Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Simon had two sleep tinctures, two confusion, and four shield vials. The shields, he said, erected a temporary wall in front of the thrower, hopefully giving them enough time to escape. Aunt G had brought four vials of the protection tincture she, Amber, and Willow had been drinking every twelve hours a few months ago, when Kieran was in town. The tincture was easily the most foul-tasting thing Amber had ever consumed, but it very well had saved Aunt G’s and Willow’s lives when they’d both been hit by a dose of Kieran’s cursed magic that had been powerful enough to lift them off their feet.

  “For a Penhallow-specific protection tincture, what would you guys need?” Amber asked.

  “Hair,” Simon said.

  “Or blood.” Aunt G patted her fanny pack strapped to her waist. “I brought a few syringes with me.”

  Amber didn’t even want to ask why her aunt had spare syringes.

  While Simon, Aunt G, and Edgar debated the difference between a blowback spell and a wind spell, Amber studied the locator one she’d written while in this very spot not that long ago. She’d written it to reveal a hidden object—which at the time had been the cache Zelda had placed in a fountain back in 1971, just before the ley lines under the neighborhood had erupted and sent everyone packing. But now, Amber wondered if she could repurpose it to show her the hidden Penhallows. If they were still alive, they were hidden from sight because they were stuck in the past, just as the cache had been.

  Even though she was sure she could touch the ground and tap into the ley lines that were already making her head feel woozy, she—and her ankle—remembered all too well what happened when she tried to harness that much magic. She would like to avoid that if she could. An indirect route into the past felt like a less traumatic trip than diving into it headfirst.

  Starting the spell on a fresh sheet of paper, Amber tweaked it until the language was more specific to a person than a thing. When the words on the page glowed gold, she knew the spell was complete.

  Twenty minutes later, each witch had the spells they wanted to use. They stood in a circle behind Edgar’s truck, each holding a vial of Aunt G’s horrendous protection tincture.

  Uncorking the tiny bottles, they clinked them together, then knocked them back. Amber tried plugging her nose as she drank, but it didn’t help. Her eyes and nose immediately started to water and her tongue felt like it was coated in thick pond scum. She gagged. Somehow it was even worse than she remembered.

  Simon had his hands on his knees while he coughed violently. Edgar had his head tipped to the sky as he shouted a few choice words at the canopy of leaves above them.

  Aunt G shuddered, but otherwise didn’t make a fuss. “Oh, you’re all so dramatic!”

  Once they’d all more or less recovered, Simon handed Amber and Edgar a sleep tincture, and handed a confusion one to Aunt G, keeping the other for himself. They each got a shield tincture, the liquid inside a dark blue. With their vials pocketed and their defense spells either memorized or scribbled on loose pieces of paper—no one wanted to lose his or her grimoire in the past—they moved to the middle of the dirt road.

  Before Amber recited her spell, she dropped to one knee. She swayed a bit, even though she didn’t have any skin directly in contact with the ground. The magic below this neighborhood was not only powerful, but felt alive. One of the theories about why the ley lines short-circuited was because magic itself had been angry and retaliated. As much as magic felt like a physical thing, Amber had had a hard time buying into that theory. Until she’d been here, that is. Until she’d experienced the magic here and felt like it understood her and vice versa.

  She’d asked magic for help when she didn’t know what to do with Damien and Devra, and magic had responded. It had taken their unconscious bodies back in time, and then spit Amber back out into the present.

  She placed her hands on the ground now and nearly toppled over. She sat back on her haunches to keep herself from collapsing.

  I’m back, she thought, hoping the magic here could still sense her. We’re here to speak to Damien and Devra, if they’re still here. We think the Penhallows are planning something, and these two might have answers. The Penhallows still want to reverse the curse. There’s no way to know how much damage that could do to the witches alive now—or to you.

  It felt strange speaking to magic directly, as if it were a singular being, but she didn’t know how else to address it. When nothing happened other than a slight rumble beneath her palms, Amber shakily got to her feet.

