Chapter Six
Lily couldn’t believe it. It had taken a week, but Evan and a couple of other guys were trying to convince Luke to join the basketball team, and so for the first time, Luke had been roped into sitting with Lily’s friends at lunch. This was such a fortunate opportunity that Lily couldn’t let it go to waste, although it was unclear how to use it to her benefit.
She glanced Chrysanthemum’s way to see how she took this change (badly, Lily hoped), but Chrysanthemum’s back was to her, so Lily would have to assume instead.
“How can you be so tall and not play basketball?”
Sonia asked, leaning over the table. She rested her chin on her hands and gave Luke a smile that was hard to misinterpret.
Lily seethed in frustration. She needed to be the one flirting with Luke, but flirting with him seemed wrong. She hadn’t fallen for him, so trying to make him fall for her was a little cruel.
Taking a bite of her sandwich, Lily shoved these concerns aside. She hadn’t fallen for him yet. That yet was important. Her cards had made it clear that she could eventually, and to make sure that happened and that her year would unfold successfully, she had to act like it was her only possible fate, since it very much was not. She could practically hear her father telling her that if she wanted something, she had to take action. At the time, he’d been encouraging her to run for student council her freshman year (back when her parents paid more attention to her), but the point held. If Lily wanted perfection, she needed Luke. And that required action. A party was a good step, but it couldn’t be the only one.
“I did play in middle school,”
Luke said.
“But the season overlaps with the fall musical.”
“Forget the musical,”
Evan said.
“You should play. We could use you.”
Conversation delved more deeply into basketball, and Lily found herself tuning most of it out. As her mind often did when boredom took over, her attention drifted toward Chrysanthemum.
All these years, she’d suffered quietly as Chrysanthemum plotted against her. There was value in being stoic, of course, but mostly her reticence had been about not acknowledging that she knew Chrysanthemum was her nemesis. Her silence—hopefully—prevented Chrysanthemum from seeing the way her existence got under Lily’s skin. It was seeming like that time had come to an end, though.
Strange that Luke would be the reason for it. As much as Lily liked his company in a friend kind of way, there was something irritating about her battle with Chrysanthemum escalating over a boy. It felt very anti-feminist.
“So what are you guys?”
Luke asked.
“The Thornhaven Witches or the Thornhaven Pirates?”
It took Lily a second to realize he was asking about the school mascot and not everyone’s personal affiliation.
“We’re the Thornhaven Pirates.”
“There’s really no such thing as witches,”
Sonia added, a little too quickly.
“You have a shop downtown that sells magical supplies,”
Luke pointed out.
“Yeah, but …”
Sonia took a drink from her water bottle, which was decorated in stickers of crystal balls, tarot cards, and the insignia from her aunt’s psychic shop.
Lily kicked her under the table.
“Witches aren’t, like, evil hags cursing people or anything. You wouldn’t have to be afraid even if they were real. And the tourists love that stuff—it’s really good for the island. As for the Cauldron Supply, it just sells nice candles and incense.”
The Cauldron Supply was owned by a couple of witches, so they also sold plenty of necessities for real magic, but the normies didn’t know that.
Luke didn’t look convinced as he reached for a potato chip.
“Maybe you would say that. Chrys and Anushka said your family is descended from a bunch of witches. Are you a witch?”
He said it with just enough humor to allow anyone listening to interpret it however they wished. Like he didn’t believe such a thing, yet he would totally appreciate some confirmation either way.
Lily would not scream. Her parents had raised her to have more decorum than that. An Allerton witch didn’t lose her temper. She smiled in public and hexed her enemies in private.
But Chrysanthemum had talked about her to Luke.
Lily wanted to take satisfaction in knowing Chrysanthemum was thinking about her, maybe even obsessing over Lily’s burgeoning friendship with Luke. Hopefully, it was irritating the shit out of her that her plans for keeping Luke to herself couldn’t compete with Lily’s plans to save him from her.
That didn’t cool Lily’s temper, though. The scream remained lodged in her throat, held down by two years of practice in suppressing her Chrysanthemum-related emotions.
“Please.”
Lily tossed her hair over her shoulder and gestured at Chrysanthemum.
“Look at us. Which one of us looks like a witch?”
She was wearing a blue cardigan over a white sundress with blue and yellow flowers, living it up these last few days before the weather turned chilly. Chrysanthemum, with her witchy eyes, was dressed all in black. As usual.
Luke shook his head.
“I don’t know. You do have that hair. Isn’t red hair associated with witches?”
“I thought the saying was that redheads didn’t have souls,”
said Evan, which was so not helpful.
“That’s all part of European folklore.”
Sonia waved around her water bottle.
“It’s related. Don’t you remember? We studied that in—”
She cut herself off before she could say witch school.
Groaning, Lily walked her lunch trash over to one of the bins. About thirty feet away, Chrysanthemum smiled at something Isaiah said, her strange blue eyes flashing, and Lily’s irritation with the lunch conversation increased. She didn’t want Chrysanthemum’s creepy eyes; she only wished she had some outward sign of her own power. Proof that it was strong. And yet, when she’d ended up being told she had some proof (her hair), it had come in the worst possible way.
A seagull was picking at the grass near the trash can, and Lily’s hands balled into fists. “Hey,”
she whispered, with only a brief check to make sure no one had crept up on her from behind.
“See the girl over there in all black?”
Lily wasn’t sure how well the seagull could distinguish between students, so she mentally formed an image of Chrysanthemum in her head. While she had not mastered her talent, trial and error had taught her a few tricks. One of them was that visual aids often helped.
“If you steal her lunch, I’ll bring you a treat tomorrow,” she said.
The seagull cocked its white head in her direction, and Lily held her breath.
Now that the words were out of her mouth, she wondered if she should have uttered them. This was crossing a line she’d never crossed before. Of course she’d thought of hexing Chrysanthemum. Who wouldn’t in her position? But while this wasn’t a hex, it was a direct attack.
Or, well, she was asking the seagull to attack for her. That technicality didn’t make much difference other than that the seagull could refuse.
Part of her hoped it would. This wasn’t like her at all. Another part—the frustrated, stressed, and angry part—hoped it wouldn’t. An Allerton witch smiled and hexed her enemies in private—and she was an Allerton witch. If she wanted to be powerful, she should own that power.
Besides, Chrysanthemum had started it. Whatever had happened with the book yesterday, she’d done that to Lily. Payback was only fair.
The seagull took flight, and Lily willed herself to toss out her trash and not watch it go. To not do anything suspicious at all. Using a talent wasn’t like a normal spell—it didn’t leave behind a tinge, so Chrysanthemum would have no reason to believe Lily had done anything. But her heart pounded, and her hands shook like she’d exerted herself on a real spell.
Composing herself, Lily returned to her table, and she was just sitting down when she heard a scream.