October 3: Hale Manor

Eli spent the day learning magic, and for a few hours it almost felt like a normal thing to do.

He sat at the kitchen table with the grimoire open in front of him and Vex in the chair at his elbow, and she guided him through it the way she might have guided a nervous driver through an empty parking lot. She stopped him when he skipped ahead. She made him read the difficult ages aloud, then explained them in plain words, and when she did not understand a age herself she itted it and the two of them hunted through Thomas's margins until they found his note. Between pages she had him light the candle again and again, until the flame came as easily as a breath. She taught him to feel for the thread, the faint pull at the center of his left palm that meant the magic was listening, the way you feel for a stair in the dark. By afternoon he could light three candles at once without scorching a single cabinet. She also made him a small cloth bag on a cord, with rosemary and a sliver of iron and a pinch of black salt inside, and told him to wear it under his shirt. "Personal ward," she said. "Don't take it off. Not even in the shower." He felt it against his breastbone all day, a small and steady warmth.

They had breakfast together, and then a long second breakfast she called brunch, and then lunch, which was cold pizza eaten standing at the counter. They talked and joked and argued over which of two anime openings was better, and laughed more often than either of them seemed to expect. The shadow that had lain over them both since the funeral, and over the house itself, thinned a little with every hour. It did not vanish. A man's death was not something you got over in three days, and Thomas Calloway had cast a very long shadow across both their lives. Twice Eli saw Vex stop in the middle of a sentence, her eyes drawn to his father's coat on its hook by the door, and twice she picked the sentence up again, a little too quickly. But those moments came farther apart than they had the day before, and Eli found that he was grateful. She had helped him with the magic. She had helped him, without ever saying so, to start putting words around what he felt. And it was plain that she was glad of him too. She was laughing when he caught her at it. She had stopped hovering in the doorways of rooms his father had used. She talked to him, and trained him, and let herself be teased, and in the evening light she looked, for the first time since the funeral, like someone who was not bracing for the next blow.

Then it was almost six, and a car was waiting at the curb.

It was long and black and very clean, with a driver in gray livery who got out, opened the rear door, and waited without a word. Eli had changed into the one dark jacket he owned, the one he had worn to the funeral. Vex looked him over at the door and straightened his collar with two quick fingers.

"You look like you're going to a funeral," she said.

"I was at one two days ago."

"Fair." She did not smile, quite. "I'm not on the list, or I'd come. what I said. Be polite. Don't promise her anything." Her hand lingered a moment on his lapel, then fell away. "Come back and tell me everything."

Mordecai was already in the car. He had somehow slipped past both of them and settled himself on the leather seat with his paws tucked under, looking straight ahead, and when Eli slid in beside him the cat did not even turn his head.

"You are coming," Eli said.

"I have been to that house more times than you have," Mordecai said. "I am not about to let you walk into it alone."

The car pulled away from the curb and climbed through Port Verity in the failing light. They ed the old cannery with its blind windows, and the cranes, and the slow dark water, and then they were rising into the Heights, where the streets turned wide and quiet and the houses sat far back behind iron fences. Eli had been up here as a small child, a handful of times, in the back seat of his mother's car with his mother's mouth set in a hard line. He ed chandeliers. He ed a staircase as wide as a street. He had always supposed that a child's memory made things bigger than they were.

Hale Manor proved him wrong.

It stood at the end of a long gravel drive, behind gates that opened without a sound, a Georgian pile of gray stone with a row of tall windows lit gold against the dusk and a copper roof gone green with age. Ivy climbed one wing. Two stone lions guarded the steps. It was even grander than he ed, and he understood, looking at it, what old money meant. This was not a house someone had bought. It was a house that had been accumulated, layer by layer, over generations. His father had always provided for his family, and Thomas's house was solid and comfortable and paid for, but it could have fit inside the manor's entrance hall with room left over for a ballroom.

"Mind where you step," Mordecai said quietly as the car crunched across the gravel. His fur had risen along his spine. "The wards on this property are older and stronger than your father's. They will not harm you. They have been told you are expected. But they are awake, and they are looking."

