Page 1 of A Circle of Uncommon Witches
ONE
For more years than she knew what to do with, Doreen MacKinnon had been waiting for the day she would turn thirty and find true love or die.
It was the curse of being a MacKinnon; the thirteenth generation of Scottish witches who had been cursed by a rival line, the MacDonalds, back during the times of King James VI. Each line blamed the other for alerting the blustering king to their existence, and the witch hunt and trials that followed.
“If Ambrose MacDonald hadn’t bewitched Lenora, none of this would have happened,” Doreen’s aunt Stella always said, usually when Doreen was up to her armpits in research, working on her own to break the curse. “You’ll never get anywhere with it, girl, but then again, neither will he,” she’d cackle, before returning to pruning the dark violet roses that ran along her drive while Doreen sat on a threadbare blanket in the shade surrounded by books, wondering how anyone could be so happy to have imprisoned another witch.
“Why did he bewitch her?” Doreen asked.
“Oh, he did not,” her aunt Kayleen had said during a visit when Doreen and Margot were eight and nine years old. “Stella, you know it wasn’t that simple. Ambrose fell in love with Lenora, and Lenora with Ambrose.”
“She had a bad picker,” Stella argued.
“Still, she chose him, and then she left him. All he knew was how she had been spirited away by her family in the night, taken and then gone. Deader than an exorcised spirit,” Kayleen said, while measuring out sugar and fermented grapes and hibiscus before pouring all three into her cauldron—a mixer she had purchased from a new store in town.
“You can’t have a modicum of sympathy for that man,” Stella warned, adding a pinch of lavender to the mix. “He took his broken heart and devastated our family line, cursed us to the bone.”
“Broken hearts break hearts,” Kayleen said.
“And now we break him over and over again,” Stella said, before finally shooing the girls out of the room.
“All these years later, and I still don’t get it,” Doreen said to her cousin, Margot, some twenty years later. They were sitting in their family’s herbal apothecary shop in the small town of Pines, waiting for customers or time to hurry up and pass them by. “Why won’t anyone tell us where Ambrose is?”
Margot shot her a look. “He’s in the Dead House.”
“Which is a myth.”
Margot snorted. “Yeah, and so’s the curse.”
Doreen blew her too-long bangs away from her face. “The curse can be broken. And you know it.”
Margot shook her head.
“You do, and yet you’re really going to marry Dean Whitmeyer?”
Margot sighed, not bothering to look up from the soul cards she was sorting. “I love him.”
“But you don’t know if he loves you .”
Margot didn’t reply. She wasn’t about to lie to her best friend and cousin, and she couldn’t rebuke the truth. What Margot had chosen instead was to accept that she was marrying a man under her spell. Or enthralled, as Stella put it, but a thrall always made Doreen think of a B movie with a vampire rising from the grave, his black hair slicked back, eyes bulging as he sank his fangs into the neck of the first unsuspecting blonde who came his way. “ I vant to suck your blood. ”
Though what Margot was doing felt almost as bad. “ I vant to steal your love. ”
Doreen pulled out her final resource from beneath the table. It was a notebook adorned with a unicorn flying across a rainbow on the front, the cover bent and worn from age and love, and a last-ditch effort to convince Margot to make a different choice. She turned to a dog-eared page, and slid it under her cousin’s nose, over the cards.
“I know what it says,” Margot said, shaking her head at Doreen. “I wrote it.”
“Are you sure ?”
When Margot made no move to glance at it, Doreen took it back and began to read out loud instead.
“‘I, Margot Rose Early, being of brilliant mind and even better body, do hereby promise to never give up on myself or true love. Unlike the aunts and mothers before us, I refuse to believe this hogwash of a curse. This jinx of a whammy will not take my sanity or my life or my heart. I am the goddess of my destiny and may no curse mess with me.’”
“We were kids, Doreen.”
Doreen huffed an exasperated breath. She leaned over and grabbed Margot’s arm, forcing her cousin to look at her. But she dropped it when she saw the tears in her eyes.
Margot was strong, fierce, and determined, and Doreen was always convinced it would be her who would smite the curse and restore the balance, once and for all. When they were small, Doreen and Margot had created a spell that enabled them to get into the magically locked attic of their home and steal Stella’s books on their history and craft. It was a spell they would use many times while researching how to break the curse and grow their powers. Doreen, the mimic, was able to duplicate any spell, and Margot, the creator, capable of crafting any charm from thought.
