The Skinwalker's Apprentice (9 page)

New
York, NY

October 5
, 1984

Emerald was home. She had sneaked into the backyard, closed the wooden fence behind her quietly, and lay on the soft grass. It was already dark out; she had spent the entire day out avoiding Nora, and she knew her aunt was probably seeing red by now. She thought of the conversation she’d had with Seneka. She felt horribly about her friend leaving, but even worse about how selfish she herself was being. She thought of Charlie and studying music. It was probably an impossible dream, but why shouldn’t she try? She would be no better or worse off than she was now if she failed, and if she got in, it would be major. She thought of Henri, of his kind words, of his encouragement. It was what she needed to hear today, on her sixteenth birthday, when everything else had gone to hell. She thought about her own father, how he never got to tell her she’d be okay, or that he believed in her, because he ran away at the first sight of trouble. He’d given up on her, and she didn’t even know why. And then she thought of her mother. She was sure that if Penelope were still alive, she wouldn’t be having such a tough time with life, with trying to be good when all her insides screamed at her to do the wrong things over and over again. She bit her lip to keep from crying.
Twice in one day,
she thought. It was probably a record.

She looked up at the boarding house. It seemed to almost fade into the navy blue night sky. She closed her eyes and whispered the words she’d heard Nora repeat so many times as she told the story about that night in Riverdale.

“
Scintillatione stellarum constare
,” she whispered with a flourish of her hand.

In an instant, thousands of twinkling lights engulfed her house, making it look like a giant disco ball. Nora, who was inside the boarding house, saw the stunning light show through a window and rushed outside, putting the lights out with a wave of her hand and covering them both in darkness.

“
WHERE
HAVE YOU BEEN?” she howled in her thick New York accent. “DO YOU KNOW HOW FREAKING WORRIED I’VE BEEN ABOUT YOU?”

“I’m sorry,” squeaked Emerald. Nora was screaming so loud she was sure Mayor Koch could hear her all the way on 88
th
Street.

“Emerald,” said Nora, trying to tone her voice down, “it’s your birthday. I made you your favorite red velvet cake, and you don’t even give me a PHONE CALL?”

She was doing so well and lost her composure again towards the end there,
thought Emerald to herself.

“Nora, I know I messed up real bad. I was just worried about what you’d say about me getting in trouble this morning, and I panicked.”

“You panicked for EIGHT HOURS?”

“Yes?” cringed Emerald, only peeking at Nora through one eye. Nora was naturally loud, but she’d cracked the boarding house paint that night. Emerald cleared her throat and looked at her aunt hopefully.

“I don’t want to keep messing up. I promise you, I will try harder. Please don’t be mad,” she pleaded.

“Don’t make promises just so you can figure out a way not to keep them, Emerald. You always say one thing and do another and I’m just so
disappointed
,” said Nora, shaking her head.

At those words Emerald looked down at the grass, and her eyes filled with tears. There was nothing she could do to stop them now. ‘I’m disappointed’, ranks really high up in the worst things anyone can hear from their parents.

Nora put her hand under Emerald’s chin and lifted her face up. She was not used to seeing her niece cry.

“Hey,” she said with a slight smile, “I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to spend your birthday with you. That you didn’t at least let me know you were okay. I’m not disappointed in you.”

“But the senior prank,” said Emerald wiping her tears with her jacket sleeve. It smelled like pizza.

“You think I didn’t know you were planning that? Come on, kid, I know you better than that. Why do you think I told your principal to buzz off?”

Emerald laughed through her tears. Her entire face was red like it always was when she cried, and Nora was reminded of when Emerald was a little girl. Her own eyes now filled with tears.

Nora pressed all ten of her fingers together and closed her eyes briefly, throwing a protective shield over their home. With a wink, the lights were back, and she reached for her niece, who was already falling into her arms.

The two hugged each other tightly as Nora whispered, “Just for tonight, Emmy,” into a sobbing Emerald’s ear. It was the first time Emerald had ever seen her aunt use her own magic, and it made her feel like for once, she wasn’t alone.

“You’re all I got, kid, and I’m all you got. We gotta make the best of it,” Aunt Nora said, and the two stayed that way for a long, long time.

