Mystify (2 page)

She’s already walking toward the door. Not giving me a chance to respond as usual. Sighing at the things that will never change, I’m already moving across the room to my desk, quickly flipping open my laptop.

Once my mother leaves the room, Casietta speaks up. “Your papa will be steaming mad if you do not hurry up.”

I shrug. “That would be the first emotional reaction I’ve ever seen from him. Might be interesting.”

“Watch your mouth,
princesa
. They are still your parents.” Casietta mumbles something as she smoothes the comforter on my bed.

I’m curious what else she has to say but more concerned with an answer to my email.

Cryptic.

Then again, nothing dealing with these powers or this so-called Darkness is easy to explain. Still, at least she responded to me. Now all I need to do is get the letter from Jake’s great grandmother’s journal, the one that was written by Mary Burroughs who was accused of being a witch and burned during the Salem Witch Trials. Mary wasn’t a witch, I’m convinced of that. She was a Mystyx just like me, and I’m going to prove it and find out just how many more of us there are out there and why we exist.

Krystal and Jake think the origin of the Mystyx is steeped in Greek mythology. Like the Olympians and the Titans, Zeus and Aphrodite. Personally, I think our power comes more from the Wiccan beliefs. I came to that conclusion after we found Jake’s grandmother’s journal. Mary Burroughs also had a power, one that was misunderstood. Me, Krystal and Jake decided to keep our powers a secret. But I don’t leave anything to chance if I can help it. So I’m thinking ahead, protecting us
and our powers before others find out and reenact a modern-day witch hunt.

But first I have to deal with my parents. I’m sure whatever they want is just as superficial and materialistic as their lifestyle. But since I’ve got to live here another two years until I’m eighteen, I’ll have to go with the flow.

“The
Oaks Center will be an exclusive club for only the elite members of Lincoln’s society.”

My father is talking—
the
Marvin Carrington, with his tall broad shoulders and silver-gray hair. He’s forty-five years old, three years older than my mother. He was born in Houston and inherited some of his father’s oil money. Using his inheritance, he started his own company, Carrington Investments. From what I can tell, people pay him money to invest their money. If all goes well, they both get richer. I guess that’s the name of the game for everybody these days.

Anyway, he’s been talking for the last fifteen minutes. I made it downstairs in about seven minutes, which had my mother shooting daggers at me with her eyes. If there’s one thing she hates, it’s making my father angry. Me, I don’t care how they feel about me at this point. Still, I guess any show of emotion from them is better than nothing.

“So I’d like to have my girls behind me in this venture,” my father says, finishing up.

I’m barely paying attention.

“Of course, Marvin. Sasha and I will do whatever we have to. This venture will be a success just like everything else the Carrington name is behind.”

Blah, blah, blah. I hear the sound of their voices, but my
mind keeps going back to the email, the letter, the strange trip to the club. And of course, Antoine.

“Sasha?”

My father’s heavy voice pulls me out of the other world I usually live in—the one where parents aren’t allowed or
tolerated
, I should say.

“Yes, sir?” I stumble over the words and clasp my hands in front of me. He’s staring at me. That makes me uncomfortable since I’m not used to being in the same room with him.

“You’ll have a special assignment in this venture.”

“Me? What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll need you to help recruit young people. I want the Oaks Center to include the affluent younger generation and pave the way for the future. We won’t exclude them this time, but rather teach our values.”

Our values,
like we’re a separate species or something. The confused and more than slightly irritated expression on my face must be evident, because my mother clears her throat.

“Sasha can do that. There are a lot of students in her school, even in her class, that she can help recruit. Right, Sasha?”

Recruit? What am I, some type of employee?
“Ah, I don’t know.”

One of my father’s bushy eyebrows arches. I guess this is his intimidating look. I can see some of the people who work for him becoming nervous, but I don’t see this look often, so I’m not sure how to react.

My mother, as diplomatically as she possibly can, moves quickly across the room and is at my side before I can say another word. Wrapping her arm around me, she digs her fingers into my shoulder. I try not to cringe. “She’ll do just fine, Marvin. I’ll work with her personally.”

His one eyebrow lowers, and his lips thin into a straight line. He nods, then turns toward the bar and picks up a glass.
“Very good. We’re having a cocktail party. Everyone who is anyone in Lincoln will be here. We want them all on board with this venture.”

He’s still talking. Since I’m clearly not interested in what he’s saying, I look toward the window. My mother is still standing next to me holding me close like she thinks that’s going to make a difference, like her firm grip can make me listen or obey.

She doesn’t have a clue.

