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—A Guide to Traversing the Supernatural Realm
Andrea was staring at me. Hard.
I wouldn’t say that my new vampire friends “detained” me, but it was made quite clear that any attempts to leave would not be met with friendly handshakes and an exchange of e-mail addresses. With the customers cleared out, I was sitting at the coffee bar, trying to suss out exactly how much I should tell them. Since they’d kept me from dinner, Jane was nice enough to provide me with something called “lemon bars,” an odd cross between a biscuit and a custard pie. And Andrea was staring at me. It wasn’t an angry stare. She seemed to be looking for coded messages in my eyelashes. I started to blink in odd patterns while I chewed on lemon bars, just to see what happened.
Nothing, just more staring.
“Should we wait for Dick?” Jane asked, pulling the “Closed” sign over the front door of the shop.
Andrea gave me a quick, furtive look. “Um, Dick has a business meeting. I’m not able to reach him.”
“Why do the words ‘business meeting’ seem to be in unspoken subtext quotation marks?” I asked.
“My husband,” Andrea told me, in a tone that brooked no further discussion. “You’ll meet him later.”
“All right, then.”
Jane moved behind the bar as if she were going to make more coffee, until Andrea hopped over the counter with vampire speed and chased her away from the large, shiny cappuccino maker. Jane pouted a bit and plopped into the seat beside me. Andrea gave me a sweeping hand gesture and said, “Floor’s all yours.”
I straightened in my chair, clearing my throat. “ ‘Once upon a time’ is the best way to start, yes? Well, once upon a time, there was a happy little family in the wilds of Ireland, practicing what they called magic. For years and years, they kept the locals happy by caring for the sick, taking care of ailing livestock, and keeping the crops fertile. Even through the Inquisition and the witchcraft trials, the villagers kept peace with the family, because they needed them to prosper, and vice versa. You would think the lack of pitchfork-toting townsfolk would keep the family safe, but of course, in stories like these, there are always problems.
“It boiled down to a difference of opinion on magical policy. The family had always operated under the tenet of ‘do not harm.’ But a small branch of the family grew tired of being ‘servants’ to the locals. They argued that the family should take a firmer stance, domination instead of appeasement. They seemed to think that we should be leading the people around us, instead of working with them—through force, if necessary.”
“Are you telling me that there’s a real Voldemort?” Jane asked, what little color she had leeching from her face. Andrea smacked Jane’s arm and rolled her eyes. Jane winced and cried. “What? It’s a legitimate question!”
I chuckled despite myself. “These rebellious family members said that the witch who can’t harm can’t heal, that there has to be a balance of both. And unfortunately, this philosophy led to a few . . . well, let’s call them magical amputations. This was unacceptable to the main contingent of McGavocks, and they asked these rogue relatives to leave.
“So that branch left the village and settled halfway across the country. Several of the witches married into the Kerrigans, a local family who raised their children according to a more strident magical philosophy. While the McGavocks flourished and enjoyed plentiful harvests and peace, the Kerrigan branch got more aggressive and bitter—although as a side note, they have made a considerable amount of money in the last century or so manufacturing small arms. Anyway, the Kerrigans went out looking for problems to ‘solve’ with their magic. Because, in their opinion, some people just needed smiting. And eventually, that included members of the McGavock family, which started a vicious cycle of retaliation and misinterpretation.”
“It’s like the magical Hatfields and McCoys,” Andrea marveled.
“You’re not entirely wrong,” I admitted. “We lost people on both sides, to violence and curses. About three hundred years ago, the two matriarchs of the families met and agreed that matters had gone far enough. They selected four objects representing each of the elements and blessed them with magic from both sides. These objects, which they called the Elements, were scattered to the winds, given to strangers, sold to tinkers, that sort of thing. The matriarchs agreed that the family that found all four objects first would be able to bind the other branch.”
“Like magical Pokémon?” Andrea asked.
“If I wasn’t under an enormous amount of stress, I would find that funny,” I assured her. “The potential of losing our magic was a considerable risk, a risk I can only imagine was inspired by desperation. It took decades, but we rounded up the Elements first and bound the Kerrigans from doing magical harm. For the most part, they’re no more powerful than the average disenfranchised teenager who has seen The Craft once too often. The most they’re able to pull off is a stirring of air, which, honestly, could be done with a strategically placed fan, so it’s not terribly impressive. But every one hundred years, on the night of the summer solstice, the binding has to be repeated by the family’s strongest witch. This leaves a small window of time in which the Kerrigans have the chance to obtain the objects and undo the binding, reversing it onto my family. They tried it once in the early 1900s, and my nana Fee’s great-grandmother laid down a witchcraft bitch-slapping of epic proportions. I also hear there was a mighty non-magical slap involved. And now it’s my generation’s turn, and by some bizarre accident of birth, the so-called strongest witch in my family happens to be sitting here in front of you.”
A Cheshire cat’s smile split Jane’s face. Andrea held up her hand and said, “No!”
“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!” Jane huffed.
“Whatever juvenile, ill-conceived test of her abilities you were about to demand could only end in tears.”
I stared at both of them. These were the people Mr. Wainwright had entrusted with his shop? They were the ones who were supposed to help me track down the Elements?
I was doomed.
“Sorry, Nola, you were saying?” Andrea asked, pouring me another cup of coffee.
“Under normal circumstances, the binding wouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “It’s just a minor incantation spoken over the artifacts. Around the time Mr. Wainwright visited all those years ago, Nana got rather worried about an increase in Kerrigan-related violence. She saw that he was trustworthy, that he was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. So she took the objects out of the family vault and entrusted them to his care. She thought they would be safer with him.”
Both women winced, the corners of their mouths drawing back sharply. Jane said, “She probably should have rethought that. I don’t want to alarm you, but when I first got here, the shop looked like an episode of Extreme Hoarders: Book Edition.”
“I have a basic idea of what I’m looking for. There are some old sketches. Why Nana Fee didn’t think to take some pictures, I have no idea. But according to my family, she was incredibly secretive about the objects. She wouldn’t show them to anyone, for fear of the infamous McGavock loose lips. In other words, my aunt Margaret.”
“Quick question. Why the solstice?” Jane asked.
“Solstices are considered times of beginnings, endings, new cycles, so it made sense. And I guess no one wanted to travel to meet on the winter solstice.”
