Poison (19 page)

“Really?” she asked, peering over my shoulder. “So where’s mine? I only see you out there.”

I hated to tell her. “It’s in a hospital in Michigan, I think.”

Her face crumpled. “Will I . . . you know, get back all right?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “That’s why I’d rather ask someone who knows about these things.”

“No!” Summer stamped her foot. “I’m not going to stay in here one second longer. Now do something!”

I gulped. “Okay,” I said. “Take my hand.”

“Hurry up!” Summer ordered as I walked through the doll’s eyes.

•  •  •

“Summer?” I hauled myself up onto all fours. My head felt like it was splitting apart. The kind of magic I’d been doing was taking its toll on me. I could barely move without sending shooting pains into my head. “Summer, did you make it?”

But of course she wouldn’t answer, I realized. If I’d managed to get Summer’s soul—or whatever part of her I’d visited—out of the doll, it would have returned to her body back in Michigan.

Maybe the others went with her
, I thought hopefully. The prospect of doing this three more times wasn’t something I was looking forward to at all.

“A.J.? Suzy?” I whispered as I crawled toward the heap of antique dolls. “Tiffany?”

Then I saw it. The Summer doll, with its human eyes glaring at me.

“I guess it didn’t work,” I said, picking up the doll as if I could give it some comfort in my arms. “I’m sorry.”

At first the eyes looked as if Summer wanted to strangle me, but within a few seconds her bravado abandoned her. The doll’s expression softened until I thought the eyes were about to cry. I wondered if somewhere in a hospital far away, Summer’s impassive face was covered with tears. “I’ll find a way to get you out,” I whispered, cradling her in my arms as I picked up the other three dolls. “I promise you.”

Suddenly there was a loud pounding on the door. The little bell jingled furiously while a hundred delicate things in the store quivered and trembled in its wake.

Morgan
, I thought, and then:
No.
Morgan wouldn’t have to force open her own door. It had to be someone else, a drunk probably, or . . .

“Peter!” Hanging on to the four dolls in my arms, I lumbered to my feet and moved as quickly as I could toward the front door, where Peter was making urgent-looking faces through the glass. “Hey,” I said, managing to get the door open. “Can you take a couple of these?” I handed him the dolls.

He looked at me like I was crazy. “What’re you doing, robbing the place?”

“I’ll explain later,” I said. “Right now, we have to get them out of here.” I shoved him away and closed the door behind us. “As fast as we can.”

“Okay,” he said dubiously. “Only . . . ”

“What?” I pushed him with my shoulder. “Talk while we’re moving. Go.”

“It’s just . . . I didn’t think there was anything in that place anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” I turned around. “The store just opened—”

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my legs almost gave out beneath me.

In the soft early morning light I saw an abandoned storefront, its filthy windows revealing an empty space with a broken counter and a floor with half its tiles missing. Outside hung a broken sign that had fallen over the doorway:

Fr d’s Barga

“What’d you call it?” Peter asked. “I walked up and down the street for more than an hour trying to find the place you texted me about. Finally I just looked in every store to see if there was any movement.”

It was gone. The Emporium. The whole place.

Vanished.

Under my arm, Summer’s horrified eyes stared out of the doll’s porcelain face.

•

Peter didn’t ask a lot of questions on the way to my great-grandmother’s, although I think he wanted to.

“I’ll tell you all about it afterward,” I said. “Okay?”

“Sure.” He tried not to look hurt. “I understand. I’m not much use when it comes to magic.”

“It’s not that . . . ”

But it was, and we both knew it. There were some high-powered male witches in the world, but, in Whitfield at least, the women were definitely the prime movers.

“Hey, I don’t mind,” he said gently. “You’ve been left out of my life often enough.”

“Like at Winter Frolic,” I said, hoping to sound jolly and mature about it, even though I didn’t really feel that way.

I think it was the opening Peter was waiting for. “So will you come to the dance?” he asked.

“With you and your date?” My good humor was beginning to sound forced.

“You know I have to take Fabienne.”

I sighed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t think about it now.”

“Okay,” he said, giving me back the dolls. “I’ll let you do what you need to do. Good luck.” Then he kissed me.

Whoever had come up with the idea that only bad boys were interesting must have been crazy. I’d take my nice guy any day.

•  •  •

An hour later Gram, Hattie, Miss P, and I stood around Gram’s kitchen with the four dolls propped up in the middle of us.

“Now, dears, there’s no need for concern,” Gram said, patting the Summer doll on its head. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

She hadn’t blinked an eye when I’d bombed into her bedroom before dawn asking for her help. Gram was an empath. Her gift was compassion. She volunteered at the local hospital seven days a week, helping people get ready for surgery, or calming frightened children or soothing the grieving relatives of the dead. I knew that if I’d been one of the souls trapped inside those dolls, she would have been the person I’d want to have around me. When she touched them, I saw their terrified eyes soften inside their little china heads.

