by Cassandra
“Yes! How was the date with Kacey?” Ashley asked.
She glanced nervously around the room.
“Relax. He’s not here today,” Sara explained. “Do you want to tell us why? Did you keep him up too late?” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.
Eric shifted in his seat. He looked down, suddenly very interested in his textbook.
“Oh, shut up. It wasn’t like that. I keep telling you, it was not a date.”
“Uh huh. Sure,” Sara agreed.
“Look at the way your face is turning red, you’re clearly keeping something to yourself,” Ashley accused.
“I am not.”
“You are too.”
“Am not.”
“Then why won’t you tell us how things went? Just spill it already.” Sara leaned forward. “Did you guys make out all night in the theater? How much of the movie did you actually see?”
She and Ashley broke out into a fit of giggles and Jessica suddenly wanted to slap them both.
“If you guys don’t cut it out, I’ll never tell you anything ever again.”
“Ooh, you hit a nerve, Sara,” Ashley crooned.
“It must be some awfully juicy stuff if she’s this offended. I can only imagine.”
Jessica groaned. “It is not. We went to see a movie and actually watched the movie. No making out. At. All. And then we went to get ice cream. After that, we said goodbye. Verbally. And went home. End of story.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Eric shift uncomfortably again. “By the way, I can’t believe you all stood me up. That was so not cool.”
“We only tried to give you and Kacey some privacy.” Ashley batted her eyelashes in an attempt to look innocent.
“Yeah,” Sara agreed. “And technically, you should thank us. We had to keep Eric from crashing your date. He was adamant about tagging along as a third wheel.”
“Whatever,” he muttered.
“He wouldn’t have been a third wheel,” she insisted. “None of you would have been.”
“I bet Kacey felt differently,” Sara teased. “Where is he, anyway? How come he didn’t come to school today?”
“I don’t know.” Jessica shrugged.
“That is strange. Doesn’t he usually, like, have perfect attendance? Then he goes out with Jessica, and he’s suddenly absent the next day.” Ashley raised her eyebrows. “Maybe we have the story wrong? Did things go really bad instead of really good?”
Eric’s head tilted like his ears had perked up.
She sighed. “Everything went fine.”
Ashley rolled her eyes. “All right. Be secretive if you want to. The truth will come out eventually.”
I certainly hope not, Jessica thought as the teacher walked in.
Ashley did have a point. Kacey hardly ever skipped school. Something had to be wrong for him not to show up. He had been perfectly fine the night before, so she found it unlikely that he had suddenly come down with some sort of illness.
She sincerely hoped his absence didn’t have something to do with her. Had she weirded him out so much that he couldn’t deal with the prospect of seeing her again so soon? What if he couldn’t stand seeing her at all, even if it was from the other side of the classroom or across the hallway? She leaned back in her seat and her stomach churned, either from stress or from how quickly she had eaten her breakfast.
This dating stuff all seemed far more complicated than it was worth, and she wasn’t even sure it was a date. However Kacey saw her, Jessica knew that things had been so much simpler when they were strictly friends. Hanging out in group settings was easy.
Annoyed with Ashley and Sara, Jessica almost decided to move to a different seat so she wouldn’t be stuck in their group for the class project. However, she knew that would be unnecessarily petty. She didn’t want to cause a rift between herself and the few friends she had.
Perhaps sensing her mood, Ashley and Sara refrained from pestering her about Kacey any further. They finished their group project in peace.
“I’ll see you guys.” Jessica stood as soon as the bell rang.
“In a hurry?” Sara asked.
She nodded. “Unfortunately, I have detention for the next two weeks.”
“What?” Eric turned toward her. “Why?”
“Because Ms. Mitchell is totally psycho. She went off on me in front of the whole class this morning.” She thought about the imp in her room and felt a knot form in her stomach. Hopefully, he had stayed hidden there and not drawn attention to himself. “I accidentally overslept this morning and was late leaving the house.”
Eric, Sara, and Ashley all stared back at her, plainly aware that she wasn’t entirely upfront with them. She averted her eyes and started packing her books. “Well, see you guys later.” With that, she dashed out of the room.
She needed a plan. A whole two weeks of detention was something she seriously couldn’t afford. There was too much on her plate for that. Walking as fast as she could without breaking into a run, Jessica headed to Ms. Mitchell’s classroom. She needed to catch her alone with an empty class but before she left herself. When she reached her destination, she peered through the door. Two students still lingered behind and asked questions about an upcoming assignment.
“Come on, come on.” Jessica tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for them to leave. The very instant they said their goodbyes and exited the room, she hurried inside and closed the door behind her.
Jessica, you no longer have detention. Jessica, you no longer have detention. Jessica, you no longer have detention.
While she chanted in her head, Ms. Mitchell stood before her, visibly confused. She locked eyes with the teacher and quickly turned the repetitive thought into a whispered chant. Ms. Mitchell’s eyes narrowed for a moment, then glazed over.
Please let this work, Jessica thought. She was about to ask Ms. Mitchell to repeat the chant out loud and seal the spell when the classroom door swung open again.
“Ms. Mitchell, when is the next paper due?” a boy asked as he bounded into the room.
