trees shifted in infinitesimal motions, swaying not to the wind but to the turning of the planet.
I closed my eyes and put my cheek against the cottonwood’s trunk, where it shimmered with invisible magic. Strings of power lined everything here, and I could just feel the threads unsettle, the pull of strangeness, a shift in the pattern. Was it because of what I did to Lukas, grounding his rune to the land like that? Or because of what was happening to Will? Did the blood land recognize the roses’ curse?
“Mab!”
I glanced down to where he stood just under me, face lifted and wide with shock.
“Are you feeling better?” I asked him.
“Healthy as a horse.”
“Good.” I smiled at him and took a deep breath. “Catch me.”
WILL
Her body relaxed as if she fainted. In slow motion she slipped off the branch and fell toward me. I cussed and held out my arms. She landed hard against my chest and right
shoulder, staggering me to my knees. Her arms and legs fell limp. Her head lolled back, and all that yellow hair streamed around me. I yelled her name, shook her, and set her down. The ground under her was muddy and covered in a layer of leaves. “Mab.”
Nothing. She didn’t respond at all.
I saw thin blood all over my hands. Holly’s slack mouth.
Cawing crows snapped me out of it, and I yelled, “Mab!” I put my ear to her mouth and scrambled to find a pulse under her jaw. It was there; she was breathing. Calmly, like she was asleep. “Mab,” I said again, pleading with her to wake up.
She didn’t so much as twitch. I touched her cheek, her lips, her chin, and ran my hand down her arm. No blood. She was warm. Just asleep, I told myself.
No. Possession.
She’d left her body, and I remembered that double-vision memory of stepping over her prone form on the floor of the barn.
An owl swooped past my face, its white feathers flapping silently as it sped through the branches. The crows cawed at it, and about half of them took off after it. The others hopped down to me, circling around us.
My heart thudded hard and fast.
Do you trust me? she’d asked. I’d said yes without even knowing what it meant. Without asking her the same. But now, here, was her answer.
I lifted her into a sitting position, and scooted behind her. She slumped against me. I wrapped my arms around her. Her shoulder pushed into the bruise. I ignored it. Her hair tickled my neck. The damp ground soaked into my jeans. All around me the crows watched, wings spread. When they flapped those wings, I smelled thick rainwater and mud.
Catch me, she’d said. And hadn’t even considered that I wouldn’t.
FORTY
Once, you said to me, “I love you because you’re part of the world.”
FORTY-ONE
MAB
The trees tried to whisper to me, but I couldn’t understand. I flew through the topmost branches, beating silent white wings, and listened with the owl’s ears, but to no avail. I leapt into a sparrow and rode its tiny mind through the trees until there was a pair of blue jays shrieking at me. Taking them both, I spread out. Reese joined us, and we were a flock of black and blue, spreading a net over the land. As we flew past squirrels and a family of foxes, I snatched them up, too, throwing myself into more and more small minds. I let go of my name and became the forest. I listened, I watched, I felt and sensed and smelled, and all of it rolled into a giant ball of knowledge I could almost parse.
The wind shook branches, and I crawled over roots, I scampered up through twigs, I skimmed wings across the canopy and yet did not understand. Even when I pushed toward the roses, when I felt the energy of them, the message was garbled.
I was the skin of the forest but could not touch its bones.
And so I turned toward my body at the base of the hill, and let go some of my little souls.
First a raccoon and then the sparrow, and soon I released more. The squirrels and the owl, the blue jays, the rabbits racing from bush to bush. Until I was only a red fox, running headlong through the rain-soaked underbrush. I could smell Will, could feel where he’d passed, for it had left a red-hot mark on the earth. There he was, cradling my body. I let go of the fox’s mind and dove home into myself.
Oh, it was grand to lie there on the warm, wet earth with my eyes closed and feel my heartbeat. I did not move but breathed in a circular pattern my mother had taught me for reconnecting with all the tissues of my body, for helping what I had seen and heard and smelled in different tiny animal minds coalesce in my own mind. It needed a long moment to process, to transform from animal memory to my own. Too fast and it was all a black blur, confusing and maddening. Force it, and it became a blank palette to imprint your own assumptions upon. You are only a different kind of animal, pet, my mother had said when I was small. And you only need give your blood and your power time to convert beastly knowledge into your own.
Heat flooded me, from Will’s arm. His fingers lined up against my ribs, his thumb over my sternum. I felt pressure where his other hand twisted in my curls. A small smile turned up my mouth as I nestled closer.
“Mab?” Will whispered.
I opened my eyes.
His eyes were right there, big and dark and edged in blood.
“Will,” I said.
“Mab.” His breath puffed over my cheek, and I touched his face just under his eye.
“That red is darker,” I murmured. “And I couldn’t discover what exactly made your curse flare up.”
His lips pressed together, pinching his whole expression. “Are you okay, though?”
