Poison

by Molly Cochran

  “No Facebook,” I said with a shiver.

  “No phones,” Peter added. “No TV. No Internet.”

  “No visitors.” At that, Bryce met my gaze. “No one can come into Avalon,” he said. “And very few can leave.”

  Peter and I looked at each other, bewildered. “Then why are you here?” I asked.

  Bryce wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I told you. I’m a Traveler. That means I have the ability to leave that plane, and permission from the Seer to leave Avalon. I may enter this world and travel wherever I need within it in the service of my mission.”

  “Right,” I said. “The fairy.”

  “She is not a fairy,” he said, irritated. “Just small. Small enough so that I could transport her.” He shook his head. “But alas, I lost her through a hole in my pocket.”

  “Where were you taking her?” Peter asked.

  Bryce looked abashed. “Here, I’m afraid.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You were bringing this dangerous-if-pint-size sorceress to Whitfield?”

  Bryce nodded glumly. “To Hattie Scott,” he said. “Your high priestess. Our Seer said she would know what to do.”

  “Like what, toss her in with the mashed potatoes?” I shouted. “We don’t have demon jails here, Bryce. When witches go bad, we send them away from Whitfield. We don’t invite them in.”

  “Calm down, Katy,” Peter said, turning back to Bryce. “Why’d she—your Seer or whatever—send you here, of all places?”

  “Because you are witches, like us,” he said simply. “Your blood connections to us make Whitfield the closest place to Avalon on this plane.”

  “I don’t see one peeled apple,” Hattie boomed from the doorway.

  “I’m on it, Hattie,” I called back, running to my station.

  Bryce picked up his mallet again. “Anyway, if I cannot find the sorceress, nothing else I do will matter a whit,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Avalon will not exist. That’s why the Seer sent me away with the amber. As long as the sorceress was trapped inside, our world was safe. But the Seer had a vision that the sorceress would one day destroy Avalon.”

  I swallowed. “And now she’s escaped from the amber.”

  “She’s escaped here,” Peter said.

  Bryce hung his head. “Because of me.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “If your Seer sees everything, didn’t she see this, too? That your little felon would escape?”

  “Her vision was that the sorceress would destroy Avalon,” Bryce went on doggedly. “By bringing her here, I was changing that future.”

  “Maybe,” Peter said. “Or it might mean that the future can’t be changed.”

  “Of course it can be changed,” I said hotly. “That isn’t the problem.” I looked from one of them to the other, trying to wrap my head around what Bryce had told us. “The problem is that now she might destroy Whitfield instead.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  NINETEEN

  “Have you three been jawing all this time?” Hattie growled. “After I told you how much there was to do?”

  We all finally sprang into action. Within ten seconds the kitchen was running at full speed, a symphony of hisses, thumps, clicks, and the whoosh of running water.

  “Anyway, that’s why the witches here are dropping the investigation into the girls in the comas,” Bryce said. “It all depends on my finding the sorceress before . . . ” He shrugged hopelessly.

  “Who knows about this?” I asked. “This whole thing.”

  “Hattie, of course. The Seer sent her a message. Miss P. Now you two. And honestly, I’d prefer it if the whole witch community didn’t know how I’d failed.” He looked pointedly at me. “With some luck I’ll be able to capture her and make the whole thing go away. Those girls will revive. The amber will be with Hattie. And I’ll go home,” he added quietly.

  “I won’t tell, I promise,” I said. “But you’ll have to watch out for Peter.” That was a joke. Peter wouldn’t blab a secret if he were being tortured. That’s a fact. Bryce and Peter both grinned.

  “How many apples have you done?” Hattie yelled.

  “Almost enough,” I shouted.

  “Is that chicken flat?”

  “As a pancake,” Bryce answered.

  I smiled. “Your English is getting better,” I said.

  He smiled back. “My English is correct, if antiquated. Yours is the variant.”

  “How about mine?” Hattie interjected. “You understand my English?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bryce answered.

  “What about when I say wrap those chicken parts in plastic and take them to the walk-in?”

  “I understand clearly,” Bryce said, abashed.

  “Peter, are you done with the salad?”

  “Yes, Hattie.”

  “Then help Katy pare her apples. She’s slow.”

  That hurt. I’m normally a lightning-fast fruit parer, but I’d gotten absorbed in Bryce’s story. To make up for lost time, I started moving faster than ever.

  “Where’s the other peeler?” Peter asked, rummaging through the utensil drawer.

  “Use this,” I said, handing over mine. “I’ll use a knife.” I could work even faster this way, paring and coring in one movement.

  “Katy?” Peter’s voice was soft.

  “What?” When I was working at this speed, I really didn’t want to be distracted.

  “We need to talk,” he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Bryce and Hattie were both out of earshot.

  Oh, no, I thought. Not the “It’s better if we’re friends” talk. The “I need some space” talk. As if I’d even seen him outside of work lately. The “It’s not you; it’s me” talk. The—

  “Katy, you’re bleeding.”

  I looked down. My apples were covered with blood. My blood. While I’d been stressing about how Peter was going to break up with me, I’d sliced open my thumb.

