Molly wasn’t stupid. She knew that if there was a trial it would end up being about what mortals considered “facts,” and not about witchcraft. But she also knew that the witchcraft thing could easily take hold in the public imagination, that people could start talking and asking questions, and that the White Council would not be remotely psyched about this, which was why Daddy was so stressed. Even if he was an absent single father, she had to admit that he did have some protective instincts. Maybe he was acting so crazy now in an attempt to make up for lost time.
To reassure herself, she felt for the ring on the chain around her neck.
But it wasn’t there.
She panicked and began to look around frantically.
“Are you all right?” Marshall sounded concerned from behind the counter.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing,” she said, beginning to tremble. Was it possible that she had unhooked the chain and slipped it onto Mardi’s neck, or that Mardi had taken it and slipped it on her finger? She didn’t have the faintest memory. She would have to discreetly check Mardi’s neck and hands later. Still, all of Molly’s intuition told her Mardi didn’t have it. No, Molly had misplaced it herself. But where? And when?
It came to her. It must have somehow fallen off in Tris’s library while they were hooking up. Her memory of the evening was hardly sharp. The thick chain was long enough to fit over her head without unclasping it. It must have come off when other things were coming off.
Trembling, she felt the empty spot on her chest where the ring had lain. Although she did not know exactly why, she knew that losing her mother’s ring could be disastrous. How could she have been so delirious?
She would double-check tonight that Mardi did not have it. And if it wasn’t around Mardi’s neck or on her hand, then she, Molly, would go back to Fair Haven and find it.
Soon.
17
TAKE ME TO THE WATER
The smell of chocolate cake was growing stronger and more delicious by the minute, filling the house with a sense of promise. Mardi had never baked before, and she was amazed by the simple pleasure of mixing the sugar, butter, eggs, flour, chocolate, and buttermilk under the tutelage of Ingrid and Jo, while Henry licked utensils. She had always thought you bought cakes at bakery counters, usually at the last minute when you remembered it was someone’s birthday. This experience of actually making one with her hands unveiled a whole new realm of magic to her.
“Smells good in here,” Matt sang out as he came through the sliding glass doors that opened onto a deck on the beach. He was wrapped in a towel after a swim. “Looks good too,” he said to Ingrid, giving her what Mardi couldn’t help noticing was a deep kiss. Maybe they weren’t so uptight after all, she thought. And then it occurred to her again that because he was mortal, he would die before their passion did. That sucked.
Jo and Henry came running up to their father. Henry leapt into his arms, and the family portrait they made was so charming that Ingrid’s choice was beginning to make some sense.
“Daddy!” Jo squealed, “We’re baking a Fourth of July cake for our picnic! It’s going to have whipped cream frosting and red and blue sprinkles. That makes red, white, and blue! Get it? Mommy, can we decorate it soon?”
“It has to come out of the oven and then cool first, sweetie. Then we can frost it.” Ingrid smiled as she went to answer her ringing phone, wiping her hands on her apron so as not to get flour on the phone. “Hello? Oh hi, Troy, how are you? . . . You’re kidding.” With a furtive and anxious glance at Mardi, she went out onto the deck, sliding the glass door behind her, and began to pace as she talked.
Matt went upstairs to take a shower, leaving Mardi to watch Henry and Jo, who were wild with excitement about the picnic tonight with the opera on the big town green overlooking the sea. Poor kids had no idea they were going to be subjected to a bunch of fat people screeching in German all night.
Mardi was relieved that she wasn’t going to the concert. Trent had invited her out on the Dragon to see the fireworks up close—they were going to be launched from a barge off Gardiners Island.
Mardi felt sure that tonight was the night they would finally kiss. It would be just the two of them, with a bottle of wine and one of his delicious meals, watching the rockets fire and the colors rain through the night sky. She’d foraged a great outfit from Freya’s attic closet: a dress from a ’60s love-in, made out of an American flag with peace signs graffitied between the stripes. It was sewn into a toga, a very short toga, with fringe. To match it, she had star-spangled garters from Freya’s vast lingerie collection. It was going to be a good night.
