The Book of Spells (Private 0.50)

“Which you deserve!” she said, tromping across the room. “What are you doing? Please tell me you’re not really taking this stuff seriously.”

She wrested the Billings Literary Society book from my hands and looked at it. “What are you, writing a term paper now?”

I grabbed the book back and crouched, shoving it into my messenger bag with shaky hands, along with the Book of Spells. My nerves had yet to catch up to the fact that there was no danger, and my pulse throbbed in my temples. I breathed in and out a few times, closing my eyes and hoping for patience before I stood up again.

“I’m just messing around,” I improvised, shouldering my bag. “I was trying to figure out whether those Billings Literary Society girls really believed in this witchcraft crap.”

Noelle, to my surprise, looked interested. “Did they?”

“Some of them, I think,” I said, lifting my shoulders. For some reason I didn’t want to name names and open the girls up to Noelle’s ridicule. Which was, of course, ridiculous, since they were all dead.

“Yeah, well, people were a lot more gullible back then,” Noelle said, turning and heading for the open doorway. “Come on. There’s still a mess upstairs and I am not hanging out here again if it’s infested with mice.”

“I’m right behind you,” I told her, picking up the candle.

As I placed my foot on the first stair, a light breeze ruffled my hair. Only there were no openings in the stone wall, no windows anywhere. At the third step, I felt it again. And by the seventh it was stronger still, the wind right in my face. By the tenth step, the flame of the candle died and by the twelfth, I had to squint my eyes to see. When I got to the top I slammed the door behind me, breathless.

“Since when is that staircase a wind tunnel?” I asked.

Noelle’s carefully brushed hair stuck out from behind her ears, and some of her bangs stood up straight on her forehead.

“Must be that window,” Noelle said, gesturing at the pane behind the desk. The top was completely bare, as if someone had broken it, removed all the shards, and never replaced it. My insides squirmed as I stared at the bending and swaying branches of the trees outside.

“I don’t remember that being broken before,” I said.

“Well, it is now,” she replied. “Come on. Let’s clean up and get back to Pemberly. We need to talk guest list for your party.”

“Okay.”

I tried to sound as excited as she did, but as we walked out I took one last trembling look at the window, half expecting to see Elizabeth Williams’s ghost reaching out to me. I closed the door firmly behind me and jogged to catch up with Noelle.

If I really wanted a life with no drama, maybe it was time I stopped walking around in the middle of the night, looking for it.