Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “This is really it,” Patrice said in awe. Then she looked past Amber to where Raphael stood. “Are you ready?”

  “I’ve been ready,” he said.

  Patrice took Amber by the shoulders and spun her to face her uncle. “Give him permission to take the book from you. That should break the pesky spell.”

  Teeth gritted, Amber stared at this man she’d once called family. “I grant you permission to use the Henbane grimoire.”

  With a look of joy on his face that rivaled Patrice’s, he took the book from Amber. The moment the familiar weight was gone, her knees nearly gave out. It was as if a vital organ had been violently torn from her body.

  Patrice, Neil, and Raphael huddled together to go over the plan one more time, Amber guessed, but she didn’t care. She dropped to her knees beside Willow and gave her a gentle shake. Willow’s forehead bunched in discomfort, but she didn’t open her eyes. How had Amber managed to screw this up so badly?

  She’d failed everyone who’d believed in her. She’d failed her parents.

  And somehow in that moment, the worst part of it all was that she’d failed magic itself. She agreed with the Penhallows that what had happened to them and the ley lines had been wrong. She agreed that the council had made terrible choices. But what the Penhallows planned to do now was no better. The Penhallows could claim that all they wanted was balance, and for magic to be free, but it was a self-serving desire. Magic shouldn’t have been forced into the situation it had been in before, and it certainly shouldn’t be forced into the one it confronted now.

  With tears running down her face, Amber placed a hand flat on the earth. She swayed from the intensity of the energy below her skin. I’m sorry, she told the magic. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to ask anything more of you either, though. I’m just sorry.

  And just like the first time Amber had been in this abandoned neighborhood and had communicated with the magic in the ley lines, a force of energy slammed into her. The world around her went black and she happily allowed it to swallow her whole.

  Chapter 30

  When Amber came to and found herself standing on the intact front porch of 523 Ocicat Lane, she was convinced she’d died. That, or the time-travel spell had worked and somehow the fire had never claimed her house. Which would mean—

  She quickly let herself into the house, scanning the familiar front room that was just as she remembered it from the last day she’d been here. “Mom? Dad?” Running up the steps, she poked her head in every room. “Willow? Is anyone here?”

  No answer.

  She ran back down the steps, grabbed hold of the knob at the end of the banister and swung herself around the side and toward the kitchen, just liked she’d done hundreds of times as a teenager. She peered into the garage, the downstairs bathroom, the backyard. The house was deserted.

  She turned around and yelped. Her parents stood there in the doorway of the kitchen, wearing twin expressions of confusion. Amber’s breath caught in her throat. “Am I dead?”

  Her mother shook her head. “Something has happened with the book, hasn’t it? Did the Penhallows succeed?”

  “I’m sorry,” Amber said. “I tried—”

  “Hush, pumpkin,” her dad said. “Now, listen to us. We’re here, but we’re also not. Magic is trying to speak to you, and it’s choosing forms that will help you best understand.”

  “Whether intentional or not,” her mom said, “our families have become protectors of magic. We’ve made choices that, while traumatic for our family, have been necessary for magic’s survival. Your grandparents chose to protect magic over allowing Raphael to give into his bitterness. We chose to protect magic over accepting a deal from the WBI, as well as choosing it over staying with you girls.”

  “But I chose Willow over magic,” Amber said.

  “Yes, but it was you against twelve,” her father said. “If you had fought back, do you know what their backup plan was? Using Willow as a conduit for another magic-severing spell. But they planned to sever magic from the Blackwood clan, thereby cursing you, your aunt, and Willow—were she to survive. But magic knows that if they did that, it would destroy it completely. You not only chose to save Willow, you chose the option safest for magic.”

  A moment later, Willow appeared in the kitchen beside her.

  “Oh my God, Will!” Amber yelped and the two collided in a fierce hug. Amber could feel her there—her warmth, her tight embrace—and heard her tinkling, watery laugh. “Are you okay? How are you here?” she asked, holding her sister’s face in her hands.

