Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Catherine rushed me the moment I walked through the door, cupping my face so tightly, I was sure she would leave fingerprints on my cheekbones. She was still in her silk robe, hair down, no makeup on. I'd never seen her this way before and it didn't make me feel any better about anything.

‘I came to bring you some tea but you were gone,' she said once she was satisfied I was still in one piece. ‘Where were you?'

‘Not burning the city to the ground if that's what you're worried about,' I replied. I carefully prised her hands away from my face and tried not to stiffen when she drew me into her arms instead.

‘That wasn't my concern at all.' She brushed back my hair as she let me go. ‘I only wanted to know where you'd run off to without getting a good breakfast.'

Holding my hand tightly, she led me out of the foyer and into the dining room, just in case I made another run for it.

‘I couldn't sleep so I went for a walk.'

‘In your pyjamas?'

‘In my pyjamas,' I confirmed as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do. ‘It's cooler out today.'

‘Yes, we are due for a break in all that heat,' she replied, nonchalant and discussing the weather like we hadn't both seen me at the beginning of the end of the world only a few hours earlier. ‘Ashley's been in the kitchen for hours cooking up a feast. What'll it be? Biscuits and gravy, grits, pancakes, eggs? Your aunt makes the most wonderful French toast. She coats the brioche in dark cocoa powder before she cooks it, cuts through the sweetness of the custard. It really is perfection.'

Through the open kitchen door, I saw a glowering Ashley, wielding her spatula like a hunting knife.

‘No need to go to any trouble,' I gulped. ‘I'm really not hungry.'

Catherine sat and waited for me to do the same and I pulled out the wooden chair carefully, trying not to scrape the floorboards. The dining table and its six matching chairs were impossibly heavy and, according to my grandmother, some of the oldest things in the house. I was almost as afraid of doing damage to them as I was of accidentally causing the apocalypse. Right now, only one of those things was likely to get me grounded.

‘Honey, I really hope you aren't overthinking what happened last night,' she said, spreading a thick layer of honey butter on a freshly baked biscuit. ‘Your Wilcuma was a resounding success. And please close your mouth, we have all this marvellous food, you don't need to catch flies for breakfast.'

‘I really hope you're not underthinking it.' I helped myself to a big mug full of black coffee, astounded by her casual attitude. ‘You saw the same thing I did. Fire, brimstone, end of the world.'

‘What I saw was my granddaughter defending our city against an enemy.' She took a bite of her biscuit and rolled her eyes in ecstasy. ‘You really shouldn't drink coffee on an empty stomach. In fact, you really shouldn't drink coffee at all, you're too young. It'll stunt your growth.'

‘Buying jeans is difficult enough as it is. I don't need to be any taller.'

Still, I plucked a biscuit from the platter at the centre of the table and stared at it. The taste of ashes was still in my mouth, the heat from the flames still on my skin. How my grandmother could happily dig in to her breakfast was beyond me.

‘You're looking at this all wrong,' she said, waving her butter knife around in the air. Much shorter and considerably less sharp than the one she'd been tossing around the night before. ‘The vision confirmed everything we thought we knew. You are the witch who will bring the blessing back to life. You are going to reawaken your sisters. Tell me how that isn't cause for celebration.'

The bitter black coffee scalded the back of my throat as it went down.

‘Because that's not what I saw.' The biscuit disintegrated in my clenched fist. ‘I wasn't saving the city, I was destroying it. You said terrible things could happen if I didn't learn to control my magic. I've already killed a werewolf without meaning to, I've caused storms and earthquakes. I'm a walking natural disaster. How can you be so sure you're right?'

She looked back at me, blazing with fervent belief.

‘Because I believe it. Because I have always known. The prophecy says—'

‘The prophecy says the chosen witch will either end the world or save it,' I cut in. ‘The prophecy that is so important no one ever thought to write it down?'

‘Some things are too important to put in writing,' Catherine replied. ‘Once words are written, they can be read.'

‘Yes, that's literally the point of writing!' I exclaimed. ‘It saves a whole bunch of confusion, you should try it.'

‘Words can be read by the wrong people, interpreted in the wrong way,' she returned. ‘Knowledge is power, Emily, and we never willingly give anyone power over us, so writing about the prophecy is forbidden. You're giving in to your doubts again. If you'd been here, if I'd raised you—'

‘Please don't say it again,' I begged, suddenly exhausted. ‘I already know.'

She exhaled through her nose and took a bite of her biscuit, chewing slowly, thoughtfully, making me wait until she had swallowed before speaking.

‘The world is changing too quickly and I can't cope on my own anymore. Taking care of this city was never meant to be a one-woman job. My only desire in this life is for you to embrace your legacy and become the woman I have been waiting to meet ever since the day your daddy told me you were on the way.'

There was no point arguing with her. My birthday, my Becoming, was in two weeks. Either Catherine was correct and I was about to turn into some kind of super witch or my interpretation of the vision would be confirmed and nothing much would matter anymore. Fighting with the only other witch I knew was not going to help me any. I picked the biscuit crumbs from off the table and reassembled them on my plate.