Henry broke her reverie by squealing one of his few words over and over: “Beach! Beach! Beach!” He tugged her out the door, past Ingrid, who was still on the phone, in an apparently stressful and all-consuming conversation. Impatiently, she waved Henry and Mardi past her on the deck, then ignored Jo asking her when the cake would be out of the oven.
After about fifteen minutes of halfheartedly helping Henry load and unload a plastic dump truck full of wet sand while Jo worked on a sand castle, Mardi saw a stone-faced Ingrid heading toward them.
“Jo!” Ingrid snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you, no magic sand castles!”
Jo was busily constructing a latticework palace with simple waves of her shovel.
“Use your hands like a normal kid,” Ingrid went on relentlessly. “We don’t do ‘special’ in our family.”
“But that’s so boring,” Jo whined as she watched her beautiful construction crumble into a heap on the ground.
Ignoring her daughter’s complaint, Ingrid gave Mardi a long and serious look. “I just spoke with your father,” she said. “Things in New York are not looking good.” She proceeded to explain that there was a formal accusation against the Overbrook sisters by the family of the dead girl, Samantha Hill. Mardi and Molly were accused of brainwashing with an intent to kill, but the subtext was witchcraft.
When Mardi tried to interrupt in her own defense, Ingrid told her that there was another development. Right before calling her, Troy had received a warning from the White Council. The Council was concerned that the twins were not only wantonly disrespectful, but that they were unleashing a rash of bad magic into Midgard.
“What exactly did the Council’s message say?” Mardi asked as they headed back toward the house with the kids in tow.
“It said, ‘Beware the storm of retribution.’”
“Well, that could be a metaphor for almost anything,” Mardi laughed nervously.
“No,” Ingrid corrected her, sliding open the screen to the deck. “It could be a metaphor for almost anything negative. We’re going to have to do another session with Jean-Baptiste as soon as possible to figure out what happened that night and clear your names.”
Coming into the house, they were assaulted by a burnt smell and a haze of smoke.
“The cake!”
Henry and Jo both burst into tears. Mardi tried hard to stifle a grin. These people were so earnest.
Ingrid and the kids ran to the oven. Dropping the pretense of oven mitts, Ingrid pulled out the blackened cake with her bare hands. It was a sad sight, a steaming lump of coal.
“Please, Mommy, please fix it,” Jo begged, while Henry gazed at her with huge imploring eyes.
Mardi watched carefully as Ingrid caved, her face melting into a smile. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll do it for your grandmother Joanna. She would have loved you so much. And spoiled you so rotten.” As she murmured an incantation over the pan, the smoke cleared, the delicious odor of chocolate returned, and the cake rose again. Jo and Henry squealed with delight. Promise was restored to the day.
Ingrid gave Mardi a sheepish smile as she put her finger to her lips. “I know, I know. All right. You got me. Why don’t you go get ready for your date.”
Mardi slipped into her vintage red, white,
and blue. Then she gunned the Ferrari down to the docks, trying to banish negative thoughts brought on by her father’s drama queen antics. What the Hell was a “storm of retribution,” anyway? A lot of hot air was what it was. Dad might even have been making up the whole White Council thing to freak them out. Since he had no control over his daughters, he was always trying to get higher authorities to step in and parent for him. A summer at Ingrid’s with the threat of divine punishment if she and Mardi didn’t shape up might well be nothing more than his latest desperate stab at being a father. Pathetic. Not for the first time, she wondered what her mother had been like.
It took her a while to find Trent. When she finally did locate him, he was sanding a countertop in the kitchen of his friend’s soon-to-open new restaurant. He was shirtless. His back was sculpted, every lean muscle defined, alive, and alert. His chest and stomach were toned by swimming in the ocean and working on the docks rather than lifting weights. His beauty was unconscious, carefree. It was all she could do not to run her fingers up and down the grooves of his muscles.
