“I almost didn’t,” she admitted.
“I’m sorry for using you,” I said, then paused, trying to find the right words. “I’ve never . . . I’m not used to having friends.”
Talya smiled.
“Neither am I.”
“I’m trying to get better at it,” I told her, then sat up straighter. “At everything, really. I may be a thief, but I am not an arsonist. I don’t want to hurt people.”
Talya nodded. “No, I didn’t think that you did.”
“I want to stop my mother. I need your help.”
“Okay,” Talya said. “What should we—”
The door to the Depot swung open and Kellen walked in.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly very dry.
Talya looked back and forth between us.
“Does he know?” she asked. Quietly, but not so quietly that Kellen couldn’t hear.
“Yes,” I said.
“Good.” Talya sat back on her stool and folded her arms. “Because I think we’re going to need him if we’re going to figure out how to stop your mother from burning down the entire town.”
Kellen’s eyebrows shot up, and I cringed. I guess he didn’t know everything.
Kellen was quiet for a moment. He looked at the boxes on the floor around us, and settled himself down on one after poking it to make sure it was solid.
“I’m in,” he said, still not looking at me.
“Good,” Talya said briskly. “Let’s figure out a plan.”
“Well, obviously we could go to the mayor. Or the police,” Talya said for the second or third time, after we had been kicking ideas around for half an hour without agreeing on anything. “But if we’re going to save the town without implicating Macie, I think we’re going to have to stop Aubra ourselves.”
“Okay,” Kellen said, sounding unconvinced. “How do you suggest we go about stopping a Natural?”
“The same way the Inquisitors did,” Talya replied, remarkably cheerfully considering the subject matter.
“You mean angelica,” I filled in.
“Exactly.”
“Wait a sec,” Kellen interjected. “I thought angelica was banned? Only law enforcement can get it.”
“That’s true,” Talya agreed. “Unless you find it growing wild. Which Macie did.”
“Here?” he asked, amazed. “In Witchtown?”
“By the river,” I told him. “That day we figured out there was rowan in the water.”
Kellen let out a low whistle.
“What will it do to her?” he asked. “I’m not an herbalist, so I only know the basics.”
I looked over at Talya. I didn’t know much more than the basics either, but I had a feeling she did.
“Based on what I’ve read, it varies,” she said. “Depends on the strength of the witch and the potency of the herb. I still haven’t seen the angelica you found, but since it’s summer, it’s probably pretty immature. Potency might be an issue. But at the very least, it should prevent her from using magic against us. Even in its weakest form, it takes away a Natural’s most important advantage.”
“And what about its strongest form?” I asked.
She sucked in a breath.
“It kills. But only in large amounts, which we don’t have, and only when it’s at peak maturity, which ours isn’t. I can almost totally guarantee that we won’t kill her.”
“Almost totally?” Kellen echoed worriedly.
“Well, nothing in life is certain,” Talya reminded him, and then she slid off her stool. “I need to see what we’re working with before I speculate any further.”
I started to get up as well, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“I think I can find it, based on what you told me. You stay here. And talk.” She cocked her head over at Kellen.
She left before I could argue with her, and when the door of the Depot closed behind her, the silence that was left behind was painful.
I looked down at my feet. Gayle had said that Kellen and Talya would see me through this. But the truth was, she had no idea what this was. That was the entire problem with taking her word for it.
“Macie?”
“Yeah?”
I looked over at him. He looked tired, like he hadn’t slept well the night before. I wondered if that meant he was regretting what he had said to me. Or maybe he was regretting not having said even more.
He drew in a breath, and I got the strangest feeling that he was about to tell me something. Something important. My ears perked, and a shadow of my old doubts about him peeked over my shoulder.
But he only said, “What are we going to do, once we have your mom under the influence of the angelica?”
I let out a slow breath, and my misgivings about him fell away.
“I don’t know. Let’s just see if it works, okay? Then we’ll figure it out.”
Because honestly, and with all due respect to Talya, the thought of a simple, innocent-looking plant taking down Aubra O’Sullivan made me want to laugh.
I was going to have to see it to believe it.
Even after Talya returned, angelica in hand, and we hammered out a plan, I was still having a hard time summoning up much confidence. Which turned out to be kind of a good thing, because it’s hard to be nervous about something when you’re ninety-nine percent sure it isn’t going to work. That was the only way I was able to sit across a table from Kellen and sip my water in relative calm at Odin’s Tavern for the hour and a half it took for Aubra to walk in.
I drank water. Kellen worked his way through three pints of Odin’s ginger ale, explaining that he was the only one in town who actually liked it.
When my mother finally breezed in, arm in arm with Percy, the first stab of true apprehension hit me.
I had never had the guts to face her with anything other than attitude, and I was pretty sure she was immune to that. Part of me was desperately curious, in a wide-eyed-child kind of way, to find out what it would feel like to hit her with something substantial.
Something like the herb that Talya was, at this moment, hiding under the bar.
