The Book of Spells (21 page)

“Catherine! Watch out!”

Catherine looked up, her eyes wide with fright. Theresa grabbed for her, but it was too late. The limb came crashing down. Catherine’s body crumbled like a rag doll’s, and she tumbled backward into the chasm.

“No!” Eliza shouted.

She collapsed at the edge of the ravine; Theresa did the same on the other side, like a mirror image. They stared wordlessly into the chasm.

Catherine lay at the bottom, rain pelting her broken body. Her gray dress was so soaked, it looked black. Her dark hair fanned out around her head in wet clumps. Her ice blue eyes were wide, her mouth frozen open. It was almost as if she was trying to call out to her friends, but the unnatural bend in her neck meant she would never speak again.

“Theresa! There you are!” Alice came tromping up behind Eliza, her light blue dress clinging to her body. “I sent everyone home like you asked me to. Did you find Catherine?” She stopped next to Eliza. “What are you doing here, Eliza? Why are you staring down into that—” Alice looked over the edge of the ravine and screamed. “Catherine! Oh my . . . Is she . . . ?”

“She’s dead,” Eliza said. She could barely choke out the words. Her mouth felt as if it was full of cotton. Her dream, at least part of it, had just come true before her eyes. The locket weighed heavy around her neck, cold as a stone in winter.

“She can’t be dead!” Alice wailed. “She simply can’t be!” She turned around and got on her hands and knees, backing herself toward the edge of the ravine. Eliza stared at her for a moment in catatonic wonder. Demure, girly Alice on her hands and knees in the mud. But then she realized what her friend was doing, and she sprang to her feet.

“Alice! No!”

But it was too late. Alice was already lowering herself down into the chasm. She clung for a moment to a tree root that stuck out of the dirt wall, then let herself fall the last couple of feet. As soon as she recovered herself at the bottom, she got up, wiped off her hands, and began trying to remove the tree limb from across Catherine’s chest.

“It’s too heavy! I need help!” Alice called up to them. “Theresa! Eliza! Come help me!”

Eliza’s and Theresa’s eyes met across the ravine, and suddenly it was as if the life had been breathed back into the both of them. Eliza slid forward and lowered herself exactly as Alice had. A branch caught her ankle and left a deep scratch in her skin, but she barely even noticed. She slid the last few feet, her fingers clinging to the dirt wall to slow her descent, and fell to her knees at the bottom of the ravine. Theresa alit on the other side, and all three girls grasped the branch, with Alice at the center.

“On the count of three,” Theresa instructed. “One, two, three.”

Eliza braced her feet against the slick, muddy ground and dug in, pulling with all her might. Theresa let out a grunt as the branch finally freed itself. The three girls stumbled backward and dropped the limb at Catherine’s feet. Eliza climbed over the branches and twigs and leaves and fell to her knees once again, this time at her friend’s side. The back of Catherine’s head lay atop a jagged rock. It was covered in blood and matted hair. Next to her on the ground was the bright yellow sulfur stick, its tip singed to a dingy black. She looked into Catherine’s wide-open, lifeless eyes, and finally the tears came.

“What happened?” Alice cried, taking up Catherine’s lifeless hand. “What happened to her?”

Eliza looked up at Theresa, her vision blurred.

“She fell,” Theresa said, her voice high and breathless. “She was trying a spell and it went wrong and the branch snapped. She fell. She fell, and there was nothing we could do.”

“Poor Catherine,” Alice said, kneading the girl’s hand within her own as tears sluiced down her cheeks. “Poor Catherine.”

“We have to fix this,” Eliza said, wiping the back of her grimy hand across her nose. She looked at Theresa. “We have to fix this.”

Theresa stared back, her jaw working, and Eliza knew that she understood. This was no accident. This was their fault. Catherine never would have been out in these woods on this night if it hadn’t been for their own selfishness, their stupid feud.

“She’s right,” Theresa said, shoving her soaking wet hair behind her ears.

“Fix it?” Alice wailed throatily. “Catherine’s dead, Eliza! There’s no fixing this! She’s dead!”

“All right, Alice, that’s enough,” Theresa snapped.

Alice’s mouth hung agape as she gasped over and over again, struggling for breath through her surprise and grief. “That’s enough? Theresa, she’s dead!”

