The Magick of Dark Root (Daughters of Dark Root) (30 page)

“Oh.” I opened one of the scrolls. It was blank. “Invisible ink?” I asked, reaching for the nearest candle.
 

Ruth Anne stopped me. “Most likely. But if our mother went to such lengths to hide these, she wouldn’t use ordinary candle magick to read them.”

“We have to try.” I lit a red candle and ran the flame across the parchment. No words appeared.

“Now what?” Merry asked, worry all over her face.

“Moon magick?” I asked.
 

Ruth Anne took the scrolls and crossed the bedroom, positioning herself in front of the window. She squinted through her glasses as she attempted to read one, then another. “No dice,” she said. “But these could require the light of a full moon. If so, we’re screwed.”

“Mirror magick?” I asked tentatively, checking Mother’s book.

“It’s worth a shot,” Ruth Anne said. “Eve, I know you have a mirror somewhere in that purse of yours.”

Eve rummaged through her handbag and produced a large compact. Ruth Anne held a scroll to the mirror as Merry and I crowded behind her, but the parchment wasn’t giving up its secrets.

“Maybe there’s nothing on these scrolls,” I said, slumping against one of the bedposts.

Merry waved her hands over them. “Oh, there’s something on them, alright. Dark things. Spells that should have been destroyed a long time ago.”

“I think we should just turn ourselves in,” I said.

Merry raised her chin. “No, Maggie. It’s not just about you and Eve. It’s about that man in the car out there. We have to try and fix this.” She passed her hands over the scrolls again, stopping at each one as she sensed its energy.
 

“This one,” she said, removing one and handing it to me. Her hands trembled, a sign that she had depleted too much of her energy with the task.

“But how?” I asked. “We still don’t know how to read it.”

Merry closed her eyes and a soft glow enveloped her. “We try it all.”

“Of course!” Ruth Anne said, as Eve relit the candle.
 

I unfurled the scroll and stood before the window, facing away. Ruth Anne held up the mirror so that the moon cast its glow onto it and it bounced back onto the parchment. Eve ran the flame of the candle along it.

“Holy Hell,” Ruth Anne said, shaking her head. “It worked.”

Sure enough, black letters in archaic script began to appear.
 

At the top of the scroll were the words:
Recipe for Raising the Dead.
 

We scoured the house, collecting the list of ingredients imbedded on the scroll: the wax from three black candles, an assortment of herbs, a lock of hair from an innocent.
 

The last was achieved by snipping a strand of June Bug’s hair while she slept, all the while trying to keep Merry calm as she watched a golden lock from her daughter’s head fall into a silver bowl. We even managed to find a box large enough to “entomb the subject”––the box from Paul’s metallic tree.

All that was left was
a wand of life.
 

“Mama said she lost it,” Merry sighed as we stood in the living room. “This may be the end of the line.”

A memory trickled into my brain.

I raced towards the door that guarded Mother’s sitting room,––a room filled with treasures hoarded across the decades and the one room in the house we had never gotten around to cleaning out because the job seemed insurmountable.

My sisters caught on and were by my side.

“Door of steel, door that’s locked, let us in with just a knock.”

I was surprised that I remembered the spell. Eve gave the door a quick rap. A click on the lock let us know the incantation had worked.

“Impressive,” Ruth Anne said. “Good work, Maggie.”

I flipped on the light. The space was the size of a small bedroom, and packed from wall to wall with an assortment of boxes, bins, knick-knacks and, no doubt, secrets.
 

“Where shall we start?” Eve kicked at a box as she headed in.
 

“Help me clear a path,” I said, wading through a waist-deep collection of Mother’s belongings towards the far back corner of the room.

Around me, my sisters pushed and piled crates to the side, allowing me squeeze through. The musty smell was suffocating, and I had to cover my nose with the back of my arm to keep from retching.
 

At last, I found my way to the spot where I had seen the shining object the last time I was here. Ruth Anne and Merry joined me while Eve guarded the door, worried perhaps that it would shut and lock us in. We sifted through pictures, newspaper clippings, and small pieces of furniture, tossing them all aside even as nostalgia did its best to lure us in.
 

“Merry, you sense anything?” I asked, sifting through a bin of costume jewelry.

She put her hands to her temples. “This room has too much energy from too many people. It’s actually making me sick.”

“I guess I was wrong,” I said. Maybe the wand really was lost.

