Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “Did one of them break into her apartment?” Amber asked.

  “I believe Patrice said Willow left her second story window open and the witch climbed in.”

  Amber wished she had the ability to shudder. Willow had been taking tinctures for sleep and dreams then, she’d said, to help combat her insomnia. Perhaps the concoctions she’d been taking had been so strong that not even a prowler had woken her up. Amber was going to scream “Always lock your windows!” at Willow at her first opportunity. “And they’re doing all this just to get my mom’s book?”

  Though there was nothing to see here, Amber could feel him bristle. “Believe it or not, this has been more about me than my golden child of a sister. They’ll use Neil to find the spell; they believe he has a connection that can transcend time and death itself. The night of the fire, he collected both your father’s watch and the promise ring Neil had given Belle years ago. The fact that she kept it told Neil that Belle still loved him. As you well know, objects from events of great trauma can hold a person’s essence, as well as a bit of their magic. They’re convinced that’s all Neil needs to find the hidden grimoires.”

  Mom kept a promise ring from Neil? Amber could hardly process that, so she shoved it to the back of her mind. “How is all this more about you than my mother?” she asked.

  “Once they find the spell, they need someone to cast the thing. Patrice is proof enough that Penhallows, as powerful as they are, don’t have the ability to do memory and time magic—few do,” Raphael said. “They want me to take the time-reversal spell Belle wrote and alter it so I don’t reverse all of time, but rather send a single person back to a moment in time. Neil will go back to the moment Belle created the spell and steal it from her.”

  Neil’s younger self was part of that memory, too. Wasn’t there a rule about time travel and not meeting yourself, otherwise it could break time itself … or something?

  “This will be a trial run for the real thing,” Raphael said. “Reversing over a hundred years on the first try is a bit ambitious. If Neil’s mission is successful, the Penhallow clan will make the trek to modern-day Sedona, Arizona’s ley line convergence. Once there, I’ll cast the time-reversal spell to take us back to the day the curse was born. It will be future Penhallows against the council—and the Penhallows are sure to win.”

  It took Amber a moment to think clearly. “And what about everyone in this timeline?”

  “They don’t care,” Raphael said. “They’ll be back in a time where Penhallows were at the height of their power. Patrice wants to be the head of the new council made up entirely of her clan. She’s even hinted that she wants to use the same spell the council used to strip the magic from enemy clans.”

  “So she wants to make the same choice the council did, but expect a different result?” Amber asked. “Isn’t that the definition of insanity?” She mentally shook her nonexistent head. “None of this matters. You know I can’t let you do any of it, right? I can just outright refuse to help you get your magic back and then the whole plan falls apart.”

  “I’m on your side, Amber,” he said. “Why would I risk telling you this if I was sympathetic to the Penhallows?”

  “Isn’t that exactly what someone who is sympathetic to the Penhallows would say?” she asked.

  There might have been a flicker of amusement in the darkness. “I don’t plan to send Neil back in time. When my memories came back, so did my bitterness and anger. I’ve had years, thanks to Patrice, to work through that. I know the Penhallows can’t succeed. When it became clear that Patrice, despite all her efforts, wouldn’t be able to restore my magic, the network started to panic. I figured as long as my magic was hidden, their plan would fall apart. I just needed to bide my time. But then you and Willow got pulled into it. They see you as the backup plan because they don’t know if you have the aptitude for memory and time magic the same way that I do.”

  Perhaps being an untrained witch with unknown potential wasn’t always a bad thing.

  “I’m telling you this because I want to help you and Edgar,” Raphael said after a moment. “I couldn’t do what I needed to for him back then, but maybe I can right things now. But to do that, I need my magic restored. I need Patrice to think their original plan is going off without a hitch. And you need to let me betray my son to his face. Once you restore me, I’ll use my magic to break out of here. Her instructions are: Get her to return your magic, exact your revenge as you see fit, and then meet me out front. She’s waiting for me in the parking lot right now.”

