The Bitterwine Oath Page 25

  She didn’t acknowledge my words. She seemed to have forgotten me as she stared out the window at the deep woods.

  “Malachi, what have you been doing out here?” I asked again, losing patience.

  I’ll never forget the chilling look in her sleepless eyes, or the answer she gave me. “Trying to understand the evil we’ve wrought.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Natalie Colter

  THE MORNING BEFORE THE CLAIMING

  Everything was still when I opened my eyes hours later, too aware of the pain singeing my flesh. A light shone from somewhere, blocked by the half-closed curtain. Lindsey now slept in the chair at my bedside.

  Sleep attempted to tow me back into its depths, promising an escape from the agony. But I held on to my memories from last night. I had to stay awake. I had to make sense of this.

  The Woodwalker could have devoured me. But it didn’t.

  I pushed up on my elbows, feeling a sensation akin to thick needles pricking every inch of my back. Someone had plugged my phone in to charge in an outlet next to the bed. I reached for it and winced at the bright screen.

  Seeing a text from my dad sent a stab of panicked remorse through me. Only hours remained until his fate was determined, and I was useless.

  Ranger will be okay, my dad said. I reset his leg and put him on an IV. I slept in the clinic to watch over him. When are you coming home?

  I pressed the inner corners of my eyes to banish tears before they came. Tears of relief, of paralyzing fear, of regret that I couldn’t be there—that it might look like I didn’t care enough to be there. No summer school or social event could justify my absence this time.

  I checked the hour: just before dawn. The final day had come.

  I eased myself to a sitting position with a broken gasp. Maggie’s confession about Kerry and Nora had seized my imagination. That’s what Kerry had meant by breaking the curse: freeing the ancient power that animated the Woodwalkers. Offering our magic at the risk of giving our lives, to finally liberate San Solano from the darkness.

  The group’s scrutiny had caused Kerry to balk, leaving Nora on her own. Kate had said Nora was a powerful Earth Warden, but apparently, that hadn’t been enough.

  What if…what if Kerry could have been enough? What if I could be enough? What if we didn’t have to risk the Woodwalkers acquiring human forms and augmenting their power? Or more losses that would devastate a town already suffering from a tragic legacy?

  I dimmed the light on my phone and stood in the least excruciating way possible, which was pretty damn excruciating. My heart warmed as I silently slid aside the curtain and saw Levi sleeping on the top bunk. His presence made me aware that nothing but gauze bandages covered my torso. I looked down to find one of Lindsey’s dresses shoved down to my waist like a skirt. My spare clothes must have been too tight for the injuries.

  No one else was here. There was a feeling like the calm before the storm. I knew the chaos would come, and it would be brutal. But for now, the air was static, the world at a standstill.

  Swaying, I crossed to the shelves of supplies and downed a glass of water sitting on the countertop. The strain of remaining upright made coils of fiery pain unwind through my body.

  The monster could have killed me, yet here I stood. Did that mean Nora and Kerry had been right? That there was a creature of another nature living somewhere between layers of darkness and evil, trapped where it did not belong, lending power to the depraved beings that longed to be human again?

  What did I need to do to rend them apart? Did I have enough time to find out?

  Beside my bed, something rustled in my starter kit. I thought I was hallucinating until I remembered the antler I’d enchanted to find the lost page. Maybe the fact that it had become active again meant the lost page was somewhere in this room.

  Suppressing a groan, I managed to extract it from my bag. It immediately started tugging like a dog on a leash and surprised me by taking me straight to the stairs leading out of the basement.

  I felt a prick of guilt over abandoning Levi to wonder where I’d gone, but I had to follow my curiosity. Maybe it was the lingering delirium that fueled my determination, but I felt I had no choice.

  I shrugged the bodice of Lindsey’s white gauzy sundress over my bandaged torso and buckled my revolvers around my waist, holding in a sob of agony.

  Levi slept curled up on his side with his hands tucked under his head. I couldn’t help but smile at the childishness of the pose and the peace that had fallen over his features like pure snow.

