Timespell (9 page)

But she had felt the power. It had been a real thing inside her, too much to handle until she held hands with the other two. Was it possible she wasn’t high on some drug? Could they be making some kind of sense?

“Here, take our hands,” Angie said.

She stared down at the translucent, outstretched hands.

“Come on!” the sidekick yelled. “Do you want to be invisible while we explain everything?”

Kaitlyn grabbed their hands. “Now what?”

“This was your power,” said Angie’s calm voice. “So, you’re the one who has to make us visible again.”

“Would you care to explain how?”

“Draw out the power from us,” Angie said. “Let it build until you feel the urge to release.”

“The urge to release?” She laughed in her invisible face. “Are we using magic or the toilet?”

“Fine, don’t then,” the sidekick said. “Let’s just be invisible the rest of our lives. I’ll unfreeze time.”

“Julia, calm down.”

“You’re always telling me to calm down!”

“This is so stupid,” Kaitlyn muttered, but she yanked on their arms. “I’m doing it, just shut up already.”

She felt the power pour in from their hands. She let it build, the burn on her arm coming alive with pain, but not as bad as before.

“Now what?”

“Release,” Angie said.

“What does that mean?”

“What do you think it means?” said the sidekick, Julia. “Let go. Don’t try to hang on anymore.”

Kaitlyn couldn’t figure out what to do with the power they had given her. It moved inside her, warm and waiting. She pushed against it, felt it retreat back into the other girls before seeping into her again.

“You’re not doing it right,” Julia said. “Don’t give it to one of us. Release it into the world.”

“I can’t figure it out, okay? Lay off!”

“You did it before,” said Angie, her soft voice more irritating than usual. “It feels scary, but it’s okay. Just imagine the power leaving your chest. Like you’re shooting it forward.”

The pressure built up again as the other two sent her more of their magic. Her chest hurt from it. She didn’t know what they meant by letting it go, but she couldn’t do it. Whatever. Let them
figure out what to do with it. She pushed the magic back at Angie, crying out with the effort.

Both girls appeared in an iridescent glimmer. “I did it,” Kaitlyn gasped, almost smiling at them. They had given her power and she knew how to use it.

“Good,” Julia said. “Now we can get on with our lives.”

Angie groaned, her eyes huge and glowing white as she sank to the ground. “Kaitlyn you can’t just push your magic into me.” She broke off with a cry.

Julia took Angie’s hand and glared at Kaitlyn. “You shoved all your magic into her, jerk. Hurry up, take her hand again.”

Kaitlyn took it as Angie’s head rolled back, magic releasing from her body in a wave of white light. The frozen girls around them vanished as the walls and lockers turned gray.

Angie let go of their hands and rubbed her face. “I didn’t even think about what spell I cast, but it felt like Historia,” she said. “Give me a minute and I’ll make it stop.”

Kaitlyn shook her head at the black-and-white world. A bell rang. Girls streamed into the room, all of them gray. Adding to this already freaky scenario, the girls didn’t see them at all. One headed right for her. Kaitlyn didn’t step aside in time.

“Watch out,” she cried, but the girl passed through her like cool mist. A ghost girl. Or maybe Kaitlyn was the ghost. She didn’t know what to think anymore.

“You may as well learn,” Angie said. “The Historia spell lets us walk the past.”

Kaitlyn narrowed her eyes. “Don’t just say stupid crap like that. Tell me what it means.”

“Excuse you?”

Kaitlyn narrowed her eyes at Julia, but Angie came between them. “It means I’m the Daughter of Past. I’m supposed to be able to take us back in time, but it’s extremely difficult. So far I can only relive the past in my mind, or walk through the past of a given place.”

“She can show us any time in a place’s history,” Julia added. “Look, there’s us.”

Angie’s lips parted. “Take my hands. I don’t want to be here.”

Kaitlyn shrugged her off. “This is insane.” She recognized herself. She and her friends laughed and talked as they got ready for tennis. “Ashleigh, Becca,” she whispered, reaching out to them. Instead of gray flesh, her fingers met icy air that rippled as if she had dipped her hand in a misty pool.

“That freshman has been crushing on Tim all freaking year,” ghost-Becca said, trailing her hand down her dark braids. “It’s so pathetic.”

Ghost-Ashleigh laughed without smiling. “Oh my gosh, we should tell him to de-virginize her.”