  Amber’s gut and her heart were at war. “Was betraying Edgar her idea or yours?” she finally asked.

  There was a slight pause in the black. “Mine. She thinks my loyalty is fully with her now that she’s returned my memories. I need her to believe that so the network is more focused on me. They underestimate you. Make them regret that.”

  “Where is Patrice going to take you?” Amber asked, but she already knew.

  “Edgehill is the nearest location in the United States with a ley line spillover,” he said. “That’s where she’ll take me. I’ll do whatever I can to buy time until you can get back there.”

  “Get back there to do what?” Amber asked, the same feelings from last night rushing back in. Worry, self-doubt, panic, inadequacy.

  “You need to gather every witch you know. Every witch your family knows. Call in every last one of your favors and get everyone to Edgehill as fast as possible. You’re running low on time. You have to stop them—stop me—from succeeding,” Raphael said. “But remember: you can’t let Edgar know this is a ruse. If you tell him, Neil will know.”

  Amber wanted to scream. She wasn’t cut out for this. She wished more than anything that she could ask Aunt G for help. When she was overwhelmed, she’d complain, whine, and generally be overly dramatic. Aunt G would humor her for a moment, then offer a practical solution. “Did they really have to do this during the tourist season? I get that maximum chaos is their whole thing, but so many innocent people are going to get hurt because they chose to do this on the busiest day of the festival.”

  There was a ripple of confusion in the darkness.

  “What?” Amber asked.

  “This has nothing to do with the festival. They’re using it to their advantage, sure, but Saturday evening marks the fifty-year anniversary of the spell’s creation. That’s why it’s happening now; they see a significance in the number. They have a ritual they plan to conduct on the ley line spillover on Saturday evening. They’ll have Penhallows there specifically for the ritual, and others there for defense. We need all the witch power there we can get.”

  A flare of anger rose up in this not-place at the realization that the WBI had kept this from her, too. It had been Agent Howe who had lied about this one. “We’re guessing they chose this weekend in large part because of the festival—they’re big on creating chaos in a crowd, as I’m sure you know. And that parade will be jam-packed with people.”

  Amber had no idea what she and her ragtag group of family and friends could do against a barrage of Penhallows. This was a plan years in the making and Amber was only now piecing it together with less than two days until her town would be under significant threat. Chief Brown had said that he didn’t know what non-witch cops could do against cursed witches … well, Amber wasn’t sure what she could do either.

  Her thoughts flailed around aimlessly for a while. And then they slammed to a halt. “Do you know who Damien and Devra Penhallow are?” Even if Patrice had been grooming Raphael for years, keeping him abreast of the Penhallows’ grand plan, Amber didn’t know how much information from the outside Patrice was bringing in. Perhaps the lines of communication between Raphael and Patrice were on a need-to-know basis.

  “Patrice mentioned them,” he said. “All I know is that they disappeared recently. Something about them being volatile and that no one was surprised when they bailed on the mission.”

  She desperately wanted to trust him, but she didn’t know
if that was just the pre-teen Amber part of her who missed her uncle. She wanted to trust him for Edgar’s sake. “They didn’t disappear voluntarily. I’m able to tap into the ley lines. I asked the magic there to help me and somehow I transported them to a memory in 1971. Their magic is suppressed there. What if we could get the other Penhallows into that memory? Then I could heal them the way I healed Kieran.”

  The silence was long. “I can’t say it’s any less loopy-sounding than the Penhallow plan.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she muttered.

  “What would you need to pull this off?”

  “The grimoire,” Amber said. “I know the second the cloak drops on the books, even if I get a cloak back on it immediately, Neil could trace the location of the magical signature. So I would need as much magical backup as I could get in case I get ambushed.”

