Speak (Witches & Warlocks Book 1) (12 page)

Becca’s jabbering away, her hands on my arms and shoulders, her voice all maternal and worried and I realize exactly what that girl was. She was a ghost. Oh, God. Or maybe she was a demon. Those eyes…

My stomach spins in a violent circle and my little cover story is suddenly very true. I race to the bathroom, leaving Becca looking somewhat confused and concerned near the door and throw up bits of strawberry flavored protein bar into the toilet. When that’s gone, my stomach is still not appeased because I keep heaving until this awful yellow bile comes out, squeezing hot tears out of my eyes along with it. I flush the toilet and rinse my mouth. Splash water on my face and check myself in the mirror.

For a second, I consider changing into pj’s, but that might require more out of me than I have to give, so I just curl up in bed and pull the covers up to my ears and squeeze my eyes shut. Sleep isn’t going to come, though. That’s for damn sure.

You gotta wake up.

What does that even mean? And if waking up means that I’m going to see more girls like the one I saw on the sidewalk today, I’m not so sure I want to do that. I might want to forget ghost-Noah and all the crazy things he said, forget the demon girl and just go back to hanging out with Luke and Becca and Carter and spend my time playing video games. Is that an option? Can I do that? I promise I’ll never question Carter’s ability to make Becca happy again.

I can’t help it, thinking of Carter makes me think of the day Becca and I met him at Flannigan’s. The day I met Luke. The night with so many holes in it. They say I was shit-faced drunk that night, but that’s so out of character for me, so out of my comfort zone. If I’m honest, and I guess I’m in the middle of being like,
way
crazy honest right now, I don’t think I would have let myself get that drunk. Sure, Luke makes me feel comfortable and safe, but there’s not been one time in my whole life that I ever felt comfortable enough to drink so much that I blacked out. And apparently that’s exactly what happened.

I remember meeting Luke. I think we played pool. The rest is just … gone. So, this new Zoe who sees ghost-Noahs and demon girls, this new Zoe who gets really honest, she has to wonder if maybe, instead of drinking too much, maybe they did something to my memory. Is that even possible?

A single thought has my eyes lurching open. Oh hell, my journal! Where is it? I had it at the park, but I don’t remember carrying it home. Was it in my hands when that guy knocked me down? I distinctly remember both of my hands hitting the concrete — even have the scrapes to prove it, but I’m not sure if I dropped it to catch myself or if I left it by the tree.

Shit.

I don’t think I wrote anything important in it about what’s happening today, but that’s my journal. The one place I totally don’t censor myself. The thought of someone finding it and reading it makes my poor sick stomach start reeling again. My head hurts.

There’s no way I could get past Becca so I can go back out and see if I can find it. She either believes that I’m sick and she’ll push me back into bed or she’ll wonder why I’m suddenly not sick and she’ll … I don’t know. Cast a spell or something.

‘Cause that’s what’s going on.

There are spells and magic and demons or ghosts and who the hell knows what else.

Well, I bet Becca knows what else. And Noah. And I bet Carter. And probably Luke. Looks like I’m the only one who doesn’t know what else. Poor Zoe, last one on the train as usual.

Becca’s moving around the living room and I can tell she’s trying to be quiet. I slide out of bed and creep to the door, trying to hear what’s going on. I think she’s on the phone, although I can’t make out what she’s saying. Maybe if I close my eyes and concentrate, I’ll catch more of the conversation. So I do just that, blocking out my room and focusing on her voice. I start to hear a word here and there and there’s this kind of stretching feeling and just like that, I can hear everything Becca says as if she were standing next to me and enough of what the person on the other end is saying to know she’s talking to Carter.

“Did you get the journal?” Becca pauses long enough for Carter to make a noise of affirmation. “Did you read it? Is there anything important in there?”

I kind of choke while Carter replies, fear becoming a tangible thing and lodging itself in my throat.

“What?” Becca’s voice is violent. “What do you mean you think she saw a remnant?” No, not violent. Becca’s voice reminds me of a snake, hissing its warning from the grass. I focus hard on Carter’s voice, hoping and wishing,
demanding
that I hear his reply. There’s no doubt in my mind about what a remnant actually is; Becca’s talking about the demon girl. Carter’s answer might have some information as to just exactly what she was.

“Hold on.” That’s Becca again, interrupting Carter before he gets more than a few words out. “Shit. I swear I just felt magic.
Her
magic. I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you when I know more.”

There’s a click, the sound of her fingernail making contact with the screen of her phone and I open my eyes. Becca is stalking towards my bedroom door, aware that I was eavesdropping, or at least suspicious that I was. I leap back into bed and throw the cover over my head and pray to as many gods as I can think of that she doesn’t come throw open the door and confront me.

Something tells me I won’t be that lucky.

Chapter 14

My doorknob spins and the door creaks open and the fact that it’s so much like a horror movie might have made me giggle if I wasn’t absolutely terrified of making noise. Becca slinks through and closes the door behind her. She swoops down over me, wearing an aura of dread and discomfort, and wipes hair out of my eyes. Fear has my forehead clammy, so at least if she still kind of thinks I might be sick, she’s got physical evidence that might support that theory.

When she touches me, there’s this explosion of energy that sweeps across my skin, skittering like electricity over a lightning strike, like hundreds of spiders crawling on my face and neck and arms. “Zo?” Becca’s voice falls to my ears, clouds of purple and black and heavy with power. “Are you asleep?”

I can tell that she’s very much aware that I’m not asleep. But as she speaks, my eyes grow heavy, little pulses of fatigue edging out from her fingers, seeping into my skin. Something inside me flares to life and goes to work putting out the little fires of drowsy that Becca is leaving for me.

