“We should go, Cym,” I said, standing and taking the notebook. Una took it out of my hands, and with a glance, turned the page we’d been writing on black.
Cymbeline walked us to the door. Her mother sat in an old plaid chair in the living room, smoking.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Holliston,” I said, like we were leaving a study date. The blank look on her face made me touch my hair nervously, look down, force myself to lift my head and not be afraid.
“Hey,” Una said, putting her hand on Cymbeline’s arm before we left. “What did you put in that Coke bottle at school today?”
“Smog, loneliness, and the feeling a shark has before it attacks,” she said, monotone. “What did you change it into?”
Una shrugged. “Red. A warning for the kid.” She smiled. “Then you turned it into lava.”
Cymbeline smiled shyly and nodded.
“Guys,” I said, glancing in the open door at the Air Elemental. “Why would that kid have tried to drink something sitting on a window sill for who knows how long, no matter what color it was?” The trance-like way the boy had gone for the Coke bottle suddenly didn’t sit right with me. I should have seen it before. As odd or rough-edged as they were, the Witch of Empty Things and the Witch of Shades wouldn’t hurt a random kid for nothing.
But the Witch of Wicked Words would.
“It had to be Vera,” Una said. “She found a death wish inside him or something. A need for suffering.” She grimaced. “If she was watching us then, what else has she seen?”
We didn’t need to say it out loud. She may have already found the demon boy. She may know the three of us were together at that very moment. She might gang up on him with the vicious Earth Elemental. The demon could be here because Vera Whispered to him all the way to The Gone. Like venomous spiders were scuttling around my brain, is what that felt like.
“I need to go home,” I said. “I need to be ready for tomorrow.”
Una turned a condescending eye on me. “What are you going to do? Meditate? You are, aren’t you?”
“No,” I mumbled. “Read star charts.”
“Read? Really? Really helpful right now.”
“It’s all I can do, look at the stars, draw a map….” Una and even Cymbeline stared at me like I was nuts, and it made my heart flutter. Of all things, that was what would send me into a panic attack. Nothing made me well-equipped to handle this, I had nothing special. I wasn’t funny, or quirky, or smarter than everyone else. I wasn’t artistic, as proven by my horrible star charts. My boobs were too big for me to be athletic and I hated sweating. I didn’t have talents, wasn’t popular. It all mattered in that moment, when panic stared me down.
The one thing I did have was the stars, power that made them bow to me, a unique magic bigger than anything earthbound. That magic made me who I was, even if I wasn’t much of anything yet. To make myself who I wanted to be, I had to learn my place. Read everything there was to know about stars, constellations, the zodiac, the sun, the moon, palmistry…. Ironically, that helped distract me from using magic. I surrounded myself with stars. They had to swirl everywhere around me, or I felt like I would vanish.
“Quit your shaking, Star Witch. You have research to do,” Una said gently.
Then the Air Elemental closed the door between Cymbeline and us with a sickly breeze.
Chapter 4
“You were out late,” my mom said when I flopped on the couch beside her. “Are you hungry? You must be hungry.” She leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, lip gloss leaving a sticky smear, and stood. I dragged myself back up and followed her to the kitchen. I was more tired than I should be for lounging on someone’s bed for hours, but interacting with the Poisons was like playing a game of chess. If I knew how to play chess. I wasn’t exceptionally good at either one. The coven and I were constantly measuring each other up, always on guard, looking for a weakness. If I’d been a better leader I’d have made us a team—but we were pretty much forbidden to interact, like a handful of little bombs. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered how I was supposed to bond with them, get them to trust me. But Mom had done it with the Elementals, and I was expected to do the same.
But I was only the leader because my mother was the most powerful Elemental. I never earned it. I wasn’t better.
