CHAPTER 10

An old ache, a buried hurt, rises up beside my confusion.

My mom is not strong or brave. She doesn’t even like to walk down the driveway to get the mail. She doesn’t even make toast. She doesn’t even know how to love me. And yet she has figured out the key to fighting the greatest forces of darkness in the universe?

I feel all the things I’ve missed piling on me at once. Birthdays she could have cared about, nights when we could have read together, hugs and inside jokes. I think of the mom who painted my room, the one who painted, Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness. Was she once really all the things Homer says she was? I want to believe it and I’m scared to believe it.

Germ lays a hand on my arm. Homer sighs, looking at me with pity, which angers me. I’m angry and sad and hopeful at once.

A breeze blows cold across us.

“All of this brings us to you,” Homer says. “And how you yourself are an impossible thing.”

I hesitate. “Impossible how?”

“Well”—he pauses, looking around the cemetery and up at the sky, as if gauging the time he has to answer—“the stories of you both are woven mostly of rumors and gossip. We ghosts have quite a network—ghosts meeting up in fields, at cemeteries, out on the sea, passing along information. I can only tell you what I know. But I’ll have to do it quickly.

“I know that your mother left home at sixteen to travel the world searching for witches, and preserved everything she learned in The Witch Hunter’s Guide to the Universe. And that her mother—your grandmother—had passed along the book to her just before being cursed by Mable the Mad and wandering off into the woods, never to be seen again.” He eyes me for my reaction as I listen breathlessly. My grandmother, cursed, lost.

“I know that somewhere in your mother’s travels, while crossing the sea by freighter on one of her journeys, she met your father. I know that she showed up here in Seaport after he died, with just a suitcase and a growing belly and a key to the house on Waterside Road.”

My skin prickles at the mention of my father, but Homer pushes on quickly, before I can ask more.

“It didn’t take the ghosts who haunt your house long to figure out who she was—we ghosts have known about the Oakses for years. And it didn’t take long for us to see she was hiding, and to guess whom she was hiding from.” For a moment pity overtakes him, deepening the lines on his face. “The ghosts at your house, including Ebb, watched her stash The Witch Hunter’s Guide under the floor and wait for your arrival. She was hiding your history from you, I suppose. She was already, before you were born, hiding your sight. She was turning her back on all of it.”

“But why?” I finally interrupt.

Homer looks at me sadly. “As I think Ebb has told you, those with the sight stand out in the world like a beacon, easy for witches to find. Most of them pose no threat to witches. And a witch hunter can learn to sort of… dim themselves, a mental trick that’s hard to master. But the daughter of a witch hunter, a defenseless child… well, I suspect that, despite all her courage, she couldn’t face the possibility of losing you.”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“And she might have had a chance to live a normal life with you. Only…”

“Only?”

Homer wrings his hands together and lowers his voice, looking around the cemetery again as if keeping an eye out for the Memory Thief herself.

“Only, somewhere in her travels—we believe—she’d discovered the enormous secret of finding and reaching the witches. The rumors circulated quite a bit at the time. And those rumors, I believe, made it to the witches’ ears.” He leans back, as if he doesn’t want to say what he has to say next. “And even though the famous Annabelle Oaks had given up hunting witches, a witch came for her anyway. And for you. And that’s the impossible thing.”

“What?” I ask, confused.

“Why, isn’t it obvious?” he says. “You’re still here.”

Homer drops his voice lower still. He leans toward us, and speaks so quietly, we have to lean forward to hear him.

“The night you were born, your mother was cursed. That much is obvious. When she went to the hospital to have you, she was the same powerful woman we had always heard about. But when she came out, her memories were gone; she was just a shell of a person.

“As the newborn daughter of the woman who had so threatened the witches and their secrets, the Memory Thief should have hated you, even feared you. And you were but a helpless baby; it would have been so easy for her to curse you, too, or to bid her familiars to steal you. But for some reason that we can’t begin to guess, you weren’t taken. Your mother’s memories were—but not you.” He smiles gently.

“Your mother somehow saved you, Rosie. We don’t know how. In my heart, un-beating as it is, I believe that means something—a powerful secret. There’s no other way to explain it. But no one can imagine what it might be.”

“The Memory Thief,” I offer, “she said something about being tricked.”

Homer contemplates this, then shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’ve spoken to every ghost who haunts that hospital, and none of them can tell me anything useful. They all fled when they sensed a witch in the vicinity that night, and never looked back. It’s a dead end, no pun intended.”

He gazes at me, then leans back, swipes a worm gently out of his ear and drops it onto the ground. He looks at us. He thinks for a long time.

“All I know is that the Memory Thief is coming for you now. And to stay safe, you’ll have to go far from here. Give up everything you know. Go into hiding.”

“For how long?” Germ asks for me.

He blinks at me a moment, taken aback. “Why, forever.”

He does not seem to notice that he has shocked us. He looks down at his hands as if counting on his fingers, working out logistics under his breath. “There are people who could hide you, take you in, all over the world—in Japan, in Zimbabwe… a few brave people with the sight, scattered remnants of witch hunting families who’d take the risk for one of their own. All that matters is that you’re safe and away from here come the dark moon.”

