The Darkness Within (34 page)

Dylan looked each of us in the eye. “Where do we start? She never leaves that spell book out in the open. She guards it with her life.” Good. He was jumping right in. We didn’t have time to waste on a group hug anyway.

I dropped my hand from his shoulder. “I think she uses magic to conceal it.”

“I agree,” Ethan said. “Every time we finish our sessions, she leaves with the book. But at the start of each session, she conjures it
from somewhere. Ever since she first pulled it from the bookshelf, anyway.”

“So it’s under a spell.” I nodded. “That’s good. Spells are traceable.”

“Unless she made sure to cover her tracks.” Shannon pulled her knees up under her chin and hugged them. “She’s not stupid. If she doesn’t want us to see that book, she’ll make sure we don’t.”

“Except I
have
seen it.” I’d gotten so close to it. Close enough to read it, to touch it. “Oh my God!” How hadn’t I thought of this sooner? “She knows I read the spell!”

“How?” Ethan was at my side again.

“I tried to use magic to show Dylan and Shannon the pages I’d read. Only what was projected wasn’t the same as what I’d seen. It had been tampered with. Don’t you see? Mirabella realized I read the spell book and she made sure I couldn’t replicate the pages with magic. She knew I’d go to you guys, so she made sure I’d look like I was making it all up.” Damn, she was good at being evil!

“This is seriously creepy stuff.” Shannon couldn’t get into a smaller ball on that chair if she tried.

Dylan started pacing again. “We have to wait until we know she’s asleep before we get the book. Otherwise, she’ll catch us. She’s way more powerful than I gave her credit for.”

“We all underestimated her,” Ethan said. “I’ve been with her more than you guys, and I had no idea about any of this.”

I rubbed his arm. “You were in a trance. You didn’t remember anything she said or did. It’s not your fault.”

“Maybe, but what else has she done? If she fooled me so easily—”

“She fooled all of us.” I squeezed Ethan’s arm. I didn’t want him blaming himself. As I stared at him, another realization hit me. “I think she drugged the tea.”

“What?” Shannon shook her head. “That’s crazy. She was drinking the same tea. We’ve already figured out it was the coven that put the dark magic in it.”

Ethan whipped his head back and forth between Shannon and me. “There’s dark magic in the tea?”

I’d forgotten he wasn’t around for that. “Yes, but it stayed in the cups. We’re all fine.” I met Shannon’s gaze. “Maybe she didn’t drug
the tea, but she put a spell on it—before we found out about the dark magic. Kind of like the spell Ms. Matthews put on me that day in her classroom. I started talking and saying things I’d never meant to say.”

Shannon narrowed her brows. “Maybe. I really didn’t mean to tell her all that stuff about you in the kitchen. I never meant to tell anyone about what Nora did to you. It sort of slipped out.”

“Because you’d finished your tea.”

“We don’t know that,” Dylan said. “Shannon can be a blabbermouth sometimes. It’s her ‘tell it like it is’ attitude.”

“I don’t think so. I think Mirabella used the tea to get information from us. I think she’s still trying to use it that way. That’s why she wanted us to drink tea just a little while ago. She’s suspicious of us.”

“What about the dark magic, though?” Ethan asked.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. She might not know about it. It’s most likely Ms. Matthews and Mr. Ryan’s coven is trying to get to us again. Or Mirabella suspected we were on to her and the dark magic in the tea so she laced her own tea with it.”

“Guys,” Dylan said, “we need to get back to finding the spell book. All these other things can wait. It’s not like we have answers to these questions anyway.”

“No, we just keep getting more questions,” Shannon said.

Sometimes I really missed Shannon’s old cocky attitude. Ever since she’d removed the popularity spell, she wasn’t the same person. I never thought I’d miss the old Shannon, but she had been pretty kickass, and we could’ve used that right now. “Magic is the answer to everything, right?” I smiled at her. “Let’s bring back that theory and use our magic to find the spell book.” I hoped the reminder would snap her out of her frightened state.

