The witchery, p.15
The Witchery, page 15
“Mathew?” Trent reached back into a clouded mess of memories. “Probably Soma Café. I haven’t seen him all morning.”
And Trent continued to reach and reach and reach, like he was looking for something that he’d never seen before.
“So, it’d be okay?” Thalia asked, snapping him out of it. “For Bloom to crash here?”
“Yeah.” Trent shrugged. “Totally.”
He popped a cocoa cluster into his mouth, suddenly content.
Talullah Turner wasn’t sorry. She was sick of being sorry.
Her blessing arrived in the worst place for a preacher’s daughter that it could: in the middle of Mass, during her father’s sermon. She was thirteen years old.
Witchery theory stated that blessings came when the witch was most vulnerable. In a physical sense for most, and that usually meant while they were sleeping. They’d find themselves floating above their bed, awoken by that terrifying sense of falling, or from scratching their face on a popcorn ceiling, or bumping their head. A bit of fear, maybe a bit of blood. That would have been preferable.
With a hallelujah on her lips, Talullah felt an ungodly heat creep up her spine and spread throughout her. It came from within, like she’d swallowed a flame, and her terrified heartbeat only made it stronger. She turned to the pews of worshippers, analyzing them with a critical eye. Her witchy senses were coming in like baby teeth. Suddenly, her surroundings felt questionable. Was she safe? Mrs. Marsters, her second-grade teacher, was looking at her kind of funny. What was she thinking?
Witches were more than just mundanes who could manipulate magic and wield wands. Their entire beings were augmented. Instincts were heightened, senses reinforced, bodies made more durable. Not infallible or invincible, but whatever you believed gave witches their power—the earth, evolution, the devil, or an all-seeing being—it equipped its chosen with almost-feral tools needed to outlast centuries of violence against their kind.
Talullah thought she was having a panic attack.
Her mother touched her hand. “Are you okay?”
Talullah looked up. Her mother’s dark brown skin was lined with worry. The burgeoning witch drew in a shaky breath. “I don’t know.” Her body felt like it was on fire. “I think I’m gonna be sick—”
Her eyes snapped forward as the organ resounded, the blare of “Ave Maria” vibrating through the church. The worshippers stood for their song, and when Talullah picked herself up, she found that her feet weren’t touching the ground.
She opened her mouth in shock, but the scream she heard wasn’t her own. It was her mother’s. Then one scream became a chorus of cries, replacing what should’ve been joyous song.
It wasn’t possible. Talullah’s parents’ bloodlines were clean, and witches were born of Satan’s hellfire, not to a pious couple living in Annex, Arizona.
Please, God, not me.
She floated higher into the church, powerless. The congregation looked up in silent horror. She looked down, ashamed.
Talullah fell, drenched in the piercing red light of the stained-glass windows.
The impact drew gasps, but it didn’t hurt much. The sharp pain in her skull seemed more related to stress than hitting her head against the church floor.
She closed her eyes, wishing this was a nightmare to wake from.
When she opened them, her father stared down at her with a hatred reserved for the most depraved sinners. Brows furrowed in disbelief, pale face red with shock.
She should’ve run then.
Abraham Turner was an exquisite liar. “We will always love you,” he said later that evening. “But you are an abomination.”
Talullah wrung her hands. “Why is this happening to me? You said that God looked at his children with love and forgiveness. Why am I being punished?”
Fiona Turner pursed her lips into a thin line. “Your tone, Lullah.”
For all of Talullah’s devotion, the one thing she could never get behind was God allowing suffering. She bothered her parents about it incessantly. If God is so good, then why are people hungry? Why is there murder, war, death? Talullah was never satisfied with whatever verse they spat at her in response.
“Tell me,” Talullah said, a bit angry. “Why me?”
Her mother approached. She stroked Talullah’s hair. “Resist the pull of the devil’s witchery, and you will find God’s love. Give in, and you will only find damnation.”
