Eliza suddenly imagined Catherine’s mom as a stern type who never let her daughter play outdoors or leave the family property. Unless, of course, she was taking her to New Orleans in search of witch doctors.
“Parents can be strange creatures,” Catherine mused, as if reading Eliza’s mind.
“Yes, they can be,” Eliza agreed.
There was a sudden crack of the bat, and shouts of “Run!” and “Get it!” came from the boys on the quad. Eliza hit the brakes and placed her feet on the ground, lifting her hand over her eyes to better see the game. Her heart skipped when she realized it was Harrison running for the ball. His cap flew off his head as he raced into the outfield, while Cooper Coolidge—clearly recovered from his spontaneous boil outbreak—rounded the bases at a sprint.
“He’s not going to make it,” Eliza said under her breath.
Then, suddenly, Harrison flung himself forward, making a heroic dive for the ball. Eliza gasped, and her hands flew up to cover her mouth. Harrison slammed into the grass with his arms outstretched, his glove reaching . . . but the ball landed two feet from his grasp.
Half the boys on the quad groaned, while the other half cheered. Cooper rounded third and headed for home, jumping with both feet on whatever it was the boys were using as home plate.
Eliza’s spirits sunk. “He missed it.”
Catherine eyed her with a discerning glint in her eyes. “But you missed nothing,” she teased.
Eliza blushed and looked back out at the quad. Harrison was just getting up and dusting himself off. He grabbed the ball and, head hanging, loped back toward his friends.
“A valiant effort, m’boy!” Jonathan Thackery greeted him with a slap on his back.
“He likes you, you know,” Catherine said.
Eliza’s head snapped up. “What?”
“He does,” Catherine said firmly. “I saw it in the way he held you that day in town. And the way he looked at you at the dance last night. That boy is completely smitten.” She paused and smiled. “You didn’t feed him any of Alice’s potions, did you?”
“I wouldn’t dare.” Eliza took a breath and swallowed hard, her heart pounding. She knew it was wrong, and she knew that she risked everything by admitting it, but suddenly the words itched the tip of her tongue. “I think I’m in love with him.” She hazarded a glance at her friend.
“I thought as much,” Catherine said.
“Yet you haven’t told Theresa?” Eliza asked.
Catherine squinted into the sun. “What good would it do?” She placed her hand over Eliza’s on the handlebar. “Besides, I would never betray your trust, Eliza.”
Eliza gazed out at the Easton Academy campus, watching as Harrison tagged a player out. Harrison’s friends slapped his back, congratulating his effort as they left the field and headed for the plate.
“I feel awful,” she said. “Falling for an engaged man. I fear it makes me a horrid person.”
“You’re not. You can’t control who you fall in love with, Eliza,” Catherine said, giving her friend’s hand a squeeze before releasing it. “For what it’s worth, I think you should follow your heart.”
Eliza looked at her, surprised. “But Theresa’s your best friend.”
“She is,” Catherine said with a nod. “But so are you.”
Eliza’s heart warmed inside of her. No one had ever called her a best friend before. “And you’re mine,” Eliza said, meaning it.
Catherine grinned in response. “Then as your best friend, I should tell you that I don’t think Theresa is truly in love with Harrison. I’m not even sure her heart would be broken should anything, or anyone, come between them. It might even be good for her. It might help her realize her true feelings now, before it’s too late.”
“What makes you think she doesn’t love him?” Eliza asked, scarcely willing to let herself believe it—to believe that Harrison might actually one day be free.
Catherine looked down at her hands, kneading her fingers. “I’ve
not told you this before, because I didn’t think it was my place, but now . . . there’s something you should know. About Theresa and May.”
Eliza blinked. She felt as if the sun had suddenly shifted on her, throwing off her entire view of the world. “Theresa and
May
?”
“Yes, well, I know you’ve noticed that May doesn’t exactly hold a fond place in Theresa’s heart,” Catherine said.
“I’ve noticed,” Eliza said.
“Well, there
is
a reason for that. The thing is . . . Theresa was in love with George Thackery,” Catherine said.
Eliza felt suddenly dizzy. “Theresa and George?”
