The Bell and Candle Book Club

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The wind is cold on Rawiya’s skin as she and Amity wait in front of the strange house, its harshly canted angles reaching up to the too-blue sky like bony fingers tracing trailing cloud – shredding it in their rigid wake. Amity catches her discomfort as they wait for the house’s owner to answer the sweetly trilling doorbell. She places one tawny hand on Rawiya’s arm to steady her, and Rawiya gives a gentle smile in return, though she can’t meet Amity’s eyes. Her shivers, when they come, born of the memory of standing before another house, waiting to enter.

Of how seductive, how inviting Harrow House had felt once she’d been shown inside, like a second skin wrapped around her own. Of the warmth of Nyah’s hand taking hers to lead her in. Of the flush of heat racing through Rawiya as Nyah guided her through rooms whose ordering made no sense, connected haphazard at best. Before Nyah had shown her into a parlour splashed everywhere in crushed red velvet and settled into a gilded chair lined in patterned wine-dark leather, folded one leg gently over the other, straightened her back, and laid one hand on the seat’s carved arm and the other on her knee. Rawiya had swallowed, unsteady, as something hungry flashed across Nyah’s face; the ghost of other features momentarily overlaid on hers.

But it was when the coven had introduced her to the Mother that Rawiya had fled.

She can still see the towering height of her every time she closes her eyes; that terrifying smile, teeth so bright in the warm dark they’d glowed like stars; the emptiness in her eyes that threatened to devour her whole. She left a tiny piece of herself when she’d run, stumbling, over the threshold of that crumbling edifice and back into the cool May night – something she can’t name. But she can still feel that jagged tear somewhere deep in the pit of her chest every time she closes her eyes. She’s thrown up at the memory more times than she can count, Amity holding her hair back gently. Amity who’s never pressed her on what happened; who’s been endlessly patient with her. With how afraid she still is to dig into what that encounter did to her.

Amity who’d come into her life after she fled Harrow House – another seeker after Rawiya’s fledgling power, raw and untrained; desirous of the things Rawiya can do with little more than an extension of her will. But this encounter a gentle introduction in the library where Rawiya worked. In her space. An unexpected question from the unassuming Wampanoag patron in a Yamantaka // Sonic Titan band T-shirt over modestly cut faded blue jeans and chunky-heeled black boots; a question too pointed to be anything but from another practitioner.

The story continues in The Bell and Candle Book Club.