I reached into my blazer pocket and pulled out a handful of loose change. I separated a penny and handed it to him.
He curled it in his fist for a moment and then opened his hand. Where the penny had been was now a golden spider token. Remi wasn’t even breathing hard. He handed the second spider to me. “I can’t take this,” I said.
“It was your penny,” he said, so I took it.
“Remi, this is amazing. If you can do this, you can do any of the stupid transformation assignments Eastman gives.”
The boy got a peculiar look on his face—like he’d never even considered that possibility.
“It’s just, I don’t need a box or an egg or a balloon or any of the things he wants us to make. And if I don’t need it, then there doesn’t seem any point to doing it and I can’t make it happen.”
“Maybe next time he asks, tell yourself you need it to get a grade. That you need it to get him off your back.”
The look on his face was priceless. And what happened next reminded me of that moment in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller suddenly connects the letters Annie Sullivan is tracing in her palm with the objects they represent.
He picked up his fork with a thoughtful look and held it loosely in his left hand. “What do I need right now Laine?”
“How about a gardening fork,” I said.
And just like that, he had a gardening fork in his hand. The surprised joy on his face was so infectious. I clapped.
He grabbed the backpack he’d slung over his chair and started pulling out random objects. He lined them up on the table between us. His phone, a black sharpie, a bicycle lock, and a small pen knife inlaid with mother-of-pearl on the handle. I pointed to it.
Remi picked it up and folded his fingers over it. Suddenly there was a beautiful Spanish fan in his hand. He shook it out with a flourish. Then changed it back into the pocketknife.
“My grandfather gave me this,” he said, almost apologetically.
I suddenly noticed that other students were crowded around to watch the show. For the rest of the lunch hour he transformed the items on the table—a small bottle of hot sauce a cute girl name Annie donated, a spare house key, someone’s lucky rock. He turned his milk carton into a small fishbowl with a guppy in it, then turned that into a snow globe with the Seattle skyline and the Space Needle in it. Finally, he turned the snow globe into a bottle shaped like the Eiffel Tower and filled with an almond and honey hand lotion, which he gave to me.
“I know you like French stuff,” he said shyly.
“I do.” A week ago, I might have wondered how he knew that but now I just assumed that everybody knew everything about everyone.
“Can you make things change without touching them?” I asked.
He looked at the bicycle lock on the table. Nothing happened. He looked at me. “Not yet,” he said.
I liked that he hadn’t just said, “No.”
“You’re awesome,” I said, as the bell rang.
He grinned. “That’s what Wix always says.”
Really?
That afternoon in class, Remi practically dared Mr. Eastman to call on him. Finally, he did, tossing him a fuzzy wool sock and ordering him to transform it into a Christmas stocking. His expression said, “If you can,” as clearly as if he’d said it out loud. Remi glanced at me, which diverted the teacher’s attention for a nano-second and in that space, Remi transformed the sock into the most elaborate Christmas stocking ever made. It was red velvet, embellished with pearls and iridescent beads, with embroidery and appliques.
Eastman looked amazed, but then suspicion settled on his rat-like features. “Change it back,” he said. So, Remi did. Eastman snatched the sock from him and examined it, as if somehow Remi had switched socks on him and carried out some mundane feat of sleight of hand.
I bet that’s the last time he calls on Remi, I thought.
From then on, Remi ate lunch with me every day, and we were soon joined by a small group of his friends, most of them younger than he was. I felt like a babysitter, but once they got over their shyness of me and started revealing their personalities, they turned out to be surprisingly engaging companions. Lunch became the highlight of my day, and not because of the food, although it was pretty good.
One afternoon Wix stopped by the table as Lucas, Jonna Harrison’s little brother, was describing the plot of the latest movie he’d seen, complete with little holographic clips of scenes he was conjuring into mid-air. It was an impressive bit of magic and done so casually I was jealous.
“Robbing the cradle, Laine?” Wix said, silencing everyone at the table.
“Don’t be a dick,” Remi said. “Laine is nice.”
Wix shot Remi a lethal death stare that would have leveled most people, but Remi stared right back at him.
“She’s a Blackwood,” Wix said.
“I like her,” Remi said. Wix just shook his head and stalked away. Remi watched him go, troubled. I’d learned that Wix—real name Wilton Ivor Wixsted—was Remi’s cousin and I knew that Remi worshipped the ground the older boy walked on. It was a big deal that he’d defended me to Wix, and I was touched.
Later, walking to class, I asked him why Wix hated the Blackwoods.
“It’s because of what your dad did to his aunt.”
I did the relationship math. “Your mother?”
“Other side of the family,” he said. “There are a lot of us.”
I remembered what the shopkeeper at Witch Tree Wonders had said to me weeks ago. “Everyone in town is related to the Wixsteds in some way or another.”
“So, Wix’s aunt?”
“Her name was Emily.”
Was. This will not be a happy story.
“Emily was engaged to Wix’s dad Lewis.” He looked at me to see if I understood why that was important. “That’s a big deal because women aren’t important in the Wixsted coven, but since Lewis is head of the coven, she’d have had some power.”
