Scary Cool (The Spellspinners) (10 page)

“But
…” I cleared my throat. “But that’s not possible.” I turned to Rune. “Is it? I
mean,
spellspinners
don’t just
happen.
Do they?”

Rune looked troubled. “Ordinarily, I would say no. They don’t. We monitor our bloodlines very carefully.
Spellspinners
don’t procreate willy-nilly; we’re not even fertile unless there’s an opening in our circle, and when that happens—when one of the Council dies—the rules are very strict. Only the couple chosen by the Council may bear fruit.” He spread his hands lightly, palms up. “
Yet
here you are.”

Lance leaned forward, frowning. “There must be an explanation.
”

“Indubitably,” said Rune dryly. “But what is it?
”

We didn’t solve the riddle of my existence
, but Lance thinks the afternoon was
well spent anyhow.
Rune isn’t quite on my side, not entirely, but at least—having met me—he would feel a pang of regret at having to witness my destruction. I am no longer an abstract thing to him, a rogue
spellspinner
living among the sticks and putting everyone in danger. He has had me in his house. I have sat on his sofa and drunk his grape soda. I’m real to him now.

Rune, it turns out, is quite the respected figure in
spellspinnerdom
. He is too young to be on the a
ctual Council, but he’s important in his own right
. He’s
the unofficial keeper of
spellspinner
history.
He’s l
ike the amateur genealogist in every family, the one who labels the photographs and keeps track of all the cousins.
Spellspinners
don’t have a written history. T
he race is
far too cautious
, too secretive,
to write anything down. But tales persist, handed down through people like Rune, and every so often the accumulated wisdom comes in handy. Now is one of those times.

Or would be, if it actually led to any answers. The one I care most about is just as elusive as ever:
we’re no closer to figuring out who my parents were.

What ended
my afternoon at Lance’s apartment
was my phone emitting its text-message burble. I knew it would be Meg, eager to tell me about her afternoon with
Alvin, but just glancing at the
screen
woke me up; it was after 4:00 p.m.
“Holy smokes,” I exclaimed. “I’ve got to get home.”

Rune and Lance immediately rose to their feet like a pair of Victorian
dancemasters
. Where
do
spellspinners
learn their manners?

“What a pity,” said Rune. “
There is still much to discuss.”

“She’ll be back,”
said Lance. “We’d better show her the well.” He picked up the confusion in my mind and grinned. “More
spellspinner
slang,” he explained. “It’s what we call the safe spot—the place we keep clear for
skatching
.”

Brilliant. I should have realized that every
spellspinner
home would have the equivalent of
Spellhaven’s
skatching
stones; a place deliberately kept clear at all times, so that one could
skatch
to it without fear of
detection—or of
knocking something, or someone, over.
T
heir “well”
was in the hall,
defined by a square, hooked rug,
out of view of the windows
and invisible to anyone visiting the front parlor. Just in case.

I
skatched
in a hurry. This is almost always a mistake. I knew this, but I was so focused on
grabbing my bike and
getting home that I didn’t think things through
—
and, without thinking, I
skatched
back to the spot behind the gym that we had used as our take-off point.

Of course, when
Lance and I
took
off, we
were able
to look around first and make sure we were unseen. Returning, I was arriving blind.

I
can’t believe I was so careless
.

I arrived at the back of the gym
and immediately heard a distant
exclamation of some sort, and the sound of someone falling. I was standing against the stucco wall next to the ceme
nt steps leading
to the loc
ker room
door
s. The steps
blocked the view of me from most directions, but unfortunately I was in clear view of anyone who was, say,
running around the track and facing just the right direction. So I materialized out of thin air—or so it would have seemed to the boy
in shorts and tee-shirt
who was, in fact, running around the track and facing just the right direction.
And now he was sprawled on his stomach in the dirt, his face still upturned, staring open-mouthed at me.

And—just my luck—it was Alvin.

I froze in place for half a heartbeat. I had never, ever, been caught
skatching
before. Of course, I had
only just
learned how a couple of months ago.

And this, I realized with a sickening sense of despair, is the very reason why the other
spellspinners
think I am so freaking dangerous. A
spellspinner
who doesn’t know the ropes, who hasn’
t been prepped since childhood
, is a
spellspinner
who shouldn’t be let loose among the general population. Because she will make mistakes. Like this.

It was already too late to
skatch
back to
the well in
Lance’s apartment and hope Alvin chalked the sight of me up to optical illusion, or dehydration, or whatever.
He had seen me, good and proper.
I smiled weakly.

“Hi,” I called. “Are you okay?”

He hadn’t moved. I
trotted over to him and reached for his hand. He took it and let me help him up, but
he didn’t seem hurt. He seemed…
preoccupied.
He
replaced
his glasses and stared intently at my face. H
is gaze was quite penetrating. It made me uncomfortable. I looked away, nervously aware that my irises are, well, purple. It didn’t seem a good time to let him
notice
that.