She stood up and walked over to me. “Remember the first day we met? You walked into class and Mr. Ryan was totally giving you all the attention?” Of course I remembered. All I’d wanted to do was hide, but instead he’d made me read aloud from
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, which could’ve been my diary at the time. “I hated you. I hated that he paid attention to you for no reason, and he brushed me off like I was nothing but a pest.”

I knew what she was doing. She was trying to make herself mad, because pissed-off Shannon didn’t take crap from anyone, not even
a truly scary witch like Mirabella. “Tristan told me all about you,” I said. “How you were his twin sister, how you asked Mr. Ryan questions just to hear him say certain words that you’d later pretend he was saying because he was as into you as you were into him.”

Shannon looked about ready to explode. “I’m good. Tell me what we’re looking for exactly. What did the page say? We can find the words, and they’ll lead us to the book.”

Now we were in business. Shannon was taking charge, which of course made Dylan mad, but maybe it would fuel him the same way. “I’m not sure I remember the exact words.”

“You have to, or the spell won’t work.” Dylan was by my side again, closing our circle. “Think.”

My mind raced. I pulled together the magic inside me, using it to search my brain. It only took a moment to find what I was looking for. “Got it.”

Shannon and Dylan had a swirling mist of golden energy glowing in the center of our circle. This was the magic that would search out the words I spoke. They nodded to me. I looked at Ethan, who mouthed, “You can do this.”

I took a deep breath and began reading the words that were now floating around in my mind. “‘Dark magic can be transferred to a willing host, but the new host body must be strong enough to take it. The magic has to be severed from the previous host and pulled into the new one. It cannot be transferred by a third party. The new host must be the one pulling the magic into their own body.’” When I finished, the golden magic thinned out and floated under the door.

“What do we do now?” Ethan asked.

Dylan looked at his watch. “We hope Mirabella doesn’t see the golden energy on her way to bed.”

We’d been up here talking for a while. Mirabella might have gone to bed, or she could’ve made a big meal for herself. There was no way to be sure without risking getting caught. “I’ll go see where she is,” I said.

“No.” Dylan reached for my hand. His fingers grazed mine as I pulled away. “We’re doing this together. No splitting up from this point on.”

I nodded. Strength in numbers and all that. I opened the door
and peeked down the hallway. Mirabella’s door was closed. That didn’t mean much, because she always kept it closed. Shannon waved us toward the door. She definitely had a spell in mind, and since my only plan was to sneak around and pray we didn’t get caught, I was on board. Shannon raised her hand and ran it in a circular motion. “Form a window clear as glass,” she whispered. “Let me see what now does pass.” The door shimmered, and in seconds a circular window appeared. I stepped back when I saw Mirabella sitting on her bed. “She can’t see you,” Shannon said.

I crept closer, trying to figure out what was in Mirabella’s hand. It was a little green snake of dark magic.

“That’s all the proof I need,” Ethan said. “She’s using dark magic. Probably mine.”

“But for what?” Shannon asked.

Mirabella opened her hand, and the green snake slithered through the air, coming straight for us. No doubt about it. Mirabella had cast that thing to spy on us—or maybe worse, to kill us. Either way, we were sitting targets. “Run!” I said in a loud whisper.

We headed downstairs. For some reason I was leading the group, and all I could think about was how I wasn’t going to be the girl in the horror movie who trapped herself upstairs when the killer was chasing her. I wanted to get to the basement, where the exit was nearby and easily accessible.

“We can’t keep running,” Dylan said, closing the basement door behind us, not that it would even slow down the green snake. “We have to find the book.”

“We need to stop that thing first.” Shannon was already casting another spell.

I grabbed her hand. “No! Wait!”

“What?” She shook me off her. “Are you crazy? That thing is going to kill us.”

