Bittershore

by V.V. James

Genres: Ghost; Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

The only thing stronger than a witch's promise is a mother's vengeance...

Sarah loved and trusted no one in her close-knit coven more than her oldest friend, Abigail. Then Abigail's son was found dead at a house party and Sarah's daughter, Harper, was accused of murdering him. While the entire village of Sanctuary was consumed by the witch hunt, Sarah and Harper lost everything but their lives.

They fled to the storm-wracked coastal reserve of Bittershore for refuge, but now the past is catching up with them and the secrets they have kept not only from each other, but from the entire world, are set to be unleashed at last...

Big Little Lies meets The Crucible in this fearless portrait of the hatred and hysteria that can so swiftly corrode a community consumed by bigotry - perfect for fans of The Year of the Witching and Her Majesty's Royal Coven.

Release date: February 13, 2025

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

My body jerks at the gunshot, flinging me back six months to the beach at Green Point when one of Tad Bolt’s officers held a gun to my girl Harper’s head.

The stirring rod in my hand clatters against the copper pan, and I steady myself before it slips into the brew bubbling on our little gas stove. My heart’s still racing as I hear laughter and applause from outside, where my neighbors are gathered around the campfire. I’ve wedged open the window of the RV’s kitchenette so it doesn’t steam up in here, and along with the crackle and spit of the fire, the tang of scorched pine resin drifts in. I flatten a palm on my breastbone, willing its frantic beating to calm. That ‘gunfire’ was just the pop of sap exploding from heartwood as more logs were thrown to the flames.

The campfires took some adjusting to, our first weeks here at Darkening Pine. I’d see the panic in Harper’s eyes sometimes, and I know she saw it in mine. Her sweaty hand would reach for me, or I’d pull her to me extra-tight, each gripped by memories. Hers, of that night at Sailaway Villa when Daniel Whitman fell to his death and the party house burned. Mine, of being trapped and baited in my own home by those cruel boys, Dan’s former teammates. How they laughed as the bricks smashed through the windows and whooped as the flames caught. How I fled with our Starcross grimoire in my bag and Aira, my familiar, yowling in my arms.

Our shared memories of that final fire at the Sanctuary Spartans stadium. Of whatever Abigail saw that made her call out her son’s name as she rushed into the flames.

Mine, of the look in my girl’s eyes as it happened. A look I’ve not yet had the courage to examine.

We’ve been running from those events for months. First to Atlantic City, where we holed up in a boarding house and Harper had a lucky few nights at the gambling tables. I let my child do it, sunk too deep in shock at all that had happened. Then I picked myself up and moved us on. Harper had won enough to buy a beat-up RV, and I took any work I could find: waitress, gas-station attendant, warehouse packer. We traveled and we healed. We’re not done healing yet, but when we found Darkening Pine Campground in the North Carolina woods, with winter closing in, we figured we’d give ourselves a break from running. It was Thanksgiving the week we arrived, and for the first time in a long time we realized how much we had to be thankful for. I bought a phone and called my friends, Pierre and Bridget, and told them we were safe. Just hearing their voices was a rush as heady as my magic coming in all over again.

The following week, I started doing witchcraft again. I remembered how much it does me good to do good for others, and there are plenty at Darkening Pine that need it. Folks here are open-minded in a way I’d half-forgotten people can be. So many of us have been running from something and there’s a fellowship that comes from simply sitting down by a fire to rest for a while.

I check the brew’s taste with a wooden spoon and its potency with a ripple of magic. It’s ready. Shifting the copper pot onto a trivet, I bundle up as January here in the coastal forest demands, before decanting the remedy into a flask.

Old Queenie’s sitting nearest the fire – elder’s prerogative. Anyone daring to shift their camp chair closer is rapped over the knuckles with her walking stick. She reminds me of my grandmother, Serafina. Queenie’s expression gentles as she sees me, shadows softening her sunken cheeks. She uses her stick to prod the young man next to her out of his chair, then hooks it around for me.

More than a dozen of us are here by the fire, some talking boisterously, one strumming a guitar, others staring into the flames. But silent or sociable, this is a community – one that’s folded me and my daughter into its embrace.

