Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 14

Esther's garage was entirely non-extraordinary considering it was the garage of a witch. It smelled like gasoline just like my mother's garage did at home in Weeping Willow, and a bicycle hung on one wall for the winter from hooks. In another corner, a name-brand fancy lawn mower rested with a dustcover over it, and gardening tools hung from a pegboard on one wall.

In silence, Trey and I inched around a Mercedes that I assumed was Esther's to reach Laura's VW Bug. So much had happened in the last sixteen hours or so that everything in my life that had happened prior to our incarceration in Esther's secret room seemed like a distant memory, and now all that mattered was getting in that car and driving away as fast as possible...

Even if it meant that we would have to live out the rest of our lives with these new appearances that we'd obtained within the walls of Esther's house. This was a concern that pressed heavily upon my heart as I waited for Trey to unlock the passenger side door of the car. I wanted to believe that I'd love Trey forever no matter what he looked like, but the truth was that I felt very weird leaving Esther's house while the person who had Trey's solemn face, sharp cheekbones and aquamarine eyes was hidden away on its second floor. Perhaps that made me superficial, but I couldn't deny it: I adored that face.

I buckled my seat belt and kept my expression blank while I watched Trey hesitate for a moment as he tried to figure out which key on Laura's key chain would start the engine of the car. With Esther still watching us from the open doorway, I remained silent, not even daring to look in the side-view mirror on my side of the car at my reflection. The car's engine hummed to life, Esther tapped a button on the wall of the garage to raise its automatic door, and daylight flooded the garage, making my pulse dance with anticipation. Trey threw the car into reverse without looking in the rearview mirror even once, and finally we backed out into the driveway. I exhaled a gust of air in relief as we cleared the boundaries of the house. Now I was able to peer up at its exterior and try to determine from the position of the windows which room was the one in which I'd been held prisoner. The room's windows had overlooked this very same street, only I could see lace curtains hanging in the two windows that seemed to match the position of the room where Trey and I had been kept. There had definitely not been any lace curtains in that room when I'd been locked inside, which furthered my belief that Trey and I hadn't been held in a real room at all.

Trey cranked the steering wheel to the left once we reached the corner and peeled away down the block. Snow was melting in all of the front lawns which served as a bitter reminder that I was supposed to be in Florida at that very moment, riding the bus down Royal Palm Lane to the high school I attended in Dad's part of Tampa. I stretched my neck to peer over my shoulder trying to see if the cement lawn animals had ever returned to their resting place next to Esther's driveway. There was no sign of their gray forms on the spotty snow covering her front yard.

It was only when we reached the corner, waited for one solitary car to pass, and turned right onto the busier residential street which cut through Esther's neighborhood that I began to breathe more normally. The muscles in my shoulders and back ached from having been so tense since the moment I'd awakened in the hidden room over twelve hours ago.

"I really wasn't sure if we were going to make it out of there," Trey said with a little cough.

"God," I gasped, unable to even formulate a sentence about my feelings in that moment. I was, of course, relieved to be free, but still totally despairing about the impossible predicament we'd gotten ourselves into. Esther was going to stalk us with her magic until we convinced Mischa to abandon her Olympic dreams and come back to Illinois with us. Even if by some unlikely, miraculous circumstances we were able to accomplish that, I had my doubts that Esther was just going to let us go on with our lives without further conditions placed on our freedom. The tables had definitely turned against us; now not only were we going to have to avoid the evil that seemed to protect the curse, but a suburban witch was going to devote all of her energy to making sure that we deal with the curse in a timely manner.