I sighed, flopping into a chair at the kitchen table. “This is hopeless.”
“Of course it’s not. We’re just trying to do too many things at once,” Rhi said, plunking a plate down in front of me with one of her own scones. “You need to learn how to have confidence in the basics of cooking first. I didn’t realize how little experience you had, or I would have started with something simpler.”
I shrugged. “Mom has never been much of a cook. I can boil pasta and scramble an egg and make pancakes from a box, but that’s about it.”
Rhi laughed. “Yes, we never could tempt Kerridwen into the kitchen very often. She was too busy running wild on the beach and in the garden.”
I tried to imagine my mother, an ER nurse, ever being the kind of hippie little wild child my aunt was describing, but my imagination wouldn’t stretch that far. She’d changed so much. Run from so much. Buried so much.
There was a reason Rhi was taking my magical education in hand rather than my own mother, and that reason was fear. The same fear that had sent her running from Sedgwick Cove when I was a toddler had never faded. And in fact, after my recent run-in with the Darkness, it had only increased. Although my mother had agreed to move back to Sedgwick Cove and renew the Covenant alongside her sisters, that didn’t mean she was ready to throw herself headfirst back into life as a Vesper witch. I’d barely seen her over the last few days since the Covenant was renewed; and while I knew she had a lot to do to finalize our move to Sedgwick Cove, I couldn’t help but feel like she was avoiding the cottage.
No, it was worse than that. I felt like she was avoidingme.
In a way, I understood. After all, I was scared, too. Now that I’d accessed my power, it was terrifying to think it had been there all along, and that I had no real idea how to control it. But I also knew that running from it wasn’t going to help. I needed to do what my mother hadn’t been able to do all those years ago. I had to look in the mirror, embrace who I was, and then start to understand what exactly that meant.
And so here I was. Burning scones. Figuring it out.
I took a bite of Rhi’s scone. It was soft and crumbly and ridiculously delicious, but that wasn’t the best part. As I swallowed that first bite, a warmth spread through me, rich and dripping like honey, coating my insides in a sense of calm and contentment. I looked at Rhi, wonder all over my face.
“Better?” she asked, smiling.
“Better. How do you do that?”
“Intention combined with the right ingredients. You’ll get there. And if you don’t, that’s okay, too. Every witch has to play to her natural strengths. Much like your mother, you won’t find Persi in the kitchen unless she’s hungry. Speaking of Persi, I promised I’d drop lunch down at Shadowkeep for her. Would you like to come along?”
I nodded eagerly. I hadn’t been to Shadowkeep yet, our family’s shop in downtown Sedgwick Cove. All I knew about it was that it sold “witchy” items geared toward tourists who flocked to Sedgwick Cove, the same way they flocked to Salem in Massachusetts. But under the facade of a kitschy tourist trap, Shadowkeep was also a trusted source to the local magical community for the kinds of things witches really needed: herbs, gemstones, books, dousing rods, and all manner of other things I had yet to learn about.
I went and got myself cleaned up, and waited on the front porch while Rhi packed a small basket with lunch for Persi. I stared out over the ocean, watching the waves crash on the sand,and inhaling the sharp, salty air. My heart seemed to swell in my chest, and I knew I would never tire of this view, never wish myself away from this place. From almost the first moment I’d set foot in Sedgwick Cove, a deep, untapped part of myself had woken up and claimed it as home. I didn’t really have a choice. We belonged to each other. I wondered for the first time if that feeling had something to do with the Covenant. Did my very blood know it was irrevocably tied to this place? Perhaps the magic of that spell included me, too, tying a string to my heart and tugging me back to the place where I was meant to be.
As this question rolled around in my mind, my eyes strayed to the lighthouse, and I felt my heart rate quicken. I hadn’t been down on the beach since that night—in fact, no one had. The section of the beach near the lighthouse had been roped off, and official-looking signs had been posted warning people away. “Falling rocks” was the public-facing excuse, and it was a good one. The cliffs that dropped down toward the sand were very tall and craggy, and it was easy to believe that they could be dangerous if you were a tourist who didn’t know any better. For the locals, though, the real meaning of the warning was even more frightening.
