This book is given to my incandescent one, my fire fairy, Bradhadair, on her fourteenth birthday. Welcome to Belwicket. With love from Mathair.
My heart stopped, and my breath turned to ice inside my lungs. Bradhadair. My mother's Wiccan name. Alyce had told me. This was her Book of Shadows. But how could it be? It had been lost after the fire, hadn't it? Could there be some other Bradhadair, some other Belwicket?
Hands shaking I started skimming the entries. About twenty pages in, "The whole town of Ballynigel turned out for Beltane," I read silently. "I was too old to dance around the maypole, but the younger girls did it and looked lovely. I saw that Angus Bramson lurking by the bicycles, watching me like he does. I pretended not to see him. I'm only fourteen, and he's sixteen!
"Anyway, we had a lovely Beltane feast, and then Ma led us in a gorgeous circle, out by the stone cliffs. — Bradhadair."
I tried to swallow but felt I was choking. I flipped through more pages toward the end. Instead of being signed Bradhadair, these entries were signed M. R.
Those were my initials. They also stood for Maeve Riordan. My mother.
Stunned, feeling dizzy, I sank down into Selene's desk chair, which squeaked. I had tunnel vision, and my head felt too heavy for my neck. Remembering long-ago Girl Scout training, I scooted the desk chair back and put my head between my knees, trying to take deep, calming breaths.
While I hung upside down in this graceless position, trying not to taint, my mind whirled with thoughts that bombarded me so fast, I couldn't make sense of them. Maeve Riordan. This was Maeve Riordan's Book of Shadows. This book before me, the one that had spoken to me even before I touched it, had belonged to my birth mother. The birth mother who had been burned to death only sixteen years ago, in a town two hours from here.
Selene Belltower had her Book of Shadows. Why?
I straightened up. Rapidly I read passages here and there, reading the entries as my mother changed from being a girlish fourteen-year-old, newly initiated, to a teenager experiencing love, to a woman who'd lived through hell by the age of twenty-two, as she found herself pregnant with an unplanned child. Me.
My gaze blurred with hot tears, and I flipped back to the front of the book, where the entries were light, girlish, full of wonder and the joy of magick.
Of course this book was mine. Of course I would take it with me tonight. There was no doubt about that. But how had Selene Belltower come to have it in her library? And why, knowing what she knew about me, had she never mentioned it or offered it to me? Was it possible that she'd forgotten she had it?
I rubbed the tears out of my eyes and flipped through the pages, watching as my birth mother's spells became more ambitious and far-reaching, her love deeper and more compassionate.
This was my history, my background, my origin. It was all here in these handwritten pages. In this book I would discover everything there was to know about who I was and where I had come from.
I looked at my watch. It was 7:45. Oh, my God. I'd been in here for more than twenty minutes already. And now it was time to go. The others were surely looking for me.
As hard as it was, I started to close the book. How was I going to get it out of the house?
Then the secret study door opened. A shaft of light from the hall dropped into the room, and I looked up to see Cal and Selene standing there, staring at me sitting at Selene's desk, an open book before me.
And I knew I had trespassed unforgivably.