Poison

by Molly Cochran

  Still, Livia Fowler didn’t look as if she was going to let me pass. She grabbed the sleeve of my coat—she didn’t know how dangerous that was—and then let go with a shriek, clutching her heart. “What . . . ” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You did this,” she rasped.

  I shrank back, but people were already approaching me. Please leave me alone, I thought. I didn’t want to hurt them. No matter what they thought of me or my friends, they didn’t deserve to die.

  “Stop her!” Mrs. Fowler said, fanning herself.

  “Better not,” I said, holding up my hands. A blue-white light emanated from them.

  Mrs. Fowler reached out for me, then thought better of it. The others backed away too, parting to form a path for me. But as I got to the massive front door, someone threw a stick at me from behind. Fortunately, I was wearing so many heavy garments that it didn’t really hurt. Still, I was very eager to get inside.

  I pounded on the door, but no one came. Well, I reasoned, if I’d been inside, I wouldn’t have let me in either. Then something hit me hard on the shoulder, and I saw a rock glance off me and land at my feet. At first I couldn’t believe it. Would they actually stone me out there in the open?

  Another rock struck me in the middle of my back. That one hurt. Then someone hurled a handful of small stones that broke the glass of the door, and I knew I had to get out of there.

  It was just like being back in Avalon, with witches pelting me with rocks. In fact, I thought as I looked for an avenue of escape, there was a lot about Whitfield that was like Avalon: a lot of judgment and punishment and fighting for power, and rules made so long ago that they no longer had any meaning. And this crazy prejudice against outsiders, as if “we” were somehow always better than “them,” no matter what.

  Were my own people so weak? But I already knew the answer. They were. We all were. It was too easy for human beings to turn into monsters. Look at me. I hadn’t done anything except pick the wrong friend, and I’d become a walking bomb. And Morgan, who’d only wanted her dad to love her. And Mrs. Fowler, who was just scared. And even the Seer of Avalon, who had sold out her people for a stab at immortality.

  So easy.

  I tried to shake off those feelings. Even if they were true, they weren’t going to help me do what I’d come to do. For that I had to get inside the house, and that meant I had to get away from Livia Fowler and her rock-throwing cronies.

  First I leaped out of the way of the next projectile, onto the low wall that was on either side of the stairway. This, I discovered to my dismay, made me more of a target than ever. As a tree branch whizzed over my head, I looked down. The wall may have been low from the front, but behind it was a drop of nearly ten feet. For a moment I hesitated, trying to decide which would be easier to run with, a broken leg or a broken head. Then another rock hit me hard in my back, and I jumped.

  As it turned out I didn’t break either my leg or my head, but the crowd wasn’t about to give up. I took off in a sprint, taking care to keep between the house and the boxwood hedge that surrounded it. My plan, such as it was, was to get to the rear of the mansion, out of sight of the protesters, and then run for the woods on the far side of the lawn, where maybe I’d be able to call someone inside on my cell phone. It wasn’t much of a plan, I admit, but it was something, at least some kind of effort.

  Just do what you can. Right then I didn’t know what the best thing to do was. Would it be best to talk Peter out of the whole project? Or help Bryce lead those doomed people out of Avalon? Or would I be of more help casting spells with Gram and the other witches? I only hoped I’d be able to figure out what I was meant to do before it was too late to do anything. As I ran through the knee-high snow with the ugly sounds of the crowd receding behind me, I was becoming aware of a feeling I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. It was the feeling—the knowledge—that, however I might have screwed up in the past, I had something to offer now. And I had to get into the house.

  “Katy!” someone whispered. I looked up. Becca was peering out from behind a narrow door at the back of the house. “I saw what happened out front,” she said, waving me inside. “I can hide you. Hurry.”

  “Just get me a blanket,” I said, running up the back steps. They led to the laundry room, where Becca held out a comforter thick enough to protect her—and whoever else was in the house—from me.

  “It was in the dryer,” she said. “So I guess it’s clean.”

  “I don’t care.” I snatched it out of her hands and covered myself with it.

  “Notice I didn’t ask you what you wanted the blanket for.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Because I know,” she said quietly. “Everyone knows.”

  I looked at the floor. “Are you saying I’m not welcome?”

  “You are to me,” she said. That meant a lot. “And to Peter.”

  I swallowed. I wished she hadn’t said that. This was no time to get emotional. “I just want to help,” I said, trying to act casual as I nodded toward the interior of the house. “So what’s going on?”

  She sighed. “You’re too late,” she said. “It’s already started.”

  Well, that’s one option I don’t have to think about anymore, I reasoned. “Okay. There are still some things—”

  “You were supposed to stop Peter!” she screeched, planting her hands on her hips. “I mean, I asked you, begged you, but you hung up on me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, remembering that I’d been on the phone with Becca when my dad and Mim had come home. “I got here as fast as I could.”

  She blew air out between her lips. “Well, Bryce is already in Avalon.”

  “And Peter?”

  “Peter’s at the controls in the lab here while Bryce is on the other side, trying to get the Travelers through. Only there are a lot of witches over there trying to stop them.”

  “Are the Travelers fighting back?”

