by Tegan Maher
CHAPTER ONE
I LAUGHED AS MY BEST friend Emma shoved me forward along the snowy path that led from the school to the center of town.
"We're so totally up the creek without a paddle if Principal Larson finds out we're the ones who did that."
"Well, since we're the only witnesses, I guess we're in the clear, then."
We turned around to take one final look at the school fountain. The lighting reflected festively off the newly colored Christmas-green plume of water erupting from the center.
Our home-ec class had decorated around it earlier with red bows and garland, but it just hadn't looked complete to me. That's when I'd hatched the plan, then shared it with Emma, who'd embraced it with open arms. Cody, my straight-laced boyfriend, had been a little harder to convince.
As my Aunt Addy would say, he'd been as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs while we were adding the green food coloring to the water, but had finally relaxed once we were within a couple of blocks of the diner and a half-mile away from the school.
I nudged him with my elbow. "So how does it feel to be one of the bad kids?"
He tried to maintain his frown of disapproval, but couldn't. He burst into a grin. "A little weird, but that fountain really does look cool." He leaned down and gave me a quick kiss. A little thrill ran through me that had nothing to do with the remnants of adrenaline from the prank. I was still dumbfounded that such an amazing guy had picked me.
The pinks and blues from the neon lights shining from the windows of the diner lit Emma's face as she rolled her eyes. "Jeez. Get a room you two."
She stomped the snow off her boots and pulled the door open. The warmth of the diner felt great after we'd just walked for a mile in thirty-degree weather. My stomach rumbled as the smells of bacon and hot coffee permeated my half-frozen nose.
The Starlight Diner had been a gathering place for teenagers and adults alike since the mid-50s. Becky, one of the owner's daughters and the fourth member of our little group, rushed over to us. "Oh my god, Shelby! Y'all did it, didn't you!" she whispered, her green eyes sparkling with excitement.
"Why, whatever are you talking about Rebecca? We've just been out for a stroll, admiring the Christmas decorations around town," I replied as I peeled off my coat and slid into a booth.
"Oh bull, Shelby. Don't feed me that." She had the best alibi ever if we got busted, but have no doubt that she was just as guilty as we were—she'd provided the commercial-sized bottles of green food coloring purloined from her mama's baking supplies. She slid onto the red fake-leather booth across from Cody and leaned in. "What does it look like? Did you take pics?"
Emma rolled her eyes. "Oh sure. We just snapped away, then went ahead and uploaded them to Instagram. Oh, and we did a Snapchat with my mom, too. She was real proud of us." She shoulder-bumped Becky. "Of course we didn't take pics, dingbat."
Becky raised a brow. "Keep it up. I'm the one bringing your food."
"Baloney. You know you wouldn't." Em narrowed her eyes at her. "Would you?"
Becky gave her a smug smile. "Hmm. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Maybe you oughta be nice to your waitress." She propped her elbows on the table, a move her mama would smack her for if she saw it. "Fine. Are you guys eating?"
My stomach was past the point of patience and growled again, this time loud enough for everybody to hear it. Cody laughed. "I think that's a yes."
I nodded. "No joke. Walking all the way to the school and back made me hungry. Will you ask your mom to make me my cheeseburger? I'm starving." By mine, I meant a bacon cheeseburger with avocado, jalapenos, tomato, and extra mayonnaise.
Cody wrinkled his nose. "I swear you only eat that because you know nobody else will ask for a bite."
I gave him a half grin. "Nah, that's just a bonus."
Becky went and told her mom we were there and returned carrying a tray full of ketchup bottles. She plopped down in the booth and married them while we talked about the fountain and the upcoming class Christmas trip to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta to check out their annual Festival of the Season.
We'd raised money all year to go, and it was going to be the highlight of the school year. Becky's mom brought our food out to us, and just as I squirted ketchup on my plate, my phone dinged with an incoming text. My sister Noelle wanted me to grab bread on my way home. I looked at the time at the top of my phone and gasped when I saw that it was nine-forty.
"Em, we only have twenty minutes to get home." My mouth was watering as I gazed longingly at my burger, but there was no way I was going to be able to get everybody home in time if we finished our food. Taking it with us wasn't an option because as far as the parental units knew, we'd been at the diner for the last hour—plenty of time to have eaten. I couldn't think of a valid excuse to fill the missing time.
