Shadow Girl
Book One: Who I Am
[Chapter Two: Messages]
Two days later, I was sitting at the kitchen table, wishing I was in the other room with the rest of my parents' coven, Kithic. I know I'm going to sound hypocritical here, but I love going to circles. It's the feeling of belonging. But part of my punishment was missing circle. And when Sharon and Ethan Sharp's conceited twelve-year-old son agreed to keep me company, it became so severe that it's now all of the punishment. I was half-listening to Todd telling me about his football game. Imagine my astonishment when he told me he'd somehow made all of the touchdowns single-handedly.
"What are you reading?" Todd asked condescendingly. He craned his neck to try to see the book.
"A book on medieval torture," I told him coolly. I only said that to scare him away; I was really just brushing up on my magickal herbs.
"Girls shouldn't read so much," he said matter-of-factly. I gave him an annoyed look. "It'll make their pretty little faces get thinking creases."
"Right now you're giving me pissed-off creases," I muttered, trying to concentrate on the book.
Todd grabbed my book and pulled it away from me. I looked up at him, wondering how stupid this kid was. "I've never seen your room."
"Well, that's nice," I said, reaching for my book.
Todd pulled it away again. "I want to see your room."
I just looked at him. "Up the stairs, last one on the left, touch nothing or die."
"No." Todd leaned into me. "I want you to take me up there."
I narrowed my eyes. "Why?"
"Because…I wanna get to know you a little better." Todd gave me a bad imitation of a seductive smile.
I snapped my arm out so my finger was an inch from his face. "Do you want a ball of witch fire up your nose?"
Todd grinned. "I like 'em feisty."
I pretended like I was about to punch him in the face, and Todd squawked. "Mooooooommmyyyyyyy!"
There was a pause in action in the other room, and my father appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, wearing his dark green robe. Sometimes when I look at him like that, I want to yell, Dumbledore! Nice to see ya!
"Moira, what's going on in here?" he asked, looking from me to the cowering Todd. A few of the coven members were gathering behind him. My mother was looking at me with a questioning look. Things were still strained between us after my outburst.
"He was doing it again," I explained, gesturing to Todd.
His mother made an irritated noise from within the crowd. "That's it! We are going home, mister, and if you can't learn to behave yourself, you aren't coming back!" Sharon dragged Todd out of our house by his ear.
Ethan followed her, saying, "I'm sorry, Hunter, I promise he won't do this again…"
"Oh, it's all right. It's not your fault," Dad answered, looking at me.
I sighed and crossed my arms across my chest. "Sure. Blame the girl."
"Morgan, would you finish the circle, please? I want to have a word with Moira," my dad said.
Mom bit her lip before saying, "Sure." She gave me one more quizzical look, then led the rest of Kithic back into the living room.
My dad ran his fingers through his hair and looked at me. "Moira, why can't you just try to get along with other people?"
"I can't help it if people are constantly pissing me off," I told him.
"You can't keep losing your bloody temper!" Dad yelled at me.
"Well, my bloody tempah shouldn't be tested by twelve-year-old brats!" I put my hands up on my face and took a few breaths. "You know what? I'm gonna go calm myself down the Wiccan way, okay?"
"That's a good girl," my father said as I ran upstairs. Dagda padded after me.
Once I got to the second floor, I stood for a minute, thinking. Then I walked into my parents' room.
I knelt down and opened the cabinet of my mother's nightstand. Inside were a collection of beautifully bound books. My mother's Books of Shadows. I'd read most of them, but not the smallest one. That one was from when my mother was a teenager. I took it and sat down on my parents' bed, flipping through.
Dagda gave out a warning-filled mrow as he hopped up next to me.
"It's not like I'm looking for her darkest secrets," I told him, stroking his black fur. "I'm just seeing if she wrote down a calming ritual." I scanned the pages quickly, until something caught my eye. "Calming circle," I read aloud. "A ritual for inner cleansing. Well, got what I needed." I hopped off the bed and went out to my room, with Dagda meowing disdainfully behind me.
The cat followed me as I walked into my room. I quickly began to set up my own little circle. The ritual didn't require me to set up an altar, just a circle. Most witches just draw a circle on the floor with a piece of chalk, but I like to be a little different. I gathered all the candles in my room (and there were a lot of them) and set them up in a circle, leaving two candles out of the ring until I had turned off my light and moved my mother's Book of Shadows, a bowl of salt, and myself into the circle. I sat with my knees drawn up to my chest, and I took my time lighting each candle with my mind. The look of my room in the candlelight was beautiful.
I sprinkled salt around my circle of candles, saying, "With this salt, I purify my circle." Then I opened the old book to where I'd found the ritual. I put it on the floor in front of me, crossing my legs Indian-style.
"With every breath out, release a negative emotion," I read from the Book of Shadows. "With every breath in, take in white light, healing light, soothing and calming light. Feel it enter your fingers, your toes, settle in your stomach, reach up through the crown of your head." Wow, this lady was weird, I thought, frowning at the slight cheesiness. According to the Book of Shadows, this had been shown to my mother by a woman named Selene.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the breathing though, then began speaking again, as the ritual dictated. "I release tension," I said. "I release fear and anger. I release uncertainty." With every breath, with every feeling of discord that I released, I felt calmer. More at peace.