  “What with? Those guys don’t even have pitchforks, let alone weapons. All they’ve been able to do so far is put up a kind of wall made out of whatever they could get their hands on. But they won’t be able to hold out long. Those shape-shifters are going to kill Bryce the second they get the chance. They’ll kill them all. And then they’ll come here and kill us, too.”

  And then I knew. I understood the message. There was something I could do, after all. Something I could do that no one else could.

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “Look, even if you get Peter to shut it down, I don’t think Bryce is going to leave without the Travelers at this point.”

  I didn’t have time to talk, but she needn’t have worried about that. I knew that Peter wouldn’t shut it down for me or anyone else. “Which way is the lab?” I asked.

  Becca pointed. “Through the kitchen and down the long hall. Hey, what are you going to do?”

  “Whatever I can,” I said.

  • • •

  The lab was full of people, including Hattie, Miss P, and Gram, who were pressed together in a circle, deep in concentration. I think Peter was the first to notice me, although I don’t know how he did, since I was behind him. But at the moment I walked in, before the room quieted and people started to flee in panic, Peter turned away from the console where he was sitting and looked right into my eyes.

  Then the fear in the room took root.

  “Who is that?”

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “Get her away!”

  “Clear out! It’s the poison girl!”

  The crowded room suddenly split into two groups with a wide space in the center with only me in it. Me, and the console where Peter sat before a huge screen at the front of the room. On the screen three vultures were flying from a familiar outcropping of rock toward a ragged group of people huddled behind a makeshift barrier.

  “Katy!” I heard Gram call out, but I was already running.

  “Let me through,” I said. Peter closed his eyes in anguish. He knew. He knew me, and
he knew what had to happen if the Travelers were going to be saved. “Now!” I shouted.

  Peter nodded once. Good-bye, my love, I thought as I leaped through the screen into Avalon.

  CHAPTER

  •

  FIFTY-TWO

  “Katy?” Bryce was so surprised that he almost touched me.

  “Keep the Travelers away from me,” I said as I moved past the barrier Bryce had built to protect the Avalonians from the Seer’s witches. The blanket was still wrapped tightly around me. “I’ll try to cover you.”

  Once I was in the open, I took off the blanket and my winter coat. The vultures recognized me immediately. For a moment they seemed to hesitate in midflight, shimmering between the glamour that made them appear as birds and their true human forms. I knew they were afraid of me. One of them even tried to turn back, but was attacked by the others until it wheeled around and hurtled forward toward me, shrieking, its talons out, the shadow of its black wings spreading over me.

  I knew I had to kill it, but when the actual moment came to strike, I think I would have preferred almost anything else. As the vulture speeded toward me, I had a very strong impulse to run back behind the barrier and hide with my hands over my head. But then, I knew, I’d really be of no use to anyone.

  I gathered all the strength of the terrible power in my hands and shot it out at the vulture. It fell to earth, not a bird at all but an old woman who seemed to grow older with every second until, by the time she might have struck the ground, there was nothing left of her but dust.

  Behind me the Travelers cheered. “Go, Katy!” Bryce shouted, pumping his fist in the air. But I didn’t feel like it had been any kind of victory. I kept seeing the old woman’s face as she fell, her rags flapping around her like broken wings.

  “Look out!” Bryce shouted, pointing at the sky behind me. I whirled around before I could think anymore about the vulture—the person—I’d just killed. Because that was what I was there for. To kill. I’d known it when I’d come. It was what I was good for, maybe the only thing I was good for anymore.

  So I choked down the bile in my throat and shot the poison out of my hands. It lit up the sky like a forest fire. Four of the witches fell, disintegrating before they hit the ground. But two others managed to escape by changing themselves into snakes that shot through the crowd of Travelers like lightning bolts, attacking the line of people waiting to come through the narrow portal that Peter had created.

  The Travelers screamed and scattered while Bryce tried vainly to round them up as the snakes slithered from one person to another, biting indiscriminately.

  “Help us,” someone wailed. I couldn’t use my poison this close to the crowd. I knew I’d kill them all. All I could do was find the snakes.

  I lumbered behind the barrier. A few people fled from me in terror. Some had already tried to run away, back to the caves and huts where they had lived all their lives. They now lay dead in the field. The others were too panicked by the snakes in their midst to notice them, or me. Trying not to get too close to anyone, I walked toward where the two snakes were slithering among the Travelers. One of them hissed malevolently as I approached.

  “What are you going to do, poison me?” I asked softly as I grabbed the snakes in my two hands. They squirmed wildly before the inevitable happened, and they disintegrated.

  I shuddered, wishing I could have removed my hands from my body, from my memory.

  But I had come to kill. I tried to remember that as the snakes became rats and swarmed toward the barrier. One of them bit me hard on my leg before it fell down dead. I gasped at the pain, but I couldn’t stop to look at the wound. More were coming, and behind them, birds.

  A wall of birds.

  “Hurry, Bryce,” I called, my voice shaking.

  The sky was black with them. I’d had no idea there were so many of the Seer’s followers. They’d come out in force, though, to stop the exodus of the Travelers. And me.

