The Price Guide to the Occult(3)
Later, drunk on whiskey and the exhilaration of the hunt, the men sifted through the remnants of Rona’s home; they found nothing but a hypnotic purple glass eye, staring up at them through the ashes. They brazenly mounted that eye on the wall of the Willowbark General Store alongside the rest of their trophies — stuffed pheasants and wild turkeys and the head of a black-tailed deer. Forsythe Stone, the evangelical pastor, likened it to staring into the eye of a storm. He claimed it proved them heroic. In truth, it was further evidence that the Original Eight were simply a bunch of damn fools.
Rona returned in the dead of night, waking them with a piercing scream that chilled their blood and shattered their eardrums. She banished the darkness with a blinding light that they later swore radiated from her fingertips. And she brought with her something far more terrifying than fire: an army of wooden leviathans, hybrid monsters carved from trees, so tall they blocked the moon. The foolish men could only watch, blood spilling from their ears, as Rona’s monsters tore down their homes. Even they had to admit it was fair reparation: an eye, as they say, for an eye.
But for Rona, simple retribution wasn’t enough. She knew how much they wanted her to disappear from the island, how much they wanted all trace of her to vanish as cleanly as the tide erases footprints in the sand.
So, when Rona felt that familiar urge to leave, to carry on with the nomadic ways of every witch that came before her, she searched for a spell that could silence the call in her blood. Rona wanted Anathema’s animals to thrive on the oxygen from her lungs. She wanted to carve out the island’s landscape with her own hands and for its rivers to flow with the sweat from her own brow.
Her search for such a spell led her to the branches of the Blackburn family tree. She traced limbs that reached to the heavens and bent back to the earth again. She followed roots that stretched across all parts of the world and were inscribed in languages that had been dead for centuries. And there, buried deep beneath those gnarled roots of that ancient family tree, Rona found one.
She cast a binding spell and etched its words into her own skin, strengthening it with the potency of her own spilled blood. Using the sharp blade of her knife, she also carved the name Sebastian Farce into the parts of her he had blessed with his mouth: her hips and thighs, the curve of her neck, and the swell of her breasts.
When her daughter was born, Rona picked up the knife and pricked the bottom of her infant’s foot. Their mingled blood spread like an ink stain across the mattress, and Rona crooned that spell once more, this time as sweetly as a lullaby.
A binding spell requires one to peel back the layers of her soul and stitch them to another entity entirely, such that she is no longer herself, but a chimera made of her own flesh and blood and something else. It is black magic, wicked and terrible, and as Rona learned all too well, black magic always comes at a wicked and terrible price.
Rona’s daughter Hester possessed none of her mother’s natural talents for magic. Until she was nine years old, that is. At that age, she could suddenly run faster than any man — or boy — on the island. Hester became the fastest sharpshooter west of the Rockies. Many claimed that it was the threat of a gun clenched in her small hands that kept a single drop of blood from being shed during the Pig War between the United States and the British Empire — as long as you didn’t count the poor pig. But Hester’s gift for speed was both the start and the end of her abilities.
Starting with Hester, no Blackburn woman ever again possessed the full range of her ancestors’ gifts, gifts that should have been her birthright. Instead, the gifts were splintered and parsed — each generation benefitting from only one. Should this splintering of talents have been the only unintended side effect of Rona’s binding spell, perhaps the Blackburn daughters could have been content. But sometime in her nineteenth year, Hester awoke to find she could think of only Andreas Birch, the son of the good German, to the exclusion of all else. Just as suddenly, Andreas was similarly afflicted. For three days, the two were consumed with exploring all of the ways their bodies fit together. On the morning of the fourth day, Hester awoke alone. She later found Andreas back behind the grocery counter. His face, red with shame, was the only evidence of their passionate affair until the second Blackburn daughter, Greta, was born nine months later.
A Blackburn woman’s love story only ever lasts three days. When it is over, the man returns to his life, to his children and his wife if he has them, never once acknowledging — often times, not even to himself — the part he played in the creation of another Blackburn daughter.
Rona wanted to expunge the names of those foolish men from all of history. She did not expect that by doing so, she’d inadvertently tied their bloodlines, one by one, to her own until it was Blackburn blood that had the greater claim on Anathema Island. In casting her vindictive spell Rona unwittingly damned every future Blackburn daughter to heartbreak and a loveless union.
For seven generations, the fates of the Blackburn daughters have been bound to Anathema Island and to the descendants of the Original Eight. One can’t help but wonder what this might mean for Nor, the eighth and therefore last of the Blackburn daughters. Could it be that for her, love was a choice, a hand she could either grasp or push away? And, more importantly, would that impressive line of family talent finally come to a quiet and unremarkable end with her?
Nor had been counting on it.
Nor Blackburn wasn’t afraid of blood.