Poison Read online

  “We?” She arched her eyebrows disdainfully. “What do you think you could do?”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, for one thing, I can walk through objects.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Into them, rather. I thought that maybe if I had something of Summer’s—”

  “You will do no such thing!” Hattie grabbed the rolling pin from me and held it up as if she were about to hit me with it. “This is not a matter for students. Do you understand?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, holding out my hands to placate her.

  “Get away from those biscuits before you kill them.”

  “Fine. Okay.” I stepped away. “But about the girls . . . ”

  “Why, oh why, are you always sticking your nose into things that are none of your business?” she wailed.

  “Hattie, there’s no way those girls did that to themselves,” I said. “No weight-loss tea would send all four of them into instant comas.”

  “Oh, so you’re a medical expert now, are you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Well, people who are medical experts are saying that’s exactly the case.”

  “They’re cowen. They can’t see—”

  “And you can? Is that it? Katy Ainsworth, girl detective?”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “Leave it alone. I’m telling you—”

  “No!” I shouted. “Look, I’m no medical expert, that’s true, and I’m no detective, either. But I know there was Craft involved with those girls. And so do you.”

  We stood there for what seemed like a long time, staring each other down. To my amazement, Hattie looked away first.

  “All right, all right,” she said, and sighed. “If it makes you feel better, we’re looking. We’re looking as hard as we can. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the cowen families. They’ll never know, one way or the other. But we’re trying to save the girls. I made a potion to get people to remember—”

  “Was that the soup you made? That night you sent me home?”

  She nodded. “It was an attempt. A failed attempt. But we’re still trying.”

  “Then let me help,” I said. “That’s all I want. If we can just find out what happened to the Muffy girls—”

  “We know what happened to them,” Bryce said behind me.

  I spun around. He was standing there, his head hanging. Peter was beside him. “Don’t,” Hattie began, but Bryce held up a hand.

  “Katy has suffered sufficiently,” he said. “I am honor-bound to tell her.”

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  Hattie rolled her eyes. “The question is, will we have to shoot her afterward, to keep her big mouth from blabbing all over town?”

  “No,” I said defensively. “I can keep a secret. You know that now,” I said, sliding my eyes toward Bryce. I hadn’t told a soul about him or where he came from. Hattie grunted reluctantly.

  “Yes, we must tell her, Hattie,” Bryce said. “Always Katy taketh the blame for everything that’s happened to those girls.”

  “Oh, taketh off, Bryce,” Hattie said.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Scott, but I cannot. We knew all along that Katy was innocent.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “I must tell her. Everything.”

  Hattie threw up her hands. “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But don’t just hang around jawing. Make the pies for dinner service, Katy. Two apple, three pecan.”

  “Yes, Hattie.”

  “Peter, you prepare salad for twenty-five. Bryce, pound fifteen chicken breasts for scaloppine.”

  “Yes, Hattie,” they said in unison.

  We all got busy until she left the kitchen. “Okay,” I said, slapping the flour off my hands. “Talk.”

  Bryce put down the wooden mallet he was using to hammer a raft of chicken breasts. He looked small. Small and tired and scared. “It’s my fault that those girls are in their unfortunate condition,” he said.

  “You?” What was he telling me? “You zapped them?”

  “No. But because of me someone else did. Someone very dangerous.”

  “Who?”

  “A sorceress,” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning someone with a great deal more power than a witch. I cannot even mention her name, for fear that she might hear me.”

  I looked over at Peter, to see if this was some kind of a joke between them. “Are you serious?”

  Bryce gave a rueful laugh. “I wish I were not. I was entrusted to transport her to a safe place, but I failed in my task,” he said.

  “Are you like a bounty hunter or something?” I asked.

  “How’d she get away?” Peter interrupted.

  “She did not ‘get away,’ ” Bryce said. He cleared his throat. “Well, not exactly. She was trapped in a piece of amber, and I dropped it somewhere.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, squinting. “Did you say ‘trapped in amber’? Like, say, a fly?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “Er . . . Just how big was this person, exactly?” I asked.

  “Small,” he said. “That’s how she came to be trapped.”

  “And you dropped her somewhere.”

  “Here, I think. In Whitfield.” He sighed. “Those cowen girls must have found her and somehow released her from the amber.”

  “That’s a big ‘somehow,’ Bryce,” I said. “I don’t know if Summer and her gang deserve that much credit.”

  “They needn’t have known anything about witchcraft,” he said. “The sorceress who was in the amber is very powerful. She could have communicated with them, told them how to break the spell that bound her. In fact, that is almost certainly what happened.”

  “And the potion—”

  “It was a memory potion. Hattie and I were hoping that someone would remember seeing the sorceress. It might have given us an idea where she is.”

  “From your description, it sounds like she’d be pretty hard to forget,” I said.

  “Yes, but it yielded nothing. No one we’ve spoken to has seen her except for the four cowen girls, and they’re . . . ” He spread his hands in despair.

  “Summer was trying to summon power the night I broke into her room,” I remembered. “The girls were arguing about it. I got the feeling they’d done it before.”

  “Really?”

