by Cate Martin
But it didn't come.
"It doesn't matter," she said, and her sudden calm was so much more frightening than her rage had been. “Even with her gone he won’t have me. So he's gone now. But Miss Zenobia remains."
"Miss Zenobia is dead," I said.
"Oh, I know," Helen said, still in that eerily calm voice. "But her school still stands. And that offends me."
I tried again to sit back but I just couldn't. I felt unsteady like my inner ears didn't know how to find equilibrium anymore. I couldn't even open my eyes.
I wanted to know if Brianna and Sophie were still safe. But I couldn't ask, because there was always the chance that Helen didn't realize they were in the house. I didn't want to give them away.
"This school will always stand," I said because I had to say something.
"Don't be ridiculous," Helen said with a barking laugh. "It's been destroyed before; it can be destroyed again."
"The house can," I conceded. "Not the school."
"You might think that," Helen said, and she knelt down in front of me, leaning in close to look at my face. I forced my eyes to open. One managed it better than the other. "You might, and maybe in most cases, you would be right. But not this time. Because I have an ally, a powerful ally who's been waiting a very, very long time to destroy Miss Zenobia. And yes, I know she's dead, but she won't be truly destroyed until everything she's touched, everyone she's ever known, is completely destroyed."
"She lived for centuries," I said, peering up at her with the one eye that was working a bit better. "You could never destroy everything she did."
"You don't know my ally," Helen said. "Well, I think we've chatted long enough, don't you? Time to be on with it."
I wanted to fight. I wanted to run, to scream, to tackle the woman standing over me.
But my body wouldn't cooperate. It was too battered, too exhausted. I had nothing left.
I pressed my forehead to my hands and waited for the blow to come.
"Now!"
Was that Sophie?
The racks of potted plants all around us exploded, filling the air with twisted leaves, sprays of dirt, shards of pottery.
Helen cried out in alarm, and her feet stumbled back a few steps away from me.
But only for a moment. She started to charge towards the kitchen but was blown back by a blast of wind. I hunkered low, letting the hurricane pass over me.
"You're no match for me!" Helen yelled. I looked up to see she had shifted her rolling pin to her left hand. She fished something out of the pocket of her skirt: a little crystal ball like the one in Miss Zenobia's office.
Only this one wasn't filled with golden, sharp-edged discs. No, this one contained a swirling mass of inky forms, all twisting and turning around each other.
And when she threw it down the hall to land between Sophie and Brianna, it smashed with a bang like a grenade, showering them both with bits of glass.
There was a sulfur smell that carried all of the way to where I still cowered on the floor.
And then Sophie and Brianna started shrieking. The inky forms were gaining shape. Dozens of little devil things with sharp teeth, sharp horns on their heads, sharp talons on their hands and feet, even a sharply barbed point to the ends of their tails. They swarmed both of my housemates, biting and clawing and stinging, each wound leaving a bright red welt with a blackened center as if the tissue there were necrotic already.
Helen was laughing. And my friends were crying out in pain and dismay.
And I remained crumpled helplessly on the floor.
I closed my eyes and pushed away the tiredness, the nausea, the swimming feeling in my head. None of that mattered. I shoved it all aside and founded the one thing I really did need.
My anger.
My hands grasped at the floor again, but this time they didn't feel helpless.
Something was flowing into me. Like the house itself was filling me with energy, coursing into my hands through the floor, from the very foundation of the building.
Filling me with strength.
Chapter 27
The power kept flowing into me, wave after wave. It was like being out too long in the sun and taking gulp after gulp of ice cold water. It sloshed uncomfortably in my belly, but I just couldn't slake my thirst.
I needed more.
Finally it was like the house pushed me away and I was thrown back onto my heels, finally able to sit up.
I opened my eyes.
The world around me was all dancing, glittering silver. What I had seen when I had passed through the portal had only been the faintest hint of what I was seeing now. It took a moment to even make out the outlines of anything beyond the silver. It was like the kitchen, the house, everything had simply ceased to be.
Then I started to make out the details. The silver was a million tiny threads running in a million different directions, like a web of impossible complexity.
I hadn't understood what Brianna had been saying before about multiple dimensions. How could anyone picture such a thing? But I was seeing it now. Everywhere I looked, the points with all of their collapsed extra dimensions expanded out to fill my view. The sketches hadn't even properly suggested it. They were like a stick figure of a man, and now I was seeing a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, even more beautifully detailed than real life.
It was disorienting, to say the least.
But I started to see patterns. I saw where the threads gathered together to suggest shapes. Helen, Sophie, Brianna.
The thousand intersections that made the little devil things, all dancing in and around the other threads, plucking them and disrupting them as they danced.
I stood up, or part of me did. I'm not really sure how much of me was left back in the real world. But I caught hold of those little intersection of threads and started pulling, tangling the threads until they formed a single larger knot.
Then I blinked, and the world changed. I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, Helen beside me. She was staring down the hall, the rolling pin forgotten in her hand as she gasped in terror at something else she was seeing.