Sitting at the breakfast bar, I watched my mom, the most powerful being on the planet, make me a snack. Traffic-stopping curves that moved in perfect sync, lips so full I wondered how they didn’t get in the way of each other, dark brown eyes that held secrets I was jealous of and eager to know. So pretty. So easily capable. The representation of The Chains that she wore was more literal than any of the rest of ours; cascades of small, but strong links upon her shoulders, crawling up her neck, determining her next breath. The possibility of destruction with just one wrong movement always her weight to bear, yet she carried it effortlessly.
If I were in her place as leader, we wouldn’t last a day.
Clanking dishes brought me back to the moment. I was always hungry for her food, even when I wasn’t hungry. My mom, the Spirit Elemental, was Mother Nature in my mind; drawing on the power of the Earth, Fire, Water, and Air Elementals and infusing them with love. I tasted it in her cooking.
“Where were you?” she asked. I smiled. She said it in such a way that didn’t demand I tell her, but I would anyway.
“Um. Actually? I was at Cymbeline’s house.” She probably already knew that because the Air Elemental reported to her.
Her shoulders twitched, chains tinkling. “The Witch of Empty Things? Why on earth would you go there? You know better, Celeste.” Her soft voice made me sad to have done it without telling her.
But then I thought of the other Poisons, and the demon boy. How it felt to figure out the beginning of the plan on my own. And I wanted to do things my way, whatever the hell that was. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t as strong as my mother—I wasn’t her. I didn’t have to be.
“I may have something that might be a threat to The Chains,” I said, shrugging. Shrugging felt stupid. “Nothing major. But just a thing, and I figured I should tell one of the others. No big deal.” Right. No big deal. “And I have to show a little faith in the girls sometimes, don’t I? That whole give them the A thing.”
She handed me a bowl of soup that made me think of being sick as a kid, when she’d hold me as long as I needed. “Baby.” She ran a finger through my silver hair. “Why wouldn’t you come to me? You shouldn’t have to handle something like that on your own.”
“I kinda do, actually,” I said, grinning. “That’s what you created the Poisons for, Mom. Protecting The Chains alone was too much. You needed our help.” I tried not to let my eyes fall on the silver chains that sat on her shoulders in heaps, wrapping around her throat in a beautiful, horrible pattern. They looked light, but I knew how heavy they had to be.
The chains made not a sound as she put her elbows on the counter and looked into my eyes. “I’m strong enough to handle it all.”
I put my spoon down and pursed my lips. “Then you wouldn’t need the rest of the Elementals. You can’t babysit them and—” I straightened my back. Link heated up in my pocket. “I’m not arguing this with you again, Mom. I’m a big witch now. There’s only ten witches in the world, and I’m the…” I counted on my fingers and she chuckled, “sixth strongest one.” I took her hands in mine and sighed like I’d put a Band-aid on a stinging papercut. “The Elementals answer to you, and the Poisons answer to me. I’m as strong as you, on a smaller scale.” I could be. “Let the chain of command do its thing. No pun intended.”
She shook her head, hanging it in mock defeat, locks of dark hair skimming the counter. “Okay, okay,” she said. “But the second you realize that you need help, and that teenage girls are vicious things, and that those girls in particular are wildly conniving, I’m riding in on my virtual white stallion and taking care of whatever threat you’ve found.”
“Mom,” I laughed. “Okay. But the stallion has to
be a unicorn and the unicorn should have like, a little elf army, but the elves will stay here—”
“Celeste, you’re doing it again.”
I stopped talking, let out a long breath. “Sorry. I wasn’t Wish—”
“Don’t even say the word, baby. You know what can happen.” She kissed the top of my head.
I ate my soup, and remembered.
I’d woken up one morning, thirteen years old, still half-dreaming of the ocean. We lived hundreds of miles from the nearest one and I’d never seen it. But I could smell it from my dream as if the surf was kissing my feet, my body smelling like coconut oil and sleep. Just the way I always imagined it.
But the scent of bacon was real, coming from our tiny apartment’s kitchen. I sat at our two-person table, ate a bacon strip and said to Mom, who I only knew as my mother back then, “I Wish more than anything that we lived near the ocean, and that I could wake up to the smell of the sea and bacon every day.” Where the offhand wish was just a hope, really, a dream, this felt different. A Wish, like it had a will of its own and was an action, not a thought. I Wished it from my bones. And my mother was afraid.
