Ominous

by Kate Brian

  Sawyer closed his eyes for a moment, as if gathering his strength. “He said no. He said he didn’t want to have anything more to do with Billings, and he didn’t want his girls anywhere near it either.”

  My face burned and my eyes met Noelle’s across the table.

  “His girls? WTF?” Portia said. “Have you got some secret sister we don’t know about, Noelle?”

  The other girls laughed halfheartedly, but I felt the orange juice traveling back up my throat. This—all of it—was very not good.

  “Obviously, Sawyer misheard,” Noelle said through her teeth, staring me down. “And don’t worry, ladies,” she added, lifting her hair over her shoulders. “I’ll get to the bottom of this. There’s no way I’m leaving Billings in the hands of a loser like Missy Thurber.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t get us passes off campus,” Josh said. He dimmed the lights to a romantic glow and sat down across from me at the small pedestal table he’d placed in the center of the art cemetery. Arranged on its small wooden surface were boxes of steaming Thai food, everything from lemongrass chicken to coconut rice to salmon with mango sauce. “After everything that’s gone on in the last year, I guess Hathaway’s finally cracking down.”

  I smirked as I reached for the chopsticks. “Or he just hates both of us.”

  “That too,” Josh conceded. He lifted his wineglass full of sparkling champagne. “Still, I think I did pretty well.”

  I picked up my glass and clinked it with his. “I’ll second that.”

  We looked into each other’s eyes as we sipped our faux champagne, and I felt a twist of anticipation. When it came down to it, the art cemetery was the best place we could possibly be. Because all I could think about was kissing him, and kissing him in a way that probably couldn’t be done in a public forum.

  “You want to forget the food?” Josh asked suddenly.

  I dropped my glass on the table with a clang. “Good plan.”

  We both stood up and collided with each other, his lips on mine before I could even catch my breath. He cupped my face with both his hands and tripped us sideways into the old-fashioned love seat pressed up against the wall. My feet hit a set of gilt-framed paintings as I fell on top of Josh, knocking the whole stack over with a terrific clatter, but neither of us even paused. I fumbled my hand up under Josh’s sweater and was met with the rough fabric of his chambray shirt.

  I pulled away, my lips buzzing. “Can you?”

  “What? Oh yeah.”

  He sat up to tear his sweater off and I sat back to give him room. As he flung it on the floor, I went right to work on his buttons until I saw a hint of his bare chest, and then I kissed it. He leaned back again as I kissed my way over his collarbone, up his neck to his ear, and then found his mouth again. He let out a little moan as he kicked off his shoes. Then he shifted sideways, kind of tossing me aside so that we were lying facing each other, my back against the back of the couch.

  I felt like we hadn’t been alone together in weeks, even though it was only days, and from the frantic direction of Josh’s hands, I could tell he felt the same way. It was like he wanted to touch every inch of me as quickly as possible, all the while kissing my lips. He pulled back suddenly and looked directly into my eyes. It took a moment for me to catch my breath. My hand was inside the opening of his shirt, holding onto his waist.

  “I love you, you know,” he said, trailing a fingertip down my cheekbone.

  “I love you too,” I said.

  Then he laid his palm flat on my cheek. His fingers were unbelievably warm and his breath was ragged on my face. “But we’re not gonna do this here.”

  I looked up into his eyes. “We’re not?”

  He leaned in and kissed my cheek, then my temple, then my forehead. “We’re going to do this, don’t get me wrong. Just not … here.”

  I swallowed a lump that had formed in my throat and exhaled. My head dropped forward and I rested my face against his chest. He placed his chin atop my head and just held me. He was right, of course. We couldn’t have our first time together be here. In this place where Dash McCafferty and I had confronted Thomas Pearson’s brother, Blake, after Thomas had died. This place where Sabine had drugged Josh and tricked him into hooking up with Cheyenne. It had always been our place before that, and we’d made it our place again since. But it was tainted. And Josh and I—we deserved better.

