“Where else could she hide something like that?” I said. “If it wasn’t at home, then someone else in town would notice it. There aren’t any other witches here, but there’s quite a few good sorcerers, and some of them are very suspicious about strange spells.”
“I don’t know your town well enough to answer that,” Mantis said. “I’m just making a suggestion. I’m also going to recommend that you eat another cookie. You’re too short.”
I stuck out my tongue at him. “I’m not that short! How are cookies going to make me taller?”
He winked. “Just listen to wise old Manny. You worry about too many things. Let’s talk about something happier.”
I tried to ask him what he was doing there, but he managed to dodge the question yet again so I finally gave up. We talked about school and the weather changing.
He got me to relax and I lost track of time talking. When my phone finally buzzed with a message, it turned out to be Akasha, done at the library and ready to go home. Mantis said good-bye and cleaned up our dishes while I sent a warning to my friends to get out of the house. Whatever had happened at home, the window of opportunity was gone now. We’d have to figure out the next steps later.
Mantis ended up walking with me to the library and said hello to Akasha. “You owe me a rematch,” he reminded her. “I’d better see you at All Hallows’ Eve.”
Akasha nodded, suddenly too shy to say anything. When he was gone and we started driving home, she said, “What was he doing here?”
I shrugged. “He was just stopping by to say hello, and I guess to cheer me up.” I smiled. He did make me feel better.
Akasha just shook her head and pulled out a book.
I dropped Akasha off at home with her library books and then went over to Ashleigh’s house to meet up with my friends to find out the details of their search. Ashleigh’s dad wasn’t home from work, but we also knew that he didn’t ask questions or pry when Ashleigh had her friends over. I already knew that they hadn’t found the binding spell or the mind control spell, but maybe there was more information that they could give me. We also had to plan the next step now that the search had failed.
They showed me another map of the house that Ashleigh had made. Hers looked better than mine—she was in the art class at school, after all—and when we compared the two, we found a lot of overlap, but there were a few things that I’d missed. They were all small and nothing was surprising, though, so I didn’t feel bad.
“What I thought was odd,” said Glen when they’d finished telling me about the afternoon, “was that she didn’t really seem to have that much stuff. I mean, all the basic witchcraft tools were there in the attic, and between that and the kitchen I was able to find most of the herbs that she was growing in the garden, but I thought your mom was a more advanced practitioner and I didn’t see anything she would need for these kinds of powerful spells. She also didn’t have any notes on any of her work.”
Heather shrugged. “Maybe she just memorizes everything so that Rosa or someone else can’t find her notes and figure out what she’s doing.”
Glen shook his head. “I doubt it. Most magic users take notes, especially the good ones like Rosmerta who have the mage’s mark. If it’s a spell that she did a long time ago, like a mind control that’s been in place since before Rosa was born, then she wouldn’t want to forget all of the subtle details of how she performed it in case something went wrong and another spell interfered or she had to recast it.”
I looked down at the map. “I don’t know of any notes that my mom takes. She’s never told me to write anything down.” Yet another thing she’d failed to teach me. “But I do know that she keeps a lot of her stuff in her shop. That’s where she does all of the magic for her clients.”
Glen looked up at me and frowned. “Have you looked in her shop?”
“No, I’m sure the spell has to be at home—” I stopped short. My earlier conversation with Mantis flashed through my mind. What if she’d put it somewhere else so I couldn’t find it?
“Why do you think it has to be at your house?” Glen said carefully, watching me.
“Because I thought it felt stronger when I was there. But you’re right, I don’t know for sure, and we’ve run out of places to look at my house.”
Kai said, “Do you have a key to your mom’s store that we could use to get in there?”
I shook my head. “I could try to get her keys at home, maybe, like take them when she’s not looking.”
Glen frowned. “She’ll probably have some kind of magical ward on the door, too, with another one of her alarms. It’s a good thing that she doesn’t really like magitek, because that’s harder to get around, but we’ll still need to be prepared.”
Heather said quietly, “If you can’t get the key, Rosa, I have a set of lock picks.”
We all turned and stared at her in surprise. I picked my jaw back up off the floor and said, “I—I don’t think I know how to use those.”
“That’s okay, I can do it,” Heather said, which just made everyone stare at her more.
Kai said with a snort, “Did your parents teach you that? I thought vampires had to be invited inside, not breaking and entering.”
I kicked him. We were all sitting around Ashleigh’s living room, and he’d insisted on being on the couch next to me, which put him in harm’s way if he was going to make insensitive comments like that. I glared at him and hissed, “Don’t pick on her parents.”
“Ow—I wasn’t!” He shrank away from me.
Heather just smiled thinly. “It wasn’t my parents. I’ve had a lot of time when they’re not watching me because they aren’t very active during the day, and since they always wanted me to stay at home where I’d be safe, I was always looking for ways to sneak out.”
