The Complete Private Collection: Private; Invitation Only; Untouchable; Confessions; Inner Circle; Legacy; Ambition; Revelation; Last Christmas; Paradise ... The Book of Spells; Ominous; Vengeance (320 page)

The other Billings Girls parted to let us through, unwilling to mess with Noelle, and she hustled me toward the door like a girl dragging her little sister clear of danger.

“I know, Mom. I know. But I’ll still see you on Friday for the party,” I said as I threw my favorite sweaters and jeans into my duffel bag. If there was a party, of course. I held the phone between my ear and my shoulder, my neck straining as I flitted around my room, grabbing a lip gloss here, a notebook there, trying to figure out whether I’d really need my history text and how long we’d be gone. “It would be stupid for me to fly out there and then turn around and fly right back. Hopefully by then Astrid and Lorna will be found and everything will be okay.”

“I just . . . I would feel a lot more comfortable if you were here,” my mother said. “With us.”

I paused, a T-shirt balled up in my hand.

“I know,” I said softly. “But being in New York . . . ”

I’ll be with Noelle. And, more important, with Josh
, I thought.

“I’ll be closer to school if it reopens and we have to come right
back,” I said. “And Mr. Lange . . . ” I paused, swallowing hard as I recalled how intimately my mother once knew Mr. Lange—how intimately we were all connected. “I’m sure he’ll have some serious security set up for us.”

I shoved the T-shirt into my bag, then quickly added the framed photograph of me and my father—my real father—that sat atop my desk. Then I zipped up the duffel and tossed it toward the door.

“Okay. If that’s what you really want to do,” my mother said sadly. “Just call me when you get there. In fact, call me every hour.”

I exhaled a laugh, my heart squeezing into a tight ball inside my chest. “All right. I will.”

“Love you, Reed,” she said.

My throat closed. I hadn’t told my mother I loved her many times in my life. She’d spent most of my childhood on her back in bed, hopped up on prescription drugs and blaming my entire family for her sucky situation. Since she’d gotten sober last year, the words had been uttered between us more frequently, but now I was finding them harder than ever to say. Now that I knew she’d been lying to me about who my father was my entire life.

But then, I could be the next to go missing. If I didn’t say it now, when would I have the chance again?

“Love you too, Mom. And Dad,” I added quickly, clutching the phone so tightly it almost slipped out of my grasp like a greased pig.

“We’ll see you at the big party,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “Be safe.”

“I will.”

I hung up the phone, shoved it in the back pocket of my jeans, and grabbed my pillow. Outside the open door of my room, girls rushed past with their backpacks and laundry bags, their teddy bears under their arms, their cell phones pinned to their ears. As I tossed my pillow toward my packed bag, I noticed the long, dingy laces of my favorite sneakers sticking out from under my bed and dropped to my knees to fish them out.

I pulled out the first shoe but had to flatten myself on the floor to dig for the other. As I grabbed it, my fingers grazed the edges of some folded papers. Grasping them between my thumb and forefinger, I tugged them out. As soon as I saw what they were, I sat back hard on my butt. The pages were thick and yellowed, frayed along one edge as if they’d been torn from a book. I unfolded them in my lap, and one hand fluttered to my mouth.

It was Eliza’s handwriting, though slightly more haphazard and seemingly rushed than usual. From the size and the texture, I could tell that these were the pages that were missing from the BLS book. Suddenly I recalled the fluttering noise of falling papers the other night, when I’d woken from one of my nightmares. These must have been tucked somewhere inside the book of spells and tumbled out that night.

There was a commotion out in the hallway as someone dropped their suitcase and it burst open all over the floor. I got up shakily and closed the door, then sat down on my bed. Breathlessly, I began to read the pages.

I never would have believed the horrifying events of the past few days if I had not witnessed them with my own eyes, if my own heart had not been shattered by what has occurred. I realize the risk of putting these words to paper—of the danger myself and my friends might face if this book were ever to fall into the wrong hands—yet I must write them. I must record what has happened, if only to remind myself one day that I am not insane—if only to warn the coming generations of what has transpired.

