Ominous (18 page)

We sat in a circle in the middle of Noelle’s private living room. The chairs and the couch were shoved up against the walls, and several gleaming silver trays of pastries and fruit were placed at the center of the cushy, dark pink rug. We’d kept the lights bright, and Noelle’s current favorite playlist pumped through the speakers. Her theory was that if any of the girls realized why they were there before we told them, they’d bolt before we could ever get started. I saw no flaws in that logic.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down between Noelle and Ivy, feeling nervous. We’d decided that making everyone wear full-on white was out of the question, but I’d donned my white roll-neck sweater and light jeans for good measure. I zipped the locket back and forth on its chain and looked around at my colorfully clad friends. “Let me tell you why we’re here.”

“You’re gonna try to make us into witches, aren’t you?” Vienna
asked, her mouth full of chocolate éclair. She looked at me over her fingers as she licked them one by one. She was wearing yoga pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt that stretched across her stomach. Stress eating was starting to affect her usually fit body.

No one laughed or scoffed or moved. They all just gazed at me with varying expressions of expectation, annoyance, and fear. So much for them not knowing why they’d been invited.

“I’m not trying to make you into anything,” I replied, glancing at Ivy. “We just … we figured that since there happen to be eleven of us—”

“Left.” Kiki stared straight ahead, her hands pressed flat into the floor at her sides. Her earbuds hung around her neck and her hair looked limp and unwashed. “There are eleven of us
left
.”

My heart was tight inside my chest. “Yes.”

Suddenly the room felt very warm. No one breathed, it seemed, for an oddly long time.

“We thought it might be fun,” Noelle piped up, turning a palm toward the ceiling.

“And
I
thought it might help us protect ourselves,” Ivy put in.

“So you really believe all this,” Tiffany said flatly, reaching for the fruit platter and dragging it toward her across the carpet. “You really believe that when you guys said this incantation, you developed some kind of power?”

I took a breath and shook my head. “I don’t know what I believe, Tiff. I just know that if it
is
real … then Ivy’s right. We might have a better shot of keeping ourselves safe.”

“I can’t believe you actually agreed to this, Noelle,” Portia said with a nervous laugh.

“Yeah, well, I’ve already got a therapy appointment booked for tomorrow morning,” Noelle joked. “Maybe Dr. Markowitz can help me sort out why.”

The other girls laughed and I felt my shoulders relax a bit. Noelle didn’t need any incantations. She was already so powerful. She had the ability to make everyone in the room feel chill, or turn them tense on a dime.

“Really, though, I just thought it might take our minds off things,” Noelle said. “And besides, Reed would just
not
let it
go
,” she joked again, rolling her eyes.

More laughter. I glanced at Ivy, who was clearly not amused, but I didn’t care. If Noelle’s tactic worked to get the others on board, I was all for it.

“So, what do you guys think?” I asked, glancing around.

Tiffany finished chewing her last bite of strawberry and closed her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but fine. I’ll do it—if only to prove this whole thing is a joke.”

“I’m in too,” London said. She glanced at Vienna and blushed. “I think it’d be kind of cool to be a witch.”

“Well, if she’s in, I’m in,” Vienna said, dusting powdered sugar off her fingers. She’d just downed another doughnut. “What do we need to do? There’s no blood involved, right?”

“I’m not doing it if there’s blood,” Rose said, looking peakish.

“There’s no blood involved,” I assured them, feeling a rush of
excitement so sudden and fierce it actually made me nauseous. I nodded to Ivy, who grabbed a small stack of papers behind her and started passing them out. “All we’re going to do is hold candles and say this incantation.”

Rose chewed on her lip as she read the words, kneading her hands together. Tiffany read it through once and put it aside, as if she’d already memorized it. Amberly’s page shook as she held it, and a line appeared between her eyes as she concentrated. I held my breath, imagining that this was similar to how Eliza had felt when she realized her friends were going to join her. They were going for it. They were really going for it.

“This is never gonna work,” Noelle whispered to me, leaning toward my ear.

I lifted one shoulder and bit back an unexpected grin. For the first time in my life, I was certain she was wrong.

As I looked around the circle of my friends, candlelight casting their faces in dancing shadows, I suddenly felt like a complete idiot. Like the ringleader in some crazy endeavor to experiment with some new drug or base-jump off the Empire State Building or get everyone to shave their heads. This little undertaking was just as stupid, and potentially just as dangerous—at least as dangerous as the first two. Not that I would ever admit that out loud. Because I couldn’t take another eye roll from Noelle without knocking her on the head.

Ivy returned to the circle after making sure everyone’s candles were lit. She stood to my left, Noelle to my right. Directly across from me, Rose stared into her flame as if mesmerized and Amberly seemed to be blinking in slow motion. Kiki’s jaw was set in determination, and Tiffany kept checking her watch. Portia toyed with her gold chains, her thumb hooked over the longest two as she ran it up
and down the length of them. Vienna and London whispered, holding hands, and Constance just stared at me, like she’d follow me wherever I wanted to lead.

