Cars slowed when they passed the ramshackle yet somehow still regal old Victorian where my parents, my younger sister, Chloe, and I lived with my grandmother. Time and nature had conspired to batter the once brightly painted clapboards to the color of faded orchids and turn the ornate trim smoky rose. In another place and time, Oz perhaps, the house might have blended in, but in a sea of homes wearing staid coats of white or gray, it was a beacon of weirdness. Kids would pedal their bikes for blocks to check out the moat of prickly, overgrown shrubs, gargoyle-crowned downspouts and the portentous weather vane—a black iron raven with red-jeweled eyes and outspread wings—perched atop the turret. They were careful to restrict their ogling to the other side of the street, not even the bravest daring to venture too close to what was commonly known as “the witch’s house.” Of all the crazy rumors that circulated about my grandmother, that was the most ridiculous of all. As anyone who bothered to research the Celtic protection symbols set in paving stones at each entrance could have told you, 128 Sycamore was clearly the house of an enchantress.

Few people have heard of, much less understand, the power of enchantment. Say the word “enchanted” and most folks think of a favorite Disney movie; say “enchantress” and it’s likely that one of two visions will dance in their heads: the first, pure slinky evil, dressed in black spandex; the second, an ethereal beauty with long golden tresses and a swirling rainbow of gossamer veils.

I’m not evil. I’m also not a blonde, and the only time I wore a gossamer veil was when I was seven and the veil was lime green and attached to my fairy princess Halloween costume. And sadly, while I like to think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I’m sure whatever beauty I might possess doesn’t come close to the “ethereal” classification. I am, however, an enchantress. A genuine, honest-to-goodness, nonpracticing enchantress . . . emphasis on the “nonpracticing.”

The power of enchantment isn’t something you learn or acquire . . . or, I might add, ask for. It’s a blood right, meaning you’re either born with it or you’re not. In the case of my family, this rare power has been passed in T’airna blood from mother to daughter since . . . well, brace yourself because as incredible as it sounds, since forever, also known as “the time before time.” Of course, I can’t prove any of this with legal documents or carbon dating or historical accounts, but then, I don’t have to. Those who know the truth know, and those who don’t are better off that way.

An enchantress’s power is pure and inimitable, rooted not in witchcraft but in ancient magic now very nearly extinct. It comes from within. You’re probably wondering if there are spells involved. Sometimes. There’s also an assortment of other magical trappings to call on: crystals and talismans and amulets, special incantations and rituals; but all these are mere tools designed to enhance and channel the power that flows from deep within. And then there is the Book of Enchantment, the magical equivalent of a family Bible. It’s there that I first encountered the Winter Rose Spell, one of my family’s oldest and most treasured.

The spell is said to have inspired the romantic folk legend, which in turn inspired poet John Keats to write The Eve of Saint Agnes. According to legend, if a maiden performs a certain painstaking ritual she will be granted a vision of the man destined to be her one true love. The particulars of the ritual varied with time and place, everything from fasting and glancing backwards into a looking glass at bedtime, to weaving a lover’s knot and sleeping with it tucked beneath a silken pillow. In time the folklore came to be associated with Saint Agnes’ Eve, but never did it come close to matching the power of the spell itself.

The actual spell calls on the four elements of nature to fuse spheres of positive and negative energy into a single, seamless and very potent flow of time and space. Like I said, I can’t prove it. Hell, I can’t even explain it. All I can tell you is that it’s not something that happens every day. In fact, it’s only possible on a single night, and then only if the spell is executed flawlessly, down to the most miniscule detail. That night is January 20, Saint Agnes’ Eve and, according to family legend, the coldest night of the year.

I came across the spell by chance, if you believe in such a thing, written in a flowing, ornate hand on yellowed parchment and tucked deep inside the Book of Enchantment. Back then I loved everything about the heavy, oversized book with its worn-soft leather binding and the mysterious, heady aroma that wafted from its delicate pages; most of all I loved the solid comforting weight of it in my lap when I curled up in the overstuffed chair in Grand’s turret hideaway.

The only time I got to pore through it to my heart’s content was when my parents weren’t around. My mother wanted no part of what Grand insisted was our sacred birthright. She’d spent her entire life hiding the truth from others, desperate to fit in, to be “normal.” She even managed to keep my father in the dark until after their whirlwind courtship and elopement. They were married nearly a year before she ran out of plausible explanations for Grand’s sometimes, shall we say, unorthodox behavior and was forced to come clean.

In my mother’s mind, being normal meant having normal children, and she made it clear she didn’t want Chloe and me contaminated by magic, insisting it would only lead to trouble and ruin our lives. My father was even more irrational about what he referred to as Grand’s “wacky hocus-pocus crap.” Magic was a constant source of arguments and stress, and so for the sake of household harmony all things magical were kept pretty much under wraps when he was around. Which, for one reason or another, wasn’t always that much. To be honest, my folks were usually too caught up in the drama of their own lives to pay much attention to ours.