  “What’s that blood doing on my apples?” Hattie shouted into my ear.

  I jumped. I hadn’t even seen her come in. I grabbed a towel. Cuts and burns didn’t mean much in a professional kitchen. All of us were pretty familiar with the first aid cabinet in Hattie’s upstairs bathroom.

  “Go clean yourself up,” she said. “Peter, go with her.”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said.

  “Go!” Hattie pointed at the door. We left her griping as she threw into the garbage all the apples I’d cut.

  “I hope I didn’t freak you out,” Peter said once we got to the bathroom.

  That was such a guy thing to say. As if there were any possibility that I wouldn’t be freaked out. “No, of course not,” I lied as I ran cold water over my hand.

  “Oh. Good. Because I thought . . . Well, you know . . . ”

  I wrapped my thumb in a paper towel and lifted it above my heart. “Just say it, Peter,” I said wearily.

  “Uh . . . Well, it’s about the, uh, about Winter Frolic.”

  I knew it. My thumb throbbed in rhythm with the beating of my heart. “What is it this time?” I asked. “Some celebratory dinner? An awards ceremony? An emergency jaunt to South America with Uncle Jeremiah?” I’d heard all of these excuses before and they all meant the same thing: Peter wasn’t going to be available.

  “No. Actually, I can go.”

  “You can?” A spring of hope began to well up inside me.

  He nodded, looking crestfallen. “Only I have to take someone else.”

  The towel dropped to the floor. “Someone else? Someone else?” I shouted. “Who else?”

  “Some French girl,” he said. “Her father’s going into partnership with my uncle on some deal.”

  My thumb had started to bleed again, and was dripping onto the floor.

  “Watch out,” Peter said. “Hey, are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He took my hand. I pulled away from him so har
d that blood spattered all over both our faces. He grabbed it again and forced it under the water. “Jeez, Katy, the dance isn’t that important, is it?”

  “Yes, it is!” I shrieked. I heard my voice crack. “It is important, okay? To me, anyway.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said conciliatorily. “I just thought—”

  “Ever since Jeremiah Shaw came into your life, it’s like you’ve become a different person.”

  “I have not,” he protested, pulling the strips off a Band-Aid with his teeth.

  “Well, I never see you.” Ugh, what was I saying? I sounded like an insecure housewife.

  “You’re seeing me now.”

  “I want to see you at Winter Frolic,” I whined.

  “I wanted that too,” he said, “but we can’t always do what we want, can we?”

  “Oh, stop being rational and mature,” I spat. “I hate it when you’re like that.”

  “I can’t help the way I am, Katy. You must see—”

  “Well, I don’t!” I wailed. “I don’t see at all why you’re taking someone else to Winter Frolic, after we’d planned to go together.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a plan,” he said in his maddening, reasonable way. “As I remember, you said you hated those dress-up things. We were going to stop in for ten minutes and then go for pizza.”

  “Well, that was a plan, wasn’t it?” I burst into tears. “Is she . . . Is she beautiful?”

  Peter sighed. “Look, I don’t even know this girl, Katy. I’m taking her as a favor for my uncle. Apparently this French guy thinks that American teenagers are all drunkards and sex fiends, so Jeremiah told him—”

  “I don’t care what he told him! I’m your girlfriend!” I shrilled.

  “I know. And you always will be,” he said, pulling me close to him. “But I have to listen to him, at least for now. He’s my only hope of going to college. Do you know what that means to me?”

  “That you have to do everything he wants?” I spat, pushing him away.

  “You’re not being fair,” he said.

  There was a long silence. I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right. Before Uncle Jeremiah showed up, Peter had resigned himself to two years of community college and then a possible transfer to a four-year school that he could pay for with a bank loan and his savings from work. Now everything was different. He had a chance of going to Harvard, after all.

  I knew how much that meant to him, because I knew how much it meant to me.

  “All right,” I said. “I guess it’s not like it’s prom or anything.”

  “Hold your thumb up.”

  I looked him over suspiciously. “You’ve never seen her?”

  “Who?”

  “Your date,” I reminded him.

  “No. She just started here. She’s a freshman.”

  “So?”

  “So she’s fourteen. She’d probably rather be riding her bike.”

  I thought about that. At fourteen I was geeky and skinny and spent a week with my hand over my face because of a giant zit on the end of my nose.

  “Besides, we can still see each other there.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Bring a date.”

  “A date?”

  “Well, not a real date. But maybe someone . . . gay,” he said, brightening. “That’s it. Check out the guys in theater club.”

  “And what makes you think that anyone, gay, straight, or prone to necrophilia, is going to want to take the resident mass murderer to Winter Frolic?” I ranted.

  “Oh, that. Yeah. Hmm. Well, that’ll blow over before long.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just have a good time.”

  “No, I want you to go, Katy.”

  “Right. Just not with you.”

  “I’ll find you someone. How about Bryce?”

  “You know he’s taking Becca.”

  “Well, couldn’t the three of you . . . ”

  “Forget it, Peter,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go alone.”

  He smiled. “Would you do that?”

  “Maybe,” I said, unable to resist a tiny smile. “For ten minutes. Then I’m going for a pizza.”

