The Book of Spells (18 page)

“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.

“Catherine!” Theresa said, hand to her heart. “You just made me scribble all over this note!”

Eliza tilted her head toward the door, silently beckoning Catherine to follow her. She walked out past Helen Jennings, who was stationed near the door, and endeavored to ignore the girl’s steady stare. From the foyer, Eliza glanced back inside, hoping Catherine had understood her.

Catherine hesitated, then spoke. “I’m sorry, Theresa. I must have
dozed off for a moment there.” She got up to gather the books. “I think I’ll go upstairs for a bit and lie down.”

“And I suppose I’ll just start this all over again,” Theresa groused, crumbling up her letter.

Catherine hastened out of the room to join Eliza. She took her roommate’s arm and tugged her toward the front door of Crenshaw House, as far away from the parlor as they could get.

“What is going on?” Catherine asked. “You scared me half to death!”

Eliza felt a chill at Catherine’s mention of death, but shoved it out of her mind. It had been only a dream.

“I’m sorry, it’s just . . . this is sheer torture,” Eliza replied, leaning back against the thick door.

Catherine took a deep breath and hugged her books to her chest. “What is?”

“It’s Harrison,” Eliza whispered, glancing back toward the parlor. “I’ve never felt this way before, Catherine. It’s as if my heart is trying to tear my chest open and run off to him.”

Catherine stuck out her tongue. “That’s disgusting.”

Eliza walked to the staircase and slumped against the banister in a way that would earn her a slap on the wrist if Miss Almay were to see her. “What do I do? I have to see him soon, or I’m going to go mad.”

Suddenly, Catherine’s blue eyes brightened. “Oh! We could try scrying for him.”

“What’s scrying?” Eliza asked, standing up straight.

“Basically, it’s a magical way to find out where any person is at a given moment,” Catherine replied.

“So I could know where Harrison is right now?” Eliza said.

“Exactly,” Catherine confirmed, grasping Eliza’s hand excitedly. “I think I have everything upstairs in our room.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Eliza and Catherine raced upstairs hand in hand. Once the door of their room was closed safely behind them, Catherine crouched on her knees next to her bed. She tugged out the long, flat box with the gold clasp that Eliza had seen her hide there on her first day.

“What’s in there?” Eliza asked, her curiosity piqued.

“A few things I brought from home,” Catherine replied. She laid the box on her bed and undid the clasp. “Can you fill the wash basin?”

Eliza used the pitcher full of cold water to fill up the ceramic bowl. Catherine, meanwhile, opened the case and began to carefully pick over its contents. Eliza was startled to see that the box was full of items mentioned in their books on witchcraft. There were several jars full of spices and herbs, a couple of white candles, a few crystals, some velvet pouches full of substances Eliza couldn’t see, and a few colorful sticks, which appeared to be made of crystal.

“What is all this?” Eliza asked.

“Some things I picked up on travels with my mother,” Catherine replied. “It’s all quite basic stuff, but you need a specific crystal for scrying.”

“Is it this one?” Eliza asked, lifting one of the sticks. It was bright
yellow in color, with uneven edges, as if made by hundreds of tiny jagged rocks fused together.

“No. That’s sulfur,” Catherine replied. “You’re supposed to be able to make a spark by holding it and reciting a simple spell, but I’ve never gotten it to work.”

“That could come in handy on our midnight jaunts,” Eliza joked. “No candles needed.”

Catherine laughed. “If only we could get it to do what it’s supposed to do.”

She gently took the sulfur stick from Eliza’s hand and replaced it in the box. “Ah. Here it is.” She turned and grinned at Eliza, holding a black ribbon attached to a long, multifaceted purple crystal. “Let’s scry for your beau.”

Eliza reached up to finger her gold locket, her heart pounding with excitement at the idea of Harrison as her beau. But then a picture of Theresa appeared in her mind’s eye, and her chest flooded with guilt. She was consumed by the awful, sour, heavy sensation she felt whenever she allowed herself to recall that Theresa and Harrison were engaged—even if they’d become so under dubious circumstances. For a moment she thought to stop Catherine, even reaching for her arm. But then she remembered Catherine’s belief that Theresa did not love him, and the moment passed.

Catherine grabbed a jar full of what looked like tiny blue pebbles and approached the filled wash basin.

“Do you have anything of Harrison’s?” Catherine asked.

Eliza shook her head, feeling a twist of longing in her gut. “No.”

Catherine’s lips twisted up in thought. “What about something he’s touched?”

Eliza immediately thought of the book Harrison had gifted her, but she’d lied to Catherine about its sender. She shoved aside another pang of guilt.

“My glove!” Eliza said, remembering. She turned and yanked open the top drawer of her bureau, then took out the left glove she had worn the night of the dance. “He held my hand when I was wearing this.”

Her skin tingled at the recollection, and she ran her thumb over the palm of the glove.

“Perfect,” Catherine said, snatching it out of her hand. She tied the crystal’s black ribbon around one of the fingers of the glove, then laid the whole thing aside on their dressing table. “Now, you’ll need to dump the pebbles into the water. Concentrate on an image of Harrison as you do so.”

“All right.”