When the telephone rang, Franny looked and saw something black dart by. It was most definitely not a mouse, and although she said nothing, her pulse had begun to race. There was Antonia on the other line, in the throes of early childbirth, on her way to Mass General, revealing Maria’s instructions on how to break the curse. “You’ll never believe this,” she said, but Franny did. She believed every word.
“What was that all about?” Vincent asked when the call was over. Franny drank her scotch in one gulp. “Bad news?”
“Good news,” Franny said. “Antonia is having her baby and I’m going to bed.”
She embraced Vincent, then kissed his cheek. That was when he understood. They could always read each other, from the very start.
“I can tell when you’re lying,” Vincent said.
“You were always good at that. We can’t have another generation suffer as we did.”
Vincent looked like a boy standing there and Franny could not have loved him more. How lucky she’d been to have seen him again after all this time. How she wished Jet was here with them.
“Is there no other way?” Vincent urged.
“There’s only one way to break the curse.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. Together.”
“We will not.” It was always going to be her and her alone.
“I can’t stop you?” he said.
“When could you ever?”
“You were always difficult,” Vincent said, his eyes brimming with tears.
“You were worse,” Franny told him. “But you know the truth as well as I do,” she said, and he did. Love was a sacrifice. It was all things and everything. It was the way they had lived their lives.
* * *
The Book of the Raven was open on the desk. It was late, but not too late for what she must achieve. Franny understood that the book itself was magic. Words were everything, they built worlds and destroyed them. Alone in her room, Franny knew what she must do. Before she made the sacrifice and destroyed the part of their past that held them back, she would make certain to keep their history. She copied everything in their family Grimoire into a red journal found in a desk drawer that was stamped with the logo of the inn, three hedges in whose branches perched three blackbirds. She began and didn’t stop until every spell and cure had been copied down. Wood avens to cure toothache, black horehound for nausea and monthly cramps, salted leaves to heal the bite of a dog, elderberry and cherry bark for coughs, dill seeds for hiccoughs, hawthorn to calm a frantic heart, and nettle, which made a fine soup, ladled out to treat burns, infections, and inflammations. Apple for love, holly for dreams, ferns to call for rain, feverfew to ward off colds. List after list of all that mattered, silver coins, pure water, willow, birch, rowan, string, mirrors, glass, blood, ink, paper, pen.
As she wrote, the ink on the pages of the original Grimoire rubbed off onto her fingertips and sank into her flesh and bones, so that her veins turned dark blue and then black, threading up her arms, straight to her heart. She could feel the years unwinding. She could feel the magic inside of her. She had always wanted time to move backwards, and now it did. As she wrote she was a young woman with long red hair in love with Haylin Walker, she was a girl quarreling with her mother over the strict rules she’d set forth to keep her children away from magic, she watched over Vincent when he was a boy looking for love. Franny wrote out the enchantments of the women who came before her, going back through the generations until she reached Maria, who stood on the gallows and cursed a man who had betrayed a sacred trust.
At last, Franny had transferred everything from their Grimoire. When the new book was completed, Franny heard something in the wall beside her bed. She recognized the clacking. She had finished just in time, for the deathwatch beetle was waiting for her. That was the black shadow she had seen slipping by. It had begun to follow her as soon as she took the call from Antonia. Now it emerged from the wall. In a short while the sun would begin to rise, the sky would lighten and then turn red. Red for blood, for magic, for love.