From Bad to Cursed (28 page)

It was like falling backward onto a feather bed after spending a day doing hard labor.

And like some vile parasite, the traitorous thought writhed in my head:
It’s just Zoe.

By the time I got my feet untied and stood up, I was like a new girl.

I was Aralt’s girl.

L
YDIA WAS DRESSED
like a movie star from the 1940s, in a slim-fitting red dress with a deep V-neck and a floppy red bow on her hip. Her hair was pulled back tightly, and she had a small red feathered barrette pinned near the top of her head.

She looked beautiful. The dress caught the light and held it; it hadn’t been cheap. I thought I recalled seeing it in one of the magazines we’d passed around at lunch.

I didn’t think about her giving Tashi’s ring to my sister. That didn’t automatically mean Lydia had killed Tashi, anyway—maybe Tashi gave it to her.

Yes, of course,
said the voice inside me.
What a smart girl you are to figure that out. What a sweet, good girl.

“We protect your dwelling with our blood and our lives,” Lydia said. And every voice in the room repeated:
“We protect your dwelling with our blood and our lives.”

“As you all know,” Lydia said, “for the past several weeks, we’ve had the privilege of being part of the Sunshine Club. With Aralt’s blessing, we were all able to improve ourselves and become more beautiful, popular, successful, and smart. We’ve taken what he offered and made the most of it, and now it’s time to make a real change. To dedicate our lives to a cause bigger than our little group.”

Like curing diseases. Negotiating peace treaties. Creating art.

“Tonight…we graduate.”

Applause.

I sat back in my chair and looked around while Lydia continued her speech.

We all looked overdressed in the Smalls’ dank, dingy basement. The room was about twenty by thirty feet. The poured concrete floor had crumbled with age, and the ceiling was so low that it seemed to push down on us, stifling the air in the room. The stairs that led down from the creaking hallway were hardly more than a glorified ladder.

One side of the room was completely filled with piles of boxes, leaving the rest open. A long snack table was set up under a wide, low window, but no one had touched a bite of food.

It was for afterward, for the celebration.

The Sunshine Club occupied a circle of folding chairs. Every girl was perfectly coiffed and made-up, every dress perfectly pressed.

In the center was a makeshift podium.

Kasey had sat down a few chairs away from me. Like everyone else, she was brimming with excitement. Why shouldn’t we be? After tonight, we would begin leading the kind of lives most people can only dream of. Money. Success. Fame. Anything we wanted, basically.

Zoe, for her part, had never looked as radiant as she did sitting there, practically overflowing with her secret. Her eyes glowed with affection as she glanced around the room. There was also a tinge of self-satisfaction. Almost smugness.

She really was happy to do it, just like Farrin had said someone would be.

Lydia reached down and opened the book.

“And now,” she said, “we begin. Alexis, would you do the honor?”

This distinction—letting me be the one to lead the spell—was Lydia’s idea. She’d been so thrilled by my renewed devotion that she suggested it immediately.

I walked over to the book and gazed around the room at the happy faces looking back at me.

Forget Elspeth. If someone was holding out a lottery ticket to you, you’d take it, wouldn’t you? Not taking it would make you a fool, wouldn’t it?

This could be the best thing that ever happened to me.

The best thing that ever happened to me.

Where had I heard that before?

It was what Farrin had said to me.

And I believed it.

But not because I’d thought about it—only because she’d made me believe it. She’d manipulated me the way I manipulated everyone around me. She probably did it without thinking. Like reading lines out of a play.

Was she ever real? Did she ever get to choose for herself? Or was it always about the right thing according to Aralt? The right thing to further the aims of her friends? Was she free?

Or was she only as free as Aralt let her be?

I looked back down at the spell and opened my mouth. Then I closed the book.

Disappointed sighs rose around the room like bubbles in a fish tank. Lydia was on the verge of leaping out of her chair.

“I…just wanted to tell you,” I said, “how much I care about you all. And how great it’s been…being your sister.”

Everyone muttered polite replies. You could tell they all hoped I’d just get on with it.

But I couldn’t get on with it. I’d made up my mind—my
own
mind, for once. The other girls might tear me to pieces and go on without me. But as far as my part in it was concerned, I knew I could never bow down to Aralt.

I’d once thought I’d choose death over a life without Aralt.

But now a life
with
him felt like death anyway.

I opened the book again. Lydia sat up straight. “I marked the page,” she said.

I expected to see
TUGANN SIBH
at the top of the page. But the one Lydia had marked was different. It said
TOGHRAIONN SIBH
.