  His lashes fluttered. Refusing to think about what I was risking, I grabbed his keys and ascended the stairs with my boots tucked under my arm, biting back a cry as the cuts stretched and oozed across my back. I tottered down the empty hallway, my pulse pounding in all the broken, bruised parts of me.

  Bowls of heady, fragrant herbs smoked in the sanctuary, and lit candles lined the perimeter of the room, but it was empty. I could hear voices coming from the fellowship hall, a strategizing meeting I’d been excused from. My gaze rose to the gothic chapel windows. Outside, dawn’s light lurked at the horizon.

  I set the antler on the Communion table. Was the missing page here in the sanctuary? Hidden and glamoured in a hymnal? Stowed away under a pew?

  But the enchanted object pointed straight at the front doors of the sanctuary with no hesitation. Soundlessly, I went out and sat on the dewy grass of the churchyard to lace up my boots. Climbing into Levi’s truck was no easy feat, but I managed, then set the antler on the dashboard. It balanced itself and spun to point east.

  Ten minutes later I’d passed my house and the turnoff to the cabin, slowing down for the antler to react to either one, though it didn’t. I kept driving, wondering if I’d given the bone the wrong intention. But then it jerked sideways to point me down a secluded country road that I recognized.

  It was leading me to Malachi’s house.

  It was quiet at the farmhouse, other than the trilling of cicadas. I trailed through the garden and up to the peeling porch. The windows had been boarded up snug and tight. I didn’t even think about trying to pry them loose in my condition. I shot the door handle clean off instead.

  Dust swirled in the abandoned home, and the air was almost unbearably stuffy. But it was tidy. The retro furnishings transported me back through the decades. Mostly, it was no-frills, but there were faded floral patterns here and there, an old piano, paintings of the Piney Woods and wildlife. Ignoring the antler anxiously twitching in my grip, I toured the house where the legendary Malachi had lived.

  My curiosity had nearly been sated when I noticed discolored photographs on the mantle that looked vaguely familiar. Crossing the musty living room, I took a close look and gasped. One was Grandma Kerry’s elementary school picture. Another was Grandma Kerry with her parents—Malachi’s son and his wife. There was a newspaper clipping in a frame about Grandma Kerry winning a prize for biggest pumpkin at the county fair. I didn’t realize I was crying until I couldn’t read the words anymore.

  The dam broke. I sank to the floor and sobbed. Something about Malachi’s shrine to the life she’d left behind shook me, saddened me, but imbued me with a strange hope. The ties between us were tighter than I’d known, five generations strong and unbroken. She’d loved Kerry the way that Kerry had loved me, in a way that only people who shared our unique burden and gifts could love. And now I felt that love from both of them.

  I brushed my face where I had felt the ghostly contact inside the sacred circle on the floor of the abandoned cabin, on the night that I witnessed magic for the first time. Here, I felt someone on the other side reaching out to me again. It was cold and relieving, like a soothing compress or the fragile taste of a first winter snowfall.

  In a corner of my mind, I knew I had not a second to waste. But I had never felt so safe, and sleep approached like a gentle twilight tide teasing a sandy shore.

  The sound of floorboards whining under footfalls woke me. These were gentl
e, bare feet. A dreamlike blur outlined everything in the room, smudging and softening it.

  When I opened my eyes, Grandma Kerry lowered herself down beside me. She looked comfortable. She felt at home here, too.

  A pale blue nightgown hung loose on her thin frame. Her eyes looked lost, the way they had the last few months before she’d died. But as she met my startled gaze, the fog behind them cleared away. Strand by strand, her white hair darkened to dirty blonde. Her wrinkles plumped out until her skin was smooth as a fresh tub of butter. She became the girl from one of the pictures Malachi had saved.

  I almost spoke her name, but I didn’t want to spook her away. I knew this dream was fragile, like gossamer strands and butterfly wings. It could leave as softly as it came.

  I took her hand in mine.

  Somewhere, at the far reaches of my mind, a voice told me to ask her about the letter. But I felt a nudge against my thigh and startled awake.