  The group formed a circle, holding hands—Simon on one side of her and Edgar on the other—and Amber recited the hidden-person spell out loud. She kept her eyes closed, hoping it would heighten her other senses. On the surface, it was a simple spell. It used the same framework as the spell she’d perfected over the years when she needed to find her cell phone.

  Once the last word left her lips, she cracked open an eye, half expecting the Penhallow siblings to be standing in front of her wearing twin sinister smiles. But nothing immediately looked different.

  Then the ground beneath her rumbled—more of a vibration, really. The others opened their eyes too and looked down, as if they all expected Damien and Devra to come crawling out of the earth like mutated sandworms.

  Amber wasn’t sure if anyone else noticed the bright burst of white light, but her yelp of alarm was cut off before she’d made a sound. Moments later, the light faded and Amber was in the neighborhood from decades before. It was the same scene, too. Doors to houses stood open, a suitcase lay overturned on someone’s lawn, and the woman’s laundry from across the street still hung from the line, flapping slightly in the light breeze. Not a person was in sight.

  The last time this had happened, Amber had been alone; Willow and Aunt G had been left behind.

  This time, Aunt G, Edgar, and Simon had made the journey with her. They all tentatively let go of each other’s hands. The spell held firm.

  “This. Is. Wild,” Simon said, looking around. “So this is what this place looked like in the 70s?”

  “Yeah,” Amber said, scanning the area just as the others were, but Amber was on the lookout for Damien and Devra. She had no idea how this all worked. If they’d truly traveled back in time and it had been nearly a week since she was last here, the Penhallow siblings could be anywhere. If this was merely a memory, were they trapped within the confines of this single neighborhood during this one day?

  A door slammed behind her. Damien and Devra stalked down the front walk of a house two buildings over. Just like Neil and Kieran, these siblings had jet-black hair. They looked remarkably similar—twins, possibly, if not close in age. They were both about 5’7”, Damien perhaps an inch taller. Damien kept his hair cut short to his scalp, while Devra’s fell around her shoulders in loose waves.

  From what Amber could tell, they were wearing the same clothing they had been a week ago. Jeans and a dark blue T-shirt for Damien, and skinny jeans and a black tank top for Devra. She wore knee-high rubber soled chunky boots. The line of silver buckles on the sides of them glinted dully as the pair marched toward them.

  Without discussing it, Amber and her group formed a horizontal line along the width of the dirt road. A united force ready to take these two on if they decided to attack. Amber had a hand in her right pocket, where she had placed her shield tincture.

  “Couldn’t stay away?” Damien called out from behind Devra. He had an apple in one hand and took a final bite of it, tossing it over his shoulder as they continued forward. Once they reached the street, they walked side by side toward Amber’s group. “The good thing about being stuck here, at least,” he said, “is that every house is newly abandoned. Food in every fridge and pantry.”

  “You here to reverse whatever this is?” Devra asked as the pair stopped a few feet away. She crossed her arms and glared at Amber. “If not, I’ll be on my way. I left the oven on.”

  “I wanted to ask you a few questions,” Amber said, her palm growing sweaty around the vial.
/>   “And why exactly would we help you, time witch?” Damien asked.

  “Because I’m your way out,” Amber said. “I’m guessing you wouldn’t still be here if you could get out. You’re both powerful witches. A week would have given you plenty of time to work through your arsenal of spells.”

  The siblings simultaneously paled.

  “A week?” Devra asked. “I was awake when you vanished. We weren’t able to move until you were gone. The sun hasn’t set since we’ve been here. All the clocks are stuck at the same time …”

  Damien eyed Amber warily, some of his earlier bravado gone. “What is this place, then? A memory?”

  “That’s the theory,” Edgar chimed in.

  Devra snorted derisively. “You don’t even know?”

  Simon fidgeted next to her. “So you’ve tried to leave here?”

  Damien assessed him, then refocused on Amber. “Is this your new plan for dealing with our clan? The council’s plan to sever our magic didn’t work—clearly—so now you’re going to lock us away in pockets of memories so we couldn’t even use our magic if we wanted to?”

