To Ashes

Stormrow House stood apart from its neighbors—a wide and towering cottage with twelve rooms and fewer windows. From the door, a dirt path rolled between the greens for fifty paces before butting soundly against a black gate. Beyond, the road became asphalt. Beyond, a village made of thatched roofs: quiet folk rolling strollers beside low stone walls, cows and chickens in the fields, a gray church steeple nestled between shops and bakeries, though there hadn't been a Father there in years and likely never would be. Praying folk were jumpy like that. Never knew how to leave well enough alone.

My mother says the Heatherby's killed the last one.

"Ash-marked," she scoffed, twirling one finger to stir her tea while she checked over my broom for hexes and wear. I couldn't get it to levitate. "Quicker to cast than speak, I tell you. Nosy old git could've been left aboveground."

I didn't mention that Penelope Heatherby hadn't walked since the Nosy Old Git called the exorcist. I'm not sure if there was time enough for money to change hands before the screaming started, the brass bell beneath the steeple ringing and ringing and ringing under the Father's orders, sound enough to swallow sin and send the cows moaning on the hills. I heard Penelope couldn't even be in the same room as a filled sink basin without going queasy, but I wasn't supposed to talk about Penelope so I sat still with my hands clasped in front of me while my mother coaxed the errant bristles back into line.

Our coven lived at Stormrow and the Heatherby's at Hildon and sometimes when I crawled into the attic I could spy the dark smudge of their House like a crow in the foggy distance, smaller than the raindrops that slithered down the glass, the village like golden specks at our feet. 

Sometimes I could still hear Penelope's scream.

**

"You have to fly higher than that."

My sister's hair whipped in the wind, perched sideways on her broom seven feet in the air.

A storm was coming, my hands sweaty where they gripped my own broomstick, right hand over left, knees tucked, feet pointed, a black cat charm clipped to the lace of my boot for luck. It clattered against my heel in the gale, tap t-tap tapping, all shuddering plastic and no resolve. My toes dragged against the grass.

Mithian rose another three feet, gazing at the full-faced moon. Burning logsmoke carried sweetly on the wind, the sage lining both of our dress pockets meant for the blaze.

An eclipse wasn't like an equinox or a marriage, no rites to be upheld, no clasped-hand chanting with blood in the bowl and bare feet in the dirt. I could have drifted back to Stormrow with hair in my mouth to sit beside our six-year old sister at the dinner table. I could have crept up to the attic window and scoured the windswept plains for a fire on the other side of the wall separating Stormrow from Hildon.

"Will Matty be there?" 

Mithian's broom rose sharply. Regal, she hovered beneath the moon with hair as black as ash as twice as righteous, arms painted with sigils for revelry and good fortune. And I, like a pumpkin Sissy had colored on with marker.

"He is dead to us."

Ash-marked like the Heatherby's, with the Heatherby's, most likely. But his name was still penned in The Book of Sneaky Spells beside my own and Mithian's, hangman drawings squashed beside hexes for tripping and sneezing and hiccups that only ended once you gave somebody ice cream.

The Earth's shadow touched the moon.

I drifted after my sister, following our cousins laughter and squeezing my eyes shut on the rise before the treeline.

If I gave Shelley or Meredith a hiccuping fit tonight, no one would laugh. It spoke too plainly of the nights I would squeeze myself inside their wardrobe, giggling between Mithian and Matty as his sisters' swooning about a pair of red-headed boys in the village came to a sneezing, stumbling, hiccuping stop. 

We all had our specialty.

And when Matty hopped over the wall, a defector stretching his fragile bones into new, dogged shape, we were instructed to blacken each memory to ash.

**

Mithian and our cousins paid homage to the Mother Earth in darkness. The bonfire gave light enough only to see their shadows, dancing and singing in a triad, their bare skin hazy and rippling in the smoke. A camisole landed on the log beside my head with a shrieking giggle.

It's like a high, Mithian said. The moon and sun cannot touch you. Only the Earth. Only power.

