She was mulling over her deficiency in words starting with z when she heard a knock at the cottage door. Wondering if there was a problem with a guest, or if Zoë had decided to drop by, Justine hopped off the sofa and went to answer the door in her sock feet.

Opening it, she felt her heart stop as she was confronted with the last person she expected to see.

“Mom?”

Twenty-five

Whenever Justine had tried to envision a reunion with her mother, she had thought it would take place in cautious increments … an e-mail, a letter, a phone call, a brief visit. She should have known better. Marigold had always been a creature of impulse, following every whim and doing whatever was necessary to avoid the consequences. Showing up at the front door was to Marigold’s advantage; the surprise of it would throw Justine off balance.

Justine had always hoped that someday she and her mother might come to a new understanding and acceptance of each other. Some resolution that didn’t involve winning and losing, but instead … peace. But after four years of estrangement, her mother’s eyes were hard with the same anger that had underpinned every moment of Justine’s childhood. No visible signs of softening.

“Mom, what are you doing here?” Opening the door, she stepped back to allow Marigold inside.

Marigold ventured just past the threshold and looked around.

There was a time when Justine would have worried about her mother’s reaction to the cottage, the inn, the life she had built. She would have desperately wanted Marigold’s good opinion, so seldom given. It came as a revelation that she no longer needed her mother’s approval. It was enough to know that she had made the right choices for herself.

“Is there a problem?” Justine asked. “Why are you here?”

Marigold’s voice was threaded with contempt. “Is it hard to believe that I might want to see my own daughter?”

Justine had to think about that. “Yes,” she said. “You’ve never liked my company, and I still haven’t done what you wanted me to do. So there’s no reason for you to visit unless there’s a problem.”

“The problem, as always, is you,” Marigold said flatly.

As always. Those two words brought the past into the room with them as if it were a living presence. A giant standing over them both, casting an inescapable shadow of blame.

There had been no softening in Marigold’s heart. She had ossified until, like a beautiful stone statue, any change in posture would cause her to break and crumble. She would never be able to turn her head to look in a new direction, or take a step forward, or hold her daughter in her arms. How terrible it must have been, Justine thought with a trace of compassion, to stay so rigid while life changed around you.

“Does this have to do with the geas?” Justine asked gently. “Rosemary and Sage must have told you by now. You must be angry.”

“I made a sacrifice for you, and you threw it away. How should I feel, Justine?”

“Maybe a little like the way I felt, when I found out about it.” She saw from Marigold’s incredulous fury that it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder about Justine’s feelings.

“You’ve always been ungrateful,” Marigold snapped, “but I never thought of you as stupid. I gave you what you needed. I did what was best for you.”

“I wish you had waited until I was older,” Justine said quietly. “I wish you’d explained it to me first. Maybe allowed me to have a say in it.”

“I suppose I should have asked your permission before feeding you, clothing you, taking you to the dentist and the pediatrician—”

“That’s different. Those things are all part of raising a child.”

“Ungrateful,” Marigold spat.

“No. I’m grateful that you took care of me and raised me. I have to believe you did the best you could. But the thing is, you made a decision for me that wasn’t yours to make. Binding a lifelong curse to your daughter doesn’t fall under the category of dental visits or polio vaccinations. And you know that, or you would have mentioned something about it to me.”

“I kept it secret because I knew if you found out, you would ruin everything. I knew you would do something stupid. And you have.” The bleached white of Marigold’s face contrasted sharply with the red fury of her hair, the ruddy slashes of her brows over hard eyes. She burned like an angel of vengeance as she continued. “I’ve just come from Cauldron Island. They’re performing a midnight rite because of you and your selfishness. And if they don’t succeed, you’re going to die. The witch’s bane has turned on you.”

Justine discovered that her heart wasn’t entirely safe, after all. One human being could always find a way to hurt another.

“You fell in love with a man who betrayed you,” Marigold ranted, “and the witch’s bane is going to kill you unless they do something. It’s your fault. You deserve this.”