The front doors were opened by a man in black with a face like a closed door. Inside, the hall rose three stories to a painted ceiling, and the floor was marble the color of old ivory. Servants stood along the walls in a stillness that did not look natural: grim-faced men in formal black, hands folded, standing watch like statues, and between them moved young women in dark dresses and white gloves who carried trays and murmured and ed without making a sound, with the grace of the well-trained and the obedient. No one looked at Eli directly. Everyone seemed to know exactly who he was.

The corridors were lined with framed photographs. Eli ed Ophelia Hale shaking hands with a senator. Ophelia at a gala beside a man he thought he recognized from the news, a CEO of something with a name on a skyscraper. Ophelia cutting a ribbon beneath a banner that read The Hale Foundation. Ophelia with a governor, two mayors, an archbishop. He knew what the photographs meant. His grandmother held large investments in some of the biggest companies in the country, wrote enormous checks to political campaigns, and gave to charity on a scale that put her name on the sides of buildings. He wondered, and the thought was not entirely idle, how much of that fortune had come down through the family and how much had been bought with witchcraft.

A gaunt servant stepped forward to stop Mordecai at the door of the dining room. "The animal cannot..."

"Let him in, Hargrove."

The voice was low and warm and carried the length of the room without being raised. Every conversation within earshot ceased.

Ophelia Hale stood at the head of a table set for twelve. She was seventy-one years old, and she did not look it. She looked closer to forty-five. Her skin was smooth and ageless, with no trace of the wrinkles that should have been there, and her silver-streaked black hair had been drawn back from a face of sharp cheekbones and perfect composure. She wore a gown the deep green of a river at night, cut with an elegance that cost more than Eli's mother made in a year. She stood as tall, as regal and as proud as any queen among her subjects, or any high priestess among her worshipers, and as she turned to look at him Eli saw that her lips were a little too red.

"Elias," she said. "Thank you for coming."

"Grandmother." He had not been sure what to call her, and the word came out stiffly.

Her gaze moved to the floor. "Mordecai."

"Ophelia." The cat's tone could have frozen glass.

"You are looking well. Cats do, in their way." She gave a small smile that did not reach her eyes. "He has been in this house before, Hargrove. Let him stay."

There was no warmth in it on either side. Eli understood that he had just watched two old enemies pretend, for his sake, to be civil. He filed it away.

The table was long and white and glittering. Around it sat men and women in dark, expensive clothes who rose when Ophelia did and bowed their heads a fraction when Eli ed. He suspected them at once. Some looked sixty, some thirty, and they all watched him with the avid, careful interest of people sizing up a new addition to a game. Coven , he guessed, full witches and apprentices who had sworn to follow her. Two of them stared openly at his left hand.

The seat on Ophelia's right had been left empty for him. He sat. Mordecai slipped under the table and curled against his ankle, and Eli felt the cat go rigid as the first course arrived.

Two of the guests were not like the others. They sat near the middle of the table, and the way they sat told him something. Mayor Gerald Whitcombe, fifty-eight, silver-haired and ruddy-faced, with a practiced politician's smile and a wedding ring he kept turning on his finger. Police Chief Walter Drummond, fifty-five, bull-necked, buzz-cut and heavy-lidded, in a uniform collar a size too tight. They were, on paper, two of the most powerful men in Port Verity, and they behaved as if Ophelia Hale were the only person in the room. Whitcombe laughed a half-beat too late at her remarks. Drummond waited until she lifted her fork before touching his.

Eli wondered, briefly, whether they were witches too. He looked at the way they moved, the careless ease with which they ignored the symbols engraved in the silver and the herbs bundled in the sconces, and decided they were not. They were something else. They were hers.

They had both come alone. Their wives, Eli noticed, were conspicuously absent. Ophelia's young servants attended them all evening, a handful of men and women who could not have been much older than Eli, who filled their glasses before they were empty and lingered at their shoulders with smiles that did not waver. The mayor smiled at the young women. The chief smiled at the young women and the young men alike, and let a hand rest, a moment too long, on the sleeve of a boy who was pouring his wine. Neither of them looked at the servants the way a man looks at a servant. Eli looked down at his plate. He had the feeling that both men would sign whatever his grandmother put in front of them, and that neither would read it first.