  “Are you mad?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied, shaking my head as best I could.

  “Will a present make it better?” he asked.

  I lifted my chin to look up at him. “Always,” I said with a laugh.

  He sat up and I did too, adjusting the skirt of my dress, which had ridden up a considerable amount. Josh took a deep breath and blew it out, like he was relieved to have gotten through that conversation. I smiled and put my hand on his back. For some reason, in that moment, I loved him more than I could have imagined possible.

  Glancing at me over his shoulder, Josh leaned forward and tugged something out from under the couch. It was a dark gray book with weathered yellow pages. When he placed it on his lap, I could just make out a gold date embossed near the bottom right corner.

  1915–1916

  My heart all but stopped “Is that—?”

  “The Billings School for Girls annual,” he said, holding it up so I could see the spine. “Complete with class photos.”

  “Shut. Up!” I said, grabbing for the book. He held it away—over the arm of the couch—like we were suddenly playing one-on-one out on the basketball court. “Where did you get that?”

  “I dug it out of the archives this afternoon.”

  I got on my knees and made another grab, but his arm was annoyingly long. He lifted his other hand to stop me and my butt hit the cushions again.

  “What?” I asked petulantly.

  “You have to promise me one thing,” he said.

  “A gift with provisions? I don’t like it,” I joked.

  He smiled and placed the book in my hands but kept his own heavy palm on the cover, holding it closed. “If she looks different in the picture than she did in your dream, you’ll drop this,” he said. “No more midnight treks through the woods, no more listening to people who appear in your dreams. Promise me you’ll drop it.”

  I looked at him, the words crowding my throat, but I couldn’t seem to let them go. His green eyes turned serious and he looked at the floor. “Reed, I just … I want you safe, okay? That’s all.”

  “I know,” I said. “I get it.”

  And I did. Because after everything, that was all I wanted from him, too.

  “I promise. If she looks different, I will drop it,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he said. He lifted his hand from the cover.

  I hesitated, looking at him uncertainly. “Josh? What if she does look the same?”

  His eyes clouded with concern. “Then … I don’t know.” He nodded at the book. “Page twenty-two.”

  I hungrily skipped to the designated page, rushing by ancient print and grainy black-and-white photographs. When the book fell open to page twenty-two, I stopped. Because there, staring back at me from a sepia-toned photograph set in a large oval, was Elizabeth Williams. The dark hair, pulled back from her face. The creamy white skin. The almond-shaped eyes. Her expression was serious, more serious than I would have predicted. There was a slight smile on her lips, but sorrow in her eyes. Eyes that I knew would have been green if the photo were in color.

  Because Elizabeth Williams was the girl from my dream.

  Tentatively I touched my fingertips to the page, feeling the depth of her sorrow within my chest. Beneath the photo was the inscription ELIZABETH JUNE WILLIAMS and below that, one word, ELIZA. So she’d really been called Eliza. I liked it a lot more than Elizabeth. It was less stuffy somehow.

  “The thing is …,” Josh said slowly, putting his arm behind me on the couch, pressing his hand into the cushions near my hip. “The thing is … she looks like you. A lot like
you.”

  “Really?” I said, tearing my eyes from the photograph.

  Whatever Josh saw in my eyes made him blink. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s her.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as we both looked down at the picture again. “Reed. I have to tell you something.”

  “What?” I asked, breathless.

  “The other day, when I said I had a nightmare and you were in it? And that I woke up from it the same time you woke up from yours?” he said.

  I pressed my tongue into the top of my mouth. “Yeah?”

  “That wasn’t a joke,” he said. “I actually did have that dream. I just … didn’t want to freak you out.”

  My head went light and fuzzy and it took a moment for me to focus. “What was the dream about?”

  Josh slumped back into the couch and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I don’t remember. I know you were in trouble. I think someone was … trying to kill you.”

  My heart dropped to my toes as his hands dropped from his eyes.

