Poison (30 page)

And it wouldn’t matter anyway.

So I slunk away like a thief, staying close to the walls, while the women pushed and pulled at Peter’s lifeless body.

•  •  •

I followed Hattie’s car on foot. Aunt Agnes’s fiancé, Jonathan, met the women at Hattie’s house and carried Peter inside.

From a window I watched as the boy I loved was laid on his bed, on top of a quilt my great-grandmother had made. Near the bed was a desk with a few books on it—not many, since recently Peter had been living at the Shaw mansion—and a framed photograph of the two of us that Becca had taken the previous September during the car wash fund-raiser for Winter Frolic. In the picture we’re both blasting each other with hoses. Our eyes are closed, our mouths are open, there’s a pouf of soap on his head, and my legs are slick with water.

I leaned my head against the window as snow began to fall. All I could think about was that I wanted to turn back time. If only I’d listened to Peter when he’d asked me not to go through the painting . . . If only I hadn’t called Bryce, hadn’t asked him to go with me . . . If only I hadn’t accepted the ring, Morgan’s gift of death . . . If only, if only, if only . . .

If only it took more than a second to change your life.

By the time Hattie carried Eric into the room, I could barely see through my tears. With shaking hands I wiped a place where my breath had fogged the window. Eric must have been sleeping, because he was yawning and digging his fists
into his eyes. Then, when he saw Peter, he held out his arms enthusiastically, a big smile on his face, as if he expected a response. When there was none, his expression changed to one of puzzlement. He flapped his thin arms and kicked out his legs, wanting to be set down. I had carried him myself so many times that I could almost feel him squirming against my side, snuffling and whimpering.

Hattie lay him gently beside his brother. Eric cooed and patted Peter’s face as the adults in the room held their breath.

“Buh,” Eric said.

Do it,
I thought, willing his power.
Nownownownownow.

For a long time Peter just lay there, his face impassive as a stone.

Oh, God, no.

“Buh!” Eric said, thumping on Peter’s chest.

Hattie came over and put her arms around him. “It’s all right, baby,” she said softly. “You did your best.”

But Eric squirmed away from her. “Buh! Buh!”

Hattie sobbed into her hands. Gram sat down on Peter’s desk chair. Miss P leaned against the wall.

“Peter!” I screamed, so loudly that they all looked over at the window. Hattie’s haggard face turned toward me. “Peter!” I banged on the window with my fists. Silently Hattie stood up and, without ever meeting my eyes, pulled down the shade.

“No!” I screamed. “Please, Hattie! Let me see him! Oh, God, please!”

But no one else came to the window, and I didn’t hear another sound.

I crouched down in the snow for a while, trying to make myself stop shivering.

Peter was dead. Like the bird women in Avalon. Like Bryce. I had killed them all.

Numbly I walked to Gram’s, scribbled a note saying where I was headed, then took the keys to her car and started driving.

I drove until I reached New York City. It snowed the whole way.

And all I could think of were three words:

Peter is dead.

Peter is dead.

Peter is dead.

•

Now that I look back on it, I must have been out of my mind to drive to Manhattan during a snowstorm, especially since I didn’t even have a license. Gram had been teaching me—that was how I knew the basics of handling her ’58 Cadillac—but I was a long way from being a proficient driver. Fortunately, the streets were nearly deserted. My dad had told me that when it snowed in Manhattan, no one drove. That certainly seemed to be the case when I arrived that evening, and probably the reason why I didn’t get pulled over or crash.

The truth was, though, I didn’t care. The way I was thinking at the time, it would probably have been best all around if I’d just gone up in a ball of flame on the highway. But that didn’t happen. Luck, I guess. Lucky, lucky me.

On the street where my father lived, cars were scattered willy-nilly, having been abandoned in snowdrifts by their owners, but a car pulled out of a parking spot right in front of Dad’s building just as I drove up. I locked Gram’s Caddie
and went inside the first set of doors to Dad’s intercom.

This building was a lot different from Madam Mim’s, where he’d lived previous to their breakup. Her building was on Sutton Place, with a uniformed doorman and a marble-floored lobby dotted with potted palm trees and a sculpture by Picasso. Dad’s current entryway was a drafty area between two sets of doors with dirty glass, adorned only by a wall of mailboxes, and smelling of stale cigarette smoke.

I didn’t think he was home—he’d written that he was going to India with Madam Mim—but I rang anyway. No one answered, so I used my key to get in. At least I had this place to come to—for a while, anyway, until he got back. After that I didn’t know where I would go.

The apartment was dark. The kitchen was clean, with no dishes in the sink. His bed was made. The papers on the desk in his office were neat. His answering machine had sixteen messages on it. For a while I just wandered from room to room, listening to the quiet. It felt like a professor’s home, spare and utilitarian, with no frills except for hundreds of books, most of them old, lining shelves in every room and smelling musty and comfortable. Plus it was quiet. That was undoubtedly due to the snowstorm and would change as soon as the roads got cleared, but for that night, anyway, it felt safe. Almost. I knew I’d never really be safe again.