I dug my fingers into the soil. The sigils on my arms soothed the prickle in my head. I, the weatherwatcher. I, the anxious. The wind howled above the clearing, branches trembling in revelry. I smoothed down my dress with dirt-stained fingers and inhaled, chin tilted to the darkened moon.

Two crows crashed against each other in the gale winds, a burst of feathers before a fall. The thud of racing paws hitting the dirt echoed up my palms, the beat of a witch's heart close enough for me to sense. Distant, but kin. I could only ever sense kin. 

I abandoned the bonfire, smoke whirling in my absence. Mithian's laughter pealed at my back like a compass, my boots guided swiftly over roots I could not see in the black, my hands reaching for trunks I knew would be there, solid and humming. Sage hung heavy in the air but also fur, also salt. A tang that settled over the backs of my teeth like old silver.

"Matthew," I whispered, crouching to weave through bush and bramble, another clearing just ahead.

"Matthew!" another voice shouted. Opposite me, Patience Heatherby tromped into view with sweat lining his brow. Feathers slipped from his flushed skin to the ground, the moon re-emerging. 

I ducked, rising only when the dog appeared, sleek black and trembling with exertion. A ripple tore over the creature from snout to haunch and then it was Matthew, sitting there with bloodied sigils carved into his hands, each one perched delicately over a knee. 

"This is madness," Patience hissed. More feathers fell from his cheeks and shoulders.

"Did you lose Penelope?" Matthew asked, grinning.

"She could not go on. I sent her back." Patience stepped towards my cousin. Hesitated. "I promised I'd bring you home safely."

Matthew sighed, rolling out his shoulders and cracking his neck.

"Hildon is your home," Patience insisted. "You don't need them anymore. They blackened you."

"You don't know what I need," Matthew dismissed.

Breathing deeply, he pressed his bloodied hands to the soil. His power surged into the ground, cracking and splintering towards Stormrow. The sigils hummed, his magic creeping beneath the House as if to wriggle through the floorboards. Something familiar and something foreign. Accept me, accept me.

"Go home," he grunted.

Patience ground his teeth. "I can't-"

Crack!

The wards of Stormrow lashed out. 

Rejection. 

Expulsion. 

Denial.

Matthew sucked in a pained breath between his teeth, brow pinched, and was swallowed in a flash of fire.

Patience collapsed, shielding his eyes from the shine and heat.

My vision swam. Demon fire, my mind chanted at me. Demon fire. The all-consuming flame of a promise broken for power borrowed. A life extinguished.

Pain seared itself between my eyes. I cried out, falling to my hands and knees. Far behind me, Mithian's laughter carried sweetly on the gale. Stormrow settled once more into stillness. The rusty attic weathervane screamed, spinning and spinning and spinning.

Here, blood dripped between my brows and my vision rightened to Patience's sterling eyes, his mouth pulled into a grimace.

"What is it?" I asked him, my fingers coming away red from my brow.

"A sigil of inheritance," he murmured. "The debt…has not yet been collected."

Lightning flashed above us, illuminating the green-eyed cat perched inhumanely still above us. Its branch did not shudder in the wind like the others. It shed no tears to be carried away on the breeze. It did not hunch its shoulders as Patience and I did, our clasped hands an awkward intersection of grief.

My voice wavered. "Only kin can inherit. He was blackened."

The cat leapt from the branch, spilling like ink onto my shoulder.

Patience frowned, his expression tightening with fear.

"It appears your heart was still open."

**

Blood heirs are best for transference of debts, the demon told me, his tail curling against my ankle. Similar magics.

The sigil had faded, the blood washed away by Patience's own magic, yet I still rubbed at my forehead.

"Out wandering?" Mithian tsked, dressed again and weaving a burnt hole in her hem back to fullness. Her hands jerked. Up up down. White cloth spilled from nothingness to mend the grievance. "I told Mother you'd stay with us."