Kaitlyn tried to remember this day. Ashleigh didn’t have bangs, so it had to be at least a month ago.

“He
so
would,” ghost-Becca said. “We could video it.”

“Put it on the internet!”

Kaitlyn couldn’t help but notice how cute her skirt was as her ghost-self wriggled out of it. Suddenly, she remembered exactly what she was about to say. “When you guys are done trapping virgins for Tim,” her ghost-self said, “I have gossip. About me.”

Ashleigh and Becca stopped, half naked, like an old-timey porn movie. Ghost-Kaitlyn smiled, and Kaitlyn smiled at how hot she looked in nothing but a bra and panties. She remembered savoring this moment, with Ashleigh and Becca hanging on her next words. “I just broke up David and Angie.”

Even now, the silence was delicious.

“Shut. Up.”

“The little cheerleader and her wannabe husband? How?”

“Yeah, that guy is perfect.”

“No such thing as perfect,” ghost-Kaitlyn said.

“Did you leave your panties in his truck?”

“Was he good?”

“I don’t know yet. All I did was kiss him and she flipped out.”

“You didn’t bang his brains out?”

“No, but I plan to.” Ghost-Kaitlyn slammed her locker shut. “He was tasty.”

Kaitlyn blinked in surprised at the hands that grabbed her. She felt Angie and Julia drawing away her power, and for one crazy moment she was flooded with feelings, flickering emotions that didn’t belong to her. Rage-aholic anger. And pain. Everything fast forwarded from that day. Flirting in class, afternoons at the mall, waking up and doing it again, a few parties, and then they were back in the frozen world where they had started.

Angie stared at her with eyes rimmed in pink.

Julia’s face twisted. She drew back her hand and slapped Kaitlyn across the face.

Angie
couldn’t bring herself to exhale. The crack of Julia’s palm across Kaitlyn’s cheek seemed to hang in the air. For a split second Kaitlyn remained utterly still. Then she jerked her head up, green eyes blazing hot and bright. With a screech, she slammed Julia against the sinks.

“Stop!” Angie yelled.

Julia shoved Kaitlyn back, her teeth bared and her face splotched with red. The shoving match became a tangle of limbs as the two fought in earnest. Angie tried pulling Julia off but got a wayward elbow to the chest for her efforts. She landed on the floor with a slam to her tailbone, glancing up in time to see Kaitlyn punch Julia in the mouth.

What could she do? The mass of furious hair and claws looked less like Kaitlyn and Julia and more like a pair of Tasmanian devils. There had to be a way to stop them from tearing each other apart. Her body still buzzed with magic. She focused on that magic, letting the power grow in her chest.

“I said
stop
!” she cried, thrusting her hands, palms out, at the both of them.

Twin bolts of white light shot out from her hands. The girls glowed for a moment before they flew apart with amazing speed, crashing against opposite walls.

Angie lowered her hands. She couldn’t stop shaking.

Julia groaned, rolling onto her side. “Why’d you do that?”

“Because you can’t fight each other,” Angie said. Her mind spun as her entire body began to tremble.
How had this happened? Why would the Fates let this happen?

Kaitlyn tucked her knees up and dropped her head onto them. “Ouch.”

“We have to work together, don’t you see?” Angie heard the fear in her own voice and swallowed, trying hard to get a handle on her emotions. “We found each other, and now we have to fulfill our destiny. We have to protect the past.” Her voice trailed off. Daughters of Fate were a team. They were meant to be friends. Shame overwhelmed her as she realized she had turned her power against them both. It was the only thing she could think of to keep them from hurting each other.

“Protect the past?” Kaitlyn scoffed.

Angie took a shaky breath. “Every time the creatures of Mythos kill, the Sorceress becomes more powerful. And history is being altered, little by little, until the world becomes a completely different place.”

Julia blinked, her eyes growing twice their size. She shot to her feet, then swayed back against the wall.

Angie wrapped her arms around her middle. This wasn’t how she imagined this moment happening. Not at all.

“But, these people are all dead anyway, right?” Julia asked, her mouth twisting with worry. “I mean, it’s history.”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” Kaitlyn demanded. “Creatures? Dead people?”

