Page 48 of The Sisters of Crimson House

“Stop following me!” Miranda yells, already so far ahead.

“I’m going to see a tree that somebody rolled with toilet paper,” said Miranda so quietly that Charley tried not to breathe so she could hear her. “Always toilet paper in the dream. You call them the paper snakes because the wind makes them sway like that. But I keep telling you to go home.”

Miranda maneuvers her bike off the sidewalk onto the street.

“You’re not supposed to ride in the street!” Charley huffs at her big sister, catching up. She doesn’t want to be alone. Doesn’t want to be yelled at by kids who fear her because of her name, her house.

“So go home and tell on me,” Miranda snaps back, launching forward with an extra burst of speed. Miranda doesn’t make the rules, so Charley follows suit, easing her bike into the road. The wind picks up. Charley feels it lift her hair, her spirits, the paper snakes. She’s going to see the paper snakes. They twist in the wind, and Charley watches, dazzled by the light and hypnotic sway. She does not see the car, the one that barrels through the four-way stop.

“Charley!” Miranda screams.

“And you get hit by that car,” Miranda said, finally looking at her. “Over and over. Night after night. The dream is always the same. I thought maybe it was survivor’s guilt. I couldn’t save Mom and Dad from their car accident, so I dreamed I lost you to the same fate.”

“So you and I have the same vision of an event that never happened,” said Charley, desperate to make sense of the story. “But what if it was supposed to?”

“What do you mean?”

A very ugly thought began to take root in Charley’s brain. So ugly that it took a moment for her to say it out loud. “What if the accident was supposed to happen but never came to pass?” she asked Miranda. “What would that mean?”

Miranda took a very long time to answer.

“It means you’re not supposed to be here.”

***

A balsamic moon scraped the sky like a fingernail, the night dark enough that nearby planets shone like rings on an invisible hand. Charley studied it from her bed, trying to remember the meanings of each phase of the moon from when Astrid had briefly but intensely invested them both in astrology. Balsamic, the period just before the new moon. It was supposed to mean rest, a rest that was definitely not happening tonight.

Her mother’s warm hands. A rotten spirit trying to swallow her whole. A shared dream that only created more questions than answers beyond the one that continued to loop in her brain.

You’re not supposed to be here.

She got out of bed, restless and raw as she made her way down the grand staircase. She walked into Sadie’s parlor, her mind casting back over Miranda’s drumbeat of a warning about boundaries, of Sadie’s literal wards carved into the floor. Where had she seen those images before? The pile of books from her frantic Seeker’s Star research remained spread out on the floor, but she found it quickly on top of Sadie’s desk: Brydes: A History. Tucking the book under her arm, she left the parlor, walking quickly past the kitchen and up the stairwell into Sadie’s tower bedroom.

Charley sat on the floor, the carved Star before her. She opened the slim volume, Beatrix’s poem welcoming the reader with her rhyme about the Star printed on the second page, a glorified nursery rhyme Charley had read a million times before. She flipped through the rest of the book. Nothing beyond Beatrix’s stories of barnstorming across the country before landing in California. A chronological history of the purchase of Crimson House and the extensive repair work it had required.

Her eyes fell on the bookshelf opposite. It had survived the flooding, tucked away in the corner of the room, close to Sadie’s chair for easy access. Charley scooted over for a closer look. Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities had been returned to the shelf. It was the last book she’d seen in her grandmother’s hands. She held it reverently, holding it up to her face as if she might catch a whiff of Sadie’s Ciara perfume. It smelled of dust and time and the only good memories she had in this room with her grandmother. She opened the book, surprised when a slim journal fell into her lap. She set down Dickens, her hands shaking as she held up the extra copy of Beatrix’s book. Sadie had told her she kept the only one in her office. Charley flipped to the back, her eyes widening in recognition. A strange epigraph was written with a cramped hand, not the big looping Beatrix signature, but clear and legible.

Protect her.

Protect her.

Protect her.

Protect her.

Underneath the words, a hand-drawn spiral, a line bisecting it on the diagonal. An ouroboros. A blue jay, the bird she’d told her grandmother made her feel safe. Just like the one carved in the Star on the floor, Charley realized, her eyes widening in recognition.

And two final words below.

Forgive us.

Charley shut the book in frustration. Forgive who for what? More answers only seemed to raise additional questions. Why had her grandmother been so frightened that she carved a Star into the ground with mysterious symbols whose meanings died with her? Why hadn’t she shared anything in that magical liminal space when they did the ritual? If Charley didn’t know any better, she would guess that, even in death, Sadie wasn’t ready to give up her control of all the answers.

Twenty-Six

October 15, 2008

Charley mostly hated Beale Street, hated the commercial pandering to tourists, the giant beers and cocktails slurped through straws as long as your arm, that the drunk out-of-towners who staggered along the cobblestones didn’t know anything about the history literally under their feet. She almost hadn’t known about it either, not until the books changed that, the ones she found on the third floor of A. Schwab’s that revealed an alternate Beale. This Beale was a not-so-long-ago magical superhighway, a place where root workers and conjure men and women from around the mid-South could source oils and soaps and other items intrinsic for spells that were still stocked on the upper floor of the very building in which she stood.