Astrology is my thing. Not many people know that. Well, okay, nobody knows that. It’s my secret, even though I really don’t know why I keep it a secret. It’s not like I’m a nerd or anything. I just like the stars. When I was seven, my father hired someone to paint my ceiling like the night sky with the stars in the shape of my favorite constellation, Orion. When I turned fourteen I figured I was too old for that and repainted my room a pale yellow. It suited my mood at the time. Right now, even though it’s morning, my mood is like the night sky, dark and starry, drifting, yet clearly a part of something.

“Something” meaning whatever is going on with the Mystyx. And there is definitely something going on. Fatima, that’s the follower of Wicca who I researched online and contacted, and who had responded to my message. But I need to get to Jake’s house and the journal to figure out what her message means.

What I know right now, as I’m sitting in the back of the car while Mouse—my larger-than-life driver—takes me to school is that we’ve pinpointed the origin of our powers to cataclysmic weather events and the mythical Greek river, Styx. But I feel like there’s so much more we’re missing—like how is the weather connected to the River Styx? And the power,
it comes from powerful energy emitted during major storms. It just isn’t adding up.

My mind flashes back to the stars and how I sometimes feel just as distant from my family as they are from the earth. I know enough about astrology to know that the Greeks believed in the power of the moon and the sun. They believed the sun to be the manifestation of the god Apollo, and the moon, with its three distinct phases—full, quarter and half—was linked to three goddesses—the maiden Artemis, the motherly Selene and Hecate, the goddess of the Underworld. Somehow, it all fits together with the idea that the sun dominates the sky during the day, thus representing vitality and life, while the moon comes into its power at night, bringing fertility, nurturing and the perpetuation of the cycle of life and death. The knowledge that the moon really has eight lunar phases probably wasn’t known to the Greeks at the time.

Still, I think there’s a correlation. I feel like the moon might explain a significant part of our power—or at the very least, my power.

Arriving in front of the school, I figure I should probably shift my mind to the classroom. Good grades aren’t hard for me. But with all this going on, I don’t want to take anything for granted.

Just as I step out of the car, I see Krystal and Franklin getting off the school bus. They instantly hold hands and walk side by side into the school building. I wonder how that feels. To be a part of a couple, I mean. I can do that, I’m sure, be a girlfriend to some guy. Question is, do I want that guy to be Antoine?

The
next two days are spent keeping an eye out for Antoine, who I finally decide I don’t want to see. Being with him in that club was surely a dream, one I hadn’t revisited since that night, thankfully.

I resigned myself to forget how real or how right it felt to be with Antoine. Both were totally unbelievable.

Now I’m anxious to go to lunch to see Jake and Krystal. While I have no intention of telling them about my goofy Antoine dream, I’ve been impatiently waiting to see the journal again. When I’d called Jake on Saturday morning to tell him that I was coming over to look at the journal, he must have had some stuff going on because he kind of stuttered and gave me like five different reasons why that wasn’t possible.

Jake’s home life is anything but smooth sailing. His grand father is really cool, if you don’t count the days he doesn’t know his name and forgets to put on his pants. His father, on the other hand, always seems angry, on the days that he stays home long enough for me or Jake to see him. It’s for that reason alone that I decide to just send Jake a text this morning asking him to bring the journal to school.

Heading to the cafeteria I look around one more time just to make sure Antoine and his crew aren’t around. I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been not to run into him for this long. Still, I
don’t want to tempt fate, so I hurry into the cafeteria and sit at the table Jake, Krystal and I usually occupy.

“So I was thinking we should meet tonight, at the library,” Jake says while chewing the biggest bite of a hotdog I’d ever seen. His cheek looks like he stuck a golf ball inside his mouth, and I sigh in disgust.

Krystal, who just started eating like a normal teenager a couple of weeks ago, shakes her head in agreement. I think Krystal is going through a lot with her mom. In the first few weeks we’d known each other, I figured she just had the regular teenage woes that all of us have. But turns out hers are a little different. Krystal’s real father is a real idiot. He cheated on Krystal’s mother with the nanny—how clichéd. Then he got the nanny pregnant and moved to the West Coast to be with her. Krystal was stuck here in Lincoln, a small, behind-the-times town, with her mother and her stepfather. I don’t think either one of them is that bad, but then I don’t have to live with them.

From the outside looking in, people probably think Lidia and Marvin Carrington are the best parents a girl could have—they work all the time and give me about as much attention as they do the other furniture in the house. They make sure I’m always dusted and shined to perfection when guests come to the house. Otherwise, I’m sort of just there.

“That’s a good idea,” Krystal says, her voice bringing me back to the current conversation.

“Can’t,” I add, chewing on yet another celery stick. My mom might not know what classes I’m taking this semester or my favorite color, but she knows what size clothes I wear and will bust a button in her designer suits if she finds out I’m eating anything other than health food.