My mother noticed me right away, but gave me only the barest of glances before taking a seat beside Percy at the bar. I squirmed and turned all of my concentration to looking like I wasn’t about to fall off my chair with anticipation.
Kellen must have been thinking the same thing, because he leaned forward suddenly and took my hand, which was resting on top of the table.
“Talk to me,” he said. “We can’t just sit here silently; it looks weird.”
“What should we talk about?” I asked. Over his shoulder, I had a perfect view of the bar. Odin was nowhere to be seen. Talya had talked him into letting her work a daytime shift, and she was putting napkins down in front of my mother and Percy.
Kellen squeezed my hand.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. His tone was more inquisitive than demanding.
“What do you mean?” I squeaked, even though I was pretty sure that my mother was too far away to hear anything other than the rise and fall of our voices. “I told you everything!”
“Not everything, no. You didn’t mention that you were working against your mother now. From everything you told me . . . you know, last night, after we . . . I assumed you were onboard with whatever her plans were for Witchtown.”
“Surprise,” I said, watching his eyes.
He looked down at the table, at our hands, and shifted his fingers so that they were between mine.
“I’ve never had so much difficulty figuring a person out,” he said. “Just when I think I’m getting close, something happens that makes me doubt everything.”
I blinked. I could have said the same thing about him. At least, I would have said that before I found out about his mom.
“Do you think you could ever let somebody know you for real?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. Rafe had known me. Not totally, not everything, but enough. He had
n’t wanted to know the rest. Hadn’t needed to. But Kellen did. What did that mean?
“I wonder if that’s why I like you so much,” he said, mostly to himself.
“I thought you didn’t,” I said.
“I lied. I thought that was obvious. I do like you, Macie. More than I probably should.”
“I like you too,” I said, stretching out my fingers between his. “I don’t . . . I don’t want you to forget about me.”
“I won’t,” he promised, his blue eyes catching mine across the table.
Over Kellen’s shoulder, I saw my mother throw her head back and down the last of whatever had been in her glass.
I stiffened, waiting.
Kellen felt it through our intertwined hands. He didn’t look over his shoulder, just watched my face carefully. He would be able to tell by my reaction what was going on.
My mother put the empty glass down on the bar, in front of Talya. Then she turned slightly on her stool and regarded the chandelier that hung down from the center beam on the tavern ceiling. It was a tangled web of interconnected metal candleholders, but only about half of the candles were lit.
“A bit dim in here, don’t you think?” I heard her say.
She pointed, and the unlit candles burst into flame, instantly brightening the entire room.
Then she winked at me and turned back to Percy.
Talya picked up the discarded glass and shook her head slightly at me.
I let out the breath I had been holding.
The angelica hadn’t worked.
“Did you give her enough?” Kellen asked, as we walked back to the Depot.
“I gave her a lot,” Talya said. “I put twice as much into her second drink. Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s too immature?” I suggested.
“Maybe,” Talya said, sounding unconvinced.
“It’s too bad we don’t know any other Naturals to try it on,” Kellen said.
I blinked as I caught sight of a small, curly head peeking out from the side of the Depot.
“Aimee?” I called.
The curls disappeared, and I heard the sound of running feet.
“She’s a bit scared of you right now,” Talya informed me. “She said you yelled at her the other day.”
“She’s been following me around like a shadow,” I said, with more than a twinge of guilt. “I might have lost my temper. I’d like to apologize, if she’ll let me.”
“She’ll come around,” Talya assured me as we arrived at the door of the Depot. “And as for the angelica, I think we should try again.”
Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a fistful of angelica blossoms. She extracted a few stems and held them out to me.
“Try grinding these up and putting them in her tea or coffee. Whatever she drinks in the morning. Maybe it’ll have more of an impact when she has an empty stomach.”
I shrugged, and reached out my hand to take the flowers.
“I guess there’s no harm in—”
The moment my fingers closed around the angelica, my eyes rolled up and the sidewalk tilted strangely upward to hit the side of my face with a loud smack.
Then there was just darkness.
Chapter Twenty
“Ten thousand eight hundred and sixty-two.”
“What?” I asked.
“Dollars. I checked with the bank today. And I need ten thousand eight hundred and sixty-two dollars to pay off my father’s mortgage.”
“Oh, is that all?” I teased.
“And ninety-seven cents.”
I was ready to tease him again, but his eyes were suddenly very serious, so I shut my mouth.
“That’s maybe six months of work,” he said. “Then I’m free. We’re free.”
“Free?” I tried out the word.
Rafe took my hand and held it between us on the pillow.
“I can leave my dad then. And you can leave your mom.”
“I can’t. She protects me—”
“I can protect you.”
“Not the way she can.”
That silenced him for a moment.
“Then we’ll go where it doesn’t matter that you’re a Void. We don’t have to live in a Haven, you know.”
“We don’t?”
“It’s not only witches who need furniture. I could get an apprenticeship. On the outside. With the regular people.”
