I’m shaking, breath caught in my throat. As I try and twist off the receiver, it falls from my nerveless hands.
Pierre, who caught Bea Garcia as gently as if she was a newborn when we cut her from the tree in Bittershore woods. Who’d gotten so angry with me when, during the original Sanctuary investigation, I’d briefly suspected his daughter Izzy. Who put himself on the line for Sarah and Harper, again and again. He would have given his life for them.
I think he just did.
Tears won’t stop coming.If you ever need a handyman, you have my number, he’d told me as I was packing to leave Sanctuary. I never called that number. I knew his heart belonged to Sarah Fenn.
Sarah Fenn.
She deserves to hear this news from me. It can’t be some just-a-job colleague. I can’t tell her Harper’s alive, buteverything in me is screaming that the girl made it out. That smashed windshield? It must have been her. She’s the girl a whole town couldn’t kill. She doesn’t die at the bottom of a reservoir. Such amundanedeath. Witches get more lives than that, surely.
Hauling myself up by the sapling’s too-slender trunk, I wipe my face. Pull myself together to pass for normal. Professional. Like a cop who has every right to be in the WRA Registration Zone. Not one who’s listened in as a good man drowns and a girl disappears.
With a detour to drop the radio back where I palmed it, I head for the allocated zone. It’s in the shabby prefab we acquired and nicknamed the Burglary Box the last time a governor decided a Property Crime unit would be a vote winner. The Box is sited across the parking lot. Notoriously freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. But even so, I’m shocked at how bleak it feels.
A half dozen men and women of all ages, shapes, and ethnicities sit on hard plastic seats, their faces weary and resentful. One woman has small kids, twins, sat either side of her. Another, a grizzling red-faced baby in a pushchair. A Black dude catches my eye and nods; the teenage boy and tween girl opposite him are both glued to tablets. Round all their wrists are fluorescent plastic tags, each with a barcode and long row of numbers, which doesn’t sit right with me.
There are touches of flamboyance here and there. Silver jewellery. A feathered earring. Delicate tattoos of flowers on the most prim-and-proper looking woman. But nothing to betray what they are – witches. People with abilities the rest of us don’t have. It’s an unnerving thought.
Then swing doors are pushed wide and in comes Sarah Fenn, eyes bright and distracted. She plucks off a band-aid stuck to the crook of her elbow and folds it into her pocket,then presses two fingers where the needle must have gone in for a blood sample. There’s no sign of any puncture mark when she removes them. She’s harassed and frantic with worry.
How can I tell her?
Only a career spent knocking on doors to break it to folks that their kid won’t be coming home, or their husband, or mom, puts enough steel in my legs to walk up to her and say, as gently as I can, ‘Sarah? We need to talk.’
9
SARAH
Pierre is so big – his heart, his personality, his broad shoulders and wide smile – that it doesn’t seem possible to draw together the edges of the world after he’s been cut out of it. How can that wound be stitched up? How can it heal?
How can I ever get over this?
Aira hasn’t stopped kneading my lap. Her firm, gentle paws trying to work the ache of misery out of me as I sit here in the house he built for me. The chair he honed and worked over until every line of it was a perfect replica of Gramma Serafina’s.
I try not to let my mind circle back to Harper. I’d know, I am certain, if she was lying at the bottom of that reservoir, rocked in a cold green cradle of water. How can you lose your only child and not know? No witchcraft required.
The photo on the table in front of me I flip up and turn face down. Flip up and turn down. Pierre isn’t even in it. But he took it. It’s the one of me and Bridge and toddler Izzy and Harper at the beach, that he’d set here for when I came back to Sanctuary. The one where I glimpsed the truth of his heart more clearly than in any stumbling words, any bashful appearance with pizza and wine, any warm, encircling arms. I’m right at the front of the frame, sunlight firing my hair to flame, Bridget just half a face and a raised soda can beside me.Even our daughters, his and mine, are out of focus behind, like I’m the only thing he sees.
Pierre.Pierre. My oldest, dearest friend. We should have watched our kids grow up. Taken our grandkids on playdates together. I remember our own first days at school. When every lunchbreak for a week my new classmates played chasing games and always made me ‘It’, fleeing shrieking that I had witch cooties. How on the Friday, Pierre had said ‘Make me It, I don’t mind,’ then chased after every mean girl in that class and tackled them to the grass. Rolled all over them crowing about how he was covering them with witch cooties. How when the teacher scolded him in front of everyone, a sweet-faced girl with badly tied pigtails – I wasn’t sure of her name, but thought it might be Bridget – told the teacher he hadn’t done anything wrong, and everyone had deserved it because they’d all, herself included, been very mean. There were no chasing games the next week, and Pierre, Bridget and I had formed an unbreakable unit.
It’s broken now.
Even though I know a draught of tranquillity is false comfort, I’ll take any comfort I can get. I try to brew it with what I have in my kitchen, but the tools are stainless steel, not silver. I’m using a saucepan and a gas ring, not my cauldron. That must be why it doesn’t work, because even when I drink down the sickly potion, I don’t feeltranquilin the slightest.
At some point there’s a knock on the door. More cops, doubtless come to tell me my daughter isbelieved to have been in a vehicle accident. ThatPierre Martineau is dead. But I already know. I don’t answer, and they don’t try to force a way in.
I sit there hours longer, thoughts of Harper irresistible after all. Memories crowd my mind. Her clear, guileless eyes and the pudgy baby limbs Gramma Serafina had squeezedso lovingly. Small Harper sitting at my workbench while I brewed, rigid with attention. Bent so close over Starcross her nose almost touched the pages. Harper the night of her Determination, in the long white ritual gown, blinking back tears as we embraced and grieved her absent magic – or so I’d thought. Teenage Harper tattooed and defiant, slamming the door as she stormed out to spend time with anyone but me. Harper bruised and furious and so vulnerable as we stood bound in Sanctuary’s sports stadium. The fascination with which her pale eyes stared at the burning stage as Abigail rushed into the flames, chasing the vision of her son. Her pale face bathed in kinder light from the campfires at Darkening Pine, where for a while we found refuge. Her astonishment and wonder the morning she came home to Sanctuary, when Lachlan appeared on the stairs and Harper saw her father for the first time.
I press my fingers to the blood beneath the thin skin of my veins. The same blood beats in her. I’d know if that beat had stopped.I’d know.I don’t cast a spell to track her. I promised her once I never would and have kept that promise. But every part of my power reaches out yearningly with a single question –does Harper live?– and the answer returned by every sense isyes.
Later, I doze off in my chair. Too tense. Too numb. Too overwhelmed.
When evening has fallen I rouse from my stupor. They would have had a visit from a cop by now. I can’t put this off any longer.
At Bridget’s, Bea Garcia opens the door.
‘You’re the last person they’ll want to see,’ she tells me.
