I try to think of the statue as being made of metal, like a copper wire in a flame, glowing red with heat, or the blinding white of a light bulb’s tiny wire. I visualise it hissing as droplets of water land on the fauns face. I banish the damp cold from my skin and instead feel dry heat bathe my face and hands, like sitting in front of the electric fire at home.
Swallowing, I open my eyes and look at the statue.
“It’s working.”
Everyone else opens their eyes and we all look at the statue, which is glowing a reddish orange in the centre. Slowly the light dims, but the statue continues to radiate heat and I hold my hand out to feel the warmth.
“Who actually thought that would work?” Campion asks.
“Shut up, this is amazing,” I tell her.
“We still have to recast every seven hours.”
“One of us should be enough if we don’t actually let the glamour fade entirely,” Ilex says. “We’ll have to experiment.”
We close the circle and settle down to enjoy the heat and flip through the books Nara took from the library, which she promises she’s going to take back...eventually. After a while Ilex goes to the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of vodka. I see Chronicle and Cray exchange a look.
“Bit early,” Chronicle says carefully.
“Yeah, if I had parents or school to go to I’d be in a lot of trouble.” He twists the cap off and takes a deep drink, wrinkling his nose at the taste.
“Ilex, slow down,” Campion says.
“Oh my God, shut up,” Ilex gestures with the bottle, vodka splashes onto the patchy carpet. “No one’s saying you have to have any.”
I don’t want to be in the room while this is happening, it’s horrible.
Campion’s jaw sets and Chronicle lays a warning hand on her arm. They leave it alone after that. Ilex sprawls out on the sofa and takes long pulls on the bottle while I flip through pages and pretend to read. Everyone’s so tense.
“I think I’ll go practice my projecting,” I say to Cray.
“OK, be careful. Cast a circle this time, I won’t be around to make one for you.”
“I will.”
I make for the stairs and am halfway up when I hear Ilex’s voice calling from the living room. “Watch out for demons, Princess.” There’s a burst of angry muttering, Campion probably, I go into the bathroom and close the door.
With the bedding rolled out of the way I sit down and light a black candle. Black, I have learnt, absorbs negativity. It’s not an evil thing at all, every stupid horror film I’ve ever seen at a sleepover was wrong about that.
The raising of energy and casting of the circle is familiar to me now, like putting on make-up or straightening my hair. I could do it in my sleep. Once I’m done I close my eyes and visualise the room. It’s simple because I’ve spent so much time in it, even the shapes of the cracks in the plaster are easy to picture. Just like before in the library I see myself standing up and leaving my body, taking a step out into the room. I glide through the wall and into the boy’s room, I’ve been curious about how they live, or how Ilex lives, now that Cray is with me.
It’s smaller than the girls’ room, clearly the box room of the house. There’s one bed under the far window, with space next to it for another. Ilex’s sleeping bag is unrolled and covered in a few blankets, they look expensive, made of thick grey wool and pale blond fake fur. He must have stolen them, or else taken them when he left his parent’s house. Trust Ilex to shun cheap fleecy throws. There are pin-up pictures on the wall, torn out of GT, according to the logo, which I take to mean Gay Times. On the floor is a stack of crime novels and piles of old magazines – Gay Times and Empire and SFX. Poking out from the sleeping bag is the neck of a bottle. I don’t look any closer.
I leave and find myself outside Sophia’s door. Curiosity makes me step through into the velvet draped weirdness of her room. I let out a silent yelp when I see Sophia staring directly at me. She’s sitting cross-legged in her big armchair, incense smoke hanging in the air, though the sticks on the altar have turned to ash. She doesn’t move, or even blink, and I realise that she’s sitting in the middle of a circle made of salt.
If I could feel my heart I know it would be beating hard, but everything in me is still as I move slowly towards her. Still Sophia doesn’t move and I begin to think she must be astral projecting just like me. Cray had said she did it all the time. Looking at her glazed eyes I wonder where she is, in another part of town, or another country? Maybe she’s on another plane altogether, seeing things I can’t even imagine.
I glide out through the wall and go into the girls’ room to look out over the fields behind the house. There’s a woman in the garden of one of the houses at the edge of the village, a big house with leaded windows and a chimney. She’s in the walled garden clipping holly from a hedge. Decorating for Christmas. The need to see my parents stings me again and I cross my arms over my chest. Astral-me is cold and it’s got nothing to do with the conditions inside the house.
I want to see my parents.
I blink and I’m looking in through a window instead of out of one. It’s the front window of my home, my real home. For a moment I feel lightheaded, confused, then I realise that I’m still on the astral plane. I’d thought that while outside my body I’d have to travel everywhere like I would normally, but apparently I was wrong.
The house looks different to the last time I saw it, the night Dad threw me out. The night Mum wouldn’t open the door. There’re old leaves all over the front path, all brown and rotted; wet leaflets for the takeaway down the road are buried in the sludge. Everyone else in the street has their lights up, icicles and blinky-twinkly stars, but our white net of bulbs isn’t hanging over the front window. The curtains are drawn tight.