“What about Germ? Is she in danger too?”

He looks at Germ, then shakes his head. “She’s got the sight for some reason I can’t guess. I suppose it could be a coincidence. But she’s not a witch hunter. As long as she stays uninvolved, they’ll ignore her. It’s you the witch wants. And she’ll be angry. A witch can’t kill, directly. But her familiars are something to be reckoned with, and there are many ways a witch’s curse can cause you to end up dead—to wander off a cliff, say, or jump from the deck of a ship.”

I’m afraid—so afraid that my heart feels like it has fallen into my feet—but an entirely different idea now catches hold of me. And I know, now that it’s caught, it won’t un-catch. I don’t say it at first.

“My mom would never come with me,” I say instead. “She won’t leave sight of the sea.” I think of how agitated she gets when we’re away from the shore for just a couple of hours.

And then I find the courage to ask what I most want to know. It causes that same prickling, heavy, sea-urchin-in-the-chest feeling that I’ve felt all night. And now I realize what it is. The painful, lopsided, unfamiliar feeling that has been rising in me for hours is a scary, risky, prickly kind of hope.

“Um, Homer, you talk about all these curses that witches cast by touching someone. Can a curse be broken?”

Homer blinks at me and leans back, his brow furrowing in concern.

“Rosie…”

He hesitates for a long time before he finally speaks again.

“I don’t know everything about witches, but I do know that the only way to kill a curse is to kill the witch who wields it. And only one person, by some fluke we can’t begin to guess at, has ever killed a witch. Even an adult twice your size would not be able to do it. Even a trained soldier. Even your mom couldn’t.”

“But if I could get my hands on a witch weapon like the kind you were talking about—”

“It’s not so easy to do that, I’m afraid. The witch hunters have secrets just like the witches do—and the biggest one is their weapons. We don’t know how they made them, or where any of them are. I doubt even the guide will give you much help there.”

“But…,” I say, and can’t find the words. I think of how Germ’s mom says the day Germ was born was like getting the deed to a Hawaiian island. If I broke the curse, would my mom feel that way about me? Would she look at me like Mrs. Bartley looks at Germ? The thought makes me dizzy.

An itchy, watched feeling makes me turn to Ebb. He’s staring at me intently with a strange look on his face—sorry and guilty and uncertain all at once. But before I can try to make sense of the look, Homer speaks again. “Rosie, once, your mother loved you with all her heart, and that counts for something, even if she’s forgotten it now. And her only wish was that you be safe. She would have never wanted you to be a witch hunter.”

“I don’t want to hunt witches. I just want to hunt one witch. I could just stay and kill the one witch.”

“You can’t stay. It’s out of the question.”

Beside me, I feel Germ studying me. She clearly wants me to run, like everyone else, but she also knows me better than anyone else. People assume that because I’m small and quiet, I’m also easy to go along with things. I am not. Germ shakes her head.

“Rosie won’t go,” she says.

Homer stares at us a moment, then scans the woods around the cemetery, nervous.

“We ghosts couldn’t help you, you know—we ghosts—if you got in trouble.” He looks at Ebb, who’s been listening quietly in the background. “We’re only shadows, remnants—our uselessness is our greatest burden. Even if we could fight, which we can’t, the fate of a ghost who crosses a witch is worse than death. If you stay, if—and when—she comes for you, we can’t save you. You’d be completely on your own.”

I sit very still. My stomach hurts. It feels like I’ve swallowed a bag full of rocks. But Germ has always said I’ve had a piece of iron lodged in my back that won’t budge once I decide something.

I can’t leave my mom. Especially when I know there’s a tiny, tiny sliver of a chance I could… fix her.

Homer sighs, relenting, but exasperated.

“If you want to kill the Memory Thief, Rosie, you’d have to do two things: find a witch weapon or how to make one, and find out how your mom saved you the night you were born—why and how you were never taken. But let’s be clear: I’m against it.”

He sounds bitterly worried and disappointed as he continues, “Remember, at the dark moon, she’ll be back for you. There’s no getting around it.”

I knead my hands together, too filled with worry to reply. And seeing this, Homer seems to take pity on me. He slumps a little, and smiles at me.

“Take heart, Rosie,” he says. “Only the witches would have you think there is more darkness in the world than there is light. Only they would have you believe that love could ever really leave you.”

He ruminates for a moment, then stiffens. “The moon is low. You’d better go so Ebb can get you home before he disappears at dawn, like we all do. I’ve kept you too long.”

I stand on unsteady legs and glance at Ebb, who still has the guilty, uncertain look on his face.

“I’d shake your hand,” Homer says, “but you’ll just have to settle for me saying it’s an honor to meet one of the famous Oaks women at long last. And I hope our paths cross again.”

Germ tugs my sleeve. Ebb is already making his way across the cemetery, impatient now, and we turn to follow him.

Looking over my shoulder, I see Homer waving as we hurry away, until he is hidden beyond the trees.