The Wind Between Worlds

by Julie Hutchings

  I screeched when Cymbeline suddenly appeared in the old wooden doorframe, statue still and staring at me with those damn eyes.

  “Jesus, were you going to say hello?” I gasped, hand on my chest as I tried to catch my breath. Just what I needed, coming off a panic attack.

  “No,” she said, and turned down a hallway. I followed.

  She sat on her bed and continued to stare at me, her go-to expression.

  Empty, I thought, and swallowed hard.

  “Nice room,” I said stupidly, glancing around, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the smell. It was not a nice room. Shelves lined the wood walls in rows, not a one of them straight. They were jam packed with hundreds of containers, all shapes and sizes, filled with all sorts of things; rusty nails, dying fireflies, coins, sea glass, feathers—bloody feathers—and something that shimmered like heat on blacktop. There were some filled with ants, some filled with balls of thread and lint, moving liquids, ripped up pages of magazines, ashes, fingernails—

  “Please stop looking at my things,” she said.

  I tried, but they were everywhere. I looked down and there were containers on the floor, in my path, peeking out from under the bed. I shut my eyes and whimpered when I caught a glimpse of a Tupperware container half-hidden under the dust ruffle. I know I saw a tiny, very human, decaying foot. My heaps of star charts, maps, astronomy and astrology books, were just things. This collection was a sort of torture. Like she was trying to fill up every empty thing she could find.

  Like empty things tormented her.

  “I said stop looking.”

  I brushed silver hair out of my face and tried to concentrate on Cymbeline, sitting cross-legged on her messy bed. I sat down the same way across from her, putting out the metaphorical handshake. She blinked as I shimmied to make myself comfortable. God, I wanted sweatpants instead of the waist of this skirt, digging into my belly.

  “You want to talk to me.”

  I smiled warmly, a power that had nothing to do with magic. My mom would jokingly say, “A hush fell over the crowd” when I smiled. She said people sensed that I believed in them. In the case of the Poisons, that trust wasn’t returned. “There’s a demon boy at school,” I said, pushing disappointment away.

  “You told me. Not one of the others.”

  Did she never ask an actual question? “I’m telling you first. What do you think we should do?”

  “Why me?”

  “Ah, you asked a question,” I said with a grin. No grinning when I said, “I want you at my side when we take on the demon.” Because I was protecting The Chains, but myself just as much. “Because you’re the size of my thigh and always look scared, but you’ve got the potential to be the most dangerous of us all.”

  She glanced at the billowing curtain and pinched her eyes shut, as if it hurt. “You’ve never seen me do anything to make you think that.”

  I’d so wanted to tell this story. “I’m giving you the A,” I said with a smile. She didn’t ask what I meant. “Storytime. So, this professor on the first day of class hands out report cards to his students. They all have a big A on them, dated for the end of the semester. Everyone’s confused, obviously. He tells them that this is the hardest course they’ll ever take. He also says that he has no reason to think they all won’t earn an A. In his mind, they’ve got the A already. Now they only need to prove it to themselves.”

  She blinked, and I knew she understood. I wanted to take her hand when I said, “I’m giving you the A because I know you’re worthy of it.”

  “What. Bullshit.”

  Cymbeline looked over my shoulder at the third voice. Una never required an invite to show up. I knew she was uninvited because it was one thing that I’d been allowed in; Cymbeline couldn’t tolerate the Witch of Shades. Where Cym was so vacant, Una overflowed with emotion, and I think she was jealous.

  Una was an acquired taste that I’d never wanted to acquire. She was rude, crass, and treated everyone like they were stupider than her. I envied her self-assurance.

  She brushed a pile of clothes off a chair in the corner that had been barely visible, and picked up a clear box filled with black hair that had been under a shirt. Inspecting it and tossing it to the ground, she fell into the chair dramatically, one voluptuous white-fishnetted leg over the arm, layers of white lace tutu spreading out around her. She stretched a long string of pearls in her fingers, showing off her cleavage in the ripped up white tanktop underneath, and the lacy white bra that covered more than the shirt.