Doreen had never considered Margot would give up.
“Oh, Margot.”
Margot sniffed and turned back to the cards. “I don’t want to die , Doreen. This is my best option, and I do love him. I can be enough for us both. You’ll see.”
“You’re wrong, and what we’re forced to do is wrong,” Doreen said.
“We have a choice,” Margot said. “That’s more than most get about their fate. Maybe we should try to be happy instead of wasting our time dreaming we can change it.”
Doreen remembered vividly the day she had learned the truth. She was seven and had developed her first crush on a boy named Lucas in her first-grade class. Doreen always thought he was so mysterious, mainly because he ignored her no matter how often she studied him. But one day, during a field trip, they’d ridden the bus to the science museum in the next town over and gone over a bump. He’d looked back at her, grinning his gap-tooth grin. In that moment, it hit her—a bolt of lightning to the soft spot under her belly. She wanted to jump up, climb over the seats in the bus, and brush her fingertips against the curve of his smile.
Her stomach quivered and he blinked, and a change slowly came over his face. His eyes widened, his mouth trembled, and he got out of his seat. He moved toward her as though she were the only person on the bus. He bumped into Dave Sanders, knocking his bag to the floor, climbed over Suzie Macintosh and Lennie Brown in the seat in front of Doreen, and dropped into the bench beside her.
“Doreen,” he said, her name on an exhale. He smelled of caramel Pop-Tarts, and his eyes were so green she thought they might have been dipped in food coloring.
“Hi, Lucas,” she said, smiling and ducking her chin, shocked he seemed to feel exactly what she was feeling.
His hand reached up, and he ran a finger over the hair falling into her face, tucking it behind her ear. “Hi,” he said. “Want to split a grilled cheese with me at lunch?”
For the rest of the day, they stayed side by side, holding hands as they walked the star walk—a dark room filled with projections of stars—studied the mini tornadoes produced by controlled gusts of air inside glass domes, and made water flow back and forth in the crank tank to study the tides. It was the single best day of her life.
Until she got home.
“Who was the boy?” Stella asked. She stood in the doorway, waiting, her arms crossed over her chest.
“My new boyfriend,” Doreen said, grinning so wide she was afraid her cheeks might split in two. She hadn’t officially asked Lucas to be her boyfriend, but some things were simply destined.
Stella sighed. “It’s time.”
She ushered Doreen into the kitchen and sat a glass of milk and single biscuit in front of her. One of Stella’s secrets were her beloved biscuits. She only made them for birthdays and special occasions.
As Doreen gobbled the biscuit down, Stella drummed her painted red fingernails on the table. “You can’t have a boyfriend.”
“I’m not too young,” Doreen said, rolling her eyes, dusting crumbs from her lips. “Maisie Newnan and Sally Jones both have boyfriends, and so do Sam Haven and George Miles.”
“No, love, you don’t understand.” Stella sat at the table holding a tin can with a smiling dog on its front. “You can’t have them because it’s not real.”
“Of course it’s real, I like him.”
“I mean it’s not real for him. ”
Doreen frowned, confused.
For years, any time Doreen had shown any romantic interest in members of the same or opposite sex, Stella had found a way to subvert it. She’d pulled her from library programs, preschool classes, and their one failed attempt at choir. Doreen had assumed she was either bad at the programs or Stella was just that grumpy. But now her trembling knees told her this might be something different.
“My girl, you’re cursed. We are cursed. You have no hope of finding true love, because every person you ever show interest in will fall under your spell, your thrall. Your only hope is to accept that what you have will never be real. I’ll bind the boy; he won’t bother you again.”
It was then that Doreen understood Stella’s ruthlessness. That her aunt would do whatever it took to protect her in whatever way she saw fit.
From the beginning, there were signs of disquiet in the love lives of the MacKinnon women. Doreen knew it in how no one ever spoke about love. Not in the ways people in storybooks would. There was no such thing as “happily ever after” or even “happily ever now.” While there were aunts and cousins who married, they didn’t see them often.
“Marriage is a cage for those of us unable to escape the lie,” Stella would say while baking her biscuits on a Saturday morning.
“What’s the lie when it comes to love?” Doreen asked Margot later, while they were lying in their twin beds in their attic room. “Love is why we’re here.”