  I shot out my hands at them, but there were too many of them, and I couldn’t take them all from a distance. As poisonous as I was, I just didn’t have that much power anymore. Even when they got closer, it was taking a lot longer for them to die. I was getting tired, and my poison was being spent. Oh, man, I thought. What a time to run out of juice.

  Meanwhile, the people behind me screamed in panic as they tumbled through the narrow portal, looking over their shoulders at the snakes, rats, and vultures that were bearing down on them. But they weren’t the target now. I was the one the Seer’s followers were after. In a suicidal frenzy they swarmed around me, biting and scratching my legs until my knees buckled and I found myself on the ground in the middle of a moving sea of repulsive creatures bent on destroying me.

  I struggled against them, but I was exhausted. There was nothing more I could do. A rat tangled in my hair, chattering. I gagged in revulsion but was too weak even to stand. I had no power left in my hands. The stone in my ring was the flat gray of limestone.

  With the last of my strength I pulled myself upright and picked up two of the rats. They bit my fingers until my blood washed over them and dripped onto the ground. When they fell out of my hands, they changed back into human witches, still clawing at me with their gray fingernails. Their mouths opened into weird, perverted smiles, their rank breath spewing through brown stubs of rotten teeth, their eyes glinting with malice and victory.

  They pulled me up by my hair until I dangled with my feet off the ground. “Bryce,” I panted. I don’t know if he heard me. “Hurry. Please.” But I knew in my heart that nothing he could do would help me now. I only wished I could have won this battle. I might have felt that my life had been worth something after all.

  But even this, I thought, even this pain, this failure, was worthwhile. Because I’d tried. I’d done my best, and I would keep trying until the very end, and that meant I was something more than poison. I was a human being—flawed, maybe, wrong, but still a person whose life had been worth living.

  “Forgive me,” I whispered, knowing that I was worthy of forgiveness. That we all were, no matter what we’d done, and why.

  I blinked away my tears. I wasn’t the only one who needed forgiveness. We all had something of the Darkness in us. We all just did what we could.

  “I forgive you, Dad,” I said. Immediately I felt as if a weight of a thousand pounds had lifted off my chest. “And Mim,” I went on. “And Mrs. Fowler.” I took a deep breath. “And Morgan, too,” I managed. “I forgive you all.” My words flew into the wind like the fragrance of flowers. They left my heart clean and full of peace, and I knew at last that I was free.

  Suddenly there was a brilliant light that bleached out everything in sight. A gasp of wonder went up from the crowd of Travelers, and I felt the witches’ fingernails scrape against my skin as they released me. Wobbling, I stood on my own feet again, shielding my eyes from the light.

  Eventually I could see a shape in the center of the blinding light. At first the shape was amorphous and nearly blue, like the cobalt heart of a flame, but as the light began to ebb, it grew more distinct, revealing a human figure.

  My heart was pounding. What new horror had the Seer sent? It was a woman. I could see that much. An alien, then? Or a hologram? Or had one of the Avalon witches shape-shifted into something like a burning sun come to kill us all with its heat?

  “I should have known you’d screw up without me,” the figure inside the light said conversationally.

  “What?” I squinted at the bright halo.

  “You’re supposed to be the hero here,” she went on, stepping out of the nimbus of light.

  “Morgan,” I whispered.

  “Who else? You summoned me, didn’t you?”

  “Summoned?”

  “Okay, you thought of me. That counts.” She pulled a wand out of her sleeve and shot it at a pile of sniffing rats. They dissolved into jelly. “Good thing too. Somebody had to bail out your sorry butt.”

  Clumsily I lumbered toward her. “Morgan,�
�� I began, looking warily at the Travelers, who recognized her and were tripping over one another in a frantic attempt to reach the portal. “Please don’t hurt them. They haven’t—”

  “Oh, shut up,” she snapped. “I won’t touch your precious people.”

  “They’re your people,” I said.

  “Stop talking and touch my wand.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was planning, but a new wave of vultures was heading toward us, so I did as she said. The moment my hand came in contact with the tip of Morgan’s wand, I felt a powerful surge like nothing I’d ever felt before. The shock of it was so strong that it nearly knocked me backward. Instantly the ring on my finger glowed a brilliant blue that shot out across the sky in Klieg-like rays, and the vultures fell.

  “Go now!” I shouted to Bryce.

  “Almost done,” he called back. “But you have to come, too. Once the portal’s closed—”

  “Just go!” I screamed.

  Then I couldn’t hear him any longer.

  The sky, so bright now that involuntary tears streamed out of my eyes, reeked of burning flesh. “I think they’re gone,” I said, mostly to myself, but Morgan answered me.

  “Good,” she said, breaking the contact with me. For a second I could see the space between us. “Because the next wave is coming, and it’s going to be rough.”

  She nodded toward the grove of trees from where the Seer and her followers had come. Something that looked like a thick snake was winding out of it now, twisting like a long rope toward us.

  “Listen,” Morgan said. The snake was talking.

  “I call thee to my aid, O mighty one, thou who is greater than all things. . . . ”

  The sound dissipated as the wind changed. I looked at Morgan, frowning in bewilderment. “What is that?”