Ambrose’s smile was smug. “That was the spell being sealed.”
It was done now. I put the nine-knotted rope down on the table and watched the black flame die away. I felt a dull ache and realized I’d bitten down on my own lip too hard. The taste of blood was in my mouth, metal and fear and magic.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have done it.”
“Magic is what keeps us safe from mortals,” Ambrose argued. “Why risk your heart, or anything else? You believe in Prince Charming and happy endings and fairy-tale love, Sabrina, but what happens to witches in fairy tales?”
I looked away from my cousin’s dark eyes and darker smile, away from the rope. The flowers I had gathered from the riverbank were bright against the knots, like tiny blue stars, and I thought of the other name for myosotis: forget-me-not. I’d always thought of that as a sweet name, romantic even, but for the first time I thought about it as a command. Forget me not, even if you want to.
Suddenly it was as hard to breathe, here in my own warm home, as it had been in the stream when the cold waters closed over my head.
It was done, I told myself again. It was too late to wonder what I had done.
“Don’t worry so much, Sabrina mine.”
Ambrose’s voice was coaxing, sweet as poisoned honey, a voice I had trusted and followed all my life. It was much too late for second thoughts.
“You need to get used to breaking the rules, that’s all,” he assured me. “It’s well past the witching hour, and you should go to bed. Good night, fairy-tale princess. May flights of dark angels wing thee to thy rest. You’re half human. You should get half a happy ending, at least. I hope your prince will be charming tomorrow.”
Rosalind Walker has the strangest dreams.
In the waking world, she’s totally normal. The preacher’s kid, studious and well-behaved unless she has to fight for justice—and Jesus fought for justice too, so Roz feels that’s okay. Her grandma is a little eccentric, but whose grandma isn’t? Roz spends all her free time with her family, or with her friends since forever, Sabrina, Susie, and Harvey. Her dad does have doubts about her friends, though.
Funnily enough, Reverend Walker has no problem with Harvey, the only boy in their group. Even though Harvey’s brother is the town heartthrob, Roz secretly, guiltily thinks Harvey is just as handsome. Not that it matters. Harvey has always been so into Sabrina there’s no way out, thus he’s no threat to Roz’s doubtful virtue, and Harvey’s brother, Tommy, never takes off the cross around his neck. Reverend Walker says the Kinkles are good boys.
Sabrina and Susie are a different matter. Reverend Walker only frowns a slightly puzzled frown over Susie and doesn’t comment, but he has a lot to say about Sabrina. Nobody has ever seen the Spellmans in any church.
Roz’s dad can get pretty intense, but she can’t discard what he says entirely.
Sabrina is Roz’s BFF. Best friends forever, the most sacred agreement there is in a teenage girl’s life, and most BFFs know absolutely everything there is to know about each other. They constantly sleep over at each other’s houses.
Sometimes Roz is scared to sleep at Sabrina’s place. She used to think her fear was because of the house being a mortuary, and it is a little freaky to think of bodies laid out, cold and still, beneath the floor Roz walks on whenever she sets foot inside. Roz was once standing in the hall, waiting for Sabrina to come downstairs so they could go, and she had a sharp flash, as if she’d really seen it, of a dead woman lying somewhere beneath her. A dead woman staring up at Roz with open eyes, wide and white and blind.
Where do people go when they die? her father asked Roz once when she was a kid, and she said: They go to Sabrina’s house.
She still remembers the stern, disappointed expression on his face as he told her that when they died, people went to heaven or hell.
They went to heaven if they were good, and believed, and to hell if they sinned, and did not believe.
What goes to Sabrina’s house are only the empty shells, after the souls are gone. Roz believes that. She’s almost certain she believes.
She still gets a little freaked out even going near the Spellman house, even talking to Sabrina’s creepy aunts, and her creepy cousin. Her dad says they are sinners, and Roz senses that, at the very least, they have secrets.
Maybe secrets and sins are the same thing.
Then there are her dreams. Roz keeps those secret. She’s a sinner too.
In her dreams there are ghosts in the woods, hanging shadows that swing into Roz’s path and stop her from taking another step. In her dreams she sees the Kinkle family with guns, hunting through the woods. She’s terrified of Harvey’s father, no matter how much Reverend Walker approves of the Kinkles. In her dreams she sees Ambrose Spellman in the mortuary, with blood on his face, laughing. And her best friend, Sabrina, Roz sees her in the woods wearing a white dress that turns black.
And worse than that, worse than anything … Sometimes in Roz’s dreams the pictures she sees blur, like destroyed paintings, as if the wet paint of the world is running. She sees herself in a mirror, and her eyes turn to darkness, and darkness drips down her face in long, black trails. The whole world is reduced to messy streaks of color against an overwhelming, all-enveloping dark, and she weeps and her tears are shadows, and nothing makes sense any longer.
Roz loves her friend, and she fears for her, though there seems no reason for fear in the waking world. She’s frightened for herself too, and she hasn’t told her friends. Not about the dreams. Not about her eyes failing.
She gets headaches, and the words of her father’s sermons seem to pound in her head: his voice thundering judgment, so different from his usual low and loving tones. Sometimes Roz thinks those words will split her skull. Sometimes she thinks she will weep blood.
Do you believe in what you cannot see? If she couldn’t see at all, what would she believe in? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe. What about what she can see? Is she supposed to believe in every vision?
She sees things differently, in her dreams. She wonders what other people see in their dreams. Everybody worries that the people around them see things differently, but perhaps Roz worries more than most.
Roz has her dreams, and she has her doubts. On the days after her worst dreams, on the days when the strangest things happen, the doubts get stronger.
She doesn’t know whether her dreams are warning her about danger to Sabrina, or if Sabrina is the danger.
I went downstairs that morning to find Aunt Zelda staring disapprovingly over her newspaper as Ambrose leaned in the doorway and flirted with the woman delivering our mail.
“You know the saying,” I heard him murmur. “How does it go again? Something about good things and packages.”
The girl was a redhead, so her blush was extremely apparent, violent crimson under her peaked cap and freckles. We go through a lot of mailmen and mailwomen. I don’t know if Ambrose scares them off, or if Zelda requests for them to be changed.
Aunt Zelda came and sat with me at the kitchen table. Usually Aunt Hilda is at the stove, making me breakfast, but not today. I looked out the window and saw the fresh soil heaped on the grave outside. I swallowed and poured myself some cereal.
Ambrose swaggered in a few moments later, passing Aunt Zelda an envelope from the school. It was probably about the next parent-teacher meeting. Aunt Zelda ignored the envelope with total disdain, as she does everything about my mortal life. She was having a cigarette for breakfast, which was standard.