December 25th
The snow has started again.
Hazel watches it drift down in the darkness, as she twists her necklace around her finger, the corner of the H charm pressing against the tip of her thumb.
The insomnia began almost as soon as she came back to the island. It hadn’t been ideal to move back into her childhood room, particularly considering its distance from her new workplace, but when the Bureau seized her house and everything in it, the Rosenbloom Estate was all she had left.
But, of course, it’s not the house that keeps her awake at night.
It’s Amy.
She feels the loss of Amy Whitmore in her chest, even now. Hazel’s ex-boyfriend (currently on the run from the Bureau) is responsible for Amy’s death—as Harvest and Quinn uncovered while investigating Amy’s murder—but the weight of grief rests on Hazel’s shoulders. And it seems to be getting heavier with time. Almost three months since Amy’s death, and it still feels fresh.
But Hazel knows it’s not just grief coursing through her: it’s regret.
She loved Amy. She sees it now, in the dark as the snow drifts almost aimlessly outside of her window. Worse, she loves Amy still, and can’t seem to rid herself of the memory of her. Amy is there when she closes her eyes, laughing in the silence, her perfume surrounding her. Her heart aches with missed opportunities.
With a sigh, Hazel throws back the blankets and wraps herself in a robe. The house is quiet, and Hazel makes her way down the stairs, thinking she’ll perhaps have another glass of wine. Maybe bring the bottle back upstairs.
Instead, she is drawn by the light from the library, spilling onto the landing in a triangle. When she glances inside the room, she’s not surprised to find her sister, hunched over a stack of papers, suppressing a yawn while refilling a cup of coffee from a carafe.
“You shouldn’t drink coffee. It stunts your growth,” she says, parroting what their father would tell them when they were younger, hanging out at the family diner after school. It was always somewhat of a sore point that Hazel is taller than Harvest and yet drinks decidedly more coffee.
“Well, we can’t all be graceful gazelles like you,” Harvest replies with a smirk, taking a sip of coffee.
“Probably for the best. Gazelles have a habit of getting eaten by lions.” She sits down, shifting an open book out of the way. “I’m surprised you’re awake. I figured you’d be in the guestroom.”
Harvest shoots her a cross look, but Hazel just shrugs. “What’s all this?” she asks, motioning toward the stacks of file folders.
“I asked Angel to send me everything we have on Sunny Blackwood, Henry Faulkner, and Leon Cruz.”
“And mom’s yearbook?” She angles the book so she can see the picture of their mother.
Harvest shrugs. “I wanted to find a picture of the girl who drowned. Maisie Myer.”
Harvest had done the math and had been fairly certain that when Maisie died, her mother, Tabitha Rosenbloom (née Grymes), was a freshman at Ilton High. Her father is in the yearbook, too, also a freshman, but Harvest has left the book open on Tabitha. Her hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail, the rose gold almost blonde in the fading picture. Her smile is reluctant and apathetic about having her picture taken for the school yearbook.
So unlike Hazel’s memory of her mother, which is sunlight and bright colors and big laughs that shake you so hard it starts to hurt.
“Mom would be proud of you,” says Hazel, quietly.
“Proud that I drink coffee too late at night and have a terrible work-life balance?”
“Proud that you quit a soulless job to do something you’re proud of. Something that makes a difference.”
Hazel remembers Harvest coming home from shifts at the start-up tech company she worked at before enrolling in Bureau agent training. She never fully understood what it was they did there, but she highly doubts that it should have caused so much stress.
Then again, Hazel reminds herself, that her own job at the time wasn’t supposed to be so stressful either. Taking over the family business, Tabitha’s Diner, had been more time-consuming than she thought it’d be. It started as a favor for her dad, but quickly took over her life as she took on extra shifts and stayed late to sort through invoices or sign payroll checks. The job kept her away from her home, from her family and friends, and especially her boyfriend at the time.
Really, it didn’t come as a complete shock that he ended up cheating on her. She can admit that she had begun to lose interest and was increasingly absent in their relationship.
What had stung more than his affair was that it was with Harvest. She acknowledges that her immediate reaction—disappearing without a trace for two years—was a bit of an overreaction to the one kiss and handful of flirty text messages that classified the affair, but it still took her at least a year to begin forgiving Harvest.
And anyway, since she’s been back, she’s learned that Harvest and Ezra never quite worked smoothly, despite the truth of their feelings for each other. It somehow seems tragic, which makes Hazel feel much better about the whole thing. Hazel isn’t sure what this says about herself, but has declined to indulge in such self-reflection. Besides, Harvest has apologized almost every day since; Hazel isn’t sure she can stand to hear the words anymore.
