The Witchfinder Wars (6 page)

The sensible part of my mind was rejecting
the images of his slow smile playing against my memory. How his
voice sounded as he spoke to someone who should have meant nothing
to him. No, it was the mystical side of me feeling the fear. The
child in me, the one who had grown up to understand the power
simple thoughts and simpler words could have, was screaming what I
had done would influence, change, even harm Tommy. My sudden spell
had constituted a powerful magic and thus, I was no better than my
mother or aunt, who used their own powers so selfishly.

No. Maybe it didn't work at all. I'm no
good at this. I've not followed it as closely as I should have.
Surely the Great Mother will refuse the words of a selfish girl. A
lonely one who doesn't understand the mystical powers She
controls
.

My room welcomed me, but my bed embraced me
as I waited for sleep to come. The cold light of the moon danced
across my threadbare quilt and the events of the day played at the
edges of my dreams.

Don't be silly, Annie. What happened
today
...
tonight
...
was nothing more than getting
caught up in the moment. You can't influence anything. Anyone. You
must know better than that. Besides, Ivy and Evie are masters at
pulling you into their fantasies. Always have been
.

But as I finally felt the heaviness of
sleep, a single phrase flashed against my thoughts.

So now must it be.

Chapter Four

Tommy

"Weird people. Weird town. Weird day in
general, I guess," I told Grand.

Well, after all, she asked me. What else was
I going to say? That my first day at school in a new town had been
a normal day? Not that I was any too sure what a normal day was, at
least for me. Sometimes I wished I could have a life like other
people: same house, same city, same country, waking up in the same
room day after day after day. But there was no use hitting Grand
with anything like that, at least not right now. None of it was her
fault.

If anything, it was Dad's. I couldn't blame
him; well, not really. Sure, we owned the biggest company in the
world. Sure, WFG provided employment to about a gazillion people,
from the U.S. to the tiniest little backwater in Chad—which I had
to look up once because I never thought anyone would name an entire
country a surfer dude's name.

But even if WFG did all this chewy goodness
all over the world, did that mean me and my sisters and Grand—and
Dad, of course—had to keep moving from place to place all the time?
Oh, sure; I enjoyed it, lots of the time. But, for some funny
reason, this little North Carolina town—even after only a single
day, mind you—was starting to feel like...home.

And I wasn't sure if that was necessarily a
good thing. Because, if there's no place like home—what happens
when you have to leave it?

I tried to wipe all this from my mind. Grand
had enough on her plate; why worry her about my newly-discovered
homeboy-ness?

I laid my backpack on a little table near
the desk in her big room up on the second floor, then sank into an
armchair. I was exhausted, and I couldn't decide if it was all
these new feelings, leftover jetlag, the usual hassle of meeting
new people, or just the collective weirdness of the aforesaid
people, town, school, day.

Not to mention my recent meeting with Anya.
Who named a girl from North Carolina something like that? It so did
not sound like any Southern name I'd ever heard. Bobbie Sue. Nellie
May. Lula Belle. Savannah Courtney, even. But Anya? That sounded
more Russian or at least eastern European. I wondered where her
folks had come up with a name like that?

And that whole thing with Jordan and his
bully-boy pack. Accusing a nice little red-haired girl of being a
witch. What century did the guy think we were in?

I decided to ignore the strange feeling
which had come over me when I had gotten a look at her eyes.

Grand finished the letter she'd been typing
on her laptop and hit 'print'. Her laser printer hummed and spit
out three pages. Grand didn't even glance over them, just signed
her name on the last sheet and slid them into a big manila envelope
from a stack with address labels stuck to them.

Just one of the many things I admired about
Grand. Me, I always have to read over anything I've written at
least three times to check for errors. Grand, on the other hand,
produces nothing but perfection on her first shot. Whoa, if I could
do that, it would seriously cut homework time in half.

She slid back and turned her desk chair to
face me.

"Weird?" she asked.

"And not in a good way either."

"Well, it is a new town. Something to get
used to. And, Tommy, you do realize we're in the South now, right?"
She grinned at me, her head turned to one side, her pale blue eyes
sparkling. "The South is like no other place on earth. Just ask any
Southerner."