The next morning, we woke up in a bright yellow house, dropped like Dorothy’s right on the sand of a sunlit beach. The house was foreign but definitely ours. My shoes were in the same pigpile in the corner. My bed had the same mismatched floral sheets, thrift store quilts and afghans. That was my reading lamp on top of a pile of cut-up magazines, old recipe cards, and scrapbook materials. My stuffed animals, my hairbrush on the salvaged blue dresser, my Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, everything from there, now here. My mom was in the kitchen, cooking, confused, but she felt it the same way—the place belonged to us, even if it wasn’t quite right.
And I had school to go to, and everyone would know me there, and I had something to learn that had nothing to do with school at all.
I showed up at Rocky Nook High in a haze. They were all expecting me; of course they were. I was only thirteen, but I was skipping a grade just like I’d been back home. My other home.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one skipping to freshman year at Rocky Nook, despite not feeling much smarter than anyone; I met four other girls in a private meeting with the principal before classes. Vera, Una, Cymbeline, and Delcine. We saw each other, but couldn’t say what we were seeing. We couldn’t speak to each other; the feeling of déjà vu and seeing the future was too weird. Like promises hung in the air that none of us wanted to make or keep. That was the day my panic attacks started. Every single one felt like that pressing presence of the unknown.
When I got home, to our house on the beach, my mother waited for me at the breakfast bar—something I’d always wished we’d had—and she told me something so unreal it had to be true.
“Celeste, we’re part of the only witch coven that prevents demons from paralyzing our world with evil, and we hide magic from humanity because we must. People aren’t wise enough to grasp it. You will be the strongest of what’s known as the Five Poison Witches. Those other four will slice your throat before they’ll smile at you, and their mothers would do the same to me.”
My stomach should have plummeted. My heart should have been pounding. A million questions should have slapped me, but all of it rang too true. Magic wasn’t what I had questions about. It wasn’t what haunted me.
“They don’t have fathers either, do they.”
“No,” she said with a crispness that told me she’d wanted to ease my mind about our lack of family for a long time. “You were born from deepest magic. You began your life owing a debt to that power, one that we created by creating you. You serve the power and the power serves you.”
We were sisters in that, then. I wondered if they imagined their dads the way I did, every single day. If they made up families that never existed, kept fake heirlooms and worn things in a rubber-banded junk journal with tea-dyed pages, made to feel decades old. I wondered if they were embarrassed by how sad that felt like I was.
“Why do we all hate each other?” It wasn’t hate I’d felt when I sat with those girls in the principal’s office. My mother put a name to it for me before I could do it myself.
“Because your powers are all your own and you won’t want to share them. Because the Poisons are being told right this minute that if one day, they were to destroy you and I, they’d have to answer to no one, and their powers could run free. What’s important, baby, is that you are the Witch of Stars.” She stroked my silver hair. “And there is not one wish you can’t make come true.”
It sounded like a fairy tale, and I was the princess.
Until she handed me a link of chain.
“Seen him?”
The Witch of Shades sidled up next to me as I stared blankly into my locker. My head was so wrapped up in thinking of how stupid I’d been to talk to the Poisons without telling my mom that I’d been a zombie all morning, and looking forward to lunch a little too much. It was school spaghetti, for the love of God.
I slammed the locker shut and faced Una, expecting her to be ready to make fun of me, or do a little annoying spell on me. Her magic rooted in emotion, could turn our feelings inside out. But her eyes were honest and concerned.
And surrounded with a lot of purple eyeshadow.
“No. I haven’t,” I said. His absence bothered me more than I wanted to admit. “You haven’t either? Not that you could see around all that makeup.”
She bit the chain link in her lip. “Shut up.”
“Why do you have all that makeup on?”