  The sun was higher in the sky through the grimy farmhouse windows. I didn’t know how long I’d slept. Panic came roaring through the stillness. Angry, I looked for what had woken me, and found the antler convulsing on the dusty carpet next to me like a pet I’d forgotten to feed.

  Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I hauled myself up and let the antler guide me to the kitchen. There was an enormous antique breakfront that was too big for the room. Inside I found a miniature library of magical oddities just like the one at the Warden hideout. Some of the resins and oils had gone rancid. My fingers fumbled around vials, jars, and tins, and even a bottle of bitterwine, but nothing resembled a missing page from the Book of Wisdom. Maybe someone had rolled it up and stuffed it in one of these containers like a message in a bottle? No, nothing. I wobbled, woozy from pain, and sank to the floor to take a break. Sitting, I looked up and noticed a folded piece of paper taped to the bottom of the top shelf.

  I gathered the strength to rip it off and unfold it, finding that there were several pages, only one of them from the Book of Wisdom. The first was a transcribed recipe for boiled bitterwine and eyebright collyrium on ruled notebook paper, written in Grandma Kerry’s handwriting. There were five pages of a diary entry, also written by her.

  The pages were folded together in eighths, just like the letter that Maggie had promised to deliver to me, unopened, if I ever found out about the Wardens.

  The realization dawned. Grandma Kerry hadn’t left me in the dark. She’d bequeathed me everything I needed to embrace my magic and open my Sight. Yes, it would have been difficult for me to make the wine and collyrium without training from the Wardens and with no idea what half of the ingredients even were. But I could have tracked them down, diligently procured whatever I needed.

  Her cryptic message made sense. It wasn’t meant to be cryptic at all. She had given me a road map, but she’d entrusted it to the wrong person.

  Maggie had only fulfilled part of her promise. She’d given me the letter with no possible means to obey its imperative. She had given me no choice but to either join the Wardens or wallow in my uselessness and endure the torment of my magic fighting to break free.

  She had lied. She had manipulated me.

  Breathless, I sat at the kitchen table and spread out the pages in front of me. The diary entry was an account of what had happened leading up to the previous Claiming. Kerry wrote of meeting Malachi for the first time, realizing who she was. She wrote of embracing her power, of feeling like herself in a way she never had before. She described how she had fallen in love with Roger McElroy and planned to tell her parents they were engaged, only to discover that he was being hunted by the “demons in the woods.” She described how he had changed, how his eyes darkened, how she had lost hope of saving him until she realized what she needed to do to break the curse. She understood why Malachi could never do it alone.

  Fear of failing Roger was what made her fall in line with the Wardens. And he died anyway.

  She described feeling targeted by the Woodwalkers more than the others. She was a Triad on her own, like me, and she was their foremost threat.

  Last, she described what the siege in the church was like. The Wardens had held out for most of the night, but in the final minutes of the witching hour, the Woodwalkers managed to break through the barriers and possess the bodies. The victims, including Roger, had obeyed their new masters fully at that point, and became desperate to get back to the sacred clearing.

  When I finished reading her description of the Claiming, I felt bereft. And then I remembered what I’d come looking for.

  There, laid out on the missing page from the Book of Wisdom, was a ritual for breaking the Claiming Curse, in my grandma’s scratchy handwriting. She had written with such confidence, even nearly poking holes in the pages with her pen when the inspiration behind the incantation she was creating from nothing seemed to strike most zealously.

  On the night of my attempted initiation, Maggie had said, “Magic requires symmetry.” Everything about this ritual echoed that principle.

  The binding. The four girls. The sacred glade.

  Even with all three powers inside me, I wasn’t enough. Just as the Woodwalkers had to bring their victims back to the sacred glade to claim their bodies, I needed to go back. We needed to go back.

  Where it began, so must it end.

  I just had to convince one of each sect of Wardens to try the unthinkable.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The bottle of bitterwine sloshed in Levi’s front seat, where I’d buckled it in to keep it from rolling around on my way back to the church. By now he would be worried about me, and was probably ticked that I’d hijacked his ride without explanation. I hadn’t checked my phone in hours.