  “You screamed to me for help, and then I woke up.”

  I breathed in and out, trying to normalize my body. Trying to stop the rushing blood, the screaming thoughts, the terror and—oddly—the excitement that seized my heart at once. I turned my head and stared down at Eliza Williams, silently begging her to tell me what it all meant.

  “Okay. That’s … okay,” I heard myself say slowly.

  Josh sat forward again and looked me in the eye. “What the hell’s going on, Reed?”

  I touched the locket around my neck, the metal suddenly so warm it reddened my fingertips. “I wish I knew.”

  “She really does look like you,” Ivy confirmed, looking from the open yearbook to me, then back down again. We were sitting in the center of my dorm room, her with the BLS book and me with the book of spells, comparing the two and trying to figure out which dates in the BLS book corresponded with which spells. It was amazing how careful Eliza had been. Nowhere in the BLS book did it mention spells or witchcraft or anything other than regular old meetings, gatherings, parties, and community service projects that the secret society had done. “You have the same jawline. And the eyes … Do you think you could be related?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  Because that’s what the old me would have said. The one who was a product of two no-names from Pennsylvania. But now that I knew I was a Lange, who knew where the hell I’d come from—who my ancestors might be? Still, Noelle had never mentioned being related to Eliza Williams before. She would have claimed that connection if it was there, wouldn’t she? I took the book from Ivy, closed it, and set it aside on the floor. She went back to studying the BLS book and I went back to the book of spells.

  “Did you notice there are some pages missing from this?” Ivy asked, turning the book toward me on the floor. I leaned forward to see the spot she’d opened to and, sure enough, there were a few jagged tears down the center of the book. Carefully, I ran a fingertip over their edges, feeling a shivery sense of apprehension.

  “How did I not notice that before?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. You’ve practically been living this book,” Ivy said. She shrugged and lifted it back onto her lap. “Whatever it was, it was written by Eliza. Her handwriting’s on the pages before and after,” she said, lifting her shoulders again. “Guess it was something she didn’t want anyone to read.”

  I slumped back against the side of my bed, feeling—ridiculously—betrayed. “Yeah. I guess not.”

  Slowly I flipped back to the front of the book of spells. The first page was a careful, intricate drawing of intersecting circles. I ran my fingertips over the design, thinking of Eliza and wondering what she’d felt the first time she’d seen this book. Touching my fingertips to the locket—which, as always, felt warm against my skin—I turned to the next page: The Initiation Rite. I felt a flutter inside my chest, recalling what had happened when I’d read the rite on Friday. I looked up at Ivy tentatively. She was staring right at me.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  I licked my lips. “What if we recited this incantation?”

  She looked at me, her face a blank slate. “Why, exactly, would we do that?”

  “I don’t know.” I lifted a shoulder. “For fun.”

  She gave a thoughtful frown, then shrugged. “Okay.”

  She closed the BLS book and set it aside, angling for a better look at the book in my lap. One thing I loved about Ivy Slade: She was always up for anything.

  I laughed. “That’s it? Just ‘okay’?”

  She looked at me with a wry smile. “Why not? Nothing’s going to happen.”

  I tilted my head, hoping she was right. She had to be right. Because even if I believed that Eliza Williams had actually visited me in a dream, and even if I thought it was weird that the gold locket always felt warm, and even if my candle had gone out then relit itself, it wasn’t possible that magic actually existed. It just wasn’t possible.

  “We need candles,” I said.

  “Why? You need to make this charade official?” Ivy joked. But there was something serious behind her eyes. Maybe she was more freaked by my finding the locket in the woods, and by the fact that Eliza really had been in my dream, than she’d let on.

  “Okay. Forget it,” I said, disappointed.

  Ivy scooted over next to me and crossed her legs so that our knees were touching. I moved the book so that it laid across both our laps, half on my thigh, half on hers. “Okay. Ready?” I said. She nodded and we began to read.

