Of Witches and Wind

by Shelby Bach

  I could tell by the way Mom smiled—very politely, like someone kind of crazy had just asked for her autograph—that she didn’t like the idea. But I said I would think about it.

  Then Mom and Amy ushered me inside, and a weird period of pseudo grounding began. They couldn’t pin me for leaving L.A. without permission, at least not completely, so I got a brief lecture on how I really needed to call when I promised I was going to call. I got only one week of no TV or Internet, plus an extra-early bedtime for two weeks.

  But they didn’t give me any privacy. They even made me leave my bedroom door open all night, like they expected me to run away again as soon as I was out of sight. That first evening, I was just so tired I fell into bed and slept for the next fourteen hours straight. But it got old really fast over the weekend. And Mom kept staring at me—half-wary, half-concerned. I tried not to let it bother me. I’d probably looked at Chase like that when I’d found out I didn’t know him as well as I’d thought I had.

  Then, on Monday, Mom and Amy both took me to school. Usually, it was just one or the other. That was the first sign of the new routine. The car was silent and tense, and I spent the whole drive frantically trying to remember if I’d had any homework.

  Amy parked in front a good half hour before homeroom. The school was basically deserted. “Okay, kiddo. We’ll pick you back up at three thirty. Right here.”

  “Three thirty?” I repeated blankly, bookbag in hand. They normally picked me up closer to dinnertime.

  “We worked out a special schedule for the rest of the shoot,” Mom said, extra brightly, turning around in her seat to look at me. “I get done at three, every day. Just in case you need to talk.”

  Oh. Mom thought I was rebelling against her busy work schedule.

  Nobody mentioned EAS, but I saw the trick. If they were picking me up as soon as the bell rang, then there was no need for me to go to a special after-school program. It wasn’t a punishment if Mom just wanted us to spend a little more time together.

  It was going to be even harder to get back to EAS than I’d thought.

  “Okay,” I said hesitantly. Arguing at this stage wouldn’t help.

  “Good,” Amy said with a tight smile.

  “Have a great day at school, sweetie,” Mom said.

  We were all being so polite. That was worse than the new no-privacy rule.

  But Rapunzel was proud of me, and Lena’s gran was grateful.

  I climbed out and wandered through the empty halls. The vice principal did a double take when he saw me, like he couldn’t believe any kid would show up so early the first day after spring break. Even Mrs. Lapin wasn’t in homeroom yet, but I sat down anyway, suddenly very lonely.

  So instead of checking on that homework situation, I took out my M3. “Hello? Anybody out there?”

  Lena’s face popped up, a spoon halfway to her mouth. “Rory! Getting poisoned must make you really hungry. This is my third bowl of cereal. How did it go with your parents?”

  “Weird, but okay.” It was nice to speak with someone who wasn’t mad at me.

  Then Chase’s image cut Lena out. I hadn’t expected him to be waiting beside his magic mirror. “But you can’t come back for a while, right?

  “I think I’ll have to spend at least a month convincing them.” Actually, maybe two.

  “A month?” Chase repeated, annoyed. “Do you know how much training you can lose in a month?”

  “Rory,” Lena said, serious now, “did Iron Hans really say that I’m like the Director?”

  “Chase, you told her?” I thought I would have to bribe him just to bring it up.

  “Because I’m not so sure that it’s a compliment,” Lena went on, worried. “I mean, I don’t have to follow rules all the time. Right?”

  Chase, very wisely, didn’t say anything.

  “Well, if you’re exactly like the Director, that makes me exactly like Solange.” You would have become me, if you had lived, the Snow Queen had said. I shuddered.

  “I plan to be about a million times cooler than that dumb Sebastian guy,” Chase said. “Nobody’s going to turn me into stone.”

  “If we’re really a triumvirate,” Lena said, as if she were extremely doubtful on this point, “then we’re actually the third one. Madame Benne, Maerwynne, and that Dapplegrim guy were the first.”

  “That Dapplegrim guy?” Chase repeated. “His name was Rikard Longsword.”

  That cheered me up. Maerwynne seemed okay.

  “Rapunzel told me to tell you hi, by the way. Thursday, after you left,” Lena told me. “That’s how I knew I needed to keep the M3 next to me.”