“Nope.” I murmur the word and hope I sound sleepy, hope she can’t hear my heart jackhammering against my ribs. “Wish I was, though.” And that’s not a lie. I totally wish I was unconscious right now.

“You feeling ok?” No, I’m not feeling ok. I’m terrified and something icky is worming its way from Becca’s hand into me. I just shake my head and bury my face in my pillow. “Well, look sweetie. I’m going to go out and meet Carter. I’ll tell Luke that you’re sick. You need anything?”

Whatever Becca’s doing, she’s probing into my head, there’s this little questioning push, this seeking, sifting, sorting feeling. And again, something inside me flares to life, shielding my thoughts and feelings from her. I don’t know if she can tell what’s happening, what I’m doing. She totally felt the last bit of magic I did. (Oh my God! Magic? Is that really what’s going on? Magic?)

I’m in so far over my head and out of my comfort zone, I don’t know what to do.

“You need me to bring you a drink of water before I go?”

No. I just need you to go. Leave me be so I can think. Or run. Maybe that’s the thing. As soon as her Jeep is out of sight, I could just hop in my car and drive as far as I possibly can and not stop until I’ve even managed to lose myself.

“No, thank you.” I twist on the pillow so I can make eye contact with her and really wish I hadn’t. I kind of shrink from the darkness in her eyes. “I think I just need to sleep.”

“Alright, well, I brought your cell phone. I’ll put it here on the table beside the bed. You just text me if you need anything, k?” I nod and close my eyes and slow down my breathing, doing my best attempt at looking and sounding like I’ve fallen asleep. Becca slides my phone onto the table and glides out of the room, lightly closing the door behind her. I wait to hear her leave, but instead, I feel another pop of power.

The edges of the door, the cracks where it sits in the wall, glow faintly purple and I get the sense of fog or smoke rolling into my room. There’s another pop. Another flare. Another burst of power and Becca raps her knuckles against my door.

“Sleep tight, Zoe.” Her tone tells me she totally knows I’m awake and listening. Regardless, I stay tucked tight into my bed, afraid to touch my door because of whatever it is she’s done to it. The front door slams shut and her Jeep roars to life.

Curiosity gets the better of my fear and I slide out of bed and slink towards the door, half expecting to get blasted by some crazy lightning bolt or something when I get close. When that doesn’t happen, I wait and try to see if I get a sense of wrongness or something like that from it, just kind of let my hands rove the door without touching it, as if I could feel whatever it is she did. When I don’t get any kind of bad feeling from that, I press one finger to the pressed wood and immediately pull it back, checking it for damage. Ok. Still standing. No crazy, super bad magic traps.

The doorknob is kind of warm against my hand. It also completely refuses to budge when I give it a twist. You know how when a door is locked, you can kind of jiggle the door knob? There’s this slight movement while the mechanism strikes whatever it is that keeps the handle from turning? Ya. That’s not happening. The door knob might as well have been sculpted from the same wood the door’s made out of. It’s one hundred percent immobile. I run to the windows and try to open them. Nothing. I knock on the glass and there isn’t even a reverberation; they’re solid. Same goes for the door that leads from my room to the bathroom.

It wasn’t a trap. I
am
trapped.

If I felt sick before, I feel like I’m dying now. My senses light on fire and I can see and hear and feel everything in my room all at once. The fabric of my clothes brushing my skin, the blood rushing in my veins, the oxygen being sucked into my lungs, making me lightheaded. The clothes slinking half in, half out of my laundry basket, the open drawer where my journal normally lives. Cars pulling in and out of the parking lot.

I pace, a tiger caged.
You’ve got to wake up.
I don’t have a single clue how to do that.

I think, if I could, I really would hop in my car and disappear. Just throw a bag of clothes in the trunk and drive until I feel safe and never think of this day again for as long as I live. Thing is, I can’t. I’m trapped in my room and so I have no choice but to face whatever it is that’s coming my way. I’m going to have to calm myself down and figure out a plan. On my own. No seeing-eye dog for me because it turns out she was a snake the whole time.

The nervous energy has my mind flickering from thought to thought, incoherent and incomplete. I don’t even have a framework for how to begin processing all this. It’s so far outside what I know to be normal. The cell phone beckons me from its place on my bedside table, and I’m distracted by a nearly all-encompassing need to reach out to Luke. He’ll know what to do. He’ll tell me how to make sense of this.

I’m safe with Luke. I can relax.

Except those thoughts feel foreign and I don’t think they’re mine and suddenly I feel the total opposite of safe and relaxed. Ok, so Luke is off the table. It’s more than likely that I’m under some sort of, I don’t know, spell? Is that the word? I guess it’s the only word that really applies. Anyway, I guess I’m under some sort of spell that makes me feel better about being around Luke.

Great. And here I thought I’d found someone who understood me. Turns out I don’t even understand myself. I just kind of sit and spin my mental wheels, remembering little blips of things people have said, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together in a way that makes some kind of sense.

You’re stronger than you know.

Both Noah and Luke said that to me. Maybe Luke was trying to tell me something? Warn me? Let’s just say for a second that he was hired by Carter and Becca to pretend to date me, to help keep me from knowing whatever it is that I am. That doesn’t sound like something someone would say if he was trying to hide the truth from me. It actually sounds more like something someone would say if he were trying to help me discover the truth.

As if on cue, my cell phone vibrates on the table, alerting me to an incoming text from Luke. I slide my finger across the screen to unlock it and read the text:

I’m so sorry you’re sick, babe. You ok?

Without hesitating, I type out my reply:

I’m fine. I’m stronger than you know.

Maybe, just maybe, he’ll read between the words and know what I’m saying. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll give me some glimmer of hope, some dose of information that I can use to understand what’s going on. My phone buzzes again and I try to puzzle out his reply: