Poison Read online

  “Please. I didn’t mean . . . ” I began, but I knew that what I was saying was so foolish, so useless. I hadn’t meant to kill her. As if that made everything all right. As if anything would ever be right again.

  I staggered away from them, looking from the lifeless girl who had begged for my help to the rocks where Bryce had been carried off, and my heart was so heavy with grief and shame that I felt as if it were going to fall out of my chest. I had destroyed them both.

  My knees buckled, but before I hit the ground, someone grabbed me by the collar of my sweater and shoved me toward the cave where the bats had come from.

  Over my shoulder I saw her face. “You,” I whispered, meeting Morgan’s eyes.

  CHAPTER

  •

  FORTY-ONE

  “Relax,” Morgan said. “She’s not dead. They’re just sensitive here. She only had to be close to you to get knocked out by your mojo.”

  I blinked in astonishment.

  “Move.” Her rudeness seemed to wake me out of my guilty torpor. “Into the bat cave, Robin.”

  I stared at her in shock and disgust. “How . . . How . . . ”

  She sighed. “Just get inside.”

  I noticed that she was dressed in rags, like the other witches of Avalon. Without her sophisticated clothes and perfect makeup, Morgan looked ordinary, almost pitiful. She reminded me of what I thought mountain people who lived a hundred years ago might look like. Her pathetic appearance made me feel less afraid of her as I let her lead me deeper into the cave.

  It was obviously a home, despite its primitive structure. There was a fire burning inside an earthen pit, beneath an opening that let out the smoke and let in a single shaft of bright sunlight. Nearby were a few cratelike blocks made of wood that served as chairs and a rickety table on which burned a smelly candle that popped and spewed black smoke.

  “Not much like the Emporium of Remarkable Goods, is it,” Morgan said bitterly.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, completely flummoxed. She was the last person I thought I’d find in this place.

  “Waiting for you,” she said with a smile.

  I shook my head, trying to hold myself together. “Look, Morgan, if there’s an antidote to what I’ve got, what I did to that girl—”

  “I told you, she’ll be fine,” she said. “For a while anyway. They’re all dying, though. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “From . . . the water?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t want it to drag on like this. I thought you’d just come in with guns blazing. It was a mistake to put you into the lake. That lessened the effect of the poison. I didn’t plan it that way.” She leaned against one of the uneven damp walls. A spider crawled beside her. “But then, in the end, I suppose it doesn’t make much difference how it happens.”

  “It happened because of me,” I said hotly, before I remembered who had started all this. “Because of you.”

  She waved me away. “Don’t be stupid. It’s because of her.” She gestured with her head.

  “Who? The Seer?”

  “She’s the one who’s kept us all in the Stone Age, and it’s killing us. Killed us already,” she said. “There’s no hope here. No future. And anyone who tries to make one is killed.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “She didn’t pollute the lake,” I said levelly. “I did.”

  Morgan laughed. She laughed. “Okay, fine,” she said. “You want the prize for wallowing in guilt, you got it.”

  I opened my mouth to speak a couple of times, but closed it again. She was beyond unbelievable. “You make me sick,” I said finally. “They’re all going to die here, Morgan, and you’re laughing about it.”

  She looked at her nails. “That was the point.”

  I buried my face in my hands.

  “Oh, stop being boring.”

  That was it. If killing off an entire civilization was boring, Morgan was about to get very bored. Bored to death. I lunged at her, claws out.

  She caught me by both wrists. “Hey, you were trying to kill me, you little turd,” she said.

  I took a long look at her hands, enclosing my wrists. “You’re not . . . ”

  “Poisoned? No.” She pushed me away. “I gave the ring to you, so I’m immune. Too bad, huh?”

  “I . . . ” I felt my eyes filling with tears. What was I becoming? In the end was I any better than she was? “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I really was. It had been a terrible thing for me to do, no matter what.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said. “Is there anything you’re not sorry for?”

  I turned away from her.

  “Sooner or later, babe, you’ve got to accept that you’re not perfect.”

  I whirled around to face her. “Not perfect?” I shouted. “I kill people by touching them, Morgan!” Angrily I wiped my eyes. “Oh, what do you care? As soon as you met me, you sent me into a lake to drown.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Get off it, Morgan. You know that you wanted—expected—me to die there.”

  “You mean when you went through the tankard?” She gave a disgusted sigh. “I hardly think I tried to kill you, especially since I was the one who pulled you out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your precious Peter,” Morgan said, morphing in front of my eyes into an exact duplicate of Peter Shaw. “Do you still believe after all this time that he rescued you?”

  For a moment all I could do was gape. She looked exactly like Peter, except for the expression on his face. Peter would never have looked at me with such disdain. “No one rescued me,” I muttered, trying to remember what had happened. I’d been in the water, I remembered that. And then Peter . . . well, he’d just sort of appeared. “He told me how to get back,” I recalled. Morgan nodded. “Are you saying that was you?”

  “Do you really think your boyfriend would have told you to find the tankard?”

  I was confused. “But then why . . . ”

  “Would you have listened if it had been anyone besides Peter telling you what to do?”

