Page 14 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)
Fourteen
The first of August is not called the Sturgeon Moon in our household, but rather the Wishing Moon. On Aisling’s birthday, she makes a wish, and it comes true, because her coven makes it so.
Family Traditions, Tempest Family Grimoire
An hour and a quarter before the clock is set to strike midnight, ushering in August the first, Aisling’s twelfth trip around the sun coinciding with the Gaelic festival Lughnasadh, Romina and I tiptoe down the hallway toward Aisling’s bedroom door. Bells are tied to the bracelets on our wrists and ankles, their music a light, sweet glimmer. In Luna’s room, I can hear the quiet murmurings of 3rd Rock from the Sun . She used to bemoan recordings of that show always playing during our weekend stays at Grandma’s house when we were kids. I think that if I were to ask her about it, she’d say she left it for Dottie’s ghost to watch, but I think she likes having the comforting noise around to make it feel as if our grandmother’s still around, too.
We push Ash’s door open, which protests on its slanted frame, and sneak toward the sleeping child. Her head is at the foot of the bed, library books scattered across the comforter. Bare mattress—the sheets have been wadded up and thrown on the floor.
“Happy birthday, little imp,” we say in low singsong. It’s what Great-Aunt Misty calls her. Imps are clever, free-spirited creatures known for their ability to talk their way out of trouble. While playful, they are also emotional, sensitive, quick-to-love beings. We generally see Aunt Misty only on our birthdays, so everything about her is sort of ingrained in the occasion.
Ash scrunches her face, eyes still closed. “Mm?”
Only a few hours ago, she was up in arms for being made to go to bed early (“But it’s almost my birthday! People who stay up late have higher brain activity! I’m on school vacation! If this is what twelve is going to be like, I want to stay eleven!”). Judging by the dying glow of her booklight, I don’t think she’s been asleep for long.
“Up, up.” I drape a scarlet linen dress over the back of her desk chair. “Put this on.”
“Right now?”
Ash stumbles out of bed, rubbing her eyes, and flicks on a table lamp. She’s got a red welt across her right cheek from falling asleep on a book. “Aunt Zel’s not wearing black!”
My cloak is flowing linen just like Ash’s dress, except mine has a deep purple hood attached. The hood of Romina’s cloak is butter lettuce green.
“Hurry! Get dressed.” We step into the hall, closing her door. When she emerges, Romina blubbers and exclaims over how cute she looks, all dressed up in red like a little house finch.
I braid Aisling’s hair, tying a thin cord strung with bells to the end.
“What are we doing?” she asks excitedly. “Does Mom know about this?”
By way of answering, Romina settles a crown of purple flowers over Aisling. “Gladiolus,” she tells her. “The flower of your birth month. This will bring new beginnings, charm, and mystery.”
“Ooooh.” Ash stands very still while we pin the crown in place. “I love mystery!”
I turn her palm over, dropping the silver-coin-like pods of the honesty flower into it. “You’ll need to put these in your shoes.”
“Why?”
I lean closer, smiling conspiratorially. Tonight is not about the truth, what is real or not real. Tonight is about making Aisling feel as if she’s in a story.
“So that you can see them,” I whisper.
She peers at me with big, round eyes. “See what?”
Romina and I take Aisling arm in arm, hustling her into her shoes and out of the house. Beyond, Vallis Boulevard is suitably more magical than usual, a full golden moon turning its face toward us to follow our movement. It lights up the glow-in-the-dark-painted footprints on bricks in the road that, if we were to follow, would lead to the Moonville tunnel.
“Where are we going?” Ash loud-whispers, craning to get a glimpse of The Clockery, a shop that specializes in keeping the time, from which juts a tall clock tower embossed with elaborate silver scrollwork and a radiant white face big enough to rival the moon. “It’s eleven o’clock.”
“You know what that means,” I say lowly.
Romina tugs playfully on Ash’s arm. “In an hour, you’ll be older and wiser.”
“ And you’ll turn into a toad. Sorry. It’s simply how all witches spend their twelfth year.”
Ash pretends to brace herself. “I’m ready.”
We laugh, rushing down the empty street, no sound but the chirruping of crickets and cicadas, the swish-swish of tree branches overhead. Ash doesn’t watch her step, her head tipped back so she can watch the moon and stars in gaps between tree canopies.
We pass windows with the muted blue of television sets within, banners showcasing Moonville’s veterans hung from lampposts. The heat isn’t as pressing as it was earlier, air light and skies clear. At this time of night, I notice details I ordinarily wouldn’t, shops that seem to have poofed into existence following sundown. The decommissioned turn-of-the-century trolley in its Christmas colors, the Holly Jolly Trolley, rests now beside the post office, spotlit like a memorial, and come November will be decorated in festive lights, piney garland, and holly.
It’s a quick walk to our destination, and soon we reach a rounded red bridge, Foxglove Creek rushing below. On the other side, brightened by a path of lanterns, Luna waits in a scarlet cloak with a gold hood pulled low over her forehead. Hands joined, from them dangles a necklace with a sparkling red pendant.
To the southwest of us, bells heave in The Clockery’s tower, their melody like gongs rolling down a hill.
Ash is all amazement. When she approaches, Luna brings the jewelry around her daughter’s neck and secures it. “Red goldstone for boldness, ambition, and ingenuity. Deflects unwanted energies. Magnifies happiness.” She kisses Aisling’s forehead, all smiles. “Happy birthday, my love.”
“Am I being sacrificed?”
We all laugh.
“We’re taking you to the wolves,” I tell her, tweaking her nose gently. “They’re going to raise you the rest of the way, since we’ve run out of things to teach you.”
