Witching Hour

by Skylar Finn

  As it turned out, I didn’t have to. Peter knocked on her door, calling, “Tamsin! Are you there? It’s me, Peter. It’s an emergency.”

  Tamsin threw the door open immediately. “Did something happen to Sam--” she started to say, seeing me behind Peter. “Oh. You guys are both here.”

  She was a mess. She looked like she’d been wearing the same t-shirt and crying since I’d seen her last, which if my memories of college served, seemed highly likely. She wore no make-up, her hair in a lifeless bun. Her eyes were red-rimmed behind her glasses and her face was bare of any make-up. I’d never once seen Tamsin without at least mascara on. She put lip gloss on before she went to bed.

  I was moved that the first words out of her mouth at the sight of Peter were to ask if I was okay. Not that I thought Tamsin was so mad she wouldn’t be upset at the possibility that I’d disappeared or been horribly murdered, but it had been the most pressing thought on her mind.

  “I’m okay,” I ventured cautiously. “But we need to talk.”

  “Is your roommate here? We’re coming in.” Peter sounded more serious than I’d ever heard him sound. Tamsin immediately stepped aside.

  “She’s not here,” she said. “It’s just us.”

  “Look, I know you’re mad at Sam, but I don’t care,” said Peter, striding into the room. “This is an intervention. I don’t care if I have to hogtie you and take you back to Mount Hazel in my trunk. I have hard evidence that your teacher is a criminal. He’s also a potential murder suspect. So if you’re going to insist on being stubborn and angry, I’d be more than happy to play the bad guy.” He fixed Tamsin with an unblinking stare. “By calling your mother.”

  “No! Don’t call my mother,” pleaded Tamsin, who had progressed from looking sheepish to ashamed to fratnic over the course of Peter’s speech. “She’ll make me come home and drop out of school and say how she knew I wasn’t ready to go out into the world.” She flopped into the chair at her desk, looking morbidly depressed. “And I know I made a mistake, okay? I know that Cristo isn’t interested in me, and even if he was…” She trailed off.

  “He’s dangerous,” I said. “Did you get my messages?”

  “I did,” she admitted. “I wasn’t ignoring you. I was just so mad at myself. It was really hard to admit that I’d been wrong. I know you would never lie to me about something that serious.” This last statement she directed solely at me, so I knew she recognized that Cristo was not only highly dangerous as a person--but magically as well.

  Peter’s phone vibrated and he checked the screen. “It looks like my co-worker has something on Cristo,” he said excitedly. “Something we can take to the police.” He glanced up at us, and I could see his internal debate at leaving us alone with a murderer in the neighborhood.

  “We’ll lock ourselves in Tamsin’s room,” I said. “Barricade ourselves in for the night.”

  “Just till I get back,” he said. “I’m going to meet him at the bar. Then I’ll come back.” He turned to Tamsin. “You’re staying with us until this is resolved.” He gave me an appraising glance, as if surveying the likelihood that I would run out the second he left and try to make a citizen’s arrest of Cristo myself.

  “Really, Peter.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s fine.”

  My apparent irritation at his lingering doubts failed to convince him where my seeming sincerity did not. I had no intention of staying put once Peter was gone, but he couldn’t know that or he’d never leave.

  I hated deceiving him, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t have been so worried if he knew that my combined powers with Tamsin’s were enough to fortify us against the worst attack. But even then, he wouldn’t have wanted us to be the ones who had to fight Cristo. And it was looking more and more like that would prove the inevitable outcome.

  “Okay,” he said, relenting. “Maybe like an hour, tops. Lock the door behind me. The windows, too.”

  He was gone before I could blink, confirming my earlier suspicions that nothing could stop Peter from getting this story.

  “What was that?” said Tamsin irritably. “All this stuff about him tying me up and calling my mom, then telling us to stay in my room while he saves the day? Normally I’m a Peter fan, but seriously?”

  “He’s just worried about you,” I said. “About both of us. Though I agree, it was a little patronizing.”