That was a good thing, since it wasn’t easy for Grand to censor herself, especially under her own roof; she was an extremely strong-willed woman who would have greatly preferred to turn her irksome son-in-law into a cocktail olive and drive a plastic toothpick through his heart. Grand and my father shared what you might call a mutual disdain society. It was only his frequent threats to move out—or more accurately, to move out taking my mother, my sister and me with him—that forced her to reluctantly walk a fine line between pacifying him and doing whatever she damn well pleased.

On the day I found the spell, my folks had taken Chloe, who was nine, to see Cinderella, which meant I had Grand and the Book of Enchantment all to myself for the afternoon. Even before I finished reading it, I knew the spell was going to change my life forever. It was as if the simple act of unfolding the fragile parchment permitted the words to float free and become part of me, like a promise written on my heart.

The path of passion twined with fate . . . The words set fire to my fifteen-year-old imagination. It wasn’t hard to persuade Grand to help me with the spell. It broke her heart that her only daughter had turned her back on magic, and it was no secret she had high hopes for me. She was convinced my birthmark, a Celtic cross over my heart, was a sign of destiny and foretold great things for my future.

I found the spell in late November, which meant I had only seven weeks to master it. Grand and I spent hours secreted away in the turret while she taught me to cast a sacred circle and to weave an infinity knot from twigs of willow and red ribbon so fine it slipped through my fingers like warm honey. In spite of my parents’ efforts to “protect” me from Grand’s magic, I’d seen her float teacups across the room, start fires in the hearth or change the color of the clothes on my back with no more than a glance and a few musical phrases. Now, for the first time, she actually spoke to me about magic and what it meant to be an enchantress.

I was like a dry sponge tossed into the ocean; I absorbed every word, and the more I learned and understood, the more mystified I was about my parents’ opposition to something so utterly, amazingly cool. And the more convinced I became that they were dead wrong about magic, the more eager I was to embrace it with a vengeance. I would make up for their shortsightedness. In fact, I would single-handedly prove to them how wrong they were about magic and our family heritage and everything. Who knows? That might even be one of the great deeds Grand was so certain I was destined to perform.

Until then my parents remained Obstacle Number One on my road to successful spell-casting. With January 20 rapidly approaching, I needed a foolproof plan to get them out of the house for the entire evening. I considered and rejected a dozen ideas before hitting upon the perfect solution. Cats. My Christmas present to them that year was a pair of front-row seats to see Cats in Boston. The tickets cleaned out my meager savings, but it was well worth it. I figured dinner, a two-hour performance, plus the fifty-minute drive each way would buy me more than enough time to do what I had to do.

As the night drew closer, Grand’s lessons focused on the spell itself.

One for seeing in this hour . . . The prospect of glimpsing my one true love excited and terrified me in just about equal parts. But I was ready. I just hoped he—whoever and wherever he was—was ready for me. My mother had traded who she was—or could have been—for love, and I was determined not to make the same mistake. I refused to believe her warning that it was an either-or proposition. I fully intended to claim my power and find true love.

Of course, historically the odds were against me, something else my mother was quick to point out at every opportunity. When it came to romance, T’airna women had been plagued by broken promises, broken vows and broken hearts. The only man Grand had ever loved died on the battlefield without ever knowing she carried his child. And while I never doubted my parents loved each other, in their own stressful way, their relationship was more about passion and melodrama than genuine happiness and understanding. It was a bad-luck streak that stretched back as far as anyone could remember, and it was one family tradition Grand was reluctant to talk about.

I intended to change all that as well. No weak, close-minded, unadventurous soul mate for me. I wanted a man strong enough to accept and love everything about me, a man willing to understand and deal with the fact that the world isn’t always exactly as it appears on the surface. A man who believed in destiny as much as I did. And I couldn’t wait to sprinkle rose petals into the circle of candlelight and see his face.

For the record, I never stopped believing in destiny, or magic for that matter. I’ve simply stopped thinking about them and allowing them to influence the choices I make. Of course, when I say I’ve stopped thinking about them, I’m referring to conscious, intentional thoughts only. Memories are an entirely different matter and much harder to control. Memories are stubborn and subversive; they laugh in the face of willpower and determination, hunkering down, making a home for themselves in some tiny, out-of-the-way corner of your heart, always waiting for a quiet moment when you lower your guard so they can claim center stage.

I remember what happened with icy clarity. All I have to do is close my eyes and I’m back on Sycamore Street on that crystal cold January night.

It had been storming on and off all day, and I remember looking out the kitchen window at the snow-clad cedars strung like hulking snowmen across the back of the yard and, for the first time since undertaking the spell, contemplating the all-too-real prospect of frostbite. In keeping with tradition I would wear a white robe and walk barefoot through the snow to pluck a rose from the bush that grew at the very heart of my grandmother’s garden. Thoughts of my toes and how much I enjoyed having five of them on each foot were suddenly foremost in my mind.