The thought of abandoning the juicy, oozing burger with the tips of crispy bacon peeking out from the edges of the bun made me want to cry. Both Emma and I had missed curfew last night though. Being late two nights in a row wasn't an option.
Cody and Em groaned but started to get up.
"You know," I told Emma thoughtfully, "Cody's car is already at my place and his curfew isn't until ten-thirty, and Will's out of town." Will was Cody's uncle and guardian. "We could scarf down our food then haul butt to the farm. I'll pull around to the barn where Noelle won't see us, then just port you home." By port, I meant teleport. I'm a witch and so is Em, but she doesn't really have the ability to move stuff from one place to another, at least not as well as I do, so I'd have to take her.
"I don't know," she said, doubtful. "If something goes wrong, you could get in big trouble. Or something could happen to us. That's a pretty new trick for you and you've never taken anybody else with you."
I'd been working hard—unless you asked my sister—to master my powers, because unlike most witches who had a chance to grow into theirs, mine had been bound when I was young, which is a long story for another time. Anyway, they had sort of attacked me all at once when I took a serious hit to my head last summer. I was getting pretty good at porting though, and had confidence.
I scoffed. "Every time I've done it in the last month, I've been dead-on. C'mon. Aren't you hungry?"
She stared at her chicken tenders wistfully. "Yeah, but—"
"But nothing. Eat."
Cody spoke up, his eyebrows drawn together in concern. "Shel, I don't think that's a good idea. Em's right. You're already on thin ice with the council and that's a pretty complicated spell. What if you don't get it exactly right?"
He was referring to the Witch's Council. I was currently being tutored—translate babysat—by Camille, Em's mother, who was a member of the Magical Oversight Committee.
I bit into my cheeseburger, getting a little irritated. "I can do the spell just fine and we're not gonna get caught," I said around a mouthful. "Just eat."
They didn't look convinced, but dug into their food. We scarfed down our dinner in just over five minutes and jumped in my car. By the time we pulled into my yard, we had three minutes left to get Em home. I pulled around the side of the barn and Em jumped out and met me in front of the car.
"Text me later," I told Cody and gave him a quick peck.
"You text me as soon as you're back here and both of you are safe," he told me back, worrying his bottom lip.
"Stop worrying." I grasped Em's hand, then centered myself and pictured the sidewalk outside of her house. I pulled the spell together and felt the magic swirling around us. Just as I uttered the last words, Noelle screeched my name from the porch. It grabbed my attention at the exact second I should have been directing all of my focus on our destination, but it was too late to stop the spell. I shut my eyes and hoped for the best.
"Emma Rose Payne! What in tarnation do you think you're doin'?"
I heard Camille yelling at the same time I landed with a thunk, startled both by her voice and by something wiry poking me in the butt. I opened my eyes and my heart dropped t
o the floor. Instead of appearing on the sidewalk out front, we'd landed square in the middle of Em's living room, right on top of the opened box of Camille's brand-new, unassembled fake Christmas tree.
And to make matters worse, Aurora Darkmore, the president of the local chapter of the Witch's Council, was sitting on the couch, her glass of eggnog halfway to her mouth.
I was so dead.
CHAPTER TWO
I heard Em squeal and assumed she was suffering the same pincushion experience I was. I struggled to get out of the box, finally rolling onto the floor and shaking off a couple of the top-tier limb pieces that had wrapped around my wrist in the struggle. Of course, when I pushed myself up, more of the limbs tumbled out onto the floor and made an even bigger mess.
I didn't realize until I managed to make it to my feet that the room had gone silent. Camille was staring at us—well, at Em—cringing and wide-eyed, with her hand over her mouth. Aurora looked thunderous. She slammed her eggnog down onto the table so hard that the sticky contents splashed over the side, then pulled Em's granny's Christmas afghan off the back of the couch and marched toward us, holding it out and looking to the side. What the heck?
Turning, I looked at Em and groaned. She was standing there in her bra, doing her best to cover her girls with her arms and a piece of plastic Colorado Blue Spruce.
She snatched the afghan from Aurora and fled to her room without looking back. Camille was glaring at me with her arms crossed and Aurora was terrifyingly emotionless as Em's door slammed behind her.