Justine tried to gather her wits. Her own voice seemed to come from far away. “What are they doing? What kind of rite?”

“They’re trying to lift a spell from the man you’re involved with. He’s there at this moment. I met him. He might die for you. And if that happens … the blood is on your hands.”

* * *

When the last group of coveners had been delivered to the old schoolhouse, Jason accompanied them inside.

The crafters had been busy. The place looked like a set for a horror movie, with black cloth draped everywhere and a wealth of flickering candles. Incense burned in a pedestal bowl, thickening the air with aromatic smoke. A huge pentagram had been chalked onto the floor, with handfuls of crystals placed at various places around the central star. Chalices and wands had been set all around the pentagram.

The hair rose on the back of Jason’s neck.

Violet, a crafter in her mid-thirties, came forward to take his arm and give it a comforting squeeze. “Sorry. I know it looks creepy. But we want to do the very best we can for you, so we didn’t hold back.”

“Tim Burton would be impressed,” he said, and she smiled.

As he glanced at the faces of the women around him, Jason was reassured. They were trying to help him, and in doing so, they would help Justine. “There’s something I need to know,” he said, and was surprised when they all fell silent and looked at him. A couple of coveners paused in their sweeping, while another who was arranging crystals looked up from her task. “I need to know that the results of what I did won’t cause problems for Justine in the future. In other words, whatever you have to do to make sure that Justine will be safe … go for it. No matter what the consequences to me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“We understand.” Violet regarded him with patent concern. “Rosemary explained the risks, yes? This spell is hard to remove. Like separating sand mixed with sugar. And once the witch’s bane is focused on you again, you might have very little time left. No one knows what condition you’ll be in when the spell is lifted, or what will happen.”

“That’s fine,” he said gruffly. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

Sage came to him and took his hand. “Just sit in the middle of the pentagram while we do our work. Try to relax and let your mind clear.”

Jason went to the center of the chalked circle and sat, while the crafters gathered at the edges of the pentagram.

“Once we begin,” Rosemary told him, “you have to be quiet. No interruptions. We’ll all need to maintain our focus.”

“Got it. No talking, no texting.” He looked at the group around him. “Has everyone turned off their cell phones?”

Rosemary looked stern, but the corner of her mouth twitched. “That’ll be enough from you. Unless you have any questions.”

“Just one.”

“Yes?”

“What is that knife with the curved handle for?”

“For cutting herbs.”

He looked dubiously at the foot-long knife.

“It’s midnight,” someone said.

Rosemary looked at Jason. “Let’s begin.”

Sage had already explained to Jason that the ritual would involve a series of chants, blessings, and invocations before the actual spell-lifting would occur. “If you could possibly go into a meditative state during the rite,” Sage had told him, “that would be very helpful to us. Focus on your breathing, let your thoughts go—”

“I can meditate,” he had assured her.

He sat up straight and focused his attention on the flow of his breath. He tried to focus on a single image. His mind touched on one memory after another until he found the dark-sliding surf of Coronado Beach at night, the endless soothing rush of water, the way he had relaxed and listened with Justine’s warm weight in his lap, her head on his shoulder. Waves turning over on themselves, salt-burled rhythm making its way from the blackest depths up to a moonstruck shore. A sense of calm pervaded him.

He heard women’s voices calling to unseen spirits, summoning and beguiling. A cool, dark energy seeped into the air around him. He took it inside with every breath, feeling it cleanse the lingering thoughts and anger and fear until his mind was spread like the fingers of open hands and the place where a soul should have lived was left raw and exposed. The truth came to him between the space of one breath and another.

He had no time left.

He received the revelation with wonder and a brief, blind instinct to struggle. Not yet. Not now. But in the absence of a soul, his heart compensated with aching beats of acceptance … Let go, let go, let go.

* * *

Justine was not in a mood to take no for an answer. When no water taxis were available, she called a friend who owned a small trawler and desperately talked her into taking her to Cauldron Island. “I know it’s late, I’ll pay anything, do anything, if you’ll just get me there, you know it’s not far—” The friend had said yes, seeming to understand that Justine wasn’t going to give her a choice anyway.

