Strange Magic (14 page)

          Duncan was staring at me like he had never seen me before.  The silence stretched between us as we stood frozen in place.  I seemed to have forgotten how to speak or move.  Duncan was the first to break the spell as he suddenly hurried down the stairs.

          “Are you okay?”

          Hysteria threatened to overwhelm me.  “Not really.”

          “Are you hurt?”  He examined me with worried eyes.

          “No, but it was close.  If you hadn’t stopped her…”  I shuddered.

          “Susannah, that was all you.  I barely had enough strength to stop the chair she threw at you.  I’m much weaker than she thinks, but you must be very powerful.  She couldn’t touch you.”

          I stared at him.  “What do you mean?”

          “You were immune to her sleeping spell.  Then the furniture would have crushed you if you hadn’t stopped it.”

          “Me?  I didn’t do anything.”  Then I remembered the sense of power I had felt before Anna’s attack.  “How—how can that be possible?”

          Duncan regarded me with those pale blue eyes.  “It must have been lying dormant all this time until you were in danger, like a reflex action.”

          I heard a groan behind me and looked back to see the group stirring.  “Caitlin!” I cried and ran to her.  “Are you okay?”

          “Suzy, what happened?”

          I didn’t answer yet as I helped her stand up.  What could I say in front of everyone that wouldn’t make me sound crazy?  I looked to Duncan for help, but he seemed to be at a loss, too.  Caitlin took in the state of the room.  I didn’t expect her next question.

          “Where’s Anna?”

          “She left.”  Duncan’s curt reply was the only answer Caitlin needed.

          She then gave one of her best performances ever.  “She got us good!”  Caitlin actually laughed.

          “Who?”  Alex’s confusion was mirrored in the eyes of everyone in the room.

          “Anna.  She hypnotized us.”

          A girl from Caitlin’s drama class spoke up.  “What?  That’s ridiculous!”

          “That’s what I said when Anna told me she could hypnotize people.  Guess she decided to prove me wrong.”

          Another girl took up the argument.  “That’s impossible.  She couldn’t hypnotize all of us.”

          “How else can you explain nobody remembering how the furniture got over there?  She hypnotized us into moving it.  I bet she got the whole thing on video.  She’s probably posting it on YouTube right now.”

          “Cool,” Alex said.  “I can’t wait to see it!”

          “Guys, please help me move it back and clean up this mess before my mom gets home.”

          I gave Caitlin a grateful look.  With all of us working together, it took only minutes to set everything right again.  The party continued with cake and ice cream.  It was surreal to be singing Happy Birthday and watching Caitlin blow out the candles after what just happened.  Caitlin opened her presents and smiled as if she didn’t have a care in the world.  I knew that she was dying to hear the real story, but it had to wait until all of her guests left.  Duncan and I pretended to leave so that Alex would go home, too.  We walked down the street and sat in Duncan’s car until Caitlin came out of her house.  She couldn’t call me on my cell phone, because Anna had destroyed it.

          Caitlin led us back into the basement.  “Mom’s upstairs taking a shower.  Talk fast.”

          Duncan and I told the story as if we had rehearsed it.  When one would falter with the words, the other would finish the sentence and continue the story.  Caitlin’s eyes grew wide with horror as Duncan described Anna’s attack on me.

          “What are we going to do?”

          “I don’t know,” I said.  “We better go before your mom sees us.”

          Caitlin walked us to the door.  We heard a hairdryer running as we passed the stairs to the upper floor.

           “What’s this crystal that Anna wants?”

         “I don’t know,” Duncan said.  “Whatever it is, I don’t have it.”

         “I’m so sorry about your party.”

          “It’s not your fault, Suzy.  Anyway, it’s a birthday I’ll never forget, at least the parts I can remember.”

          We said goodnight and walked back to Duncan’s house.  He was going to drive me home.

          “What are we going to do?”  I looked around, fearing that Anna would attack us at any moment.

          “I think we’re okay for now.  That must have taken a lot out of her.  She’s going to need to rest and get her strength back,” Duncan said.

          “Then what?  Is she going to keep coming after us?  She doesn’t believe that you don’t have her crystal.”

          “Let’s go talk to Mom.  Maybe she can figure something out.”

          We entered the house and found Mrs. Mkkenna in the kitchen making tea.  She watched us approach with solemn eyes.  “What’s happened?  Why is Susannah here?  You know that’s not safe for her.”

          “Nowhere is safe for her.  Anna’s come after her.”  Duncan told his mother the whole story while I sat wearily in my chair.

          She seemed to wilt as she listened to his account of Anna’s attack on me.  “I’m so sorry, Susannah.  You’ve been caught in the middle, and it’s all my fault.”

          “It’s my fault,” Duncan began, but his mom kept talking over him.

