“Would you have preferred me to kill him?” Nick asked.
Harvey was speechless.
“Would you?” Nick pursued. “Because I could do that.”
“No!” Harvey snarled. “I don’t want you to kill my dad. He’s my dad! Why would I— What kind of question is that?”
When he looked up, Nick was watching him.
“Do you … love him?”
“Yeah,” mumbled Harvey.
Nick made a face. “Why? Do you just love anybody?”
“No, I don’t,” Harvey said curtly.
He could count the people he loved on one hand. There was Sabrina and Tommy, always. There was Roz and Susie. Then there was his father, who he loved with a resentful, uneasy love that had no liking in it.
And now Tommy was dead. Sabrina was lost to Nick’s world of shadows and blood. Magic had taken so much he loved away.
Harvey hadn’t wanted Sabrina enchanting his father, and he didn’t want Nick doing it either. It was awful he was glad his dad wasn’t drinking any longer, and awful he was glad his dad was in his room and not coming out. It was awful that Harvey was happy to have company.
“Does your father always talk to you like that?”
“Yeah,” said Harvey bleakly. “Can we stop discussing this? Get back to your books. That’s what you’re here for.”
Nick shrugged and complied. Harvey cleared up the dishes and finished his math homework, trying to ignore the answers Nick had written, which were irritatingly correct and made sense of a few things Harvey hadn’t understood before.
Then he was done. Nick was still leafing through the books, making copious notes. It was late, but Harvey knew what it looked like when Sabrina or Roz was absorbed in a problem. So he did what he usually did during late-night study sessions when his own brain had turned off, which was sketch stuff and make the beverages.
Harvey had drawn a thousand pictures of every detail of his home long ago, trying to practice every way he knew how. Nothing much changed in Greendale, but he’d never had a warlock studying at his kitchen table before.
Harvey put a steaming mug at Nick’s elbow and went back to drawing until Nick gave a soft murmur of realization five minutes later when he discovered the mug was there.
“What …” said Nick, squinting at it as if he wasn’t familiar with mugs.
“For you,” said Harvey.
Nick kept squinting at the mug. Eventually, he muttered: “I want coffee.”
“No,” Harvey told him. “It’s too late. You won’t sleep. This is herbal tea. It’s soothing. You should know this. I’m sure witches know about herbs.”
Nick made a face at him. Then he made a face at the herbal tea and whispered a few spells into his cup, which Harvey found rude. Eventually, he returned to swearing quiet eldritch curses as he made more notes, pulled at his own hair while lost in thought, and drank his tea. The header on Nick’s new page read The Battle between the Sexes? Actual Weapons Seldom Involved.
Harvey kept sketching. When Harvey was making another cup of tea, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Nick swivel the sketch across the table toward him with a fingertip. Nick, who was unruffled by discussions about sex and dark magic, seemed taken aback.
“That’s me.”
“You’re the only new thing I have to draw,” Harvey explained. “Do you mind?”
“No,” Nick answered. “I don’t mind.”
Nick tapped his pen against the sketch and smiled briefly to himself. Harvey thought the picture had turned out well too.
Then the drawing burst into flames. The paper curled up at the edges, black as a dead rose, and within moments the sketch was only a cinder on the table and red lights reflected in Nick’s dark eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Can’t leave any images of myself lying around for people to enchant,” Nick told him briskly. “It’s fine to draw them, though. I’ll destroy them later.”
“Oh my God,” said Harvey. “I can’t believe you.”
Nick yawned. “Could you not talk about the false god so much? Hey, I have another question.”
Harvey braced himself.
“Sometimes I go out into the world to watch mortals. What does it mean when mortals give you a piece of paper with numbers on it? Is it a code?”
“You don’t know what a phone number is?”
He wasn’t sure how to explain phones. He didn’t remember who had invented phones. Maybe Edison. Wait, no, that was light bulbs.
“If a girl gives you her phone number …” Harvey said. “That means she likes you.”
“I see,” Nick said.
“Does that happen to you a lot?”
