11
On the drive back to Average, I felt very frustrated and thought hard about what I could do to make Irene tell me the truth about Sam’s father, but I didn’t come up with anything feasible. When I got home, Allison was still at work, and I rushed upstairs to take off her clothes and scrub all that horrible makeup off my face.
By the time I walked back downstairs, Allison had returned from her part-time job at the town hall and had fixed sandwiches for the two of us.
After lunch, I did the laundry according to Allison’s instructions then volunteered to pick my sisters up from school. As I sat in the car, waiting for them to come out of the school gates, I was seriously annoyed with myself for not having come up with an alternate plan to find out the identity of Sam’s father from Irene yet.
I was mentally cursing Zack for blocking my efforts. “Why not bloody save me the trouble and help me out with that information?” I muttered to myself. “No, I have to run around playing dress-up to get Sam’s mother to even talk to me. Not that it got me anywhere.” I couldn’t help but bemoan the fact that I didn’t have any special gifts that would help me get the truth out of her. Being an ordinary human sucked. Even a vampire could glamor someone into telling the truth, at least on TV. Did vamps really exist?
My—admittedly rather derailed—train of thought was interrupted when Anna opened the passenger door and climbed into the car. “Hey.” I looked around. “Where’s Marie?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t there when I…”
My stomach twisted in a knot. I had started to be less vigilant where Marie was concerned. She had seemed fine. But today, I had been second-guessing my approach to fulfilling Sam’s wish. Last time I’d had such doubts…
“Oh, there she is.” Anna pointed at my little sister, who was bouncing toward the car. I exhaled a sigh of relief.
“Hey, Marie, what kept you?” I asked her when I strapped her in.
“I had to wait so Miss Turner could give me a note for Mom and Dad,” she answered, completely unconcerned.
I sat back in the driver’s seat. “What note?”
Marie hesitated. “She said I’m to give it to Mom and Dad.”
Anna looked at me. I didn’t know what she saw in my eyes, but she turned around to face Marie. “Show her.”
Marie pulled a brown envelope from her backpack and handed it to me. It contained a stack of drawings with a handwritten note underneath.
“Mr. and Mrs. Martens,
Marie has been making these drawings in art class—and she draws nothing else of late, I might add. They are rather disturbing, and in light of what happened a few months ago, I thought you might like to know about this. Please contact me so we can discuss this further.
Eliza Turner.
My heart beat faster when I took a closer look at the images. They were drawn with a thick black crayon, and they all looked similar—bird-like black wings emerging out of a person.
But it wasn’t a bird.
It was a winged demon.
My heart pushed into my throat. Panicked, I looked at Marie then at the drawings again.
“You made those, honey?”
Marie just nodded with a nearly impassive face. My panic was now almost constricting my breathing completely. Her facial expression reminded me of the possessed Marie. Was she possessed again?
I coughed and desperately sucked oxygen into my lungs so I could talk.
“What… what does that mean?”
Marie shrugged and smiled. Thank God, a genuine Marie smile. But the tension didn’t drain from me completely. “It’s what I see,” Marie said.
Tears were stinging in my eyes. “See where?” Why couldn’t Mal leave my sister alone? I should have known that Marie emerging seemingly unscathed from that experience would have been too good to be true.
Marie drew her brows together. “I don’t know. Where I see all the things that I draw. In my head, inside my eyes, I guess. Am I in trouble?”
Okay, maybe she was drawing from memory—memories that she wouldn’t talk about and, I assumed, that she had suppressed. This didn’t have to mean that Mal was trying to go after her again, and I would only make it worse if she sensed how these drawings scared me.
I swallowed and swallowed again, until I was reasonably sure my voice wouldn’t sound strangled anymore. “No, of course not, sweetie. They’re just drawings, right?”
I smiled. I couldn’t do anything about the drawings or influence how my parents reacted to them. I could only really do one thing for her. I could make sure that Mal wouldn’t get to her again. For that, I would have to build up my armor, my grace. I would have to have faith in what I did, and I couldn’t let little setbacks like not succeeding with a plan deter me.
Driving back home, I willed myself to return to my thoughts about finding out the truth from Sam’s mother. What had I been thinking about? Vampires, right. There had been no indication that they existed. Zack never mentioned anything about other supernatural beings, and in Vito’s books and pamphlets, there had been nothing on them, either.
It was kind of hard to concentrate because I couldn’t push Marie’s drawings out of my mind, and Malachriel kept turning up in front of my inner eye—Mal and those black wings … Actually, I remembered that other supernatural creatures had been mentioned in that pamphlet on the demon Malachriel. Shapeshifters. And according to the grimoire Demonica Magica, Malachriel had appeared to witches, pretending to be the angel Zachriel. I never had found out how he could make his black wings look white, but the witches believed they were helping a good entity and did his bidding. I figured Mal used witches because they were so powerful.
As I turned into our driveway and put the car into park, I sighed. Having powers that strong would have been nice. I needed something stronger than my human powers of persuasion to get Irene Sullivan to tell me the truth.
Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.
I had to find a witch.
How hard could that be?
