Scary Cool (The Spellspinners)

by Diane Farr

  “But there are no roads?”

  “Right. You normally get there by skatching, so it’s inaccessible to sticks. But in a pinch, Rune could get you there cross-country.”

  This puzzled me. “If I can get there cross-country, why couldn’t a stick?”

  “There are chasms and rivers to cross. But if Rune can take you where you can see across the chasm, you can use your powers. Either throw up a temporary bridge—which is what the Council does when they carry you to the mainland—or hold onto Rune and skatch across. Spellspinners can get in or out. Sticks can’t.”

  Interesting. I hadn’t considered that the ability to skatch to a place you can see would enable you to travel pretty much anywhere by short hops. Until you came to an ocean.

  Which made me think of something. “Hey. Doesn’t that rule make our shield no good? If spellspinners can skatch to a place they can see, even if they haven’t been there before, why can’t they walk up to our shield, look through it, and skatch to the other side?”

  Lance almost laughed. “You might be able to do that, but you’d be the only one. Remember the banishment you put on me? I couldn’t even skatch to the park, once you were there. The shield is going to work like that. Spellspinners can walk up, look through, and try to skatch. But nothing will happen. Except for you.” He shot me a sly look. “And maybe me, babe. Once you lift this crazy curse you’ve got on me.”

  “Are you sure they can’t?”

  “Positive. Remember, seeing through to the other side of the shield isn’t enough. They would have to be touching one of us. Touching someone who’s been there.”

  I blew my breath out in a sigh. “It’s a lot to process,” I told him. “And I don’t know why everybody’s so hot to get me to Spellhaven anyway.”

  “They want to get you someplace safe. So they can talk to you.” I heard the wry emphasis he put on the word talk.

  “They could talk to me in Cherry Glen.”

  “They could,” he agreed. “But they won’t. Whatever they decide will need the consent of all of us. And the only place the Council will gather all of us is Spellhaven.”

  I got up and moved restlessly around the room, thinking—and blocking Lance. Rune was obviously the guy to talk to. Lance knew a lot, but Rune knew more. And some of the things Lance told me didn’t add up. Something told me Rune’s stories would have fewer holes.

  Unfortunately, Rune wasn’t exactly in my corner.

  And, come to think of it—whatever the future holds for me and Lance—at this point I wasn’t a hundred percent certain he was in my corner, either. We are so freaking different.

  Ah—I hadn’t meant to send that out, but I did. I felt him catching it. And it annoyed him, naturally, which is why I hadn’t meant to send it out.

  I was over by the windows at this point, so I turned to face him and leaned back against the sill. “Sorry,” I said. “But you’ve said it yourself.” I hope I didn’t sound snippy, but maybe I did.

  “You’ll come around,” he said. “Once you accept who you are.”

  “Lance.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Remember the night you taught me to skatch? You took me to the mall when it was closed. And you told me spellspinners don’t shop, they steal.”

  He looked pained. “I never said—”

  “It’s what you meant. You think the rules don’t apply to spellspinners. You think right and wrong are for sticks.” I leaned forward. “I am never going to think that.”

  I was getting emotional. Rats. The hotter under the collar I got, the cooler Lance would get. Because he thought emotions were for sticks, too.

  He answered my thoughts instead of my words. “Stick rules don’t apply. That doesn’t mean there are no rules. We have rules too. Different rules.”

  Another car went past. The headlights swung through the room, spotlighting our standoff, throwing my shadow up on the wall. I remained motionless, tensed by the window, but my shadow chased Lance’s, crazily racing left to right, then vanishing into darkness again.

  In the darkness, Lance came closer. “Zara.” His mind reached for mine. I closed it like a fist. “Zara,” he repeated softly. “It’s not a bad thing to be a spellspinner. You don’t have to…renounce your humanity. It’s not so much that we’re other. It’s more like…” He was searching for words. “Extra. Not other.”