Talullah spent weeks under the keen eye of not only her parents but the entire population of this little town. It infuriated her. She knew in her heart that they’d just been waiting for her to fuck up. Even if Talullah shared her father’s gray eyes, height, and ever-curious expression, her light brown skin and loose curls were of her mother. That was all they saw, and finally, they all had an excuse to judge.
It was okay at first. Talullah could handle her father’s sermons, always pointed toward her, taking on more violent themes. She ignored the taunts at school and learned that even without a wand, a raised hand and a murmur sent them all running. It didn’t last long. The others realized that she was never really going to do anything. She didn’t have a wand, and worse, she didn’t have the courage.
I deserve this, she thought. I am an abomination.
But her power begged to be released, no matter how hard she tried to ignore the spark. When she ran away from bullies after school, the trees bent toward her like they meant to embrace her. An exposed root that Talullah easily jumped over tripped several of the others. And the way the wind sang and the willows whispered, beckoning her … it didn’t sound like the voice of Satan.
After a month of restrained curiosity, Talullah locked her bedroom door and sat cross-legged with her laptop, a half-filled bag of Doritos, and one of her mom’s famous coconut almond cupcakes. She typed how to be a witch into Google.
Outside, the wind gusted in approval.
At three a.m., eyes burning, Talullah dialed a familiar number.
The voice on the other end was frantic. “Lullah? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I need a wand,” Tallulah whispered.
“That’s why you’re calling me?” Aunt Nonni paused. “You need a wand?”
“I can’t get one myself. There aren’t any witchy shops here, and I can’t just order one!” She had to feel the weight of it. She had to let the wandmaker pull her blood into the wand and hitch the connection between the wood and her heart.
Nonni sighed. Talullah could hear Maria, Nonni’s wife, chuckling on the other end.
“There’s a wandmaker in Phoenix,” Talullah whispered excitedly. “I looked him up. He has good reviews. So I can come visit you, right, and you can take me?”
“Oh, your parents would just love that.”
“Please, Nonni.”
Nonni sighed again. “I have next weekend off. If they’ll let you visit, then maybe. We’ll see.”
“Yay!”
“I said maybe.”
In the end, she got the wand.
She only practiced when her parents were out. That didn’t happen often since her mom ran a bakery from home, but on Saturday nights when they went out to dinner, they left her behind, believing her when she claimed that her witchery might act up.
Talullah twirled her wand. She dripped her blood into her father’s violets and watched them shiver. She wrote down spells from open-source grimoires on the internet and learned about incanting from a YouTuber named NotYourMothersWitchery. She pricked her thumb with her mom’s sewing needles.
But she needed more. Herbs, a cauldron, a sanctified needle … she needed to be around other witches. She needed to go to a school for kids like her.
Nonni agreed. “Your father will never talk to me again, but you can’t stay there.”
Talullah didn’t like the tension in those last words, like there was more to fear in Annex than her parents’ disapproval.
Abraham and Fiona never found the wand. They never looked through her diary of scribbled spells or attempted to unlock her laptop and scan the browser history. Nonni never snitched. No one would’ve ever known that Talullah was a practicing witch if not for Oliver, Raina, and Michelle, sophomores at St. Christopher’s. The prodigal offspring of the affluent Warner family did nothing but terrorize the younger citizens of Annex. Talullah had never been a target since Abraham held so much sway.
That was over now.
She’d felt the grating wrongness of her walk home from school, but the baby witch didn’t yet know how to respond to it.
Her eyes burned when they pelted her with blackthorne-steeped water balloons. She thought her skin was going to fall off; she thought she was going to go blind. The Warner triplets were in their perfect black convertible but leapt out once she was on her knees, gasping for breath.
Raina kicked her hard with a heeled boot, and Talullah felt the cruel warmth of blood spread over her face.
“We’re just preparing you,” Michelle said sweetly. “They torture witches in hell. Get used to it.”
Talullah stayed down, even as her body pleaded at her to get up and run away.