So why do I feel guilty at how much I miss Sanctuary?

‘Hey, Mom!’

Arms go round my shoulders, a cheek presses against mine. I breathe in Harper’s scent as her dark hair tickles my neck. My beautiful wild girl. Fierce and free.

‘I’m taking the car to see friends – won’t be back till late. Don’t wait up!’

I reach up to hug Harper but she’s already pulled away, so I call to her retreating back to be careful on the roads, because the car we bought once we decided to stop at Darkening Pine is a trashcan on wheels that cost a few hundred bucks. I shout that I love her, and watch the taillights kindle then fade as she turns onto the access road.

‘It’s hard to raise them, but even harder to let ’em go, right?’ Queenie murmurs as she sips the pain-relieving potion I made to ease her arthritis. Her words send an ache through my bones so sore I could grab the cup from her and down it myself.

Letting Harper go? How can I ever do that? I’m overwhelmed all over again by guilt at everything my girl went through without me knowing. What Daniel Whitman did to her. How she was shamed at the party. And guilt at everything I was powerless to prevent – Bea Garcia ducking her in the school fountain, Tad Bolt dragging her away like a criminal, and Abigail howling for her death. Some days, if I’m honest, I want to lock Harper in the RV and drive to the ends of the earth, far from anyone who might hurt her.

Other days, I desperately miss Sanctuary and my friends, and the purpose I had there.

And in the late, dark hours when Harper shifts and moans in her sleep alongside me, I dwell on everything I still don’t know about my daughter. The vine tattoos that coil across her midriff. And concealed among their black flowers, a faint scar in the shape of the Old Sign Obscurity, and the inked shapes of Ruin, Command and Undoing.

I glimpsed them just once, when Bolt seized us on the beach at Green Point, but in all the months since I’ve not stopped thinking about them. Many times I’ve wished I could soothe Harper asleep and while she slumbers, somehow draw out that ink, heal up that scar. Cleanse my girl’s body of such wicked marks.

I still don’t know why she did it – because I feel certain that both the scar and tattoos are her own work. The scar is years old, pale and faint. The idea I keep returning to is that she did it after her failed Rite of Determination, in a fit of grief and disappointment at being found giftless. Marking herself with one of the strongest symbols she knew, found in those never-to-be-opened pages of Starcross, as a way of claiming some part of our heritage despite lacking magic.

The other possibility, the one that lingers longest during my sleepless nights, is that for some unfathomable reason she did it before her Determination.

Obscurity. A sign of concealment. Surely enough to hide magic even from the rite and its Moot witness – and from a mother who never wanted anything more than for her child to have the Gift.

The tattoos date from after her sixteenth birthday, when she first started visiting Green Point and Jonny Maloney’s ink parlour. The four Old Signs are the darkest sigils our magical tradition knows. Secular law bans the writing or reproduction of them, even though they have no power if not shaped by a witch. Their inscription on Harper’s body could be a bitter joke between Jonny and my daughter, two giftless children of witches. A dangerous act of defiance or mockery.

Or perhaps – this is the idea that haunts my hours when my daughter lies burrowed under blankets as she did when small – Harper does have the Gift, concealed by that scar, and chose to tattoo the other three sigils on herself to claim their power also.

Ruin. A sign of destruction. Violent enough to burn a house or collapse a stadium.

Command. A sign of compulsion. Strong enough to send a woman screaming into flames, convinced she’s seen her dead son.

Undoing. The worst of all.

I can’t know the truth until Harper tells me. Not knowing is eating me alive, but I have to trust that she’ll tell me when she’s ready.

‘Hey sonny, turn it up!’ Queenie’s hoarse yell jerks me out of my spiralling thoughts. She’s bawling at Peanut, a tanned, wizened guy who none of us know by any other name. ‘You turn that radio up!’

‘It’s the news,’ he whines, dropping the wind-up transistor into her lap. ‘Ain’t nobody here needs to hear that.’

‘You do,’ Queenie whispers to me conspiratorially.

I’m about to protest – none of us here follows the news. We find our peace away from all that. But I catch a few words and snatch up the little device.

