Under a Spell

The pentagram on the floor was slowly, painstakingly being formed. A line of chalk arched into the circle. Another one, slightly larger, moved faster. Star upon star upon star etched itself into the ground.

The etching sped up, the wail hitting an ear-splitting crescendo as the thunder of unseen footsteps shook every bone in my body. And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the sound, the movement, the hot wind, the chalk, all disappeared.

“What the fuck was that?”

I stared down at the circle around us. The lines were thick, heavy, well defined. My throat was suddenly dry and I tried to swallow, tried to talk, but my tongue was plastered to the roof of my mouth. Finally, I was able to point a single shaking finger toward the floor.

“It was them.”

What seemed like hundreds of pentagrams—one on top of the other—were outlined around us. Some were exact, some were slightly skewed, but each had a point that formed a direct line toward the bay.

“You can see them too then?”

Will circled slowly, once hand clenched around his jaw. “Of course I can. There must be at least a hundred here. What is this? What is this room used for?” He gaped at me. “What the hell kind of classes do they teach here?”

I scanned the macabre graffiti, my stomach clenching with each new line. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the only electives they offered when I was a student were jazz band and home ec.”

When my phone rang, I went light-headed and Will dodged for the door. “It’s only my phone. Were you taking off?”

Crimson washed over Will’s cheeks. “I was securing the door to save you.”

“Right. Hello?”

“So, did it work?”

It was Lorraine, and once my heart dropped out of my throat and into my chest, I spoke. “Yeah. Maybe a little too well.”

“What does that mean?”

“There are pentagrams everywhere. The spell illuminated at least sixty—maybe more.”

Lorraine paused for a beat. “Really?”

“Really. What does that mean?”

“It means that you’re definitely not dealing with a couple of kids messed up with the occult. You’re dealing with a legacy, Sophie.”

I clicked the phone shut and looked at Will. He swallowed slowly. “So?”

“Lorraine says we’re dealing with a legacy.”

“A legacy? What does that mean?”

I picked my way across the room, careful not to step on any of the fading lines on the floor. My entire body ached and my skin felt pinpricked and tight. My heart dropped down to a normal beat, but the thuds were heavy and hard. “It means that Cathy Ledwith wasn’t the first. And, unless we stop this, Alyssa Rand won’t be the last.”

I drove home with the heat blasting and the radio off, Will’s taillights shining bright in front of me. Everything felt wrong—I felt wrong—and I tried a series of deep-breathing techniques I had seen on some late-night yoga set infomercial. Everything was churning in my head—was it the students or was it the school? Had other girls gone missing, girls we didn’t know about yet? Who—or what—was to blame?

I was just starting to feel normal again when I crested the third-floor steps of our apartment.

“Christ.”

And there it went again.

“What is this?” Will asked.

The little strip of public property between our apartment and Will’s was set up like a waiting room, complete with a stack of long-expired magazines, my living room set, and the half-dead spider plant I had been trying to revitalize since the Bush administration. It would have been a nice little setup if I didn’t have to throttle the arm of the couch and clear the coffee table to reach my front door, or, if it had been, you know, inside my apartment as it had been when I’d left this morning.

“Good luck with all that,” Will said with a smug smile before disappearing into his furniture-on-the-inside apartment.

I groaned and grabbed my door, flinging it open. “Nina, what the hell is go—”

“Shhhh!” I was met by a chorus of angry hisses and then the business end of a megaphone as Nina yelled, “Cut!” directly into my face. She pinched her icy, bony fingers around my elbow and yanked me into the kitchen, which had miraculously gone from cozy mess to break room chic: our mismatched collection of hand-me-down mugs with unappetizing statements—Carrie for Prom Queen, The Problem Is Gonorrhea—had been replaced by an orderly heap of stolen straight-from-the-UDA Styrofoam stand-in mugs and brown paper napkins stamped with the Starbucks logo. Our sugar bowl was stuffed with pilfered packaged sweeteners and coffee stirrers, and bottled water bloomed from an ice bath in the sink. There was a hastily arranged basket of individually wrapped snacks that I recognized—basket, bagels, and all—from the Red Cross station on Second Street.

“What is all of this?”

Nina swept an arm toward the cleared out living room. “Auditions.”

I scanned the room and frowned. “Auditions? For the UDA commercial?” I rolled up on my tiptoes and eyed the woman pacing my living room. She couldn’t have been under five feet nine inches tall or over eighty pounds. She took short, careful steps, smacking a sheaf of papers against her bony hip as she spoke soundlessly, her eyes bright and batting, engaging the struggling kitten on my Hang in There! poster.

“Who is that?”

Nina produced a clipboard from somewhere and thrummed through a stack of eight-by-ten black and white glossies. “Um, that is Stella MacNeir. Don’t you just love her?”

I pinched my bottom lip. “What department does she work in? I don’t think I’ve ever seen her. Is she new?”

“Uh, new like just off Broadway.”

I raised my eyebrows, impressed. “Like, Broadway, Broadway?”

“Like Broadway at Kearney, San Francisco.”

“That’s Big Al’s porn shop.”

Nina leaned through the kitchen–living room pass-through. “Thank you, Stella. We’re going to wrap up for the day. We’ll be in touch.”

“Wait. You’re auditioning people for the UDA commercial who don’t work at UDA?”

“I need the best, Soph.”

I gaped as Stella slid into a neon-pink leopard-print jacket and slipped one of my Frescas into her knock-off handbag before she slunk out the door.

“That’s the best?”

Nina looked casually over her shoulder as though Stella would reappear, perhaps in even more thespian- slash-sex-store-worker glory. She looked back at me, using her index fingers to rub tiny circles on her temples. “Look, it’s been a really long day. And we need Stella. You know how many actual Underworld employees show up on film? Two. Two! And one of them is a centaur. So as you can see, outsourcing this part was necessary.” Nina’s face suddenly brightened as her eyes slipped from the top of my forehead down to my toes.

“Unless . . .”

I stepped backward, mashing my hips against our cheap Corian counter. “No. Oh, no.”

Nina framed me with her hands and grinned so widely, I could see the tip of her fangs and the tops of her gums. “Oh, you’re perfect.”

“No. I know what you’re thinking and no. No, no, no.”

Nina’s arms dropped to her side and she pushed out her swollen lower lip. “You have no idea what I was thinking.”

“I’ve lived with you way too long, Neens. I know exactly what you’re thinking and the answer is a giant, loud,