Witch-Child

by Gerilyn Marin

  Serves him right.

  "I said I'm fine with it, Mom." I return to picking at my food. "I really don't care. We're actually just going to do research, that's it."

  "I know, starlet," she replies with a small, certain grin. "I trust you."

  "Thank you." I sit straight and pick up another taco.

  "I'm still going with you."

  A sigh escapes my lips, and I say under my breath before taking a bite, "Yeah, I know."

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Wendi's voice squeaks as she pleads with me over the phone.

  We hadn't discussed the Grey-and-me situation at all on the walk home from school today, but then, she'd heard about my fainting spell, too. The girl spent the whole time hovering around me like some small, nervous bird, asking me repeatedly if I was okay.

  I should know by now that gossip free Wendi-time has a bit of a backlash.

  "I really don't want to hear it! You listened to Stacy, again, and after I told you she didn't see anything going on, you still told my brother what she said!"

  "Well, technically, no." She sounds distant, and I know well enough to understand that she's fidgeting with something on her end to keep occupied while I yell at her. "I heard it from Dennis, who heard it from Stacy."

  "I don't—wait, which Dennis?" Like this matters, but what can I do? Minutia distracts me.

  "Chadwick, my lab partner."

  "Oh," I furrow my brow. "Since when does he even talk to Stacy? Okay, you know what, that's not even the point! Why would you say anything you heard at school to Jeremy? You might as well have dropped by my mom's office after school and taken a damned meeting with her!"

  "I don't know! He said 'hi', and I just . . . I wanted to say something that was interesting, but I got nervous and the words sort of fell out of my mouth."

  "Why were you nervous?" Stupid me, I know the answer, but I can't help asking.

  She sighs heavily. "Look, I didn't want to say anything, because I thought it might be weird, but um, I think I . . . maybe like him."

  "Wendi, sweetie," I say slowly, "I know. You're not exactly subtle."

  She shrieks, and I pull the phone away from my ear until the sound dies.

  "Oh, God. Oh, God! Do you think he knows?"

  I roll my eyes, shaking my head. "No, he's completely clueless."

  "Phew." Her voice has dropped to a near-whisper, as though she's suddenly drained. "That would be so embarrassing."

  "You have just totally sidetracked, you know that, right?"

  "Sorry," she says after a pause. "Are you still mad at me?"

  Now, it's my turn to sigh. "No. Well, yes." I shrug, even though she can't see me. "I'm still mad, but whatever, it's not that big of a deal, I'll get over it. Jer just caught me off-guard."

  "Good. You're not going to stand me up for our walk to school on Monday, right?"

  "Wasn't planning on it." Well, I hadn't planned on standing her up this morning, either, but I don't mention that.

  After we hang up, I peel off my jeans and crawl into bed. The clock reads nine, and I'm not that tired—for a change—but with the way the last two days have gone, I don’t think a little extra rest will be a bad thing.

  I switch off my lamp and then snuggle down under my covers. Opposite of what I feel, I fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow.

  I jerk awake, biting hard into my bottom lip to keep from screaming. My gaze darts around, but a few breathless second tick by before I realize that I'm staring up at my bedroom ceiling, recognizable due to the silly little glow-in-the-dark star stickers Dad helped me put up there when I was six.

  I sit up slowly, pushing my blanket away, and press a hand to my face. My forehead is sweaty, and my pulse is racing, but . . . again, I can't remember what I've just dreamed about.

  "Calm down, Cae. Calm down," I whisper to myself.

  I try to recall what was happening, but my head is spinning as it is, and the harder I try, the worse the dizzy feeling gets. Closing my eyes, I focus on my breathing to force my thoughts away from any attempt to remember and drop my head into my hands.

  I don't want to think it, but I know Grey's right. This is probably because of my involvement with his family's issue. I want to believe there's some other reason, like, maybe something followed me home from the cemetery.

  But maybe that's too much of a coincidence.

