Witch-Child

by Gerilyn Marin

  "Well, if you're out of it, we can do this another day; it's not like there's a rush." He taps his fingers against something on the table in front of him and I notice, only now, that he has a ratty, old cloth-covered book resting beneath his hand.

  Bridgette Addison's journal is a few inches away from me, and here I am, so darned groggy I hadn't noticed before. Locking eyes on it, I feel a little burst of energy jolt through me. "I'm alright, Grey, really."

  "Fine," he says after a moment, gently slipping off an elastic band that's clearly been keeping the book together for a long time. "But no more of that spirit-channeling, or whatever that crap was."

  I reflexively glance around, still seeing only the librarian, but she either didn't hear him, or is pointedly ignoring us.

  "Shh," I snap in a whisper as I turn back to face him. "Can you not bring that up anymore, please? You're the only one who knows I can do that and I'd kinda like to keep it that way."

  "Why do you care if anyone knows?"

  I frown as I place my fingertips on the book. "Even in 'Spooky Hijinks Central,' there can still be such a thing as too weird."

  "Careful," he says with a cringe as I slide the journal away from him and open it to a random page.

  The handwriting is beautiful, looping and curly, but smudged in places—probably from the sweep of Bridgette's hand against the page as she wrote—and the paper feels delicate and worn; like it might crumble to bits from being handled and read too many times. I wonder how many times he's looked over these pages. I also wonder who in his family put him on this trail when he's already told me that his parents want nothing to do with his search.

  "Sorry. So, anyway, you never told me what your family thinks really happened."

  "I told you, we don't know."

  The page I turn to is a recollection of a normal day in his ancestor's life. Seems like Bridgette recorded it for that reason alone; a simple day with her children when her life is usually anything but simple was probably a remarkable thing for her.

  I flip to another entry and immediately wish I'd found a different one. "Sometimes I wish I had not left. Not only is there the mystery of what happened to my darling Jack," I try not to adopt a hollow tone as I read Bridgette's words, but I can't help it. "I don't care what was said of him, it cannot be true. I will not believe it. It is also that I miss my little angel. He no longer visits me, I think I have traveled too far for him. Poor Gabriel, I wonder if he is lonely, now."

  I give a start, feeling a touch on my cheek. When I lift my gaze from the book, Grey is looking at me uncertainly as he pulls his hand back, and makes a vague waving gesture toward my face. "Um, sorry, you were . . . crying."

  I blink and force a sniffle as I close the journal and wipe at my eyes. "I . . . was tearing. There's a difference. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sidetrack. So, anyway, there had to be someone who had an idea of what could have happened to Jack, right?"

  "Oh, well," he nods. Looking down at his hands, he says, "Yeah, um, the most popular was that he was having an affair with the wife of somebody important and they just caught up with him when no one was paying attention."

  "But you don't think so?"

  "I think maybe he was doing something he shouldn't have been, just not that sort of something."

  I flip, gently but idly, through the pages, skimming for something more clarifying than Bridgette's accounts of occurrences. "Something that what? Turned Drake's Cove into the happy bundle of sunshine it is now?"

  He shrugs one shoulder. "Well, it was the eighteen hundreds, witch trials on the East Coast had been over for almost two-hundred years. To have one here would have drawn a lot of negative attention to the area, don't you think? But if a guy who's leaving town up and disappears, who'd notice?"

  "So you do think he was a witch, like the bad kind, then?"

  "It's kinda more believable than 'devil', don't you think?"

  I'm back to the beginning of the journal, glossing over the retelling of how Bridgette and Jack met. "What is it you plan on doing to . . . break your family's connection with him?"

  "Well, I was going to . . . ." He trails off with a pained expression.

  "To . . . ?"

  Grey leans close again, murmuring in my ear. "Well, I wasn't sure what I was going to do at first, I'm not sure I was actually expecting to find Jack. Not sure how, but I'm . . . going to purify his remains. Salt and holy water, and that crap."

