“I worked closely with your grandmother, you know,” Timothy said. “To try to save your mother from that awful man. But their bond had been too strong. She was a lost cause.”
“I’m not sure if you heard,” Cassie said. “But my grandmother passed away earlier this year.”
Timothy’s face wrinkled forlornly. He sat down. “Oh,” he said, looking at his hands. “No, I hadn’t heard.”
Cassie watched his reaction. He’d softened before her eyes.
“She was an amazing woman,” he said. “But I’m sure you know that.”
Cassie nodded.
“She and I joined forces against your father,” Timothy continued. “We knew that awful man would play your mother for a fool. But she was charmed by him the way everyone else was. I’ll never forget the way your grandmother cried on my shoulder the day John Blake betrayed your mother.”
Timothy touched his bony fingers to his shoulder as if Cassie’s grandmother’s tears might still be damp on his shirt. “She was devastated when your mother left New Salem. Not a day went by that she didn’t wonder about you, Cassie, the granddaughter she never knew.”
Cassie felt a knot form in her throat. She’d gotten so little time with her grandmother before she died. If only she could have known her as well as Timothy had.
“But I suspect you’ve dropped in on me today for a more pressing reason,” Timothy said, “than to reminisce about the past.”
“Yes.” Cassie’s voice sounded meek to her own ears. “My Circle performed a dark-magic spell from my father’s Book of Shadows. A witch-hunter curse that left them possessed by . . .” She trailed off.
“By evil spirits?” Timothy asked.
Cassie looked down at a stain on the floor, an amoeba of coffee or soda that had never been properly scrubbed clean.
“Your ancestors,” Timothy said.
For some reason, relief settled into Cassie’s shoulders. This man might be a little strange, but he seemed to understand. “How did you know?” she asked.
Timothy pointed to the leather book he’d dropped onto the desk. “I’ve studied the Blak family—that’s the Middle English spelling of Black without the ‘c’—for decades. All dark magic can be traced back to the early days of the Blak family.”
All dark magic, Cassie thought. That was practically like saying all evil in the world had originated from her ancestors. She was beginning to understand why her mother had kept her from this man for so long. He had nothing good to tell her.
“I assume you learned about the Black Death in school,” Timothy said. “The bubonic plague?”
“Yes,” Cassie said, but what did she really recall? Some rats, thousands of people getting sick and dying. She hadn’t retained much else.
“You only learned half the story,” Timothy said. “Medieval people called that same catastrophe many different names—the Great Pestilence or the Great Plague. It wasn’t until much later that people started describing the events as black.”
Timothy paused to let his meaning sink in. “Historians today agree that the term Black Death refers to black in the sense of gloom, to denote the terror of the events, as well as the way the disease caused the skin to turn black with gangrene. But the actual truth is that by the fifteenth century people began to figure out what was really going on.”
“What was really going on?” Cassie asked.
“A line of witches who went by the name of Blak were wreaking havoc on the world,” Timothy said. “They hated the Outsiders for persecuting them, and they had no qualms about getting revenge.”
Cassie’s stomach churned. “That was my family?”
Timothy nodded grimly. “The scientific-minded argued that the plague was spreading through rats and their fleas. That was true—but the rats had been bespelled by your ancestors. It took years, as the death tolls rose and hysteria grew, for more and more people to believe there was a supernatural cause for the sickness. That sinister witches were at fault.”
Cassie’s legs felt weak even though she was sitting down.
“It was a terrible time for witches and warlocks who weren’t of the Blak bloodline,” Timothy continued. “There were persecutions and massacres. But the real witches responsible, the Blaks, were smarter and much more powerful than the thousands of innocent witches who were persecuted.”
“But what started it all?” Cassie asked. “What did the Blaks want?”
Timothy grinned. “That’s the mystery I’ve been trying to solve for more than thirty years.”
“And?” Cassie asked. “Have you found the answer?”