Poison

by Molly Cochran

  This was the Merlin’s cave. When the wizard had first discovered it, he’d intended to suggest that it might be used as an emergency hiding place for the castle’s inhabitants in case of attack. But as Arthur’s power had solidified, it had seemed less and less likely that such a strategy would be necessary, and the Merlin had granted himself the small luxury of using the area as his personal retreat. This was where he had come in the past to reflect and plan in crystalline silence. This was where he had decided that Britain and its high king would be the central focus of his skill and his life. And now this unearthly chamber was where he had come to die.

  “Father?”

  The Merlin, who had collapsed against a column of sheer quartz, struggled to focus his eyes.

  “It’s me. Morgan.”

  He swallowed once. There was no longer any trace of anger in the haggard gray face.

  “Would you have done it for me?” she asked.

  “Wha . . . what?” His voice trembled with weakness.

  “Would you have died in my place?”

  He blinked, uncomprehending, then closed his eyes.

  “Would you?” Her voice was high-pitched, urgent.

  With a nearly imperceptible movement, the old man seemed to sink into the translucent rock as if it were something soft. “For you,” he rasped, clutching Morgan’s hand. “My son. My king.”

  CHAPTER

  •

  FORTY-EIGHT

  With a strangled sound Morgan dropped the amber stones. Her eyes were flat and dull.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Why?” she countered sharply. “Your father doesn’t love you, either.”

  I didn’t answer. My relationship with my father was too complicated for casual conversation. In the end, though, I believed he did love me. He wasn’t very attentive or affectionate, true, but he’d allowed me to stay in Whitfield because he knew how important that was to me. That’s love, in a way. His way. But it took me a long time to figure it out. Maybe if Morgan had taken the time, she’d have found that her father loved her too.

  Or maybe he didn’t. Sometimes you just had to live with things that hurt. It didn’t justify destroying all of Avalon.

  “Oh, hell. It was a long time ago,” she added. Then she burst out laughing, a harsh, bitter, mirthless sound that let me know that even sixteen hundred years wasn’t long enough to forget some things.

  “When he died in my arms, he was delirious. He thought I was Arthur.”

  “I know.”

  “So I took the ring from him—it doesn’t hurt me, and it had hurt him more than enough—and then I took his body back to Avalon.”

  “Why?”

  “They didn’t care for me there, but they revered my father. I wanted to bring him home. I thought they’d be happy that the great Merlin wasn’t left in an English grave. I didn’t think . . . ” She took a deep breath. “I didn’t think that witch would still be waiting to get even with me for knowing her secret.”

  “How many other children has she killed since then?” I asked.

  “Shut up!” Morgan snapped. “Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”

  I wasn’t sure. Morgan’s silence had guaranteed the death of countless babies like the one I had seen in my vision. After knowing that, her own suffering just didn’t strike me as that terrible. But I knew she wanted to speak, so I nodded. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “As soon as I arrived, her cronies surrounded me. I made myself small so that I could get away, slip through their fingers. But she was fast. I hadn’t even hit the ground before I was encased in this gloppy stuff, like liquid plastic. I remember struggling . . . and feeling like I was suffocating. . . . ” Her eyes filled at the memory. Her hands shook. I took one of them in my own. It felt cold, and I realized how fragile she was, despite her evilness.

  “Hey, no pity,” she said, pulling her hand away. She just didn’t know how to be close to anyone, in any way.

  “Okay. Then what?” I asked quietly.

  Morgan hesitated for a moment, then closed her eyes. “And then it was done. The resin hardened into amber, and I was trapped inside.”

  “Like the Muffy girls you put inside the antique dolls?”

  Morgan gave me a disgusted look. “Yes, like that,” she said.

  “Did you at least feel bad that you did that to them?”

  “No,” she said. Then, miserably: “Yes, but what could I do about it?”

  For a moment I could only blink at her. “What could you do?” I echoed hollowly. “How about letting them out?”

