Season of the Witch, Page 2

  My birthday is Halloween, and summer is already coming to an end. I didn’t consider, back then, that embracing my destiny as a witch would mean turning my back on my mortal life. Now it’s all I can think of: losing my friends, losing Harvey, even losing math class at Baxter High. Every day, I feel like the world I know is slipping a little further out of my grip.

  Yet I still love magic. I love the feel of power building in my veins and the idea of having more. I love the click when a spell goes perfectly right as much as I hate the thought of disappointing my family.

  It’s an impossible choice, and soon I have to make it. I never thought of that when I was a child daydreaming about magic, or when Harvey leaned in and kissed me by my gate.

  I guess a part of me still believed that day would never come.

  I spent so long thinking the future was forever away. I’m not ready for it to be now.

  We are the weird woods; we are the trees who have turned silver beneath a thousand moons; we are the whisper that runs through the dead leaves. We are the trees witches were hanged from. The hanging trees bear witness, and the soil that drank witches’ blood can come alive. There are nights the woods bear witness to love, and nights we bear witness to death.

  The girl in green that the young half witch saw was waiting for a boy. He came to her at last, through the storm. Many pairs embrace amid our trees, but they did not. Lovers’ meetings often end in lovers’ quarrels.

  “I’m telling you to leave this one-horse town and come with me,” she urged. “I’m going to LA. I’ll be a star.”

  The boy smiled a small, rueful smile, his eyes on the ground. “Isn’t that what everybody says when they head for LA? That they’re going to be a star. Just once, I’d like to hear someone say they were going to LA to be a waiter.”

  “At least I’ll be something,” she snapped. “What are you going to be, if you stay here? Are you going to be a loser your whole life?”

  The boy lifted his eyes and stared at her for a long moment. “Guess I will,” he said at last.

  He turned and walked away, hands in his pockets. She called out after him, her voice raised in imperious, furious command. He didn’t answer.

  She was too angry to get back in the car. She plunged into the woods and the wind. Her bright green coat billowed behind her as she went; her hood fell from her shining hair, and the wind turned our branches into long fingers that reached to snag her clothes and claws that raked over skin. She strayed from the path and got lost in our woods. It’s so easy to get lost in our woods.

  She stumbled into a little clearing, where a bright stream ran.

  We could have warned her. But we didn’t.

  The stream shone like a silver chain laid down upon the earth. The howling gale did not ruffle the surface of the waters.

  The girl advanced, frowning in puzzlement, and then in the silver, mirrorlike waters she saw her own reflection. She did not see the scratches on her face, or her wild hair. In the mirror of the waters, she had the glamour that only a stranger can possess. She saw someone who was all shining surface, someone who could make you believe the beautiful lie of perfection was true. Someone to be seen once and never forgotten.

  She forgot the wind, and the woods, and the world. She saw only herself. She heard only the siren song.

  This is the glory you have been waiting for. You were born for this. All you must do is reach out and take it. You were always meant to be special, beautiful, unique; only you deserve to be given this gift, only you, only you—

  When the hands reached for her from the waters, the girl stretched out her own hands eagerly for an embrace.

  The river swallowed her, green coat and all, with one gulp. The brief struggle barely disturbed those calm, silver waters. Then the girl was gone.

  In the living world, the last words spoken about her were She’s nothing compared to you. It’s not an epitaph anyone would want, but that hardly matters.

  Now that lost girl is nothing at all: nothing but an echo of a sigh, dying among summer leaves. Leaving behind an echo is tradition. Our woods are full of echoes.

  People spend their whole lives waiting for something to begin, and instead they come to an ending.

  Well, you can’t complain about endings. Everybody gets one.

  I love going to school. It’s not that I love Baxter High, the redbrick prison where our football team and their cheerleaders, the Baxter High Ravens, maintain the established pecking order (raven pun intended). It’s that I love my friends, and I always have fun with them.

  Well, usually.