  “A little?” She went over to her bed and threw herself on it facedown, her voice muffled by her pillow. “This time six months ago, you probably would have punched him in the head.”

  “I would not!”

  “Not literally.” Tamsin rolled over and stared at the ceiling. I got the impression she was still avoiding looking me in the eye after the things she’d said. “I get that he truly believes we’re helpless. But what makes him so invincible?”

  “He’s not. That’s the problem.” I sat at her recently-vacated desk chair. “And he can’t know how serious it really is, because we can’t tell him. Which is insane, because he doesn’t even know what he’s up against. Cristo isn’t just a murderer, he’s capable of stopping time. And we’re the only ones capable of stopping him.”

  26

  Into the Fireplace

  We both agreed going after Cristo by ourselves was too dangerous. Instead, we decided to revert to the original plan: find Lindy for Suki and Janice, contact Suki, and help them fight Cristo together. We went back to New Waves first.

  “Do you think it’s open?” I asked Tamsin as we approached the storefront. “It’s kind of late.”

  “There’s definitely something going on in there,” said Tamsin, her eyes fixed on the front window. I could just make out a strange blue light emanating from somewhere deep in the shop. I tried the door. It was unlocked.

  The shop was dark, aside from the mysterious light. Magdalena was nowhere to be seen. Something felt strange and electric; it also felt very off, like something extremely weird was going on. I remembered my earlier dismissal of Magdalena having any real magic. I wondered if I was wrong.

  We were nearly to the doorway that led to the tea room when she appeared. I pulled Tamsin behind a shelf and we watched as she glided by us, carrying a glass of milk. What had she told me, about using a glass of milk to appease evil spirits?

  We peered out of our hiding place, wide-eyed, as Magdalena seemed to flicker in and out before us like a badly-tuned station. She tipped the glass and drained it in a single gulp and resumed her solid form. She locked the front door and then laid down in the middle of the shop with a mild belch. A series of snores issued from her inert form a moment later.

  “It’s her,” I whispered in horror. “She must be working for Cristo!”

  I pulled Tamsin into the next room where Magdalena served tea, trying not to think of what literally lay behind us. We snuck over to the fireplace, confronted with the apparently solid back. How had Lindy gotten through? Was it with a magic known only to the Never Was?

  “I don’t know how she did it,” I whispered to Tamsin. “She didn’t say anything. She just looked at it and then walked through it.”

  Tamsin stepped closer to the fireplace. She crawled onto the hearth and placed a hand against the back of it. She closed her eyes and whispered an incantation. Nothing happened. Tamsin opened her eyes, frustrated.

  “Sam, come over here and help me,” she whispered.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Put your hand on the hearth alongside of mine,” she whispered. “Try to imagine it fading away.”

  I placed my hand next to Tamsin’s and closed my eyes. I felt something humming under my palm, like a build-up of static electricity. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but bricks.

  “I’m doing it wrong, I think,” I whispered.

  “No, you’re not,” Tamsin contradicted me. “They put some kind of spell on it to prevent any magic from opening it but their own.” She twitched suddenly, turning her head. “Did you hear that?”

  There was a slow, lumbering
, shuffling sound. I heard it, too. I froze on the hearth. “Magdalena!”

  We crawled off the hearth and under a nearby table. Magdalena--or whatever she was--entered the room. I saw then how little she resembled anything human, as if now that she was alone, she could no longer be bothered to maintain the pretense of her human disguise. She seemed to ooze across the ground, as if her legs were a mere afterthought. She slithered up the hearth and into the fireplace. Just as she flickered out of sight, Tamsin leapt up from the floor and followed her.

  I hurried to follow Tamsin before the barrier could close. We tumbled through the back of the fireplace, plunging into darkness. Just ahead of us, a dim, blurry shape emanating a vague blue light flickered forward.

  I tried to stand, but it was impossibly disorienting in the pitch black. Tamsin extended her arm in front of me, preventing me from moving forward and silently indicating for me to remain still and quiet lest we attract her attention. I reached up behind us. The entrance we had come through was solid again.

