Black Magick

CHAPTER 3 Dread

April 2000

Scrying doesn't always mean you see a picture—it can be more like receiving impressions. I use my lueg, my scrying stone. It's a big, thick chunk of obsidian, almost four inches at its widest and tapering to a point. It was my father's. I found it under my pillow the morning he and Mum disappeared.

Luegs are more reliable than either fire or water. Fire may show you pasts and possible futures, but ti's hard to work with. There's an old Wiccan saying that goes: Fire is a fragile lover, court her well, neglect her not; her faith is like a misty smoke, her anger is destruction hot. Water is easier to use but very misleading. Once I heard Mum say that water is the Wiccan whore, spilling her secrets to any, lying to most, trusting few.

Last night I took my lueg and went down to the kill that flows at the edge of my uncle's property. This was where we swan int the summer, where Linden and I caught minnows, where Alwyn used to pick gooseberries.

I sat at the water's edge and scryed, looking deep into my obsidian, weaving spells of vision.

After a long, long time, the rock's face cleared, and in it's depths I saw my mother. It was my mother of all those years ago, right before she disappeared. I remember the day clearly. An eight-year-old me ran up to where she knelt in the garden, pulling weeds. She looked up, saw me, and her face lit, as if I was the sun. Giomanach, she said, and looked at me with love, the sunlight glinting off her bright hair. Seeing her in the lueg, I was almost crushed with longing and a childish need to see her, have her hold me.

When the stone went blank, I held it in my hand, then crumpled over and cried on the bank of the kill.

— Giomanach

My birthday dinner was like a movie. I felt like I was watching myself through a window, smiling, talking to people, opening presents. I was glad to see Aunt Eileen and her girlfriend, Paula Steen, again—and Mom and Mary K. had worked hard to make everything special. It would have been a great birthday, except for the horrific images that kept crashing into my brain. Hunter and Cal grappling in the churned, bloody snow. Myself, sinking to my knees under Cal's binding spell, then me looking down at the athame in my hand and looking up to see Hunter. Hunter, rivulets of blood on his neck, going over the edge of the cliff.

"Hey, are you all right?" Mary K. asked me as I stood by the window, gazing out into the darkness. "You seem kind of out of it."

"Just tired," I told her. I added quickly, "But I'm having a great time. Thanks, Mary K."

"We aim to please." She flashed me a grin.

Finally Aunt Eileen and Paula left, and I went upstairs and called Cal. His voice sounded weak and scratchy.

"I'm okay," he said. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," I said. "Physically."

"I know." He sighed. "I can't believe it. I didn't mean for him to go over the edge. I just wanted to stop him." He laughed dryly, a croaking sound. "Helluva seventeenth birthday. I'm sorry, Morgan."

"It wasn't your fault," I said. "He came after you."

"I didn't want him to hurt you."

"But why did you put binding spells on me?" I asked.

"I was afraid. I didn't want you to jump into the middle of it and get hurt," Cal said.

"I wanted to help you. I hated being frozen like that. It was awful."

"I'm so sorry, Morgan," Cal breathed. "Everything was happening so fast, and I thought I was acting for the best."

"Don't ever do that to me again."

"I won't, I promise. I'm sorry."

"Okay. I called 911 when I got home," I admitted softly. "And I sent Sky an anonymous witch message, telling her where to look for Hunter."

Cal was silent for a minute. Then he said, "You did the right thing. I'm glad you did."

"It didn't help, though. I saw Sky at the river the morning. She said Hunter didn't come home last night. She was sure I knew something about it."

"What did you tell her?"

"That I didn't know what she was talking about. She said she didn't feel Hunter's presence or something like that. And she called me a lying Woodbane."

"That bitch," Cal said angrily.

"Could she find out about what happened somehow? Using magick?"

"No," said Cal. "My mom put a warding spell around the whole place to block anyone from scrying and seeing what happened. Don't worry."

"I am worried," I insisted. A bubble of panic was rising in my throat again. "This is horrible. I can't stand it."

"Morgan! Try and calm down," said Cal. "It will all be okay, you'll see. I won't let anything happen to you. The only thing is, I'm afraid Sky is going to be a problem. Hunter was her cousin, and she's not going to let this rest. Tomorrow we'll spell your house and your car with wards of protection. But still—be on your guard."

