Charmed (21 page)

“Brooke, this is important. We need to know what happened when Samantha was kidnapped.”

“I don’t know anything,” she says. Her head bobs, like she’s struggling to stay conscious. I bite my lip in frustration.

“You must—you were there. Come on, any details. Anything at all could help. Just think.”

“Who the hell said you could come in?”

I stiffen at the sound of Bianca’s voice. I look over my shoulder and find her framed in the patio doorway, hands on hips, but it’s hard to take her seriously when she’s dressed in only a white corset that leaves little to the imagination. Judging by the elbow-length gloves, half ton of jewelry, and hair teased into a big eighties pouf, she’s going for “Like a Virgin”–era Madonna. Ironic.

“I distinctly remember not sending you an invitation,” she adds. Julia comes up to her side. She’s wearing the usual Fairfax High cheerleader’s uniform of blue pleated skirt, silver spankies, and a fitted silver shell, but she’s got fake rot on her cheeks and blood dripping from her mouth. She eyes my jeans, tank top, and bunny ears and gives a condescending little snort.

“Nice costume.”

“Thanks,” I say, feigning nonchalance. “You should have dressed up too. I mean, you do the whole brain-dead-cheerleader thing every day. Where’s the fun in that?”

Snickers burst out around me. Julia’s cheeks flame, and she flares her nostrils like she’s a bull considering charging.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” I say to Bishop. “Pick Brooke up.”

“We’re taking her with us?”

“Well, we’re not leaving her like this!”

He shrugs, then hefts a now-unconscious Brooke over his shoulder. Together, we push past Bianca.

“I wasn’t done talking to you!” Bianca shrieks, grabbing my arm. “This is private property and you’re trespassing. I should call the cops!”

Someone starts up another chant of “Fight, fight, fight!” All of a sudden, everyone from inside the house is spilling outside to see what’s going on.

I look down at Bianca’s hand, then up at her face. “Then call the cops,” I say, barely restraining myself from pulling her hair out. “I bet they’d
love
all the underage drinking going on here.”

“So you’d narc on us? You’re even more of a loser than I thought.”

“What?” I shake my head at her moronic words.

I could just leave—actually, I really should just leave. But as much as I’ve tried to tell myself otherwise, the way Bianca has been treating me ever since I caught her with Devon has upset me. We’d been friends since the first grade, and sure, her personality took a nosedive in recent years, but did all that history mean nothing to her? How could she treat me so badly? Where is the friend I once knew?

Strictly speaking, a party with hundreds of my peers isn’t the best place to have this conversation, but I can’t help myself.

“What happened to you?” I blurt out.

She crosses her arms. “Oh please. Don’t be so dramatic. Nothing happened to me.”

“No, it did,” I insist. “You changed. Don’t you remember…” I stop myself from listing some of the great times we had together—dressing up in furry hats and trying to convince people we were Russian sisters, singing and dancing in the car at stoplights to embarrass her mom, staying up until four a.m. watching marathons of our favorite reality TV shows—there’s no point. Nothing I can say is going to make her suddenly realize she’s become a horrible person. I have to let go. But I have one more question before I do.

“Listen, Bianca. Things might not have been good with me and Devon, but I trusted you. The least you could have done was be sorry about it after I caught you. Instead, you’ve treated me like scum. And I just want to know…why?”

She bites her lip, and I feel a tiny flicker of hope come to life inside me. Bishop adjusts the weight of Brooke in his arms. I wait. And wait. But Bianca doesn’t speak. Finally, I shake my head and turn my back.

“Stop.”

She says it so quietly I might not have heard her if a deafening silence hadn’t descended over the party. I glance at Bianca.

She hesitates, and in that moment, Julia drapes her arms around Bianca’s shoulder.

“This is a no-losers party,” she says. “So why don’t you scram.”

I wait for Bianca to come to my defense or at least say whatever she wanted to say, but she just gives a brittle laugh.

I give them my back again. I don’t need Bianca to apologize—just saying what’s been on my mind lifts a weight I didn’t know I was carrying from my shoulders.

We push through the crowds until we make it out the front door. I keep waiting for someone to complain about this strange guy carrying Brooke out of the house in her underwear, but no one does, which makes me even happier we aren’t leaving her here.

“I think that went well,” I say.

Bishop gives me a sweet smile as he lugs Brooke. “You did good. I’m proud of you.”

