Page 27 of Wicching Hour (The Sea Wicche Chronicles #3)

TWENTY-SEVEN

A Burnt Witch

I t felt like the walls in the studio were closing in on me. The next episode was titled. ‘A___ is a Witch!’ This had to be illegal. I’d ask Mom to talk with the family lawyer. No. Better. I’d sic Mary Beth on his ass.

I wanted to let it go and let someone else deal with the problem, but I couldn’t. He was fixated on me, and I needed to be prepared for what he was sending my way. I considered my beautiful gallery that I’d finally opened. Was this why I’d had that vision of someone trying to burn down the gallery?

I needed air. I put on my fleece jacket by the back door and went out to the same bench I’d used earlier so I could watch the waves in the moonlight while I listened to his unhinged ravings. I hit play again and put my phone, speaker side up, in my breast pocket so I could hear the podcast over the roar of the wind and waves.

“Welcome back to A Witch Burning. I’m going to be honest here. I wasn’t sure how many people would listen or care, but my inbox is already flooded with witch identifications. We’re going to get to them all.

“It’s great too that so many of you are seeing the signs as well. When I posted the first episode, it got sixteen listens. Now, there are thousands. We’re doing something important here, and we’re doing it together.

“So, let’s get back to the witch that started this journey for me. I’m going to call her A~. We gotta be careful, right? I don’t want witch lawyers harassing me. Right? Okay, she lives in this old cannery that she remodeled into an art gallery. First of all, she looks like she’s in her twenties. Where the hell did she get that kind of money to buy oceanside property and then remodel this gigantic space?

“She works, but artists are usually too poor to afford a cheap studio apartment. Where did she get all this money to buy prime real estate? I think someone made a shady deal or she’s got some demonic sugar daddy setting her up.

“Speaking of which, I told you about that seven-foot monster guardian of hers. He sure acts like her boyfriend, showing up at all hours, often not leaving until morning. Maybe it’s sex. Maybe it’s Satanic rituals. I don’t know. That gallery of hers is locked down tight. There are tons of windows on the ocean side of the building, but they’ve all been blacked out.”

Gee. I wonder why. I had no idea he’d been slinking around this much—because I was working! Shit, I was going to need to go through the security footage so I could give Osso the stalking and trespassing evidence.

My stomach twisted. I hated this so much. This is why I’d been living on my own for years: the weird obsessions some people developed and then blamed on me. They weren’t all sexual either. There was a new girl—Emily—in eighth grade who’d stared at me constantly. She’d just moved to town and almost immediately started following me from class to class or positioning herself behind me on track runs in PE. I stopped once to talk with her, but she turned away, trying to pretend she hadn’t been following me.

Finally, one day I came out of a bathroom stall and Emily was there. She tried to open the door and flee, but I flicked my fingers and kept the door from opening. She panicked and I tried to calm her while asking why she’d been following me. She was like a deer in headlights, but as she stared at me, her panic subsided. She told me she thought we should be best friends.

Recalling it now, perhaps it was sexual, and she just hadn’t come to terms with that yet. What I felt radiating off her in that moment was loneliness, fear, and adoration. Her obsession scared me, but I didn’t want to hurt her, so I said she should start walking with me, not behind me, so we could talk.

It had been exhausting. She projected her emotions so loudly, my head was killing me by the end of the day. I also couldn’t take all the negativity. I already had so many dark visions and nightmares in my head, the last thing I needed was constant hissing in my ear about how so-and-so likes someone who hates her and how ugly some other so-and-so was.

I could do no wrong, though, and a couple days in she’d started wearing gloves too, like it was a fashion choice on my part, like we were twin trendsetters. Emily was new to town, though, new to school. She didn’t know about me, so I was—in her mind—the most popular girl.

I’d told her I didn’t like being touched and she was good about not touching me, though she got as close as she could without making contact. We were in the cafeteria at lunch one day and she was unusually quiet. That part was great, but the staring was starting to feel more aggressive. Trying to ignore her, I ate my yogurt, feeling a little sick to my stomach because at some point, that yogurt container had been touched by a deeply depressed person. I’d been happy Emily was leaving me alone so I could work through someone else’s depression when I felt a hand on my cheek.

I went down and saw the reason she’d left her last school, the reason for the move to a new town. She’d been cyberbullying a classmate, encouraging others to join in. Her target couldn’t take it anymore and tried to end her life. Thankfully, she’d survived and got the help she needed. It all came out then and Emily became a pariah, as everyone was more than happy to tell authorities about the things Emily had done to unmercifully harass the poor girl.