“Right,” said Ashleigh, standing up. “So the plan is that we’re breaking into Rosa’s mom’s store in town and searching there. We’ve got to think this through. It’s in a public area, so we’d better work at night. We’ll need time to prepare, so could you all see if your parents will let you come hang out here on Friday? That gives us a few days, plus we won’t have school the next morning if we get stuck out very late again.” She looked at me. “I don’t want you getting in trouble again.”
We all agreed. I tried not to think too hard about how it would feel to be without magic for three more days. I didn’t normally use it very often or rely on it, but it was something that had always been a part of me, and I took it for granted even though I didn’t want to practice as often as my mom told me to. Without magic, I was just a normal human like everyone else. It made me feel helpless compared to my friends who all had their own abilities—apparently even Heather made up for her lack of vampiric abilities by learning how to pick locks and who knows what else.
We tried to make a list of items that we’d need for Friday—Heather’s lock pick set, flashlights for everyone, charms and potions to help Glen get past any magical locks and alarms. I also decided to bring my camera in case there was anything important that we wouldn’t be able to take with us, to take pictures that we could look at later.
Before long, I had to head back home to get started on my homework and have dinner with my family. “We’ll all keep thinking about this for a few days, in case there’s anything we’ve missed,” Ashleigh said when we were saying good-bye. “Just be careful not to say or do anything that would let people know. This is not only dangerous because of Rosmerta, it’s also illegal, so we really don’t want to get caught.”
I shivered a little when she said that. I’d never done anything illegal before. It was too important for me not to risk it, but the thought of what my friends were doing—
I cleared my throat. “If anyone wants to back out of this, just let me know. I don’t want to force anyone to take a risk for me. You all have the option to walk away if you just promise not to tell anyone what I’m doing.”
Heather threw her arms around me and squeezed. “Of course we’re
helping you, Rosa,” she said. “You’re a good friend and we want you to be happy.”
I looked around and saw Glen and Ashleigh nodding in agreement. “You’ve done just as much for us,” Glen said.
I glanced at Kai, who shrugged and smirked. “I told you to trust me and let me help you,” he said. “If this is what you need help with, I’ll do it.”
I blinked back tears and smiled. “Thank you guys,” I said. I squeezed Heather back, then went around and gave each of the others a hug, too.
When I sat back down, Ashleigh and Glen shared a look. “There’s one more thing,” Ashleigh said gently. “We’re running out of time.”
My smile faded. “What do you mean?”
Glen cleared his throat. “You know your mother’s spells violate her oath to the Faerie Court. We’ve given you time to try handling the problem on your own—”
“But we have to report what we know sooner or later,” Ashleigh finished for him. “If we know about it and we don’t do anything, then we’re breaking the Faerie law, too. What your mother is doing is dangerous and illegal, and she could be hurting other people, too.”
My eyes widened. “So if we can’t find the spell and break it, you’re going to report my mother to the magical authorities and get her in trouble? That would rip my whole family apart!”
Ashleigh put her hand on my arm. “We have to report her even if you break the spell first, because she’s still breaking the law. I just don’t want your family to get caught in the crossfire. I also think that since you’re her daughter, you probably have a better chance of breaking the spell than anyone else. You need to warn your family first.”
“I’ve tried to talk to them,” I said, shaking my head. “The spell is too strong. Even when I point out the obvious problems with my mom, they excuse it and tell me to stop criticizing her. You have to let me break the spell and then talk to everyone, including my mom. If I show her how serious this is, then maybe she’ll change.” The threat of losing her whole family, let alone going to jail, had to be enough to make anyone change.
“I think you can find a way,” Glen said. “You’ve already made it this far. Don’t stop trying.”
I looked down at the floor. “How much time are you giving me?”
“Glen and I talked it over.” Ashleigh took a deep breath. “Next week is Halloween, and a lot of our Fae relatives will be visiting for the party, but also for official business. It’s one of the biggest Court sessions of the year. We decided that’s when we have to tell them.”
I shook my head. Halloween was on Wednesday. If we didn’t find the spell in my mom’s shop on Friday night, then that left only a few days for me to find it somewhere else and figure out how to break it—with no leads, and maybe without any magic. “That’s not enough time. I’ve only even known about this spell for a week, and in that time all I’ve managed to do is make my mom suspicious enough to bind my powers.”
Ashleigh gave me another hug. “That’s why we’re doing everything we can to help you. Please don’t be mad.”
I hugged her back, burying my face in her shoulder. “I’m not mad, I’m just—scared. I don’t know if I can do this.”
Kai reached over and patted my back. “We believe in you, Rosa. Don’t give up hope.”
15
Rose's Garden
While I waited for Friday night, I kept thinking about my dad’s journal. Had he written more about my mom? Was there more that he understood about what she was doing than I realized? In the end, my curiosity overcame my guilt, and I decided that I had to read more of it.
I sat down on Thursday after school and pulled the little notebook out of hiding. Reading his handwriting was difficult at first, and I couldn’t figure out every word, but as I continued, it got a little easier. My dad mostly seemed to sit down and write when he was upset about something—not unlike Akasha and her diary, or me and my poetry. I guessed we all found ways to let our feelings out.
