by Diane Farr
But Rune was listening to neither of us. “Or three,” he went on, “that power stones are not as important as we have been led to believe. When captured spellspinners lost their stones, is it possible that their loss of power was partly psychosomatic?”
Lance snorted, and I sensed Rune reluctantly letting his latest theory bite the dust. “Probably not. No, probably not.” His lips twitched into a half-smile. “It would be nice to think so, though, wouldn’t it? We’re all so afraid to let our guard down. It would be pleasant to believe that our powers are truly inherent. Not linked to an object outside of ourselves.”
“They are, though,” said Lance flatly. “Case closed.”
“Well, yes. In a manner of speaking. If I took your stone, Lance, you would not lose all your power.”
“Just most of it.”
“Yes,” Rune agreed. “Most of it. Which brings us back to Zara.”
I was pinned by two sets of eyes, peridot and aquamarine. I hugged myself defensively. “What about Zara?”
“You have the Power,” said Rune. “You must, therefore, have a power stone. Where is it?”
Lance lifted his soda glass in a mock toast. “Zara Norland, international woman of mystery.”
I cracked a weak smile. “Guess you can add this to the mystery list. Power, but no power stone.”
Rune’s lips thinned. “And a spellspinner with no spellspinner blood line, apparently.” He leaned back in his chair, still regarding me with those ice-blue eyes. “That’s even more impossible than Power without a power stone.”
I took a sip of fizzy grape and set my glass down, very carefully, on the coffee table. If my hands were shaking, I didn’t want the soda’s shiver to give me away. I tried to make my voice sound casual. “Are we sure about that bloodline thing? Sounds like you know who my parents are.”
“No,” said Rune bluntly—dashing my unspoken hopes. “We know who your parents aren’t.”
I tilted my head like a puzzled puppy. “Who they aren’t? So you’ve narrowed it down?”
“A bit.” His expression was faintly mocking. “From all of humanity, we’ve eliminated forty-nine possibilities. Every living spellspinner.”
My palms were sweating. I shoved my hands into my skirt pockets. “So I’m the daughter of dead spellspinners?”
I could feel Lance fighting an impulse to put his arm around me. My eyes sought his. Even in the midst of heart-pounding anxiety, it was nice to feel waves of sympathy coming from him. From anyone, I suppose, but especially him. It was…unexpected.
“Honey, that’s the mystery,” he said, in the soothing tones one employs to calm a shrieking toddler. “We gathered at Spellhaven a few weeks ago—all of us. When the Council calls, you don’t say no. They don’t call us together that often.” I picked up an image from Lance’s mind: a solemn group of pale-skinned people sitting around a campfire in the woods. Eyes glittering like many-colored jewels in the firelight. Eyes studying each other, minds groping for truth, reading each other’s thoughts and emotions until all were convinced. Nobody was hiding anything. No male had fathered me. No female had borne me.
Lance saw that I had viewed his memory, and nodded. “I wish I could tell you who you are, Zara,” he whispered. Regret showed in his green, green eyes; he hated to tell me this. I would have known that even if I couldn’t read his mind. “But I can’t. We don’t know where you came from. That’s the simple truth.”
“But…” I cleared my throat. “But that’s not possible.” I turned to Rune. “Is it? I mean, spellspinners don’t just happen. Do they?”
Rune looked troubled. “Ordinarily, I would say no. They don’t. We monitor our bloodlines very carefully. Spellspinners don’t procreate willy-nilly; we’re not even fertile unless there’s an opening in our circle, and when that happens—when one of the Council dies—the rules are very strict. Only the couple chosen by the Council may bear fruit.” He spread his hands lightly, palms up. “Yet here you are.”
Lance leaned forward, frowning. “There must be an explanation.”
“Indubitably,” said Rune dryly. “But what is it?”
