And my ring began to glow.
Every second it grew brighter until it was too bright to look at directly. All the other lights in the place flickered and went out. The music wound down into silence. Then, with a flash that was like a white-hot sun, it was over.
The music whirred back to life and the lights came back on. Everyone was walking around in a daze, blinking. It had all happened so fast that I don’t think anyone even knew I’d had anything to do with it.
Well, one person knew. Verity was standing exactly where she’d been when I’d . . . I guess “given in” would best describe what I’d done. Yes, I’d given in to some force that was a lot bigger than me. And to tell the truth, I didn’t care. I felt good now, the way I’d felt when I’d first put on the ring—buoyant, powerful, happy. All of the coldness and loneliness of that cold, lonely winter seemed to fall away like confetti. All of the rejection, indifference, betrayal, abandonment, and self-pity that I’d been wallowing in for months was suddenly gone. This was my time, my moment.
Verity was staring at me, looking accusing, as usual.
“What?” I mouthed.
She cut her eyes toward Peter, who was stumbling toward me. “Katy?” he shouted, squinting in the electric light that seemed strangely dim after the blinding brightness of my ring. “Are you all right?”
“Wonderful,” I whispered, although I knew he couldn’t hear me. To tell the truth, I didn’t know what I was feeling anymore. It was all so confusing. I didn’t know if I even wanted Peter near me. I didn’t need him. I knew that. I didn’t need anyone. I was complete just the way I was. Complete. Strong. Perfect.
“Bryce!” Becca shrieked, bumping into me as she sprinted past. Bryce was staggering and ashen. As soon as Becca reached him, he fainted in her arms.
• • •
He was the first to go down, his face sheened with sweat. Becca was struggling to hold him up. Peter grabbed him before he fell.
“Hey, buddy,” Peter said, dragging Bryce to a chair.
“He must have gotten hold of some of Summer’s tea,” Cheswick said, chortling. It wasn’t very funny, but I think it was sort of a hysterical comment, since within a few seconds Cheswick’s legs buckled too.
Then I saw Miss P sink right through Mr. Dominic’s arms onto the dance floor. The Dominator was right behind her. The two of them lay in a heap in front of the bandstand while Fabienne threw up all over our table. That was truly horrible. I looked to Becca, because she always knew what to do in an emergency, but she was panting and turning green next to Bryce’s unconscious body. A knot of people was stampeding through the fire doors to get outside, while another bunch raced toward the bathrooms.
The strange thing was, about half the people at the dance seemed totally unaffected, blinking in bewilderment at the scene unfolding before them. I overheard two teachers hysterically going over the cafeteria dinner menu. The band gamely played on, but there was so much barf on the floor that nobody wanted to dance.
Then it dawned on me. Only witches were sick. The cowen were fine. Coach Levy, still dressed like Santa Claus, was shouting orders to members of the football team—cowen to a man—who had assembled as a kind of emergency task force to haul the sick and infirm outside.
I turned toward Peter, pulling myself out of the cocoon of well-being I’d been feeling. “Maybe I should take you home,” I said.
He put a finger under his collar. “Okay. Just give me a minute to . . . ” His eyes rolled back in his head.
“Leave him alone!” someone shrilled. It was Verity, looking like one of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. Her face was pasty white. Dark circles under her eyes made her look like an old woman under her beehive hairdo. She was crawling—literally crawling—toward me. Whatever she wanted to tell me must have been pretty important, since Verity never left Cheswick’s side for anything, and there he was passed out on the floor alone.
“Get out,” she rasped.
At that moment Peter crashed to the floor. I started toward him, but Verity grabbed what was left of my dress. “Don’t touch him,” she rasped, retching. “Don’t touch anyone.”
I tried to disentangle her fingers from my dress, but they were like claws. “You did this,” she said, her thin arms trembling. “I see it. There’s a dark nimbus around you.”
“A what?”
