Free The Lost Boys by Lilian Carmine Page A

become a real witch.”
    “That’s nonsense!” I shook my head in denial. “I have nothing magical going on here. I’m just plain Joey. And witches don’t exist.”
    “Oh, you have no trouble accepting ghosts that come back to life, but you have difficulty accepting witches, now? That’s funny,” Miss Violet scoffed, mildly offended.
    “I-I … that’s not what I meant. I’m just saying I have no witch blood in me whatsoever,” I corrected myself, looking at Tristan.
    Suspicion passed across his eyes. Did he think I was lying?
    “I’m not lying!” I snapped at him. “How can you think that?”
    “How did you know what he was thinking?” Miss Violet asked squinting her eyes at the both of us.
    “I just … saw it. In his eyes,” I mumbled, feeling confused.
    “She always does that,” Tristan said quietly. “Even when I was a ghost. She always knows exactly what I’m feeling when she looks at me. It’s been bothering me for some time now. I didn’t know how she was doing it. But it is always very … accurate.”
    “It’s not quite telepathy, more empathic insight. You need visual contact to do it, right? You can read what the other person is feeling. Quite handy,” Miss Violet said to me.
    “Everybody can do that. It’s normal, right, Mom? Did you not see suspicion in his eyes just now?” I asked, bewildered.
    “No, dear,” said Miss Violet, “We just saw him looking at you. Nothing more. He had a pretty blank expression. I don’t know what he was thinking or feeling, and I’m a pretty good observer of human behavior. I have been around in this world for some time now. I know how to read people. And he was letting nothing out.”
    I shot my mom a pleading look, silently asking for her help.
    “You have always been spot on about people’s feelings, honey,” she said thoughtfully. “I just thought you were very perceptive, but you’re scarily accurate. I’ve got used to it over the years, but strangers sometimes notice, don’t they? Remember your friends at your old school used to say it kinda creeped them out. After a while you stopped vocalizing your reads, but you could still see, right?” she asked me.
    I bit my lip and shifted uneasily on my seat.
    “What about this spell you talked about, Miss Violet? What actually happened last night? Do you have any theory that could help us figure this out?” My mom finally decided to ask the million-dollar question. She didn’t seem upset at all by the revelations happening in her own living room. Perhaps she too had suspected there was some “witch blood” in our family, and was only now verifying this.
    “Well, we’re still trying to figure that out, but it seems that Joey here managed to set a very powerful spell in motion. We knew something was going to happen; my friends and I had seen some signs alerting us. That’s why I’d been going there a few days each week lately, to see if I’d catch something. I suspected it was something to do with the girl – you, Joe – when I saw her first speaking to a ghost boy without realizing it. After that, I asked my husband to keep an eye on her … on you,.” she said, looking at me. “We never thought this could happen, though. To bring back the dead … it’s tricky and dangerous. Not to mention extremely difficult. It takes many powerful elements to be combined at the same time and requires a lot of power to perform such an act. We never knew what those elements could be, but from what we observed last night, we now have a vague idea.”
    “Elements? Spell? Bringing back the dead?” I asked, stunned. It was just too much information and nonsense for my head. And I’d done this?
    “Apparently we had seven people present there last night. Seven is a powerful number for magic. Five elements were combined – fire, air, earth, water and the most important one, the one that made the connection between the boy and the girl. Also, there was the importance of place and time.