“And neither will Mariah,” Geo said thoughtfully.
“You know about Mariah?”
“Everybody knows about Mariah,” Jonna said. “She’s running around town acting like she’s about to give birth to the baby Jesus.”
I thought about my mother’s dire prediction of the complications to come. But that was a problem for another time.
“You plan to destroy it?” I said to Jonna. “You never mentioned that.”
She turned her amber gaze to me. “You have an objection?”
“It would have been nice if you’d told me,” I said, annoyed. I don’t like being tested. But instead of engaging, I said, “We need more people.”
“Tessa and her cousins are all in,” Jonna said. “They just don’t want to be seen as Blackwood or Harrison allies in case the Wixsteds find the book first.”
“What about the Riquelmes?” I knew my World Sys teacher was part of that clan and Ms. Izquierdo struck me as a remarkably sensible woman.
“She tends to stay out of witch business,” Jonna said. “You know what they say, ‘those who can, do; those who can’t, teach?’”
I nodded. “So, it’s true she only has that one talent?”
“Teleporting is a pretty good talent,” Geo said.
“I’m not dissing her,” I said. “Just trying to figure out what we have to work with here.”
“We could really use a Wixsted,” Geo said. “Even if we find it by ourselves, it’s going to take someone from all the families to destroy it.”
“No Wixsteds,” Jonna said.
And that’s where the matter stood until the day Remi died.
7
A New Perspective
It was mid-November. My friends back in L.A. were full of plans for which Harvest or Homecoming Dance they’d be going to and which boy or girl would be their escort. Ali and her family were going to their place in Mexico for Thanksgiving and Travis was flying to Paris to visit his father, who was shooting a movie there. I couldn’t very well tell them that the biggest thing I had going on was the search for an ancient book of magic.
I knew my California life was fading away and it made me sad.
The weather had turned cold and drizzly and gray, and that didn’t help. “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” my mother said. “Make sure to take your vitamin D.”
Dad didn’t even notice. It seemed more and more that Mom and I were just distractions in his life, and he resented having to take any time out to deal with us.
The only time he’d noticed me in weeks was the day he found me going through Ned’s library for the umpteenth time, just in case I’d overlooked a magic book in disguise.
“What are you doing in here?” he asked when he saw me up on the kitchen foot stool so I could reach the books on the top shelves.
“Just rearranging things,” I said. “Everything’s so disorganized.”
I knew my father would buy that excuse. My own books are kept in rigid order—arranged according to height and subject matter and sometimes even by color and width.
“Leave them the way they are,” he said, and there was a sharpness to his words. I hesitated, and he said, “I mean it.” He must have seen something in my face because he took a breath. “It’s just…I need to index all Ned’s books and I have a system.”
“Okay,” I said. I climbed down the stool and folded it up under my arms. My father waited until I was out the door, then I heard him lock it. Unlike Jonna, I didn’t yet know the spell for unlocking locks.
And why would he need to lock the library anyway? What was in there he didn’t want me to see?
I intended to tell Jonna and Geo about the incident the next day, but I didn’t have classes with them until the afternoon. I was taking a test in calculus when a kid—Remi’s friend Lucas—came running into the classroom. “Sorry Mr. Patel,” he said, “I need Wix.”
Wix rose out of his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“Remi’s dead.”
I could feel Wix’s fear. “What?”
Lucas was already running out of the classroom. Wix followed and I followed him. Mr. Patel didn’t try to stop either of us.
Lucas led us to the foot of one of the big double staircases that rose from the mansion’s huge foyer.
Remi was crumbled at the foot of the stairs, unmoving.
“Remi,” Wix said, and there was so much raw pain in the word that Lucas and I both flinched.
Wix went to Remi and bent over him. I could tell from his body language that Lucas had been right. Remi wasn’t just unconscious, he was dead.
“What happened?” I asked Lucas.
“He was pushed,” Lucas said.
“Who pushed him?”
“The old man’s ghost,” Lucas said.
I got a chill. Efraim? I wanted to know more but my attention was diverted by the sight of Wix holding Remi in his arms and keening as he rocked back and forth.
“Go get the headmistress,” I said to Lucas, and then I walked over to Wix and Remi. The little boy’s eyes were open but sightless and there was a look of surprise frozen on his face.
Wix looked up at me with haunted eyes. “He’s dead, Laine.”
Maybe not.
I knelt beside Wix and put my hand on Remi’s lifeless arm. There was no pulse that I could feel, and to my horror it seemed his flesh was already growing cold.
No, I howled inside my mind. Not Remi. For a moment it was hard to catch my breath. But then a great sense of peace settled over me. I suddenly knew what my talent was as I felt my chest fill with sunlight and warmth that passed from me into Remi as the demon shard began to throb. I channeled that dark energy into Remi too, fusing it with the golden essence flowing from me and forcing him back to life.
He convulsed once and then blinked and struggled to sit up. “Easy there,” Wix said.
“What’s wrong with my leg?” Remi said. “It hurts.”
