You Only Spell Twic

by Paige Howland

  She was a medium, though.

  Not all witches shared the same talents or affinity for the craft. For example, some witches were stronger than others. Most witches were spellcasters. Some were rune witches like me. Fewer still were aura readers, like Andersen. And some witches had psychic abilities, like Eugenia’s ability to channel ghosts. And most witches tended not to fit squarely into one box. Andersen, for example, or Aunt Belinda, who was a spellcaster and also the teensiest bit prescient. Her glimpses into the future were sporadic but tended to manifest in surprisingly useful ways, like the garage sale she’d foreseen last month, where she found an antique clock possessed by the spirit of a Buddhist monk—at least, that’s what she claimed. So far it hadn’t spoken a word, so I was skeptical—and I scored a pair of gently worn Lululemon yoga pants for eight bucks. And while I could cast spells, I was much better with runes. I couldn’t read auras, though, and I couldn’t see the future like Aunt Belinda or hear the dead like Eugenia, thank the goddess.

  Eugenia stopped in front of me. I eyed her warily.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, dear,” she said. “I dreamed about your death last night.”

  I sighed.

  “It was brutal,” she said gleefully.

  “Let me guess. Cleaver?”

  Dahlia raised an eyebrow, and I shrugged. It was a safe guess. Usually Eugenia’s dreams involved someone ending up in pieces.

  “Worse. You fell out of a tree.”

  Actually, that didn’t sound so ba—

  “And into a wood chipper.”

  Naturally.

  “Want me to read your palm?” she offered. “We could look at your life line.”

  “Oh, Eugenia,” Aunt Belinda said, joining us, “I’m sure Ainsley didn’t come all this way to hear you prophesize her untimely demise.”

  Eugenia looked so disappointed that I said, “Maybe we could talk about my death later.”

  She perked up. “I’d like that.”

  Aunt Belinda glanced at Dahlia. “Ainsley dear, who’s your friend?”

  “This is Dahlia. I thought you might be able to help her.”

  “Of course, dear. But you could have brought her by during business hours,” she said, giving me the look. The one that said I should know better than to bring a human to a coven meeting. She put an arm around Dahlia’s curved shoulders and steered her toward the stairs. “Now, what can I help you with? I have herbal ointments upstairs for gout, liver spots, sleep disorders—”

  “She needs the counter-spell to an aging curse,” I said.

  Belinda’s coven abruptly fell silent, staring at us.

  Aunt Belinda glanced between us. “What makes you think she’s cursed as opposed to simply, well …” Aunt Belinda trailed off, unable to find a polite way to say “old as dirt.”

  Dahlia sighed. “I slept with a witch’s boyfriend and she cursed me. One year for every time we did it.”

  Aunt Belinda’s eyebrows rose. Dahlia looked very, very old.

  “Check for yourself,” Dahlia said.

  Aunt Belinda looked startled, probably because while few humans knew magic and curses existed, even fewer knew that it was possible for a witch to sense them.

  Aunt Belinda needed to know what type of curse they were dealing with before they could help her, but still she hesitated. I didn’t blame her. The only way for a witch to sense a curse was to feel around with our magic inside of the cursed person, and the results could be unpredictable. I’d only done it once, with Ryerson, and from his reaction he’d definitely felt something. My cheeks warmed at the memory, and I dragged my attention back to Dahlia. Supposedly the process only felt, well, unusual, if the cursed had feelings toward the witch doing it.

  “I’ll do it,” said Maven, a red-haired mother of two little witches I used to babysit. Her kids were terrors, but Maven was sweet as pie. “Gotta keep my skills up,” she added cheerfully.

  Dahlia shrugged as Maven put a hand on Dahlia’s arm, and the witch’s expression shifted to one of concentration. After a few seconds, Dahlia made a face, but nothing compared to what had happened between Ryerson and me. After a full minute, Maven pulled in a deep breath and stepped back.

  “Ainsley’s right,” she announced. “This one’s definitely been cursed. How old did you say you are?”

  “Twenty-two,” Dahlia said.

  She nodded and turned to her coven. “Ladies? We have a curse to break.”