Best let it go.
Hazel pours herself a cup of coffee from the carafe, while taking a cursory glance at the case files scattered on the table. She smiles at Harvest’s ability to fill a space; despite her insistence that she prefers tidiness, her sister always finds herself in the midst of a particular sort of self-created chaos.
But of course, to Harvest, this is tidy.
“Are you looking for anything in particular?” Hazel asks.
“Something that may explain why this is happening now, assuming it’s tied to Maisie’s death.” She shifts through a stack of papers. “I was starting with Maisie, but this is what Agent Nguyen has compiled so far about Leon Cruz’s death, including Leon’s last known movements before he was found, face down in the bathroom.”
By all accounts, Leon Cruz’s death had been incredibly sudden and unexpected. His wife had gone out for dinner with a friend, only to return two hours later to find her husband dead, with no indication of what happened.
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They lived in a small Texas town, just outside of Austin, that Hazel had never heard of before. They had one daughter and were active in their church, which doubled as a community center for the small magical neighborhood of Blindspell.
The day Leon died, he had been cleaning out the garage, in preparation for a neighborhood flea market. He boxed up some items and dropped them off at the church around two in the afternoon, then took his daughter to soccer practice. The daughter had been sleeping over at a friend’s house when he died, alone, seven hours later.
There are photographs of the contents of Leon’s pockets too: a wallet, a pack of gum, a crumpled up receipt. The next picture shows the receipt unfolded. It’s for the Blindspell Post Office. According to the timestamp, Leon mailed a package the day before he died. There is no specific address indicated on the receipt, but there is a town name.
“Before Leon died, he mailed something to Mount Dora,” says Hazel.
Harvest frowns at the stack of papers in front of her. “I’ve seen that name.” She rifles through until she finds the newspaper article about Maisie’s death, which includes a photo of Maisie and a few sentences about her family. “The Myers moved to Ilton in 1980. Before that, they lived in Mount Dora.”
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There’s something cloak-and-dagger about being in the school library on Christmas Day, with the lights turned off, the sound of their boots so loud in the absence of teenage gossip and class bells.
Not that what Lottie and Milo are doing is particularly covert. They were given the key to the school by the principal, Lottie’s step-sister.
The 1982 yearbook for Ilton High School is spread open on the table, turned to a picture of five smiling faces, open and ready for what the world can offer.
It’s sad, she thinks, to consider that three out of the five kids in this photo are dead. By all accounts, Sunny Blackwood and Henry Faulkner seemed to have lived full, happy lives. Sunny had a successful freelance design business, and Henry was an award-winning architect.
This is not much of a comfort but it is something, at least.
Technically speaking, Lottie doesn’t have the authority to investigate Henry Faulkner’s death. But between Alice’s stilted grief and Milo’s observation that Henry looked scared, Lottie couldn’t stop the Worries from circling back to him, lying in the snow, eyes staring unseeing at the sky above.
When she found Milo on the couch, head buried in his phone as he scrolled through search results about Ilton in the 1980s, she pulled up her own laptop and settled in beside him.
But when the internet yielded very few results, they decided to reevaluate their methods. If Lottie has learned anything in life, it’s that it’s always best to start at the beginning. And the beginning, for all of them, was Ilton High School.
So they roused Lottie’s sister before the sun had even begun to rise, requesting access to the school library. Lottie will be volunteering at no less than five school functions this upcoming semester, which is a rather steep price to pay. Still, Lottie looks over at Milo, and thinks it’s a price worth paying for time well spent.
The school library holds two important things. The first is a full collection of back-issues of the school newspaper. She’s sure Maisie’s drowning would have been front page news on the Ilton Chronicle, but those issues are only available from the newspaper office, which is closed for the holiday, or from the Bureau Archives, which she doesn’t have access to.
As Milo pointed out, the Ilton High Gazette would have covered the story, and those issues are available in the school library. The article is on the front page of the May 1982 edition of the Ilton High Gazette and features a candid photo of Maisie, her hair curled and pulled up into a high ponytail. She wears a heart-shaped locket on a gold chain that rests against the emblem of Ilton High on her sweatshirt.
The article is vague about the accident, but it does include the names of the other students involved and some more about Maisie. It talks about how she arrived two years previously, the shy new-girl until she found her place among the social hierarchy of the school. She excelled in art and drama, snagging the lead role in the school’s production of Pygmalion. She was going to attend an acting course in England for a summer semester before beginning her studies in theater at a state university.
