Poison Page 14

  Suddenly there was a loud pounding on the door. The little bell jingled furiously while a hundred delicate things in the store quivered and trembled in its wake.

  Morgan, I thought, and then: No. Morgan wouldn’t have to force open her own door. It had to be someone else, a drunk probably, or . . .

  “Peter!” Hanging on to the four dolls in my arms, I lumbered to my feet and moved as quickly as I could toward the front door, where Peter was making urgent-looking faces through the glass. “Hey,” I said, managing to get the door open. “Can you take a couple of these?” I handed him the dolls.

  He looked at me like I was crazy. “What’re you doing, robbing the place?”

  “I’ll explain later,” I said. “Right now, we have to get them out of here.” I shoved him away and closed the door behind us. “As fast as we can.”

  “Okay,” he said dubiously. “Only . . . ”

  “What?” I pushed him with my shoulder. “Talk while we’re moving. Go.”

  “It’s just . . . I didn’t think there was anything in that place anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?” I turned around. “The store just opened—”

  My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my legs almost gave out beneath me.

  In the soft early morning light I saw an abandoned storefront, its filthy windows revealing an empty space with a broken counter and a floor with half its tiles missing. Outside hung a broken sign that had fallen over the doorway:

  Fr d’s Barga

  “What’d you call it?” Peter asked. “I walked up and down the street for more than an hour trying to find the place you texted me about. Finally I just looked in every store to see if there was any movement.”

  It was gone. The Emporium. The whole place.

  Vanished.

  Under my arm, Summer’s horrified eyes stared out of the doll’s porcelain face.

  PART THREE

  THE KILLING GIFT

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Peter didn’t ask a lot of questions on the way to my great-grandmother’s, although I think he wanted to.

  “I’ll tell you all about it afterward,” I said. “Okay?”

  “Sure.” He tried not to look hurt. “I understand. I’m not much use when it comes to magic.”

  “It’s not that . . . ”

  But it was, and we both knew it. There were some high-powered male witches in the world, but, in Whitfield at least, the women were definitely the prime movers.

  “Hey, I don’t mind,” he said gently. “You’ve been left out of my life often enough.”

  “Like at Winter Frolic,” I said, hoping to sound jolly and mature about it, even though I didn’t really feel that way.

  I think it was the opening Peter was waiting for. “So will you come to the dance?” he asked.

  “With you and your date?” My good humor was beginning to sound forced.

  “You know I have to take Fabienne.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t think about it now.”

  “Okay,” he said, giving me back the dolls. “I’ll let you do what you need to do. Good luck.” Then he kissed me.

  Whoever had come up with the idea that only bad boys were interesting must have been crazy. I’d take my nice guy any day.

  • • •

  An hour later Gram, Hattie, Miss P, and I stood around Gram’s kitchen with the four dolls propped up in the middle of us.

  “Now, dears, there’s no need for concern,” Gram said, patting the Summer doll on its head. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

  She hadn’t blinked an eye when I’d bombed into her bedroom before dawn asking for her help. Gram was an empath. Her gift was compassion. She volunteered at the local hospital seven days a week, helping people get ready for surgery, or calming frightened children or soothing the grieving relatives of the dead. I knew that if I’d been one of the souls trapped inside those dolls, she would have been the person I’d want to have around me. When she touched them, I saw their terrified eyes soften inside their little china heads.

  “We have to get them out before Morgan gets back to the store,” I said. “Or what I thought was the store. Actually—”

  “That’s all right, Katy,” she said, shushing me as she stood dialing the phone. I’d been babbling ever since I’d walked in. “We’ll sort all that out later. The important thing is, you’ve found the girls. And you’re right. There’s no time to waste. . . . Hattie, dear?” she said into the mouthpiece.

  Of course Hattie had to be notified. Then there was Miss P, the djinn. She could put ideas into people’s heads, which meant she could start a revolution just by thinking if she wanted to. She could convince the guards at Fort Knox to turn over all the gold in their vaults to her, get the President to declare that the United States had become a territory of Switzerland, or make Justin Bieber fall in love with her, even though she’s nearly thirty. If Miss P was going to be there, I knew that what was going on was a big deal.

  And then there was me, but only because my aunt Agnes wasn’t available. It felt strange to be in the company of these three witches. They represented the values of knowledge, strength, and compassion. Translated into witch ritual, that meant the elements air, fire, and water, or east, south, and west. I was positioned at north, signifying earth, the grounding influence. I didn’t know what I could possibly contribute to the group, but I was willing to do my best. I just hoped I wouldn’t screw things up.

  • • •

  “Katy, concentrate!” Gram snapped, nudging me with her wand.

  Wands, which amplified whatever gifts you had, were called for only in extreme cases. This must have been one, because they all had their wands out, except for me. I used to own one, but I’d lost it somewhere in the middle of Whitfield Bay last year. So I held a hammer. It wasn’t a very magical tool, but necessary all the same.