  In the darkness, Tamsin whispered something I couldn’t hear. A tiny light flickered in her palm and grew until it looked like she was holding a small incandescent globe. She reached out and handed it to me. It was perfectly spherical and as insubstantial as holding air. She created a second one in her hand and set out down the long, dark tunnel after Magdalena, who had faded from sight.

  At least, I was pretty sure it was a tunnel. It was hard to say. Our immediate path was illuminated, the orbs shining light on what appeared to be a stone floor. But I couldn’t feel walls on either side of us as far as I could reach with my free hand. There was a distant drip of water that suggested we were underground, but I felt like I couldn’t be sure of what I was hearing.

  I don’t know how long or how far we walked before the tunnel started to slope gently uphill. In the distance, I could see a dim pinprick of light. As we grew closer, Tamsin blew on her palm and extinguished the light like blowing out a candle. I imitated the gesture. The light in my palm went out. We reached the crest of the tunnel and paused in the shadows at an opening to a large round room.

  It looked like an underground version of the tea room, but much older. The floor was dirt and the giant stone hearth looked hundreds of years old. As we watched, Magdalena prodded a thick black cauldron in the center of the hearth, and the coals beneath it grew hot. She went around the room raising a finger to each white wax candle, long and tapered on a series of wooden shelves. They lit at her touch and she went to the center of the room. She didn’t so much as sit down as retract her legs into her body. I watched, revolted, as she stared into the hearth.

  Tamsin tugged my sleeve and led me farther into the shadows until we finally reached the wall of the tunnel we’d been in and pressed ourselves against the wall. As we looked on, I heard the scraping sound of distant footsteps and squinted at the opposite end of the room. What I mistook for a shadow was another entrance, large and circular like the one we were huddled in. Lindy appeared at the mouth of this other tunnel, opposite from ours.

  I cringed as I wondered if Suki’s spell was still working. Could she see me? Even if she couldn’t, she could still see Tamsin. But Lindy’s eyes were fixed on Magdalena in the middle of the room.

  “It’s nearly time,” she said to her. “At midnight, the ritual will commence and we will be shadows no more.”

  “Is he here?” Magdalena asked.

  “Soon,” answered Lindy. “We require only one final ingredient to perform the spell.”

  “Is it the man?” asked Magdalena.

  “Obviously, it is the man,” said Lindy. “His perfect, pure heart is the one that Father Death requires.”

  Peter. I clutched Tamsin’s arm so hard I almost pulled it out of the socket. She swatted me away.

  “Shame,” said Magdalena. “He’s awfully handsome.”

  “For a human male,” said Lindy coldly, which didn’t sound like a compliment. “Come. He awaits for us aboveground.” She no longer sounded like the Lindy I’d met. She barely sounded human at all. I marveled at how easily she had pulled the wool over my eyes.

  Magdalena oozed to her feet and followed Lindy out of the tunnel opposite. After a beat, I rushed into the room and grabbed one of the candles from the shelf. I didn’t want to waste a second waiting for Tamsin to cast another spell. I practically ran after them.

  “Sam!” Tamsin hissed behind me. “Wait! Let them get ahead of us, so they don’t hear us following them.”

  I stopped briefly in the dark tunnel and waited impatiently for Tamsin to join my side. We listened for the sound of their footsteps, and when we could no longer hear them receding ahead of us, we set off down the tunnel.

  I don’t know how long or how far we walked before it happened. I kept running ahead of Tamsin and she kept reaching forward and holding me back so I wouldn’t run right into them. All I could think of was getting to Peter before it was too late. Just when I thought we were catching up to them, I saw it: the tunnel ahead of us was no longer a tunnel. It was three tunnels.

  I stopped dead. I held my candle aloft and shone it ahead of me to confirm what I saw: one, two, three possible paths that Lindy and Magdalena might have taken on their way to take Peter.

  “No,” I whispered, aghast. “How can we know which way they went?”

  Tamsin’s frightened expression was lit by her candle. “I don’t know. We’ll have to guess.”

