Witchtown

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “Here we go,” I muttered, and fought back a powerful urge to run for the door. I immediately regretted having brought Kellen here. Recruiting him to help had seemed like a fine idea earlier, when we were safely arguing at the sunny lakeside. But now that we were here, all I could think about were the bloodshot, calculating eyes. Not to mention the fire. What could Kellen possibly do to help, even if he did have Gayle for a mentor?

  We both jumped when one of the boxes in the middle of the pile exploded and the poltergeist jumped out.

  He hung over the boxes for a moment, giving me a much better view of him than I had had earlier. He was young. Early twenties, maybe. Beneath the black trench coat, he was wearing modern clothes that bordered on trendy: distressed jeans and a hoodie that were both so effortlessly casual they had to be expensive. His brown, slightly curly hair was expertly mussed and did not move with the icy wind he stirred up.

  With a shock, I realized that my poltergeist was actually sorta . . . hot. In an overly groomed kind of a way.

  But it was hard to concentrate on that when he was staring at us so menacingly. And by “us,” I mean me. His freaky, red-eyed glare reminded me a little of Rafe’s, and the thought put me off balance.

  His expression was so furious that I expected him to yell. But when he spoke, it was in the same quiet almost whisper he had used before.

  “You came back,” he purred, menacingly. “Why did you come back?”

  I cringed as another blast of wind blew my hair back. But I stood firm. Having Kellen immediately next to me made me feel braver than I had the last time I had faced Bradley.

  “I own this place,” I informed the poltergeist coolly. “This is my shop.”

  His glare deepened. Honestly, if he hadn’t been dead, I would have said he belonged on a runway somewhere.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, abandoning the creepy whisper and speaking in a tone of voice that was surprisingly normal. It made him seem more annoyed than homicidal, especially when he rolled his eyes. “I told you that already. Did I not make myself clear?”

  “I heard you,” I informed him, and his slightly less frightening manner gave me the courage to try using his name. “I heard you, Bradley. Why don’t you think I own this place?”

  He looked around, sweeping his dead eyes over the ruined counter and the empty shelves. When he got to the boxes beneath his feet, he wrinkled his nose. “This place is not yours. It’s Stan’s. And you are not worthy of it.”

  “Who’s Stan?” Kellen asked, taking a step forward.

  Bradley turned in his direction.

  “His husband!” I burst out, then flinched as they both looked over at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?” I asked the ghost. “Gayle said you owned this place with your husband. Was his name Stan? You both died in the first Depot fire, right? How did it happen?”

  Bradley’s glare faded to a pout, and I could have sworn his lower lip wobbled.

  “Get out,” he said, and he was back to the scary whisper again. His eyes blazed and he rose higher above the boxes as the temperature in the room abruptly dropped another ten degrees. His voice broke as he said it again: “Get. Out!”

  Before either of us could move to obey him, the front door to the shop opened.

  Autumn walked in, with Royce right behind her. Witchtown’s Queen Bee gave a friendly wave when she saw Kellen and me standing there.

  “Hi, Macie! I heard your mom bought this place! Hey, how come it’s so—”

  She stopped dead and stared, open-mouthed, at the poltergeist. Behind her, Royce was doing exactly the same thing.

  “What the—” Royce began.

  “GET OUT!”

  The poltergeist’s voice was a screech now as he swooped down from the roof and flew straight at Autumn. She screamed and covered her head with her hands as she and Royce ran back outside. The poltergeist slammed into the wall above the door, grunted in frustration, then turned and dove straight into the pile of merchandise, tossing boxes and packing material aside. A box marked “Candle Holders” hit the wall with a sharp crash, and I jumped out of the way as an oil lamp shattered at my feet.

  Kellen grabbed my hand.

  “Time to go.”

  I let him pull me toward the door. When we were outside, I cringed at the sound of more glass breaking from inside the shop.

  My shop.

  “Don’t worry,” Kellen said, and gave me a smile filled with such genuine warmth that I felt my knees shake a little. Or maybe it was that I had just survived a second encounter with the poltergeist without being burned alive. “Now that we know what we’re dealing with, we’ll come up with a better plan for next time.”

  Round two definitely belonged to the poltergeist. But I was nowhere near giving up. Round three was going to be mine.

  Gayle had said that the first step to having power over something was to know its name.

  And now I knew another one.

  Stan.

  Chapter Twelve

  That evening I stood alone in the apartment, clutching a mug of lemon balm tea. There were a lot of things to ponder about this incomprehensible day. But one thing kept standing out.

  Kellen. So he was going to try to teach me, was he?

  I did not trust him. My internal alarms had been going off since I met him, and I wasn’t one to ignore that strong a gut feeling. Even if there seemed to be less evidence to support it every time I was around him. Part of me still couldn’t help but wonder if he was right about me. He had seemed so certain. He had the kind of confidence that was contagious. What if. What if I wasn’t a Void after all? What if I could learn to channel . . .

  I shook my head. I had a lifetime of evidence to stack up against his totally uneducated opinion. Seattle be damned. I. Could. Not. Channel.