“I said shut up.” Una emanated a wave of fury, then every yellow object in the hallway flared up brighter, jumping out at me like they could suck me in and make me afraid forever. I fell back against the lockers with a bang.
“Okay, okay, call off the dogs, Jesus Christ, Una.”
The hideous yellow hallway throbbed, distorted, then returned to its normal coloring. Nobody even looked at me sideways for the debilitating fear that she’d forced on me. I didn’t know if it was The Chains that shielded everyone from the magic, or if they just didn’t bother paying attention to me anymore. I’d never let any of them close enough to care about me.
Shaking, feeling the same yellow hue as the yellow things she’d made swell and overwhelm me, I asked her something I never wanted to utter out loud to anyone, let alone a girl I knew would happily bury me alive. “How the hell did you know I’m afraid of bananas?”
Una laughed loud and happy, and every shade of white around us overwhelmed all the other colors, like doves released at a gaudy wedding party. “I can see it just looking at you,” she said, shrugging, wrists clanking with bracelets as she put a hand on her hip. “When you’re freaking out about something, yellow spikes show up all around you.” Her eyes skimmed the air over my head, seeing my feelings the way no one else could. “You hate yellow.” Her eyes went from dreamy and searching to searing into me fast, looking inside before I could stop her. “Bile. That story The Yellow Wallpaper, too much sun, pollen, Big Bird—”
“Stop. Ugh,” I said, wincing, squinting my eyes shut.
“But you hate bananas the most,” she said, sneering, happy to take the opportunity to needle me. It sucked that she knew the color of my fears better than I did.
“Yes. Yes, I do. Bananas suck. They’re the color of loud construction trucks, they grow with… friends, in bunches, like goddamn alien pods or something, and they’re shaped to fit perfectly in your hand like they were put here specifically for that purpose and that’s just too much for me. Too much. And they smell delicious, to draw you in, and I can’t even think about it.”
Una stared at me, mouth hanging. “Man, you are messed up.”
Pouting, “Am not. So, what happened to your eye?”
With a deep sigh, she said more quietly than I thought she could be, “I guess your mom didn’t have as strong a reaction to our little after school special yesterday as mine did.”
“Oh my God.”
“Hey,
losers. What are you two getting all girl on girl about?”
Delcine pushed her way between us to lean against my locker, dressed like a cross between the devil and a burlesque dancer. She bit a red Twizzler that didn’t smell as sweet as she did.
“Three’s a crowd, Delcine,” Una said.
“That’s not what your boyfriend told me. Now spill it. Because like it or not, it involves a boy, so you need me.”
“I am perfectly capable of handling a boy,” Una said, scowling.
Delcine smirked with sin-red lips. “Not the way I do, baby.”
“Boys aren’t really my thing, but I want first crack at him just to prove you wrong.”
I was getting a headache from rolling my eyes. “All right, enough, you’re both pretty and everyone wants you. He’s a damn demon, Delcine. Probably stronger than us. He crossed The Chains. We’ve never even tried to see The Gone.”
Delcine ran a thumb over her fingernails; red with black chains painted on them. Cocking her head seductively, a lick of fire danced in her eyes. “Nobody goes near him without me, demon or not.”
I leaned closer, looking into her eyes. “Cool trick,” I said. “The fire?”
She smiled wide. It was prettier than her other smiles. “Yeah, being the Fire Elemental’s little girl has its perks.”
“How did you do that?” Una asked. “I didn’t get the ability to part the sea or anything from Rain Mom.”
Delcine’s smile disappeared. “I took it from her. She uses me and I use her right back.”
The bell rang and we all sighed, either in relief or irritation.
Delcine started off with a clacking of heels, looking back at us one last time. Fear took over the fire in her eyes. “Does she know?” she asked. “Vera?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. I was ashamed that I didn’t. I was afraid to find out.
“I do,” Una said, staring down the hallway.
The demon stood dead center of the hall, black eyes blazing through that jagged hair, clenched fists peeking out from under immaculate white cuffs.
The Wind Between Worlds Page 3