  A lightbulb went off inside my head. “It was the Ouija!” I said. “I knew it! They were doing incantations over a Ouija board when they got into some kind of fight, and then—”

  “And then she appeared?” he asked.

  “No,” I corrected. “And then they opened the door and saw me.”

  “And they collapsed?”

  “Not right away. First they made fun of me for a while.”

  He shook his head. “That does not seem to be sensible,” he muttered.

  “So who is this tiny evil being you’re chasing? Is she a fairy or something?”

  He started seasoning the coating for the chicken. “Actually, she is a Traveler,” he said. “Like me.”

  “A traveler?” Visions of Bryce lounging on a beach chair in the Caribbean while wearing a hair shirt swam into my head. “Where do you travel?”

  “Anywhere I want.” He grinned, then caught himself. “Of course, I do not indulge in that sort of thing. I go only where I am told.”

  “Like here.”

  “Yes. Actually, that is the main thing a Traveler can do. Leave Avalon.”

  I smiled. “Avalon?”

  To my surprise Peter caught on to what I was thinking. “Wasn’t that where King Arthur ended up?” he asked.

  “Yes, after he died. And only then because it had been the express wish of one of our greatest magicians, the Merlin.”

  “Merlin,” I said, awestruck. “Merlin the magician was from Avalon?”

  “You know of him?”

  “A little.” The witches of Whitfield practically revered the Merlin. Actually, “Merlin
” was more of a title than a name. It meant “court magician” or something. According to legend the Merlin practically raised King Arthur. He was with him when Arthur became king by pulling the magical sword Excalibur from the stone, and was his mentor throughout Arthur’s reign. With the Merlin’s help Arthur brought peace to Britain by bringing all the local leaders together around the famous Round Table, where no one was considered more important than anyone else. That nearly changed the world.

  Nearly.

  “With Merlin’s help Arthur nearly unified England,” I said.

  “Nearly,” Bryce repeated. “They both died before their dream was realized. If they’d succeeded, there would have been no such thing as the Dark Ages. And by now the world would have been technologically ahead of where it is at present. Ahead by centuries.”

  “Because of one person,” Peter said.

  “Two,” Bryce corrected. “King Arthur and the Merlin. It was the combination of the two of them that was so extraordinary.”

  I chewed on a slice of apple, unimpressed. “So what does that have to do with the fairy? Or with us?”

  Bryce cocked his head. “Because that’s where—and when—the sorceress I’m looking for is from,” he said.

  I frowned. “What do you mean ‘when’?”

  “Well . . . that was when she was captured. During the time of King Arthur.”

  “What?” Peter interjected. “Are you saying she’s not only from a different plane of existence, but from a different time as well?”

  “Yes,” Bryce said, blinking innocently. “I thought you knew that. She was the Merlin’s daughter.”

  Peter and I looked at each other. “And you guys trapped her in amber for a thousand years?” he asked incredulously.

  “It was more like sixteen hundred years,” Bryce said. “But it was necessary. She was a very wicked girl.”

  “But didn’t you think the Merlin would be, well, extremely irritated that his daughter had been trapped for all time like an insect in amber?”

  “The Merlin was already dead when that happened,” Bryce said. He cleared his throat. “His daughter killed him,” he added in a whisper.

  I choked on my apple. “H—how?” I coughed.

  “By summoning the Darkness,” Bryce said.

  I heard Peter suck in air. We’d all hoped that the Darkness would give us a rest for a while, but I guessed we were wrong.

  CHAPTER

  •

  EIGHTEEN

  “The Darkness” was our name for evil. That is, the distillation of evil. Most people—cowen, anyway—saw evil only through the terrible things they did to one another. But witches knew that it didn’t work that way. Evil existed on its own. The Darkness, grown out of the evil in people’s minds, was an entity unto itself, just waiting to infect whomever it could.

  Cowen didn’t have many defenses against the Darkness, although they had more than they knew—kindness, faith, loyalty, integrity, humor, gratitude, and love all kept the big D at bay. But a lot of people thought those things didn’t matter. When the Darkness was overwhelming, they wanted supernatural help of some kind. So they started praying to gods that they’d ignored all their lives, or threw coins into wells, or they went to medicine men or wise women or anyone who they thought might be a witch. What they didn’t realize was that the Darkness preferred magical people. We had more power to feed it. So we were the choice targets, if that made any sense.

  “To keep the Darkness at bay, the elders among my people put a protective spell around Avalon,” Bryce said.

  That was certainly familiar. When my ancestor Serenity Ainsworth was living in Whitfield in the 1600s, the Darkness and its ensuing evil—meaning the bloodthirsty witch-hunting Puritans—got to be so much of a danger to the witches that they came up with a spell to protect a section of town, the Meadow, which sits right in the middle of downtown Whitfield.

  It was Serenity’s spell, actually. She and Hattie’s ancestor Ola’ea Olokun, a West African shaman, created a barrier that would keep the Darkness forever out of the Meadow. It didn’t work perfectly, though, as we all discovered some time ago. I guessed that was because the Darkness could be expelled but never destroyed. Still, the barrier was pretty effective most of the time. During every magical holiday, the whole Meadow moved to a different level of existence, so that while life went on as usual in the human world that we shared with cowen, the Meadow and every witch in it seemed to vanish.