  But I would go along with it. Be the dutiful pupil. I would keep him close, mostly because I couldn’t afford to have him anywhere else. Not now that he knew.

  Only one other person had ever found out I was a Void, and I had known that Rafe wouldn’t betray me. I couldn’t say the same thing about Kellen, whatever promises he might have made to me. I was reasonably sure we were playing each other. Me, to make sure he wouldn’t get in the way of my con. Him? I still had no idea what his deal was. But my connection with Rafe . . . that had been real. At least, it had turned real. Once I figured him out. My first impression of him had been dead wrong.

  “You think I’m a drug dealer?” Rafe had asked, incredulous.

  “Well . . .” I hesitated, trying to think how to explain myself. “I mean, you’re all kinds of mysterious about what you do all day. And you have lots of cash hidden in plastic bags in the woods. What was I supposed to think?”

  “Unbelievable,” Rafe muttered. “Come on. I have something to show you.”

  He led me to the larger of the two dilapidated shacks on his property. Inside, the air smelled almost sweet, and it was so thick it felt heavy inside my lungs. There was wood everywhere, all in various stages of becoming something more. Furniture, mostly. There was a stack of half-finished chairs in the corner and a beautiful table in the very center, with a power sander and several piles of sandpaper sitting on it. A workbench took up the far wall, which was also home to a scary-looking saw and lots of tools.

  “This is what I do all day,” Rafe said behind me, leaning against the center table.

  “Oh,” I said sheepishly. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I didn’t think you were interested. You only seemed to care about how many mandrake plants I could lead you to.”

  Really? That was what he thought? How depressing. And how true.

  I looked around the room, trying to take in everything at once. I walked over to one of the chairs.

  “So the money in the woods . . . that was from selling furniture?”

  “Furniture, carvings, whatever I feel like making. There’s a pretty good market for quality handcrafted wood products. I have a guy who sells my stuff outside the Haven. So
meday, maybe I’ll be able to open a shop myself. In a Haven where the people have more money to buy things.”

  I sniffed the air. It smelled like sawdust, but also very strongly of sage, a smell I used to associate only with ritual but which was becoming more and more connected to Rafe.

  “Do you cast in here?” I asked.

  “I don’t do formal spellwork, no. But there’s a lot of craft that goes into woodworking, if you do it right. Wood is very absorbent of thoughts, feelings.” He picked up a piece of sandpaper and absent-mindedly started sanding the table. “Every time you touch a piece of wood, you put your intentions into it. So I burn a lot of sage in here. It gets my mind right, you know?”

  I didn’t know. I ran my hand over the back of the chair, feeling the surface that Rafe had touched, again and again, as he had shaped it and made it smooth. I felt nothing more than the flawless wood beneath my hands. Was there more? Did other people feel more when they touched something that Rafe had touched?

  The idea disturbed me. I changed the subject.

  “Why do you stay here?” I asked. “You have enough money to get out, to start your shop. More than enough. I’ve seen it. What’s keeping you?”

  “That money’s not for me,” Rafe explained. “It’s for my dad.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. I stopped petting the chair and stared at him incredulously. “You cannot be planning on giving that to your dad. You know what he’ll do with it!”

  “I’m not going to give it to him,” Rafe agreed, tossing aside the sandpaper and jumping up to sit on the edge of the table, facing me. “I’m going to use it to pay off the mortgage on the farm. I’m paying it now, every month, but once I go he won’t be able to keep the payments up. His assistance will cover what he needs for food and stuff, but I can’t let him lose the farm. I can’t leave him homeless. What?”

  I was staring at him, reliving every moment we had ever had together through this new prism of understanding. How had I been so wrong? I blamed the way we had met. It had given me a weird first impression of him, and first impressions were difficult to shake. Even for me.

  I will never steal from Rafe.

  The thought hit me with such force that I had to grab the back of the chair to steady myself. The truth of it was undeniable. If he had led me to his stash right that very moment and given me an hour alone with it, I would have left every dollar exactly where it was.

  I had never in my life been as sure of something as I was about that.

  Everybody I had ever met had always been fair game. To the extent that I had ever bothered to find out their stories, their problems, their hopes, I had never let their needs eclipse mine. No one had ever been off-limits.

  Until now.

  I was gripping the chair with both hands. Slowly, I looked back across the room at him.

  He was still sitting on the table, watching as I warred with my own thoughts.

  “You must be some kind of terrible,” he remarked, holding my eyes. “To have spent all of this time with me, thinking what you thought, and never worrying about it.”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m a Void,” I said. And I watched his eyes carefully, looking for a reaction.

  There was no surprise. No shock. No . . . revulsion. Instead, his eyes gradually grew darker, until they reminded me a little of the eyes that had stared down at me in the woods. But this was a different kind of darkness. This was wanting. This was curiosity satisfied, which in turn opened up another need.

  My stomach clenched and felt like it was flipping over itself, and I felt my fingertips press harder on the back of the chair.

  He eased off the table.

