Poison (10 page)

I don’t know how long I stayed there, but when I came up, I couldn’t breathe. The boat was gone. Crickets chirped along the distant shore. A mosquito droned near my face. I was so tired, too tired to do much besides allow the water to drag me down again.

•

“Katy.”

Someone was hugging me. Or punching me. I couldn’t tell which. Water poured out of my mouth. But it was still all around me. I would have screamed if I’d had the strength, but all I could do was stiffen my limbs.

“Stop it. Relax. Listen to me. Relax.”

“Who . . . ” I managed to turn my head. “Peter!”

The sight of him did a lot to bring me around. “How . . . How did . . . ”

“Shh. Just listen,” he said. “It’s the ring. You’ve got to concentrate on the ring, okay?”

“What?”

“The ring will take you back. To the store, remember?”

“The . . . store . . . ” I shook my head and coughed. “Okay. The ring.” I looked at my finger. The ring Morgan had given me was glowing a bright opalescent blue.

“But . . . I don’t know how . . . ” Suddenly I was coughing
again, but not from the water in my lungs. The place had a horrible smell. “Are we in a swamp or something?”

“Never mind,” Peter said. “Just concentrate on the ring.”

“Okay,” I breathed.

“The ring will take you home.”

Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers,
I thought, focusing on the ring.
Take me home. Take me home.

Peter was still holding me, but his grip was loosening. Somewhere in the corner of my consciousness, I could hear him coughing. Then he let go of me, and I slid out of his arms and into the deep water.

Take me home.
I touched the slimy bottom of the lake, and the tankard was there, calling to me like sonar.
Yes, yes. Home.

I felt myself constricting again, being sucked into the molecules of the tankard. With a huge sigh of relief, I just allowed myself to go.

And then I felt as if someone had just smacked me across the face with a plank.
Peter!

Where was he? Hadn’t he come with me?
Couldn’t
he?

“Peter!” I screamed. “Peter!”

“Calm down,” someone was saying.

I opened my eyes. I was on the couch in the store.

“Sheesh, what a drama queen.”

I propped myself up on one elbow and tried to swallow the furriness in my mouth. “I’m back,” I whispered.

“Keenly observed,” Morgan said. “Who’s Peter?”

I cleared my throat. I could still taste the lake water. “My . . . my boyfriend,” I said, looking around. “I was drowning. In a lake that smelled like a toxic dump. And Peter came. He rescued me.”

Morgan laughed out loud. “And they lived happily ever after,” she said. “Is that how it ends?”

“What?”

“Your fairy tale. The handsome prince has to make the scene, is that right? I mean, you couldn’t possibly have made it back by yourself, on your own two feet.”

“I wasn’t on my feet. It was a psychic journey.”

“Whatever. Barbie goes metaphysical.”

“Who are you calling Barbie?” I demanded, sitting up.

“You,” she said, looking at me levelly. “Because nobody rescued you. You went into the tankard, and you came out, all on your own power. You didn’t need a
guy
to make it okay.”

“I needed
someone
to tell me how to get back,” I said angrily. “It sure wasn’t you.”

“Oh?”

“Peter told me to use the ring. Otherwise I’d never have known how to leave that place.”

“What ring?”

“The ring you gave me. It’s a magic ring, isn’t it?” I sounded like an interrogator.

“Of course it isn’t. Going into that tankard must have burned up some of your brain cells.”

“How else was I supposed to get out?” I shouted.

“How would I know?” she shouted back at me. “You’re the one with the gift.”

I was so frustrated, I crammed another cookie into my mouth. “These suck,” I mumbled, spitting into a napkin.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s be reasonable. Call Peter. He’ll tell you if he was there or not.” She handed me a phone.

“Good idea.” I dialed his number. If he didn’t answer, I’d
take that as a sign that he was still at the lake.
Or in it
, I thought with a frisson of horror.

“Hello?” Peter mumbled on the other end.

“Where are you?”

Smacking of lips. “I’m back in the limo,” he said with a yawn. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. What are you doing?”

Silence. Finally a sigh. “I’m sitting here,” he said. “I’m going home. To bed. Because it’s late, Katy. Any other questions?”

“Oh,” I said. “Then you weren’t . . . somewhere else?”

“I might have been,” he said patiently. “Can you give me a clue as to where?”

“Like in a lake? Rescuing me from drowning?”

“Is this some kind of prank?” he asked crankily. “I think you pretty much know everywhere I’ve been, since you’ve called me just about every hour on the hour since I left.”

That hurt. I’d called only three times. “Okay,” I said contritely. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I really am.”

“Hey, sorry. It’s just been a long and boring day,” he said, his voice softening. “You never bother me.” I could hear the sleepy smile in his voice. “How about breakfast tomorrow?”

I laughed. We were both scheduled to work the six a.m. shift at Hattie’s. “Sure,” I said, and hung up.

“I owe you an apology,” I said to Morgan.

