Nineteen bodies dangled from ropes, hanged for witchcraft.
“Margot,” a voice echoed from the back of my mind. A whisper, desperate and pleading. “Margot!”
I sucked in a gasp and blinked, and instantly, it was daylight once more and Nathaniel was standing before me, shaking me and shouting.
I blinked, trying to get my bearings. “Did you see that?”
Nathaniel looked at me in confusion.
“Was that…was that…” Mary-Beth’s fingers dug into my arm, and I looked over to meet her eye to eye. She was white as a sheet.
I looked around, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “You…did either of you see that?” I asked, looking back at Nathaniel and Borden.
“See what?” Borden demanded, looking nervous and confused.
“The hanging!” Mary-Beth said as tears started welling in her eyes. She hugged her arms to herself, looking around at this cursed space. “Mare McGregor was hanging right there!” She pointed to the exact spot.
“What…” Nathaniel started, shaking his head in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“As soon as I was touching Mary-Beth and she touched that tree, everything went dark,” I said, attempting to explain. “And then it was all there. The townspeople watching. And everyone…” My stomach rolled and I had to take three slow breaths to keep from throwing up. “I saw Mare hanging, dead.”
Suddenly, Mary-Beth took off down the hill. She was crying, shaking from head to toe.
She couldn’t do any magic, but it was undeniable that she had a connection to magic, to Mare McGregor.
“I want to leave,” I said, feeling all my insides shaking with fear. “I don’t ever want to come back to this place.”
My legs felt like trembling stumps as I set off after Mary-Beth. I could feel the evil and the dark coming out of the very ground. I could swear there were screams seeping up from the dirt.
Nineteen people died here because of mass hysteria. Two were really witches. My actual ancestor died because of what she could do.
I wanted out of Salem.
I felt better once we’d left the immediate area. I still couldn’t explain what had happened, but the overwhelming feeling of darkness lifted from my chest once we were back on the main road. We still had work to be done here, so we stayed.
We had dinner at an old pub. We were worried they wouldn’t let us in, considering I was nineteen and Mary-Beth twenty. But they seemed the type that didn’t care, and we didn’t order any alcohol anyway. The food was excellent and when we were finished, we wandered out onto the beach.
Nathaniel wrapped his arms around me as we faced the ocean and the nearly nonexistent light. It was pushing seven o’clock, and considering it was only the beginning of March, there wasn’t much of anything to see anymore.
But we all lingered there, staring at the ocean like it could give us answers.
“I don’t think we’re going to find much here,” Borden said. He kicked the toe of his shoe into the sand, sending it spraying out toward the small waves.
“There’s still the bookstore,” Nathaniel pointed out. “We might find something there.”
“I mean here, in the entire United States,” Borden clarified. “If you think about it, this country was only occupied for a short amount of time during the surge. There could only be a small number of mages who even came to America. Unless some of the Native Americans were mages, and we know they didn’t keep much of a written record, so that’s not going to help us.”
“You think everything we need is in Europe?” Mary-Beth asked. “In the UK?”
Borden nodded.
And something dawned over me that I had never considered before.
He was right.
“Think about it,” Borden pointed out. “Every one of us traces back to the UK. Scotland and England, and who knows? Maybe you have mage blood on both sides, Mary-Beth, and it’s Ireland, too. Most likely. And we know there were plenty of mage families in Germany.”
“Where would we even start?” Nathaniel asked. But I could hear the excitement in his voice at the prospect of what we might find.
“You know the history,” Borden pointed out. “We start with those regions. We trace back through our family history. And then we talk to locals. Go from there.”
I glanced over at Nathaniel and watched his brows furrow together as he considered it.
“It makes sense,” Nathaniel said, and it kind of felt like it was meant just for me, to help calm my nerves.
Borden nodded. “Flights to Europe are long,” he said. “This wouldn’t exactly be a quick weekend trip like this one. And even Spring Break isn’t going to give us enough time.”
“Summer is the better time to go anyway,” Mary-Beth pointed out. “The UK is kind of a miserable, gray place in the winter.”
Nathaniel and I looked at each other. They talked about extravagant vacations, places that Nathaniel and I could never, ever afford to go to.
“Don’t worry, you guys,” Mary-Beth said with a smile as she walked up the beach and looped her arm through mine. “I’m not going to leave you behind. What are trust funds for, if not to bring your friends across the Atlantic Ocean?”
“I could also use a new pair of boots,” I said dryly. “These ones got a little scuff on them.”
“We’ll hit the shops in the morning,” Mary-Beth said without hesitating.
“I was kidding!” I declared, shaking my head at her ridiculousness.
“We should head in,” Nathaniel said, squeezing me a little tighter and shifting to my side, taking one of my hands. “It’s getting darker by the minute.”
Our hotel was only two blocks away and it didn’t take us long to get there. We’d already checked in earlier, so with a quick goodnight and plan to meet for breakfast in the morning, we went our separate ways, Mary-Beth and Borden to their separate rooms, and Nathaniel and I to our shared one.
I was frozen to the bone from standing out on the beach, so I showered, turning the water as hot as it would go. I brushed my teeth while Nathaniel changed into sleeping clothes. I pulled my hair up into a knot at the top of my head and then changed as well.
And as we both slipped into the bed, I let out a long sigh. I curled into Nathaniel’s chest, wrapping an arm tight around his chest.
“Are you going to bed feeling exceptionally disappointed as well?” I asked.
Nathaniel snaked his arms around me, and in the dark, we clung to each other tightly. “It wasn’t what I expected,” he said. “But three books are better than none. Even if we can’t read a third of what we found.”
I chuckled at his professor-like wording. He was always talking like he was teaching a class, and it tickled me through and through.
“Poor Mary-Beth,” I said. “Why do you think she can’t do anything? She isn’t doing any of it wrong. And we know she has to have mage blood. With the telekinesis book and the wands, and now that vision? We’ve seen her genealogy tree.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “I really don’t know. There’s so much about ourselves we don’t understand yet. But…maybe this trip to the UK will reveal some secrets.”