My spirit soared up above the circle and Lydia screamed as though someone was separating her flesh from her bones. Watching from above, I saw myself holding her down. She thrashed around, arms and legs spasming in the dirt, moss and grass and muck staining her white shift. She clawed at my arm and wrist, nails raking my flesh but I couldn’t feel it, even as the sleeve of my dress turned scarlet. Reluctantly, I floated back down to my body like a feather, filling myself up to the brim, more than I was before.
‘Earth,’ I said, sliding her hand into the ground, no longer a solid mass but soft and yielding, like a warm bath.
‘Water.’
Rain came pouring down, bathing our bodies, our souls. I turned my face upwards and let the warm water wash me clean.
‘Fire.’
I welcomed the flames as they flickered into life, caressing the tops of the trees as they grew, Lydia’s screams a world away as they warmed my skin.
‘Air.’
The rain stopped and the fire burned out. There was no sound, no heat, no anything. It felt like bliss.
‘I can’t breathe,’ Lydia choked, clawing at her own throat with her one free hand.
Her panic was so strange to me. The whole clearing sparkled, the trees bejewelled, rubies, emeralds and sapphires glinting in the night. We were so close.
‘Blood,’ I whispered, picking up the dagger.
With the last of the oxygen in her lungs, Lydia screamed as I thrust the blade through my own palm, my blood gushing over her skin. The strength of two hundred years of Bell witches engulfed my body, hurling me forward, face-first. I’d been at this door before, at my Becoming, but I’d only peeked inside. Now it flew wide open and I lay in the dirt, watching golden stars shoot across the sky, smiling up at the universe. Everything was as it should be, everyone where they needed to be. Lydia and I were in perfect harmony with the city that loved us. Savannah wanted us here, both of us. All of us.
‘You were born for this,’ the first Emma Catherine Bell whispered in my ear. ‘We’re all so proud.’
I was wrapped in love, pure and unconditional, unable to speak or move but filled with light and energy as the circle filled with witches, my ancestors and Lydia’s.
‘The blessing welcomes you.’
I sat up, spluttering out a mouthful of dirt I didn’t remember taking in. On the ground, the dagger sat between me and Lydia, my blood on its blade, on my dress, on Lydia’s skin, as her gold eyes turned white, then black, then brown again, crystal clear and full of new strength.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked, pulling her into me and holding her so tightly, just for a second I was afraid her bones would break. ‘Do you feel different?’
‘Yes and no.’
She pulled away from me, staring at the woods around us as if she’d never seen them before. ‘I feel complete.’
The trees pulled back, releasing us back to the world and as their branches unfurled, the first fall of snow landed on the ground at our feet. Lydia laughed, holding out her hand to catch a pair of identical snowflakes. Smiling, I blew on them gently and watched as they sparkled, shifting into something more permanent. Diamonds.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Lydia said as I unfastened the clasp of her necklace and slid one of the diamond snowflakes onto the chain alongside her locket then added the second to my own. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me,’ I replied. ‘We did it together.’
I stared at her, my friend, my sister, full of something too strong to simply be called love. She beamed, directing the snowflakes as they fell from the sky, making one flurry dance while another hovered in midair.
‘We should head back, find Wyn,’ I told her, carelessly picking up the dagger blade first. It cut into my palm as Lydia reached to knock it from my grip and I fell backwards into the vision, watching her disappear down a dark tunnel of nothingness.
I saw Virginia Powell, a teenager again, only she wasn’t laughing beside my grandmother this time. She was exploding with pain on the tiled floor of an Italian palazzo, her great-grandmother calmly listening to the radio in the next room. Then Alex Powell, underneath the Candler Oak in Forsyth Park with my father. He looked so serious but she was laughing, at least she was until he handed her a dainty opal ring, sliding it onto the middle finger of her right hand and begging her to never, ever take it off. Jackson replaced his mother, walking along the riverfront with a man I didn’t recognize. I chased him, calling out his name and when he saw me, he smiled, pulled out a silver sword with a gold hilt and drew it across his own throat before collapsing sideways into the river, his body pulled under the water before I could scream.
‘You’re back,’ Lydia said, when the blessing released me, tossing me back into my body. She took my hand and pulled me up to my feet. ‘You’re safe.’
I allowed her to take the lead, guiding us out of the woods and back towards the avenue of the oaks, so much closer than they were before.
We were safe. For now.
Chapter Thirty-Three
With everything happening around us, it didn’t feel like the right time for a party but Lydia would not be told.
