by Cate Tiernan
But what could it be? They both looked physically ill. Morgan had seemed so close to saying something, something hard. And last week there had been a day when Hunter had sat outside school literally all day. I didn’t think it was just because he couldn’t stand to be away from her.
Sitting up, I decided to confront Morgan again. I would somehow make her tell me what was going on, what was wrong with her and Hunter. The flaws in this plan were immediately obvious: (1) I had already asked Morgan, and she’d made it clear that she wasn’t going to tell me. (2) Mary K. would wonder why I needed to talk to Morgan. And if it was some weird witch thing, I didn’t want to drag her into it.
So how could I find out?
Hunter.
No. I knew him, but we weren’t good friends. I was kind of impressed by and wary of him at the same time. What would he think if I asked him to tell me their secret? Would he get mad at me?
Hunter was out. But . . . there really wasn’t anyone else. I went through the members of Kithic in my mind. No one else had seemed nervous or ill. Just Morgan and Hunter. The blood witches. I shook my head. My brain kept coming back to this again and again, the way it had about my mother’s green book.This felt the same.
I had to talk to Hunter.
I didn’t have his phone number, but I knew where he lived. Now, did I have the nerve to ask him? I had no choice. I ran downstairs: Girl of Action. In the living room I encountered Hilary, watching a dvd of Sex and the City. Too late I remembered that Dad had gone to a union meeting at the post office, where he worked. Damn, damn, damn. I met Hilary’s inquiring look. I had to go ahead and ask her.
“Um, I forgot my algebra book at school,” I said, giving an Oscar-caliber performance. Not. “My friend has the same book and says I can borrow his. Do you think you could give me a ride to his house?”
Hilary actually looked touched to be asked, and I felt a little pang of guilt over the way I usually treated her.The fact that I would now owe her was not lost on me. Once again I wished the state of New York would lower the freaking driving age to, say, fifteen. Then I wouldn’t have to ask anyone for favors.
“Sure,” Hilary said easily. She clicked off the TV and stood up, stretching. She gave me a smile and almost looked pretty for a split second. “Let me go to the bathroom real quick. Since I’ve been pregnant, I have to pee every five minutes.”
She turned and left the room then, so she didn’t see the horrified expression on my face. Oh, gross! Why did I have to know that?
Not being a complete idiot, I held my tongue, and a few minutes later I was directing her to Hunter’s house. When Hilary parked behind Hunter’s car, I said, “I’m having trouble
with this one section. Is it okay if I stay for a minute so he can explain it to me?”
“Take your time,” Hilary said. She clicked on the radio and closed her eyes, leaning back against the headrest.
“Thanks,” I said, and hopped out of the car. Up on the porch I rang the doorbell, and after a moment it was answered by an older man I didn’t know. Oh, this had to be Hunter’s dad—I’d heard he’d come back from Canada to live with him. He didn’t look much like Hunter—almost too old to be his real dad.
“You’re a witch,” he said after a moment, startling me.
“Uh—” I was caught off guard. No one had ever sensed this before. Including me.
“I get a strange reading off of you,” he said, squinting at me. He had a slightly different accent from Hunter, too.
“Da,” came Hunter’s voice, and then I saw him push in next to his father. “Oh, hullo, Alisa. Are you all right? Did you come here alone?” He looked out past me to the dark yard.
“My stepmother-to-be drove me,” I said, feeling an attack of shyness and regret sweeping over me. “I really need to talk to you.”
“Sure. Come on in.” Hunter turned to his father. “Da, this is Alisa Soto. She’s a high school student, part of Kithic.”
I noticed that Hunter looked as bad as Morgan had this afternoon. It was as if all the witches I knew had, like, witch pneumonia or something.
Mr. Niall looked at Hunter. “What’s going on? Who is she? Why does she feel strange?”
“Calm down, Da,” Hunter said. “She might feel different to you because she’s only half witch.”
I felt like a microbe, the way his dad looked at me.
“But she has power—I can feel it. How is that possible?” he asked.
Hunter shrugged. “Here she stands. So what can I do for you, Alisa?”
Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned what to say. So what came out was, “Hunter, what’s going on? Why do you and Morgan look like death? Why won’t she tell me what’s happening?”
“I’m off,” Mr. Niall muttered abruptly, and left the room.
Strange dad behavior.
I turned back to Hunter, aware that Hilary was waiting outside.“Hunter, what’s the deal?” I asked again.
He looked uncomfortable, then ran one hand through his short blond hair, giving himself bed head. “How do you feel?” he asked.
I stared at him. Why did everyone keep asking me that? “I have a headache! What is going on?” “
Alisa, there’s a dark wave coming to Widow’s Vale,” he said gently.“Do you know what that is?”
A what? “No.”
“It’s—a wave, a force, of destruction,” Hunter said. “It’s dark magick, a spell that a witch or a group of witches casts. They aim it at a particular village or coven, and basically it wipes everything out.”