  I turn and look at him, not realizing sooner how near his face is to mine. "Wait, what? You don't even know what you're doing. Even if you figure out how to 'purify remains,' it might not change anything for you."

  "Not going to know until I try, am I?"

  "Okay." Seems like there's no talking the boy out of anything when he gets all uppity and determined like this. "So, we found him. You know where he is, why don't you just go and—"

  "And what? Dig him up and toss salt on his bones? I don't think it's going to be that simple."

  Oh. He has a point. I blink, trying to focus on the conversation, but . . . wow, the flecks of bright green in his blue eyes are distracting.

  "Okay," I force myself to say, "So what’s the plan, then?"

  He stammers as he holds my gaze. "S-see, this is why I want to find out what happened to him, so I can know if what I want to try will even work."

  Damn it, he's noticed something is up with how I'm looking at him.

  "You're asking me to believe in some . . . witchy sort of magic," I say in a reasonable tone, doing a stellar job of ignoring the feeling of his breath dancing over my skin.

  We really need to have more conversations where he doesn't have to be all up in my face.

  "You're telling me you don't? With everything you've seen living here?"

  "Fair point." Even so, it seems like he's asked me to wrap my head around an awful lot in the last twenty-four hours. Psychic or not, there are some things that are still difficult to get a grip on.

  "And if I can find a way to purify his remains," he pauses deliberately and forces a small gulp down his throat; I'm not sure if it's me, or the subject matter, that's making him nervous. "Maybe it'll give all the stuff that happens here a chance to die down."

  I can't quite process what he's saying, though I know he explained it clearly enough; I'm preoccupied with wondering how, exactly, I'm supposed to help him with spiritually sanitizing his ancestor's remains. "What?"

  "I mean, maybe it'll make Drake's Cove, you know, normal."

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Walking Phantom

  My thoughts screech to a halt. Drake's Cove and normal in the same sentence, without a healthy dose of sarcasm or a not-so-veiled reference to spooky business, either? This sort of thinking has simply never occurred to me before. I still don't understand a lot of what is going on. I shake my head, opening my mouth to speak, but my voice sticks in my throat.

  "Oh, my God, I was right! You guys are dating!"

  I whirl around in my chair, slapping Grey with my hair in the process, and see Stacy Bonham peering in through the library door.

  There's a huge grin on the cheerleader's face, even as the librarian shushes her and raises a gnarled finger to her lips in warning.

  "Ah, crap," I grumble as Stacy disappears from view.

  I close the journal and jump out of my chair, grabbing my bag. "Can I borrow this? I'll be careful with it, and I'll return it soon, I promise!"

  He catches my wrist just as I snatch up the book from the table. "What are you doing?"

  "Damage control."

  I remember to take the elastic band in my free hand as I slip my other hand from his grasp. "I'll text you later."

  By the time I get out into the hall, I don't see Stacy anywhere, and I'm not in the mood to run around searching, either. Peachy. Sighing, I ease open the book and start down the nearly-deserted hallway. People are just going to have to think I'm dating Grey, then. I'd have to be dense not to realize that the misunderstanding should at least make scoring time for priva
te conversations a bit easier.

  There's a good chunk of lunch period left; maybe I can grab a snack from the vending machines. I enter the stairwell, focused more on finding something of importance in Bridgette's words than on where I'm heading. A single phrase snags my attention, and I skip back to scan it a few more times.

  Frowning, I sit down on the top step and lean a shoulder against the metal bannister, overcome by the sudden feeling that I don't want to be distracted by the noisy crowd in the cafeteria. I run a finger over the soft, worn page, tracing her sentence, but what she'd written doesn't make much sense to me.

  "You didn't get very far."

  Grey's voice startles me out of my confused re-reading. I glance in his direction as he takes a seat beside me on the step.

  "You didn't tell me Jack had brothers." In fact, it only occurs to me as I say these words that there's been no mention of family from that time period, outside of Bridgette and Jack themselves.