  “Oh, that’d be smart. As if they wouldn’t start blabbing all over the place.”

  “You could have erased their memories. That’s easy magic.”

  She leaned in toward me. “They were cowen,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  I looked down at my hands. “A lot of people in Whitfield felt that way too,” I said.

  “And stupid. Every last one of them was really, really stupid.”

  “So they didn’t count.”

  “Not much.”

  “And the girl in Avalon? The one I almost killed?”

  “She brought that on herself.”

  “Then, what about how you’re poisoning everyone else in Avalon?”

  She laughed. “I’m not poisoning them, girlfriend. You are.”

  “How can you not take responsibility for that? For any of it?”

  She shrugged. “I just don’t want to. So I don’t. If you do, then I guess it sucks to be you.”

  I clenched my teeth together, willing myself not to punch her.

  “You’d understand if you’d been me,” she added.

  “Understand what?”

  “That sometimes you have to forget about being a nice guy.”

  “You mean being fair.”

  “Fair.” She spat out the word as if it were a bug that had flown into her mouth. “The last thing I saw before the resin hardened around me was my father’s body. The Seer was moving her hands over it, trying to take his magic. Yeah, tell me about fair.”

  “What do you mean, take his magic?”

  “Don’t you people know anything?” She reached over and touched me lightly on my arm.

  “Ouch!” It felt like a hard pinch.

  “Ummm.” She smacked her lips. “Your telekinesis tastes like chocolate.”

  “You took my magic?”

  “Not much of it. Just a little. Here, take some of mine.” She held out her arm.

  I shook my head. If I didn’t watch myself, I could pick up a person’s entire history just by touching them. I’d learned how to keep that from happening, but I knew that if I touched Morgan for the purpose of taking something from her psyche or her memories, I’d probably get a lot more than I’d bargained for. Morgan was a liar and a cheat, and she’d called down the Darkness in order to hurt someone who had done her no harm. I didn’t want those things to become a part of me, even for a second.

  “Go ahead,” She said.

  “No.”

  “All right, then. I’ll give you some.”

  “Hey, I don’t want—” With a touch of her index finger, she sent a shot of something that felt like an electric hum through my arm and down my spine.

  “What was that?” I shouted, angry.

  She grinned. “My magic. What does it taste like?”

  “It doesn’t taste like anything,” I said testily. “Don’t do that again.”

  Actually, it tasted like pears, and while I still had that taste in my mouth, Morgan said, “We could go to South America.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve given you some of my magic. You can Travel, the way I do. Understand? You can go anywhere you want. The two of us could tear up Rio de Janeiro. Or São Paulo. Both are very nice this time of year.” She held out her hand to me, wiggling her fingers in invitation. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  I couldn’t believe her gall. “What makes you think I’d go anywhere with you
?” The pear taste in my mouth was turning as bitter as vinegar. “After what you’ve done to me—to everyone you’ve ever known—”

  “But you’re fine,” she protested.

  “The girl in Avalon isn’t fine! Bryce isn’t fine. And Peter—” My voice broke.

  “All right, all right,” she said, waving me away. “If you’re going to be a drama queen about it, I’ll go without you.” She wrapped her muffler around her neck. “I just thought it’d be fun. We could be friends.”

  A wave of rage and hopelessness washed over me. “I can’t believe . . . ” I let it drop. She really doesn’t care, I thought. Not about me, or any of the people she’d destroyed through me. The only person in the world who mattered to her was herself.

  But then, I knew that no one believed they were evil. People always had what they thought were good reasons for doing the horrible things they did. “We’re not going to be friends,” I said simply.

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Then she put on her coat and boots and opened the door. “You know, you won’t have anyone else,” she said, turning back to face me.

  “I know.”

  I watched out the window as Morgan walked out of the building’s front door into the snow. At one point she looked back and probably saw me at the window, but she didn’t wave, and I didn’t either.