***

It had been a long day, and Emerald was finally back in her room. As she took her army jacket off, one of her safety pins caught on her t-shirt and she yanked it, ripping a hole through the white fabric. She put her finger through the hole of the shirt and sighed, shaking her head.
Serves me right,
she thought. She slid one sneaker off with her right foot and kicked it in the air, then did the same with the other, not bothering to check where it landed.
They’d put themselves away,
she thought. Since her room was the only place she could use magic, she used it freely, enchanting every last thing from her socks to her wallpaper. Her walls were covered with posters of her favorite bands, and they all came to life as she entered the room. One drummer in a black and white poster twirled his drumsticks in an infinite loop, while the guitarist shredded his guitar midair, legs splayed out to his sides. The little wallpaper that was showing from underneath her posters, swayed as if the flowers were in a breezy meadow instead of an apartment in downtown Manhattan. Her mint-colored robe laid lazily on her bed, its fluffy sleeves turning the pages of her precious Vive Le Rock magazine as if it could actually read, or see for that matter. Emerald shook her head and smiled, just as her slippers plodded out from underneath her bed, stopping at her feet.

“Not yet,” she dismissed the slippers, and they shuffled back into the darkness underneath her wrought iron bed. Records lined the shelf to the right of her bed, and a record player sat on the sill of the bay window that looked out into her backyard.

She looked at her record collection and twisted her mouth in thought. Before she could make up her mind what to play, a record flew off the shelf, slipping out of its sleeve and floating over to her stereo set. The needle settled on the vinyl disk and ‘Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops’, began to play. 

She peeled her jeans off and left them on the floor, walking to her bathroom. One giant advantage of living in the boarding house: a private bath. She stepped into the white tiled room and ran the tub with hot water. As the room steamed up, she looked at herself in the mirror. Emerald wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t pretty either. She was just strange looking, different, but not in a bad way, she thought. That never bothered her, Emerald liked being unique. She just didn’t like the problems that came with it. She felt misunderstood, like nobody knew who she really was. When she looked at herself in the mirror, besides blue hair and emerald green eyes, for which she was named, she saw someone who stood up for herself. She saw someone who wasn’t afraid to speak up, who defended people who didn’t know how to defend themselves. She knew she was a loyal friend and that she had a selfless heart. Well, she did most of the time, she cringed, remembering how she’d reacted to Seneka’s news that afternoon. But somehow she had become a nuisance, a rebel, and the girl who always had too much to say and didn’t know when to quit and shut up. None of the great things she thought about herself mattered as much as the awful things everyone else thought about her. Those things seemed to weigh heavily in her heart, and to take up all the space in her brain. She wondered if anyone else felt the same way. Maybe if she looked less intimidating, she thought, picking up her hairbrush, which was buzzing happily on her porcelain sink. She passed the brush through her electric blue hair, and as she did, it turned a shade of candy pink she’d seen Missy wear on her nails once. She did this until her entire head was pink and then put the brush down.

“There, now I look like cotton candy,” she said with a smirk. It didn’t occur to her to make her hair blonde or brown. She wanted to fit in, but not if she had to be boring.

She took the rest of her clothes off and stepped into the steaming bath. She reached up for the small window in her bathtub and let some of the steam out of the small room. She could see the stars from where she lay, but she brought her knees up to her chin and stared at the suds instead. She dipped her head back into the water, and some of the pink dye from her hair ran into the bath. Emerald hadn’t perfected the hairbrush just yet. It made the bubbles look like tiny scoops of strawberry ice cream. She sat in the tub and tried to relax, stretching herself out so only her toes showed on the other side of the frothy water. She was emotionally drained from her sixteenth birthday, not to mention that her feet hurt from running around the city, avoiding Nora. She stayed until her fingers looked like ten little old ladies. She stretched one hand over the edge of the tub, and a hot pink towel came hurtling towards her. She stood up and wrapped herself in the fluffy rectangle, her cheeks flushed from the hot water. She got dressed for bed in her black, oversized The Clash t-shirt and looked around her room, hands on her hips.

She thought of what Henri had told her about, the poem. She walked over to her overstuffed desk and frowned. The book of poems was in there somewhere.

She shuffled through the enormous mound of papers on her desk, sheets of papers and college booklets falling over the sides and piling up on the floor. Nothing. She looked to her left in a huff; maybe it was in her armoire. She opened the top drawer and shuffled the contents around. It was full of old cassette tapes, rubber bands, and one Twinkie still in the wrapper, which Aunt Nora would’ve screamed her head off if she’d found. Beneath all of that, at the very bottom of the drawer, was the book. She lifted it out of the drawer and sat on her bed.

“Which poem was it?” she asked herself. Ah, ‘A Seed in Soil’, she remembered and found it on page 119.

‘A Seed in Soil’ by D.L. Staneda

What you are 

And who you'll be
 

Don't have to differ much, you see
 

For what has brought you to your fate
 

By trial or error, love or hate
 

Have all been planted to be sowed
 

Through clearest day, or darkest storm

Of all the things I've learned I know

A seed in soil
 

Needs rain to grow
 

A seed in soil
 

Needs rain to grow
 

Emerald closed the book and furrowed her brows with a sigh. Poems always seemed like riddles to her, and she was awful at riddles. She supposed she understood what Mr. Darcantel was trying to tell her, though, and she hoped he was right. Maybe the fact that she hadn’t figured out where she belonged was okay; maybe she still had time to find that out. She shut her bedside lamp off and shuffled into her covers. As a fresh breeze wafted into her room, she closed her eyes and slept, dreaming of Penelope’s warm embrace beneath a starry sky.
 

