The Bitterwine Oath Read online

  “Maybe it was asinine, but it worked,” Vanessa argued, ignoring me. “Her Sight opened up even more out there. Maggie said that Nat’s magic would emerge when it sensed a threat. Last night, she saw straight through our beguilement.”

  “Your Book of Wisdom plan was too slow, Kate,” Lindsey added. “It hasn’t even shed all of its glamour for her yet. It just looks like a half-empty, old journal.”

  “Yeah, and we didn’t know that the Triad would decide to let her in,” Vanessa went on. “Otherwise we would have left it alone.”

  Kate sighed. “Well, in any case, Nat, I’m glad you’re here, and I’m sorry we had to go about this backwards. If I could have told you everything outright, I would have.”

  “What are the Woodwalkers?” I asked.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, did I say that word?” Kate asked. “Grandma Maggie’s going to wring my neck. I’m not saying anything else.” She mimed zipping her mouth shut.

  “I’m excited you’re here.” Lindsey bounced to face me in her seat, her smile electric. “When you brought up the talismans in your yard, I was afraid my beguiling spell was getting weaker. But it was just your Sight opening up.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to see those?”

  She shook her head. “They were wards meant to protect you. They’d been there for months.”

  “What about the protection sachet that Milo found?” I asked. “Why was Bryce able to see that?”

  “Cats are basically immune to magic,” Vanessa explained. “Bryce never would have found it if Milo hadn’t brought it right to him. That’s not the first time I’ve had problems with that little regurgitated hairball.”

  “So how does the magic work?” I asked, hanging an elbow over the back of Vanessa’s seat. “Each of yours is different?”

  “We have our own magical domains, but we can reach beyond them in limited ways,” Kate explained. “Since I’m an Earth Warden, I’m like a kitchen witch. Our domain is anything that grows, plus stones and crystals, and recipes are the foundation of most of our spells. We make elixirs, tonics, resins, oils, all that good stuff. Earth Warden strengths are summoning protection, secrecy, wellness of body and spirit, even romance.”

  “Could I do everything you can?” I asked.

  “Yes, but actions have consequences,” she said, wagging her finger unconvincingly. “Remember that before you go trying spells willy-nilly. You’re a triple threat, so any carelessness on your part could do a lot of damage.”

  “Understood,” I said, splaying my hands to show I meant no harm.

  I still didn’t know if I could trust the Wardens, but I wanted to. Despite the overwhelming unknowns, it occurred to me to feel envious of them, maybe even resentful. Grandma Kerry had deprived me of an upbringing that involved magic. Real magic that actually worked, just like Lillian had claimed. Her book described some of the harmless spells that the Pagans of the Pines had performed before they decided to seek revenge. Malachi had helped Lillian make an herbal honey love elixir to snag a boy’s attention. She had healed a fawn with a broken leg. They had charmed the cabin to keep anyone from finding them after she fled her home. Until they took it too far, magic had been their comfort, their haven, and their salvation.

  “Bone magic deals mostly with divination,” Vanessa said matter-of-factly. “Seeing beyond the veil, communicating with ancestors, predicting the future, etcetera. Any spells to do with time, wisdom, revealing the unknown…They’re all bone based.” She unwrapped the layered leather bracelet from around her wrist and showed me the cameo pendant of a carved flower. “This is my pendulum. It’s made of bone. And bone ash is the basis of the forgetting spell I hit you with.”

  “Worked like a charm,” Lindsey said, giving Vanessa a congratulatory fist bump. “She was so clueless.”

  “It wasn’t too shabby,” Vanessa agreed with a grin.

  I narrowed my eyes, a tad insulted that they would celebrate stealing my memories. What if Vanessa’s tinkering around in my mind caused me to forget something permanently, or remember things that didn’t happen? What if the moment with Levi in the truck had been nothing but a fiction to fill the void? I didn’t want to consider that.

  “What about blood magic?” I asked Lindsey, increasingly curious as to what I could do if I applied myself.

