This was it. The moment that her parents had waited seventeen years for.
“Remember me?” the ancient woman asked Risa with a voice like dried leaves scraping against the ground.
Risa shook her head. “Not at all. I am not in the habit of meeting old ladies.” Truth be told, she wasn’t in the habit of meeting anyone, considering everybody avoided her like the plague.
Whichhadn’tswept through Barrow in several centuries, at least, so surely her bad luck only extended so far.
The woman narrowed her beady black eyes, and something flashed in their onyx depths.
Risa should have been scared. Barrow had its stories of witches hiding in the woods. She’d read century-old articles and pamphlets that detailed the witch agenda, which was typically about the fairygodmother trade or payment agreements or the traveling-witch circuit.
But Risa was desperate. She didn’t care about hidden agendas or presumed danger. She needed a miracle. Something wildly powerful.
A witch.
She had waited a whole year. Despite the expectation that someone would come knocking on her seventeenth birthday demanding payment for a forgotten favor, she was still surprised that it wasthiswitch—a small thing weighed down by all the centuries she had undoubtedly seen. Her mottled, leathery brown skin was pulled taut across bone. White wires sprang from her head, on a personal mission to defy the physical rules of the universe.
Somewhere behind Risa, a door slammed shut. Her mother stumbled out of the Porto home in a mad rush.
“Brunhilda,” Ma greeted, skidding to a halt beside Risa. Ma gripped the lapels of her silk robe in a tight fist to keep it from flying open, though it didn’t hide the faint scars that traveled across her collarbone like a meandering stream. The scars did nothing to diminish Ma’s beauty. Unlike Risa, her mother had frizzy silver curls that escaped a neat bun and framed her heart-shaped face, hazel eyes that shifted from brown to green under different light, and a plump figure that suggested a refusal to change after having created life.
Five years ago, Ma’s hair had been the color of a cloudless midnight, much like her daughter’s. But one fateful morning, lightning struck Ma as she stumbled outside to chase after Risa, who was determined to run away from home. Risa had frozen in horror to watch the door of the house catch fire, the entrance burn downto cinders, a crawling scar of bright red lines appear across her mother’s torso, and Ma’s hair turn the color of stormy skies.
It was Risa’s fault, of course. Everyone whispered about it when they saw her mother in town later. Poor thing, her mother—cursed with a daughter who only brought bad luck, as was evidenced by Ma’s near-death experience and the partial destruction of their home.
It was then that Risa had realized her curse was determined to destroy everything she loved. Her town, in all its sadness; her home, in all its grandeur; her parents, for all their harried attempts to love her despite knowing what she was.
The witch nodded in greeting. “Preena.”
Risa looked between her mother and the old woman standing at the gate.
Ma placed a delicate, trembling hand on top of Risa’s head. “This is my daughter, Risa.”
Brunhilda returned a nearly toothless smile, though it did not reach those fathomless dark eyes that searched Risa like they saw right through her and found her lacking.
“She’s tall.”
Risa chanced another look at her mother, whose worried face appeared more fraught than usual. Despite having had seventeen years to prepare for this, her mother looked beside herself.
“This is the woman who helped me during your birth,” Ma explained, words slow. Risa knew the story by now but remained silent as her mother pursed her lips, deep in thought. “When no one else would.”
Brunhilda cocked her head, observing Risa with that uncomfortable stare.
“Are you ready?”
Risa’s heart sputtered.
Her mother gasped, “No, you can’t! She’s too young—”
But her mother made no attempt to shield her daughter. She stood frozen, much like Risa had five years earlier when lightning struck.
An insistent itch started at the back of Risa’s neck, like fire licking at her fingertips. An omen of trouble ahead. “For what?”
“For an adventure. What people here would call a Bad Thing.”
Risa did not move. She glanced at the Porto mansion, at the windows with their curtains drawn, at the facade leached of color after centuries of rain. Where her bag was waiting, packed since her last birthday. Where empty rooms held memories of years spent alone, years dreaming of the Bosque and the world beyond it, where no one knew her.
Risa Porto is a Bad Thing.