I know it’s stupid but I can’t help thinking my Dad will see me as soon as I ghost my way inside. I’m actually scared of seeing him, his furious red face glaring at me, telling me without words what a disappointment I am.
I jump as the gate clatters against the post behind me. There he is. He’s dressed for work, black trousers tight on his legs under his big black fleece. I always used to think he looked like a bear in it. He doesn’t look at me, just digs his keys out and, with a defeated slump of his shoulders, opens the front door.
I slip in after him.
“I’m back,” he calls.
There’s no response, he tugs off his fleece. The hallway is crackly with tension, I can almost see it hanging around him. Being near him is too difficult, so I lag behind as he goes into the lounge. It smells like home, Pledge and oven chips and the collection of wool coats and old shoes in the hall. In the living room the TV is off, which is almost unheard of – Mum likes the noise so she always has it on when she’s home alone. She knits or irons or reads with Bargain Hunt or Who Do You Think You Are? on in the background.
“Cath? Love?” Dad calls.
“In here,” Mum’s voice comes from the kitchen and I follow Dad out there.
Mum’s sitting at the kitchen table, just like she was the night they threw me out. There’s a newspaper on the table in front of her, a notepad off to one side. There are still toast crumbs all over the counter and washing-up stacked in the sink from breakfast. Normally Dad would have cleaned that up, or Mum would have gotten around to it while he was at work.
“Cath? Are you still working on that?”
“I want to get it right; it’s almost Christmas and I want this to be...I just want to say the right thing.”
“You will, of course you will.”
I crane my neck, gliding forwards to peek at the notepad.
There’s a noise like a hundred wasps all boring into my head at once, my vision goes black. Blind, I panic and try to scream, but no sound comes out. There’s a cold grip around me, like a wet sheet, I fight against it and there’s a sharp pain in the back of my head.
I open my eyes and realise that I’m back in my body, I can see and breathe and hear. I’m on my
back on the bare floor, the candle an ocean of tarry wax in front of me. It feels like I’m about to throw up, or cough up my heart. My skin is goose pimpled and crawling all over, I’m covered in sweat and when I rub the back of my head and struggle to sit up, the room spins.
The door creaks open and Cray is kneeling beside me. “Michaela?”
His hand is warm and solid on my back. I turn and burrow against his soft hoodie, which smells like incense smoke and feels warm under my cheek. There are tears in my eyes, but I’m too frightened to care.
“Hey,” he says softly, wrapping his arms around me, “what happened?”
“I was, I was...” I’m stuttering helplessly and he rubs my back through it. “I...on the astral I went, to my parent’s house. I don’t know h-how...I was watching them and then...there was this noise like, buzzing and static. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t m-move, and then I was here,” I can’t stop shaking.
“It’s alright now, you’re back and it’s safe here,” Cray says.
“I cast a circle, I did everything right-”
“I believe you. We’ll find out what happened, I promise.”
I’m so tired but at the same time I’m afraid to close my eyes in case the cold darkness swamps me again. Cray seems to sense this, because he squeezes me gently and says, “Why don’t we stay up a while, I’ll light some more candles and we can play some cards.”
I nod, feeling like a little kid, while he lays out our bedding so we have somewhere to sit. With candles glowing and Cray’s knee against mine as he deals, I feel a little better. Grounded. Safe.
Under my skin though, I’m still cold. Even when it gets late and Cray can’t keep his eyes open anymore, I can’t settle down to sleep. I lie next to him looking up at the ceiling and feeling very alone and out of my depth.
Chapter Twenty
In the morning I can’t face the others, so I stay in the bathroom and hide. For a while Cray hangs around, but him being there only makes me feel awkward, so in the end I ask him to leave.
There isn’t anything to do in the bathroom, not really; a few games of patience have me lying down on the bed in boredom. I take out my notebook, my ‘Grimoire’ and flick through it. There are my first notes, squidged up small like I was embarrassed, writing about magic; chakras, raising energy, the blinding hex, conjuring powder, invoking the fae, it goes on and one. I get my pen and open to a new page. In clear letters I write out what happened to me on the astral, my travels and the terrifying end to them.
While I’m making my notes I can’t help thinking about my parents. The house had looked so sad without its decorations, without the path being swept. Mum looked so thin and stressed, Dad so sad and slumped. It was almost like there were missing me. Maybe they had been all along, maybe after that horrible phone call they’d forgiven me. If I’d gone home weeks ago I might have been welcomed back. For a moment I think of going there with Cray, perhaps they’d like him and help him get back into school, or find a job.
I close my book and squeeze the covers together. No, it’s stupid to think they’d ever tolerate me being with Cray, but still I want to see them. But the memory of that horrible noise, the sudden blindness has me scared to go back to the house. I stuff the book back into my back and reluctantly go downstairs.
Cray is on the sofa reading a library book. The only other person in the room is Ilex, asleep on the floor cushions with the mostly empty vodka bottle next to him.
“Hey, feeling better?” Cray asks.
“Not really,” I sit down next to him and he puts the book to one side.
“I’m sorry things went so badly last night.”
“I don’t know why.”
“Maybe the circle wasn’t strong enough; it’s hard, keeping one up on your own.”
“Maybe...”
