Someone cleared his throat, and Aria looked up. A balding guy in his twenties in a vest made out of what looked like horsehair was slumped by the register. HI, I’M BRUCE, said his name tag. RESIDENT WITCH. There was a musty, ornately bound book in his lap, and he was studying her as if he thought she might shoplift. Aria backed away from the table of ritual oils and gave him a sweet smile.
“Uh, hi.” Aria’s voice cracked. “I’m here for the seance. It starts in fifteen minutes, right?” She’d found a seance schedule on the store’s website.
The shopkeeper flipped a page, looking bored. He slid a clipboard across the table. “put your name on the list. It’s twenty bucks.”
Aria rifled through her yak-fur bag and scraped together a couple of limp bills. Then she leaned over and wrote her name on the sign-in sheet. Three other people had registered for today’s event.
“Aria?”
She jumped and looked up. Standing next to a wall of voodoo talismans was a boy in a Rosewood Day blazer, a yellow rubber Rosewood Day lacrosse bracelet circling his wrist, and a huge, pleased smile on his face.
“Noel?” Aria sputtered. Noel Kahn was her brother’s best friend, the typicalest Typical Rosewood Boy she’d ever met, and just about the last person she’d ever expect to see in a place like this. Back in sixth and seventh grade, when being popular mattered, Aria had had a huge crush on Noel—but of course he was crazy for Ali instead. Everyone loved Ali. Irony of ironies, the moment she’d stepped off the plane from Iceland at the beginning of this year, Noel had been all over her, suddenly finding her exotic instead of kooky. Or maybe he finally noticed she had boobs.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Noel drawled. He strolled up to the counter and scrawled his name below hers on the seance sign-in sheet.
“You’re going to a seance?” Aria squeaked incredulously.
Noel nodded, examining a set of tarot cards with a half-naked sorceress on the front. “Seances rock. Have you listened to any Led Zeppelin? They were obsessed with the dead. I heard they got their song lyrics from Satan worshippers.”
Aria stared at him. Led Zeppelin was Noel and Mike’s latest craze. The other day, Mike had asked Byron if he had an old copy of Led Zeppelin IV on vinyl—he wanted to play “Stairway to Heaven” backward and listen for secret messages.
“Anyway, now that you’re here, it’s getting me closer to a hot girl, isn’t it?” Noel snickered lasciviously. “And hey, maybe if this works, you’ll come to my hot tub party Thursday night.”
Aria’s skin felt like it was crawling with leeches. The various skull talismans lined up on a nearby shelf were leering at her. Behind the counter, the shopkeeper smiled mysteriously, like he was keeping a secret. What was Noel really doing here? Had someone from the Rosewood press put him up to this, asking him to follow Aria around and report her every move? Or maybe this was a prank thought up by some of the lacrosse boys. In sixth grade, before Ali had welcomed Aria into her exclusive clique, kooky Aria had been relentlessly teased by girls and guys alike.
Noel picked up a phallic purple candle, then put it down again. “So I guess you’re here because of Ali?”
The patchouli incense was beginning to clog Aria’s sinuses. She gave a noncommittal shrug.
Noel looked at Aria carefully. “So did you see her in the woods?”
“It’s none of your business,” Aria snapped, looking around for hidden cameras or recorders nestled among the boxes of clove cigarettes. That seemed like just the kind of question a Rosewood reporter would encourage him to ask.
“Okay, okay,” Noel said defensively. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
The shopkeeper slammed his book shut with a whump. “The medium says you can go in now,” he proclaimed, parting a bead curtain at the back of the store.
Aria looked at the curtain, then at Noel. What if a bunch of Typical Rosewood Boys were waiting to jump out from behind the boxes in the back room, take pictures of her, and post them online? But the shopkeeper was glaring at her, so Aria gritted her teeth, pushed through the curtain, and slumped down on one of the folding chairs that had been set up in the center of the room. Although she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to, Noel sat next to her and shrugged off his coat. Aria peeked at him. It was obvious why so many girls wanted to date Noel—he had dark, wavy hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and a tall, athletic body. His breath smelled like Altoids. But whatever. Even if he was here for legitimate reasons, he was so not her type. His perfectly broken-in dark denim jeans clearly came from a high-end boutique, and he was too groomed for Aria’s taste; he didn’t have a millimeter of stubble on his face.
Aria looked around the back of the occult shop, frowning. The only lights in here were a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and a foul-smelling candle in the corner. Unidentified boxes were piled high on shelves, and toward the emergency exit was an enormous, oblong wooden thing that looked suspiciously like a coffin. Noel followed her gaze. “Yep, that’s a coffin,” he said. “People buy those for, like, personal use. They get off on pretending they’re dead.”
“How do you know that?” she whispered, flabbergasted.
“I know more than you think.”
Noel’s ultra-white teeth gleamed in the darkness and Aria shivered.
The beads parted again, and two more people shuffled in and found seats. One was an old man with a handlebar moustache, and the other was a woman who looked like she was in her thirties, but it was hard to tell. She had a kerchief over her hair and wore big sunglasses. A young man came in last. He wore a velvet cloak and had a scarf wrapped around his head. pendants and strings of beads dripped from around his neck, and he carried a dry ice contraption that spilled smoke around the already hazy room.
“Greetings,” he boomed. “My name is Equinox.”
Aria stifled a laugh. Equinox? Come on. But next to her, Noel tipped his chair forward in rapt attention.
Equinox spread his palms toward the ceiling. “To conjure up the spirits you’re looking for, I need everyone to close their eyes and concentrate as one.” He began to om.
A few people—including Noel—joined in. The cold metal of the chair penetrated Aria’s wool skirt. She cracked one eye open and peeked around. Everyone was leaning forward expectantly and a few people had joined hands. Suddenly Equinox teetered backward, as if an invisible force had just shoved him. A shiver ran through Aria’s body and the air felt heavy around her. Taking a leap of faith, she omed too.
There was a long silence. The heating ducts rattled. There were soft patterns from the floor above. Incense wafted in from the front room, sweet and pungent. Something soft and featherlike brushed very faintly across Aria’s cheek, and she jumped. When she opened her eyes, there was nothing there.
“Goooood,” Equinox said. “Okay, we can open our eyes now. I’m feeling someone with us. Someone very close to one of you. Has anyone lost a friend?”
Aria stiffened. Ali couldn’t be here, just like that . . . could she?
Horrifyingly, the medium walked right to Aria and crouched down. His goatee ended in a sharp point, and he smelled faintly of pot. His eyes were wide and unblinking. “It’s you,” he said in a low voice, his lips close to her ear.
“Um,” Aria whispered, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end.
“You’ve lost a special friend, haven’t you?” he asked hauntingly.
The room was still. Aria’s heart started to pound. “Is she . . . here?” She looked around the room, expecting to see the girl she’d rescued from the fire, dressed in a sweatshirt, her face tinged with soot.