Epilogue

I was so sure, as I laid down in the pre-dawn light of the morning, that Veronica would return for me within hours. That the Gray Man would be standing beneath my window, within days. That Sarah Claire would haunt my waking steps, before a week had passed.

But the hours passed. The days passed. The weeks passed. Nothing.

Well, I really shouldn’t say nothing. After all, that would be doing a serious injustice to the best summer of my life.

I worked at Shadowkeep, mostly dealing with the tourists downstairs. But on those little lulls and breaks, I could sneak upstairs, where the real magic lived. I began to learn every nook and cranny of the shop. I learned to differentiate the dried herbs and flowers, first by sight and then by smell, when Persi declared she would blindfold me. Soon, I knew what each and every apothecary drawer contained without reading the labels.

Back home at Lightkeep, I divided my time between the gardens, the kitchen, and the library. I read every book I could find on elemental magic, on the pentamaleficus, on the moon, and the witch’s calendar. I learned the properties of the plants in our gardens, helped Rhi dry and crush them, and wrote little labels on them, before storing them carefully in one of our pantries. It made my heart happy to see my slightly messy handwriting alongside Rhi’s neat square hand, Persi’s languorous scrawl, and Asteria’s flowing script. It felt like completing a family photograph; I was finally in the frame.

I started to get the hang of baking—not to say it would ever be my forte, but I learned my way around the kitchen, learned to listen to myself, to what I needed, and incorporate it into my cooking. I learned to observe my aunts and my mom, to read their moods, and adjust my recipes to nurture their needs—a bit of vanilla for tranquility. A pinch of allspice to soothe sore muscles after a day of weeding. A bit of cardamom for courage after a hard day. I would never be a true kitchen witch, but I could do my part. I was finally starting to understand intention. I knew now that when I took the focus off myself and onto others, intention wasn’t so hard after all. I learned to get out of my own way… most of the time.

I spent time with my new friends and my old ones, too. I went back to Portland for the 4th of July, and had a blast at Charlie’s block party barbeque, and down by the water eating ice cream and cotton candy while watching the fireworks over the bay. I invited Poe and Charlie for the weekend in August, and took them all around Sedgwick Cove. I even took them to the playhouse to see the summer’s flagship production, a revival of Sweeney Todd, during which Poe required physical restraint to keep her in her seat at the end of each musical number. They met my aunts, who kept the full extent of their witchiness under wraps, and we walked the beach to the lighthouse and ate lunch at Xiomara’s Cafe. It meant a lot to share the parts of my life that I could with them—the secrets didn’t feel so heavy when I knew they could picture my house, the inside of Shadowkeep, or the faces of my new friends.

It wasn’t all sunshine, though. Stewing just beneath the surface of this beautiful summer was the fear, and the expectation, and the questions, the constant questions of why nothing had happened yet. Where had Veronica gone, and why hadn’t she returned yet? What had become of the Darkness? Was it simply biding its time? And though she searched and reached and grasped deeply into her connection with the spirit world over and over again, Xiomara could find no trace of Asteria. So many questions, and each week that passed without any answers only magnified them.

And then there was Luca. My heart sank every time I thought of him.

It wasn’t only that Luca had no idea what was going on. I didn’t see him as often once I no longer had a reason to be at the playhouse (and about a million reasons to stay away). I’d heard that he and his uncle had had to file a missing persons report with the Sedgwick Cove police department, but we all knew that was a mere formality. If Veronica Meyers didn’t want to be found, not even a police department as uniquely skilled as ours was likely to find her. The town itself had drawn back from the Meyers, even more so than before. After all, there were outsiders, and then there was a family harboring a dangerous enemy, and though they had done it unwittingly, a safe distance had to be kept. I knew Luca could feel it—I knew he was probably hurt by it. But there wasn’t much I could do. I wouldn’t let him get drawn into this. I wouldn’t put him in danger.

The fact was that Veronica had exploited even my budding schoolgirl crush on Luca. She had used him to get to me—or at least, used his image to get to me. But I knew she was capable of far worse. I wouldn’t have put it past her to put her own stepson in real danger if she thought it would lure me into doing her bidding. And so, when he stopped by Shadowkeep and asked if I wanted to hang out, I made an excuse. I kept making excuses, and soon, he stopped asking. And when the summer season at the playhouse ended, he didn’t even bother to say goodbye before he left for Manhattan again. It made my heart ache, but I had to let it go. He was safer without me in his life, at least for now.