Chapter 6
We didn’t solve the riddle of my existence, but Lance thinks the afternoon was well spent anyhow. Rune isn’t quite on my side, not entirely, but at least—having met me—he would feel a pang of regret at having to witness my destruction. I am no longer an abstract thing to him, a rogue spellspinner living among the sticks and putting everyone in danger. He has had me in his house. I have sat on his sofa and drunk his grape soda. I’m real to him now.
Rune, it turns out, is quite the respected figure in spellspinnerdom. He is too young to be on the actual Council, but he’s important in his own right. He’s the unofficial keeper of spellspinner history. He’s like the amateur genealogist in every family, the one who labels the photographs and keeps track of all the cousins. Spellspinners don’t have a written history. The race is far too cautious, too secretive, to write anything down. But tales persist, handed down through people like Rune, and every so often the accumulated wisdom comes in handy. Now is one of those times.
Or would be, if it actually led to any answers. The one I care most about is just as elusive as ever: we’re no closer to figuring out who my parents were.
What ended my afternoon at Lance’s apartment was my phone emitting its text-message burble. I knew it would be Meg, eager to tell me about her afternoon with Alvin, but just glancing at the screen woke me up; it was after 4:00 p.m. “Holy smokes,” I exclaimed. “I’ve got to get home.”
Rune and Lance immediately rose to their feet like a pair of Victorian dancemasters. Where do spellspinners learn their manners?
“What a pity,” said Rune. “There is still much to discuss.”
“She’ll be back,” said Lance. “We’d better show her the well.” He picked up the confusion in my mind and grinned. “More spellspinner slang,” he explained. “It’s what we call the safe spot—the place we keep clear for skatching.”
Brilliant. I should have realized that every spellspinner home would have the equivalent of Spellhaven’s skatching stones; a place deliberately kept clear at all times, so that one could skatch to it without fear of detection—or of knocking something, or someone, over. Their “well” was in the hall, defined by a square, hooked rug, out of view of the windows and invisible to anyone visiting the front parlor. Just in case.
I skatched in a hurry. This is almost always a mistake. I knew this, but I was so focused on grabbing my bike and getting home that I didn’t think things through—and, without thinking, I skatched back to the spot behind the gym that we had used as our take-off point.
Of course, when Lance and I took off, we were able to look around first and make sure we were unseen. Returning, I was arriving blind.
I can’t believe I was so careless.
I arrived at the back of the gym and immediately heard a distant exclamation of some sort, and the sound of someone falling. I was standing against the stucco wall next to the cement steps leading to the locker room doors. The steps blocked the view of me from most directions, but unfortunately I was in clear view of anyone who was, say, running around the track and facing just the right direction. So I materialized out of thin air—or so it would have seemed to the boy in shorts and tee-shirt who was, in fact, running around the track and facing just the right direction. And now he was sprawled on his stomach in the dirt, his face still upturned, staring open-mouthed at me.
And—just my luck—it was Alvin.
I froze in place for half a heartbeat. I had never, ever, been caught skatching before. Of course, I had only just learned how a couple of months ago.
And this, I realized with a sickening sense of despair, is the very reason why the other spellspinners think I am so freaking dangerous. A spellspinner who doesn’t know the ropes, who hasn’t been prepped since childhood, is a spellspinner who shouldn’t be let loose among the general population. Because she will make mistakes. Like this.
It was already too late to skatch back to the well in Lance’s apartment and hope Alvin chalked the sight of me up to optical illusion, or dehydration, or whatever. He had seen me, good and proper. I smiled weakly.
“Hi,” I called. “Are you okay?”
He hadn’t moved. I trotted over to him and reached for his hand. He took it and let me help him up, but he didn’t seem hurt. He seemed…preoccupied. He replaced his glasses and stared intently at my face. His gaze was quite penetrating. It made me uncomfortable. I looked away, nervously aware that my irises are, well, purple. It didn’t seem a good time to let him notice that.
“How did you do that?” he asked abruptly.
“Um,” I said. “Do what?”
“You just popped out of nowhere.”
