Maggie puts her hands on her hips, surprisingly serious for her. “So if we can’t read Carmina’s, what do we read? Where do we even start?”
“Well, we’re looking for clues about these male magic users, how they came to be,” I say. “So that means we need to read about the times our family has been hunted and Cursed, or anything else that seems out of the ordinary for witches in general.”
Maggie nods. “Yeah, that narrows it down. A little.”
“We should split up,” Kat says. “Someone should start from the beginning, someone at the middle, and someone near the end.”
“That could work, but . . .” I tap my foot. There has to be an efficient way to do this. I snap my fingers. “Okay, Kitty Kat, you start at the beginning, since you have a lot to learn anyway. Mags, you find the Salem incident—that’s when things got pretty bad for all witches in America. Maybe something will stick out. And I’ll start with Agatha, who built this house. If someone wants it, maybe she’ll have clues about who.”
They both nod.
“This way.” I lead them down the narrow aisle between shelves. The histories take up the entire attic. The farther we go, the more tattered the books become. We try our best to care for them, but we can’t stop time. At least I don’t think so. If we could, I bet we’d have to do something terrible like sacrifice people. No thanks.
A few books hiss or wail as we walk by, which has Kat even more on edge. She squeaks when a ghost girl with no eyes comes oozing out of one. “What pretty eyes you have,” the girl sings to Kat. “Give them to me, and I will show you my secrets.”
“Jo . . .” Kat backs into Maggie, who shoves her right through the ghost to me.
“It’s okay. Witches can make ghosts. Way easy defense because they have always freaked people out.”
Maggie smiles wickedly. “Plus it’s fun.”
“That, too.” I reach into my satchel for the common items I grabbed. Eyes. It’s like every spell requires them.
The ghost reaches out to Kat, brushing Kat’s bangs away with a pale, translucent hand. “I’ve never had green ones before. Perhaps they have special powers. . . .”
“Here,” I say, holding out two pig eyes in a plastic baggy. “I think these suit you better.”
The ghost takes them happily, and then she’s sucked back into the journal she came from. I take it from the shelf, since I had to go to the trouble of unlocking it anyway. Mary Hemlock, 1634–1698. “Hey, lucky us—she was alive during Salem!”
“Really?” Maggie looks at it. “Shoulda guessed, trying to freak us out with such theatrics.”
“She was probably the head of the house at the time, since the trials were in 1692.” I look at the book spines nearest Mary’s. “Here’s Emily Hemlock, who is probably her daughter . . . and Charlotte comes next, oh, and Teresa. Looks like Mary had a few daughters.”
“So your family was fertile at one point.” Maggie already has Mary’s book open. She flips through the pages slowly, and I get the sense that she enjoys histories much more than I do.
“Shut up.” Most witches struggle with infertility, having one child or two. Three is extremely lucky. Nana says that’s how it is. She tried for a decade to have Mom, and apparently Mom was with Dad for a while before . . . Okay, stopping that image now. “Just because the Crafts are having a couple of fruitful generations doesn’t mean you’re immune. It happens to all families at one point or another.”
“Do you guys always talk this openly about fertility and passing on bloodlines and other reproductive topics?” Kat asks.
I laugh. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“It’s really important,” Maggie says. “My mom might make me wait until I’m old enough, but making babies is how we keep our magical lines going. How could we not talk about it or want it or look forward to it?”
Kat nods slowly, seeming to mull it over. “Fair enough.”
After I open the Salem histories for Maggie, I head for the oldest books, which Kat will have a fun time reading. They are from twelfth-century England, and pretty crazy. “I’ll dispel the first three for you. Call if you get through them all.”
“Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “They won’t kill me after they’re unlocked, right?”
“No.” I smile at her worried face. “Actually, I thought it’d be worse. Seems like most of them have touch spells; so as long as you don’t bump anything, you’re good. And I’m right here if you get clumsy.”
She nods. “You already saved my life once today.”
“True.” I look down at my hand, which has significantly improved thanks to Nana. I can still feel some pain, but it appears to be normal at least. “And I’ll save it as many times as I have to.”
“You’re like a superhero.”
“Yeah, if superheroes used the powers of darkness.”
I pull out the very first history—Golde Hemlock, 1153–1201. Hers I have read, and it’s fascinating how she was born with magic, though her mother didn’t have it. That happened occasionally—still happens sometimes—when a mother-to-be gives birth in a place brimming with magic. The dark power takes the child for its own. Golde slowly discovered her powers, and then one day she found another witching family, the Sages, who took her in and taught her their ways.
The Sages were also afflicted with the Curse, even then. Nana told me that their family died out from it right before many witches left for the Americas to escape it. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why it’s also followed the Hemlocks so often, because Golde learned from the Sages.
The lock is simple to break: just a heat enchantment dispelled by blowing magic onto it. I hand it to Kat, and she carefully opens the leather cover. Inside, the parchment is yellow and slightly brittle. Then she tilts her head. “Uh, is this English?”
“Middle English.” I pull out a piece of glass that’s round like a monocle, but without the chain. “This is a translator. Look through and it’ll make sense.”
She takes it from me. Now I can tell she’s excited, because she’s already reading. “That is amazing.”
“It only took about a hundred animal tongues to make, so don’t break it.”
She cringes. “Lovely.”
I open the next two books for her, and then head back to the newer histories. Agatha’s isn’t very far from the reading area in the round tower portion of the attic, which is well equipped with plush chairs and silky pillows. What little light we get under the freeway streaks through the windows. I take her history off the shelf, surprisingly nervous to read it firsthand. Nana has told me the story many times, so I never bothered to look up the source. Immediately the book sticks to my fingers, like the best superglue in existence. Funny. You’d definitely know who took it.
I rummage in the satchel for a vial of enchanted slug mucus. As I pour it on my hand, I realize I should have brought antibacterial wash, too. Oh, well. I settle into a deep red recliner and crack open the book.
Agatha’s journal is fairly boring early on. She lived in New York as a child, near the Crafts, which isn’t too surprising. The Hemlocks had a good piece of magical land up there that we stayed on for hundreds of years. It gets interesting when Agatha gets older—she’s restless and wants to travel, so she takes a long trip to Europe and visits some of the most magical sites in the world. That’s when it gets bad.
August 31, 1890
Nice, France
Fanny wrote me today with distressing news—Mama has been Cursed. They don’t know how, but she has been complaining of weakness, of not being able to hold magic like she used to. I feel as if it’s my fault somehow, for leaving the house. But then why am I not the one Cursed?