Pawsitively Swindled

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  The majority of the house was a navy blue, the accents a softer pastel shade of the same color. The windows ringing the wide base of the tower-like structure were shiny, the curtains inside drawn open to reveal a living room with furniture and a black cat perched on the windowsill, staring out at the street beyond. The cat didn’t seem to notice them. A lemon tree ripe with fruit stood beside the leftmost window.

  Amber turned to say something to Edgar, only to gasp at the sight past her cousin: the whole street had been transformed. Up and down this unnamed road, houses had sprung up. Cars lined the street and were parked in driveways.

  Four laughing children on bikes rode down the road, the sun kept at bay by the towering bigleaf maples creating a canopy above them. A pair of cats trotted along behind the set of four boys. A woman across the street relaxed in the shade of her porch while her hands guided her magic in the task of hanging damp laundry on a clothesline. She was dressed like she’d just stepped off the set of a 70s TV show.

  “Dang, cousin,” Edgar said, whistling as he looked around, too. “I had no idea your memory skills had gotten this strong.”

  The thing was, Amber didn’t think they had gotten this strong. She wondered idly if this use of magic was leaving behind a magic signature. Magical signatures left behind by an abundance of magic use had been how Neil Penhallow had traced Amber’s parents back to Edgehill, after all.

  “And no offense, but how did a spell like this not knock you on your butt?” he asked, interrupting her thoughts. “Have you been practicing in secret?”

  He was joking, she knew, but he sounded as baffled as she felt. How could a simple time spell have caused … all this? Not to mention, there was still something “wrong” with her magic.

  “Do you feel strange here?” she asked him, gawking at the transformed neighborhood they stood in.

  “I guess I feel a little more … drained?” he said, though he didn’t sound terribly concerned. “I haven’t slept in thirty hours, though, so I just figured the caffeine was starting to wear off. But … it’s almost like my magic feels tired, too?”

  “Didn’t you say there are claims that something in Edgehill dampens magic? We’re technically still in Edgehill even if we’re on the outer fringes of it. Feels dampened, doesn’t it?”

  “Huh,” he said. “That’s a good word for it. But if magic is dampened, how did you do this?”

  She didn’t have an answer for that.

  After a few more awestruck moments, she remembered why they’d come here in the first place. “Do you know where this supposed dead zone is?”

  “Man! That’s a Volkswagen Beetle. But, you know, from the actual 1970s. Because we’re in the 70s, right?” he asked, tracking a shiny blue car going by that was both there and not there. Then he shook his head slightly, as if he needed to remind himself of their original task, too. He turned to her. “So in order to find the dead zone, we need a locator spell to find a spot where there’s no magic.”

  “We need magic to find the lack of magic?” she asked, feeling less hopeful about this idea by the second. “How do we do that?”

  Edgar winced. “That’s the thing … I’m not totally sure. If someone found the cache already, there could be any number of spells layered on top of the location. And I’m guessing that’s the case since there are endless rumors that it’s here, yet no one has found it. So we have to dismantle the layered spells and then find the dead zone. Kind of like an invisible riddle. It’s what makes caching dead zones so fun.”

  “We have very different definitions of fun.”

  He chuckled. “There’s a lot of debate on which spells work best for something like this. There’s even a lot of debate on what these spots are. Some claim they’re little windows into other dimensions—people have accidentally walked into one and vanished forever. Some think it’s a location where a spell was used that was too powerful and sucked the ambient magic out of the area, creating a void. That would explain the varying sizes of the zones—the bigger the anomaly, the more powerful the spell had been.”

  Amber was still uneasy about all of this, but she was determined to see it through. “Well, we’ve got about five hours before you have to take me back to the shop,” she said. “Let’s see what we can come up with.”

  The spell on the neighborhood faded after twenty minutes or so. She’d known something was happening by the way her magic reacted—she felt the same thing when she’d put her hand on the porch’s pole, but in reverse. Her palms warmed and magic seemed to flow back into her. Amber had never experienced anything like it, but then again, this place was very strange.

  When her magic started to recede back into her like a tide away from the shore, she’d been sitting in the passenger seat of Edgar’s truck, the door open, and had watched as the life slowly drained out of the place. Like Amber was a straw sucking all the color back out.

  “Well, that was weird,” Edgar commented from beside her, his attention focused out the other open door.

  Then they’d gotten back to work.

  For the next several hours, Amber and Edgar scribbled down spells. Balled-up scraps of paper from Edgar’s notepad littered the floor and dashboard. Amber wrote and rewrote spells in her personal grimoire. When a spell didn’t work, she magically erased it and tried again.

  Her maps of both Edgehill and Marbleglen were spread out in the bed of his truck, the corners of the maps held down by rocks and broken chunks of concrete. When one of them had a spell they thought might work, they’d stand at the tailgate while one of them uttered the spell, then waited. There had been a lot of waiting. Amber felt no closer to finding this supposed dead zone now than she had when they started.

  Currently, the right-hand corner of the Edgehill map and part of a rock paperweight were scorched from a particularly angrily worded spell Edgar had just tried, fueled more by frustration than anything else. Three hours was a long time to be unsuccessful at something, especially on no sleep and a nearly empty stomach.