  But Willow had just seen her parents and had burst into tears. She broke free from Amber to hug her parents, too, but her hands moved through them. They smiled sadly at her. “Are you … ghosts?”

  “No,” her mother said. “We’re no longer of this earth so we don’t have a form anymore. Our essence was absorbed back into the ley lines when we died. We’re part of magic now.”

  Willow moved back beside Amber and looped her arm through hers.

  “What do we do?” Amber asked. “It’s me against them; Willow isn’t conscious.”

  “Your plan is a good one,” her father said. “Accept that even if you feel clueless, you know what you’re doing. You’re a protector of magic, and magic will protect you, too.”

  Amber swallowed. “Okay.” She still felt vaguely nauseated, but seeing her parents—even if they weren’t flesh and blood anymore—bolstered her. “Oh, and Mom? Neil is the worst.”

  Her mother laughed. “He really is. I’m glad you have Jack.”

  Amber flushed.

  “Give Edgar a hug for us, even if he’ll hate it,” her mother added.

  “By the way, John Huntley isn’t the worst choice you could make, peanut,” Theo said to Willow, then winked.

  Amber and Willow were still sharing a wide-eyed look of shock when the cheery, familiar atmosphere of their childhood kitchen melted away. The ground was cold beneath her knees and palms. She was still a little woozy from the magic below her hands, but it wasn’t as debilitating as before. Willow, however, was still unconscious.

  Neil, Patrice, and Raphael still talked behind her. Her friends and family still ringed the invisible dome. Had anyone noticed that she’d traveled … somewhere else? She cast a quick look at Kieran’s collapsed form and sucked in a breath to see his eyes were open. The black lines of the cursed magic were still writhing around under his skin, but that dead-eyed look she associated with the Kieran she’d once met wasn’t there. The real Kieran—the healed one—was still the dominant force, but Amber didn’t know how long that force could fight until he had to succumb.

  Accept that even if you feel clueless, you know what you’re doing.

  Amber quickly cycled through all the spells she’d used over the last few months, and the training she’d done with Edgar. The key things for her—even when she didn’t have a spell in front of her—had always been contact, intent, and channeling emotion. And, when in doubt, she asked magic her questions, letting it guide her when she felt lost about what to do next. It was a cobbled-together technique, but it was the best she’d come up with without formal training.

  Shooting another quick look at Kieran, she whispered, “Is your magic okay? Healed still, I mean.”

  “I think so,” he croaked out.

  That wasn’t reassuring, but she was running out of options. “Do you trust me?”

  He managed a nod.

  “Think of your magic like a physical thing you can put in a shoebox,” she said. “When I grab onto you, hand it to me.”

  He cocked a brow at her, clearly worried that she’d finally cracked under the stress, but nodded again.

  She quickly worked through the words of a noise-cancelling spell in her head, swapping out “noise” for “privacy,” and then worked backward. She didn’t want to create a dome around them; she wanted to knock one down. When she had it worked out, she nodded once at Kieran, reached out a hand to wrap around his forearm, and the
n firmly placed her other hand on the earth. At the same time that the ley line magic ignited under her skin, Kieran shoved his own magic at her. It was like a caffeine rush or a sugar high. Her head buzzed.

  Then she pooled both sets of magic with her own, mentally cast the spell, and then funneled it all down and out. Through her limbs, into her hands, and into the earth. Into the ley lines.

  Shouts rushed in, like a crack in a dam that had first let in a trickle, and then a flood.

  “What in the—” Patrice called out.

  Her exclamation wasn’t cut off intentionally. The sound around Amber had snapped off too. Was the dome of silence back? Had the spell not worked? There was something off about the quiet now, and she scrambled to her feet and whirled around.

  Everything was frozen in place. Simon was in mid-run next to Scarlett several hundred feet away. The Penhallows all had varying expressions of confusion on their faces. Patrice and Neil glared Amber’s way, fingers pointed in her direction.

  And Raphael, with the grimoire still propped up in his hands, stalked toward her. She stumbled back, hands out.

