Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Molly was more intuitive than Amber gave her credit for.

  “No, there was no truth spell. You really hate me so all you needed was a willing audience and you talked freely,” Amber said.

  “They were right about you,” Molly muttered.

  “Who?”

  “The Penhallows,” Connor said, his tone matter of fact. “We know all about the feud between the Penhallows and Blackwoods, okay?” He awkwardly cleared his throat. “Just let Willow go. There has to be some other way than sacrificing her to perform this ritual of yours. She’s your sister, Amber.”

  It took Amber a few seconds for all of that to settle in her mind. Molly had been there when Willow was kidnapped. Molly had seen Sienna Tate—a known alias and glamour of Amber’s—walk away from the Manx Hotel with Willow over her shoulder. Molly just hadn’t seen the full spectrum of the glamours Patrice used tonight.

  “Patrice became your new contact after Kieran went to prison,” Amber said, but it wasn’t a question. “She’s your witch source who gives you information no one else would know. Like my products malfunctioning.”

  “Don’t blame Patrice for any of this,” Molly said. “She predicted Henrietta’s coma, your toys attacking those children on Kids Day, and that you’d sabotage the parade. All of it came true.”

  “Yeah, because she’s the one who made all of that happen!” Amber snapped. “It would be like getting tips about fires set by the arsonist herself.”

  Molly laughed. “You are obsessed with fire, aren’t you? She said you were. And she also said if I was outside the Manx Hotel at 6:15, I would have proof of how out of control you’ve gotten. You’re so hell-bent on ruining this town and hurting everyone in it that you’d even turn on your own family. So where’s Willow?”

  Amber was so frustrated, her eyes watered. “I don’t know. Patrice took her, not me.”

  Hitting the mute button on her phone for a second, she instructed Edgar to take her Edgehill map out of her glove box and to start scrying not for Willow, but for Connor. He found a pencil in the glove box, too. With the map laid out across his knees, he loosely held the pencil by its eraser to act as a pointing device. He closed his eyes, his lips moving quickly as he cast the spell. Amber hoped they’d get a hit quickly, since Connor and Molly couldn’t have gotten far.

  Amber’s mind whirled. It wasn’t running in any particular direction. It just ran and ran without going anywhere—like Thea had been in her wheel.

  A soft tap drew her attention to the map. Edgar’s pencil had landed.

  “Looks like Feral’s Diner,” Edgar said.

  Amber pulled out onto the street. Feral’s was a good fifteen minutes away. She hit the gas. She knew she should be focused on the task at hand—namely coming up with the best way to stop the Penhallows’ ritual—but she was so unbelievably angry in that moment that her vision tunneled out. How could either of them believe she would hurt Willow? It was so insulting, Amber saw red.

  If Aunt G called with the hit on Willow’s location, she would immediately change course. But with everything currently spinning out of control, with no clue where her sister was, or when exactly this ritual would take place or what it entailed, and with her fear of inadequacy screaming in her head, all she could focus on was how much she wanted to get to Connor and Molly if only so she could punch them in their faces for making a stressful day ten times worse.

  “We saw you that day, you know,” Connor said finally, cutting into her wildly scattered thoughts. Amber tapped the mute button on her phone that was now attached to her dashboard. “That day in the abandoned neighborhood when you made those two Penhallows disappear. Patrice told us you’d do something awful to them. We just had to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “Patrice said she needed us nearby so Damien and Devra could more easily create replicas of us,” Molly said. “They were supposed to taunt you to see if you really had forbidden magic. And then you … made them vanish into thin air. Patrice said if we reported back to her about what we saw, she’d give us enough information to take all of this public. The story to set our careers in motion. The world needs to know that there’s a bunch of evil witches in Edgehill who plan to burn their enemies to the ground. No one believed you that your parents were supposedly killed in a fire, so now you’re going to use fire as revenge. Well, we’re not going to let you do it, Amber.”

  What in the heck was she talking about?