I laughed as I reached for a cookie on the
tray Brent always brings Grand at three every afternoon regardless
of where we are. Only the contents changed. Sometimes coffee, but
usually tea, and always an interesting range of cookies. I've been
filching cookies from Grand's tray ever since I was tall enough to
reach it.

This particular cookie had a weird—that kind
of a day, remember?—look, almost translucent, with darker spots in
it. I bit into it, chewed, stopped.

"Wow," I said around a mouthful of utter
bliss, "what's that?"

"Pecan praline and don't talk with your
mouth full," Grand said automatically. "I guess Brent is going all
southern on us."

"Hope he keeps it up then," I said. "If this
is a sample of the cooking here, I think I could get used to it,
and fast," I said as I grabbed another chunk of joy.

"Don't spoil your supper," Grand said,
another automatic response I'd heard a bazillion times. "Your
father should be here in time to have it with us, with any
luck."

That sent a chill through me. Not enough to
spoil the cookie, though. I finished it, dusted off the crumbs and
sat up straighter.

Don't get me wrong. I love my dad; he's a
great guy. He's fair and impartial, but at the same time, he'll
give me or my sisters anything we want, no questions asked. I've
tried not to take too much advantage of his generosity. The twins,
now; I can't exactly say the same about them. Once Jax wanted a
pony. She got one, then cried when we had to leave it on yet
another move. That taught me a lesson, and I'm guessing her too: Be
careful what you wish for, cause when you get it, and you love it,
you can lose it. And it hurts.

So, like I said, my dad is a great guy. It
was just, lately, Dad had been acting a little, well, weird. He
seemed to be moving us around a lot more than just a few years ago.
His best friend and our uncle, an Englishman named—and how much
more English can you get?—Zachariah Pringle, hadn't even been to
visit us in close to ten months, which was about nine months longer
than usual. All my life, before my mom died and after, Zachariah
always spent holidays with us, but lately Dad seemed to, almost, be
on the run from his brother-in-law. But the
strangest
thing of all was, Dad kept dropping hints
about something big coming down the road expressly for me,
something important, something that would "change your life,
Tommy."

Now that was scary. I can't say I was
perfectly satisfied with my life as it was—especially with all
these new feelings coming on even before we got to Manning—I wasn't
looking forward to some kind of big earth-shattering change
either.

Of course, maybe Dad just wanted to discuss
college or something. But I didn't see how it could be that. I knew
where I wanted to go—Oxford—and what I wanted to study—history. The
Hopkins were English originally and had all gone to Oxford until my
grandfather, who'd been born in the States; he'd gone to Harvard
and a couple of other colleges, at one of which he'd met Grand. Dad
had gone back to the old way, studying modern languages at
Oxford—he spoke about six—and he'd already told me I could go there
too. So I wasn't too worried about it. One thing did bother me,
though; Dad naturally wanted me to go into the family business,
just like he and his father and grandfather and even further back
all had. That's why my last given name is Matthew.

"Matthew Hopkins is always in charge of WFG
Ltd." That was the family and company slogan.

But I had other plans, plans that didn't
necessarily include sitting on the board of WFG. And why wouldn't
Dad agree? He's always let me have anything I wanted, right?

Somehow, I wasn't too sure about it this
time. The company meant something to Dad. I'm not saying he loved
it or anything, but he wanted it to succeed.

I was pretty sure WFG didn't need me to be a
success. In fact, I might be more of a liability.

I stood and stretched so hard I heard stuff
crackle and pop in my neck and shoulders, like tiny little pistols
going off. I yawned and grabbed my backpack.

"Guess it's time for the old homework,
Grand. Call me when you hear from Dad, okay?"

I was heading for her door when one of the
phones on her desk rang. I heard her say "Hello?" just as I put a
hand on her doorknob. I looked down at it; it was crystal and
faceted, and it felt colder than the usual doorknob, somehow. Or
was something else giving me a cold and creepy feeling? I'd been
getting more and more of those odd flashes of feeling lately. I
remembered the figure I'd seen in my foggy bathroom mirror
earlier.