"Such a tragedy, your father," Whitcombe said, lifting his glass in Eli's direction with a politician's sorrow. "Thomas was a fine man. A real asset to this city."

"I took a personal interest in the report," Drummond said, without being asked. He did not look at Eli. His eyes had gone, briefly, to Ophelia. "Single-vehicle collision. Wet road. I went over every detail myself. There was nothing suspicious. Nothing at all."

Under the table, Mordecai's claws sank gently into the carpet.

"Thank you," Eli said. "I appreciate that."

Ophelia said nothing. She lifted her glass. It was not the same glass as everyone else's. The wine on the table was pale gold in crystal flutes, and hers, in a heavier goblet, was something dark and red, thicker than wine, that clung to the sides of the glass when she tilted it. She sipped. Her lips came away redder than before. Eli smelled, faintly, beneath the roast and the candle wax, something like copper.

He did not touch his own glass again.

He wondered, between courses, who or what his grandmother's patron might be. She looked as he ed her: proud, confident, domineering, a woman who always expected to be obeyed and who took any disobedience as a slight. She was wealthy and powerful and gracious, in a way that felt like ownership, and she watched every servant at the table the way a woman watches her own hands. He watched her, and the guests, and the endless courses coming and going, and he said very little, and when the conversation turned to his school and his plans, he answered in the careful, pleasant voice Vex had coached him to use, and gave away nothing.

Dinner ended the way everything in that house seemed to end, at a signal Eli did not see. A servant stepped back, the candles burned a shade lower, and the guests began to rise.

The coven took their leave quietly, each with a murmured word to Ophelia and a bow of the head. The mayor went last of the three whose names Eli knew, though not by much. He bent over Ophelia's hand like a courtier, said that it had been a privilege, that it was always a privilege, and let himself be turned and led from the room by a young woman in a dark dress who took him gently by the hand. Not toward the front door. Toward a side corridor, where a lamp had been lit. The police chief made his own farewells with the same deference, the same lowered eyes. Two servants stepped forward to attend him, a young man and a young woman, both in formal black, and the young man was the same boy on whose sleeve the chief's hand had rested a moment too long earlier, and the chief let them lead him away as well, one on either side.

Eli looked at the tablecloth. He understood, in a dim and unwelcome way, what he was not being shown, and he found that he did not want to understand it any better.

In the hall, as he waited for his grandmother to finish with the last of her guests, he noticed a pair of teenagers standing among the others along the wall. A tall, pale boy in a long black coat with a silver ring through one eyebrow, who looked about nineteen. A pretty, dark-skinned girl with a short bob and black lipstick, her hands folded in front of her, whom Eli guessed to be about eighteen, his own age. They were not common servants, nor did they seem to be full witches. They looked like a combination of guard, servant, and watcher, and Eli guessed they were acolytes. The way the two of them stood together, brushing hands now and then, or leaning very slightly toward each other, told him they were a couple, a boyfriend and a girlfriend. The mayor ed them on his way out. His eyes lingered on the girl a moment too long, and the smile she gave him did not move at all. The boy looked at the floor. Something flickered across his face, quick and strange, and was gone. Eli did not understand it, and then Hargrove was at his elbow.

"Mistress Hale will see you in her study."

The study was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor lined with portraits. A fire burned in a hearth tall enough to stand in. The walls were books, floor to ceiling, and a desk of black wood sat before the windows with a green-shaded lamp. Over the mantel hung a painting of a boy of ten or so in a dark suit, with Thomas's jaw and a stiff, careful stillness. Eli stopped in front of it. It took him a moment to realize why it bothered him. The boy was not smiling, and he did not look as if he had been asked to.

"He hated that suit," Ophelia said from behind him. "He wore it anyway."

She had come in without a sound. She crossed to a wing chair by the fire and lowered herself into it with the ease of a woman half her age, and the goblet came with her, held loosely in one long hand. Mordecai had followed Eli up the stairs and now sat at the foot of Eli's chair, upright and silent, watching her.