  Whatever, I'm not telling Grey about this. I said I will help him, and if what I'm going through is even a fraction of what his family's had to deal with all this time, I don't think I can tell him to continue digging into this all by himself.

  Damn my sympathetic nature. I laugh quietly at myself. Okay, no. This is me, so it's more like damn my stubbornness.

  The combination of slowly inhaling and exhaling and chiding myself has managed to calm my nerves. I lift my head from my hands and look around my room.

  It's very dark, but my eyes are adjusted, so I can see all right. There's a bit of dim orange light near the windows, filtered through the curtains from the streetlamps outside, but the illumination doesn't do much.

  I glance over at my clock. Three a.m. Fantastic. Stretching, I force a yawn—trying to trick my body into believing that I'm still tired enough to fall back to sleep easily—and grab for my covers.

  I halt instantly. There's a sensation like ice water trickling across every inch of my skin as I stare across the room, into the mirror on my vanity table, at a pair of glowing red eyes.

  Again, I bite my lip, trying not to make a sound as I stand up.

  It's just a trick of the light, I say it to myself over and over again. I want to orient myself, to figure out where the light is coming from, or what could be causing it, but every time I move, so do they.

  Every time I blink, after a beat, the glowing red flickers.

  My hands are shaking, and I can barely feel my fingers as I pad quietly and slowly across my room toward the mirror. As I inch closer, the eyes . . . seem to get larger.

  I can't be seeing what I'm seeing.

  I snap my head around at a sound outside—something simple, like a tree branch hitting the windowsill. When I return my attention to the mirror, the red eyes have vanished.

  And I know I'm the only one in the room.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jumping Black Flash

  "Huh," Grey says, as his gaze combs the dusty, expansive shelves of the Archives. "Maybe I should have just let you do this yourself, and then begged for the information afterward."

  I roll my eyes at him and let out a breath. Sure, I know it's a joke. But in my mind, his words are another reminder that he hadn't wanted me helping in the first place, which is not what I need right now.

  I haven't told him about that weird red-eyes thing that happened in the wee hours of this morning. I figure that will only give him a new reason to rethink this. True, trying to back out now will mean breaking his promise to me, but I have to remember that I don't actually know him very well.

  I don't have any real cause for believing that he has a problem with not keeping his word.

  On the bright side, nothing notably weird has happened since then, so . . . . A few spook-free hours was a nice change of pace.

  "Oh, no," I say briskly as I scoop my hair into a ponytail and bind it high on the back of my head with a black band.

  With a nod, I continue, "I believe I said that I would keep it to myself if you try to exclude me."

  His bright eyes narrow and he gives a little sneer. "You are lucky you're cute."

  "I know." I sigh wistfully. "So . . . ."

  "So?" He looks honestly mystified.

  Frowning, I hold out an arm toward the mass of cluttered shelves. "Bust out the journal so we can get started?"

  "Oh, right! The date." Grey hangs his head sheepishly as he swings his backpack off his shoulder and up onto an old, unused desk beside the door.

  The room is awkwardly silent as he fishes for the journal and delicately extracts it. He always handles the b
ook like it's super-fragile, even though it is actually pretty sturdy for how old and worn the old, cracked leather binding and soft, woven-feeling pages are. We both might be a lot more at ease if my mother—when she'd pulled me aside after a short, but tense car ride—had lowered her voice a bit more while commending my taste in boys.

  Neither Grey nor I have brought up the issue of that near-kiss in the stairwell, but I think my mom's observation has made not thinking about it more difficult.

  He carefully turns the pages for a quiet moment before he nods. "Okay, 1843. Bridgette says that she got the letter from Jack . . . she doesn't give an exact day, but the month was June. I, uh, I don't know how long mail deliveries normally took back then."

  He looks to me for a chime-in.

  I shrug helplessly. "Sorry, me, neither."

  "Hmm, okay; well, let's assume that it could have taken anywhere from a few weeks to a month, but we don't know when in the month this was. Maybe we start with mid-May and work our way forward?"

