A Mixture of Mischief

by Anna Meriano

  Leo knew exactly where she wanted to start. “I’m going to spy on Belinda O’Rourke, the lady who’s opening Honeybees and trying to put us out of business. I have a hunch she’s working with Abuelo, but I need proof if Mamá is going to believe me.”

  “Why do you think Abuelo is trying to sabotage the bakery?” Isabel asked. “I know he’s been a terrible dad and grandfather, but he’s never tried to hurt any of us. Why now?”

  “Because now he knows there’s a powerful Logroño he can train,” came a voice. “And he’ll do anything to get his hands on her.”

  Isabel jumped away from the door as it cracked open, and Caroline jumped when JP’s face appeared in the crack. Leo was too stunned by his words to move at all.

  “Shh!” she hissed. “Get in here!” She ran to the door to pull JP inside and found Brent standing behind him wringing his hands.

  “It’s my fault,” he admitted. “I mentioned your grandpa, and it turns out JP actually knows he’s a brujo, and so he sort of put the pieces together himself. It turns out he didn’t need to be kept in the dark at all, and he might be able to help. So . . . you’re welcome?”

  “Just come inside.” Leo sighed, too confused to be all that annoyed. She had never told Brent the details about Abuelo’s magic training, so how could he blab a secret he didn’t know himself?

  The office was getting crowded now, and Leo worried that Mamá or Daddy would come to investigate at any moment.

  “How do you know that Abuelo Logroño wants to train me?” she asked JP.

  “He wants to train you?” Isabel asked. “In what?”

  “Turning invisible,” Leo said. “And I guess some other stuff, like fighting evil magical creatures or something?”

  “Yup, he tried the same thing on me,” JP answered. “He was all ‘You’re very special, Juan Pablo Logroño. . . .’ Nobody even calls me that unless I’m in trouble.”

  “And he wants me to be a saltasombras, like him,” Leo added.

  “A salta what?” Brent asked. Standing in the middle of the office, his head bounced left and right to follow the different speakers like a video-game character glitching. “Do you have salt magic now too?”

  “It means a shadow jumper,” Caroline explained, pulling Brent to the corner. “She can disappear. But she can’t control it yet.”

  “You’re a saltasombras?” Leo asked JP. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m not.” JP shook his head. “Abuelo tested me; I guess I didn’t have enough magic. He was really upset because I made it through the first spell—a memory spell, something that makes people forget things. Which is further than anyone else had gotten, I guess. But then he said a whole bunch of weird things about me getting my Logroño name from my mom instead of having my dad’s name. . . .” JP inspected the zipper of his fanny pack. “It was really rude, actually. It didn’t make me feel very good.”

  “He’s like that,” Leo said, patting her cousin on the arm. “That’s why he’s a bad guy.”

  “I still wish you had told us.” Isabel tapped her finger against her lip and squinted. “When did this happen?”

  “A little over a year ago,” JP said. “He said he didn’t bother with me before because I was just raised by my mom? I guess he’s getting desperate for someone to train.”

  “What’s wrong with having a single mom?” Brent growled from the corner.

  Isabel nodded. “That explains why he decided it was worth it to face us. I wonder if that means he’s been revealing himself to all the cousins. We always assumed it was just us because of our mom’s magic.”

  “Right, so about that.” JP held up a finger. “Are you saying you have a whole different set of magical powers? Why didn’t Alma and Belén tell me? Why didn’t any of you?”

  “Well, we kind of did,” Leo said. “At your mom’s party.”

  “The baking?” JP said. “I thought that was a joke!”

  “So he was focusing on Leo’s family,” Caroline said. “But then your mom warded him away, right? I’m guessing he gave up until he was sure he had no other options.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” Brent asked Caroline. “How does everyone know so much about this?”

  “You’re right,” Leo said, ignoring Brent. “I’ve talked with Abuelo Logroño. I know what he wants and what he’s doing. Our protective spells are supposed to stop thieves from entering the bakery—which means he must have had help to steal the mixing bowl. We need to find his accomplice. I think it’s Belinda O’Rourke, but whether it’s her or someone else, Mamá won’t believe me. Unless I find proof.” She looked around the small room. “If we don’t stop him, he’s going to take Amor y Azúcar down. So does that catch everyone up? Can we get started?”