"I am very glad you came to dinner, Elias," she said, with the faintest hint of a smile. It was not exactly grandmotherly, but she did seem pleased. "It is a pity, what happened to your father."

"It is," Eli murmured.

He ed the funeral. His grandmother standing at the edge of the grave, in black, a car and driver waiting behind her. Everyone else had been crying, or trying not to. She had not shed a single tear for her only child. Even now, in this firelit room, she showed no visible sign of grief for him. Not the way Vex had. Vex had cried for Thomas at the funeral and at the kitchen sink, and even now she looked at the house as if the walls had been hollowed out. Ophelia's face held nothing of the kind, and Eli found, to his own surprise, that he was colder toward her for it.

"I take it Thomas's familiar has told you everything," she said. "The contest. The coven. Our history as a clan."

"He did."

"Good." She turned the goblet slowly in her fingers. "I cannot stand for the clan myself. I am a Hale by blood and a Calloway only by marriage, and the seat follows Calloway blood. It must be you, as it would have been Thomas." The smile became softer, like a kindly grandmother's, and he did not trust it at all. She needed him, he realized. She had wealth and power and a hundred servants, and the one thing she could not do was stand in the contest herself, because she did not have the blood. That was why she was being so kind. "It is a pity you were not trained as you should have been, from childhood. I told Thomas to begin your lessons the year you were born. The boy could be... disobedient. And his wife was no help. An outsider without the talent."

Eli had the distinct feeling that she had been about to say something far worse than outsider about his mother, and had thought better of it. His grandmother was too clever to insult a boy's mother in front of him when she was trying to win his trust. He thought about the inscription in his father's book. If I have not found a way to keep him out of this. He thought of a man who had spent years disobeying this woman in the one way that mattered most to him, and for a moment he was almost grateful to the outsider without the talent who had taken his father's son four hours away.

"I will help you in any way I can, Eli," Ophelia said. "You are my blood. My dear and only grandson. I will guide you."

"Thank you, Grandmother." He said it politely, just as Vex had told him to. He would much rather learn from Mordecai and Vex than from this woman, and he saw no reason to say so.

"The other clans will come for you," she mused. "Do not doubt it. They will try to kill you before you can become a threat. You will need the coven's help. You will need protection." Her eyes glittered in the firelight. "You will need servants."

She clapped her hands, twice. A door opened at the side of the room, and two teenagers stepped in. The tall pale boy in the black coat, and the dark-skinned girl with the black lipstick.

"Mina and Jonah," Ophelia said. "Mina is an Okafor, and Jonah is a Pryce. Both are families that have served the coven loyally for generations. They are young, Mina is eighteen and Jonah nineteen, and they serve the coven as acolytes."

Mina was short and slight and, Eli noticed, quietly pretty, though she did not seem to encourage it. She had a neat black bob, black lipstick, silver rings on her fingers, and a face that gave nothing away. Jonah was tall and lanky and pale, with the ring through his eyebrow, the long black coat, and an air of quiet watchfulness. They stood close without touching, and Eli saw what he had already half guessed in the hall.

"Both are quite gifted in magic, Mina especially," Ophelia went on, with a smirk. "They can help you train. They can perform rituals with you, and protect you from your enemies. Mina can also go to school with you, being a senior herself at eighteen. Jonah is a year older and has already graduated, but you may send him on errands while you are in class."

Eli blinked. "I don't go to school in Port Verity. I go to school in the city where I live with my mom, and I'm on bereavement leave."

"Do not trouble yourself. I have already spoken with the school here. You will be transferred."

"I don't think you can just transfer someone in senior year, Grandmother."

Ophelia let out a short, dry laugh. "Elias, I am one of the largest donors to the school board in this city. I can do a great deal more than that."

She had not asked him. She had not asked his mother. It was already done, as if the matter of where Eli would spend the next eight months of his life were the same sort of thing as the seating at dinner. Whether he wanted it did not enter into it. His grandmother simply did not count other people's consent as a factor. He ed, with a cold clarity, how his mother had talked about this woman. She decides things for people. It had sounded like exaggeration at the time.