  “She told me I needed to tell you what Iron Hans said while you were sleeping,” Chase said. “Here it is: ‘Stop making so much noise, or you’ll wake her.’ ”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure it was more important than that.”

  “He said something like . . .” Chase frowned so hard it looked like it hurt. “ ‘When the battle comes, you three must all play your parts, and when the war runs its course, the world will be forever changed.’ ”

  Lena made a face. “Change isn’t necessarily bad.”

  Chase snorted. “Tell that to the Director.”

  I noticed I was twisting the West Wind’s ring nervously around my finger, and stopped. “I would settle for just not smashing things accidentally.”

  “Training,” Chase said. “That’s what you need.”

  “No, she needs a glove that helps her control the magic.” You could practically see all the invention wheels turning in Lena’s brain.

  I laughed. “Or maybe I just need to get used to having this on my hand.”

  Voices rang out in the hall. I really hoped it was Mrs. Lapin, but they sounded too young.

  “Someone’s coming,” I whispered reluctantly.

  “Oh, okay! Bye!” Lena started chanting the off spell.

  “See you later!” said Chase.

  I snapped the M3 covering closed just two seconds before Madison, Katie, Arianna, and Taylor filed in. Each one carried a glossy magazine, and I knew that my picture was in at least one of them. I wondered if it was at the airport or the studios.

  I waited to feel slightly nauseated with dread, but I didn’t. I just felt . . . resigned. I was ready to get this over with.

  They flipped pages at their desks right across from me, just like they always did, and the room filled with the sound of crackling paper.

  “You’ll never guess what happened to me over break,” Madison said.

  “What?” said Arianna.

  “I went to this casting call on Tuesday, and this one girl—the director’s daughter—was expected to land the role.” Madison shook her perfect hair back. “But when she showed up . . .”

  “Bad haircut?” Katie asked.

  “Bad teeth?” Taylor asked.

  “Bad breath?” Arianna asked.

  I looked at her—really looked at Madison—for the first time in a long time. She had a zit on the side of her nose, and concealing makeup caked on around it. She was no Snow Queen. She was just a kid, just like me.

  “All these, and more,” said Madison. “She showed up dripping wet—”

  No, I didn’t just want to get this over with. I wanted to put an end to this whole thing before Mrs. Lapin showed up.

  “I don’t know what’s bothering you, Madison,” I said lightly. “All I did was make you look good. You should be thanking me.”

  Madison’s superior smile faded a little bit. I wasn’t following her script, and it obviously threw her off. “And your dad . . . I mean, her dad, this director—”

  “My dad and I had a long talk after that,” I said sharply, “and it’s none of your business. You should stop wasting your allowance on those magazines.”

  The KATs glanced from me to Madison uncertainly, not sure what they were supposed to do now. Madison’s mouth hung slightly open.

  Definitely not the stuff of nightmares and goblin-induced visions.
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br />   “Did you get the part?” I asked, a little bit curious.

  Madison looked hurt, just for an instant. She hadn’t been called back, and she had wanted it.

  She clearly had her own doubts to conquer.

  Mrs. Lapin clunked in, her clogs hitting the linoleum with big thumps. She smiled at us, but she had a much larger mug of coffee in her hand than usual. “Hello, ladies! How were your breaks?”

  “Busy,” I said, because the others didn’t speak up. “And kind of stressful. But I found out that I’m getting a new stepmother.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Lapin with blank brightness. Mom gave me that look sometimes, on Sunday mornings, when I overloaded her too much on her day off.

  Someone knocked on the classroom door, and Mrs. Lapin hurried to open it.

  Across from me, the other girls didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. One of the KATs started folding the pages of her magazine to make a fan.

  “New student,” said a grown-up outside.

  “There must be some kind of mistake,” said Mrs. Lapin. “You can’t be assigned here. I’m only supposed to have girls.”

  “It’s the long eyelashes. They make me look like a girl,” said a familiar voice, and I whirled around. Chase popped his head in and waved. I was too surprised to wave back. “Hey.”

  I had no idea what he was doing here, but I definitely wasn’t complaining.

  Madison perked up, like she did when the captain of the eighth-grade soccer team walked by. “Hi.”

