“Is this a dream?” I mumbled as we wandered through the dimly lit foreign house. It felt like I was simultaneously under water and like time had stopped. When I heard the laughter, I knew that it was a dream made by a witch.
“Celeste!” Una put a glass full of red wine on a side table amidst several other empty bottles of red wine, and hopped over the back of a maroon sofa to take me in a hug, which was weird on its own.
“Man, you reek of wine! You smell like Dirty Larry!” I pushed her gently away, but was laughing with her as she did her Dirty Larry impression. The constant odor of booze was probably the cleanest thing about the school janitor.
Delcine was lounged across a cracked black leather chair, legs in second-skin-tight red latex thrown over the arm. She looked like the devil, a wine glass in her hand like she’d been born with it there, smoky eyes smudged from too much fun.
“Okay, somebody tell me what the hell is going on. Whose house is this?”
“It’s ours, doll face,” Delcine said, cherry lips turning up seductively. “We girls need a place of our own. Now we have one.” She exchanged glances with Una and they both burst into giggles. My amusement was dwindling fast.
“ENOUGH! Tell me—”
“Wish for it,” Vera hissed in my ear with the unsettling sound of cicadas. The Whisper snaked inside me, slithering in and leaving a cool trail behind it, giving me such an impossible relief that I let out a sigh. “It’s what you want to do.”
Then her magic worked on me, the Whisper finding the part of me that wanted it, wanted to be brought into the open, wanted to see the worst that could happen. It eased a burn in me from the inside out the more I gave into it, and I smiled when I Wished to know all the things that had happened in that house without having to ask.
I desired the power to know, to see everything. I wanted that forever, and Vera found it.
The scene played out in the snippets that mattered, both emptying me of need and filling me with knowing. A filthy Vera approaching the house only hours before, walking in like she already owned the place. The man sat on the sofa where Una had been, sullen, tired and drinking wine. That wine. Vera sat next to him. He never looked at her. She watched him for only a few moments before Whispering to him the thing he wanted most.
“You want none of this. This house, this wine, this ordinary, normal life. It’s a needle in your skin, meant to make you better but all you feel is the sting. You want to kill your boss, steal his money and live in a penthouse where you don’t have to do anything for yourself.”
The man hung his head, swished his wine around in its glass, and smiled when the words sunk in. “What kind of angel are you?” he scoffed, still not daring to look at the Witch of Wicked Whispers.
When Vera spoke, every word hung in the air, thick with the joy she took in terror. “The kind even the angel of death would run from,” she said. “But it’s your turn to run. Make your desires real.”
He finally looked at Vera with nightmare fear in his eyes. I was terrified, and I was watching it hours after it had happened. Her smile didn’t begin to touch the happiness the moment gave her. The next thing I saw was the man leaving his home with a small bag in hand. He handed Vera the key. She put a hand on his shoulder before he walked out the door.
“You’re forgetting something,” she said, and put a butcher knife in his hand.
“No,” I choked, even as the rest of the vision came real before me; Vera going to Delcine’s house and telling the witches to come with her, the argument and fighting her off as she tried to Whisper to each of them, until she finally recounted the story for the Witch of Sweets and the Witch of Shades.
They both made a face when she told them how she got the house, but they followed her as if she were leading them to the Promiseland.
My stomach lurched when the vision flipped to Cymbeline’s house. I couldn’t bear it if my friend in her tarnished innocence, condoned what Vera had empowered that man to do. But I already knew.
The Witch of Wicked Words entered Cym’s backwards little house, floorboards creaking under her naked feet, air throbbing with powers clashing in tiny beats. The Air Elemental was there in the breeze that rustled up cigarette ashes from an end table, but they stilled with a glance from Vera. She smiled, dry lips cracking.
This was her time, and no power would overshadow her.
Cymbeline stood in front of her bedroom mirror. Tears filled her enormous eyes, and I knew why. The image that looked back at her was empty, a container that her magic could never fill.