“Katy.” It was Peter, coming to. Verity tried to wave him away, but she was too weak. “You must be . . . ” Peter closed his eyes. “God, it’s hot in here,” he said.
“Go,” Verity repeated, panting desperately. “You’re poison.”
I backed away.
Verity’s head hit the floor. Peter tried to get to his feet, but he kept falling. That was the last thing I remember seeing, because my eyes were flooded with tears. I ran out of the building, past Peter’s truck in the parking lot, past the string of ambulances that were already pulling into the entrance, into the welcome anonymity of my dorm.
• • •
The hallway was busy, as girls in various states of undress beat a path to the bathroom and showers. Whatever they’d come down with, I hoped they weren’t going to blame me for it this time. I hadn’t cooked the food. I hadn’t been near the sodas at the dance. I hadn’t done anything, no matter what Verity thought. . . .
“Oh,” I said aloud. I knew as soon as I opened my door that something was wrong. Whatever it was—a slight shift in the space, maybe—it was clear that someone had been here. Someone beautiful, I thought as I tried to place the fragrance. Someone I liked.
The blue stone glowed suddenly bright in the darkness of the room. And then I saw it, propped up against my bed—the versimka.
But it was different from how it had been. The mist that had suffused the scene with a soft veil was gone, replaced by a harsh unworldly light. The water in the distance—the lake that surrounded the isle of Avalon—had turned a sickly green color. And across the whole canvas, written in what looked like blood, was one word:
POISON.
CHAPTER
•
THIRTY-FOUR
Poison?
That’s what Verity had called me. It was the same word the witches of Avalon had used. But that hadn’t been about me, had it? I mean, I’d been poisoned back then. Morgan had given me the lemonade so that I’d fall asleep. Or die. And then the witches had come.
And you killed them, a voice inside my head said.
“No!” I protested out loud. “I don’t know what happened—”
Of course you do.
I felt myself shaking. This doesn’t have anything to do with what happened at the dance, I told myself. Pull yourself together. Do you hear me, Katy? Pull—
Tears trickled down my face. I heard myself sobbing, saw my shoulders heaving. But I understood nothing except that Morgan le Fay had come into my room and left a message, the same message Verity Lloyd had croaked out with the last of her strength:
That I was poison.
Every witch at the dance had gotten sick. Every one except me.
I stood in front of the mirror, trying to undo my dress with shaking fingers. They weren’t the only part of me that was shaking. In the dim light from the lamp on my dresser, I saw the gown shimmering down the length of my body, to my now-exposed knees. But there was something else, too. On my right hand, a ring. Not a glowing blue ring, but . . .
I leaned in closer. I turned up the brightness on my lamp. “What?” I whispered. I looked down. The ring was as beautiful and luminescent as ever. But when I saw its reflection in the mirror, what I saw was a plastic cat face on a pink elastic band.
Cute, Becca had said.
Was this what everyone besides me had seen instead of the glowing blue stone? A kittycat face? Was that why no one had thought to mention the ring that Morgan had given me—because it looked like a harmless trinket?
“Oh, God. It’s the ring,” I whispered. The ring that had given me such a feeling of well-being and goodwill. The ring that I wanted to ke
ep so much that I hadn’t said anything about it to the only people who might have helped me.
I wasn’t poison; the ring was.
I grabbed it with my other hand. No matter how good it made me feel, the sooner I was rid of it, the better. I would throw it away, or bury it, or—
It didn’t come off.
I struggled with it until my finger was raw and bleeding, but the ring wouldn’t budge. I tried to calm down, breathing deeply and evenly. Then I soaked my hand in cold water. I rubbed lotion all over my fingers. Nothing. In the mirror the face of kittycat laughed at me slyly.
The poison in the ring had been slowly growing stronger every day, but it hadn’t affected anyone until . . . until what? What had made it suddenly deadly?
You have a dark nimbus . . .