“I understand that she’s dead,” Theresa said, hovering over all of them. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Eliza’s head whipped around as she looked up at Theresa. Suddenly an image flitted through her mind: a drawing of a skull with roses growing out of its empty eye sockets. The Life Out of Death Spell. The page that had so frightened Eliza that night in the temple.

“What are you talking about? There’s nothing you can do about death!” Alice cried, scrambling to her feet. The light blue skirt of her dress was covered in mud and muck, with evergreen needles and bits of rotted leaves clinging to the wet fabric. “The Lord has chosen to take her and—”

“The Lord didn’t choose anything!” Eliza shouted vehemently, rising to her feet. She grabbed the sulfur stick and shoved it into the pocket of her skirt. “He would never have taken her. She was too good, too kind, too . . . loyal. She—”

“Eliza’s right, Alice,” Theresa interrupted. “She was only sixteen years old. This was not her time. If there’s something we can do about it, I say we do it.”

“We have to move her. We need to get her back to the temple,” Eliza said, needing to have a task to focus on. To have a plan. To have
something to think about other than Catherine’s gaping eyes, the unnatural twist of her neck.

“No. We need to go for help,” Alice said, shaking her head as tears streamed down her face.

“I’ll get under her arms, you get her feet,” Theresa instructed Eliza.

Alice tripped backward a few steps to get out of Theresa’s way. “No. You can’t do this. No.”

“Alice. You’re either helping us, or you’re not,” Eliza said tersely. Alice just continued to sob, covering her face with her dirty hands. Eliza’s heart was suddenly hardened against the girl. How dare she try to stop Eliza from saving her best friend?

“We’ll lift again on three?” Eliza said. Theresa nodded determinedly.

Alice let out a wail as Catherine’s body rose off the ground. Eliza started backing toward the sloping portion of the ravine, the way down which Theresa had come.

“No! Wait!” Alice shouted.

Automatically, almost against her will, Eliza stopped. Alice stepped forward and, her hand shaking violently, reached out and placed her thumb and forefinger over Catherine’s eyelids. Turning her face away, her own visage screwed up in grief, Alice drew Catherine’s lids down over her eyes.

“God bless you, Catherine,” she whispered. Then she took a deep breath and looked at Eliza, her chin lifted, her eyes shining. “Now go.”

Eliza tried not to think about the gruesome load she was carrying as she and Theresa struggled down the dark, winding stairs to the temple, the wooden steps groaning ominously beneath their weight. She tried not to think about where Catherine’s soul might be right then, whether her friend was watching them. Tried not to think about how things had gotten to this horrible point. How, if Eliza hadn’t been so selfish, they would both be asleep in their room right now.

Instead, she thought about the next day, when Catherine would be back with them. When their power had brought her back. The power they never would have realized they had, if not for Catherine.

“We’ll lay her in the center of the circle,” Theresa said. Perspiration covered her face, but she hadn’t complained once, nor had she asked to stop.

“Wait!” Alice cried.

She gathered a few of the softer scarves and tapestries and laid
them out reverently on the floor. Arm muscles straining, Eliza waited until Alice was satisfied with the bed she had fashioned. Then she and Theresa moved forward and laid their friend’s body down carefully, her blood-matted hair coming to rest on Alice’s mink jacket, which she’d folded for that purpose. Eliza felt a pang of gratitude.

“What do we do?” Eliza asked as Theresa made a move for the book.

“We can’t just do it now,” Theresa replied, flipping quickly through the pages. “There are special supplies. And we’ll need the entire coven.”

“What?” Eliza asked, devastated. “But I thought—”

“Special supplies?” Alice interrupted. “You’re not . . . you girls aren’t actually planning to . . . to bring her back?”

“Why do you think we carried her all the way back here?” Theresa demanded.

“I thought we were just bringing her out of the woods,” Alice said, her bottom lip trembling. It seemed she was unable to face reality. “Bringing her home.”

Theresa slapped a thick page down. “Here it is. The Life Out of Death Spell.”

Eliza rushed over to peer over Theresa’s shoulder. A shudder went through her at the sight of the awful skull, and she wrapped her arms around herself as the cold air of the chapel started to slither around her wet limbs. She averted her eyes from the drawing and concentrated instead on the words, clinging to them like a mantra.

