by Diane Farr
I was upset about Lance going out of his way to hurt me. And Cheryl dating Lance. And Tres going all macho on me. And Alvin expecting me to teach him how to teleport. My emotions were way, way out of control. But there was something else going on, too …something I couldn’t quite identify. The atmosphere was thick with secrets. They curled in the air like smoke and pulsed in the music.
“Who are all these people?” I asked Tres. I had to lean in and shout over the noise. “Some of them look kinda old for a high school dance.”
He looked amused. “It’s Homecoming, remember? Not just for high schoolers.”
I had no opportunity to stop and analyze it. Tres threaded me through a throng of gyrating couples and I had to concentrate on what was happening in my immediate vicinity. I had to dance, little as the idea appealed to me. That was what I’d come here to do, right? Be with my peers. Dress up, go out, get together, dance. Experience high school.
Too bad a large part of the high school experience involves emotional trauma. I was getting that tonight, too. In spades.
While dancing, my main goal was to blend in with the crowd. This is always difficult for a spellspinner, no matter what we’re doing, and dancing was no exception. It was hard to find the sweet spot between looking like an idiot and looking too good. I couldn’t help watching Lance and Cheryl out of the corner of my eye, and whenever they swept into view it was clear that Lance did not share my fade-into-the-wallpaper instincts. His moves were subtle but gorgeous as he effortlessly steered Cheryl around in a complicated way that most boys would never dare attempt. She looked dazzled.
I was not having fun.
And there was something about all the strange faces in the room that made me uneasy. Was it my imagination, or were several of them watching me? Not all of them, of course. There was a plump middle-aged couple who seemed to be having the time of their lives, whooping it up on the dance floor. They were okay. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the adults in the room looked a little too tense, a little too shifty-eyed.
A little too much like me, frankly. I bet I looked tense and shifty-eyed too.
The music pounded. The lights swirled. I couldn’t see what was happening through the crowd. Fear prickled along my skin; I sensed danger and couldn’t tell where it was coming from. This is not my favorite way to feel. Eventually Tres picked up on it. He leaned toward me, shouting, “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t think how to answer. “Could we sit down for a minute?” I shouted back.
“Sure.” He reached for me. Took my hand. Started muscling his way through the mob, leading me to the side of the room, which was lined with round tables and chairs. And the oddest thing happened: Just as we reached the edge of the dance floor, Tres’s hand disappeared.
Startled, I glanced down. His fingers were still laced through mine. I just couldn’t feel them anymore.
A peculiar sensation, like a chill, had started at my fingertips and was crawling up both arms, leaving numbness in its wake. I had barely registered this fact before the floor disappeared. Emitting a startled gasp, I looked down again, and again saw nothing wrong—my eyes told me that my feet were touching the gym’s thickly-waxed hardwood floor—but I could no longer feel it.
It was terrifying.
These thoughts flashed through my mind: Am I sick? I’ve never been sick. Spellspinners don’t even get zits, let alone the flu, so this would be a first. Am I about to faint?
I looked around wildly. The music’s thump sounded distorted. Tres was staring at me like I’d just sprouted horns. Perhaps I had; anything seemed possible. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out his words. Other people turned as Tres shouted, and when they saw me they stopped dancing and stared, too. Some started backing away. I saw one girl scream, but I couldn’t hear her.
I was disappearing.
I realized it when Tres let go of my hand—or did it just float through his like a ghost?—and I tried to grab his sleeve. I saw my arm. It was fading. I don’t know how else to describe it. I was, somehow, less opaque than a normal person should be. Not transparent—not yet. But visibly heading in that direction.
And surrounding me—at a distance, but closing in through the crowd—was a ring of seven spellspinners. I recognized only Lance, Amber and Rune, but there were four more—strangers to me, pinning me with their glowing eyes and holding me helpless in a net of magic.
Could I have broken through it to summon Power of my own? I don’t know; the ambush scattered my wits with fear.
Terror simultaneously sharpened my focus and paralyzed me. Time slowed to a crawl. I saw Meg and Alvin on the other side of the gym, so into each other that they were oblivious to what was going on with me. I saw Cheryl Sivic standing stock still with her mouth open. She looked furious; what was that about? Ah, yes. Lance must have been mid-dance with her when he turned and started walking away. Toward me.
And Cheryl hadn’t noticed I was turning invisible—because to Cheryl, I had always been invisible.
How odd that in a moment like this, that thought could hurt so much.
It was happening fast, but somehow I had time to notice and think all these things while I faded. I even had time to wonder whether, in the end, I would wink out and be gone, like a blown-out match…or would my disappearance be more like turning off a radio, with my signal still beaming out as strong as ever, but nobody able to hear it anymore?
I felt all seven of the spellspinner minds that were focused on me. I could sense each one individually. Rune, troubled and reluctant, filled with regret as he acted. Amber, gloating. Four strangers who were taking the battle much less personally; each one of them was determined to see it through but they were all afraid, to varying degrees. And Lance.
Lance.
The wall between us was gone. It had to be, for him to join with the others and do this. His mind was forced to reach for mine, so I reached back, groping frantically for the one spellspinner who had ever been an ally. My teacher, my torment, my sometime-crush. My soul’s other half. Lance.