  If there had been an agenda to tonight’s meeting, it was quickly forgotten as the coven broke into excited conversation, throwing out ideas and spells. Eventually, half the coven pulled Dahlia upstairs to peruse the spell books and herb collection for ideas. Eugenia took Dahlia’s arm as they left and I heard her say, “Have you given any thought to how you’d like to die, dear?”

  I left them to it and turned to Aunt Belinda. “Do you know any defensive spells?”

  Aunt Belinda blinked. “Defensive how, exactly?”

  “You know, like if I’m attacked. By a mugger or something,” I added quickly when her eyebrows shot up.

  Belinda’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, but Maven clapped her hands excitedly and said, “We know so many spells like that!”

  The other four women left in the basement—two sisters who co-owned a bakery down the street and a mother-daughter duo (magic tended to be hereditary)—nodded enthusiastically.

  “We had a guest speaker at one of our coven meetings a few years ago,” Maven explained. “A witch who specializes in magical self-defense. She taught us some spells.”

  “I’m a rune witch,” I added, so they’d keep the spellcasting to a minimum.

  They talked animatedly amongst themselves, and then we moved the furniture against the walls. Once the basement had been turned into a makeshift dojo perfect for impromptu magical self-defense lessons, Maven clapped her hands and turned to me, her eyes bright with excitement.

  “This will be so much fun!” she said. “Self-defense for witches. We should start a class.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Aunt Belinda, bemused. “Who would come? Most of the witches in DC are already here.”

  Maven waved her off. “There are plenty of witches outside the city who’d be interested. Now then,” she said, swirling her fingers in the air above her palm until a small ball of electric-blue light appeared there. “Let’s begin, shall we?”

  For the next two hours, I dodged magical attacks and tweaked spells into runes. Some of them were pretty cool, with nicknames based on fairytales so the witches could keep them straight. Or maybe the fairytales had been the inspiration for the spells.

  The wicked witch rune, for example, involved a devious glamour that made the recipient believe their legs were melting. Then there was a pretty neat tracking rune that Maven had nicknamed the breadcrumb spell, and a few other useful but less creatively named spells.

  While we worked, the other witches slowly filtered back downstairs, sometimes adding helpful tips like where to place the emphasis on the wicked witch incantation to boost the spell’s power, and sometimes unhelpful ones like Eugenia’s suggestion to skip the rune altogether in favor of enchanting a sword to simply cleave a person in two when it touches skin, or one of the sister witches who suggested I might not need to take so many breaks if I hit the gym once in a while.

  It was late and half the coven had wandered home by the time we moved the furniture back into place. I was exhausted but pleased with the new runes I’d added to my arsenal tonight. I found Dahlia asleep on one of the couches upstairs. The coven hadn’t found the counter-curse, but that didn’t seem to have dampened their enthusiasm, and most of them had left eager to check their own resources.

  Witches like a challenge.

  I woke Dahlia and we said our goodbyes to Aunt Belinda and Eugenia, the only two witches left in the store. Eugenia wandered down the herb aisle, mumbling about being out of Astarte Oil. On our way out, we passed by the front counter, a glass-top cabinet crowded with a cash r
egister, credit card machine, impulse-purchase trinkets, and a cardboard stand stuffed with advertisement flyers for the shop. I picked up a flyer. Aunt Belinda printed new ones every month and filled them with a calendar of store events: author signings, upcoming sales, occasional psychic readings. But it wasn’t the new events inside the fold that caught my interest. No, this time it was the seven-pointed star printed on the front of the leaflet, right under the store name.

  “Coming to the séance next Tuesday, dear?” said Aunt Belinda, coming up beside me and nodding at the pamphlet. “I booked the loveliest charlatan. She’s not a witch, of course, but she tries so hard, and her theatrics are so much more exciting than the real thing.”

  “Hmm? Oh, not this time.” I pointed to the star. “What is that?”

  “Why, that’s an old family crest, dear.”

  “Our family crest?”

  “Well, not anymore. We stopped using it for personal matters years ago, but I still use it for advertising purposes for the shop. It feels very new age-y, don’t you think?”

