Chapter 15

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Witching Hour

Rain thrashes against the windshield as we drive into the library parking lot. There is half a tree’s worth of windswept orange leaves plastered to the side of Rebecca’s car. The library is large, out of place, even for downtown Salem. There are over a dozen cars parked, a lot for midnight on a Wednesday, I think to myself.

We exit the car, and I let out an ungraceful scream as the rain pelts my face. Laughing, Matthew grabs my hand with his good arm and pulls me forward. We run through the rain, into the colonial brick building. Warm air rushes around us once we get through the glass doors. There are long tables arranged in an open central room, with rows and rows of bookshelves in every direction. Hushed whispers echo quietly around the room, along with Matthew’s and my labored breaths from running, but for the most part it’s quiet. A sandy-blond-haired man sits behind the reception desk.

“Hello,” I say in a hushed tone.

The man looks up from his desk and smiles. His tired eyes go wide when he sees Matthew. I look at Matthew’s recently bandaged arm, but thankfully it is hidden beneath his shirt. No sign of the healing cut and glowing adhesive. The receptionist’s eyes dim in disappointment after a moment, once he sees Matthew’s hand grasping mine. I blush and try to pull away, but Matthew tightens his grip ever so slightly. Not so much a command as an invitation. I let my hand settle into his, enjoying the warmth.

“How can I help you two?” the receptionist, whose name card reads “Michael,” asks in a whisper.

“We’re looking for Laurie,” I say. The man’s eyebrows rise in surprise.

“Oh,” he says. “She doesn’t get many visitors. Her office is down and to the left, at the very back of the archives.”

We thank him and make our way toward the other end of the building. Around my shoulder is a knitted grocery sack. Inside, wrapped in several scarves, is the cursed tome. I cling to the bag as we walk past shelves covering American history and sociology. We turn down a darkened hallway lit by a single lamp that swings from its fixture despite no air vents in the vicinity. The only door looks like it goes to a janitor’s closet. I look to Matthew uncertainly. He shrugs, equally confused.

I reach out and knock on the closet door. It swings open, and Matthew and I both take a step back as a young woman with the largest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen steps out. She has cool brown hair in tight curls piled into a sloppy bun, and she is wearing a long gray dress with a pocket watch dangling from a belt tied around her hips. Ten small clockwork rings adorn her fingers. I recognize her from some of the past Samhain gatherings, a time witch.

“You’re early,” she says sharply, looking both of us up and down.

“Laurie! Good to see you,” I say, holding out a hand. “I’m here to meet with Ginny. She said to ask for you.”

Laurie stares at my outstretched hand for a beat before looking back up at me, her eyes magnified behind her giant glasses.

“You’re early,” she repeats.

“Sorry,” I say, a bit taken aback but getting the sense that we have offended her.

“No use apologizing. Ginny must not have told you how things operate here. May I have your name and coven affiliation? I need to write it down in my Time Table.”

“Oh yes, I’m Hecate Goodwin.” I say.

“Coven affiliation?” she asks, pulling out a palm-sized leather journal and a quill pen from the pocket of her dress.

“Atlantic Key,” I mumble quietly, embarrassed for assuming she’d know who I was.

“Really?” Laurie’s head pops up from her book and she gives me a closer look. “Have we met before?”

“Once or twice,” I admit. She shakes her head.

“Sorry about that. I can’t remember a human face to save my life.”

“It’s fine.” I smile. My mother told me once that time witches use memories as sacrifices to practice their craft. It makes sense that my few unimportant interactions with Laurie are no longer embedded in her mind.

“And you?” she says, turning to Matthew.

I tense but he answers her question in a relaxed tone.

“Matthew Cypher of the Pacific Gate.”

She pauses her scribbling, giving me a questioning look.

“I vouch for him,” I say firmly.

“All right then,” she grumbles, writing his name down in her book. “We still have a few minutes, but come in. Better to wait out of view.” She beckons us into the small room behind her. Matthew and I walk in, side by side. It’s cramped with the three of us in there. We stand around a small coffee table with two large hourglasses on top. The room echoes from the ticking of discordant, unsynchronized clocks. The walls are covered with time tellers, their minute and second hands moving in hypnotizing patterns.

“Don’t stare at those!” Laurie says to me urgently. I rip my eyes from an intricately carved cuckoo. “Don’t want to get lost in time, do you?” she asks.

“No?” I say in a hushed, uncertain whisper.

She holds out a finger, and I don’t try to talk further. Her right wrist nearly bumps against the edge of her nose as she studies her diamond-encrusted watch.