"You should have left her at home," Shelley said without looking at me. Facing Meredith as she was, righting stray hairs and loose collars, they looked even more identical than usual. I could only tell them apart when they spoke and Shelley was always meaner.

Mithian merely spared a glance at my new companion and turned her back.

We mounted our brooms in a line: Shelley, then Meredith, then Mithian, then me, mine listing forward with the cat's unexpected weight. The charm on my boot lace had been lost. Shelley and Meredith and Mithian were all inside Stormrow when the rain finally fell, icy and hard. My boots dragged on the muddy ground, hands drifting from proper position to wipe the stormwater from my eyes and rub my forehead again, again, again.

The sigil was gone but the demon was not.

Matty's heartbeat was stilled and I could not get it back.

Sissy hefted the creature into her arms gleefully when I dripped into the foyer.

"Tarabee's got a pet!" she squealed. "A pet, a pet, a pet. Tarabee's cat!"

I rubbed my head, then my eye. "We'll call him Tar, then, shall we?"

"Taranius," she insisted, unbothered when the creature wriggled from her grasp.

"Of course," I said, propping my soggy broom at the end of the row where it listed two inches to the left. Mother would need to look at it again. "Taranius." 

**

Tar lounged on his back in my bedsheets.

I haven't been in a witching house in ages, he purred. All this magic.

I lit a candle before peeking into the hall, listening for anything other than the clock ticking downstairs, rain pelting the walls, the creak of the spinning weathervane.

"I think they're asleep," I told him.

I've never been this full, he sighed.

I bit the inside of my cheek, reaching sullenly for the silver brush tucked inside my bedside table. A bath had washed away the soil and sigils, but little else. I sat on the ground and pulled the bristles through my sodden hair.

"What debt have I inherited, demon?"

The cat stretched, flicking one ear, then the other, before rolling to face me.

Mm, yes, he said. Matthew was an ambitious creature. My favorite ilk. But it seems your wards were stronger than him.

"Do not mock him," I pleaded. "No one is stronger than an unpaid debt. You doomed him."

I did not set the terms. 

"What terms?"

Tar stretched languidly. Your witch promised the wards would remember him. And then we could begin the work.

"Perhaps," I searched, staring at the edge of my quilt, "perhaps if he had spoken with our parents face-to-face. Then they might've-"

They felt his presence, the cat assured, blinking down at me with steadiness. And heard his call. My magic made sure of that.

I'd heard it too: Accept me. Accept me.

Poor Matthew, Tar cooed mockingly, rolling onto his back, not even a Mother to crack a window when he was so desperately banging at the door. How delicious.

Tears landed on the silver brush clutched tightly in my lap. Downstairs, my aunt and uncle slept peacefully in their chambers. My mother. I could sense their hearts beside my own, two beats for every four of mine.

Blacken your memory, they'd said. Shape-shifting is an arcane sin, the Heatherby's who practice it a stain upon witchcraft, ash-marked and wicked. Even their name burdens the mouth.

I dragged the Book of Sneaky Spells into my lap from beneath my bed, staring at it.

"What work?" I whispered. What debt was mine to fill on pain of death?

The demon dropped from my bedding to peer at the book. He settled beside my hip with eyes as green as Matty's.

Destroying the coven.

**

Breakfast was a brittle affair.

Mithian's hand trembled over the butter dish, pretending to still feel the high of the eclipse. My uncle read the newspaper. Sissy fed half her toast to the cat—for which my mother only half-heartedly scolded her—and my cousins traded a letter back and forth, whispering giddily.

My aunt delicately cut her fruit into slices.

It was one thing to reject Matthew from his ancestral House, but my aunt should have felt his death. My uncle was a cold man, married in and weaker for it, but she, whose family has practiced here for centuries, should have felt it. A flare in the center of her chest howling against the breastbone before guttering out like a pinched candle. All of us should have felt the ripples. Us, his coven. His blood.

As it was, we were having breakfast.