I realized I was still staring at the
doorknob and snorted. But before I could turn it, Grand said,
"Tommy?" in the strangest voice I'd ever heard from her.

I turned loose of the knob and was by her
side in less than a heartbeat, all thoughts of homework and worries
and everything else forgotten.

Grand still had the phone up near her ear
but not touching it. I could hear little distant buzzes and squeaks
amidst the murmur of a distant voice too low to make out any actual
words. The sounds echoed in a room gone suddenly silent and
still.

Grand's face had gone from its usual pink
and white to the ugly grey color old putty had as it flaked out of
a window frame. Funny. I'd looked at Grand's face a million times
but, until now, I'd never noticed how deep the lines around her
mouth were.

"Grand? You okay?" I put my hand on her
shoulder. It felt like...it felt hard; like she'd been turned to a
brittle stone, stiff yet fragile like just the weight of my hand
might shatter her into a thousand pieces.

Before, I'd been uneasy.

Now I was scared.

Then, Grand handed me the phone without a
word. She just looked up at me with an expression I could not
decipher. Or maybe I didn't want to.

"Hello?" I was shouting into the phone and
hadn't realized it. I lowered my voice. "Hello? Who is this?"

"Mr. Hopkins?"

"Mr. Hopkins is my dad," I said.

Grand put both hands over her face. I was
glad I didn't have to look at her expression. Her shoulders started
to tremble.

"Mr. Thomas Hopkins?" asked the voice in my
ear, far off, impersonal.

"Yes. I'm Tommy—Thomas Hopkins."

"I'm afraid we have some bad news for you,
sir. Mr. Spenser Hopkins..."

Suddenly I really, really didn't want to
hear anything else. Not one more word. But, like Grand, I seemed to
have turned to stone. I wanted—so badly—to hang up the phone, cut
off the distant voice that suddenly sounded so sorry, like then
whatever the man on the other end said could not, would not be
true.

But I was frozen.

"My dad—Spenser Hopkins is my father. I'm
his son," I said idiotically. "What's happened? What's wrong?"

"Sir...I'm afraid your father's dead."

The phone dropped from my hand, which had
gone from frozen to boneless in a nanosecond. I fell to my knees,
banging my shoulder on the edge of Grand's desk, and patted around
on the carpet looking desperately for the handset. I couldn't see
it, but I could hear a voice still coming from it; faint, distant,
with just a word here and there I could make out: "landslide" and
"crash" and, most horrible of all, two words together: "no
hope."

No hope.

I gave up trying to find the phone and put
my arms around Grand.

I think she cried.

I know I did.

***

I spent the rest of the day in a daze of
pain mixed with grief and horror. Grand, I'm sure, felt something
like what I did, but she held up better. I guess it was because she
had to take care of Jos and Jax after we called them into Grand's
room and told them what happened. The twins—well, they didn't
know—hadn't known Dad as well as I did. As well as I had. Mom died
when they were born and I'd always felt, somehow, Dad blamed the
girls, just a little, for her death. It wasn't anything I'd ever
mentioned to him or to them. Just a feeling I had.

They both seemed shocked and sad, but what
do I know about eleven-year-old girls? Jos cried and hugged Grand,
but Jax just got all kind of quiet and distant. I patted them both
on the shoulder, kind of awkward about it, but I was hurting so
bad. I didn't know what else to do.

Then, after the girls were told, Grand
gathered the servants together and gave them the news. Brent and
the maids were really nice; they'd been with us the longest. The
chauffeur, Ray Lecroy, was a little stand-offish, but he'd only
been with us a couple of months. I guess he was thinking something
about what if he'd been with Dad, driving, when the landslide came
down on Interstate 40 up in the mountains.

After Grand and I told the servants, I
escaped to my room and locked the door. I got online and looked up
the spot where the accident had happened. The news services were
reporting it everywhere; seems Dad wasn't the only one who'd been
caught in the landslide. I clicked and read and clicked and read
until the words on the screen started to bleed together and got
harder and harder to see.