  I guessed she knew me better than I’d thought.

  “What about being your own hero, Katy?”

  She was just so harsh. “Whatever,” I said. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Came to watch,” she said, smiling. “Those bird-women are old. They’re dropping already.” She held out her hands, palms up. “Can’t live without water.”

  “What about the others?” I shouted. “The innocent ones.”

  “I’m the innocent one,” she said. “And I’ve already been punished. Now it’s their turn.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake.” I stood up. “You’re insane.”

  “Why? Because I want to get rid of this place, this place that’s so poisonous it makes you look like cotton candy?”

  “Because you’re destroying people who had nothing to do with what happened to you!” But it was pointless to talk to her. “Fine, do whatever you want. I only want to get rid of this stupid ring.”

  “Then you came to the wrong place. Or haven’t you noticed that our so-called Seer isn’t interested in helping you . . . or anyone else?”

  I swallowed.

  “It’s getting stronger, isn’t it,” she said. “The poison.”

  “Do you care?”

  She shrugged again.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said. “But for the record, destroying Avalon isn’t going to kill the Seer. She’s immortal, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “Once everyone’s gone, she’ll have this whole world to herself. A master without slaves. A queen whose subjects are all ghosts.”

  I headed toward the mouth of the cave. “Great. Enjoy yourself, Morgan.”

  “Don’t go out there,” she said. “Those hags are looking for you, waiting for you. If they see you, you’re dead.”

  I looked back at her for what I hoped was the last tim
e. “Then they’ll save everyone a lot of trouble,” I said.

  • • •

  As I walked out of the cave, I saw the witches on the rock outcropping begin to stir. They had spotted me. Now they were coming for me, sliding down the rock or leaping off it, transforming into animals and other things I didn’t ever want to see up close. Two of them changed in midair into the huge vultures I recognized, their tattered robes morphing into wings, their voices rising in a wild scream as they sped toward me over the meadow.

  I ran blindly, without any idea which way the versimka was. I could hear the witch creatures behind me now, their shrieks and cries growing louder as their wings made shadows over my head. When I felt the first talon’s scratch on my back, I whirled around.

  “Get away!” I spat, and light poured out of me. One of the witches fell to the ground before I could close my eyes. I heard the others dropping behind me as I ran, ablaze like a torch with my own dangerous power.

  Poison. You are poison, a voice inside me said. You are death.

  “No!” I screamed. I tried to cover my face with my hands, but the light emanating from them was too bright.

  Then a voice, familiar, close. “Katy!”

  “Who . . . Where . . . ”

  “Over here!”

  I stumbled, squinting. “Peter?” I called. “Is it really you, this time?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t come near me. I’m—”

  “Katy!” Before I could see past my poisonous light, Peter caught me in his arms. “I’ve found a way inside,” he said as he pulled me through what felt like a membrane of thick air. Those were the last words he spoke.

  I screamed as we fell to the floor together in a room filled with electronic equipment. Against the oddly ornate nineteenth-century walls stood my great-grandmother, Hattie Scott, and Miss P. All of them looked shocked, their faces frozen into masks of horrified surprise.

  Before I even saw him, I knew what I had done.

  Peter wasn’t breathing. He lay on the floor like a rag doll, dead.

  He was dead.

  CHAPTER

  •

  FORTY-TWO

  I skittered away, blinking, trying to hold my poison in, trying to retract it, take it back.

  Miss P fainted. Hattie ran up to Peter and held him, rocking and wailing. By the time Gram knelt beside them, the nimbus around me had dimmed to nearly nothing.

  “He’s gone,” Gram said, looking at me.

  I felt myself shaking all over. Sparks were flying out my fingers, and my throat opened to let out a moan that would have poured out of me like a river, but I didn’t let that happen.

  “Take him to Eric,” I said in a hoarse whisper, using every ounce of control I could muster to keep my voice steady.

  “Can’t you see!” Hattie shouted in a burst of anger. “Can’t you see it’s too late for that?”

  “Hattie, please. She’s only trying to help.”

  “I don’t want her help!” she shrieked. “I want her out of here! Do you understand?”

  “Shh,” Gram said, placing her hand on Hattie’s arm.

  “Eric can help him,” I said levelly. “He helped me.”

  “Were you dead?” Hattie growled.

  I had to tell her. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I was.”

  Both Hattie and Gram swiveled their heads to face me. Miss P was just coming to, bewildered.

  “It happened last year,” I said. “I died and Eric brought me back.”

  Gram and Hattie exchanged glances.

  “Take him, Gram,” I said. “Take him to Eric.”

  Gram blinked for a moment, then nodded her head. “All right.” She stood up. When Hattie kept rocking with Peter in her arms, Gram pried her hands away. “Come on, Hattie,” she said gently.

  “Why should we listen to her?” Hattie choked, weeping.

  Gram sighed. “Because it’s the only hope we have. Take his arms, Hattie.”

  As the three women were struggling with Peter’s weight, Gram turned to me again. “Where is Bryce?” she asked.

