I opened my backpack and took out a book bound in dark red cloth and a dagger with an intricately carved ivory handle. They were part of my inheritance, the Book of Shadows and the athame, or ceremonial dagger, that had belonged to my birth mother, Maeve Riordan. The rest of her witch’s tools were back in Widow’s Vale, hidden in my house.
I settled myself on Mr. Warren’s living room floor and opened the Book of Shadows to an entry dated April 1982, a few months after Maeve and Angus Bramson, my birth father, arrived in America. They’d fled Ireland when their coven, Belwicket, was destroyed by something called the dark wave, a deadly concentration of dark energies. Maeve and Angus were the only survivors.
With nothing left in Ireland and a clear sense that they were being hunted, Maeve and Angus came to New York City. Eventually they left the city and settled upstate, an hour or two north of Widow’s Vale, in a tiny town called Meshomah Falls.
The entry on the page I’d turned to talked about how unhappy Maeve was in her Hell’s Kitchen flat. She felt Manhattan was a place cut off from the pulse of the earth. It made her grief for all she’d lost that much sharper.
I held the athame to the page covered with Maeve’s handwriting. Slowly I passed the age-worn silver blade over the blue ink, and as I did, pinpricks of light began to form a different set of words entirely. It was one of Maeve’s secret entries.
I have been staring at this gold watch for hours, as though it were a gift from the Goddess herself. I never should have brought it with me from Ireland. Oh, it’s a beautiful object, passed down through the ages from one lover to another. Were I to cast my senses, I know I could feel generations of love and desire radiating from it. But it was given to me by Ciaran. If Angus ever saw it, it would break him.
Ciaran gave it to me the night we pledged ourselves to each other. He said that if you place it beneath the house, the tick of the watch will keep the hearts beating within steady and faithful. Is my holding on to it a selfish hope that Ciaran somehow will find his way back into my life? I must not even think such thoughts. I’ve chosen to live my life with Angus, and that’s all there is to it.
Next month Angus and I will leave this dreadful city for a new home upstate. I must end this heartsick madness now. I can’t bring myself to destroy the watch, but I won’t take it, either. Angus and I will move on. The watch will stay here.
Ciaran had been Maeve’s mùirn beatha dàn, but he had lied to her, betrayed her. And then, years later, long after she’d rejected him, he had found her and Angus in Meshomah Falls, where he’d trapped them in an abandoned barn and set fire to it. She was pure goodness, he pure evil. How could she have loved him? It was unfathomable. Yet…yet I’d loved Cal, who had nearly killed me the same way Ciaran killed Maeve.
I needed to know more. I needed to understand, as much to silence my questions about myself as to know Maeve more fully.
When we’d made the plan to come to New York, it had dawned on me that while we were there, I’d be only a subway ride from where Maeve and Angus had lived. If I could find their apartment, then maybe, just maybe, I’d find the watch. Maeve had said she was leaving it behind, after all. I knew the odds were heavily against its still being there—it had been almost twenty years ago, and even if she’d hidden the watch, surely someone would have found it. Still, I couldn’t let the idea go. I wasn’t even sure why I was so obsessed with the watch. Morbid fascination? I needed to see it, hold it.
Of course, I realized that anything touched by Ciaran was tainted, even potentially dangerous. Which was why I hadn’t mentioned the watch to Hunter or anyone. Hunter would never approve of my doing anything remotely risky. But I had to try to find it.
I tucked the athame and the Book of Shadows back into my pack. At home I’d tried scrying with fire for Maeve’s old Manhattan address. All I’d seen was a vision of the inside of a dingy apartment. Granted, most witches considered fire the most difficult medium with which to scry, but I had a natural connection to it, another gift from Maeve. But what the fire revealed was only a second cousin to what I asked for, close but not quite right. Was I doing it wrong?
It was doubly frustrating because just before Yule, I’d undergone a ceremony calledtàth meànma brach with Alyce Fernbrake, the blood witch who ran Practical Magick, an occult store near Widow’s Vale. Tàth meànma is a kind of Wiccan mind meld, where one witch enters another’s mind.
Tàth meànma brach takes it one step further: it’s an exchange of all you have inside you. Alyce gave me access to her memories, her loves and heartbreaks, her years of study and knowledge. In turn I gave her access to the ancestral memories that flowed through me from Maeve and her mother Mackenna before her.
I came out of the tàth meànma brach with a much deeper knowledge of magick. Without it I’d never have stood a chance against Selene. It had focused me, connected me to the earth so powerfully that for almost two days afterward I’d felt almost like I was hallucinating.
Since then I’d gotten more used to the infusion of knowledge I’d received from Alyce. I wasn’t conscious of it all the time. It was more like I’d been given a filing cabinet chock-full of files. When I needed a certain piece of knowledge, all I had to do was check my files.
Of course, the knowledge in those files was specific to Alyce. For example, I now had a wonderful sense of how to work with herbs and plants. Unfortunately, scrying wasn’t Alyce’s strong point. That meant I had to resort to more mundane means to find out where Maeve and Angus had lived.
In Mr. Warren’s study I found a Manhattan phone book. I got the address for the city’s Bureau of Records, then consulted a subway map Mr. Warren had left out for us. The bureau was near City Hall. The number 6 train would get me there.
I’d just put on my coat and scarf and grabbed one of Mr. Warren’s spare keys when the door to the apartment opened and Bree came in.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself. Where is everyone?”
“I left them in an East Village art gallery. There’s some kind of performance going on involving a stone pyramid, two dancers dressed in aluminum foil, and a giant ball of string. Robbie was mesmerized,” she said with a laugh. “Are you going out?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to lie to Bree, but I didn’t want to tell her about my quest for Maeve’s watch, either. I was afraid she’d try to talk me out of it. “I was going to run a few errands,” I said vaguely. “And I thought we could use some candles for Saturday night’s circle. You’re sure your dad doesn’t mind us having a circle in his apartment?”
“He probably wouldn’t, but he’ll never know,” Bree assured me. “He’s seeing some woman who lives in Connecticut, and he’s going out to her place this weekend.” She pulled out her wallet and checked for cash. “I’m going to stock up on some food—if I know my dad, his idea of food in the house is one wedge of gourmet cheese, a jar of imported olives, and a bag of ground coffee.”
Bree’s prediction was accurate except for the cheese, which was nonexistent. “Why don’t we go together?” she suggested. “I know all the good stores in the neighborhood.”
“Sure,” I said. I realized I was glad of the chance to spend a little normal time with Bree, even though it would delay my trip to the Bureau of Records.
Bree and I had been best friends since we were little kids. That, like nearly everything else, had changed this past fall when Cal Blaire came into our lives. Bree fell for him, Cal chose me, and we’d had a horrible fight and stopped speaking to each other. For a hideous couple of months we were enemies. But on the night that Cal tried to kill me, Bree had helped save my life.