“C’mon, Sasha,” Jake whines. “This is important. You remember Krystal’s vision. It’s coming for us, for everybody.”

Krystal is a medium. She can see, hear and talk to ghosts. And just recently we found out that she has visions. However, we aren’t all that sure whether those visions are of the past or the future. The Darkness, that’s what we call the black fog and the blackbirds that seem to always flock around us. It’s some type of evil. That much we all agree on. How to fight it is the question.

“I know. I know. But my parents are having this cocktail party thing and I have to be there.”

“You never go to their parties,” Jake argues.

And he’s right. I always try to get out of going to whatever gatherings my parents are having, because I already know I’ll be bored out of my mind. Not to mention they never care if I’m there or not. But a couple weeks ago, right around the time we came into our powers and this freaky dark cloud started surrounding us, my mom started asking me questions about some of the kids at school. Other Richies, of course, because those are the only people my parents care about. The other day I found out
why
they’ve been asking all those questions. They want me to be some kind of recruiter of the rich kids at school for this new exclusive club they are starting. I don’t want to be bothered, but don’t really have a choice.

“Look, I just have to be at this thing with them or they’ll freak. So Jake, did you bring the journal?”

“Yeah,” he answers, taking another bite of food. He pulls it out of his backpack and pushes it across the table to me. “What do you need it for? We’ve all read it over and over again and agreed there aren’t any new clues in there.”

I was already flipping through the pages, looking for the letter. “I’ve got another lead. Remember we read the letter from Mary Burroughs that seemed to connect us to the Salem Witch Trials.”

“Mary was hanged for being a witch,” Krystal said.

I nodded. “But I don’t think she was a witch at all. I think she was a Mystyx.”

“You’ve said that before.”

Then I find the letter and gingerly pull it out of the book. The paper is very thin and fragile, like it would crumble into pieces at any moment. I lift my arms, tilting back so that the letter is in a direct line with the fluorescent light.

“Wow,” I sigh as I spy what I suspect Fatima wanted me to see.

“What are you doing?”

I look at Jake and Krystal. “I found this practicing wiccan online. She lives in Bridgeport. Anyway, I asked her a couple of questions about our powers and I told her about the journal we found. She wrote back and told me to hold the letter up to the light and to get back to her with what I saw.”

Jake frowns. Krystal put down her soda can. “And what do you see?”

“Look for yourself,” I say, handing them the letter.

Since I already read it I’m mulling over the possible meanings. It reads:

Behind the written words is a watermark—the letter
M
, which looks exactly like our birthmarks.

“I don’t get it,” Jake says.

Krystal looks as confused as I am. “Did you see the
M?
”

“I saw it,” Jake says, “but I still don’t get it.”

“A curse? Maybe the Darkness that’s following us is the curse?” I add.

“So now we have a letter from a witch, powers connected to a storm and a curse,” says Krystal, and she’s getting that faraway look she gets when she’s thinking. “What else did the witch say?”

“She said to get back to her with what I found on the back of this letter.”

Jake nods. “So you email her back and tell her. But how do you know she’s safe?”

“Because nothing I’m saying so far is credible. No one will believe her,” I quip. “Look, Jake, I know you’re afraid of people finding out we have powers and the repercussions of that. But right now, nobody is even aware of anything being wrong around here. I’m just trying to get us some answers. The more we know about why we have these powers, the better we’ll be able to fight whatever is after us.”

“I agree,” Krystal says. “Email her tonight and see what she says. Then tomorrow we definitely need to go to the library to see what we can find about curses in Greek mythology.”

“Why about Greek mythology?” I ask, because I’m thinking that maybe the witch in Bridgeport can give us some answers.

“Because it says that the heroes are bathed in the water and in the light. The River Styx,” she says waiting for us to catch on.

“The heroes are bathed in the river?” Jake asks. “That’s not possible. The river circled the Underworld serving as the border between earth and the Underworld. It was like some sort of black ash. Nobody could swim through that.”

Krystal shakes her head. “Not true. Achilles’s mother dipped him into the River Styx. Every part of him except the heel
of his foot, and it made him invulnerable to every place the water touched.”

I shake my head, not satisfied with this explanation. “But we weren’t even living during the time of the River Styx. How could this relate to us and our powers in today’s world?”

“I don’t know,” Krystal says. “But there’s got to be a way—genetics or something.”

“I doubt my family tree goes back to the Greek gods,” I say, taking the letter from Jake.

“Mine either. Still, it opens another door. We should check it out,” he says.

Jake closes the journal and puts it back in his bag.

Krystal is nodding in agreement. “Okay, tomorrow it is. My mother wants me to go to Bible study tonight anyway.”

“Bible study!” Jake frowns. “I didn’t know you went to church.”

