Page 1 of Wateredge

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WITCHES, RETURNS & GUILT

1922…

“She’s a member of the Sacred Twenty!”

“I heard General Rockland shook her hand back in Europe!”

“She got the Navy Cross! There’s just one woman alive who has ever been awarded that medal before her!”

“They say she has magic in her hands, she has helped so many sailors and soldiers on the front! And then here with all the sick…”

She righted the heavy bag slung over her shoulder, pulled her wide-brimmed hat lower over her face and ignored the whispers behind her.

Not that she minded the gossip. Most of it, for once, was remarkably true, if perhaps both exaggerated and understated.

She was indeed one of the members of the Sacred Twenty, the first group of nurses to be commissioned by the US Navy. Fourteen years later, and she still smarted at how they had been treated. They were expected to serve, they were expected to wear a uniform, this very damn hat, and yet they had been provided no room nor board.

And yes, she had known Jack Rockland, the legendary general. They had met in France over blood and guts and gore. She had bandaged his arm. He had made a crude joke. She set him straight. He offered her his flask. They remained friendly, or as friendly as a woman who owed a man nothing and refused to dismiss that truth and said man could be. She still teased him every time their paths crossed, be it in Washington or anywhere else.

And yes, she had been awarded the Navy Cross. Four crosses were bestowed that day to her fellow nurses, members of the Twenty, and hers had been called first. The virtue of the alphabet.

Crowhart.

And the virtue of being the only one of the four still alive. The other three names were etched on cold tombstones, including…

Tears choked her, and she pushed the memories away. Yes, when the medals came down, she was the only one left standing among the dead.

A Navy Cross recipient. For her service in the Great War. For saving patients during the Spanish Lady. The damn influenza. She was given a hunk of metal for her many and varied heroics. The Cross was packed in her little suitcase. She had torn it from her chest a few minutes after it had been attached there.

Damn this service. Damn these people. Devil take it all, and you above all. You didn’t save… You didn’t save her… You were a coward, and you were forever damned!

As for that last piece of gossip? Well, her hands did have magic—maybe not as these simpletons thought about it—and that made everything about her life and her sin so much more banal. So much more tragic. So much more unforgivable.

She had run away from home, from Dragons, from Crow’s Nest fifteen years ago, barely eighteen years old, determined to make a name for herself. Her family had been besieged by tragedies, one after another, with her aunt dying at the hands of her uncle for daring to love someone else, the final straw that shook the already barely standing family.

Her grandmother had taken her own life upon finding her daughter’s body. Her mother had married the very first man who asked her and had been suffering ever since. She was not going to follow in their footsteps. Or in the steps of Lynnie Crowhart. No man was going to be her lord. No god would be her Lord.

She had escaped Dragons. She had forsaken Crow’s Nest. Louisiana beckoned. The bayou. The port of New Orleans was where she found her calling.

Or so she thought at the time. She had been recruited into the Sacred Twenty of the US Navy by her superior nurse in the local hospital, where she had made a name for herself through her ability to “allay suffering.”

Too bad you didn’t allay the suffering of the only one who really mattered…

Well, no use thinking about that now. Not when she was coming back to Dragons. She was coming back home, to a place that had never felt her own. A place that she had tried to escape. A place that would be her prison.

The ferry was slow and unnaturally packed. She wondered if something was happening on the island to warrant the large number of people. None of them looked local. Not that after being away for fifteen years, she’d know anyone.

Liar. Some things you will never forget…

She blinked as the water rose up the hull of the ferry as if to greet her, slowly lapping closer to her feet. Water. Her Water.

Hence, she did not mind the last accusation that had been whispered her way.

Magic hands.

Yes, she had magic in her hands. She was a Crowhart. A family blessing. A family malediction. And an actual ancestral curse. Maybe not hers, as she did have an older sister, but it never touched just one person.