  “Patrice is hunting you right this second. You know better than anyone how extensive her scrying skills are,” Connor said. “We can negotiate with Patrice on your behalf. She doesn’t want to hurt you, but you’re leaving her little choice. We have a secret meeting place with Patrice. We’re there now. You can bring Willow to us, no questions asked. If you agree to abandon the ritual and exile yourself, like Patrice has been begging you to do, no one will get hurt. But that can only happen if you give Willow up, Amber.”

  Amber shot an incredulous look at Edgar, who looked even more baffled than she did.

  “Why on earth do you think I would do anything to Willow?” Amber blurted.

  Molly laughed. “Don’t play naïve with us. We know everything. Without Willow as your sacrifice, you won’t be able to steal Willow’s fire magic. Meaning you won’t become the most powerful fire witch the world has ever seen.”

  Good grief. It sounded like the plot of a fantasy novel. Which was probably what Patrice had been going for, knowing it would appeal to someone like Connor.

  “There has to be another way,” Connor said. “Willow deserves better.”

  She had to keep them talking. In their eyes, this was the climax of their fantasy adventure. They’d rooted out the villain—her—and they were doing all they could to save the day. Save the world. “What do you even know about this feud between our families?”

  The story Molly and Connor proceeded to tell Amber and Edgar was nearly identical to the truth. Amber’s mother creating a forbidden spell, the Blackwoods being on the run for years, the Penhallows’ curse, and the Penhallows’ obsession with finding the hidden book with the coveted spell inside. Except there was one key difference: Patrice had convinced Molly and Connor that the bad guys in this story were Amber and her family. They believed Amber was the one who was cursed and that the Blackwoods were hiding the spells from the Penhallows because of the fire spell Amber’s mother had written. A fire spell that was so strong, it caused flames that burned so hot, it melted metal like wax. According to Molly and Connor, the incident that happened on Edgar’s property when Kieran had nearly killed Amber hadn’t been a Penhallow attack, but an experiment with deadly fire magic that had nearly liquefied Amber’s and Edgar’s cars.

  Patrice had convinced the pair that if Amber was to harness this fire magic, she would then be able to use it with such precision that she could burn people from the inside out without hardly lifting a finger.

  No wonder they sounded terrified of her. Kieran had started the ball rolling with these two, but over the course of months, Patrice and other network witches had been slowly revealing “clues” to these reporters, preying on their desire for meaty, unique stories they could sink their teeth into.

  And for what?

  Kieran said he’d been sent to Edgehill a second time to distract her.

  Earlier, Edgar had said, Neil is … laughing now. He’s saying that part of their success is because of how predictable we all are.

  Amber pursed her lips. Predictable.

  Molly was still rambling about Amber’s apparent nefarious plans. Nefarious plans that were supposed to come to fruition during a ritual scheduled for that night, not tomorrow. Amber’s brain slammed to a halt.

  She abruptly pulled over.

  “Connor Declan,” she said, then called on her magic—magic that was thrashing around inside of her, desperate to be released. “Why do you think I kidnapped Willow tonight?” Imagining her magic as that twisting coil of blue smoke, she sent it out. Down the familiar streets and sidewalks
of her beloved town, around corners and down alleys and over fences until it arrived at Feral’s Diner.

  “The ritual has to happen at thirty-seven after midnight, the exact time your mother created the spell,” Connor said.

  “Dang it, Connor!” Molly said. “Where are you, Amber? Are you out here?” A slam of a door echoed through the phone. “Stop being a coward and show yourself!”

  Molly probably thought Amber was lurking in the tall hedges that lined Feral’s Diner’s lot on three sides, casting her devious spells from the shadows. She pictured Molly with her arms out, yelling at the shrubbery. Rolling her eyes, Amber ended the call.

  It was just after seven. They had five hours to find Willow, not a full day. Dang it!

  Predictable, huh? Well, screw that.

  She glanced at Edgar. “Sorry about this.”

