The Price Guide to the Occult(59)

Fern’s tattoos crept across her skin like barbed wire or broken capillaries. Blood seeped from wounds crisscrossing her skin and trickled onto the wet roof. Her head and neck were squeezed into an unnatural shape by tight black vines.

“Then what does that make me?” Nor asked.

“You?” Fern cackled. “You are nothing! You are no one!”

Blood dripped from Nor’s injured hand. It mingled with her mother’s blood on the wet roof until it was just one dark red stream.

“But you said it yourself. I’m your daughter,” Nor said, raising her voice above the howling winds. The storm raged with renewed fury. Fern took a step back. She screeched when the wind tore a ribbon of skin from her cheek. Then another from her arm.

“I am Hecate,” Fern wheezed, “Goddess of Storms.” Her voice whistled through the holes in her face.

“That may be true,” Nor cried. “You may be doom and death, misery and blame, but none of those things frighten me. I know what misery is. I know what blame is. There is no pain that you can cause that I haven’t already felt.”

Another strip of skin was ripped from Fern’s cheek and carried off by the wind. She shrieked in confusion.

Nor started to laugh. “Don’t you understand?” she screamed. “Death and I are now friends! And you can’t hurt me or anyone else ever again. I won’t let you.”

The sky above them had become a black hole, an insatiable beast with its mouth open wide in a cry of terrible torment. Fern fell to her knees as her skin cracked and flaked like ancient porcelain. “I am the thing that the darkness fears!” she croaked before her jaw unhinged and fell away. Nor closed her eyes, preparing for the black sky to swallow her and her mother whole.

But then a memory pierced the darkness. Warm yellow light flowed through Nor’s palms as she remembered another glow, growing larger and larger until she recognized it as the lit bowl of a pipe: the pipe of her grandmother, who had spent all that time quietly waiting for her to return home. Nor pictured Apothia’s smile and recalled Savvy’s laugh. She remembered the feel of Reed’s hands on her skin, Bijou’s happy dreams, and the fact that alpacas hummed when they were content. She pictured Gage, battling those storming seas below, and her scars, evidence of all the times she’d battled death before and won. Nor held out her brilliant shining hands, and their light vanquished the shadows and black holes that surrounded them.

The rains stopped, the clouds broke, and the moon reappeared in a night sky no longer beastly with rage. The winds ceased howling. The ocean calmed.

“You’re wrong, Mother,” Nor said quietly. “I am the thing the darkness fears.”

And the rest of Fern Blackburn, unfurled like a spool of frayed ribbon, was swept up by the wind and hurled into the sky.





When Nor arrived back on Anathema Island, she wasn’t sure if whole days had gone by or merely hours. Sunlight sparkled off the water, and the ocean lapped softly against the shore. Nor tied up the dinghy, grateful the old boat had managed to stay afloat.

The island’s plant life seemed to be recovering. New buds and leaves bloomed where once there had been only thorns. For Nor, however, it wouldn’t be that easy. No amount of soaking her clothes would ever completely lift away the stains of her mother’s blood, her own blood, the blood of her friends. Some things could not — would not — be washed away.

Nor made her way down Meandering Lane and stopped at the island’s small cemetery. Kikimora, the cat, was sitting outside the black iron fence. She stared at Nor and then padded through the open gate. Nor followed.

Most of the graves were old, their epitaphs worn smooth with age. Nor walked to Rona’s headstone. Though there had always been much speculation surrounding Rona’s death, the truth was that she had died of natural causes. According to the diary she kept, Rona never cast another spell after her daughter, Hester, was born. Perhaps out of guilt, or perhaps she’d simply had enough of the magic in her blood. Nor wondered if peace was something that she, burdened with so many “gifts,” could one day find as well.

Nor found a small piece of cedar plank on the ground. Using her fingernail, she roughly carved Madge’s name into the soft wood. After examining her work, she propped it up against Mara’s headstone and followed Kikimora back out onto Meandering Lane.

That evening Nor stood on the Tower’s front porch. Kikimora sat beside her watching the silvery flicker of fish swimming in a pond the storm had left in the front yard. The limbs of the apple trees hung upside down, like broken fingers; the pebbled walk that had once shone like a stream of molten lava was scattered across the lawn.

Nor made a mental note to rescue the fish trapped in the pond and realized that the beehive, the one that had sat along the side of the yard since the days of Rona Blackburn, was oddly quiet. Nor suspected the bees inside had drowned.

“Everyone’s looking for you,” Reed said, coming up behind her on the porch. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her against him.

A few moments before, Pike — his arm around Charlie, whose leg had been mended — and a newly healed Sena Crowe had proposed a toast in Nor’s honor. They had all somberly held up their plastic cups of frothy beer or tumblers of scotch, and Nor’s face had burned with embarrassment. It felt wrong getting credit for doing something she wasn’t sure she should have been able to do. Plus, there was no vanquished beast, no conquered villain to display.