“Be still my heart,” Becca said. I couldn’t see her face very well, but I knew she was giving Cheswick an eye roll.
He was undaunted. “A hundred percent humidity!” he exclaimed, as if he were answering a question on Jeopardy!.
“Gosh, you’re so smart,” Verity said. She actually meant it.
Bryce snorted. “That does it,” he said disgustedly. “There is no chance that we’ll find anything remotely resembling a fairy if we keep talking and bombing around like cowen on a picnic. Now spread out!” With his outstretched hands, he indicated the directions we were to take.
“But what if we get lost?” Verity asked, her voice trembling.
“Don’t worry,” Cheswick said. “I’ll protect you.”
“Oh, well, then you don’t have anything to worry about,” Becca said sarcastically.
“Maybe we ought to have a signal or something,” I suggested. “To identify each other in case we can’t see. Like a whistle.” I tried a low whistle. “That wouldn’t scare off any fairies, would it?” I whistled again.
“Crap,” Becca said. “Bryce is gone. Bryce!” She took off with a lot of noise, rustling dead leaves and breaking twigs underfoot.
“How about the whistle?” I called after her, but she didn’t answer. “Verity? Cheswick?”
“Over here,” Cheswick called. He sounded pretty far away.
“Wait up,” I yelled, moving toward where I thought he was. “Whistle or something, Cheswick.”
There was no answer. “Cheswick?” Silence. “Hey! Anybody?”
Again, silence. I tried a whistle and waited for a response, but there was none. No sound. Nothing except for the droning of insects and the creaking of tree branches high up, sounding as if the forest itself were weeping.
I swallowed. The fog was getting thicker, covering my feet. I tried to whistle again, but my throat was so dry that nothing came out of my mouth except air.
It didn’t matter. I doubted if anyone had paid attention to my whistling code, anyway. I pulled out my cell phone and clicked on Becca’s number. I’d got a NO SERVICE sign. Then I tried Verity. Then Cheswick and Bryce. It was always the same. I looked up at the thick canopy of leaves overhead, and the trees all around me. I supposed they might be dense enough to cut off phone service.
Or maybe it was something about these woods . . .
Stop it, I told myself. I’d lost touch with my friends for five minutes, and already I was getting paranoid.
I tried to text. It didn’t go through. Ditto e-mail. I tried the GPS, thinking I might at least find my way home, where I could call the others from a working phone. I might have been able to get my bearings from seeing which side of the trees moss was growing on, but even the flashlight on my phone was inoperative. When I tried to call Becca again, I didn’t even get the NO SERVICE sign. The phone was completely dead.
“Great,” I said. I had no bearings, no idea how to find Whitfield or the bay or the Meadow. If I didn’t make it back tonight, I’d probably be kicked out of school. My aunt and great-grandmother, who lived in Whitfield, would be furious, and my dad would probably make me live with him in New York, where I can never sleep for the noise. And Peter . . . Well, this was just another stupid thing I’d done in a lifetime of stupid things, and I knew how Peter felt about that.
Whoa, Katy. I was letting my paranoia run away with me. I’d only been lost for a short time, I told myself. I would probably run into someone I knew very soon.
A deer stepped out from behind a tree not ten feet from me and blinked its big soft eyes.
“Nice deer,” I said, feeling myself sweating. The deer bounded away.
I’ll find my way out, I thought, trying to convince myself. The fog will lift, and there’ll be moonlight. Or my phone will start working. Or I’ll hear the ocean, and know I’m near the bay. Or . . .
A light shone. I was sure I saw it, in the grass around a tree trunk a hundred yards or so ahead. Cell phone? I wondered. As I walked toward the light, my heart started to beat faster. If Becca or one of the others lost their phone, what did that mean? Had they been attacked and left for dead? I stopped cold and looked around nervously, listening for the sound of footsteps, but I heard nothing except my own breathing.
Then again, if the phone was working—which it must be if it was lit up—then I’d be able to use it. I felt a wave of relief wash over me. That is, until I no longer saw the light. I got down on my hands and knees and swept away layers of soggy leaves, looking for it.