"Okay." Dread settled more heavily on my shoulders as I hung up. Wherever this is going, I thought, there's no way it can end well. No way at all.

On Monday morning I got up early and grabbed the morning paper before anyone else could see it. Widow's Vale doesn't have its own daily paper, just a twice-monthly publication that's mostly pickup articles from other papers. I quickly paged through the Albany Times Union to see if there was any mention of a body being fished out of the Hudson. There wasn't. I gnawed my lip. What did that mean? Had his body not been found yet? Or was it just that we weren't close enough to Albany for them to cover the story?

I drove with Mary K. to school and parked outside fie building, feeling like I had aged five years over the weekend.

As I turned off the engine, Bakker Blackburn, Mary K.'s boyfriend, trotted up to meet her. "Hey, babe," he said, nuzzling her neck. friends.

Mary K. giggled and pushed him away. He took her book bag from her, and they went off to meet their Robbie Gurevitch, one of my best friends and a member of my coven, strolled up to my car. A group of freshman girls stared admiringly at him as he passed them, and I saw him blush. Being gorgeous was new to him — until I'd given him a healing potion a month ago, he'd had horrible acne. But the potion had cleared up his skin and even erased the scars.

"Are you going to fix your car?" he asked me.

I looked at my broken headlight and smashed nose and sighed. A few days ago I'd thought someone was following me, and I had skidded on a patch of ice and crunched my beloved behemoth of a car, fondly known as Das Boot, into a ditch. At the time it had seemed utterly terrifying, but since the events of Saturday night, it felt more in perspective.

"Yep," I said, scanning the area for Cal. That morning I'd noticed the Explorer was gone from my block, but I didn't know If he'd be back at school today.

"I'm guessing it'll cost at least five hundred bucks," Robbie said.

We walked toward the old, redbrick former courthouse that was now Widow's Vale High. I was striving for normalcy, trying to be old reliable Morgan. "I wanted to ask you—did you go to Bree's coven's circle on Saturday?" Bree Warren had been my other best friend since childhood— my closest friend—until we fought over Cal. Now she hated me. And I… I didn't know what I felt about her. I was furious at her. I didn't trust her. I missed her fiercely.

"I did go." Robbie held the door open for me. "It was small and kind of lame. But that English witch, Sky Eventide, the one who leads their circles…" He whistled. "She had power coming off her in waves."

"I know Sky," I said stiffly. "I met her at Cal's. What did you guys do? Did Sky mention me or Cal?"

He looked at me. "No. We just did a circle. It was interesting because Sky does it slightly differently than Cal. Why would she mention you or Cal?"

"Different how?" I pressed, ignoring his question. "You guys didn't, um, do anything scary, did you? Like call on spirits or anything?"

Robbie stopped walking. "No. It was just a circle, Morgan. I think we can safely say that Bree and Raven are not having their souls sucked out by the devil."

I gave him an exasperated look. "Wiccans don't believe in the devil," I reminded him. "I just want to make sure that Bree isn't getting into anything dangerous or bad." Like I did.

We walked to the basement stairs, where our coven, Cirrus, usually hung out in the morning. Ethan Sharp was already there, doing his English homework. Jenna Ruiz sat across from him, reading, her fair, straight hair falling like a curtain across her cheek. They both looked up and greeted us.

"Bad?" Robbie repeated. "No. Sky didn't strike me as bad. Powerful, yes. Sexy—absolutely." He grinned.

"Who's this?" Jenna asked.

"Sky Eventide," Robbie reported. "She's the blood witch that Bree and Raven have in their new coven. Oh, guess their coven's name." He laughed. "Kithic. It means 'left-handed' in Gaelic. Raven picked out that name from something she read, without knowing what it meant."

The rest of us smiled. After our fight, Bree had split off from Cirrus to start her own coven with Raven. To me it seemed both of them were just playing at being Wiccan, doing it to look cool, to get back at me for winning Cal, or just to do something different. Widow's Vale is a small town, and there aren't that many entertainment opportunities.

Or maybe I was selling them short. Maybe they were really sincere in their commitment. I sighed and rubbed my forehead, feeling like I didn't know anything anymore.

