‘You need to work on your control,’ she replied, pleased with my response. ‘A witch as strong as you must be able to open and close the door to her magic, not let anything and everything wander through at will.’
I dumped a teaspoon of sugar in my coffee and stirred. ‘So you’re saying right now I’m an emotional cat flap.’
‘Not quite,’ she replied, a smile playing on her lips in spite of herself. ‘Books won’t help you connect to your natural abilities. Your magic is inside you already, everything you need is inside you already. What you must find is a way to tap into that strength.’
‘I’ll try,’ I promised, focusing on a speck of hope visible on the horizon. ‘If you think I can do it.’
‘I don’t think, I know,’ she replied smoothly. ‘You are, after all, a Bell.’
Catherine might believe there was nothing useful in the books but I’d been raised to check my sources. While she was upstairs getting dressed, and Ashley was busy outside, I snuck into the library and locked myself in. It was the calmest spot in Bell House, a sanctuary, and the only room with wood-panelled walls rather than spelled wallpaper, meaning I didn’t have to watch for a growing vine or flitting bird to flicker into life out the corner of my eye. In here, I felt more like a welcome presence and less like I was being watched.
I set Dad’s computer down next to the creaky old desktop, the sleek matte silver casing making its beige plastic shell look even more outdated. The internet was still a no-go but at least I could compare any findings with his seemingly endless notes on the original Emma Catherine Bell. She was real, Dad was able to prove that easily enough. There was plenty of hard evidence to confirm her existence, it was only three hundred years since she was born, practically yesterday in historical terms, but there was no perfectly preserved pamphlet titled ‘So You’ve Found Out You’re A Witch’ or ‘Prophecies 101: Literally Never a Good Thing’. Just mountains and mountains of dry, dull research.
The library was about as well organized as my dad’s files. Hardbacks sat next to paperbacks, bound manuscripts werewedged in between three-ring binders full of random pieces of paper, half of them illegible and the other half too faded with age to be helpful. But it was the Bell family journals, tucked away in the back of the library, that I was most interested in. Dad taught me first-person accounts were often the most useful source, always biased but untarnished by hindsight. If Catherine’s alleged prophecy was passed all the way down from our original ancestor, someonemusthave mentioned it in their diary at some point over the centuries.
After collecting as many as I could find, I lined up all the journals on my desk. Some of them were ancient-looking, thick pages sewn together by something I suspected was not vegan. Others were more modern notebooks, the kind of thing you expected to start with ‘Dear diary, guess who I have a crush on?’ rather than ‘Dear diary, today I started Armageddon but I swear it was an accident’.
I pored over the pages, filling in some missing names and dates on my father’s genealogy chart as I went and jotting down notes I thought might be useful in future; recipes for life-saving herbal concoctions, rituals to enhance abilities, spells to communicate with other witches over long distances, but there was no mention of black fire travelling along Spanish moss, no mention of one hundred foot tidal waves, and absolutely no mention of the prophecy.
Also, the journals didn’t cover our family’s entire history. There were conspicuous gaps, whole decades missing sometimes. Some of my ancestors only wrote a few notes while others left dozens of completed journals, as though they’d committed their entire life to paper.
Every time I came across a relatable moment, I found myself smiling. I hadn’t expected it, but all these women, existing sometimes centuries apart, all wrote about the same things.Teenage problems had been the same since the beginning of time – unrequited love, overbearing parents, a lack of freedom, and page after page of uncertainty and doubt about their place in the world. At the same time, they were living through so much hardship; recessions, depressions, war after war after war and all the pain that followed, but nevertheless, they did what they could to aid the people of Savannah.
They were all the same but different, their magics manifesting based on what was needed at the time. Healers were most common along with conduits, who could commune with the dead, and elementals like Catherine, who could manifest the elements at will. Bell women had acted as spies, healed whole communities when plague struck, they influenced powerful historical figures, and above all else they held one duty sacred above all others: Bell witches saved women when no one else cared if they lived or died.
And while there was no mention of black flames, there was plenty of talk of fire. The great fires of 1796 and 1820. The more I read, the more one thing became worryingly clear. No matter what we Bell witches did, Savannah seemed destined to burn.
Hours passed like minutes, the steady, comforting energy of the library pushing me on, lending me the strength to read one more chapter, look at one more journal. Almost the whole day passed by while I was lost in my research but I felt as though I’d only just sat down at the desk, fully sustained and content, absorbed in the lives of my ancestors. Until I came to the one book I’d been avoiding. It was easily the oldest book here, the cover made from slick animal skin that didn’t feel quite like any kind of leather I’d encountered before, and any writing on the cover had long since faded away. Inside, the pages were so fragile and thin, they were almost see-through.It fell open on a random page somewhere near the middle of the book, the title of the chapter written in ancient, elaborate script.
‘A ritual for binding a Bell witch,’ I read aloud.
All around me, the library shuddered.
Chapter Thirty
‘Where’s Catherine?’
Ashley looked up from her Saturday morning coffee and shrugged.
‘Good morning to you too. Sleep well? No, me neither.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked again, the strange book tucked away in my backpack and throbbing against my spine. I didn’t have the patience for her hot and cold attitude today. When I left the library the night before, I couldn’t find my grandmother anywhere. I waited for hours, desperate to talk to her about the book I’d found, finally falling asleep on the sofa in the parlour, and when I woke up with the sunrise, she’d been back and was gone again.
‘I need to find her,’ I pressed. ‘It’s important. Why is she always gone anyway? There can’t be that many meetings of the Savannah Historical Society.’
‘I don’t know where she went to or why she’s there,’ my aunt snipped. ‘You think everything is important but it’s not. Nothing is. You’re just a cog in a wheel, honey, a part they need to keep the engine running, that’s all. Get over yourself.’
‘Maybe you need to work on a new tea blend, somethingto sort out your mood,’ I suggested, grabbing a freshly baked muffin from the counter. ‘I know Catherine told you about our vision, you must see how serious it is.’
‘How would you know what’s serious?’ She laughed, sharp and wicked. ‘You’re sixteen, you don’t know shit.’
‘Is that how you felt when you were sixteen?’
A flash of something bitter passed over Ashley’s face but she composed herself and gave me a small smile instead.
‘Must be a head fuck,’ she said sweetly. ‘All this prophecy stuff. It’s Catherine’s whole personality, being the grandmother ofthewitch. She’s literally built her life around it. Personally, I’m more into your version, the one where you flip out and kill us all? But that’s classic me, always the optimist.’
I stared at her from across the room as she chuckled to herself.
