The Magick of Dark Root (Daughters of Dark Root) (28 page)

Eventually, they were all overtaken.

The service went on, as a man in a long, black robe talked about eternal salvation and going to a better place, a place where there were flowers in the winter and no one got sick. Maggie thought it sounded nice. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to die to get there.

At last, the robed man called up several people to speak about the deceased.
 

Through tears, they talked about the woman’s devotion as a mother and her services to the community. When they finished, the pastor prompted the entire audience to come and view the coffin.

“I don't want to,” Maggie said to her mother. “Please don’t make me.”

 
“She looks the same as always. Pretend she’s sleeping.”

But she did look different. Her olive-toned skin had grown pallid, her limbs seemed bonier, and her hair looked like strands of frazzled yarn. The woman had never been lovely, but now she looked spectral.

Maggie noted another difference as she stared into the coffin, an indefinable element that separated the living from the dead. She stared at the body, trying to figure it out.

 
Then it dawned on her. There was no life force, no energy. Just emptiness.

The thought saddened her, to an extent that she felt it all the way down into her stomach.

It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. Why should someone be given a life, then have it taken away? What was the point? She looked at the line of people behind her, listening to them whisper about what they should eat for lunch or where they should spend their next weekend.
 

Why should they continue on, Maggie wondered, while this woman lay here cold?

“It isn’t fair,” Maggie declared out loud, turning her glare onto the crowd.
 

“It is the natural order of things,” her mother said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

“But why? Why do we live only to die? Who decided that was a good idea?”

Mother gave Maggie a sad, weary smile and Maggie noticed how old she looked. She would die too, Maggie realized, leaving her and her sisters alone.
 

In that moment Maggie vowed never to have a child. It would die, or she would.
 

Either way, someone would be left behind.

Maggie took one final glance at the woman, etching her image into her brain. Life might go on for the others, but Maggie would honor the woman’s memory by spending the day alone in her bedroom, with every light off.
 

She reached inside her skirt pocket for the wildflower she had picked while playing in the woods that morning. It was crumbled now, and a few of its purple leaves had fallen away, but it was still lovely and the only offering she had. As she placed the flower on the woman’s chest, the woman’s eyes popped open.

They stared at her, with wide, bulbous, empty lenses.

Maggie screamed and pushed her way through the crowd and out the door.
 

When her mother caught up, she scolded her fiercely for making a spectacle of the family.

“She woke up!” Maggie insisted. “I swear it!”

 
“For Heaven’s sake, Maggie,” Miss Sasha said. “Get ahold of yourself. If you are going to take my place someday, you can’t be afraid of something as trivial as death.”

Dark Root, Oregon

November, 2013

“This can’t be happening,” Eve buried her face in her hands, her shoulders rising and falling as she tried to catch her breath.
 

There was no doubt about it. The man was dead and we had killed him.

Correction. I had killed him.

“Eve, snap out of it,” I said, pulling her hands from her face. “We need to figure out what to do.”

“What to do? What to do?” Eve bordered on hysteria, the cool demeanor she normally wore replaced by one of sheer terror. “What
can
we do? He’s dead!”

I kicked at him, trying to nudge him onto his side. He wouldn’t move. His mouth popped open and blood ran down the sides of his cheeks. His hazel eyes stared up at us accusingly.

“How can you be so calm?” Eve asked, as I studied the corpse. “You, of all people, should be freaking the fuck out.”

I should be. I was practically phobic when it came to death.
 

Yet here, when confronted with the corpse of a man I had just killed, a macabre sort of calm washed over me. It was almost dreamlike in its irrationality. People couldn’t be alive one moment and then gone the next. That wasn’t the way the universe worked. We had warning. We had time to drink our tea before we fell in, face first.
 

“Maggie,” Eve said, covering me with something. “Are you okay?”

“No. I’m not okay. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay again.”

A car pulled into the parking lot and a handful of college students tumbled out. They walked past us, one of them almost stepping on the man. “Old people can’t handle their booze.”

“We need to call the police,” I said.
 

Eve grabbed me by the shoulders. “We can’t. We...I might go to jail.”