Angie backed away from them both. She should have thought things through before marking Kaitlyn. Now it was too late. She
squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of a song to replace the sound of Kaitlyn’s venomous voice bragging about kissing David. The only thing that replaced it was the sight of Kaitlyn and Julia at each other’s throats. The scene replayed itself in her mind until she thought her skull would split in two. She began counting out the taps of her fingers against her thighs. When she hit thirty she stopped and took a breath, forcing herself to clear her mind.

Had she made the right choice? She had thought marking Kaitlyn was the right thing to do. Finding the other two Daughters had been her singular mission since the day she turned sixteen. This had to be the path she was meant to follow.

But to be bound for all time to Kaitlyn? The idea made her nauseous. After school they would freeze time, find Indira, and complete the seal. It had to be this afternoon. They didn’t have any more time.

She watched Julia spit blood into the sink. “Gross,” she muttered before rinsing her mouth. She met Angie’s gaze in the mirror. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. It’s fine.” Her voice sounded small to her ears. “I’m fine. Here, let me heal you.”

“I’ve got it.” Julia lifted her hand to her bloodied lip. “Restore.”

Angie turned aside. She stared vacantly at a random locker before she swallowed. “Let’s change out of our PE clothes. We should go somewhere else to unfreeze time.”

“Why?” Kaitlyn asked with a hand on her hip.

Angie pressed her lips together, imagining what Kaitlyn might do if she was free to roam the time-frozen school.

Julia maneuvered past a pair of frozen girls to get to her locker. “Gee, Kaitlyn, don’t you think it would look, I don’t know, slightly inexplicable to all these girls if we popped into the locker room out of thin air?”

Kaitlyn’s cheek’s blazed. “We could make ourselves invisible first.”

“Yeah, that worked out real well last time,” Julia said. “You can’t handle your power yet. Forget it.”

“Who put you in charge?” Kaitlyn asked, shoving a frozen girl aside on her way to her locker.

“Be careful,” Angie said. “This girl is going to unfreeze and wonder how she ended up on the floor.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Kaitlyn said, rounding the corner.

Julia shook her head in disgust. “You’re such a bi—”

Angie grabbed her arm. “Don’t make things worse. Please?”

She waited for Julia to lower her eyes before squeezing her own eyes shut. She was so sickened by the thought of Kaitlyn sharing the magic that her stomach churned. Why had the wild magic chosen Kaitlyn? She had to believe there was a reason. She had been raised believing in her destiny. Her purpose. She would succeed, as she was meant to do. But Kaitlyn did seem ... evil.

She sidestepped to her locker, careful not to brush against a girl tying her shoes or another strapping on a bra. Maybe this wasn’t her destiny after all. Maybe releasing Kaitlyn’s magic was supposed to show her that she should
not
be sealed with the powers of the Fates. Maybe letting their magic fade was a better thing for the world than allowing Kaitlyn a lifetime of power.

She didn’t know.

Her fingers were slick as she spun the dial on her locker, her mind still reeling from everything that had happened in the past half hour. Her locker didn’t open on the first try and she purposefully got the combination wrong a second time. The third time it opened smoothly and she felt better. Third time was the charm.

“Are either of you going to explain exactly what all this is about?” Kaitlyn asked, returning in nothing but a pushup bra and matching panties. “You drag me over here, burn tattoos into my skin, and the whole world gets frozen over. What is this?”

“They’re marks of magic, not tattoos,” Julia said. “We have them because we’re Daughters of Fate. Or at least, we could be.” She glanced over at Angie, a look that said she wasn’t so sure about sealing themselves to Kaitlyn either.

“What do you mean, we
could
be?” asked Kaitlyn.

“She means these powers are temporary. We have to be sealed to one another before the oldest Daughter’s seventeenth birthday. Otherwise the magic is lost, and the creatures that wreak havoc through time can roam free, until three new Daughters find each other and create a seal.”

“Okay,” Kaitlyn said, opening her enormous bag of makeup. “Who’s turning seventeen first?”

Angie undid her ponytail and brushed out the knots in her hair. It calmed her, having something else to focus on. “My birthday is tomorrow.”

“So you’re saying we have until midnight tonight?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Yes.”

“And what happens with being sealed?” Kaitlyn’s green eyes narrowed. “Another tattoo? More pain?”

Julia became still. Angie remembered the pain from her own marking and frowned. “We don’t know how it will feel, and nothing comes without a price, but it means keeping our powers forever.”