His left leg looked okay but his right leg, was bent at an impossible angle, a branch of bone sticking out of a hole in his uniform pants. I put my hand on his knee and he sucked a pained breath. “Straighten your leg,” I said, “and it’ll stop hurting.”
Wix shot me a questioning look but Remi didn’t hesitate. As he stretched his leg, the shattered bone slipped ack into place, the tendons and muscles and blood vessels knitting together. I felt the healing through my hands, vibrations like some sort of wonderful music.
Remi sat up straighter and looked around at the crowd that had gathered. They were stunned to silence by what they’d just seen.
The scrum of students parted to let the headmistress through. Ms. Lavollie glared at all of us. “What’s going on here?”
“Remi fell,” Wix said, straightening up and offering his hand to his cousin who took it and stood up.
“He was pushed,” Lucas said softly.
“He fell,” Wix said, and there was some kind of magic compulsion behind his words because Ms. Lavollie just nodded.
“That was very careless of you Remi. Your pants are ruined.”
“Sorry,” Remi said. “I hurt my leg, but Laine fixed it.” All eyes turned to me.
The headmistress gave me a disapproving look, then surveyed the rest of the assembled students. “Everyone back to their classes now.” She turned to me, Remi, and Wix. “That means you too.” She made a little “shooing’ motion. “Go on.”
Everyone gradually dispersed and Lucas and Remi went on to their class they’d been headed for when the “accident” happened.
Wix and I headed back to our calculus class without speaking. I was still reeling from the implications of what had happened. I hadn’t known about my talent because—in Remi’s words—I hadn’t had a need to use it before now.
Later, as I walked to my locker, Wix fell into step beside me. “There hasn’t been a necromancer in Stony Point in more than three hundred years,” Wix said.
“Necromancer? No. I just healed—”
“He was dead, Laine.”
<
br /> I knew Wix was right. Remi had been dead as a dinosaur.
At lunch, Remi and Lucas joined me as if it was just another Thursday and the most exciting thing happening that day was the appearance of pumpkin spice yogurt on the dessert table.
But halfway through the meal, Wix showed up. He looked at Remi and Lucas and said, “Would you guys mind giving me and Laine a little privacy?”
Remi looked at me. I nodded. It’s okay.
“Okay,” Remi said. “Just don’t be mean to her.”
He and Lucas took their trays and set down at a table out of earshot. Wix sat down across from me.
“I’m not going to be mean to you,” he said.
“Glad to hear it,” I said, spooning up the last of my pumpkin spice yogurt and deciding it wasn’t something I’d need to eat again.
Wix pulled something out of his pants pocket and placed it on the table between us. It was a golden spider on the table between us, this one about the size of a quarter.
A marker.
Wix really didn’t understand humans at all. I looked down at the token. “So how exactly does this work?” I asked. “The bigger the spider, the bigger the favor? Could I trade in five little spiders for one of these?”
Wix looked surprised by the question. He started to answer, but I just rolled over him. “Do you make any spiders in platinum or rose gold? Yellow gold clashes with my hair.”
“Stop,” he said.
“No, I really want to know. If someone opens a door for you, do you tip them a spider? If someone drives you home from a party, do you leave a few spiders on the seat in appreciation?”
Wix put his hand over mine. “Laine. Please stop.”
Keenly aware of the light pressure of his hand on mine, I stopped talking and waited for him to say whatever it was he wanted to say.
“Remi is like a little brother to me. He’s the only one in my life who…”
I think he wanted to say, “loves me,” but what he said was, “cares about me.”
“He worships you,” I said.
“He shouldn’t,” Wix said.
“I don’t disagree,” I said, which was a bitchy thing to say, but I’d been pissed off at him since that first day of school, partly because I was attracted to him and knew he was Mr. Very Wrong. To his credit, Wix took the hit without wincing and that made me feel worse.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said, and reached for the spider with the hand that wasn’t sitting on mine. I put my hand on the spider. “You can’t have it back,” I said. “I’ve started a collection.”
He pulled his free hand back but kept the other resting on top of mine. I let it sit there. It felt kind of good.
“Just saying ‘thank you’ would be fine, you know.”
Wix shook his head. “Why would you do something for me without expecting a reward?” He sounded genuinely curious. It wasn’t for you, I thought.
“Because that’s what people do,” I said.
“No,” he said. “People do favors for me because they want favors in return. It’s a business transaction. Nobody gets hurt as long as it’s kept businesslike.”
I suddenly understood Wix a whole lot better. I still wasn’t sure how I’d managed to do what I did, but it sure as hell wasn’t so I could claim a favor to be named later from Wix.
“I love Remi too,” I said, and realized that was exactly how I felt about the boy who’d befriended me. I loved him like a pesky little brother. I slid the spider back across the table to him, changing it back into a quarter as I did.
All those hours practicing my transformations were coming in handy.
“I don’t want your marker Wix, but I could use a favor.”
“Name it,” he said without hesitation, and a little bit of triumph in his voice.
See, you’re no different.
“I want you to help me find the Book of Wix.”
