Page 6 of The Witches of Cambridge

“It’s time,” Lauren said in a heated whisper. “Hurry!”

There was a full moon, and streams of light fell over them in a shimmer of white. Ava pulled on her clothes and her boots.

“Don’t forget your suitcase,” Lauren reminded her.

For once, Ava would act on instinct. She had the shivery feeling that she was meant to be somewhere else. Lauren had already opened the window and flung down a rope ladder that was stored beneath one of the bureaus for new Lilith initiates.

This is what you wanted, Ava reminded herself. Take a risk, take a chance, change your life. The air crackled as she stepped onto the window ledge. The blue lines of the world beneath the world were there to see. One step and she had entered the place where past, present, and future met.

As soon as Ava and Lauren climbed down, they took off across the lawn, suitcases in hand, their path illuminated by pink-tinged streetlights. They didn’t stop until they could see the Cambridge Common, a large grassy area that had once been a meadow where sheep were set free to graze, protected from poachers and wolves by huge white sheepdogs. Tonight, the women gathered under a large elm known as the Hangman’s Tree, where a witch had once been murdered in the middle of a dark night. All who attended were dressed in black with crowns of ivy on their heads. They wore crystals and malachite and small river rocks strung onto red cords, all meant to give the wearer protection and luck.

Ava stopped where she was, shivering even though the night was warm. Her heart was already pounding. She knew witches when she saw them. She had dreamed of them and read about them in storybooks.

Rise off the ground, jump from the roof, tell no one the truth.

“Afraid they’ll put a spell on you?” Lauren said mockingly when she noticed Ava’s anxious expression.

“I don’t think I’m meant to be here,” Ava whispered as she and Lauren continued down the dark street.

“The society never makes a mistake. Your mother was here, and now you are.”

“My mother didn’t attend Radcliffe. She never went to college at all.”

Lauren shook her head, marveling at the depth of Ava’s naivete. “You really don’t know who you are. Let me ask you this. What color is your blood at your time of the month?”

“I don’t know. I don’t look,” Ava said.

“You’re too afraid to look at yourself.” Lauren shook her head, then reached for a sharp penknife she carried in her pocket and quickly pricked the skin of her palm.

Ava gasped and took a step back, shocked. “What are you doing!”

“Showing you who you are. Someone has to.”

A single black drop fell onto the ground, and where it had fallen, a dark flower arose. It was a hyacinth, a flower associated with life and death and mystery.

“Who are you?” Ava said, her thin voice wavering. She gazed at the women gathered under the tree and saw beyond them, to those who had gathered there long ago. She saw black birds, marshes, dark roads, hazel trees, hope. Ava felt herself shivering. “What are you?” she said.

“The same as you.”

“I’m nothing like you. I’m ordinary!”

They were pledging together; they might be judged together; if one failed to be inducted into the society, the other might meet the same fate, and so Lauren seized Ava’s hand and, before Ava could pull away, Lauren pricked the palm of her hand as well.

The night was pitch dark, as it had been in Ava’s dream. That was when it happened. The end of one life and the start of another. Her blood was black. She had spied something on her undergarments at her time of the month, but she’d thought the darkness was just a stain, perhaps from eating too many blackberries. Now she knew it was more. It was the reason why Ava had been able to slip out of the ropes when her parents tied her to a chair when they thought she had misbehaved, why crows gathered on her windowsill and followed her wherever she went. Each time she’d skinned her knee or fallen, whenever she walked through bramble bushes, she had never once drawn blood. She was hearty, that’s what her mother always told her, as strong as a hazel branch. And so Ava had never really seen her own blood before. “This can’t be,” she said. “It’s a trick.”

That had been what her mother had always called the odd things she could do. A trick, she would shout as if she’d been wounded. If you don’t want to wind up in a circus sideshow you must stop it right now! Her mother would hold a hot spoon to Ava’s tongue as punishment for this trickery. She would hit Ava’s hands with a ruler. Ava was drawn to nature and felt a deep kinship with animals and plants; weather was the way she read the world. Do not ask the rain to fall, her mother told her. Do not talk to the trees. Once she had brought a bird back to life, feeling its skittering heartbeat in the palms of her hands as its body grew warm from her touch. Her mother had wrung the sparrow’s neck, then she’d locked Ava in the closet for the rest of the day. There in the darkness, Ava told herself she must continue to be ordinary at any price. That was how she’d been raised, to fear anything rare and unusual, even if it was herself. “I’m not going with you,” she told Lauren. “It’s all trickery.”

“Fine. Do as you please. See if I care! I’m happy to be rid of you,” Lauren proclaimed as she stepped into the road to cross over to the Common.

Ava would have turned and headed back to South House, overlooking all this nonsense and unpacking her suitcase, but she suddenly had a vision, an occurrence that wasn’t unusual for her. Out of the corner of her eye there was a flash of light, the sign of what was to come. A branch that had fallen to the ground before a windstorm. A nest of speckled blue eggs before she discovered baby sparrows in the woods. The future was an instant away, so close she could often see it before it happened. Now Ava spied a body careering through the air, so wounded and bloody that a hundred hyacinths would soon fill the road, bursting through the asphalt to bloom out of season.

Ava leapt to grab Lauren’s arm, wrenching her back to the sidewalk. That was when the motorcycle passed by. That was when they lived. Both could barely breathe, and their hearts were pounding. Fate wasn’t necessarily what you thought it would be. It could change in an instant, it could turn inside out, blood and bones, disaster or salvation. One step forward or one step back made all the difference, changing your fate. Yellow leaves glided down, and inky blue exhaust arose in midair, and there they were. Lauren was pale and shivering violently. She wasn’t as fearless as she seemed. “I was supposed to die,” she said.

“No.” Ava shook her head, certain. She was not as fearful as she had appeared to be. “It was supposed to be me. If you hadn’t told me not to go with you, I would have been the one run over in the road.”

They realized they would never know which of them would have been struck and killed, for their fates came to them instant by instant, but from that moment on each believed the other had saved her, and each was correct. They were holding hands, and the slashes in their palms caused them to exchange blood. They let go of one another’s hands, each embarrassed, but it was too late. Like it or not they were blood sisters now, their fates intertwined from this night forward. Their fate was to rescue each other. Now when Lauren gazed at Ava, she saw a girl crying in the dark, living her life backward, and Ava saw the girl perched in a tree, the one who never wanted to come back to earth and face the sorrows of mortal life.

It was the time of year when Massachusetts was plagued by thunderstorms, when people took shelter wherever it could be found. The six young women in black applauded, welcoming Lauren and Ava as they approached. There had been no mistakes about who was invited to join them this year. There never was. Each member of the society could rise above the ground, they could call for the rain to begin, and start a fire with the heat of their breath. They were Radcliffe students, but they were something else as well, not by choice, or by reason, but by legacy. It was who they were, and when they entered the circle, they didn’t look back. That was when Ava realized there was only one thing she knew for certain.

She had no idea who she was.