“You look incredible,” Trent said when he saw her. He apologized for not being quite ready to set sail and promised that there was wine and a killer picnic on the boat if she wanted to go wait for him on the Dragon’s deck.
She went to hang out on the boat for a moment, thinking she would enjoy the calm of the sunset and the distant strains of the orchestra tuning as all of North Hampton gathered on the town green for the annual Fourth of July concert. But instead of feeling peaceful as she sat on the Dragon’s cushions, leaning on a pile of orange life jackets, she felt a tempest brewing inside her from the White Council’s warning. It was so unfair! They hadn’t done anything. Every gentle lap of the sea against the side of the boat set off a flurry of furious reverberations in her soul. She was like Jo or Henry on the verge of a tantrum. Only instead of pounding little fists on the floor, she had the urge to set fire to every boat in this harbor, to watch the sails go up in a vast conflagration of her own making, and to feel herself burn among them. She hated the White Council. They had nothing to do with her life, and yet they were threatening to wreck it.
She hadn’t done anything to those kids back in the city. She and Molly were spoiled rotten, wild and selfish and heedless, but they weren’t murderers. Except she was beginning to wonder now how well she actually knew herself and just how much evil she might be capable of. What had Jean-Baptiste called them? Twin goddesses of strength and rage? Of course since Thor was their father it made sense. But did that make them She-Hulks or something? Maybe she and Molly had bewitched and killed those kids. Maybe they were evil.
“Mardi, are you all right? You look upset,” Trent said, with a worried look on his face.
“What are you talking about? I’m fine.”
“All right, then, look what I stole from the cellar of Fair Haven.” It was a 1999 bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild. “A very special year.”
“I was born in 1999,” she said, impressed.
He winked as he uncorked the bottle and poured two glasses. The ruby liquid sloshed a bit more than usual. Everything around her seemed to be surging with secret power, even though the night was beautifully calm. You’re projecting, she thought. Aloud she simply said “cheers,” as he started the motor.
After a short ride, they anchored off Gardiners Island at a safe distance from the barge that would set off the firework display that the Gardiner family organized every year for the citizens of North Hampton.
Trent had put on a light blue linen shirt. As he set out their picnic of smoked bluefish, oysters, and lobster salad with tarragon from his greenhouse garden, the breeze began to pick up so that his shirt billowed in a pale blue cloud and her American Flag dress flew up to reveal Freya’s funky garters.
Trent raised his eyebrows in amusement and wolf whistled.
Mardi tried to meet his smile head-on, but felt a momentary shyness. She looked down at her bare feet only to be surprised by a sudden wave washing across the deck over her toes. She scanned the water for a big vessel that might have caused the surge, but saw none. Then she noticed Trent doing the same, a tinge of anxiety in his eyes.
“Isn’t the weather supposed to be perfect tonight?” she asked.
“Everything about tonight is supposed to be perfect,” he said over the howling rising wind.
18
DAS RHEINGOLD
Cheeseboy had gone all-out on his picnic for Molly. He had brought a plaid cashmere blanket, the chic wicker basket, overflowing with delicacies, that had first attracted her to the Cheesemonger’s window, and a cooler packed with oysters and champagne. He had shucked the oysters before her eyes, arranging them on a bed of ice as the orchestra tuned.
She commented on the rough sea and darkening sky. What was going on with the weather? Wasn’t it supposed to be a beautiful evening?
Of course it was a beautiful evening, he said almost defensively, filling two champagne flutes, acting as though she were wildly exaggerating the effect of a gust of twilight breeze. He obviously didn’t want some surprise storm to ruin the effect of his long-planned evening.
As the overture to the Ring Cycle began, an expectant hush came over the crowd on the green. A single note repeated, at first only on the strings. As the rest of the orchestra progressively joined in, and the note took on volume, there was a thunderclap from the east. The sound of pounding surf from the nearby beach competed with the percussion section to dominate the rhythm of the music. It was as though a battle were rumbling to life.
