House of Ivy & Sorrow

FIVE





Nana doesn’t say anything as we go inside. Or when I follow her to the kitchen. She pulls a chocolate pudding from the little fridge, grabs a spoon, and eats while staring me down.

I am in so much trouble.

Gulping down my fears, I say, “I assume you were watching, so you have to admit that I shouldn’t have gone straight home. That guy could have followed, and then he would have known both entrances to our house.”

She takes another spoonful.

I hate when she does this. It’s worse than a lecture. Worse than punishment. My guilt is enough of a penalty. I lean my head on the counter. “Nana, I’m sorry. Really.”

The pudding cup lets out a crumpled cry when she crushes it. “You need to tell me exactly what was said between you and that man.”

I look up, surprised that she doesn’t sound angry. The spying spell doesn’t include sound unless you want to throw in bat ears, and those are pretty hard to come by so we save them for important things. “He asked if I was related to Carmina.”

“Did you say your name? Did he hear your name at all?”

“I’m sure he didn’t.” Then my stomach drops. “But I did say Winn’s name. Is that bad?”

She sighs. “It’s not good. You may have put him in serious danger—you know the power of names.”

I suck in my tears and guilt. “I was so scared. I wasn’t thinking straight. The man hardly said anything, but he carried . . . something. Shadows. Darkness. Anger. It kept oozing out of him. Not sure what it was, except it was bad.”

She nods. “I could see it.”

“What was it?” I reach out for her hand. “What is going on? I think I have a right to know. It’s after me, isn’t it?”

Nana is not exactly the kind of grandma who looks young, but with one sigh she ages another few decades. “I hoped this day would not come. Carmina and I worked so hard to prevent this from happening. But those shadows found him—and since his intentions toward us are good, he isn’t repelled by our barriers.”

“Who is he?”

Her look is flat. “Surely you know, Josephine. Separate him from the darkness, and you will see.”

I do as she says, picturing the man with as much detail as possible. He has dark hair and light eyes, but I can’t remember the exact color. He is tall and lean, and his skin, while tan, has traces of freckles. I gasp. Mom never had a single one, and who else would care so much about finding my mother? He seemed familiar to me because . . . “He’s my father?”

She nods. “Joseph Johnson.”

I can’t seem to find air. This is a day I never thought about because witches simply do not know their fathers. We don’t do families like that. We have relationships, but they never result in commitment. We only have girls—girls who possess our bloodline and power. It is the mother, grandmother, daughter, sister bonds that make up our families.

Romantic love never ends well for us, though we need it like anyone else. The men we choose to be with are always in danger of becoming pawns, leverage. Which must be my father’s case, because knowing who he is makes me want to protect him. Nana doesn’t have to say anything for me to know what’s going on. Someone is using him to get to us. Someone cruel and consumed with darkness.

“Carmina loved him very much,” Nana says. I can feel the sorrow in her voice, the pain of losing her daughter and her daughter losing the man she loved. “She wanted so badly to stay with Joseph, and she took many risks to be with him as long as she was. But when she found out she was pregnant, she knew she had to protect you and him. She disappeared from his life and came home, though I don’t think she ever got over it.”

“He never knew where she went?” I ask.

She heads for the apothecary, and I follow. “Oh, he tried to find her. We did many things to ensure that he couldn’t, since any knowledge he had would only hurt him. When she was Cursed, we put more barriers around him, for fear that he would be used as he is now. It seems our hunters finally found a way through.”

“If only we knew who they were.” There are other witch bloodlines. Some friendly. Others not so much. The Curse must have come from someone’s magic, but no one will own up to it. Those who go looking for answers end up dead. All we can do is what we’ve done for centuries: Run. Hide. Hope it doesn’t find us again.

“If only, yes. The shadows around Joseph are similar to your mother’s Curse. I fear they have come for us, Josephine.” She grabs the jar of spiders she made me collect. Spiders, which crawl and sneak and kill. What she plans to do with them, I’m not sure yet. “But if we are very careful, we may be able to free him. And if we are very lucky, we could discover your mother’s killer as well.”

My eyes go wide. “Are you saying we might be able to avenge Mom’s death?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” She grabs a bag of crow ashes and heads for her desk. Crow and spider—this spell must be something with bite. “Of course, it was safer to hide before, since making sure you came of age was far more important than vengeance. But if they’re knocking at our door, they will have hell to pay for what they’ve done to us.”

“We can’t leave? Find another magical place to hide in?” Not that I love the idea of leaving Gwen, Kat, and Winn, but the Hemlock line is at risk here.

Nana’s expression is positively grim. “It takes too much time to search and rebuild. When Agatha came here, there were still five witches in the New York house. Only one had been Cursed. By the time she established this house, none of them were alive.”

“Oh.” My heart doubles its pace. I don’t have to ask more questions. The Curse has been a plague for generations, slowly killing family lines. The Sages, the Maggis, the Firebrands . . . they are long gone. And we might be next.

“I don’t mean to frighten you, Josephine, but if this evil plans to snuff us out I cannot sit here and wait for it. Maybe we can find answers—and with those answers we could stop this, save other witching families from the Curse. We might be a small bloodline, but we are strong.” She puts her wrinkled hand on my arms, squeezes once. “What do you say? Shall we fight back?”

I can feel the smile on my lips, which reminds me too well that I am no mild-mannered, normal girl. Murdering a witch is a grave, evil offense. We should not kill our own—there have been too many years of other people doing that for us. When my mother died, our sister witches gave their condolences, but we wondered which one of them had done the unthinkable and why.

My mother did not die without pain. I remember her cries, young as I was. I would sit by her bedside, holding her hand as Nana tried everything to remove the Curse. She did all the spells she could think of to stop Mom’s blood from turning black, but it never worked. Whatever that poison was, it wasn’t going anywhere. I remember the moment I knew Mom would die, though she never said it.

“You’ll be okay, right?” I’d ask every day after school when I’d rush up the stairs to her room.

And every day, she would smile and say, “Of course.”

But one cool fall afternoon, as the leaves were turning gold and red and orange, I came in to check on her. I asked what I always asked, and she said, “I don’t know, baby.”

That’s when I knew, though I told myself she was just tired of being sick. Tomorrow she would say she was fine. It was only a hiccup in the pattern. But after that it was always “I don’t know,” until she couldn’t speak at all.

Then she was gone, and it felt like I would never quite be whole again.

Truth is, I’m still not.

I stand tall, determined, as Nana and I stare at each other. It’s time to fight, and vengeance sounds good right now. “What do I need to do?”