  I set my mind on what I wanted to happen. In High Magic you didn’t have to know exactly what to do. You just had to focus your intention clearly and open up a channel to let the forces of the universe do what needed to be done. All of the rituals and magic words that witches and sorcerers were supposed to use were just ways to get them into that state of pure focus, so that the channel would open. But these witches were too well trained to need those crutches. They just zeroed in on the dolls with so much intensity that the tips of their wands glowed.

  I saw Miss P’s wand out of the corner of my eye, but I made a point of not looking at her face. When she went into djinn mode, she became pretty scary-looking, with these luminescent not-of-this-earth eyes and a telepathic voice.

  The energy we generated began to hum. It traveled in a circle around us, thin at first, then growing louder as the cone of power grew thicker around us. The dolls vibrated on the table. We all heard the faint, pitiful screams of the girls inside as the energy inside the cone became so strong that it was hard for me to hang on to my hammer.

  Then, when everything threatened to fly apart and I didn’t think I could hold on any longer, I smashed the hammer down onto Gram’s wooden cutting board. It was the signal for the witches to shoot their power out through their wands.

  The dolls exploded into a thousand pieces, leaving nothing but dust behind.

  I stood there blinking for a long time afterward, afraid that the girls had been vaporized.

  “Are they all right?” I finally whispered timidly.

  “Shh.” Gram nodded toward Miss P, who was gradually turning back into herself. She shook all over, as if throwing off the magic that had enveloped her, then patted her hair back into place. “I’ll go find out,” Miss P said in a breathy voice, and left the room.

  Gram tucked her wand into the lacy sleeve of her dress. “Tea, anyone?” she warbled.

  “I’ve got to be going,” I said. “I’ve got an eight o’clock exam.”

  Hattie pointed at me. “Sit down,” she said. I sat. “We released those girls without much inf
ormation about what put them there because it was an emergency situation, but it’s time you told us everything you learned from Summer.”

  I looked at my watch. “Can’t this—”

  “No.”

  I blew air out of my nose. “Okay,” I said, “but Bryce has to be here too.”

  “Bryce?” Hattie raised an eyebrow. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  I gave her a level look. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but he’s got to answer some of my questions too,” I said. “Like why he didn’t warn me about Morgan, so that I might have suspected something before she poisoned me and sent me off to die.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWENTY-SIX

  “I was looking for someone small,” Bryce said when he arrived ten minutes later. “That was the main thing about her, her size—”

  “Hello, she’s a shape-shifter,” I reminded him acidly.

  “All right, all right,” he said, and sulked. “I had planned to bring the amber containing her to Whitfield and then go back. There were not supposed to be complications.” He shook his head. “And now Morgan le Fay has eluded us forever—”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Morgan le Fay? As in King Arthur’s nemesis?”

  “And sister,” he said.

  “Sister?”

  “Half sister,” Bryce corrected. “At least according to legend.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What about Uther Pendragon, the king?” I argued. I hadn’t spent the better part of a day looking up references to King Arthur online for nothing. “He was supposed to be Arthur’s father, even though Queen Igraine was married to—”

  Gram cleared her throat. “Fatherhood is never a certainty,” she said delicately.

  Miss P raised her eyebrows.

  “Morgan the sorceress killed her father the Merlin because she was jealous of his love for his human son, Arthur, whom he helped to become king,” Bryce recited.

  I sat back. “Wow,” I said. “So that’s Morgan’s story. And so the place she sent me to was . . . ”

  “Avalon,” Bryce said grimly. “My home. And hers.”

  Suddenly I was able to see why Bryce hadn’t seemed wholehearted in his appreciation of his native land, and why he wasn’t knocking himself out to return there. “Those vulture women, then—”

  “They’re the Seer’s security force,” Bryce said. “They keep the rest of us . . . morally responsible.”

  “By killing you?” I asked.

  Bryce didn’t answer.

  “Fine, dear,” Gram said. “That’s all terribly interesting, but the question we ought to be asking is not what this Morgan person did in the fifth century but how the cowen girls broke a sixteen-hundred-year-old spell six weeks ago.”

  “I’ve told you from the beginning,” I said. “The Ouija board. They called her with that.”

  “But those girls didn’t know the first thing about magic,” Hattie said. “I’ll bet they didn’t even know who Morgan le Fay was.”

  “It didn’t matter. Summer said the planchette was moving all over the board. She didn’t figure out that it was spelling out a message, but I’ll bet it was. My guess is that the message was the spell to break the binding.”

  “That was how they released her,” Bryce said, awed. “By writing a spell they themselves knew nothing about.”

  “Even while they were writing it,” Miss P added.

  Agnes, who had just materialized on the sofa, frowned. “Forgive me,” she said. “I came as quickly as I could.”

  “Quite all right, Agnes, dear,” Gram said before turning back to me. “But what about the amber?”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The substance that encased Morgan le Fay. If the girls released her from it, then it had to have been nearby. Perhaps one of them had it in her possession.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following this at all,” Agnes said.

  “Penelope’s finding out about the girls now,” Gram said, getting to her feet. “I’ll ask her. Meanwhile, Katy, would you try to bring Agnes up to speed?”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’ll probably help us all to put things in the right sequence.” They all turned to look at me. “First, the Seer of Avalon sent Bryce de Crewe to Whitfield,” I began.