“Yes.” I pushed gently off of him and stood. My skirt was muddy and stuck to my thighs. “Let’s get to the barn.”
Although the blood ground seemed the most logical place to cleanse away a curse, the barn would do, not only because it was drier than the rest of the world but because the wards painted around the outside made it into a permanent working circle. The curse could not escape these solid pine walls.
While Will fidgeted over near the family tree, I dragged the basket of purity stones out from under a pile of old rugs and set them onto the dusty floor next to a short cast-iron fire pit. I spread out a thin red cloth for him to lie on, and another for my tools: a fleam, a crow-feather fan, and six little bowls of herbs I’d ground down earlier that afternoon. From outside, I fetched a wide and shallow stone bowl that had collected rainwater overnight, and as I carefully walked it to the fire pit, I noticed Will running his finger along one branch of the family tree.
I’d always loved the mural. Arthur’s name created the darkest lines of the trunk, and we were all there, our names and birth dates penned in blood ink. Every branch led up and away from him, out to the dozens of cousins since his son was born in 1887. There on the left was the unrelated Harleigh line, ending with Nick, and just below him, Donna. And far across from that, a lonely branch named Josephine Darly that stretched up thin and winding to my name. We did not know where our bloodline came from, and now that she was dead, we never would. Maybe Mother had been an orphan from a known line, lost to time, and maybe that’s what Lukas was, too, for we had no records of family settling in the Ozarks. The nearest were the Yaleylah witches, of Arthur’s own direct line: Silla’s family, where Arthur had drawn Reese’s death date below his name, as well as the silhouette of a flying crow.
That was the branch Will touched, tracing the line of the crow’s wings.
“Will,” I said gently, and he turned to me, his shoulders twisting and his smile in place. “Can you build a fire?” I indicated the fire pit with a slow wave of my hand.
“Of course.” He joined me, and I showed him the old newspaper, bundle of dry logs, and long matches.
He crouched and got to work twisting paper, and I turned my attention to the purity rocks. Each was marked with a strength rune so that it would not crack in the heat, and a rune of holy rain so that it might carry only the clean magic we wished. With the fleam, I pierced my tattoo, letting a single drop splash onto the center of the runes. Lifting each of the nine stones to my mouth, I breathed life into them and set them in a small pile.
The fire danced up from the tent of sticks as Will’s newspapers caught alight. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and he lifted the hem of his shirt to wipe it off.
I gasped when I saw his stomach.
He froze, shirt halfway down again. “What?” His voice rang with alarm.
I reached forward to lift the hem of his black-and-white-striped shirt higher. “Take it off,” I whispered. Lines of angry red cut down from his chest, just under his skin, streaking like blood poison.
“Jesus,” he said, standing and stripping off the shirt. It fluttered to the ground, and he pushed his fingers into his chest. “It was not this bad two hours ago.”
“It must have been when you stepped back onto the blood ground. Here is where the curse originated, so here it is stronger.” I skimmed my fingers along one of the largest bl
ood branches, and Will shuddered. “Take deep breaths. In, count to five, out, count to five.”
His breathing remained shaky, but he got it under control as I traced my finger along the lines. I stepped in close and put both my hands against him, covering the center burst of the bruise gently. It radiated the tingling heat I knew to be magic. Glancing up at him, I said, “It will be all right, Will.”
“Oh yeah?” He was hoarse, and he tilted his chin down. My eyes were only a few inches from his. Even in the shade of the barn, I could see the red around his irises had bled inward, stretching thin fingers toward the black of his pupils.
“I promise,” I said. “Now take off the rest of your clothes.”
He started in surprise, and I hoped I’d calculated right.
It only took a second before Will laughed a little bit. I kept my hands on his chest, and his merriment didn’t last long, but when he covered my hands with his, he wasn’t shaking anymore. He wasn’t holding himself so tightly he might explode.
WILL
Turned out, she hadn’t been entirely kidding. Mab dug through a cardboard box of clothes and pulled out a pair of dark blue drawstring pants. Apparently, jeans weren’t going to cut it for the cleansing ritual.
I was glad to grab onto the slight embarrassment of ducking behind a stack of crates to change into some incredibly hippie-looking pants. Embarrassed was better than scared. I rubbed my hand over the bruise. The hard weight pushed into my chest. I remembered looking at it in the mirror this morning, when it had been free of red streaks and just a bruise. And I remembered the sharp compression when we’d driven onto the land, when I’d been dizzy and hurting and felt like somebody had dumped a bucket of hot coals over my head. If it had been like this at Dr. Able’s, he’d have hooked me up to an IV of antibiotics and I’d never have escaped.
This had to work.
I came out, leaving the rest of my clothes in a pile. For a moment I watched Mab kneel and set the last of her rocks in the fire. She seemed calm. Certain.