Once again my spirits sank. Could the dropped phone have died, too, only a few minutes after mine had bitten the dust? “Stupid trees,” I muttered, feeling the dampness of the ground seeping through the knees of my jeans.
Then I saw it again, up ahead, glowing a weird bluish color. I crawled toward it, trying not to blink so that I wouldn’t lose sight of it again.
As I followed, I realized that the source of the light probably wasn’t a cell phone at all. For one thing, the light was intermittent. Sometimes it went dark for minutes at a time while I waited, poised like a retriever on my hands and knees. And it was blue. Faint and blue, the way I’d always pictured ether, the witches’ fifth element. There was water, air, earth, fire . . . and ether, the element of spirit that made magic possible.
Slowly I moved toward it, as if this thing, this ether, would fly away at the sight of me, until I could see it clearly. Yes, there it was, blinking soft as down against the trunk of a massive oak.
Fairy, I thought in a flash. Didn’t Mr. Kruger say they gave off light? Blue light?
I could hardly keep from laughing out loud. I’d found a fairy! What would Peter say to that? An apology, maybe? That would be sweet.
And what about the treasure that came with it? What was I going to do with that? Louboutin shoes with red soles. A vacation in Hawaii for me and a few dozen friends. A car of my own, a Porsche Boxster. Oh, yeah. A full-time maid for Gram, a big diamond for Aunt Agnes, who was marrying Jonathan Carr next fall, and expensive presents for all my buds.
With a mighty leap from my kneeling position, I vaulted through the air to grab the little flickering light with both hands. “Gotcha!” I shouted, as if I’d caught it in midair instead of simply plucking it off the ground. If I could have spared an arm, I would have performed a triumphant fist pump, but I wasn’t about to let the fairy slip away. Slowly I peeked between my two cupped hands.
It wasn’t a fairy. It was a box, a tiny alabaster box glowing blue. Was this the treasure? It didn’t look as if it could hold very much. A ring, maybe. Well, okay, maybe it was this big honking jewel that was worth millions. That would be acceptable. I’d just sort of pictured a chest filled with doubloons or something, but I’d take a jewel.
Gradually I opened my hands and gently, gently removed the lid of the box. Immediately it stopped glowing.
“No,” I whispered. The box was empty.
Had I wrecked the treasure by touching it? Had there been a fairy inside, a fairy who was now dead and vaporized because of me?
“Oh, God,” I moaned. I couldn’t bear the thought that I might have killed a tiny magical creature. Sticking the box in my pocket, I scrambled around the roots of the tree, thinking wildly that maybe the fairy had somehow fallen out of the box and was lying under a leaf somewhere.
“Please be alive,” I muttered. “Please, please, please . . .”
I found nothing. And the tree roots were so large and crowded that there couldn’t possibly be a treasure buried beneath them.
I sat with my back against the tree, despondent and exhausted. And still lost.
Had the blue light even been real? I wondered. Or had I just imagined it?
I took the little box out of my pocket and examined it. It was a pretty thing, to be sure, but now that it wasn’t glowing—if it ever had been—there wasn’t anything special about it. Just a pretty gew
gaw that someone had dropped. Well, that was okay, I guessed. At least I hadn’t killed anyone.
Suddenly I heard voices through the trees, then, “Is that her?”
It was Becca’s voice. “Hey!” I shouted, jumping up. “Over here!”
They made a lot of noise running through the woods, so different from the silence that had surrounded me while I’d been on my own. A light shone in my face. I held up my hand. “Sorry,” Bryce said, moving his flashlight. “We tried to call you, but none of our phones worked.”
“Mine neither,” I said.
“Why’d you wander off like that?” Cheswick asked, making me see red.
“I didn’t,” I said hotly. “You wandered off and left me.”
“So did you find a treasure, at least?” Becca smiled.
There was no point going into the whole saga of my serial delusions. “No,” I said.
“We didn’t either.”
