“‘Rebecca Bishop’s Book of Shadows,’” I said, reading aloud from the words written in thick black ink on the daisy. “This is my mother’s missing spell book—the one she used for the higher magics.”
I cracked open the cover. After all our problems with Ashmole 782, I was braced for anything from mysterious illustrations to encoded script. Instead I found my mother’s round, childish handwriting.
“To summon a spirit recently dead and question it” was the first spell in the book.
“Mom certainly believed in starting with a bang,” I said, showing Matthew the words on the page.
The notes beneath the spell recorded the dates when she and Emily had tried to work the magic, as well as the results. Their first three attempts had failed. On the fourth try, they succeeded.
Both of them were thirteen at the time.
“Christ,” Matthew said. “They were babes. What business did they have with the dead?”
“Apparently they wanted to know if Bobby Woodruff liked Mary Bassett,” I said, peering at the cramped script.
“Why didn’t they just ask Bobby Woodruff?” Matthew wondered.
I flipped through the pages. Binding spells, banishing spells, protection spells, charms to summon the elemental powers—they were all in there, along with love magic and other coercive enchantments.
My fingers stopped. Matthew sniffed.
Something thin and almost transparent was pressed onto one of the pages in the back of the book.
Scrawled above it in a more mature version of the same round hand were the words:
Diana:
Happy Birthday! I kept this for you.
It was our first indication that you were going to be a great witch.
Maybe you’ll need it one day.
Lots of love, Mom
“It’s my caul.” I looked up at Matthew. “Do you think it’s meaningful that I got it back on the same day the babies quickened?”
“No,” Matthew said. “It’s far more likely that the house gave it back to you tonight because you finally stopped running from what your mother and father knew since the very beginning.”
“What’s that?” I frowned.
“That you were going to possess an extraordinary combination of your parents’ very different magical abilities,” he replied.
The tenth knot burned on my wrist. I turned over my hand and looked at its writhing shape.
“That’s why I can tie the tenth knot,” I said, understanding for the first time where the power came from. “I can create because my father was a weaver, and I can destroy because my mother had the talent for higher, darker magics.”
“A union of opposites,” Matthew said. “Your parents were an alchemical wedding, too. One that produced a marvelous child.”
I closed the spell book carefully. It would take me months—years, perhaps—to learn from my mother’s mistakes and create spells of my own that would achieve the same ends. With one hand pressing my mother’s spell book to my sternum and the other pressed against my abdomen, I leaned back and listened to the slow beating of Matthew’s heart.
“‘Do not refuse me because I am dark and shadowed,’” I whispered, remembering a line from an alchemical text I’d studied in Matthew’s library. “That line from the Aurora Consurgens used to remind me of you, but now it makes me think of my parents, as well as my own magic and how hard I resisted it.” Matthew’s thumb stroked my wrist, bringing the tenth knot to brilliant, colorful life.
“This reminds me of another part of the Aurora Consurgens,” he murmured. “‘As I am the end, so