  With a heavy sigh, I stroll along the shelves, looking at the year labels affixed to the bottom of each shelf. "Or, just to play it safe, we include the entire month of May. We have no way of knowing if the letter was delayed for any reason."

  The farther along the shelves I go, the more lax the semblance of organization gets. What starts out as large, neatly ordered boxes becomes antiquated crates, until there's no type of container at all, just the oldest papers simply stacked in uniform piles. One would think the more aged, delicate periodicals would receive more care, but I guess Drake's Cove really does have some sort of disconnect with our past.

  "It's amazing you guys can keep anything intact around here," Grey says, joining me beside the eighteen-forties section, as though he knows what I was just thinking.

  With a frown, I step forward and climb up the shelves to reach the highest one. I inspect the first paper on the highest pile to the left, hoping that the barely-existent filing system follows some kind of logical order.

  "What'cha doin', monkey girl?"

  "Well, I'm trying to see how much of a mess we've got on our hands." I glance down, over my shoulder at him to find that he's not looking at my eyes.

  He's not even looking above my waist.

  "Enjoying the view, Mr. Addison?"

  As he lifts his gaze to meet mine, a faint wash of red tints his cheeks. "Sorry."

  "I'll just . . . opt to take it as a compliment," I say with what I imagine is probably the dorkiest, big grin of embarrassment ever. I nod toward a bunch of old metal folding chairs stacked in a corner. "You wanna grab one of those so you can help me up here, maybe?"

  "Fine," he playfully rolls his eyes before he turns and heads over to grab a chair. "Make me do my fair share, why don't you?"

  "I didn't bring you here just to be eye-candy," I say quietly to myself.

  Not quietly enough, I realize, as he asks, "What was that?"

  "Nothing!" I return my attention to the newspapers and resume my inspection.

  Thankfully, the piles are organized chronologically, and not just placed up here in a neat stack, so it turns out I have January of 1843 in front of me. Everything smells musty in an odd, dry sort of way and my disturbance of the papers kicks up a small plume of dust. Waving the cloud away, I hold in a cough. Once I'm certain I've got my lungs under control, I start to gently shuffle through several of the yellowed issues, to be certain that the order of the first bunch isn't a fluke.

  Grey climbs up next to me, but the chair doesn't allow him to get up quite as high, so he rummages through the next shelf down. "I've got the Spring months over here," he says after a moment. "March, April . . . May."

  "Sweet," I let go of the shelves and drop to the floor. "Start passing 'em down."

  We—sneezing and probably covered in a film of dust to match everything else in the archives—choose to sit at a desk in the far end of the room, so that my mother won't immediately hear us, should she decide to be nosy and wander casually past the stairwell door. We've decided to err on the side of caution and start as far back as April, splitting the papers between us evenly.

  The pages feel coarse and thickly textured beneath my fingertips; well, compared to modern papers, anyway. Strange, because I thought they'd be all worn, delicate. Like the ones in Bridgette's journal.

  Grey and I are quiet again for a long, long, while as we scan through issues in our respective stacks. I'm sure he finally gets what I've been trying to tell him about Drake's Cove, now that he's got these pieces of our history laid out before him.

  The devil sighting reports are odd. Well, at least I think they are. I find them interspersed throughout the issues, as though they're just any other story. A small flood after a rainstorm . . . Oh look, some lady found the Drake's Cove devil peeping into her window . . . The Jansen boy made a miraculous recovery from pneumonia . . . hey, this farmer saw the creature bounding through his field.

  I'm still a little awed that these sightings seemed so normal to our ancestors, they treated them like anything else that touched their day-to-day lives. Maybe that's not so different from how we treat spooky incidents now.

  "So," he says after we've each made it through about half of our piles. "Help me out here."

  "Hmm?" I glance over at the paper in front of him, thinking he must be talking about something he's read.