“I’m proud of me, too,” I say. “I really wanted to punch her in the face for a minute there.”

He laughs. “I would have liked to see that.”

I open the car door, and Bishop carefully lays Brooke across the backseat. Then the two of us look at her with our hands on our hips, as if we’re two maintenance workers assessing a job.

“So what are we going to do with her?” Bishop asks.

I lean into the car and give Brooke a little slap on the cheek. Her eyes flutter open.

“Wake up,” I say.

She groans.

“We need to know where you live.”

She goes back to sleep.

“Brooke!” I shout.

Nothing.

Great.

I notice a bulge inside her bra. Well, it’s not the strangest thing to happen tonight. I reach inside and am pleased my guess was right when I pull out a cell phone.

I feel like a jerk going through her personal stuff, but how else am I supposed to find out where she lives? I see an entry called Mom in her contacts. My finger hesitates over the Call button. Contacting her mom will get Brooke into some
serious
trouble.

Finally, I hit the button.

It rings three times before a tired-sounding lady picks up. When I tell her why I’m calling, she doesn’t sound the least bit surprised that her daughter is drunk. It occurs to me that Brooke’s lost her best friend too. That maybe this is how she’s been coping. If there’s one thing this strange night has taught me, it’s that I didn’t know Brooke like I thought I did. I’m not scared of her anymore—I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at her again and feel anything but sadness.

Her mom rattles off her address, and Bishop and I get into the car.

Despite telling Bianca how I feel, the night feels like one gigantic failure. We came here looking for answers, wasted
all this time, and we’re still no closer to finding Paige than we were hours ago.

Hopelessness descends over me, the landscape outside the window blurring behind my tears. Bishop grabs my hand and gives a little squeeze.

We get to Brooke’s house twenty minutes later. She groans when Bishop hauls her out of the backseat.

“Where am I?” she asks, looking around confused.

“Home,” I answer.

“Oh no,” she says. “My mom’s gonna be pissssed.”

Bishop hoists her into his arms, and I lead the way up the path toward her house.

“I miss her,” Brooke blurts out. “I’ve known her since I was three. Did you know that?” Her head is lolled back on Bishop’s arm, but she lifts it to look at me with glassy eyes.

“I didn’t,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“You know who I
really
hate?” she asks.

“Who?” I say, humoring her.

The porch lights flick on, and Brooke’s mom appears in the doorway, pulling a bathrobe around her chest.

“The cops,” Brooke slurs. “I hate ’em. All of ’em.”

“Oh yeah, why is that?” Bishop says.

“They wouldn’t listen to me. I told them the woman was talking about sacrifice, but they said I must have misheard. I didn’t mishear.” She belches loudly, then laughs.

Bishop stops dead. I whirl on her, my heart thumping wildly.

“What did you just say?”

“I said Bianca’s a bitch. That was mean of her to talk to you that way.”

“No, about the woman and the sacrifice,” I say.

She swallows, wetting her lips. “They made me sign papers. They threatened my family if I told anyone.”

“Who?” I demand. “The cops? Who is this woman?”

She starts gagging.

“Not on the leather!” Bishop shouts. He practically drops her onto the grass. Brooke’s mom runs down the porch steps and falls to her daughter’s side, holding back her hair.

“Thank you,” she says to me, with a strained smile. “I’ve got it from here.”

I
used to hate the attic of the Black Cat. It’s a tiny, unfinished space with exposed insulation for walls and a low ceiling with a single, flickering overhead bulb. Cobwebs are strung between the boxes that fill up the space, and it smells like moldy cardboard and cigarettes.

When Mom was alive, I did everything possible to avoid coming up here. But after what I’ve had to go through, a creepy attic is the least of my concerns.

Bishop is stretched out in front of a stack of boxes across from me, while I sit cross-legged with a giant tome open in my lap.

After Brooke’s little barf-fest in the front yard last night,
her mom ushered her inside and practically slammed the door in our faces. And despite my calling Brooke so many times this morning it nearly bordered on harassment, I couldn’t convince her to tell me anything else. She even denied the whole thing about the cops threatening her, saying it must have been drunk talk.

Aunt Penny hasn’t been much help either. She said that child sacrifice was a cornerstone of black magic at one time, but it had been outlawed for so long she didn’t know much about it. But if killing one snake meant powers that could cause an earthquake, I don’t even want to know what sacrificing a bunch of teenagers could do for the Chief. Whatever it is, I doubt it’s going to mean great things for the general population.

