Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned what to say. So what came out was, “Hunter, what’s going on? Why do you and Morgan look like death? Why won’t she tell me what’s happening?”
“I’m off,” Mr. Niall muttered abruptly, and left the room.
Strange dad behavior.
I turned back to Hunter, aware that Hilary was waiting outside. “Hunter, what’s the deal?” I asked again.
He looked uncomfortable, then ran one hand through his short blond hair, giving himself bed head. “How do you feel?” he asked.
I stared at him. Why did everyone keep asking me that? “I have a headache! What is going on?”
“Alisa, there’s a dark wave coming to Widow’s Vale,” he said gently. “Do you know what that is?”
A what? “No.”
“It’s—a wave, a force, of destruction,” Hunter said. “It’s dark magick, a spell that a witch or a group of witches casts. They aim it at a particular village or coven, and basically it wipes everything out.”
This was too much to take in. I wasn’t following. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s a bad spell,” Hunter said simply. “Very uncommon. In the Wiccan world it’s rare to come upon someone who practices dark magick. But dark witches can cast a spell when they want to kill other witches, destroy a whole coven, even level a whole village.”
I stared at him. “What... what...” What he was saying sounded like the plot of a Bruce Willis movie—not something that could happen in Widow’s Vale. But at the same time, I felt in my bones that he was telling the truth. I didn’t understand it, but I did suddenly believe that something bad was coming. Something very bad. “Is this why you and Morgan are sick?”
Hunter nodded. “I would guess your headache is caused by it, too, but since you’re half and half, it’s not wrecking you as much.” He went on to explain what he and Morgan had figured out and also what his father was trying to do, how he was trying to come up with a spell to disperse a dark wave. And he told me that the witch who cast this spell would probably die and that his father was going to be the one who cast it. I felt shocked. Hunter looked really grim, and I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling.
“I guess you guys are pretty sure about all this,” I said faintly.
He nodded. “It’s a situation that’s been developing for a while.”
“Are you sure your dad—”
“Yes. I’d like for someone else to do it, obviously. But any blood witch is likely to die, and he won’t let that happen to someone else.”
“And a nonwitch can’t cast it?”
“No. They have to be able to summon power. But if they’re strong enough to summon power, then they’re strong enough to be decimated by the dark wave.” He looked frustrated. I felt so sorry for him. If only there was some alternative—a way for a witch to cast the spell yet not be susceptible to the powers of the dark wave. Like if a person were...
I frowned as an awful, horrifying thought seeped into my brain. Immediately I shut it down.
“I have to go,” I said quickly. “My stepmonster-to-be is waiting for me.”
Hunter nodded and opened the door for me.
“The rest of Kithic doesn’t know about this,” he reminded me. “They wouldn’t be able to help, and there’s no use in terrifying them.”
“Okay.” I looked back at him, framed in his doorway. Then I turned and ran down the stairs, to where Hilary was waiting in the car. I was actually really happy to see her.
I had always thought people exaggerated when they talked about sleepless nights. But that night I had one. Every time I felt myself drifting off, I thought, Great, great, I’m going to sleep. And of course as soon as I thought that, I was wide awake again. I heard my dad come home after I had gone to bed. I heard Hilary ask him if he wanted something to eat. I remembered how, before Hilary came, I used to leave him something for his dinner when he had late meetings. For twelve years it had been me and him and a succession of housekeepers. By the time I was ten, I’d been able to make dinner by myself, do laundry, and plan a week’s worth of meals. I’d thought I was doing pretty damn well, but now I’d been replaced.
After they went to bed, the house was still but not quiet. I listened to the heat cycle on and off, the wind outside pressing against the windows, the creak of the wooden floorboards. Don’t think about it, I told myself. Don’t think about it. Just go to sleep. But again and again my mind teased the idea out of me: I was half witch. I might be able to call on the power, enough to cast the spell against the dark wave. And I was half not witch. So I might very well be able to survive the dark wave itself.
Don’t think about it. Just go to sleep.
I thought about Hunter’s weird dad, about his dying right in front of Hunter.
I thought about my mother, whose powers had scared her so much that she had stripped herself of them so that she couldn’t cast any kind of spell good or bad. Had that been the right thing to do? Would I want to do that?
I couldn’t control my powers. Sometimes I broke things and made freaky stuff happen. I’d only just found out about being half witch—I didn’t even know how I felt about it yet. It scared me; it pissed me off. Then I remembered some of the things I’d seen Morgan do. Now that I knew that I was the one who in fact had been causing the scary stuff to happen, I tried to separate out what had been Morgan. She had turned a ball of blue witch fire into flowers, real flowers, raining down on us. Mary K. thought she had saved their aunt’s girlfriend from dying after she’d fallen and hit her head. She had come to visit me in the hospital when I had been sick. And I’d gotten better, right away. Those were good things, right?
I hadn’t asked to be half witch. I didn’t want to be. But since I was, I needed to decide what to do with myself. Was I going to strip myself of my powers, like my mom, and just keep being a regular human, not tuned in to the magick that existed all around me? Or was I going to try to be a Morgan, learning all I could, deciding what to do with it, maybe deciding to be a healer? Or was I going to be a total weenie and pretend none of this was happening?
Hunter was about to lose his dad, to watch him die. He didn’t have the luxury of pretending none of this was happening.
My brain wound in circles all night, and when I realized that my room was growing lighter with the early dawn, I still didn’t have any answers.
“Alisa.” Hunter looked surprised to see me on his front porch, and frankly, I felt surprised to be there again. I’d taken a bus most of the way, then walked the rest, the cold wind whipping through my ski jacket. The school day had been endless, and after my sleepless night it had been especially painful to do laps around the gym.
“Come on in,” he said. “It’s nasty out there.”
Inside, my hands twisted together nervously. “I could do it,” I said fast, getting the words out before I lost my nerve.
Hunter looked at me blankly. “Do what?”
“I could cast the dark wave spell.” I licked my lips. “I’m half and half. Witch enough to cast the spell. Unwitch enough to survive it. I’m your best hope.”
I had never seen Hunter speechless—usually he seemed unflappable. Behind him, I saw Mr. Niall come out from the circle room. He saw Hunter and me standing there and came over. Hunter still hadn’t said anything. I repeated my offer, talking to Mr. Niall this time.
“You’ll die if you cast the dark wave spell. I probably won’t. I don’t know how strong I am, but I can shatter small appliances from twenty feet,” I said, trying for some lame humor. “All of you guys are sick—you look terrible and you can hardly move. All I have is a headache. You need me.”
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Niall gruffly. “It’s out of the question.”
“There’s no way, Alisa,” Hunter said finally. “You’re completely untrained, uninitiated. There’s no way of knowing if you could do it or not. There’s no way we could risk it.”
“You can’t risk not using me,” I said. “What if your dad is overcome by the dark wave before he finishes the spell? What happens then? Do you guys even have a backup plan?”