I knew, because when I looked at my own image, I saw wishes I could never make come true.
Vera appeared behind Cym in the mirror; two apparitions in cotton with fairy tale eyes and aching hearts.
“You don’t have to Whisper to me,” Cymbeline said to the witch behind her.
“You’ll come with me no matter what the consequence, won’t you?” Vera said. Her green eyes flashed.
Cymbeline turned to face Vera, tears gone, emptiness still there.
“Celeste will understand,” she said.
Unwilling to see more, I Wished reality to come roaring back. My knees shook as much as my voice. “You all knew what the guy was going to do, and you let it happen? You encouraged it.” My eyes roved over each of the Poisons, not an ounce of remorse in any of their eyes. I was glad Cym was still outside; the flicker of change, the freedom I’d see in hers would be too much for me.
Then a small, cold hand grasped mine from behind. The Witch of Empty Things still sounded like a lost princess when she said, “You fell in love with a demon. There’s no such thing as wrong.”
I nearly hung my head. I’d lied to them, but I had never knowingly let a man be killed. They may as well have done it themselves.
“No,” I said firmly to Cymbeline as she perched on the arm of Delcine’s chair. “You know as well as I do that what happened here was wrong.” But I was reminded of a Cymbeline that couldn’t be trusted near anything hollow. When her frailty was a thing of dangerous sadness. The only thing that had changed was that I understood why.
I let out a bitter chuckle. “The three of you were terrified of Vera days ago, and suddenly now you’re all on the Wicked Whispers train when it suits your needs?”
Una stood, a sizzling shade of magenta in her anger. “Get off your goddamn high horse, Stars. You could have Wished for us to have a place to stay, to be safe, but you ran right back home instead. You left us to fend for ourselves.” She stormed to me, her breath hot on my face. “We. Rule. The world. It won’t always be pretty, and I don’t fucking want it to be.”
They all watched me with challenge in their eyes. I knew what they saw; a goody two shoes that did everything on the straight and narrow to the point of self-induced panic. Nice to everybody, befriended by nobody. Out of sync, and quickly running out of time.
“You know what? You’re right.”
Una and Delcine glanced at each other; Una shrugged. “What did you say?” Delcine asked.
“I think you’re probably right.”
Una grinned. “No, that’s not what you said. You didn’t say you think we’re probably right. You said we’re right. Period, the end.”
“Fine, fine, you’re right. I left you to make a plan, and you didn’t have time for that. I left you in danger, but if you want to ‘rule the world,’ Una, then be a big girl. I might be dead before you.”
But my stomach turned when I thought of what my lack of leadership had caused. We held life and death in our hands; we controlled The Chains, kept them strong, shielded entire worlds from each other. But it didn’t feel quite the same as knowing a man was going to murder another man because I’d overlooked it.
Then again, who knows what else I’d overlooked when avoiding Vera ever since she became the Witch of Wicked Words?
Una snapped her fingers in my face. “Earth to Celeste. Look, thanks for the okay on this or whatever.” She looked down and mumbled, “It probably sucked to say that.”
I smoothed my already smooth hair down, the low light catching the silver in a big, square mirror on the wall. “I could Wish him back to life. That guy. Couldn’t I?” My mind was wandering, and I didn’t know if I had control enough to be careful of my thoughts anymore. I’d been too loose with my imagination, Wishing for things just for fun.
“Celeste, you can’t do that,” Delcine said.
“Oh, what, you’re the voice of reason now, Sweets?” Una spat, turning away from me towards her old rival. “So we can let a guy get killed, but we can’t bring him back to life?” Excitement tickled her voice as she pleaded with Delcine. “Come on, I bet we could do it. Cymbeline could fill his empty soul, and I could bring the color of blood back to his veins and you could, I don’t know, wake him up with a cookie or something.”
“Stop it! We have to stop some time, don’t we?” Delcine said, biting her lip as she looked at me. Suddenly I felt like the mother she never really had. But I wasn’t ready to stop us yet.
