The Zodiac Collector (16 page)

I follow her gaze.

Zeena. She's standing next to Dad. They're both leaning on the counter, chatting. Why isn't he freaking out? She has vertical pupils. No one else on the planet has vertical pupils. It's a strictly animal trait, which means Zeena is not entirely human.

Dad nods. He's grinning weirdly and his eyes have a vacant look, like he's not really seeing anything. My heart squirms in my chest. “Yeah, the whole family is into it. I'm the blacksmith, my wife makes costumes and gowns, and my daughters Anne and Mary—they're twins—they just love to dress up.”

“Oh, how lovely.” The woman's fake sing-song voice grates on my ears.

Dad nods. His gaze shifts to us. “Hello, girls. William.”

“Hi, Mr. Devans.” William waves, then flips his hair out of his face. I melt, but only for a sec. I can't let him distract me from Zeena.

I take the toolbox from William and stare the old woman down as I stalk across the room. She's not the only one who can play scary. “We got what you asked for, Dad.”

Dad checks the toolbox. After a moment, he slaps the lid shut and says, “Excellent. Well, I'm going to get back to work. Nice talking to you.” He smiles at Zeena, then nods to us. “I'll be late for dinner, girls. Make sure your mom eats something.” He disappears into the back room, leaving us with the collector.

Mary and William flank me. We create a wall of solidarity and I feed off the vibes. “You shouldn't be here.”

The woman smiles at me, exposing her crooked and yellowed teeth. I step back, and our line of strength snaps. Brittle pieces litter the floor at our feet. My power wanes.

Zeena crowds closer. Her bad breath is as deadly as her words. “Be careful, Anne. Castor and Pollux don't like to be toyed with. They are jealous, especially of friendships with outsiders. They will turn against you, quite unexpectedly and for little reason.” Her reptilian stare slips to William. “What a handsome boy.”

He clears his throat. “Um, hi.”

That's it. I won't give her the chance to talk to William like she talked to Dad. I fold my arms, as if that'll stop my heart from pounding straight through my rib cage and out of my chest, the flipping coward that it is. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“That's right. You don't.” She sidesteps me to approach William. She presses a bony hand to his face and whispers something in another language. His face contorts with confusion, then goes blank. “Libra. How nice. Very balanced.”

“Are you done?” I slip back in between William and Zeena. Hopefully, my weak knees won't buckle.

“Anne,” Mary warns.

The woman glances at her, then grins at me. “She's the steadier one, isn't she? And you're the fireball. Prone to anger like your mother.”

“You don't know—”

“Oh, but I
do
know. The stars tell me everything. You're too bold to understand that I've already won, and it's only a matter of time.”

“Won what?” My brow furrows.

“Exactly.” She retreats on her own, but her laughter lingers, just like her musty smell.

Mary lets out a breath. I lean against the counter, gasping for air in the vacuum Zeena left behind.

William blinks several times, then looks around the room like he's seeing it for the first time. “What's going on? Why were you so rude to that old lady?”

“Rude? No, she…” I gurgle, stuck on the explanation. Zeena's muting spell is as potent as ever. “I can't do this. We have to change the…you know.” I throw my hand out and wiggle my fingers.

Mary nods. “I know. Otherwise…”

“Wow, you guys are making no sense. I'm gonna go. When you figure out what you want to tell me, let me know.” William rolls his eyes and leaves.

“Wait.” What the heck? He rushes away so fast that I have to jog to catch up to him. “William.”

He spins on me. A different version of William stands before me. The lines of his face are hard and his eyes stony. He's never looked at me this way before, not even when we're mad at each other. “What is it, Anne? You act like you can't talk, you keep doing sign language with Mary. If you don't want me around, why don't you just tell me?”

“What are you talking about? We want you around.
I
want you around. It's just we…can't tell you. We—”

“Never mind. It's a sister thing. I understand. The old woman said you'd keep secrets from me.”

An avalanche of subzero shock smothers me. My heart shivers from the cold. “What? When did she say that?”

“Don't act like you don't know.” He sprints away.

“William!” My chest tightens, but it's not from an asthma attack. It's from the jabs of pain from William's accusation.

That old witch must've enchanted him or something. I press a shaky hand to my lips. Zeena is more powerful than I could've imagined. All it took was a few seconds, a couple words, and my friendship with William is broken, tearing further apart with every step away he takes. Tears burn at my eyes, melting my soul and sparking a chain reaction of fury and hurt. I'm not losing my best friend because of some old woman. It's time to chat with Castor and Pollux—the twins, not the dogs.

Chapter Thirteen

M
ary watches me set a candle in each of the four corners. She sits on her bed and eyes her closet like it's begging her to reorganize it again. “Can you at least put away all the stuff that might fly around? I don't want to get a pencil lodged in my forehead. And let Castor and Pollux out.”

Thunder crashes from above.

“Really?” I glare at the ceiling, then pour some stardust on a small plate and set it in the middle of the room. Sitting on the floor, I flip through the pages of my spellbook and search for a modification spell. Not returning it is another promise to Gamma I'm breaking. This one is for a good reason, though. I want to fix all this stuff before Gamma finds out about it. Otherwise, I'll probably never have another chance to learn magicks from her.

“We might have to change the dogs' names.” Mary bites her fingernail. “I don't know about this, Anne. What if we make it worse? Didn't Gamma say to bring the book back to her?”

“For goodness sake. An old witch is after us, our parents are lunatics, and William is mad at me. How much worse can it get?”

“Never ask that question.” Mary collects the knickknacks from her bedside table and shoves them in a drawer. Then she carefully places Julius and Maximus in the trunk at the end of her bed. “Come on, pups, out.” She ushers the dogs out of the room. They immediately start scratching at our door.