I gulped in a breath. Eliza’s terror poured off the pages. Pressing my lips together, I read on. Each line was like a fresh knife to my heart. Painstakingly, Eliza told the story of Caroline Westwick, a girl who had attended Billings a few years before Eliza had gone there, and about the coven Caroline’s sister Lucille had started. She told of how Lucille wouldn’t let Caroline in, and how Caroline had taken it personally, stolen the books, and cast spells on herself until she’d gone mad. She wrote that Caroline had committed suicide, throwing herself off the roof of the Easton chapel, and that her final words were “I don’t belong.”

Of course, we didn’t know any of this when we happened upon the locket and the map that day in the garden. If we had, perhaps we would have been wary enough to stay away. Or perhaps not. We shall never know.

The next few paragraphs told of how Eliza, Theresa Billings, Catherine White, and Alice Ainsworth had formed a coven of eleven
girls. Some of the girls were apparently reluctant but were convinced by Theresa’s cunning. She described the night they had read the incantation, and what had happened just after the words were spoken.

A fierce, cold wind whipped through the temple, extinguishing each and every candle. We were all gripped with terror, but then, a moment later, only the candles we held in our hands flickered to life. Eleven points of light forming a circle in the darkness. We knew then that the spell had worked. We were witches.

My hand clutched my stomach. The light had gone out, and then their individual candles had flickered back to life. Just like that night in the chapel basement. Just like the night Ivy and I had said the incantation as well. My brain swam and I closed my eyes, holding back a wave of nausea. This couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Outside in the hallway a door slammed, and I opened my eyes, forcing myself to continue.

There were stories of fun spells—a boy with boils on his hands, a headmistress with a wayward skirt. Stories of celebrations with the coven, retellings that sounded so much like the gatherings I’d had with my own friends it was almost eerie. And then, just as I was feeling comfortable again, another part stopped me cold.

And then, a few nights ago, I had the dream. At the time, I thought it was nothing but a horrible nightmare born of my morbid imagination, but now I know it was so much more.

Eliza had dreamed that her friend Theresa and the maid, Helen Jennings, had thrown Catherine White into a ditch in the woods, killing her. And then, just a few nights later, Catherine died in almost that exact way. She was fighting with Theresa when Eliza happened upon them: A spell had gone wrong, and Catherine had fallen to her death.

I leaned back against my bed, trying to breathe. Catherine had
died
? All those times I’d read through the BLS book, I’d imagined the two of them together, hanging out on the Billings campus, reading books and flirting demurely with hot turn-of-the-century boys. But from the date on the entry, Catherine and Eliza had barely known each other a month when she’d died.

But this wasn’t the worst realization of all. Eliza had a horrible nightmare that had sort of come true. Now I’d had two horrible nightmares that had sort of come true. Did this mean that Astrid had really been kidnapped? That Lorna was really . . . dead? My heart all but stopped inside my chest and I bent forward at the waist, fighting for breath as I was assaulted by the horrifying images from my dreams. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

I looked down at the pages in my hands and wished I had never found them. Whatever this was, I couldn’t handle it. Whatever it was, I wished it was happening to anyone other than me.

After taking a few deep breaths, I forced myself to sit up straight again. Part of me didn’t want to read any further, but I knew that I had to. I had to know. Stoically, silently, I read. I read about the coven bringing Catherine back to life. About how it had turned out to be
some kind of monster and not Catherine at all. How the thing had attacked Eliza. How Helen and Theresa had saved her. How the thing had cursed all of them, and all of their ancestors, before finally falling over dead.

I felt sick and scared and confused. Did I really live in a world where things like this could happen? I felt like I was reading a horror novel, not a diary. But these things had actually happened to Eliza—or at least, she believed that they had. The sorrow as she described the night she and her friends had brought Catherine’s body back to the site of her original death was so real. The description of how they’d buried the trunk full of books, and how Eliza had thrown the locket in the ditch as well, was detailed and vivid. As I read these last words, my hand touched the chain around my neck.

If Eliza had been so done with it, if she’d hated it enough to throw it away, why had she led me right back to it?