  “Extra.” I tried the idea on. It didn’t quite fit. “Yeah, spellspinners have something extra. But you have something less, too.” I flung my arms out, indicating the room. The school. The town. The world. My emotions were too large to express. “You’ve given up a lot, to live the way you do. And you’ve never had it, so you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ve had it. I can’t give it up.”

  I had to let him in, now, to show him what I meant. So I sent him images. They were so personal, it was hard for me to share them…but they were all I had, to explain what I meant.

  I let him see how it felt as well as how it looked, to have a best friend. A home. My home in particular. And Nonny—the name I gave as a toddler to a woman who said she was ‘not-mommy.’

  I sent him way it feels when school lets out for summer vacation. The view from my bedroom window. The smell of breakfast wafting up the stairs as I snuggle beneath my quilt, listening to Nonny sing her stupid show tunes in the kitchen. I sent him Meg and me, laughing ourselves sick at a private joke. The scent of furniture polish in the parlor. Finches hopping around in my peach tree. The creak of the porch swing. Chapman Road spinning out beneath my bicycle tires.

  I sent him Christmas morning.

  I got that far and had to stop. My eyes were wet and my throat felt tight. My emotions had reached Lance, but he was trying to keep them at a distance. He pushed them away far enough so he could examine them. I felt a wavering little smile twisting my features. “You can’t understand that way,” I told him. “You have to feel what I’m feeling, to get it. But I know you’re not comfortable with that.”

  “I get it,” he said. His voice was barely audible. “You’ve been lucky, I think. Lucky to have what you have.”

  I nodded. “Yes.” He was right. I was lucky by any measure. Because my life is amazing. Simple, but abundant. I have everything that matters, everything that makes a human life worth living.

  And I have more. Like Lance, I have power.

  And unlike Lance, I haven’t had to pay a price for it. Yet.

  “So you see,” I said, “that the notion of leaving all this to go off and skulk in the woods doesn’t exactly appeal to me.”

  Silent laughter shook him. “Skulking in the woods? Is that how you think we live?”

  I shrugged. “You’re a bunch of loners, as far as I can tell. Islands unto yourselves. You’re all suspicious of each other, and contemptuous of normal people. So superior, yet so competitive. You’re a bunch of snobs, if you ask me. It’s a pretty unappealing life.”

  “Compared to what you have, I guess it seems that way.” But Lance was grinning. “It has its compensations, though.”

  “Whatever.” I was starting to feel cross. “So tell me again. How am I getting to school on Monday?”

  “Ride your bike to the meadow and ditch it in the grass. Then skatch to my place and I’ll drive you. In a car.”

  I noticed he didn’t say ‘Rune’s car’ this time. I opened my mouth to ask him—then closed it again. No point in going there. Being Lance, he’d have a car Monday, one way the other.

  Later I realized Lance never did finish telling me about wholesoul.

  That boy is so distracting.

  …

  After I skatched back to my room, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed in the quiet house and listened to the September wind rattling the peach tree outside my window. I felt tension gathering in me, worsening by the minute. When I heard the clock downstairs strike four, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I slipped out of bed and padded downstairs.

  Nonny’s cedar chest was calling my name.

  I knew where she kept the
key, so retrieving the blanket was no problem. I slipped outdoors to examine the thing—in private, I told myself. But of course my bedroom would have been private. It wasn’t privacy I was after, not in my heart of hearts.

  It was Power.

  My bare feet made no sound as I crossed the cool, damp lawn and headed for the side of the house that faced the creek. I’d be invisible from the road there—just in case. And Nonny’s room was on the opposite side of the house.

  The only sound was the wind, gusting softly across the meadow, tossing my hair behind my shoulders and teasing the hem of my sleepshirt. I needed whatever light the moon could give me, so I couldn’t seek cover among the trees at the bottom of the meadow. No matter. My only audience would be the crickets.

