The Calling

2. Searching

March 3, 1977

My wedding garments are laid out. The white robe embroidered in gold with the runes to summon power. The belt woven of gold and crimson threads. The groom’s wristbands, beaten gold set with rubies, that I inherit from Grania’s father. Everything is spelled with charms for strength and fertility, with protections against whatever might harm us, with blessings for wealth and long life.

I wonder about love, though. Grania teases me, saying that nothing truly touches my heart, and maybe she’s right. I know I don’t love her, though I’m fond of her.

Yet my mind lingers on last summer’s fling with that American Woodbane, Selene. Now, I know that wasn’t love, but Goddess, it was exciting, the most intense experience I’ve ever had. And that includes all the times I’ve been with Grania. Still, Grania is a pretty thing and very pliant. And she’s strong in her magick. Our children will be powerful, and that’s the most important thing. Power. Woodbane power.

So why do I hesitate as I prepare for our wedding? And why do I keep dreaming of that damned white dress?

— Neimhidh

Bree’s father’s apartment was on Park Avenue and Twenty-second Street. Bree gave directions, and I maneuvered Das Boot off the FDR, across Twenty-third Street, and finally onto Park and into the garage beneath the building.

The garage attendant gave me a strange look as we pulled in. With its two front quarter panels covered with gray body filler, its slate blue hood and shiny new metal bumper, Das Boot was not looking its most sophisticated.

Bree cranked down her window and spoke to the guard. “We’re guests of Mr. Warren in apartment thirty-sixty,” she said. “He’s arranged for a guest pass.”

The guard checked a computer screen and let us in. The garage was filled with BMWs, Jags, Mercedes, and top-of-the-line SUVs.

I patted Das Boot on its piebald fender. “You’re good for this place,” I told it. “They need to see how the other half drives.”

“It’s the perfect city car,” Robbie assured me. “No one would ever try to steal it.”

Loaded down with bags, we walked to the elevator. Bree hit the button for the thirtieth floor, and I felt Hunter clasp my hand. This was so glamorous, like something in a movie.

Raven smiled at Sky. “This is very cool. I love the city.”

Sky smiled back at her. “Think I could persuade you to visit the Cloisters?”

“Hell, yes,” Raven said. “It’s a medieval museum, right? I love that stuff.”

The elevator opened, and we walked down a narrow hallway to the apartment at the very end. Mr. Warren opened the door before we knocked. Like Bree, he was tall, slender, and very good-looking. He was dressed in an elegantly tailored suit and silk tie.

“Come on in,” he said. He pointed to a little video monitor by the door that revealed the thirtieth-floor hallway. “I saw you arrive.” He pecked Bree on the cheek, then gave me a smile. “Hello, Morgan. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Hi, Mr. Warren,” I mumbled. He had always made me a little nervous.

He hit a button, and the scene on the monitor switched to the garage. Another button showed us the building’s lobby and doorman. “I’ve told the security people that you’ll be here through Monday,” he said. “Did you have a good trip?”

Bree stretched. “Perfect. Morgan drove. I slept most of the way. Oh, Dad, you’ve met Robbie, Raven, and Sky. And this is Hunter Niall, Sky’s cousin. I’ve mentioned him to you.”

I wondered what, exactly, Bree had told her father. Did he know that Hunter and Sky were witches, that his own daughter practiced Wicca? Probably not, I decided. Mr. Warren was a pretty hands-off parent. Half the time he was in New York City instead of Widow’s Vale, and even when he was home, Bree didn’t have a curfew, didn’t have to be home for dinner by a certain time, didn’t have to call to say where she was. My parents had been a little leery of letting me come on this trip because of that.

Mr. Warren glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to run, kids. Meeting. Bree, I’ve left a couple of extra keys in the kitchen. Show everyone around and help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. You can sleep anywhere except my room. I’ve got a dinner out on Long Island tonight, so I won’t be back until quite late.” He brushed her cheek with a kiss and reached into the hall closet for his coat. “Enjoy the city!”

When he was gone, Bree smiled and said, “Come on, let me give you the grand tour.”

The grand tour took all of two minutes. Mr. Warren’s apartment consisted of a decent-size living room whose windows looked out over Park Avenue, a master bedroom, a small study, an even smaller guest room, a bathroom, and a tiny efficiency kitchen.

