Witchtown

by Cory Putman Oakes

  “She refused?” I asked, looking harder at the house. There was something odd about it. A fiercely sad vibe was emanating from the place, as though it missed its owner. But there was something else . . .

  “Yeah, she refused,” Kellen said, smiling a little. “So they built downtown around her. That was right around the time I got here.”

  I continued to scrutinize the house. It was the yard, I think, that bothered me. It didn’t look right. The vividly green grass and the freshly mulched flowerbeds looked too labor-intensive to belong to a slightly crazy old lady. Even if the lawn was just a tad too overgrown to be described as well manicured.

  Beside me, Kellen was looking closely at the lawn as well.

  “Grass could use some mowing. I was going to try to come by today or tomorrow, but . . .” He spread his hands.

  “You mow her lawn?” I asked. “I mean, mowed?”

  “Sure,” he said, looking surprised at my surprise. “It’s not like she could do it herself, you know.”

  I followed him silently into town. He ducked quickly into the Green Man Organic Grocer, promising that he would only be a moment. Rather than follow him in, I browsed the outdoor racks of Widdershins Wardrobe, the secondhand clothing place next door. It looked like a fifty-fifty mix between ritual wear and everyday wear. I flipped mindlessly through a jumble of coats, wondering if I would ever find the outer limits of Kellen’s do-goodedness.

  Then my fingers touched something familiar.

  I shoved an armful of hangers aside to get a better look, and there it was: Rafe’s jacket. Just hanging there. With a red tag tied to the zipper.

  My heart started beating in my throat.

  I snatched the hanger off the rack and marched inside. I walked right up to the girl sitting behind the counter and threw the jacket down in front of her, right on top of the tarot cards she had laid out beside the cash register.

  “Hey!” she protested.

  “Where did you get this?” I demanded.

  She gave the jacket a lethargic stare, then shrugged. She looked about my age. She had probably been at my second initiation ritual.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “Half the stuff we get is donated. There’s a bin. We also buy stuff that’s in good condition.”

  “But you don’t know who brought this in?” I pressed her.

  “Not my job,” she said, peeling the jacket off her cards and handing it back to me.

  I knew who had brought it in. But confirmation would have been nice.

  “Are you buying it or what?”

  “There you are!” Kellen said, coming up behind me and holding a reusable bag full of oranges. “Are you buying something?”

  I glanced down at the jacket in my hands and fumbled for the red tag. It said twenty-five dollars.

  My heart sank. I had gone food shopping again yesterday and as a consequence, I had only eleven dollars of my own money left in my wallet.

  “I can give it to you for twenty,” the clerk offered. I had no idea why she was being nice. Probably just to get rid of me. But twenty dollars was still too much.

  I wanted to kick myself. It was too late to come back later and steal it—​not when I had made such a scene.

  My mind was telling me to lay the jacket on the counter and go, but my hands would not cooperate. They held on like I was drowning and the jacket was the only life preserver in sight.

  “Do you need money?” Kellen whispered.

  I opened my mouth to say no, but there was already a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. He set it down on the counter and gave the clerk one of his trademark grins.

  I wanted to protest. Letting Kellen pay for this jacket was wrong on a number of levels. But I couldn’t summon the words. I just hugged the jacket to my chest and followed him out of the store.

  When we were back on the sidewalk, he stopped. I looked up and struggled to cobble together two words.

  “Thank you.”

  He folded his arms and assumed an expression that I was becoming familiar with: the Macie-contemplation expression. A mixture of scrutiny, curiosity, and smaller but equal parts wariness and amusement. I was expecting him to demand an explanation, and I was busy trying to figure out a plausible story, when he said, “I never figured you for a fan of leather.”

  There was no good response to that. I didn’t want to lie to him. Not when he had just done something nice.

  I think he saw at least some of that on my face, because all of a sudden he called up a very fake-looking smile and gestured for me to lead the way down the sidewalk.