I turned my head to follow her gaze, down the length of the hallway to where Sophie and Brianna were sprawled on opposite sides of the hallway, one in the dining room and the other in the butler's pantry.
Between them was a single massive devil thing. Same teeth, horns, talon and tail, although now that it was bigger I could see the poisonous ichor that coated each of those.
I had turn a thousand tiny menaces into one gigantic one. Was that helpful?
Brianna got up on one knee, aimed with the three fingers of her left hand, and shouted the incantation as she waved her wand at it. Her bolt of energy hit the thing square in the middle and the smell of sulfur filled the air once more.
Then Sophie was on her feet, creating the hurricane winds once more, holding the creature trapped in the center of the hallway as Brianna struck another blow, then another.
Each one left the creature smoking and reeking of sulfur, but I could see that it was also shrinking. Its skin was emitting inky smoke as if it were losing cohesion.
Brianna summoned one last blow then fell to her hands and knees, her energy spent.
But it had been enough. The last bolt had scattered what remained of the thing. For a moment it was nothing more than streaks of inky cloud in the whirlwind that Sophie controlled. Then she flung it down the hall, blowing open the front door and casting the thing up into the skies.
I don't, strictly speaking, know what happened to it after that. But I could still sense the world of threads and I felt it dissipate, thinner and thinner. Perhaps it had the power to pull itself back together, but that would take time. Like, years. The three of us would be ready for it, if it ever returned.
I turned to Helen, who flinched even at that small motion and raised the rolling pin again. Her entire hand was a gory red mess, my blood and Frank's staining her skin.
I blinked and was back in the world of threads. I
looked more closely, deeper into the node that was Helen.
I saw no evil, not the way I had seen inside of that cloud of blue devils she had unleashed. But I saw bitterness, bitterness she had carefully nursed into a fierce hatred. Decades she had put into growing that hate. The intersections of web that formed her being had lost all of its silvery luster. There was nothing there but ugliness now.
Still, not evil. Just a sadly misguided human.
I could feel the power coursing through me. I knew I could snuff out Helen's life with a thought. Just cut her off from the world of the living and leave her body to fall like a marionette after its strings are cut.
But it wouldn't be justice. And it wouldn't be what Cynthia and Frank would have wanted.
I blinked back into the world and realized I had tears in my eyes.
"They didn't deserve to die that way," I said.
Helen sneered at me. The anger inside of me tried to kick up again and it took all I hide to fight it back down.
To remember compassion.
Helen really was just a sad, pathetic little thing.
When I flicked my hand, bonds of eldritch light like Brianna's bolts flowed away from me, wrapping themselves around Helen until she was tied up like a maiden about to be left on the train tracks by a mustache-twirling villain.
We could do the same with real rope before we turned her over to the authorities, but for now she was quite contained.
I felt something else calling me, like an enormous wave forming just behind my back. I turned to face it and the world went back to being filled with nodes of silver threads.
The portal between times. I could see it clearly, could study its structure. It was all so clear, and yet I didn't know how I understood it. I just instinctively knew how the portal through time was formed.
I could see which thread to pull to collapse the entire thing forever.
I could see which other threads to weave open to expand it. I could make an opening so large and stable any person magical or not could walk through to the past or to the present. There would be no more secrets.
I could choose. The power was mine.
Vaguely, I felt more than heard someone calling my name. It wasn't Sophie or Brianna, although I could sense them breathing, watching me from where they huddled together in the hall.
It wasn't Cynthia, calling to me from beyond the grave.
It wasn't even the voice that had called me to the box, that had tried to lure me to open it before the appointed time.
It was only then I realized that voice had not been Miss Zenobia's. I had heard her speak in her office and never given it a moment's thought, but those two voices had been very different.
The voice that had tried to get me to open the box had been the one I had heard talking to Helen in 1927. A nicer version, hiding all of its malevolence from me, but the same voice.
But this voice calling my name now really was Miss Zenobia's. She said no more, but perhaps her momentary distraction had been enough, because when I looked back at the bridge the feeling of wanting to use all my power to do something truly epic was gone.
I might have the power, but that didn't make it my choice. Whether the portal existed or not, how potent it was, how easy it was to slip through, those were all things that would affect so many more people than just myself. How could it just be my choice?
I was starting to see why there were three of us working together to guard this portal. We would be each other's checks and balances.
I dropped down on one knee, touching the tile floor of the kitchen. I let all that energy drain out of me, back into the house, before it could tempt me again.
Then I looked up at Sophie and Brianna, who were standing in the doorway, clutching each other tightly.
I summoned a smile.
"I guess I'm a witch," I said.
"I guess so," Sophie said, then she too managed a smile. Brianna saw us both smiling and tried to give one of her own but only managed a slight quirk to one corner of her mouth.
"What do we do now?" Sophie asked.
"We need to take Helen back to 1927," I said. "Her and her rolling pin. It's still in her hand under all that… whatever that magic stuff is."
