Hex Hall (20 page)

"So what are you doing here? Why have you been folowing me?"

"I haven't been folowing you," she answered hotly. "I've been appearing to you. You weren't ready for me before, but now you are. I've worked very hard to get to you, Sophia. Now, can we please stop al this chattering and get down to business?"

I let her drag me away, mostly because I was afraid she might zap me if I didn't, but also because I was genuinely curious.

How many people get puled out of bed by their great-grandmother's ghost?

We walked away from Hecate and down the steep hil toward the greenhouse. I wondered if she was taking me there for training, but when we arrived, she veered off toward the left and puled me into the woods.

I'd never been in the forest that surrounded Hecate, and for very good reason: it was spooky as hel. And of course it was doubly so at night. I stepped on a rock in my bare feet and winced.

When something soft brushed against my cheek, I gave a little shriek.

I heard Alice murmur a few words, and suddenly a large orb of light appeared in front of us, bright enough that I had to shade my eyes. Alice muttered under her breath, and the orb jerked upward as if someone had it on a string. It floated away until it was about ten feet over our heads, casting light in al directions.

You would think that the light would make the woods less creepy, but actualy it was worse. Now shadows moved across the ground, and I caught the occasional flash of animal eyes. We came across a dry creek bed, and to my surprise, Alice leaped nimbly into it. I folowed, a lot less gracefuly, tripping on loose soil and cursing.

If I'd thought the woods were spooky, they had nothing on the dry creek. Rocks were sharp against my bare feet, and it seemed that everywhere I looked, there were dark holows and exposed roots that looked like the entrails of some giant animal. In the end I just grabbed Alice's hand and kept my eyes shut until we came to an abrupt stop.

I opened my eyes and immediately wished I hadn't.

In front of me was a smal wrought-iron fence flecked with rust. Behind the fence were six gravestones. Four were slightly crooked and covered in moss, but the other two stood straight and were as white as bone.

The gravestones were unsettling enough, but it was the other thing in this tiny graveyard that had my heart in my stomach, and the metalic taste of fear in my mouth.

The statue was about eight feet high, maybe a little taler. It was an angel carved in light gray stone, its wings spread wide. They were so finely carved you could make out every feather. Likewise, the angel's robes seemed to ripple and float in a nonexistent wind. In one hand it held a sword. The hilt was carved out of the same stone as the rest of the statue, but the blade was some sort of dark glass, which shone brightly in the light from the orb. The angel's other hand was held out in front of it, palm forward, as if it were warning others to stay back. The look on its face was one of such stern authority that it would have put Mrs. Casnoff to shame.

The angel was very familiar to me, and I realized with a start that it was the same one depicted in the stainedglass window at Hecate. The angel that cast out the Prodigium.

"What . . ." I broke off and cleared my throat. "What is this place?"

Alice was gazing up at the angel with a faint smile. "A secret," she answered.

I shivered and puled my blazer tighter around me. I wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but there was a steely look on her face that told me I probably wouldn't get an answer. Hadn't the brochure said that one of Hecate's big rules was to never go into the woods? I'd just assumed the woods were dangerous or something.

But maybe it had been more than that.

The wind picked up, rattling the leaves and making my teeth chatter. Why hadn't I thought to grab shoes, I wondered as I rubbed one numb foot on top of the other.

"Here," Alice said, pointing to my feet. They tickled for a moment, and as I watched, my feet were suddenly encased first in wooly white socks and then in my favorite pair of fuzzy red slippers.

Slippers that, as far as I knew, were stil sitting in the bottom of my closet in Vermont.

"How did you do that?"

But Alice just smiled mysteriously.

And then without warning she whipped her hand through the air.

I felt a heavy blow right in my chest that knocked me off my feet. I hit the ground with a startled, "Oomph!"

Sitting up, I glared at her. "What was that?"

"That," she said sharply, "was a ridiculously simple attack spel that you should have been able to block."

I stared at her in shock. It was one thing to get laid out by Archer in Defense, but being attacked out of nowhere by my great-grandmother was just embarrassing.

"How could I have blocked it when I had no idea you were going to do that?" I fired back.

Alice walked over to me and offered her hand to pul me up. I didn't take it, mainly because I was pissed, but also because Alice looked like she weighed about ninety pounds, and I thought I'd probably end up puling her down with me.

"You should have been able to sense that I was going to do that, Sophia. Someone with power as great as yours can always anticipate an attack."

"What is this?" I asked, dusting the dirt and pine needles of my now-sore butt. "A Star Wars thing? I was supposed to 'sense a disturbance in the Force'?"

Now it was Alice's turn to blink in confusion.

"Forget it," I mumbled. "Anyway, if you've been watching me at al over the past six weeks, you've probably picked up on the fact that I don't have any 'great power.' I'm like, the least powerful witch here. Clearly, the awesome family superpowers passed this gal by."

Alice shook her head. "No they didn't. I can feel it. Your powers are every bit as great as mine. You just don't know how to use them yet. That's why I'm here. To help you sharpen and mold them. To prepare you for the role you must play."

I looked up at her. "So you're like, my own personal Mr.

Miyagi?"

"I have no idea what that means."

"Sorry, sorry. I'l try to stop with the pop culture references.

What do you mean the
role
I must play?"

Alice looked at me like I was stupid. And in her defense, I felt pretty stupid.

"Head of the Council."

"O
kay, why would I want that?" I asked with smal laugh.

"I know nothing about Prodigium, and I'm a crappy witch."

The wind caught my hair, blowing it into my mouth and eyes. Through the strands covering my face, I saw Alice flick her hand toward me. My hair swept back from my face and gathered itself into a bun on top of my head. It was so tight my eyes watered.