  I barely heard her. I stared down at the symbol I must have seen a thousand times before and never paid a lick of attention to it, until now.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Aunt Belinda asked.

  “Yes, sorry. It’s just, I saw this crest recently, somewhere else. On the cover of an old book.”

  Dahlia glared a warning at me, and I shut up.

  Aunt Belinda frowned. “That’s not possible. Witches don’t share family crests, and this is not a symbol the public has come to associate with witchcraft. Perhaps you saw a six-pointed star? Those are quite common.”

  I shook my head and opened my mouth, but Dahlia’s foot twitched, like she wanted to kick me. Right. National security. I snapped my mouth shut again.

  But Eugenia had wandered out of the aisle, her Astarte Oil apparently forgotten. Her bespectacled eyes were narrowed on me, her focus intense and unwavering. She walked right up to me and tapped one knobby finger against the pamphlet I still held.

  “Where did you see the book with this crest?” she said, and Aunt Belinda stiffened beside me. Because the voice that came out of Eugenia Halfpenny’s mouth did not belong to Eugenia. It was a rasping, gravelly sound, like the words had been dragged over vocal chords that were rusty with disuse.

  The hair on my arms leapt to attention and my magic curled around me, waiting. Wary. I tried to step back, but Eugenia grabbed my wrist. “The book,” she demanded. “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. Not exactly.

  “Ainsley?” said Dahlia, alarmed. “What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea,” I murmured as Eugenia’s gaze, or rather, the gaze of whatever was wearing Eugenia Halfpenny like a suit, bored into mine. The grip on my wrist was painful now, although I don’t think she realized it. I tried to wrench my arm out of her grasp, but her bony fingers were a vice. Squeezing. Dots of pain burst into my vision.

  “Enough.” Aunt Belinda’s hand covered Eugenia’s, and the word held power. Eugenia’s grip eased, but that unnerving stare never left mine. Suddenly, her lips curled and she abruptly stepped back, out of my personal space.

  “You know where lies the Grimoire, witch. And soon, so will I.”

  And just like that, whatever was inside Eugenia drained away and she deflated, like the intensity had been all that was holding her upright. I rushed forward and caught her before she hit the ground, and Aunt Belinda and I helped her to the couch.

  “Thank you, dears,” Eugenia said. To everyone’s relief, her voice was her own once more, if weaker than normal. “Just give me a minute to recover. Possession by the dead always takes the wind out of me.”

  Possession?

  I whirled on Aunt Belinda, who was frowning down at Eugenia with a troubled expression. “Aunt Belinda, who was that?”

  “That,” Aunt Belinda said gravely, “was your great-great-aunt Myrna.”

  4

  I couldn’t get Eugenia’s words out of my head.

  Or Myrna’s words, whoever the hex she was. If she really was my great-great-aunt, why had I never heard of her? Witchcraft was hereditary on the woman’s side, which meant she would have been Mom and Aunt Belinda’s grandmother’s sister, but I’d grown up believing that Nana, my great-grandmother, was an only child. And Aunt Belinda had refused to tell me anything else about her, other than “no one you should listen to.”

  Which was super helpful.

  Problem was, I couldn’t tell her why it was important without breaking the twelve non-disclosure forms the CIA had made me sign. I might have done it anyway, had Eugenia and Dahlia not been there too.

  You know where lies the Grimoire, witch. And soon, so will I.

  Her words ran through my head all night and by morning, I was no closer to figuring out what, if anything, my creepy dead aunt intended to do.

  The morning dawned bright and cheery, spilling warm rays of sunshine across my pillow that made me want to hit something. I cracked an eye and instantly regretted it as a headache pounded to life behind my eyes. It would dissipate in a few hours—my magic hangovers always did—but for now it was hard to think straight. Which might explain why I spent twenty minutes staring down at my empty suitcase, wondering what the weather was like in Brazil before I thought to Google it. Or why coordinating outfits felt so daunting that in the end I emptied a couple of drawers into the suitcase instead. I sprinkled in a few pairs of underwear and socks and a couple of travel-sized bags of Cheetos for good measure, and I was all set.