This was too much to take in. I wasn’t following. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s a bad spell,” Hunter said simply. “Very uncommon. In the Wiccan world it’s rare to come upon someone who practices dark magick. But dark witches can cast a spell when they want to kill other witches, destroy a whole coven, even level a whole village.”
I stared at him. “What . . . what . . .” What he was saying sounded like the plot of a Bruce Willis movie—not something that could happen in Widow’s Vale. But at the same time, I felt in my bones that he was telling the truth. I didn’t understand it, but I did suddenly believe that something bad was coming. Something very bad. “Is this why you and Morgan are sick?”
Hunter nodded. “I would guess your headache is caused by it, too, but since you’re half and half, it’s not wrecking you as much.” He went on to explain what he and Morgan had figured out and also what his father was trying to do, how he was trying to to come up with a spell to disperse a dark wave. And he told me that the witch who cast this spell would probably die and that his father was going to be the one who cast it. I felt shocked. Hunter looked really grim, and I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling.
“I guess you guys are pretty sure about all this,” I said faintly.
He nodded. “It’s a situation that’s been developing for a while.”
“Are you sure your dad—” “
Yes. I’d like for someone else to do it, obviously. But any blood witch is likely to die, and he won’t let that happen to someone else.”
“And a nonwitch can’t cast it?”
“No. They have to be able to summon power. But if they’re strong enough to summon power, then they’re strong enough to be decimated by the dark wave.” He looked frustrated. I felt so sorry for him. If only there was some alternative—a way for a witch to cast the spell yet not be susceptible to the powers of the dark wave. Like if a person were . . .
I frowned as an awful, horrifying thought seeped into my brain. Immediately I shut it down.
“I have to go,” I said quickly. “My stepmonster-to-be is waiting for me.”
Hunter nodded and opened the door for me.
“The rest of Kithic doesn’t know about this,” he reminded me. “They wouldn’t be able to help, and there’s no use in terrifying them.”
“Okay.” I looked back at him, framed in his doorway.Then I turned and ran down the stairs, to where Hilary was waiting in the car. I was actu
ally really happy to see her.
I had always thought people exaggerated when they talked about sleepless nights. But that night I had one. Every time I felt myself drifting off, I thought, Great, great, I’m going to sleep. And of course as soon as I thought that, I was wide awake again. I heard I heard my dad come home after I had gone to bed. I heard Hilary ask him if he wanted something to eat. I remembered how, before Hilary came, I used to leave him something for his dinner when he had late meetings. For twelve years it had been me and him and a succession of housekeepers. By the time I was ten, I’d been able to make dinner by myself, do laundry, and plan a week’s worth of meals. I’d thought I was doing pretty damn well, but now I’d been replaced.
After they went to bed, the house was still but not quiet. I listened to the heat cycle on and off, the wind outside pressing against the windows, the creak of the wooden floorboards. Don’t think about it, I told myself. Don’t think about it. Just go to sleep. But again and again my mind teased the idea out of me: I was half witch. I might be able to call on the power, enough to cast the spell against the dark wave. And I was half not witch. So I might very well be able to survive the dark wave itself.
Don’t think about it. Just go to sleep.
I thought about Hunter’s weird dad, about his dying right in front of Hunter.
I thought about my mother, whose powers had scared her so much that she had stripped herself of them so that she couldn’t cast any kind of spell good or bad. Had that been the right thing to do? Would I want to do that?
I couldn’t control my powers. Sometimes I broke things and made freaky stuff happen. I’d only just found out about being half witch—I didn’t even know how I felt about it yet. It scared me; it pissed me off. Then I remembered some of the things I’d seen Morgan do. Now that I knew that I was the one who in fact had been causing the scary stuff to happen, I tried to separate out what had been Morgan. She had turned a ball of blue witch fire into flowers, real flowers, raining down on us. Mary K. thought she had saved their aunt’s girlfriend from dying after she’d fallen and hit her head. She had come to visit me in the hospital when I had been sick.And I’d gotten better, right away. Those were good things, right?
I hadn’t asked to be half witch. I didn’t want to be. But since I was, I needed to decide what to do with myself.Was I going to strip myself of my powers, like my mom, and just keep being a regular human, not tuned in to the magick that existed all around me? Or was I going to try to be a Morgan, learning all I could, deciding what to do with it, maybe deciding to be a healer? Or was I going to be a total weenie and pretend none of this was happening?
Hunter was about to lose his dad, to watch him die. He didn’t have the luxury of pretending none of this was happening.
brain wound in circles all night, and when I realized that my room was growing lighter with the early dawn, I still didn’t have any answers.
“Alisa.” Hunter looked surprised to see me on his front porch, and frankly, I felt surprised to be there again. I’d taken a bus most of the way, then walked the rest, the cold wind whipping through my ski jacket. The school day had been endless, and after my sleepless night it had been especially painful to do laps around the gym.
“Come on in,” he said.“It’s nasty out there.”
