Page 22 of Witchlore
I immediately feel foolish. Of course it’s dangerous. I might not be the best at witchcraft but I know that an ancient spell like this, something crafted for permanence, requires a heavy sacrifice. It’s not like Bastian has lied to me.
“What happens if someone finds out we’ve done it?”
“Lando, if we do it right,everyone’sgoing to know we’ve done it. Then you get your girlfriend back and I get the career I want.” Bastian looks at me, narrowing his eyes, as if he’s trying to figure out what’s truly bothering me. “Are you worried we’ll get in trouble? Or worried they’ll be able to undo it? They won’t, and the worst they can do is take the grimoire away to the Merlin Foundation and tell us off for being bad, reckless students, but who cares? We’ll have what we want.”
Elizabeth,I think. I nod and Bastian, satisfied, looks back to the book.
“So the first places it mentions, Boggart Hole… Clough and Kilgrimol, do you know them? Are they local?”
“They’re both in the northwest.” I wonder if it was written by a shapeshifter from the north. “Boggart Hole Clough is a wood near the city—it’s got ravines and gullies in it, that’s whatcloughmeans—and Kilgrimol is a drowned village near Blackpool.”
“How far away from the city is Boggart Hole Clough?”
“It’s out near Failsworth, we could get the tram out.…” I check my phone. “It’d be, like, forty-five minutes?”
“Okay.” Bastian jots some words down in his notebook. “Boggarts like half-moons, so this weekend is good. How’s Friday night for you?”
I stop stroking René’s ear and stare at Bastian. He’s really hard to read sometimes.
“Wait, you’re taking this list literally? We’re going to the park to find a boggart?”
“Yeah, of course I am, how else will we complete the spell?” Now he’s looking at me like I’m mad, and all I can think is:Who is this person who talks about boggarts like he meets one every day?Obviously, I know that magical creatures exist, but they mostly prefer rural settings where they can stay hidden from humans—kelpies off the coast in Scotland, piskies on Bodmin Moor. Witches in those places strive to live in balance with the magical creatures in nature around them but here, in the city, I would never expect to find them. In fact, the closest most witches come to meeting a hidden magical creature is meeting me.
I wonder how many other spells Bastian has done, how many strange magical creatures he’s encountered. I nod.
“Friday, then?”
“Yeah. You should take this home with you.” He stands up and hands the grimoire to me. “I’ve got what I need right now and we should take it farther away from—”
“The scene of the crime?”
“My dad.” Bastian stuffs his hands into his pockets. “It will be safer with you than with me.”
I nod and we awkwardly wait for the lift to come up.
“So is this the kind of thing you usually do? Weird and dangerous spells?” I say, trying to make conversation.
“Why? What have you heard?” He frowns.
“Nothing.” I step into the lift. I can’t imagine doing a magical scavenger hunt across the northwest of England is going to be much fun if every conversation we have is such hard work, but Bastian doesn’t seem to be the type of guy for small talk.
“Bring cheese on Friday,” he says, in lieu of goodbye.
I’m so baffled by this that all I can say to the closing doors is “What kind?”
Obviously, I don’t get an answer.
When I get back to Beryl’s and I’ve kicked Mr. Pebbles off my bed and locked the door and Beryl has yelled through the locked door at me about how I’m not allowed to have my doors locked, I climb onto my bed and open the grimoire. I stroke my fingers over the embossed title on the leather:The Witchlore of Bodies. I’ve got a shoebox under the bed filled with old notebooks that will be a perfect hiding place, but I’m interested in this shifter from the past. I flip past all the spells and evidence of hundreds of years of different authors to the diary bit. The part that starts in 1878, when the shifter was given care of their family grimoire. I settle against the pillows, reading the words from an entry at the beginning:
Mother and Father say that now I am seventeen it is my responsibility to settle in my resting form, to choose a gender and abide in it. That it is the safest path to protect myself. I do not understand how they can fathom remaining in one traditional formwhen everything is changing so rapidly, when Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s words are lighting the world afire. We are none of us safe in this life, there are so many dangers. Surely now is the time to challenge our ideas of what a woman or man can be? My ideas for my future are so much more vast than what my parents could ever imagine.
I press a hand against the words on the page, marveling at the grainy feel of it under my fingertips. It has existed for so long, this story of the past, but the pressure they’re describing, I feel it so keenly. Instantly, I have a memory of my mother, telling me to put a dress on even when I didn’t want to.No matter how you shift, you are a girl. You were born female. This is your resting form.I didn’t have the words to tell her then, but at six years old I knew that, even if I could control my shifting, even if I learned everything she so desperately wanted me to, I still wouldn’t feel like a girl. When I finally did have the words for it and the bravery to tell them, I was ten and they called me ridiculous. Reckless.Do you not see how gender is safety for shapeshifters, the one way we can fit in?
For the first time in my life, staring down at the words of another shapeshifter who feels like me, I realize how lonely I have felt being the one who questions it all. The one who can’t control their shifting, who can’t make themselves safe, no matter how much I try. I have felt lonely for so long that until Elizabeth came into my life, I didn’t realize that I even was lonely. I just thought I was alone. Then Elizabeth was there, changing my perspective, and now she’s gone and I don’t want to go backward. I want her back.
When I have tucked the grimoire safely in the box under my bed and have turned out the light, staring up into the darkness, mymind is full of what getting Elizabeth back might actually mean. Will she know that she’s been gone? Will her soul or something have been absorbed into nature, like many of the witch covens believe? If that’s the case, will her soul come back endowed with some kind of special knowledge from being dead? Will she even want me still, if she’s all wise and in touch with nature? What if she comes back from the dead and changes her mind about me, about us? The thought makes my heart race and my hands sweat, so I pull my pillow over my head and try to do one of the breathing exercises I learned in the hospital to get myself to sleep.
I am sitting at a writing desk, holding an old pen in my hand as I scrawl across the page. I look out the beautiful bay window onto long, flat lawns covered in snow, and it drifts down outside the window.
