I quickly peel off my clothes—tight jeans, a white T-shirt, a gray cashmere cardigan—and slip the black dress over my head. I’m not going to traipse through a city park at midnight in heels, so I drag my black boots back on, lacing them tight, in case I have to run. I don’t have a black sweater. The trench I bought a few years ago will have to do. I toss the pills into the drawer and scoop the envelope up.
Maybe I’m losing my grip after so many years of unhealed trauma. Maybe I’m so desperate to put meaning to it all—the power, the fire, the loss—that I’m fabricating this whole scenario in some deep, forgotten corner of my subconscious. But the hard-creased edges of the envelope digging into my palm remind me.
This invitation is very,veryreal.
2THE FATHOM
I have thirteen minutes. Thirteen minutes to make my way down the ravine trail that leads below the 20th Avenue NE Bridge. I don’t know if that’s lucky or unlucky under the circumstances. Ravenna Park is a twenty-minute drive from my condo. I left my Mazda beneath the artificial glow of a well-lit nearby café, since the park closes at ten, and hustled down the road hoping no one saw me. When I got to the park, I had to climb over the guardrail that’s chained across the entrance to keep people like me from entering. Finally on the other side, I glance at my phone—11:47. Without a moment to lose, I scurry in the direction of the trail, using my phone light as a guide.
The dark presses around me like wool, leaking out from between the trees as the path narrows, ferns at either side spread like hands. I’ve never been in the park this late. The thought that I might not be the only one here, that nefarious souls could be lurking unseen, puts an added dose of pep in my step. There are no lights this far from the roads. I could be tramping down a trail in the Hoh Rain Forest for all I can see, the safety of the city miles away, the path doused in black. I gave up isolated locations after Solidago, just far enough north of Bandon and south of Florence to essentially be nowhere. A place where the echoing of waves and the reverberating barks of spotted owls were often my only company. Ileft that dismal stretch of sea and made my way toward the busiest place I could find, somewhere with jostling crowds and teetering skyscrapers to hem me in, both of which Seattle has in ample supply. Though the water remains a constant backdrop I can’t escape, the North Pacific Ocean lurking salty to the west like a bad date that won’t stop texting, bathed in subtle, nice-guy menace.
But tonight, I feel as desolate as I did in those dismal acres my grandfather set aside for us. Aurelia’s paradise was nothing more than a cage he constructed to constrain my grandmother’s spirit and later confine her ghost.
It was a lonely place to grow up, though I lived with nine other people. They were thoroughly in my grandfather’s thrall, paid to do his unquestionable bidding. Nina was the only one I could partially trust. I knew she would never hurt me, but she made it clear whose orders she followed. Even Mother succumbed to his whims, the vibrant woman I had known in San Francisco fading with each passing year at Solidago into a hardened effigy of herself. I had glimmers of real connection with her, moments when I would look into her eyes and for a fraction of a second, I saw a spark of who she’d been. But they would cloud over again, the filter of the estate like a cataract that distorted everything passing through it. I lost her at sixteen, but I think I must have been grieving her since the day we arrived on those polished steps.
Even the neighboring townspeople seemed to sense the darkness our land exuded. Aside from Dara—the only true friend I ever made—no one would set foot on the estate. Packages were left at the roadside. Callers were an anomaly. If someone rang the bell, they were either too far from home or too stupid to know where they were, on whose property they were trespassing. So complete was my grandfather’s dominion over my grandmother, and then my mother, that visitors were not welcome unless expressly invited and carefully controlled, not even for routine reasons like deliveries or sales. I only met Dara when I ventured too far on an afternoon walk, desperate for novelty; she lived down the coast on a neighboring property. Otherwise, I was utterly on my own.
Except for the power, that rare kinetic energy that sparked along my veins like gunpowder and murmured in my ear. In the beginning, it felt as natural to me as speaking or snapping my fingers. I believed, perhaps wrongly, that I had control of it despite my mother’s warnings. I felt it as an organic part of who I was, like an extra limb. I was lighting candles from across the room before I could read, making my night-light flicker before I could write my name. When my mother noticed, panic rolled across her face in a storm. I couldn’t understand her fear. It was like cursing your toe or judging your thumb, trying to stop the workings of your kidneys. The power was a cog in the wheel of my being, a link in a chain, a facet of my physical expression. But to my mother, it was a possession, something nesting inside that, if loosed, would be our undoing.
The devil comes with sweet words, she said to me once,but her tongue is forked. It will cut you to the core if you listen.