  When we arrived at the door of my apartment building, I smiled a quick goodbye and went to duck inside, to sort my feelings out in private.

  He stopped me with a hand on my arm.

  “You asked me what it feels like to channel . . . do you still want to know?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s like . . . you’re suddenly a part of everything around you. Something greater than yourself. Something beautiful.”

  I nodded again, still cradling the leather jacket to my chest.

  Kellen squeezed my arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you there.”

  I stretched out on the couch with Rafe’s jacket clutched tightly to my front, with the sleeve pressed against my nose.

  What does it feel like to channel?

  Rafe had tried to answer that question for me once too. But he hadn’t used the same words that Kellen had.

  Actually, he hadn’t used words at all.

  We pushed the motorcycle out of the shed as quietly as possible, toward the cornfield behind Rafe’s house. His dad was home, but judging by the new bottles that had accumulated in the sink that afternoon, he was in no shape to interfere.

  Rafe swung his leg over the seat. I went to jump up behind him but he shook his head.

  “No, in front of me,” he said.

  I hesitated. That would mean sitting on what looked like the gas tank, and the handlebars looked too wide to hold on to comfortably. I would rather have just held on to him.

  “Trust me,” he said, and placed a gentle kiss on my bottom lip.

  Thus reassured, I climbed up in front of him. I felt mildly encouraged that once he scooted up close to me and grabbed the handlebars, I was completely encircled by his arms. I was sure of him. What I wasn’t sure about was the hodgepodge of motorcycle parts I was currently perched on. The engine under Rafe’s seat was orange and had a faded “350” on it. The part under my butt was blue. And the headlight between my knees looked too rusty to even function.

  Rafe aimed the bike for one of the lanes between the rows of corn and started the engine.

  I don’t know what startled me more, the worryingly loud, throaty roar beneath us or the way we jerked forward. But before I could react, we were racing between two walls of corn and the wind was slapping me in the face.

  I could hear Rafe shouting in my ear.

  “Feel that?”

  “Feel what?” I yelled back. I wasn’t sure he could hear me. It was all I could do to hold on, one hand on the handlebars, one reaching down to clutch his knee.

  It took three lengths of the field—​two stops, two sharp turns, and two abrupt re-starts—​for me to relax enough, to trust Rafe’s driving enough, to realize that the wind was not, in fact, trying to keep me down.

  It was trying to raise me up.

  I sat up straighter.

  “Feel it now?” Rafe yelled.

  I had been gripping both the bike and Rafe like my life depended on it. Now I let go. Moving slowly, to test my balance, I sat up even straighter and brought my legs up and under me, until I was balancing on my knees on top of the gas tank, just behind the headlight. Then, very tentatively, I raised my arms into the air.

  I closed my eyes.

  And I felt it.

  “It” was an assortment of things. The engine of the motorcycle, pushing me forward. The warm embrace of the wind, pulling me up and blowing back my long hair. Rafe’s arms, still in a circle
around me. Even the cornstalks on either side of us, stretched out for an acre in each direction. They had an energy too. And trumping everything else, there was the moon. I couldn’t see it, because my eyes were closed, but I felt like if I reached up just a tiny bit more, I’d be able to touch it . . .

  I felt the bike slow and skid to a halt. We had come to the end of the row.

  I lowered my arms and twisted around to face Rafe. I couldn’t imagine the expression on my face, but whatever it was, it made Rafe smile in a way I had never seen before.

  “That,” he said, “is what it feels like to channel.”

  I was saved from having to say anything by a gruff, angry voice coming from the direction of Rafe’s house.

  “RAFE!”

  Rafe grabbed me by the shoulders and tossed me off the bike.

  “RAFE! I warned you about that bike!”

  The voice was closer now. So much for Rafe’s dad being dead to the world.

  Rafe grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the cornfield, toward the trees, leaving the motorcycle behind.