  “Blood is more ceremonious than earth, but less mystical than bone,” she answered. “It’s good for making people stick to their word, which you’ve seen already. It’s also good for justice and revenge, but…” She glanced at Kate, who kept her eyes on the road, silent. “We don’t do revenge because of what happened when Malachi cast her curse.”

  Lindsey didn’t give me a chance to ask for the missing pieces of the story. “It also symbolizes revival and rebirth,” she went on, smoothing down her tight ponytail. “If you need a calming tea or a cold remedy, you go to an Earth Warden. But if you need to be brought back from the brink of death, you find a Blood Warden. And since blood contains metal, we also work well with that. We make the charms like the one on the protection sachet, and we maintain the weapons.”

  “Weapons?” I echoed. “Isn’t magic enough of a weapon on its own?”

  Vanessa and Lindsey both looked to Kate for guidance. “Usually,” Kate replied, her voice soft. “But not always. Sometimes we need both.”

  “The weapons have been charmed,” Lindsey explained.

  Again, the shadow of the unknown loomed large over the conversation. What were the weapons for?

  We turned onto a shady street a few blocks from downtown, where Calvary Baptist Church waited like a pale specter in the cloud-covered, moonless night. “Why are we here?” I asked, clenching the edge of my seat, wondering if I had made a mistake in coming.

  “I know this is hard to believe, but CBC is the safest place in town,” Kate assured me, pulling into the empty parking lot. The arched windows were dark, and the gothic tower cut into the sky.

  My knees trembled, objecting to my decision to follow the three of them across the dewy churchyard. Thanks to Lindsey’s and Grandma Kerry’s entanglement with the group, I’d been eager to believe Maggie’s claim that these women were not killers. But a cult leader would be convincing. She would lie. She would catch flies with honey.

  I couldn’t walk away, though. Not when I was so close to getting answers to questions that had haunted San Solano for a century.

  Kate unlocked and opened the wooden double doors of the sanctuary. They gave a ghoulish screech. I shuffled a step closer and peered inside.

  The stained-glass windows allowed only the faintest light to fall across the rows of empty pews. A black candle burned atop the Communion table, which was covered in a white cloth and positioned in front of the imposing onstage lectern.

  “It’s okay,” Lindsey whispered. “I promise.”

  I tried not to think of the crime scene photos from 1971, the bodies of the twelve young men sprawled haplessly around this room.

  I followed Lindsey and Vanessa down the aisle to the Communion table. Kate picked up the candle dish and held it out for me to take. “Black candles help banish fear.”

  Quivering, I accepted the light and cast it upward across the chancel area, illuminating the stage, the ascending rows of choir pews behind it, and the elevated baptistery that overlooked the church like a balcony. That was the same pool where Malachi once turned the water to blood. It was curtained off.

  “This way,” Kate said, and led us from the Communion table to a door beside the stage. The wood-paneled hallway beyond was cluttered with music stands and stacks of chairs. We passed choir rooms and the back passageway leading up to the baptistery before arriving at the end of the hall.

  Kate splayed her hands across the dead-end wall and whispered an incantation. “From the undeserving gaze, this secret way conceal; but to Wardens’ worthy eyes, the hidden path reveal.”

  She pushed. A secret door swung open to expose a steep staircase leading down. I could see a concrete floor, brick walls, and dim
light shining from below.

  “Go ahead,” Lindsey encouraged, nudging me gently with her elbow.

  My heart slammed against my throat, but I could feel the black candle nudge away the tight, cold feeling of fear and replace it with a warm feeling of peace. I descended on surprisingly steady legs, my free hand trailing along the rough bricks for lack of a railing.

  This felt like the moment of truth. My research about the cult had planted unsavory images in my mind: bloodstained altars, animal sacrifices, masked disciples.

  What awaited me was a sophisticated secret lair. There were two dozen women dressed in black, sitting in high-backed chairs surrounding three scarred wooden tables fit for a medieval banquet. Symbols had been carved into each of their surfaces like a centerpiece: the upside-down triangle with the horizontal dash for earth on the left, the X for bone at the center, and a circle, presumably representing blood, on the right.

