Frustrated, she tried to empty her mind of all other thoughts. It was hard to do with everything that had happened recently. She visualized a lake, with waters still and serene, but then a thought would bob up about Leo, or Ember, or school, or the fact that she had missed lunch and her stomach was rumbling. She tried focusing on Leo. She tried to picture him outside in the cold. She tried to see the landscape around him—outside or in, town or country? Nothing came to her at all, just the flat, emptiness of the lake.
Then Poppy remembered how her and Mr. Jeffries’s hands had touched and how that had caused her to see into his life. She rushed to the hall to pick up the bag that Leo had touched, then all the items within that might hold a trace of him. She still got nothing, not an inkling. Poppy felt so powerless that it almost made her laugh to think she had proclaimed herself a witch. What’s the use of magic, she thought, if I can’t control it?
Poppy was so used to her powers being random and unprompted that it didn’t occur to her until much later that night that she simply might find a spell to aid her. As it turned out, Ember’s books contained several methods for locating people. Some for enemies, others for strangers, and some for loved ones.
With a deep breath, Poppy went for loved ones. If she wanted the spell to work, she reckoned that she had better be truthful. A couple of the spells demanded ingredients she didn’t have. Another required her to boil a concoction in a cauldron over a fire (Poppy hoped a nonstick saucepan on the stove would do). However, the smell was so putrid Poppy had to abandon her cookery halfway through, open all the windows, and flush the vile mixture down the toilet. Finally she thought she’d try to divine Leo’s presence using sticks. She didn’t have a glass ball, her dad never bought loose tea so she couldn’t read the leaves, and they had run out of coffee, but sticks she could collect from the garden.
Spin, turn, around and around
If the person must be found.
Quicken, quicken, until you drop,
Then throw your hand to read your lot.
The sticks in their landing show
All it is you seek to know.
Open your eyes and you will see
Where it is your loved one be.
Poppy spun on the spot like a whirling dervish, arms outstretched, head tilted back, eyes closed, lost in motion. She felt silly at first, self-conscious, even though she was alone in the house and had shut the curtains so no one could see her. But then the sensation of turning began to feel familiar. As she built up speed, Poppy felt transported back to a time when spinning until you were so dizzy that you couldn’t stand anymore and bumping into furniture and stumbling across the carpet until your brain went straight again was a totally normal thing to do. Whipping through the air, Poppy recalled her mother’s voice telling her to stop and she heard her young voice shouting back as she spun, “I want to go home! I want to go home! I want to go home!” Poppy remembered feeling weightless, like she was flying, until her mother’s hand yanked on her arm, pulling her to the floor.
“I want to go home!”
“You are home!” Poppy heard her mother scream.
Poppy was whirling so fast now that the memories floated up with her hair and blurred with her arms and the room around her. Then, unexpectedly and all of a sudden, Poppy stopped. Just as the spell instructed, her fingers released the sticks as she fell to the ground. Her head was a mushy, mindless mess. Her temples throbbed. “I want to go home!” she heard in the far-off, remote, unreachable past. As her brain began to settle, Poppy slowly raised her head and opened her eyes.
It took a moment to focus. The sticks seemed to sway on the carpet in front of her. Poppy blinked and then they stilled. She had wondered how she would read them. She had thought she would have to study the book to decipher their meaning. But she saw it instantly, where Leo was. In her mind flashed an image of Leo, lying down, curling up against the cold, and shutting his eyes against the dark. She glimpsed the shadowy shapes and structures surrounding him.
Leo was in the playground at the park.
With the spell completed, Poppy grabbed her coat and was hastily putting on her boots when her father opened the front door.
Without a hello, he immediately said, “Uh-uh. You’re not going anywhere. Not at this time.” Poppy put on her other boot. “And I had a phone call today from your principal recommending me a dog breeder.”
Poppy paused, then straightened. “I just thought . . . ”
“What did you just think, Poppy? That you can fool me like you did him?” Poppy noticed her dad looked more weary than angry, but she didn’t have time to answer before he continued, “What did you do this time to end up in his office?”
