I found myself on my feet, walking towards the blue-painted door at the end of the hallway, ignoring the anxious reverberations of the house.
Catherine’s craft room.
The place she went to work her darkest magic, hide her secrets, cast curses and spells. The place she had offered up her own blood to take the lives of others.
If Bell House was a living thing, that room was its beating heart.
And like it or not, it was time for me to step inside.
Chapter Twelve
When Catherine called it a craft room, I assumed she was talking about sewing or scrapbooking, and it took me far too long to discover the truth. Now, the thought of her hiding away with a glass of wine, a fun podcast and a bag full of goodies from Target made me choke. The things she had done in this room defied belief. While I was upstairs, in the same house, she’d been in there, plotting.
Standing before the sky blue door, the air turned frigid, blasting down on me, even as the brass doorknob twisted all on its own and the door creaked open. The room wanted me to enter, but the house did not.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ I told it, one hand on the now grey-tinged wallpaper. ‘Whatever it was she did in there, that’s not what I’m looking for.’
When my grandmother ran Bell House, the hallway walls were a cool sage green. Now they changed every day, depending on the house’s mood. Or mine. We were linked in ways I didn’t understand just yet but I knew in my bones it was right and good. Unlike the acts Catherine committed in this room.
‘She’s gone,’ I reminded us both. ‘She can’t hurt us now.’
Unless she wasn’t. Unless she was waiting just a few feet away on the other side of the door. There was only one way to find out.
Without another second’s hesitation, I pushed myself over the threshold before I came up with any more reasons not to, and once inside, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
‘What the heck?’
I turned to make sure I was in the right room, in the right house. Sure enough, I saw the hallway behind me and beyond that, the foyer, as it always was. But this wasn’t the same room I’d stepped foot in before.
The last time I was in here, the small, dimly lit, windowless space was a mess. Covered in half-burned black candles, leather-bound journals, and every kind of crystal, from the tiniest shard of black garnet to giant hunks of smoky quartz. There were bundles of dried herbs and piles of bloody feathers everywhere I looked, with a twin-sized bed pushed up against the wall, laden with more of the same. That was the place where Catherine had recuperated after almost killing herself in order to take my father’s life.
Today it was completely different.
It was still the same size but other than that, utterly changed in every possible way. The walls gleamed as though made from mother of pearl and the iridescence shifted with the flicker of white candles that sparked into life when I closed the door behind me. The pale wood shelves were well stocked with untouched notebooks and books I’d never seen before, some of them written in languages I didn’t recognize and all of them singing to me in a beautiful, harmonious tune. All of Catherine’s uncut crystals had been replaced with tumbled rocks and polished stones, the largest piece of amethyst I’d ever seen sat on what looked like an altar, andwhite roses and pink carnations grew from nowhere, sweetly scenting the air. Every trace of Catherine and her darkness was gone.
I knew the layout of Bell House like the back of my hand. The craft room sat right beneath the curving staircase that led from the foyer up to the bedrooms yet somehow, the ceiling of this tiny space reached up to the sky. I sank into a cream-coloured armchair in front of the built-in desk that ran along one side of the room, my legs weak as I watched a flock of doves pass overhead. All the bitter, insidious energy I’d felt in here before was gone, replaced with only light. A clean slate. Was this how the room started for Catherine? I wiped away a stray tear at the thought.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, wiping my face with the back of my hands. ‘It’s beautiful.’
A pair of crystals rolled off the desk and under the bed. Dropping to my hands and knees, I pulled them out, weighing one in each hand. Clear quartz and selenite. Clear quartz I already knew but the selenite whispered its name to me, the same way all the plants in the garden had introduced themselves when I first arrived. I returned to the desk and laid my list out on the white oak surface, feeling so close to my magic and my ancestors, tears welling up behind my eyes.
Wolf attack
Catherine missing
Why can’t I see the ghosts?
How can I convince Lydia she doesn’t want to be a witch?
Prophecy
Where does the blessing come from?
Jackson
I stared at the piece of paper and felt my mouth twist at the order of my concerns. Three months ago, my worries ran to which colleges to apply to, how long it would take to get my driver’s licence and what kind of mascara could actually hold a curl. Things had changed.
With Ashley’s words still ringing in my ears, I reluctantly picked up a pen and added another item. There was no point leaving anything out.