“How did you do that?” he asked abruptly.

“Um,” I said. “Do what?”

“You just popped out of nowhere.”

“Um,” I said again. “
Oh.” Then, “
Is that what it looked like?
”

A smidgen of relief lightened his expression.
I had opened the door to the possibility of illusion, and h
e was now
awaiting
my explanation—
a sentence or two from me that would
make everything all right
. Unf
ortunately, I didn’t have a
n explanation
prepared and ready to go.

There was a knot of boys doing peculiar football-type exercises down the field from us, under the barking leadership of Coach Ayres. My arrival hadn’t been observed by th
em because the stairs had
blocked their view. But
now they were lining up for some reason, and
a couple of them
at the back of the line had turned around and were staring curiously at us. I edged backward a step or two. “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry if I startled you, and I’m glad you’re not hurt, and, um, I have to get going because I’m late, so I’ll see you later, okay? Bye.”

And I fled.

My bike was the last one left in the rack. My hands were unsteady as I unlocked the chain, so it took me an extra second or two. Long enough for Alvin to catch up with me.

“Seriously, Zara. What
was
that?”

Lock free at last, I stuffed it hurriedly into my bag and tried an old CIA joke. “Well, Alvin, I could tell you—but then I’d have to kill you.” I hopped onto my Schwinn
. He grabbed the handlebars.

His face was p
erfectly serious. His blue eyes held mine steadily, although he was still so pale that his freckles stood out across his nose and cheeks as if someone had dusted him with wheat bran. “You can trust me,” he said.

Which was laughable, because of course I couldn’t trust him. I had spent less than five minutes in this boy’s company, and he wanted me to confide the darkest secrets of my existence to him? Yeah, right.

“There’s nothing to trust you with
,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted and unconcerned. Inspiration
struck. “It’s just kind of a…
kind of a trick I’m working on. I want to be the next David Copperfield.”

My cheeks burned with shame as I blurted out this big, fat lie. I hate lying. Irrationally, I felt a flick of anger with Lance for putting me in this position, a position where I had to tell lies to a nice boy with freckles.

“Really?” He looked uncertain. “So you can’t tell me because it’s, what? A professional secret?”

“Something like that.”

“Huh.” He didn’t look completely convinced, but he let go of my bike. “Well, you’re pretty good. You sure had me fooled.”

“Thanks. I should be more careful, though. Not to startle people.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good.”

I waved back at him as I sailed off into the sunset—m
et
aphorically speaking, of course—and saw him still standing there, watching me with a puzzled frown on his face.

If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get home, I would have pulled over into the first shady spot I saw and called
Meggie
immediately.
As it was, I set a new personal best in the racing-home-from-school category, letting my phone
chirp and sing from the bottom of my bag, unattended. Which it did. Repeatedly.

I knew the texts would be from Meg and the call would be
Nonny
.
And
I was pretty sure
they
wanted
approximately the same thing:
to know where I was and what I was doing
.

When I got home I
parked my bike near the back door and checked my texts as I hurried inside.
The first one—the one that had jolted me out of my trance
while I was downtown—
was “OMG
a
lvin
just left call me
asap
.” The second was “OMG where are you call me
asap
.” The third was “I
cant
believe you
havent
called me call me
asap
OMG.”

Nonny
was in the kitchen as I walked in, stirring something yummy on the stove. She didn’t seem upset, for which I was thankful.

“Hi,” I said, tossing my bag on the counter and setting down my books. “Sorry I’m late. Dinner smells terrific.”

“Where were you?”
Nonny
tapped the spoon against the rim of the pot and laid it on the spoon rest before she turned to me, her face unreadable.

Uh oh. Had Meg called the house when I failed to text her back? Probably. It’s what I would have done.

“I, um, watched the football team practice for a while,” I said lamely. An incredibly  brief while, but at least it wasn’t a lie. “I couldn’t go to Meg’s because she had a boy over.”

This distracted
Nonny
—which is exactly what I had hoped. Her eyebrows flew up. “A boy? That’s interesting.”

“
I guess
.” I went to get silverware and set the table. “His name is Alvin. He’s new
.
I probably could have still gone to her house, but I didn’t want to be a third wheel.
”

“You could have come to the nursery,” she said—mildly enough. “
Tres
would have been glad to see you.”

“Too glad,” I muttered.

“Or you could have just come home.” She turned the heat off underneath the pot.
“There’s always Facebook.”

I gave a derisive snort. “I’d rather watch the football team.”

She looked hard at me now. “Zara. You’ve never been into football.”

I shrugged. “I’ve never been into Facebook either.”

Facebook, in my experience, is just another reminder that I only have one real friend in the world. And my one real friend has weird parents who won’t
let her on Facebook
. So
what’s the point?
Although sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I have been known to play
Zuma
Blitz for hours on end.