  “We come together to form this blessed circle….”

  Both of us paused, looking at each other. We weren’t exactly a circle.

  “Let’s hold hands,” Ivy suggested. She pulled her hands out from under the book and we clasped our fingers together over the pages. “Okay. Start again.”

  “We come together to form this blessed circle, pure of heart, free of mind. From this night on we are bonded, we are sisters.” I looked at Ivy here and we both smiled goofily. “We swear to honor this bond above all else. Blood to blood, ashes to ashes, sister to sister, we make this sacred vow.”

  That was when the lights went out.

  “Holy shit,” Ivy said under her breath.

  I sucked in some air, still clinging to Ivy’s hands. It was just like the other night when my candle had died. Then both our cell phones rang at the exact same time, their tiny screens lighting up to cast square beams from the floor to the ceiling. I let out a noise that was half gasp, half squeak.

  “Okay. Okay. Calm down,” Ivy said, gripping my fingers so hard they hurt.

  She released one of my hands and grappled for her phone. “It says ‘unknown caller,’” she said, staring down at the screen, which cast a glow over only half her face.

  I swallowed hard and grabbed my iPhone. My throat went dry. “Mine too.”

  Then both screens went dead in our hands. “Ivy. There’s something I have to tell you,” I said in the darkness, my breath shallow and quick. My whole body prickled with sweat. “The other night, I said the incantation by myself in the basement at the chapel. And when I did, there was this sudden wind, and my candle went out, and two seconds later, it relit.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me this before we said the stupid thing together?” she hissed.

  The door to my room opened suddenly, and Ivy and I both screamed. Noelle took one look at us and leaned into the side of the doorway. She was backlit by the hall light, which meant that only the electricity in my room had died. She held a tri-folded letter.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked.

  Then her eyes flicked to the book of spells, which had fallen off Ivy’s lap, but still laid halfway on mine. Yeah. I was never going to live this one down.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said, standing up straight. “You guys! We are not witches!” she hissed, glancing over her shoulder into the hall.

  Iv
y and I looked at each other, my right hand still clinging to her left. Noelle hadn’t seen what we’d just seen. And even though her sudden, larger-than-life presence had brought me somewhat back to reality, the niggling belief I’d started to have when Josh showed me Eliza’s picture the night before was starting to grow.

  Maybe … Was it possible? Could we be witches?

  The moment the thought occurred to me, I laughed out loud. Because how ridiculous was that?

  “We were just messing around,” Ivy said, dropping my hand and standing up. She wiped her palms on the back of her jeans and rolled her head around, cracking her neck. Her dark ponytail swung down her back and I took a deep breath at the sudden normalcy. Even my skin was starting to cool down.

  “Good.” Noelle hit my light switch and the overhead lights popped on. I looked up at them, startled. “Because I have something to show you guys,” Noelle said, taking a couple of steps into the room. She turned the page around, holding it in both hands to show us. “I just got into Yale!”

  “Are you serious?” I blurted out, jumping up. I grabbed the letter from her fingers and read the first couple of lines. “Noelle! Congratulations!”

  Throwing my arms around her, I hugged her hard. Tears sprang to my eyes as it hit me full force that she would be gone next year, for real this time, but I told myself this wasn’t about me. Yale was what Noelle had always wanted. She’d be at school with her boyfriend, Dash McCafferty, and the two of them would surely be the power couple on campus. Plus, New Haven wasn’t that far from Easton. As Ivy League schools went, it was the best possible outcome for me.

  “That’s great, Noelle. Congratulations,” Ivy said as I released Noelle. She even managed to sound sincere. “Did you call Dash?”

  “Of course. I expect a huge box of Yale crap in the morning,” Noelle said with a giddy laugh. “But right now, we party.”

  “What?” I asked, glancing at the clock. It was already past ten.

  “You heard me. We’re going to the chapel. Get your crap together, bitches,” Noelle said. “It’s time to celebrate.”