The second week of the Congressional Hearings on Witchcraft is set to conclude tomorrow, after yet another day of evidence has been marked by what police authorities are calling ‘significant’ protests …

I listen to the end of the bulletin, only lowering the radio when the DJ resumes his country music programming.

I’ve known these hearings were in progress. They’re not specifically about what took place in Sanctuary – they’re about everything that’s happened since. Things Harper and I have hidden from, though we’ve caught snatches in overheard conversations, TV news blaring in gas stations, or on people’s screens as they scroll idly.

A rise in hate crime against witches. The government announcing a special session of hearings to examine what the press has taken to calling ‘the Witchcraft Problem’. That was when I started thinking Harper and I should stop somewhere. No more moving, simply lie low until we know what the mood of the country will be. That was when I turned our wheels toward Darkening Pine, where there’s forest to the back of us, ocean in front of us, and seven hundred miles between here and Sanctuary.

‘Don’t you worry,’ says Queenie, reaching over to wrap cold fingers around my wrist. ‘It’ll all come right for your kind, Darcey Sutton – or whatever your real name is. Trust this old woman’s intuition.’

She toasts me with the thermos cup of potion and tips back her scrawny neck to drain the lot.

‘O-ho,’ she says, reflected flames giving her eyes back a brightness that old age stole. ‘Did you think none of us know what you are? You fair reek of it, Darcey. Just like the ones your daughter has gone to visit.’

My breath plumes in the raw air, like winter cast a spell to force the unseen visible. There’s no such spell in Starcross – not even in its pages of proscribed magic, the ones I turned to at my most desperate. But our grimoire does contain a simple cantrip of unnoticing, which I cast over the car as I lock it. I’m bouncing on my heels with anticipation, and every sound I make is unnaturally loud. Or rather, this place is unnaturally quiet.

There’s a reason for that.

The path lies at the back of the farmhouse. The front is nothing unusual, showing a respectable face to the world. Neatly painted weatherboard gleams in the moonlight and ‘Stoneacre Farm’ has been carved into a chiseled-smooth rock next to the porch steps.

That name is the clue that all is not what it seems. Stoneacre is one of the state’s biggest growers. Trucks roll out of here to towns and cities for miles around, and occasionally one stops on the way back from Jacksonville to drop excess produce at the campground store. That was how I first became curious – the faint throb of magic I sensed in the delivery driver I helped unload one day. Then I thought about it some more, and really, what business does a farm called ‘stone acre’ have being so productive?

Illegal business, that’s what.

I pick my way across the rutted ground, flint-hard and bald of grass, perfectly normal for this time of year. That’s the ground in front of the farmhouse. Conjuring a light, I illuminate the trail leading toward the rear. I can do magic freely here, as the only people who might see me are those with a secret as dangerous as mine. Stoneacre is home to a coven composed not of a witch and nonmagical assistants, but of many witches working together – something forbidden by law and submitted to by the Moot.

Soon, my boots are brushing thick, lush grass. A little further and I no longer need any illumination, because ahead of me an entire field is aglow. What’s happening here kindles my magic, too. I feel it like a glowing coal in the hearth of me, waiting to burn.

The entire field is a matrix of power. Members of the Stoneacre coven are stationed around the perimeter and their magic flows like water down the furrows cut into the soil by machines, gridded by crosscurrents from one witch to another. I’m an invited guest here. Anyone not invited would see only the lantern-light of farmers bending to plant out winter crops of peas, lettuce, and spinach. But magic is fertilizing the field tonight, cocooning every seed in the cold soil.

The Starcross grimoire calls this the Greenmagic, primitive and powerful. Witches’ ability to give fruitfulness to the land is one of the things that’s ensured our survival down the centuries. No village with a greenwitch would have starved through even the harshest winter. But it’s a rare talent and a limited one, as I’ve learned from our Starcross, which Mom rescued when our house burned. (I’m sure the grimoire was the first thing she saved, before her favorite photo of us or my baby clothes, and the thought leaves a soft bruise on my heart even though I would have done the same.)