I plopped down on a wing chair—a Salvation Army special, from the looks of it—and closed my eyes. My life had become a horrible dream, so frightening that I couldn’t bear to think of it.
Later,
I told myself.
Later I’ll go over everything that has happened. Later, when I can picture Peter’s face without dying inside, when I can speak Bryce’s name without tears, when I
can think of the young girl from Avalon who withered just by being near me, I will remember.

I ran into the bathroom and threw up, again and again, until I was weak and shaking and sobbing again.

Later,
I reminded myself. Think of something else. Anything.

Something was pressing against my hip. In the pocket of my jeans were the two pieces of Morgan’s amber.

Yes
, I thought.
I can go there, to her world, sixteen hundred years in the past.
Whatever she had done, I would rather be in her skin than mine.

•  •  •

Morgan is in the center of the reverse pentagram, where I left her, casting her spell. She walks widdershins, or counterclockwise—another sign that the magic she is performing is black. It will bring harm.

She calls on the elements of fire, water, air, and earth, and their compass points—north for the great powers of earth; south for fire and passion; east for air and its provenance, thought; and west for water, comfort, and healing. The homage she pays to the lords of air and water is perfunctory; she does not need them. Her driving force is her passion, and her ultimate goal is an object forged from earth things.

During the ritual the air stills around her as the earth inside her magic circle heats and trembles. The moon is new, invisible, and there is no light. She has chosen a place far removed from human habitation, where thunderclouds obscure the moon and stars.

“Be with me, Darkness, thou who art the center of the world, the perfection of the universe,”
she says in her peculiar old-woman voice.

How aged she has become!

What? My own thought startles me. Aged? How could Morgan be so old? It is Morgan I’m seeing, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

I am biting my fingernails. Again, odd. I never do that. In fact, I feel completely different again, in the same weird way I felt the last time I’d picked up the amber pieces. And again, an insistent question burns through my brain: Who am I watching—the witch, or the watcher?

And then I realize, understand, grasp at last what has happened. I am no longer Katy Ainsworth, but
Morgan herself
. It is Morgan who is standing behind the tree, holding her breath, biting her nails. And I am inside with her, feeling her fear, hearing the sound that has been bothering me since I came upon this evil sight.

The sound is a cry of wretched terror, uttered by a child. The cloaked figure inside the reverse pentagram reaches out bony arms to pick up the toddler—a boy no more than two years old—screaming through the gag in his mouth, struggling against the ropes that bind him.

“For you, my Sire, a sacrifice,”
the old woman says. The child squirms wildly; he kicks off the woman’s head covering.

I almost scream as I recognize the rheumy eyes, the mouth filled with brown teeth, the thin white hair plastered against the pink spotted head.

It is the Seer and
I
know her for I am fully Morgan now.

•  •  •

The Seer . . . the Seer . . . I remember her from an incident in my childhood. My father had left me in a meadow and had
vanished into the worldly realm. I called for him to come back. I ran after his shadow, already gone.

“Da!” I screamed. “Da, come back!”

But he did not come back to me. He had gone to his child of preference, the boy, Arthur. The boy my father would one day make into a king, while I was left as a plaything for the vultures who served the Seer.

They picked me up with their talons and carried me to the rock where she lived within the deepest crevasse, away from all light. I caught only a glimpse of her in that dank, dark place, but the image of her face never left me. She was as pale as a worm’s belly, almost iridescent in the gloom.

“I have seen your future,” she whispered, dragging a long fingernail lightly across my cheek. “One day you will be me.”

I was too frightened to answer, but in my heart I knew that she was wrong. I would never be one of her ugly birds. I would never serve her or whatever Master she answered to, because I would not remain in Avalon for one moment longer than I had to. One day my father would teach me how to enter that other, better realm, and when I got there, I would never return.

Or so I thought. I was very young then.

•  •  •

The Seer looks around now, watchful, her movements those of a small bird. She knows she has been seen. She senses me.

She swallows, afraid, guilty.
“Who is it?”
she asks, slipping her hand over the child’s mouth. The boy tries to scream again.

“Stop it!” I rasp, stepping out from my hiding place. “Let him go! He’s a baby!”

For a moment the hag hesitates. Her grip loosens. But then her eyes narrow, thinking, calculating.
“I know you,”
she
says.
“You are Merlin’s wild and unloved daughter.”

This hurts. The Seer’s gift is that she is able to look into your heart and find your weakness. This is what has enabled her to be our leader. We all fear her. We do not question her, because she is immortal. She will outlive all of us, no matter what we do. But she will outlive us far longer if we dare to criticize her.

“Why have you returned to Avalon, child?”
she asks sweetly.
“Ah, but of course. You have come for some magic, haven’t you? Do you think I do not know your dark dreams?”

I know that I will not be forgiven for my intrusion. I should have let her kill the child. But I could not. I have not yet lost all of my humanity.

Is it worth my life?
I ask myself. Because I know that will be the price I will have to pay.

Ah, but I do not have to decide to end my life as a hero. This evil woman is the Seer. She sees me, the black heart of me. She knows I would never save anyone but myself.