Page 18 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“I’m from American Telegram. If you’ll sign here, please?”
“A telegram?” Aja guffawed. “Who sends actual telegrams?”
Inside, I deflated. There was only one person who sent telegrams in a world of text messaging and email. Someone who deserved her own tinfoil hat for the number of conspiracies she shouted. Someone who walked the line of sanity more precariously than any madwoman in the attic.
“My mother,” I said grimly.
I scribbled my name, then accepted the creased yellow paper and shut the door after the courier.
“It’s kind of sweet.” Aja returned to the couch. “Like a sentimental gesture, I guess?”
“More like she’s a head case who thinks everyone is tapping her phones.” I waved away Aja’s mortified look. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”
These messages were never good. Either she was asking for money (which I didn’t have), or she was warning me of yet another plot against witches everywhere. Last time she was convinced that with Mercury rising, salmon were magically poisoning all fae women under thirty. Salmon.
Aja furrowed her eyebrows in mild confusion. I had never mentioned Sybil to her, and we hadn’t been living together long enough for me to divulge that fraught history.
“Well, what does it say?” she asked.
Upon opening the letter, the dizziness from the afternoon returned. But this time it had nothing to do with attached memories.
“Cass?” Aja asked as I collapsed onto one of the chairs at the oak table. “Cass, are you all right?”
I cradled my head and sucked in sharp breaths. “Oh gods,” I moaned into my hands. “Oh no, no, no, no,no.”
The letter fluttered to the floor, a crumpled yellow bird. Aja picked it up to read aloud, every word landing like a hammer in the back of my mind.
CASSANDRA WHELAN
APT 5B / 12012 SUTHERLAND DR
BRIGHTON MA 92210
PENNY DEAD -[STOP]- GO HOME ASAP -[STOP]- CANT LEAVE SEATTLE -[STOP]- SYBIL -[STOP]
“Who’s Penny?” Aja’s voice seemed very far away. “Cass? Cassandra. Who’s Penny?”
“It’s…she’s my grandmother,” I whispered into my hands. “Oh,Gran.”
Tears started to fall fast and hard.
My grandmother—the only real family I had left—was dead.
PART II
MANZANITA
6
FROM THE DREAM JOURNAL OF CASSANDRA WHELAN
Last night I dreamed of home. The day Dad died.
It wasn’t home yet to me. It wouldn’t be until Mom left for good. Then it was still the place we lived while Dad was away. The place Mom—Sibyl—was forced to go because we couldn’t stay at a base anymore. The place she hated more than anything else.
I was in the living room folding laundry while she was fussing with something in the kitchen. Gran was somewhere else. I don’t remember where. The garden, maybe, or out in the orchard talking to her trees.
“Pick up the towel, and do it right. I don’t want to have to ask you again.”