  Her feet sank deeply into the snow for a while, and then vanished as she slowly faded out of sight. Morgan was a Traveler, and she was traveling on. I was the only one who would have to live with what we had done. What we’d both become.

  I lifted the window a crack and tossed the amber pieces into the street. Then I sat down and rested my head in my hands as the taste of pears danced in my mouth like a memory.

  CHAPTER

  •

  FORTY-NINE

  Yule.

  Another sunny day, noisy with the sounds of water dripping everywhere. The neighborhood snowmen were shrinking, melting in the warm morning. Little rivers sloshed in the gutters. Cars made zipper sounds as water sprayed from under their moving tires. Police sirens wailed in the distance. People shouted to one another on the street below.

  Life had gone back to normal, at least for most people. Here, though, in this apartment, the very air was heavy with memories. It didn’t matter if those memories were mine or Morgan le Fay’s. They were both crushing, suffocating, toxic. I had to get out.

  Throwing on my jacket, I ran outside, my legs automatically making their way back to the park. There, at least, I could breathe. There were a lot of other people there too, more than I’d expected. Surely this wasn’t another snow day.

  I checked my phone. There were three messages, all from Becca. I ignored them.

  The date was the twenty-second. I looked at the crowds again. Were all these people celebrating Yule? Then I almost laughed out loud. It was Sunday. That was why so many people were hanging out in the park at nine in the morning.

  Some of them were there for Yule, though. On a nearby hill a group of women were gathered in a circle, chanting something that the wind brought to me in snatches of sound. Then one of them turned around to face the outside of the circle, raised her arms, and spoke. The wind must have been just right then, because I could understand every word:

  “HAIL TO THEE, GREAT SPIRITS OF THE EAST, YE LORDS AND WATCHTOWERS OF THE EAST, LORDS OF AIR.”

  I knew those words. This was a ritual of High Magic, and these women were a coven of witches. Well, cowen witches, if there is such a thing. Cowen have invented all sorts of rituals to access the magic realms. Back when I’d lived in Palm Beach, I used to read about spells and rituals, feeling vaguely guilty for even wanting to learn about witchcraft. Now that I’d spent a year around real witches, all of the hocus-pocus seemed silly to me, but it probably wasn’t to the women on the hill. They were trying to find their power in a place that taught them that such power didn’t exist, especially for women.

  I sent them a little love-bomb, a message some of them might be open enough to receive. They’d feel the power, and think it was the ritual that gave it to them. That was the thing about magic: Thinking was never the way to achieve it.

  There are two basic kinds of magic. This was High Magic, as opposed to Practical Magic, which is magic designed to get things done. In High Magic no one expects anything to happen, but the experience can lead to a kind of enlightenment. It’s like meditation, only performed by a group. Covens liked High Magic because it put everyone in the right state of mind for celebrating things, like the eight major witch holidays.

  That made me stop breathing for a second. Last year I’d spent Yule with my aunt and great-grandmother, exchanging gifts and creating a cone of power. There had been a stocking with my name on it hanging over the fireplace, and the aromas of roast duck and apple cobbler wafting through the house.

  Suddenly I felt as if all the air had gone out of my lungs. I would never see that beautiful old house again, or Gram, or Aunt Agnes, or Peter. A fat tear plopped onto my glove.

  I had to get out of there, away from the ritual. It was just too painful. I started to run as fast as I could, my arms working like pistons as my feet raced along the pavement, splashing water onto the backs of my pant legs.

  That was the best I’d felt in days. I never wanted to stop. Maybe I could just do this, I thought, run until I was out of the city, away from everything I knew. Run until nothing could ever catch me again.

  Just do what you can, the homeless man had said.

  “What . . . if you can’t . . . do anything?” I huffed, still running at full tilt. “What . . . if . . . ”

  Just do

  “No!”

  what

  “Stop!”

  you can—

  “Shut up!” I screamed, just as I ran full force into someone’s shoulder.