  We ran until we could no longer hear his dad behind us. We must have passed the outer boundary of the Haven, but there was no formal border, no markings to tell us when it happened. The trees did not change much, except that they grew thicker the farther away from Rafe’s house we got.

  After a while, we burst into a clearing. Rafe stopped, dropped my hand, and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees to catch his breath. I did the same, and listened hard for anyone coming up behind us.

  Nothing. The night had gone silent.

  “I’m going to catch it tomorrow,” Rafe said. Still breathing hard, he took off his jacket and laid it on the ground behind us.

  “Don’t go home,” I suggested.

  “I have to,” he said, a glint of humor in his eyes as he sat down. “It’s home.”

  I sat down beside him on the jacket.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble—”

  He stopped me, putting one finger to my lips.

  “My idea. My fault. It was worth it to see you smile like that.”

  “Is that really what it’s like?” I asked.

  “Not always,” he admitted. “Sometimes. On a good day.”

  “I hate being a Void,” I said, making a face.

  Rafe caught my chin, making me look at him.

  “I don’t hate anything about you.”

  He kissed me. We were both still breathing hard from all the running, so it was almost a relief when he moved from my lips down my jawline and then down farther to the sensitive skin on my neck. After that, everything got a little fragmented and fuzzy.

  There were so many things vying for my attention all at once: Rafe’s lips, the softness of his leather jacket on my (eventually) bare back, the feel of his hands on me, the sound of us breathing not quite in unison but together, the sight of the half-full moon above, keeping guard over us. All the practical thoughts, all of the impractical ones, and the blazingly romantic look that was in his eyes whenever they met mine.

  But the main thing I was feeling was the sense that I was in the right place. For the first time in my life, I truly felt as if the Goddess—​Laverna, if you like, or whatever guise you prefer to think of her in—​was smiling down on me.

  I had never wholly participated in any ritual I had ever attended—​I had always felt like an outsider, always had to hide behind an act. But not this time. Now, then, I could give myself up completely, lose myself, and not worry I would be found out. Because here there was only Rafe and the smiling Goddess above me. Both of them knew what I was.

  And both of them loved me for it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I woke up blurry-eyed, stuck somewhere between trying to forget the cornfield and wanting to pore hungrily over every little detail, just to torture myself.

  I rehid Rafe’s jacket underneath Laverna’s altar, even though I didn’t have a lot of faith it would be safe there. The thought put me in no mood to find a perky, curly-headed little person lurking just outside the apartment door.

  “Hi, Macie! Wanna play?” Aimee asked, bouncing on her tiptoes.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what I had done to gain her approval, but ever since that day by the creek, she had been popping up everywhere I went. Like a cute stalker.

  My little shadow.

  “Sorry, kid,” I said. “I have things to do. Does your dad know where you are? Or Talya?”

  Grinning wickedly, she shook her head side to side.

  “I ditched them,” she announced proudly. “I got away. Like a spy!”

  Like a thief, the thought came to me, along with an uncomfortable twinge. I wasn’t looking for a protégé. I couldn’t afford a little tagalong, so I gave her the sternest look I could muster.

  “Go find Talya,” I commanded her. “She’s probably worried about you.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me and took off running.

  I shook my head.

  Kellen was leaning against the Depot door, waiting for me. There was a cardboard box at his feet and a half-eaten breakfast sandwich in his hand. It was a croissant, egg, and cheese thing, wrapped in biodegradable waxy paper that had the Crescent Roll logo on it.

  The mouthwatering smell launched a new attack on my already traumatized senses. I had eaten a handful of raw carrot noodles for breakfast that morning, which I had had to scrape clean of my homemade sauce in order to avoid another overdose of raw garlic. My stomach had not been willing to accept that as a proper meal and was now strongly encouraging me to rip the sandwich out of Kellen’s hand. I came very close to doing just that, especially when he held it out for me to take.

  “Bite?” he offered.