Both Mina and Jonah were looking at their matriarch with a perfect, patient obedience. Eli could not read the girl at all. The boy's eyes held something Eli could not quite place.

"The girl has a good bit of slave blood in her, by the way," Ophelia remarked, with a small nod at Mina's dark skin, as casually as another woman might remark that it looked like rain. "Her kind has always made good servants. Her mother's line goes back to our plantations. They have served the Hales since the days of cotton, and they will serve you."

Heat rose up the back of Eli's neck. He knew something of his grandmother's side of the family, because he had looked it up once, years ago, out of idle curiosity. The Hales had been Southern aristocracy, old money that had come over from Europe, planters who had owned great estates and a great many people. Even by the standards of their day they were known for cruelty. Hale men had whipped enslaved men to death over small offenses, and had raped enslaved women whenever they pleased. After the war they had carried their money north to Port Verity and built the house he was standing in. Eli was not proud of it. He had never been close to his grandmother, and no one chooses their blood or their ancestors. But it was one thing to read about a family's sins in an old record, and another to watch them walk across a room in a green silk gown, perfectly at ease, in the present day. No wonder his mother could not stand the woman.

He waited for Mina to say something. He waited for Jonah to defend her, or even to flinch. Neither of them did. They stood in the firelight with their eyes lowered, as if they had heard it all before.

"They are my gifts to you, Elias," Ophelia said, in a sweet, grandmotherly tone. "Mina, Eli is your master now. You will serve him, and you will obey whatever order he gives you."

The way she said serve, and whatever order, made Eli's skin crawl.

"I will, mistress," Mina said. Her voice was low and clear, and there was no trace of disagreement in it.

"And you, Jonah. You will do whatever my grandson asks of you."

"Yes, mistress." Jonah's voice was lower, and his eyes, when they flicked up, held a strange, bright hint of excitement. It was as if he wanted to be told.

Eli thought of the gifts that had always appeared on his birthdays, in thick cream paper, with a check tucked inside. He had thought they were the clumsiest kind of affection. He understood now what they had been. This was only a larger version, a gift that breathed. Mordecai had said that rank was a leash. This was the collar that went with it. Ophelia gave gifts as hooks. She used them as leashes, to bind others to her, and Eli ed the mayor and the police chief being led away by young servants. For a moment he suspected something so gross it turned his stomach, and he decided that it was better not to think about it.

He did not say no. Refusing would not be an outright declaration of war, but it would displease a woman who always expected to be obeyed, and he did not yet know what that would cost him. For now, he intended to play nice. "Thank you, Grandmother," he said, and was ashamed of how steady it came out. "It has been a long few days. I would like to go home."

"Of course."

"Master Eli," Mina said. She had stepped half a pace toward him, her hands folded. "Should we move into your father's house tonight, so that we may protect and serve at your convenience?"

Eli looked at her. He suspected that the pair of them were really her eyes on him, and that whatever he said and did in front of them would be repeated by morning. "Not tonight," he said. "I'll let you know when it's a good time."

"As you wish, Master Eli."

"One more thing, Elias." Ophelia had risen, and stood with the firelight behind her, the goblet at her lips. " that power always costs something. We all make sacrifices. Your father never quite understood that." She lowered the glass, and the red on her lips shone. "I hope that you will."

She said nothing more. She did not need to. Eli felt the words settle in his chest like a stone, and Mordecai, at his feet, did not move at all.

The car was waiting in the drive, its engine running, the gaunt servant holding the door. Mina and Jonah followed Eli down the steps and squeezed onto the wide front bench beside the driver without being asked, Jonah at the window and Mina in the middle. It was an old-fashioned car, the long kind, built when a front seat was meant to hold three. Nobody spoke as the gates opened and the house fell away behind them, gold windows shrinking in the rear glass.

Eli sat with his hand on Mordecai's back and watched the girl in the front seat. She had taken out her phone. She held it low, near her lap, her thumbs moving quickly and without a sound, her face in the dim blue glow as calm as a stone. She was typing something short. She thought, apparently, that he could not see.