And he couldn’t keep me out. I slipped right into his brain and merged my consciousness with his. It was a desperate move, but desperate is exactly what I was.
The sheer weight, the complexity, of what was going on with him was crushing. I felt myself stagger beneath it, struggling to breathe. He was not wholehearted about this night’s work—no, indeed. I caught that right away, and clung to it, hope flooding me as I perceived the complicated depths of Lance’s anguish. An anguish that was completely invisible on the surface, but was there, all the same, and so strong I actually pitied him.
Pitied Lance! When I was the one thrashing around in the net—and he had helped to put me there!
But this is the screwy thing about wholesoul. It messes you up, to really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head.
I was so blended with him that I could see myself through his eyes as he looked at me, standing alone at the edge of the dance floor. I seemed terrified—and more ghostly every second. Some of the people around me looked even more frightened than I did. There was Tres, in a fighter’s stance, shouting for help and looking like he’d rescue me if he could only figure out how.
From Lance I picked up a sense of what the other spellspinners were doing and how they were uniting their power to do it—which would have been, you know, really interesting if their target had been something other than me. But since it was me, I didn’t dwell on that part. Instead, I reached for the part of Lance I knew.
The part that belonged to me.
The part that was my only hope.
And then…Tres tackled me.
It was really very brave of him. Everyone else was backing away. Tres took off his suit jacket, flung it over me, and knocked me to the ground, cradling my body with his. I’m not sure what he was thinking. But he sensed that I was under attack, he saw that I was frightened, and he basically didn’t much care that whatever weird thing was taking me out might take him o
ut too.
In retrospect, you know, it’s quite touching. But the immediate consequence of his heroism was disastrous. Tres’s tackle broke my connection to Lance.
I hit the floor—not that I could feel it—with Tres on top of me. And the last image I picked up from Lance’s brain was his reaction to seeing me in another boy’s arms.
His response was as visceral as it was illogical: Lance’s interior monologue went berserk.
Lance’s fury broke over my head like a tsunami. It encompassed Tres as well as me, and seemed to roll us, flinging us against each other, against the wall, against the floor … where was I? Without my sense of touch, I was beyond confused. I was so disoriented I was completely helpless.
But the anger pouring out of Lance was tangible only to me, of course. It wouldn’t affect Tres in any way. I had to remind myself of that to get my bearings.
I wasn’t drowning or being dashed against rocks, I was lying on the floor—I must be; my view was of the floor. My hearing had faded out, and my skin felt nothing, nothing at all, as if I were floating in space, so I had to trust my eyes; they were my last source of reliable data. I was looking at the wooden floor turned sideways, ergo, I was lying on the floor.
I saw Tres’s hand, palm down, pressed against the floor near my eyes. His arm blocked my view. I barely had time to figure out that he must be pinning me down, trying to shield me with his body, before my already-chaotic view of things worsened. Tres’s palm left the floor; his arm flew out of the range of my vision; then he reappeared, tumbling away from me. I managed to roll onto my back and saw Lance, green eyes blazing, standing over me like the Colossus.
Lance had picked Tres up and thrown him off me.
Lance.
I put out my transparent, hologram hand and reached for him. I couldn’t help myself. He seemed the only solid object left in the world. Somehow I knew he’d be the only thing in the room I could still feel.
My fingertips brushed his ankle. Instantly, searing pain sizzled up my arm and fizzed against my skin. The purple lights danced between us. Was this what Lance had felt, touching me? No matter; he’d feel it no more. As soon as the spell (of my making) touched me, it broke—to avoid hurting me.
It was just as he had guessed. My touching him destroyed the invisible barrier I’d created when I banished him.
And the instant we touched, nothing else mattered.
His skin was warm against my fingertips. Our eyes met. The mysterious connection that neither of us wants and neither can deny blasted through us. Our minds fused.
I thought, You can’t let them do this to me at the same time he thought I can’t let them do this to you.
One of us felt his resolve waver and break. The other felt a wild leap of hope and relief.
Briefly.
Then Lance, the gym, Tres, the music, and everything I’d ever known swirled away into darkness.
Chapter 14
I was cold. That was the first thing I noticed, so that may have been what woke me. Or it might have been the awk-awk-awk-awk of the blue jay that swooped over me, a little too close to ignore. Or the chill and the squawk may have had nothing to do with it; the spell may have simply released me, and there I was: lying in a heap on the bare ground, as if I had been thrown there.
So Lance had let them do it to me after all. Whatever this was.
I still had Tres’s suit jacket. Someone had dropped it on top of me. I don’t know how long I lay there, awake but too afraid to move or open my eyes. Eventually I had to sit up; I’d been lying awkwardly and my hand was numb. So I opened my eyes and sat up slowly, wincing as the blood flowed back into my arm. I wrapped the jacket around me like a shawl and took a deep, shaky breath of the cold air. It smelled damp and fresh and woodsy.
Well, it would, wouldn’t it? I was sitting at the base of a redwood tree in a fog-shrouded forest. It seemed to be morning. And I was completely alone.