  “We haven’t solved the problem of your power yet,” Isabel reminded her. “We can’t put aconite in an herb pouch for you. If only there was another herb with the same properties, one that you could consume without getting sick. . . .”

  Leo opened her mouth to ask about different ways to look at the problem, but Isabel’s phrasing sparked something for her. Another herb with the same properties.

  “Spice magic!” she cried. “Isabel, we can do that with spice magic!”

  “Shh!” Caroline glanced at the door, and they all held their breath for a moment. When they heard no footsteps, Isabel turned back to Leo, finger tapping her lips.”Leo, that’s perfect! I should have thought of it. It’s been so long since I studied spice magic—it’s an obscure branch of magic, since most spell casters don’t create magic that’s meant to be eaten.”

  Leo beamed. “So we can make that herb pouch to help me stay invisible. In the meantime”—she turned to JP, Brent, and Caroline—“would y’all be willing to do some reconnaissance work?”

  “Anything to save my adopted bruja family,” Caroline whispered with a smile.

  “If it means getting some revenge on the world’s worst grandpa, I’m down,” JP said.

  “I have no idea what’s going on.” Brent shrugged. “But you can always count on me. As long as I have clear instructions, and competent partners to help me out, and something to make sure I don’t get hungry while we’re on the job.”

  Leo laughed. “Actually, I think you’ll be good at the observation part of this. Isn’t that the first part of the scientific method?”

  Brent perked up a little bit at that. “Can I use my scientific journal to take notes?” He pulled a palm-sized notebook out of his back pocket.

  Leo beamed. “I was hoping you would.”

  CHAPTER 14

  SPICE MAGIC

  Brent, Caroline, and JP practiced their spy skills by exiting the bakery without anyone noticing—sneaking past Mamá while she was putting two giant cake pans in the oven for a lamb-shaped Easter cake, and waiting until Daddy was distracted by a customer to make a run for the front door. Leo had given them instructions for staking out the site of the future Honeybees Café and researching the O’Rourke family. Caroline was on magical component watch, keeping an eye out for candles, herbs, or symbols that would hint at brujería at work in the half-remodeled building. JP was in charge of searching for the mixing bowl, and any sign of Abuelo Logroño. Brent was in charge of note-taking.

  The second part of the mission was to find out a way for Leo to spy on Belinda O’Rourke. That part might even be more important; Leo wasn’t sure if the dark, dusty Honeybees building would hold many useful clues. But she didn’t want to leave it unexamined. Besides, sending her friends ahead meant they could get the plan started while Leo cooked up a special spice-magic herb pouch with Isabel. Then she would be ready to act on their information.

  “Mamá, are you good for another minute?” Isabel asked. “Leo wanted to practice spice magic, so I thought I could show her a few things.”

  Mamá looked up from dropping food coloring into dough for the top of Easter-egg-colored conchas. “What a good thing to practice! I’m so proud of you, Leo. Yes, I’ll be fine here for a while
. Go ahead.”

  Leo felt a twinge of guilt. Mamá thought that practicing spice magic would keep Leo out of Abuelo Logroño–flavored trouble, when really it was the opposite.

  Marisol grumbled about doing all the work in the bakery, but when Leo tried to whisper in her older sister’s ear to let her know about the plan, she held up a hand.

  “I saw you hiding with all your friends, cucaracha. I know you’re up to something. But I’m perfectly happy to keep the bakery running while you and Isabel mess with whatever magical mischief you’ve got cooking.”

  “I was going to tell you,” Leo promised, afraid that Marisol might feel left out in spite of what she’d just said.

  “Somehow I suspect I’ll find out about it soon enough.” Marisol gave her a teasing smile. “Try not to . . . I don’t know, create any rifts in the space-time continuum or burn anything to the ground. Be careful.”

  Leo stuck out her tongue. “I always am.”

  Isabel climbed precariously onto a rolling chair to root the wolfsbane out of the highest cabinet in the least accessible corner of the office. Leo pulled down the molcajete. Lastly, Isabel fetched a mostly empty bag of sugar.