  Bryce nodded uncertainly.

  “He was bringing a piece of amber to Hattie for safekeeping, because it contained Morgan le Fay, who the Seer said was destined to escape and destroy Avalon.”

  “It’s all my fault,” Bryce said, sounding wretched. “That’s what we were trying to avoid. And now it’s going to happen after all—”

  “Just stay with me for a minute,” I said. “At the time Morgan was captured, she’d shrunk down to the size of a mosquito because she can shape-shift, just like the Seer’s army of ghouls.”

  “It’s a pretty common gift,” Bryce observed with a sniff.

  “Morgan has another gift too, one that isn’t so common. She’s what’s called a Traveler, meaning that she can travel between Avalon and the real world. Bryce has the same gift.”

  “I am not sure what you mean by ‘real,’ ” Bryce said.

  “Hush up,” Hattie said.

  “So Bryce made it to the so-called real world, at least as far as Whitfield. But then the amber containing Morgan fell out of his pocket and landed on the street.”

  “Where Summer and her friends picked it up,” Agnes said with a Let’s get on with it motion.

  “Right. Then later Summer put the witch doll in Verity Lloyd’s locker, and her boyfriend Cheswick got so mad that he threw out five fingers at Summer.”

  “For shame!” Gram said. “And in school.”

  “I didn’t know what he was going to do to the girls, so I threw out another spell to knock his out.”

  “The one that made them stink,” Bryce said, smirking. Hattie elbowed him.

  “Right. After that I thought everything was okay because the school didn’t punish anyone, but Summer was still angry about the stink spell. To get even with me, she bought a Ouija board at Fred’s Bargain Mart.”

  “Fred’s must have been going out of business at the time,” Gram said.

  “But a Ouija board?” Hattie looked skeptical. “Why would she do that? A Ouija can’t do anything except call up the dead.”

  “She didn’t know that,” I explained. “Summer and her friends were totally clueless.”

  “Cowen,” Gram stage-whispered behind her hand.

  “Then how—” Hattie began.

  I knew what she was going to ask. “The planchette that was supposed to come with the board was missing, so they used the piece of amber they’d found instead.”

  “The one I’d lost!” Bryce said excitedly.

  Agnes nodded. “The amber with Morgan le Fay trapped inside.”

  Hattie’s eyes widened. “And those idiot girls used it in a board game?”

  I nodded. “After it wrote out the releasing spell, she burst out of the amber and promised to grant the girls a wish.”

  “Why?” Hattie asked. “She didn’t have to do any such thing.”

  “I think it was so that they wouldn’t talk to anyone about what had happened.”

  Everyone seemed to be in agreement about this. “And they really thought they had power,” Hattie said, shaking her head. Gram tsked.

  “They had enough to turn my burger and fries into slugs and severed fingers,” I said.

  “That must have been a terrible strain,” Agnes said.

  “No lie. It totally wrecked my lunch.”

  “On them,” she explained. “Spellwork is demanding, even for trained and talented witches. For non-adepts . . . ”

  “Can you imagine?” Gram said, wincing.

  “But they all collapsed at the same time,” I said. “It happened the next night, in front of me. That didn’t happen because they just got tired.”

  “You’re right,” Agnes said. “They didn’t do anything. Morgan performed the magic that transmogri
fied your food.”

  “So why did they fall down then, just when I arrived? Was that a coincidence?”

  Hattie laughed, a deep alto rumble. “Honey, nothing’s a coincidence,” she said. “That part of it seems clear to me.” She looked over at Gram, and then back at me. “You were what she was after all along.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Her?” Bryce stared at me. “Am I missing something? Why would Morgan want Katy?”

  “Because she has power,” Hattie said. “And your sorceress knew it as soon as Katy walked into the girls’ dorm room. Maybe even before that.”

  Bryce frowned. “Excuse me, but this is Whitfield. There are many powerful people here.”

  I sucked in air. “But not many who can travel through objects.”

  “What?”

  I told them about the tankard. “But then she gave me this painting—a versimka, she called it—that I could just walk through.”

  “To get to Avalon?”

  I nodded.

  There was a long silence. Finally Gram asked, “What did you do there?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing much. The first time, I fell into the lake. The second time, Morgan slipped me a roofie or something and I just wanted to sleep, but these witches chased me away. Well, first they bit me—”

  “They bit you?”

  “They turned into sand fleas or something,” I said. “But then they shape-shifted into vultures and came after me.”

  Bryce nodded. “They’re the price we pay for living in peace and security.”

  “But they didn’t hurt me,” I interrupted. “The vultures. Actually, I think I hurt them.”

  “It sounds as if they wanted you to leave,” Agnes said.

  “Oh, definitely.”

  “Because you hurt them?”

  “No, I didn’t do that until . . . I can’t remember.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but I was pretty groggy by then. I remember a bright light . . . ” I tried to remember exactly what had driven them away, but I couldn’t. “I guess they just don’t like strangers,” I finished.