Chapter 9

Chapter

Nine

W hen she comes back, Mom’s dress swishes at her calves and her bare feet curl into the carpet. She comes to me first.

“Can you sit up?” I try but am unable, so she stands at the opposite side of the chair and slides her arm around my shoulders. She pulls me up, holds me with one arm and tips a metal cup to my lips with the other hand.

The liquid tastes terrible, but I can’t move enough to spit it out, plus, she would only make me drink more. I know that from a childhood experience with cough suppressant syrup that tasted like acid.

The liquid slips down my throat and a warmth starts in my belly then branches out into the rest of my body. Feeling returns and I clear my throat, move my ankles up and down, then my legs, and finally the rest of me.

Mom wipes the dribble of her potion off my chin and cheek. “Can you tell me what happened, RJ?” She moves toward Aimee, whose eyes are open now and she’s sitting up .

Before I can speak, Aimee shouts, or maybe it’s better described as a scream. Loud. Shrill. Sharp.

Mom startles, and I look at Aimee. She’s sitting up, holding her hands in the air with her palms facing her then she turns them away and back again. “Mom!”

Our mother rushes to Aimee’s side, takes her hands and holds them, trying to calm a panicked Aimee. Her face is taut with what is either horror or terror; I don’t watch enough scary movies to know the difference. But the screams that follow are definitely of the same genre.

Mom pulls Aimee into a hug as my stomach clenches and I stand, try to take a step then fall to my knees and pull myself to the couch where Mom is hugging Aimee. “What happened, Aimee?”

“It was a syphoner,” I say.

“A syphoner?” My mother heard me, but she doesn’t believe me. She’s heard my brand of bullshit before. So, she turns to Aimee. “A syphoner?” And this time, her brows lift.

Aimee nods, solemnly. “A syphoner. And she took my magic!” Aimee shakes her hands out like they’ve gone to sleep and she’s trying to wake them. “I used to feel it inside of me. But it’s gone!” She shakes her hands harder, like she can bring the magic back if only can shake her hands hard enough. “It’s gone!”

Her voice is a wail, high-pitched and desperate.

“Calm down, Aimee.” But telling her to calm down is like telling a wind not to blow or a bird not to sing.

“It’s gone, Mom! It’s gone!” Every sound is a pinch in my stomach. Every note of desperation is another kick to my side.

She holds Aimee to her. “Where were you? Where did you go?”

She doesn’t mention the grounding, but then she doesn’t have to. I’m already racked with guilt. The shame is almost bigger than I am. I’m ready to bargain with whoever if they can only make Aimee right again.

I should tell her everything. But bearing my soul to her isn’t going to happen. She doesn’t need to know about Zane or the jealousy or his connection to Rowen or the fire at the beach.

“We were walking through the park.”

“Why were you at the park?” She isn’t stern right now. Her voice is soft instead.

I sigh because while I want to tell her everything, I don’t want to tell her anything.

“It was a syphoner, Mom.” Aimee’s voice is still shrill, but it’s a couple decibels softer now. “She took my magic. I don’t have anything anymore.” She pulls away and looks at me. “Wasn’t it a syphoner, RJ?”

I nod as Aimee looks at me. “It was.”

She breathes in deep and nods at Mom. “A syphoner. She had Margery Faulkner.” Her gaze flips back to me again. “Where’s Margery?”

“I don’t know. I got knocked out and when I came to, Zane was there.”

“Zane Bradbury?” She cocks a brow at me like she knows this is my fault, like as soon as a boy’s name was mentioned, the blame for this entire mess shifted from the syphoner to me.

“He asked us to go to the beach, Mom. I begged RJ to go along.” She’s lying for me. I should stop her, but I can’t. Not because I want her to take the fall but because I know that there won’t be a fall if she takes the blame.

“He didn’t mention another girl,” Mom says and looks at me. “What was her name?”

“Margery Faulkner. She’s a third-year at the Institute. ”

“And you’re sure it’s a syphoner?” There’s something she isn’t telling us, but she’s giving off hiding vibes. They’re almost visible, like another entity in the room.