And Verity has an overactive imagination, I thought. I didn’t even know what a nimbus was, for crying out loud. Was it like a nimrod, in which case it was definitely a product of Verity’s mind?
I looked it up. “A luminous cloud or halo,” quoth Wikipedia. Well, okay, that wasn’t so bad.
Except that Verity was a scenter.
You’re poison.
It was me. That’s what Verity had seen. I had given the ring its power at the dance, just as I’d activated it in Avalon. The witches had been coming for me, and I’d . . . made them disappear.
You killed them.
“No! I didn’t kill anyone. I never intended—”
And you would have killed Fabienne, too, wouldn’t you?
“No!” I shouted again.
Because she kissed Peter.
“Oh, God,” I sobbed. “I’m not like that! I wouldn’t do that!”
But you did. And you know it.
Already the ring was powerful enough to make everyone around me sick. I thought of Miss P and Bryce, the most adept witches at the dance. They had been the first to be affected. Then eventually it had reached everyone else, even Peter.
Of course. That was why the Muffies hadn’t felt anything. The poison had gone to the most sensitive witches first. The stronger their magic, the sicker they got. And the more powerful the ring became.
I looked back at the painting, at the sickly green water of the lake where I had gone when I’d entered the tankard in Morgan’s shop. Had I done that, too? Just by falling into the water for a few minutes, had I polluted the lake that surrounded Avalon?
I groaned. “Oh, Morgan,” I whispered. “How could you do this?”
Don’t you mean we? the voice inside my head corrected. How could we do this?
I took the blanket off my bed and covered the painting with it so that I wouldn’t have to look at it.
• • •
About an hour later I decided to take out the amber. It was the only thing I could think of that would take my mind off the horrible events of the night, and the even more horrible decisions I would have to make come morning.
Besides, I told myself, it was always a good idea to know your enemy, even if she was a million times stronger than you. Even if more than anything, you wished she would just leave you alone.
Holding the pieces in my hand, I inhaled sharply as I hurtled back to a forest clearing in a far distant time and place.
• • •
A woman wearing a cape and a hood pulled low over her face knelt on the bare earth a hundred feet or so in front of me.
I watched from behind a tree, my heart knocking in my chest and my hands trembling with fear. For what I saw was enough, I knew, to bring about my death.
What? Who said that? Who thought it? I wasn’t behind any tree. And how would seeing anything, particularly a vision of someone else’s life, bring about my death?
I felt strange, amorphous. Was I watching the witch in the clearing, or was I watching the watcher?
“Come to me, you who can do all things,” the witch in my vision intoned. As the image grew clearer, I could see that she was kneeling in the middle of a pentagram drawn in the dirt with ash. The pentagram was upside down, a sign of black magic.
“Give me a gift to kill at will. A killing gift, a killing gift,” she chanted in a singsong voice that sounded like she was a hundred years old.
A hundred years old? Morgan? Who was I seeing, exactly? I shook my head. But of course it was Morgan I was watching. It had to be. Who else would be in the vision brought about by the amber? Who else would be casting a spell to kill someone?
“A killing gift,” she repeated, raising her arms into the air.
And then, with a gasp, I realized exactly what she—whoever she was—was doing. The woman I was observing wasn’t just casting a spell. She was calling the Darkness.
“Don’t,” I heard myself whispering. Nobody who made a deal with the Darkness ever came away whole. What had she asked for? A gift to kill . . . Who? Her father? King Arthur? Had that been what had earned Morgan sixteen hundred years of captivity?
But then again, it was far too late for second thoughts. The evil had been done long, long ago, the price already paid.
CHAPTER
•
THIRTY-FIVE
“Katy?” someone whispered outside my door.
I jumped. It occurred to me—too late—that I hadn’t locked it. As I was stashing the pieces of amber under my pillow, the door swung open.
It was Peter. “Can I come in?” he asked.
