Free The Night of the Solstice by L.J. Smith

late.” “Could we use something else shiny?” “There isn’t any time.” “Janie, I’m going to
kill
you!”
    â€œWait!” shouted Charles. Half a crescent of whiteshowed above the foothills as he fumbled with the zippered pocket of his windbreaker. Getting the pocket open at last, he pulled out a familiar flat shape—a Hershey bar.
    â€œCharles,” Alys screamed, purple-faced, “if all you can think about at this moment is your stomach—”
    Charles tore off the outer paper wrapper in one motion, revealing the inner foil wrapper. “Here’s your mirror,” he said. “Or as good as. It’ll reflect light.”
    The white crescent in the eastern sky looked elongated, as if its bottom horn clung to the hills below. Alys dropped her backpack and snatched the shining rectangle of foil from Charles, falling to her knees with the crucible in front of her.
    â€œI don’t know if this will work or not—I don’t even know if I’m holding it right.” Shakily, she shifted the foil back and forth, trying to judge the angle that would throw a ray on the crucible. The others crouched over her.
    â€œMoonlight isn’t like sunlight,” said Charles. “I bet we won’t even know exactly when it works.”
    He was wrong. On the word
works
the moonseparated entirely from the mountains. At the same instant Alys saw the smudged foil blaze and then a beam of purest silver shot out to strike the golden crucible. There was a flash like summer lightning and Alys nearly fell backward. They were all blinded. When they could see again through the dazzling afterimage, the crucible was topped with a ghostly flame, translucent and radiant as the moonlight itself, rising twelve feet into the air.
    â€œI wouldn’t touch it if I were you,” said Alys thickly, at last.
    â€œ
Touch
it!” Charles said, gaping.
    They lost track of time, watching that cool, unearthly column of flame which neither rose nor fell but endlessly poured its energy upward. Long after they were too numb to feel the cold it began to flicker, and between one flicker and another it went dead. Blinking, the chilled watchers stirred.
    In the crucible, the grayish, moisture-clotted mixture had undergone a transformation. It was now fine sand, the color of the eldritch flame, the color of moonlight, or running water, or the surface of anempty mirror. Janie, overcome by curiosity, tested it with one finger.
    â€œCool,” she said huskily.
    â€œGive me the bags,” said Alys.
    No one moved as Alys divided the star-colored sand into four parts and pinched it into the bags. No one spoke or urged her to hurry as she clumsily stitched the open ends of the bags closed. When it was done each of them took a bag and looked at it quietly, feeling the soft weight of the sand inside. And then they realized that it was all done and they were wet from kneeling on the grass and half-frozen from the night air and it was terribly late and they had to go home.
    Stiffly, they gathered the used materials and started down the hill.
    Above them, the crescent moon rose in the sky.

Chapter 9
THE FIRST MIRROR
    I ’ll
go first,” said Alys gently.
    â€œLet’s get it over with, then,” said Janie.
    It was the next evening, just after moonrise, and they had been arguing all afternoon about which mirror to go through. Charles and Claudia wanted to try the cellar, maintaining that this was the logical place for a prisoner like Morgana to be kept, but Alys and Janie thought it would be more useful and less dangerous to use the little hallway between the kitchen and the living room, and as usual Alys had had the last word. Now she had also ended the debate about who would lead the way into the Wildworld.
    She paused, looking at their four reflections in the hallway mirror and fingering the silk bag which hung from a shoestring at her neck. “Give me a moment afterI