“We used to. I mean, my grandmother on my father’s side always made me go when we visited her. And my mother joined a church when we were in New York. We haven’t been since moving here. But she started going like two weeks ago and really wants me to join her.”

“Great, your parents are dragging you to church and mine are dressing me up to smile and play nice at a party. I really wish they’d get a clue.”

“Who doesn’t like a party?” Lindsey Yi chimes in. She’s the new girl at Settleman’s High. She joins our table and immediately starts talking.

We met Lindsey the night of the spring dance. That night she was hitting on Jake like he was drenched in honey and she was queen bee. The memory of how exasperated Jake looked as Lindsey was gyrating her body against him still made me giggle.

Ever since that night, Lindsey has been popping up wherever
we are, which probably isn’t a good thing because, with all the freaky stuff going on around us, she might see something she doesn’t understand. Although, I swear, the girl never stops talking long enough to see anything other than the words coming out of her mouth.

Case in point, she’s still chattering away even though none of us have said hello or gotten a word in edgewise.

“At my last school we had a dance every month. There was always a theme to the dances like a masquerade ball, a black-and-white party, a slumber party. Like I said, everybody loves to party. I don’t get that Lincoln is like that, though. Seems a little more uptight here than it was in Milan.” She shrugs. “Guess that might be a cultural thing.”

I almost choke trying to swallow my bottled water. Did she just say a “cultural” thing? I’m pretty sure she’s Chinese. I’m half Argentinean. Jake’s white and Krystal’s part Native American, part African-American. Could our little table be any more diverse?

“It’s a private party,” Jake says in a tone that’s unlike him. Lindsey makes him uncomfortable. I wonder if that means he likes her—I mean,
likes
her.

“Just a little get-together that my parents are having,” I say, trying to defuse the tension. Even though Lindsey doesn’t look like she’s bothered by what Jake says at all.

She just waves a hand as if dismissing Jake altogether. “That’s fine. I was just saying that we used to have parties all the time. Anyway, what else do you guys do around here to have fun?”

Fun? In Lincoln? Was there any? Not that I can think of.

When nobody answers right away, Lindsey just shrugs. “I understand how you feel, Sasha.”

“What?” I say because I haven’t said anything, and I’m totally lost as to what she’s talking about.

“You don’t want to go to the party, don’t want to be bothered with your parents and their fake friends. Actually, it’s still a mystery to you why they even want you there.”

And how did she know all that? “Ah, yeah, I guess,” I say, stumbling over my words as I stare at her.

She’s short, I mean shorter than both me and Krystal, which means she’s got to be like five feet two or three inches. Her hair is long and jet black and hangs straight down her back. Her bangs are cut stylishly long so that it looks like she can barely see. Yet she’s looking at me as if she can see right through me. Strange.

The bell rings, and Jake quickly jumps up from the table first. “Gotta go,” he says but then waits for Krystal to get up.

But as Krystal gets up, we’re joined by another student. I’d been wondering where Franklin was. After the spring dance he’d almost become a member of our little clique.

Franklin Bryant is Krystal’s boyfriend now. Most lunch periods Franklin sits with us, his arm around Krystal’s chair while Jake watches them both out of the corner of his eye. Now Jake’s frowning as Franklin’s arm—as expected—snakes around Krystal’s shoulder.

“Hey, ready for afternoon classes?” Franklin asks in that geeklike voice of his. He’s not really a geek just because his father is the local weatherman, and he talks about storms and high pressure fronts more than anything else. I guess they make a cute couple.

“Not at all,” Krystal says, smiling and grabbing her books. “I’ve got American History with Alyssa Turner.”

Lindsey opens her mouth and sticks a finger inside like she’s gagging. “I don’t know what’s worse, history or Alyssa.”

Alyssa Turner is the resident
bitch
at Settleman’s High. She hates any-and everyone who doesn’t live in Sea Point, the neighborhood where all the other Richies live. Because I live
only two doors down from her, I guess that puts me square on her BFF list. Woo-hoo, for me.

“I’ve got Chemistry,” I say, smiling at Lindsey. She’s different from anyone else in Lincoln. And I don’t know why, but I’m starting to like her.

“Oh,” Franklin says, pausing.

He and Krystal are walking in front of me and Lindsey. Jake is lagging behind me. So when Franklin stops, all of us stop.

“Did you guys hear about the kids that are missing?”

Krystal immediately frowns. “No. What are you talking about?”

Franklin sort of shrugs. “I just got a tweet on Twitter,” he says motioning toward his cell phone that’s stuck in his front pocket. “It just said that this bus from Pennsylvania full of kids on some kind of religious retreat was due back two days ago. None of the parents have talked to their kids and the bus driver last checked in with the bus company on Friday afternoon.”