  I stood in the windswept silence with my bare feet pressing the grassy earth, and unfolded the baby blanket. The stones dancing along its edge gleamed dully in the pale, silvery light, heavy with mystery. The sense of anticipation was almost unbearable. I knew nothing about how to use a power stone, exactly, so I tried the obvious. I held the blanket with both hands, touched the amethyst sewn above my name—lightly, using just my index finger—and summoned the Power.

  The stone flashed. I saw it. It was so brilliant that the tip of my finger lit up purple—the way your fingers glow red when you cover a flashlight with your hand. Like lightning, the flash was swift, blinding, and brief. But it filled me through and through, as if it had shot into my body and I was containing it like a bottle. Purple foxfire glittered and writhed across my skin. My hair lifted like ribbons in a breeze. My feet felt rooted. I was one with the earth, the air, the sky.

  Exhilarated, intoxicated, I lifted my arms and stared at them in wonder. They were still my arms, slender and pale, but gleaming with a second skin of amethyst light. This was like nothing I’d experienced before—except when I had piggybacked on Lance’s power stone and we had stood together, haloed with purple and green. And I knew instinctively, without any shadow of doubt, that I was in control in a way I had never been before. The Power would do what I asked. My spells would not fade, or go awry. There would be no more half-measures, no more unraveling.

  The stone made me complete.

  The future stretched before me, filled with limitless possibility. And in my hands I held my past. Now that I knew who I was…I would find out where I came from.

  I stared at the blanket, gazing at it with my new, fire-filled eyes. I felt the power rippling through me as I looked.

  I expected knowledge to flood me, just as power had.

  It didn’t.

  Puzzled, I looked harder. It seemed to me that the other stones sewn into the fabric pulsed with faint light, as if answering to mine, or sensing the Power all around them. I had already guessed that they, too, were power stones. But what did it mean? Could I use them, somehow, too? Or were they not meant for me at all? Lance had always spoken of a power stone as something singular, giving me the impression that each spellspinner had a single, unique stone—one, and no other.

  Whose, then, were these?

  I touched them, one by one. Garnet, topaz, aquamarine, topaz, citrine, aquamarine, topaz, topaz, amethyst, topaz, on and on. The nature of the stones came to me as I touched them; the topazes came in several colors but I knew they were all topaz. And yes, definitely they were power stones.

  But not my power stones.

  What did it mean? I stared again at the embroidery, concentrating. I focused so much of my energy at the images that they, too, began to glow faintly purple. Light danced along the threads, illuminating what I already knew was there. A man. A woman. Stars—or jewels. The name “Zara.”

  What does it mean? I asked the Power. I demanded the answer. Tell me.

  And thus I learned something I hadn’t known before: the Power is for doing things. It does not answer questions.

  There were many things I could have asked of it, and it would have instantly performed my will. But it could tell me nothing.

  I tried from several angles. I asked it riddles. I asked it to transport me to a time when the answers were known—forward or backward; I tried both directions. Nothing happened. Thinking it needed some concrete task to perform, I asked it to pluck the answers from the ether and write them on the ground before me.

  I stood there in that meadow, lit from within with more power than I had ever dreamed of, power that conformed itself to my will more completely than I had ever known—and achieved exactly nothing.

  At first, I couldn’t believe it. I thought I must be doing something wrong. After all, up to this point my experiences summoning Power had been comparatively hit-or-miss. But eventually, I had to accept the glaringly-obvious fact that, even with my power stone, there were limits to my power.

  And I couldn’t stand in the meadow forever, radiating purple light. The sun would rise soon.

  So for the first time ever, I sent the Power back into the earth without having used it, really, for anything. It was a strange feeling. But I used the trick Lance had taught me, sending it down through the soles of my feet. It worked like a charm. The light vanished. My hair fell down my back. I blinked, sighed, and slowly folded the blanket.

  Knowing more than I knew an hour before, but still less—much less—than I needed.

  Chapter 11

  Of course the hard part of my new getting-to-school arrangement was telling Meg. And now I had to risk skatching to tell her, because I didn’t want to tell her over the phone, and I didn’t dare ride my bike through the shield Lance and I had made until I figured out how to get the darn thing back through the shield.