I was still wearing the little pale-violet silk number I had worn to the dance. I also had on the silver-spangled, low-heeled pumps I had picked out, thinking that high heels would make me too tall next to Tres. In other words, I was not dressed appropriately for my surroundings. To say the least.
I buried my nose in Tres’s jacket, inhaling the familiar aroma of Eau Sauvage that still clung faintly to the collar, and tried to think.
It seemed pretty clear that I had been kidnaped. And although I had never been here before, I knew exactly where I was, of course. A million years ago—last July—Lance showed me this place in his memory. So I recognized the wild, woodsy air, the ferns, the shamrocks, and the towering trees. And even if I hadn’t, any fool could have guessed where they would take me: Spellhaven.
But where were my kidnapers? There was not another soul in sight.
I struggled stiffly to my feet and headed out to get my bearings. I got about a step and a half before hitting an invisible wall. With my face, mind you. I staggered back, muttered “Ow,” and rubbed my cheekbone.
Guess I should have seen that coming.
I leaned forward—carefully—and felt the perimeter of my prison. The walls seemed smooth and curved, about four feet out from the tree in every direction. It was like the tree and I were inside a glass tube, except that there was no actual glass. I could feel the wind on my skin. I just couldn’t go anywhere.
I immediately tried to skatch to my bedroom. Nothing happened.
Guess I should have seen that coming, too.
I sent out my spellspinner antennae…very, very carefully…seeking Lance. I couldn’t pick up a trace. Not a hum, not a hint, not a shiver. It seemed to me that this was a bad sign. But then again, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything.
Since I was alone, my fear receded and depression reared its ugly head. This, I realized dully, must be what Lance meant when he said my enemies wanted to get me to Spellhaven and bind me. Except that, at the time he told me about it, he also said it wasn’t going to happen.
I slumped back down on the ground, leaned my back against the tree, and huddled as much of myself as I could beneath Tres’s suit jacket. Nonny must be out of her mind with worry by now. And what did Tres think had happened? Not to mention all the other people in the gym.
Horror swamped me as the memories unspooled in my brain. My cover was completely blown. I had been forcibly, magically disappeared. In front of half the student body of Cherry Glen High. And a bunch of grownups!
Cheryl had been right all along. I was a spook. A freak. And now the whole town knew it.
Not that it mattered, because I would probably never see Cherry Glen again.
My own people, the spellspinners, hated and feared me. And now everyone back home would, too.
So even if I escaped Spellhaven …which I could already tell would be no easy feat…I could never go home again.
Tears stung my eyes. I rested my cheek against my knees and gave in to despair.
But a pity party can only last so long. Eventually I got a grip and scolded myself back to a semblance of self-control. Okay, I was in a bad spot. A very bad spot. But feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to get me out of it.
The thing is, I had no idea what would.
The light crunch of feet in the bracken warned me that I was no longer alone. I sat up hastily, my heartbeat quickening, and tried to look calmer than I felt.
There were two of them. One was Rune, who stopped and regarded me with his hands in his pockets and a grave expression on his face. The other was a tiny, birdlike woman in a bright blue jacket. She had a shock of white hair that was really my only clue that she was old; her eyes were the same sparkling aquamarine that Rune’s are, and I could tell at a glance that she was one of those inexhaustible, lively souls who run circles around most other people.
“Well, well,” she said, studying me. Her eyes twinkled, making her seem kind. Even friendly. I wanted desperately to believe she was friendly. But her next words shot that idea down, unfortunately. “Looks like she’s harder to kill
than Amber thought.”
Rune looked pained. “Now, Pearl. We weren’t really trying to—“
“Don’t you ‘now Pearl’ me, Rune Donovan,” the old lady said tartly. “You may have had one thing in mind, but Amber had something different. Some of the Council backed her, too—and I can’t say I blame them. Would’a been simpler. Wears a body out, pinning her down with spells like this. And for what?” She looked disgusted. “It’ll probably go Amber’s way in the end.”
“Good morning,” I said. Because they were talking about me as if I weren’t there, which made me feel powerless and insignificant. Which I was, of course, but that didn’t mean I had to act like it.
The woman’s expression sharpened into interest. “Good morning, child,” she said. “You look cold.”
“I am cold.”
Pearl and Rune exchanged glances. “See?” said Rune. “She doesn’t know what she is.”
They were looking at me again, Pearl with her head cocked, birdlike. “Perhaps she can’t do it.”
“Oh, she can do it.” Rune snorted. “You’re looking at the girl who managed to spellbind Lance—and without even knowing what that was, or that such a power existed.”
Spellbind? Confused, I thought for a moment that they meant I had fascinated him, or that he was in love with me or something. That’s what most people mean when they use that word. And then it hit me like a thunderclap that when a spellspinner says ‘spellbind,’ they mean something quite different. Quite literal.
Rune and Pearl were talking about the banishment trick I pulled.
And more: spellbound was what I was. Right here, right now. I had been bound and imprisoned by a spell.
I must have had a peculiar look on my face as I processed this, because Pearl’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Well, now you’ve done it,” she told Rune. “You’re putting ideas in the child’s head.”