Mom and I haven’t had that talk yet, about my magic – my sigils. My hunch is that she’s figured out what I did and is so spooked, so horrified, she can’t bear the thought of any conversation. My body, marked with the Old Signs, might be a walking crime in the eyes of the law, but among magicals it’s an abomination. Mom’s choosing to live in ignorance, no doubt because she finds it easier. But all I long for is for her to see me, all of me, as I truly am.

I reach for Stoneacre’s Greenmagic to test if it resonates. Because not even our family grimoire can answer my greatest question: What kind of witch am I? Some nights in the RV, when I’m stark awake as rain drums the roof, I think of all the things I’ve done with my magic. I sent Daniel through a window. I choked Bea Garcia. I burned down Sailaway Villa.

I lured Abigail Whitman into the fire.

Wanting Abigail dead wasn’t purely desperation amid the insanity at the stadium, where she put us on trial in front of the whole of Sanctuary. It was revenge and it felt good.

I try not to think about just how good.

Here, now, in this cold field thrumming with energy, a different sort of magic stirs in me. Through my boot-soles comes a throb like the heartbeat of the earth. A fluttering circulates inside my veins: part blood, part magic, part sap. Tonight, I’ll surrender myself to the Greenmagic and see if it claims me.

At the field boundary I take up a position, stretch out my arms, and lock myself into the matrix cast by Stoneacre’s coven. I’m joining other witches in a collective act of magic. All we’re doing is growing vegetables that’ll feed folks for miles around. But under the laws that force every witch in America into solitary practice, it’s a heinous act that deserves a decade in jail, our magic bound.

I strain to send my power deep into the soil, reaching for the seeds, communicating their mission to germinate, grow, and flourish. But I’ve no idea what I’m doing, and a small part of me worries that given my track record all I’ll do is kill the seeds or warp their growth. That under the influence of my malign magic, this field will sprout only nightmares, rotting as they grow.

Inside me there’s another seed, rooted long ago in Sanctuary, now shooting up fast thanks to my time at Stoneacre. It is bitterness at what society does to us witches. How it punishes us with the full weight of the law for simply being who we are. How our own Moot, that should defend and protect us, instead meekly acquiesces.

The crops we’re planting at Stoneacre tonight will be picked in spring.

When my resentment ripens, what fruit will it bear?

AMERICAN NEWS NETWORK, 24-HOUR ROLLING BULLETIN

ANCHOR Welcome back to ANN, the network serving you all the news and views without prejudice or partisanship. We’re returning now to Washington DC, where our Capitol Correspondent Joshua Feldstein has all the latest from today’s session of the Congressional Witchcraft Hearings. Joshua, the mood’s been rather different this week compared to last. What’s going on there?

FELDSTEIN Yes, Maritza, that’s right. Last week the focus was on witchcrime – allegations of criminal acts committed by members of the magical population. Numbers for these have stayed mostly consistent over the years, but if you recall there was a significant spike following events last summer in the Connecticut town of Sanctuary. Last week, it was the committee’s task to sift how credible that upsurge was – namely whether America is, as some allege, in the grip of an epidemic of magical lawlessness. You needed a pretty strong stomach to hear the details of some of those accusations. So gruesome, in fact, that I won’t be repeating them here.

ANCHOR So this week, how has that focus shifted?

FELDSTEIN This week flips the other side of the coin – complaints that the magical community is being unfairly vilified and harassed. Those we expect to hear from include non-magicals victimised on suspicion of witchcraft, and Charles Okoye, President of the Moot, the national body representing the magical community.

ANCHOR And today?

FELDSTEIN This morning’s session began with a punch. Evidence from parents of children with PMP statements – that’s ‘Persons of Magical Potential’ – and from witch parents whose children have not yet been formally statemented. They’ve been sharing their kids’ experiences of being targeted.

ANCHOR By ‘targeted’, I’m guessing you don’t mean teasing during recess?