Everybody oohed and aahed, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, and I suspected the others did, too. Bree had told us the apartment had only two bedrooms, but somehow I’d expected something bigger, grander. Privacy was going to be tough.

“Nice,” Robbie said at last. “Great location.”

“One bathroom?” Raven sounded incredulous. “For seven of us?”

Bree shrugged. “It’s Manhattan. Space is at a premium. Actually, this place is huge by Manhattan standards.”

“I like the decor,” Sky said. “It’s simple.”

That was an understatement, I thought. Like the Warrens’ Widow’s Vale house, the apartment was austere. The walls were white, the upholstery, muted neutrals. The furniture was light and spare, with an L-shaped couch, a coffee table, and a flat-screen TV the only furniture in the living room. One painting hung on the north wall, an abstract block of brown fading into tan against a white canvas. There were no knickknacks, no photographs or vases. The room didn’t feel very lived in.

We dropped our bags in a pile next to the couch. Hunter stood by the windows. In faded jeans that hung loose on his hips and an oversize wheat-colored sweater, he looked vaguely bohemian and wholly beautiful. The light made his eyes turn a deep jade. In the time that I’d known him, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Hunter’s eyes. Sometimes they were the color of spring grass, sometimes the color of the sea.

“What’s the plan, then?” Sky asked Hunter.

“It’s just after ten,” Hunter said. He hadn’t bothered to check a clock. His witch senses included an uncanny sense of time. “I need to call on some people,” he went on. Briefly he explained his mission to the others.

“Oh, right,” Raven said sarcastically. “No problem.”

“Hey, I lost a needle in a haystack last week,” Bree chimed in. “Think you could find that for me? You know, when you’ve got a second.”

“Do you want help?” Sky asked Hunter quietly, and I had to suppress an irrational surge of jealousy. She’s his cousin, I reminded myself. They look out for each other.

Hunter glanced at me with a very slight smile, and I knew he’d noticed my reaction. “No,” he told Sky. “Not for this part of it, anyway. It will be easier for me to get people to talk if I’m on my own. We’ll meet back here before dinner. Say, six o’clock?”

“Works for me,” said Raven. “There are some stores near St. Mark’s Place I want to check out. Anyone want to come?”

Sky, Bree, and Robbie signed on for the St. Mark’s excursion. I decided to stay at the apartment, my excuse being that I wanted to rest for a bit after the drive. Actually, I had a secret mission of my own in the city. I needed to come up with a plan of action.

When the others had left, I went to the wide double window that looked out over Park Avenue. I could feel the city humming beneath me, people in cars and buses and taxicabs; pedestrians and bicycle messengers. I felt a twinge of regret that I wasn’t down there on the streets with the others. But I had work to do.

I opened my backpack and took out a book bound in dark red cloth and a dagger with an intricately carved ivory handle. They were part of my inheritance, the Book of Shadows and the athame, or ceremonial dagger, that had belonged to my birth mother, Maeve Riordan. The rest of her witch’s tools were back in Widow’s Vale, hidden in my house.

I settled myself on Mr. Warren’s living room floor and opened the Book of Shadows to an entry dated April 1982, a few months after Maeve and Angus Bramson, my birth father, arrived in America. They’d fled Ireland when their coven, Belwicket, was destroyed by something called the dark wave, a deadly concentration of dark energies. Maeve and Angus were the only survivors.

With nothing left in Ireland and a clear sense that they were being hunted, Maeve and Angus came to New York City. Eventually they left the city and settled upstate, an hour or two north of Widow’s Vale, in a tiny town called Meshomah Falls.

The entry on the page I’d turned to talked about how unhappy Maeve was in her Hell’s Kitchen flat. She felt Manhattan was a place cut off from the pulse of the earth. It made her grief for all she’d lost that much sharper.

I held the athame to the page covered with Maeve’s handwriting. Slowly I passed the age-worn silver blade over the blue ink, and as I did, pinpricks of light began to form a different set of words entirely. It was one of Maeve’s secret entries.

I have been staring at this gold watch for hours, as though it were a gift from the Goddess herself. I never should have brought it with me from Ireland. Oh, it’s a beautiful object, passed down through the ages from one lover to another. Were I to cast my senses, I know I could feel generations of love and desire radiating from it. But it was given to me by Ciaran. If Angus ever saw it, it would break him.