“And Mirabella will do it herself if we destroy that thing. We have to get it to obey us.” Everyone looked at me like I was green and full of dark magic. “Okay, maybe not obey us, but we can confuse it. We’ll create images of ourselves and let it spy on those. Then it can report back to Mirabella or do whatever else it was supposed to.”

The green snake slithered under the door. I pulled Ethan to the
sliding glass door. “Now! Create a duplicate image of yourself!” I made my twin in seconds. Shannon and Dylan had theirs ready too, but Ethan was standing there looking confused.

“It’s not working.”

I created the image for him and pushed him outside, leaving the door cracked so we could hear our clones. Shannon and Dylan followed. We hid in the bushes, watching our images. Shannon controlled them like puppets. Making them talk about stupid things like missing school and what our deer-twins were doing in our places back home. It was pretty convincing. The green magic swirled above them for several minutes before it left the way it had come. We ended the spells, making our images disappear.

“What happened?” Ethan stared at his hands. “I couldn’t get my magic to work at all. I felt it stir a little, but it was like it wasn’t fully there.”

Goosebumps ran up my arms and legs. I’d been right all along. Mirabella was taking Ethan’s dark magic into herself. But what I hadn’t realized was that she was taking
all
of his magic. When she was finished with the spell, Ethan wouldn’t be a witch anymore.

36

D
YLAN
, Shannon, and I shared a look. Finally, they were catching on, figuring out Mirabella’s plan. She was stealing more than just Ethan’s dark magic. She was taking every ounce of magic in him. She was bleeding him dry. That was why his spell had failed. That was why he’d felt so lightheaded after the last session. The transfer of power was almost complete.

“I’m losing it all, aren’t I?” Ethan’s eyes met mine. He looked lost and helpless. “I won’t be like you guys anymore. Can I even survive without magic after what’s happened to me? I was a monster. A killer. What am I now?”

“You’re Ethan.” I wrapped my arms around him, hugging him to me. “You’ll always be my Ethan. I don’t care if you have power or not. It doesn’t change anything.”

“Yes, it does.” He pulled back, but I took his face in my hands.

“Listen to me. You won’t change. Even when you became a witch, you were still you.”

“I won’t be part of the coven anymore. I’ll lose that connection to you.” The pain on his face was unbearable. “You’ll be closer to Shannon and…” he swallowed hard, “…and Dylan than you will be to me.”

“No.” I shook my head, but I knew in a way it was true. The bond within the coven was so strong. Even when we fought, we knew we’d risk our lives for each other. We were one. My relationship with
Ethan got even stronger after we’d bound our magic. If that tie was cut, things really wouldn’t be the same.

“Magic is a tricky thing.” We all spun around at the sound of Mirabella’s voice. “It fools the senses. It makes something out of nothing. Like the image of me in my room.”

She’d used the same spell we had, and we’d fallen for it. “That wasn’t you. You tricked us.”

“Much like you tried to trick me.” She walked around us, forcing us to stay close to each other. “I saw the entire thing. Those images were quite convincing. You’re all getting much better with your spells. All except Ethan, that is.” She stopped to smile at him. “Such a shame—for you, I mean. It’s all good for me.”

I stepped between Mirabella and Ethan. “We already know you’re taking his dark magic. That you want it for yourself. So why don’t you fill in the blanks for us and tell us why?”

“Was it the dark magic you got from me?” Dylan asked. “Did it do this to you when the spell backfired?”

Mirabella laughed. “You stupid boy. My spell never backfired. It did exactly what I wanted it to. It gave me
more
dark magic.”

I had to keep her talking while we figured out a way to get out of here. Stroking her ego was my best bet, even if it meant lying through my teeth. “Wow, and I thought Nora had been a good actress, but the performance you put on makes hers look like—”

“Child’s play.” Mirabella smiled. “That was the problem with Nora. She thought too small. She was like an annoying little mosquito. But no matter. She got me what I was after, and now I have almost all of Ethan’s dark magic, too, which was technically hers. So in a way, I owe Nora a thank you.” She looked down as if peering into Hell. “Thanks, sister.”