Robbie glanced over at me and nodded. "Hmmm," he said
"Hmmm, what?" I asked. "Do you mean, hmmm, that's I great? Or hmmm, I'm not so sure?"
"More like—hmmm, it's complicated, I guess," Robbie told me. "You know, because of Bree and everything."
I stared at him, but he was watching the road again, and I couldn't read his profile.
I looked out the window. I wanted to talk about something that we hadn't really hashed out. "Robbie, I really am sorry about that spell. You know. The one about your skin."
He shifted gears without saying anything. "I won't ever do it again," I promised once more.
"Don't say that. Just promise you won't do it without telling me," he said as he parked his Beetle in a tiny space. He turned to me. "I was mad that you did it without telling me," he said. "But I mean, Jesus, look at me" He gestured to his newly smooth face. "I never thought I'd look like this. Thought I'd be a pizza face forever. Then have awful scars my whole fife." He glanced out over the steering wheel. "Now I look in the mirror and I'm happy. Girls look at me—girls who used to ignore me or feel sorry for me." He shrugged. "How could I be upset about that?"
I reached out and touched his arm. "Thanks."
He grinned at me and swung open his door. "Let's go get in touch with our inner witches."
As usual, Practical Magick was dim and scented with herbs, oils, and incense. After the chilly November sunshine, the store felt warm and welcoming. Inside, it was divided in two, one half floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the other half shelves covered with candles, herbs, essential oils, altar items and magical symbols, ritual daggers called athames, robes, posters, even Wiccan fridge magnets.
I left Robbie looking at books and went over to the herb section. Learning about working with them could take my whole life and then some, I thought. The idea was daunting but also thrilling. I had used herbs in the spell that had cured Robbie's acne, and I had felt almost transported in the herb garden of the Killburn Abbey, when I'd gone there on a church trip.
I was looking through a guide to magickal plants of the northeast when I felt a tingling sensation. Glancing up, I saw David, one of the store's clerks. I tensed. He always put me on edge, and I could never pinpoint why.
I remembered how he had asked me what clan I was in and how he had told Alyce, the other clerk, that I was a witch who pretended not to be a witch.
Now I watched him warily as he walked toward me, his short, gray hair looking silver in the store's fluorescent light.
"Something about you has changed," he said in his soft voice, his brown eyes on me.
I thought about Samhain, when the night had exploded around me, and about Sunday, when my family had blown apart. I didn't say anything.
"You're a blood witch," he stated, nodding as if he were simply confirming something I'd said. "And now you know it."
How can he tell? I wondered with a tinge of fear.
"Were you really surprised?" he asked me. I looked around for Robbie. He was still over by the books.
"Yes, I was kind of surprised," I admitted.
"Do you have your BOS?" he asked. "Book of Shadows?"
"I've started one," I said, thinking of the beautiful blank book with marbled paper that I had bought a couple of weeks before. In it I had written down the spell I had done for Robbie and also about my experiences on Samhain. But why did David want to know?
"Do you have your clan's, your coven's?" he asked. "Your mother's?"
"No," I said shortly. "No chance of that."
"I'm sorry," he said, after a pause. Then a bell tinkled, and he moved off to help another customer choose some jewelry.
Glancing down the aisle, I saw that the other clerk, Alyce, was on the floor way at the end, arranging some candleholders on a low shelf. She was older than David, a round, motherly woman with beautiful gray hair in a loose bun on top of her head. I had liked her the first moment I had seen her. Still holding my herb book, I wandered down the aisle closer to her.
She looked up and smiled briefly, as if she had been waiting for me. "How are you, dear?" There was a world of meaning in her words, and for a moment I felt like she knew about everything that had happened since she had helped me pick out a candle, a week before Samhain.
I didn't know what to say. "Awful," I blurted out. "I just found out I'm a blood witch. My parents have lied to me all my life."
Alyce nodded knowingly. "So David was right," she said, her voice reaching me alone. "I thought you were, too."
"How did you know?"
"We can recognize them," she said matter-of-factly. "We're blood witches ourselves, though we don't know our clans." I stared at her.
"David in particular is quite powerful," Alyce went on. Her plump hands made neat rows of candleholders shaped like stars, like moons, like pentacles.
"Do you have a coven?" I whispered.
"Starlocket," said Alyce. "With Selene Belltower."
Cal's mother.
Robbie appeared at the end of the aisle, thirty feet away. He was talking to a young woman, who was smiling at him flirtatiously. Robbie pushed his glasses aside, rubbed his eyes, then answered her. She laughed, and they drifted back over to the book aisle. I heard the murmur of their voices. For a moment curiosity made me want to concentrate on hearing their words, but then I realized that just because I could didn't mean I should.
A sudden idea sparked in my head. "Alyce, do you know anything about Meshomah Falls?" I asked.
It was as if a snake had bitten her. She literally drew back, anguish crossing her round face. Frowning, she got slowly to her feet, as if troubled by a great weight.
She looked into my eyes. "Why do you ask?" she said.
"I wanted to know more about… a woman named Maeve Riordan," I said. "I need to know more." For long moments Alyce's gaze held mine.
"I know that name," she said.
CHAPTER7
Burned
May 8, 1980
Angus asked me to marry him at Beltane. I told him no. I'm only eighteen and have hardly ever been out of Ballynigel. I was thinking of doing one of those tours, you know, with a bus and going through Europe for a month. I do love Angus. And I know he's good. He might even be my muirn beatha dan, my soul mate, but who knows? He might not! Sometimes I feel like he is, sometimes I don't. The thing is: How would I know? I've met precious few witches in my life that I'm not related to. I need to be sure. I need to know more before I can decide to stay with him forever.
"Where will you go?" he asks me. "Who will you be with? Someone not your kind, like David O'Hearn? A human?"
Of course not. If I want children, I can't be with a human. But maybe I don't want children. I don't know. There aren't that many of our clan. To go outside our clan to another would be disloyal. But to seal my fate at eighteen seems disloyal too—disloyal to me.
And after all that's been happening—Morag's murder, the bad luck spells, the bespelled runes (Mathair calls them sigils) we've found—I just don't know. I want to get away. Only three more weeks and I'll take my A levels and be done with school. I can't wait.
Now it's late, and I have to do a warding spell before I sleep, to keep away evil. We all do, nowadays.
— Bradhadair
I waited while Alyce cast back her mind. There was a tall stool nearby, battered and blotched with multicolored paint spills. I perched on it, my eyes on Alyce's face.