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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 Tuga
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.”
Tréiga
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?
TRÉIGANN SIBH. 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 pla
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.”