Witch's Brew - Spellspinners 1 (Spellspinners of Melas County) (14 page)

Chance’s body hunched over into the dirt. Logan wanted to scream, but couldn’t lose the last of the pure oxygen in his lungs. Then Lily’s image in the air (in his head? He couldn’t tell the difference anymore in all this red fog) morphed in his now-poisoned mind into a red-eyed, snake-haired mythical creature that snarled at him.

A witch from a childhood fairytale. A wicked witch from a little boy’s nightmare.

He clung to his sanity as Father grinned at them. Pleased, their Master’s forked tongue flicked from his mouth as he spat down on the asphalt. It hit the ground like black soot.

Then Jacob placed his palm on the side of Logan’s face. A burning sensation coursed through him, cold yet hot, like dry ice. He watched in disbelief as an electric thread of blue light coursed through Jacob’s clawed fingers and down his bony forearm. It flowed into his shoulder, up his bumpy neck and, finally, into his face. Logan blinked, as Jacob’s baggy skin grew taut, as his stringy grey hair thickened and grew dark like it was in the painting outside his room. His watery eyes sharpened into two rubies, like snake eyes. His bone structure was regal; his posture tall, ominous and proud.

Logan squeezed the amulet in his pocket. Instantly Jacob’s face twisted in fury and pain as the spell reversed itself; the youthful energy he stole from Logan flowed out of his body, back into Logan, leaving Jacob in a heap on the ground, gasping for breath.

“What a selfish child,” he stammered. “Perhaps you are more wicked that I knew. Channel the darkness within you at the Gleaning, boy, when more than just a nibble of your youth is at stake, and you might make something of yourself after all.”

Lily

“IRIS!”

“Jeez, Lil, you trying to wake the dead? ’Cause if you are, don’t do it without me!”

If I were in a better mood I would have laughed. “Where’s Mom?”

Daisy pointed up toward the ceiling with her French manicured finger.

“The attic?” I asked.

Without looking up from her magazine, she sang in a funny voice, “Good luck. Might want to carry a weapon. Or a blowtorch. She’s in one of her moods.”

I snorted, knowing exactly what she meant. “Thanks, Daze.”

Practically flying up the stairs, past the framed pictures of us as little girls, age 2, 4, 6, 8. Adorable towheads to gap-toothed pixies, to awkward tweens. Me and Daze. Either two steps ahead or two steps behind. I wondered what Logan’s staircase looked like at the Academy. If there were pictures of himself and his warlock brothers lining the walls. If he had any biological siblings at all.

Upon reaching the top of the stairs, I found the attic hatch up.

Strange. How did she get up there then?

Grabbing the steel hook, I pulled down the wooden stairs and scrambled up into darkness. “Iris?”

The attic was pitch black. A cool breeze whispered in my ears. Then suddenly a row of candles sparked to life along the windowsills, trilling like wind chimes.

“I don’t have time for games, Iris! I need to talk to you.”

A shadow slinked along the wall, and then leaped, knocking Mom’s music box open. The pink ballerina sprang to her toes and danced in slow circles. The Nutcracker Suite.

The cat arched. “Give a kitten a pat, won’t you?”

My shapeshifting mother rubbed against my legs. Reluctantly, I lifted her up and looked into bright indigo eyes. “Teach me how to do that and I’ll forgive you for trying to scare me.”

If I could shapeshift, then I could sneak into Logan’s room and steal back the amulet.

Logan’s room.

Logan asleep in his room.

Flustered, I shook my head and focused on the here and now.

My mother, the cat. Ahh, the irony.

“Soon. Soon.” Iris said, her voice lilting like a feline. “What’s wrong?”

I filled her in about the day’s shenanigans with Logan.

She licked her paw while she listened. Then purred, “When the tomcat’s away the little war-rats will play…”

“Little war-rats? Do you not care that I just defied your orders and was hanging out with Logan?”

“You are drawn to him and he to you.”

“But I broke Camellia’s explicit directions.”

“Yeeees. But only because you couldn’t help yourself.”

I’m not sure Camellia would agree, but if I wasn’t busted? Who was I to convince her I should be? “You’ve been sucking way too much catnip. Why are you a cat anyway, Mom?”

“I had to do some research and didn’t feel like letting down the ladddder,” she said. “The angle kinks my back, and with your father no longer here to rub it…” Her furry head tilted sideways. “So I climbed the tree and jumped through the window.”