12
“You are starting to be a really bad influence on me,” Sarah remarked good-humoredly when I picked her up near her dorm a couple of days later.
“Why? Because I’m taking you to Salem?”
“No, because you made me miss class again.”
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I hadn’t really thought about that. You should have said. I can go by myself. Shall I drop you off again—”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, interrupting me. “I don’t want to miss all the fun. Also, it gives me a whole hour in the car with you, where you can’t evade my questions. What is this all about? Spill.”
“What do you mean? I told you, I want to check out a few stores in Witch City.”
“Right. I’m not talking about your sudden interest in spellcasting. This is obviously part of the bigger thing that has you running around all mysterious and cloak-and-dagger-like. I want to know. As your best friend, I have every right.”
I grimaced and suddenly became very focused on the traffic. But Sarah left me alone. She knew I would crack eventually without any further encouragement.
“Okay. I can’t tell you the whole story. And what I tell you… you have to promise to keep it to yourself.” I shot her a warning look. “I’m serious.”
“That goes without saying.”
“So, there’s this guy—”
Sarah grinned. “I knew it. I knew this was about a guy.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that. At all. Anyway, I can’t tell you why he sought me out—that’s the big secret I have to keep to myself. But he looked me up for a reason, a good reason, and he gave me proof that what he told me was true.”
“Confusing, but go on.”
“He gave me… a job. A mission.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow and looked at me. I kept my gaze directed at the road. “I know it sounds weird.”
“I’ll say. He tells you to do stuff, and you do it for him? What kind of stuff?”
“
It’s not for him. He’s just a… mediator, I guess. And it’s nothing illegal. Most of the time. In any case, it’s nothing bad. On the contrary, it’s good. I help people.”
“Hmm.”
I sighed. I wished I hadn’t even started trying to tell her. It was far too complicated.
“Let’s just say that it’s important, okay?”
Sarah nodded slowly. “Okay. And what is your current… assignment?”
“I need someone to tell me the truth, someone who is scared to do so. And I have reason to believe that a witch could help with that.”
Probably for the first time since I’d known her, Sarah didn’t know what to say. Eventually, she regained her wits. “This isn’t some government job, then? Because they have drugs that make people tell the truth. At least on TV.”
I grinned. “No, I don’t work for a secret government organization. I can tell you that much.”
She gave me a searching look. “But you suddenly started believing in hocus-pocusy stuff?”
“I guess I did.”
Sarah bit her lip and thought hard for a couple of minutes. “Okay, I want to trust you and just believe what you say, but promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“That you’re not a paranoid schizophrenic or something and this isn’t all in your head.”
I took one hand off the steering wheel for a pinky swear. “Done.”
“Okay, that means we’re going to Salem to find a sort of truth spell or serum,” Sarah said, unable to tone down the incredulity in her voice. “And Stella…”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“You’re welcome. It’s a relief, actually, to talk to someone about it.”
Sarah laughed. “You didn’t really tell me anything. You know that, right?”
I pulled a face. “I know. Maybe one day, okay?”
“This better be good.”
“Oh, it is.”
She leaned back in her seat. “Now you have about forty minutes left to tell me everything about this guy.”
***
Salem was much bigger than I had imagined. We had been to Pioneer City in fifth grade and read The Crucible in history class, so I kind of pictured Salem as this quaint New England town. Instead, I found it a bit overwhelming because there was so much to see—the waterfront, museums, the historic town center… We could have easily forgotten about our witch errand and spent the whole day sightseeing.
Um, no, actually, we could not have forgotten about witches, because we were reminded that this was Witch City everywhere we looked. Salem was really milking it. But who could blame them? They found their tourist hook and went with it. As a result, tourism was booming, and the city was thriving.
We started on Essex Street, aiming to hit the magic shops I had looked up online. As we walked down the cobblestone street, though, we soon got distracted. Every other red-brick building that lined the pedestrian street was a business with a witch-related name.
We dipped in and out of shops, quickly discarding those that sold T-shirts, jewelry, souvenirs, Halloween costumes, and masks. First, we wasted a bit of time in those shops that looked properly witchy but were in fact just esoteric gift shops. They all had the same scented-candle, purple-walls feel.
Then there were those rarer shops where the owners claimed to be true witches. Those stores were all really different—some dark, some light, some big, some small—and they sold a variety of merchandise, from wands to Ouija boards, from books to tarot card sets, from herbs and candles to spell kits. All of them offered clairvoyant, tarot, palm-reading, or spellcasting sessions and advertised workshops and events. If there was a witch to be found in Salem, he or she would probably be connected to one of these shops, services, or events. But how were we supposed to know who was the real deal and who wasn’t?
I had kind of hoped that the couple of shops I had looked up online would be the only legit ones and that I would intuitively figure out who was a real witch. But I was grasping at straws when I finally recognized a name, a woman who claimed to be the official witch of Salem, according to my research.
“Look.” I pointed at the woman’s picture above a table full of assorted spell kits that she had supposedly put together herself. “She’s the real deal, apparently.”