  Aunt G cocked her head. “You can’t use your magic?”

  “Didn’t I just say that, old lady?” Damien snapped.

  “Watch it,” Amber snapped back.

  Devra rolled her eyes. “We still have it. We just can’t use it. It’s … dampened here. It’s like an itch I can’t scratch.”

  Damien worked his jaw. Amber could tell he was angry, but he was scared, too. Scared that Amber would leave them here indefinitely, forever trapped in the memory of a single day until they ran out of food in these abandoned houses.

  “Why did Kieran come to Edgehill?” Amber asked.

  While Damien was equal parts rage and fear, Devra was all calculating assessment. “Oh, I get it. This is an interrogation tactic. You get recruited by the WBI or something?”

  Amber’s cheeks heated, embarrassed almost. “What do you mean?”

  Damien cocked his head. “This is the kind of thing the WBI does. Large-scale memory wipes. Imprisoning witches in creative new ways. This—trapping someone in a time loop—sounds like something right up their alley. What did they offer you to get you to do some of their dirty work for them?”

  Amber couldn’t say she liked the agents from the WBI either, but could she trust an assessment from a pair of cursed witches?

  Devra stalked up to Amber, nose to nose. Amber could see Simon tense on one side of her, and she had to grab hold of Edgar’s forearm on her other side to keep him from intervening. Amber held her ground, though her heart raced. She knew the Penhallows could have been lying about their dampened magic, and had been biding their time while they lured Amber into a false sense of security, but threatening either Amber or her companions would be a stupid move on Devra’s part and they all knew it. Because at the end of the day, only Amber could get the Penhallows out of this memory. Hurting her or infuriating her would do them no favors.

  “Is that the plan? Throw us in a memory like a jail cell and make us wait it out?” Devra asked, her breath warm on Amber’s face. Devra turned her head this way and that, like a snake. “Are you waiting for us to go mad in here so that by the time you bother to come back, we’ll be so desperate to get out of here that we’ll tell you anything?”

  Amber didn’t flinch, though she squeezed Edgar’s arm a little tighter. “Something like that. We can leave if you don’t want to talk. I can come back when the food runs out.”

  “There’s a lot of food, time witch,” Damien said.

  “Yes, but you thought you were only here for a few hours,” Amber said. “It’s been a week. Now you know you can’t tell time here. The sun doesn’t set. The clocks don’t work. So you might think you have plenty of resources—and you might—but what if it takes me ten years to come back and you think it’s only been a day? Sounds like enough to drive a person a little loopy.”

  Devra’s lip twitched a fraction.

  “What do you want to know about Kieran?” Damien blurted.

  Devra whipped around to glare at him. Damien glared back.

  “I want to know why he came to Edgehill,” Amber said. “I know he was here for the grimoire—but what made him come looking for it after all this time?”

  Damien and Devra had a silent conversation. Eventually Devra groaned loudly in what sounded like defeat, took a few steps back both from her brother and Amber’s group, crossed her arms, and glowered.

  Damien refocused on Amber, but he didn’t speak. He worked his jaw.

  “If you want any chance of getting out of here,” Edgar said, “I suggest you talk.”

  Damien said, “Kieran was sent here to do reconnaissance.”

  “Sent by whom?” Amber asked.

  “I don’t know,” Damien said. When Amber started to protest, he held up a hand. “Honestly. There’s a network of us online. We mostly keep it anonymous.”

  “Is everyone in the network a Penhallow?” Simon asked.

  “Nope,” Devra said, wearing a sly grin now. “There are quite a few witches from other clans who are sympathetic to our cause. Reversing what the council did will heal magic and places like this. This—” she said, waving her hands around the memory they were in, “shouldn’t exist.”

  Amber couldn’t argue with her on that point.