  "They've never really come into the picture," he says with a small shrug.

  This leads directly into what stumps me in the journal. "Yeah, I don't understand. She says he had brothers that 'made the journey with him,' but she never met them, even though that should have meant they were all on the ship, and she ended up marrying Jack. Is there really no other mention of them? "

  He doesn't take the book from me; instead, he simply reaches around me, delicately pushes my finger off the page, and flips to a latter portion of the book.

  "No, but if you look, like, here, and there are a couple of other mentions, where she glimpsed someone that looked like him. We're talking, 'could be his twin,' like him."

  A blurred connection zips through my mind and I have to press my free hand—still tingling from where he'd brushed against it a second ago, but I'm so not about to let that show—to my forehead.

  "Okay, wait, so the places you've been to are the route your family traveled after coming to the States, and you said that those towns have devil-sightings, and Jack was said to have been a devil. He had brothers who came here with him, and . . . Bridgette saw guys who looked a lot like him in these other towns, so those had to have been his brothers.

  "And if that's so, if we guesstimate that a different brother was living in the each area your ancestors moved to, then based on that, he had to have at least four brothers. That's kind of a big family, it seems very bizarre that they all traveled here together, yet she hadn't met even one of them. She couldn't have ended up in those places by accident. Once, maybe, but just so happening to run into more than one of them, when she'd never met them before, is just too much of a coincidence, isn't it?"

  When I finish rambling, Grey is staring at me, unblinking. A bit startled by his surprised expression, I feel my own eyes widen in response.

  "Did I say something wrong?"

  "No, actually you just . . . hit the nail right on the head. It wasn't coincidence, she says that the areas she—and the other heads of the family down the line—moved to were chosen because she felt drawn there."

  He's still staring, and I feel very caught off guard by it, for some reason. I'm immediately aware of how quiet it is in the stairwell when neither of us is speaking, of how I can tell from the set of his shoulders in my peripheral vision that his breathing has slowed dramatically.

  Almost as if he can tell that I've noticed this, his lips part and he inhales, but it's a soft noise; I can barely hear his breath, even though I'm so close to him. It strikes me only now, in a dazed way, that he's turned a bit towards me and I'm sort of tucked into his side because of how he'd moved to turn the page in the journal.

  Ah, hell, we have a spark. No wonder Stacey already thinks we're an item.

  I clear my throat and snap my attention pointedly back to the book in my hands; the realization that he had to have just noticed I'm not oblivious to the chemistry at work between us effectively slaps sense into me.

  "If, um, if she, and other, later, people in your family, saw these guys who resembled Jack and these towns had stories about devils, then . . . I don't get it. Was your family the one making the stories up?"

  "No," he says quickly.

  I think he's trying to recover from whatever that almost-moment might have made him feel, but I'm not about to look up at him to confirm that notion. "That's where this gets even weirder, because the stories were already circulating when they got there, in every case."

  "Wait, so what you're saying is those . . . devils," I have trouble saying the word without making air quotes, "were actually Jack's brothers?"

  "Well, yes and no. I told you, I really don't have a whole lot to go on, so I don't know what to think. I figure they are more likely the ones who started those stories."

  My gaze roves the stairwell as I ask, "What, like, as a prank?"

  "Maybe, or maybe it was like a verbal marker. Like, they would know if one of them was in the area if they heard the story."

  "But you said people are still reporting sightings. How can that be possible if these were just stories, and the people that were supposed to have been pretending they were devils died two-hundred years ago?"

  "The more you nitpick, the weirder this gets," he says with a short laugh. "My guess is these 'sightings' are tied directly to the paranormal activity. Maybe it's something, I don't know, residual left over from whatever they did to make the places the way they are now."

  Now this, at least to my relatively spook-accustomed mind, makes sense. "So, like, ghosts?"