  I glanced at the clock. Twenty minutes until Ryerson was supposed to pick me up. I should shower. Or start reading the thick mission dossier that had been sitting on my nightstand when I got home last night.

  My gaze strayed back to the bed. And the soft, cozy blankets.

  Twenty minutes later, Ryerson stood at the foot of my bed, arms crossed as he frowned down at me. No, at the Cheetos lying on top of my overnight bag.

  “When is the last time you ate a piece of fruit? Or anything that wasn’t coated in cheese dust?”

  “I’m going to give knocking lessons,” I said, my voice muffled by the pillow. “You’re invited.”

  “I did knock,” he said. “You didn’t answer. Also, your lock is completely inadequate and you have no security system.”

  “I have a sugar glider,” I pointed out.

  “You have a flying hamster in a cage in your kitchen. That is not a security system.”

  I unmashed my face from the pillow just enough to look up at him. And more importantly, what was looming behind him.

  “And a golem,” I reminded him helpfully.

  Ryerson tensed. But instead of drawing his gun and whirling around to face the threat, he just looked resigned as Golem, in all of his eight feet of clay glory, picked Ryerson up one-handed and tossed him into the wall.

  “Golem,” I scolded, then climbed out of bed and helped Ryerson to his feet. He rubbed his shoulder and glared at Golem, who didn’t look the least bit sorry. I planted my hands on my hips and gave Golem my sternest expression. “It’s not nice to throw people into walls. Tell Agent Ryerson you’re sorry.”

  “He break in!” Golem protested. “Looked mad.”

  “He always looks like that.”

  Ryerson’s scowl deepened.

  “But Agent Ryerson is a good guy, and we don’t throw good guys into walls. Now what do you say?”

  He looked down and scuffed the floor with one of his two giant toes. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Then his glance landed on the open travel bag at the foot of my bed and he looked up, round black eyes bright with excitement.

  “We go bye-bye?”

  I glanced at Ryerson who shook his head. Truthfully, I was a little relieved. Golem was good at throwing people into walls, and he’d definitely proven himself helpful during our last mission, but golems are animated by Jewish magic and a human soul. Until I knew more about that soul, I couldn’t help but feel protective over him.


  I looked back at Golem. “Sorry, buddy. Not this time. I’ll only be gone a few days and I need you to watch Jinx for me. Can you do that?”

  The clay above Golem’s eyes scrunched, and his mouth more or less disappeared. Golem didn’t have a nose or eyebrows, but I was beginning to recognize his expressions from the few facial features he did have. This one, I was pretty sure, was a scowl. I wondered if he learned that from Ryerson.

  Apparently, that was a no to pet-sitting duties then.

  “Next time you can come, okay?”

  In response, Golem’s whole body began to vibrate. Then, with an annoyed poof, he disappeared. Or rather, shrank back down to the six-inch form he seemed to prefer. I had no idea which one was his natural size, but I was crossing my fingers for the action-figure version. My apartment was barely big enough to fit me, and it made the sleeping arrangements way more practical.

  I sighed as Golem stomped out of the room on tiny feet and then turned back to Ryerson, who was looking at me strangely. I opened my mouth to ask him what his problem was, but then he stepped close and I promptly forgot to be mad at him. Before I knew what was happening, his thumb brushed my cheek, sweeping the traitorous butterflies in my stomach into a frenzy. I should have stepped away, but instead I found myself leaning into his touch.

  “Ainsley?” he said.

  “Hmm?”

  “What happened to your face?”

  He sounded faintly horrified.

  I blinked and stepped back. His hand fell away, but his gaze stayed riveted to my cheek.

  Oh, right. That.

  “I got hexed.”

  “With a tattoo of a beaver?”

  Technically, it was an otter. The mascot of the high school Maven’s bratty kids attended. They had apparently whipped up the hex—which looked like a dancing otter drawn in thick permanent marker—to use against a rival football team and had hexed every car in the other school’s parking lot. Maven had found the hex in the girls’ Grimoire. She’d grounded them and then used it herself last night as practice ammunition when the coven tried to teach me a deflection rune.