Chapter 31

Today is graduation day at Darby Prep. At least that’s what Beatrix tells me. I haven’t really been keeping up with things there in the past few months. My own graduation will be next month, a pretty low-key affair compared to what the prep school is probably doing. We’ll have some streamers and balloons and handmade 'Congrats, Grads!' banners hanging from the rafters of the gymnasium and then a bunch of kids are going to the for an overnight party. I might go.

You know, that’s a lie. I do know a few things. I just try not to dwell on them too much.

There is no more Bell Book and Candle at Darby Prep, not after all that happened. Even though the events didn’t have anything to do with the sorority.

I love how impersonal that sounds: the events, as if they had no connection to me or anyone I knew.

Headmaster O’Brien doesn’t want the negative association. This will be the last year for the group and that’s only because Fiona Geddes made a big fuss about it. But come fall, there won’t be any such thing as Bell Book & Candle.

Or will there? It is a secret society, after all.

Speaking of Fiona, what happened to her was probably the best thing to come out of all that. She, of course, had no idea she was being manipulated by Mrs. Gibson into trying to frame me and force me to shift. And she apparently genuinely enjoyed hanging around the woman. She really didn’t have much to say to police about any plans Mary Gibson had to destroy Beatrix and me.

But she did talk to them about her father. Douglas Geddes quietly retired from public office right after the holidays and was replaced in a special election in March. According to Bea, Fiona will be living with her aunt in this summer until she starts her freshman year at .

Julia and Mackenzie are headed to Bates at the end of summer. Mack led Darby Prep’s swim team to state finals but he didn’t make the Olympic team. He and Julia got pre-engaged on the last day of classes. I wager they’ll be broken up by sophomore year when Julia finally catches on that Mack is cheating on her.

Erin and Molly are going to together for the summer, right after graduation, and then on to where they’ll be roommates. Trey teases me that they’ll probably come out of the closet once they move to the city and announce they’ve secretly been dating for years. That’s always good for a laugh.

Better than zombie jokes.

After the fire, Beatrix took a week off at Headmaster O’Brien’s request and found us an apartment not far from Darby Prep, within walking distance of the high school since she won’t let me drive. Then she threw herself into her work with a vengeance I have never seen before. She offered to look for a new job and I secretly thought that was a fantastic idea but of course I told her no. She really does love her students at Darby Prep. Besides, in the past few months, she and O’Brien have started seeing other for off-campus dinners, although no one’s supposed to know that. Maybe one night they’ll double with Erin and Molly.

So yeah, I guess I know a few things. I keep a low-profile now, fly under the radar. Nothing attention-grabbing, certainly no shifting.

Well, no unnecessary shifting.

***

Classes at DCHS are a lot easier than at Sisters or Darby Prep which means I’ll probably graduate with a B average instead of the C I had been aiming for a few months ago. It’s good enough to get me into UMass in Amherst, if I decide to go. I don’t know yet. That’s kind of far from Beatrix.

And Trey.

Yeah, Trey.

Right after the events, Trey and I discovered we have a lot more in common than we knew. He came to see me at the new apartment on the first day I was back from the hospital.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

I was glad to see him but a little pissed that he hadn’t visited me when I was in the hospital. Even with Bea by my side, it was a very lonely four days until they released me.

He took my hands in his – very carefully – because they were both still bandaged and sore. I was on major beds for over a week just to deal with the pain. I also had suffered burns on my arms from where I fell into the votive candles with Mrs. Gibson. I had been so numb from the damage to my hands that I hadn’t even noticed the burns until I was brought to the hospital by the paramedics. They said I was lucky my whole uniform didn’t go up in flames, considering how much flammable material it was made of.

“I, uh, I’m sorry I didn’t come to the hospital,” he said.

He was going to have to do a lot better than that in the apology department, although his hand on mine was really soothing, I had to admit.

“I should tell you why.” He hesitated for such a long time then that I thought maybe he had forgotten about me, about my hand in his. “It’s, um, dangerous for me to be around…things that, um, run…”

I shook my head, thinking it was the drugs that made Trey incomprehensible. “What are you talking about?”

“I, um…” and then he stopped and looked around my bedroom. He pointed at my alarm clock, an old LED thing that played CDs. “Is that important to you?”

“What, time?”

“No…forget it. I’ll buy you a new one. Okay, watch.” He raised his hand and brought it closer to the clock. When it was about an inch away, the clock suddenly went dead. The red numbers blinked out and that was that.

I waited for the backup battery power to work but nothing happened. I looked at Trey. “Um, what was that?”

“I can’t go near electrical things. Or battery-operated things. Or cars or…anything that runs. I don’t…I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.” He looked down at the hand that held mine. “I’ve never known how to explain it. Not me, not my dad, not my grandpa.”

“So what does this mean?”

“It means,” he said, drawing out the word. “That if I had come to the hospital, all those respirators and ventilators I got close to would stop working. And those people attached to them would…you know, die.”

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But then, like a flash, I remembered how Trey never drove, how my own car had refused to work with him in it, how Bea’s cellphone went dead in his hand. His office didn’t have a computer or a coffee maker. I had no reason to doubt him. After all, he knew my secret. That he would have one of his own didn’t seem so far-fetched to me. Maybe that’s why he didn’t freak out as much about mine as I thought he would.

“No internet?”

“No internet porn.”

“Maybe your family were witches too,” I teased him.

He didn’t laugh at that, though.

“Joke, Trey, just a joke.”

And then he told me the craziest thing of all.

“We were the hunters.”

You could have knocked me over with a single breath. Trey looked so sorry then, so apologetic, as if it were his fault his family had wanted to kill mine three centuries ago.

“That’s why Grandpa was keeping those journals, why he knew all of that. It had been handed down from generation to generation.”

“So we weren’t destined to be together? We were destined to…” I couldn’t accept that he was supposed to hate me or want to see me hanging from a tree. That was his past – our past.

He smiled then and pulled me into his arms. “You think we were destined to be together?”

“Maybe.”

***

When I’m with Trey, I don’t hear the voices in my head, the voices of all those people whose I have absorbed. When he kisses me, it’s like he resets me, returns me to my normal internal self.

Yeah, maybe it is destiny.

We spent the first weeks after the fire just hanging out, occasionally making out, but mostly talking and reading and laughing. And then we got the news no one had wanted to tell us:

Mary Gibson’s body was never found in the fire.

“That’s impossible,” I said when Beatrix told me. “I saw the knife in her back.”

My aunt nodded grimly. “I watched those doors. I never saw her leave.”

“You’d think we’d have noticed someone who was on fire running away from a burning building,” Trey says.

“What about the woods around the cemetery? Was anything found there?”

Bea shook her head. “Nothing. No bones, no hair, no clothes.”

Nervous laughter shook my arms and my legs. I wanted to run back to the hospital and demand more meds. “What does this mean?”

“She’s out there.” Bea pressed her lips together. “Still hunting.”

I rested my head against Trey’s shoulder as I wondered what we could do, where we could go. Would she forget about us? I felt comforted by Trey’s presence, knowing he was there for me and for Bea, and maybe too I felt safer with someone who had hunting in his blood.

“Maybe she’ll go back to being a librarian at some school in the where they’ve never heard of Salem or Bell Book and Candle,” Trey said, a hopeful note in his voice.

Bea and I exchanged a glance then.

Evangeline.

I could read in the lines of worry on Bea’s face.

My mother is out there too.

The End.