  One out of three were not acceptable odds. We had a two in three chance of being wrong. And if we didn’t choose the same path that they had, not only wouldn’t we get to Peter, but who knows where we might end up? Maybe some other weird cavern with a fireplace, or maybe in some forgotten netherworld from which there was no escape. No one knew where we were--not our family, not Suki and Janice, not anyone who could help us. For all we knew, Father Death might have some evil monster lurking down here with us.

  “We can’t split up,” said Tamsin. “No matter what.”

  “I’m afraid; I’m not an idiot,” I said. “Of course we can’t split up. But which way?”

  Tamsin glanced back and forth between the three. “If it was a normal person, there might be a spell we could use to tell which way they had gone. But it’s like the fireplace. They’re impossible to track.”

  No longer able to tolerate waffling in a state of indecision while Peter was in danger, I plunged forward into the darkness and chose the tunnel directly ahead of us. After a while, I felt certain I was wrong. We’d been walking at least ten minutes with no sign of either of them. The tunnel began sloping gradually upwards, as if we were heading above ground. Finally, we came to a wall.

  “Is it a dead end?” asked Tamsin, holding her candle closer and squinting.

  “No, look,” I said, leaning over. “There’s a door, see?”

  I could just barely make out the protruding shape of one of the rocks, which wasn’t quite flush with the rest in the wall. There was an ancient brass ring in the center. I reached out and tugged on it. The entire rock swung outward, like the door of a submarine. There was a second, far more narrow tunnel behind it. I looked at it and felt faint. I was horribly claustrophobic.

  “Do you want me to go first?” ventured Tamsin, sensing my hesitation.

  “No,” I said, thinking of Peter. I leaned over and crawled into the narrow space. I moved determinedly forward on my knees and elbows. I could hear Tamsin behind me, and it pushed me onward. I kept telling myself it had to end soon, but it seemed to stretch on indefinitely. I felt like I would be trapped forever, crawling forward in this narrow tunnel with no end in sight and no way to turn around. I felt the walls closing in. My breathing became labored.

  “Sam?” I heard Tamsin behind me. “Are you okay?”

  I didn’t want to answer her and reveal to both Tamsin and myself how not okay I was, the only thing that could make the situation even worse. It was then that I noticed a narrow square of light ahead in the distance. I crawled faster. If I could just get to it, everything wo
uld be okay.

  “I see a light up ahead,” said Tamsin behind me. “What is that?”

  I didn’t know or care. All I could think was that it might be the exit. When we got closer, I could see that it looked like light peeking around the edges of extremely warped wood. When we got closer, I saw that the tunnel ended in another wall. I thought maybe the light indicated a door like the one made of stone. I pushed against it. Nothing happened.

  “It’s stuck,” I said, fighting off a wave of panic. “I can’t get it open.” I pushed harder on the door. It was as if it was locked from the other side.

  “Wait, let me get closer,” came Tamsin’s voice behind me. “Maybe I can--”

  I assumed she had some sort of magic for this, but by then I was starting to lose it. “Help!” I shouted, pounding on the wood square that separated us from our freedom. “Help us! Please, somebody! We’re trapped!”

  It was probably the dumbest possible reaction, given the most probable candidates to hear me also wanted to kill us, but I admit to losing my head inside the crawl space. You try wiggling down a dark hole for half an hour after seeing a woman melt halfway into the floor and see how well-preserved your sanity feels after the fact.

  “Sam!” hissed Tamsin, who clearly was not afraid of confined spaces. “Quiet! What if they hear us?”

  But it wasn’t Lindy’s, Magdalena’s, or even the voice of Father Death I heard next. Instead, it was the most welcoming sound I could have possibly heard. At first, it was just a little high-pitched squeal, followed by a “Who’s in there?”

  The next thing I heard was a key turning in a lock and a loud long creak as the wooden door swung open. I was hit in the face with the most welcome breath of fresh air I’d ever taken. I tumbled headfirst out of the crawl space and landed on my back a foot below. Looking down at me, his expression astonished, was Cameron.