“We have to get them out before Morgan gets back to the store,” I said. “Or what I thought was the store. Actually—”

“That’s all right, Katy,” she said, shushing me as she stood dialing the phone. I’d been babbling ever since I’d walked in. “We’ll sort all that out later. The important thing is, you’ve found the girls. And you’re right. There’s no time to waste. . . . Hattie, dear?” she said into the mouthpiece.

Of course Hattie had to be notified. Then there was Miss P, the djinn. She could put ideas into people’s heads, which meant
she could start a revolution just by
thinking
if she wanted to. She could convince the guards at Fort Knox to turn over all the gold in their vaults to her, get the President to declare that the United States had become a territory of Switzerland, or make Justin Bieber fall in love with her, even though she’s nearly thirty. If Miss P was going to be there, I knew that what was going on was a big deal.

And then there was me, but only because my aunt Agnes wasn’t available. It felt strange to be in the company of these three witches. They represented the values of knowledge, strength, and compassion. Translated into witch ritual, that meant the elements air, fire, and water, or east, south, and west. I was positioned at north, signifying earth, the grounding influence. I didn’t know what I could possibly contribute to the group, but I was willing to do my best. I just hoped I wouldn’t screw things up.

•  •  •

“Katy, concentrate!” Gram snapped, nudging me with her wand.

Wands, which amplified whatever gifts you had, were called for only in extreme cases. This must have been one, because they all had their wands out, except for me. I used to own one, but I’d lost it somewhere in the middle of Whitfield Bay last year. So I held a hammer. It wasn’t a very magical tool, but necessary all the same.

I set my mind on what I wanted to happen. In High Magic you didn’t have to know exactly what to do. You just had to focus your intention clearly and open up a channel to let the forces of the universe do what needed to be done. All of the rituals and magic words that witches and sorcerers were supposed to use
were just ways to get them into that state of pure focus, so that the channel would open. But these witches were too well trained to need those crutches. They just zeroed in on the dolls with so much intensity that the tips of their wands glowed.

I saw Miss P’s wand out of the corner of my eye, but I made a point of not looking at her face. When she went into djinn mode, she became pretty scary-looking, with these luminescent not-of-this-earth eyes and a telepathic voice.

The energy we generated began to hum. It traveled in a circle around us, thin at first, then growing louder as the cone of power grew thicker around us. The dolls vibrated on the table. We all heard the faint, pitiful screams of the girls inside as the energy inside the cone became so strong that it was hard for me to hang on to my hammer.

Then, when everything threatened to fly apart and I didn’t think I could hold on any longer, I smashed the hammer down onto Gram’s wooden cutting board. It was the signal for the witches to shoot their power out through their wands.

The dolls exploded into a thousand pieces, leaving nothing but dust behind.

I stood there blinking for a long time afterward, afraid that the girls had been vaporized.

“Are they all right?” I finally whispered timidly.

“Shh.” Gram nodded toward Miss P, who was gradually turning back into herself. She shook all over, as if throwing off the magic that had enveloped her, then patted her hair back into place. “I’ll go find out,” Miss P said in a breathy voice, and left the room.

Gram tucked her wand into the lacy sleeve of her dress. “Tea, anyone?” she warbled.

“I’ve got to be going,” I said. “I’ve got an eight o’clock exam.”

Hattie pointed at me. “Sit down,” she said. I sat. “We released those girls without much information about what put them there because it was an emergency situation, but it’s time you told us everything you learned from Summer.”

I looked at my watch. “Can’t this—”

“No.”

I blew air out of my nose. “Okay,” I said, “but Bryce has to be here too.”

“Bryce?” Hattie raised an eyebrow. “What’s he got to do with this?”

I gave her a level look. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but he’s got to answer some of my questions too,” I said. “Like why he didn’t warn me about Morgan, so that I might have suspected something before she poisoned me and sent me off to die.”

•

“I was looking for someone
small
,” Bryce said when he arrived ten minutes later. “That was the main thing about her, her size—”

“Hello, she’s a
shape-shifter
,” I reminded him acidly.

“All right, all right,” he said, and sulked. “I had planned to bring the amber containing her to Whitfield and then go back. There were not supposed to be complications.” He shook his head. “And now Morgan le Fay has eluded us forever—”

“Whoa,” I said. “
Morgan le Fay
? As in King Arthur’s nemesis?”

“And sister,” he said.

“Sister?”

“Half sister,” Bryce corrected. “At least according to legend.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about Uther Pendragon, the king?” I argued. I hadn’t spent the better part of a day looking
up references to King Arthur online for nothing. “He was supposed to be Arthur’s father, even though Queen Igraine was married to—”