Perhaps I should have trusted her when she told me such things, told me about my grandmother, about the spell that became a curse. About a woman so beautiful every man in the world wanted her except the one manshewanted. A woman unaccustomed to hearing the wordno. A woman who scaled mountains when the sea called to find her destiny in the waves. A woman who was young and wild and took a lover and lost her heart and then her head. He strayed and eventually he left, as was his nature. And try as she might, the woman couldn’t call him back. So, she did the only thing left to her. She gathered up her heart and her power, the ingredients, the sacrifice, the secret words. She whispered them to the dark, and she drowned them in the sea. And when she was done, the man returned. He married her and he built her a big house right there by the water. But love spells only work on those capable of loving. And the woman had cast her spell on a man with no heart. Before long, she saw what her working had wrought, but by then, stomach swollen with life, it was too late. The love spell had become something else, something tainted and dark, something unpredictable like the magic of her line. Itdevoured the man, and it trapped the woman. And the child born of it would pay for both their sins.
And her child after her.
That woman was my grandmother Aurelia. The man she married, my grandfather, legendary mogul Macallister Bates. They were the reason we didn’t trust our hearts or our power.When you make a deal with the dark, my mother would say,you get only darkness.
There were others before them. The Cole women had a long-standing policy against casting of any kind—spells, rites, charms. Our magic was too strong and too unpredictable to be trusted to baser instincts. When it was, terrible things ensued.
Things like the beheading and burning of my ancestress Beata in a Swedish village in the seventeenth century after the villagers begged her to bring rain during a drought. What she brought were five days of heavy flooding that washed half their homes and livestock away and left her neighbors with a hearty distaste for sorcery and the meddling of women. Her daughters fled their homeland soon after.
Then there was Meg, a Victorian governess who used a magic charm to seduce the lord of the house,andhis butler, groom, and gamekeeper to boot. The lady of the house had her committed to a sanatorium for her troubles.
And finally, Avis, a notorious psychic of the roaring twenties, whose uncanny insights into the death of a local magistrate’s son landed her in prison for murder.
Magic is only spell deep,my mother used to say.It is as likely to harm as to heal.
Who knows how many other cautionary tales in love and magic populated my storied family tree? And at the simple age of sixteen, I had, in my own way, taken my place among them.
Still, I knew there was more. Things my motherhadn’ttold me, things about my grandmother, about her, our family. Things she’d run from once, only to have to run back. But I assumed that those things lived in the past; they couldn’t touch me.
How wrong I was.
And then camethe voice, so distinctly feminine and instantly soothing. The voice followed me around the estate like a pet shadow, from the attic dormers to the cliffs that towered above the sea. It whispered between heartbeats and nuzzled me in the dark. It knew about my abilities I’d been commanded to hide when we arrived at the estate, it encouraged them even, prodding me to little acts of magical rebellion like starting small fires and popping light bulbs with a thought. It was my secret keeper, the one I shared things with that I could tell no one else. I believed in those early years that it was purely benevolent, until my mother overheard me alone in my room one day and asked who I was talking to. Before I could tell her, the voice screeched through my brain, fierce and feral—Don’t!
My face must have gone as gray as the ashes in the hearth. “No one.” The words scraped out.
“Let’s keep it that way,” she said, suspicion narrowing her eyes. I was to be seen and not heard, after all.
After that, I doubted. I doubted myself and I doubted the voice. I doubted my mother and I doubted our powers, our history. I doubted the swaying field of golden stalks outside one window and the mist that rose over the sea cliffs out the other. I doubted everything and everyone. But most of all, I doubted the man I called Grandfather, a man whose eyes held no love in them and whose demeanor struck terror in men half his age and twice his size. The same man who took one look at me the day we arrived and criticized, “Her hair is the color of stale tobacco.”
“She has her father’s coloring,” my mother had answered, though we both knew that beneath the dye she’d spread over it the night before, my hair was the same color as her own, golden as the flowers quivering at our backs.
I wrap my arms around myself even though I’m not cold.Don’t be late.I glance at my phone again. 11:54. What happens if I don’t make it?
I hurry my steps to a jog until the bridge looms into view, arcing over me like a giant iron trellis. My eyes fall to the path beneath, a little chill tiptoeing its way up my sternum. My breath hitches. I don’t see anyone. Turning in slow circles, I near the bridge and call, “Hello! Is someone there?”
A rustle from behind causes me to spin around, and I think I see something dart into the trees, but I can’t be sure. “Hello?”