East Hampton, NY

1658

Three days had passed since Margo had reversed time, and she had not left the stone house. She had scarcely slept as hour after hour of lessons took place. But this time the roles were reversed. The Priestess had been pleased with Margo’s time-telling and had asked her sheepishly to teach her how she’d done it. Despite her best efforts, however, Margo could not recreate the act, let alone teach someone else how to do it.

“FOCUS,” The Priestess would command an overtired Margo when she tried for the hundredth time to reverse the clock. No number of fireballs, black smoke or spells prompted the same reaction, and instead Margo was sick from the poison fumes and had burns and cuts all over her face and body. Her once long black hair was nearly singed to her chin now, and she could not remember when she’d had her last meal.

“Please … when can I return home?” she pleaded finally. She had not seen or heard from her family since the morning of the time reversal, and she was sure they were worried and frantically searching for her.

“I have sent word to your family; they know you are safe,” replied The Priestess every time, but Margo was certain that was a lie. She was dirty, exhausted, and starved. It seemed that until she could show The Priestess how she’d done the time-telling, she would not rest.

“If only I could get some sleep,” Margo countered, “maybe then I would be able to teach you. I have no strength. I’m begging you.”

But The Priestess didn’t budge. She did give her some bread and a cup of warm milk and allowed her to sleep for an hour at best. But after that it was back to the unavailing lessons. The Priestess was not about to let this opportunity slip through her fingers.

The year before The Priestess had carried out a spell that was decades in the making. Her planning had been meticulous, or so she’d thought. She’d found a time-teller, the last of their kind, one that could not only reverse time, but go into the future as well. It was more than she’d even hoped for, and everything was in place for her to execute the plot. But then something went wrong…horribly wrong. The Priestess touched the sides of her face remembering, she could just feel the tiny stitches along her jawline.

She had spent months in a drunken stupor, cursing her luck, and praying for death to come quickly. And the voices, they taunted her, causing her to pull her hair out in chunks. Bloody scabs covered her scalp and she swept her hair into a bun to hide them from view. 

But one night, she’d decided to peer into the future one more time, her final attempt before surrendering herself to a life of solitary madness. She’d enclosed herself in her home, not the opulent stone house she used for her role as professor, but her true home. A ramshackle cottage, foul smelling and covered in cobwebs and bird carcasses; the only thing she could eat now. She had stumbled into her chambers and pulled her wand out from a drawer in her armoire, where it had been collecting dust whilst she drank every bottle in sight.

She wobbled into the washroom, damned if she knew why her peering room door always appeared there, and began searching the walls. Her crackled hands caught on the splintery walls as she searched every inch for the low humming noise that signaled the room’s location. By the time she found it, both palms were covered in cuts, fresh blood trickling down her wrists, but she did not flinch. She tapped her wand against the wooden slab and a black doorknob appeared. It was hot to the touch and tiny wisps of smoke slithered all over its round surface. The Priestess turned the knob, her skin sizzling on contact, but if it hurt her, she did not show it. She entered the room, and it was covered floor to ceiling in bones and skulls. It resembled a catacomb, except the bones still had bits of flesh attached, and slivers of blood adorned their gray exteriors. There were no chairs or furniture, but a crystal orb was suspended at the very center of the room, vibrating ominously as if at any moment it could burst into a million pieces.

The Priestess walked to the orb, the bones beneath her snapping as she did. She ran her long jagged fingernails over the ball, her eyes rolling to the back of her head, and her face contorting grotesquely. The crystal ball began to spin, making an ear-splitting screeching noise, and whirling faster and faster, until sparks flew from The Priestess’s fingers.

And that’s when she saw the young witch, Margo Pennyfeather, running in the woods at sunrise. As she ran, the sun began to sink into the horizon, and the sky went from a fiery orange, to pitch black.

The Priestess released the orb, inhaling deeply as if she had been underwater.  She had seen enough.

Margo had not been chosen as her apprentice by chance. The Priestess knew that the day would come when Margo would reverse time; she had planned it to be so, and it had all worked perfectly until now. She was losing her restraint. If Margo was unable to teach her to control time, The Priestess would have to resort to other measures, and that would be risky, considering her current situation. She decided to give her a few more days. After that, she would have no choice but to do the unthinkable. Luckily for The Priestess, she’d already had some practice.