I laughed. “Yes, most people find shapeshifting into a cat much easier than letting down a ladder.”

“It’s nice to see you smillling.”

It was so much easier to talk to Iris when she was a feline.

And I needed answers. “Tell me more about my amulet, Mom. Logan says his amulet is similar, that he got it from his parents, his
real
parents. Did you know Jacob wasn’t his real father? Anyway, he wants to compare them to get more information. Does this mean he’s more likely or less likely to be the Roghnaithe? Because I think—”

“Close your eyes,” Iris the cat said.

I closed my eyes. Felt the floor shake. Tremble. A small, but powerful quake. The room grew cool and then cold and then colder still. So cold glassy frost crawled across the window and the cat’s eyelashes glistened with ice crystals.

And then, finally, the familiar gust of wind.

“Open.” Naked except for a dusty red truck blanket wrapped around her glistening skin, she raised both hands. “Voila!” she said proudly.

“Does that hurt? To shapeshift?”

Beads of sweat melted the frost that glistened on Iris’ snow-white skin like jewels in the candlelight. Golden hair tumbled down her shoulders and across her chest and shone like her romance book models.

When she shifted back into human form, it was like she was reborn again. Peaches and cream skin of a newborn. It was hard to imagine anything more beautiful.

I wanted to feel that way too: New. Fresh. Reborn.

But I knew that the feeling, like most things in my life, would have to wait.

Logan

His eyes were fire. Across the ring his best friend unsheathed curved steel.

At the instant the swords jerked from posture into motion and rang in the air, the boy’s face shone wicked confidence. As the sabers clashed, it was clear he knew how to anticipate his opponent. His body whirled with the agility of an acrobat.

His sword was quick.

Each time his friend made an impressive slash, the boy confounded it, like he had been prompted, prepared for it. Like a calligrapher painting an “O” he knocked his friend’s sword to the floor.

Flicking his wrist, he held the blade against his friend’s throat, against his best friend’s skin.

From where he was, Logan could hardly see what was happening in the ring. Everything was muddled, wrapped in red fog. All he felt was anger.

Do it
, a voice taunted him.

He pressed harder. The blade. The blade nicked his friend’s skin. A bright red trickle ran down his throat.

Do it. You know you want to
, the voice purred in the boy’s ear.
Don’t you want to taste blood? Don’t you want to see it pour?

The boy’s eyes skimmed the silver blade to the shivering throat of his best friend, whose eyes were wild too, challenging, daring him to do it.

To cut him.

To kill him.

Trapped in Jacob’s spell, his friend unintentionally dared him to do it.

Then her face. Through the mist it came. The half-moon eyes, the ribbons of hair. “Logan. Stop this. You have to stop this! Wake up!” Through the red mist she called to him. Not the Medusa-image of before, but the real Lily. “You’ll kill him!”

Logan glanced down at his hand, looked at her worried face, her panicked eyes. Lily was the thing he had to concentrate on to break the spell. Lily was the good.

Logan jerked back from Chance and tossed his weapon to the black-ash dirt. Tilting his head back, he roared at the moon. The most hideous sound he’d ever heard. The cry of a warrior who'd lost his way. Collapsing onto the blood-red dirt he stared at his shaking, bloody hands.

When he looked up again, Lily’s face was gone; her voice had evaporated into the mist, and now it was Father’s laughter, cruel and sardonic, that rang in his ears.

The moist hand on Logan’s bare shoulder felt like a dead fish. Logan longed to slap it away with the butt of his sword.

“Yeeeees, Logan. Aside from that melodramatic finale, that’s
exactly
what I want to see in the Stones.”

Logan didn’t meet his eyes. He stared down at his hands. His betraying hands that couldn’t resist Jacob’s spell. The hands that had almost murdered his best friend.

Would Jacob really have let him slay Chance?

Was that what he’d intended, or was this just a wicked game? He had a feeling it was the latter. But…his mind reeled from the shocking thought: What if Lily hadn’t come to stop him? What if he had killed his best friend?

Jacob’s clammy hand still rested on Logan’s shoulder. “Think about it, Logan. Everything you felt just now as you fought your brother? All of that will come to you tenfold in the Gleaning. There’s nothing like it in this universe. The delicious joy of defeating a witch.”

