(ON HOLD) Spellbound (BxB)

Chapter 12 | Magic

From that moment on, Kingsly went into a silent, social collapse.

Students disbanded the dance when police flooded in with yellow tape and investigators shut down the entire mile radius of Kingsly High. School remained closed for days after—which meant several more nights on the musty carpet of Rodger's little white house.

Asher didn't mind it so much. Waking up to the smell of coffee and the sound of his father shuffling through the kitchen at five in the morning felt like...home. He didn't miss the cold, empty halls of Kingsly, but he did miss one thing, strangely enough. He missed Lilly Whitman.

Once classes resumed, Asher's therapy sessions were withdrawn to allocate more resources into mourning counseling, and he was starting to feel resentful. Not that he enjoyed being force-fed feelings, but he'd seen it all too. He watched the blood fall from Logan's fingers, he touched the red water, he smelled the pennies. And a week later, he witnessed the others gathered around his coffin in black, the warm summer sun rising over the treetops. The sky was pink when they buried Logan six feet underground.

Asher wasn't allowed to join the mourners; Jackal had made it very clear not to come. My parents will be there, he'd said. I don't want them to know about you yet. But Logan had been his friend too, so he watched from a bench across the graveyard, sitting beside a stone angel, clutching Logan's shades in his denim jacket pocket. The dean had attended, just as Jackal said. He'd traded his suit for a black dress shirt and slacks, and he looked far shorter than Asher remembered—maybe just because Jackal was taller than his father. Maybe because Asher had scarcely seen him roaming the halls, and only been subjected to Dean Riley when he was seated at his desk.

Jackal's mother was there too; Asher could tell it was her by the way she fussed with his hair. That was what mothers did, Asher had noticed. They fussed with perfectly fine things. And sometimes they melted into bony cadavers and bit at your fingers with thorns for teeth. Not Mrs. Riley, though. She was lovely, with a narrow chin and a narrow nose, and tiny lips that made her look like more of a baby bird than a woman. Several times, Jackal shrugged her hands off of him. Several times, Asher panged with prayers that Jackal would smile or frown or do anything but look the way he looked at that moment. Silent and calm, but somehow still terribly furious. The kind of fire that burned blue in a person. The kind that was so powerful, it didn't really show at all.

Josephine had been there too, though she stood respectfully aside. Beside her was a man with icy eyes like packed snow and bone-pale hair, combed back flat on his head, a hedgehog at ease. The woman he was with was a carbon copy of Josephine, save for her ember hair—long and fiery and whipping endlessly in the morning breeze. Ethan had attended too, without his clone for once. Ryan and Courtney were among the most tortured faces of the group, worried over by the people around them. Dabbed with handkerchiefs and sucking in their quivering lips. Among them were several others Asher hadn't yet come to know.

The only person who hadn't attended was Aspen.

For the next week, Asher saw nothing of her. He saw nothing of any of them. They were scattered pieces, Logan being their center of gravity. The twisting, whirling star that kept them all together, moving along their respective axis and rotating and working in tandem like they were meant to. Asher hadn't known Logan well enough to be shattered by his loss, but he was...something. A hole had been punched out of him and filled with sickness.

As time went on, his mysterious illness began to return. He would feel this way until Jackal decided he wouldn't anymore—that was what Logan had said. But Asher was too afraid to seek him out after days of silence, so he kept to himself and endured—until one evening, when the skies of Willowsbrook had grown gray and matted for the first time since his move. Asher dragged himself from his room and out into the rain, desperate for the feel of the cool drops on his fevered forehead.