“Listen. I'll come for the hearing, but it'll be Wednesday before I can get there.”
“Thanks, honey. I know things'll be fine once you're here.” In the space of a few minutes, Carlene's voice had gone from breathless panic to breezy confidence.
Madison clicked off and stood clutching the receiver. During the course of the conversation, a weight had descended. A yoke of responsibility, familiar from the time she was small. The burden of making sure everything turned out all right.
Seph was still there. He stood, a little shakily, using the back of the chair for support. “What happened?” he asked.
“I have to go home. Family crisis.”
“Can I help?”
“No.” She didn't really want to discuss her sad-assed family.
Seph reached for her, she took a step back, and he dropped his hands. “Look, I'll talk to my father. I think he's planning to stay through New Year's, anyway. If he can help with the boundary, I'll go with you.”
Madison's heart lurched in gratitude. She could really use a friend. It had been so long since she'd had someone on her side. Then she thought of Seph in Coal Grove, meeting Carlene and the rest. Seph, who'd been born to money and raised in Toronto and gone to school in Switzerland and spoke French like a native.
No. Seph was her friend—more than a friend. Maybe they couldn't be together, but she still didn't want to look into his eyes and find embarrassment or pity.
Besides, he seemed to be in charge of saving everybody else.
“Thanks. I mean it, but I'd better handle this on my own.”
Seph cleared his throat. “It might not be a good idea for you to leave the sanctuary by yourself.”
Madison's mind was already racing, cataloging all the things she had to do. Now it stumbled. “What? Why not?”
“It's just a bad time. Everyone's trying to gain an advantage—D'Orsay, the Roses. Someone might have remembered what happened at Second Sister, and be looking for you.”
So his concern for her had to do with wizards. Always wizards. Madison thrust her face into his. “Listen. I. Have. To. Go. I have no choice, understand?”
He raised his hands, capitulating. “When will you be back?”
“Not this semester, anyway. If I had to take a guess, I'd say I'll be lucky to be back in the fall.”
Seph frowned down at her. “You're not serious. You've been working so hard to get to art school. And now you want to drop out of high school?”
She turned away, rounding her shoulders against his questions. “Don't worry. I'll think of something. I'll know more after I get down there.”
“I wish you'd let me help.”
She shivered, feeling sparks arcing over the chasm between them. Feeling totally alone. Maybe Seph couldn't leave. But she could. It would give her time to work this out. He wasn't the only one having a hard time.
“Maddie? Are you okay?” The dark brows came together in a frown. “You're shaking.”
“Look, it's late,” she said, backing away, putting her hands behind her back and nodding toward the door. “You'd better go. I need to pack.”
He hesitated, as if he would say something else. Then he shook his head, turned, and was gone. She didn't even hear the front door open and close.
As soon as Seph was out of sight, Madison raced up three flights of stairs to the third floor, taking them two at a time. She shouldered open the door to her room and thumbed the light switch. The bulb in the overhead fixture fizzed, then exploded in a shower of glass.
Crossing to the window in the dark, she ripped open the curtains, her fingers leaving smoldering holes in the cloth. She flung open the wardrobe and snatched off the sheets draping the painting that stood inside.
Throwing back her head and closing her eyes, she extended her hands and sent power through her fingers like a breath long held and finally released. It streaked through the air and buried itself in the canvas, smelling like burnt coffee grounds. The paint blistered and ran into muddy swirls.
She backed away until the bed hit the backs of her knees. She slumped back onto the mattress, resting her feet on the bedframe, her elbows on her knees.
The painting reorganized itself, bleak, but recognizable and horribly animated. It was Second Sister all over again, Seph thrusting her behind him as Leicester and the alumni sent flame spiraling across the conference room. Only this time it struck Seph dead on, flinging him against the wall like a broken marionette.
It changed again—Seph laid out in St. Catherine's, pale and still, candles at his hands and feet, mourners filing past, pointing and whispering when Madison entered the church.
Buried in paint was the evidence of a dozen such attacks, an unrelenting series of scenes of Seph dying in every way imaginable.
Seph stirred the alien magic beneath her skin, woke it up like some monster of the deep. When she let it trickle out, Seph grew pale and tired, he developed raging headaches and his appetite dwindled. When she held it back, Seph visibly improved. But it built and built inside her until she had to release it or explode. There'd been several near misses until she'd discovered she could dissipate it into art—horrible art, but better than any other alternative. She'd tried to paint over it, to obliterate the sequence of awful images, but they continued to surface, like oil on polluted water.