Life Out of Death. Life Out of Death.

“No. We can’t do this,” Alice said, backing toward the stairs. “It’s unnatural.”

“What’s unnatural is a sixteen-year-old girl falling to her death in the middle of the night in the woods because of a stick of sulfur,” Eliza replied, glancing up from the list of instructions for the spell.

“I can’t be a part of this,” Alice said, shaking her head. “I have to go.”

Then she turned on her heels and raced up the stairs, her tiny feet making scrambling sounds until the door had slammed behind her. The sound echoed down the stairs, and Eliza shivered, feeling suddenly closed in, closed off, buried alive.

“And so we are down to two,” Theresa said wryly.

Eliza took a deep breath and tried to ignore the foreboding feeling that swirled through her.

“Three,” she corrected, glancing at Catherine.

She looked so peaceful now that she was inside and out of the mud. The branch that had fallen on her had left not a scratch on her face. From the right angle, she looked as if she was merely sleeping peacefully—as long as one didn’t get a glimpse of the awful wound on the back of her head.

“Right. Three,” Theresa replied. She pointed to the list of ingredients needed for the spell. “We’re going to need some time to gather these things. The spell can be done anywhere up to forty-eight hours after the subject’s death. We need to move fast.”

“But we have classes tomorrow,” Eliza said, pacing away from
the pedestal and toward the wall. “How are we going to explain Catherine’s absence?”

Theresa bit her lip. Eliza had never seen her look so uncertain, and suddenly she felt an odd connection to Theresa. They were in this together now. Together—for Catherine.

“We could tell them she received an urgent message from her parents. That a coach came in the middle of the night to take her home.”

Eliza leaned one hand against the cold clay wall and nearly froze. She pushed herself away again, pacing the periphery of the room to try to warm herself from the inside.

“It won’t work. All messages have to go through Miss Almay.”

She thought of the Spell of Silence. “Is there anything in that book we can use? Something that will make them think they see her, even though she’s not there?”

Theresa shook her head and flipped a few pages, frustrated. “Nothing. And believe me, I know. I read through the entire thing earlier tonight, remember?”

“I do,” Eliza said, her heart twisting in agony. Tonight she had been sitting just there on the right side of the room with Catherine. If she concentrated hard enough, she could see her friend bent over the book across her lap, studying for an exam she would never take.

“Wait a minute,” Eliza said, a rush of realization running through her. “What if we made up a spell on our own?”

“Can we do that?” Theresa asked.

“Why not? We can word it like the Spell of Silence, but make it so
that none of the adults miss her.” She walked over to the book and flipped to the beginning, where the more basic spells were written. “Wherever we go, wherever we might, let us walk in silence as the night,” she read, contemplating the words.

Eliza stared at the wall, rhymes floating through her mind. Perhaps something about keeping adults in the dark? Or making them forget Catherine ever existed? But then how would they explain who she was when she came back? Unless they made the spell last for only forty-eight hours . . .

“What about something like . . . ‘Wherever we go, wherever we breathe, let others see Catherine where she might usually be’?” Theresa said, walking around to the front of the pedestal.

Eliza blinked. “Theresa, that’s amazing. We should write it down,” she said, picking up the pen on the pedestal. “In case it works and we need it again.”

Theresa flipped to the center of the book, where the spells ended and the blank pages began. Eliza handed over the pen.

“Here, you should do it,” she said. “It’s your spell.”

“All right,” Theresa said, the pen hovering over the blank page. “But what shall I call it?”

Eliza’s brow knit. “How about the Presence in Mind Spell?”

Theresa nodded. “I like that.”

She wrote the title across the top of the page in large letters, then scrawled the words beneath, separating the lines as if the spell was a stanza of poetry. Finally she placed the pen down and, much to Eliza’s surprise, took Eliza’s hand. “Come. We’ll say it together.”

“No. Wait,” Eliza said, gazing down at the body of their fallen friend. “We should hold Catherine’s hands too.”

Theresa shuddered. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am,” Eliza said. “The spell will be stronger if we’re connected to her.”

“Why? How do you know?” Theresa asked her.

“I just feel it. We must be connected to her when we say it,” Eliza replied. She walked over and knelt next to Catherine, trying not to look at her face. “What are you so skittish about, Theresa Billings? You carried her all the way back here.”