Uncle Barnabas’s eyes narrowed to thin, pale slits. His hair was glowing under the old lightbulb. “He’s getting more powerful, isn’t he? I told you that pocket spells wouldn’t be enough. Perhaps this will inspire you to remember where your mother placed her grimoire.”
But…Nell knew exactly where the grimoire was. Missy had told me it was at her shop. Why not go get it and see if there was a spell in there that might actually work, if she really meant to help me?
I shook my head. No. She must have already checked and found nothing. Nell said that grimoires weren’t just spell books, but served as private journals. Even if she was protecting her mom’s privacy, she could tell him that.
But Nell clearly had no problem lying to her father, or at least keeping secrets, did she?
An excellent point, Maggot. I wonder, how can you entrust your life to two people who endeavor to keep secrets from each other? Because surely if they lie to each other…they lie to you as well.
It got bad. Real fast.
What I learned right away was that I could push back against Alastor and regain control of my body—when he was tired. And pretty much only when he was tired.
After trapping Nightlock downstairs and locking the basement door, Nell and I went back to the attic. She stayed up the rest of the night making sure Al didn’t try anything. I was too exhausted to try to play it cool and stay awake too. I passed out the second my head hit the couch pillow.
But I had nightmares. Horrible, horrible nightmares. The kind that show you, in gory detail, your family dying. Your house burning down to little piles of ash. Falling off the side of a tall building. Being chased by red-eyed demons and fiends, feeling them tear you apart. It made me miss the prowling panther and its singing bone.
Nell and I went to school on Saturday and Sunday for play rehearsal. The art class rotated each day, coming in to finish each other’s work. Once, my hand “accidentally” jerked and nearly knocked over a whole can of paint onto the newly finished classroom backdrop we’d spent hours on. After that, I had to suck it up and lie, pretending I was sick and needed to sleep it off in the audience, which made me feel both useless and lazy. And, on Sunday, I stayed home with Uncle Barnabas and listened to the many, many ways Alastor was going to tear my family apart like confetti once he was free of my body.
Monday arrived like a snake, silently slithering up to us before we were prepared for it. Frost coated the world, and what leaves had managed to hang on to the trees dropped overnight with the sudden spike of cold temperature. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was some kind of ending.
I tried to keep my spirits up, knowing that fear and hopelessness only fed the malefactor. Failure couldn’t be an option when my family’s lives were on the line. But I couldn’t shake the shivers of dread that were working through my blood.
“What if I hurt somebody?” I whispered as we waited for the bus. Alastor was silent, but not sleeping. It felt like he was…waiting.
“I’ll be there,” Nell promised. “We have almost every class together. If it seems like it’s getting too bad, let me know. We’ll ditch. Everything will be okay.”
Everything was not okay. That much was clear from homeroom, when Mrs. Anderson stood at the front of the room and began to cry because Eleanor, the classroom tarantula, had gone missing.
“Please, if you find her…if you took her, just return her, no questions asked…”
I turned to look at Nell, but she only shrugged. Maybe the changeling had finally gone back to Missy. Still, it seemed weird that she would just leave when the point of her being there was to keep an eye on Nell. But, clearly, the witch herself didn’t seem to think so.
In math class, Alastor made me kick the girl sitting in front of me until she cried and the teacher sent me out into the hall for being “rude and disruptive.” And because Nell couldn’t go with me, I ended up spending the rest of the hour slamming my good hand into the side of the building until the knuckles bled and I was sure it was broken. Nell was horrified, but there wasn’t much she could do beyond take me to the nurse’s office.
Alastor still wasn’t done.
Mr. Gupta gave us a surprise pop quiz on the Greek gods in humanities. I was tired and felt a little fuzzy, but I knew all the answers. Or, at least, I thought I did. At the end of the class, the teacher waved me over. His dark eyes narrowed as he looked at my twitchy, bandaged hand. Which I’m sure seemed even worse when I used my other already bandaged arm to hold it down.
“I didn’t realize you could speak Greek,” he said.
The sinking, sick feeling was back in the pit of my stomach. “I can’t….”
“Oh, really?” Mr. Gupta asked, holding up my sheet. “Then, in that case, please don’t waste my time or mock me. If you don’t know the answer, just leave it blank.”
I squinted at my first answer. It was my dark, smeared handwriting all right, but…it was definitely not in English.
My answer is perfectly correct, Alastor said. I don’t see what he’s so upset about.
“I’m impressed you know this many Greek letters,” Mr. Gupta said. “I suppose I should give you some points for creativity.”
“I’m…sorry, sir?” I said, because I had no idea what else I could say.
Nell was smart enough to separate us from the rest of the kids at lunch. We ate out on the basketball court, then moved onto the nearby field when other students wandered over to play a quick game before the bell went off again.
“Nell!” We both turned at the sight of Norton, dressed in head-to-toe red, jogging toward us across the dead grass.
“What’s got you mad today?” I asked, eyeing what looked like a red puffy snowsuit. To be fair, he looked the warmest out of everyone sitting outside on that icicle of a day. Behind him, one of the basketball players was so distracted at the sight she threw her pass too hard and it hit Parker square in the head from where he was watching from the sidelines.
Norton raised his eyebrows. “What makes you think I’m mad? Red is the color of passion—oh, never mind. Here! I remembered.”
In his hand was an old, beat-up iPod.
“Thank you!” Nell threw her arms around him, and his face suddenly matched his suit.
“N-no problem,” he said. “It’s yours. I got a new one for my birthday a few weeks ago.”
I waited until Norton wandered off at the warning bell before asking, “What’s that for?”
Instead of answering, Nell shoved the earbuds into my ears and began scrolling through the menu to find what she was looking for. But she wasn’t in the music section—Nell was in the alarm one. Before I could repeat my question, the sound of bells—big, metal, hearty bells—were clanging in my ears.
Al shrieked. Legitimately shrieked.
I pulled out the earbuds, enjoying his pathetic moaning maybe a little too much. “Wow, he’s not a fan.”