Inside, my hands twisted together nervously. “I could do it,” I said fast, getting the words out before I lost my nerve.
Hunter looked at me blankly.“Do what?”
“I could cast the dark wave spell.” I licked my lips. “I’m half and half.Witch enough to cast the spell. Unwitch enough to survive it. I’m your best hope.”
I had never seen Hunter speechless—usually he seemed unflappable. Behind him, I saw Mr. Niall come out from the circle room. He saw Hunter and me standing there and came over. Hunter still hadn’t said anything. I repeated my offer, talking to Mr. Niall this time.
“You’ll die if you cast the dark wave spell. I probably won’t. I don’t know how strong I am, but I can shatter small appliances from twenty feet,” I said, trying for some lame humor. “All of you guys are sick—you look terrible and you can hardly move. All I have is a headache. You need me.”
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Niall gruffly.“It’s out of the question.”
“There’s no way, Alisa,” Hunter said finally. “You’re completely untrained, uninitiated. There’s no way of knowing if you could do it or not.There’s no way we could risk it.”
“You can’t risk not using me,” I said. “What if your dad is overcome by the dark wave before he finishes the spell? What happens then? Do you guys even have a backup plan?”
From the quick glances they exchanged, I figured they didn’t.
“But Alisa,” said Hunter, “you’ve never even cast a spell.
part in this, but it won’t hurt anything to have you know some of it. As you said, the fact that you’re only half witch works in your favor here.”
I nodded. Now that they had agreed, a whole new set of fears crossed my mind. But I wasn’t able to back out now. My mother had been afraid of her powers and in the end had destroyed them. I wasn’t there—not yet. I needed more information; I needed to explore their possibilities first. If I did have real powers and I could somehow learn to harness them, use them for good—well, that would be better than not having any powers at all.
9 Morgan
><“There can be great power in darkness. There can be great ecstasy in power.” —Selene Belltower, New York, 1999><
Wednesday Today sucked. I feel like I have the flu, but nothing I takes makes any difference. I’ve tried every type of sinus medicine I could find-nothing touches how I feel. Mom has noticed how yucky I look, even for me, and keeps feeling my forehead. But I have no fever. Just this horrible, ill feeling that seems to be eating at me from inside out. I am so tried of feeling this way-I keep bursting into tears. Our situarion is so dire that I can’t even fully wrap my head around it. I’m trying to go to school, to eat dinner with my family, to go on as normal, and all the time I trying not to think about the fact I and everyone I love might be dead in a week.
In terms of my studies, I worked on some of the correspondence that Bethany assigned. I am studying the different structures of crystals and how their individual molecule patterns can aid or deter their powers when used in actual spells. I like this kind of stuff. It’s sciency. I’m just finding it hard to think.
On Thursday, I opened my Book of Shadows to write the day’s entry. I’d been trying to write a little every day, at least a few sentences about what I was doing, Wicca-wise, what I was focusing on. I realized my brain just wasn’t functioning. I needed a Diet Coke. Downstairs, I heard the TV on in the family room. I got my soda from the fridge and poked my head in on my way back upstairs. Dad was working on the computer, Mary K. was on the floor, an open textbook in front of her, and Mom was on the couch, going over new real estate listings while she watched TV. My whole family might be dead in a week; this house might no longer exist; these three people who had been the only family I’d known, who had taken care of me and gotten mad at me and loved me—they might be killed. Because of Ciaran. Because of me. Through no fault of their own. Their only crime being to have adopted and loved me.
Feeling wretched, guilty, and sick, I went upstairs. I wanted to cry but knew that would only make me feel worse. It wasn’t just my family. It was Hunter, the person I loved as much as my family. The person I felt so close to, so in love with, whom I wanted so desperately. The thought of him dead, lifeless and charred on the ground, made me feel like I was going to throw up.
And if by some miracle Mr. Niall managed to avert the dark wave, then what? He would still be dead. We would all be alive, but I would have indirectly caused the death of my boyfriend’s father. Would Hunter ever be able to forgive me for that? Knowing him, probably. But would I ever be able to forgive myself?
I sat down at my desk, my head in my hands. My birth father was going to take Hunter’s father away, just as Hunter h
ad found him again. What could I do? A series of crazy thoughts went through my head. Could I shape-shift into a wolf and kill Ciaran? I didn’t think so—I didn’t know how to shape-shift by myself.The last time Ciaran had told me what to say and do. Plus, I never wanted to shape-shift again—it had been too scary. Plus, I didn’t think I could really kill anyone, even Ciaran. Could I somehow warn Kithic and their families so they would leave the area? Again, I didn’t think so. It would be virtually impossible to convince anyone, and it would only delay the dark wave, not dismantle it. I wondered if I could put a binding spell on Mr. Niall so he couldn’t do the spell. Well, if he didn’t do the spell, we would all die. On the other hand, since we would all be dead, Hunter wouldn’t have to face his father’s death.