  He kissed my cheek. “Thank you,” he said. Then he kissed my lips, and I forgot all about being mad at him. I knew that whatever stupid problems came into our lives, Peter and I would always be together. The dance didn’t matter. The fourteen-year-old French girl was probably a beast, anyway, or she’d have been able to get her own date for Winter Frolic.

  “I love you,” Peter said.

  “I know. I love you, too.”

  He kissed me again, this time stroking my hair with one hand while he held me close to him with the other. His tongue touched mine, and it was like an electric shock shooting through my body.

  “Peter,” I whispered.

  “I hate being away from you,” he breathed into my ear. “I wish I could spend my whole life touching you, loving you . . . ” Then, once again, he pressed his lips against mine until I wanted to cry out with need.

  “Is that what’s taking you two so long in there?” Hattie bellowed from the hallway. “That had better be mouth-to-mouth resuscitation I’m seeing.”

  We scrambled to clean up the mountain of bloody paper towels around us.

  “I thought by now either you’d be healed or your thumb would be amputated.”

  “We were just going back to the kitchen,” I said.

  “Oh? How were you planning to get there, on your lips? Because those were the only parts of you two that were moving,” she shouted down the stairs after us.

  She’d finished all the apples, so I looked around for something else to do while holding my thumb aloft. I must have looked like the Statue of Liberty, giving a big thumbs-up to all the world.

  “You go home,” Hattie said.

  “No, really, I’m—”

  “Go home and let your grandma see that cut. I won’t have you bleeding on the food here.”

  Peter and I looked longingly at each other until Hattie spun him around. “Prepare two dozen artichokes,” she said, pushing him toward the sink.

  “I’ll try to find you a date,” Peter called.

  “I don’t even want to know what that’s about,” Hattie said as the double doors swung shut behind me.

  • • •

  After a brief visit to my great-grandmother, who bandaged my thumb, I called my father, the medievalist.

  “Yes?” he muttered, preoccupied as usual. I think the only time he ever spoke to me without doing something else at the same time was when I was in the intensive care unit at the hospital last year. I guess that was what it took for him to pay attention to me. But I was calling about medieval history, so I figured he’d probably answer me.

  “It’s Katy, Dad. I need to know something about King Arthur. For a paper,” I added.

  He snorted. That was what he did when he thought something was too ridiculous to respond to. “Aside from the fact that he probably never existed, what specifically are you looking for?”

  “He . . . Arthur never existed?”

  “In all likelihood King Arthur is an amalgam of several tribal chieftains who attempted to unify Britain after the occupying Roman garrisons left the region to defend their own city, which was being invaded by Visigoths and other—”

  “Er, what time frame are we talking about here?” I interrupted. I knew he could go on about Ancient Rome forever. Or until he got bored with me and hung up before answering my question.

  “Well, the Romans left in 410, after having occupied—and modernized—Britain for nearly four centuries. The governor’s last message to the Britons was ‘Defend yourselves!’ From that point on, Britain disintegrated.”

  “I thought they were modernized.”

  “By the Romans.” Dad was warming up now. “They were the ones who built the roads, the aqueducts, the baths. The Romans supplied the architects, engineers, physicians, soldiers, and craftsmen. When the Romans left, they took their knowledge wi
th them. Imagine a mansion that suddenly had no electricity, running water, replacement roof tiles, pipes to fix the plumbing, glass for the windows, or anyone who knew how to make or use these things. That was Britain, and it remained that way for several centuries.

  “The warlords, including ‘Arthur,’ if that happened to be the name of one of them, made futile attempts at conquering one another. Had one succeeded, England might have been spared the worst of the so-called Dark Ages.”

  “So, er, when was it that he—they—Arthur—might have lived?”

  “Oh, I’d say the most likely period within the sub-Roman catastrophe would have been about a hundred years after the Roman exodus. Everything the Romans built would have fallen into ruin by then. The cities would have been overrun by rats and disease. Tribal infighting would have been at a peak. That would have been between 475 and 535, generally.”

  “It sounds like unifying England would have been a pretty hard task.”

  “Virtually impossible, I’d say. Nothing short of magic could have helped, under the circumstances. And I mean real magic, not the sort of thing those silly women in Whitfield pretend to do.”

  I let that go. I always let it go.

  “I can recommend several books about that era if you’re interested,” he offered hopefully. Dad would have liked for me to become a scholar like he was, even though we were both pretty sure that I wasn’t cut out for academic life.

  “Uh, sure,” I said, and dutifully wrote down the titles. “So Arthur just . . . failed?”

  “Obviously, they all did. Perhaps one or two of the chieftains managed to bring a few other strongholds under their purview before they died—”

  “The Knights of the Round Table!” I said.

  He sighed. “Katherine, why do you insist on speaking as if the legend were true?”

  Because it is, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. “It’s an interesting story.” That was the sort of nonanswer I’d perfected when talking with my father.

  “I suppose,” he said dismissively. “I wish you’d try to think a little more broadly, though, if you can. You tend to lack imagination.”

  That was a new one. “I do?”

  “Well, all this speculating about legends and mystic things. It’s a waste of time. And an embarrassment, really.”