“Yes. For years,” Catherine said, looking out across the Easton campus. “She was completely heartbroken when he proposed to May. Heartbroken and furious. She went after Harrison soon after, telling herself and everyone who would listen that he was the better catch anyway. Harrison was so stunned and taken in by her that I think he just went along with it. I don’t even know if he realized what was happening until he was so embroiled in that situation, it was too late to veer off course.”
Eliza was at a complete loss for words. May had stolen Theresa’s love out from under her? No wonder Theresa had detested Eliza from the moment she’d learned her last name.
But still—it wasn’t Eliza’s fault that George had fallen for May. The whole thing was so unfair, so petty. And to think Harrison might be tied to this person for life—this person who didn’t even care about him.
Eliza looked up to find Harrison at bat. “How could she play with
his heart that way?” she asked, toying with her locket. “I understand that she was heartbroken, but why involve someone else? She altered his whole life just to suit her whim.”
“That’s Theresa,” Catherine said. “But that’s also why I’m telling you.”
Eliza nodded. There were so many thoughts swirling in her mind, she couldn’t make heads or tails of them all. The only thing she knew for sure was that Harrison shouldn’t be manipulated by Theresa Billings.
“Well, what are you going to do?” Catherine asked.
Eliza narrowed her eyes as Harrison pulled back to take a swing. “I’m going to . . . race you back to Billings,” she said.
And before her words could even sink into Catherine’s mind, she’d turned around and started back along the path.
“No fair, Eliza Williams!” Catherine shouted after her.
But Eliza just laughed, feeling the wind in her hair, not even looking back when she heard the telltale crack of the bat.
“Eliza! Help me!”
Eliza woke with a start, her heart pounding in her throat. She clutched her blankets to her chest in terror and looked at Catherine’s bed. It was empty.
“Eliza! Eliza! Where are you?”
Eliza flung the covers aside and raced for the door. Sleep still clung to her eyes, blurring her vision.
“Help! Help me!”
Eliza threw the door open and stepped into the woods. The dark branches tangled and wove overhead, blocking out the sky and stars. The earth beneath Eliza’s feet was soft and wet, as if it had been recently soaked by a good rain. Mud seeped between her bare toes and coated her skin, and the piney scent of wet evergreen needles was all around her.
“Help! Eliza! Help!”
Eliza crashed through the underbrush ahead of her. Her pulse raced with fear, heating her from the inside as she shoved aside brambles and branches and tripped over fallen limbs. Catherine was out here somewhere, and Eliza had to find her. She had to find her now.
“Catherine! Where are you?”
“Eliza! I’m here! Please hurry!”
The voice seemed to be coming from somewhere in the dense trees to Eliza’s right. She turned and shoved her way through the bushes. Sticks and jagged rocks cut into the bare soles of her feet, but she forged on. There was no visible path, no clear route to take, but she was headed toward Catherine now. She was certain of it.
“Eliza! Where are you? Help me!”
Eliza paused. Now the voice was coming from behind her. She turned around, and a branch snapped against her face. She felt blood trickling down her cheek, but ignored the pain and doubled back the way she’d come.
“Catherine! I’m coming! Just hold on! Please, hold on!”
Eliza stumbled. She threw her hands out just in time to keep from breaking her forehead open on a jagged stone. When she pushed herself up, her breath caught in an inaudible scream. It wasn’t a jagged stone at all, but a bone. A human bone, broken and jutting at an angle from the ground.
“Eliza!”
Tearing her eyes from the awful sight in front of her, Eliza looked up. There was a clearing in the woods dead ahead. A clearing that
hadn’t been there just moments ago. And there was Catherine, clad in her white nightgown, one arm held by Theresa Billings, the other by Helen Jennings. The two girls were shoving Catherine toward a gaping hole in the ground, their teeth gritted in concentrated effort.
“Catherine!” Eliza screamed, and the scream seemed to pierce her own heart.
She shoved herself off the ground and took a step forward, but the earth fell from under her feet and her toes came down atop a bare skull. She stopped in her tracks as the mud and gunk and fallen leaves melted away before her, leaving nothing but a broken, battered terrain of human bones. Empty eye sockets stared up at her. Jagged teeth caked with grime, finger bones, toe bones, shattered ribs—they all seemed to point up at her like a ghastly, accusatory jury.