  “Sounds like you have some phone calls to make,” Raphael said. “Can you inform your sister and aunt about this without Edgar finding out? You have roughly twenty-four hours to amass an army and get that book back. If the Penhallows don’t get me and that spell, they’ve got a Plan B. I’m not sure what it is exactly, because Patrice won’t tell me, but what I do know is that it involves funneling large quantities of magic into the modern-day, already broken ley lines. It’ll be like a bomb; Edgehill will be a crater.”

  It sounded like Plan B was the very thing Zelda Rockrose had practically begged Amber not to try: using the ley lines to cast another complicated, widespread spell.

  There was one thing left to discuss before she made her decision. “How do we get your magic back? The one solid idea we had was based on the assumption that your memory was gone,” she said. “At least I know you’re a good actor.”

  “Your presence here stirred my magic,” he said. “It feels a bit like when Patrice started her memory work with me. A faraway tingle in the back of my mind. A gentle pressure, almost. I know something is there, but I can’t get to it. I think I need a nudge in the right direction. This might sound odd since we don’t really have a physical form here—wherever here is—but can you use magic in this space?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, feeling a little self-conscious even though he obviously couldn’t see her. She thought of the simplest spell she knew. “One by one, let’s have some fun. Two by two, let’s turn it blue.”

  The world of black they were in flashed blue, like a TV screen, then faded to black again. They both let out astonished laughs.

  “Man, that brings back memories,” he said. “Those rubber cats were sold in every convenience store in Delin Springs. Nothing special about them at all as far as witch kids were concerned. But you and Willow loved those things. You know, there’s a whole series of rhymes to change those cats all kinds of colors, but your mother enchanted your cats to only turn blue.”

  “Aha!” Amber said. “I knew it. We spent hours trying to get them to change other colors.”

  “Try something else,” Raphael urged.

  Amber tried thought-reveal, memory-retrieval, and truth spells. Nothing worked. Most of Amber’s magic was heightened by touch. She couldn’t touch anything here. She tried confusion, sleep, and wind spells. Nothing.

  “Ugh!” Her frustration mounted. She tried the one-by-one spell again. The fact that it worked only frustrated her more. All she was good for was parlor tricks, simple spells even children could do. And children were probably more skilled! She had only just learned about Magic Cache, for Pete’s sake! “Maybe I need something stronger.”

  Funneling all her annoyance and worry into where she thought her core might be, she cast a blowback spell. When she pretended that magic itself had a physical form, she pictured it like sentient smoke, snaking and curling in the direction she told it to go. The magic erupted from her not-hands and slammed into a wall.

  And shot her straight back. The chair she was in scooted backward and toppled over, tossing her to the wood floor of Raphael’s room.

  “Amber!” someone called out, and in the next second she realized it was Edgar.

  A loud buzz sounded, followed by a door slamming into a wall.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Raphael swing his legs off the bed. Edgar was too focused on her to notice. Raphael made very brief eye contact with her, nodded once, and pursed his lips as he eyed the back of Edgar’s head. Then a wholly terrifying look crossed his face.

  “They told me you were a gullible idiot,” Raphael said. “A silly, untrained witch who is so desperate to believe in the good in people that she gets steamrolled at every opportunity.”

  Edgar was on his feet in an instant, whirling to face his father. “Dad …”

  “I never actually planned to come back that day, you know,” Raphael said. “Neil ruined you just as much as he ruined my sister. I found a way to reverse it. Maybe you would have been there in the new future, maybe you wouldn’t have been. This version of things is pretty screwed up, if you ask me.” He winked at Amber. “Thanks for giving me a chance to try again.”

  Edgar growled and ran for his father. Raphael shot out a hand and Edgar flew backward, slamming into the wall.

  “What the …” one of the newly arrived orderlies said, his wild eyes bouncing from the perfectly lucid Raphael, to Amber on the floor, to Edgar who was struggling back to his feet.

  Amber noted that the orderly, Stanley Johnson, wasn’t among them.

  Raphael turned to the orderlies, his bed between them. “I’m afraid I’m leaving, boys. This place is a peaceful nightmare. Fisher, Hearn … sleep.”

