The island itself was crowded with federal agencies. There used to be cottages here, before World War II, to house Japanese fishermen and their families, who lived on the island. But then war with Japan had broken out and the Japanese had been forced to give up their land and property and move to detention centers inland. The village was razed. Ironic that now there was a new generation of so-called un-Americans who had been sent to Terminal Island. The prison itself took up a small portion of this island once used for off-loading cargo.
New cottages and apartment buildings had been hastily built for the use of the jailers and their superiors. The entire place was a fortified, secured center. To keep the women in and others out.
She watched her fellow prisoners. Women rambled around the enclosure in pairs and alone. Some sat and talked quietly while others walked aimlessly, around and around in circles. One or two simply sat on benches and cried. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run, but being able to move outside the tiny cell they spent most of their time in felt like a vacation.
In the two days she’d been there, Shea had already noticed that the two distinct groups of prisoners—the ordinary human women swept up in a tide of fear, and the women of power, women with witchcraft humming through their veins—acted as one outside the cells. Though they were all different, they were also all in the same boat. Amazing, really, that women who would have, in the outside world, been the first to spit on a witch . . . in here, were compatriots with them. Linked together against a common enemy.
Their captors.
For years, Shea had been running and hiding. Odd to finally find a fatalistic peace in the very prison she’d been trying to avoid.
“Ms. Jameson?”
Shea jolted at the sound of her name and whirled around, expecting a guard, and then laughed silently at her own stupidity. No guard here would be calling her “Ms.”
A short blond woman with anxious blue eyes hurried up to her.
“It is you.” The woman grabbed Shea’s hand and held on, as if clinging to a life rope in a roiling sea. She took a shuddering breath, blew it out again and said, “I thought I recognized you, but I never expected to see you here. Although I never thought to find myself here, either.”
Shea’s mind scrambled to find the woman’s identity. In the last day or so she’d been through so much, seen so much, she could hardly string two coherent thoughts together beyond the one all-consuming one: Get Me. Out. Of. Here! But as the woman continued to talk, it finally dawned on Shea where she knew her from.
School. This was the mother of Amanda Hall. The very girl Shea had been talking to when all of this madness had started.
“It’s Terri, isn’t it? Terri Hall?” Shea said when the woman wound down.
“Yes,” She whipped her hair out of her eyes and looked around quickly, making sure no one was close by. “I met you at parent-teacher conference night last month. God, that seems like years ago now. Amazing how fast things can change. How long have you been here, Ms. Jameson?”
“Call me Shea. Just a day or two.”
“Then you must have seen my Amanda since my arrest. Is she all right?”
All right but terrified, Shea thought but couldn’t bring herself to say it. No more than she’d tell this poor woman that talking to her daughter had started the slippery slope and landed Shea in prison. Terri Hall was locked away from her daughter and Shea couldn’t even imagine the terror the woman must be feeling. Especially since, unlike Shea, Terri hadn’t done a damn thing to deserve this. Instinctively, she reached out to soothe and comfort.
“Amanda’s fine,” she said, squeezing Terri’s hand. “I saw her at school and told her to stay with her grandmother and not to go back to school.”
“Good, that’s good,” Terri muttered. “I still can’t believe any of this is happening. I’m not a witch, for heaven’s sake. One of my neighbors told the MPs that she saw me lighting candles and saying a spell.” She laughed shortly and wrapped her arms around her middle as she lifted her gaze to the soaring sky above them. “I was saying a prayer for my husband. He died last year.”
“I’m so sorry.” It was all crazy and getting worse every day. Ten years after the existence of magic had