I frowned. I had no memory of living outside of a Haven. I hadn’t, not since Seattle. What would it be like to go from a world full of witches to one with no witches at all? I could probably do it. I could go without the community, the rituals, the weirdness. But could Rafe?
“You’d do that?” I asked. “For me?”
“Yes, I would. For you, I would.”
I laid my head on top of our hands and closed my eyes.
“And what would I do?” I asked dreamily. “Outside of a Haven?”
“Anything you wanted.”
I woke up to an unfamiliar smell assailing my nose.
I was stretched out on the dumpy couch in the apartment above the Depot. The smell was coming from the kitchenette. I couldn’t quite place what it was, but it was making my mouth water.
“Kellen, she’s awake.”
Talya, who had been perched on the arm of the couch at my curled-up feet, jumped down, walked to the other end of the couch, and knelt in front of me. Her large eyes, un-eyelinered today, looked concerned, and also faintly purple around the edges of the corneas. She must have been wearing colored contacts.
“Almost done,” Kellen called from the kitchenette. He opened the small oven and used mitts to extract the source of the smell: a huge, gooey, piping hot piece of pizza.
I had to look away before I started to openly drool. I turned back to Talya.
“How long was I out?”
“About half an hour,” she said. “But you were breathing and everything, so we figured you’d wake up eventually.”
Bradley swooped down from the ceiling. I flinched, bracing myself, but all he did was hover just above Talya’s head.
“Checking up on me?” I asked him. Then, because his eyes looked marginally less scary than usual, I added, “Don’t tell me you were worried.”
“Hmmphmm,” was his noncommittal reply as he slowly faded from view.
“Order up,” Kellen announced, and Talya moved aside so he could approach and wave the pizza under my nose.
I tried to breathe through my mouth. My stomach woke up anyway and demanded that I inhale the pizza or else. I could already taste the cheese, feel the grease running over my tongue, imagine the crustiness of the bread on the outside and the fluffiness on the inside . . .
If I didn’t stop this soon, I was going to pass out again.
“I can’t eat that.”
Kellen crouched down, still holding the pizza plate right in front of my face.
“Is that you talking or your mom?”
I glowered at him. My stomach glowered at me.
“Do you really object to pizza?” he persisted. “Or are you still just following your mom’s orders?”
I blinked. He was right, damn him, and not just about the food.
I took a deep, deliberate breath through my nose.
No, I most definitely did not object to pizza. Quite the opposite.
“Give me that.”
Kellen brightened and put the plate into my hands.
“Fresh from Gayle’s bakery,” he informed me. “She calls it Pentagram Pizza: it’s the best pizza in town.”
“Also the only pizza in town,” Talya added, settling herself on the arm of the couch again. “Kellen thinks that if you hadn’t been doing the raw vegan thing, you wouldn’t have reacted so strongly to the angelica.”
I closed my lips around my first bite of the pizza and had to stifle a groan. It was still a little too hot to eat comfortably, but I didn’t care. It was even better than what I had been imagining. Why, oh why, had I ever voluntarily given up cheese?
A fe
w bites later, I emerged from my revelry to find Talya and Kellen both staring at me. The combination of their serious expressions and the unaccustomed heaviness of the processed food made my stomach lurch, when I had expected it to be rejoicing.
I swallowed hastily.
“Why did the angelica affect me at all?” I asked, voicing the question we all had to be thinking.
Kellen and Talya exchanged a look.
“We have a theory about that, too,” Talya said, a bit uneasily. “Tell her, Kellen.”
Kellen ran a hand through his hair.
“Well, for one thing, you’re immune to rowan.”
“You know why that is,” I countered, stuffing another bite into my mouth. Suddenly, I felt the need to argue. To prevent him from spelling out their theory.
“I know why you think it is,” he corrected me. “I have always disagreed. Especially now.”
“I used to think you were a Void too,” Talya said, jumping in. “When I couldn’t read you, I assumed that’s what it meant. But I’ve done some research since—”
“You thought I was a Void and you didn’t say anything?” I snapped, angrily.
“You thought the same thing about me at first,” she said calmly, not rising to the bait. “I didn’t have to read you to figure that out. You never said anything either.”
“Yeah, but you researched it,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of to accuse her with. It was lame, but it was all I had.
She took a deep breath. Determined, I think, not to let my attitude bother her.
“The Archives house Reginald Harris’s personal library,” she said, crossing her legs and flashing me a temporarily violet-eyed glare. “Why else do you think I took that boring job? I wanted to find out about myself. About other people like me. I thought I couldn’t read you because you were a Void. But I think I was wrong about that. I don’t think it’s Voids who are immune to my readings; it’s Naturals.”
“But you read my mom,” I blurted.
“Yes,” Talya said pointedly. “I did.”
I bit my lip.
“Look at the facts, Macie,” Kellen said, in his teacher voice. “You’re immune to rowan. So you’re not a Learned. And the angelica knocked you out cold, but it didn’t affect your mother.”
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