Ciaran gave it to me the night we pledged ourselves to each other. He said that if you place it beneath the house, the tick of the watch will keep the hearts beating within steady and faithful. Is my holding on to it a selfish hope that Ciaran somehow will find his way back into my life? I must not even think such thoughts. I’ve chosen to live my life with Angus, and that’s all there is to it.

Next month Angus and I will leave this dreadful city for a new home upstate. I must end this heartsick madness now. I can’t bring myself to destroy the watch, but I won’t take it, either. Angus and I will move on. The watch will stay here.

Ciaran had been Maeve’s mùirn beatha dàn, but he had lied to her, betrayed her. And then, years later, long after she’d rejected him, he had found her and Angus in Meshomah Falls, where he’d trapped them in an abandoned barn and set fire to it. She was pure goodness, he pure evil. How could she have loved him? It was unfathomable. Yet…yet I’d loved Cal, who had nearly killed me the same way Ciaran killed Maeve.

I needed to know more. I needed to understand, as much to silence my questions about myself as to know Maeve more fully.

When we’d made the plan to come to New York, it had dawned on me that while we were there, I’d be only a subway ride from where Maeve and Angus had lived. If I could find their apartment, then maybe, just maybe, I’d find the watch. Maeve had said she was leaving it behind, after all. I knew the odds were heavily against its still being there—it had been almost twenty years ago, and even if she’d hidden the watch, surely someone would have found it. Still, I couldn’t let the idea go. I wasn’t even sure why I was so obsessed with the watch. Morbid fascination? I needed to see it, hold it.

Of course, I realized that anything touched by Ciaran was tainted, even potentially dangerous. Which was why I hadn’t mentioned the watch to Hunter or anyone. Hunter would never approve of my doing anything remotely risky. But I had to try to find it.

I tucked the athame and the Book of Shadows back into my pack. At home I’d tried scrying with fire for Maeve’s old Manhattan address. All I’d seen was a vision of the inside of a dingy apartment. Granted, most witches considered fire the most difficult medium with which to scry, but I had a natural connection to it, another gift from Maeve. But what the fire revealed was only a second cousin to what I asked for, close but not quite right. Was I doing it wrong?

It was doubly frustrating because just before Yule, I’d undergone a ceremony calledtàth meànma brach with Alyce Fernbrake, the blood witch who ran Practical Magick, an occult store near Widow’s Vale. Tàth meànma is a kind of Wiccan mind meld, where one witch enters another’s mind.

Tàth meànma brach takes it one step further: it’s an exchange of all you have inside you. Alyce gave me access to her memories, her loves and heartbreaks, her years of study and knowledge. In turn I gave her access to the ancestral memories that flowed through me from Maeve and her mother Mackenna before her.

I came out of the tàth meànma brach with a much deeper knowledge of magick. Without it I’d never have stood a chance against Selene. It had focused me, connected me to the earth so powerfully that for almost two days afterward I’d felt almost like I was hallucinating.

Since then I’d gotten more used to the infusion of knowledge I’d received from Alyce. I wasn’t conscious of it all the time. It was more like I’d been given a filing cabinet chock-full of files. When I needed a certain piece of knowledge, all I had to do was check my files.

Of course, the knowledge in those files was specific to Alyce. For example, I now had a wonderful sense of how to work with herbs and plants. Unfortunately, scrying wasn’t Alyce’s strong point. That meant I had to resort to more mundane means to find out where Maeve and Angus had lived.

In Mr. Warren’s study I found a Manhattan phone book. I got the address for the city’s Bureau of Records, then consulted a subway map Mr. Warren had left out for us. The bureau was near City Hall. The number 6 train would get me there.

I’d just put on my coat and scarf and grabbed one of Mr. Warren’s spare keys when the door to the apartment opened and Bree came in.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey, yourself. Where is everyone?”

“I left them in an East Village art gallery. There’s some kind of performance going on involving a stone pyramid, two dancers dressed in aluminum foil, and a giant ball of string. Robbie was mesmerized,” she said with a laugh. “Are you going out?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to lie to Bree, but I didn’t want to tell her about my quest for Maeve’s watch, either. I was afraid she’d try to talk me out of it. “I was going to run a few errands,” I said vaguely. “And I thought we could use some candles for Saturday night’s circle. You’re sure your dad doesn’t mind us having a circle in his apartment?”