  Along the far wall, there were vast shelves packed with glass containers storing all sorts of oddities: herbs, oils, resins, salt, roots, dried insects, small bones, snakeskin, and honeycombs drowning in golden honey. There were stacks of candles, balls of twine, bundles of dried herbs, carafes of burgundy wine, and bottles of electric-green absinthe.

  On the right side of the room, dozens of weapons hung on pegs or reposed on red velvet cushions in glass-front cabinets. On the left side, there was a sitting area with velvet chaises and shelves of dense books.

  The staircase I’d descended was set against the corner of the room, and along the adjacent wall there were six neat bunk beds with curtains. On the far side of the beds was a pantry stocked with food and first aid kits, a kitchenette, and a doorway revealing a bathroom with a pedestal sink and filigree mirror.

  This secret society wasn’t just some hobby. It was an entire second life, lived in the shadows.

  “Welcome, Natalie,” Miss Maggie said, rising from her place at the head of the Earth Warden table. I half expected a monotone echo from the crowd, but they watched me in silence. Vanessa sat down in an empty chair at the Bone Warden table near her older sister, Brianna, and their mom. Their grandma, whom Maggie had said was the ranking Bone Warden, sat at the head. I also recognized the librarian from the San Solano Public Library.

  Lindsey’s mom and abuela smiled invitingly from the Blood Warden table, where Lindsey took her seat. I saw Gabby, one of Lindsey’s cousins on her mother’s side, who was just fourteen.

  At the Earth Warden table, I recognized a purple-haired, full-figured woman in her twenties who sported a sleeve of gorgeous floral tattoos, colorful against her ivory skin. Her name was Heather Cobb, and she owned the downtown bakery, Butter Babe’s. She’d recently visited my senior economics class to speak about starting a small business.

  “Take a seat,” Maggie offered, pointing to a chair off on its own, facing everyone. There was a stand beside it holding a glass vial and dropper next to a silver-plated chalice with an engraving of the Warden’s Rune.

  “I don’t want to join,” I told Maggie. “I mean…I’m not sure. I just want answers.”

  Kate rested a hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do anything. Just sit for now…if you want to.”

  She took her own seat with the Earth Wardens.

  “There’s no chance anyone will come down here, right?” I asked, throwing a glance over my shoulder.

  “We commandeered this space and charmed it more than fifty years ago,” Maggie said, waving off my concerns. “Not even the pastor knows there’s a basement.”

  Hesitating another moment, I swallowed my fears, set the black candle on the stand, and sat. “Start from the beginning. The night of the first massacre.”

  TWELVE

  As though readying to pray, Miss Maggie set her hands together and propped them on the edge of the table. “Malachi was extremely powerful, but a revenge curse like the one she contrived that night cannot be cast without repercussions.”

  “I know she didn’t mean to kill them,” I interjected, anxious to arrive at to the part of the story I had never heard. “She just wanted to make the evil inside them visible, so they’d be ostracized from society.”

  “Yes, their deaths were an unexpected consequence,” Maggie affirmed. “But the curse did more than bring evil to the surface. It ripped the evil out, leaving so little of the men’s souls intact that their bodies perished on the spot, and the evil took on a life of its own.”

  My nape convulsed with a shudder. “Is that what the Woodwalkers are?” I asked. “The evil inside the twelve men as”—I paused, hunting for the right words—“animate beings?”

  “Yes.” Maggie nodded, her imperturbable gaze fastened on me. “The Woodwalkers roam the night as specters that only the Wardens can see. They’re made of shadows, mostly, but they hunt animals and collect their remains to fabricate physical forms. They want to resemble living creatures as much as possible, and they gain strength from the remains. That strength allows them to cross our boundaries and defy our protection spells.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry—y’all are the only ones who can see them?” Malachi’s magic, the forgetting spells and blood oaths, was undeniably real, but the Wardens could be scapegoating conveniently “invisible” creatures for their own crimes.

  “You can, too,” Maggie said, gesturing at the items on the table beside me. “That’s what the collyrium is for. It allows you to see what’s cloaked in the shadow of otherness. You will no longer be susceptible to deceptive charms, either. But you don’t have to take it until you’re ready.”