When September came, a wave of sadness overtook me. Even though I loved my new life in Sedgwick Cove, it was strange not packing up my backpack and heading back to Portland High, to the familiar hallways and the theater, answering excited texts about the fall musical, knowing they’d be putting it on without me, knowing that each day that passed, each rehearsal I wasn’t there for, every inside joke I missed, was another inch of string that I let out, distancing myself from my old life. It was necessary, but it was not easy. On paper, I was officially enrolled in Sedgwick Cove High School. In reality, my education going forward would be a hodgepodge of a few in-person classes, a smattering of online courses, and a lot of homeschool witchcraft. Our schedule revolved around the witch’s calendar and the phases of the moon, rather than arbitrary things like local holidays and breaks. Kids came and went at all hours of the day and night so that it seemed, to an outsider, that there was no rhyme or reason to the school at all. And speaking of outsiders, I was walking out of one of the school buildings in the middle of the morning, three weeks into September, when I first spotted her.

She was a young woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties. She had long black hair with purple streaks in it, and she wore an oversized black sweater over a pair of shredded jeans, and black boots. As I glanced at her, she appeared to be spouting a stream of colorful language under her breath as she glared, first at the school buildings, and then down at the phone in her hand. I wondered if she was lost; I had certainly been confused when someone first pointed out a row of tall, stately Victorian-style houses and told me they were, collectively, the local high school. I very nearly stopped to offer my assistance, but she looked too aggravated to accept a stranger’s help, so I kept walking.

As I turned the corner to head downtown, I chanced a glance back toward her. She was marching up the front steps of the first building. I decided that she looked determined enough to find whatever it was she was looking for, and put her out of my head as I walked toward Shadowkeep. An hour later, from my perch by the shop window, I spotted her again, this time examining one of those trifold maps of town you could find in the Visitor Center. Occasionally, I watched as she stopped and spoke to people. She looked like she might be asking for directions. She had that overtly goth look that made me think her next stop would be the tourist level of Shadowkeep, in search of gaudy pentagram jewelry, or notebooks with Edgar Allan Poe quotations on the covers. But despite my expectation that I’d see her walk through the door at any moment, she disappeared down the street, and didn’t reappear.

That afternoon, I rode my bike along the road back to Lightkeep Cottage. I was supposed to be reciting a list of gemstone properties I was trying to memorize, but I kept trailing off, entranced by the scenery. The first of the leaves were just beginning to change; little pops of red and orange and yellow bursting in the trees, heralding the coming of fall. Though I’d lived in Maine all my life, I never got tired of watching the change of the seasons, each one beautiful in its own way, transforming the landscape in its own unique style. I was so distracted that I didn’t notice the woman in front of the cottage gate until I was almost next to her. I braked hard, swerving a little to ensure I wouldn’t bump into her as she whirled and saw me coming.

“Hi,” I said as I dismounted from the bike and leaned it up against the fence. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Lightkeep Cottage,” the woman said, running a hand through her slightly wild hair. “And since the road ends just up there at the cliff, I’m assuming this is it?”

“Yeah, you found it,” I said.

“And do the Vespers live here, do you know?” the woman asked. Now that I was seeing her up close, I could see dark circles under her eyes, and an almost sallow paleness to her skin. She looked exhausted.

“Yeah, they do,” I hedged. I felt some uneasiness. I didn’t know this woman—had never seen her in Sedgwick Cove before today. It made me anxious, not knowing what it was she was here for. My words brightened her expression at once, though, and her face lit up with a relieved smile at my affirmative reply.

“Thank God,” she said, sagging a little. “I don’t think I could have walked much further. Did you know this place isn’t on Google Maps? And no one in this town gives information very freely.”

So, she wasn’t local. And she was here solely to find us. My heart began to pound. Should I call for my mother or my aunts? Was anyone even home?

“What do you want with the Vespers?” I asked, playing for time.

“I’m actually just looking for one. Her name is Wren. Wren Vesper.”

My heart leaped into a gallop as the woman stared at me, her eyes full of expectation. I swallowed hard, choking back first one answer, then another. What should I say? Should I lie? How could I know what to do if I didn’t even know who this woman was?

She noticed my strange hesitation, and she narrowed her eyes. “Is that who I’ve found? Are you Wren Vesper?”

“I… I am,” I finally managed to stammer.

The young woman’s face split into a smile so genuine that I felt my body relax slightly. Maybe I was reading into this all wrong. Maybe my anxiety about Veronica had me seeing enemies in perfectly average strangers.

“Wren Vesper,” the young woman repeated, still smiling. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been so happy to see anyone in my life. I have something for you.” And she pulled a black backpack around onto her hip, so that she could unzip it and dig around inside.

“Sorry, but… who are you?” I asked, taking half a step back from her as she pulled something from the bag, something large and rectangular, and wrapped carefully in a swath of velvet fabric.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself first,” the young woman said. She unwound that fabric from the item in her hands to reveal a very old and tattered book, which she held carefully out to me. “My name is Jess Ballard, and I’ve traveled a very long way under strict instructions to give this to no one but you.”