Somehow that scared me more than any of my nightmares had.

There was a round of deep laughter outside the closed doors of Noelle’s living room, which exited onto the same hallway as the now infamous double doors to her bedroom. The laughter reminded me that time was of the essence here. It had taken a lot of convincing to get all the bodyguards and security personnel to leave us alone in here—Amberly’s had pointed out that most threats came from “someone you know and think you can trust” (preaching to the choir, dude). I figured we had ten minutes tops before the whole army of them came banging down the door.

“Everybody ready?” I asked.

Nods and murmurs rippled around the circle.

“All right. Here we go.”

“We come together to form this blessed circle, pure of heart, free of mind,” I began. I was surprised by the strength of the voices around me, and it squelched my nerves a bit. “From this night on we are bonded, we are sisters.”

I glanced at Constance, feeling a stab of guilt so intense it nearly knocked me over. Once upon a time I had sworn to be her sister, and London’s too, and I knew how betrayed they’d felt when I’d formed the BLS and kept them out.

“We swear to honor this bond above all else. Blood to blood, ashes to ashes, sister to sister.” I closed my eyes for the briefest moment,
knowing what was coming. Or what was supposed to come. “We make this sacred vow.”

I held my breath. A cold wind swirled through the room, and I heard a couple of people gasp. Amberly grasped Rose’s hand and whimpered as all the candles flickered out. I glanced at Ivy, and she gave me a sly, triumphant smile. Then I looked at Noelle. Her face betrayed nothing.

The candles now extinguished, I waited. Then, slowly, they started to flicker to life again. First mine and Ivy’s. Then Noelle’s. Then Kiki’s, London’s, and Vienna’s. Portia’s glowed like a tiny pinprick, as if it were having trouble coming to life, but Rose’s popped up so fast, she took a step back. Amberly stared at her candle, but nothing happened. I blinked, perplexed, and looked at Ivy. Tiffany’s candle smoked for a second but didn’t light. Constance’s candle, however, was flickering merrily.

“That’s weird,” Ivy said.

“Nice trick, Reed. With the wind and everything,” Tiffany said, looking around at the windows. Finding them closed, she cast her glance at the various air-conditioning ducts overhead. “How’d you time that one?”

“I didn’t time anything,” I said. “That’s what happened when I said the incantation the first time. The wind, then the candle. At the time, I thought the wind had come down the stairs when Noelle opened the door, but … ”

“There was no wind when we did it,” Ivy said. “Just the cell phones.”

“But my cell phone didn’t ring,” Amberly said, glancing toward her foot where she’d laid her phone on the floor.

“No. It wouldn’t. Because we used the candles this time,” I said, feeling impatient.

“So why didn’t my candle light?” Amberly asked, her bottom lip puffed out petulantly.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“And mine’s barely doing anything,” Portia said, waving it around like a Fourth of July sparkler. “WTF?”

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“So what does it mean?” Kiki asked, her gaze intense. “Are we witches or not?”

“Maybe
we’re
witches and they’re not,” London said, waving a finger at Tiffany and Amberly. “Because, you know, our candles lit and theirs didn’t.”

“Or maybe the factory that makes the quote
magically relighting candles
unquote made a couple of defectives,” Tiffany shot back.

“Tiff, we got the candles at Pottery Barn,” Noelle said flatly. “As far as I know, they don’t do trick candles.”

“So what does that make me?” Portia said. “Some kind of weak-ass witch because my candle barely lit?”

“Maybe you guys just aren’t believers,” Kiki blurted out.

“You’ve got that right,” Tiffany retorted.

Suddenly everyone was talking at once, throwing out theories, debating the reality of what they’d seen. I closed my eyes, the voices colliding and roiling inside of me, stretching my nerves to their breaking point.

And then, suddenly, a whistle split the air. I opened my eyes to find Noelle standing there with her thumb and index finger stuck inside her mouth.

“Everyone shut up!” she shouted.

They did, of course.

“Reed,” she said, turning to me, holding her candle casually at her side. “This is your baby. What do you suggest we do now?”

I breathed in, counted to ten, then swallowed back my confusion, my excitement, my annoyance, and my fear—which was a mighty large pill to swallow. Everyone looked at me, hanging on my next words. I recalled Eliza’s torn diary pages in my head and knew exactly what we should do.

“I think we should try out some of the basic spells.”

“This is one of the first spells Eliza and her friends tried,” I said as we all gathered around the small round dining table near the bay window in Noelle’s living room. It was a spot where she liked to eat croissants and sip black coffee while reading the Style section of the
New York Times
and looking out over the park, or nurse a hangover with the blinds drawn, depending on the day. Ivy, Kiki, Constance, London, and I leaned into the table, while the others crammed in behind us. Tiffany was over by the wall, scrolling through photos on her camera, the picture of indifference. I wondered if she was really uninterested, or if she was just posing as such. But if this spell worked, she would be convinced. All of them would.