  Both men’s eyes rolled back in their head and their bodies hit the floor.

  Raphael bolted. Edgar scrambled after him. Amber, however, ran to the window. The door to the SUV where Silent had been waiting sat in the same place, but two of the doors stood open. If Amber craned her neck just right, she could make out a black sedan idling on the dirt road, facing the exit. Was that really Patrice?

  “Good work, Amber!” Agent Barker called out, and she spun to find Raphael and Agent Barker squared off. “I’m going to need you to come with me, Raphael.”

  “No thanks,” Raphael said. “I already have a ride.”

  “You’re going to be hunted by Penhallows if you leave here,” Agent Barker said, hands out, placating.

  “For an agent in an organization as prestigious as the WBI, I would think you’d be a little smarter,” Raphael said. “It’s not called hunting if it’s voluntary.” Then he charged toward Agent Barker.

  The agent cast his own spell. In one second, Amber saw Raphael vanish from view, then reappear a moment later directly behind the agent. The wind spell that Agent Barker had intended for Raphael careened into Amber and Edgar, sending a rug, chair, and potted plant into the air, too. The prone bodies of the two orderlies slid a few inches as if they were nothing more than debris, rather than full grown men. It had been more of a small, contained hurricane than a blast of wind.

  Raphael hurled a blowback spell, hitting an unsuspecting Agent Barker, who went sprawling.

  “Much appreciated, Amber,” Raphael said, then flicked his wrist. The door to Room 9 slammed shut.

  It took them all a few seconds to get reoriented and back on their feet. Amber ran after Edgar and Agent Barker. Across the hallway, down the stairs, and out the standing-open, prison-like door. The woman behind the Plexiglas was passed out face down on the counter.

  The trio sprinted outside. The two men ran to either side of the SUV. Amber stopped in the middle of the dirt road and stared down the small incline.

  Agent Barker reached into the driver’s side door. “Wake up, you oaf! How’d you let someone sneak up on you!”

  Edgar paced back and forth behind the SUV, his hands in his hair.

  Amber’s chest heaved as she kept staring down the road as if the black sedan would come back and the two passengers would stick their heads out the window and call out, “Gotcha!”

  Patrice and Raphael were gone.

  Amber hoped she hadn’t just made t
he worse judgment call in the history of the world.

  Chapter 22

  It took nearly twenty minutes for the sleep spell on Silent Agent to wear off. Agent Barker tore him a new one, shouting that he only had one job and he’d literally fallen asleep on it. Amber did what she could to comfort Edgar, but he had retreated into himself. He’d only had his father back for two days and he’d just abandoned him again.

  Amber hoped like heck that Raphael had told her the truth. She’d destroy him otherwise.

  As Silent drove them to the airport, they all made phone calls. Agent Barker called Agent Howe first, then called into what Amber assumed was the WBI headquarters. A sound-cancelling spell went up around him after he stated his ID number, shielding his conversation. She supposed he was also going to file a report against Silent Agent for allowing himself to be compromised.

  Edgar called Aunt Gretchen. What Amber heard of the conversation was short and clipped.

  Amber contacted Simon and Zelda, begging them both to call in reinforcements. Amber knew Simon had many connections to the witch community because of his time in Weldon, a hybrid town his late wife had been a detective in. Zelda’s daughter was in law enforcement, too. It was now a matter of how many witches they could find who would first be willing to combat an untold number of Penhallows, and secondly, could get to Edgehill at such short notice.

  Next, for the sake of privacy, she sent a text to Betty. Hi, Betty. Can you tell my grandparents that the Penhallows are making their move in Edgehill tomorrow night? Do they have any advice on what we should do? We need all the help we can get.

  While she waited for a reply, she sent a group text to Kim and Jack.

  Amber: We’re headed to the airport. Raphael got his powers back and has gone rogue. He’s heading to Edgehill with a Penhallow, and there are others already there. I need you both to get out of town. Convince as many people as possible to go with you.