The teacher blinked and looked at the boy as she slowly came out of the trance Jessica had put her in.
Crap.
“Okay. See you later, Ms. Mitchell.” Jessica hurried out of the room and prayed that the spell had worked.
School was cramping her style enough as it was. If the spell didn’t work, she honestly had no idea what she would do next.
Chapter Thirteen
Finally, the school day came to an end. Students flooded out of Bishop Fenwick High School, but Jessica was frozen in place.
She wanted nothing more than to pack her bags and leave. Aside from all the things she had to do, she hadn’t forgotten that she was supposed to meet Chad, Todd, and Pastor Norman. They would meet at her grandma’s before they went to visit the rogue coven.
However, she knew that if her spell hadn’t worked on Ms. Mitchell and she skipped detention, she would likely be in trouble for the rest of the semester rather than only two weeks. What would she do if she had to spend all that time in detention?
It was a risk she couldn’t afford to take. She had more important matters to attend to.
Hastily, she checked the time. She knew there was only one way to find out whether or not she was off the hook for the detention. Resigned, she went to the first floor and shambled down the hall. She knew she was in close proximity to the detention crowd when she saw annoyed expressions on the faces of the kids around her. She slowed her pace as she wanted to remain unnoticed.
Once they all filtered inside, Jessica approached the door carefully. She peeked in and saw the school’s dean standing in the front of the room. Footsteps sounded from somewhere behind her, quick and brisk. She recognized the sound of the walk but glanced back anyway to confirm her suspicions. Yes, it was Ms. Mitchell, marching down the hall. She was focused on a stack of essays.
Her heart leapt into her throat. Jessica darted into the next available room. Had Ms. Mitchell seen her? She pressed herse
lf against the wall and made sure she couldn’t be seen through the door’s window. The footsteps grew louder as they moved closer to the room.
She held her breath as they passed the room and began to fade. Ms. Mitchell hadn’t seen her. After a moment, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Jessica stepped back into the hallway and moved closer to the detention room. Careful to remain undetected, she peered inside. Ms. Mitchell now stood in the front of the room beside the dean.
“Dean Morgan, if it’s all right, I’ll supervise detention today. I need to make sure everyone is present.”
She cringed. The fact that Ms. Mitchell had shown up personally to supervise detention didn’t bode well for her. She knew without a doubt that the woman wanted to see with her own eyes that Jessica was there.
“Oh! Thank you, Ms. Mitchell.” Dean Morgan sounded surprised and pleased at the same time.
Jessica ducked out of view again and narrowly avoided the dean. Unfortunately for her, he had closed the door after exiting.
She swore under her breath as she approached the door and pressed her ear against it. Luckily, she was able to hear inside the room well enough. Students shuffled about and chairs scraped against the wooden floor.
“All right, everyone. Settle down,” Ms. Mitchell commanded. “I don’t want to hear all this attitude. You all only have yourselves to blame.” The room quieted shortly thereafter. “Now,” Ms. Mitchell continued, “let’s see who’s here today.”
Jessica held her breath. This was it. The moment of truth had arrived. She was about to find out within the next few seconds whether or not her spell worked.
“Say ‘here’ when I call your name,” Ms. Mitchell instructed. She began reading through a list of students who were to report for detention that day. Each student responded with “here” after their name was called.
She made it through the “M” names, the “N” names, and through “O.”
“Jessica Palmers,” Ms. Mitchell said. Jessica couldn’t decide if she had imagined the dramatic flair with which the teacher said her name or not.
A heavy silence ensued. From where she stood with her ear pressed against the door, Jessica heard the room break out into mutters once again. She sighed and squeezed her eyes shut.
There was nothing else to do. If Ms. Mitchell called her name again, she would have to enter the room and reveal herself. She would have to serve her detentions—all of them—for the next two weeks or risk being in trouble for the rest of the semester.
Jessica realized there was a real chance that she was screwed either way. Ms. Mitchell might be offended that she was late yet again that she handed detention down for the whole year. When would she find the time to study witchcraft?
She opened her eyes, resigned to the fact that her spell hadn’t worked.
Ms. Mitchell’s voice drifted out into the hall again. “Excellent. It looks like everyone’s here.”
Wait, what? Jessica thought, unable to decide if she had heard correctly.
Bemused, she froze and stood for a long while as still as a statue. The other students inside continued to mutter. This time, a conspiratorial tone had entered their whispers.
Jessica pressed her ear firmly to the door in an effort to catch what some of them were saying.
“…hypnosis. A guy from third period was there this morning. He said Jessica…”
“…if that’s the case, I wonder if we can pay her to do it again on our behalf?”
She pressed her hand to her mouth and fought back the urge to giggle. While she didn’t quite catch every word, she certainly caught the gist of it. Apparently, there were rumors going around the school that she was skilled at hypnosis, and some kids thought they had witnessed it firsthand. After this particular incident, the rumor was bound to spread further.
In a sense, she supposed they were right. Whether or not this would prove to be an advantage for her in the future, she didn’t know yet. At the moment, she didn’t care. All that mattered was that she had gotten out of detention, which meant she could focus on more important issues at hand.