“I’m sorry, Maggie.” Merry stumbled over a trunk to stand beside me. “We’ll figure something out.”
 

“Well, lookie here,” Ruth Anne said, pulling on a stick half-buried beneath a carton of photo albums. She bent over, tugging at it, as if she was trying to pull a stubborn weed from a garden.
 

At last, it gave, sending her tripping over the box behind her.
 

She lifted the stick as our mouths dropped open. It was thin and sleek, pale yellow in color, with an emerald gem attached at the end. Ruth Anne waved it and a soft, green glow illuminated the room.

“It looks just like the wand in the book,” Merry said.
 

“Only more beautiful,” I added.

“Let’s get this done,” Eve said, holding the door open as we stumbled to the entrance. “Before it’s too late.”

Eighteen

MAN IN THE BOX

There are nights when you question just about everything: who you are, where you've come from, what your purpose is, how you got to your current place in life.

And then there are nights when you just accept things.
 

Nights when you stand beneath a silver moon, digging a shallow grave for a man you murdered. A man who probably had a wife and children, a mother and a job. A man who probably wouldn't have tried to molest your kid sister, if she hadn't been wearing a perfume enchanted to entice men in the first place.

These are the nights you try not to think.
 

Because if you think––about the corpse sitting in the car a dozen feet away, about your inability to determine wrong from right, about the fact that your mother was right about you after all, that you walk the line, just like your father––you just might go mad.

And I couldn't go mad.
 

Anyway, it was Thanksgiving, officially, and I wasn't going to let this little
incident
ruin the holidays.

“No!” I said aloud as I plunged my shovel into the earth and tossed out another spade full of dirt. “I’m going to keep it together!”

“Maggie, you okay?” Merry stopped digging and faced me, her eyes concerned. In this lighting, as her gold hair framed her sweet face, she looked more angelic than ever. “You can take a break, if you need to. We’ll be okay.”

“Me? I’m fine, Merry. Thanks for asking.”

I caught my sisters shooting each other knowing looks, looks that said I wasn’t
all right
, that in fact I had lost my marbles.

“I’m fine,” I repeated emphatically, tossing out an extra-large helping of dirt and wondering how much deeper we would need to dig.
 

The spell said to encase the subject in a box, then bury him under the light of a waning moon, but it didn't specify how
deep
the grave needed to be. An unhelpful omission. Since the “subject” would eventually dig his way out of that grave, clawing his way through the box and layers of muck, I conjectured we shouldn't dig it too deeply.
 

The experience would be traumatic enough for the poor guy as it was.

Fortunately for us, however, the timing of his death couldn't have been better, being a waning moon and all. If I’ve learned anything from this ordeal, it’s that if you are going to commit murder, and have any intention of bringing the deceased back to life, always plan it around the correct moon cycle.

Lucky break for Maggie!

“I think,” I said, continuing to dig. “That this might be a lucrative business. Bringing people back from the dead. If it works out, we might start charging for it. Gotta bring in more money than that stupid magick store does.”

“Maggie, stop,” Eve said, wiping her forehead with cashmere gloves she would never wear again.

“I’m just saying…why not? We can call it Bodies R Us. They’re not dead unless we say they’re dead.” I grinned at Ruth Anne, sure she’d appreciate my joke.
 

She shook her head and continued digging.
 

“What?” I asked, throwing my shovel onto the ground. “Are we too good for death jokes now?”

Merry pressed her lips together. “Honey, you’ve had a terrible shock and now it’s finally setting in. Go sit on the porch steps and we’ll finish this. We’ll call you when it’s done.”

“No!” I screamed, surprising myself with the shrillness of my voice. I tore at the air with both hands, as if being assaulted by an invisible man, tears stinging my eyes. “I won’t sit by while my sisters bury the man I…”
 

I choked, unable to finish the sentence. I lifted my trembling chin. “Neither hell nor jail is good enough for me.”

Someone’s arms wrap around me. I recognized the vanilla and lavender scent as Merry’s. I hyperventilated in her arms as she held me, cooing me to quiet.
 

“It’s okay, honey. It will be okay.”

How could I explain to her that it wouldn't be okay? Nothing might ever be
okay
again. Even if we did manage to raise him, I had the
deathtouch
, just like my father. And there was no coming back from that.
 

“What if we can’t do it, Merry?” I sniffed, wiping my nose on her shoulder as I stared at the Christmas tree in the front yard, the box that would soon be a coffin.