          “I didn’t think it through.  I just acted on instinct.”

          I was still confused, but Duncan looked at her in astonishment.  “You mean you took her crystal?”

          “I had to.  I had to stop her before she became unstoppable.”

          He put his head in his hands.  “I can’t believe this.”

          “What is it?” I asked.  “Why is it so important to her?”

          “It’s called the Crystal of Devotion.  As far as we know, it’s the only one of its kind.  It allows the one who possesses it to take power from another.”

          “That’s how she did it?”

          I stared from mother to son.  “Did what?”

          “She was stealing Duncan’s abilities.”

          “What?  How is that possible?” I asked.

          “I didn’t know either until I stumbled onto a reference about the Crystal of Devotion during my research.  It explained what had happened to Duncan.  I knew that Anna must have it, and that I had to destroy it.”

          “So it’s gone.”  Duncan’s voice was strained.

          “No.  I was planning to destroy it, but I couldn’t.”

          “You mean it’s unbreakable?”  Duncan stood up and began to pace.

          “No, I mean that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  I had this very strong feeling that I shouldn’t break it.”

          “How does it work?”  He looked at the floor as he asked this.

          “The giver must be emotionally open to the receiver.”  Mrs. Mkkenna gave Duncan a sympathetic look.  “The conduit is love.”

           There was silence as we all took this in.  Duncan had been in love with Anna, and she had used it against him.

          Duncan’s voice interrupted my thoughts.  “We’d better go.  Susannah is tired.”

          “Yes,” Mrs. Mkkenna agreed.  “The battle with Anna required a lot of energy.”

          We didn’t have any idea what to do about Anna.  Duncan told me that he and his mom would figure something out, but he didn’t look convinced.  He started the car and backed out of the driveway.

          “How did you find out that she was stealing your abilities?” I asked.

          “I started to lose them.  It was for short stretches of time at first.  Anna and I would be sharing our thoughts, and I would blank out on hers.  They would fade in and out.  Then sometimes I’d be talking with Mom that way, and she couldn’t hear me.  I got physically weak too, and I started getting sick more often.  Anna was concerned at first, but then she started coming up with excuses of why she couldn’t come over.  I thought maybe she had found someone else.”

          “Did she?”

          “Yes, but it was worse than I thought.  Anna wasn’t in school that day.  She texted me that she was sick, and I thought she had caught what I’d had the week before.  But then I saw that Tyler wasn’t at school either.  He was always flirting with her, and I could tell that she liked it.  I decided to go to her house and see if she was really sick.  I saw Tyler pull out of her driveway just as I was driving up her street, and I pulled over and ducked down.  Then I started to drive home, but I ended up parking on the next street over from hers.  I sat there working up the nerve to confront her.  I started driving back, but I saw her turn out of her street in the opposite direction.  So I followed her.”

          Now that he had started talking, I wanted to hear the entire story.  “Where was she going?”

          “To a middle class neighborhood.  No mansions there.  A man in a business suit answered the door when she got to his house.  He was older.  I’m guessing about thirty.  I went around the house, peeking in the windows.  I found them in a bedroom in the back.  They were kissing.  I thought they were going to—“  Duncan cleared his throat.  “She must have used the same sleeping spell on him that she did tonight, because he was completely out.”

          I waited for him to continue.  He looked tired now, too.  He kept his eyes on the road the entire time he was talking.

          “She held her hands over him.  There was, there was this energy around him.  I could see it.  I think it was his aura, maybe.  Then she somehow drew it to her.  It expanded around her and got really thin around him.  After that, I couldn’t see the energy anymore.  He woke up and tried to kiss her again.  She said something to him, and he followed her out of the room.  I waited until she left, and then I followed the guy to his job.  Guess it was his lunch break.  I hung around and found out his name was Keith.  The next day, I had Mom call me off of school.  I went to the guy’s office, but he never showed.  I made up a story and asked for him.  They said he was out sick.”

          I was starting to put it all together.  We had now arrived at my house, and Duncan idled the car.

          “I went back a few days later and saw him walk out of the building at noon with some coworkers.  They walked to a restaurant down the street.  They were walking in when I called his name inside my head.  He turned around, but I kept walking.  That’s how I knew what Anna was doing.  I confronted her that day, and she didn’t deny it.  She claimed that she didn’t know it had been making me sick.”

          “Duncan, that’s…”  Words failed me.

          “She’s the only girl that…”  He looked at me then.  “We were lovers, Susannah.  And the whole time we were together, she was slowly siphoning off my power.”

          I hugged him, and he held onto me.  Reluctantly, we got out of the car and walked to my door.

          “Get some rest, Susannah.  Get your strength back.”

          The unspoken part seemed to hang in the air between us—because you’re going to need it.