  Amber had put out the small flame in record time, then made Edgar walk it off. He was still gone, though she could see him off in the distance, hands in his pockets as he listlessly kicked at a rock.

  Her grump of a cousin was doing this for her, despite the rough go of it he’d been having lately. Edgar pulled a hand from his pocket then and waved it around in the air. It looked like he was in a heated argument with a shrub, but she guessed he was shouting at Neil.

  Amber really needed to help Edgar evict the “roommate” in his head.

  But first, she needed to figure out a safe place to hide the grimoires so Neil—or any of his equally unhinged relatives—couldn’t steal them. She shifted her attention from her irate cousin to the open spell book in her lap and the scribbled half-formed spells written there.

  She couldn’t help but think that their “try every spell you can think of and hope something sticks” approach had a lot to do with their current rate of failure. To be fair, though, there was no way to know what the nature of this particular dead zone was—assuming it existed at all. It could be naturally occurring or created by a witch’s hand, maybe both. It also, as Edgar theorized, could have been altered by the last witch who’d found it.

  Amber leaned into the passenger seat, resting her temple on the headrest, and stared at the sagging house with the tower-like front room. Her mind kept drifting back to the memory spell revealing the decades-old neighborhood. Everything about that experience had been odd. Not only had magic never flowed back into her like that before, but the amount of magic needed to conduct a spell of that magnitude should have drained her. Every “advanced” spell she’d done with Edgar recently had zapped her of so much energy it left her woozy. Yet here she’d transformed the entire neighborhood so successfully even Edgar had seen it. How? Why didn’t she feel even the slightest bit winded?

  She suddenly sat up straight.

  It hadn’t been her magic that had woken up the memory of the neighborhood. It had been the house’s
magic. It had … what? … borrowed Amber’s magic to strengthen its own?

  But even that didn’t totally make sense.

  She cycled through the things Edgar and Simon had told her. What had Simon said? I was scared to hit one of those supposed magic veins and blow myself to smithereens.

  “Magic veins,” she muttered to herself.

  The image of the color draining out of the neighborhood and receding back to her replayed in her head.

  She had been wrong again. It hadn’t been the house’s magic. It had been the land it sat on.

  Dropping her grimoire on her seat, she hurriedly climbed out of the car. She approached the house in front of her, but instead of touching any part of the structure, she knelt on the cracked cement of the driveway and placed her hands flat on the surface.

  She listed to the side, as if suddenly exhausted, her head cloudy. Her magic felt even more sluggish now. A dammed-up river.

  Pulling her hands away from the ground, the feeling vanished. What in the world happened to this place? Blowing out a breath, she placed her hands on the ground again, fighting the nausea that churned in her stomach. Her magic resisted even as she tried to focus on it. If she hadn’t known better, she would have said that her magic was telling her not to do this. That whatever was wrong with the land here was so wrong, she shouldn’t mess with it—shouldn’t kick the hornet’s nest.

  But Amber was both too stubborn and too determined not to kick it just a little.

  Show me what was here fifty years ago.

  Unlike the time she’d done this with the porch railing, the magic surged directly out of the ground and into her hands with a force that lifted her off her feet and sent her backwards. She yelped as her hip landed on a large piece of broken concrete, her head narrowly missing the open truck door.

  She hardly felt the pain of the impact because the neighborhood from then was back. A night and day difference rather than the slow bleed it had been before. In the distance, she heard Edgar cry out followed by the pounding of footfalls.

  “Amber!” His face appeared in her vision what seemed like a moment later, his hands on her shoulders. “Are you okay? What the heck just happened?”

  “There’s a magic vein here,” she said, her mind racing. “That part of the rumors is true. There’s so much magic under the ground here. What happened? Why is it here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, holding out a hand to help her up.

  Amber winced as she put weight on her right side. The pain might have been from the throbbing in her hip or from her twisted ankle. “Something happened here fifty years ago, right? That’s what your forums said?”

  “Amber, we should go,” he said. “I’m sorry I even suggested this. You’re all banged up now. Your pants are ripped, you’re covered in dirt, and there’s a cut on your forehead.”

  She ignored all that, waving him away with a hand—the heel of which ached—and then hobbled toward the tailgate. Crossing her arms, she stared at the maps laid out. “I keep thinking that myths have to start somewhere. Simon mentioned something happening in Edgehill several decades ago that turned this place from a witch town to a town filled with just their cat familiars. There are reports about magic veins and ricocheting magic and dead zones. It’s based in reality. So this hard-to-find dead zone is here, too. I’m sure of it.”

  Edgar had his forearms rested on the lip of the truck bed and was eying her warily.

  “Hear me out,” she said, “but what if we’re looking for it in the wrong time?”

  “Did you bump your head?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Let’s just assume there’s a cache in the dead zone, which could be another reason why the spot has been so hard to find. But even more than that … what if the cache is hidden in the same time it was hidden? It’s possible that was the intention of the witch who hid it. Maybe the layer of spells he or she put on the cache are time spells the next cacher had to dismantle. But, depending on what happened here, maybe The Event messed up the cache’s magic and now no one can find it because it’s stuck in a memory.

