Chapter Thirty-Five
Lily had tried to get Chrys added to the decorating committee, and for many reasons now, Chrys was glad she’d failed. She liked working the check-in table for the ball. The job took less time than decorating, and while it was probably a lot more boring, it enabled her to avoid being sociable. Most years, that was all Chrys had wanted. This year, it was still kind of what she wanted, but it came with a problem—Lily arriving with friends and needing to be checked in. If Lily approached her, Chrys couldn’t run away.
The text Lily had sent her last night burned like a fire in the pocket of Chrys’s black tulle skirt. She hadn’t discovered it until she’d gotten home, and then she’d stared at it for a minute before throwing her phone at her bed in frustration.
Almost twenty-four hours later, Chrys still hadn’t responded. Curiosity was killing her, but she had to have some self-respect. She needed to prove to Lily that nothing Lily had to say would interest her.
Speaking of, here she came, looking like an autumn fairy, reminding Chrys of the day when they’d stomped on leaves in Lily’s yard. She wore an emerald-green dress with asymmetrical straps. Her shoulders were dusted with gold glitter, and her reddish-blond hair was swept back and held in place by golden leaf-shaped clips. She was so pretty, it made Chrys want to toss more things, including her stomach contents.
Lily was surrounded by the usual crowd—Sonia and Evan, and more witches who’d never acknowledged Chrys’s existence until the last couple of weeks.
In her desperation to not look at Lily, Chrys accidentally met Sonia’s gaze, and Lily’s best friend smiled cautiously at her and motioned her head toward Lily as if to suggest Chrys be the one who did the approaching.
That could only mean Sonia was delusional.
Chrys took a step back from the table, wondering if it was too late to ask for a bathroom break, but if she did, she’d have to walk past Lily to get there. Since running wouldn’t help, Chrys surreptitiously crept down to the far end of the table, toward the Z side of the registrants.
“Alina Young.”
One of the witches who’d entered with Lily held out her ticket so Chrys could mark her off the guest list.
Chrys snatched the black-and-orange card stock. As if she didn’t know the girl’s name after being in classes together for the past several years. She stamped the back of Alina’s hand harder than necessary, and the inked cat (made of bespelled ink) growled at her before resuming its normal position on Alina’s pink-freckled skin.
“Did you get my text?”
Lily’s voice froze Chrys in place.
“Yes.”
Chrys added Alina’s ticket to the pile and became very busy straightening it so that all the edges lined up perfectly. It was a very Lily sort of thing to do.
“Can we talk?”
Lily asked.
Chrys thumbed through the tickets, pretending to count them.
“I’m busy.”
“Later?”
Maybe later she would leave.
“Please?”
Lily pressed.
Chrys shrugged. Bored indifference remained her preferred defense.
She was saved by a familiar voice. Anushka, dressed in a luminous pink gown with butterfly wings on her back, hurried across the lobby, her younger sister skipping on her heels.
Chrys hadn’t been able to stop herself from sharing with Anushka that she and Lily were no longer together. Anushka and Isaiah could tell she was upset, and so for only the second time in three years, Chrys had accepted an invitation to go to Anushka’s house after school on Friday. Letting out her feelings had been strangely helpful. Anushka had been ready to murder Lily on Chrys’s behalf. They’d spent the evening listening to angsty music and plotting ways to convince Anushka’s parents to let her travel with Chrys to Boston over winter break to see one of their favorite bands.
It was no surprise, therefore, that Anushka was glaring daggers at Lily’s back as she approached.
Perhaps sensing that rage, Lily stepped aside.
“I’ll find you later.”
Please don’t, Chrys thought. She couldn’t stand to hear whatever Lily wanted to tell her, and she was wearing makeup tonight. If she got too upset, she could smear it.
Chrys checked in Anushka and her family, but once they disappeared, she couldn’t stop looking toward the ballroom, half hoping Lily would come back out to find her.
She was so weak.
Struggling to hold herself together, Chrys glanced above the ballroom’s open doors and frowned. There was a crack in the wall, one she could have sworn hadn’t been there the last time she’d looked that way.
As if it noticed her staring at it, the crack faded.
No.
Chrys swallowed, blinked, and scanned the rest of the lobby while her heartbeat picked up the tempo.
Everything else seemed normal.
The ball had opened an hour ago, and new arrivals were thinning out.
Clusters of people stood around chatting, and hotel staff scurried by as they worked.
Clearly, no one else had noticed anything amiss.
Chrys told herself to relax. She had enough problems to deal with. Maybe stress was causing her to hallucinate?
When the new guests finally stopped coming altogether, Chrys was informed she should head into the ball and enjoy her evening.
That seemed highly optimistic, but sitting around outside the ballroom was getting too boring to endure.
She should poke her head inside, check out the decorations, and figure out what to do.
Leaving early actually wasn’t that simple.
Her mom would stay for a few more hours, and most people hung around until midnight, which the Historical Society marked with its most fantastical displays of magic.
It was too far to walk home, and Chrys’s black lace-up boots precluded that anyway.
As it was, she’d be thankful not to end the night with any blisters.
If nothing else, she should wander the ball to convince herself that the thing she’d seen earlier wasn’t real.
That no black veins had somehow invaded the hotel.
Every year the witches’ decorating committee transformed the Haven Harbor Hotel and Resort’s ballroom into a Halloween fantasyland, and this year was no exception.
The entire ceiling was filled with smoke.
Lights cascaded down within it, dripping gold and purple, their colorful hues evaporating into the air in time with the music.
