Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Max leaves the room, expecting me to follow, but I feel rooted to the floor; this bland IKEA catalogue office is a smoke screen.
A ruse. It has to be hiding something, or at the very least needs to be where I start.
But I clench my hands into fists and turn away, careful to leave the door open behind me. Soon.
Austin Taylor’s bedroom is in keeping with the rest of the house; it looks like something out of an expensive hotel, all glass, black wood and hard angles. The final Warhol is above his bed, a print of Queen Elizabeth II in a deep maroon, surrounded by green, blue and pink squares.
Max stands at the foot of his dad’s bed, staring up at it. ‘I personally would find it weird to have an old dead lady watching me sleep, but my dad doesn’t seem to—’
The doorbell rings.
‘Hold that thought,’ he says, jogging past me to the landing. ‘That would be the food.’
The moment I’ve been waiting for.
‘I’m just gonna go to the bathroom,’ I say to his retreating back as he descends the stairs.
‘Sure thing,’ he calls. ‘It’s at the end of the hall.’
I slip back into the dark office before Max can turn around.
He’ll notice if I turn on the lamp, so I’ll have to rely on the thin rectangle of light cutting in from the hallway.
It’s enough for me to see the basic outlines of the furniture, its sharp corners and cold, metal surfaces.
I tiptoe to the desk, quietly opening drawer after drawer, but they’re all organised neatly with little plastic boxes.
Even the Post-It notes are grouped together by size and colour.
If Austin was trying to cover up his magical past, wouldn’t it make sense for him to go out of his way to hide it in something that’s the exact opposite? Something that wouldn’t blow his cover.
‘Wait,’ I murmur into the darkness.
My eyes slide to the opposite side of the room, landing on the locker.
A piece of furniture so trendy as to seem like something you’d buy when redecorating in the middle of a mid-life crisis.
The light in front of the locker is weak, but not so ineffective as to completely hide the four-digit combination lock sitting above the handle.
To check it’s not just for show, I pull the handle, but the door doesn’t budge.
Something important is in here. It has to be.
I press my lips together in thought. What four numbers would be so important or memorable enough to Austin Taylor that he’d use them as his lock code?
My mom still uses 1-2-3-4 as her debit card pin.
I spin the numbers on the lock, but the door still won’t open.
Apparently even Austin Taylor is smarter than that.
A quick google on my cell tells me that most people use their birthdays, or the birthdays of someone important to them as passcodes.
Max’s birthday is September 1, but 9-1-0-7 doesn’t work.
Before I can dwell too much on why I remember this information when Max only mentioned once that he’d had to start third grade on his birthday, I google Austin Taylor’s birthday.
April 4, 1982. My fingers shake as I rotate the dials until they read 4-4-8-2, but the handle still stays firmly in place.
‘Shit,’ I hiss under my breath.
I plug in the day Austin opened his first F’resh, his house’s address, but nothing works. Even though it feels like I’ve been trying combinations for hours, I know it can’t have been more than a minute and a half, but my heartbeat hammers in my ears, loud as a drum.
Suddenly, a number pops into my head, clear and bright, like a candle in a dark room. I spin the numbers so that the lock reads 1-3-8-4, and this time when I wrench down the handle, it gives easily. The door swings open.
1-3-8-4. January 3, 1984. My mom’s birthday.
But I don’t have time to think more about it. Instead, I shine my phone flashlight on the contents of the locker, my chest constricting.
Bingo.
Inside the locker are three shelves lined with jars, at least ten half-spent candles, a collection of small leather pouches, a couple bundles of twigs, a wooden rack of test tubes, and even a small black cauldron crusted with age.
‘Okay, Merlin,’ I say.
Everything is furred over with a thick layer of dust, as though the locker hasn’t been opened in years.
On the top shelf is a small stack of books, their spines identifying them as mostly flora guides and a couple autobiographies.
At the bottom is the largest book, its spine made from a craggy leather the colour of mud.
I slide it out of the locker and peer down at its cover, worn and scuffed with dirt.
Carved into it are curling symbols that look like upside-down triangles, swirls and stick figures.
A chill seeps into the tops of my thighs where the book rests against my black jeans. When I trace the title with my fingertip, an electric shock seems to run the full length of my arm.
‘The Gospel of Witchcraft,’ I whisper.
This is it. Austin Taylor’s spell book.
A boom sounds from below. The front door closing. I grit my teeth against a yelp of panic, curl my hands into fists. I need to focus. Two scraps of paper poke out of the top of the book; I peel apart the pages to see what it is, but freeze when I read the page’s title:
‘Hexes on Lovers Past,’ I read quietly. My eyes flit around the page, only taking in snippets of information. ‘For lovers scorned, use this curse … to begin, obtain an object of the desired … speak thy will into darkness most black …’
It’s the curse. It has to be the curse Austin Taylor used on my mom, the one that’s currently ruining my life.
‘Indie, you good?’
Max’s voice filters up from somewhere downstairs.
Grabbing the papers that were marking the spell, I shove them back between the pages, only realising just before I slam the book shut that they’re not actually papers at all.
They’re two halves of a photo. Together, they capture a young couple, a man and a woman.
Her blond hair is pulled back in a clip.
With one hand on her pregnant stomach, she’s grinning so widely her eyes have almost disappeared.
Beside her with an arm wrapped around her shoulder is a young man I’d know anywhere – dark hair, gold-brown eyes fixed on the woman’s face as he leans in close as if to plant a kiss on her cheek.
It’s Austin Taylor and my mom, sitting beside each other.
Or they would be, if the picture hadn’t been torn in half.
Fingers shaking, I flip the two halves over, but all that’s written on the back are the words Austin 2008. I recognise the careful loops that form each letter. It’s my mom’s handwriting.
I can hear Max’s footsteps, currently beneath me in what I think is the kitchen.
If he comes to the foot of the stairs, there’s no way I’ll be able to leave his dad’s office without him seeing me.
I’m out of time, but I can’t leave the spell book behind.
Not when I haven’t had a chance to really study it.
I wrench my sweater off over my head and quickly wrap it around the spell book. The sweater is bulky enough that if I hold it crumpled against my stomach, hopefully Max won’t be able to see the book hidden inside.
The roaring in my head is so loud, I can’t even tell whether or not the hinges squeak as I shut the locker door again and rush back out to the landing. Then I hold my breath, and walk downstairs.