  We have a special table in the cafeteria. The first one of us in the cafeteria always snags it, and people expect to find us there, the inseparable quartet: Susie in her shapeless hoodies, either avoiding the eyes of the football jerks who hassle her or glaring defiance at them. Roz, with her vague stare and strong opinions. And me and Harvey, who always sit beside each other. Normally the four of us chat all the way through lunch.

  None of us talk about our families that much. I think Susie’s uncle might have problems. Harvey’s dad is a problem. And Roz’s dad is Reverend Walker. It’s tricky, having a best friend whose dad is a minister when you have two aunts who might drop a casual “Hail Satan” at any moment.

  Usually we talk about books and movies, TV shows and art. Harvey has as many opinions about golden age superheroes as I do about classic horror.

  Today, Harvey ate nothing and said less.

  “What’s with him?” hissed Susie as Harvey carried back his untouched tray. “He doesn’t seem interested in anything. Not even Sabrina!”

  I tried to smile, and failed. Roz elbowed Susie viciously in the side.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “We all have off days. I’m sure he’ll be a changed man tomorrow.”

  When Harvey came glumly back to the table, I put an arm around his neck and gave his hair a fond tug.

  “Ow!” Harvey exclaimed. “Sabrina, you pulled some of my hair out!”

  “Wow,” I said. “I did not. I was just playing with your hair, in an affectionate and normal manner.”

  “Sabrina, do you have some of his hair in your hand?” Roz demanded.

  I hid the hair. “Sometimes my affections are too strong.”

  Harvey, Roz, and Susie were all staring at me now. Sometimes I wonder how they would look at me, how strange they would find me, if they knew the truth.

  No matter what was going on with him, Harvey walked me home as usual. Unfortunately, that meant his eye was caught by the sight of girls in the woods. Again.

  “Hey, ’Brina,” said Harvey, nodding to the group beyond the trees. “Do you know them?”

  There were three girls today. They all wore dresses with lace-frilled collars and cuffs and in dark materials, but with short skirts, like sexy Quakers. There was a boy with them, in dark clothes with dark hair, but I couldn’t see his face.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, but I was lying. I recognized the girls, even from a distance. They were a group of three witches who already attended the Academy of Unseen Arts. We’ve had a few run-ins. Prudence, Dorcas, and Agatha are beautiful, powerful, and not very impressed with the idea of a half mortal attending their precious school. They take every opportunity to make clear that I’m inferior.

  Now they were making me feel inferior without even seeing me. Without even trying.

  I didn’t think I knew the boy. He was probably a mortal they were messing with. Prudence, Dorcas, and Agatha’s business was loyally serving Father Blackwood and Satan, and their pleasure was tormenting mortal men.

  “Yeah,” said Harvey. “I haven’t seen them around either. They must be from out of town.”

  “Are you going to be checking out other girls every day now?” I teased. “Couldn’t you have picked a more attractive hobby, like chess or collecting moths? I think collecting moths is very sexy.”

  “I wasn’t checking them out,” Harvey claimed. “I’d never do that. It’s just that sometimes I
do look at people from out of town, and I wonder what their lives are like. I think about how it would be, to leave Greendale myself, and have a totally different life. Do you ever think about that, Sabrina? Having your life utterly transformed?”

  “Maybe sometimes,” I said softly.

  Harvey’s gaze was fixed on a far-off vista that nobody but he could see. In some ways, he was a magic maker as much as I was. My artist, my seer of visions who wants to commit his dreams to paper and show the world. He wasn’t looking at the witches in the woods, and he wasn’t looking at me.

  When Harvey dreamed of far-off places, I wondered if he thought of me. Was I in his rearview mirror as he made his grand escape, part of the town and the life he was leaving behind?

  As I watched the witches in the woods, the dark-haired boy turned, and a green leaf beside his head caught fire under his gaze. The leaf became a glowing ember and then curled up into darkness. The ash drifted away on the breeze.

