The Coven (6 page)

January 9, 1980

They found Morag Sheehan’s body last evening. Down at the bottom of the cliffs, by old Towson’s farm. The tide would have taken her away and none of us the wiser, but it was a low tide because of the moon. And so she was found by young Billy Martin and Hugh Beecham. At first they thought she was the charred, rotted mast of a ship. But she wasn’t. She was only a burned witch.

Of course Belwicket met before dawn. We hung blankets over the shutters inside and gathered around my folks’ kitchen table. The thing is, Ma and I had put that powerful protection on Morag last year, and since then nothing had gone amiss with her. All was right as rain.

“You know what this means,” said Paddy McTavish. “No human could have got close to her, not with that spell on her and all the ward-evil spells she was doing herself.”

“What are you saying?” Ma asked.

“I’m saying she was killed by a witch,” Paddy answered.

When he said that, of course it seemed obvious. Morag was killed by a witch. One of us? Surely not. Then is there someone in the neighborhood, someone we don’t know about? Someone from a different coven?

It makes me cold to think of such evil.

Next circle we’re going to scry. Until then I’m keeping a weather eye on everybody and everything.—Bradhadair

 

The first chance I had to tell Cal about my research was after school. He walked with me to Das Boot, and we stood by my car and talked. “I found out about Maeve Riordan,” I said bluntly. “A little bit, anyway.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, but I saw him glance at his watch.

“Do you need to go?” I asked.

“In a minute,” he said apologetically. “My mom needs me to help her this afternoon. One of her coven members is sick, and we’re going to do some healing.”

“You can do that?” It seemed every day I learned of new magickal possibilities.

“Sure,” Cal said. “I’m not saying we’ll definitely cure him, but he’ll do a lot better than if we weren’t working for him. But tell me what you found out.”

“I ran a search on the computer,” I said. “I hit a lot of dead ends. But I found her name on a genealogy site, which led me to a small article from the
Meshomah Falls Herald.
So I looked it up at the library.”

“Where’s Meshomah Falls?” asked Cal.

“Just a few hours from here.Anyway, the article said that a burned body had been identified as Maeve Riordan, formerly of Ballynigel, Ireland. She was twenty-three.”

Cal wrinkled his brow. “Do you think that’s her?” he asked.

I nodded. “I think it must be. I mean, there were other Maeve Riordans. But this one was close to here, and the timing’s right. . . . When she died, I would have been about seven months old.”

“Did the article mention a baby?” asked Cal.

I shook my head.

“Huh.” He stroked my hair. “I wonder if there’s somewhere else we could get more information. Let me think about it.Will you be okay? I don’t want to leave, but I kind of have to.”

“I’m okay,” I said, looking up into his face, relishing the fact that he cared about me. And it wasn’t just because I was a blood witch like him. Raven and Bree were just jealous—they didn’t know what they were talking about.

We kissed gently, then Cal headed toward his car. I watched him drive off.

Motion caught my eye, and I glanced over to see Tamara and Janice about to get into Tamara’s car. They grinned at me and raised their eyebrows suggestively. Tamara gave me a thumbs-up. I grinned back, embarrassed but pleased. As they drove off, it occurred to me that the three of us should try to see a movie soon.

“Skipping chess club?” came Robbie’s voice.

I blinked and looked around to see Robbie loping toward me, sunlight flashing from his glasses. His choppy brown hair that only last month had looked so awful now seemed to have a rakish trendiness.

I considered for a moment. “Yeah, I am,” I said. “I don’t know—chess seems kind of pointless now.”

“Not chess itself,” Robbie said, his blue-gray eyes serious behind his ugly glasses. “Chess itself is still really awesome. It’s beautiful, like a crystal.”

I braced myself for one of Robbie’s chess rants. He’s almost in love with the game. But he just said, “It’s just the club thing that’s pointless now.The school thing.” He looked at me. “After you’ve seen a friend of yours make a flower bloom, school and clubs and all of that seem kind of . . . silly.”

I felt proud and self-conscious at the same time. I loved the idea that I was gifted, that my heritage was showing in my ability. But I was also so used to blending in with the woodwork, not making waves, standing happily in Bree’s shadow. It was hard to get used to being noticed so much.