The second the thought crossed my mind, I scoffed at myself and got up off the floor. A thick fog cleared rapidly from my brain as I extricated myself from the fantasyland of Eliza’s story and planted my feet firmly in the real world.

This was crazy. This whole thing was making me certifiable. A ghost hadn’t led me anywhere. It was impossible. I was falling for all of this like some gullible moron, but it couldn’t be true. No truer than Cheyenne sending me e-mails from the grave or leaving me spooky presents to find. All of that had had a reasonable explanation—Sabine had been trying to scare me. Clearly something similar was going on now. Someone was messing with me. It was the only explanation.

But how did they get inside your dreams, Reed?
A little voice inside my head asked.
What about the dreams?

Suddenly my door swung open and my heart hit my throat. Noelle looked me up and down.

“Get your coat on. Let’s go.”

“Wait,” I said. I closed my eyes and held out the pages to her. “Please just read this. Just read it and tell me I’m not going crazy.”

Noelle sighed with impatience but took the pages. As she began to read, all the color drained from her face. “Where did you get this?”

“It’s Eliza’s,” I said. “It fell out of the book of spells. I’m pretty sure the pages were torn out of the BLS book at some point. Who knows when?”

I sat down shakily on my desk chair and Noelle sat on the edge of my bed. To my surprise, she slowly, carefully, read each and every word. The pages trembled in her fingers as she shuffled them.

“Somebody’s messing with us,” she said suddenly.

I took in a breath and waited for the relief to follow, but it didn’t.

“What do you mean, us?” I asked.

“This,” she said, standing and holding a couple of pages in each hand. “This doesn’t just affect you anymore. It affects me, too.” She put the pages back together and studied them. “Who could have done this? It’s so freaking elaborate. I mean, look at the pages. They really do look ancient. Who could have known about—?”

“Noelle.”

Her head popped up. She looked confused, like she’d forgotten where she was or that I was there too.

“What do you mean, it affects you, too?” I asked.

She hesitated a moment and I felt my blood start to boil. I’d told her everything. She’d better not even think about holding back from me.

“Girls!”

We both jumped as Mrs. Shepard stuck her head in the room. “Downstairs in five minutes!”

“Okay!” we both replied.

As soon as she was gone, I stood up to face Noelle. “What, Noelle? What is it?”

“Okay,
promise
you’re not gonna read too much into this.” Noelle took a deep breath. She folded the pages up, tucked them under her arm, and shook her hair back, lifting her chin as if ready for a fight. “Theresa Billings? She was my great-great-grandmother.” She cleared her throat. “
Our
great-great-grandmother.”

“What?” I blurted out.

My heart pretty much stopped. My eyes blurred as I stared at her, trying to figure out what this could mean.

“My father’s mother’s mother’s mother,” Noelle said, narrowing her eyes. “Yeah. I think that’s right. Anyway, remember how annoyed I was when you found the BLS book in your room? That was because I saw her name on the list of members. I figured if anyone should have it, it should be me.”

I nodded once.

“But now that I know we’re sisters . . . ”

“Yeah.”

My brain would not go past one-word answers. It was like it was
afraid to think beyond that. Everything beyond that was a swirling black void of horror.

“So that means that you and I are Theresa Billings’s ancestors . . .,” Noelle said in a leading way.

Suddenly I felt like I was spinning and falling, spinning and falling, right down into the void. I clung to the back of my chair and tried to ground myself.

“So whatever that thing was that took over Catherine’s body, when it cursed them, it cursed us,” I said.

“Yeah. Sure,” Noelle said with a scoff. “And I’ve got some crown jewels I’d like to sell you.”

Suddenly everything snapped into focus. “Noelle, did you not read what Eliza wrote?”

“I read what
somebody
wrote,” Noelle said with a dubious expression. “Clearly none of this is true, Reed. It’s a piece of science fiction! This kind of stuff does
not
happen in the real world!”

“Fine. You think someone planted that in my room? Let’s just see.” My whole body shook as I walked over to my duffel bag, unzipped it, and yanked the BLS book out of the bottom, spewing clothes all over my floor. I dropped it on my desk with a bang and opened it right to the spot where the pages had been torn out. “Give me the pages,” I demanded, holding out a hand.