“Nothing. Nothing big. I just wasn’t concentrating in class. I was tired.”
“Tired! I could hardly get you out of bed this morning.” Poppy felt her father’s eyes scan her face with worry. “If you’re so tired, you better get to bed quick then. We’ll see how you feel in the morning.”
Poppy took off her coat, then her boots. She knew there was no persuading him. She couldn’t bring herself to attempt any magic or clairvoyance on her dad. Somehow she sensed it wouldn’t work anyway. As she walked up the stairs to her room, he called after her.
“Poppy!” She turned around and noticed suddenly how small her father seemed to her as she looked down upon him. “You’ve been doing so well since we moved. Don’t let what happened to the cat . . . don’t let it spoil things.”
Poppy felt a pang of pity for her dad, for all his regrets, for ending up here on the edge of the country so far from home, for having a daughter like her, and so she nodded in understanding. Her dad sighed and padded off to the kitchen, and Poppy climbed the rest of the stairs to wait it out until it was safe for her to leave to see Leo.
By eleven o’clock Poppy could hear the low rumble of her dad’s snores rolling across the landing. She waited another half an hour to be sure, then slipped silently out of the house. The cold night air felt fresh and illicit, and Poppy ran down the street, the adrenalin picking up her feet and making her feel more awake than she had been in days.
She reached the park more quickly than she’d anticipated. She climbed over the iron fence and jumped down the other side, her knees and feet soft for the landing. She had seen the playground from afar but had never been inside before. Her eyes pierced the darkness, looking for movement or just the shape of him. The place was eerie at night, like it was never meant to be empty or so very quiet. The slide, swings, and merry-go-round looked sad and desolate without any children on them. It felt to Poppy like it was the end of the world and she was the only person left upon it. Then she saw him, curled up beneath the climbing frame, nestled on the woodchip floor.
Leo didn’t wake, not even when Poppy lay down beside him and got underneath the old blanket, burying her face in the back of his neck. He seemed to feel the warmth, though, and in his sleep, his hand took hers and tucked it underneath his chin. Poppy felt the tears form in her eyes that such a gesture could come so easily and naturally in sleep. She pressed her whole front against his back, her legs curling behind his, and let herself lie there peacefully, feeling this was where she should be. Nowhere else in the world but here.
Nothing was going to wake Leo that night. His day had been full and tiring. He’d walked across the hills to the next town inland to sell the bits and pieces he’d scavenged from the dell. A scrap-metal merchant, round as a truck tire, weighed Leo’s paltry pieces of iron and copper and offered him a pittance for them. Leo took the money gratefully and said he’d be back with more. The man gave him a look of indifference, but Leo held the five-dollar bill up in the air triumphantly and told him he’d be seeing him soon. On the walk home Leo kept his hands plunged into his pockets, rubbing the five between his finger and thumb, thinking he would feast at lunch time. As it turns out, the chicken pot pie and the candy bar made him sick, and he threw them up down an alley, so his stomach was back to being empty once again. Leo had lived off l
eftovers for so long, it seemed he couldn’t even eat normally anymore.
After gulping down some water he found in a half-finished bottle in a trash can, Leo took Ember’s clock to Mr. Bryce. In all the drama with Poppy, Leo had forgotten his offer to Ember until late last night, when he had used his bag as a pillow and felt the edges of the clock digging into his head. Now that it came to it, though, heading off to the other side of town was the last thing Leo felt like doing. But a promise was a promise, and Mr. Bryce was the only person Leo knew who might be able to do the job.
His workshop, Bryce’s Restorations, was a tiny antiques place on the corner of a terraced street of houses. It seemed a miracle that Mr. Bryce ever did any business from such an unlikely location, but his place was always full of ancient pieces of furniture and ornaments that people wanted him to repair. A few months back Mr. Bryce had found Leo sleeping in the back of his van. Leo, who had found the doors unlocked, had taken shelter there for the night, planning to be gone before dawn. Mr. Bryce was a very early riser. But instead of being angry or calling the police, he’d calmly made Leo a proposal—a little breakfast in return for a little help. He hadn’t interfered or offered any pity or any charity—just a simple business transaction.