Meredith yawned.

"Long night?" my mother asked, smiling. "I trust it was enjoyable."

"So," Meredith agreed.

"But I think we must liven ourselves with a walk into town," Shelley continued. "Otherwise the day will seem so bleak in comparison."

My aunt eyed the letter half-hidden beneath her plate but did not mention it. "Bring back some plums from the market, would you? We seem to have run out."

My mother nudged my shoulder, wiping away the corner of a sigil left behind. "You seem pale."

I jerked from her reach. "I'm not."

My mother sighed pointedly from her nose, laying a hand atop Sissy's head to stop her from reaching for second servings of honey.

"Does the cat have a name, at least?" 

She was already dressed for the day, dark hair coiled artfully atop her head, her gaze steady where it met mine. I hated that cat, and for a moment I hated her, too. 

"Taranius," I reported. My chair screeched across the floor. "If you'll excuse me."

**

The village church was empty. It's altar cold and gray on a raised dais taller than I was, a smear of blood forgotten on the right-most corner. 

"Are you going to go through with it?" Penelope asked. She lay on her back in the front-most pew, her cane propped against the peeling wood.

"Would you?" I scoffed.

Penelope frowned, eyes clouded with faraway thought. "I do not wish to die," she whispered.

"Nor I to damn and defile," I snapped, hand closing over the curse in my pocket. If my heart had been open to Matty once, it was shut tight, now. "That- that selfish idiot."

Penelope merely hummed.

"And like the phoenix: rise."

**

Meredith was weeping against a low wall when I ran from the church. I froze and she scoffed. 

"You know you're the weak link, right?" She sniffled, hugging her arms close to herself. "Grieve in private if you must, but that's it."

"Why?" I demanded. "If you're also-"

"I'm not," she hissed. "And if you tell my mother I was, I will hex you so badly you won't know up from down. Keep it. Together."

My gaze drifted to the bell-tower, gnawing on my cheek, thoughts on the rumor. On the ugly sound of it. Penelope howled. And when she did, her coven came. When Matthew was caught conspiring with Patience, he was severed. He begged at the door for weeks, sobbing viciously, before the wards widened themselves to push the noise away.

"Would you have opened the door?"

Meredith glared, pushing off the wall.

"Don't ask stupid questions. I don't know who you're talking about."

**

Hours later I sat alone, scowling at the curse Tar had given me. 

Penelope emerged with red-rimmed eyes that brightened in surprise.

"Show me," I said. 

She clasped my hand in hers, leaning heavily on my shoulder. 

"First," she whispered, "destruction has many hearts."

**

Dinner was quiet but for clattering forks, Sissy's knife dulled to rubbish. No one noticed.

They spoke of idle things.

I placed a compulsion on the plums—the same that guided a hiccuper's hand to the freezer. The bowl emptied quickly, juice dribbling lurid down each of our chins, napkins and fingers stained red. That, the ceremony that bound us. The table, which remembered the shape of Matthew. The sigil, carved beneath its wooden planks with my own hand on Sissy's knife, inscribing our fate.

"Taranius," I called.

"Yes, my dear," he said, leaping featherlight onto the tablecloth. Almost in unison, my coven's hearts started to pound: Sissy's with the joy of seeing an animal and the rest, finally noticing the thin webs of power binding them still, the demon in their midst.

Tar pressed his forehead to mine and glassware shattered around the table. The sigil glowed green over our knees. Sissy laughed. It would not be so painful for her.

One by one, the demon's power flowed into our chests, reaching, twisting, pulling until a new shape was left behind. Fingers become paws, become legs. Clenched jaws to open, panting mouths. 

Eight black dogs at the dinner table, pretending to be human. 

They brayed. They cried. 

I rolled my shoulders until I returned to my original shape.

"The Heatherby's are kind enough to teach the transformation if Stormrow be open to the ash-marked." 

Their hearts thudded wildly beneath their breastbones, howling.

"It was Matthew's dying wish."