The Skinwalker's Apprentice (13 page)

New York, NY

Midnight, 1984

Magnolia had seen the signal. She had seen it with her own two eyes, or she’d never have believed it was true. The slow moving star dragged across the sky like a broken zipper. She’d gone to the park in an effort to convince herself it had been a mere coincidence, that the mission she had been entrusted to fulfill so many years before was nothing but the mad words of a dying wretch. And then
he
appeared. He was standing underneath the sixth lamppost, just as she’d been told he would. It sent a chill down Magnolia’s back, but it also confirmed that she had to carry on with her promise.

“Watch her and keep them away.” She remembered the words, spoken from something that resembled a corpse more than a person. It had been a cool night; she remembered how the cloaked figure had rushed in just as Magnolia was opening a window to let in the fresh breeze.

“I need you,” the gravelly voice said and described three things to look out for: one, a shooting star, moving slowly across the night sky; that was the signal that it had begun. Second,
him
the one underneath the lamppost, he was the Timekeeper, and lastly the one thing that she hadn’t yet seen. She doubted she’d see the last thing, but it was curious how things had been playing out, how everything had happened just as it had been described to her that night.

She figured she would start watching the young witch now, so she wouldn’t be in danger of missing anything.

The next morning, after seeing the slow shooting star, she had waited outside the home of the young witch with the blue hair. She watched her sneak into a window at her school, and later when she climbed atop the roof of the building. She had watched her as she walked home, headphones on and face etched with lines of worry. Later she thought the young witch had noticed her, on the train. She’d dug her face into her pastry and hoped she’d look away. The young witch seemed to stare at her, and Magnolia just kept looking down until she left the train. After that she decided to keep watch from her shop. She’d make a peering spell, which was just as good as having a television station of whomever you were watching. That would have to do. The young witch walked faster than the dickens, and Magnolia was slower and rounder than she used to be. She couldn’t traipse up and down the city the entire blessed day. She would have to watch her every move from now on. That was the agreement, and Magnolia always kept her word. She yawned from her bakery cellar as the young girl read from a book on her bed and tossed the leather hardback aside, the vision appearing to Magnolia in a green cloud above her cauldron. When Emerald shut out her light, Magnolia’s own eyes began to sag. She would take a small nap, she decided. What could be the harm in that? She doubted anything eventful would happen anyway. She’d watched Emerald all day, and she didn’t seem like the kind of witch that could time-tell.

Emerald Kipp & The Riddle of the Timekeeper

Book One of The Empire Witches Series

The truth about Emerald Kipp is that she was kind of a weirdo. That’s the first thing she knew, unmistakably, about herself. Second, she wasn’t very popular at school. In fact she was the polar opposite of popular. She did have three friends at least, which was two more than Rosie ‘Lunchbox’ Gulitz. So she wasn’t the
biggest
loser in school, but she was in the top three, for sure. Third, today was the happiest day of her life. It was her last day of high school, and even if Manhattan sunk into the Hudson, she could not be late.

Her room was as messy as ever, Aunt Nora’s warning the night before to “clean up that pigsty or so help me” had clearly gone unheeded.
 

Stacks of books with curious symbols on their covers teetered on a small wooden desk near her window. Against the abutting wall stood her dresser, blue and purple glass perfume bottles sat atop a black doily cloth, along with a silver hair brush and mirror set, a mountain of hair elastics, and a two year old red lipstick she had used once. The dresser’s four drawers ruptured with variegated t-shirts and underwear.

The pale roses and green leaves on her wallpaper drooped sleepily against their royal blue base. Tacked on top of the ancient paper, which was put up before even Aunt Nora was born, were nearly twenty posters of musicians. Her favorite bands stared down at her disapprovingly as she lay in her wrought iron bed. A few wisps of pink hair and her upturned feet were the only things visible from underneath her black sheets.

Swinging her arms above her head and throwing the sheets off her body, she yawned loudly. Emerald rose from her bed sluggishly. She was not a morning person. With the flick of her hand, a mint-colored robe flew to her bedside, the furry sleeves positioned like a soldier at attention, and Emerald snorted out a laugh as she snapped into a salute position herself.

“At ease, soldier,” she said with mock authority as the robe drooped lazily. Emerald slid into the housecoat and tied the belt around her waist loosely just as her slippers shuffled out from under a pile of laundry and stopped in front of Emerald’s feet. She stepped into them and plodded down the hall towards the smell of bacon, warm rolls, and fresh coffee, her eyes and body still leaden with sleep.