“Just two more minutes until midnight. No speaking, please. I need to concentrate.”

Matthew gives me a smirk as we stand awkwardly in the dark room. I itch to say something, to ask where Ginny is, but Laurie’s pointer finger is still up, a beacon of silence.

After a long bout where the only noise is the incessant ticking of clocks, Laurie lowers her wrist.

“Ten more seconds now. Look here, please.” She points to one of the hourglasses, filled with pitch-black sand. “You will have thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?” I ask, dragging my gaze to her.

“Eyes on the hourglass!” She snaps her fingers at me and points toward the coffee table. Matthew snorts at her tone. I nudge him with my elbow but keep my eyes where Laurie has directed.

“It’s time,” she says. With elegant hands covered in rings, she lifts the hourglass and turns it over and then sets it back down onto the table with a thud.

“Oh good! Right on time,” Ginny’s voice breaks through the silence. Matthew and I both turn toward the sound. My mouth drops open. We are no longer in the small cupboard. The room has become a spacious study bursting to the brim with overloaded bookshelves, a writing desk, and several large leather chairs that smell heavily of cigarette smoke.

I turn around. Laurie and the cupboard are gone, replaced by a brick wall. A marble console table sits against it, with the hourglass on top. Black sand slowly pours through the bottle’s neck into the bulbous bottom.

“Ginny?” I ask, turning back to look at her. She is dressed in a tweed jumper with dark brown stockings and a beige turtleneck, standing in front of one of the bookshelves. She eyes Matthew with interest and turns to give me a knowing smile, but her face falls.

“What the heck happened to you?” she demands to know, taking in the bandages on my feet and legs.

“Long story. What is this place? Where are we?”

Ginny looks around. “We are still in Salem Library,” she says. “These are the archives of the Atlantic Key. Only elders and book witches are allowed in here. But Laurie owes me some favors. It’s normally her job to protect the room from non-coven members.” She gives Matthew a smirk.

“Protect it how?” I ask, still marveling at the space around me.

“I don’t know exactly. She puts it either in the recent past or distant future. She’s told me several times, and I always forget.” She waves her hand, as if the details are irrelevant. I turn to Matthew, exasperated. He laughs at my expression.

“You don’t think this is a bit peculiar?” I ask.

“Time witches are peculiar folk,” he says.

I turn back to Ginny. “Does your mother know you’re here so late?”

“There is no ‘late’ in the witching hour. And you’re wasting your sand,” she says, snapping her fingers and pointing toward the hourglass behind me.

“Right.” I cough. “Well, first I have something for you.” I reach into the knitted grocery sack and pull out Le Morte d’Arthur . Ginny smiles, pleased, and holds out a hand. I give her the book, and she strokes it lovingly.

She takes it from me eagerly and places it on a writing desk, next to several other books on medieval folklore.

“I’m glad you reached out. I’ve been looking more into the King Below ever since I did my recall for you. My own library wasn’t enough, so I had to come here. Laurie’s been nice enough to hold it open for me all day.”

I expected as much. Once Ginny is on the scent of a good research topic, it’s difficult to get her to come up for air. The room we are in is in a state of disarray matched only by Ginny’s room at Rebecca’s house: papers strewn about; books piled high in different corners; a large tote bag with pens spilling out of it, lying much too close to the burning embers in the fireplace.

“Find anything new?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. Her face turns grim. “Nothing good, though.”

“Well, that’s comforting,” I grumble. She looks contrite as she picks up one of the books on folklore. The pages are scribbled over in inks of a dozen different colors—Ginny’s own note system that I’ve never been able to make sense of.

“It took me a while to figure him out. But there are dozens of references to the King Below in books collected by the coven as well as in the journals of our ancestral mothers.” She points to a section of the bookshelves where hundreds of bound leather tomes are crammed against the wood, their spines cracking from age and confinement.

“Margaret Halliwell’s Navigator is the most recent addition to the collection. Her whole book is written in code, but it didn’t take me too long to crack it.” Ginny smiles smugly, always endlessly proud of her mental prowess.

I tense with anticipation. “Did you read her diary entries? Were there any mentions of my mother?” Winifred had said that she and Margaret had confronted my mother after my birth. Maybe Margaret had written about the encounter. I cling to a small hope that perhaps her version of events will paint my mother in a better light than Winifred’s. My hopes are dashed as Ginny shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “Her diary entries weren’t very personal, mainly just descriptions of the ocean currents she encountered during her daily swims. But there was one specific page I found fascinating.”

Her eyes flash with intention, and the pages of the Navigator flip wildly before settling in her hands. She holds the book out to me and Matthew.