  “Watch where you’re going!” a girl screamed at me, so loudly that passersby stopped to stare.

  I gasped, waiting for her to slump to the ground after coming into contact with me.

  “What’s wrong with you? Idiot!” She reeled around, rearranging a bunch of shopping bags hanging from her arms. But at least she didn’t keel over dead. She didn’t even throw up.

  Relieved, I finally managed to close my mouth. My lungs filled with air for what seemed like the first time in an hour. “Excuse me,” I said breathlessly. “I was just . . . ” Then I looked up and saw her face. “Suzy?” I asked. “Suzy Dusset?”

  “Who— Oh. You’re from school,” Suzy said, as if she were passing on information to me.

  Great. It would be my luck to run into one of the meanest girls in school. But hey, at least I hadn’t poisoned her. Might as well look on the bright side.

  “Let’s go,” she said to her companion, whom I also saw for the first time. It was Summer Hayworth.

  I stepped aside to let them pass, but Summer came up to me and, inexplicably, threw her arms around my neck.

  “Stop!” I screamed, so loudly that she jumped backward. But it was too late. She’d touched me, cheek to cheek, skin on skin.

  Summer blinked in surprise. “Okay,” she said, holding her hands up in front of her. “I didn’t mean to freak you out or anything.”

  I just stood there with my mouth hanging open for a while. “Er . . . ” Why wasn’t she sick? “Er . . . ”

  Because she’s cowen, I remembered.

  I couldn’t hurt them.

  Maybe living among cowen wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. I could disappear here. I could pass.

  The way I did back in Florida. Lying, hiding, pretending to be like everyone else. Trying to be someone besides myself.

  “Are you all right?” Summer asked.

  “Whatever,” Suzy muttered, rustling her bags. “I’m the one she ran into.”

  “I’m . . . I’m fine,” I managed to say.

  “I dreamed about you,” Summer said with a smile I’d never seen before. It looked genuine. Her face actually looked kind. “It was weird. I was
trapped inside this giant doll, and I didn’t think I’d ever get out, but then you recognized me through my eyes.”

  Suzy made snoring sounds.

  “And then you came in and talked to me. You told me everything was going to be all right.” She smiled again. “And it was.”

  “Positively riveting,” Suzy said. “Can we go now? My arms are getting tired.”

  “And then Miss P came and gave me a message to give you.”

  “Me?” I asked, surprised.

  “Miss N, you mean,” Suzy said. “For ‘Nerd.’ ”

  “Shut up, Suzy,” Summer said. “Yeah. She told me that I would never know what you’d done for me.”

  I looked around. “Er . . . Was that the message?”

  “No. The message didn’t really make sense.”

  “Too bad,” Suzy said, yanking Summer’s arm. “Maybe you can write her a letter.”

  Summer staggered a few steps toward Suzy. “She said ‘Just do what you can.’ ”

  I coughed. “What?”

  “I know, dumb. But it was a dream. What can I say?” She laughed as Suzy dragged her away. “Hey, let’s have lunch together once school starts again, okay?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said, although I knew I wouldn’t be going back to school after break. Or ever again. Because even if half the population was immune to me, sooner or later someone was going to show up dead. And no one would know why except me.

  No, my school days were done. Actually, my whole life was pretty much done, I guessed. What could I do?

  Just do what you can.

  Exactly the words the homeless man had used.

  Were they supposed to be some kind of special message for me? What did they mean, anyway, “Do what you can”? Of course I would. Didn’t everybody just do what they could all the time? And what about Summer’s so-called dream, which actually really happened? Miss P was supposed to make them all forget everything, not pop into their subconscious minds to deliver homey messages of encouragement. Do what you can. Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind while I’m living in the Alaskan tundra, Miss P. I kicked a can of Red Bull down the street, surprised to see that I’d walked back to the street where my father lived. I was less than a block away from his apartment building.