The second important thing is the 1982 yearbook. Lacking physical descriptions of the other students involved in the accident, Milo suggested (quite brilliantly; he truly does take after his mother, she thinks) they could find a photo in the yearbook. “I know they’ll be, like, old now—” (his father’s influence showing through, regrettably) “—but it’s a start, right, Mom?”
“So, this is Henry Faulkner,” she says, turning back to the yearbook. She points to the figure on the left. “And I think this is Sunny Blackwood next to him.” She flips through to the senior portraits, then back to the group photo. “This is definitely Leon.”
Milo holds a photo they found from an article in the newspaper. “Maisie is in the middle,” he says, “So, the girl on the end must be Rowena, right?”
Lottie nods and leans closer, wishing she had thought to bring her glasses.
“She looks like Ms. Wilkins,”says Milo.
“Who?”
“Ms. Wilkins. The new English teacher.” Milo pulls out his phone. “Here’s her profile on the school website.”
He angles the screen so Lottie can compare the two photos side-by-side. “She does look an awful lot like Rowena. Is there a bio on the school website too?”
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What Hudson lacks in communication skills, he makes up for in expertise—not that Angel notices any of it. It is almost five in the morning on Christmas Day, and Angel’s eyes are drooping as Hudson frowns at his computer screen.
The incredibly thorough autopsy was completed in an hour under the supervision of Angel, but then Hudson moved onto the lab work, running blood tests and looking for anything out-of-the-ordinary. Angel had moved to follow, but Hudson put his hand out. “It’s a sterile environment. You’re not allowed in the laboratory.”
When Hudson emerged two hours later, he refused to verbally share the results with them. “I’ll type them up on the official form,” he said, settling down at a desk.
That was an hour ago.
Angel waits, head propped up with their hand and feet stretched out on a chair in front of them. Wild managed to find a narrow-backed chair to allow for his wings and is absentmindedly tossing a crumpled up ball of paper into the air. Catch. Toss. And repeat.
Hudson looks down at his notes and then back at the screen with a grunt of confusion.
“What now?” Angel asks.
“I can’t read this word.”
“You wrote it. You can’t read your own handwriting?”
“I was in the flow. My penmanship gets messy.”
Angel sighs and looks up at the ceiling at some vengeful god who must be watching them from the heavens. They level their gaze at Hudson and wave their hand toward his notes. “Well, let me have a look. Maybe I can decipher it.”
Hudson hesitates for a second, but does hand Angel his notebook.
“It’s putrefaction,” they say, reading through the sentence. They move to hand the notebook back, but a word catches their eye. “What’s this right here?”
“A foreign entity in the blood.”
“Like a poison?”
Hudson leans his head to the side, as if weighing the word in his mind. “More like a pathogen than a poison.”
“Like a virus or illness?”
Hudson nods. “It reminded me a bit of shingles in humans. How it’s something that’s carried around in the blood and could be activated under the right circumstances.”
“So, it was a virus that killed her?”
“Well, I don’t know about that. There’s evidence that there was something in her blood that was active but foreign. Whether it killed her or not, I’m not sure. There’s really no clear sign of the cause of death. Her heart just stopped.”
Angel nods to show they understand, but their thoughts are running through possibilities and explanations to see if any of them fit together to create a cohesive whole, like a painter arranging shapes to create a recognizable landscape.
Magic, they think, is not that different from a virus, in some respects. It is something that travels from one thing to another: from words to reality, from hand to earth.
And just as easily, mischief can be contained and stored, like potions or amulets. In motions and prearranged words. Spells.
No, they think, a curse would be more fitting.
They pull up Leon Cruz’s autopsy results on their phone and scroll to a particular part. They hand the phone to Hudson who reads silently.
When he looks up, he nods. “They probably haven’t done a full blood test yet, but it could be the same thing.”
Angel navigates to their phone contacts. “Boss, you need to find Rowena Little. If she’s not dead already, she’ll definitely be next.”
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She knew Death would be cold, but she hadn’t truly known how cold it would be. She remembers what Henry told her—Death is a bird, squawking in a cage, calling to be let out. Well, the bird is out now and its claws are ice, squeezing her torso.
She coughs and for a moment, she is warm again.
And it feels heavenly. Blissful.
Then she realizes the warmth is red, which is the wrong color for it.
It should be white. Sunlight. Pale yellow.
Not red, covering her hands.
But it’s too late.
She wishes the cold would come back.