“I could try. I’ve never really used my spells on vampires before,” Mary Jane said uncertainly. “I’ve never used them for anything important. Just for little things. To make the rent collector go away, or to get a rat to do tricks like this. But I don’t know if I’m strong enough to defeat a vampire. Unless…I have friends who could help,” she finished, letting the rat free. It squeaked, then skittered away into the shadows. “Only I’m not sure they’ll like you. We keep to ourselves, mainly. But I’ll tell them you saved me. I can’t say whether that’ll sway them, seeing as you kill our kind, but I can take you to them.”
“That wou
ld be very kind,” I said. “Are your friends like you?”
“You mean, are they witches?” Mary Jane asked matter-of-factly. “Why, I suppose so. Although I don’t know what makes a witch a witch. But I do know we all have magical powers,” Mary Jane said, giving me a lopsided smile. I smiled back encouragingly.
“How many?” Cora breathed.
“Not many. There’s just five of us. Me, Billy, Gus, and Vivian. And Jemima of course, but she’s…”
“She’s what?” I asked.
“She’s the one who might not like you,” Mary Jane said. “She doesn’t trust others. But when I tell her that you saved my life, she might reconsider.”
“But the rest of them?” I asked.
A fond smile crossed Mary Jane’s face. “They’re lovely. They’re my family, really. I never had a proper one. When I was twelve, I thought I’d be adopted. I used to dream about what it’d be like to have a mother, a home, and a bed with a feather mattress…” Mary Jane shook her head and set her mouth in a firm line. “That didn’t come true. But I got something better. I got people who’d never let me down.”
I nodded. I had so many questions and scarcely knew where to begin. A memory from years before flashed through my mind. I’d been sitting on a rock in the middle of the forest on the edge of Mystic Falls, listening to Katherine explain how she’d turned others into vampires like her. But witches were different. They didn’t become witches—they were born witches. The craft was in their blood.
“How did you find the others?” Cora asked softly. Her knees were pulled close to her chest, and she looked like a child being told a bedtime story.
“Well, once you know what you’re looking for, you start to notice things,” Mary Jane explained. “Jemima and I found each other first. We were in the same orphanage together, and as soon as she came in, I realized she was special. She could fix things. Her chores would magically get done while she was up in bed sleeping. Or she’d accidentally spill ink on a book, and seconds later, it would look good as new. I finally got the courage to ask her about it, and then we started working on spells together.”
Hope flickered in me. It sounded like Mary Jane and Jemima were both very powerful. If so, then maybe we really did have a chance of defeating Samuel. Although he was strong, magic overrode all other Powers. We had to do anything we could to get Jemima to agree to help us.
“What about the others?” Cora asked.
Mary Jane wrinkled her forehead. “Well, I saw Vivian making a concoction with some leftover whiskey at a tavern where she was a scullery maid. Gus was a paperboy who Jemima saw talking to sparrows in his spare time. And we found Billy putting a spell on a roll he was eating outside a bakery. Before he took the last bite, he conjured up four more fresh ones.” Mary Jane smiled.
“It will be a pleasure to meet them,” I said. A witch, a human, and a vampire, teaming up to fight evil. It sounded like the premise of a penny-paper serial. But thanks to the monster who was plotting our deaths, this was our lives.
4
The next day, Cora and I followed Mary Jane to the home she shared with the orphans. The foggy, gray morning matched my mood. What if Mary Jane’s friends wouldn’t help? Or what if it was too late to save Damon? Out of the tunnel, I could see the dark circles under Mary Jane’s eyes, the frayed hem of her faded brown dress. She looked every inch the orphan she was. No matter how hard I tried to push it out of my mind, I kept wondering: If she was so powerful, why wasn’t she able to rise in society? Why were she and her witch friends living in a slum at all? Damon would have asked. But I didn’t. Because why did it matter? The point was, she was all we had.
“Here we are. Home sweet home,” Mary Jane said brightly as she turned a tight corner into a tiny alley. The buildings on either side of the street were dilapidated, with boarded-up windows and, in some cases, huge holes in their outer walls.
She pushed her shoulder against a door and let Cora and me step inside.
I blinked inside the dark foyer of the hovel that Mary Jane called home, taking in the uneven ceiling, the sloped floor missing half its boards, and the endless strands of cobwebs glimmering in the darkness.
“Shh.” Mary Jane put a cautionary finger to her lips as she crept up the staircase—if it could be called that. The banister had been ripped from the wall, and several steps had rotted away. The ones that remained were off-kilter, and it seemed a miracle—or magic—that the entire house hadn’t collapsed.
At the top of the stairs, Mary Jane opened a thin door. “I’m home!” she announced grandly.
I blinked. In the center of a room was a fire, ringed and contained by concrete slabs most likely stolen from the street. A skylight was directly above it. The glass must have fallen out long ago, leaving only a gaping hole that offered a view of the cloudy sky. Around the fire sat two boys and one girl, all no older than eighteen. One of the boys, the youngest, looked like he was only twelve. The room smelled of mildew and damp. I coughed.
“Mary Jane!” The youngest boy sprang up and wrapped his bony arms around Mary Jane’s waist. She smiled fondly and ruffled his blond hair. “You’re home! I thought the Ripper got you!”
“Don’t be upset, Gus. I’m home now. But it’s all thanks to Stefan here. If it wasn’t for him, I would have been hacked to pieces,” Mary Jane explained.
“By the R-r-ripper?” Gus asked, stuttering in fear.
“Worse than that,” Mary Jane said. “Stefan and Cora, this is Gus, Vivian, and Billy. My family. Jemima must be in another room,” she said, making a short introduction to the group sitting around the fire. I wondered whether Mary Jane would tell them I was a vampire. I wondered if they, too, knew just by looking at me.
“What’s worse than Jack the Ripper?” the girl, who must have been Vivian, asked in disbelief. Her lilting voice held an Irish accent similar to Cora’s. Cora perked up, but didn’t speak.