The tune was hauntingly familiar, although Molly couldn’t think why. She wasn’t exactly an opera buff. Once, she had gone to a benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House because the chance to wear her favorite floor-length Versace gown was too good to pass up. She couldn’t even remember who the composer was. Mozart? Verdi? They all sounded the same. The only thing she clearly recalled was that she had fallen asleep during the first act and made her date take her home early.
For some reason, though, this music was echoing deep inside her, connecting with her unconscious. “What’s this opera about, anyway?” she whispered.
“See those mermaid-like creatures ‘swimming’ on the stage?” he said, referring to three large, lusty singers in big iridescent dresses floundering around in billowing sheets of blue plastic that Molly assumed were supposed to represent water.
“Yeah?”
“Those are the Rhinemaidens, and they possess something called the Rhinegold, a magical gold. Whoever forges a ring from the Rhinegold will have immense power.”
Shivering in her sheer wrap, Molly felt instinctively for her ring on the chain around her neck. Nothing. It was really lost. And this silly opera plot was randomly driving the point home.
“And see that guy who just rose up from the ‘crack in the Earth’?” Marshall went on enthusiastically.
She nodded. There was a stocky bearded man pursuing the Rhinemaidens through gusts of steam coming out of the floor while everyone sang loudly in incomprehensible German.
“That’s Alberich, the Nibelung. Since the Rhinemaidens won’t love him, he’s going to steal their gold to forge a powerful ring. It will make him lord of many lands, and, most importantly, it will allow him to subjugate the women who have hurt him, to take revenge on the female race, and—” Marshall was interrupted by more thunder and a wild streak of lightning as the sound system died with a fierce screech and the music was replaced by a crashing rain and screams from the crowd.
The lights on the boats, which had gathered around Gardiners Island for a close-up view of the fireworks, were darting up and down on the suddenly hectic sea. Several of them were sending out flares of alarm, which flickered, barely visible, in the rain-blackened sky. A coast guard siren blared as rescue boats sped out toward them. People everywhere were screaming, running from the green with their picnic blankets flapping behind them like ghosts.
&
nbsp; No weather news source had predicted this. Nature was throwing a tantrum. Unannounced.
“Let’s go!” Marshall yelled over the din, taking her hand and pulling her toward town. “We can be inside the store in five minutes.”
But Molly could not take her eyes off the raging sea. She stood, drenched, fixated on the lights of the stranded boat. “My sister’s out there!” she cried.
Mardi had been making obnoxious comments for the past couple of days about how she would be seeing the fireworks from the deck of a yacht off Gardiners Island. She wouldn’t say whose yacht, but she implied that she was going to have way more fun than anyone else in Ingrid’s house. No boring concert on the green for her.
Molly had been annoyed, dismissive, and secretly a bit jealous of Mardi’s date, since Tris seemed to have disappeared for the holiday and she was stuck on a boring picnic with Cheeseboy. But as it hit her now that Mardi might be in real danger, her irritation vanished in a desperate surge of fear and love.
“Mardi!” she screamed, her voice carrying across the water with a force that put the local opera singers to shame. “Mardi, where are you?”
“Please, Molly,” Marshall tried to reason with her, “if your sister is in any trouble, the coast guard will rescue her. They can do much more than we can.”
Ignoring him, she rushed to join Ingrid and Freya, who were pushing through the crowd toward her. As the three witches fell into an embrace, they sang out Mardi’s name in unison. It was an incantation. They had no doubt that Mardi would now know that they were coming for her.
Marshall looked on, soaked and bewildered but unwilling to abandon Molly.
“We need a coast guard boat!” Freya shrieked. With that, she turned and led the others to the docks, running as fast as her heels would allow. Molly assumed they would lose Marshall at this point, but, amazingly, he kept up, his eyes pulsing the brightest blue through the storm, as though he had somehow been touched by their magic.