Poison

Acknowledgments

Part One: The Emporium of Remarkable Goods

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Two: The Mistress of Real Things

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Part Three: The Killing Gift

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Part Four: The Travelers from Avalon

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

About Molly Cochran

For Warren Murphy, who taught me everything I know about anything

Many thanks to my talented and hardworking editor, Alexandra Penfold; my brilliant and amazingly organized agent, Lucienne Diver; to my initial readers, Pam Williamson and Lynne Carrera, who make sure my course steers true; to BFF Michele Horon, without whom I could plot nothing; to all the bloggers who took the time to read and review my first YA novel,
Legacy
; and finally, to my new readers whose support has given me a new future.

•

I probably went to the only school in the country with a rule against practicing witchcraft.

That wasn’t really as crazy as it sounded. The Massachusetts town where I lived was sort of known for its rumored history of magical residents. Some said it was even more haunted by witches than Salem, our famous neighbor. The story went that while the Pilgrims in Salem were burning innocent women at the stake, the real witches went to Whitfield and vanished into a fog.

Of course, that wasn’t entirely true. Nobody had actually been burned at the stake in Salem. Oh, there had been plenty of murders, jailings, and torture of women who hadn’t done much more than piss off their neighbors. Lots of widows had their property stolen, and one guy got crushed to death. But the burnings were pretty much left to the Europeans. The part of the story that
was
true was the part about the real witches going to Whitfield.

I knew because I was the descendant of one of those witches.

A lot of us were, although we kept quiet about it. That was because even there, in the town where at least half the population were witches, we had to live among
cowen,
aka non-magical people. Actually, we thought of ourselves as
talented
—we could all do different things—rather than
magical.
But that wouldn’t have mattered to cowen. They had a nice tradition of destroying anything they couldn’t understand. Look at Salem.

At school there were two kinds of students, the Muffies and the witches. Muffies were the kinds of girls you’d find at every boarding school in the Northeast: fashionable, promiscuous, and clueless. Okay, that wasn’t fair. There were plenty of cowen kids at Ainsworth School who weren’t Muffies. Half of them weren’t even girls. But those non-Muffies generally left us alone. It was the Muffies who were always making life difficult.

They sneered at us. They called us names. (Yeah, these were the same people who were legally named Bitsy, Binky, and Buffy.) “Geek” was probably the most popular name for us, since it was pretty much true, at least from their point of view. We generally didn’t have problems with drugs, alcoholism, reckless driving, kleptomania, credit card debt, or STDs. To be fair, we did sometimes have issues with ghosts, apparitions, disappearing, transmogrification, rainmaking, telepathy, demon rampages, telekinesis, and raising the dead. And maybe a few other things.

Hence the injunction against performing witchcraft at Ainsworth. This rule had been in place ever since my ancestor Serenity Ainsworth had founded the school. (I liked to think that one of her pupils had given some Puritan Muffy a pig nose in a catfight.)

The Muffies didn’t know about this rule. They didn’t know that Whitfield was the biggest and oldest community of witches in the United States, or that the geeks at Ainsworth School could summon enough power to make a hydrogen bomb seem like a fart in a bathtub if we wanted to. They thought that Whitfield was an ordinary place and that Ainsworth was an ordinary school.

Or did they?

I’d often wondered if they knew. . . . I mean, how could they
not
know? On every major witch holiday the Meadow—that was a big field in the middle of Old Town—filled up with fog so dense that you couldn’t see through it. It was the same fog that saved the witches from being grabbed by the Puritans back in the day. When the fog appeared, the witches all tumbled into it like lemmings, but cowen couldn’t—physically
couldn’t
—enter. And that was only one of the weird shenanigans that went on there. Even the dumbest Muffies must have had an inkling once in a while that Whitfield, Massachusetts, was a little different from wherever they called home.

At least that was my theory about how the whole mess started. With a jealous Muffy.

And an idiot who should have known better than to forget the no-witchcraft rule, since it was her relative who’d made it in the first place.

•

Right. It was me. But in all fairness I had a good reason. I was protecting my friend Verity from Summer Hayworth, the most evil of the evil Muffies at Ainsworth. More accurately, I was protecting her boyfriend, Cheswick, from expulsion, and possibly arrest, for what he was about to do to Summer in Verity’s defense.

I could still see it—Summer, who had the taste level of a dung beetle, laughing when Verity opened her locker and found a stuffed witch doll hanging by its neck. The doll had been made to look like Verity, with striped stockings and red hair. Its eyes had been removed and replaced by
X
s, and someone had sewn a red tongue hanging out the side of its mouth.

There was no doubt about who’d done it. Even though none of them had classes near Verity’s locker, Summer and her three main cohorts—A. J. Nakamura, Tiffany Rothstein, and Suzy Dusset—just
happened
to be hanging around the area. Aside from Verity, me, and our boyfriends, Cheswick and Peter, the
evil Muffies were the only people within a hundred feet of the locker in question. As for the witch doll itself, well, it had “evil Muffy” stamped all over it. A.J. was an artist, and the tongue definitely looked like her work, but the idea had to have been Summer’s because nobody else in the school could possibly have been so crass.

If it had been my locker, I wouldn’t have thought much about it. The witch doll was actually kind of cute,
X
-ed out eyes and all. But Verity was, well, sensitive. More to the point, she was a QMS—a quivering mass of sensitivity—of the highest order. She got emotional if someone swatted a fly or squashed a mosquito. She went into coughing fits if anyone in the room was wearing perfume. She was a vegan, of course, and only wore plastic shoes. Frankly, she wasn’t the most fun person to party with, but that wasn’t the point.