“He probably wouldn’t, but he’ll never know,” Bree assured me. “He’s seeing some woman who lives in Connecticut, and he’s going out to her place this weekend.” She pulled out her wallet and checked for cash. “I’m going to stock up on some food—if I know my dad, his idea of food in the house is one wedge of gourmet cheese, a jar of imported olives, and a bag of ground coffee.”

Bree’s prediction was accurate except for the cheese, which was nonexistent. “Why don’t we go together?” she suggested. “I know all the good stores in the neighborhood.”

“Sure,” I said. I realized I was glad of the chance to spend a little normal time with Bree, even though it would delay my trip to the Bureau of Records.

Bree and I had been best friends since we were little kids. That, like nearly everything else, had changed this past fall when Cal Blaire came into our lives. Bree fell for him, Cal chose me, and we’d had a horrible fight and stopped speaking to each other. For a hideous couple of months we were enemies. But on the night that Cal tried to kill me, Bree had helped save my life.

Since then we’d begun to rebuild our friendship. We hadn’t yet found our way back to being completely easy with each other. On the one hand, she was the friend I knew and loved best. On the other, I’d learned there were parts of Bree I didn’t know at all.

Besides, I was different now. Since I’d learned I was a blood witch, I’d been through experiences that were both amazing and horrifying. Once Bree and I had shared everything. Now there was a huge part of my life she could never understand.

We walked toward Irving Place. The wind was brisk and cold. I gave myself a moment to adjust to being on the streets, massive buildings towering overhead, people hurrying by. It was as if New York moved at a pace faster and more intense than the rest of the world. It felt both intimidating and wonderful.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Bree said.

“It feels like we’re light-years away from Widow’s Vale.”

“We are,” Bree said with a grin.

“So…things are good between you and Robbie?” I asked.

“I guess,” she said, her grin fading. We went into a supermarket. Bree grabbed a basket, headed for the deli counter, and ordered macaroni salad and sliced turkey breast.

“You guess? You two seemed pretty much in sync on the drive down.”

“We were,” she said. She shrugged. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Why not?”

She gave me a look that made me feel like I was seven.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong with Robbie?”

“Nothing. We get along great. That’s the problem.”

We moved to the aisle with chips and sodas, and I tried to make sense of what Bree had just said. I’d seen Bree break up with dozens of guys for all kinds of reasons. One was too self-absorbed; another too controlling. One bad-mouthed everyone; another couldn’t talk about anything except tennis. One guy was such a lousy kisser that Bree got depressed just looking at his lips.

“Okay,” I finally said. “Maybe I’m dense, but what is the problem with a relationship in which the two people get along great?”

“Simple,” she said. “If you love someone, you can get hurt. If you don’t, you can’t.”

“So?”

“So…Robbie wants us to be in love. But I don’t want to fall in love with Robbie. Too risky.”

“Bree, that’s ridiculous,” I said.

She grabbed a bottle of Diet Coke and turned to me, anger flickering in her dark eyes. “Is it?” she said. “You loved Cal, and look where it got you.”

I stood there, stunned. She could be so cruel sometimes. That was one of the things I hadn’t really realized about her until our falling-out.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I–I didn’t mean that.”

“You did,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm.

“Okay, maybe I did,” she admitted. The hand that held the basket was trembling. “But I also meant that loving someone—really opening your heart to them—is just asking to have your heart smashed and handed back to you in little pieces. I mean, love is great for selling perfume. But the real thing, Morgan? It just trashes everything.”

“Do you really believe that?” I demanded.

“Yes,” she said in a flat voice. She turned and strode down the aisle.

“Bree, wait,” I called, hurrying down the aisle after her.

I caught up to her at a rack full of assorted potato chips. She was staring at them with a frown, apparently concentrating on just which flavor was the most desirable.

“Is this all because of your parents?” I asked in a tactful, subtle way. Bree’s parents had split up when she was twelve. It had been ugly—Bree’s mom had run off to Europe with her tennis instructor. Bree had been shattered.

Now she shrugged. “My parents are just one example among many,” she said. “Look, it’s not really that big a deal. I’m just not into the whole love thing right now, that’s all. I’m too young. I’d just rather have fun.”

I could tell the subject was closed, and I felt a pang as the realization of how far apart we’d been pulled hit me yet again.

I sighed. “Listen, there’s somewhere I need to go. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

Bree looked at me, and I could read regret on her face, too. Once she would have asked where I was going, and I would have invited her along.

“I’ll get the candles and some salt for the circle,” she said. “Sure you’ll be okay on your own?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”