And so, since before the Black Cat opened this morning, Bishop and I have been poring through every book that has even the remotest possibility of containing information on human sacrifice. So far the most useful thing we’ve found is a spell to combat body odor. I’ve been reading for so long that the text is starting to bleed together and my eyes are crossing.

Our determination from this morning has taken a nosedive. I don’t think either one of us wants to admit it, but chances are good we aren’t going to find anything in these pages. We don’t even know what we’re looking for, and besides, it’s unlikely we’re going to come across a chapter titled “Creepy Ceremonies Requiring Much Human Sacrifice.”

I finally break the silence.

“Find anything yet?”

Bishop sighs. “Nothing. You?”

“Nada.”

I return his sigh and go back to skimming my finger across the ancient paper. Through the thin floorboards, I can faintly make out the chatter of customers and hear Aunt Penny’s greeting as the bell jangles and someone new enters the store. My mind drifts back to this morning.

We started out reading downstairs, until the influx of shoppers for the big Spooktacular Halloween Sale forced us to move somewhere with more space and privacy. But in the short time that I saw Aunt Penny in the role of shopkeeper, I was shocked to discover she’s become as possessive of the place as Mom once was. When a snarky customer demanded to know why the athames were priced so high, she delved into an in-depth explanation involving the price of gold and manufacturers in Scotland that left me gaping at her. I always thought she was just doing this job because she had to in order to keep a roof over my head and her ass in designer jeans, but in that moment it seemed like maybe she was doing it to honor Mom, who loved this place like a second home.

A rattling jars me from my memory. I look over at the trapdoor, expecting to see Aunt Penny emerging, but instead Jessie Colburn is poking her head into the attic.

“Jessie, what are you doing here?” I slam the book closed,
my heart racing hard. How did Aunt Penny not notice her come up? She was supposed to be watching.

“I was looking for you,” Jessie answers. Her eyes zero in on my face. “What
happened
to you?”

My cheeks blaze with heat, every single fading purple bruise beating in time with my heart. I shouldn’t have skipped the makeup this morning. I scour my brain for an excuse that sounds legit, but all I come up with is a mugging gone bad, and I’ve already used that one.

“This area isn’t open to customers,” I say.

“Good thing I’m not buying,” she replies. “And you didn’t answer my question. What happened to you?”

“It was my fault,” Bishop cuts in. “Her aunt called me looking for her. I threw my cell to her, but she didn’t react in time and it smacked her in the face.”

It sounds totally made up, but I giggle and give a self-deprecating roll of the eyes anyway, playing along.

Jessie’s eyebrows pull together. She doesn’t believe us, but she isn’t going to argue. Good enough.

“So did you need something?” I ask, which might as well have been “Go away.” But instead of leaving, she climbs up the rest of the steps. I send a panicked look to Bishop, but he just shrugs.

Jessie sits down heavily across from me.

“Listen,” she starts. “I know something is up.”

I try to find words—any words—but she holds a hand up. “No, let me finish. I called every single music school
in North America and not a single one has any record of a student named Paige Abernathy.”

My heart thumps so hard I’m sure she can hear it.

“You’d think her parents would have looked into that, right?” she continues. “Would have noticed by now that something was wrong? And yet every time I go over there, it’s like nothing happened.”

She’s gone over there?

“It’s weird,” she says. “It’s like her mom has been brainwashed or something. And then there’s you.” She tilts her head to the side, assessing me. I feel like the words
LYING WITCH
are stamped across my forehead. I should have been more careful when I noticed Jessie was on to me. I shouldn’t have underestimated her.

“You go missing from school for weeks at a time,” she says, “and when you come back you’re different.”

“My mom just died!” I cut in.

“I know,” she answers, totally unruffled by my outburst. “This is different. You’re different. And that’s saying nothing of your injuries. Have you looked in the mirror lately? You look like you got in a fight with a meat tenderizer. And lost.”

I shrink under her penetrating gaze.

“Look,” she says. “I know you’re probably going to say that I’m crazy, but I’m not going to leave and I’m not going to stop bothering you until you give me something, okay? I want Paige back just as much as you do.”