FELDSTEIN Absolutely not. Some of these accounts have been pretty bizarre – one eight-year-old boy in New Hampshire was shot with buckwheat and beeswax, that’s apparently based on a colonial-era superstition that witches can’t be harmed by normal weapons. Other stories are downright tragic. In Colorado, a girl whose father is a witch was allegedly stoned to death by her peers. The facts of that case are still disputed – the other kids involved say she was fatally injured in a rockfall while they played outdoors. The father claims his child had been subjected to a campaign of persecution as she approached the age when witches are traditionally ‘Determined’ – that’s the official rite used to identify those of magical potential.

ANCHOR These are shocking examples, Joshua. But not everyone believes the hearings should be giving them time of day, correct?

FELDSTEIN That’s right. With the shift in focus this week we’ve seen protests from those opposing witch integration, who say the hearings should instead be looking to impose greater penalties for magical activity. These are not fringe complaints. One vocal supporter is Pennsylvania Representative Sandra Ortiz, who has been attending the daily sessions. She’s thought to be building a broad coalition to push for tighter controls on witches.

ANCHOR Much of the current mood can be traced back to the events in Sanctuary. If I’ve got it right, that town was placed under quarantine after a supposedly magically-caused illness ripped through it, and the deaths of two local boys – and subsequently the mother of one and the father of the other – were also attributed to witchcraft. Yet a police investigation ultimately found that magic was not, in fact, responsible. Is it correct that these hearings are re-examining exactly what happened in Sanctuary?

FELDSTEIN I don’t know if ‘re-examining’ is the right word, Maritza, but the committee has summoned Detective Maggie Knight, the Connecticut investigator on the Sanctuary case whose report ultimately led to state prosecutors deciding not to press charges. I should add that the whereabouts of the persons investigated in that case, local witch Sarah Fenn and her daughter, remain to this day unknown.

ANCHOR An interesting week ahead, then. Joshua Feldstein at the Capitol in DC, for now, thank you very much.

You’d think our nation’s lawmakers would put more powerful gas in their tank than the lightly stained water this congressional canteen claims is coffee. It’s enough to make you fear for American democracy.

Don’t they understand a girl gotta steel her nerves somehow?

I keep repeating the assurances I’ve received. This isn’t a re-investigation. No one’s questioning my conclusions about Sanctuary. The case file is staying closed. The hearings committee simply needs to talk to me about what happened to prevent it ever happening again.

I remember what I told my commander, Remy: A boy lost his footing at a party, and a town went mad with grief.

That was my line then. The line has held.

Stay calm, Mags.

There’s some fuss at a nearby table, but a glance tells me it’s not my skittish sergeant Chester making a signature entrance by tripping over his feet, just an official and her entourage. An overeager young staffer is dragging every free chair across to her table.

‘Taken!’ I bark, before the kid gets any ideas about the seat opposite me. He scowls, but barely looks old enough to be out of school, so I simply shoot back a complacent Chill, kiddo grin. His face, and it’s a shame coz it’s a nice-looking face, twists contemptuously.

His scorn leaves me feeling suddenly foolish. It’s funny, but back when we were working the Sanctuary case I always figured I was the one keeping Chester calm, showing him the ropes of policing. But right now, I wish he’d show up. I’ve never lacked confidence. I’ve doubted my own judgement a few times – more than a few, and never more often than in Sanctuary – but that’s part of what makes a good cop. Here, though? This isn’t my turf. Here, I’m merely a provincial detective, and one who plenty of folks were happy to call out as a sympathiser, a witchcrime enabler, in the weeks following what went down in Sanctuary. What if the lawyers and politicians on the hearings committee decide they’re not done examining my official story after all?

My hands are fiddling with my hair – I’ve straightened it for the occasion and feel unmoored from my everyday self – when I hear something spoken. Or rather, I hear the silence that follows something spoken, and my brain rewinds to retrieve the word that caused the hush.

Malef. A slur for magical folks that’s now considered completely unacceptable. The sort of thing which, if you said it in front of higher-ups, you’d get bawled out and sent on training, and rightly so.

It came from the overcrowded table next to mine. And judging from the way several heads are turned towards him, it came from that stuck-up young staffer. I wait for his boss to give him a tongue-lashing, but none comes. The kid tips up his chin defiantly – and really, I thought youngsters today are supposed to be the enlightened ones, doing the Lord’s work telling off their elders for offensive, outdated language. The woman in charge, clearly a lawyer or politician, still doesn’t reprimand him, instead frowning at her entourage.