“Stella says we’re here to balance the imbalance in the world and change it,” Margot replied, unable to suppress a yawn. Margot thought her mother, Stella, was grumpy and lonely, though she never dared to speak those words out loud. At least not then. She also thought her cousin Doreen thought too much. Margot didn’t have half as many words thinking in her head as the ones that came out of Doreen’s mouth.
“I don’t want to change the world,” Doreen said. “I want to hold hands and dance under the stars and laugh so hard we cry and then dance some more.”
“We do that,” Margot said, thinking it wasn’t like Doreen was missing out when she had Margot.
“Yeah, but it’s different than if, say, Lucas and I were doing it. If he held my hand I would burst into a firework, fly into the sky, and fall back down like a hundred shooting stars.”
“That sounds painful,” Margot said, before rolling over and falling asleep. And it did sound painful, but it also sounded like the most beautiful thing Doreen could think of.
It was no surprise, though, that when they confronted Stella for more details the following day, Margot was accepting and Doreen, angry.
After what happened with Lucas and Doreen, Stella invited both girls out into the garden to help cultivate the herbs they would need for her full-moon tea readings.
“Do you remember the story I told you,” Stella asked, as she cut the lavender and placed it into a stainless-steel tray shaped like a crescent moon, “of how the bee got its stinger?”
Margot looked up from where she was chaining daisies, pausing her knot. “The bee fell in love with a stingray, but the stingray couldn’t fly. It needed to live in the water.”
“Right, and then what happened?”
Doreen dipped her palm into the lavender tray, letting the flowers tumble from her fingers. “They realized they couldn’t be together and the stingray was so sad it tried to make a deal with the gods of the ocean, but the gods were tricky, as they so often are, and they cursed the bee and the stingray instead.”
“By giving the bee a part of the stingray, a piece of its heart,” Margot said.
“And yet when the bee tried to use it, thinking it would lead it back to the stingray,” Doreen said, “it died, and they were never together again.”
“So the bee lives on land and in the air, and the stingray is stuck in the water,” Margot finished.
“Neither are better off for it,” Stella said, before she handed each girl a pestle and mortar containing a scoop of dried lavender and a pinch of her own blend of herbs she liked to call Hella Stella. Stella shifted back onto her heels from her kneeling position, watching them get to work. “We’re a bit like the bee, girls. We got stung by a very big jackass.”
“Jackasses are donkeys, not stingrays,” Margot said.
“Right, well, we would have done better with the jackass. Now we carry our own curse.”
“That’s why you don’t believe in love?” Doreen asked, her eyes locked on her aunt’s and the answer to a question Stella had been avoiding like a snapping alligator.
“I believe in love, but love does not believe in us. We are cursed so that love can no longer see us; only desire and infatuation can meet the wise women of our line.”
“Cursed like the bee?” Doreen asked.
“And the stingray?” Margot said.
“Cursed worse than both,” Stella said, with a huff that might have been a sigh. “We are the bumblebee. Many years ago, a stingray fell in love with one of us. And when she could not stay with it, the stingray cast a spell on us all. Because of it, our stingers will kill us if we don’t use them by the time we reach maturation, or the age of thirty.”
“Wait, is Ambrose the stingray? Also, I thought the gods gave the bee the stinger?” Doreen asked, still stuck on the word “kill.”
“How do we use our stingers?” Margot asked.
“We must sting another with desire, infecting them so they fall in love with us, and we commit to that union. I suppose poisoning them like we did the stingray so long ago.”
“And if we don’t, we die ?” Doreen said.
“We’re dying from the day we’re born,” Stella said. “Or most of us, at least. This just gives us a firm deadline.”
“But what about the people we sting?”
“Oh, this kind of poison isn’t so bad,” Stella said, with the wave of a hand. “Most people don’t mind it.”
“Is that why my mama died?” Doreen asked, her voice small.
“Your mama died because it was her time,” Stella said. “Not all women die in their own time; your aunt Goldie refused to sting, and she never made it past twenty-nine. Neither did my great-aunt Stephie, or our cousin Valerie, or cousin Pauline.”
“You stung,” Doreen said. “Or else Margot wouldn’t be here.”
“I was once young and foolish,” Stella said. “I did not think love songs were written for me, or that I could ever be the main character in a Jane Austen novel. I did, however, think I was powerful enough to protect myself. I was not, and I failed, much like my mother failed to protect me. Which is why I won’t fail the two of you.”