“Why?” I asked, meaning, why don’t women have power?
Remi shrugged. “I know, it’s sexist. My mother complains about it all the time.”
With good reason, I thought. That explained a lot about Wix right there. I could tell Remi was really uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken, but I had to know more. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, “go on.”
The rest of the story came out in a rush. “So, Emily and Lewis were supposed to get married but then your dad raped her, and she killed herself and he married Amelia instead.”
“Wait, no,” I said. “That can’t be what happened.”
“It was,” he said, so matter-of-factly my heart sank. And then the pieces slotted into place—all my mother’s passive-aggressive comments, the reason my father had been living on the down-low.
“No,” I said slowly, figuring it out for myself. “My father took the blame for his brother. No one wanted Ned to leave because he was the head of the Blackwood coven. So, Dad took the fall and left town. He was hiding out my whole life. I didn’t even know he was a witch until Ned died and we came here.”
No wonder Ned had left my father everything—he’d walked away from everything—including his magic—to cover up his brother’s crime.
It made me sick. And I realized that protesting that it wasn’t my father’s fault didn’t really change the outcome. Emily had been raped and was dead. And a Blackwood witch had been responsible.
5
Let Them Eat Cake
Life went on. I was tolerated but not really part of the social eco-system that was Wixsted Academy, though I’d progressed to the “small talk” phase with half a dozen people who said “hey” to me every time they ran into me in the halls between classes.
A week before Halloween, everything changed.
I’d skipped my first class to study in the library for a calculus test. Upperclassmen could do that as long as they had a B+ average in whatever class they skipped. About half an hour in, I’d gone into the hallway to get a d
rink of water and realized there was something uncanny going on. Everyone was in class, but it was deathly still, no ambient noise coming from behind closed doors. And despite the hall being lined with windows, there seemed to be no light coming in at all. In fact, even as I processed this, the hallway seemed to get even darker.
The scar on my breast where the demon-shard had entered began to itch and burn.
At the end of the hallway there was suddenly a bank of darker shadow filled with fizzing sparks. I thought at first there was a short in one of the lights but then the darkness somehow thickened and coalesced into the shape of a man.
Somewhere a classroom door banged open.
I felt someone come up behind me.
“Do you see that?” I asked without taking my eyes off the figure.
Yes.”
It was Jonna. I nearly sagged with relief.
“What is it?” I asked, completely creeped out by the silent figure, a man in his late middle age, with long, shaggy white hair like a retired rock star. He was wearing what I thought of as “frontier clothes,” complete with a waistcoat and a pocket watch. Whoever he was, he wasn’t from this era. And though he was still, his body language radiated pure menace. For some reason, that rage seemed aimed directly at me.
“Jonna?” I wasn’t sure what I was trying to ask her, and the answer I got was not reassuring.
“You been paying attention in your Language Arts class?” she asked.
“Yes, but—”
“I need you to throw the protection spell right now.”
The protection spell had been the first thing we’d learned, and we’d practiced it for an hour a day for a week. I knew the protection spell.
“What are you going to be doing?”
“The banishing. Say the spell now Laine.”
I started reciting the words as fast as I could. For a minute I was afraid I wouldn’t remember all of them, but I’d repeated them so many times, they were burned into my memory like the times tables. As I chanted, Jonna moved toward the man mumbling her own spell. I could feel the power of the words as she spoke them. Each one felt like a blow.
I followed her as she moved, trying to imagine a shield of white light around both of us. It was hard to maintain focus as she wove her own spell. Her words kept breaking my concentration.
As we got closer to the man, the temperature in the hallway suddenly got colder. A lot colder. I could feel the cold reaching out to freeze us in place but Jonna began to whisper her spell more urgently and the heat of her words melted the ice.
There was a brief, intense pressure that pushed my breath out of my lungs and made my ears pop. Then…nothing.
“Is it gone?” I asked.
“For now.”
“What was it?”
“I need some cake,” Jonna said, instead of answering my question, taking my arm and pulling me toward the exit.
It was eleven in the morning, but far be it from me to get between a girl and her cake.
I followed Jonna out to the student parking lot. She pressed a button on her key fob and the lights on a cherried-out, fire engine-red vintage Shelby Mustang blinked.
“Nice wheels,” I said.
“My older brother’s a gearhead,” she said.
We drove a hole-in-the-wall place called the Strawberry Street Deli. The place was packed, and we weren’t the only Wixsted Academy students there. There was a display case near the door but Jonna didn’t pause to look at the offerings, just led the way to an empty booth in the back.
A waitress materialized instantly. “The usual sweetie?” she asked Jonna, who nodded. “And for you?” she asked.
“What’s hummingbird cake?” I’d seen the name chalked on a board by the display case.
“Good choice,” she said, without answering my question. “Anything to drink?”
I guess I’ll find out, I thought. “Just water,” I said. She nodded and turned away, returning a minute later with two glasses of ice water and two ginormous slabs of cake—some kind of pink cake with pale yellow icing for Jonna and a piece of hummingbird cake for me. I took a bite and nearly swooned. Until that moment my favorite dessert in the world had been carrot cake, but this cake was an order of magnitude tastier—pineapple and bananas and toasted pecans topped off with a cream cheese frosting so good I could have eaten a bowl full of it.