Aunt Nora stood in command at their Magic Chef 6300 stove, looking much taller than her five feet one inches in height. Her olive skin and raven hair contrasted sharply against Emerald’s own bleached blonde tresses and alabaster skin. Not to mention that the younger Kipp had taken to dying her hair wild colors, her latest choice now fading from its former glory of candy pink to a softer pastel hue. Nora’s cat Cashmere, or Cash as they sometimes called her for short, a skinny black cat, sat stiffly on a wooden stool near the breakfast counter. Cashmere had disturbingly human expressions; she looked perpetually bored or disappointed, and when she meowed it sounded more like an insult than a plea for food or attention. Cash also loathed anything dirty. Aunt Nora had to put tiny white socks on her paws, otherwise Cash would just lay on her bed, eyes like daggers at anyone who tried to make her walk on the filthy ground without them. She usually sashayed slowly around the boarding house, ignoring everyone, but this morning she was staring with considerable interest at the bacon Aunt Nora was preparing.

Emerald sat down in one of the kitchen’s hard wooden chairs and immediately jammed an entire breakfast roll into her mouth, earning her a raised eyebrow and a shake of Aunt Nora’s head. 

“I’m going to the park after school,” said Emerald, her mouth now full of bread. ‘The Park’ was Washington Square Park, famous for the Parisian Arc de Triomphe-inspired arc at its center, and it was the place where Emerald and her friends, Jackson Darcantel, Seneka Belling, and Charlie Woo met after special occasions to resolve teenage nervous breakdowns and spend hours of speculation about what they would do after high school.

They had met at the park two weeks earlier to reveal their plans after graduation. Both Jackson and Charlie were going to universities nearby, so Emerald would still see them all the time, but Seneka planned to take time off to travel before starting at a school in Boston, and she was flying out that very night. Emerald was secretly crushed.

“Well?” probed Seneka when it was Emerald’s turn to divulge her grand plans.

“Uh, I guess I’m going to stick around the boarding house and help Aunt N … I haven’t really thought about it much,” she lied awkwardly. She had spent weeks torturing herself over what to do with her life. She wasn’t like her friends; the prospect of more school and a job in some office didn’t grip her. After all, Emerald was, like her Aunt Nora, a witch. So okay, maybe there were
four
things she knew to be unmistakably true.

She struggled to come up with a better answer to the question she knew her friends would pose, but she blanked and instead gave the stammering response about the boarding house. The truth was, her biggest dream was to spend her time finding out more about her family, about other witches, and the possibility of her not being alone. But she couldn’t very well tell them that, and ‘witch’ was not a career she could list in her yearbook. She dried her slippery hands on her jeans and became uncharacteristically quiet.

“Way to dream big,” teased Seneka with an eye roll, but Charlie noticed how nervous Emerald was and put his hand on her shoulder before Jackson erupted into a speech about how they needed to plan a big end of the year party to celebrate graduation.

Emerald actually had tried to get into school. She had applied to a music program only a few months back and was still waiting to hear a response. She hadn’t told anyone, not even her aunt, that she sent in her application. She was tired of being thought of as the failure in her group of friends, and she didn’t need any more points in that department. Besides, music school had begun to lose its appeal. She had done a great job at convincing herself she wouldn’t get in, and by now she just wanted to get her rejection letter so she could get it over with. Emerald had other things besides school on her mind these days, things her friends could never understand.

By the end of the afternoon, they had decided to throw a party at Jackson’s house; his mother, Georgia, was the best cook they knew, and besides Charlie lived in Brooklyn or “on the other side of the world” as Emerald put it, and her own house was out of the question. None of Emerald’s friend’s had ever visited; Nora was afraid of what they might see.

The plan was set. They would meet Charlie at Washington Square Park right after school. He went to a private academy closer to his own home. Then they would head over to Hell’s Kitchen to the Darcantel residence. There was no other way Emerald could picture celebrating the end to the awful chapter of her life that was high school. If she felt misunderstood or alone on a daily basis, her classmates and teachers, who made her feel invisible at best, weren’t helping her case. Her last day of high school meant the end of not fitting in, of feeling out of place and alone, or at least she hoped so. It meant she was free to go off into the world, and maybe, finally find out what made her tick.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Em, and you won’t be out too late, miss. I don’t like you wandering around like you’ve got no home,” warned Aunt Nora, all the while working the breakfast ingredients into a meal.

“Yeah, yeah,” muffled Emerald before Nora turned around and gave her a playful pancake-battered slap on the back of the head. Both were thick-skinned and smart-mouthed, and anyone looking in on their daily interaction might think they disliked one another, but nothing could be further from the truth.

“I’m only mean to you if I like you,” Nora quipped once, and Emerald agreed heartily.

“I’ll be at Jackson’s house; they’re having a going away party for him and a sort of happy graduation thingy for us,” she said, looking at Nora sideways as she chewed.

Emerald never knew how Nora would take news of her going pretty much anywhere. She liked to call her “the warden” sometimes when she was being particularly strict.