Sarah was rubbing her temples. I was also starting to get a headache from all the burning incense and scented items in the shops we had visited. “Okay, how do you—”
“She certainly is,” the shop assistant said, interrupting Sarah. “Are you looking for something in particular?”
“Um, actually, we would love to meet this lady and ask her for something ourselves,” I said.
The shop assistant—a middle-aged lady dressed in black—laughed. “That won’t be possible, I’m afraid. She’s really famous, in case you didn’t know. You can’t just knock on her door and ask her for a spell.”
“I suppose that’s why you sell these here.” Sarah’s sarcasm was totally lost on the shop assistant.
“Exactly. Now, what were you looking for?”
The woman actually unearthed a kit for a truth spell from the mountain of little boxes.
Sarah gasped when she heard what the price was, but we were already standing at the counter, and I didn’t dare walk out without the spell kit. So far, it was our only lead.
“Lunch is on me,” Sarah said when we walked out of the Colonial Revival-style building and turned back toward the historic center of town. “I need a break.”
I readily agreed, and we had a lovely lunch at the Witch’s Cauldron Cafe. We didn’t have any witchy-themed food, though, like stew or soup with questionable ingredients, or even traditional New England fare. We both had wraps with feta cheese, baby spinach, and cherry tomatoes, served with quinoa salads. Despite its image, Salem was a very modern town, and the witch thing was, well, a gimmick. That became very apparent when we came across a statue of Samantha from Bewitched.
I was about ready to give up when we stumbled across an unassuming store that called itself the Herb Garden and looked like an old apothecary. It sold herbs for spells, and the owner readily gave us information on what herbs might be used for our purpose. Most matched up with the ones I had found in the spell kit, which I had opened during lunch. The shop owner also told us that the candle I had found in the kit would be useful, so I was pleased that my purchase had not been a total waste of money. Although I knew I had been drastically overcharged when I saw the prices of the herbs in the apothecary shop.
When I said as much to the owner, he slowly shook his head. “I would like to claim that my herbs are just that efficient, but they can only do so much. They loosen someone’s tongue, but if someone is really resistant to speaking the truth, you would need a pretty strong spell to make them talk against their will.”
Sarah critically studied the piece of paper with the spell on it. “Then we better hope this witch is as good as everyone says.”
I looked at the store owner’s face and noticed that he was about to say something but stopped himself.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing. I wish you good luck,” he said earnestly and turned to busy himself behind the counter.
“Please tell us,” I begged. “This is really important.”
He grimaced and looked up at us again. “I hate to say it, but in reality, you need someone practiced in the art of spellcasting for this. Unless one of you has a natural propensity for things like this, you won’t get very far.” He searched our faces. “And I would say you don’t, because people usually find that out about themselves. Visions, telekinesis, encounters with spirits—ever experienced anything like that?”
Sarah shook her head, and I—more hesitantly—did too. Whatever I had experienced lately probably fell into that category, but I didn’t kid myself into thinking that I had acquired any witch-like powers.
“Okay, well, I say, if you really want to make this spell work, you’ll need a professiona
l.”
We left the shop kind of deflated, but I also felt some tingles of excitement. The shop owner had seemed authentic and very serious about the whole thing. He had acted as if the whole idea wasn’t completely and utterly ridiculous, as if casting a spell was a perfectly reasonable thing to do if we wanted to get the truth out of someone. Hire a witch and cast a spell.
When I said as much to Sarah, she grinned. “Only in Salem.”
What did she mean by that? I didn’t ask because I didn’t really want to know the answer. I chose to believe that this was a place where things like that were possible rather than interpret her comment cynically. People in Salem were so wrapped up in their marketing gimmick that they had actually started to believe it was based in reality rather than a myth.
We stood outside the Herb Garden, a little bit at a loss as to how we should proceed.
“I guess the best thing to do would be to contact this lady who made the spell kit and book a session with her,” Sarah said with an uncertain voice.
“Hmm.” Who knew if and when I could make that happen? I wanted to get this wish over and done with. “Let’s just try one more place, okay?”
During my research, I had come across one of Salem’s oldest magic shops. The owner was a psychic lady who had her own regional TV show and a web site with a psychic line for people to call. I didn’t need a psychic; I needed a witch. But now I recalled that she also held psychic sessions and spellcasting sessions in the back of her magic shop.
Sarah and I found the right house—an interesting-looking, dark-wood Victorian structure—and stepped into the busy shop. I asked a shop assistant about a private spellcasting session with the owner—and almost had a coronary when she told me how much that would cost me. I didn’t have that much money—at least not to spend on something that came with no guarantee on whether it would help me.
I whispered a shocked “no, thanks” and just stood there in the midst of the hustle and bustle. People of all ages, ranging from excited children to young goths to little old ladies, rifled through potions and spell kits; admired jewelry, crystal balls, and magic wands; picked out scented candles and incense; picked up tacky, witch-themed knickknacks; and looked at books, postcards, and tarot decks. I asked myself what on earth I was doing there, searching for truth in the midst of this hub of occult tourism.
Wish for Santa: Average Angel Page 6
