The Price Guide to the Occult(4)

There were several things she was afraid of, but blood wasn’t one of them. This was fortunate, because when she picked up shards of glass from the cup she had dropped, she cut her finger, and it bled. It bled a lot.

For a moment too long, Nor looked at her finger and watched the blood well up and trickle into the sink. It reminded her of how, in the past, she had sometimes been “careless” with knives when loading the dishwasher or chopping vegetables for dinner. It was a way to cause pain without appearing to do so deliberately. It was a way to disguise spilled blood as accidental.

Nor ran cold water over her finger and then wrapped it quickly with gauze. She was more careful when picking up the rest of the broken glass. Nor wasn’t afraid of blood, but not being afraid of blood was one of the things she was afraid of.

In her bedroom, Nor found the little dog still asleep on her pillow and an early morning September rainstorm beating against the windows. She stretched her arms over her head, and her fingertips brushed the slope of one of the eight walls that made up the room. With windows and a skylight on every side, Nor’s room seemed closer to the heavens than to the ground. At night, the dark blue of the sky was her blanket, and the glow from the stars illuminated her dreams. On clear days, she could usually see most of the island from up there. On this morning, a thick, dreary fog blanketed the ground, and Nor could see only the tops of the trees along the shoreline and the rocky gray waters of the Salish Sea.

It had been Nor’s great-grandmother, Astrid — a woman who could lift a length of timber twice her size over her head — who had built the Tower in the shape of an octagon, making it virtually indestructible. “It is not impossible to destroy a witch,” Astrid had been known to say, “so her home should be sturdy enough to at least give her time to escape through the back door.”

Nor pulled a pair of ripped jeans out from under a pile of clothes on the floor. She tugged the jeans up over her hips and pulled on a black sweater. The stretched-out sleeves flapped at her sides like broken wings, but they did a good job covering the thin white scars that ran across her wrists and along her upper arms.

She paused just long enough in front of the mirror to line her blue eyes in shimmery black and attempt to rake her fingers through her wild waist-long hair. She found her phone on her dresser beside an old book of Greek myths, then snagged her muddy running shoes by the laces and stepped over her grandmother’s dog, Antiquity. The wolfhound, transfixed by a pair of crows perched outside one of the windows, gave a low growl.

“Oh, hush,” Nor scoffed. “We both know you’d have no idea what to do with one if you caught it. Your hunting days ended lifetimes ago.”

Antiquity pondered the truth behind this, then, giving a final huff at the crows, stood, pushed past Nor, and bounded down the stairs, the windows of the house rattling with each thunderous step. The little dog in the bed burrowed farther under the covers.

Unlike the rest of the Blackburn daughters, Nor’s gift — or “Burden,” as the Blackburn women called it — hadn’t arrived until the first penumbral lunar eclipse after her eleventh birthday. She had awoken early that morning — so early that the moon still shone brightly in the dark February sky — to find her grandmother Judd standing at the end of her bed.

“Well, what is it then?” Judd had spoken around the rosewood pipe clenched in her teeth. Having only moved into the Tower the year before, Nor had been still unaccustomed to her grandmother’s gruff ways. Her heart had quickened when Judd peered at her; there was never any hiding from her all-seeing eyes.

Judd was the sixth daughter, Burdened with the gift of healing. Nor had always feared those times when she found herself at her grandmother’s mercy, when all of her discrepancies, all of her flaws and fears were exposed, and Judd calmly repaired the parts of her that she’d broken.

“Take a deep breath,” Nor’s grandmother had ordered. Nor did as she was told, and a surge of relief filled her. She felt — nothing. Perhaps she’d been spared? Judd exhaled a plume of smoke so that the next breath Nor took was thick with it. It tickled her throat. And in noticing that, she’d noticed something else.

“I can hear the bees,” Nor had whispered, and, closing her eyes, the sound of the hibernating hive in the garden grew louder in her head. “They aren’t talking to me exactly. But I can hear them. I can hear their queen. The next snow will be here in a week. And the rooster in the yard will be dead by spring.”

Judd confirmed Nor’s Burden with a firm nod. “So the plants and animals can talk to ya, can they? That’s a fine one, Nor.”

Nor had understood what her grandmother was telling her then: that she was safe. As long as Nor stayed content with her innocuous ability, there was little chance of her becoming like her mother.

Which was why, long after Judd had gone back to bed, eleven-year-old Nor had watched the moon fade into the morning sky and tried to pretend that the Burden she’d told her grandmother about was the only one she’d received.

Although a fair portion of Anathema Island remained mostly uninhabited, the more populated part of the island was a composite of farmhouses and beach rentals, historic buildings and the occasional tourist trap. Most of the shops and businesses sat along the main road, Meandering Lane, named for the way the street twisted and turned along the island’s southwestern coastline.

The Witching Hour sat atop the Sweet and Savory Bakery. As Nor started up the outside stairs, she noticed the door to the bakery had been flung open, and the aroma of freshly baked bread — cinnamon and pumpernickel and sourdough — wafted over her. She could see Bliss Sweeney, a smudge of flour on each of her rosy cheeks, sharing a morning cup of coffee with Vitória Oliveira, the proprietor of the Milk and Honey Spa down the street. They both waved when they saw Nor.