8
Family Values
“Are you crazy?” Jonna said when I told her and Geo what I’d recruited Wix. “Did I not tell you that the last person—literally the last person on earth—who should get the grimoire is Wilton Ivor Wixsted?”
“He thinks he owes me a favor,” I said. “And you know how Wixsteds feel about favors.”
“Did you really resurrect Remi?” Geo asked.
I sighed. The story had been all over the school within hours. I’d been surprised my father hadn’t heard it.
“Remi took a bad fall that knocked him out,” I said carefully. “I revived him.”
I saw they didn’t believe me. “It seems my talent is for healing.”
“Yeah,” Geo muttered. “If you want any help training that…healing…talent, you should talk to my father.” He looked somber. “He has some experience along those lines.”
“Really?” Jonna said. “You never told me that.”
Geo shrugged. “He doesn’t like anyone to talk about it,” he said.
“I’d be grateful,” I said. “I could really use some guidance.” I kept hearing Wix say the word, “necromancer.”
“And you don’t want to talk about it with your father?” Jonna said. “Interesting.”
That was one word for it. The day it had happened, I’d gone straight to his office on the third floor of the school, anxious to tell him what had happened, desperate to get his advice and insight.
But when I knocked on his door, he’d glanced up from his laptop and looked at me like he couldn’t quite remember who I was. “Yes?” he’d said, like I was a random student who’d dropped by outside of office hours.
“Are you busy?” I’d asked, ignoring his body language, which just screamed, I am busy doing important stuff and too busy to talk to you.
“Yes,” he said. “Can it wait until we get home?”
“Sure,” I’d said. But he hadn’t come home that night until late and by then, I’d already retreated to my room. At breakfast he’d seemed distracted, and he’d clearly forgotten the conversation altogether. I hadn’t brought it up again. But still, I didn’t need to hear Jonna being snarky about it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“No need to get defensive,” she said.
“I don’t hear you talking about your father very much,” I said. And the minute I said it, I knew I’d said something incredibly stupid.
“My father had a talent for languages,” she said. “He could memorize them the way someone else could memorize a poem. All he had to do was read one page of a language and he knew it like a native speaker.”
She paused and I knew I really, really, really didn’t want to hear the rest of her story, but I’d opened the door to her pain, so the least I could do was let her unload it on me.
“He was working as an interpreter in Afghanistan,” she said. “An I.E.D. killed him. He was thirty-seven. I was nine. Anything else you want to know about my father?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing that she did not give a damn about what I felt or what exactly I was saying I was sorry for—her father’s death, my decision to involve Wix, my existence in general.
There was a brief silence and then Geo said, “We’re a month away from the solstice.”
Ned had died on the summer solstice, ostensibly from a heart attack. None of us looking for the grimoire had any idea if there was a significance to the upcoming date, but I knew Jonna shared my fear that there was. One of the first things Jonna had told me was that Ned had been murdered, and I’d been alert for clues to the killer’s identity ever since. At first, I was sure that the culprit had to be a Wixsted but knowing about Mariah and her baby made that unlikely. I didn’t know enough about the other witch families to even make an educated guess who might have done it.
Tessa and her cousin Anne Vo were part of the Li family, but they’d never been anything but nice to me and as far as I could tell, kept their magic very much to themselves. The only member of the Riquelme family I’d met was Ms. Izquierdo and I was pretty much teacher’s pet
in her class.
Or was I? Maybe she was just pretending to like me because she, like Efraim Wixsted, thought I might know where the grimoire was.
“Remi doesn’t remember the accident that killed him,” I said, “but Lucas told me that he saw Efraim’s revenant push him down the stairs. He meant to kill him.”
“Lucas was pretty shaken up,” Jonna said of her little brother. “He’s been having night terrors.”
Poor kid.
“We’re not going to be rid of Efraim until we destroy the book,” Geo said.
“Wait a minute,” I said struck by an idea I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of before. “Could Efraim have killed Ned?”
“Of course, Efraim killed Ned,” Jonna said. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Apparently not,” I said. “You think Efraim killed Ned before he could tell him where the book is?”
“That’s my working hypothesis,” Jonna said. “Your uncle’s autopsy revealed that he had a hidden heart condition. He might have wanted to tell Efraim, but his heart exploded before he could.”
I didn’t even want to think about how Jonna had gotten access to Ned’s autopsy report.
“Hiding in plain sight,” I said. “Maybe it is, and we haven’t been looking in the obvious place.”
“And that would be…?” Jonna said.
“In Lewis Wixsted’s house,” I said. “Mariah’s still living there, right?”
Jonna nodded slowly.
“So, at some point, she probably invited Ned to stay for a sleepover. And he would have enjoyed that—sleeping with her right under her father’s disapproving nose.”
“That would have made it more exciting,” Jonna agreed.
Geo looked from her to me. “You guys are scaring me,” he said, but Jonna and I were in sync.
“Lewis would probably never think to look in his own house,” Jonna said.
“And Mariah’s so caught up in proving Ned was her baby daddy that she’s not even thinking about the grimoire,” I said.
“You’re right,” she said. “We need Wix. I can’t disable the wards on Lewis’ house.”
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 22