Down on that sand was an anomaly of magic and nature, created the night I battled the Darkness, and no one knew yet how dangerous it might be. It was a strange structure made of molten sand created by a lightning strike—that would have been strange enough all on its own. But what we were really concerned about was what may or may not be contained inside it.
The Darkness, trapped and immobilized, its power frozen in grains of sand.
I hadn’t seen the Gray Man, sleeping or waking, since that night; but I knew he wasn’t gone—whatever power I had, it surely wasn’t that impressive. I’d acted out of instinct to protectmyself, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think it all over, and neither was the Conclave. They were the ones, my mother informed me, who had demanded the beach be cordoned off so that they could examine it safely; and though it had been several days, we’d heard nothing about what they’d been able to discover. Rhi had become increasingly cheerful about it, insisting that “no news was good news.” I wasn’t quite so optimistic, and from the dark glances I’d seen them throw toward the beach, neither were Persi or my mother.
“Ready, Wren?”
I jumped. I’d been too caught up in my own jumbled thoughts to notice that Rhi had appeared on the porch beside me. I nodded my head, and we set off on a brisk walk toward town.
Main Street in Sedgwick Cove was like something out of a tourist brochure for coastal Maine, but with a decidedly witchy twist. The local microbrewery was called “The Witch’s Brew.” The little antique store was called “Secondhand Magic.” The bed-and-breakfast had a rustic twig broom hanging over the porch rockers with the sign “Come Sit a Spell” dangling beneath it. On the corner was a small black shed with a roof shaped like a witch’s hat advertising walking tours. But of all the places that could draw the eye, Shadowkeep was by far the most intriguing.
Shadowkeep comprised a tall, slender, three-story Victorian house painted a vivid shade of lavender, with black shutters and a black slate roof. An intentionally crooked turret thrust its little pointed roof into the sky, topped with a copper weathervane of a witch on her broomstick. A sign in the shape of a bubbling cauldron was adorned with shining gold lettering:Vespers’ Shadowkeep.The porch was crowded with plants: plants in macrame hangers, plants erupting from vases and pots, plants wrapping their tendrils around the posts and railings. A pair ofwhite porcelain cats stood sentinel on either side of the stairs leading to the front door. I felt a grin spread slowly over my face.
“What are you grinning about?” Rhi asked, when she spotted the look on my face.
“Nothing, it’s just… I’ve never seen a place quite so… Asteria.” I watched in horror as Rhi gasped softly and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh God, I’m sorry, Rhi, I didn’t mean to?—”
“No! Please don’t apologize!” Rhi said, brushing impatiently at the tears escaping down her cheeks. “Ignore this, please—I cry at everything these days. It’s just that… you’re absolutely right, and it makes me so glad to know that you can see it.”
“I may not have been able to spend a lot of time with Asteria, but she left a powerful impression,” I said. Rhi reached over and squeezed my hand, and then we walked up the steps into Shadowkeep.
A cluster of little bells jangled discordantly as Rhi pushed the door open and stepped inside. The air was redolent with the warm scent of incense and the earthy tang of dried bunches of herbs strung from the rafters between the twinkling string lights. Even though it was a bright June day outside, the interior had a cool, dark feel, as though we’d suddenly gone underground, or else slipped through a little hole in time that led to twilight. Part of the reason for this was all the plants that had crept up outside the window were blocking the sunlight, and the other was the complete lack of overhead lighting. Rather, the whole interior was lit with flickering battery-operated candles in mismatched brass lanterns, and clustered on shelves and tables. The walls were lined with shelves containing books on witchcraft (Finding Your Inner WitchandSo You Want to Be a Witch: Now What?prominent among them); and an array of trinkets and home decor. A pair of women in sun visors were examining a candle in the shape of a skull. A teenage boy was digging through a display of different packages of tarot cards, while his girlfriend gushedover a spinning rack of amethyst pendants carved into animal shapes. A sign on top of the rack said, “Choose Your Familiar!”
Rhi watched me take it all in with an amused expression on her face. “What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s… not quite what I expected, actually.”
