Cara Blackwell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Cara sat in the back row of first period and heard none of it. The teacher's voice slid past her. She stared at the tall windows of Hawthorne High and saw the alley instead. The boy from the woods. His words. Your mother had one too. She rubbed the flame mark on her wrist until the skin burned. She wanted to believe him. She could not. A stranger walks out of the woods and names her dead mother. That was too easy, and too dangerous. She had one memory of a stranger's word against everything she thought she knew. She needed proof he was not lying. Then it came back to her. In the alley, when he crouched to calm Rico, his sleeve had pulled up. A mark on his wrist. Not flame-shaped like hers. A thin curve, like the moon three days from full. She had barely seen it. Now she could not stop seeing it. Two marks. Two witches, he'd said. If the marks were real, they'd be written down somewhere. The bell rang. Cara did not go to second period. The school library was empty at that hour. She pulled every book with old town records, family names, local history. She spread them across a wide table under the windows. Her hands shook as she turned pages. She looked for Blackwell. She looked for any mark like the ones on their wrists. For an hour she found nothing but crop reports and church picnics. Her chest went tight. Maybe he'd made it all up. Maybe she was chasing a lie because she wanted a mother back. Then a thin book slipped from the bottom of the stack. Old town families, printed long before she was born. She flipped to the B names and stopped breathing. Blackwell. A grainy photo. A woman with dark skin and locs, younger than Cara's mother in any picture at home, but the same jaw, the same eyes. And on the wrist, turned toward the camera, a flame-shaped mark. Cara's own mark went hot. Her eyes stung. She pressed her lips together and forced the purple down before the windows could rattle. She read the caption twice. One line named the family a line of "marked women," going back further than the town itself. He hadn't lied. Her mother came from a bloodline, and the mark proved it. The boy knew a truth her mother had buried. Cara tore a sheet of paper and copied the page by hand. She folded it into her pocket. The proof changed everything. She could trust what he told her now, which meant she had to meet him and hear the rest. But the book listed no living Blackwells. No aunts, no cousins. Every marked woman on the page had a death date beside her name. Cara was the last one. And the only person who could explain that was a boy she'd met once, in an alley, whose name she still did not know.