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It wasn’t me that was interfering with their seance at all. It was the thing that hovered behind me, so close now that the cold had resolved into a steady breathing, in and out against the back of my neck. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. The horror of it petrified me, leaving me paralyzed and helpless. It would reach out and touch me, I knew it. Any moment, that icy breath would become an icy touch, and I would be powerless to stop it. Then the whispering, skittering sound congealed into a voice unlike any living voice—a voice made of the buzz of insect wings, and the scratching of their legs, and the darkness of their eyes; a symphony of horror that spoke four words:
“Welcome home, Little Bird.”
My eyes fluttered closed. I smelled the sea. I felt the lapping of waves around my ankles, and I was falling…
Falling…
10
“Expand the circle!”
My eyes, which had been drifting closed almost without my realizing it, snapped open again. Rhi had suddenly realized something was wrong. As I watched, frozen, the strange voice still echoing in my ears, she glanced down at the paper under her fingers and gasped, jumping to her feet. “Expand the circle! Do it now, Persi, now!”
“What do you—?”
“It’s a warning from Asteria! Protect the garden! All of the garden, do it now!”
I forced my eyes open again, pulling away from the call of the voice that wasn’t a voice, and watched in a haze as my mother and her sisters jumped to their feet and joined their hands. They were chanting something, but I couldn’t hear it over the voice, which threatened at every moment to drag me back into the darkness with it…
And then two things happened in quick succession. First, the necklace that Asteria had sent to me, the one still hanging around my neck, began to grow warm, and then hot against my cold and clammy skin. I fumbled for it with my fingers before gripping it tightly in my fist, and as I touched it, I felt the dark cold energy around me retract slightly, like a startled animal.
And then, before the coldness could reassert itself, a wave of power crested and broke over the garden, flooding every corner, washing away the cold and the voice and the darkness. I felt it go, felt it try to take me with it like a riptide, but I clasped one hand around my necklace, and dug the other into the soil of my family’s garden, squeezing my eyes shut against the pull. Rhi’s words echoed in my head, and I whispered them over and over again:
We imagine ourselves planted here, reaching downward, downward, deeper, deeper, finding purchase, claiming home in the soil that sings to our power.
At last the sentient cold released its hold on me. Warm balmy summer night air swirled around me once more. I gasped, and then called out the only word I could think of, because it was the only person I wanted.
“Mom!”
“Wren! Oh my God!” My mother’s voice was strident with fear, and I heard her crashing through the flower beds toward the sound of my voice. Carefully, I got to my feet, wobbling a bit on shaky legs, but trying to pull myself together so that she wouldn’t know how scared I’d been—how close to succumbing to whatever that thing was that had found me; and, perhaps most disturbing of all, how familiar it had seemed.
She found me as I rose, and crashed into me, nearly knocking me flat again as she hugged me. “Wren, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and though the response was automatic, I realized it wasn’t a lie. Second by second, the ill effects of the experience were fading away, leaving me feeling more and more like myself—confused as hell, but definitely myself. I was already starting to doubt everything I’d just experienced, and yet I felt a nagging disappointment that I hadn’t turned around to see who—or what—had been behind me. A tiny part of me was shouting that if I hadn’t been such a coward, I’d understand everything.
My mother had her hands on either side of my face, staring into my eyes as though afraid she was going to see someone other than me staring back out at her. But having ascertained that I was, indeed, fine, her anger kicked in. “What in the world are you doing out here?”
There was a scolding edge to her voice that ignited my own temper. I pulled my face out of her grip. “Are you kidding me? What the hell areyoudoing out here?!” I asked, gesturing over to the elder tree, where both of my aunts were still standing, pale and wide-eyed, with the same fear that had infected both of us.
My mother blinked at me as though that was the last question she was expecting instead of the first. “I… we… it was a private… you shouldn’t have followed me!” she blustered, but there was no way she was getting away with that kind of amateur deflection, not this time.
“I followed you because you were acting sketchy and you won’t tell me anything! I’m not a kid anymore, and I need some answers!”
She was shaking her head violently. “This is between me and my sisters. It was just something we needed to work out.”
I barked out a laugh. “You can’t seriously just expect me to believe that this was normal sisterly bonding stuff! I realize I don’t have sisters, but I’m not an idiot, Mom! You have to tell me what’s going on!”
My mother was staring at me, chewing on the inside of her cheek, opening and closing her fists at her sides, and looking like she might break into a sprint and run from me at any moment.
“Kerri, it’s time. You’ve run from this for thirteen years. Enough running.”
It was Persi who said it, in a voice that sounded bone tired. I looked over at her, and her eyes were fixed on my mother’s rigid form, her expression sad, almost defeated.
“I’m not running,” my mother ground out through a mouth that didn’t seem to want to open.
“But you’re still hiding. Enough hiding. Tell the girl. She has a right to know.”
“She’s only sixteen.”
