Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “Yes,” Edgar said shakily. “Is the voice still there?”

  “The woman?” Raphael asked. “Yes. She’s more familiar to me than you are, but now that feels wrong. She doesn’t like this turn of events, I can tell you that much.”

  “Can you tell us her name?” Amber asked.

  “Patrice,” he said, then immediately pitched forward, head in his hands.

  Amber bit down on her bottom lip. If the orderlies watching the cameras thought Amber and Edgar were causing their guest too much distress, they’d likely intervene. “Uncle Raphael,” she said, her voice firm but her hand gentle on his back. “I need you to tell Patrice to leave you alone. They’re watching. You need to make her stop. Sit up straight again or they’ll ask us to leave.”

  Slowly, letting out an agonized groan through his teeth, Raphael sat up while still clutching his skull. As his fingers relaxed, his hands came away from his temples. His eyes, however, were still screwed shut, and his mouth and eyebrows were bunched.

  “She won’t be quiet,” he ground out. “She’s trying to tell me something. To show me something …”

  “I can help you find ways to deal with her,” Edgar said. “Do you know where Patrice is? Physically in the world, I mean.”

  “Wait. It’s starting to come into focus now.” Raphael gripped the armrests, his chin tucked against his shoulder. “She doesn’t want me to tell you where she is. She says you’ll betray me just like my …” He stilled. “Like my parents did.”

  “They didn’t betray you,” Amber said. “They made a decision they thought would keep you safe.”

  Edgar cocked his head at her. This was the part she hadn’t been able to share with him yet. Their grandparents had decided that Raphael was not only a danger to himself and his family, but to time and history itself, so they’d stripped him down to a shell and locked him away in this remote location where not even the paranormal government could find him.

  Raphael’s eyes snapped open and he whirled toward her. Complete lucidity took him over. The glare he aimed her way was all Henbane. “Keep me safe? They took my choices away. Them and Annabelle. My sister the golden child made the world’s biggest mistake and the whole family gets punished for it? We all had to go into hiding because she was stupid enough to fall for a Penhallow’s lies. The WBI gave me a chance to have my life back and my own parents snatched it away from me.”

  “If you’d gone back in time to stop my mother, who knows what this future would look like now,” Amber said, her own anger mounting. “I might not exist. Your son might not exist. The Penhallows might have found another path to the spell. Maybe—”

  “Might, might, might …” Raphael said. “You don’t know what would have happened. It’s easy to justify that what you all did was the best option for the greater good when there’s no way to know it’s actually better.”

  “Dad …” Edgar tried.

  Raphael quickly got to his feet, spinning around so his back faced the windows. “Patrice showed me the truth. Showed me that my parents betrayed me. You’ll betray me too. Once you get whatever you think is up here—” he tapped his temple hard three times, “you’ll rip it all away from me again and stick me back in the prison of my own body and mind. Everyone always says the Penhallows are the enemy, but your enemy’s goals line up with your government’s. The WBI and the Penhallows want the same thing. What do you think will happen when I tell that agent friend of yours that you know more than you’re telling him, huh? What’ll happen then?”

  Amber didn’t know what to do. Her uncle’s mind had been poisoned for years by Patrice Penhallow, grooming him to reject his own family when the time came. But why?

  The WBI and the Penhallows want the same thing.

  The Penhallows wanted to use Raphael as a weapon, too? To what end?

  Apparently your uncle has the same magical proclivities that your mother did, Betty had said.

  The WBI wanted Raphael to go back in time to stop the spell from being written. But the Penhallows still wanted the spell; they didn’t want to intervene to stop its creation. What if the Penhallows wanted to go back in time to immediately steal the spell from Annabelle before she’d had a chance to hide it?

  It was true that the WBI and the Penhallows wanted the same thing—the time-travel spell. But Amber was willing to bet that neither group actually cared what happened to Raphael once they had what they wanted. He was a weapon for them both, but a disposable one.