  With a supreme act of will, I shook my head and reached into my pocket for the Depot key. I was not my mother. At least one of us needed to keep up appearances.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Kellen said. “You don’t eat this kind of stuff.”

  I nodded at the box.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Just some stuff I thought might be useful.”

  Curious, I knelt to take a peek inside. There were a couple of sage smudge sticks, a small container marked “Saltwater,” an obsidian arrowhead, a large gray stone, a smaller stone with a hole through its middle, a horseshoe, and a bag of beans.

  I picked up the beans and looked questioningly at Kellen.

  He shoved the last of the sandwich in his mouth and chewed carefully before answering.

  “Supposedly if you spill something, like beans or coins, ghosts have to stop and count each one.”

  I pointed at the Depot door.

  “Do you really think that thing is going to stop and count beans?” I asked.

  Kellen shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s worth a try. Why? What’s your idea?”

  Instead of answering, I stood up and busied myself with the stubborn door. I had shoved the key in the lock and taken a deep breath, preparing to throw my weight against it, when I was distracted by voices on the other side of the square.

  Kellen and I both turned around.

  Mayor Bainbridge was coming out of Good Karma Coffee. She stopped and held the door open for six or seven people in dark suits who emerged behind her.

  My gut twitched. I couldn’t recognize everybody in Witchtown by sight yet, but my instinct was telling me that these people did not belong here.

  “Who are they?” Kellen asked. And I could tell by the caution in his voice that he was thinking the same thing.

  “Those must be the investors,” I surmised, recalling what the mayor had told my mother in our living room.

  “Oh, right,” Kellen said, and the worry drained out of his voice. “The expansion.”

  Well, at least I knew something that Kellen didn’t.

  I squinted over at the suited figures. Witchtown’s last hope. I wondered if the mayor had given them the fake books yet, or if my mother had been too busy
fooling around with Percy to forge them.

  I opened my mouth to say more about the suits, but suddenly there was a buzzing noise in my ear. I let go of the doorknob, swatted at the sound, and slapped something. It felt like a bug, but it hit the ground with way too solid a thwack to be a mere fly.

  “Ew!” I cried, revolted. I covered my head in case there were more of them.

  “What?” Kellen asked, startled, and I pointed down at my feet.

  The bug was brown, with a cylinder-shaped body, about the length of my palm. It had long, folded-in legs, two antennae, and transparent wings. I had wounded it, and the wings were making a disturbing scratching sound as they twitched in vain, trying to get it back up into the air.

  I shuddered.

  “Is that a grasshopper?” Kellen asked.

  “Aren’t grasshoppers green?”

  “I don’t—​ugh, look out!”

  We both ducked as two more insects dive-bombed our heads. They made a screechy humming sound, like someone playing loud notes on a severely out-of-tune guitar.

  The bugs flew away, but the sound did not disappear with them. If anything, it got louder.

  I straightened up. The sound was all around us. No, that wasn’t exactly right. It was above us.

  Hesitantly, I raised my eyes to the sky. There was a dark cloud hovering over the ritual area. A cloud full of flapping wings and darting, solid little bodies.

  “Not grasshoppers,” I said ominously. “Locusts.”

  Kellen knelt to pick up his box, without taking his eyes off the swarm.

  “Let’s get—”

  Before he could say the rest, the cloud broke apart and suddenly there were locusts everywhere. Across the square, I saw the mayor and her investors duck, and all around me I heard screams as people ran for cover.

  Kellen dove for the Depot door, but I grabbed his arm and pulled him away. We couldn’t escape into there—​not when there was an angry poltergeist in residence who could probably do more damage to us than the locusts. I pulled Kellen toward Tenjin’s Tomes next door instead.

  We ran inside and it took both of us together to slam the door shut again against the cloud of insects that tried to follow us in. At least two dozen winged bodies smacked into the door behind us, then fell motionless to the pavement.