“Yeah. Dan’s at college. Caden stops by every now and then. I think he’s keeping an eye on Ben while Dan’s away, making sure he doesn’t get into trouble.” Josh directed his next comment at me. “I don’t think he’s going to keep Ben on the straight and narrow and then go abduct someone else.”
Isaac set a midnight-blue bowl over the star. “We’ll know in a minute if she’s with him.”
We sat on pillows, boy-girl-boy-girl, forming a circle.
“What are we doing again?” Kaylee asked.
“Scrying,” Josh replied. He set a dark red pillar candle on one corner of the black cloth. Isaac already had a few others around his room.
“Why aren’t we using a crystal ball?” Kaylee asked.
“Don’t have one,” Isaac said. “My parents always preferred to use a scrying bowl to see past events.”
Isaac raised his hands, and the pillar candles around the room ignited along with the white ones in the iron chandelier above us.
“And we need the candles because?” I asked.
“It’s best to scry by natural light.” Isaac snapped his fingers, and the lamp on his dresser went out. “Did you bring something of hers?”
I held up a lavender hair band. “Lauren said she borrowed it from Natalie.”
“That’s perfect. Set it on the cloth.”
Josh placed the picture of Natalie next to it. “Isaac and I think with our combined powers we’ll be able to narrow in on her aura. We’ll know if she’s alive by the energy it gives off. We might even find out where she is.”
I bit my bottom lip, hoping this worked and bracing myself for what we were about to see.
Please don’t let it be Natalie’s body in a shallow grave. Please let her be alive.
We raised our arms over our heads.
Kaylee began to close our circle, naming the element she represented: “By the power of earth.”
“By the power of air,” I said.
“By the power of water.” Josh’s eyes narrowed as he focused on the bowl. A moment later, water flowed in from the bottom until it threatened to spill over the lip.
“By the power of fire,” Isaac said. The flames of the candles around us reached several inches into the air then settled back to a flicker.
Together we said, “We shall cast with the powers of three times three.”
Our circle closed with a faint snap.
Magic was best practiced within a protective ring. This had been one of the first things Isaac and Josh had taught me. It kept our energy in a controlled area while protecting us from outside forces. The latter wasn’t as important when we were indoors, though, especially in Isaac’s room, which had been built by the original owners of his house decades ago to provide a safe haven from all things supernatural. From the stone floors to the iron hardware, his room was a fortress to those with powers.
Isaac took my and Kaylee’s hands and said, “Concentrate on the last time we all saw Natalie.”
Josh grabbed our free hands. I closed my eyes and pictured Natalie sitting on the stone bench near the fire pit in Ben’s backyard, strands of brunette hair peeking out from underneath her grape-colored hat. When I was sure the image wouldn’t disappear on me, I looked at the bowl. The water was no longer still. It swirled clockwise as if it had been stirred.
We must have sat in silence—hands linked, watching the water twirl hypnotically—for a good five minutes.
Isaac grunted. “It shouldn’t take this long.”
“Maybe it’s me.” Kaylee’s shoulders sagged forward. “Maybe it won’t work with someone who isn’t a natural witch.”
She went to stand, but Isaac and Josh tightened their grips on her fingers.
Josh spoke first. “You’re part of our coven. You have a bond with each of us. There is another reason this isn’t working.”
Isaac nodded. “Josh is right. We can’t afford for you to start doubting your place in the circle.” When Kaylee opened her mouth, Isaac quickly added, “We’ll prove it. Focus on the first night we all met.”
It had been a warm fall evening. A large group of people from school had met at Wingaersheek Beach. Isaac had just moved to Gloucester, and he’d come to the gathering with Josh.
The water in the scrying bowl stilled, and there we were, standing on the shell-littered beach. Josh’s black hair fell around his face much like it did now. I had been wearing a cream tank top and white hoodie with my pink plaid sneakers because Kaylee hadn’t warned me I’d be meeting someone new. Isaac had his brown hair spiked and wore an olive green jacket. The setting sun glistened red off the sea next to us. We watched the exchange of small talk, not hearing what had been said. Then Josh scooped Kaylee up and jogged down the beach ahead of Isaac and me.