  My life is way too complicated.

  It was Sunday afternoon. I skatched to the back of the O’Shaughnessy family garage. Meg had to scope it out first to make sure nobody was around, so when I arrived she was standing in the driveway, hands on hips. “Are you going to make a habit of this?” she demanded. “Because I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

  “You’re right. It isn’t,” I said glumly. I strolled out into the sunshine. “I just couldn’t get here any other way.”

  So I told her about the shield. Which shocked her, because she hadn’t believed I was in danger—mainly because I’d told her Lance thought I was, and she didn’t believe a word Lance said anymore. And, um, I had been downplaying the whole spending-time-with-Lance thing. So Meg was upset on several levels.

  We were in her room by the time I finished, huddled so she could hear me. My voice was doing that strange thing it does lately when I try to talk to Meg about spellspinner stuff…it’s like my throat closes up on me so hardly any sound comes out.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said at last. She was frowning. “There is now a whole gang of spellspinners gunning for you? And the person you trust to keep you safe is Lance Donovan?”

  “Lance isn’t so bad,” I croaked. “Not as bad as you think. In fact—”

  “He’s despicable.” Meg was never one to mince words. “And you know he is, Zara. That’s why you haven’t told me any of this stuff until now.”

  I shook my head vehemently. “No,” I said, more firmly. “I haven’t told you because…” My mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. I cleared my throat. “There’s something going on with that. I can’t…I can’t talk about it.” With a stick, I almost said, but caught myself in time. “I mean physically. Physically, it’s hard to talk about.”

  She just stared at me.

  I tried again. “I trust you, Meg. Absolutely. You know that.”

  “Sure. So?”

  My eyes traveled around the room while I tried, helplessly, to find words that would come out. “Lately…I have a hard time sharing secrets.” I pointed at my neck. “You hear that?” I rasped. “Every time I try to talk to you, it’s like there’s gravel in my throat.”

  Uh-oh. I had awakened the Girl Scientist. Now she looked interested. “So you want to tell me, but you can’t?”

  I nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Have you been
bewitched?”

  I can’t believe I never thought of that. For a second, my jaw dropped as I entertained the possibility. But as I rolled the idea around in my brain, it didn’t quite fit. Reluctantly, I shook my head. “No. I think it has something to do with…growing up.”

  “You’re outgrowing me?” It made me sad to see the look on Meg’s face. But then she grinned. “Well, you know what they say.”

  “What?”

  “Truth hurts.”

  I laughed weakly. “I guess so. Because when I try to tell you the truth, it hurts.”

  Ha, ha.

  Actually, of course, it’s not funny. Something is happening to me, and it’s killing me that I can’t tell Meg. But my inability to tell Meg is part of what’s happening to me.

  I’m growing up to be a spellspinner. And spellspinners don’t have besties.

  Unfortunately, I’m still human enough to find that thought depressing.

  All my life, I’ve been a loner. But I sort of assumed that I had to be—not that I wanted to be. Now I realize there’s a genetic component. I was born to be a loner.

  And the two people I truly love—Meg and Nonny—are being pulled, inevitably, out of my reach. By a bunch of strangers who have come to claim me, against my will. And by who I am becoming. Also against my will.

  I am not happy about this. Any of it.

  I felt like a criminal Monday morning when I hopped on my Schwinn and sailed off down Chapman Road. As I ditched the bike at the side of the road, making sure it was well hidden by the tall weeds, I reminded myself that there’s nothing illegal about skatching.

  Didn’t work; I still don’t like deceiving Nonny. So I was in a bad mood when I popped into Lance and Rune’s skatching well.

  My mood did not improve when I strolled out, picking foxtails off my skirt, and saw Amber. She was sitting on Rune’s couch, flipping through a magazine with a mug of coffee in her hand. She was wearing sweats this time, and no makeup, and still managed to look fabulous. She also looked perfectly at home.