“Um,” I said again. “Oh.” Then, “Is that what it looked like?”
A smidgen of relief lightened his expression. I had opened the door to the possibility of illusion, and he was now awaiting my explanation—a sentence or two from me that would make everything all right. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an explanation prepared and ready to go.
There was a knot of boys doing peculiar football-type exercises down the field from us, under the barking leadership of Coach Ayres. My arrival hadn’t been observed by them because the stairs had blocked their view. But now they were lining up for some reason, and a couple of them at the back of the line had turned around and were staring curiously at us. I edged backward a step or two. “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry if I startled you, and I’m glad you’re not hurt, and, um, I have to get going because I’m late, so I’ll see you later, okay? Bye.”
And I fled.
My bike was the last one left in the rack. My hands were unsteady as I unlocked the chain, so it took me an extra second or two. Long enough for Alvin to catch up with me.
“Seriously, Zara. What was that?”
Lock free at last, I stuffed it hurriedly into my bag and tried an old CIA joke. “Well, Alvin, I could tell you—but then I’d have to kill you.” I hopped onto my Schwinn. He grabbed the handlebars.
His face was perfectly serious. His blue eyes held mine steadily, although he was still so pale that his freckles stood out across his nose and cheeks as if someone had dusted him with wheat bran. “You can trust me,” he said.
Which was laughable, because of course I couldn’t trust him. I had spent less than five minutes in this boy’s company, and he wanted me to confide the darkest secrets of my existence to him? Yeah, right.
“There’s nothing to trust you with,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted and unconcerned. Inspiration struck. “It’s just kind of a…kind of a trick I’m working on. I want to be the next David Copperfield.”
My cheeks burned with shame as I blurted out this big, fat lie. I hate lying. Irrationally, I felt a flick of anger with Lance for putting me in this position, a position where I had to tell lies to a nice boy with freckles.
“Really?” He looked uncertain. “So you can’t tell me because it’s, what? A professional secret?”
“Something like that.”
“Huh.” He didn’t look completely convinced, but he let go of my bike. “Well, you’re pretty good. You sure had me fooled.”
“Thanks. I should be more careful, though. Not to startle people.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good.”
I waved back at him as I sailed off into the sunset—metaphorically speaking, of course—and saw him still standing there, watching me with a puzzled frown on his face.
If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get home, I would have pulled over into the first shady spot I saw and called Meggie immediately. As it was, I set a new personal best in the racing-home-from-school category, letting my phone chirp and sing from the bottom of my bag, unattended. Which it did. Repeatedly.
I knew the texts would be from Meg and the call would be Nonny. And I was pretty sure they wanted approximately the same thing: to know where I was and what I was doing.
When I got home I parked my bike near the back door and checked my texts as I hurried inside. The first one—the one that had jolted me out of my trance while I was downtown—was “OMG alvin just left call me asap.” The second was “OMG where are you call me asap.” The third was “I cant believe you havent called me call me asap OMG.”
Nonny was in the kitchen as I walked in, stirring something yummy on the stove. She didn’t seem upset, for which I was thankful.
“Hi,” I said, tossing my bag on the counter and setting down my books. “Sorry I’m late. Dinner smells terrific.”
“Where were you?” Nonny tapped the spoon against the rim of the pot and laid it on the spoon rest before she turned to me, her face unreadable.
Uh oh. Had Meg called the house when I failed to text her back? Probably. It’s what I would have done.
“I, um, watched the football team practice for a while,” I said lamely. An incredibly brief while, but at least it wasn’t a lie. “I couldn’t go to Meg’s because she had a boy over.”
This distracted Nonny—which is exactly what I had hoped. Her eyebrows flew up. “A boy? That’s interesting.”
“I guess.” I went to get silverware and set the table. “His name is Alvin. He’s new. I probably could have still gone to her house, but I didn’t want to be a third wheel.”
“You could have come to the nursery,” she said—mildly enough. “Tres would have been glad to see you.”