Another kick to the head, this time from Oliver, and her skull rebounded off the sidewalk so hard that her vision was dotted with little white spots. Her witchery couldn’t protect her now.
Or could it?
It was risky to take her wand to school, but Talullah couldn’t bear to be away from it. As the Warners trotted toward their car, she pulled it from the waistband of her pleated skirt. Her vision still blurred, her mind still reeling, she pushed her magic hard against the watered-down blackthorne that was trying to subdue her. Talullah aimed at Raina texting in the back seat.
“Azuamorraille,” she whispered.
She’d just wanted to scare them. Lift Raina into the air and dangle her there until she wet her pants. Maybe she’d cry, and apologize, and they’d never mess with her again.
But it wasn’t just Raina that levitated.
The entire car lifted with all of them in it, and in Talullah’s horrified shock, she swung her wand and sent the car crashing violently into the side of the high school.
Talullah was frozen. It was the most awful thing she’d ever seen.
The sidewalk was soon full of jaw-dropped passersby, scrambling and screaming and looking at Talullah like she was the devil incarnate.
God, no, she thought, realizing that so many people had seen her.
Then she felt anger like she’d never known before. They’d all seen everything and chose to stand around and watch. Nothing mattered until their own were hurt, never mind the witch bleeding on the pavement.
Like vultures, they converged on her, and Talullah knew she could either run away or stay here, take responsibility, and die. She hadn’t known then that she’d killed Oliver, but even if they’d all survived, she knew what the consequences would be.
In that one moment of selfishness and self-preservation, she was changed forever.
This was why Thalia Blackwood could understand every bit of Jailah’s thought process in betraying Vero, and why Jailah understood her. Even so, Thalia didn’t tell her about altering Trent’s mind. There was a standing moral code of witchery. Thalia never intended to break it. She didn’t like messing around in Trent’s head. But if the last ingredient of a resurrection spell called for a murderess’s blood, then no one could ever know that she was the one to supply it.
This was for survival. If her own father could lead the witchhunt to her with torches and blackthorne-loaded guns, then a Hammersmitt she barely knew surely could, too.
An icy tremor inched up her spine. Thalia knew herself to be needlessly paranoid, but she couldn’t deny that outside of the Wolf Boy, if there was anyone with the power to bring them all down, it was the Roddin Witch. She knew too much about their interest in the Wolf Boy, and she had a book with the spell for bringing up the dead.
Standing in front of her cabin, Thalia called Maverick. Come on, lazy-bones. He appeared from behind the window first, then popped through the doggy door and ran to his witch.
Thalia touched the top of his head.
Keep an eye on her. But don’t get too close.
He barked in agreement.
I mean it. She was once a deathwitch. And she’s done something horrible. Let me know what you find.
Thalia pulled her hand and her thoughts away. She didn’t need him to sense this last bit—
She’s the only person in Haelsford I’m afraid of.
In the living room of Beaumont Manor, the young heirs exchanged a secret code of eye rolls and smirks while their parents tried their hardest to discredit each other.
Mathew’s parents were tense, the two of them surrounded by beauty and wealth but neither feeling like they had anything particularly valuable in their lives. Mathew was already annoyed that he’d spent hours rummaging in the basement for witchy things and come up empty. His parents’ squabbling only amplified the headache in his skull.
He was bored. Just a few days ago, he watched a boy pull himself out of his own casket. And now that undead boy was at Helios Dorm, probably riffling through his protein bars, or summoning the devil, or whatever magical zombie boys did in their spare time. Mathew hadn’t known what to think when the witches brought him over, but now he considered himself unimpressed. The witches seemed to agree, judging from their annoyed expressions, and he felt that whatever Iris imagined she’d have to do to end the Haunting, Bloom was not what she’d envisioned.
Rebecca cleared her throat and shot him a questioning look. He only sighed, unable to hide his lack of interest.