  Amber lurched forward and grabbed hold of Raphael’s forearm. Her magic rose up like a tide at the contact. She didn’t have time to perfect her intention; she needed her magic to cooperate, dang it. She pulled up her memories of Edgar. The teenage boy who had never really been a chatty happy-go-lucky kid, but had a lightness to him that was almost entirely gone now. She pushed those memories at her uncle, like they were photographs pushed toward him on a table—physical things he could pick up and hold.

  Then came the memories of Edgar during the years after Raphael’s disappearance. Edgar going from sad and lonely to furious and antisocial. Edgar disheveled, broken, and lost.

  She flipped a page in her mental photo album and shoved snapshots toward her uncle of Edgar venturing out of the house in the last few months, of him doing his best to meet her for breakfast in town on the weekends, and of Edgar and Kim on the dance floor at the Hair Ball. Edgar didn’t look particularly happy in any of the most recent memories, but he looked better.

  Then she showed her uncle the expression Edgar had worn when he’d seen his father for the first time in years not more than a few hours ago. A bit of that outer shell of hardened anger had chipped away in that moment. A bit of his old light had shown through.

  This is your son, she willed him to understand. He’s never stopped missing you, even if he didn’t know where you were. Even if your parents betrayed your trust, your son didn’t.

  Her magic released its hold and she stumbled away from her uncle. Head woozy, Amber placed a hand on the chair’s back to steady herself. Her mouth felt parched, her energy drained. It was a familiar feeling. When Edgar had first started training her on being a better witch, spells zapped her of her energy more often than not.

  Edgar quickly darted away, and Amber wondered at first if he was going to flag down an orderly for her, but he came back with a glass of water he’d filled in the bathroom. He handed it to her.

  As she quickly drank down the water, she eyed her uncle who sat slumped on the windowsill, the heel of his hand pressed against the middle of his forehead. She didn’t know if what she’d shown him would make a difference. Maybe he was too far gone.

  He was a very angry, bitter young man back then, her grandparents had told Betty.

  That angry, bitter man was still in there. Even if Amber were to heal his mind, how much of that anger would come with his powers?

  Edgar stood beside her, his arm flush with hers, as they watched Raphael. The unblinking eyes of the two cameras were boring holes into the sides of her head.

  Slowly, Raphael lowered his hand from his face and used it to grip the windowsill. He looked up at Amber. It felt like eons passed in silence. Raphael’s expression was as unreadable as Silent Agent’s. Any number of things could be going through the man’s head—one of which could be more lies fed to him by Patrice Penhallow.

  A buzz sounded and the door swung open. Neither Amber nor Edgar turned to see who had arrived.

  Raphael didn’t seem to notice they had a visitor. As his gaze shifted to Edgar, Amber sagged a little in relief. Being under the intense scrutiny of a Henbane wasn’t for the faint of heart.

  Finally, his voice a little gravelly, Raphael asked, “What is the name of your Penhallow?”

  “Neil,” Edgar said.

  “Patrice has spoken of him,” Raphael said. “I can’t remember it all, but my gut tells me I hate Neil Penhallow.”

  Edgar grabbed hold of Amber’s forearm again.

  Raphael stood, no longer slouching on the windows
ill. He still looked a bit unsteady on his feet, but the determination that came over his features made up for it. His intense gaze swung back to Amber. “I want to remember. Can you help me?”

  “She sure as heck is going to try.”

  Agent Barker stood in the doorway, his smile wide and triumphant. “We’ll start in earnest tomorrow morning, Raphael. Get some rest. Tomorrow is a big day!” His eyes slid over to Amber. “We’re one step closer. With your skills and my help, we’re going to change the course of history.”

  Which was exactly what she was afraid of.

  Chapter 20

  Back at the Mermaid Inn, all four of them holed up in Amber and Edgar’s motel room. Agent Barker must have had a grimoire like any other witch, but he either didn’t have one with him, or agents weren’t allowed to share their grimoires with civilians. Amber could only imagine the kind of spells Agent Barker and Silent had on hand as members of the WBI.