She dances. “Hooray! I’ve always wanted to run on all fours.”
Luna turns and walks into the trees. The rest of us follow.
This area isn’t proper forest, not as thick and foreboding as it gets in the south of town. This is more of a light, spritely wood. The shagbark hickory trees are my favorite for their peeling appearance; they’re spaced apart, and where Luna stops and waits, moonlight pours into a pretty little clearing, with a circle of brown mushrooms growing at the very center. More lanterns of varying shapes, sizes, and colors are clustered here and there at the base of trees, their light throwing long the shadows of three men dressed all in black.
When they begin to play their instruments—flute, violin, and hammered dulcimer—I recognize the song immediately as Aisling’s favorite, “The Skye Boat Song,” which has trilled through The Magick Happens every day for the past forty to fifty years along with other music connecting Dottie to her Irish and Scottish heritage.
One by one, people who love Ash step out from behind trees and present her with trinkets. Trevor’s girlfriend, Teyonna, slips iridescent wings over Ash’s shoulders. Trevor gives her a bottle of nail polish, which has tiny gold star confetti in it. From Romina’s boyfriend, a pocket-sized copy of Alice in Wonderland . Alonzo Mozzi and his grandson, Cannon, bestow on her a chunky pen filled with pink liquid and many-colored beads. And from Great-Aunt Misty and her granddaughter, our cousin Nitya, a pack of Lenormand divination cards drawn by Nitya herself.
“Does the Fairy Queen accept our tributes?” Luna inquires, curtsying deeply.
Ash raises her chin. “I do.”
We cheer. The musical trio plays a lively tune, and everyone bursts into dance except for Alonzo (who does bow very gentlemanly, however). Romina, Luna, Ash, and I link our hands, twirling around the fairy ring. “Do you see the fairies?” I ask Aisling. “That’s what the seed pods in your shoes are for. They enable you to see them.”
“Yes! They’re everywhere.” Her face transforms with wonder, her stare riveted on the surrounding trees. “Their clothes are made from petals and leaves, and they have more musical instruments than humans have invented. Each fairy is holding a different instrument—there must be hundreds!—and they’re singing in a language that sounds familiar. It isn’t quite English, but it has such a similar sound.”
“Don’t step inside the fairy ring,” Romina warns. “Or you’ll be spirited back to Fairyland.”
“ Back to?” Cannon repeats. He is Aisling’s best friend, and her total opposite. He has the most serious face of any child I’ve ever met and is always worrying. It’s good for Cannon to have an Aisling. He’d never get into any fun trouble without her.
Luna laughs. “Where do you think she came from?”
“ That’s why their language sounds so familiar,” Aisling quips. “I was born there, but when I was a baby I flew out of Fairyland on a dandelion puff—fairy babies are very small, you know—and when I blew into this world, I adapted to my environment by growing bigger, to look like a regular human baby and blend in.”
“I found her sitting in the back garden, in a row of vegetables like a summer squash,” Luna says. “Grandma Dottie knew she was coming. She’d seen her in a vision.”
“And we knew we could never give you back,” I join in, thinking about what it was really like on the day Aisling was born. Luna in labor, gripping Romina’s hand, moaning that she couldn’t do this alone; Romina promising she would never have to while I fruitlessly dialed Luna’s ex-boyfriend over and over, unable to get past a full voicemail box. “You were too perfect.”
Ash’s expression is almost trancelike, face upturned. “If only you could see all the fairies here,” she says to us. “And so many ghosts, too! They love the music.”
“Isn’t it incredible?” Luna agrees. The song changes and we detach, Ash demanding that Cannon spin with her. My sisters, Teyonna, Trevor, Nitya, and I rush toward the fairy ring, then back, toward and back, while skipping around it, in such a brisk frenzy that sweat drips from my temples. “I forgot he knew how to really play, not just mess around.”
“Who does what?” I ask Luna, half listening.
“Morgan. That’s his band, Heavy Mettle.”
My steps falter, gaze cutting across the fairy ring. Morgan Angelopoulos is unrecognizable without his loud Day-Glo prints, strikingly elegant in a suit black as Death, hair trimmed a couple inches and swept neatly back. His bow slides over violin strings, left hand gripping the neck, his fingers moving deftly.
His eyes meet mine, and my chin drops.
“He can do that ?” I hear myself sputter. “Then why does he subject me to such horrible shrieking with that thing?”
Morgan watches me narrowly for another moment, as though he heard what I said even though that’s impossible from this distance, and then focuses on his work. The two men accompanying him, one tall and burly with an auburn ponytail and the other fair as alabaster with golden curls spilling over his forehead, are lost in their music. I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them before. The late hour, the moonlight, excitement, the song so lovely that it stirs my emotions to an unreasonable degree—it all collides into the strangest fancy that at least one of the people here must be fae, weaving a spell over the rest.
I study Morgan as though I’ve never seen him before. It is the eeriest sensation, gripping me like cold hands on my arms and legs, rooting me to the spot: it is almost as if, all this time, I have merely been looking at his reflection in a darkened window, and not at the man himself. If there is such a thing as fairies, then this must be fairy music. I’ve never heard a human produce anything half as enchanting.
Who is he?
Pale, raven-haired, dark-eyed. Quick with a grin and also a lie, always on the cusp of amusement no matter the situation. I know him, and I don’t. My eyes glaze over as I watch him watching me, my vision going bright and shiny at the edges, like light striking a mirror.
And this is when I hear a voice, gentle as dandelion fluff from Fairyland, emanating from behind him:
“The clock.”