‘What’s got you all?’ she snaps eventually. ‘They call us mundanes, so why shouldn’t we use the corresponding term for them? Why is it okay for my son to be mundane, but not for him to call some witch a malef? It’s only what they are. It’s the word used in the Constitution, or have you all forgotten? Maleficus – witch.’

Talk about doubling down. I mean, lady, there were plenty of terms used by our Founding Fathers that I hope to goodness never cross anyone’s lips today. But ‘my son’, huh? That explains both the kid’s youth and his entitlement, particularly when the rest of them crammed round the table, instead of pushing back at the defense of the indefensible that came out of their boss’s mouth, start murmuring For sure, Sandra, and You’re so right, Sandra. And when I hear that name, it all makes sense.

This is Sandra Ortiz, House Representative for some district in Pennsylvania, if my memory serves right. I’ve seen her photo enough times that I should have recognized her. She’s building a platform campaigning for tighter controls on witchcraft, bigger penalties for witchcrime, even movement restrictions on witches themselves, which strikes me as about as unconstitutional as you can get. Thankfully she’s not on the hearings committee, but she’s been attending every session, making mileage out of all the bad stuff that was thrown about last week. I send up a small prayer that she doesn’t notice little ol’ Witch Apologist Number One sat at the table right alongside her. I doubt she’d ask the barista to send complimentary coffees my way.

But actually, no. Dammit. My face is heating up as I think about it. No one on her crew challenged her son when he used that ugly word, or Ortiz when she defended him. And if they won’t …

I’m steeling myself to issue a corrective and doubtless make an enemy for life when my name is called from across the cafeteria.

‘Mags!’

My very own puppy, Sgt. Chester Greenstreet, bounds toward me. How good it is to see this guy. If our investigation changed me, it changed him even more. He’d been looked down on by his fellows and bullied by the Sanctuary station chief, Tad Bolt, who I’d lay a large bet assigned him to me aiming to hamper my investigation. If that was the plan, it backfired spectacularly. Ches was the biggest ally I had. Heck, I even let him shut me in the trunk of his car while he busted us through checkpoints erected for Michael Whitman’s bogus witch-flu quarantine lockdown.

I didn’t involve him in the final act, getting Sarah and Harper Fenn to safety. I did that with Sarah’s best friend, Pierre. I needed Chester to be able to go back to his job when everything settled down, with full deniability. He did, and he’s been acing it ever since. I pinch his cheeks like a doting auntie and he breaks out a goofy smile.

Ches fetches me another gallon of the dishwater coffee – my chance of peeing myself at the witness table this afternoon just doubled – and a milk tea for himself.

‘No donuts,’ he says, face kinda mournful as he sets down a stack of cookies.

‘They fueled some of our finest investigative work,’ I recall.

We both snort. And just like that, the months since we’ve been able to meet in person drop away as we joke and catch up. Policing’s the kind of work that keeps you busy. You can’t refuse a request to give evidence to a congressional hearing, but Chester was put on notice as an alternate should the demands of my current case make me unavailable. Needless to say I went straight to my boss Remy to ensure that under no circumstances would I be unavailable. Remy grinned like the sadist he is and pushed a gnarly money-laundering investigation my way, which required me to get acquainted with a stack of files that reached almost to the ceiling but kept me out of harm’s way at my desk.

Chester had to turn up today anyway, in case of a last-minute no-show on my part, and I’m glad of it. Sanctuary was … traumatising. There, I said it. I’m not seeing a shrink. The cop in me doesn’t one-hundred-per cent trust in patient confidentiality, plus I can’t imagine confiding to another human soul the things I saw – and did – during those crazy weeks. But Chester was alongside me throughout.

I have questions I can’t ask him here, of course. Questions such as: Have you heard from the Fenns? And, How the hell did Michael Whitman crawl out from the wreckage of the fake quarantine and Jake Bolt’s death with his reputation int. . .