“That’s fine with me; just don’t come home too late,” said Nora cautiously.

Emerald celebrated silently and smirked, quickly pointing and retracting her index finger in the direction of the sizzling bacon, sending three pieces into the plate in front of her as she did a little happy dance in her seat.

“Emerald,” chided Nora through clenched teeth, “not in here.”

Emerald rolled her eyes. She was not allowed to use magic outside of her room and only then with the door shut and the curtains drawn. In defiance she had enchanted every last thing from her comb to her wallpaper. Aunt Nora assured Emerald it was for her protection, but Emerald never understood it. She wasn’t a big fan of rules.

Being born a witch was something Emerald referred to as her ‘one-woman circus act’. She could summon small items; bring inanimate objects to life—that sort of thing. Nothing that Emerald considered terribly useful, especially if she couldn’t use it at school to, say, summon test answers into her locker while no one was looking, or to cover the loathsome school bully Missy Michael’s face with gargantuan warts. To her they represented a source of frustration, a symbol of the fact that she did not know her parents, where they came from, or how her family had come to know magic at all. Worst of all, she had no idea if there were others like her left; well, any others besides The Coven, or The Thirteen as they were sometimes called, a group of thirteen powerful witches who once had governed the magic world. Aunt Nora joked all the time that they were the “last witches standing,” but something about how Nora sometimes began sweating and cleaning anything in sight when Emerald tried to ask her about it told her otherwise.

She couldn’t talk to her friends about it either because, a) Aunt Nora would murder her, and b) she was terrified of their reactions. As if she wasn’t enough of a freak show already with her pink hair, eight piercings, and tendency to burst out laughing at the worst possible time. It was small wonder she had friends at all. The few times she had made up her mind to try and spill her secrets, she had been paralyzed by fear; her mouth went dry, and the words got stuck in her throat. It wasn’t easy to tell the only friends you had that you were a witch, and whenever she tried to talk to them, a little voice in the back of her head convinced her not to. “They will think you’re crazy and then it will just be you, Nora, and the cat,” she told herself. All she could do was pretend she had no idea how unusual she truly was.

“It’s not all about us,” explained Nora whenever Emerald asked her why she could not practice magic freely. “There are rules we must live by or there could be a repeat of the past,” Nora tried to reason with her. Back before Emerald was even born, magic had been outlawed. At least that’s how Aunt Nora told it, but Emerald had no way of knowing if anything she said was true, or if she said it to keep her from riding down 5
th
Avenue on a broom stick.

She had grown up hearing stories about how The Coven would kidnap any witch who used her magic. It was Aunt Nora’s idea of a nice bedtime story.

“No offense, Aunt N, but I don’t think anyone is coming. In case you haven’t noticed, nothing has ever happened to me and I do magic here all the time.” Emerald threw her hands up, shook her head and smiled in her ‘no big deal’ gesture: she thought her aunt was just paranoid and in jest had suggested therapy several times.

“Sh! Don’t,” snapped Nora, holding one hand close to Emerald’s mouth with one eye pierced at the window. “You don’t know what it takes to even give you that much freedom. I do not want to talk about it, and that’s the end of this discussion.”

A customary answer—every time they got into it, her aunt found a way to shut the conversation down, and when she was younger Emerald would leave it at that. But age was making her bolder, and her curiosity was winning over her desire to appease her family.

“All I’m saying is we’re going through all this trouble to protect magic from leaving the world, and we don’t even
use
it. And what’s worse, once we die there won’t be any magic left anyway. It’ll just be the stupid Coven gathering cobwebs or whatever it is they do.”

“WATCH what you say, young lady,” said Aunt Nora with such a horrified look that Emerald did not dare respond.

Nora had become Emerald’s legal guardian when she was only five, after her mother Penelope became ill and died abruptly. Her father, Alexander, became a recluse, too torn up about his wife’s death to care for his only child. He had long since disappeared, and neither Kipp woman knew where in the world he could be. Emerald never mentioned her father, except for the occasional waggish joke. As for her mother, when she was younger Emerald pored over her pictures, asked about her incessantly, and listened intently whenever Nora spoke about her. It was the only small connection she had with her family and the one person, her mother, who could tell her the truth behind her powers. She’d given up on Nora being any help long ago.

Together the remaining Kipps ran ‘The Kipp Inn’, a boarding house in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. The house had nine bedrooms, six of which were occupied at any given time by a variant cast of characters. Two rooms went to Nora and Emerald and another to a woman they referred to solely as Mrs. E, a senile old woman whom Aunt Nora looked after and was quite fond of. A few months out of the year, Juda Belling, an older cousin of Emerald’s best friend Seneka Belling, rented the attic above Emerald’s room.