Chapter Eight
A knock pulled me from my dream and I shot up in bed, reaching out for my mom, who was no longer there. I looked over at my door for some sort of evidence that it hadn’t actually been a dream, but saw that I still had on the same clothes from earlier and realized the truth.
She was really gone.
The loss began to hit me in waves, slow and dull at first, and then increasing to an almost crippling pain that grew from my chest up to my throat and finally to my eyes. Just as I was about to let my grief brim over, there was another knock at my door.
Go away!
I wanted to scream at whoever was on the other side, but I collapsed back onto the bed and buried my head under my pillow instead. My guest must have taken my silence as an invitation to come in though, and I heard the muffled sound of the knob turning and the squeak of the door swinging open.
Oh, for the love of . . .
“Hadley?” It was Jasmine. “We need to talk about what happened.”
It was getting hard to breathe with my face pressed into my sheets, but I didn’t want to turn around and look Jasmine in the eyes. I just wanted to be left alone with the memories of my mom. I could tell she was waiting for me to say something though, so I sighed in frustration before answering.
“Don’t you get it, Jasmine? We’re on our own now,” I said. “What’s there to talk about?”
The room grew silent and for a few seconds I thought I’d succeeded in driving her away too. I was wrong. Before I could react, the pillow was ripped away from my head and hit the wall opposite us. I jerked around to shout at Jasmine but stopped when I saw her face. “Stop being such a witch and snap out of it already,” she growled.
Her usual indifference to everything and everyone had turned into a laser-like focus I hadn’t seen before. For the first time, I saw what most people outside of our coven probably saw: Jasmine looked scary. Like crazy scary. Her black hair shot up in all different directions and her eyes were fiery. She adjusted her stance like she was about to attack and I couldn’t help but back up on my bed.
I opened my mouth to speak, but she wasn’t done yet.
“Look, I know you’re used to being little miss Teen Queen and that your witch duties usually come in second place, but you seriously need to rearrange your priorities,” she said. “We let you come and go before, because it didn’t really affect us, but now it does. And I have no idea why, but you are more powerful than any of us. So we need you to step your homecoming-court, rah-rah ass up to the plate and start swinging.”
Something inside me clicked. Commanding crowds at school came so easily to me, and it shouldn’t be any different with this particular group of twitches. Hadn’t my mom basically said this to me in my dream? That I needed to take control of the situation?
In my heart, I knew she was right. I was stronger than the others, and given my natural abilities, I was likely the only one who could lead this group. But how could I possibly do that when I felt seconds away from falling apart?
Jasmine relaxed a little as she watched me process what she’d said. When I didn’t respond, she took her time walking away. She placed her hand on the door, but instead of leaving she looked back at me. I could tell the fight that had been in her was now gone.
“I know this sucks—it’s hard on all of us. And you’re not the only one whose parents are gone. But bottom line, we really need everyone to rally now, including you.”
Jasmine walked out of the room without a backward glance, closing the door behind her. I blinked back my tears and stood up, walking slowly over to my bathroom. Inside, I splashed water on my face and paused to study myself in the mirror. Only this time it wasn’t for beauty reasons. I was trying to see what the others saw in me.
My mom had said I was their only hope.
“Well, I guess we’re about to find out,” I said out loud.
Before doing anything else, I tried to get ahold of my dad again since he still hadn’t called me back. On the one hand, I wanted to know that he was okay and hear him tell me that I would be okay too. But at the same time, I dreaded having to tell him what had happened to Mom. How do you tell someone that the love of his life won’t be coming home? I almost threw up just thinking about it.
The call went to voice mail and my worries turned from breaking the news to Dad to dealing with the fact that he might be in trouble too. As I dialed the number to the hotel he was staying at, I started to wonder if I was really ready to know the truth. Someone answered and I nearly froze, unsure of what I was supposed to say next.
“This is the Meadowland Hotel; my name is Darcey. How may I assist you today?” a woman asked. She sounded nice. Like she really wanted to help.
Can you tell me if my dad’s still alive?
“Hi. I need to be connected to the room of Drew Bishop,” I said instead, pacing around my room. “He should be a guest there?”
There was a pause as Darcey clicked away on her computer keys. Finally, after what seemed like forever, she cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but Drew Bishop is not staying with us right now.”
The blood drained from my face. “But he was supposed to be there,” I said, helplessly.
“I do have a record of his reservation, but it appears he never checked in,” Darcey said. “Could he have made alternate arrangements and forgotten to cancel these?”
“No,” I said, defeated.
“I’m sorry about that, sweetheart,” Darcey said. Then she paused uncomfortably before saying, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Sure. Can you fix my life that’s currently imploding, Darcey?
“Um, can you tell him to call home if he does get there?” I asked.
“Sure thing, hon.” Darcey sounded like she felt bad for me. She had no idea how bad I felt, though.
This new development made me begin to think the worst, but I shook it off. I couldn’t let myself go there right now. There were other things to do. Like, tell the rest of the coven what had happened.
But instead of heading straight for the living room, I went to the kitchen first, hoping I might be able to pull some strength from my mom for what I was about to do. I’d half hoped to see her standing there at the sink like before, or cooking up a storm. It was what she would have been doing had she been there. Weekends had always been our time. During the week, we never had a chance to eat breakfast together, because I was usually running late for school and she was trying to get to the shop on time. And since Dad was always traveling, Saturdays were our time to slow down and catch up, just the two of us. She’d make waffles or pancakes and top the plate off with some eggs and bacon. If Mom was in a particularly good mood, she’d surprise me with smiley face pancakes with chocolate chips for eyes and a mouth.