As I watched the drifts grow higher, I recalled Grand’s instructions and wondered how I was going to manage to concentrate and focus inward when all I could see outward was snow, a fluffy, sparkly, icy white reminder that this was Providence, as in Rhode Island, as in New England, land of Robert Frost and Jack Frost and every other kind of frost known to man, a place where roses do not bloom in the middle of January. Not even roses wild and headstrong enough to survive being uprooted from the rugged terrain of western Ireland and carried across the ocean in the bottom of Grand’s trusty valise.

Not in the snow. Not as a rule.

“And whose rule would that be?” was her response when I nervously broached the subject.

Whose rule indeed?

That night, as always, Grand radiated self-assurance that was effortless, bone deep and as genuine as the brogue that still laced her speech. To me, her voice had always been like a magic carpet; all I had to do was close my eyes and listen to be whisked away to places other people couldn’t even imagine, to a world she alone could conjure. In the whole universe, only Grand could have convinced me that if I truly believed there would be a single, freshly bloomed white rose waiting for me in the garden that night, there would be. And that nothing, not a sky full of snow or the coldest New England winter on record or all the laws of nature and physics combined, would interfere.

As the day wore on, I began to worry about more practical matters, such as my parents coming down with a sudden case of severe common sense and deciding not to risk the drive to Boston. That would ruin everything. My father was especially restless, even for him, chain-smoking and pacing around the house, stopping every few minutes to glance out a different window. But in the end, he was the one who overrode my mother’s qualms, insisting that instead of canceling their big night out, they should get on the road early. I could barely keep from dancing in happy little circles as I stood in the doorway with Grand and Chloe and waved good-bye to them. My biggest worry was out of the way, and all I had left to do was shovel the path and count the seconds until the clock struck nine.

At last the appointed hour arrived and I stepped alone into the snow-covered backyard. It took an immense amount of sheer will to ignore the biting cold—not to mention scary thoughts of what was rustling in a nearby bush—and concentrate instead on the moment at hand. Among the zillion and one things Grand had drilled into me was that for the spell to succeed, I had to totally surrender to the intention of each individual moment. If I tried to hold on to the moment before or anticipate the one to follow, it would fail . . . I would fail.

And I flat-out refused to fail.

Intention, I reminded myself over and over, think intention.

That’s really what it was all about; four simple words that encompass the timeless mystery at the core of an enchantress’s power. Grand told me to think of it as a portal that would open within when the alignment of heart and head and hour was right. I had only one teensy problem with that scenario; I needed the alignment to be right on a very tight schedule. Assuming there was a rose to be found, I had to pluck it, get upstairs to the turret room where Grand and Chloe were waiting, cast the spell—with all the flawless intention, chanting and focusing required—and still have the house aired out and every last trace of incriminating evidence cleared away before my parents got home.

I paused at the top of the frost-kissed gravel path leading to the rose garden and drew a deep breath, fighting to clear my mind and overlook the snow squishing up between my toes. It was all up to me now. If something was going to happen, it would be because I willed it to, because I wanted it and wanted it badly enough to bring it about.

“Reality bends to desire. Reality bends to desire.”

I spoke the words aloud, slowly and emphatically and with my teeth chattering. I closed my eyes, and as Grand had taught me I imagined my thoughts gathering like a funnel cloud, which I then directed toward the path ahead. When I opened my eyes the snow was still there, but the sensation of stinging cold was gone. I took a step and the ground beneath my feet felt solid and warm. I felt warm.

It was true! That amazing realization propelled me forward, past the frozen frog pond and sleeping patches of foxglove and wild mint. I carried a white candle, anointed with coriander oil and encircled with the infinity knot I’d woven that afternoon, to light my way.

I remember that the knot was perfect. It was all perfect, and just like the day I’d discovered the spell, I knew even before I reached the garden’s innermost circle that the rose would be there. Waiting. Glowing as softly as the pale moon that had suddenly appeared and hovered between clouds directly overhead.

Hanging at my waist was a silver-handled athame, a family heirloom I used to cut the stem with a single stroke, as effortlessly as if I’d done it a thousand times before, and it was in that instant that I felt it for the first time, flowing around me and through me. Power. Pure. Dazzling. Mine. I could hear it, smell it, taste it.

Time flowed as well, carrying me up the stairs to the candlelit turret room, where with the same ease and grace I cast the sacred circle and did what I had been waiting so long to do, what I’d dreamed of doing, what I’d been born to do.

And that’s where my memory stops. Fade to black. I know I cast the spell and saw a vision in the flames. I know my parents arrived home earlier than expected, and that Grand and Chloe and I had to scramble to cover our traces and make it into our beds before they walked in. I know all that because I’ve been told; I just don’t remember any of it. Whatever memories there might have been are gone, burned to nothingness by what happened afterwards.

A matter of self-preservation? Or guilt? Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I only know that if my life was a book, that long-ago night put an end to the chapter titled “Innocence.”