“Are you going home?” Robbie asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t really feel like it,” I said. In fact, the thought of facing my parents made my stomach knot up. Then I had a better idea. “Hey, do you want to go to Practical Magick?” I felt a mixture of guilt and pleasure as I suggested it. My mom definitely wouldn’t approve of my going to a Wicca store. But so what? It wasn’t my problem.

“Cool,” said Robbie. “Then we’ll hit Baskin-Robbins. Leave your car here, and I’ll bring you back to it.”

“Let’s do it.” As I was walking up the street to Robbie’s car, I caught a flash of Mary K.’s straight auburn hair. Glancing over, my eyes locked on Mary K. and Bakker plastered together against the side of the life sciences building. My eyes narrowed. It was the most bizarre feeling, seeing my fourteen-year-old sister making out with someone.

“Go, Bakker,” Robbie murmured, and I punched his arm.

I couldn’t help looking at them as we approached Robbie’s dark red VW Beetle. I saw Mary K., laughing, squirming out of Bakker’s arms. He followed her and caught her again.

“Bakker!” Mary K. squealed, her hair flying.

“Mary K.!” I called suddenly, without knowing why.

She looked up, still caught in his arms. “Hey.”

“I’m getting a ride with Robbie,” I said, gesturing to him.

Nodding, she motioned toward Bakker. “Bakker will take me home. Right?” she asked him.

He nuzzled her neck. “Whatever you say.”

Suppressing a feeling of unease, I got into Robbie’s car.

 

The drive north to Red Kill took only about twenty-five minutes.After Das Boot, Robbie’s car felt small and intimate. I noticed Robbie squinting and rubbing his eyes.

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I said.

“My eyes are killing me. I need new glasses,” he said. “My mom made an appointment for tomorrow.”

“Good.”

“What was Bree talking about this morning?” he asked. “About your parents’ new reading material?”

I wrinkled my nose and sighed. “Well, Bree is really angry at me,” I said, stating the obvious. “It’s all about Cal—she wanted to go out with him, and he wanted to go out with me. So now she hates me, I guess. Anyway—you know I was keeping my Wicca books at her house?”

Robbie nodded, his eyes on the road.

“She dumped them all on my porch yesterday morning,” I explained. “My mom went ballistic. It’s all a big mess,” I summed up inadequately.

“Oh,” said Robbie.

“Yeah.”

“I knew Bree liked Cal,” said Robbie. “I didn’t think they would be a good couple.”

I smiled at him, amused. “Bree would make anyone into a good couple. Anyway, let’s not talk about it. Things have been kind of . . . awful.The only good thing is that Cal and I got together, and it’s really great.”

Robbie glanced over at me and nodded.“Hmmm,” he said.

“Hmmm, what?” I asked. “Do you mean, hmmm, that’s great? Or hmmm, I’m not so sure?”

“More like—hmmm, it’s complicated, I guess,” Robbie told me. “You know, because of Bree and everything.”

I stared at him, but he was watching the road again, and I couldn’t read his profile.

I looked out the window. I wanted to talk about something that we hadn’t really hashed out. “Robbie, I really am sorry about that spell.You know.The one about your skin.”

He shifted gears without saying anything.

“I won’t ever do it again,” I promised once more.

“Don’t say that. Just promise you won’t do it without telling me,” he said as he parked his Beetle in a tiny space. He turned to me. “I was mad that you did it without telling me,” he said. “But I mean, Jesus, look at me.” He gestured to his newly smooth face. “I never thought I’d look like this. Thought I’d be a pizza face forever.Then have awful scars my whole life.” He glanced out over the steering wheel. “Now I look in the mirror and I’m happy. Girls look at me—girls who used to ignore me or feel sorry for me.” He shrugged. “How could I be upset about that?”

I reached out and touched his arm. “Thanks.”

He grinned at me and swung open his door. “Let’s go get in touch with our inner witches.”

As usual, Practical Magick was dim and scented with herbs, oils, and incense. After the chilly November sunshine, the store felt warm and welcoming. Inside, it was divided in two, one half floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the other half shelves covered with candles, herbs, essential oils, altar items and magical symbols, ritual daggers called athames, robes, posters, even Wiccan fridge magnets.

