Page 66 of The Witches of Cambridge

Breathe in and breathe out, believe what you see.

Professor Sharpe was leaning over a metal table; when he heard footsteps he turned to see Ava standing there.

“Leave right now,” Sharpe told Ava, but instead she took a step closer.

Lauren was lying on the metal table, so cold she appeared blue, anesthetized with belladonna and morphine. Tubing attached to a bag was draining her blood. An infusion pump hurried the process, and once forty percent of her blood was taken, it would be impossible to bring her back. She was unconscious, barely breathing,

Sharpe saw Ava as nothing more than a young woman with red hair, a rose to some, but a thorn in the side of a man such as himself, not a threat, but an irritant to his plans. She tried one incantation after another, but the words evaporated in her mouth. He had the power of four witches, now that he’d directly infused himself with Lauren’s blood. He lifted his arm, and Ava found she couldn’t take another step.

“I’m one of you,” Sharpe said.

“You’re nothing like us,” Ava told him.

“I might as well take you.” He wrenched open the door of the cabinet where he stored his knives. “As long as you’re here.”

Ava heard a clattering in the corridor. Jamie had found a crate and he’d managed to climb into the building. Now he headed toward the voices he heard. Jack had leapt onto Sharpe’s back in a fury, sinking his teeth into the professor’s shoulder. When Ava saw that the professor had taken his knife to Jack, she realized why she had been at the cemetery and why the black necklace had come to belong to her. She held the necklace in her hands, but Jack’s throat had already been slit in a single quick movement. That was when Ava wound the black necklace around the witch-hunter’s throat and pulled tightly. In an instant the pressure of the necklace began to sap Sharpe’s strength.

Take what you need and what you want. Take back your magic.

“You can’t,” Sharpe managed to say, but Ava knew that she could. She pulled the necklace tighter, and the white crow called from the window ledge. The crow slammed against the window until the glass shattered. Red ocher was falling from the ceiling, and the room would never be white again, no matter how many times it was repainted.

With one last effort, Ava pulled the necklace even tighter. She thought of every woman who had ever danced in a field or cemetery, every one who had spoken to birds in the marshes, who’d been forced to hide from judges, who made certain she was surrounded by hedges of brambles. Ava thought she might never let go, but then she saw Jack on the floor.

Jamie heard her sobbing as he ran along the corridor. When he reached the lab, he saw Ava and nothing else. He crouched down to gather her in his arms, forcing her to let go of the dog.

“He’s gone,” Jamie said. “There’s nothing more to be done.”

Witches fell into a deep sleep before they died, and Lauren was beginning to wake, though her eyes were still closed. Ava used the desk phone to call Lionel, who was there in five minutes flat and set to work immediately, asking no questions. “We’ll bring her back,” he said. The angel of death was not in the doorway, only the crows who had flown in through the window.

Ava lay beside Lauren on the metal table and Lionel transfused her. They watched Lauren’s face flush as Ava’s blood filled her veins. She was dreaming of a man in New York. She could see him standing by a window, looking out at a river that ran two ways, blue as a bruise, black as night, eternally there. While Ava lay there, Jamie took off his watch and his jacket and leaned in to stroke her hair as he recited the story of the white crow. This time the crow stayed. He was so in love he no longer cared about the open sky. The only thing he wanted was the woman who had called to him with ribbons and bells and her own sweet voice.

“You see, even when the crow has to leave, he comes back,” Jamie said with assurance. “He could never stay away.”

When Ava had given all the blood she could safely donate, Lionel unhooked her and stabbed the needle into his own vein. Death was another country, and the person who had visited there would come back changed, so he wanted Lauren back as soon as possible. She had placed one foot in that dark land, but she was still here with them, in the same room, at the same hour. When Lauren got up from the table, Ava was there. They had rescued one another on the night on the Common and they always would.

“Fly together,” Lauren said, her first words spoken back in the land of the living, the land of light and green trees and birds and love. She sounded like a little girl, but she wasn’t. That was what had changed. That girl had climbed down from the cherry tree behind the house on Brattle Street.

Jamie drove to the cemetery as Ava sat in the backseat, holding Jack, crying black tears, knowing that just as things began, they also ended. It was nearly dawn when they buried Jack beneath the ivy edging Hyacinth Path. This is where Ava would come on Sunday afternoons for many years; she would plant lupines, grateful for their spikes of purple flowers, delicate blooms named after wolves. She would always be grateful that one night she had found a black dog that a gang of teenaged boys had mistaken for a coyote and tied to a fence. She crouched down in the ivy and sobbed. If you do not have a dog, if you have never loved one, you will not know that they break your heart in two. And still, they are with you. You look back and expect to see them. You think you hear their footsteps. Here or not, Jack would always be hers.

Ava and Jamie fell asleep beneath the brambles, and in the morning, when Ava awoke, Jamie was gone. He had realized his watch was missing, and in a panic he went back to the museum, but it was surrounded by police cars. He saw Billy from a distance talking with the officers and the janitorial staff. He had little choice but to drive out to Sudbury, interrupting his parents’ breakfast to explain he might have left his watch in a place where it didn’t belong. He had no idea that his watch had already been found. Tim Randall had been the one to call the police, but not before he pocketed the watch in the lab. He had looked up the seal on the back of the watch and identified it as belonging to one of the Mathers. He’d already met with Paul Mather that morning, in the parking lot of a pancake house, to strike a deal. Cash in return for his silence. Silence was expensive, and you could never completely depend on it, especially when the janitor refused to return the object in question.

Now the entire family was at risk, and Jamie was told that he must leave immediately. Soon enough he’d been given his plane ticket and his new identification. He was told that if he ever dared to come back his father would report Ava to the police as the guilty party, well aware that placing Ava in peril was the one thing that could make Jamie stay away. An old family friend who was now a dean was called, and when the board at Harvard met, they would be asked to grant Jamie a diploma in absentia. He hadn’t wanted to be part of the Mather family, and now his wish had been granted.

“Just curious. Did you kill that professor?” Paul Mather demanded to know.

“Of course he didn’t,” Jamie’s mother said.

“Let me hear it from him.”

If Jamie didn’t claim responsibility, they would surely blame Ava. “It just happened,” he said.

“Then you might as well have murdered him. I’m sure Ava had something to do with this mess. I told you that girl would ruin your life.”

“She has nothing to do with it.”

“And you’ll have nothing to do with her,” Jamie’s father said. “Or us. You’re on your own.”

The Boston Globe reported that Professor Sharpe had been found deceased in the museum, likely the result of a heart attack. Students and faculty were questioned, as was the janitorial staff, including Randall, who said he usually slept during the night shift and vowed he’d never heard a thing. The Mathers had made sure of that by meeting the custodian at the pancake house every month with an envelope of cash. The price was Jamie. He would disappear.

“You have no choice,” Jamie’s father had told him. “It will be best if you don’t come back.”

There would be no family graduation party for Jamie, as there had been for his brothers. There would be no law school applications, no summer in Wyoming. Jamie was going to Iceland, a place no one would look for him. He would work at a fishing lodge in the north, happy to be in a country where there were more sheep than men, a world where people greeted one another with grace, happy for a bit of light even on the darkest days.

His father had managed to get him a new passport. He’d be called Luke, after a beloved childhood dog, and he’d chosen Burroughs as his family name, after the minister Ava had told him about who’d lost his life in Salem when the witch hunts in Massachusetts had just begun. He tossed most of his belongings in the trash, leaving his clothes and books behind for any of the neighborhood kids who might want them. He pulled down the shades on his apartment windows, then grabbed his stuff and set off from North Cambridge for the last time. There was only one person he needed to see before he disappeared.