  “About wha—”

  “Sleep,” she said, hurling her magic at him with all the force of her emotions behind it.

  He let out a small gasp, doubling over as if he’d just been punched in the gut, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. He slumped in the seat. A soft snore sounded a second later. At least this would let Edgar get a little rest.

  “Did you see that coming, Neil?”

  Jaw set, Amber pulled back onto the road. She’d show these Penhallows predictable.

  Chapter 28

  Amber left her car—with Edgar passed out inside—in the parking lot beside her building. He would be out cold for at least twenty minutes, assuming Neil couldn’t find a way to wake him up through their connection. She layered the car in an alarm spell similar to the one that was constantly on her building. If Edgar tried to get out, or someone tried to get in, she’d at least get a warning.

  As Amber crested the top of her staircase, she found the place was in the same state of mild chaos as it had been when she’d left.

  Kim took one look at her and popped up from the window bench seat. “Where’s Edgar? Is he okay?”

  “I’ll explain in a minute,” Amber said. “First, have you had any luck locating Willow?”

  Aunt G stepped out of the kitchen, Simon close behind. “Not yet,” she said. “Likely that’s because she’s unconscious, cloaked, or both.”

  Amber’s jaw clenched. She imagined Willow lying in the middle of that dirt road in the abandoned neighborhood, unconscious and alone. She was so ticked off, maybe her emotions would be enough to freeze the Penhallows where they stood without her needing a spell.

  “Well, we have a slight problem beyond that,” Amber said. “The ritual is happening tonight, not tomorrow. I’m guessing Willow will be with them at the ley line spillover. The ritual is to take place at 12:37 am. What I don’t know is how many Penhallows there are or when they’re going to begin prepping the ritual. For all we know, it’s already started.” Then she filled them in on the rest, including Edgar’s current location.

  It was silent in the room for a few tense beats of silence, then people were on their feet, asking a flurry of questions. Amber did her best to answer them.

  When there was a slight lull, Amber said, “I don’t know if Willow is part of the ritual, or if taking her is just another distraction. Neil said they’ve been successful so far because I’m predictable. He either said that as a passing comment, or he said it knowing Edgar would repeat it.”

  “Predictable for you,” Jack said, “would be to abandon everything at the drop of a hat to go after Willow right this second.”

  He wasn’t wrong. It was hard to think that anything else mattered when her sister was missing. But was that what the Penhallows wanted? For Amber to go searching for Willow, letting her emotions guide her more than logic? Would it be predictable to take the grimoires with her or leave them behind with the others? Was it predictable to storm the castle alone, or with backup?

  A pair of hands gripped her elbows and she startled, finding her aunt in front of her. “It’s also predictable for you to be overwhelmed by the possibilities and then shut down.”

  “We’re being manipulated,” Amber said, forcing her brain to settle on one thread of thought at a time. “Kieran was sent here as a distraction for me. They got Molly and Connor in my path, they probably got Thea in my path, and they first manipulated Willow and then me into tracking down Uncle Raph. Patrice told Molly when to be at the Manx tonight. She wanted Molly to see Sienna and make the connection to me. It’s all been smoke and mirrors and misdirection to keep me out of their way.”

  “Then let’s go to the ley line spillover right now,” Gary said. “We’ll have the element of surprise on our side, right? Stop them before they have a chance to get the ritual off the ground.”

  Something her uncle had said back at Peaceful Meadows replayed in her head then. “If the Penhallows don’t get me and that spell, they’ve got a Plan B,” he’d said. “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.”

  What if storming the castle and ruining their plans meant they’d trigger plan B and blow Edgehill off the map? Assuming, of course, that she could trust anything her uncle had told her.

  Aunt G’s calm, comforting voice cut through Amber’s thoughts. “What does your gut tell you to do?”

  Amber glanced around the room at all these people—many of them whom she’d never met before today—while she considered that. Her heart told her that they needed to go after Willow. Her gut told her they needed to be smart about it.