  The word seemed to roll in the pit of my stomach before clawing its way up my throat and bursting from my mouth: “Gone.”

  Everything hung still for a moment, as if all the air had left the room. Then a low moan escaped from Hattie. “Steady,” Gram said.

  I took a step forward. “Maybe I can—”

  “No,” Hattie said.

  “I think perhaps you’d better go for now,” Miss P said, coughing softly. “If you’re all right.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m—” I began, but “sorry” wouldn’t begin to express what I felt.

  And it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  So I slunk away like a thief, staying close to the walls, while the women pushed and pulled at Peter’s lifeless body.

  • • •

  I followed Hattie’s car on foot. Aunt Agnes’s fiancé, Jonathan, met the women at Hattie’s house and carried Peter inside.

  From a window I watched as the boy I loved was laid on his bed, on top of a quilt my great-grandmother had made. Near the bed was a desk with a few books on it—not many, since recently Peter had been living at the Shaw mansion—and a framed photograph of the two of us that Becca had taken the previous September during the car wash fund-raiser for Winter Frolic. In the picture we’re both blasting each other with hoses. Our eyes are closed, our mouths are open, there’s a pouf of soap on his head, and my legs are slick with water.

  I leaned my head against the window as snow began to fall. All I could think about was that I wanted to turn back time. If only I’d listened to Peter when he’d asked me not to go through the painting . . . If only I hadn’t called Bryce, hadn’t asked him to go with me . . . If only I hadn’t accepted the ring, Morgan’s gift of death . . . If only, if only, if only . . .

  If only it took more than a second to change your life.

  By the time Hattie carried Eric into the room, I could barely see through my tears. With shaking hands I wiped a place where my breath had fogged the window. Eric must have been sleeping, because he was yawning and digging his fists into his eyes. Then, when he saw Peter, he held out his arms enthusiastically, a big smile on his face, as if he expected a response. When there was none, his expression changed to one of puzzlement. He flapped his thin arms and kicked out his legs, wanting to be set down. I had carried him myself so many times that I could almost feel him squirming against my side, snuffling and whimpering.

  Hattie lay him gently beside his brother. Eric cooed and patted Peter’s face as the adults in the room held their breath.

  “Buh,” Eric said.

  Do it, I thought, willing his power. Nownownownownow.

  For a long time Peter just lay there, his face impassive as a stone.

  Oh, God, no.

  “Buh!” Eric said, thumping on Peter’s chest.

  Hattie came over and put her arms around him. “It’s all right, baby,” she said softly. “You did your best.”

  But Eric squirmed away from her. “Buh! Buh!”

  Hattie sobbed into her hands. Gram sat down on Peter’s desk chair. Miss P leaned against the wall.

  “Peter!” I screamed, so loudly that they all looked over at the window. Hattie’s haggard face turned toward me. “Peter!” I banged on the window with my fists. Silently Hattie stood up and, without ever meeting my eyes, pulled down the shade.

  “No!” I screamed. “Please, Hattie! Let me see him! Oh, God, please!”

  But no one else came to the window, and I didn’t hear another sound.

  I crouched down in the snow for a while, trying to make myself stop shivering.

  Peter was dead. Like the bird women in Avalon. Like Bryce. I had killed them all.

  Numbly I walked to Gram’s, scribbled a note saying where I was headed, then took the keys to her car and started driving.

  I drove until I reached New York City. It snowed the whole way.

  And all I could think of were three words:<
br />
  Peter is dead.

  Peter is dead.

  Peter is dead.

  PART FOUR

  THE TRAVELERS FROM AVALON

  CHAPTER

  •

  FORTY-THREE

  Now that I look back on it, I must have been out of my mind to drive to Manhattan during a snowstorm, especially since I didn’t even have a license. Gram had been teaching me—that was how I knew the basics of handling her ’58 Cadillac—but I was a long way from being a proficient driver. Fortunately, the streets were nearly deserted. My dad had told me that when it snowed in Manhattan, no one drove. That certainly seemed to be the case when I arrived that evening, and probably the reason why I didn’t get pulled over or crash.

  The truth was, though, I didn’t care. The way I was thinking at the time, it would probably have been best all around if I’d just gone up in a ball of flame on the highway. But that didn’t happen. Luck, I guess. Lucky, lucky me.

  On the street where my father lived, cars were scattered willy-nilly, having been abandoned in snowdrifts by their owners, but a car pulled out of a parking spot right in front of Dad’s building just as I drove up. I locked Gram’s Caddie and went inside the first set of doors to Dad’s intercom.

  This building was a lot different from Madam Mim’s, where he’d lived previous to their breakup. Her building was on Sutton Place, with a uniformed doorman and a marble-floored lobby dotted with potted palm trees and a sculpture by Picasso. Dad’s current entryway was a drafty area between two sets of doors with dirty glass, adorned only by a wall of mailboxes, and smelling of stale cigarette smoke.

  I didn’t think he was home—he’d written that he was going to India with Madam Mim—but I rang anyway. No one answered, so I used my key to get in. At least I had this place to come to—for a while, anyway, until he got back. After that I didn’t know where I would go.