Cray sighs. “Truthfully, I don’t know what happened. It worries me, you could have been really hurt.”
“It threw me out of there before I could find out what was going on with them. Mum was writing something for the newspaper...I think it was about me,” I look up at him, “I think they really miss me. They want me to come home.”
I can’t miss the anxious guilt in Cray’s eyes. “You should go then.”
“But you’re here.”
“Michaela...”
“I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore.”
“I’d come and see you, if you wanted.”
“But it would be different. I...my parents threw me out once, I don’t know if I can trust them not to again. I trust you. What if I go back and they make me leave and you’re not here?”
“Where would I go?”
I wrap my arms around myself. “There’s the other coven, in Bristol. What if you get sent there?”
“Sent?” Cray frowns, “it’s a choice, to leave here.”
“Just like it’s a choice to never come back? Like you all choose not to visit there?”
“There’s nothing to worry about. If you want to go there, we can. If you want to go and see your parents we can do that, now.”
I squirm, too scared to say yes, too hopeful to say no. “I want to see them, I’m just scared of what they’ll say. I’m scared of what’ll happen when I go back to school and people ask me where I’ve been. What if they act like Chloe? What if they all think I’m dirty or, that I did tons of drugs and picked up a disease. I can’t tell them about any of this, they’ll think I’m crazy...and I won’t have you, or any of you guys with me. I’ll be all alone.”
“You can handle people like Chloe, you’re strong, stronger now and you have magic on top of that. You can always come and see us, or meet us anywhere.”
“My parents will be keeping an eye on me, there’s no way I’ll be able to get away.”
Cray took a deep breath and let it out in a long gust.
“I know, I’m being selfish,” I say, “I’ve got a chance to go home and I’m putting up all these obstacles-”
“That’s not what’s bothering me,” Cray says, “I’m worried that you won’t go home because of us...of me. I love you and I’d do anything to stay with you here, but...it’s only been a few months. They’re your parents, if they love you and want you back, you should go. You don’t know if in a year or so you’ll be sick of me, or we’ll be turfed out of here by the police or...it might happen again, something like before, with Rally. We don’t know. It might be too late for you by then, to go back to school, to have a life with parents that love you.”
“If it was you...would you go?”
Cray swallows, looks down for a second, then nods. “I’d feel terrible but, if there was a way I could be home again, if my parents would be different, better, I’d go back.”
“You could make that happen,” I say.
He shakes his head. “You can’t use magic to make someone love you.”
He looks so alone and I feel so far away from him all of a sudden. Somewhere inside I know my parents love me, I’ve known the whole time. It might have been buried under fear and shame and anger, but I’d known they couldn’t hate me, not really. Cray though, I can tell from the curve of his shoulders as he slumps, that he knows all the way to the pit of his stomach – his parents don’t love him. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but he believes it.
“You have to go,” Cray says, “I don’t want to be what holds you back and this, Waywood, it’s not for forever. We can’t do this forever. I mean, can you see me and Ilex still bitching at each other when we’re fifty? Living on Pot noodles and still using magic to sneak onto the buses when we’re old enough for free passes?”
I know he’s right. There’s no way we can do this forever. We might always have magic, but I can’t imagine still sleeping on the floor and glamouring myself clothes when I’m fifty. Will I keep making myself look like I do now, sixteen forever? I’ll never get back to school, or go to uni, or have children – and I’m not sure I want any of those things, but I want to be able to choose.
“I think I need to
go home,” I say quietly.
Cray nods. I can feel him pulling away from me, retreating into himself.
“I’m not going today,” I say, “I can’t just go. I need to know you’re safe.”
“Safe? Of course I’m safe.”
“There’s something really not right about the other coven. I’m not leaving you here until we know what it is. And there’s that ritual you all did, it made you all act like zombies. I’m worried about you.”
“Michaela, you can’t keep making excuses not to see your parents-”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I snap, then close my eyes for a second and get control of myself. “OK, maybe that’s a part of it. I’m scared of seeing them, but I’m also scared that something will happen to you when I’ve gone.”
“Alright, tomorrow we’ll go and visit the Bristol coven, but tomorrow night I am putting you on a bus and you are going home. Deal?”
My heart goes tight in my chest. “Deal.”
“OK,” he says, losing his decisiveness and looking down at his hands. “I know it’s probably stupid if you’re leaving and with what happened last night...but your surprise is meant to be tonight.”
“Tonight? What is it?” I feel a leap of excitement, quickly stuffed back down by the knowledge that this is our last night together.
“We can still go,” Cray says, brightening, “it’s not until tonight, late.”
“Yes that’s...we should. I want to. But until then, can we please get Nara’s books and find out exactly what that ceremony is for?”
“If it’ll make you feel better, yes. But I’m telling you, Sophia designed the whole thing to protect the coven.”
I don’t contradict him, but I want those books and I need to know exactly what the ritual does. I can’t leave Cray at Waywood if he might be in danger.
In the kitchen I boil water on Campion’s stove (she’d found a new canister somewhere, dusty as hell and slightly rusty) and make cups of instant coffee. Cray carries Nara’s books on witchcraft out of their corner, along with several classical language dictionaries.
Waywood Page 14