Page 10 of Justice & Liberty

She probably hadn’t realized herself, though, and by the time she had learned, it had been too late to do much of anything.

Part of me was furious with myself for going to college in California, and even worse, staying in LA afterward. For missing out on the few years she’d had left. But, well...Mom would never have approved of me giving up anything for her sake.

On a nightstand right next to the head of the bed, there was a glass of water on a coaster, mostly empty. Her old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind that folded down into what looked a little like a book. And an actual leather-bound book with a pen tucked into the front. I picked it up, examining the pen. A Pelikan fountain pen, Mom’s favorite, so there had to be an ink bottle somewhere nearby.

With some tiny bit of trepidation, I opened the drawer on the nightstand, but there was nothing risqué in there. Just another book, a bottle of Black Swan in Australian Roses ink, and some assorted medication bottles.

The book on the inside of the nightstand was bigger, and it didn’t look like one of the journals Mom had always kept, but tome-sized, complete with a leather strap and buckle to hold it shut. It had the family name—Mom’s family name, Abernathy—embossed across the front of it, and it was old enough that the leather had a deep glossy patina. It was gorgeous.

Was it a cookbook? Mom had always been very proud of the family recipes she had, but we’d always used them out of the wooden recipe box in the kitchen.

When I reached for the buckle on the leather strap, I had an odd moment of hesitation. What if it was private? It wouldhave been odd, given how old the book clearly was, but...well, I wasn’t an Abernathy, was I? If it was some ancient family heirloom, did I have any right to?—

Don’t be ridiculous, Mom’s voice chided in my head.If you want to be an Abernathy, we’ll change your name. You’re my family. Nothing else matters. If anything, it means even more than if I’d given birth to you. I chose you, button. I love you more than anything else in the whole world.

I fell back on the bed, book clutched to my chest, and curled up there for a long time, unable to do anything but cry.

I finally remembered the book when Bee hopped up onto the bed beside me and started pawing at it, like maybe it had her dinner inside.

“Fine,” I mumbled to her, and reached for the buckle again. This time, a strange feeling of acceptance flooded me as my fingers smoothed over the glossy leather and brass. A breeze blew through the room as I got it open, and absently, I thought to myself that I would need to find the window that’d been left open and close it. It rained too much in Iowa for me to be leaving windows open all the time.

The book was definitely old, and it started with something of a list. One woman after another, starting with an Elisabeth Abernathy whose use offin place of thesin her name was both odd, since the name usually used a short s, and dated the book, since that kind of spelling fell out of style hundreds of years ago. Eighteen hundred? Seventeen? They hadn’t written dates, these women, but the list covered almost two full pages, and it was clear that each woman had added her own name, because there in the middle of the second page was Mom’s name, in her own handwriting: Margaret Ùna Abernathy.

My breath caught, tears streaming down my face, and I couldn’t...I just couldn’t. I glanced at the Pelikan, sittingright there, loaded with ink by Mom’s own hand, and the absolute rightness of it hit me.

I had to.

I had to put my name in the book.

Before I had even truly connected the thought to action, I was uncapping the pen and scrawling in my very best handwriting: Justice Chesapeake Jones.

And suddenly I could breathe again. I could have sworn that as the ink went from glossy and wet to matte, sinking into the paper, that it flashed with gold light, and suddenly, the air was lighter and my tears were...survivable.

I could do this.

I had lost Mom, yes, but I still had her, in some ways. I had all that she’d taught me, and all of her things that she’d left me.

A book owned by dozens of Abernathy women before me.

Feeling lighter, I turned the page to find the surprise of my life.

Gramarye: All the magical learnings of the Abernathy family, collected.

What the actual fuck?

5

It wasn’t a joke,at least not as far as I could tell.

The book was, in fact, an old-fashioned...grimoire? A book of spells, recipes for tinctures and ointments, and notes on useful plants to collect when possible, including how to prepare them for storage and use them later. Some of this stuff Mom had taught me as a kid, so it wasn’t even that surprising to find she had it written down somewhere.

But . . .

Witches.

Mom’s family had been witches.

Like most sensible modern people, I believed that all the old cases of women being murdered after witch trials had been based on politics and misogyny. I wasn’t sure I believed any different now, even with proof sitting in front of me that back then, some women truly had been witches.

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