  Silent Agent remained in a chair by the door for the hours-long planning session, busy at work on his sudoku puzzles. He would throw out suggestions on occasion though, so he was clearly paying attention even when he pretended he wasn’t.

  He was a lot like a cat in that way.

  “Doesn’t the WBI have some high-level memory spell we could use?” Edgar asked in frustration sometime around hour three.

  “A) Don’t you think we would have tried that already?” Agent Barker asked, tossing his pen onto the pad of paper he’d been scratching ideas onto and running a hand through his short blond hair. He sat on the end of Amber’s bed, one leg bent on the comforter and his other foot on the floor. He’d taken off his suit coat by then, had unbuttoned his white collared shirt, and had his long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The more casual air had helped Amber feel more comfortable being in a closed space with him. She knew she couldn’t trust the WBI as an organization, but the jury was still out on the integrity of individual agents. “And B,” he said, “memory and time magic use are highly restricted—especially in the WBI—largely because of Annabelle’s spell. Its mere existence threw so many things into question that even dabbling in it can get you into serious trouble. As it is, very few witches can do time and memory magic at all. It was why Annabelle was always such a fascination to people. She was rare because she could do magic like that at all, and then to be a prodigy at it was extraordinary.”

  Amber recalled something Simon had said to her. Growing up, since his hometown was near Delin Springs, he’d heard about her mother often. The rumors about your mother being a prodigy with time spells was like hearing a fourteen-year-old just graduated Harvard with a degree in quantum physics. It wasn’t—still isn’t—anything most of us were capable of, so a lot of us from that area started to see her as an almost mythical creature.

  Her mother the unicorn.

  “Then why are the Penhallows trying so hard to get the spell?” Amber asked after a moment, curious if Agent Barker would ever admit that both the WBI and the Penhallows saw her uncle as the most viable caster of the spell. “Even if they get their hands on it, could any of them do the spell?”

  Agent Barker pursed his lips, clearly mulling over the best way to answer that. “It’s believed that Penhallows and Henbanes have intermingled over the years, so there are at least a few candidates who have the skill set necessary to attempt the spell once they have it. It’s unlikely they’d pursue the spell for this long if they didn’t have someone in their ranks who they believed could pull it off.”

  Amber didn’t need a truth spell to know that was a diplomatic answer laced with lies. Yet she nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “I think you were right earlier, Edgar,” Agent Barker said, returning the conversation to the task at hand. “Since magic is such a defining trait of a witch, reminding him of his powers might be an even more effective way to get his memories back.”

  “I know we only have a day left to do this,” Amber said, “but I wonder if these really complicated memory-transfer spells are … too complicated?”

  Agent Barker looked down at the pad of paper in front of him and frowned. He’d been taking notes on every significant date they could think of that might hold a strong memory for Raphael to latch onto. Annabelle and Theodore’s wedding, where Edgar was the ring bearer. Edgar’s first time riding a bike without training wheels. The time Amber and Edgar had been tasked with looking after Willow while Raphael and Annabelle had been busy with something in the parlor. “Busy” in those days usually meant a screaming match between the siblings before Annabelle stormed off with Amber and Willow in tow, leaving a sad, lonely Edgar behind.

  Willow had gotten her head caught in the banister upstairs, and Edgar and Amber had panicked, sure they were going to get torn new ones for letting something like this happen on their watch. They’d tried to get her unstuck using both a tub of mayonnaise and the limited magic Edgar knew how to use. Yet, whatever he’d tried had unexpectedly turned the banister stakes into rubber. Willow had screamed as she slipped through the bars and went careening to the floor. Annabelle and Raphael had come running at the sound of three shrieking children and had used twin bursts of wind to save Willow from falling headfirst onto the hardwood floor.

  “What are you thinking as an alternative?” Agent Barker asked. “I realize that transplanted memories might get rejected just as transplanted organs might, but we don’t know how many holes there are. Plugging them up and filling them in might be our only option, depending on how extensive the damage to his mind is.”