"But without Cynthia's body, what good will it do?" Brianna asked.
"She killed again," I said. "Frank Thomas. The police already have his body and are searching the Thomas house for clues. We're going to present her to them, murder weapon and all, all tied up with a bow."
"But what about the amulet?" Brianna asked.
I stepped up to Helen. Her eyes glared furiously at me, but one of the magical bonds was wrapped around her mouth and she couldn't have said a word even if she had wanted to.
I saw the glint of a chain under the high collar of her shirt and plucked it up. I kept pulling until the silver amulet that she had worn hidden under her clothes was on the palm of my hand.
I lifted it up over her head, not wanting to try breaking the clasp. Some things only make sense in movies; why break a perfectly good chain just because I was taking it from her? It passed through the bonds as if they were nothing more than light, but when Helen tried to struggle, to take it back from me, the bonds tightened and she fell to the floor.
Sophie went to find some more conventional rope to tie Helen up with to take her back to 1927.
"You should wear it now," Brianna said, nodding at the amulet in my hand.
"Don't you want to study it?" I asked.
"Sure," she agreed. "But I can borrow it when I need to. I think on the day to day it should be yours. Although perhaps you don't need it, now that you've found your power?"
"I think I borrowed that power," I said. "It didn't feel like it was mine."
"I did recommend starting with something small," Brianna said.
"I'll remember that," I said, rubbing at the spot on my head where Helen had hit me. My fingers came with a smear of dried blood, but the gash itself had healed. I didn't even have a headache.
I had been filled with so much power, I hadn't even realized all that I was doing with it.
I was suddenly very, very afraid of what I would do if that ever happened to me again.
Afraid, but also kind of excited.
Chapter 28
We had solved the murder; we had seen justice done, we'd even found out that I really was a witch of some sort.
We totally deserved a break.
None of us had yet gone out on the porch outside the library on the second floor, the one with all the potted trees and cast iron furniture. The furniture was a bit cold, but once we were settled with blankets and mugs of tea, it was actually really nice. The rays of the setting sun emerged from under the last of the cloud cover, bathing the porch in warmth.
It was getting on towards late September. There wouldn't be many warm evenings left.
We could hear the occasional car passing on Summit Avenue below, hear the rhythmic thumping of a runner on the sidewalk or the chatter of someone talking on a cell phone, but the porch walls were so high they couldn't see that any of us were up there.
It was perfectly lovely.
"So you have nothing left inside you at all?" Sophie asked for what must have been the tenth time.
I raised a hand and clicked my fingers. Nothing happened. I shook my head.
"But you did something before," Brianna said.
"Something amazing," Sophie added.
"I need to do more research, but we know you can do it. At least, when you're under great stress you can," she added.
"Do not put me under great stress just to test me," I said.
"No," Brianna said, but I saw the flicker of disappointment in her eyes.
"I can teach you how I sense things," Sophie said. "Meditation to sense the flow, maybe even some dance forms to feel how you can manipulate it."
"I think that would be a very good idea," I said. "Morning meditation. Maybe a run." I grimaced at the memory of how winded I had gotten after sprinting.
<
br /> That had only happened a few hours ago. Felt like a lifetime.
"You should craft a wand," Brianna said. "It really helps direct the energy."
"You'll have to show me how that works," Sophie said. "I have a wand I made with my mother, but I've never figured out how to do much with it."
"We can give each other lessons," Brianna said. "There's so much I don't know either. We can all learn together."
"A wand sounds good," I said.
"The wood needs to be special," Brianna said. "Something meaningful to you. The closer the emotional bond, the more powerful the wand."
"I have to go back to Iowa to get the rest of my things and say my goodbyes," I said. "I know just the tree to get the wood from."
"I'll teach you the incantations before you go," Brianna said and took out her little book to start a list of things she wanted to do.
Or continue one, I guessed as I looked at the book. Her list seemed to go for several pages.
I sat back in my chair, sipping my tea and stroking the silver amulet I now wore around my neck. I remembered when I had first seen it, in the middle of a busy lunch rush in the diner back home.
If I could go back to that day, what would I tell myself? Would I give myself a warning, tell me to flee?
No, I decided. I would just say, "good luck."
I heard the thump of another runner's feet, a familiar gait. The softer pads of a loyal dog syncopated the beat. I got up from my chair and moved to the porch wall to look down on the sidewalk.
"Hey, Nick!" I called. "Nice night!"
Despite the buds in his ears he heard me and returned my wave but Finnegan wasn’t letting him so much as pause on the way back to the condo.
I looked the other way and saw Mrs. Olson scowling up at me from her usual post at the hedge. I waved at her as well. Her scowl deepened, but then she raised a hand and gave the tiniest of waves.
"We should really look into tightening up the portal," I said. "I don't mind the music, but Mrs. Olson would appreciate if we stopped it.”
"The tuning Sophie and I already did probably helped, but we can look at it again," Brianna said, then added that to the list in her book.