"Sophia," Alice said in the tone used to placate a tantrum-throwing toddler, "you only think you're crappy."

The word "crappy" sounded ridiculously classy in Alice's cut-glass accent, and I had to smile a little. I guess she saw that as a good sign, because she took my hand. Her skin was soft and ice-cold to the touch.

"Sophia," she said in a softer voice, "you're incredibly powerful. You're just at a disadvantage because you've been raised by a human. With the right training and guidance, you could put those other girls--what do you and your half-breed friend cal them?

'The Witches of Noxema'?"

"Jenna's not a half-breed," I said quickly, but she ignored me. "You could be far, far more powerful than any of them. And I can show you how."

"But why?" I asked.

She smiled in that enigmatic way again and patted my arm.

Even though I knew Alice had died at eighteen, which made her just two years older than me, there was something very grandmotherly in her touch. And after a lifetime of having just Mom as family, it felt nice.

"Because you're my blood," she answered. "Because you deserve to be better. To become what you are meant to be."

I didn't know what to say to that. Was head of the Council what I was meant to be? I thought of my onetime fantasy of owning one of those New Age bookshops, reading palms and wearing a big purple caftan. That seemed very far away now and, honestly, kind of stupid.

And then I thought of Elodie, Chaston, and Anna glowing and levitating in the library. They had looked like goddesses, and even though I'd been scared, I'd envied them. Was it realy possible that I could become better than them?

Alice laughed. "Oh, you'l be much better than those girls."

Great, she could read my mind.

"Come, we haven't much time left."

We walked past the cemetery and into a clearing inside a ring of oak trees. "This is where we'l meet," Alice said. "This is where I'l train you to be the witch you should be."

"You do know that I have class, right? I can't stay up al night."

Alice reached down and slipped a necklace off her neck.

Her hands glowed with a light brighter than the orb stil floating above us. Then the light abruptly went out and she handed the necklace to me. It was almost too hot to touch. Just a simple silver chain with a square pendant about the size of a postage stamp. In the center was a teardrop-shaped black stone.

"There. Family heirloom," she said. "As long as you're wearing that, you'l never become too tired."

I looked at the necklace with appreciation. "Wil I learn that spel?"

And for the first time, Alice smiled a real smile, a broad one that lit her whole face and made her slightly plain features beautiful.

She leaned in and took both my hands in hers, puling me close until our faces were inches apart. "Al that and more," she whispered. And when she broke out into giggles, I found myself laughing too.

Several hours later, I was not laughing. I wasn't even cracking a smile.

"Again!" Alice barked. How did a girl so tiny have a voice so loud? I sighed and roled my shoulders. I focused as hard as I could on the empty space in front of me, wiling with al my might for a pencil to appear. For the first hour, we'd just worked on blocking spels. I'd done pretty wel blocking Alice's attack spels, even though I hadn't been able to sense them coming. But for the past hour we'd been working on making something appear out of nothing.

We'd started smal, hence the pencil, and Alice claimed it was just a matter of concentrating.

But I'd been concentrating so hard that I was afraid I'd now be seeing bright yelow Number 2 pencils every time I closed my eyes. I'd vibrated the grass a bunch, and after one particularly frustrating moment, I'd sent a rock flying toward Alice, but no pencils.

"Should we start even smaler?" Alice asked. "A paper clip, perhaps? An ant?"

I cut my eyes at her and took another deep breath.

Pencil, pencil, pencil, I thought. Bright yelow pencil, soft pink eraser, SAT, please, please . . .

And then I felt it. That feeling like water rushing up from the soles of my feet and into my fingertips. But this wasn't just water.

This was a river. Everything inside of me seemed to be vibrating. I felt a burning behind my eyes, but it was a good sort of heat, the way a sunwarmed car seat feels on your back on a cool day. My face ached, and I realized it was because I was smiling.

The pencil faded in slowly, looking like a ghost of itself at first, before finaly becoming solid. I kept my hands out, the magic stil pulsing through me, and turned to Alice to say something along the lines of "Neener neener!"

But then I saw that she wasn't looking at me. She was looking past me, where the pencil was. I turned back and gasped.

Now there wasn't just one pencil in front of me. There was a pile of maybe thirty spiling over each other, and more were popping up.

I dropped my hands and felt the magic stop instantly, like a connection had been severed.

"Holy crap!" I exclaimed softly.

"My, my," was Alice's only comment.

"I . . ." I stared at the pile. "I did that," I said finaly, even as I mentaly kicked myself for sounding so stupid.

"Indeed you did," Alice said, shaking her head a little. Then she smiled. "I told you so."

I laughed, but then a thought occurred to me.

"Wait. You said your sleeping spel lasts for only four hours." I glanced at my watch. "It's been almost four hours now, and it took us at least half an hour to get out here. How are we going to get back in time?"

Alice smiled, and with a snap of her fingers, two brooms suddenly materialized beside her.

"You're joking," I said.

The smile broadened, and she threw one leg over a broom and zoomed off into the sky. She came back down and hovered a few feet above my head, and her laugh echoed throughout the woods. "Come on, Sophia!" she caled. "Be traditional for once!"

Heaving myself off the ground, I grabbed the slender neck of the broom. "Is this thing gonna hold me?" I caled up to her. "We don't al shop at Baby Gap!"

This time she didn't bother to ask me what I was talking about. She just laughed and said, "I'd hurry if I were you! Fifteen minutes stand between you and year-long celar duty!"

So I straddled the broom. I wasn't quite as ladylike as Alice, but when the broom suddenly lifted into the air, I didn't care how undignified I looked.