I understood the dilemma all too well. Shame I couldn’t blame my magic going awry on something as simple as an unfortunate piece of jewelry.

“What did the ring look like?” asked Selene.

“Just a band with a couple of imbedded diamonds, and a silver coating on it so you wouldn’t know it was iron.”

If Rosemary had only gotten the ring last summer, then she hadn’t been a Keeper for very long. Did that mean the Keeper spell was new, too? I tried to think of the most current events among magickind, but nothing struck me as significant. Not that I paid a lot of attention to that sort of thing. Then again, it was possible the spell wasn’t new at all. She might have been made part of a preexisting spell through a transference ritual. Given what Lady Elaine had said about the Keeper ring being a rite of passage, that seemed more likely.

“Do you think the ring has something to do with her murder?” said Melanie.

“Maybe.”

A loud crack of lightning made us all jump.

Melanie glanced at her watch and blanched. “I’ve got to go.” She stood up. “If you have any more questions, let me know.”

“Okay.”

She picked up her bag and slid it over her shoulder. She looked back at me, her expression deadly serious. “Promise me something. I want to know who it is. I want to be the first.”

Not hardly, I thought as I gave her an unenthusiastic nod. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

But I had a sinking feeling it was too late to back out now.

8

Wannabe

I didn’t read any entries in the diary during school the next day since I was too afraid of getting caught with it. The day went by quickly and smoothly all the way until sixth-period alchemy, by far my worst subject. Alchemy was basically chemistry, but with magic ingredients. I just didn’t have the right temperament for it, unlike my lab partner, Britney Shell.

Britney was a mermaid with curly strawberry blond hair and eyes the color of aquamarine set in between a rather large, bulbous nose. Like all mermaids, her pale, almost translucent skin held a natural sheen that made her glisten in strong sunlight as if she was wet. And also like a lot of mermaids, she was painfully shy, almost socially comatose. It was this same shyness that made her so good at alchemy. She had no trouble ignoring distractions while she carefully counted the number of stirs and added the right ingredient at the right time.

If our teacher, Ms. Ashbury, would only allow Britney to do all the hands-on stuff for us all the time, my grade would’ve been a lot higher. But Ashbury was an equal opportunity teacher, which meant today was my turn to do the mixing while Britney read the instructions for the cooling draught we were tasked with making.

“Add this on stir twenty-one,” Britney said, holding out to me a vial of pureed bladderwrack leaves. I took it from her when I reached nineteen, trying not to be distracted by the odd webbing of skin in between her fingers. She never bothered to hide it with a glamour. You’d think I’d get used to stuff like that, but it seemed I never did.

Still, I managed to dump the bladderwrack into the beaker at the right time, turning the bubbling liquid from gray to dark green.

“Good job,” Britney said in her tiny, musical voice.

I beamed at her, delighted with how well I was doing. But then my gaze fell on Eli at the next table. He was watching me with an expression that sent jitters bouncing along my nerve endings. It wasn’t hostile, exactly, but inscrutable and full of that intense vibe I usually got from him, as if he were more physically present than everybody else in the room. All day yesterday and today he hadn’t said a word to me about getting him in trouble with Lady Elaine, but he just might be thinking about it now.

I ripped my gaze off him, running a nervous hand through my hair. When I dropped the hand to my side, I hit the ragwort jar on the table, knocking it to the floor.

“Crap,” I said.

“We need to add that next!” Britney sounded close to panic as she stooped, trying in vain to gather up the minced leaves strewn among broken pieces of clay. “Don’t lose count,” she added.

“Twenty … seven, twenty-eight.”

“Here, use ours.” It was Lance. He set a jar full of dark leaves on the table in front of me.

Without thinking, I picked up the measuring cup, dipped it into the jar, and then dumped the contents into the beaker just as I reached thirty.

Boom.

A streak of lightning exploded from the beaker, shattering it. Hot liquid splattered my hair and forearms, which I had managed to raise in front of my face just in time. I yelped in pain, and ran to the sink, quickly rinsing off the liquid before it could burn my skin.

“What’s going on here?” Ms. Ashbury stomped over to us, her face livid with anger, and her dark eyes blazing in between her hooked nose. I’d never seen a witch look more like a witch in my life. Even her dyed-purple hair looked menacing. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Uh…” I sputtered. “I have no idea. I just added the ragwort, and it exploded.”

“What ragwort? Show it to me.”

I looked at the jar Lance had brought over, realizing my stupidity.

Ms. Ashbury picked it up and smelled it, her nose wrinkling. “This is mountain ash, not ragwort. What were you thinking?”

“It wasn’t her,” Britney said. “Lance gave it to us. He did it on purpose.”

I smiled at her. It took a lot of courage for someone like Britney to call out Lance on one of his tricks.