Nick smirked. “Every time I go out among the mortals.”
Harvey rolled his eyes. “How nice for you.”
“I thought the numbers just meant they wanted to sleep with me,” Nick mused.
Harvey coughed. “Um. Well, some people only want to sleep with people they like. Uh, and some people wait to be in love.”
“Witches don’t do that,” Nick told him cheerfully. “Witches can’t love anybody. Satan forbids it.”
Harvey stared. Nick seemed to mean what he was saying.
“You think you can’t love people?” Harvey asked. Just to be clear.
“Sabrina’s the only witch who can,” Nick explained.
That fit right in with Harvey’s nightmares of witches, murderous, heartless creatures who laid waste to the world.
But now someone else said it, that made no sense. Harvey remembered a sunny day in his childhood, sitting on a gravestone in the Spellman cemetery and watching Hilda cover Sabrina with handfuls of daisies.
“So many flowers,” Hilda had said. “But where’s my flower? Wait, I see her! I see her little nose.”
The Spellman house was such a bright place. Her home made Sabrina who she was.
“Nick,” said Harvey. “You claim you’re smart, so stop talking like an idiot. Witches love people. The Spellmans love Sabrina. It’s in everything they do.”
Nick seemed stunned into silence. Possibly he was stunned Harvey had called him an idiot.
At last, he asked: “Do you really think I could?”
How was Harvey supposed to know? He barely knew Nick.
But Nick had come when Sabrina asked. He’d noticed Sabrina loved people. He talked about watching mortals. That made Harvey think of watching Hilda and Sabrina. He knew how it felt to long for a home.
“Sure,” said Harvey gently. “Of course I do.”
Nick still seemed doubtful. “I don’t think I would be very good at it.”
“The important part is trying,” said Harvey.
Nick let out a deep breath, shook his head, and retreated to his books.
By the time Harvey found himself nodding off at the kitchen table, he decided this was ridiculous and he was going to bed. He went off to brush his teeth. When he came out of the bathroom, Nick was sleeping with his head in his arms, protectively cradling the latest book. Harvey sighed in annoyance and went to get a blanket and a pillow from the closet in his room.
He turned and found Nick at the door, yawning again and still clutching the book. “Where’d you go?”
“It’s very late.”
Maybe it wasn’t late for witches? Did witches stay up all night, every night? When did Sabrina go to her other school, exactly? Harvey felt too tired to contemplate the insomniac habits of witches.
He offered the blanket and pillow to Nick, who accepted them and wandered over to the desk where Harvey usually sketched, sat, and continued to read. Harvey gave up on being a polite host and went to bed.
He woke to find the morning gray behind the fir trees outside his window, the blanket folded on the desk, and Nick finally gone.
Harvey climbed out of bed and picked up the last book, left on the desk beside the blanket. He turned the book over in his hands, holding on to it the way Nick had, as though books comforted him.
Nick was
weird as hell, but he wasn’t terrifying, not the way witches were in Harvey’s nightmares. And he’d asked Harvey for help. Harvey’s own grandfather didn’t even come by the house anymore. Grandpa was proud of Tommy, but he always said Harvey was useless.
It was nice not to feel useless for a change.
It had been a truly bizarre night, but the night was over. He’d get to see Roz soon.
With any luck, he’d never see Nick Scratch again.
I didn’t have many classes with Nick and the Weird Sisters, who were more advanced than I was, but lectures were different. When I entered the gray cavern of the lecture hall, carrying my charms and incantations project in my hands for fear of more mistakes, they were all there.
Prudence, Agatha, and Dorcas usually sat together, but not today. Prudence was sitting alone in one row, and her sisters in the row behind her. Nick was across the way. He was reading through a pile of notes, but he looked up when I came in, and beckoned.
I remembered what Ambrose had said about him. I shook my head and smiled, and then I went over to Prudence.
“Can I sit with you?”
Prudence gave a disdainful sigh. “Do what you must.”