“If we can bring life back to him…” I said, hardly believing my own words.
“No, you can’t,” Vera said. Her voice stopped all of us every time. “It will all be reversed, but not quite the same. It will be worse.”
Silence between us. We all knew what she said was true. We couldn’t do and undo magic like we were finger painting and washing it away. We served the power and the power served us. “Our magic isn’t a science lab. What’s done is done. The house is ours, and we’re safe.” They stayed silent, and my words were law.
“So, you’re staying here with us?” Cymbeline asked sweetly.
I unzipped my hoodie and threw it over a table. “Yeah. I’ll be staying here. But there’s some business I need to attend to at home.”
“Back to mommy for a few?”
“That’s not what home is for her now,” Cym said to Una.
The silence broke when Delcine dropped an empty wine bottle on the floor with a thunk and shrugged. “Good, the gang’s all here. Let’s find more booze and watch some movies. Nothing witchy.”
“Movies?” Una sneered. “Screw that. We’re working spells.”
Chapter 21
We were refugees of the best kind, together as we schemed, protecting each other, playing with magic like a toy until we were shaking and drained. We were in a stolen home and all but murdered a man, but we had each other’s backs. Una, Delcine, Cym, and Vera, knew no other way of survival except in this visceral, Spartan way. I’d led them to each other so they could share that. I’d known love, they hadn’t. Sometimes I felt like I was luring rabid dogs in from the woods. These dogs deserved more than the scraps they’d been thrown. They deserved time to breathe without fear.
But our birthdays were coming. And just because the Elementals were quiet didn’t mean we were free. It merely meant they were crossing the days off the calendar.
I wouldn’t just stand there like some sacrificial lamb.
The Poisons were asleep, intoxicated with magic or booze, or both. Their guards were down, but I had to leave them. The stars were too bright, the moon too full. And he waited.
A gunmetal gray metallic dress with an A-line skirt hung in my closet, one that I’d never worn to the winter dance. It was made for this night somehow. I Wished it to the stolen house, and it appeared amidst crackles of energy. I tugged on my black zip-up hoodie over it, like there was ever a question I wouldn’t, and my Converse. I nearly picked up my messenger bag, aware that I was dressed not so practically for a journey, that I would need water, that I’d get hungry, but I left it anyway. Nothing worldly could prepare me for what I was about to do.
The place in the woods called to me. A new one. Not Cymbeline’s, not where we had our birthday rituals, and not where the Earth Elemental stole Lux from us. A place of my own. Deeper in the forest than I’d ever been. The sky seemed to open up more despite the thickness of trees, like the stars were showing me a secret.
My breath released hard at the sight.
The trees parted to a field of velvet black, ethereal white, and royal purple flowers, glistening with frost. Luna moths flitted in and out of monstrous violet petals and pin-sized white buds. Lilac florets, midnight blue and black bell-shaped beauties made gentle shushing noises in the breeze. They didn’t belong there and they belonged nowhere else. Strange, mysterious, striking and sinister. Entirely alien, just barely fitting into the world, but necessary.
I watched a silver flower, clearly sentient, round as the moon, open from the center and swallow a firefly whole. I watched it bend its stem to look down protectively at sparkling buds surrounding it, identical to the mother bloom. The large flower shivered, bent lower, and consumed the baby buds one by one.
These flowers were all of the earth, but they blossomed under the night sky. The moon waited all day until the stars brought out their glow, making that bizarre beauty divine. I wondered if their brazen darkness was toxic as well.
I knew a little something about the magic that night created, and the poison that flourished in it.
I stole into the field, black sneakers shushing through the blooms, the bottom of my dress brushing through tall spiral buds. The night wrapped around me, and I grew stronger with every step.
When the ground sang beneath my feet, I stopped. I reached down and plucked a blue morning glory. Blue, the color of the infinite, love and desire. The morning glory, a flower that signifies love, but blooms and dies in a single day. The symbol of mortality.
I did not feel so mortal at that moment. Symbols could be fought.
