Oh, shit.
Alice chose her words with care, protecting other people's secrets. And delicate — Kate could take this in two very different directions. "Not nuts. I heard, third hand, fourth hand, someone who looked like Jackie had been seen up in Naskeag Falls. I didn't tell you because I didn't know. This was not a reliable witness, and it's too important for guesses and maybes."
Kate sat there, studying the parlor corner. She settled her hand on the cat. Amazing, how gentle those big scarred hands could be. Or how violent. She finally looked at Alice.
"You've got something else, as well."
Spit it out yourself, Alice Haskell. She'll find out sooner or later.
"The word was, this big blonde girl with some really ugly scars on her head was hanging around the alleys up there last summer. Hanging around with that girl you found dead up at the stone circle."
Kate's hand paused in petting Atropos, squeezed into a fist, and her knuckles turned white. "Not nuts." Anguish washed over her face. "God in heaven, Alice, what did I give birth to?"
Atropos stood up on Kate's thigh, purring strong enough that Alice could hear, rubbing her head against that fist and then licking it with delicate strokes of her pink tongue. Damned cat must have a doctorate in psychotherapy tucked away somewhere.
Or was it the House? Help me with this. "That wasn't Jackie, Kate. Jackie is dead. You felt her die. But we used too much Power. The brujo took it and rode it and found a body nearby that hadn't had time to die yet. Brain dead, body still alive, heart and lungs and all still pumping. He took it and did some magical transplant surgery while we burned his old body into ash. He's old, Kate, he'd done this before."
Kate looked sick, but her fist relaxed back onto fur. Alice felt power rising from the Spring and flowing out of the timbers of the House, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, felt generations of Haskell Witches gathering in the shadows and corners of the parlor and giving her words strength.
She saw Jackie's body sprawled face down in the gravel by Tom Pratt's carriage house, half her skull blown away, saw first one hand jerk and then the other, one knee shift, one fist clench just like Kate's fist had clenched. The ruined corpse pushed up and sat up and staggered to its feet like a puppet on strings, still bleeding, torn brains still glistening in the afternoon sun, and went hunting. Hunting the battlefield and burning buildings of the Pratts' compound, hunting the lost souls and shattered bodies of that smuggler's boat. She felt the Power flowing to it out of all that death and dying.
She didn't want to know what else it was hunting.
Kate's teeth were chattering, face white, eyes wide and unfocused as if they saw exactly what Alice had seen.
Shock.
The EMT took charge again, to hell with exhaustion. She forced Kate out of the chair like a massive lump of putty to lie down on the parlor rug, lifted her feet to the chair to force blood to her brain, efforts moving that heavy body that left Alice gasping. She draped Aunt Jean's knitted Afghan across Kate's chest and staggered out to the kitchen for hot water and the coffee maker, instant coffee as a stopgap while the real drug brewed.
By the time she returned with a mug hot in her hands, Kate had struggled back into the chair and looked as if she might live. Damned tough woman. Damned stubborn woman.
But she did take the coffee. With her left hand. Alice glanced at Kate's right hand lying in her lap, blinked, blinked again, and stared. Glowing green, orange, silver tarnished blue-black but still somehow glowing with life and power, a rowan sprig lay in Kate's right hand. Atropos stared at the glittering thing, too, sitting up in her Bast-statue pose and purring.
Grannie Rowley's brooch. It couldn't be anything else. It burned bright in Alice's memory, years ago when she and Kate had been kids together, visiting the strange old woman living up on the ridge. Even before Alice started training with Aunt Jean, Grannie Rowley had been different. Fascinating. Strong. A sense of belonging in the land around them. And then she'd died, stroke or heart attack one night while Kate was staying with her.
"You found it."
"Mom had it. Twenty goddamn years, she had it. Kept it locked up in the parlor closet. Part of the stuff the lawyer sent to me. Wish me a happy eighteenth birthday."
"Oh, Christ . . . You okay?"
"Mad. Sad. Glad. Feels good to hold it. Same kind of feeling the House gives, strength, protection, connection. I don't think it's just jewelry. I remember Grannie's voice when I hold it."
And then she looked up, strain still lining her face. "It can't tell me where Jeff went. Grannie never met him. Nobody has touched it since before he was born."
What is the House doing? What is the Spring doing? Or is this the other magic, the magic of the stones?
Stones. "Kate, something you told me, back in June. You were out on Ayers Island. You saw me, you saw the Morgan girls, visions of trouble when you touched stone. That's why you came across and saved my butt. Visions through the stone, granite talking to granite. I wonder if our Seeing stone would show you Jeff."
She knew Kate's face, more than thirty years of reading expressions and no-expressions. Kate was still fighting her war between magic and that hardliner Congregationalist God the Pilgrims transplanted here, stoning witches, hanging witches, drowning witches, the whole Salem legacy that had stomped into her life after her mother remarried. Kate did not want to use that chunk of tourmaline. She'd gained just enough belief to be afraid of believing.
"I can't do it, Kate. I'm too tired."