  “Each time I tell the neighborhood to show me what it used to look like fifty years ago, it could choose any memory during that time, but it seems to go back to the same day. That woman is still hanging up her laundry. Those four kids are down at the end of the street now.”

  Edgar gazed down the road at the kids, then frowned at the maps. “So we need to do a locator spell while the neighborhood is like this?” He gestured to the colorful, full-of-life memory around them.

  “Maybe?” Amber blew out a breath and looked over at the house with the tower-like front room. “This is going to sound bonkers, but I feel like that house is trying to help. Something about it called to me when we got here, and it gave me my magic back after the first spell faded.”

  Edgar looked beyond worried now.

  “We have about fifteen minutes before it fades,” she said before he could protest. “Get all those spells you already tried and let’s try them again.”

  Edgar groaned.

  “I’ll buy you Catty Cakes every day for a week.”

  “Fine.”

  They each took a stack of Edgar’s previously balled-up spells and took turns reading them. Luckily, Edgar was far better at locator spells than she was, so all his attempts were likely far better options than hers.

  They had just reached the eighth one—with ten more to go—when the color suddenly leeched out of the neighborhood with no warning other than her magic stilling in her veins a mere moment before the magic slammed back into her like a released rubber band. She hit the ground, her legs taken out from underneath her.

  Edgar yelped and hurried to her side.

  Amber lay flat on her back, her body aching, and a rock digging into her shoulder blade. When the air had returned to her lungs and the sharp pain had dulled, a laugh bubbled out of her. And then she couldn’t stop.

  “Oh boy,” Edgar said, grabbing her by the elbow to help her back on her feet. Once she’d calmed down, he asked, “Did you hit your head that time?”

  “I was just thinking that I have to do the reveal spell again,” she said, still laughing softly. “I imagined you standing in the middle of the street and catching me like a fly ball when the magic vein tosses me in the air.”

  “You’re freaking me out.”

  She pushed away from him, her ankle throbbing something terrible now, and scanned the area around her until she found a thick tree root that had partially pushed through the ground, leaving a small gap between it and the earth below, like a handle. Kneeling before it, she grabbed hold of the root as best she could, placed her free hand on the earth, and before Edgar could ask her if this was a good decision, she urged her magic to the surface again.

  This time when she was blown backward, it was with slightly less intensity than the first time, though her arm was nearly ripped from the socket. She tumbled backward, crashing into an awaiting Edgar.

  With a silent thanks, she hobbled back toward the tailgate where they worked through the rest of Edgar’s attempted spells. While Edgar was reciting one of his, and Amber was silently reading the topmost one on her stack to herself, something about his spell clicked. It was on the right track, but the wording was off. She hop-walked to the truck and grabbed a pen out of her purse, scratching out and rewriting Edgar’s spell.

  Within a minute, the words on the page glowed a faint gold before settling back to black. It was the first time that had happened with any of the spells so far.

  “Aha! I got it!” Amber said, moving toward the tailgate with as much speed as her wonky ankle would allow. “You had this spell revealing what’s been hidden,” she said, eyes focused on the spell, “but I think we need—”

  “Just recite it; I don’t need an analysis,” he said quickly. “We don’t know when the spell is going to shut off again. One more zap from the magic vein and I’m going to have to drive you to the hospital.”

  Nodding, she willed her magic to ha
ng on for just a little longer—it was as wrung out as she was—and she recited the spell. She was nearly done with it when her magic stilled. She read faster, the final word leaving her lips just as she was knocked off her feet again by the magic colliding back into her body.

  Things went fuzzy. Then black. Then fuzzy again.

  Edgar’s bunched-up bushy eyebrows swam into her vision, then the rest of his face solidified. It took her a moment to register that he didn’t look nearly as worried this time.

  Grinning, he said, “It worked.”

  Chapter 12

  When Amber’s ears finally stopped ringing, and she could stand without Edgar propping her up, she walked to the tailgate of his truck with him and peered at the maps laid out there. There, on the south end of Edgehill, was a black dot.

  “It worked,” she said softly, unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice. She turned toward him as best she could. “Whose magic skills are tragic now?”

  Edgar laughed. “Are you sure you’re up for this? You’re a mess! How are you going to work the shop after this?”

  “Are you volunteering to help me so I can put my feet up?”

  “You couldn’t pay me enough to agree to dealing with people all day,” he said. “Not even in Catty Cakes.”

  Smiling, she said, “I’m absolutely sure I’m up for this. Those Magic Cachers are going to poop their pants when they find out a novice found it before they did.”

  “The word is noob, noob.”

  “Be nice,” she said, but she was already pulling the Edgehill map toward her.

  Edgar looked at it over her shoulder. “All right, so it looks like we need to go up to the end of the street, make a right, and then … straight into all the overgrown brush I saw earlier.”

  “Great,” Amber muttered.

  They collected the maps, climbed back into the truck, and continued down the road. There still weren’t many structures left, even this far into the neighborhood. Yet, in Amber’s mind’s eye, she could still see what this place had been once. She wondered if she’d ever learn what had actually happened here.