I left Robbie looking at books and went over to the herb section. Learning about working with them could take my whole life and then some, I thought. The idea was daunting but also thrilling. I had used herbs in the spell that had cured Robbie’s acne, and I had felt almost transported in the herb garden of the Killburn Abbey, when I’d gone there on a church trip.

I was looking through a guide to magickal plants of the northeast when I felt a tingling sensation. Glancing up, I saw David, one of the store’s clerks. I tensed. He always put me on edge, and I could never pinpoint why.

I remembered how he had asked me what clan I was in and how he had told Alyce, the other clerk, that I was a witch who pretended not to be a witch.

Now I watched him warily as he walked toward me, his short, gray hair looking silver in the store’s fluorescent lights.

“Something about you has changed,” he said in his soft voice, his brown eyes on me.

I thought about Samhain, when the night had exploded around me, and about Sunday, when my family had blown apart. I didn’t say anything.

“You’re a blood witch,” he stated, nodding as if he were simply confirming something I’d said.“And now you know it.”

How can he tell? I wondered with a tinge of fear.

“Were you really surprised?” he asked me.

I looked around for Robbie. He was still over by the books.

“Yes, I was kind of surprised,” I admitted.

“Do you have your BOS?” he asked. “Book of Shadows?”

“I’ve started one,” I said, thinking of the beautiful blank book with marbled paper that I had bought a couple of weeks before. In it I had written down the spell I had done for Robbie and also about my experiences on Samhain. But why did David want to know?

“Do you have your clan’s, your coven’s?” he asked. “Your mother’s?”

“No,” I said shortly. “No chance of that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, after a pause. Then a bell tinkled, and he moved off to help another customer choose some jewelry.

Glancing down the aisle, I saw that the other clerk, Alyce, was on the floor way at the end, arranging some candleholders on a low shelf. She was older than David, a round, motherly woman with beautiful gray hair in a loose bun on top of her head. I had liked her the first moment I had seen her. Still holding my herb book, I wandered down the aisle closer to her.

She looked up and smiled briefly, as if she had been waiting for me. “How are you, dear?” There was a world of meaning in her words, and for a moment I felt like she knew about everything that had happened since she had helped me pick out a candle, a week before Samhain.

I didn’t know what to say. “Awful,” I blurted out. “I just found out I’m a blood witch. My parents have lied to me all my life.”

Alyce nodded knowingly. “So David was right,” she said, her voice reaching me alone. “I thought you were, too.”

“How did you know?”

“We can recognize them,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’re blood witches ourselves, though we don’t know our clans.”

I stared at her.

“David in particular is quite powerful,” Alyce went on. Her plump hands made neat rows of candleholders shaped like stars, like moons, like pentacles.

“Do you have a coven?” I whispered.

“Starlocket,” said Alyce. “With Selene Belltower.”

Cal’s mother.

Robbie appeared at the end of the aisle, thirty feet away. He was talking to a young woman, who was smiling at him flirtatiously. Robbie pushed his glasses aside, rubbed his eyes, then answered her. She laughed, and they drifted back over to the book aisle. I heard the murmur of their voices. For a moment curiosity made me want to concentrate on hearing their words, but then I realized that just because I could didn’t mean I should.

A sudden idea sparked in my head. “Alyce, do you know anything about Meshomah Falls?” I asked.

It was as if a snake had bitten her. She literally drew back, anguish crossing her round face. Frowning, she got slowly to her feet, as if troubled by a great weight.

She looked into my eyes. “Why do you ask?” she said.

“I wanted to know more about . . . a woman named Maeve Riordan,” I said. “I need to know more.”

For long moments Alyce’s gaze held mine.

“I know that name,” she said.

May 8, 1980

Angus asked me to marry him at Beltane. I told him no. I’m only eighteen and have hardly ever been out of Ballynigel. I was thinking of doing one of those tours, you know, with a bus and going through Europe for a month. I do love Angus. And I know he’s good. He might even be my mùirn beatha dàn, my soul mate, but who knows? He might not! Sometimes I feel like he is, sometimes I don’t. The thing is: How would I know? I’ve met precious few witches in my life that I’m not related to. I need to be sure. I need to know more before I can decide to stay with him forever.