“Your father thinks it’d be best for you to go with him to Orlando after the divorce is finalized,” Frances Beaumont said, looming over Rebecca. The way she said father made Mathew roll his eyes.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he muttered.
“Neither am I,” Rebecca added.
“Why? It’s not like either of you are witches.” Ainsley Beaumont poured more bourbon into his coffee.
“Not yet, at least,” whispered Rebecca.
The adults grimaced.
Mathew grinned.
“You’re almost eighteen,” Mother and Father said simultaneously, their witch aversion the one thing they agreed on.
“I hear witches are getting their blessings later and later these days,” Mathew said.
Rebecca stretched out her arms, wriggling her fingers. “Oooh, you know, lately I’ve been feeling a bit weird, like I told you, Matty.”
“I bet we’ll be witchy by next week!”
“You know the first thing I’m gonna do?” Rebecca turned slowly toward her parents. “I’m cooking up a love potion like you’ve never seen.” Her tone went faux jolly, like a disgruntled teen forced to play elf at the mall in December. “We’ll be a family again!”
“Enough,” Frances growled. “My family has lived in Haelsford forever. We’ve raised you here so that you would learn to stand tall in the face of witchery, not to cower at it, and certainly not to dabble in it.”
Ainsley scoffed. “Never mind that you might get mauled by a goddamn Wolf.” Dear old dad was starting to stink of liquor.
“We’ve only got another year left of school,” Mathew retorted.
“Exactly,” his father replied. “Just a year left. Would it hurt to move somewhere new before Yale?”
Yale.
Mathew finally stood up to leave.
Rebecca tapped three times on the mahogany coffee table. Don’t leave me. Hammersmitt was a boarding school; Devereaux was not. Mathew had an escape, a home away from this big, lonely house. Mathew had insisted on a dorm for this reason.
“Is it time to leave for the luncheon, Matty?” she said in the terse way of a threat.
Mathew looked at her with one raised brow. I said I wasn’t going.
She crossed her arms. I’m not going alone.
You have Mom and Dad—
Her last look veered toward you may be my twin, but I will end you, and that was how Mathew Beaumont ended up at the Haelsford house in his very best dress.
He was being a godawful guest. As his parents wore their fake smiles and toasted their crystalline glasses, he just watched. Mathew avoided all unnecessary interaction, aside from allowing Anders Osnes’s inebriated father to lean on his shoulder and ask him what his body count was.
“Because you know …” the man sputtered, “when I was your age, I had a new girlfriend every—”
“That’s nice,” Mathew said plainly. Skillfully, he adjusted his shoulder and let the man’s hand drop. As Osnes stumbled, Mathew slipped away. He could only just tolerate bro talk, an explanation for his absence from the garden, where other Hammersmitts were getting drunk on liquor more expensive than a semester’s tuition. If Trent were here, he might be able to bear it.
A chorus of excitable voices pulled Mathew from the sitting room to the foyer, where a line of witches strode through the front doors. Gini Haelsford greeted them warmly, or at least as warmly as a mundane descendent of Haelsford could.
The other guests navigated the Haelsford house with ease, but none more than Jailah Simmons. She delegated to the witches who followed her in, pointing out the refreshments, the important adults, and the bathrooms. “I’m here if you need me,” she said, and sent them on their way.
Mathew had never felt so relieved. “Jailah? Hi.”
She slumped forward, as if she’d been walking on her toes for the past hour. “Oh, thank god.” She peeked over her shoulder. “Did you know that there are four thousand bee variations in the country?” Then, angrily, “Did you know that Mr. Azoff can list them all by heart?!”
Mathew laughed. “I normally tune out around Augochloropsis anonyma.”
“Bah.” She adjusted the headband pushing back her fro, and, using Mathew to steady herself, she peeled off her heels and pulled a pair of flats from her purse. Mathew could feel the fatigue in her. Her eyes were hazy, her voice worn out. She even stood with an awkward tension.
“I didn’t know you knew the Haelsfords,” said Mathew.