Crushing the flower in my palm, I fell to one knee and plunged my hands into the earth violently, causing The Chains to leap out of the ground from the impact. I’d only ever seen them rise in the presence of the Elementals’ immortal magic. It had always frightened me.
My hunched shoulders shook as I dug deeper in the earth, searching with my fingers, roaring at the ground in a foreign tongue even I didn’t know. The flowers around me moaned in the wind my magic created. When I didn’t think I could fuse myself with the forest floor any more, dirt, rocks, grass and leaves exploded like land mines all over the clearing, fountaining into the air. The flowers remained somehow untouched. Another tremor sent the debris sky-high again, this time suspending the soil in the air, forming a woman of dirt that towered over the trees.
The Earth Elemental. In her hand, she clutched Lux. I could just make out the tatters of his suit from so far below. He wasn’t moving.
The Amazonian Earth Elemental hissed, “You dare to root into my soul?” Her voice was crashing rocks and howling mountaintops, wild and cruel.
“She dares nothing.” Mom? I swiveled my head around looking for her, my hands still buried in the ground, but she was nowhere. She was everywhere. “Celeste is part of me, and even you could not exist, Earth, without Spirit. Without me, you would be as inhuman as your own daughter.”
I didn’t like that.
“Vera is as brutal as I have made her,” the massive tree-woman screeched. “The Witch of Wicked Words will be a force more powerful than your dreamer,” she spat at me with a creaking nod of her head, raining dirt and rocks on me. “More terrifying than the power of the Elementals combined. She will serve me into eternity and outlast us all! She will know nothing but power in her life because I made it so!”
What the hell puzzle was this, ‘serve her into eternity?’ I thought they were going to kill us, I knew it like I knew my own name. Any fear I had of speaking to this monstrosity tree creature was obliterated by a surge of protectiveness for Vera and by the sparkling stars behind her mother.
Yanking my hands from the soil, I screamed at the monster, “You evil bitch! You set up her kidnapping! You let them torture her! Destroy her!”
With ear-splitting groans and falling autumn leaves, Vera’s mother bent to face me. Her face, carved from wood and the size of a house, growled into mine, jagged tree branch teeth grinning. “I arranged for her… graduation… from the Witch of Whispers to the Witch
of Wicked Words. She was soft, like you.”
“Celeste,” I heard my mom say. Heat drenched my body, my head spun, nausea creeping up my throat, because with that simple word, I knew.
“You knew she did it to Vera,” I hissed at my mother’s voice on the wind. I wouldn’t have been able to look at her if I could have seen her.
“Not until it was too late.”
“Then why do you sound so ashamed?”
No answer. The Earth Elemental grinned wider, teeth like massive thorns, arm still stretched high, with Lux dangling.
“Celeste—” I heard again.
“Don’t!” I screeched at my mother, and the Earth Elemental reeled back in shock, dwindling in height as she did. Her limbs became slender and human. Autumn leaves fell, replaced with red shining hair, branches sticking out haphazardly. Her body emerged from the bark as a woman of at least eight feet tall in a spring green gown, as much woods as she was woman.
“Petty Witches don’t speak to the Spirit Elemental that way,” the Earth Elemental hissed, body writhing like a charmed snake, the demon boy in a heap at her feet.
I’d never felt so much rage, betrayal, sadness, power, and fear at once in my life. Before I exploded, I screamed long and loud until my throat was raw. When I could refocus, I looked to the stars. “Handle her,” I said to them. And my mother appeared before me, brought there by a metallic rush of light, into the open.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said.
Her eyes glistened, reflecting the moon. “You need my help to live, Celeste.”
Faster than wind, hundreds of stars funneled together in a banner of silver, and with a sonic boom they plummeted downwards, leaving ripples of night in their wake. They crashed in seconds to the ground, spreading out in fingers to grab the Earth Elemental, my mother, and Lux at once, raising them off the ground. Hisses and crackles of exploding light sounded, but my quiet voice was still heard.
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