  Nothing could entirely cover the bruises on her arms and chest. She didn’t even try.

  Biting the tiny chain link that pierced her lip, she ran her hand up the shaved side of her head to her platinum mohawk, and studied us. Cymbeline and I could barely take our eyes off her as she settled herself. It was like watching a really good movie that you already knew the end of.

  “Okay then.” I told them what I’d seen in class; about the suit, how everyone saw him but didn’t see him, and the hair that looked a wreck but not, and the way he talked to himself. And about the chain link that he squeezed so hard his hand bled.

  “That can’t mean anything good for us,” I said. “How did he get a representation of The Chains? He shouldn’t be able to touch it.”

  “Or us,” Cymbeline said.

  “Right. But what if he can touch us?” Gulp. “Kill us? If one demon can breach The Chains, can they all do it? What does he want?”

  “Don’t be stupid. He’s one demon, and there are five of us,” Una said, bored.

  Determined not to let Una take over this conversation, I faced her, and suddenly the three of us had formed a bit of a circle, which is the friendliest we’d ever been. “Fine, there are more of us than there are of him. Numbers mean—”

  Cymbeline looked at me fast as I nearly said, ‘numbers mean nothing.’ It wasn’t true. The number five was burned into our existence in a thousand ways. The power of the five Poisons was rooted on the lines of the pentacle, and the five points of the star connected the Elementals. The five Elementals were our power source, the ones who gave us life, and they represented the five senses and essences of being: Cymbeline’s mother, the Air Elemental, our thoughts. Vera’s mother, the Earth Elemental, our bodies. The Water Elemental, Una’s mother, connected to our emotions, and Delcine’s mother, the Fire Elemental, our passions. My mother, Damaris, was the Spirit Elemental. She ruled us all. Of the five fingers of Fate’s hand, she was the thumb.

  The number five had so many more meanings, but what dawned on both Cymbeline and I at the same time was that it wasn’t the only number mystically woven into our lives. Una figured it out, too.

  “The demon boy is the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son,” she said solemnly.

  The Seventh Son of a Seventh Son was prophesied to be incredibly powerful in The Gone, and while it was a legend that I was vaguely aware of, my mother, the Spirit Elemental, was firm in that I was on a need-to-know basis.

  I didn’t question the Elementals.

  “Okay, so that explains why he was able to leave The Gone,” I said.

  “Why he can touch the chain link,” Cymbeline added.

  “I wonder where he got that from,” I said, shaking my head.

  Una ran a thumb over the chain link in her lip, and Link in my pocket buzzed like my cell phone, hoping for the same attention. We had to carry representations of The Chains at all times—a reminder that we serve the power as the power serves us. No demon could touch the links, or so we thought.

  Una said, “He isn’t so big and bad. He’s not why I came. The one we need to worry about is the Witch of Wicked Words.”

  Vera.

  The room was silent apart from the humming of insects and other things in Cymbeline’s containers. Cymbeline began to twitch. Unblinking, emanating icy waves of nothing. Or was it Air that surrounded her with the cold? She whimpered, and shook her head madly, hands scrambling. Looking for a container. The silence had gone on too long.

 
Una grinned maliciously. “What is it with you, Empty Things? Your general creep factor is enough, you don’t have to—”

  “Stop it,” I spat. “She needs to fill the silence. It’s too empty for her.” Cym knocked over a stack of ring boxes, tripped through a pile of tin cans. “Just look,” I pleaded, waving a hand at Cymbeline, hoping Una would stop being mean, wouldn’t make things worse.

  But Cymbeline had gone still; she was looking hard at Una. The world stopped.

  “You always wear white,” Cymbeline said dreamily, unblinking. “Why is that?”

  Una ran her hand through her mohawk again. “Blank slate,” was her answer.

  Suddenly I saw the Witch of Shades in a way I hadn’t before. The thing that had been drilled into my head since I was told I was a Witch had been the same for her. She was a conduit for magic, in the same chicken and egg circle as the rest of us.