  I refrain from looking at the time, but I'm starving. I can only hope Mom sneaks down that staircase soon to announce that she's ordering lunch; I don't even mind that it'll just be a ruse to check in on us.

  "There isn't anything special about this place, but all this creepy stuff is always going on. Why doesn't anyone seem to want to leave?"

  I raise a brow and shake my head as I go back to my paper. "What are you talking about? People move away."

  "Yeah, but that is just a few and some of them come back. I don't get why this place isn't a ghost town."

  Giving him a lopsided frown, I just sigh. He's been to fully populated towns that experience devil sightings on a regular basis, but we're the ones he doesn't get? "I don't know. Maybe it's easier to stay here and hang onto the hope that Drake's Cove might become normal someday, than to move to some place new and hope you get the hang of normal."

  His forehead crinkles in thought as he nods and goes back to reading.

  I guess that line of thinking has just never occurred to him before.

  Back to the words in front of me, I run my finger along the newsprint as I go, to keep my place. I read over the obituaries, just in case, but I don't feel like I'll find anything there.

  The feeling isn't rational, just one of those niggling vibes that I should know to listen to by now.

  Niggling. I don't even say words like that, but that is how Gran used to describe the little pushes. I never found the term fitting until recently, I guess.

  Every now and again, I come across a story recounting eyewitness testimony of what the locals apparently called The Jumping Black Flash. I have the sense that this should be familiar to me, but all the name does is kick off the very similarly titled Rolling Stones classic in my head.

  "I don't believe it," Grey's voice comes out as a quiet rush of whispered sound.

  I want nothing more than to drop what I'm combing through and go read over his shoulder, but I don't want to get my hopes up; for all I know, he could be not believing anything eventful that might have happened here. "What is it?"

  He raises a hand and makes a shushing noise.

  Frowning, I sit back and fold my hands on top of my paper as I wait.

  After a while, he lifts his gaze from the page in front of him and simply shakes his head at me, wearing a bewildered expression. "You are really starting to freak me out."

  I feel my face fall. "What the hell did I do?"

  "Remember when you said only one event ever happened here?"

  I have to think for a minute before I have an answer. "The Town Hall fire?" For an event that was supposed to have been ultimately harmless, I have
to admit it did always give me an icy, crawly feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Grey purses his lips and then does this funny up-and-down flick of his eyebrows as he nods. "Well, it says here that someone died in that fire."

  I blink rapidly a few times; this is news to me. In fact, as far as I know, this would be news to everyone. "Town Hall was supposed to have been vacant by then."

  Giving a second, shorter nod, he forces a small gulp down his throat. "I'll give you three guesses who it was, and the first two don't count."

  "Jack." Something about this tugs uncomfortably at the pit of my stomach.

  "Jack," he echoes.

  "I don't understand." I realize only now that I'm clasping my hands so tightly that my fingertips have gone numb. I say as I open them and start flexing my fingers, "What was he doing there?"

  He lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug. "According to local authorities? . . . He was setting the fire."

  "What the hell for?"

  "They list it as a random act of vandalism." He sends the paper skittering across the desktop with two fingers. It sails past me and the pages scatter as they flutter to the floor. "They didn't even write him an obituary."

  Shaking my head, I slip out of my chair and kneel on the floor.

  "Taking this a little hard, aren't you?" I venture as I retrieve the pages and gently shuffle them back together. "These papers are really old."

  Seriously, I'm surprised none of them tore.

  "Sorry." He doesn't sound sorry, but he's probably frustrated, so I let it go.

  I sit down and flip through the paper. "You know what," I let the words tumble out of my mouth as they pop into my head. "People around here only seem to really remember stories from the mid-eighteen hundreds on. No devil sightings from then on, either."

  "You mean no Jumping Black Flash stories."

  "Yeah, that, but hear me out. Mid-eighteen hundreds Jack dies in a fire he allegedly set for no apparent reason and then, no more devil stories, which only lines up because Jack supposedly was their devil. I mean, there's not even an obit for him."