“It was
self-defense
, Evie. That man assaulted you. I
pushed
him off.” I enunciated the word, so that we got our stories straight. Move along, no
deathtouch
to see here. Just a good, firm pushing. “He hit his head because he was drunk.”

I opened my purse and Eve clamped it shut.
 

“Maggie. Wait. It…it might have been my fault. The reason he assaulted me.”

“We were trying to hustle him, I know. But we didn’t take his money. And that still didn’t give that asshole any right to attack you. No man has that––”

Eve cut me off. “No, Maggie. That perfume we made a few weeks ago, the one I was experimenting with. Remember? I put some on, to try it out. I put a lot of it on, in fact.” She pressed her lips together, wringing her hands. “I thought we’d be going to see Paul afterwards. He’s been so distant lately. I heard him tell Shane that he would be going to Seattle soon. I thought…Oh, God, I thought…”

“You thought you’d use your perfume to make sure that didn’t happen.”

Eve buried her face in her hands again and sobbed. “Oh, God, Maggie. I’m so embarrassed.”

“And sorry,” I said, looking at the guy by our feet. “I hope to hell you’re sorry.”

“Yes.”

She wiped away her tears, streaking mascara across her cheeks.
 

“You could have told me,” I said, shock replaced by a bolt of anger. “You could have fucking
told
me that you had Man Attack all over you, before we went out. What the hell, Eve?”

“I forgot, okay? I just wanted us to get the money and go see Paul. That was all that was on my mind. And how can I tell you anything? You make fun of everything I do. You think you would have let that one slide? That I’m so insecure about losing my boyfriend that I have to resort to magick? Could you have held your tongue for that?”

I stared at Eve. She stared back.
 

The corpse lay quietly between us. It was madness, every bit of it.
 

“Okay,” I said, wiping my forehead. “We are in this together, right?” I held up the finger that I had lanced during Mother’s ritual. We were bound together as sisters and as witches. We had each other’s backs.

“Let’s get him in his car. I’ll drive and you follow. We’ll head back to Sister House and wake Merry and Ruth Anne. They’re smart. One of them will know what to do.”

 
Eve pressed her lips together, bobbing her head in agreement.

I reached into his jeans pockets, trying not to look at him as I remembered the corpse in the church whose eyes snapped open. But his were already open. I resisted every instinct I had to run through the parking lot, screaming. Finally, I found a set of keys. I clicked the little button on the keychain and the lights on a silver Cadillac went off and on. I drove it to where Eve waited, leaving the passenger door open and the engine running.

“You shouldn't be lifting,” Eve said.

“I shouldn't be doing a lot of things,” I said. “You take his legs. I’ll get his shoulders.”
 

He didn’t move the entire drive to Sister House.
 

Not that he should have. He was, after all, dead.
 

Still, I kept one eye on the road, and the other on my passenger’s stiffening body buckled in beside me, half expecting him to pop up at any time and say, “Hey, that was a great nap! Can you drive me back to my hotel?"

But he didn’t.

He sat still as a mannequin, his eyes staring straight ahead, his mouth slightly open, the rivulet of blood drying on his cheek. There was absolutely no sign that he was alive, or had ever been alive.
 

His absence of life was even more obvious as I exhaled the cold night air, steam coming from my mouth like a locomotive, while my passenger sat breathless.
 

All my life, I’d feared death, been paralyzed by the thought that someday I, and everyone I knew, would wind up six feet underground, as if we had never existed at all. Yet, here I was, driving calmly down the deserted back roads of Dark Root like it was any other night, with the man I killed beside me.
 

I still couldn't wrap my brain around all that had happened, but on one thing I was clear: I was going to do something about it. For every spell there was an anti-spell. For every power, an opposing power. If I had the
deathtouch,
then someone out there had the
lifetouch
.
 

And if anyone possessed such a power, it was my sister Merry.

I pulled into the driveway, surprised to see the light in the nursery still on. Ruth Anne must be awake, pecking away at her keyboard or reading a book.
 

The thought comforted me. If Merry did have the
lifetouch
, Ruth Anne might know how to activate it.
 

Eve pulled in behind me. Without saying a word she scrambled out of the car, her face glistening under the pale moon.
 

“Here,” she said, sheepishly handing over Mother’s spell book. It had been in my room and she must have pilfered it. “I’ve been studying spells.”