  “Amber, stop,” he said. “I froze time. Hurry, we don’t have long.”

  She stared at him.

  He groaned in a way that was so Edgar, it almost made her relax instantly. But she didn’t move. “I told you before. I needed this to be believable. Now, come here. From what Kieran told me, your time-freeze is instinctively stronger than mine. But I think between the two of us, we can execute your plan.”

  She figured she had no other choice than to believe him, then ran over to look at the spell he had the book opened to. It was a spell like the noise-cancelling and privacy spells—it created a dome, rather than freezing everything in the vicinity. Keeping everything frozen was a strain on the witch who cast the spell. Amber guessed that his teleportation-like skill only allowed him to travel through time in short distances, as it was too much energy output to maintain a spell as complex as this for very long. Raphael already looked like this one was zapping him dry and it had been less than a minute.

  She studied the spell as quickly as she could, memorizing it.

  “When I get back to my spot, time will start up again,” he said. “Funnel everything you’ve got into that spell and I’ll do the same.”

  Amber nodded, still not fully believing Raphael hadn’t betrayed their family.

  “I know changing the past isn’t the answer,” he said, a bit reluctantly. “No matter how unhappy I am with the present, I have to make the best of it.” Then he ran back to his location and she did her best to lie back down where she’d been when the neighborhood had frozen around her.

  The sound flooded back in.

  Amber called on her concern for Willow and Kieran, her hope that Edgar would be able to live a life free of Neil, and her fear for the safety of her town and all her companions here. Then she slapped both hands onto the earth, the magic in the ley lines making her head spin. She squeezed her eyes shut and uttered the words of the spell. She heard Raphael do the same.

  Patrice and Neil called out something, but it was drowned out by a loud rumbling that shook the ground as if a mini bomb had just gone off. Amber glanced over her shoulder just as a thick spray of dirt, grass, and cement chunks erupted into the air.

  Amber heard Simon cheer, “Aha! It worked!”

  Good grief! She’d known that he’d been working on a strength tincture, but she hadn’t realized how effective it would be.

  She tried not to let the sound of battle around her distract her as she called out the words of the spell in almost perfect rhythm with Raphael. Dust rained down on her, and rocks and large chunks of debris slammed into the ground. Shutting her eyes, she focused only on the words of the spell.

  And then the sounds abruptly stopped.

  Amber cracked open an eye to see Willow and Kieran in the same positions they’d been in before, but now covered in a fine layer of dirt. She quickly got to her feet, listing sideways a bit. Her head spun so badly, she had to place her hands on her knees for a moment and take a deep breath. It would do no one any good if she passed out.

  When the feeling passed, she turned and gasped.

  It was like someone had hit the pause button on the action scene of a movie. Simon’s arm was still in the air, his face screwed up mid-battle cry. Amber followed the arc of his throw to a small crater in the ground at the feet of a Penhallow who was in the midst of being blown backward from yet another exploding tincture. Scarlett was airborne, sailing backward from a burst of air thrown at her by Neil.

  Raphael was a few feet away from her, the grimoire on the ground. He’d dropped the book and fallen to one knee. Amber hurried over to help him to his feet.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He nodded and leaned on her heavily as he stood. His skin had paled and sweat beaded at his temple as if he’d suddenly come down with a horrible case of stomach flu. She wanted to tell him to sit, but she knew they didn’t have time for resting.

  “A few of them have thrown killing blows. We need to move people out of the way,” Amber said, then used a wind spell to knock a witch out of the way of Patrice, who had the witch pinned to the ground and had sent a blast of cursed magic straight for her heart. Raphael did the same with a couple of others.

  Once they’d done that, Amber grabbed the grimoire, studied the freeze spell one more time, reversed it and cast it at each of her companions, unfreezing them. By the time she’d released all eight, she was nauseated and lightheaded. She slumped to the ground.

  “Nope,” Scarlett said. She and Gary forced Amber back to her feet. “We’re not done yet.”

  Simon and a woman were crouched near Willow and Kieran. Amber watched as Simon handed a vial to the woman, who then tipped the contents into Kieran’s mouth, while Simon did the same for Willow.