“Our combined memories recreated that night down to the smallest details.” Isaac gave a nod to Kaylee. “Josh is even wearing the necklace you now have around your neck.”
I squinted at the image of us in the scrying bowl. We were sitting around the bonfire now. The flames made the dark metal cross glow crimson.
“Convinced yet that you’re not the problem?” Isaac asked as we all released our hands.
Kaylee touched the leather chain. “Yeah, that’s proof enough.”
“What if we try to focus on Caden?” Josh suggested. “See if he was telling Madison the truth?”
Isaac raked his fingers through his hair. “We don’t have anything of his.”
“I do.” I jumped up, grabbed my jacket, and dug the cigarette butt out. “I stopped him from throwing it in Mrs. Taylor’s bushes. I meant to toss it in the fire pit.”
Kaylee grabbed her phone from her purse. “And we were messing around.” She scanned the pictures. With a triumphant smile, she held the screen so we could see it, revealing a shot of my back shoulder and Caden’s smiling face.
Isaac rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “That could work. Try focusing on Caden and Natalie. Let’s see what happens.”
We joined hands again.
I alternated my thoughts between Natalie’s excitement that Caden had come to the party and Caden’s easy smile when we’d been talking. The water swirled clockwise in a mix of foggy white and dark red. When it stilled, Caden, Natalie, and Lauren were talking outside school.
“Do you think that’s the present?” Josh asked, but a second later he and Isaac walked by Caden and Natalie in the scrying bowl. “Guess not.”
Kaylee leaned in closer to the bowl. “That had to be this past Friday morning. I bet Natalie’s asking him to the party. Look how she keeps tucking her hair behind her ear and how she keeps looking from her shoes to Caden’s eyes. She’s totally crushing on him.”
“This is good. Focus on the party,” Isaac said.
The scene in the bowl was swallowed by a swirl of the water. A few breaths later, we were watching Caden and me talking near the edge of the yard. I felt Isaac’s eyes on me.
My gaze met his. “Natalie was too shy to go talk to him. I was trying to coax him into joining us.”
He bobbed his head, and we observed my double’s conversation end with a slight wave goodbye to Caden before I walked to the edge of the bowl and out of view. Shortly afterward, we watched Caden walk around to the front of the house, where he stopped to talk to Isaac and Josh. He got in his car next. Nothing exciting happened from there, unless you count him almost taking off a car door when the driver of a red Neon swung it open right as Caden drove by. Then the scene went black.
“That’s it of him at the party,” Isaac said. “Show us what Caden’s doing now.”
I realized he was talking to the scrying bowl, so I began to think, Show me Caden, over and over. We got flashes of images: Caden standing outside talking to a tall, slender blonde in a field I didn’t recognize. Caden kissing said blonde. Him in a small kitchen chugging a bottle of beer. Between each image came a brief period of darkness that reminded me of the red slime Chase had gotten from our grandparents last Christmas. That stuff had stained everything, in
cluding my favorite jeans. It ended up in the trash three days later.
Caden then lounged on a worn leather couch, holding his half-drunk beer in one hand and the television remote in the other. By the way the light flashed around him, I guessed he was flipping through channels on the television. The last scene remained constant.
Isaac’s fingers slipped from mine. “I don’t think he’s our guy.”
“I have to agree,” Josh said.
“How is it we can spy on someone we barely know, but we can’t get a glimpse of Natalie?” Kaylee asked.
Isaac stood. “Something else is blocking our ability to narrow in on her.”
“What if she’s dead?” I asked, my voice hitching. I really didn’t want to think the worst, but with no news at all, it seemed less and less likely Natalie was going to show up at home saying it was all a misunderstanding. “Maybe when a person dies, their aura or whatever dies with them.”
Isaac shook his head. “There are witches who use divination to help the police find people. The cops think they’re psychic, but a true psychic doesn’t need a crystal ball or scrying bowl. Besides, when someone dies, they leave behind an echo.”