“I found this box, though,” I said, holding it up.
“Cute,” Becca said.
“Um, would anyone mind if we got out of here?” Verity whined. “It’s getting cold.”
3.
By the time we could hear the ocean, our phones were working again.
Verity called her parents to say she’d be home soon. Because of Beltane, a lot of the witch kids moved out of their dorm rooms to stay with their families for the holiday, which the school officially referred to as a teachers’ in-service day so that cowen wouldn’t get nosy about why half the students didn’t show up for class.
I was spending the night at my great-grandmother’s house, but no one was awake there when I got back from the foray into the woods. My aunt Agnes was used to getting up at the crack of dawn for an 8 a.m. class—she was a professor of Ethnobotany at Stanford University in California, where she commuted by teleporting—and Gram, who was eighty-six years old, kept early hours. So I let myself in through the kitchen and made myself a cup of hot chocolate on Gram’s ancient gas stove.
It was a weird device that might have belonged in a Dickens novel. To light the stove, you had to strike a match and then stick your arm in the oven up to your elbow, and then retract it before the hissing gas burst into flame with a whoop. Every time I went through the procedure, I didn’t know if I’d emerge with eyebrows—or elbows—intact.
But somehow I managed to heat up the milk, cocoa, sugar, and cream, and poured it into my favorite cup of Gram’s, a fluted white porcelain mug with a line drawing of a cat embossed in gold. The whole process made me feel better. After the unpleasant events of the night, it felt good to be safe in Gram’s kitchen, warm and alone with my thoughts.
Peter had been right: Searching the Whitfield Woods for treasure was stupid at best. If my friends hadn’t found me, I might still be there, wet and freezing and convinced I’d killed a fairy. I couldn’t even tell anyone about it, because they’d laugh in my face. Especially Peter. Peter, who was always sensible. Sometimes I wanted to punch him.
No, I didn’t. I just wanted him to love me more.
My eyes stung. Don’t be a baby, I told myself. Just because he’s not obsessed with you doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you at all.
But my pep talk to myself wasn’t doing any good. Sensible or not, Peter should have been in the woods with me. He should have been looking after me. He should have cared about me more than he did.
I reached into the pocket of my jacket for a tissue and pulled out the little box I’d found.
Sniffing self-pityingly, I turned the box around in my hands. In the light, I could see that it was really beautiful—translucent, shimmering with every color in the rainbow. Its tiny lid, no more than an inch across, fitted so perfectly that no light shone between it and the body of the box. I placed it on the table and then carefully lifted the lid, admiring its exquisite craftsmanship.
I was thinking about wrapping it up and giving it to Gram next Christmas when I noticed that the box wasn’t really empty, as I’d thought. There was a leaf or something inside. Certainly no treasure, but it was surprising that anything at all could have squeezed beneath that perfectly constructed lid. I pried it out with my fingernail. Then, frowning, I laid it on the table in front of me.
It wasn’t a leaf at all, as it turned out, but something that looked like the contents of a Chinese fortune cookie. Or it would have, if fortune cookie fortunes were printed on paper as delicate and transparent as the wing of a dragonfly.
I held it to the light, careful to keep it far enough from my face that my breath wouldn’t blow it away. And then I saw it: writing. It was a fortune-cookie fortune, but written so small that I had to get out Gram’s magnifying glass to read it.
A fortune? I wondered as I tried to make out the words. Was I going to meet a tall dark stranger? Or would it be one of those sayings that nobody ever wants, like that there is no I in “team”? Worse yet, what if it said something like “Will you marry me?” I mean, that was possible. Someone had evidently dropped this box. There may have been a ring inside it, and a proposal. Now everything was lost to whoever had planned a romantic evening in the woods and ended up with a pocket full of nothing.
But it wasn’t any of those. When I finally got the magnifying glass lined up right, the only words on the paper were these:
Your wish will come true.
Ugh, a saying! The worst! Crap, crap, crap!
Realizing I’d been holding my breath, I sighed as I tossed the so-called fortune back into the box. The night had been a bust from beginning to end.