Sometimes what he wrote about was normal stuff, like when he had an argument with one of his coworkers or lost a patient at the hospital. One old woman struck him in particular, because none of her family came to visit when she was dying. “I wish that I’d gone to see Mom when she was sick,” he wrote. “Or at least gone to her funeral. Rosmerta said we couldn’t afford the plane tickets, even though she promised she’d get our finances under control and stop sinking all of her money into her shop. We had a fight so big that I was worried the girls would overhear us. When I threatened to go by myself, she said that I wouldn’t have a home to come back to.”
I almost threw the journal across the room in shock. I couldn’t believe that Mom would say something so harsh to Dad! Didn’t she love him?
But as I read on, I learned that Mom was just as harsh to Dad as she was to me. “I told Rosmerta that she was working too hard on her garden all the time, but she said I neglected the family when I worked at the hospital late,” he wrote one day, and another time, “I said we could trust the girls to be good and we didn’t need tracking spells on them, but she said I didn’t know anything about magic and to leave it all to her.” There were other little things that she did that made him suspicious, like avoiding the Faerie Court and controlling the family finances so he never knew how much money they had.
By the end of the book, I knew I had to try to talk to my father again. Ashleigh and Glen were right to encourage me to convince him about the spell. Akasha might not listen, but Dad already knew a lot of this stuff. All I had to do was help him put the pieces together.
On Thursday afternoon, I found my dad alone in his study, but I wanted to get him out of the house. I knocked on the door and went in without waiting for a response. “I need to talk to you. Can we go for a walk or something?”
He looked down at the pile of papers on his desk with regret, but he nodded. “Okay, sweet pea, I’ll be right there. Let me just put this paperwork away.”
He met me by the front door in a few minutes, and then the two of us headed down the street on foot. Leaves were scattered across the road, crunching underfoot, and I could smell a fire coming from one of the neighbors’ houses. The smoke hung low over the trees without a breeze to blow it away.
We were silent for a while, and Dad didn’t pressure me to start talking, but I knew that I had to say something. “Don’t be mad. I—I read your personal diary, which was wrong, but I need to talk to you about it.”
Dad frowned. “I’m not sure how you found that. It couldn’t have been an accident, and you must have known when you saw it that it was private.”
“Actually, I was looking for something else.” I took a deep breath. “I was looking for one of Mom’s spells. She’s actually got them hidden all over the house.”
“I know that she has spells to prevent bugs and things—”
“Not just that.” I looked over at him to watch his reaction. “Spells that control us, too, and invade our privacy. And I know, from reading your journal, that you already know about some of them, and you feel uncomfortable about them and some of the other things that she’s done.”
Dad stiffened and his face turned pale. “Look, Rosa, the things that I wrote down were just one side of how I felt, written when I was particularly angry or upset. I wrote them to get them out of my head and help me work through them, not list a litany of your mother’s faults. You can’t judge the situation based only on a few things I wrote down years ago.”
“I know—you always find a way to talk yourself into agreeing with her and not pressing the issue. Do you ever wonder if it’s really you thinking those things when you give in, or if it’s some kind of spell that she’s put on you to make you stop questioning her?”
Dad stopped short in the middle of the street and looked at me. “Rosa, you can’t go making wild accusations just because you and your mother aren’t getting along right now. Using magic to control people like that is against the law.”
“I know.” I folded my arms. “I thought it was crazy, too
, but then I found all of the other spells she cast on us—to track where we are, to keep me from dating anyone, to keep you attracted to her—” I looked down and cleared my throat. “You can, uh, check under your bed if you don’t believe me about that one. But the worst proof of it is, when I started looking for this spell, Mom cast another one to bind my powers and keep me from using any kind of magic.”
His eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
I threw up my hands. “I can’t even open the doors with the magitek locks at school, and I should be able to do that even without witchcraft. I have less magic in me than a rock.”
Dad glanced at the curve in the road, where our nearest neighbor’s house sat, and lowered his voice. “How do you know that it was your mother who did that? Maybe another one of your spells backfired.”
“Because I wasn’t doing a spell, Dad!” I shook my head. “I was looking for her spell in your bedroom, and I triggered a magical alarm that let her know I was snooping there. She didn’t say anything, but the next day all of my magic was gone.”
His eyes darted away to the side and then back to me. “Did you ask her about it?”
“No, I can’t. I can’t confront her, because she always has more power and knowledge than me when it comes to magic, and I’m realizing that there’s so much she never taught me, maybe deliberately so I could never figure out what she was doing. And—” I wrapped my arms around myself. “I’m scared of her, Dad. I don’t know what she’s capable of or how far she’s willing to go in order to keep us under her control. This stuff that she’s messing with could get her in big trouble with the Faerie Council, and I think she’s worked very hard to keep all of this a secret from them.”
Dad shook his head slowly. “Even if all of this is true, sweetie, what can I do? I don’t have any magic to stand up to her, either. If you think that confronting her with it is just going to make her angry and lash out, what can we do?”
Fae of Calaveras Trilogy Box Set Page 21