From the Records

Amelia Williams: b. 1626, d. 1657. Hedge witch

Sarah Bennet: b. 1662, d. 1699. Hedge witch

Frances Langmore: b. 1757, d. 1792. Hedge witch

Abigail Browne: b. 1795, d. 1809. Hedge witch—TKB?

Hecate Goodwin: b. 1993. Hedge witch

“I went into the records myself to confirm this list,” Ginny says. “The Atlantic Key used to consistently have a hedge witch among our ranks.”

“Here,” I point at the witch who came before me on the list. “Margaret made a note: TKB.”

Ginny nods. “I had the same thought. The King Below. I went looking for the journals of all the witches listed here. But the archives won’t give them to me.” She shoots a sullen and offended look at the stuffed bookshelves. “So I checked the journals of other coven members who were alive at the same time as Abigail Browne. Several members wrote of her sudden death. It was preceded by horrible nightmares. She kept complaining to her mother of a silver-haired man chasing her through the forest in her dreams.”

“The King Below.” I shiver. Ginny nods again.

“Apparently he used to wreak quite the havoc on the Atlantic Key in past generations.”

“I thought he only affects those who make deals with him,” I say to Ginny, reminding her of our conversation at the Raven & Crone.

She nods hesitantly. “He cannot touch most living creatures. His dominion is typically over the dead.”

There is a silent but deafening but at the end of her sentence.

“Typically?” I ask, resigned.

Ginny’s eyes flit with uncertainty. She opens another one of the old books on the writing desk and skims her eyes over it. “Well, given the secondhand accounts from many of the journals, despite his restraints, he may be able to interact with … a hedge witch.”

I plop down into one of the leather chairs.

“Of course,” I say with a laugh. An aching sadness blooms in my chest as I imagine the plight of the poor women who came before me. Girl, in Abigail Browne’s case. She had only been fourteen when she died.

“It’s still a little complicated,” Ginny rushes to say. “He is bound by the rules of nature. But a hedge witch is more at risk by the very nature of her powers and the origin of the King Below’s existence. Especially now, as Samhain nears and the veil weakens.”

My breath catches at how close her words resemble those of Margaret Halliwell.

“How much worse can it get?” I ask her. She quirks her head.

“Worse?”

“What else can he do to me? Last night, I was attacked by hellhounds. Can it get worse than that?”

Ginny’s eyes go wide, and she makes a sweeping motion with her hand, a protective sigil.

“Using hounds on a living soul?” She whistles in horror. “That skirts dangerously close to breaking the rules that bind him. He’s risking incurring nature’s wrath. Which means he’s getting desperate.”

“What does he even want with me?” I ask.

Ginny sighs. “I can only guess,” she says.

“Then guess,” Matthew prods her, his voice gentle but firm. She picks up a different book, a notebook, and holds her hands over it. It flips to a page in the middle.

“A hedge witch can be his counterpart on the living side of the veil, just as that first medicine woman was,” Ginny says, skimming her notes. As she reads, she takes a pen that had been shoved into her hair and underlines a new sentence. “Their interconnected powers maintain the boundary between the lands of the living and the dead. The hedge witch guides spirits across the veil, and the King Below accepts them into his realm so they may rest.

“When the veil is healthy and both guardians play their part, the King Below can walk in the world of the living from Samhain to Beltane. But as we’ve seen, yours is an uncommon craft.”

“And apparently I’m not even practicing correctly,” I say bitterly.

Ginny continues. “My guess is that the King Below is weak after working alone for so long. He plans to make you his hedge witch. He’ll have you help him maintain the boundary so he may regain strength and be able to travel between worlds again.” She sets her notebook down and walks over to the shelves of journals. She pulls one out and opens it to a page near the back.

“There are some notes in the oldest ancestral journals that suggest the Atlantic Key might be the descendants of the medicine woman from the folktale. I’m sure you’re a tantalizing prize for him. Original bloodline and a practitioner of hedge craft.”

“Why come for me now, though? I’m almost thirty-one. Why wait all this time?”

Ginny shrugs. “Perhaps he didn’t have a choice. His influence in the living realm is limited for most of the year, save for the weeks around Beltane and Samhain. And even then, he must conserve his powers wisely. Or maybe you’ve been under some form of protection until recently?”

Mom.

All these years, she’d lied to me and protected me. And now, without her, I’m defenseless. Just as Matthew had said. I suddenly feel very, very alone. I lean forward and put my head in my hands. I stay like that for a long while. Eventually, I feel a warm hand touch my shoulder.