  “Revitalizing tincture,” Simon called over his shoulder at Amber. “I usually put it in my coffee when I need an extra pick-me-up. It might not be enough to wake them, but it’s all I’ve got. She needs a hospital. I’ll text your aunt.”

  The rest of her companions gathered around her, Scarlett and Gary still propping Amber up by looping their arms through hers on either side. Why wouldn’t they just let her sleep? She watched through bleary eyes as the others started to link arms, too. Simon stuffed his phone in his pocket, then joined the circle. They made a ring with the original nine, plus Raphael.

  Scarlett said, “Remember what she said … after the channeling spell, visualize your magic. Picture it like a gift you’re handing to her. A box, a bag, a plastic leftover container—doesn’t matter what. But we’re all giving our magic to her to make her stronger. And she needs it now.”

  Muttered words of agreement floated into Amber’s ears, but it was a soft, faraway sound. Something jolted her and her eyes popped open.

  “Stay with us,” Raphael said.

  “You’re the only one who can do this,” Simon said, “but we’ll help you get there.”

  Amber managed a faint nod.

  A cough sounded behind her and she managed to turn around enough to see Kieran struggling to his feet. “I can help, too.”

  Two links in the circle broke to let Kieran in, then the circle was reformed.

  “All right,” Gary said, “here we go.”

  Amber, as the recipient of the magic, only had one task: stay conscious. A task that grew increasingly difficult. It felt like she’d just run a marathon—through molasses while wearing a weighted sweat suit. She had her doubts about moving this many people into the memory even when she’d felt healthy. If she were successful at this, it would almost assuredly knock her flat. And she might not be able to get back up.

  But as her companions started passing their magic to her, she felt her strength returning. Her aches diminished, her legs were strong enough to hold her up, and her exhausted magic reinflated. Her senses heightened and her mind cleared.

  She could do this.

  She felt invincible.r />
  As her companions all let go, each one drained and now holding each other up, Amber eyed the frozen Penhallows a few feet away. Her eyes skittered over the ones she didn’t know by name, and then flicked back and forth between Patrice and Neil. The woman who had orchestrated all this and had been slowly driving a wedge between Amber and her beloved town. The man who had murdered her parents and had been torturing her cousin.

  Her magic crackled under her skin. She could end both of them right here and now. She didn’t know any killing spells, but with this much energy in her system, with her own magic this eager for a purpose, Amber could be resourceful. And, since the ley lines were ticked off, Amber was sure the magic below her feet would help her, too. The world needed to be rid of people like Patrice and Neil. The kind who preyed on the innocent to get what they wanted.

  A face swam into view, breaking her concentration. It was Kieran.

  “I speak from experience when I say you’re on a dangerous path right now, Amber,” he said. “I can see it on your face. This much power might temporarily solve your problems—but it’ll create even more. And they might be my family, my clan, but they’re monsters right now. They need to be stopped—but in a way that doesn’t destroy you in the process.”

  Devra’s words from a few days ago flooded back in then. “You call us monsters, but what does this make you?”

  Somehow the Penhallows were right this time.

  “Okay,” she said softly, and Kieran nodded and stepped out of her line of vision. “Okay,” she said, louder. “If you see me start to struggle, push more of your magic at me.”

  She turned to check on her still unconscious sister. She hoped Willow would wake up once Patrice was in the memory of 1971. Maybe the poison tincture would lose some of its potency when Patrice was removed from the timeline.

  With that, Amber dropped to her knees beside her mother’s book. The sight of it gave her another jolt of confidence. Placing both hands on the ground, she said, I need your help again. What happened to the Penhallows was a punishment that didn’t fit the crime. I’ll never forgive Neil for taking my parents from me, for what he’s done to Edgar, but it’s also not his fault that the people who came before him cursed his magic. It’s not fair to him or to you. Help me move them the way you helped me move Damien and Devra. I’ll give them all a choice. If they want to be healed as Kieran was, I’ll do it.