“Eliza! Help!” Catherine screamed.
Theresa and Helen had Catherine right at the edge of the hole now—a hole that seemed to extend down, down, down forever.
“Theresa! Helen! No! Stop! Stop, please!” Eliza begged.
Catherine struggled, but Theresa and Helen were too strong for her. Eliza tried to take another step, cringing as her bare sole came down on a broken skull. The skull turned to ash beneath her foot, and she fell face-first against bony terrain.
“Please. Please help me,” Catherine begged.
Eliza stared at her, tears of desperation filling her eyes. Even if she could get up, even if she could traverse the perilous landscape, the hole still separated her from Catherine. Eliza looked left and right, trying to discern a bridge, a felled tree, a rope, any means of crossing
it, but there was none. There was nothing she could do but stay where she was and watch. Watch and beg for her friend’s life.
“Theresa,” she whispered. “Helen. Please.”
Helen looked up at Eliza then, peered directly into her eyes, and spoke ever so calmly.
“This is all your fault, Eliza. You should have turned back.”
Eliza’s blood went cold in her veins as Helen and Theresa flung Catherine over the edge. Her friend’s scream echoed against the never-ending walls of the hole, ricocheting back to Eliza like a reproach.
“No!” Eliza screamed.
She sat up straight in her bed, her nightgown soaked through with sweat. In the bed across from her was Catherine, her eyes wide with fright.
“Eliza? Are you all right?” Catherine asked.
Gasping for breath, Eliza pressed her hands into the mattress beneath her, touched her blankets, touched the cold wall beside her bed. She had to assure herself that she was there, that this was real, that Catherine was alive.
“I just . . . I had a nightmare,” Eliza replied, the awful images racing back into her head and swirling all around her. She reached back and lifted her hair from her neck. It was so wet, she might have just emerged from the ocean.
Catherine sat up a bit more. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
Eliza looked at her friend, but all she could see was terror—the
terror Catherine had felt in her dream. The pleading way she had looked at Eliza just before she’d been tossed to her doom. Eliza’s heart pounded desperately, and she had to look away.
“No. Thank you, Catherine,” Eliza said, trying to blink the images from her mind.
“Try to get some sleep, then,” Catherine said. “Just lie back and think about a happy memory. You’ll be fine.”
Eliza settled back, grimacing as her body hit the sweaty sheets. Catherine quickly dozed off again, but Eliza knew she was done with sleep for the night. She feared that if she closed her eyes, her friend would not be there when she opened them again.
Eliza closed her journal with a sigh on Monday afternoon. It was no use trying to make sense of her thoughts about the coven and the awful nightmare she’d had the night before. She’d pushed them from her mind as best she could. She got up to pace at the parlor windows. The roofs and spires of the Easton Academy campus were just visible behind the trees, and suddenly her heart was full of nothing but Harrison Knox.
She’d had her moments of distraction, like that morning’s impromptu fashion show after Theresa had received a trunk of new dresses from her father. But now the girls were in the midst of their free time, and while everyone else was occupied with studies or music or sewing or spells, Eliza could not stop thinking about Harrison, wondering how and where they would meet. Wondering if he was thinking of her, too.
“Eliza Williams, would you please stop that incessant pacing?”
Clarissa demanded, letting her hand fall across her French text. “I’m trying to write out this translation, and I can’t concentrate with you walking back and forth like a caged animal.”
“I’m sorry, Clarissa,” Eliza replied. She turned reluctantly away from the windows and looked toward the far side of the room, where Catherine was reading the coven’s divination book, which she’d tucked inside a history text, and Theresa was scribbling out more of her correspondence. Eliza was desperate to get Catherine alone, but she couldn’t do so without enduring questions from Theresa.
Catherine lazily turned the page, and Eliza was hit with an idea. Perhaps a bit of magic could be useful here. Having long since memorized the list of basic spells, she had a few dozen tricks at her fingertips. She held out her hand discretely at her side, palm toward Catherine’s books.
“Gravity potens,” she whispered.
Both the divination and history texts flew out of Catherine’s hands and hit the floor. A few of the girls gasped at the noise, and Catherine looked up, startled, right into Eliza’s eyes.