  “The Henbane grimoire, about five months ago, started giving off little pulses of magic,” Damien said. “The witches in the area sensed it and informed the network that there must have been a cloak on the book this whole time. We didn’t know if it was a cloak Annabelle had put there, or you, but now it was traceable. Rumors about Annabelle Henbane’s children have been circulating for a while, but the witches assigned to check up on you over the years had never witnessed either you or Willow using magic for more than basics.”

  Witches assigned to check up on them? She shuddered at the idea. She supposed she had her parents and Aunt G to thank for forcing Amber and Willow to bury their magic. It had kept them safe all these years.

  “Kieran volunteered to come to Edgehill, thinking it would be easy to scare you into giving up the book since you’re so unskilled at magic,” Damien said. “But somehow you not only fought him off, you hid the book again and its trace vanished. Then you stripped Kieran of his magic.”

  “Sounds like you all underestimated her,” Aunt G said, and Amber tried not to puff up at the pride she heard in her aunt’s voice.

  Devra’s lip curled.

  “How many of you are coming to Edgehill?” Amber asked.

  “A dozen had confirmed they were on their way before we got here,” Damien said. “We were the second wave of the reconnaissance.”

  “Who broke Kieran out of jail?” Amber asked.

  Devra froze; Damien’s jaw dropped. “What?” they asked in unison.

  Then Amber remembered they’d been trapped here while Kieran had escaped.

  Before she could think to ask anything else, Edgar let out a cry and pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. He sank to one knee.

  Amber, momentarily forgetting about the Penhallow siblings, dropped in front of him. She gently took his face in her hands and angled it up to force him to look at her. But his eyes were squeezed shut. “Edgar,” she said softly. “What is it? Is it Neil?”

  Edgar nodded. “He’s … cackling. He said …” Then Edgar’s eyes flew open, and they frantically searched Amber’s. “Someone broke him out, too.”

  “Of the mental institution?” Amber asked.

  Now it was Devra who was laughing. “Neil’s connection to Annabelle will guarantee that grimoire is ours. Just you wait.”

  When Edgar seemed to have a handle on his episode, Amber asked, “Did someone in the network mention this? Getting Neil out of the institution?”

  Aunt G and Simon helped Edgar to his feet.

  Damien started to answer, but Devra clapped a hand over his mouth. “That’s enough,” she snapped. Shoving her brother behind her, she a
ddressed Amber. “Now you need to give us something. Let us out of here and we’ll tell you anything else you need to know. Being stuck here isn’t worth any of this.”

  Damien nodded. “We’ll go underground. Leave town immediately. The network will just think we were compromised.”

  Amber didn’t believe either one of them. “In order to consider letting you out,” she said, addressing them in turn, “I need something else.”

  Devra narrowed her eyes.

  “What?” Damien asked.

  “A few locks of your hair,” Amber said.

  The Penhallows both took involuntary steps back.

  “What for?” Devra looked truly worried for the first time. “You’re planning to bind us here, aren’t you?” She took another step back. “Nuh uh. I’m not giving up something like that. Come back when you want to talk, time witch.” She grabbed hold of Damien’s elbow and started to drag him back with her.

  “Now,” Amber said, and thankfully her companions sensed what she meant. All four of them threw their vials at the retreating pair.

  Simon called out an activation spell just as the small glass vials smashed on the ground at their feet. Devra had realized what was happening a second before Damien did, and had taken off at a fast clip, leaving her brother behind. Damien got the full dose of the vials. One of the sleep ones took him out first. His eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed to the dirt road.

  Simon and Aunt G hurried to his prone form, Aunt G producing a syringe and a pair of scissors from her bag. Simon pulled a few empty vials from his other pocket and he and Aunt G quickly collected what they needed. Amber and Edgar stood watching Devra, who had made it halfway down the street before she spun around. She screamed at them from a distance, calling them foul names and promising that when the witches from the network found out about this, that the network would hunt them down.

  Once Aunt G and Simon were done, Amber dropped to her knees a few feet from Damien’s prone form. She instructed the others to keep contact with her—a hand on a shoulder, arm, or back—and then she placed her hands on the earth and asked the ley lines to return them to their timeline.