‘Welcome to the world of socialite southern grandmothers,’ she replied. ‘We’ll never be exactly who they want us to be because we’ll never be them. They want clones, not granddaughters. One day, they’re going to wake up and realize it’s the twenty-first century and it’s going to be the shock of a lifetime.’
‘Does Virginia treat Jackson the same way?’ I asked.
‘What do you think?’
I offered her a supportive smile. ‘Catherine already played the “it’s different for boys” card with me.’
‘Then you understand,’ she said. ‘Jackson is the golden child. He can do whatever he wants, go wherever he wants, see whoever he likes. He’s always been the more acceptable twin, tall, handsome, charming, loves sports, does well in school. The perfect little man. Then Virginia says all the same things about me like they’re bad things. I can’t win. He’s the good one, I’m the weird one.’
‘Weird is good,’ I stated as she inhaled half of Ashley’s muffin in one bite. ‘Brilliant in fact, because I’m about to ask you to do something extremely weird.’
‘OK, but only on the condition we stop for coffee first because these muffins are delicious but they are dry,’ she replied. ‘And there’s no such thing as too weird where I’m concerned.’
‘Let’s get you that coffee,’ I suggested, steering her along Bull Street. ‘Then you can decide for yourself.’
‘You want to dowhatnow?’
Lydia hung back by the gates to the Colonial Park cemetery, eyes almost as wide as her grandmother’s had been half an hour earlier.
‘It’s nothing really,’ I lied, shaking the ice in my triple mocha Frappuccino. ‘Just this cool thing I saw online.’
And not at all a ritual to invoke a spirit that I found in my dead great-great-great-great-grandmother’s journal in the spooky library of my grandmother’s magic house.
‘I won’t lie, it’s giving Satan.’ She loudly sucked up her white chocolate macadamia cream cold brew through a green straw. ‘I wouldn’t have pegged you as a witchcraft girlie, you haven’t shown any of the usual signs.’
‘There are signs?’
‘You know, chipped black nail polish, heavy eyeliner, one of those piercings that leaves a giant gross hole in your ear.’ She screwed up her face at the thought. ‘What exactly are we trying to do? Run it by me again.’
‘I want to contact the spirit of one of my ancestors,’ I said with a forced smile. ‘I thought it might be … fun?’
Lydia didn’t look so sure. ‘So this is like a Ouija board thing? We’re just asking questions?’
‘That’s right,’ I agreed. ‘We’re just asking questions.’
And I had a lot of them. But I also had a plan. The book I found in the library didn’t have any useful information about the prophecy or how I could learn to control my magic but it did have an entire chapter on how I could bind it. The details were vague, a recurring bad Bell habit, but according to the author, our abilities could be tied up and the blessing bound within its host. It didn’t say how, it didn’t say what would happen afterwards, but it was something. A possible solution to my very real problem.
The ritual to invoke a spirit, on the other hand, looked prettystraightforward. Despite Catherine’s warnings about connecting to the other side, I knew who I wanted to speak to, and I had something of hers as well as everything else noted in the journal. It had to be worth a try. If I could connect to the Emma Catherine who wrote the journal, I might have a better shot at managing my magic and saving Savannah.
‘I would like to go on record as saying this feels not great,’ Lydia declared, but she still willingly followed me through the gates.
‘I never used to like cemeteries,’ I agreed, walking directly towards the moss-less magnolia tree. ‘They always made me think of horror movies and I hate horror movies.’
Lydia clucked her tongue as I knelt on the ground then flopped down at my side.
‘But you still think it would be cute to summon the dead.’
‘No one said anything about it being cute,’ I replied before laying out the items I’d swiped from the pantry the night before: salt, bay laurel leaves, an apple, and three small pieces of cedar. Nothing especially weird, nothing that might put Lydia off her cold brew.
Almost all the rituals in the Emma Catherine journals called for a second witch but I couldn’t wait around for my grandmother to come home. I shook the salt out into a circle while Lydia slurped her coffee, saying nothing. Catherine said the Powells had had magic in their blood once. Maybe there was still enough there for this to work.
‘This looks super professional,’ she said as I crossed my legs and pulled out a box of matches. ‘And that ain’t a compliment. You sure you haven’t done this before?’
‘Definitely haven’t,’ I replied, striking a match. ‘I don’t know if this makes it better or worse but I really have no idea what I’m doing.’
I lit the three pieces of cedar and the wood burned, white smoke drifting up into the branches of the tree, then took abite of the apple and spat it out. Lydia made a quiet retching sound.
‘Gross,’ she whispered loudly.