In ten minutes Justine had scrambled to the Friday Harbor docks and boarded the waiting trawler. Every minute that passed before launching was another agonizing tug at her nerves until the reverberations made her entire body sing in panic. Jason had gone behind her back again, and the coven, too. They had all locked her out of something that would affect her more than anyone else. The longevity spell was infinitely more dangerous to remove than to cast in the first place. A spell like that could work its way down inside you with backward barbs, until it would kill you to pull it out. Almost like love.

The boat parted from the dock at idling speed until it had left the no-wake zone. The motor growled with rising ferocity as the bow ate through serrated water while the wind huffed and struck Justine’s face and tangled her loose hair. The weight of the Triodecad, contained in a canvas tote bag, thumped hard against her thigh.

Her mind was in high gear. She had talked with Jason earlier that day, and Jason had said nothing. He’d let her think he was in San Francisco. He must have been at the lighthouse right then. He’d been relaxed and casual, not revealing a hint about what he was planning.

She heard Marigold’s voice: “The witch’s bane has turned on you.”

That was the unknown consequence. A blood sacrifice was required, that was the price of love for her kind. Someone had to pay, and Jason had decided it would be him.

The blood is on your hands.

How easy it would be to turn into Marigold. All she would have to do was let herself. And when all that bitterness had eaten up her insides, the only direction it would be able to go was outward.

The trawler docked at Cauldron Island just long enough for Justine to leap onto the slick weathered boards. She climbed the endless stairs with punishing upward lunges until her thighs knotted and burned, but she ignored the pain and kept going. The lighthouse was silent, unoccupied, the yard cemetery-dark and still. Clouds piled over the waning moon like discarded laundry, slowly obscuring the gibbous curve.

Still panting from the hard upward haul, Justine went to the outside shed and pulled out one of the pair of bicycles. She headed down the ragged trail to Crystal Cove, wheels jolting on stones that protruded like knuckles, then dipping into shallow scoops that sent the bike upward for stomach-lifting seconds.

The schoolhouse windows flickered red and black, blinking slowly at her as the bike wheels rolled and spat sand. Justine was off the bike before it had even stopped, the metal frame clattering to the ground.

She shoved hard against the door and barged in.

The rite had just ended, the circle of coveners broken up, two or three of them huddled in the middle of the pentagram.

“Justine,” she heard Rosemary say in an odd tone.

“Someone turn on a light,” Justine said impatiently.

The light from a portable lamp flared, a pool of unnatural white pushing the shadows on the floor right up against the seams of the walls.

Jason was sitting in the center of the pentagram, arms loosely curled around his bent legs, forehead resting on his knees. He didn’t move or even look up as she approached. Sage, Rosemary, and Violet were crowded around him.

“Get back!” Justine cried. She rushed to Jason, dropped the Triodecad, and fell to her knees beside him. “Jason? Jason, what is it?” He made no sound that let her know he’d heard her. She cast a wild glance at the coveners. Whatever they saw in her face was enough to make them retreat. She saw that Jason was sweating heavily, the hair at the nape of his neck wet. “What did you do to him?” she demanded.

“The spell’s been lifted,” Rosemary said. “You’re safe now, Justine.”

“You shouldn’t have done this without me,” she said fiercely. “You knew I’d want to be told.”

“It was his decision.”

Turning her attention back to Jason, Justine touched the back of his head, his neck, trying to coax him to look at her. “Let me see you,” she said. “Jason, please—”

She broke off as his head bobbed up on the uncertain support of his neck. His complexion was gray, gleaming with sweat, his eyes not quite focused. Pain had tightened the skin over his bone structure, turning the cheekbones into blades. Every breath was a short, dry gasp.

“What is it?” she asked urgently. “Where does it hurt, what’s the matter?”

She saw that he wanted to say something, but his teeth were clenched too hard to allow for words. His right hand gripped the upper part of his left arm, fingers digging into the muscle. Instantly she understood.

Heart attack.