  “Is Avalon on the same plane as the Meadow, then?” I asked.

  “The same, but deeper,” Bryce said. “Your Meadow goes to an alternate plane only during Cross Quarters.”

  “Also equinoxes and solstices,” Peter said.

  Those words were witchspeak for the holidays of Beltane, Lammas, Samhain, and Imbolc, which occurred in May, August, October, and February, respectively. Those were the big ones, or Cross Quarter days. The equinoxes—times during the spring and fall when days and nights were of equal length—were known as Ostara and Mabon. Then there were the winter and summer solstices, Yule and Litha, which were the shortest and longest days of the year. Together they made up what we called the Wheel of the Year, since we viewed time—and life—as cyclical.

  “In Avalon, the barrier is permanent,” Bryce said. “The Darkness cannot touch it unless it is summoned by someone.”

  Suddenly things made sense. When the Darkness had come into our Meadow despite the witches’ shield, it had been because someone—me, actually, if you must know—had inadvertently brought the Darkness into that sacred space. I’m sure our founding mothers had never even entertained such a possibility.

  There was huge power in ineptitude.

  “Is that what your fairy did?” I asked, mostly so I could stop thinking about my own stupidity.

  “No. She summoned the Darkness from the human plane, where the Merlin was living at the time. Avalon is protected against all the ills of your world. We have no pollution, no industrial noise, no traffic, no skyscrapers.”

  Verity would love it there, I thought.

  “There is no war,” he said. “No dissent.”

  “No witch hunts,” I said.

  Bryce nodded. “Because nothing ever changes.”

  We were all silent for a long time. “Not ever?” Peter asked at last.

  “Never,” Bryce said. “Everything is exactly the way it was when the barrier was created. The way it’s always been.” He started pounding the chicken breasts again. It was too noisy to carry on the conversation, so I leaned close to Peter’s ear.

  “Is that why he sounded so strange when he first got here?” I asked. “Because he was speaking Old English, or whatever?”

  He nodded. “You should have seen him the first time he watched TV.”

  It got suddenly quiet in the kitchen. “Your world has been full of surprises,” Bryce said.

  “I’ll bet,” I agreed. “Pollution, global warming, crime, drugs . . . ”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “Compared with this, Avalon must be paradise.”

  Bryce turned away. “Some would say so.”

  “Some?”

  “At one time there were many who left. They were your ancestors. They turned away from the safety and security of our world to take their chances in this one.”

  “And ended up being burned at the stake,” I said, trying to sound worldly.

  “Their descendents, yes. Avalon was created a long time ago.”

  “How long?” I wanted to know.

  “About the time of the earliest Roman incursions.”

  “Julius Caesar,” Peter said.

  “Two thousand years?” It seemed hard to believe.

  “That was when it became clear that the Romans weren’t going to leave until we either gave in or died fighting.” He resumed his chicken pounding—in what I thought was a very intense way—so I put my hand on his, and he stopped.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He sighed and walked over to one of the folding chairs by the pa
ntry. Peter and I pulled up two others.

  “Avalon was a fairly big settlement then, from what I understand,” Bryce said softly. “We thought we’d be able to keep the invaders at bay with magic, but the Romans had weapons and tactics we’d never imagined. It was the closest we’d ever come to seeing the Darkness in its pure form.

  “Most of my people died. By the time the elders created the spell to take Avalon out of the human realm, there weren’t many of us left. And even then more than half our number chose to remain in this world—your world—rather than vanish into the mists.”

  “What happened to them?” Peter asked.

  “Not many of them survived, unfortunately. That’s why true witches are rare in this plane. But our Seer predicted that after much tribulation, the traitors—” He blushed. “Forgive me, but that is what the ones who left are called. The traitors would once again form a community in a new land. Of course, the original witches of Avalon never dreamed it would take more than a millennium and a half to found Whitfield.”

  “Your Seer?” I asked. “You mentioned that before. Is he some kind of prophet or something?”

  “The Seer is a woman,” he said. “Like you, we have many different talents, but there is only one Seer, a witch who can read the future. This person is our leader.”

  “Oh,” Peter said. “I guess that makes sense.”

  Bryce stood up, went to his station, and started pounding again. “Something’s wrong,” I mouthed to Peter. He went over to where Bryce was working and picked up one of the chicken breasts. It was so flattened that it had holes all over it.

  “Hey, man, what’s going on?” he asked. “You homesick? I mean, the modern world must seem pretty sucky at times. Katy and I get that.”

  Bryce laughed mirthlessly. “Right. You will not see any overhead electrical wires in Avalon,” he said, crushing another chicken breast to smithereens.

  “Uh, cool,” Peter said uncertainly. “Where do they put them? Underground?”

  Bryce gave a bitter laugh. “There are no wires because there is no electricity,” he said. “I told you, everything is the same as it was two thousand years ago. There is no running water. No cloth, except for what we spin and weave ourselves. No music except for our own singing. There are no books, no art, no movies.”