  “Sugar is one of the most basic touchstones of our magic,” she explained, rolling down the sides of the large paper bag to reach the white crystals at the bottom. “We have an affinity for it that stretches beyond its typical use in love and attraction spells.” She lifted a handful out of the bag and let it run through her fingers. “For us, this is a magical blank canvas.”

  Leo nodded. If the spice magic was performed correctly, the sugar would take on the magical energy of the aconite without absorbing any of its toxicity. She let Isabel shake a few dried aconite flowers out of their paper bag and into the stone bowl, but when her sister reached for the tejolote to grind them down, Leo kept it gripped in her hand.

  “It’s better if I do it, right? Mamá showed me how.”

  “Oh . . .” Isabel hesitated. “It’s just that—I’m afraid it could be dangerous.”

  “You can watch to make sure everything looks right,” Leo said. “Please, Isabel? I can do this.”

  Isabel pushed the molcajete toward Leo. “Okay, go ahead.”

  Leo took a deep breath. Aconite wasn’t simply poisonous—it had many dangerous characteristics that had earned it ominous nicknames like wolfsbane. It could be used to hurt magic users, to halt change and growth, to obscure the truth of things. In short, it sounded like an herb Abuelo Logroño would love. It was even rumored to hurt werewolves, hence the name—hadn’t Abuelo listed shape-shifters among his threatening magical creatures?

  And along with all its sinister uses, aconite could also make things invisible. The thought made Leo uneasy, a reminder that her invisibility wasn’t just a normal birth-order power from Mamá’s family magic. It also came from her Logroño family, a legacy tainted by Abuelo Logroño’s ugly way of treating others, including his own family. Was her invisibility proof that she belonged to that legacy?

  As she made circles around the molcajete, thirteen times clockwise and seven times counterclockwise, Leo tried to focus on the purpose of the spice magic. She wanted to control her invisibility. She wanted to help her family and the bakery. The repetitive motion helped to slow her pounding pulse. When she was finished, she poured the aconite powder carefully into a plastic baggie Isabel held open, then sealed it up and dropped it into the small wire trash can under the desk, hopefully leaving its power behind in the molcajete.

  “Now, the sugar,” Isabel prompted.

  Leo nodded, tilting and shaking the bag until she could scoop out a handful big enough to cover the bottom of the molcajete. The sugar cascaded out of her hand, and she licked a cluster of clinging crystals off her thumb, the sweet burst clear and calming. She worked so often with dough and batter and herbs and recipes that she sometimes lost track of the base of her family’s kitchen brujería. Amor y Azúcar, the two things that her bisabuela’s bisabuela had used in every spell she wrote for her daughters. The name of the bakery that bound their power together through the generations. This was Leo’s inheritance, just as much as the Logroño name. The sugar made a soft crunch against the stone bowl, turning the toxic strength of the aconite into a safer and sweeter magic.

  Leo’s nose tickled with the smell of magic, and for the first time since Abuelo’s appearance, she felt sure of herself. She finished her thirteenth circle, then set down the tejolote.

  “Great,” Isabel said. “Now I just want to run a few quick tests. . . .”

  Leo was so caught up in the feeling of the magic, she had already licked her finger, dipped it into the fine white powder, and pressed it to her tongue before she registered what Isabel was saying.

  Her stomach dropped like she was on a roller coaster and the hair on the back of her neck prickled, and she wondered for a moment what the symptoms of aconite poisoning were, if there was an antidote . . . and a second later she felt the familiar brush of cold against her skin.

  “Leo!” Isabel whispered in an angry, muffled tone. “You have to be careful!” Her eyes flashed around the room, and Leo smiled as she realized that Isabel couldn’t see her.

  “Leo . . . ?” Isabel’s whisper took on a tinge of anxiety. “You are here, right?”

  “Hi, Isabel,” Leo tested, but her sister couldn’t hear her either. She tried tapping on the desk in front of her. “Can you hear that?”

  “Leo?” Isabel asked. “Can you say something?” Her voice was louder, making it easier to hear past the muffle of the veil. Leo tried knocking on the desk again, harder this time.