More lights swirled up black walls, rising off strategically placed cauldrons that bubbled and overflowed with steam.
Tables had been pushed to one side of the room, each covered in black cloth and lit with candles.
The bars and food stations along the far wall were lined with mirrors, and the bartenders and servers working behind them were skeletons—real people, Chrys knew, but subject to a glamour spell that would create that illusion for anyone who stepped within its confines.
Every now and them, amid the smoke above, more illusions—bats and ghosts—swept through the artificial sky.
Finally, pumpkins sat everywhere off the dance floor, some carved and some not, filling any voids so that anywhere someone looked, there was a reason to marvel.
Once, the decorating committee had gone with a harvest theme; another year, they’d turned the entire ballroom into a haunted cemetery.
The upside to this year’s dark, almost psychedelic theme was that it would make being spotted by Lily more difficult, especially since Chrys had inadvertently dressed to match the color scheme: black skirt, black boots, lace gloves, plum satin bodice.
Chrys grabbed a couple of mini-quiches and some soda from a helpful skeleton (which was disconcerting despite her knowing how the spell worked) and headed toward the patio, keeping as close as she could to the walls.
At one point, she thought she saw a flash of Lily’s green dress moving across the dance floor, and Chrys ducked behind a bubbling cauldron until the vision passed.
The smoke rising from it smelled ever so slightly of rot, and Chrys jerked her head back.
That was wrong.
Almost all the spells that would have been used to decorate were glamour spells. They were, relatively speaking, simple things. Illusions, mainly. None should have a foul odor about them, and while it was possible someone might have thought it cute to burn some incense in the cauldrons to make the smoke more interesting, surely they wouldn’t have chosen to make interesting mean unpleasant.
Chrys’s stomach twisted. The curse had stunk of rot, too.
After another sip of her soda, she headed outside to clear her nostrils and her head.
Fires blazed around the patio, though the air itself seemed to have been warmed by a spell, as there was no way the fires were generating so much heat.
Hay covered the patio stones, and golden lights in the shape of an elaborate spiderweb hung of their own accord in the sky, creating a glowing canopy.
More pumpkins and jack-o’-lanterns were piled everywhere she looked.
The mood was less intense, and the number of revelers fewer, and both those changes were welcome.
Chrys breathed deeply, trying to relax, and she wandered through the maze of hay bales until she found a semisecluded area to rest.
But as she sank onto one of the chairs scattered about, the weight of her phone brushed her thigh, reminding her of Lily’s unanswered text.
Did she text back and tell Lily what she’d smelled? Although she wanted to avoid Lily, she had a reason to respond, one that didn’t involve giving away her feelings.
Or was she merely looking for an excuse?
That possibility forced Chrys to grasp her soda glass with both hands. No. She only thought she might have seen the veins, and the cauldron smoke could have smelled funny for any number of reasons. There was no need to jump to conclusions and therefore no need to alert Lily. Without another sign—a stronger one—that something was amiss, it was best to stick to the plan: She’d find her friends, avoid Lily, and figure out a way to leave early.
Chrys nodded at the smiling jack-o’-lantern across from her, as though they’d reached this conclusion together.
The jack-o’-lantern frowned in response.
Startled, Chrys almost dropped her glass, and she swore silently at her jumpiness. Someone had obviously bewitched the jack-o’-lanterns to change expressions. Frowning seemed rude, but clearly it was supposed to be playfully creepy.
She assumed too soon. The carved expression on the jack-o’-lantern’s face turned uglier as it sneered. Once cheerful, the golden light glowing from within took on a greenish hue that made the expression more sinister.
More alive.
Chrys was gaping at it, wondering if it was somehow responding to her thoughts, when a worm emerged from the snarling mouth. The wiggling black-and-green thing was smaller than Chrys’s tiniest finger, but a second one soon followed. Then another and another, until the pumpkin’s face was vomiting worms, pouring them through its glowing eyes and nose. In seconds, a mass of slimy creatures that reminded her of the curse’s pulsing heart swallowed the jack-o’-lantern.
Chrys jumped up, sweat breaking out on the back of her neck. As the worms trailed off, black smoke began to pour out of the jack-o’-lantern—stinking, gag-worthy smoke. Then it laughed, an evil, prickly sound that made the hairs on Chrys’s neck stand on end and her stomach sink to her ankles.
Yet no one else seemed to notice anything amiss.
No one turned in her direction. No one exclaimed over the magic.
Chrys backed into the chair and stumbled. In case she hadn’t put the signs together before, black veins spread across the straw beneath the pumpkin, removing any doubts about what was happening.
They shot right toward her across the patio.
Chrys darted aside, panic spreading throughout her body. She couldn’t shake the idea that if they’d reached her feet, they’d have opened wider. That she’d have fallen through and they’d have swallowed her up.
Only a couple of hours remained until midnight. During Samhain, the veil would be at its thinnest. For all Chrys knew, it would be possible for her to disappear through it that way, trapped forever in liminal space.
A few people finally turned her way. Chrys was conscious of the confused looks they gave her, making it clear that it was her own behavior that had drawn their attention and not the jack-o’-lantern’s. The pumpkin’s carved face had resettled into its former smile. The black smoke had dissipated. The candle inside once more glowed a soft yellow.
Ignoring the stares, Chrys decided that the time had come to jump to some damn conclusions. She was reaching for her phone to text Lily when Lily burst into view around the nearest firepit.
“There you are,”
Lily said, catching her breath.
“It’s back!”