The names were similar, and the book was full of spells. It would be easy to mix them up.

I glanced at Lydia. “Are you sure this is the one?”

“Yes,” she said. “I triple-checked it.”

If
Tugann
meant “we give,” what did
Toghraionn
mean?

Either Farrin was wrong or Lydia was wrong.

All of this flashed through my head in the space of about two seconds.

I glanced up at Lydia. At her red dress.

No.

At Tashi’s red dress—the dress Lydia had taken from her closet after she’d killed her and taken the book and slid the ring off her dead finger.

After she murdered her.

My eyes brushed across the room, and then I looked down at the book.

TOGHRAIONN SIBH
was on the right page.

There was another spell on the left.

TRÉIGANN SIBH.

The words were underlined with a violent slash of dark gray, obviously made by someone in a rush.

Someone like Tashi.

What Tashi had said to me, whispered frantically when she knew some great danger was approaching:
To abandon…try again.

And what Elspeth had spelled out on the Ouija board:
try again
.

Not “try again.”

Tréigann
.

The abandoning spell.

It was the spell we needed—and if Tashi had to entrust it to someone who could resist Aralt, that meant that Aralt wouldn’t be happy about the results. Aralt wanted the giving spell, because he wanted someone’s life energy.

So maybe the abandoning spell would rid us of Aralt—without anyone dying.

The only question was…what on earth was
Lydia
trying to get us to do?

T
RÉIGANN
S
IBH.
We abandon
.

At the moment, I trusted the advice of two dead women more than I trusted anyone else. Including myself.

So I read the abandoning spell, line by line. And the girls in the room recited it after me.

Halfway through, I felt a sharp pain in my side, like a stomach cramp. But I kept reading. And if anyone else felt anything, they ignored it too. There was no reason to suspect that a few small jabs of pain were something that shouldn’t be expected, endured. Anything could be endured for Aralt.

None of them knew the truth—that with every word, they were pushing him out of themselves, back into his book.

When I was finished, I closed the book and heaved a shaky sigh. My legs began to ache as if I’d just run a marathon. Around the room, I could tell that other girls were feeling it too. They rubbed their foreheads and stretched their necks from side to side.

Lydia, on the other hand, looked fine.

And that’s when it hit me: she hadn’t followed along when I read the spell. She’d sat silently, unmoving.

She didn’t know I’d read the wrong spell. She would have reacted.

So what was she doing?

“Now…we have one more task ahead of us,” I said, and my voice caught in my throat. I coughed convulsively a couple of times before forcing myself to stand up straight.

Everyone tried to smile, but they were feeling pretty bad. Zoe smoothed her skirt. But before she could take a step toward the center of the circle, Kasey was on her feet next to me.

“I want to do it,” Kasey said. “I want to be the gift for Aralt. Please. Let me.”

Zoe looked exactly how I felt—like she’d been body-slammed.

I stared down at my sister’s unblinking blue eyes, the pupils as big around as pencil erasers.

“Kasey,”
I said. It was just shock. But she thought I was arguing with her.

“
Please
, Lexi,” she said. “Let me be the gift.”

Lydia watched us, uneasy curiosity on her face.

So, because it had to look like things were going as planned, I numbly pointed to
Tréigann
. And Kasey read it again.

I prayed that I’d made the right choice, that reading this spell twice didn’t do something horrible to you. Maybe trusting Tashi and Elspeth had been foolish.

When she finished, the room was silent. “Okay,” I said, my fingers scrabbling with the pages. I hadn’t really thought past this part of the plan. I guess I’d been hoping there would be a big epiphany moment, everyone rubbing their eyes and saying, “What was
that
all about?”

Nope.

“I have to sign, right?” Kasey asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We should go…be alone.”

No one said anything, because everyone thought she was dying. They’d just sit there in their folding chairs with their manicured hands in their laps and wait while my sister died. Or would they get started on the snack table? Was Kasey supposed to go somewhere else and lie down and expire peacefully and not ruin our party?

Lydia’s voice cut through the room like a hot knife through butter. “There’s a little room around the corner.”

She meant the dark room they’d held me in earlier. I gave her a hard look. “Kasey deserves to be comfortable.”

My sister’s nerves started to fail her. “I think I’d rather go upstairs,” she said, her voice trembling. “I think I want to be in private.”

“Fine,” Lydia said. “We’ll go upstairs.”

“No, just me and Lexi,” Kasey whispered.

A few feet away, Mimi started fanning herself.

“I feel sick,” Kendra complained.