  Unfortunately, her most persistent idea didn’t feel smart at all.

  Turning to Zelda, who sat at the dining room table, Amber asked, “How were you able to send me the message on the rock when you had never met me before?”

  “A bit of your essence was still left on the guest book that got returned to me,” Zelda said. “If I have an object belonging to the witch in question or have a picture of the witch, the message usually reaches its destination. What did you have in mind?”

  “Our biggest problem at the moment is that we don’t know the details of what we might be walking into.” For all Amber knew, while the Penhallows readied themselves for the ritual, that Betel guy could be out in front of The Quirky Whisker with a clipboard, taking down notes on who was up here and what they’d been doing, and then reporting that back to the network. The Penhallows had sent out spies and scouts months before this—it was naïve to think they weren’t all still being watched even if the soundproofing on the building kept them from overhearing what was being discussed. But, if he was to be trusted, Amber had a spy of her own. “I want to send a message to Kieran.”

  A wave of murmurs swept through the room.

  “Just being devil’s advocate here,” Scarlett said from across the room, “but how do you know this isn’t part of the whole predictable thing? You strike me as the kind of person who wants to trust people. What if that willingness means we’re walking into a trap?”

  “This might sound cheesy, but I think we need to trust him,” Amber said. “If Kieran’s magic truly is healed and being healed is the only thing that made him see the error of his ways, he’s the answer to the Penhallow problem. It’s in all our best interests to trust him. If the Penhallows are still monsters even after the curse is lifted, we’re all doomed anyway. Not trusting him means we’re giving up on the best solution anyone has come up with in decades. Not trusting him means we might as well just hand the book over and hope we’re all still here when the Penhallows are done.”

  It was silent for a moment and Amber worried these people were going to pack up their grimoires and go.

  “I really want to hate Kieran,” Jack said from his spot on the side of Amber’s bed. Everyone turned to look at him. “I was there the night he tried to kill Amber. I saw him use his magic to nearly choke her to death. The image still haunts me. But I was also there after the curse was lifted. He was like a different person. It’s been hard to wrap my brain around the idea that someone like that could actually get past
what he was, you know? It’s like deciding whether or not someone who committed a crime could ever truly be rehabilitated. Some can’t, but others can.” He locked eyes with Amber then. “If we never give those people a second chance, then they never get an opportunity to make up for their mistakes.”

  She knew he was talking about more than Kieran in that moment and she smiled softly at him.

  “All right,” Scarlett said. “I’m in.”

  “Me too,” said Gary.

  Everyone else chimed in after that. Jack was right: they were all still with her even if her choice was risky. She heaved out a breath of relief.

  “Okay, Amber,” Zelda said. “What I need from you is something of Kieran’s or a photograph.”

  Remembering how she’d shared memories of Edgar with Raphael, she held out a hand to Zelda. “Time for me to show you something,” Amber said.

  Zelda took her hand without question.

  Closing her eyes, Amber called up the memory of the last time she’d seen Kieran—behind the Edge of Glen Pizza Parlor—and slid the virtual photographs into Zelda’s mind.

  When they broke contact and Zelda opened her eyes, she was smiling. “Oh, that’s very cool.” She went to the table to tear off a slip of paper from Amber’s legal pad. “What would you like it to say?”

  “Ask him the time of the ritual,” Amber said. “And exact number of rival witches in town.”

  Zelda scribbled the note on the scrap of paper, folded it up, and then placed the paper in the palm of one hand. She cast her spell, and then swiped a hand over the note. By the time her free hand had fully passed over her open palm, the note was gone. “Magical email,” she said, chuckling.

  “While we wait for an answer, let’s keep working on that channeling spell. I would really prefer not to have my system short-circuit …” Amber said. “And I’ll keep trying to figure out the freeze spell.”

  Amber’s heart still wanted her to spend all her time scrying for Willow, but her gut told her that was what the Penhallows wanted. They wanted her as ill-prepared as possible.