  The thought of calling Lindsey and Vanessa to a private meeting had occurred to me. But I feared they would refuse and tell the others of my plan, making it sound unhinged. I needed to cast a wide net and make my case to the whole group.

  By the time I made it back, my strength was sapped. Papers clenched in my fist, I stumbled across the street and landed on the gritty asphalt, scraping my knees.

  Tires screeched, and a car swerved around me. I looked up to see a red sedan with out-of-state plates jerking to a stop and its driver opening the door, punching numbers into his phone as he ran to my aid. Three numbers. Nine-one-one. I must have been a sight in my bloody white dress with antique revolvers hanging from my hips.

  “Oh good, you’re alive,” he whispered as he knelt over me. The muffled voice of a dispatcher answered on the other end of the line. I had the wherewithal to know I should stop the guy from talking, but my limbs were made of lead. “There’s a young woman in the road covered in blood,” the man explained. “She’s alive but she needs medical help. I’m on the corner of Liberty and—”

  A windlike force snatched his phone out of his hands. Lindsey. She ended the call and tossed the phone in the grass.

  “What the—” the stranger started, his expression displaying equal outrage and confusion.

  She glared at the man and spoke in a low voice, sounding positively sinister. “Powers of the still, dark earth, mislead all prying eyes. Cast thy veil of trickery; by Warden’s Rune, disguise.”

  He shuffled a step back. Lindsey helped me stand and guided me toward the church entrance.

  “Hey!” the guy yelled. He wasn’t fooled. The beguilement had come too late, and his tourist eyes were peeled for the peculiar amid the humdrum.

  Vanessa appeared as suddenly as Lindsey had and blew bone ash in the man’s face, casting the forgetting spell. Baffled, he picked up his phone and drove away.

  “The beguilement isn’t a miracle cure for being careless, Nat!” Lindsey snapped, leading the way to the hideout. Vanessa followed. “What were you thinking?”

  I gritted my teeth and ripped away from her grip on my elbow, to my own detriment. “I’m thinking that we’re wasting our goddamn time.”

  “What?” she asked, but I opened the door to the church and tromped down the concealed stairs, finding the
Wardens gathered around the tables in the basement.

  “If every last one of us stays strong throughout the witching hour, the victims will survive the night,” Maggie was saying, but she stopped and looked up at the three of us. “Bless your heart, Natalie Colter. You look a mess. Where’ve you been? Kate and Levi went looking for you.”

  “Are we doing anything different from the last Claiming?” I demanded. “I mean, last time, twelve people died. I’d consider that a failure, wouldn’t you?”

  “We are doing things different,” Maggie said, clever eyes peering suspiciously at the pages trembling in my fist. “We’re much more prepared now. Your daughters and granddaughters will be even more prepared than we are. I know your dad is marked, and Levi, too, but panicking at the final hour isn’t going to save them. Why don’t you let Sofia fix you up with some fresh bandages and try to calm down?”

  “Because preparation is not going to stop this,” I said. “We can’t just fight. We have to break the curse. Kerry and Nora knew how, but when they couldn’t make anyone else see the truth, Kerry backed out.”

  “And if she hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here,” Maggie said. “Thank God she came to her senses.”

  “If we do it right, we won’t die. But even if we did die, aren’t we supposed to be willing to sacrifice for the people of this town?”

  “Not in vain,” Sofia said. “Nora proved our doubts were valid. We can’t protect people if we’re dead. We cannot give our magic to the Woodwalkers.”

  “We wouldn’t be giving it to them. We would be giving the magic back to itself, rejoining both strands of it at the source. It would go back to where it belongs, in nature. Not inside the Woodwalkers, and not inside us.”

  I could tell I’d lost a few people, but I pressed on. “Nora didn’t prove anything except that the curse can’t be broken by one of us, or two, or three. It has to be four. Kerry and Nora told you that.” I shot glares to each member of the Triad. “That’s why even Malachi couldn’t break it alone. There had to be one girl to represent each of the original Pagans of the Pines. Magical symmetry. Kerry knew that, but no one was willing to try. No one was brave enough.”