Page 40 of The Witches of Cambridge

“Don’t you have anything to say to me?” Ava had a wounded expression on her face. “I waited for you, Jamie.”

“The hell you did.” He seemed in a fury, acting as if she were the guilty party. As his emotions rose, the glass in his hand shattered. There was his magic, wrapped in anger and desire.

“Is that supposed to scare me?” Ava asked.

“I don’t know. It’s scaring me.” He swept the broken glass into a pile.

Ava wanted to say, Be careful. You’ll hurt yourself, but she was still too angry to show her true feelings. “I waited until I fell asleep,” Ava now told him. “You’re the one who left without a word.”

“I asked you to meet me at the Common, but you didn’t show up. I was there all night. I slept on a bench, like a fool.” He reached for his drink and gulped it down. “I waited for you. Obviously, you didn’t give a damn about the note I left.”

Ava felt a chill. There was still the same connection between them. “What note?”

“The one I gave to Lauren to deliver to you.”

Ava thought back to the morning she’d waited so long for Jamie, when she’d woken in despair to see that the white ribbons tied to the tree had fallen onto the ground. Now her Coca-Cola went untouched on the bar, leaving a watery ring on the wood. She felt faint and somewhat dazed, baffled by this turn of events. “You didn’t leave a note.”

“Didn’t I?” Jamie finished his scotch in a single, desperate gulp. It was always his poison of choice.

“Lauren would have told me.” She would have, Ava knew that, and yet her voice trembled. “She’s my friend.”

Jamie laughed cruelly. “So you’re still on her side.”

“No, I’m not. I’m on your side.”

“It doesn’t seem like it. It seems you expected the worst of me and that’s what you’ll believe no matter what.”

“If you were there, you should have come upstairs!” Ava cried.

Jamie shook his head. “This time it wasn’t my fault. I was there, Ava.”

She wished she had stayed out on the porch and waited for him that night and that she’d never gone to bed. Jamie gave her a look that was crushing, and all at once Ava felt she was the one at fault. She should have sat on the stairs until morning, but instead she’d slept and dreamed that she was chasing after him, her feet bleeding. She had believed what Lauren, her one true friend, had told her.

“Why don’t you find out the truth for both of us?” Jamie urged. “Go ahead if you have the courage. Ask her what happened. And then ask yourself why you didn’t wait.”

Lauren returned to her room that day to discover it had been ransacked. Ink was spilled onto the floor, papers were littered across her desk, her precious grimoire had been torn to pieces, with bits of poetry littering the floor. The culprit who’d created the chaos was waiting for her. There was Ava, her hair in tangles, her hands blistered from the efforts of her search.

“What is wrong with you?” Lauren cried as Ava paced through the ruins of her belongings. Lauren crouched down, trying and failing to save her poems. Words were magic, and they had risen from the torn pages. Now they were nothing more than black lines streaked across the walls, the scattered words no longer making any sense.

“Did you think I’d never know?” Ava asked, seething. Lauren flinched, surprised by her friend’s vicious tone. If Lauren had been anyone else, she might have been afraid; she knew that a witch in despair has twice the power to curse you than any other woman who has been wronged. “I want the letter Jamie gave you,” Ava told her. “Did you forget about it, or did you just want to hurt me?”

“You know I wouldn’t want that.” Lauren was flustered and hoped her nerves didn’t show. She’d already bitten her tongue, and there was blood in her mouth. She had been misunderstood, and now she seemed like a villain when she had meant to protect Ava. Wasn’t that what friends did? Step in when they were needed, even if they weren’t called upon. “Why would you ever want it? It was all a pack of lies.”

Ava thought of Jamie at the bar, that hurt look in his eyes. “I want the letter.” Proof of love, proof of betrayal, proof that her friendship with Lauren had been a mistake.

“It doesn’t exist. I tore it in two.” By then Lauren was nearly crying. This was how it happened. Your throat tightened. Your eyes burned. You could hardly catch your breath. “I did it for you,” she said, the sound of her own voice a shock. She seemed a girl again, one who was about to lose something she loved.

“How dare you!” Ava’s eyes were cold, and her tone had turned to ice. She thought of the crow waiting in the tree, turning white with grief, and of his bride on earth, standing just below him, her eyes so filled with tears she couldn’t see that he’d come for her.

The vines growing on the outside trellis were snaking their way through the window; they’d come alive with black and twisted stems and berries the color of blood. They were growing faster all the time, spurred on by the bitter feelings, fed by anger. The scar on Lauren’s hand, which matched Ava’s from when they cut their palms on the night of their initiation, had begun to throb. Red magic, the strongest of all, the purveyor of love and hate, curses and hexes. The shy, guarded girl from Maine had all but disappeared and turned into this. A woman who could wound Lauren straight through to her heart.

“Stop acting as if I meant to hurt you!” Lauren told Ava. “I was protecting you from the Mathers! If anything, you should be grateful.”

“Stay out of my life,” Ava said, her words red and rising. “From now on, don’t come near me.” She had decided that she would scatter salt outside her room to ensure that Lauren stayed far away. She would lock her windows and her door and burn sage and juniper in a brass bowl for protection. If this was what a friend was, Ava didn’t want one.

“I’m already in your life,” Lauren called as Ava turned to leave. “You can’t just cut me off! That’s not how this works.”

But the door had already slammed, and Ava was gone. The vines outside the window had withered, and the glass was cloudy, impossible to see through. This was what happened when you lost someone. Their absence echoed. It rang in your ears. Lauren sank back, remembering why she had lost faith in people. They left you, they deserted you, they didn’t even know who you were. She lifted her arms in a fury, and as she did the black lines on the walls wrapped themselves around her, one letter at a time until she was covered with the letters she’d written into her grimoire. Words were the only things she could trust.

It was already dark, and the air was cold. Fall could trick you; you never knew what the weather might bring, flaring sunlight one moment, black and blue chill that made you shiver the next. Ava was beneath the trees where the crows slept. She planned on setting things right. There wasn’t a minute to waste. She raised her arms, and the world turned red, the leaves on the trees, the roses blooming out of season, the tall grass turning scarlet. Red magic, love magic, the spell that comes from inside your heart, that needs no incantations and no words spoken aloud.

Ava would wait as long as was needed. She would wait all night if she must. She slipped off her dress and stood there in her underwear. She tore the dress into strips and climbed into the magnolia tree to tie the ribbons to the branches. She threaded one thin ribbon of fabric to her door keys and attached it to a branch. In the rising wind, the keys rang out like a bell.

It was a quiet night, and so it was possible to hear the bell chiming for miles, even up in North Cambridge. It was the way love called out to you, in a tumble of red, so that even the stars appeared to be crimson. It was how you found your way to where you were always meant to go. Wait and it will happen. Wait and the truth will be told. Ava saw Jamie running down the street. There was no one else around, not even the bats that usually circled in the half-light. He didn’t stop until he reached the tree, and he lifted himself into the branches as if he were a crow who had fallen in love with a woman who lived on the earth but who knew how to reach the sky.