I was too horrified to speak. Spying on Morgan’s past had temporarily blotted out the horrible memory of the dance, but now everything came crashing back. What if I made Peter sick all over again? “I—I don’t . . .,” I finally managed to stammer. “I mean . . . ”
“Still got the heaves?” he asked gently. “Can I get you anything?”
I shook my head, expecting him to fall over at any moment, but instead he brought a bunch of flowers from behind his back. They were orange roses, wrapped in cellophane. “Maybe these will make you feel a little better,” he said. “They were the best I could do, considering the only place open was an all-night gas station.”
The flowers were such a sweet gesture. I wanted to put my arms around him, hang on to him for all I was worth, but I didn’t dare touch him.
He held the bouquet out to me again. “Don’t you want them?” he asked. “I’m sorry they’re orange, but—”
“I love them,” I said, snatching them out of his hand.
“Great,” he said. It was an awkward moment. “Um, mind if I sit down?” He pointed to my room’s one chair.
I wrung my hands. Of all the people in the world, this was the last person I wanted to hurt. “Peter . . . ”
He nodded, frowning. “Yes?”
“Are you . . . That is . . . ” I cleared my throat. “How is everyone?” I asked finally.
He shrugged. “Good, I think. A few people went to the hospital—Bryce, Miss P, Verity and Cheswick, of course—but everybody’s symptoms seemed to clear up in twenty minutes or so. I was taking Fabienne to the emergency room, but she got better. We passed Becca and Bryce on the way out of the hospital. They were fine too.”
I blew a tendril of hair off my face. “So everybody made it?”
“I think so,” he said. “Although Becca said that Verity was delirious.”
“What’d she say?” I asked cautiously. “Verity, I mean.”
He spread his hands. “Don’t know. The usual Verity stuff, probably.”
“So it was just a passing thing,” I whispered.
“Looks that way. I’m sorry, though.”
My head snapped up.
“For how things turned out. With Fabienne. You know what I’m talking about.”
I turned away.
Peter stood up and walked toward me. “Come here,” he said, taking my hands.
“No!” I fought him as he pulled me to a standing position. “Peter, there’s something—”
He kissed me. Deeply, passionately, thrillingly, perfectly. I was terrified.
“Relax,” Peter said, massaging my shoulders. “You’ve had a
rough night.”
After a moment I realized that whatever horrifying power had come through me at the dance was no longer working. Peter was safe from me. “You have no idea,” I muttered.
“Well, everything’s okay now.” He kissed me again. This time I allowed myself to melt into his arms. “Please don’t think that kiss—the other kiss, with Fabienne—meant anything. It didn’t to me, and probably not to Fabienne, either. She was just scared, and—”
“Shh. I know,” I said, burying my face in his neck. “I know.”
“I’ve never loved anyone except you.”
“I love you, too, Peter.” Inwardly I felt a huge weight lifting off me. If Peter could be this close to me and not get sick, then maybe I wasn’t the problem, after all. Maybe what happened at the dance was just some freak occurrence—
“Dude!” Cheswick stood in the open doorway as my door bonged against the wall. “I thought I heard your voice. Some night, huh?”
“What do you want, Cheswick?” Peter pulled away from me, frowning in annoyance.
Cheswick put up his hands, palms out. “Hey, busting in on you guys was definitely not my idea, man.”
“Huh?”
“It’s Verity,” I said flatly. I should have known the little snitch would do something, although I didn’t yet know what that would be.
“What’s she look like?” Verity’s voice came from somewhere down the hall.
“She looks normal, babe. I told you—”
Verity’s face appeared. Not her body, just her face peeking into the open doorway as if it were growing out of the frame. “It’s gone,” she said with some surprise. “The nimbus.”
“The what?” Cheswick asked.
Verity just kept staring at me.
“Okay, what’s this about?” Peter asked.
“I believed you the last time you said you didn’t use magic,” Verity said, not paying any attention to either of the boys. “You lied then, and you’re probably going to lie again.”
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