Suddenly, I feel like the unwitting protagonist in a Grimm’s tale, a woodcutter’s daughter who gets an ominous tingle only moments before stumbling upon the peasant witch and her candy house. Why go mushroom picking after dark in the first place? Didn’t they realize they were just begging for something like this to happen?
I should know better,my racing thoughts chide. I know what evil is. I’ve seen its face in a pewter-haired man with the devil in his gaze and lips that never smile. I’ve seen it flicker like a warning in my mother’s eyes and dance along my fingertips. I’ve seen it eat a village in the night like a dragon loosed on the countryside. Idoknow better. And yet, I’m still here.
I arrive under the bridge and stop. The air goes still around me, as if all the atoms are being vacuumed out of it. Even the insects hush in the underbrush, choosing to take their song somewhere safer. The stars hide their faces behind a canopy of trees. Without the sound of my footfalls, all I can hear is my breath, until I silence that too.
Maybe this was just some kind of joke.
“I brought this,” I say, holding the invitation out to the night, feeling childish. “You invited me?”
The envelope catches in my hand and goes up in a blaze of spectacular blue flame. I shriek and drop it, stomping my boot on it until the ghostly fire goes out. But after, there’s nothing there, not even a smudge of ash on my sole.
A slow clap sounds up the path, splitting the silence open. “You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to be one of us,” I hear her say.
“One of who?” I ask, eyes straining into the darkness.
She emerges from the night as if someone parted a veil. Her obsidian hair falls in thick waves over her shoulders, her face framed by a dense layer of Bettie Page bangs. She’s dressed in smartly tailored black from the pointed toe of her lace-up boots to the tuck of her carefully creased slacks to the high collar at her neck and the leather gloves encasing her hands. She’s not a large woman, not even as tall as I am, but she feels enormous on the path before me, full of swagger and command, as if she owns this park. As if she owns even the night. As if she ownsme. Something about her tugs at the edge of my awareness. I’ve never before seen anyone do what I could do, what my mother and grandmother could do.
“Did you do that?” I ask. “To the invitation?”
She stops six feet in front of me and crosses her arms. “Are you impressed?”
“How do you know my name?” I shove my hands deep into the pockets of my trench coat, jumping straight to the point. “How did you know what book I would buy? That I would even go into that store tonight?”
“I know lots of things about you, Judeth,” she says, emphasizing my full name, watching for a reaction as she approaches me. “I know you eat a tuna fish sandwich for lunch every day. And that you haven’t gotten a haircut in weeks. I know you’re still pining for that stale crust of a man you took to bed every night before the baby inside you died.”
Her words steal my breath. A thousand images of Roger flash through my mind in rapid succession—the bamboo T-shirts he slept in, the curve of his mouth around a forkful of pasta carbonara, his gray eyes narrowing over a champagne flute in a gallery. The way he loomed in the doorway, hands helplessly in his pockets, as I cried and bled on the toilet. My chest constricts around my heart. “How did you… how?”
I never mentioned the pregnancy or miscarriage to anyone besides Roger, not even my doctor. And at only nine weeks, I wasn’t showing.
She stops just shy of where I stand and bends down, picking up a long, black feather. “I know that you’re a fire rover—pyrokinesis, electrokinesis…” She points the feather at me as she leans forward to whisper, “And I know about Solidago.” An almost cruel smile twitches at her lips.
Afire rover? I suck in air. I’ve never heard the term. Apart from her warnings, my mother said precious little about our power. She called uselementalwitches once, people born with innate abilities that defy explanation. Not to be confused with historical alchemists or modern New Agers, the Wiccans and practitioners who must manipulate magic without because they do not carry it within. It’s why she feared the use of actual spells and tools and ingredients inourhands, because they would be too much, too dangerous combined with the force we possessed. A spark meeting gasoline.
How could this stranger know? “Are you from Bandon? Did someone send you? Lampitt?”
She shakes her head, hair tossing gently in the cool night. “Calm yourself, kitten. I come in peace. We all do.”
“All?” I squint in her direction, confused, and then I see them. How long have they been standing there, the dark figures encircling me? Four by my count. The air inside my lungs hardens like glass, piercing. How have I managed to get myself into this?
“As I was saying, you’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” she goes on. “You’re going to have to show us you deserve it.”
I wrap my fingers around my throat. “Deserve what?”
“A place in the circle,” she responds frankly. “A ticket to the deep.”
I glance at the figures around me, each dressed to match the night, hair or hoods obscuring their faces.
“You’re going to have to show us you have it in you, Jude.” She stares at me.
My mouth gapes open. “What?” I manage to squeak out, but it pulses in the center of my chest, that longing I’ve carried for seventeen years, that need. The power I lost.
She assesses me like a prize mare. “Do you think you can do that?”
My eyes water despite the fear. Or maybe because of it. “I don’t know,” I admit with a whisper. Then, “I shouldn’t.”
She smirks, her eyes sliding to meet those of the person to her right, like they’re in on a joke together. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.” She takes a step back as if getting ready to leave.
“Wait!” I call out, my hand reaching through the darkness for her, finding nothing. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”
