Just as the engine roared to life and I accelerated down the alley, two cops, neither of them Bert, smashed through the back door. In my rearview mirror, I saw the three massive house cats jump on the cops, slicing them with sharp claws and preventing them from pursuing me. I swerved as I nearly choked on my own breath, my foot firmly on the accelerator. I didn’t pause as I screeched onto the street, revving the engine to speed past the bloodthirsty rabble gathered at the front of the building.
As I flew through the streets of Salem, a wave of emotions flooded through me. Panic, fear, but mostly guilt at having left the cats alone with people capable of hurting them. People armed with guns. What if they were taken by animal control? I nearly slammed on the brakes to turn around and go back to them, but the thought of Tom’s face if I dared to come back without answers was enough to keep my car pointed in the right direction. I had to get the answers we needed. That was the only way forward. Answers, and then I would run back to them and this whole thing would just go away.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Retracing my steps from earlier, I made my way back to Bianca’s house with break-neck speed. My body shook, and my hands barely gripped the wheel as I tried to focus on traffic, weaving in and out of cars as I sped toward her large Art Deco home.
When I reached the gates, I pulled the car over, hardly bothering to park in line, and bolted up to her front entryway. After banging on her door for at least a few minutes, I figured she wasn’t home, and ran back to the car and made my way to the only other place I thought she could possibly be. Arriving at Dot’s bakery, relief filled me as my eyes fell on the two of them sitting sipping tea at the front seats of the bakery through the storefront window. On silent feet, I slipped inside.
“Price,” Dot’s cheerful voice chirped up at me as I padded toward their table. A flush crept up on her cheeks as she lifted her tea to cover her mouth. “Lovely to see you here, sweetheart. Are you here for some more treats?”
I shook my head and pulled up a chair, sitting between the two. Dot smiled at me warmly. Bianca, on the other hand, wore an expression of pure steel.
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” Bianca asked, and from her tone I knew it was no pleasure at all.
“I know what you are,” I spat. “I know you’re witches.” I folded my arms over my chest and glowered at Bianca. “And I’m pretty certain one of you is a very wicked witch.”
Bianca stood up, and with a wave of her hand, everyone in the bakery vanished, the doors slammed shut, the lights dimmed, and the curtains closed. I wanted to clap my hands in delight, it was like a scene straight out of a wizarding movie, but I refused to give Bianca D’Arcy the satisfaction of my awe. I kept my lips pressed together tightly.
Bianca sat down slowly, her movements calculated. She turned her head in my direction in a fluid motion. Exorcist, eat your heart out. “Go on, Priscilla. You have our attention.”
I leaned forward in my chair, feigning a confidence I didn’t feel. “You know, when you told me you’d met Agatha working at the woolen mill, I hadn’t expected it to be in 1895.”
Bianca’s pupils expanded and contracted like a nuclear explosion in her otherwise frozen face and I felt a kick of satisfaction in my gut. Take that, sly bitch. Dot reached for a piece of cake, stuffing it into her mouth with her fingers. I stared at the plump old woman as she avoided my eyes and opened my mouth to ask her something.
“Agatha was a special breed of witch, you could say.” Bianca cut across me before I could address Dot and her steely voice sent a chill up my spine. She reminded me of Cruella Deville, with her over-the-top black fur coat and perfectly coiffed icy hair. “She was powerful, we sensed that the moment we met her. Dorothy and I had been raised in witching families, magic was part of our culture as well as our blood, but Agatha’s mother was a Blank. A child with no magical ability, born into a witching family. She left the family home at a young age, met a man, had Agatha. When she realized what Agatha was…” Bianca’s voice faltered and she frowned at the table for a moment before she spoke again. “Agatha bore the brunt of her mother’s bitterness at being a Blank. The more Agatha’s magical ability flourished, the more her mother made her suffer.”
Dot took over the story. Her voice was strained. “By the time Sissy, Agatha’s aunt, found her, Agatha had developed her own brand of magic, unbound by the rules and traditions those of us who grow up in magical families believe to be sacrosanct. Maybe it was in her nature, or maybe it was a result of her desperate need to find strength deep within herself to survive the terrible things she’d faced, but whatever the reason, by the time we met Agatha when she started working for my father at the mill, she was more powerful than any other witch I’d ever met.”
“And we were drawn to her like moths to a flame, weren't we, Dotty?” Bianca's face softened as she looked at her old friend.
Dot chuckled and patted my hand. “We got into some scrapes in those first few years, I can tell you that much, Price. Damn near broke my parents’ hearts. We went against all tradition and decided we weren’t being sent off to some coven our parents chose; Portland or Newport or Astoria. Salem was a young city back then, with a very small magical population, and the witching council had no intention of granting the city rights to its own coven.”
“But Agatha never needed permission from anyone to do a damn thing,” Bianca said. The two smiled at each other, swallowed by their memories. Bianca’s smile faded. “Then the flu came and it changed everything.”
Dot nodded her head solemnly. “It was like the beginning of the end, that cursed flu.” The old woman turned her plump face toward me. “Witching families are generally long-lived. Not immortal, you understand, but in good health, a witch could live for two hundred years. Maybe more. There aren’t many witching families outside of the older cities and towns in the world, but they had survived well enough through the millennia. Until the influenza epidemic scoured the Earth.”
“For whatever reason, witches were even more vulnerable than regular humans to the virus,” Bianca said, taking over from her friend. “It ravaged the international witching community, and Agatha, Dot, and I all left Salem to help to rebuild the magical world. I ended up in Moscow, Dorothy in London, and Agatha in New York. We swore to each other we’d return to Salem and rekindle our little coven, but the flu was only the start of those dark days.”
“The Great War, the Russian Civil War, the Depression, the Second World War,” Dot said.
Bianca drew her perfectly groomed brows together. “The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam.” She shook her head. “The darkness just kept coming and the magical community did their best, as they’ve always done, to fight that wickedness and to heal the broken.”
“Witches can heal people?” The words burst from my lips before I could swallow them; so much for cool and disinterested.
Bianca cast a cold eye over me. “Witches do a great many things that the world will never know about. And we take great pains to ensure it stays that way.” I shifted back in my chair, suddenly remembering what had brought me here. Bianca continued. “But a few decades ago, when we each reached our hundredth birthday, we were released from our duties and, one by one, we all drifted back to Salem and began to build our lives here again. Our second lives, as we witches call it, when our duty is done and our time is our own. And a second life is a very precious thing, Priscilla.”
Dot patted my hand as Bianca shot me an ice-cold glare. Dot’s voice was gentle. “It takes a lot of magic to allow a witch stay in the same city for their second life. Without the magic, people would begin to notice that we barely age. And every coven guards their magic very closely. Any change in the coven effects not only our own personal spells, but the entire coven’s spells.”
“Not that Agatha gave a rat’s ass,” Bianca hissed. “Oh no, Agatha had certain ideas about how things ran, and because she was powerful, she thought she could enforce those ideas on the rest of the coven—Dot and me.”