“Like what I feel when I visit my mom’s grave,” I said, getting it.
“Exactly.”
“What if Natalie’s being kept in a cage? The metal might interfere with our powers,” I suggested, cursing to myself when an image of her cold dead body stuffed in an old beat-up freezer chest seeped into my mind.
Isaac flipped on the lights at the switch. “Maybe, but I think we’d pick up something. Not to be gruesome, but a lot of cold cases have been solved by divination, and some of the places their discoveries have led them are pretty far off the beaten path.”
“We’re assuming she was taken against her will and that our spell failed,” Josh said. “What if she doesn’t want to be found? She knows about the powers; she might have learned how to hide from us.”
“Could she do that?” I asked at the same time Kaylee asked, “Why would she do that?”
Isaac looked at Kaylee first. “No way of knowing that until we find her.” To my question, he said, “I’ll ask my parents if it’s possible for someone without powers to block us from pinning down their location.”
“Let’s hope the answer to that question is yes.” I focused on the air above the chandelier, creating a puff of wind that snuffed out the flames of the white candles. One at a time, I did the same to each pillar candle. Smoke curled upward, and the smell of burnt embers wafted around us.
I texted Sarah to ask if we had missed any news. We hadn’t. Sarah was staying with Lauren, who, I found out, hadn’t stopped crying since they’d found Natalie’s car. My heart went out to her because I knew how much of a mess I’d be if anything happened to my best friend.
Depressed and defeated, I had Kaylee drive me home. I insisted she text me the moment she was safe in her house. I didn’t care if I sounded like a mother hen. If there was a lunatic snatching unsuspecting girls, I wanted to know the people I cared about made it to their destinations safe and sound.
Chapter 8
Visited by a Princess
Dad and Chase were already in bed when I got home. I deposited my boots on the rug next to the front door and headed upstairs to take a shower.
The hot water eased my tired muscles, but the longer I stood under the spray, the more my mind wandered. The pitter-patter of water hitting my skin woke my nagging inner voice that insisted I’d missed something. I retraced my steps from Lauren’s house to the gas station, trying to remember if anything had been out of place. I replayed my conversation with Caden and then what my coven had learned, or didn’t learn, by scrying. No matter how many times I went over the details, the outcome was the same: Natalie had disappeared with no trace of where or why.
I chalked up the mental henpecking to being overtired, and I stayed under the spray until I heard the tone indicating I’d received a text. It was from Kaylee, letting me know she’d made it home safely.
With a towel wrapped around my body and my hair dripping down my shoulders, I headed toward my bedroom. Halfway down the hall, a tantalizing fragrance greeted me. I was still trying to figure out what it was when I walked into my room. My eyes immediately landed on my dresser and Mom’s large crystal vase filled with lavender irises, soft yellow carnations, and deep red daisies. The bouquet brightened my room and gave it the feel of summer. It took a moment for me to notice Brea stretched out on my bed, reading my brother’s copy of Peter Pan.
“This book always cracks me up,” she commented in a voice that sounded sweet like church bells. “Whoever heard of pixie dust making humans fly?”
“That’s part of the story’s magic,” I said, shutting my door. “I thought you left.”
She closed the book and sat up. “You said I may linger, so linger I am. I borrowed a pair of socks.” She held up a dainty foot to show me. She’d chosen a bright yellow pair with smiley faces on them. “And boots and a jacket when I went outside.” She pointed to the discarded outerwear lying in a heap next to the bed. “Did you know there’s a humongous evergreen decorated with a million lights near a sailor statue?”
“It’s a fisherman,” I said, knowing which statue she was referring to. “The mayor thought it would be nice to have a Christmas tree there this year. They did a big lighting ceremony and everything.” I rifled through my dresser, looking for something to put on. “Hey, wouldn’t people see a coat and boots moving about on their own if you wore my stuff out in public?”