“Kate.” Matthew’s voice is soft. I turn to face him.

“Did you know all of this?” I ask him. He stares at me, his mouth in a hard line.

“There have been … rumblings in the Pacific Gate. Rumors. I needed someone else to confirm them to you, though.” He speaks slowly, choosing his words carefully. His eyes scan the walls of the room.

“So, is that it, then? Some ancient death guardian is coming to drag me to the underworld?”

“I won’t let that happen,” Matthew says to me.

“Good luck,” Ginny scoffs, still reading through the journal in her hands. “Once the sun sets on Halloween, his powers will be at their maximum.”

“As will Kate’s,” Matthew says firmly.

“Is there any way to appease him?” I ask Ginny. The idea of my sisters and the whole coven being in danger, and the idea of Matthew trying to intervene, has made my hands go clammy.

“Well, you could always agree to be his hedge witch.” She laughs nervously.

“No,” Matthew growls from his chair.

“What exactly would be the outcome of that?”

“It’s not a notion worth entertaining!” Matthew argues. I turn to him and raise an eyebrow. He shuts his mouth but continues to scowl darkly.

“Based on his behavior in the stories, it would be a disaster,” Ginny breathes. “He’d likely use your powers and vitality to walk the land of the living for six months every year. Striking devilish bargains and wreaking havoc in mortal lives. And let’s not forget that not a single witch on Margaret’s list saw the age of forty.”

“Is there anything I can do? To protect myself?”

“He’s a creature of darkness. He operates in shadows. As long as the sun shines, he cannot get to you.”

“And when the sun goes down?” I prod.

Ginny’s face is grim. “Protective barriers on your home. Charmed sachets. Call on the ancestors. Anything to bring good luck.” She cracks a small smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

I slump back slowly into the leather chair.

“I should write to Miranda, tell her and Celeste not to come for Samhain. No one from the coven should come,” I whisper, my voice shaking. Matthew rises from his chair and walks to me. He kneels down beside me and takes my hands into his. Ginny watches us with fascination.

“Look at me,” he urges. I meet his gaze. “Nothing is going to happen to you or your family. Nothing.” His eyes are dark and serious. His voice unwavering.

“Are you not listening, Matthew? I’m a sitting duck. Actually, it’s worse than that because my magic is all tied up together with the very creature that’s hunting me. And now that my mom’s protection is gone, there’s no hope.”

“That’s not true,” he insists. “You have your powers. You have your sisters. Your coven.”

“I can’t bring them into this,” I say.

“You already have,” Ginny reminds me.

We both stare at her and she shrugs. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to help. I don’t think I’ll be much use in an actual confrontation, but any if there’s any information you need, I will do my best.”

The bag at my side grows heavy at the reminder.

“Did you manage to look up charm removal?” I ask.

“No, I was too busy,” she says regretfully, looking at all the books strewn across the desk and floor of the study.

I pull the cursed book out of the sack.

“This book—don’t touch it!” I say as she reaches a hand toward it. She draws back. “It’s steeped in a curse made of blood magic. The curse prevents any of the words inside from being seen. As a book witch, is it possible you could still read it?” It was my last single thread of hope.

Ginny looks thoughtful.

“Maybe. Open it up and let me see.” She leans forward as I gingerly flip to the middle. The pages are as blank as ever. Ginny stares at it for a long time.

“There is … something,” she whispers.

My heart leaps.

“Really! You can read it? What does it say?” I ask quickly. She leans away from me and shakes her head.

“I can’t read it. But I can feel the words. The book wants to be read. It’s definitely not blank.” She scrunches her nose. “Why don’t you just ask Grandma to remove the curse?” she says after a moment.

“We already did,” Matthew says quietly, still beside me. Ginny smirks.

“And she refused? Interesting,” she says, tapping her fingers on one of the books by her side. “Well, I didn’t have time to look anything up. But Grandma always says if a meta-magic witch is out of your reach, use water from the River Styx to wash away blood or shadow magic.”

My stomach sinks. Water of the River Styx is one of the most powerful ingredients a witch can have in her cabinet. The name is a euphemism: water from a section of river in which someone has recently drowned, but it’s incredibly rare. It seems every time I get close to opening my mother’s book, another obstacle gets put in my way.

“It’s a shame Margaret isn’t still alive. Any sea witch worth her salt would have water—” I stop talking, realization dawning on me.

“Kate?” Matthew asks, staring at me. “Your sister Miranda? Would she have the water?”

I shake my head and laugh.

“It doesn’t matter if she does. I already have some.”