“Stop it, Cas and Pol!” I holler. No thunder. Guess the Gemini twins don't respond to nicknames. Good. The scratching stops but whining ensues. I pull out my notebook to jot down some verses.

“Why don't you apologize to him? You did act pretty weird.” She stuffs loose papers into the desk.

“I think the old woman warped his mind somehow.” I crumple the paper I scribbled on and start over.

“I wish Grandmother never gave you that book.” She kneels on the floor, directly across from me.

“I know you hate this stuff. But you don't have to rub it in.”

“I'm not rubbing it in. Gawd, you can be so sensitive sometimes.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail.

“Whatever.” I impale the page with my pen. My mind is a wasteland, frigid and stark like the Arctic Circle. Sheets of white ice cover my brain, suffocating the brave seedlings of ideas. A moan trickles across the barren landscape. I know nothing about magick and I really think I can go up against a master at it?

“So we're going to do a reversal spell, right? Make everything the way it was?”

“Something like that.” Her idea jostles the glacier coating my neurons. I jot down anything and everything that seeps through the cracks, then review what I wrote. It's junk. I rip out the page and toss it.

“What're you doing?” She crawls around the room, picking up the trash and loose balls of paper.

I huff and open the spellbook again. “Reversal spells are complicated. Involve warping time and erasing peoples' memories.”

She leans forward. “Wait. What?”

“At least, that's what I read in the book.”

“We're not going to travel in time, are we?” She picks up a leftover shard of Castor's bone and pokes at the pad of her thumb.

“No.” I can't get a simple secret spell to work, let alone pull off distorting the time-space continuum.

“Ouch!” She drops the bone fragment and squeezes her thumb. A drop of blood plunks on the stardust. “Jabbed myself.”

“Better wash it.”

Nodding, she paws through her drawer for hand sanitizer and a Band-Aid. The bottle is half-empty and she's only had it a week. She flips open the lid, drops a dollop the size of Texas into her palm, and sticks her thumb in the goop. Her face scrunches and she sucks air through her teeth. “Then how do we fix it?”

I run my fingers along the edge of the pages. “Forget the reversal spell. The best way to solve the problem is to ask the Gemini twins permission to speak freely and for protection from Z.”

Wind howls outside and presses on the window. The house creaks and stutters in reply.

“Don't say her name.” Her green eyes flicker with fear.

“There's one problem. If Z is doing her own chanting, we might be fighting to use the same power. She's the Zodiac Collector, after all. Why else would she be so mad at us for invoking the twins?”

“But we control our sign, right?” She pries open the Band-Aid. After wrapping the bandage around her bleeding finger, she drops to her butt.

“Yeah, but she's gathering all the signs' powers. We're blocking her from completing her collection.” The words tumble out of my mouth, caught on their own cascade of interlocking chain links. As individual pieces, they were weak and brittle, but together, they wedge us in a predicament somewhere between dire and futile.

She moans and drops her face into her hands. “This isn't supposed to be happening. We're supposed to be studying for SAT, wandering the faire…”

“Flirting with Evan?”

She lifts her head. “You're one to talk. All you can do is make googly eyes with William these days.”

I slump. “And he's mad at me right now. It's her fault. We should chant for her to disappear.”

“Can we do that?”

“I don't know.”

“Grandmother would. Why don't you want to tell her?”

Confession time. “Gamma wants me to return the book.”

“Are you serious?” She's on her feet and pacing the room in a flash. Her hair bounces with every step, highlighting her agitation. “Why couldn't you listen to her? Why do you always have to go and do everything on your own?”

“I know. I'm sorry. This is all my fault.”

She halts in front of me.

I stare up at her, twisting my eyebrows in a forgive-me pose.

She hooks her thumbs through the belt loops and kneels. “We're in this together. We'll figure it out. It's not our fault some old lady is totally crazy.”

“I don't deserve a sister like you.”

“I wish you'd remember that more often.”

I stick out my pinky finger and she hooks hers with mine. “I need you.”

“Ditto. Even if you are a witch.”

“Gee, thanks.”

We giggle. The lights flicker.

“All right. Let's do this.” Striking a match, I light the candles as before, calling out the directions and the elements.

“What about the chant?” Mary asks.

“Just close your eyes and concentrate. Let me do the talking.”

I hold out my hands, palms up, and Mary holds her palms down, hovering above mine. The same steadiness that linked us when we stood in a line confronting Zeena courses through me. My skin tingles like a million ants are scurrying along invisible tracks along my hands, arms, and up to my chest. I chant:

“There. All done.” I let go of Mary's hands and blow out the candles.

Everything goes dark. Like locked in a coffin kind of dark. The only sounds are my whooshing pulse and my stringy breath. I gasp, sucking on an empty void. My throat burns, thirsting for the cool, blast of refreshing air that doesn't come.

“What is that?” Mary's scream rips into the anti-matter stuffing our room. The anti-matter explodes with a screech. The flutter of a thousand bat wings shudders above us. My hair whips around me, clamps over my face, and tries to suffocate me.

I dive for my bed and wiggle under the covers, scraping sticky strands from my mouth.

The dogs bark and scratch at the door. The hinges whine. A deep moan shifts the ceiling. Tiny beaks pick at me through the blankets.

“Anne, make it stop!” She yanks the covers up and dives under with me. We pant in each other's faces.

“I don't know how.”

“Can't you tell the twins?”

“Maybe.”

“Try it!” Her breath is hot and heavy with terror.

“Castor and Pollux, please stop!”

The magick pummels us with one last round of pecks and halts. Soft light glows through the blanket, and while breathing underneath it reminds me of sucking on a blow dryer, at least I'm getting air into my lungs.

“Anne. What did we do?”

“The chant. It must've worked.” I hook an arm around her waist. “Castor and Pollux heard us.”