  Quietly, I said, “You serve the power and the power serves you.” We were built of magic—it was stronger in some of the Poisons than others. I could subdue mine, make it sleep. I don’t think Una could. At one time, I’d thought that meant Una’s magic was stronger than mine. But now I saw that the magic made her secondary.

  The three of us looked at each other; one running her hand through the hair she refused to style like anyone else, one of us so empty she barely formed words, and one of us so filled with wishes that she didn’t dare to ask for them to be filled. Silence held us together.

  Cymbeline was the one who broke it, tilting her head, eyes penetrating Una’s. “White is blank. Empty. And I am the Witch of Empty Things. I could fill it.” She gave a Cheshire cat grin that would unnerve the Joker.

  Una let out a wild growl and jumped to her feet, a sinister fog of hazy hues swirling around her. “And I can explode those freak blue eyes tsunami-style, if you don’t watch your ass.”

  “Okay, okay, tone it down,” I said with a nervous laugh that I hated. Una was too amped to show off her power to listen.

  “What’s the matter, Star Witch? Afraid you can’t Wish us into submission? Huh, brave and fearless leader? Afraid you can’t use your magic after all this time?”

  My stomach went cold. Silver stars pinpricked the blackness swimming across my vision in a combination of my own fear and the power that welled inside me. Power that threatened to break free of its chains every day. I wanted to let it out as much as the other Poisons did, even if I knew my place.

  “Don’t test me,” I said in a voice not my own. I saw stardust in the air. Una sat down carefully. Cymbeline didn’t move at all.

  I don’t remember having stood up, but it worked out just right. “Now. Let’s discuss how we’re going to approach the Witch of Wicked Words before she finds a way to make friends with a demon.”

  Chapter 3

  The Witch of Wicked Words wasn’t always wicked. I won’t believe anyone is just bad from the start—something triggers it, makes the evil inside explode, burn into life. And if it’s forced out, how can that be evil at all? It’s a reaction to someone or something worse, and sometimes it can’t be put away again.

  I don’t think the Witch of Wicked Words wanted to put the bad away again.

  She was born the Witch of Whispers. She could get so close to anyone that their souls would show her their innermost passions, needs, desires, goals, and dreams. Things that even the person those desires lived inside of couldn’t hear. Her power was in turning that knowledge into a Whisper for that person’s ear alone, and they would then hunt down that innermost desire with unrelenting determination. A beautiful idea—when the Witch of Whispers was fueled by the most primal and clean energies of her mother, the Earth Elemental herself. I’d had visions of Vera as a child: eagle feathers proudly, carefully woven into her red hair alongside bits of birch bark, the grass hushing peacefully under her feet. Her smile, sunlight bright. Before the war paint smeared her mouth and Death’s Head moth wings surrounded her eyes. Before the rattling sound of cicadas accompanied her approach. When Vera was a flowery force of nature that felt light in her heart and saw possibility in everyone.

  Vera Fyren’s light was stolen from her when she was kidnapped at age ten. The police found her three years later, chained in a basement hundreds of miles from home, malnourished, smeared with her own filth, flame-red hair in knots, growling and spitting like a wild animal. Or so the police reports said.

  All of the officials who found her in that dungeon committed suicide by various, terrible means shortly after.

  It was an awful tragedy on top of an awful tragedy and the world could only assume that what those officers saw in that basement was more distressing than they could handle. But the witches knew better.

  Delcine’s curiosity got the better of her, and the Witch of Sweets tempted Vera with all the sugars and delicious delights that any little girl looking to forget her troubles couldn’t turn away. Under Delcine’s spell, Vera told her in hissing words that the world was wicked and everyone in it had twisted desires that she could Whisper to and bring to the surface.

  “What are your twisted desires?” Delcine had asked her, words shaking.

  And with a grim smile, Vera said, “To make them all suffer for me.”