Until her last comment, I would have told her she could eff off with her stupid suspicions, but at the mention of Paige’s name, I come undone. I know that I don’t really know Jessie—I know I shouldn’t trust her and I should keep her out of it, even if for her own safety—but I also know that Paige trusted her.

“She’s not at music school, is she?” Jessie asks quietly.

I give an infinitesimal shake of my head.

“Is she in danger?”

I look into my lap, at my callused fingers and unpainted nails. My silence is an answer.

She lets out a pressurized breath. “Okay. What can I do to help?”

I’m so relieved she’s not pressing me for more information that I grab the first book off the stack that I haven’t gone through already and toss it to her. She catches it like a football against her chest, then turns it over to read the title on the faded red leather cover.

“Practical Magic for the Modern Witch,”
she mumbles.

Her eyes go wide, but to her credit, she doesn’t run away screaming. She cracks the spine to the first page. “So what are we looking for?”

I exchange a glance with Bishop.

“Anything about a mass spell or ceremony,” he says.

“Especially if it involves human sacrifice,” I add.

“And anything about alternate dimensions or prisons,” Bishop chimes in.

Jessie blows out another breath, her face suddenly so pale that, for a minute, I wonder if she’s going to go down. But then she leans over the book and starts reading.

I can’t help smiling at her then. Paige was right about Jessie.

For the next few hours, the only sound is the shuffling of pages and the occasional battle cry as I release my frustration. I’m ready to suggest taking a quick break for food when Jessie sucks in a breath. She leans in close to a passage.

“What?” I ask.

“I think I found something.”

Bishop and I scramble up to lean over her shoulder.

“Right here,” she says, pointing to a paragraph in the middle of the page.

“ ‘All magic works on the basis of manipulating energy already in existence,’ ” I read. “ ‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred into other forms. These are the foundations of our science, the only Truth not to be questioned. Only one magician of the dark arts has ever speculated that this was incorrect.’ ”

My mouth runs dry. I wet my lips and keep reading. “ ‘He claimed that, under a full moon on All Hallows’ Eve, he’d sacrificed his child as part of a spell that he hoped would create a well to combat the twelve-year drought. He claimed that instead of a well, he’d accidentally ripped a hole in the fabric between dimensions. However, all efforts to re-create this spell failed, and he was tried for murder. The man
argued that his child had given his life willingly, but he was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the town square.’ ”

I skim the rest of the page, but it says nothing more about the spell or the dark magician.

“What could this mean?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Jessie says, her tone a bit deflated. “It mentioned sacrifice, so I thought it was important.”

“ ‘A hole in the fabric between dimensions,’ ” Bishop mumbles. “What if this hole was a door between dimensions?”

“You mean a portal?” I ask.

He shrugs as he chews the corner of a blunt nail, but his eyes tell me he thinks we’re on to something.

“A portal,” I repeat. “Maybe the Chief is trying to re-create the spell.”

“Who’s the Chief?” Jessie asks.

“But why?” I say, ignoring her question.

“To escape Los Demonios,” Bishop says.

I realize it’s true the moment he says the words. “Oh my God. That’s it. That’s what he wants—the second part of the plan. Sacrifice teens to try to make a portal out.”

“Could be, anyway,” Bishop says.

“It is. What else could this mean? We know he wants out. We know he’s kidnapped kids.”

“Who kidnapped who?” Jessie asks. “Are we talking about Paige? What’s this about a portal? You guys are really freaking me out here.”

“What would happen if it worked?” I ask Bishop.

“It wouldn’t be pretty.” Bishop paces the attic, raking his hands through his hair. “No one could stop them. Not even the Family.” He lets out a humorless laugh. “Actually, if Jezebel’s involved there a one hundred percent chance the Family would be their first targets—it’s got to be why she’s helping them. They have a shared enemy. She must have turned to them after we refused to help her.”

My stomach hollows out. “Well, what are we going to do?” I ask.

The attic descends back into silence, the muted chatter of customers filtering up the stairs. We turn back to the book passage, looking for more answers.

“All Hallows’ Eve,” Jessie says. “That means Halloween, right?”

“Yeah,” I say absently, skimming the words.

“Indie.” Bishop’s eyes flash.

And then it hits me what Jessie’s suggesting.

The blood rushes from my head.

“This is it,” Bishop mumbles.

“What? What does it mean?” Jessie asks.

I look at Bishop, then back to the page again, realization slamming into me like a Mack truck.

“The spell is happening tonight.”