  “I was talking to Rory, actually.” Giving Madison and the KATs a weird look, Chase slipped past a dumbfounded Mrs. Lapin and fell into the desk beside me. He must have come through the ruby door across the street. “Hey. It’s later, just so you know.”

  “What?” I said, still stunned.

  “I said, ‘See you later,’ like two minutes ago. It’s ‘later.’ ” Chase had obviously been planning that for a while. Ben’s corniness had rubbed off on him.

  “I’ll just . . . go visit the office to sort this out.” Mrs. Lapin left the room, giant coffee mug in hand.

  I leaned forward so the others couldn’t eavesdrop. “What are you doing here?”

  “I always wanted to try out regular school.” I knew that by “regular,” Chase really meant “human.” “Lena’s trying to come too. But her grandmother thinks switching schools will be disruptive for her education, and Melodie keeps telling her that even though she can make the temporary transports, it’s a waste of perfectly good dragon scales.”

  For me. That was why they were doing this. They didn’t want me to feel alone. Even if I lived to be as old as Iron Hans, I would never find friends better than Chase and Lena.

  “So?” Chase stretched out his legs under the desk and crossed his ankles. “Good surprise or bad surprise?”

  “Good surprise. Definitely good,” I said, so happily that Chase grinned back. Life at school was about to get a lot more awesome.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ’m not going to lie: writing this book was epic, and it absolutely wouldn’t have been finished if I didn’t have certain people in my life. Special thanks goes to:

  Joanna Volpe, my wonderful agent, and Danielle Barthel, her savvy assistant, who both read the very earliest drafts more than once and gave me great feedback (which is no mean feat, considering that back then, this manuscript was about a hundred pages longer than it is now). Just so everybody knows, the people of New Leaf Literary are, in general, totally awesome.

  Courtney Bongiolatti, my first editor, who suggested a big plot shuffle, which was as brilliant as it was terrifying. Julia Maguire, my new editor, who took over seamlessly and dove straight into a big, complicated manuscript without even missing a beat. I couldn’t have asked for a smoother transition! Karen Sherman, my copy editor, who saved me from publishing many embarrassing mistakes, including misspelling the name of Rory’s new stepmother about fifty times. Chloë Foglia and Cory Loftis, who wowed me with the cover a second time. And everyone else at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, you guys have my undying gratitude for working so hard to share The Ever Afters with the world.

  Angela, my dear—I’m sorry for BBMing you a thousand complaints about various deadlines. I know you were busy planning your wedding. Thank you for always encouraging me to take a break and calm down. Mom and Dad—thank you so much for hanging in there with me. This book was fueled by a million hugs, and most of them came from you two. To the extended Trenkelbach and Randol clans, I’m sure that a big portion of my sales comes from you guys—either from your own purchases or through your word of mouth. You guys are the best, and I feel incredibly lucky to have such a supportive family.

  Last but not least, Of Witches and Wind is all about how surviving middle school is so much easier when you have great, caring, loyal friends. Angela, Dana, Ems, Kaitlyn, Katie, Martha, and Will—I hope y’all know I’m talking about you.

  Shelby Bach grew up reading every book she could find and writing stories in battered notebooks. She also rarely came home with a clean shirt and had lots of accidents that ended with a hunt for Band-Aids. Nowadays she writes on her laptop rather than in a notebook, but not much else has changed. Of Giants and Ice, the first book in The Ever Afters series, was her first novel. She grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

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  New York

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  ALSO BY SHELBY BACH

  The Ever Afters: Of Giants and Ice

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Shelby Randol Trenkelbach

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Book design by Chloë Foglia

  Jacket design by Chloë Foglia

  Jacket illustration © 2013 by Cory Loftis

  The text for this book is set in Usherwood.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bach, Shelby.

  Of witches and wind / Shelby Bach.—First edition.

  pages cm.—(The Ever Afters ; [2])

  Summary: Rory Landon continues to attend Ever After School and participates in another Fairy Tale.

  ISBN 978-1-4424-3149-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-3151-5 (eBook)

  [1. Characters in literature—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Fairy tales—Fiction. 4. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B1319Oi 2013

  [Fic]—dc23

  2012026025