The Unquiet Grave

Chapter Two

I did not sleep well that night. I often did not sleep well after a gig, but lay tossing, going over the performance and wondering how it could have been improved. That night, however, our performance was the farthest thing from my mind.

The scene started replaying in my head as soon as I turned out the light. Over and over I watched the old man’s head disintegrate as his rotten lips mouthed their silent plea. Over and over he walked through the tables, through the wall: an unremarkable character transformed into something monstrous. Did he have any connection to the sensations that nearly had knocked me off my feet upon first entering the bar? Probably. His appearance had made my skin crawl in the same way, had instilled me with the same nausea. Did he have any connection to the bar’s name as a bad luck spot? Perhaps. A hundred-year-old ghost could account for a lot of bad luck.

I might have asked myself why he had appeared to me, but I already knew.

I rolled over and watched the minutes flash past on my nightstand clock. Three forty. Three forty-five. Three… My eyes closed and I drifted into a familiar dream. I walked up a windswept hill in the dark. Overhead, the stars fought a full moon. A door in the hill opened and a man came out, a man with flaming hair and eyes the color of the stormy sea. He took my hand.

“Ah, that’s the Old Blood speaking,” my grandmother Llewellyn had said when I told her of the dream once, long ago. “It’s Brenda Maddox you see. She slept on a Fairy hill, and the Bright Ones took her, and no one in mortal lands saw her for a year and a day. Then she came back, big with child, and no one could name the father. They married her off to a neighbor boy, and they came across the sea. But the Old Blood comes out in her daughters from time to time.” Here, she poked me in the nose and cackled.

She died soon after, and no one else in my family wanted to hear about the Old Blood.

The dream changed. Five years old, I sat on the floor of the room I shared with my sisters, making balls of light. Seven balls, all the colors of the rainbow, danced around my head and I laughed with the pleasure of it.

My sisters came in, fifteen and seventeen. At first, absorbed in chatting about some boy or other, they didn’t notice me. Then they did, and their faces grew mean with fear.

“Stop it,” said Una, the elder.

“You’re not allowed,” the younger, Mairghread, chimed in.

I let the balls vanish. “Is it true you’re going to marry David?” I asked Una.

Her face went dead white and her hand pressed her belly in a gesture I didn’t understand. She took a step forward, as if she meant to shake me, then stopped. “Where did you hear that? You little spy!”

“He’s no good for you,” I went on in a toneless voice. “He’ll break your heart.”

Una ran out of the room, screaming for our mother. Mother came in. She didn’t fear me. She grabbed me by the shoulders and slapped me across the face, so hard my head snapped back. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong, and no one bothered to explain.

My mother and sisters left the room. I crawled into bed, drew the shadows about me, and huddled there for a long time.

Disturbed, I roused a little and looked at the clock again. Three fifty-five.

My family didn’t manage to beat the magic out of me, for all they tried. I practiced in secret, and my skill grew. As soon as I could, I left home and looked for the others like me I knew must be out there. But although I learned ritual and divination, and many other things besides, I found few who could match me—a true witch. Finally, I settled in Boulder, Colorado, and made an attempt to blend in with the New Age community there. I kept a shop and read cards, and guarded my real nature from all but a few. Until Timber came to draw me out of my shell, I lived a quiet, almost Mundane life.