happen that evening.
I drifted through my memories, sad and joyous and just plain ridiculous.
I thought about Elaine and me in high school. We had lived like superheroes: two young people with incredible powers who must hide themselves from those around them, lest they be isolated and persecuted for their different-ness.
I hadn’t really been interested in girls yet when I met Elaine. We’d both been twelve, bright, and stubborn, which meant that we generally drove each other crazy. We had also been best friends. Talking about our dreams of the future. Sharing tears or a shoulder, whichever was needed. At school, we both found the subject matter to be tedious beyond bearing—in comparison to the complexity of Justin’s lessons, acquitting ourselves well in the public-school curriculum had been only nominally more difficult than sharpening a pencil.
It was difficult to relate to the other kids, in many ways. We just weren’t interested in the same things. Our magic talents increasingly made television a difficulty, and video games had been downright impossible. Elaine and I wound up playing a lot of card and board games, or spending long, quiet hours in the same room, reading.
Justin had manipulated us both masterfully. He wanted us to bond. He wanted us to feel isolated from everyone else and loyal to him. Though he put up a facade about it that fooled me at the time, he wanted us to work through our nascent sexuality with each other and save him the bother of explaining anything—or the risk of either Elaine or me forming attachments with someone outside our little circle.
I never suspected a thing about what he really wanted, until the day Elaine stayed home sick. Concerned about her, I skipped my last class and came home early. The house seemed too quiet, and an energy I had never sensed before hung in the air like cloying, oily perfume. The second I walked in the door, I found myself tensing up.
It was my first encounter with black magic, the power of Creation itself twisted to maim and destroy everything it touched.
Elaine sat on the couch, her expression calm, her spine locked rigidly into perfect posture. I now know that Justin had put the mental whammy on her while I was gone, but at the time I knew only that my instincts were screaming that something was wrong. A wrongness so fundamental it made me want to run away screaming filled the room.
And besides. Elaine only sat like that when she was making a statement—generally, a sarcastic one.
I still remembered it, plain as day.
Justin appeared in the kitchen doorway, on the other side of Elaine, and stood there for a moment, looking at me, his expression calm.
“You skipped class again.” He sighed. “I probably should have seen that coming.”
“What’s going on here?” I demanded, my voice high and squeaky with fear. “What have you done?”
Justin walked to the couch to stand over Elaine. Both of them stared at me for a long moment. I couldn’t read their expressions at all. “I’m making plans, Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice. “I need people I can trust.”
“Trust?” I asked. His words didn’t make sense. I couldn’t see how they applied to the current situation. I couldn’t see how they would make sense at all. I looked from Elaine back to Justin again, searching for some kind of explanation. Their expressions gave me nothing. That was when my eyes fell to the coffee table and to the object lying quietly next to my well-mauled paperback copy of
A straitjacket.
There was something quietly, calmly sinister in the congruence. I just stared for a moment, and the bottom fell out of my stomach as I finally realized, for the first, awful time, what my instinct had been screaming at me: I was in danger. That my rescuer, teacher, my guardian meant to do me harm.
Tears blurred my vision as I asked him, in a very quiet, very confused voice, “Why?”
Justin remained calm. “You don’t have the knowledge you need to understand, boy. Not yet. But you will in time.”
“Y-you can’t do this,” I whispered. “N-not you. You saved me. You saved us.”
“And I still am,” Justin said. “Sit down next to Elaine, Harry.”
From the couch, Elaine said in a quiet, dreamy monotone, “Sit down next to me, Harry.”
I stared at her in shock and took a step back. “Elaine . . .”
Justin threw kinetomancy at me when I looked away.
Some instinct warned me in the last fraction of a second, but instead of trying to block the strike, I moved with it, toward the front picture window, weaving my own spell as I went. Instead of interposing my shield, I spread it wide in front of me like a sail, catching the force of Justin’s blast and harnessing it.
Me, my shield, Justin’s energy, and that picture window exploded onto the front lawn. I remembered the enormous sound of the shattering glass and wood, and the hot sting of a dozen tiny cuts from bits of flying glass and wood. I remember being furious and terrified.
I went through the open space where the window had been, fell onto the lawn, took it in a roll, and came up sprinting.
“Boy!” Justin said, projecting his voice loudly. I looked over my shoulder at him as I ran. His eyes were more coldly furious than I had ever seen them. “You are here with me—with Elaine. Or you are
I lopped the last two words off the sentence to get his real meaning and poured on more speed. If I stayed, he meant to render me helpless, and from that beginning there could be no good endings. If I went back angry, I could fight him, but I couldn’t win—not against the man who taught me everything I knew. I couldn’t call the cops and tell them Justin was a mad wizard—they’d write me off as a nutcase or prankster without thinking twice. It wasn’t like I could run to Oz and ask a more powerful wizard for help.
He’d never told me about the White Council or the rest of the supernatural world. Abusers like to isolate their victims. People who feel that they are completely alone tend not to fight back.
“Boy!” Justin’s voice roared, now openly filled with rage. “Boy!”
He didn’t need to say anything more. That rage said it all. The man who had given me a home was going to kill me.
It hurt so much, I wondered if he already had.
I put my head down and ran faster, my tears making the world a blur, with only one thought burning in my head:
This wasn’t over. I knew that Justin could find me, no matter where I ran, no matter how well I hid. I hadn’t escaped that straitjacket. I had only delayed it for a little while.
I didn’t have any choice.
I had to fight back.
“What happened next?” asked a fascinated voice.
I shook my head and snapped out of the reverie, looking up to the sunlit sky outside my grave. Winter’s hold was definitely weakening. The sky was grey clouds interspersed with streaks of summer blue sky. There was a lot of water dripping down the edges of my grave, though the snow at the bottom was still holding its chill.
The Leanansidhe sat at the edge of my grave, her bare, dirty feet swinging back and forth. Her bright red hair had been bound back in a long tail, and she was dressed in the shreds of five or six different outfits. Her head was wrapped in a scarf that had been knitted from yarn duplicating various colors of dirty snow, and the tattered ends of it hung down on either side of her head. It gave her a sort of lunatic-coquette charm, especially considering the flecks of what looked like dried blood on the pale skin of her face. She looked as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.
I just stared up for a moment and then shook my head faintly. “You saw that? What I was thinking?”
“I see you,” she said, as though that explained it. “Not what you were thinking. What you were remembering.”
“Interesting,” I said. It made a certain amount of sense that Lea could discern the spirit world better than I could. She was a creature who was at least partly native to the Nevernever. I probably looked like some kind of pale, white, ghostly version of myself to her, while the memories that were my substance played across the surface.
I thought about the wraiths and lemurs that Sir Stuart had put down on my first night as a ghost, and how