I figure this was the closest thing to a welcome Prudence was capable of and hopped into the seat beside her. Set in the rough stone wall over our heads, there was a massive fossilized hand holding a flaming torch. I read over my charms project one last time by its orange glow.
“I did my project on protection charms,” I said. “Swallowing a pearl to save yourself from drowning, that kind of thing. How about you?”
“Luck charms,” Prudence answered.
The mention of luck caught my attention. I glanced nervously over at Prudence, but her eyes were on our lecturer—unfortunately Sister Jackson again—and she appeared superbly indifferent as usual.
“Oh, really?” I asked. “I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised. You do have a lot of luck with guys.”
“No luck needed there,” murmured Prudence. “They’re lining up to have their hearts crushed to powder.”
I coughed. “Right. Awesome.”
That was enough girl talk for me. I turned over another page, then watched as a fat orange spark from the torch floated through the dusty air and landed right on my homework. Before I could whisper a guarding spell, the pages went up in a blaze.
Several people turned around in their chairs to watch my project burning.
“Oh, bad luck, Sabrina,” murmured the boy sitting in front of me.
I stared at the pile of cinders. “Yeah,” I said weakly.
“Your family simply burns to get into trouble, don’t they?” was Sister Jackson’s contribution.
“Thank you, Sister Jackson,” I said under my breath. “Sick burn, Sister Jackson.”
“I heard that, Sabrina Spellman!” Sister Jackson threw over her shoulder. “Zero points on this assignment. See me after class.”
Prudence flicked a speck of ash off the lace collar of her dress and didn’t comment.
“I’ve been a bit worried that I might have attracted a bad-luck spirit,” I confided to her.
“At the turn of the year? You mean, the worst possible time to attract a bad-luck spirit?” Prudence gave a brief laugh. “Typical Sabrina.”
“Maybe I didn’t. Maybe everything’s fine.”
Prudence didn’t offer me any help, but the boy in front of us helpfully offered me parchment and a pen. I accepted with thanks. He was the same boy who’d loaned me a pencil yesterday. He must be running through office supplies fast because of me. He seemed nice. I thought his name was Peter Pan. Something like that.
I caught Nick looking his way. Maybe he and Peter Pan were friends.
Once the lecture was over, Nick rose and approached the desk where Prudence and I were sitting.
“Hey. Can I have a word, Sabrina?”
“About what?”
Nick glanced from Prudence to the boy sitting in front of me and down at the notes in his hands. If it had been anyone but Nick Scratch, I would’ve said he was nervous.
Then he looked up from his notes. “Will you give me your phone number?”
I stared. “Do you own a phone?”
Nick shook his head.
“Then why do you want my number?”
“I wish you’d give it to me.” Nick’s voice sounded almost wistful. “But you don’t have to. No pressure.”
“When boys ask for my number, I tell them I don’t have a phone,” Prudence remarked. “I enjoy cruel truths.”
I chewed on my lip and thought of Roz saying she needed time before she was ready to deal with me. I thought of wanting to call Harvey so badly and knowing I couldn’t. I wasn’t part of the mortal world any longer. The mortals didn’t want me there. Nick was only asking for a way to reach me.
I wrote my number down on the edge of parchment Peter Pan had loaned me, tore it off, and handed the number to Nick with a smile. “Here you go.”
Nick took the scrap of paper with an awed air, as though I’d given him a jewel. He consulted his notes again.
“Sorry if I’ve been coming on too strong,” he said. “I just wanted you to know I like you. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
I sat paralyzed with surprise. That was the last thing I’d ever expected him to say. I had no idea what to say back. I wished fervently that we could be interrupted.
That was the moment when, with a shower of dust and sliding pebbles, the giant fossilized hand stuck in the wall came loose and crashed down upon us. Prudence, the Weird Sisters, and the boy sitting up front dived for cover.
Nick Scratch dived for me. He knocked me off my stool, and we landed on the stone floor with rocks raining down on us. Everyone was shouting out spells to quench fire and hold the walls, me included. Nick’s back was arched protectively over my body, his hand cupping my head. His low voice was close to my ear as he whispered shielding incantations, and I felt oddly safe, in a way I wouldn’t have expected to feel among the witches of the Academy.