  The Witch of Sweets, trembling, had come to me, desperate to tell someone about the evil she’d seen. Even then I was the Poisons’ leader. Even then it was me that Delcine turned to, not because I was born to the right mother, but because of who I was. I held Delcine, and cried for Vera. It was a stolen comfort; our mothers would have pulled us apart and moments later told us we relied on each other, that we were sisters. The coven wasn’t made of friendship. When we stopped trembling, Delcine begged me to grant her a Wish—to forget everything Vera had shown and told her.

  The stars were spread out above us as we sat on my sandy lawn of beach grass, listening to the waves just across the street. I could easily have pulled a star from the sky and granted her wish. But we were the Five Poisons, and our knowledge was a tool, a weapon, and even at thirteen I knew better than to let go of it.

  “I can’t do that, Delcine,” I said, pulling away. “I can’t let you ignore what you know. She’s dangerous, and we depend on her to tether The Chains. She’s part of our coven, and we can’t let her live with this alone. I can’t help you.”

  “Yes. You can,” she said, eyes glinting in the starlight. The smell of chocolate cherries wafted over me, and she smiled hungrily.

  The stars shook in the sky when I said to her, “I’m stronger than you.”

  Delcine pursed her lips, red lipstick shimmering. “You want me to suffer. I trusted you. Not Una, not Cymbeline, and you’re refusing to help me.”

  It felt terrible to refuse her, but I had to. “You don’t trust me. I’m just the only one who can turn your wish into a Wish,” I said softly. “We’re not friends, and I don’t owe you anything except my partnership in keeping The Chains strong. The Witch of Whispers is more than I can keep under control alone.”

  “You don’t control us, you’re supposed to lead us.”

  “I need your help, and you can’t help me if you don’t know what she’s become.”

  She hung her head, shoulders slumped. “She’s the Witch of Wicked Words now,” she said. “And not even you could Wish away what she’s become.”

  The three of us talked in Cymbeline’s room until the moonlight shone through the open window, the stars twinkling at me as if to say I’d done the right thing. The curtains blew in around her head, but Cymbeline’s hair remained still.

  “Your mother is listening,” I whispered across the bed to Cymbeline, and pointed at the fluttering lace curtain.

  “What?” Una said, now sitting cross-legged on the bed with us, as she had been for hours. We’d never spent so much time together. I hated that it felt good. I hated that our families would punish us for this.

  Cymbeline only gazed at Una with those moonlit eyes. I whispered into Una’s ear, “The Air Elemental—she listens through the breeze.”

&
nbsp; The whites of Una’s eyes showed in her surprise. “That crafty bitch,” she whispered.

  “I’m surprised we’ve been allowed to talk at all, that it was safe for this long,” I said to them both, but then it dawned on me, and my eyes widened, too. “She’s spying…. for our mothers,” I mouthed to them.

  Cymbeline barely reacted, and I realized her mother knew every breath she took, lived in the air she breathed. A new sadness fell on me as I looked at her, and I was ashamed that I couldn’t see why she was so empty before.

  She was afraid to be anything else.

  I grabbed a notebook out of my army issue messenger bag, opened up to the middle and wrote: WE NEED TO TALK WHERE THE ELEMENTALS WON’T KNOW.

  Una leaned into my lap, took my pen: THEY ALWAYS KNOW.

  Our mothers were part of us, always watching over us—or at least my mom watched over me. My mom knew that I wanted a real family more than anything, and she went to extra lengths to be all the family I would ever need. It was only us, but I never felt alone. She knew I longed for history, traditions, relationships and squabbles and Thanksgiving dinners and passed down necklaces and stories from Grandma that didn’t exist. She didn’t make me feel ridiculous about it. Instead she tried to create them for me, and looked away when I made my scrapbooks full of false memories. That was what family meant.

  My eyes avoided Una’s faded bruises. She was only watched instead of being watched over.

  Cymbeline took the notebook gently from my hands: THEY CAN HELP US WITH THE DEMON.

  Una and I exchanged a glance that said the same thing for different reasons. We didn’t want the Elementals to know about the demon boy. Not yet. Una was always hanging on by a thread, waiting for another beating from the Water Elemental, and certainly didn’t want to share anything with her. I was just afraid of what they would do with him. To him.