In homeroom people were already planning their Thanksgiving holidays, which would start at noon on Wednesday. It would be a relief not to have to go to school for a few days. I've always been an A student (well, mostly), but it was getting harder and harder to keep my mind on schoolwork when so many more compelling things were taking up my time and energy. Nowadays I just flashed through my physics and trig homework and did the bare minimum in other classes so I would have more time to study spells, plan my future magickal herb garden, and read about Wicca. Not only that, but just reading the Book of Shadows written by my birth mother, which I'd found in Selene's library over a week ago, was like a college course in itself. I was stretched very thin these days.

In homeroom I opened my book Essential Oils and Their Charms under my desk and started reading. In the spring I would try to make some of my own, the way Selene did.

When Bree came into class, I couldn't help looking up. Her face was as familiar as my own, but nowadays she had another layer to her, a layer that didn't include me. She wore mostly black, like Raven did, and although she hadn't adopted any of Raven's gothy piercings or tattoos, I wondered if it was just a matter of time.

Bree had always been the beautiful one, the one boys flocked around, the life of the party. I had been the plain friend that people put up with because Bree loved me and was my best friend, but then Cal had come between us. Bree had even lied and told me they'd slept together. We'd quit speaking, and then Cal and I started going out.

After being like conjoined twins for eleven years, I'd found the last few Breeless weeks bizarre and uncomfortable. She still didn't know I was adopted, that I was a blood witch. She didn't know about what had happened with Hunter. At one time she had been the only person in the world I might have told.

I couldn't resist looking at her face, her eyes the color of coffee. For just a second she met my gaze, and I was startled by the mix of emotions there. We both looked away at the same time. Did she miss me? Did she hate me? What was she doing with Sky?

The bell rang, and we all stood. Bree's dark, shiny hair (disappeared through the doorway, and I followed her. When she turned the corner to go to her first class, I was seized by a spontaneous desire to talk to her. "Bree."

She turned, and when she saw it was me, she looked surprised. "Listen—I know that Sky is leading your coven," I found myself saying.

"So?" No one looked imperious like Bree looked imperious.

"I just—it's just that Sky is dangerous," I said quickly. "She's dangerous, and you shouldn't hang out with her."

Her perfect eyebrows rose. "Do tell," she drawled.

"She has this whole dark agenda; she's caught up in this whole program that I bet she hasn't told you about. She's— she's evil, she's bad, and dangerous." I realized in despair that I sounded melodramatic and muddled.

"Really." Bree shook her head, looking like she was trying not to laugh. "You are too much, Morgan. It's like you get off on lying, raining on people's parades."

"Look, I heard you and Raven last week in the bathroom," I admitted. "You were talking about how Sky was teaching you about the dark side. That's dangerous! And I heard you saying you gave Sky some of my hair! What was that about? Is she putting spells on me?"

Bree's eyes narrowed. "You mean you were spying on me?" she exclaimed. "You're pathetic! And you have no idea what you're talking about Cal is filling your head with ridiculous crap, and you're just sucking it up! He could be the devil himself, and you wouldn't care because he's the only boy who ever asked you out!"

Before I realized what was happening, my hand had shot out and smacked Bree hard across the face. Her head snapped sideways, and within seconds the pink outline of my palm appeared on her cheek. I gasped and stared at her as her face twisted into anger. "You bitch!" she snarled.

Out of lifelong habit, I started to feel remorseful, and then I thought, Screw that. I took a deep breath and called on my own anger, narrowing my eyes. "You're the bitch," I snapped. "You can't stand the fact that I'm not your puppet anymore, that I'm not your charity case, your permanent audience. You're jealous of me for once, and it's eating you up. I have a fantastic boyfriend, I have more magickal power than you'll ever dream about, and you can't stand it. Finally I'm better than you. I'm amazed your head doesn't explode!"

Bree gaped at me, her eyes wide, her mouth open. "What are you talking about?" she practically shrieked. "You were never my audience! You make it sound like I was using you! This is what I'm talking about! Cal is brainwashing you!"

"Actually, Bree," I said coldly, "you'd be amazed at how little we talk about you. In fact, your name hardly comes up."

With that, I swept off, my teeth clenched so tight, I could feel them grinding together. I didn't think I'd ever had the last word in an argument with Bree before. But the thought didn't make me feel any better. Why had I talked to her? I had just made everything worse.