  “Is that supposed to scare me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at my feet.

  “Would it scare you if I were a Void?”

  “No,” I muttered. No more than his face was scaring me right now. This was unexplored territory. And I wasn’t sure yet whether I wanted to run from it or straight toward it.

  Straight toward him.

  “All right then,” he said, and took a step toward me.

  I scooted backwards and put the chair between us.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “What do you think?”

  I kept the chair between us.

  “You don’t think I’m going to infect you?” I asked, my voice sounding almost pleading. “Burn you out, just by being near you?”

  “Nope,” he said. He was standing right on the other side of the chair now. I could have backed up farther toward the corner, but I was afraid of what would happen if I let go of the chair.

  “There’s more,” I said desperately. “A lot more.”

  I am so much worse than you think.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You should. You really should—”

  “I don’t.”

  He sidestepped the chair so that he was standing directly in front of me. He put one calloused hand on top of both of mine, pinning them to the chair railing. He snaked his other hand up into my hair, and tilted my face so that I was looking at him.

  “I don’t care,” he said again, pronouncing the words very carefully before covering his lips with mine.

  I felt the kiss not just where his lips and his tongue touched me, but down the entire length of my body. I felt his hands on me and I wondered if they could change me, the way they had changed the wood. Shape me, smooth me, transform me into something different. Something better . . .

  The apartment had grown dark. I put down my cold tea and felt my way toward the couch.

  It’s not backtracking. I just need to hold it for a moment.

  I reached a hand under the couch cushion, feeling for where I had hidden Rafe’s jacket. There was nothing. Had I noticed the usual lump in the couch when I went to sleep last night? Or had I been so busy trying to forget about it that I had actually succeeded?

  I threw the cushion aside, and the moonlight coming through the window illuminated the empty space underneath.

  I waited all night for my mother to come home, but she never did. She must have been putting in some serious time trying to get inside the vault with Percy. At least, I hoped that’s what they were doing. There were a myriad of other possibilities, none of which I wanted to think about.

  While I waited, I searched.

  It didn’t take long. The apartment was not big, and nomads that we were, my mother and I had very few personal belongings. My mother’s room smelled strongly of cinnamon, like she always did, and a few minutes of poking around was all it took for me to conclude that Rafe’s jacket was definitely not there.

  What was there, underneath a sweatshirt in the bottom drawer of the bureau, was a large bag full of beef jerky. At any other time, finding out that she had been cheating on the diet she had forced on me would have infuriated me to the point of tears. But I was already so angry that there was no way her latest petty betrayal was going to make any kind of dent.

  What had she done with it?

  Everything she had said about having “ground to make up” had been crap. It was always crap. And I fell for it every time.

  There was nothing to do but wait, so I paced circles around the living room. By the time the sun peeked through the hideous blue curtains, my anger had built up so much that my hands had clenched themselves into shaky fists.

  That’s it, I thought suddenly. I’m done.

  I stormed out of the apartment.

  I had no idea where my mother might be. Or what I was going to say to her once I found her. All I could hear inside my head were the same two words over and over again.

  I’m done. I’m done. I’m done.

  I stomped in the direction of the bank—​the most reasonable place to begin looking for her—​and got about two steps in that direction before I slammed right into someone.

  The person was dressed in a black skirt, black leggings, and black boots. So I just assumed it was
Talya until I regained my balance enough to look up and see Autumn scowling down at me.

  “Macie!” she exclaimed. “Watch where you’re going!”

  “Sorry,” I muttered, frowning. Why was Autumn dressed all in black?

  Now that I was able to focus on something besides my anger, I noticed that there were black banners flying all around the square.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Autumn, who was brushing nonexistent dust from her shoulder.

  “Pendle Bishop,” she said. “Didn’t you hear?”

  “What about her?” I asked, with a mounting sense of dread.

  Autumn finished fussing with her clothes and looked over at me sadly.

  “She died last night.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The rowan in the water supply turned out to be more of an annoyance than a genuine danger to the town. The mayor handled the whole thing with her usual efficiency, even though I could tell she was cringing from yet another unexpected expense and she took to muttering about the “cursed Zealots” more than usual. It took three days, two cleansing spells (both of which I managed to avoid participating in), and the installation of a fancy new filter before the water was declared rowan free and safe to use again—​just in time for Pendle Bishop’s funeral.

  I had never seen the square more crowded. I suspected that almost every resident of Witchtown was there, including the ones who hadn’t bothered to turn up for my initiation. It looked like all of the town teenagers, with the exception of Talya (who was nowhere to be seen), were standing in a clump around Autumn and Royce.

  I stood at the edge of the group, fingering my moonstone as Maire finished casting the circle around us. The nerves that normally hit me like a freight train in ritual situations were being kept at bay, for once. I suspected that had a lot to do with the large wooden structure beside the altar.

  And with the body on top of it.

  I couldn’t see the actual body, of course. Just a cloth-wrapped bundle that looked too small to contain the earthly remains of an entire person. Even a person as small as Pendle Bishop had been.