Before examining the clock, Mr. Bryce put on his spectacles, then held it right up to his long nose.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked gruffly, his eyes narrowing as he scrutinized Leo’s face like it too was broken and needed restoration.
“It’s not stolen. I swear it.”
Mr. Bryce raised his eyebrows suspiciously.
“A friend gave it to me, to get it fixed.” Mr. Bryce picked up a magnifying glass and peered at the clock again. “Look, can you fix it or not?”
“I’ll give you fifty for it?”
Leo blinked. Fifty—that could last him for weeks. He could get used to eating pot pie and chocolate again. He could buy a sleeping bag from a store. He could buy Poppy dinner somewhere, act like a normal guy taking out a girl. But then Leo remembered Ember’s face when she’d shown him the clock and how she’d trusted him to get it fixed, and he felt his mind soften and his purpose weaken. There weren’t many people in the world who would trust him like that.
“I told you. It’s a friend’s,” he said.
A look of surprise crossed Mr. Bryce’s face, then one of irritation. “You tell your friend then. It’s an antique, this one, a collector’s item. Tell them to come talk to me, unless you can decide for them?”
Mr. Bryce held Leo’s stare, waiting expectantly. As Leo stared back, he felt the few quarters he had left sitting in his pocket and thought how many quarters there would be in a whole fifty, how there’d be so many they wouldn’t fit into both his pockets. Then Leo gave a slight shake of his head and Mr. Bryce said, “Give me a few days then,” taking off his spectacles with liver-spotted fingers to reveal resigned, watery eyes. “I’ll fix it up like new.”
Leo spent the rest of the afternoon earning the fee for the repair, working in the storeroom, sweeping up, polishing the old pieces of furniture that Mr. Bryce had restored until they gleamed, unpacking boxes, and lugging the heavier items on and off the van out the back. He did all this so he could see the pleasure on Ember’s face when her clock told the time again. Yet while he toiled, he thought of Poppy—how she was, where she was, when he might see her once more.
If his day had been long, Leo’s evening had been even longer. He was shattered, every bone and muscle aching, and he longed to sleep early. But each time he laid his head down to get some rest something came along to disrupt him and he had to move on, searching for a new place to sleep. Mourners were keeping a vigil by a grave near the garden door, so he couldn’t even enter there. In his other favored spot, someone had peed and Leo hadn’t yet fallen so low to be able to ignore it. He then persuaded a couple of guys to let him join them under the arches, but ten minutes later he was woken up by yells that the police were coming. They all grabbed their stuff and ran for it.
In the next hangout, the crazy ranting of an old, white-haired street performer made it impossible to sleep, even for Leo, who had learned early on to block out noise. Finally he was uprooted by the jeers of an approaching gang of drunken office-types. He knew from experience the suits were the worst—so civilized and buttoned up by day but, at night, wild and vicious as savages.
Leo had never slept in the park before. It was considered too dangerous in there. A guy had been beaten up near the pond last year, and by the time he’d been found by an early morning jogger, it had been too late to save him. Leo preferred to have people around, safety in numbers, even if often they were out to cause trouble. But by now Leo was desperate and he could think of nowhere else to go.
When he entered the park, Leo realized immediately why he’d never ventured here before. It wasn’t so much the danger than the utter loneliness of the place, like it was a habitat for ghosts, not for the living. But he was so exhausted, his lids drooping over his eyes, that he was almost asleep on his feet and could not comprehend turning back and starting his search afresh. He headed for the playground, remembering the one in his old town that Jocelyn used to take him to, how she used to push him on the swing and turn him on the merry-go-round. He saw her grinning face as she ran around and around, before she was ill and still had life in her, spinning him faster and faster, laughing as she went.
Leo lay down in the shadows beneath the climbing frame, telling himself that no one would find him there, telling himself he was invisible. He shivered under the blanket. The weather had turned properly cold now, and Leo knew with a sinking stomach that this month was just a small taste of the bad weather ahead. He would have to get his hands on a proper sleeping bag if he was going to survive the winter.
