“We’ve spent a few centuries being pillars of the community, but the way my mother acts, you’d think we were running around hexing everything that moves every time she turned her back,” Nova went on. “I don’t think there’s a single coven in Sedgwick Cove which holds us to the kind of standards we hold ourselves to. Like, they’re over it. I’m not really sure why we can’t be. But it’s almost like she was waiting for something like this to happen.”
“Something like…?”
“Bernadette.”
“Oh. Right.” Everything Nova was saying confirmed what Eva had told me that afternoon at the cafe. The Claires were trying to do damage control on their coven’s image.
Nova sighed, and for a moment she looked beyond exhausted. “The problem is that my mother’s been so obsessed with maintaining our reputation, she doesn’t care if we’re rotting on the inside. It’s all about appearances, and if things are shitty between our own walls, who cares —as long as no one ever finds out. Not to say we’re all a bunch of evil witches cursing and plotting in secret, obviously, but we’re like any other family. We’re not perfect. We screw up. It’s inevitable. We’re human beings.”
Her voice broke, and I had to swallow against a sudden burst of sympathy. I couldn’t imagine what it must be like, having a mother like Ostara Claire. It seemed that Nova had built up her tough-as-nails exterior as a form of self-preservation; and not just from the outside world, but from her own flesh andblood. My mom and I had our differences, and we definitely had our own shit to work through, but I knew she loved me. I was realizing for the first time that maybe Nova couldn’t say the same.
“So… what exactly is going on with your mom?” I pressed, after a few moments of silence.
“Huh? Oh shit, I got carried away. Sorry to trauma dump on you. I’m between therapists,” Nova said, shaking her head. “So, the Conclave has been meeting almost nightly since everything went down at the lighthouse. They want to perform a Cleansing, which… wait, do you even know what that is?”
I nodded. No reason to tell her I’d only been in possession of that information for a few hours.
“Right. So, they want to perform a Cleansing on Bernadette to make sure that Sarah isn’t still somehow able to exert any influence over her. And they absolutely should. The problem is that my mother is fighting them on it.”
I decided then and there not to let her know that I’d overheard Davina in the shop. Nova didn’t need to know that her mother’s truculence was publicly known —she was stressed out enough as it was.
“She’s being ridiculous!” Nova went on, swiping ineffectually at the loose tendrils of hair that had fallen down around her face. “She knows there’s a possibility that Bernadette is still under Sarah’s influence somehow, but she doesn’t want to admit it! She wants to sweep it all under the rug. Sarah is the literal reason our family has this dark history, and rather than dealing with her once and for all, my mother wants to pretend she doesn’t exist!”
That was the moment I was able to put my finger on exactly how Nova Claire looked. Looking at her with her slightly wild eyes and her manic expression, it was obvious: she lookedhaunted. I suppose she always had been—her family, at least—but now it was catching up with her.
“For the record, I completely agree with you,” I said, still in a determinedly calm voice. “A Cleansing definitely sounds like the right call, just to be safe. But that doesn’t explain why you’re in my bedroom.”
“Oh, right. Well,” Nova bit her lip, like she was trying to decide whether she would even tell me the reason for her very unexpected presence in my house. Then she walked over to the chair she had been sitting in when I entered, and picked up a bag I hadn’t noticed until she drew my eye to it. It was a backpack, smallish and made of black leather. She unzipped the main compartment and pulled out a pillowcase. Then she opened the pillowcase and pulled out an object. She held it up for me to see, and I recognized it at once.
“What the hell?! Nova… what the actual… are you insane?!” I gasped, backing away from her and the object she now held in her hands.
“I know!” she cried. “I know! I told you I didn’t know if this was a good idea or not!”
“Okay, well, let me confirm for you that it is NOT. It is NOT a good idea!”
We both stood in breathless silence, staring at the thing in her hands. It was a mirror: a very old, very spotted and discolored mirror, that no one in the world would have looked twice at, unless they knew exactly what it was; and then, they likely would have run screaming in the other direction.
The mirror was a relic from the Claire family, the only surviving object that belonged to Sarah Claire herself. Once it had hung in the local historical society, but Bernadette had stolen it to use in her misguided attempts to communicate with Sarah. Bernadette used the mirror as a conductor, using Sarah’s direct connection to the mirror to clarify their communication.
“Nova,” I said, trying to remain calm, even as my body went into full fight-or-flight mode at the sight of the mirror, “Where did you get it?”
“I went to the lighthouse tonight, broke in, and took it off the wall,” Nova said, the words tumbling out over each other in her rush to say them, as though getting them over with would somehow make them better.
“The lighthouse that’s still sealed off because of the sheer amount of dark magic that was cast over it?Thatlighthouse?” I asked in a hiss.
“I used a masking spell,” Nova said defensively.
“I’m not convinced that would make me feel better even if I knew what the hell you were talking about!” I snapped.
“It means I shouldn’t have been seen coming in or out.”
“Shouldn’t?”
“Wasn’t. Nobody saw me. Trust me, if they had, Ostara would already have shipped me off to boarding school in a foreign country, right after she disowned me for disobedience.”
I narrowed my eyes at her, and she stared defiantly back, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Is it even worth asking you why you would do something so unbelievably dangerous?” I asked, after I had taken several deep breaths.