“That’s why Margot’s dad isn’t around?” Doreen asked.
“Why none of them ever stay?” Margot added.
“Living a lie is like living a secret that poisons you from the inside out,” Stella said. “It’s not something those who are pure of heart can bear for long.”
“So you make them leave?”
“Yes, and who could blame us? They aren’t meant to stay, child. We have enough autonomy to make the choice to enthrall for the chance to have children. But when it leaves you all wondering about your fathers and wanting something we can’t give you, then it’s not much of a choice.”
“What’s autonomy?” Margot asked, her brow furrowing.
“The ability to live our own life.”
“Oh,” Margot said, sharing a look with Doreen. Later, after they did a magical scry to locate their fathers and came up empty, they would pull out a dictionary and look up the word autonomy . Both would agree they did not, in fact, have the right to self-govern, as Stella governed them and everyone else in the family as far as they could tell. The idea of it was nice, though.
“We’ll never find love?” Doreen asked, the story adding into a truth she did not want.
“Not like those fairy tales you love,” Stella said, taking the mortars from them and pouring the ground herbs into little perfume jars with bellies as round as the stone gnomes in their front yard. “We have each other, and we have our power, and most of us have realized that is more than enough. The love we have is not one that can be stolen, and the truth is that love is its own curse. Honestly, the stingray did us a favor.”
“What happened to him?” Margot asked.
Stella glanced over her shoulder, down the road, and back to the girls. “He got what was coming to him. We pulled his stinger out and made it so he can never sting again.”
And with that, she put the jars in a wicker basket and carried them over to her car, leaving the girls to wonder what was so bad about love that it would need a curse to take it away, and why they both felt so heartbroken at the loss of something they’d never had.
The following day at school, Doreen broke up with Lucas and subsequently spent the next three years pining over him in secret as she watched him move on without a second thought.
She and Margot continued to gather information about their line. The curse wasn’t the only thing that made the MacKinnon family different. They were witches, the thirteenth line, and therefore prophesized to be the most powerful. It was why their aunt Kayleen said that the other cousins refused to play with them at family reunions. Why the people in town were extra skittish around them unless they needed something from the shop. In the way that you smell rain in the air, people felt power sloughing off the two of them. Little sparks, unseen, but still curdling the air, especially when they were together, and Doreen and Margot were always together.
They had been born atypical, and Doreen was as well versed in the occult as any MacKinnon could be. Her powers to cast came in handy, and she spelled her own memory to hold each important piece of data related to the MacKinnons and the MacDonalds. But her data was incomplete. The family didn’t believe in breaking the curse any longer. Not after so many of them went mad or died trying. There was Aurora who altered her beloved Arthur into a fox and killed him for seducing a cat. She wore him for the rest of her life as a hat. Then there was Bella who fed her beau her blood, hoping to cure him. It turned him anemic, but she was convinced she’d changed him into a vampire and staked him in the end.
With each attempt, they only failed to destroy the curse once more. It was because of this no one could tell Doreen what she really needed to know: What happened three hundred years ago?
That answer had vanished to the ages. Stella refused to budge on talking further about the family stingray, and no other resource had provided Doreen with answers.
If she could just find the truth, she knew, deep in her bones, she could figure out how to break the curse. She had a litany of information at her disposal, an arsenal of answers from her research.
And somehow, none of it helped.
So, in the end, on an aggressively sunny day, Margot said “I do.” Dean couldn’t take his eyes off her. One month later, she turned thirty and moved into a townhouse with Dean. They celebrated with strawberry cake and champagne.
Margot didn’t die.
But she didn’t come back to the apothecary shop, and she stopped returning Doreen’s calls. She knew Doreen didn’t approve, and it was easier not to be around the person who reminded Margot that she had made the choice to settle, the one who she had disappointed the most. Margot was happy, or at least trying to be. She had chosen her path, and it was never a path Doreen would follow.
On October thirty-first, Doreen turned twenty-nine.
And with her birthday, the clock began ticking toward her death. Doreen continued to search high and low, scouring occult shops, annoying any relative who would accept her call about the curse. For eleven months she did everything she could to find the answers she needed. She did not date, she barely ate, she never checked in with friends. She didn’t have many of those anyway.