  "Um, maybe?" he answers, and I don't know if I'm not being clearly in how I'm asking, or if he just wants clarification.

  "I mean, in many of these kinds of incidents, at least half, if not more, of what we perceive is determined by what we think we're seeing, rather than what's actually there in front of us. Maybe people are seeing your great-great-great, whatever, uncles' ghosts—because they've been around so long, the stories stuck with them—but they believe they're seeing this devil their grandparents, or somebody, might have talked about."

  He doesn't immediately respond, instead he just gives a wide grin.

  I blink rapidly a few times. "What?"

  "I, um," he laughs again and shakes his head, "I just wish you'd gotten curious about me a whole lot sooner."

  Shrugging, I give a smile, a bit infected by his laughter, until I notice that his smile is fading. "You mean . . . for helping you out with this, right?"

  "Yeah," he says, his voice oddly low. He moves just a little closer to me as he continues in that same quieted tone, "we'll go with that."

  Rather than turning away and pretending that the book is once again the most interesting thing in the world, I find myself leaning into him.

  He lowers his face until I feel the warmth of his lips brushing so, so, lightly over mine.

  A footfall sounds on the stair beside us and I jump back with a gasp; I catch myself barely an inch from banging the back of my head on the bannister. We look up to find there's no body to accompany the noise.

  Grey shifts away from it, so that he's blocking me from the unseen entity.

  The heavy step gets a little softer as it continues downward to the next step.

  I feel my skin prickle over with goose bumps as the distinct squeak of a person turning on their heel echoes through the stairwell and the sound continues descending the next flight.

  I close the book and squeeze myself out from my place between Grey and the bannister to tiptoe down the stairs after the thing.

  "Cae!"

  My shoulders bunch at the harsh whisper behind me and I turn to look up at him, bounding as silently as he can, to catch up to me.

  "What?" I whisper back and return to following the steps; which I can barely hear now, thanks to Mr. Walking Distraction.

  "What are you doing? It could be dangerous!"

  I say softly over my shoulder, "I just want to know where it's going."

  The stairs lead to a back corridor of the basement that runs between the cafeteria and the gym, and then wind
down one more flight to a subbasement. I worry for a moment that we've lost the sound to the hallway—it's not noisy here, but that's only because the stairwell door is closed—but then I hear a footstep below us.

  I peer around the corner, trying to confirm that it's going to the subbasement.

  Grey leans over beside me in his own attempt to get a look. "What's that, a boiler room?"

  I can't help wondering if it's strange that I'm already used to having his voice in my ear.

  "No," I whisper back, shaking my head and looking up at him, "boiler room's on the other side of the building. As far as I know, this one's just storage."

  His eyes, still on the door below us, go wide, and instantly, his arm is around my waist, as he tries to pull me back around the corner of the stairwell.

  My curiosity kicks into overdrive and I clamp my free hand on the bannister as I look.

  A dark shape hovers at the foot of the stairs. It's vague, but I think this was, definitely, once a person.

  I hold my breath without intending to, as I fight with myself; half of me wants to let go and allow Grey to hide me from whatever that is; the other half wants to creep forward, to see how close I can get before the specter fades from view. It shifts slowly, like it's turning, and the shadowy silhouette looks oddly substantial, as though I can make out the thick curve of a shoulder.

  Like I'm watching a flesh-and-blood person turn and look up at me.

  And there's a face, but . . . . Oh my God, that face staring into mine is . . . .

  And suddenly—everything goes black.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Reluctant Partnership

  I feel a stinging in my nostrils and jolt awake.

  The faces of Grey and the school nurse, Ms. Boson, come into view after a few forced, rapid blinks. I frown, slapping myself on the cheek, and glare at the smelling salts in Ms. Boson's hand warily.

  "I thought they only used that in movies." My voice is a little thick, like I've been woken from a deep sleep. "Did I . . . ?" I can't bring myself to say it—of all the stupid, girly things I've always sworn I'll never, ever, do—