"They report to her," Mordecai said, so quietly that only Eli could hear. He had not lifted his head. "Every word. Every move. They have been told to."

"I know," Eli whispered.

"I do not trust her. I have never trusted any of Ophelia's servants. Not because of what they are, but because of whose they are." The cat's amber eyes caught a ing streetlight and held it. "Keep them close. Use them when you need them. And never say anything in front of them that you would not say in front of her."

"I know."

Mordecai's gaze had settled on the back of Mina's neat head. "The girl is strong," he said, barely above a whisper. "Easily the most gifted of the current crop. Stronger than the full witches of the coven, and far stronger than the apprentices training to become full witches."

Eli raised an eyebrow. "Then why is she only an acolyte?" As he understood it, young witches with talent trained under full witches until they had the experience to become full witches themselves, while acolytes were roles, servants to the full witches, the ones who lacked the talent to be trained any further.

"Because Ophelia decided it. The girl's family are servants, as is the boy's, so she saw fit to keep them as acolytes who serve, rather than apprentices who learn. The boy is unremarkable in magical strength, so a role suits him. A watcher, an attendant, a scout. His girlfriend is a great deal more gifted than he is." Mordecai mused for a moment. "I think I know why the girl is so gifted, despite her family. It did not come from nowhere. what Ophelia said of her. Her mother's line runs back to women who were enslaved on the Hale plantations. Hale men took what they pleased from those women for generations. They raped them, and got children on them, mixed-race children whom they never acknowledged as their own. Still, the children inherited the Hale blood, and the Hale gift with it, and were raised as slaves all the same, though they were half-brothers and half-sisters to the next generation of masters. Sometimes the Hale blood ran strong in them, and made them naturally gifted, though no one ever called them family." The cat's voice was even and very cold. "Ophelia thinks nothing of it. She does not count Mina, or any of the plantation's mixed-race descendants, as family. She counts them as property that happens to have inherited something valuable."

Eli said nothing. It took him a moment to see the rest of it, and when he did he felt sick all the way down. The same Hale blood ran in him. Mina might be a distant cousin of his, a relative nobody had ever acknowledged, whose family had never consented to being related to anyone in that house. He looked at the silver ring on the hand holding the phone, and then he looked out the window instead.

Beside her, Jonah sat very still, his eyes on his own knees, and every so often his gaze slid sideways toward Eli with that same odd brightness, as if he were waiting to be told something. Eli could not decide what to make of him. The boy was stranger than his girlfriend, and Eli had the uneasy feeling that he did not yet understand why.

The car climbed out of the Heights and down into the lower town, past the shuttered cannery and the long dark water. At the curb in front of his father's house, the driver opened the door, and Mina got out first and stood waiting with her eyes lowered. "Good night, Master Eli."

"Just Eli," he said.

"That is not what we were taught."

"Then try it anyway."

She hesitated. A very small crease formed between her brows, the first expression he had seen on her face all night. Jonah, behind her, looked at Eli with that same odd brightness. "Yes, Master," he said, and then, catching himself, "Yes. Eli."

Then they were gone, and the car's red taillights dwindled down the road, and the street was empty.

The porch light was on. Vex was sitting on the front steps in a hooded sweatshirt that was too big for her, with her knees pulled up and a mug in her hands, as if she had been there for a long while. She stood when she saw him.

"Well?" she said. "How bad was it?"

"She gave me two people."

For a moment the porch was very quiet. Something moved over Vex's face, too quickly to name, and then she looked down into her mug.

"She does that," she said.

Eli stood on the step below her. The night was cold, and the harbor smelled of salt and tar. In his chest the small charm Vex had made for him pulsed, a faint warm weight against his breastbone, and he thought of the red goblet, and the portrait of a boy in a suit he had hated, and a house so large that a man could be led out of a room by the hand and not be seen again until morning.

"I didn't promise her anything," he said.

"Good." Vex let out a breath. She looked, for just an instant, very tired. "Come inside. I made tea. And tomorrow you're going to learn to build a ward." She held the door open for him, and Mordecai slipped past both their legs into the warm hallway, and the house, with its iron over the door and its salt on the sills, closed around them like a held breath.