Moira…
I opened my eyes with a gasp. A voice had echoed in my mind.
Calm feeling gone, calm feeling reeeally gone, I thought.
Dagda had fled from my room, meowing with alarm. I cast out my witch senses, trying to feel any unfamiliar presences. I hadn't recognized that voice at all. It was male; that's all I could tell. I quickly blew out the candles and ran out of the room and down the stairs.
I stopped short when I saw my mother sitting at the kitchen table, petting Dagda. She looked up and saw me. "Hi, Moira," she said. "Do you know what's up with Dagda? He's acting strange."
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to tell her about the voice. "I don't know," I said, shrugging. I sat down across from her. Dagda was still mrow-ing at me, as if to say, This is all your fault.
Mom scratched her cat behind the ears thoughtfully. I sat, looking at her pensively. My mother hadn't had an easy path. She'd grown up as a normal Catholic girl, with friends and two loving parents and a little sister. But in her junior year of high school, she discovered Wicca—and a world she never knew could possibly exist. That was when she found out that she was a blood witch, and adopted by her parents. Her parents didn't want Mom to practice Wicca because they knew that her mother—my grandmother—had been burned inside a barn, and witchcraft was supposedly involved. It was tough between Mom and her parents for a while, but they finally came to terms with each other. Mom's even kept their last name, Rowlands, which makes people ask me where the Riordan in my name came from.
When my dad met her, my mom was just about seventeen and he was nineteen. At the time he was a Seeker for the International Council of Witches, following a lead on misuse of magick. At first Mom and Dad hated each other, but obviously that all changed in time. My dad says that when he met her, she was a young girl with so much power and so little control. Other witches from the Council were always astounded by the witch who could light fires with her mind and only had three months worth of training. The last living heir of the powerful coven Belwicket who'd spent her life going to church every Sunday. She was the daughter of Maeve Riordan, a young woman who fled Ireland after the dark wave destroyed her whole town and renounced all forms of Wicca when she escaped to New York. Maeve would have been high priestess of Belwicket if it wasn't for the dark wave.
My mom has dark hair and dark eyes, and she looks thin and intense. People who knew Mom when she was younger say that when they see me, it's like seeing a young Morgan Rowlands again. People say I'm exactly like her.
And I wonder if they're right.
"Moira…" my mom said, looking at Dagda. "About what happened on Thursday…"
"I'm sorry," I interrupted. "I shouldn't have said what I said. I didn't mean it. It's just so hard sometimes…"
"I know," Mom said quietly, stretching her arm and putting her hand over mine. "I shouldn't have yelled. I'm just worried about you, sweetie. People don't take to witches too well, you know."
"I know." I looked into her dark hazel eyes, so like mine. "Are things going to be okay?"
Mom smiled. "Of course they are." She got up and hugged me, and I squirmed a little. I've never been a hug-y person.
I still couldn't get myself to tell her about hearing the voice inside my head. That isn't normal no matter who you are.
* * *
On Monday at school we were having an assembly. Some overachieving Harvard graduate was visiting to lecture us freshmen on planning our lives in order to be successful. This guy seemed pretty serious; he had a white board for making notes and everything. Everyone was jabbering and making a lot of noise. If I had anybody to jabber to and make noise with, I would have been, too. But everyone either ignored me or acted like I had the plague.
Mr. Richter tapped the microphone. "Excuse me? May I have your attention?" Slowly everyone quieted down. "As you know, Andrew Hoskins has come to discuss your futures with you. All I ask is that you pay attention to him and don't make a ruckus. Mr. Hoskins…"
The Harvard Smarty got up to the podium and began to drone on about how he started plotting out his path in life when he was in diapers. I stared up at the ceiling, spacing out. I thought about TV shows I'd been watching last night, the math quiz next period…
Suddenly I felt a weird presence in the room. And someone gasped. And screamed. "The pen is moving!" a girl screeched.
I jumped up, looking towards the stage. Mr. Hoskins was staring open-mouthed at his white message board. The red dry-erase pen was hovering next to it. Slowly, it touched the board and began to write an I. When it finally dropped to the floor, the message read:
I will come for you, Moira.
Here's a pop quiz:
How many Moiras are in one high school?
* * *
Minutes later I was sitting in the principal's office. "What the hell just happened?" Mr. Richter asked me.
"A pen starts floating in midair and writes a message to me, and I'm supposed to know what happened," I muttered.
"Are you telling me that you have no idea what that was about?" Mr. Richter said, leaning over his desk to look me in the eyes.
"I haven't the faintest idea who or what did that," I told him.
Mr. Richter rubbed his temples, muttering something about phantom stalkers. He sat down at his desk and breathed out. "Of course we'll call your parents--"
"No!" I surprised both of us by blurting that out. I honestly don't know where that came from. While Mr. Richter stared at me, I said, "I mean, why bother them? It didn't seem too threatening, right?" Mr. Richter looked at me skeptically. "Look, my mom wasn't too thrilled about the last time you called home. Let me tell them, okay?"
"Fine, Moira," agreed Mr. Richter. "But promise me you'll tell them."
"Wiccan's honor," I said, holding up my hand. He looked at me. "Okay, I made that up. But trust me."
I walked out of Mr. Richter's office feeling incredibly afraid. Was something…after me?