  I shot a glance to the glass vial and dainty dropper. Its label read, “Eyebright Collyrium to Open the Sight.” Maybe Maggie wasn’t banking on my willingness to accept this strange lore without proof. Maybe the proof would be in the pudding.

  On the other hand, the collyrium might be a bluff to keep my butt in the chair so they could indoctrinate me.

  Either way, I had to reckon with those animalistic, moaning howls out at the cabin in the woods and the terror I’d seen in Lindsey’s eyes. My best friend could shut down, deflect, build a wall to hide her secrets, but she couldn’t fake that kind of fear.

  I still needed answers. I could neither accept nor rule out anything so far. I was an observer, a sponge, absorbing and not judging.

  “Normally, our wards and protection spells keep the Woodwalkers confined to the woods,” Maggie went on, “but we have to reinforce them. That’s what we do: we bolster the protections, ward the Woodwalkers away, and teach magic to our daughters.”

  “Every once in a while, they manage to murder a human,” Abuela Sofia said grimly. “Usually a wanderer or someone disconnected from society, someone we don’t know to protect.”

  “They like humans best,” Vanessa’s grandmother, Cynthia, added. I noticed a necklace with a carved bone cameo against her umber skin. “Makes them feel more human.”

  “That’s ultimately what they want,” Maggie said. “They want human bodies again. And every fifty years, on the anniversary of Malachi’s curse, they get their opportunity to claim them.”

  “You mean…the boys in 1971 were murdered so they could be hosts?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Every fifty years, on July first, during the witching hour, the Woodwalkers have a window, a chance to win restitution by claiming new bodies as their own. Each of the twelve Woodwalkers chooses a virile, healthy boy or young man. They look for what they consider the cream of the crop, people with the most strength and the longest lives ahead of them.”

  “Fifty years ago, we stopped the Woodwalkers from winning,” Cynthia explained, gesturing to Maggie, Sofia, and a few other gray heads in the room. “They weren’t able to permanently inhabit the bodies of the victims they’d chosen. But we lost, too. We weren’t able to save the boys.”

  “We will this time,” Maggie said, and I had never heard so much resolve packed into so few words.

  I fiddled absentmindedly with the handle on the candle dish, thinking of my friends w
ho would be in danger if this lore were true.

  Thinking of Levi.

  “How did the boys die, then?” I asked, continuing my clinical questioning. “If you stopped the Woodwalkers from taking over their bodies, why couldn’t you save them?”

  “We only stopped the last stage of the Claiming,” Maggie explained. “There are—”

  “I’ll show her, Miss Maggie,” Vanessa volunteered. Her black sneakers padded across the concrete floor. From behind one of the bookshelves, she wheeled out a chalkboard that looked like it had last been used for some kind of strategy session. She set it up where I could see and wiped it clean.

  “There are three stages of the Claiming,” she said, taking up a piece of chalk and recording the word in her graceful artist’s handwriting. “The Shadowing, the Possession, and the Eviction. The Shadowing is when they select their victims—mark their territory. They can start Shadowing on the night of the last dark moon before the anniversary, when there’s a new moon but you can’t see it. We call it the Shadowing because the only way to know if someone’s been chosen is to look at his shadow.” With artistic strokes, she drew the outline of a man. “A boy who’s been chosen by a Woodwalker will have two.” She added twin shadows cast in opposite directions.

  “The second stage is the Possession.” She drew another outline of a man, but this one looked manic, with wild, tormented eyes. “On the night of the anniversary, we have to fight the Woodwalkers to keep them from taking control of the people they’ve Shadowed.”

  “The victim is still inside, alive, when the Possession takes place,” her grandmother explained, “but the Woodwalker is calling the shots. The humans can’t control their own bodies.”

  “Stage three is Eviction.” Vanessa drew trees on a blank area of the board with twelve arrows pointing toward them. “The possessed bodies make their way to the cabin in the woods. There, the Woodwalkers try to evict the souls of the victims so they can claim their bodies for good.”