Jessica forced away any lingering guilt. She couldn’t let herself think of what she’d done as outright deception. Instead, she had simply done what she needed to do. Ms. Mitchell had only given her detention because she didn’t understand the circumstances surrounding her recent behavior. Obviously, those circumstances were so complicated that Jessica had no hope of explaining them.
As far as she was concerned, what she had done was absolutely necessary.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder and made her way quickly down the hall. By no means did she want to hang around detention and test her luck. She needed to get the heck out of there before someone with authority noticed her and realized something was wrong.
As she approached the school’s exit, a spring entered her step. Successfully casting the spell had given her a boost of confidence and for the first time, she truly believed she had potential as a witch. Now, she was ready to do whatever she had to do to reach her full potential.
Jessica was on her way to the door when something stopped her dead in her tracks. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and her skin broke out in goosebumps.
A tune drifted toward her.
It was the creepy tune she had first heard from the crazy man at the church and then again from a strange woman at the ice cream parlor. She had come to think of it as the Aquiel demon theme song. She turned slowly and her heart hammered in her chest. There was no one behind her. No one down the hall. No one in sight. Still, the whistling continued.
A part of her wanted to run out of the school and call Pastor Norman—or maybe Chad. Out of all the days to skip school, why had he chosen today? He would have known what to do and would have been able to handle things. Heck, Jessica would have even settled for running into Roger right about now. Instead, she was alone and terrified.
Don’t let it get away, a voice whispered in her head. She took a breath and obeyed that voice. She ran back down the hall, determined to follow the whistling. What she would do once she actually confronted the demon was something she would have to figure out later. For now, she merely knew she couldn’t let it get away.
She hated the way her shoes squeaked on the floor while she ran and was afraid it might alert the demon that she was on its trail. Regardless of her fears, she didn’t slow down. She couldn’t afford to.
Jessica could still hear the whistling when she turned a corner. She stopped abruptly. A young man strolled down the hall. Kacey.
Crap!
Despite the fact that she was concerned about him, he was still the last person she wanted to see at that moment. She also felt slightly offended to see that he had actually come to school after all. She could only assume he had skipped the joint physics class because he hadn’t wanted to see her. He was obviously avoiding her.
She backed away slowly, not wanting to alert him to her presence. If he saw her, she didn’t know what she would do. Things suddenly felt too awkward between them to comprehend, and now definitely wasn’t the time to figure it out.
The demon continued to whistle, which meant it was still nearby.
Jessica waited at the corner and tried to determine her next move. She ran a mental map of the school through her head. Somehow, she needed to calculate the best route to follow the demon yet also avoid Kacey.
Before she could figure anything out, he had turned another corner and was out of sight.
The demon whistling stopped abruptly. It was too late. The Aquiel had slipped away from her again.
“Aarrrgghhh!” she yelled in frustration. She kicked at the nearest wall and hurt her big toe. Stupidly, she hopped on one foot for a second, annoyed with herself and with the pain shooting through her foot.
Right then and there, she vowed that the Aquiel would not get away from her a third time. The next time she saw or heard it, she would capture it and kill it.
She was the granddaughter of Ethel Libbon
s, for crying out loud. The next time that demon ran into her, it would be the last thing he ever did.
Chapter Fourteen
When Jessica parked her big, rusty yellow Jeep in front of Grandma Ethel’s house, she immediately looked around for her grandma’s car. She hoped that the old lady was out shopping or something. No such luck. Her car was still there, which meant so was her grandmother.
Now that she was finally home, Jessica’s thoughts returned exclusively to Frank the imp. She wondered how she could get her hands on Ethel’s magic book to find the reversal spell. That would be infinitely harder to do with her grandma in the house. She couldn’t fathom how she could distract the old woman long enough to get the book and do what she needed to do.
As she hopped out of her Jeep, her mind spun in an effort to devise a plan. How could she possibly distract her grandmother in her own house so that she could have enough time to look at the book?
She pulled her backpack from the backseat and thought about the impossible task before her. After all, it wasn’t like she could use the convincing spell on Ethel. Jessica didn’t even have the nerve to think about doing such a thing.
A little dispirited, she walked up the steps to the front porch and automatically hopped over the usual cats that lounged around.
“Hey, Grace.” Her grandma’s familiar was perched on the banister ledge. Grace didn’t exactly return the greeting. Instead, she made a tsking sound that Jessica wasn’t sure whether the cat had made out loud or telepathically. She didn’t have time to think about it as she had more important things to do than interpret Grace’s many moods.
Jessica retrieved her keys and opened the front door. She stepped over the cats in the front door, like always, turned into the living room, and stopped abruptly. Her backpack slid off her shoulder and fell to the floor with a heavy thud.
“Grandma, I can explain.” The words came automatically, even though she most certainly could not.
Grandma Ethel stood in the middle of the living room and held up Frank like he was a piece of dirty laundry. She tilted her head with her gaze glued on Jessica. “Can you? Well, that’s wonderful. Because I certainly wondered why there was an imp in my bedroom pretending to be a cat. It gave me quite a start, as you might imagine.”
