Witches of East End by Melissa De La Cruz

Author:Melissa De La Cruz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperion

Strange things were happening in town; she couldn’t deny it anymore. Joanna’s thoughts drifted to the dead birds, the silvery toxin that had polluted their ocean, as well as the grassy menace that had tried to strangle her the other evening. Ever since she had raised Lionel Horning from the dead Joanna had been especially worried. What was that silver spiderweb that had surrounded his soul? She had never seen anything like it before. Had she made a mistake in bringing him back from the Dead’s Kingdom? But she had resurrected souls before and it was not such an unusual occurrence. Sometimes resurrection happened naturally. Humans called them “near-death experiences” when they came back to report that they had seen themselves floating over their bodies, or caught a glimpse of the white light at the end of the tunnel. Death was just the beginning of a journey that everyone took at some point.

Souls that had been taken by Death were not shrouded in a silver mist, they shone with a rainbow of colors. Joanna had chalked it up to the fact that she had not visited the world of the Dead in a very long time. Perhaps they had redecorated? She was being facetious and Gilly chided her for it, nipping her cheek and cawing. Joanna followed the bird’s lead on the bridge. Fair Haven shone brightly in the darkness, lighting their way. By the end of the summer her daughter would be mistress to the house and the island, just as planned. But even if everything seemed to be going along well, the wedding date looming (Freya had even agreed to wear white), Joanna still felt a twinge of unease, which she couldn’t explain, since everything was happening just as Ingrid had predicted.

“Let’s be quiet now, won’t we, Gilly? Make sure no one sees us?” she asked as they picked their way stealthily down the bridge toward the deserted beach. There were odd-looking piles of driftwood all around, but when Joanna came closer she saw they were not ocean detritus. The beach was littered with the bodies of dead ospreys. Hundreds of them, a thick, viscous sludge over their feathers, their beaks burned. They looked exactly like the birds she had seen dead on her beach earlier that summer. So. She was right, then. The birds had been a premonition, an omen, a warning. She wanted to tell her daughters I told you so, even though being right was shallow consolation. Her heart broke to see so much death all around. She could bring their souls back, but it was futile since their bodies were beyond repair.

Why had no one said anything? She looked over at Fair Haven, at the house that held the foundation of the seam that protected the town from the twilight world of the glom. Joanna had been there when it was first built; it was always meant to be empty. She was surprised when the Gardiners arrived. Perhaps there was more to their appearance than she’d imagined?

Joanna noticed the immense sand dunes that surrounded the house.

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