“Of course, I’m sure.” I nod because I know exactly what that girl was. “I know what I saw.”

Instead of speaking again, she stands and walks to her bedroom, coming back a second later with the grimoire.

Like she knows the exact page she needs, she opens the book and starts reading. “A syphoner is a magic practitioner who cannot practice without the aid of another. They can also absorb the magic of a witch.” She reads another passage but doesn’t say it aloud. “Did the syphoner touch you, Aimee?”

Aimee nods then frowns. “Kind of. She had these ropes. They looked like electricity and had knots where it sparked when she attached them to me.” She shakes her head. “I can’t remember anything else. Did she take my magic?”

Mom nods. “Probably.”

I let that sink in. Aimee isn’t in the hospital like Rowen. She isn’t in the ICU fighting for her life and I’m grateful, but her magic being gone is serious. “Can we get it back?”

Mom breathes in deep and I think back to Mr. Beckett’s class. We’d asked questions about syphoners, but I can’t remember the information. Where the memory of that class was is now only a black hole.

Aimee looks at me. “Do you have your magic?”

I look at a candle on the table. Inside of me there’s a spark, a tiny burst of electricity and I try to light the candle but nothing happens. I try again because the spark is there, but I can’t make the candle work.

“I don’t know.” My magic has always been hit and miss. One minute I have it, and the next I don’t. This feels like that .

Mom sighs and she’s found her anger. “This all started with the grimoire, didn’t it? When was Rowen hurt?”

We’d found the grimoire a few weeks ago and had started using it a couple days after. It was a few days after that when I’d picked a spell to turn in. It was another week before Rowen’s magic was taken by the syphoner.

It couldn’t have been the grimoire that activated the syphoner’s magic or need for it.

I shake my head because I convinced myself it couldn’t be true. “No. We found the grimoire way before. A couple weeks.”

“This book was never yours.” She sighs. “Show me the spells that you’ve used.”

“A cleaning spell, the fire spell, which was by accident…” I clear my throat and look away then back at Mom. “I accidentally did a heart’s desire spell because I transposed a couple words.”

“A heart’s desire spell.” She nods like it’s the answer. “Whose heart?”

“Mine, I guess. I ripped a shirt off of Zane.”

She looks away, then back at me as if my words have only just registered. “What?”

“I tried to do the cleaning spell from memory and I transposed part of the phrasing and his shirt ripped off.” Her face pinches and I continue. “It was the other night when I came into the house and you thought I was lying about being in the yard and I swore to you I wasn’t.” Now my lips purse. “Turns out, I was lying about being in the yard. I went to the bookstore and Zane was there.” I tell her the rest of it.

“Do you know what you’ve done, RJ? Do you have any idea?” Her voice is little more than a whisper but there’s enough anger in it that it could be a scream .

Obviously, she’s found a way to make all of this my fault.

“Syphoners haven’t been seen in this area in centuries. Something you did…” She shakes her head and shoves the grimoire to the floor, away from her. “Obviously what you did, with this goddamned thing, brought them back. You’re reckless. Deceitful. Where did you learn such things?”

I pull a pen and her notepad from the drawer in the table beside the sofa. “Did you want to list my faults alphabetically or in order of importance? I imagine someday you’ll get dementia and forget. You’re going to want to have them all written down.”

She breathes in deeply enough that her nostrils flare as she stares at me. She’s trying not to kill me. I imagine it’s quite a testament to her parenting skills that I have survived this long, from what she says anyway. What she’s always said.

I’m still holding the pen and paper out like an offering, and I lower them because she gives me that look—the narrow eyed, mouth pinched, brow furrowed glare of anger. I’ve seen it before and I’m unphased by it now, but I’m also not going to push her much further. She’s at her limit and I don’t want to test those parenting skills.

She looks at me, wary in a way I haven’t seen from her in years, since I first became a teenager and started testing limits and boundaries. “I need to think this through.”

As do I. I drop the paper and pen onto the table and walk to my room. I, too, have things to work out before I can make sense of any of this.