He always found it hard to sleep when the temperature was so low. The cold would keep nipping at him, biting at his skin, chilling in his chest. But tonight he was so shattered that, though his mind registered these attacks, his body refused to wake for them. In his dreams a warmth arrived from nowhere and spread down his back and through his limbs. It was so sweet and welcome that he held it tight, praying it would never go.
The birds started singing well before dawn had broken. It was still pitch black, and their song seemed out of place and out of time. For Poppy, they were her alarm, signaling her moment to go. Much as she longed to, she couldn’t bring herself to wake Leo. He still looked so very tired, with shadows under his eyes and breathing that was heavy and slow, like even sleep was a labor. It seemed cruel to disturb him. So instead, very carefully, Poppy slid out from under the blanket. Leo stirred in his sleep, then shivered as he felt her warmth leave. Poppy took off her coat, stuffing the contents of her pockets in her bag, and laid it over him, satisfied he would recognize it and know she had been there.
Leo soon settled beneath it, his body still, his breathing steady. Poppy’s teeth started chattering before she reached the park gates, but she didn’t care. She had slept by Leo’s side and this would see her through the day.
Sorrel watched the girl depart, wishing she could take her place next to the boy. He would hardly notice, one warm body for another. But what if he woke and saw her and realized it wasn’t Ember next to him? The other girl had taken her chances. She’d been careful not to wake him, but then she’d left her coat. This puzzled Sorrel. The night was a cold one, to be true, but this would reveal her identity after taking such measures to keep him unaware. Perhaps the girl believed the boy would not recognize the coat but only wonder how it came to be placed on him.
The girl was light on her feet and she made no sound as she shut the playground gate and ran away down the path. When she had disappeared from sight, Sorrel moved closer to the boy, her eyes soaking in his features, so vulnerable in sleep. She realized with surprise that he was most likely younger than she and it made her feel like a fool for fearing his reaction to her. She could kill him right now, stop his breathing with a spell, and he would never have a chance to defend himsel
f, let alone be shocked by her presence or disappointed by her looks.
Empowered by this knowledge, Sorrel laid down next to him and put her body where the girl’s had been, stretching her arm around him as she’d seen her do. Sorrel held her breath and waited. Her body tingled with a feeling she’d never experienced before. It was more than excitement, more than anticipation. Then she breathed in his scent and felt dizzy with it. In these few moments she was not the future queen; she was not the daughter of the great witch Raven. She was merely like Ember, having a secret, making a mistake. Sorrel felt the boy’s heart beating in time with her own. She heard the rhythm, so loud she wondered why it didn’t wake him. But the boy didn’t move a muscle. His hand didn’t reach for hers. He didn’t hold it to his chest. He just lay there, breathing, in and out, as if she didn’t exist at all.
When she left, Sorrel took the coat. She did it to spite the girl whose hand he’d held. And she did it to spite him. She had gone to such lengths to find him, channeling all her power and knowledge as well as risking her mother’s wrath for leaving the camp, and for so little reward. At first she hadn’t wanted him to notice her, but as it turns out, not being noticed at all felt worse. Stinging with resentment, she stuffed the coat into a park trash can as she left. It would be found the next day by an old lady with newspaper shoes who would give a toothless grin of delight at her good fortune. She wouldn’t think to wear it, just push it around in her shopping cart with the rest of her treasures.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Poppy spent the following days working harder than she’d ever done before. Any spare minute, she would memorize spells and remedies so she knew them by heart and practice magic so it became second nature. Her mouth was constantly moving as she chanted charms under her breath, so much so that her classmates began to believe that Poppy had finally gone crazy. She wasn’t scandalous or freakish anymore; she was just sick in the head. Poppy walked around school in such a haze that even the teachers couldn’t fail to notice. Ever vigilant, they began to worry she might be under the influence of alcohol or drugs. A couple of them asked her to stay behind after class, hoping she would open up to them and offer an explanation for her behavior. They came away empty-handed, though, as Poppy stayed quiet and offered nothing. She just ever so lucidly and stone-cold soberly denied any problems.
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