  Amber was exhausted and it felt like they’d been rehashing the same ideas for hours. “His memories are on the tip of his tongue. Even he said that. Memory transfers and transplants would make more sense if his memories were gone.”

  Edgar and Agent Barker both cocked a brow at her.

  “Meaning they aren’t gone?” Agent Barker asked her.

  Her face heated. Amber still hadn’t told Edgar what she’d learned from Betty. She mentally thunked herself in the forehead, then made a show of rubbing her eyes and stretching. “I guess I’m hoping for the easiest solution because I’m so tired. I’m not the most advanced witch. This much magic use is really wearing me out.”

  Agent Barker nodded at this. “You are indeed a novice. It’s no wonder you’re tapped out. We can revisit all this in the morning. Get some sleep, you two.”

  Amber held her tongue as she watched the two agents collect their things and leave the room. Once they were gone, Amber slunk down against her pillows. She was tired.

  She wished she had the Henbane grimoire so she could study the magic-severing spell her mother had crafted. The same spell Amber had used to cure Kieran of his curse. What they needed now was the exact opposite of that spell—a magic-reattaching spell. If Amber had her mother’s grimoire in front of her, she could work backwards to create something of use.

  But she was also glad that once she and her family had realized the extent of what was in the Henbane book, they’d shut both grimoires and layered them in cloaking spells. Penhallows had likely been sniffing around Edgehill for months now. If Amber had given into the temptation to open the Henbane grimoire, even just for a few moments to take a picture of the spell she needed, that alone might have given away their hiding place.

  Deep down, Amber knew the Henbane book was safer out of anyone’s hands—even hers.

  A flash of white appeared in her peripheral vision, and a moment later, a small paper airplane landed in her lap. Her cousin sat on his bed, legs crossed, and stared at her expectantly.

  She unfolded the note.

  What aren’t you telling me this time?

  She grabbed the pen off her grimoire. Our grandparents are still alive and they’re the ones who checked your dad in. They didn’t erase his memories. They buried them along with his magic.

  She sent the paper airplane back. Edgar didn’t write back, just stared at the note for a long time. Then he tore it up into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

  What felt lik
e hours later, Edgar interrupted Amber’s staring contest with a reddish-brown stain on the ceiling. His tone was thoughtful, missing his usual biting edge. “I can’t really remember that last day I had with him. You’d think it would be clear as day. But I blocked out so much of my twenties.”

  Amber rolled onto her side, her head propped on her hand. He lay flat on his back, his hands by his sides and his dark eyes focused on nothing in particular. She anticipated his question before he asked it. “Do you want me to try to find it for you?”

  Without looking at her, he shrugged. Which meant he very much wanted her to but couldn’t bring himself to admit it. Amber climbed off her bed and sat on his. He scooted over a fraction, still keeping his attention on anything but her.

  “I can’t promise it’ll work,” she said.

  He nodded.

  Recalling how this had worked with Zelda when she had shown Amber her memory of 1971, Amber said, “Think of every little detail of that day … what you were wearing, what the weather was like, anything Uncle Raph had said to you.”

  She gave him a couple of minutes. When he suddenly squeezed his eyes shut, she took that as her cue. She mentally cast the memory-retrieval spell, let out a slow, steady breath, and placed her hand on Edgar’s forearm.

  A white light tore through her vision.

  When the light faded, she found herself standing on Edgar’s doorstep, but the mat here was a plain brown one. The paint on the house was a soft baby blue, and the wooden floorboards were clean, strong, and had nary a weed poking between them. Amber had forgotten how nice the house had been before Edgar had been left to his own devices.

  The door to the house was open, revealing a cluttered but overall tidy foyer. Sunlight streamed into the house from the windows above the staircase to Amber’s left. Her awe at her surroundings was interrupted by the sight of a younger Raphael Henbane walking her way. He had robust dark locks, dark bushy brows, and a scowl marring his face. If it weren’t for the fact that Amber was aware that this memory was Edgar’s, she would have thought she was looking at her cousin.