“Too glad,” I muttered.
“Or you could have just come home.” She turned the heat off underneath the pot. “There’s always Facebook.”
I gave a derisive snort. “I’d rather watch the football team.”
She looked hard at me now. “Zara. You’ve never been into football.”
I shrugged. “I’ve never been into Facebook either.”
Facebook, in my experience, is just another reminder that I only have one real friend in the world. And my one real friend has weird parents who won’t let her on Facebook. So what’s the point? Although sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I have been known to play Zuma Blitz for hours on end.
Nonny’s face had puckered into her trademark worried frown. “Zara, you didn’t spend two hours watching the football team. And you wouldn’t have been so fascinated by them that you couldn’t text Meg.”
“Meg!” I grabbed my phone. “I have to call Meg.” I snatched up my books and bag and ran upstairs—away from Nonny, whose voice trailed after me, calling, “Dinner in ten minutes, Zara. I mean it.”
By the time the ten minutes were up, I knew that Meg had, in fact, called the house looking for me. I also knew that Alvin had fixed her bike, eaten nearly an entire box of trail mix, and made a favorable impression on Mrs. O’Shaughnessy before leaving to go back to CGH and run around the track. “He runs,” Meg confided breathlessly. “He’s practically an athlete.”
Meg has never had a crush on an athlete before. She tends to go for the brainy types. Not that athletes can’t be brainy, but if a boy has both brains and brawn, he is usually a snot. This is one of nature’s unconquerable mysteries.
“Yeah, I saw him there,” I said.
“You what?” Meg squeaked. “You saw him running?”
“Yeah. But—“
“You were out by the track??”
“Yeah. But, Meg—“
“Omigod! I wondered where you were. Why were you at the track? Omigod. Did you say anything to him?”
“Yes,” I practically shouted. “Will you focus, please? Because I’m totally in trouble and I need you.”
“What?” She sounded cross. I couldn’t blame her.
I lowered my voice to a near-whisper. “Alvin caught me skatching.”
There was a brief, stunned silence. “He what?”
“He saw me. It’s just the worst luck. He happened to be looking at exactly the right place, and he saw me just, you know, arrive. Meg, what’ll I do?”
“Okay. Let me think.” Her voice had t
aken on the crisp, detached note of Meg in her scientist mode. “What did he see, exactly?”
“Shall I demonstrate? Where are you?”
“In my room. Why?”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes. Why?”
I skatched. Meg was curled up on her bedspread, phone to ear, absently working on a knot in one of her shoelaces. She nearly jumped out of her skin when I materialized at the foot of her bed.
“See?” I said glumly. “It pretty much gives you a heart attack.” And I skatched back to my own room.
Interestingly, my skatching disrupted our phone connection. I called her back. She was still spluttering incoherently. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry. You asked what he saw. Now you know. So tell me: Is there any way you could be convinced that what you just saw was an illusion of some kind?”
“No. No way.”
I sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
Nonny’s voice floated up the stairs, calling me to dinner.
“Gotta go,” I said quickly. “But I’ll call you back in half an hour. Think of something, Meg. I’m counting on you.”
But in the end, she couldn’t think of anything better than the lie I had already told, about practicing to become a magician. Especially since I’d already said it. I painted myself into a corner on that one.
“You know, that wouldn’t be a bad career choice for you,” she said. “Actually.”
It was the next day, after school. We were at Meg’s house, applying tiny daisies to her toenails. I looked at her in horror. “On a stage? Are you insane?”
She giggled. “Okay, okay. I forgot. You’re not the exhibitionist type.”
“It would be a rough transition,” I agreed. “After spending my whole, entire life keeping my head down.”
“What kills me,” she said, holding up one foot to admire the effect, “is how easy it will be for you to make a real difference in the world. I’m going to have to study for years and years, and go into debt, and, you know, suffer to get through school if I want to be a doctor. You could just—” she waggled her fingers. “Boom. Cure people.”