Though I never would’ve admitted it to her before, I’d looked forward to it all week long. And when I saw that the kitchen was indeed empty, my heart felt like I was on a roller coaster racing down the tracks at a hundred miles an hour.
I walked over to the sink and placed my hands where my mom’s had been, taking a moment to miss her. I’m not sure how long I stood there, but eventually I heard someone cough behind me.
“See anything out there?” a voice asked. I turned quickly to see Fallon standing there and almost groaned.
Great. The last person on earth I wanted to see was standing in my kitchen, arms folded over his chest and looking at me with a smirk on his face.
But when he saw my expression, his softened, and then his arms dropped to his sides. Surprisingly, he walked over to the table and took a seat, motioning for me to sit, too. I swiped at my face in an attempt to make myself look like less of a mess. I sighed because I knew it was futile and crossed the room to join him.
“What do you want, Fallon?” The words came out sounding harsher than I’d intended.
I braced myself for a sarcastic retort, but instead, he just looked at me with this weird expression on his face. If I hadn’t known him so well, I might’ve said he looked sorry for me. But that wasn’t possible. This was Fallon we were talking about.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice surprisingly quiet. Almost caring, even. I nearly snorted at him for mocking me, but something told me he was being serious. It threw me off so much that he had to repeat himself just for me to believe he’d said it.
I wanted to tell him to mind his own business, but I didn’t have the energy to be mean to him. Not tonight. Besides, it seemed wrong somehow, to start something up when he appeared to be waving the white flag on our frenemy war.
“Honestly? Not really,” I answered finally. I looked down at my hands to avoid his eyes, because how do you tell someone something like this? That my mom was dead and his parents were too? How could my mom and Jasmine have actually thought that I’d be able to do this, not once, but over a dozen times?
“Look, Fallon, something serious is going on and it’s heavier than anything I’ve ever dealt with before. I have to tell you guys something, but I really don’t know how. I don’t think . . .” I got choked up and had to stop talking in order to swallow the lump that had formed in my throat. “I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this.”
I had no idea why I was being so open with him. He was my least favorite person, pretty much ever, and it went against everything I believed to show weakness to anyone, let alone an enemy. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t hold it together. I knew there was a chance that Fallon would use our private conversation against me. But I just couldn’t shoulder all the responsibility alone anymore, and Fallon was asking to be let in.
“So what do I do?” I asked, staring down at the table.
He was silent for a minute and I resisted the urge to look up at him. “Use the Band-Aid approach,” he finally said.
“Huh?”
He rolled his eyes at me, but it wasn’t malicious for once. “You know. If you pull a Band-Aid off slowly, then you feel every single hair rip out of your body. And it hurts like crazy. But if you pull it off nice and quick”—he made a quick tugging motion at an imaginary wound—“it’s over fast and it hurts a lot less.”
I crinkled my eyebrows.
“Oh, come on. This is sort of common knowledge, Hadley,” he said, teasing me now. “Where have you been?”
“I don’t rip off my Band-Aids. I use magic to make them disappear,” I said simply. “Why would you willingly rip off a Band-Aid? Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, and in that case . . .” I let the sentence trail off as I raised my eyebrows at him.
“Fine, fine, whatever, but you get my point, right? Tell us quickly. It’ll hurt less that way. Don’t think about it, just do it,” he said. Then he looked straight into my eyes and said it again, more as a command this time rather than a suggestion. “Just do it.”
I took a deep breath and did as he said. “There was a fire where our parents met last night and they were caught inside,” I blurted out, not able to look at him as I said it. “Fallon . . . I don’t think anyone survived.”
There was total silence, and after about thirty seconds I dared to peek at this boy whose life I’d just turned upside down. I felt awful about being the one to break the news because I knew exactly what he was feeling. He was realizing that the life he’d once had was over. That it would be a long time before he felt safe again.
When I finally looked at Fallon, he was staring out the window behind me, his body as still as if he were frozen in place. His mouth was pulled tight in a straight line, but other than that, I had no idea what he was thinking. I was almost scared to find out but knew I had to check if he was okay. After all, I’d done this to him.
I reached out my hand and placed it on his arm, hoping to give him some solace. But almost as soon as I’d touched him, he pulled away and turned his gaze back at me. “So,” he said, taking a deep breath, “what do we do now?”
It wasn’t what I’d been expecting him to say, but I was glad I wasn’t going to have to get all touchy-feely with him. He wasn’t my favorite person, and the truth was, I had no clue how I was supposed to help him with his emotions when I hadn’t been handling my own all that well.
“Well, first I think we need to tell everyone else,” I said, still hating this part of the plan. I had a feeling not everyone would react like Fallon had.
“Then what?” he asked.
“Then we get out of here. Go someplace the Parrishables won’t come looking for us.”
“Any ideas on where that might be?” he asked.
Remembering my mom’s suggestion of our family’s cabin, I nodded. “Yeah. I think I do.”
“Okay,” Fallon said, getting up from his chair. “Let’s do this, then.”
“Rip it off like a Band-Aid?” I asked.
“Just like a Band-Aid.”