I watched Jonna forking up her cake with the happy concentration of a kindergartner at snack time.
“What is that? Strawberry?”
Jonna, her mouth full, just nodded.
“I’ve never had strawberry cake.”
“then order it next time,” she said. “This piece is all mine.”
A patron accidentally jostled our table as he passed, causing some of Jonna’s water to spill onto the table.
I reached for a napkin to blot it up, but without even looking, Jonna twirled her fingers and the water spun into a perfect miniature cyclone and disappeared into thin air, leaving the table dry.
“Wow,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’re easily impressed.”
“I’m new at this,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve noticed.” She ate another bite, obviously in no hurry to satisfy my curiosity, so I forked up another ten thousand calories of hummingbird cake. We ate silently for a while as I looked the place over. It was decorated in country kitsch, lots of rooster platters and copper. It felt homey. And in here, the constant magic buzz of the city was muted. I wondered if the deli was warded.
Finally, Jonna pushed back from the table. I kept toying with my plate. There was still about half the piece of cake on it.
“You don’t have to keep eating,” Jonna said. “My cousin owns the place. We’re not going to get kicked out for loitering.”
“Does your cousin bake her own sweets?”
“He does,” she said, emphasizing the he and making me feel all kinds of sexist.
“Best cake I ever ate.”
She smiled. “Anton always appreciates a five-star Google review.”
Her smile faded and I knew she was thinking about our encounter with the spectral figure in the hallway.
“What did we just do?”
“Stopped trouble before it started,” Jonna said.
“So, who was that guy?”
“Efraim Wixsted.”
“Any relation to Ophelia Wixsted?”
“Her great-grandfather. Why? What do you know about Ophelia?”
“Nothing,” I admitted. “I’ve just heard the name.”
Jonna looked like she didn’t believe me. The strawberry cake hadn’t mellowed her out very much.
“He’s a ghost?”
“Not exactly,” Jonna said. She took a sip of water, enjoying torturing me. Finally, when I was about to take my leftover cake and go, she relented. “Okay, look. How much do you know about the feud between your family and the Wixsteds?”
“I know there is one. That’s about it.”
“Your father never filled you in?”
My father never filled me in on a lot of things, I thought. “It apparently slipped his mind,” I said. The sweet taste of cream cheese icing had turned to library paste in my mouth.
“I didn’t know about any of this until my uncle died,” I added. Even I wasn’t sure what “any of this” meant.
She saw my expression and her face changed. There were still a few bites of strawberry cake left on her plate, so she attacked them with unexpected ferocity. She finished the slice in four big bites. It was an impressive display of stress-eating. “You know your uncle was murdered, right?” she finally said.
Talk about a buzz kill. I reached for one of the folded-up cardboard takeaway boxes tucked between the napkin dispenser and the ketchup bottle. I was done eating cake for the day but there was no way I was going to waste such deliciousness. As I carefully transferred the leftovers from my plate to the box, I tried to process what she’d just said. Finally, I looked up at her. “No,” I sa
id. “I didn’t know that.” I had so many questions, but the one I asked was, “Why would anyone kill Ned?”
“Your uncle was killed for the Book of Wix.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s a grimoire,” she said. “He had it and it didn’t belong to him.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because he bragged about it.”
I must have looked skeptical because she added, “Your Uncle Ned was not a nice guy Laine.”
I had no answer for that, so I changed the subject. “Why is Efraim’s not-exactly-a-ghost hanging around the school?”
“Looking for you. The grimoire belongs to him and he thinks you have it.”
I didn’t like the use of present tense in relation to Efraim. I didn’t like the idea that he was still lurking around somewhere. “Could he have hurt us?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Ghosts can’t hurt you but Efraim’s not a ghost. He’s a revenant.”
“I could feel how powerful he was,” I said. “I’d never have been able to protect myself. You saved my life.”
“I did,” she said.
I looked at the chain of golden spiderweb charms circling her neck. “I don’t have a marker to give you,” I said.
She touched the necklace. “That’s all right. I know where you live.” She wasn’t smiling when she said it. The weight of the obligation settled on me.
“What now?” I asked.
She frowned. “You need to meet my grandmother.”
“I’ve got a calculus test next period.”
“That’s with Mr. Patel?”
I nodded.
“He’ll let you take a makeup test if you tell him you were with me.”
“Another cousin?”
“In-law. He’s married to my cousin James. And neither one of them has much love for the Wixsteds.” She gave me a pointed look. “Or the Blackwoods either.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And Laine, you need to be respectful when you meet my grandmother.”
“Of course I’ll be respectful of your grandmother,” I said, annoyed.
Jonna just gave me a look like, we’ll see.
Starlight & Shadows: A Limited Edition Academy Collection by Laura Greenwood, Arizona Tape, Juliana Haygert, Kat Parrish, Ashley McLeo, L.C. Mawson, Leigh Kelsey, Bre Lockhart, Zelda Knight Page 20