‘What should I do?' I asked, relenting. ‘I'm a quick learner but I do better with a book.'

‘You need to work on your control,' she replied, pleased with my response. ‘A witch as strong as you must be able to open and close the door to her magic, not let anything and everything wander through at will.'

I dumped a teaspoon of sugar in my coffee and stirred. ‘So you're saying right now I'm an emotional cat flap.'

‘Not quite,' she replied, a smile playing on her lips in spite of herself. ‘Books won't help you connect to your natural abilities. Your magic is inside you already, everything you need is inside you already. What you must find is a way to tap into that strength.'

‘I'll try,' I promised, focusing on a speck of hope visible on the horizon. ‘If you think I can do it.'

‘I don't think, I know,' she replied smoothly. ‘You are, after all, a Bell.'

Catherine might believe there was nothing useful in the books but I'd been raised to check my sources. While she was upstairs getting dressed, and Ashley was busy outside, I snuck into the library and locked myself in. It was the calmest spot in Bell House, a sanctuary, and the only room with wood-panelled walls rather than spelled wallpaper, meaning I didn't have to watch for a growing vine or flitting bird to flicker into life out the corner of my eye. In here, I felt more like a welcome presence and less like I was being watched.

I set Dad's computer down next to the creaky old desktop, the sleek matte silver casing making its beige plastic shell look even more outdated. The internet was still a no-go but at least I could compare any findings with his seemingly endless notes on the original Emma Catherine Bell. She was real, Dad was able to prove that easily enough. There was plenty of hard evidence to confirm her existence, it was only three hundred years since she was born, practically yesterday in historical terms, but there was no perfectly preserved pamphlet titled ‘So You've Found Out You're A Witch' or ‘Prophecies 101: Literally Never a Good Thing'. Just mountains and mountains of dry, dull research.

The library was about as well organized as my dad's files. Hardbacks sat next to paperbacks, bound manuscripts were wedged in between three-ring binders full of random pieces of paper, half of them illegible and the other half too faded with age to be helpful. But it was the Bell family journals, tucked away in the back of the library, that I was most interested in. Dad taught me first-person accounts were often the most useful source, always biased but untarnished by hindsight. If Catherine's alleged prophecy was passed all the way down from our original ancestor, someone must have mentioned it in their diary at some point over the centuries.

After collecting as many as I could find, I lined up all the journals on my desk. Some of them were ancient-looking, thick pages sewn together by something I suspected was not vegan. Others were more modern notebooks, the kind of thing you expected to start with ‘Dear diary, guess who I have a crush on?' rather than ‘Dear diary, today I started Armageddon but I swear it was an accident'.

I pored over the pages, filling in some missing names and dates on my father's genealogy chart as I went and jotting down notes I thought might be useful in future; recipes for life-saving herbal concoctions, rituals to enhance abilities, spells to communicate with other witches over long distances, but there was no mention of black fire travelling along Spanish moss, no mention of one hundred foot tidal waves, and absolutely no mention of the prophecy.

Also, the journals didn't cover our family's entire history. There were conspicuous gaps, whole decades missing sometimes. Some of my ancestors only wrote a few notes while others left dozens of completed journals, as though they'd committed their entire life to paper.

Every time I came across a relatable moment, I found myself smiling. I hadn't expected it, but all these women, existing sometimes centuries apart, all wrote about the same things. Teenage problems had been the same since the beginning of time – unrequited love, overbearing parents, a lack of freedom, and page after page of uncertainty and doubt about their place in the world. At the same time, they were living through so much hardship; recessions, depressions, war after war after war and all the pain that followed, but nevertheless, they did what they could to aid the people of Savannah.

They were all the same but different, their magics manifesting based on what was needed at the time. Healers were most common along with conduits, who could commune with the dead, and elementals like Catherine, who could manifest the elements at will. Bell women had acted as spies, healed whole communities when plague struck, they influenced powerful historical figures, and above all else they held one duty sacred above all others: Bell witches saved women when no one else cared if they lived or died.

And while there was no mention of black flames, there was plenty of talk of fire. The great fires of 1796 and 1820. The more I read, the more one thing became worryingly clear. No matter what we Bell witches did, Savannah seemed destined to burn.

Hours passed like minutes, the steady, comforting energy of the library pushing me on, lending me the strength to read one more chapter, look at one more journal. Almost the whole day passed by while I was lost in my research but I felt as though I'd only just sat down at the desk, fully sustained and content, absorbed in the lives of my ancestors. Until I came to the one book I'd been avoiding. It was easily the oldest book here, the cover made from slick animal skin that didn't feel quite like any kind of leather I'd encountered before, and any writing on the cover had long since faded away. Inside, the pages were so fragile and thin, they were almost see-through. It fell open on a random page somewhere near the middle of the book, the title of the chapter written in ancient, elaborate script.

‘A ritual for binding a Bell witch,' I read aloud.

All around me, the library shuddered.