She was a MacKinnon and she was a witch. Certain people might have relied on her skills in the apothecary shop to help cure them of unwanted lust, insomnia, and prematurely graying hair, but they didn’t necessarily like her. She wore all black, her hair was the color of spilled blood, and her eyes were the shade of burnt honey. Doreen unnerved most of the people of Pines, but she didn’t mind. After all, she had a mission. Friends would only have gotten in the way.
Though she did sometimes daydream of them. Of people who liked her just the way she was, and wanted to help her, not ignore her like her cousins, or scoff at her like her aunt. When those particular pipe dreams arose, Doreen reminded herself that she didn’t have time for them. Not when there was a curse to break, and herself to save, all while the clock was counting down.
The problem was Ambrose MacDonald.
The MacKinnons had locked him away in a slumbering state, where he would live on trapped, unable to be with those he loved. A curse for a curse. It didn’t make a lot of sense to Doreen; it just seemed mean. None of the aunts or cousins would answer questions about the curse, not truly, and especially not about Ambrose. The MacKinnon women were often intentionally vague. They carried secrets like a rain cloud harbors water. From each other, from the outside world. It was the way it had always been. This, in fact, was their motto.
Safe as secrets. As it ever was.
They didn’t particularly like to speak of the curse at all once they made their choice, outside of passing on the information to the next generation.
Months after Margot married Dean and disappeared from her life, Doreen sat in the attic surrounded by boxes of books. She reached up and pulled down the last notebook. The one with the unicorn flying across the front. Her heart pinched, but she ignored the pain. She opened it and her eyes tracked down the page to something that had not been there the last time she’d seen it.
There was a Post-it Note written in Margot’s handwriting, just beneath her cousin’s oath. On it were four words.
The Dead House exists.
Doreen’s breath came faster as she read them over and over. Margot must have tucked it in before she got married. Or could it have been after?
She called Margot, holding her breath as she waited for her cousin to answer.
“You found it?” Margot said, by way of greeting.
That was the way with them, closer than sisters, no greeting necessary no matter the passage of time. Doreen exhaled in relief that the tether between them hadn’t been cut simply because Margot abandoned her. Her temper sparked, thinking of it, and she shoved it aside. She didn’t have time for “a mad,” as Stella called her often ill-timed anger.
“Of course I did,” Doreen said. How are you? I love you. I’m so lonely without you. She could have said any one of those things, but a wall had cobbled together and solidified in the absence of Margot, and Doreen didn’t know how to vault over it. Instead, she said, “Are you sure?”
“I made a family vow after the wedding. I can’t speak of what I know,” she said. “I wrote the truth. You can’t give up. It’s…” Margot swallowed the sob, but Doreen heard it anyway. She felt it curling into a ball in the back of her own throat. “It’s not what I thought it would be. Nothing is.”
“I’ll come get you,” Doreen said, one foot out the attic door, one hand already reaching.
“No, Dore. I made my choice. Autonomy, remember?” She took a deep breath, and Doreen could almost see her, brushing a hand down her striped shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up, pressing at the curls falling forward from where she pulled them too loosely on top of her head. “It was never okay, what Stella did to you with Jack, but it’s not too late for your happy ending. Don’t give up.”
“Margot,” Doreen said, tripping over her words in her hurry. She could feel Margot slipping away as the reminder of Jack pinged in her chest. She didn’t need to be reminded of her ex and the mistake she made with her heart, or how Stella nearly broke it. “Let me come to you. Or come to the shop. Work with me, take a little of your old life with your new.”
“The answers are still out there, Doreen. That’s all I can tell you. I… I have to go.”
She hung up, leaving Doreen to her tears and sorrow.
Doreen cried until there was nothing left except the promise of the soggy note she held in her hand.
The Dead House exists.
A memory stirred in the back of her mind, like a string unfurling from a tightly wound ball of yarn.
If the Dead House existed, he existed. Ambrose MacDonald. The answer Doreen had spent her life searching for, hoping for—how to break the curse, change her fate, even to save Margot—was out there.
As she sat in her little apartment drying her eyes, under the gloam of a rare supermoon, with the veil between the worlds thinning, Doreen stopped dreaming if her life could change and started changing it.
She stood up and crossed to the window and called his name.
Ambrose , she sang to the whispers of the unburdened wind, I’m coming for you.