She arched an eyebrow. “So Peter wasn’t your knight in shining armor, huh?”

I shook my head. “He was in New York. Actually, I knew that, but everything just seemed so . . . ” I caught myself. “I was going to say ‘real,’ but . . . ”

She laughed. “I know. Who’s to say what’s real and what’s not?”

“Especially here.”

“Especially,” she agreed.

“I guess I
wanted
Peter to rescue me,” I admitted. “I wanted him to . . . ”

“To care?”

“Yeah,” I said hoarsely. I was ready for her to make fun of me, call me a Barbie again or worse, but she didn’t. Instead she took a scarf off one of the display tables and wrapped it around my neck. “We all want that,” she said. “Sometimes it happens, and someone does care. But when it doesn’t, we have to be enough for ourselves. Do you get it?”

I nodded. “Be my own hero,” I whispered.

“Yeah, baby. Shoot, you’re the Mistress of Real Things, aren’t you?”

“Damn right,” I said, although I didn’t feel as cocky as I tried to sound. I looked over at the tankard and shuddered. I could still feel that brackish water flooding into my lungs.

“You okay?”

I took the scarf off and gave it back to her. “I’m fine,” I said.

She wrapped the scarf around her own shoulders. The moon shone through the skylight above and lit her face. I thought of the little filigree bird with the living eyes.

•

I moved back to my dorm room after the first snow, even though nothing had changed. Summer and the other three Muffies were still in vegetative states, and I was still being blamed for what had happened to them. The witches at Ainsworth believed I’d used magic against Summer, and the Muffies just thought I was generally weird and evil. Since there was no real evidence against me, I hadn’t been kicked out or anything, but my popularity rating had dipped from maybe a two on a scale of one hundred to absolute zero.

Nevertheless, Aunt Agnes convinced me that running away wasn’t going to help anything and that the best way to prove my innocence was to act as if I weren’t guilty. The school tried to help. Mr. Midgen, the custodian, had complained about the bags of dog droppings in front of my door, so the halls were now monitored regularly and I could at least walk down the hall for a shower without stumbling through an obstacle course of smelly paper bags with my name on them.

I tried to concentrate on my schoolwork and convince myself that being friendless had an upside, but I still felt rotten. I thought I’d found a friend in Morgan, but every time I went to the store to see her after that first day, the place was closed. I guessed that maybe her aunt had gotten held up longer than she’d thought, and that Morgan had gone home.

I didn’t even know where that was. It would have been nice if she’d told me she was leaving, but to tell the truth, I was getting used to being ignored.

Speaking of being ignored, my relationship with Peter had become, to say the least, uneventful. Half of his free time was now spent sucking up to his uncle Jeremiah, who showered Peter with expensive gifts—a laptop, a Wii, a smartphone, an iPad, plus a new wardrobe, haircuts at the best salon in Boston, and a couple of sessions with a cosmetic dentist, who managed to make Peter even better-looking than he’d already been, if such a thing were possible.

The other half of the time that Peter had once spent with me was now devoted to hanging out with Bryce de Crewe.

It was Hattie’s idea to enroll Bryce at Ainsworth, even though he didn’t have any records or ID of any kind. Not only was he accepted and all fees waived, but to my amazement, Miss P herself volunteered to tutor him privately to bring him up to grade level.

“But who
is
he?” I asked Hattie one day before work. “Why does he sound weird and dress like a monk?”

“He doesn’t dress any differently from anybody else,” Hattie answered, skirting my questions.

“That’s because he’s wearing Peter’s clothes.” His
gorgeous, expensive
clothes, I might have added, since Peter dressed in
only designer labels these days. “When I first saw Bryce, he looked like Friar Tuck. And he acted like a gas stove was a miracle of modern science.”

Hattie sniffed. “You sound pretty snooty for someone who’s known as the dog poop queen.”

My eyes narrowed. “Not fair.”

Hattie smiled in spite of herself. “You’re right,” she said. “But you’re nosy.” I was about to object, but she stuck a finger in my face. “Don’t try to deny it.”

She had a point. “Okay. I guess you’re right. But I won’t say a word. I swear.”

“Oh, really?” Hattie mused. “The way you didn’t say a word about Peter’s brother, and almost caused him to get killed?”

She was referring to something that had happened the previous year, before we had known what the little kid could do. “I paid for that. Big-time,” I said. “And I haven’t said anything since. You know that.”

She sighed. “Lord knows I’d be crazy to tell you anything,” she said, “but since you’ll be working with him, maybe you ought to know.”

“Yes?” I asked eagerly.

“But you’ll have to keep this to yourself.”

I crossed my heart. Hattie gave me a skeptical look but told me anyway. “Bryce de Crewe is from a different plane of existence,” she said quietly. “At one time all of our ancestors lived in his world, so there will always be a connection between our two planes.”

“The land where witches originated?” I asked, spellbound.

“Something like that, yes. So as high priestess of Whitfield, it’s my responsibility to help Bryce with his mission.”