Logan shot a sideways glance toward Chance, who was sitting up now, steam puffing out of his nose like a bull in a Spanish ring. Eyes blazing and confused. “It won’t be like with Chance. You’ll be so…detached. Just think, my prized pupil, my favorite son…you’ll experience all of the triumph. With none of the guilt.”

Lily

All glittery magic, Iris floated toward me.

“Camellia sees something in you that you do not see, daughter,” Iris said. “You must have faith in yourself.”

I wasn’t going to cry. Leaders didn’t cry. But a tiny tear escaped and rolled down my cheek. Something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong and I didn’t know what. Moments before, when Iris was shifting, I’d felt myself slipping away from this attic, going to Logan to help him. I rubbed my cheeks, the memory of it so close I could smell his sweat on my skin…yet when I tried to form a concrete image of what happened, the memory disappeared, fading into a whirling mist.

Should I confide in Iris?

With a shimmering hand, she caught my frozen tear on her fingertip, a lone droplet of ice.

Then she held it to my lips.

“One day soon everything will make sense.”

This feeling of wistfulness, of longing, or worry, was eating me alive.

I wanted to believe her.

“Are you sure?”

“Make a wish,” she said quietly, her breath a field of poppies.

I closed my eyes, blew, wished.

Because I wanted to see Logan again.

Because, suddenly, I didn’t care what the circumstances were. It was clear he needed my amulet, and in the way I was wrapped around my stone, he needed me. Maybe even desperately.

“What’s wrong with me, Mom? Why doesn’t anything make sense anymore?”

Iris answered softly, “Nothing is wrong with you, sweetie. You’re just more human than I ever was. You feel everything. Not just evil or goodness, but every emotion in between.”

I avoided her eyes. “I don’t want to feel anything for him.”

I felt the weight of her words in the air, strong as her perfume. “I know it’s scary. Feelings aren’t something you want or don’t want—they are something you have or don’t. Every feeling is a gift. It means you are real.”

I saw Logan’s face in the darkness. It was pained and confused. I reached for him and he faded away.

“You asked about the amulet. I got word this morning that some of the answers you seek are in your old costume trunk.”

Big black trunks lined the walls, filled with old costumes from the dress-up games Daisy and I had played as little girls: cowboy hats, yellow rain slickers, purple fairy dresses with matching sparkly wands.

“Answers in Little Red Riding Hood’s cape?” I muttered. Yet Mom’s eyes told me she wasn’t kidding around. By candlelight, I crossed shadows of the room and faced three trunks.

“Which one?” I asked.

“Listen. You’ll know.”

I closed my eyes, focusing my mind’s eye on the trunks’ contents. At first I saw nothing. Noting my frustration, Iris encouraged me. I tried harder.

Suddenly, the interior of each trunk shone through the wood. Not as clear as with my own eyes, but blurred, dream-like images. The contents of the first trunk were a mix of shapes: old dresses, aprons, and hats. Nothing stood out, so I moved to the next. This image was darker. A pointed hat, a magician’s robe…and something pulsed near the bottom. I couldn’t make out its shape. Then I heard music. A waltz! I opened my eyes and turned to Iris.

When I broke my trance, the music stopped.

Iris chastised me with a look.

“I know I know…sorry.” I closed my eyes again, and waited for the music. “Can you hear that?”

“Not with my own ears, but I hear it through yours. Find its player.”

The music surrounded me, as if I was in the center of a ballroom. Candlelight swirled, couples spun in time. It swept me away to a fantastical place where everything smelled like lilies and cakes and excitement.

And then, like an old black and white movie, the image faded to black and the music stopped.

I flipped open the lid. Tossing a red velvet cape aside, I spotted a bulge in the liner. There was no zipper, no snaps—no way to access it.

I pawed at the lump. “Mom, can you help me?”

“I can’t burn my way through and I don’t want to freeze it. Whatever it is must be treated with care.”

“Then I’ll get to it the old-fashioned way,” I said. I found a knife and carefully cut through the fabric. Expecting a music box, I was surprised to find a dark brown book with an indigo symbol fastened to the leather cover.

“This looks just like my amulet!” I told Mom. Gingerly, I opened the book.

“Can you see text?” Iris asked.

I blinked. “You can’t?”

“It’s blank yellow pages. Please, whatever you see, read out loud.”