“Don’t worry,” Lydia said. She got up and looked around the room, searching the dark spaces, as if she was waiting for something. When she spoke, she sounded distracted. “It’ll only be for a minute.”

Kasey dragged herself up the steps, and I came behind her, holding the book.

She looked paler, thinner, somehow. “Should I lie down?” she whispered.

I knew she hadn’t read the giving spell, but my skin broke out in goosebumps. She’d meant to. She’d wanted to. She’d tried to sacrifice herself.

“Sit on the couch in the front room,” I said. The closer to the exit, the better. “I’ll get a pen.”

She shuffled away while I eased back toward the base- ment door. There was an old, loose doorknob that shifted around under your hand when you touched it, and a small metal hook that fit into a loop on the frame. I gently pressed the button lock on the knob; as I’d guessed, it jiggled uselessly. Then I slid the hook in the loop and slowly shifted one of the kitchen chairs under the knob.

I went back to the living room, where Kasey was laid out like a fainting victim.

“I don’t feel good,” she whispered.

Neither did I. “Come on, Kase, get up.”

She sat up. “Where’s the pen?”

“There is no pen,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

Her jaw dropped. “But I—”

“You’re not dying. That was a different spell. I think Aralt is back in the book, and now I need to destroy it. You have to come with me, because they’ll think you were in on it.”

“Oh, Lexi!” she said, her face falling. “How
could
you?”

The only thing worse than the sheer absurdity of the question was the fact that she really was disappointed that she wasn’t going to die.

“We have to get out of here,” I said. “I’m going to go see if there are any car keys sitting around. You wait here.”

She slumped over, utterly forlorn.

I went back to the kitchen and looked for stray purses. Aha! Megan’s was nestled in the corner of the counter. I dug through it, but couldn’t find the keys.

From behind me came a jingling sound. “Looking for these?”

I turned to see Megan standing in the doorway.

“I believed you, Lex. I stood up for you.” She shook her head. “Even when you excluded me, abandoned me for your boyfriend or your sister…I was always ready to be there for you. And this is how you repay me?”

Then she drew her hand from behind her back to reveal a kitchen knife. Not some dollar-store apple peeler, but a big, fat one from the days when the Smalls had a fully stocked gourmet kitchen.

“Seriously,” she said. “I’m
so
disappointed.”

She lunged at me, but the separation from Aralt was slowing her down, dulling her reflexes. I dodged out of the way, and the knife just barely nicked my arm. I forced myself to ignore the sting and ran around the other side of the table.

“It’s too late,” I said. “It’s over. If you stop to think about it—”

“I don’t want to stop to think!” she said. “I want to teach you what it means to be loyal to Aralt. And the price you pay for betraying him. Betraying
me
, Alexis.”

From the living room came my sister’s timid voice. “Lexi? What’s going on?”

Megan froze. “Or maybe your sister can be the gift after all.”

Knife raised, she spun around and headed toward Kasey.

From the end of the hallway, the doorknob rattled. “Hey!” Lydia yelled. “What are you doing up there?”

I grabbed the first thing I could find, a heavy metal kitchen stool, and ran after Megan. She was waiting for me, a few feet from my sister.

“Oh, you found a chair!” Megan said, her voice mocking. “I’m so scared. What are you going to do, sit on me? Or are you going to kill me? I mean, you couldn’t kill your family, but I’m just your best friend. I hardly even count.”

She lunged toward Kasey, who tried to dash away—but Megan’s knife grazed her leg.

My sister yelped in pain and limped backward as Megan steadied herself for another charge.

I didn’t stop to think. I swung the chair low, like a croquet mallet. It hit Megan’s left knee with a sickening crunch. She screamed and fell sideways, grabbing her leg as she hit the ground and curled into a ball.

Kasey, snapped out of her self-pity spiral by the sight of someone coming at her with a knife, was on her feet, halfway to the front door.

There was banging from the basement, then a more concentrated rattle. They were trying to get out—and it probably wouldn’t take them long.

I scooped up the book and followed Kasey to the front yard. It was dark out; I’d been unconscious in the basement for almost an entire day. My sister could hardly even walk on her injured leg.

“Go on without me,” she said. “I can hide in the bushes.”

“If they find you, they’ll kill you,” I said.

“They won’t find me,” she said. “Now run!”

I was about to protest, to try to figure out something safer, but then I looked at the shrubs. Kasey was right. They were so wild and untended that nobody would ever see her. She was already hobbling toward them.

I took a split second to look around, kicked off Mrs. Wiley’s shoes, and ran.

Like my life depended on it.

Which it did.