  Well, well, well. Maybe the boy wasn’t a mortal they were messing with, after all. Warlocks were rarer than witches, but there was Ambrose and Father Blackwood and my father, of course. Now I’d seen a fourth. No doubt I’d meet plenty of them when I began attending the Academy of Unseen Arts.

  I couldn’t let Harvey see witches doing magic in the woods. I caught hold of his hand and pulled him along.

  “Come on,” I told him. “I’ve gotta get home. It’s urgent.”

  When I reached home, I ran straight up the stairs and into my cousin’s bedroom without knocking.

  Ambrose lifted his eyes from a worn copy of Oscar Wilde’s Salome and lifted his eyebrows along with them. “Sabrina, I might not have been decent. Not saying I’m decent now, in a moral sense, but at least I’m wearing pants.”

  He was wearing silk pajama pants and a red velvet robe, so it wasn’t as if he was ready for an outing. If Ambrose ever had outings.

  “Your pants don’t concern me, Ambrose! This is important.”

  “Many people find the topic of my pants to be important and absorbing,” Ambrose claimed. He rolled off his bed, tying the gold-tasseled sash on his robe tighter and slipping a dried piece of deadly nightshade between the pages of his book.

  I was still panting from my race home and up the stairs. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, but I said the words anyway.

  “Let’s do the spell.”

  Ambrose lit up. “Fantastic! Are you up for a trip to the woods? We’re going to need a few special ingredients, since this is a very special spell. Cousin, did you get a sample of Harvey’s hair?”

  I nodded.

  Ambrose smiled. “Good. So we have Harvey’s hair, the candle, the rope, the lavender, the rosemary, and the coltsfoot, but we need myosotis. I hear it grows in the woods.”

  The woods are deadly, dark, and deep. There were once witch trials in Greendale, as there were in Salem, though the Greendale horror was buried and lost to history. Witches died in the Greendale woods, and the hanging trees wait there.

  I had never strayed off the woodland paths at night to collect spell ingredients before, but maybe it was time I did. I should become one acquainted with the night.

  “The woods …” I said. “Sure.”

  I didn’t have much time before my life changed, and when it did, I had to be ready.

  Prudence, Dorcas, and Agatha were always wandering through those woods. I belonged in those woods. In a few short weeks, I would be every bit as much a witch as they were.

  I had to venture into the woods by myself, since it wasn’t possible for Ambrose to go with me. Luckily, I had an idea for where I could find what I needed.

  Harvey had given me the drawing he’d made of the old well we found on our class trip through the woods. I’d taken the drawing home to cherish it. When I ran from Ambrose’s bedroom to mine and searched for the picture, I found it neatly folded in the drawer of my desk. When I unfolded the drawing and smoothed it out, I saw what I thought I’d remembered, rendered in Harvey’s talented hand, turning the marks of a pencil into living flowers. I saw the tiny petals of myosotis nestled in the long grass, growing by the banks of the little stream.

  That felt like a sign.

  It felt like less of a sign once I was out in the woods. The wind was not as high as the night before, but the echo of a summer storm was enough to make my coat and clothes billow. I had to fight to move forward, and every tree became an enemy. The boughs rocked so violently in the wind I feared they might break, and whenever they rocked, their shadows leaped.

  Above me, I could see only swaying darkness. For all I knew animals could be crouched in those branches, ready to spring, or bodies might hang from the boughs. There were no signposts in the depths of the Greendale woods. There was only finding your way between one shadow and the next.

  I was able to find my way.

  The abandoned well I had found with Harvey did not look as appealing as it had by daylight. It didn’t make me think of wishes granted or love discovered any longer. The well seemed only a circle of stone, its dark eye staring up at the luminous eye of the moon.

  Perhaps I had only thought the well was beautiful the first time I saw it because I was with Harvey. I remembered a quote from a story about magic in the woods: Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

  It was full dark in the woods, leaves veiling the stars. I was almost blind, but as I walked into the clearing where the well stood and the stream ran, subtle illumination turned the grass to threads of silver and the water to a ribbon of silk. The moon must have found a chink in the branches, and now it was lending me light. My aunts say the moon looks down on witches with love.

