Page 41 of The Book of Magic

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said to any shade that might be nearby. She breathed deeply and evenly. “Maybe I can help you,” she offered. “Or,” more honestly now, “you can help me.”

She had lit a white candle she’d found in the desk drawer and it flickered, casting shadows on the wall. She thought perhaps there was a girl in the corner, made out of ash and dust. There was a knock at the door, which startled her. “Don’t go anywhere,” she told the shade. She went to the door and opened it a crack. Sally was in the hall.

“What are you doing here?” Gillian asked.

Sally had been down in the pub until closing, questioning people about Tom Lockland. “What do you want to talk about him for?” was the response she most often received. Jesse Wilkie overheard the conversations, and had approached to let Sally know she had seen him with Kylie. “She seemed under his spell,” Jesse had told her.

“What do you mean?” All Sally could think of was that horrible man her sister had been involved with years ago. Gillian had been possessed, until at last she understood she had to break free.

“He has that effect on some girls. Mostly ones who are lost. He has a way of drawing them in, convincing them they can trust him or that he can help them in some way.”

Sally’s heart was racing. The wicked enchantment that had befallen Gillian could not be happening again. She went into the restroom to throw cold water on her face and do her best to calm down, which frankly was impossible. It was then she saw something metal glinting on the floor, but before she could see what it was, a little shadow scooted out the door into the bar, the silvery bit in its grasp. She followed the shadow, a cat as it turned out, as it skittered upstairs, where it managed to slip under a door. Her sister’s room. “Gilly,” Sally had called. “Open up.”

Gillian had cracked the door. “I’m being haunted,” she announced. Gillian had been having unwanted memories of her old boyfriend Jimmy, the one who’d nearly ruined her life. She felt shivery and threatened, as if the darkness of that time might happen all over again, as if there were certain family legacies that repeated themselves despite how hard you tried to avoid them.

“Is there a cat in here?” Sally asked.

Gillian opened the door wider, allowing her sister inside, relieved to see her. “I think it’s Maria Owens. I saw her in the fens.” Without thinking, they had slipped into whispers. They sat on the bed together, knees touching.

“She’s been gone for over three hundred years,” Sally said.

Gillian shrugged. “In some ways. Things don’t necessary vanish completely.” There was the curse, after all. That had lasted.

“I should be out there looking for Kylie right now,” Sally said in a hushed voice. “Before anything happens. I shouldn’t have agreed to wait till morning.”

“Looking for her in the middle of the night makes no sense.” Gillian didn’t add what she was thinking. Something’s already happened. It’s happening still. She elbowed Sally and nodded toward a corner. There it was, a huge tabby cat, playing with a strand of silvery thread. “Come here, baby,” Gillian called.

The cat looked up, then disappeared through a crack in the wall.

Sally went to the corner where the cat had crouched. The air was especially cold. She knelt down, cold herself now, for she had discovered the necklace she’d given to Kylie on her birthday. She flicked open the locket and there was the photo of Jet. No matter what darkness awaited them, Jet was still with them, in loving spirit and in memory.

II.

Things that are begun in the dark are never meant to be, that is why they are so often initiated in places where no one can see the business at hand. Close your eyes and believe. Let desire take you, blood and bones, no matter who you might harm. The Crooked Path always begins in darkness; it always has and it always will. Do not reach to turn on the light, do not consider options, do not think twice. This is the left side, the zone not of the heart but of need and desire, what you must have, what you’re greedy for, what you will take no matter the cost.

Tom Lockland ran a finger across the base of Kylie’s wrist; there was a tiny black moon-shaped speck there, a witch’s mark Kylie had never noticed before. She had been blind to everything, herself, her history, the dangers in the world. Kylie thought now of the rasp of Gideon’s breathing. She called his room every day and begged the nurse to hold the phone to his ear. Pointless, she was told. Still she pleaded, until a kindhearted nurse relented, positioning the phone so that Kylie could hear Gideon breathing. She almost contacted Antonia then to ask if she could arrange more phone calls, but was afraid of what her sister would say. Come home, get out quick, don’t trust anyone you don’t really know. I’m your sister, I’m not some stranger who has desires all his own. You are asking for trouble and trouble is what you’ll get.

Kylie had power, more than she’d ever suspected. People could say what they wanted to about Tom Lockland but he had been more truthful about magic than her family had. He held his thumb on her witch’s mark and she felt her pulse racing. She was stronger than she had ever imagined. She could understand the birds’ chattering, she could start a fire with her breath. Surely she could figure out how to open the last two pages that revealed how to reverse a curse. “This is what magic is for,” Tom said. “To destroy the thing that was meant to destroy you.”

In the weedy ash-filled garden behind the house, Kylie opened The Book of the Raven to a page written in red ink, made of madder roots or berries or blood. Let the wrong man into your life and you have set out on the path before you know it. A step at a time, until you are turning left. It was a warning, but she didn’t take it to heart. Tom was merely a distant cousin, nothing more, an ally who could help her save Gideon. For that, it was worth taking the Crooked Path.

As for Tom, he had been looking for a curse-breaker in every magic book he could get his hands on. He’d recently acquired the scarlet-covered Rauðskinna, the feared book of ancient magic, from Ian Wright, who had turned him away when he came to Notting Hill for assistance, with Ian saying he couldn’t help him work black magic. Tom had broken in, then set out madder root mixed with poison, bound with his own hair and fingernails and with the bones of birds and a sympathetic wax figure of Ian. But the book had turned out to be worthless, turning ice cold in Tom’s hands, refusing to give up any of its magic. There were plenty of curses in its pages, violent and blood-tinged, all were binding and irreversible, made of such dark magic they could not be dismantled, but apparently a code was needed to open the book, and Tom hadn’t thought of that possibility. He wound up tossing Rauðskinna onto a fire in the back yard, fairly certain he had heard the book scream, as mandrake is said to do when it’s pulled from the ground. The smoke was so thick his eyes teared, and even though he was covered with soot, he had stayed until the book was a pile of gleaming ash, the words rising like glowworms into the air, as if each one had become a living creature. Now, with Kylie’s book, he had another chance.

As Tom made a fire in a metal bin while the sky grew dark, Kylie found herself wondering what her life would have been if she had lived here in Thornfield three hundred years earlier. It was likely she would have already had a husband, children, hands blistered by heavy work; she would have sought out omens in the stars, counted the silvery fish in the fens to see how many years she would live, gone to a woman who was skilled in the Unnamed Art when she needed an elixir or a cure or perhaps help with a man who could not be trusted.

Holly, thorn apple, hawthorn, rowan, oak, ash, all were tossed onto the flame.

“Will you do anything to get what you want?” Tom asked her.

What she wanted was Gideon, here in this world. Kylie nodded, afraid she would be unable to speak.

The wind was up and sparks flickered into the air. It was possible to do anything with magic, Tom told her. Curse the living, bring back the dead, create love, or extinguish its fire. A great fall would bring great success. Kylie turned her back to him as they stripped off their clothes. By now the sky was black.

“Face me and face your fear,” he said.

Her fear was that she would lose the one person she loved most in this world, and that was a fear she didn’t think she could live with if she didn’t act now.

“You said you would do anything,” Tom reminded her.