She scooted to the end of the bed so that her feet dangled over the edge. “No more than you’d see my clothes if you didn’t have the Sight, but since I was covered from head to toe, I saw no need to hide.”
“You mean you let others see you?” Even with her pointed ears tucked in a hat, she wouldn’t look human. Her features were too perfect, and her skin glistened like fresh snow.
“Faeries have magic too, you know. I can blend into your world if I so choose.”
“You disguised yourself using a glamour,” I said.
Josh was good with glamours. I’d once seen him go from a happy, healthy guy to a worried boyfriend with dark circles under his eyes in the time it had taken him to walk up the stairs.
I slipped on my baby-blue pajama bottoms and ducked into a white T-shirt before losing the towel. “Did you go see the tree by yourself?”
“I had plenty of company.” Her nose squished and lips pursed in a way that gave the impression it had been crowded. “What did you do today?”
“A girl from school’s missing. A group of us went out to look for her.” My throat closed over the last few words. It was hard to believe Natalie was gone.
Brea’s mouth pulled down into a scowl as she shook her head and mumbled something in a language I didn’t understand.
Not wanting to relive the last ten hours, I leaned closer to the colorful bouquet, inhaled, and changed the subject. “They’re beautiful. How’d you find daisies this time of year?”
She hopped off the bed and sniffed at one of the large red blooms. “I’m of the Summer Court, remember? I saw the dead flowers and breathed life back into them.”
I imagined Brea’s thin fingers touching the frozen ground in our garden out back, awakening the seeds beneath the dirt. I pictured the flowers growing in fast-forward—like the time-enhanced sunflower I’d seen on the Discovery Channel—and then Brea picking them to bring inside.
She plucked an iris from the vase and stuck it in my wet waves. “You’re pretty enough to be a princess, you know that?”
I felt my cheeks warm. “Are there a lot of princesses where you’re from?”
“There’s only me right now, but I suspect I will be joined by another soon.”
“You’re a princess?” My jaw dropped. I’d never met someone of royalty. I wasn’t sure if I should bow, curtsy, or offer her a cup of tea. I was sure, however, that I shouldn’t have asked her to do the laundry.
She t
ucked her shimmering silver-violet hair behind her ear and used an iris to hold it in place. “I suppose you’ll be sending me home now.”
“You need to be sent home?” I really should have read the rest of The Fae before I’d returned it to Isaac’s collection.
“No, but if you no longer require my services, you may ask me to return there. Then if you know when I leave your realm, you will know when it’s best to close the door you opened.”
“I don’t mind if you stay,” I admitted as I tossed the clothes I had worn that day in the hamper and went to hang up the coat Brea had borrowed. “If you’d like, that is. Just don’t let my brother or Dad see you. I’d have a hard time explaining your pointed ears and sparkling cheeks.”
Her fingers trailed over my dresser as she spoke. “I wouldn’t want to overstay my welcome. Besides, it’s not just—”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flower she’d put in her hair fly across the room. She spun around, mouth open and hand raised, paused, and snatched a daisy from the vase.
“Didn’t like the iris?” I picked it up and stuck it in the middle of the bouquet.
“The red matches my top better.”
A fashion-conscious faerie, I thought. She really wasn’t any different from me or my friends.
“Brea, you said you help humans in exchange for their company. Consider sticking around me repaying my debt.” When she continued to look hesitant, I added, “It’s been three days, and I didn’t even know you were still here. Really, it’s okay. Stay as long as you’d like.”
The corner of her mouth quirked upward. She inclined her head in a formal manner, and I could totally picture her ruling a kingdom.
I climbed into bed and grabbed my pillow, placing it in my lap as I leaned against the wall. “Tell me something else about your home.”
She joined me, sitting with her legs tucked under her. “What do you want to know?”
I peppered her with questions: “Where do you live? Do you go to school? Why are there different realms? How about boys? Anyone special at home?”
Brea giggled. “You are a curious one.” She peered off to the side, thoughtfully. At last, she said, “Let’s see…my family’s home is quite big. Have you been to Bavaria?”
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