  Even the wind seemed calmer in this clearing. Encouraged, I crossed the shining grass to the riverbank where I’d seen the tiny, pale blue flowers growing in Harvey’s drawing. The moon gave me just enough light to make out the flowers growing on the far bank. Harvey’s drawing showed flowers on both sides of the river, but it seemed I’d run out of luck.

  I crouched down on the bank and tried to reach over the stream, but I couldn’t reach far enough. I stood on the edge of the stream and considered jumping for it.

  The stream seemed far wider than it had a moment ago, when I hadn’t been thinking of crossing it. I hesitated on the edge, wondering if I should try a leap, or walk down until I found a narrower place in the stream and cross there.

  I hesitated for too long. Maybe the ground of the riverbank was muddier than I thought, or maybe the earth crumbled away beneath my feet. Whatever happened, there was one moment of lurching dismay when my outstretched hands flailed and failed to find handholds in the air. I toppled headfirst into the stream with a scream that nobody heard.

  Silvery water and shadows rushed into my open eyes. Water flooded my open mouth, cold and bitter. I would never have imagined the water would have this wintry chill in summer, bleak as a river that ran beneath a stone mountain and never saw light.

  I tried to swim and felt my limbs already numb, my arms and legs leaden weights. I struggled desperately upward, but I was sinking fast. I would never have imagined the stream was so deep.

  Then, as I fought for the surface, I felt icy fingers twining with mine.

  Every night after Sabrina goes to sleep, it happens.

  There is a tree outside her window with a branch that is bare even in summer, stripped of bark, with long, thin twigs that almost seem like fingers. That frail bough sways in the night wind, and the twigs scrape against the diamond-paned glass of Sabrina’s window.

  Sometimes Sabrina’s golden head stirs on her soft pillow. Sometimes her small hands close into fists as if she wants to hold on to something, and she murmurs in her sleep like a child drowsily asking for a kiss good-night.

  The birds and the bats, the mice and the foxes, all the beasts that fly or creep near Sabrina’s bedroom by night, find themselves straying off course, heading toward her window as if on a mission. Then they check themselves, shaking o
ff the sudden, wild compulsion.

  Sometimes Sabrina wakes in the night with a start, pressing her hand against her breast as if she has been suddenly frightened. Her skin has cold dew on it, as if she was abandoned on the grass in the chill of early morning. To comfort herself, she will take up the picture of her father and mother in their wedding clothes that she keeps beside her bed. She will caress their love-bright faces with a fingertip. Sometimes she kisses the picture.

  At times like these, the scratching of the branch against the windowpane grows so frantic it is almost a whine. It is almost like a scream.

  Danger, my darling.

  Sometimes the young half witch comes down to the breakfast table, crowded with her magical, merciless family, and her eyes are heavy. She says that she did not sleep well, but she cannot tell why.

  The hand closed tight around mine, cold as a drowned man’s, tenacious as the weeds on a riverbed. For a terrified moment, I thought that deathlike grip would drag me down.

  It pulled me up instead. As soon as I broke the surface of the water, I reached out to grasp the long grass on the riverbank. With the aid of that chill helping hand, I pulled myself out of the stream.

  I crawled out of the stream and onto the bank, and found someone watching me.

  She was in the shape of a girl, with long hair that flowed in the air around her as if it was water, but her skin was rippling silver. The girl seemed made of mercury, and when she turned to me I saw the blurry image of my own eyes reflected on her cheek and widening in shock.

  This spirit was a living mirror, and she had pulled me from the water.

  “Thank you,” I gasped.

  “Not at all. I couldn’t let you drown, not when I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long. You’re Sabrina, aren’t you?” she asked in a sibilant voice. “The fledgling half mortal, half witch. All the woods whisper about you. And I saw you, with a gathering of young mortals. You walked through this place and discovered the well.”