The rockslide ceased, shards of stone halting in midair. Nick lifted his head. There was gray dust in his dark hair and a graze on his cheek.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I gazed up at him.
Then Dorcas and Agatha pulled Nick off and away. Dorcas seemed deeply concerned that Nick had been hurt, though he was violently protesting that he was fine. Apparently, Dorcas was determined to remove his shirt and check for herself.
I sighed and sat up. Sure. I knew what Nick was like.
Prudence crouched down in the fallen debris of the wall, smoothing her dark purple skirt over her knees. Not a speck of dust had dared to land on her immaculately bleached and shingled hair. An amused smile played along her raspberry-painted lips.
“You know what, Sabrina? I think you might have attracted a bad-luck spirit.”
“Thanks, Prudence. Thanks for that insight.” I stood, dusting myself off and trying to formulate a plan.
Ambrose said bad-luck spirits were easy to banish. You only needed to find out their names. I didn’t have to go running to my family. I could do this by myself.
Well. Perhaps I could use a little help.
I turned to Prudence. “Luck charms are your specialty. Could we go to the library together? I need to find out the bad-luck spirit’s name.”
There was a pause. I waited apprehensively. It was possible this was too much to ask. Everyone knew Prudence had her hands full with her baby brother.
“Will you put in a good word for me with Zelda?” Prudence asked abruptly.
I stared. “With my aunt Zelda? Why? Oh, because she’s going to be the choir mistress?”
Prudence paused for the briefest of moments. “Naturally. I want a solo.”
I nodded eagerly. “Of course I will.”
“Then … yes,” Prudence agreed. “We have a bargain. I’ll help you banish your bad-luck spirit.”
Rosalind Walker sat in the new tea shop with Harvey acro
ss the table from her. To someone who didn’t know them, this might look like a date.
As soon as the thought occurred to Roz, she poured the contents of her little flowered teapot directly onto her éclair.
“Whoa, Roz,” said Harvey. “Hey.”
He was abruptly out of his chintzy armchair and on his knees at her feet, mopping up the tea with the paper napkins.
Roz made an agonized face. “Sorry, sorry …”
“It’s okay. You didn’t get burned?”
“No.”
Harvey smiled up at her, his singularly sweet and distracting smile. “Then it’s all okay.”
From another guy it might’ve seemed like a line, but that wasn’t Harvey. You could rely on Harvey to mean what he said.
Once the mess was cleaned up, Harvey paused and switched the plates, giving Roz the éclair that wasn’t soaked in tea.
“Come on, Harv,” Roz protested. “Don’t.”
Harvey shook his head. “Hey, teenage guys eat everything, haven’t you heard? Anyway, I love coffee-flavored éclairs. This tea-flavored éclair is probably going to become the latest trend. It’s mine now. Don’t think you’re getting it back.”
Roz stifled a laugh. “Thanks.”
Roz gave a lot of thought to words and what they meant. The words nice or good weren’t specific enough. The words covered so much that they didn’t actually mean much. The people in Roz’s church were—mostly—nice and good. Harvey was considerate. He didn’t consider what might be virtuous or sinful. He considered other people, and he put them first.
Harvey hesitated. “Are your eyes bothering you?”
Roz shrugged, feeling bad blaming her vision for her clumsiness. “Yeah.”
It was true, though it wasn’t the whole truth. Her eyes were always bothering her these days. She looked over at Harvey. They were sitting at the table set in the big front window of the Bishop’s Daughter Coffee and Teas. Behind Harvey and the glass, the main street outside was a glittering stretch of snow, but Roz couldn’t make out the curve of fire hydrants or the lines of tree branches anymore. She could barely discern Harvey’s face, but she knew it so well she could fill in the lost details: the sharp nose and crooked vulnerable line of his mouth, his eyes always a little hollow from lack of sleep as he stayed up sketching. Right now she knew that dark gaze was soft with concern for her.
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