  Isabel cocked her head. “Was that you?”

  Leo knocked again.

  “That’s weird,” Isabel whispered. “I hear it, but it sounds really far away, like an echo or something.”

  Leo reached for the rolling chair in front of the desk and pushed it hard into the desk. The crash sounded muffled in Leo’s ears, but Isabel jumped and a stack of papers fell to the floor.

  “Okay then,” Isabel said, rolling her eyes while she and Leo both stacked the papers back up. “So you can’t make sounds yourself, but you can interact with objects.”

  Leo drummed on the desk in response. Dum-dum-da-dum-dum.

  “You could just do once for yes and twice for no,” Isabel said.

  Leo snuck behind her sister and tugged the end of her braid twice.

  Isabel spun around, eyes narrowed. “Very funny, Leo,” she grumped, glaring a foot to the right of where Leo actually stood.

  The sting of cold, the triumph of a spell that worked perfectly right on the first try, and the look on Isabel’s face combined to make Leo start laughing. She laughed until her face was warm and her arms prickled with pins and needles like they had just fallen asleep. Slowly, Isabel turned her head and scanned the space, her eyes eventually finding Leo.

  “So laughing brings you back,” she noted. “That’s convenient.”

  “It worked!” Leo jumped and pumped her fist. “We did it!”

  Isabel nodded, tapping her bottom lip. “Yes, but don’t run off on a spy mission just yet. I’d like to see how long a pinch of this lasts when you don’t break it by laughing.”

  “Time for another test!” Leo reached for the molcajete, grabbing a pinch of powder. Before her sister could say anything, Leo stuck out her tongue and disappeared.

  The invisibility powder lasted approximately eight minutes per taste, which felt like an eternity when Leo was sitting in the office with nothing to do, but would probably feel very short when she was spying. Eating a bigger or smaller pinch didn’t make a difference, but eating a new pinch restarted the timer. While Leo could break the spell with laughter, she couldn’t find a way to extend it, no matter how much she tried to conjure the feelings of fear and sadness she had felt yesterday.

  Isabel gave her a ravioli-sized leather pouch to hang around her neck, filled with the rest of the spelled sugar powder. Once Leo had helped Isabel frost the rest of the Easter cake orders
, she borrowed her sister’s phone and texted Caroline.

  JP, Brent, and Caroline tumbled back into the bakery with much less stealth than they had used when they left. They were all laughing about something Brent had written in his notebook, and after getting permission to eat a snack, they ran into the back of the bakery, scattering crumbs. Mamá sighed, Marisol rolled her eyes, and Leo wondered if she could use her new invisibility powder on other people.

  “Come on.” She ushered everyone into the office. “Did you find anything?”

  “We found lots of things,” Brent said through a mouthful of pastry, flipping his notebook open and holding out a list that almost covered the page. Leo’s heart swelled with hope.

  “But nothing useful,” Caroline clarified, glaring at Brent. “At least, I don’t think so. Sorry, Leo.”

  “I still think we should have jumped the fence,” JP grumbled. “The new windows weren’t even installed yet. We could have gone inside. I bet we would have found something.”

  Leo grabbed the notebook from Brent’s hand so she could see it more clearly. The list was mostly a catalog of all the insects and different types of litter he’d spotted. Brent had also done a sketch of the Honeybees logo, just as cutesy as it had looked on the website.

  “So there was nothing suspicious at all?” Leo asked.

  JP shook his head. “It’s still a work site. Inside they’re putting in all new ovens and counters, so the O’Rourkes probably don’t even spend much time there yet.”

  Leo nodded slowly. “That’s fine,” she said. “The house was always going to be a better chance. How did that part of the mission go?”

  “Great!” Brent said. “JP is awesome at stalking people online!”

  “I’m not,” JP protested, face flushing. “I just found Belinda O’Rourke’s daughter, Becky, on social media. She posted a picture of the new house. Brent’s the one who recognized the street.”

  Leo nodded. “Great. Isabel made up a welcome gift, all ready to deliver.” She pointed to a cardboard bakery box filled with pan dulce and tied with a ribbon. “Are you ready?”