Emily denied it all and her parents were outraged by the accusations. They wanted the school administration to apologize. The principal laid out all the evidence, including all the text messages, emails, online posts. It didn’t matter. Emily swore she didn’t do it, and her parents backed her up.

When I opened my eyes, I was on the gross cafeteria floor. A teacher was talking on a walkie-talkie about calling my mom and Emily was staring down at me with a look of disgust. She took off the gloves and dropped them where she stood, while I tried to stand with a teacher hovering over me, afraid I was going to drop and hit my head again.

After that, Emily made it her life’s goal to make sure everyone knew what a freak I was. The joke was on her, though. My freak status had been established years earlier. I was no longer a hot topic. She got a little traction at first, because I hadn’t had an episode in a little over a year. So while everyone agreed with Emily, it wasn’t terribly interesting any more.

I still often felt her staring at me, but I was happier having her far away. Of course, since I’d developed early, by eighth grade Emily had a lot of competition from the boys in class who were fixated on my chest. Good times.

“The gallery opening is in just a couple of days, so I’ll get to see the inside soon. See what she’s been up to. She almost never leaves that place, though. It’s really strange. And now she has an old guy living in an RV, parked next to her gallery. He’s up all night and sleeps all day.

“Is he a part of it? Witches have those black cat familiars, right? Is he a human familiar? I don’t know. I’ve seen her talking to the water and raccoons. If she hadn’t cursed me, I’d think she was just independently wealthy and crazy.

“A woman contacted me right after the first episode aired. She left a message on the website with her phone number. I asked her if I could record our conversation, and she said yes.”

There was a soft hiss of white noise and then…

“Hi. You contacted me about the witch I’m going to call A~, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said.

It was Calliope. Fuck.

“Can you tell my listeners how you know A~?” he asked.

“Of course. We grew up together. I’m a distant relative. Ar—I mean, A~ has always been off.”

“Can you explain how?” he asked. “We want to hear it all.”

“Well,” she said, “there was a lot of speculation as she was growing up as to who her father was. Her mother never told anyone, so most of the family assumed he was a criminal or addict of some kind, once Ar—A~ started pretending to hear voices and started wearing gloves all the time like a germaphobe, we were all pretty sure her father was mentally unstable.”

“Interesting,” he interrupted. “Did you ever find out if that was true?”

“No. A~ lived in her own world, though. She drew and painted all the time. Her mom, who’s a huge bitch, would coddle A~, never letting anyone question the weird stuff she did. It was like she was trying to force all of us to like her damaged daughter, but it had the opposite effect. No one liked her. We just knew to be quiet about it, you know?”

“Did you ever see any signs of evil in her?”

“Absolutely. When she was little, we were all at the beach together and I saw what could have been the mark of the beast on her.” Cal was breathless to tell everyone the things I’d been hiding all my life. After a dramatic pause, she said, “She has scales.”

He sputtered. “Did you say scales? Like a snake?”

“Exactly like that. A line of scales went around her thigh, like she’d been roped and branded by a reptile.”

“Is that why she’s always covered up, neck to foot? Is she covered in scales?”

The giddiness in his voice was making me sick. I was a freak show. Yes. Got it.

“Probably. She hates being touched,” Calliope told him, “so I doubt that guy is her boyfriend.”

“Yes,” he said and there was a shuffling of paper. “A woman wrote in and said she went to school with A~ and that she refused to be touched. She said she got curious and did it anyway. A~ convulsed and hit the floor. She said A~’s eyes rolled back in her head and she acted like she was being electrocuted. The teachers moved everyone away from her. Did you ever see her pass out like that?”

“Too many times. They tell the family she’s epileptic, but that’s not it. It only happens if someone accidentally touches her. That’s why she doesn’t drive. She never knows when she’s going to hit the ground, writhing.”

“Do you think she’s been marked by the Devil and now if a godly person touches her, she has a seizure?” It was Christmas and his birthday all rolled up into one.

“Now that you say it, I bet you’re right. Sometimes she gets a glazed, vacant look in her eye. You just know she isn’t in there anymore. Maybe that’s when she’s communicating with her master.”

“That’s really ? —”

The show cut out and I opened my eyes. I didn’t remember closing them, but I suppose I’d been trying to hide from what they were saying.

“Why are are you crying, daughter, and why are you listening to that?” My dad was back, dressed in a toga again.

I wiped my cheeks and smiled. Seeing him lifted some of the pressure off my chest. “Hi, Dad.”