It was a secret she had to keep from Seph—from everyone. There was no way Hastings or Linda or Nick Snowbeard would allow her to stay if they knew. They'd have no idea how to fix it, and Seph was too important to risk. She should have left long ago.
But she didn't. She couldn't give up her dreams of college and Seph McCauley both. She kept hoping the magic from Second Sister would eventually peter out.
Well, now she had no choice. Grimly, she began sorting through her belongings. There wasn't much to pack. She'd brought little from her life in Coal Grove. And she hadn't had the money to buy much since her arrival in Trinity.
After some thought, she pushed the hex painting back into the wardrobe and covered it over with a drop cloth. Two drop cloths. She closed the wardrobe and locked it. She wasn't going to take that thing to Coal Grove. She wouldn't need it once she got back home. Seph wouldn't be there to wake the monster.
While she worked, she sorted through her thoughts, as well.
She had no desire to crawl back to Coal Grove Consolidated High School for the last five months of the year. She was done with that. She'd met the curriculum requirements, and she'd taken all their arts courses. She'd hoped to get a year of college in before she had to pay for it herself. Now she'd probably lose the whole semester.
She knew how it would be once she went home. Her old life would wrap around her like a well-used quilt.
The whispering would begin again, stirred up by her presence. Bit by bit, they'd tear the flesh from the bones of her dreams.
She stared out the window at the hills and hollows of the lake.
Truth be told, she missed the hills and hollows of home, the texture of the timeworn land of her childhood. She missed the people, too, some of them. But not the limits they set for her and the assumptions they made, based on who her mama and daddy were. Not the notes that got left on her locker at school. Not the way people stuck crucifixes in her face like she was some kind of vampire—as if they knew exactly who she was and how she'd turn out.
Maybe she was just running from one kind of trouble to another, from the strange and magical trouble in Trinity to a more familiar kind. At home, they expected too little of her. And here, they expected too much.
Falling in love with Seph McCauley was the kind of bad move Carlene had made all her life. Her mother careened from crisis to crisis, thriving on calamity. She acted like love was something you caught, like cholera. Or a spell that took you unaware. So she couldn't possibly be blamed for screwing everything up.
Madison meant to be different. She meant to take hold of her life and get what she wanted and leave Coalton County behind for good.
“It'll happen,” she promised herself. But not just yet.
The canopy bed with the pink satin coverlet and the leaping unicorns on the bedposts was reassuringly familiar. Aunt Millisandra had furnished the room and named it Leesha's Room when Leesha was only three. Until recently, Leesha had stayed there at least once or twice a year. It had always been a kind of confectionary cavelike retreat.
Only now she didn't feel safe.
She propped herself against the ruffled pillow shams and drew the coverlet up to her waist. Releasing a gusty sigh, she punched numbers into her cell phone.
Barber answered on the third ring. “Yes?”
“Well. I'm here.”
Barber laughed. “Really? I always know right where you are, remember?”
Leesha fingered the gold circlet Barber had fused around her neck. Jason had said attack magic wouldn't work in the sanctuary. But maybe Barber could track her just the same.
“Look, this isn't working. It's like I said. Everybody hates me.”
Barber tsked. “Haley doesn't hate you. You've never even met, right?”
“Well.” Leesha hesitated. “I met him tonight. At a party.”
“There you go. That's a start. I'm sure you made a good impression.” Barber sounded hugely amused.
“The thing is, I just don't … I can't do this anymore. You'll have to think of something else.”
Barber's voice was like velvet over stone. “That's where you're wrong. This is your problem. You made the deal with D'Orsay. You promised we'd deliver Haley and the Dragonheart. Those papers you gave me mean nothing if we can't consecrate the Covenant. You need to lure Haley out of the sanctuary and to a place where I can get at him. How you do it is up to you.”
“I have money. I can pay you. Just take it off, okay?” Leesha struggled to control her voice. Begging didn't come easy.
“You think I have to come to you for money?” The velvet was gone. “I'm sick of you bluebloods treating me like a nobody. I know where you are and I know where your Aunt Milli lives. I better see some results or I'll squeeze the breath right out of the both of you.” He hung up.