Well, what had I expected, I told myself. That was life—senseless hopes followed by inevitable disappointments. Boyfriends who’d rather work than hang out with you. Friends who ran away when you needed them. There were no fairies, no treasure. Just one boring day after another.
I quaffed the rest of my hot chocolate, turned out the light, and went to bed.
4.
I awoke to the aromas of bacon and toast. Gram was in the kitchen scrambling eggs. A bandage was on her wrist.
“Katy, dear,” she said, flashing me the big showgirl smile that made her wrinkled face always look so fresh. “Hungry?”
I shrugged. “I guess,” I said, still depressed from the night before. “What happened to your arm?”
“The Creature,” she said, jerking her head toward the cast-iron stove. “I didn’t move fast enough.”
“You ought to get rid of that thing,” Aunt Agnes said from the bottom of the stairs, where she’d magically appeared. Even though it was early in the morning, she was dressed in a pretty flowered floor-length gown.
“Goodness, Agnes, how lovely you look,” Gram said.
Agnes blushed furiously. “I just wanted to see if the dress still fit,” she mumbled.
Gram and I both tried not to laugh. Agnes had only bought the gown a week before, and had kept it hanging over the door in her room since then, covered with rose-scented tissue and waiting for today, when she and Jonathan Carr would be handfasted again. They’d planned to be married by now, but something always came up to interfere. Besides, a handfasting was cheaper and more fun than a wedding.
The highlight of the Beltane festival is in the evening, when a bonfire is built up high, and couples in love hold hands and jump over it. Most of the couples are young and don’t have any trouble leaping over the fire, but there are options if you don’t want to do that. Because of their advanced age, Agnes and Jonathan would probably just step sedately over a glowing coal. Too bad for them. Leaping over the fire is a rush. Anyway, however you do it, fire-dancing is the sign that you’re committed to someone. That you love them and they love you.
I think that’s really what made Agnes look so pretty. At thirty-eight, she’d been waiting a long time to fall in love, but it had been worth the wait. Jonathan was a great guy, attentive, caring, and devoted to the woman he loved.
The opp
osite of Peter Shaw.
“The weather will be nice, I hear,” Gram said, setting a platter of bacon and eggs in front of me. It didn’t matter that I worked in a restaurant kitchen after school. Gram always cooked for me when I stayed at her house.
“Will you and Peter be jumping the fire?” she asked me. I grunted noncommittally because, to tell the truth, I didn’t know.
Fortunately, my non-answer was allowed to slide because the kitchen phone rang. “It’s for you,” Gram said, handing me the phone. “Peter.”
I closed my eyes. I knew it. He was going to cancel.
“Katy?”
“Don’t tell me. You can’t make it.”
“Yes, I can. I’ll just be a little late. Jeremiah wants me to take him to the airport. I don’t want to hold your family up, so go on without me, and I’ll catch up to you.”
Well, okay. It could have been worse, but I still wasn’t happy. “Fine,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.” I meant to sound casual, but I think I came off as mean.
“He’s paying me a hundred dollars.”
“Lucky you.”
“Um, yeah,” Peter said uncertainly. I could tell he was trying to gauge how angry I was.
Sometimes I can be such a pill. I should have changed my tone, I knew, but I didn’t. “I’ll see you when you get the time,” I said coldly.
“Oh.” He sounded defeated. “Okay, I’ll see you there.”
“Is Peter working again?” Gram asked when I handed the phone back to her.
“Big surprise.”
“Peter is conscientious and responsible,” Agnes said in her schoolteacher’s voice. “You ought to be grateful.”
That was really annoying. “That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped, tossing my fork onto my plate with a clatter. “Jonathan always shows up for you when he says he will. He doesn’t put you last every time. He doesn’t cancel out on everything that’s fun.”
“Peter has three jobs,” Agnes pointed out. “He goes to school, he works at Hattie’s, and he’s interning at Shaw Enterprises.”
Wishes Page 2
