Page 43 of The Witches of Cambridge

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ava stumbled upon Emily Bright sprawled on the bathroom floor, her hands drawn over her face as she tried to hide her tears. It was the height of spring and blooming lilacs were just barely visible in the violet-tinged dusk. People all over the city were afflicted with spring fever. They made irrational choices they would never have made in the dead of winter. It was the season of love affairs and failure, of mistakes that had already been made and those that were about to happen.

“Please don’t look at me,” Emily whispered, embarrassed to be caught sobbing. It was her senior year, and she should have been out with friends or at the library or at a café; she should have been planning for her future. Instead, she was hiding out in the bathroom in a torrent of tears. Ava brought her some tissues and sat down beside her.

“I’m an idiot,” Emily said. “I fell for the wrong person.” She looked brokenhearted and wounded to the quick. “Now he’s seeing someone else.”

“Love is tricky,” Ava said.

“It wasn’t love. I know that now. Professor Sharpe let me go from my research position once he was done with me. I’m nothing to him.” Emily’s face took on a darker cast. “All I can say is I can see through Lauren now. Take my advice, don’t trust her.”

“What has Lauren got to do with this?” Ava asked. They hadn’t spoken to one another since the night Ava stormed out of her room to climb the tree and right what Lauren had wronged.

“He’s hers now, and, frankly, she’s welcome to him.”

Lilith House members pledged not to use magic for greed or self-interest, but now that Ava thought of it, she hadn’t ever heard Lauren recite the vow they all took at Sunday meetings. Not even once.

“Don’t worry,” she told Emily. “You’ll find someone better. Someone who values you.”

“I’m well rid of him,” Emily said in agreement, though her voice was cracking, and she was clearly hurting. “Let her have him. They can both go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

Ava wanted to say, You can’t make someone love you, any more than you can make them be loyal to you, but it was clear that Emily was on the brink of falling apart. Oddly, when Ava looked inside Emily, she couldn’t see a bit of her future, only the foggy darkness of the present. Surely there was a cure for this, and perhaps friendship would do the trick. “I’ll fix us some tea,” Ava offered. “Jack and I can stay in your room tonight if you’d like. There are times when everyone needs company.”

“Thank you, but no. I’m fine,” Emily said.

All the same, when Ava left the bathroom, she could hear that Emily was still crying. Hoping to release Emily from a love that had clearly gone wrong, Ava went to the garden for basil and lavender, healing plants used for breaking love spells, but when she returned to the house, Emily was gone.

That year the wisteria didn’t bloom. The leaves curled up and the buds fell to the ground before they opened. The flowers of this twisted vine could be fatal to humans and animals, as often the most beautiful things were. Lauren didn’t notice that the hundred-year-old wisteria that wound along the porch of Lilith House was bare. She didn’t notice the dead leaves scattered on the lawn. She didn’t glance at Ava when she passed her in the hallway or try to heal what had gone wrong between them. She was in a world of her own, consumed with researching artifacts in the storage rooms of the Peabody Museum. She had begun to practice the ancient magic she found, writing the spell work into her grimoire, reciting curses that hadn’t been spoken aloud for centuries. That was what had happened to the wisteria; it had been caught up in a curse that was a thousand years old. I take my life force from you. I refuse to give it back. I grow, while you fail to do so.

The further Lauren went down the Crooked Path, the more the darkness engulfed her. The house itself seemed built of shadows, jinxed by both sorrow and regret. The tap water went cold when someone was in the shower, and the lights flickered, and they often heard footsteps on the roof, as if a spirit had settled in above them. They were being haunted, and they didn’t dare to tell their parents, for fear they’d be hauled out of school. Ava said nothing, but she knew exactly who was behind the sudden onslaught of mysterious happenings. Practice black magic and the world gets darker; things go amiss, people get hurt. A left-handed practitioner usually kept to herself, and Lauren no longer visited Brattle Street, avoiding Lionel, who she knew would divine as soon as he saw her that she had gone over to the dark side. She had become the sort of woman witch-hunters most wanted to burn, the kind in the storybooks that witches despised, a witch who walked at night and did as she pleased no matter the consequences.

Lionel hadn’t seen his sister for so long, he decided to track her down. He followed a compass, which directed him to the museum, and stumbled upon Lauren in a storeroom. She’d been digging through a box that hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years, and her hands were coated with scarlet-colored ocher, a powder used for funerals in Alexandria. It was the element made of iron oxide used in funerary rites in the Paleolithic age in Europe and, as far back as the Stone Age, found in graves. And it was said to be used in an attempt to give blood back to the dead, decorating corpses in cultures around the world, so it was often called bloodstone, for it symbolized bloodlines and deep attachments. Lauren looked up and blinked when her brother appeared.

“Oh, Lauren.” Lionel sank down to sit beside her on the floor, shocked by her appearance. She was clearly obsessed with her work. Her hair was tangled, and her black dress was wrinkled and worn. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s not what you think it is,” Lauren told him. But wasn’t it? She’d been concentrating on an ancient weather spell written in stone, and while the sky outside thundered, she’d bitten through her lip, leaving her mouth as red as a rose. She hadn’t washed her hair for a week and had on the same clothes she’d worn the day before.

“You need to be careful.” Lionel had read his sister’s tarot cards, and the King of Wands was in her future, a visionary figure that could easily take over your life if you let him. There had also been the Knight of Cups, a more positive card, symbolizing falling in love at first sight, for this was a knight ruled by his heart, not his head.

As they readied themselves to leave the storeroom, Lionel insisted that his sister clap the red dust from her hands. “That stuff is for the dead, not the living,” he told her.

Funeral powder didn’t disappear easily, and when Lauren clapped her hands the ocher formed a whirlwind that left magenta-colored specks on her face. Lionel hovered, concerned. He could feel a twist in Lauren’s fate; it was bitter and stank of fire and smoke. He could see inside her, even though she was doing her best to keep him out of her mind. All the same, he knew she’d become involved with the wrong person. “You should save yourself for someone who cares about you.”

“Don’t be an old fogey,” Lauren told him.

Lionel spied a bruise on his sister’s arm. Witches didn’t bruise easily, but there it was. “I’m seriously worried about you.”

Lauren kissed his cheek. “Thank you, my brother. There’s no need.”

“And what about Ava? Has she disappeared from your life?”

“For now,” Lauren said. “Maybe forever.”

“A good friend cast away can only bring sorrow,” Lionel said, repeating a saying of their grandmother’s.

“And a bad friend brings disaster,” Lauren said right back.

She taped closed the box of artifacts, which contained sharply chiseled stones from ancient Persia that had been used for initiation rituals and left on graves. Some had dark streaks of blood, and the scent of lilies emanated from others. Lauren could feel the essence of the women whose blood had been spilled, witches with so much power they’d had to be tied up with twenty ropes to contain them. She locked the storeroom door, and they went out into the damp green air. Leaves turned to ash. Bird fled the trees. Lauren knew her brother would be alarmed if he became aware of deep attraction to the left-handed side, but her life was her own, and her mistakes were her own as well.