"It's totally not Em's fault." I said with my hands out. "This is all on me. It was my idea—"
"Of course it was your idea," Camille bellowed. "It's always your idea! I'm not saying that Emma doesn't pull her fair share of knot-headed shenanigans, but this! This has you written all over it. Dangerous, reckless, arrogant. Transporting two people is difficult for an experienced witch, let alone one who's barely learned to light a candle with her magic."
She pointed toward the door, so disgusted she wasn't even making eye contact. "Just go, Shelby. I can't even look at you right now. What if you'd left behind something other than her shirt? You know, like her arm?"
Tears welled in my eyes as I looked up the stairs at Emma's closed door. Aurora's gaze was stony and Camille's was so angry that I just wanted to shrink into a ball. I had to make her understand I didn't mean it. "I'm sorry," I said, tears running freely down my cheeks, blurring my vision. "It was an accident."
She just shook her head. "No, Shelby. It wasn't an accident. An accident, by definition, is unavoidable. This was just you being over-confident and screwing up." She heaved a sigh and shook her head. "I'm calling Noelle. You can wait on the porch. Don't you dare try to magic your way home or I swear I'll bind you here and now. And don't call Em. I think it's a good idea if you two spend some time apart."
Resentment bubbled in my chest as I walked out the door and settled on the top step. The Christmas lights wrapped around the porch posts blinked merrily and I just wanted to rip them down as I thought about the events of the last twenty minutes. It's not like I landed us in Peru, for cripes’ sake.
Okay, so maybe I should have listened to Em and Cody and just eaten the grounding for being out past curfew, but what was the point of having magic if I couldn't use it? I sat there and stewed for the fifteen minutes it took Noelle to get there. I had no doubt she was gonna take a strip of hide off me too. Yay.
When she finally pulled up, I shoved to my feet and trudged to the truck. She pushed the door open from the driver's side but didn't say anything when I got in. She just waited for me to buckle up and then pulled away from the curb. We made it almost all the way home before I couldn't stand the tension in the car anymore.
"Just get it over with."
She glanced at me out the corner of her eye. "Get what over with?"
"The butt chewing. I know it's coming. I can see it on your face."
She lifted a shoulder. "Why'd you do it? Why not just cowgirl up and take the grounding for being late? Do you understand what could have happened to either, or both, of you?"
I crossed my arms and glared out the side window, clenching my jaw. "Of course I know what could have happened," I snapped. "But it didn't, did it? Magic always carries a risk but I've been practicing. I would have landed us just fine if you hadn't hollered at me when you did."
"So this is my fault?" she asked. I could tell by her tone this wasn't the time to keep pushing.
"No. It was nobody's fault. I mean, yeah, it was my idea, but I didn't do anything awful. I missed my mark by a few yards and missed pulling her shirt along with us. It's not that big a deal." I really did understand exactly what could have happened and just the thought of it made me shiver, but being talked to like I was ten was getting old.
"Do you have any idea what went through my mind when I walked down to the barn and saw poor Cody standing there holding Em's shirt? I felt your magic all the way up at the house. I don't know why you think you can hide something that big from me. But when I saw him holding that shirt, I about lost my everlovin' mind worrying that one of the hundred awful scenarios flashing through my brain was what had really happened."
She turned her head and studied my face as we pulled up in front of the house. The colored lights that Noelle and I had strung along the eves and porch railings twinkled. A light snow coated them, giving them a soft, cozy glow, but the holiday good cheer of just a few hours ago was completely gone. Now they just seemed to be mocking me.
"Nobody's out to get you Shelby," she said softly, reaching out to brush my hair back off my forehead. I turned my head away and shifted my body so she couldn't reach me but didn't look her in the eye.
"Well it sure doesn't feel that way. Every time I try to do something even a little bit grown up, all I get is grief. Why can't you respect that I'm almost an adult?" I fought to keep the petulance out of my voice because I wanted a real answer.
"Oh, sugar. There's a huge difference between being almost an adult and being one."
"Yeah? Well I'll trade you places, then." I pushed open the truck door and jumped out, nearly plowing over Max, our talking donkey on the way.
"Hey! Watch where you're going, you impudent child." He took a potshot at me with a back hoof, and with the way the night was going, I was surprised he missed.
Noelle called out to me before I made it to the door. "Chill out in your room for a while, then we're going to talk."
I pushed the door open so hard the pinecone wreath crashed to the floor. I snatched it up and shoved it back on the hanger, then bolted past the brightly decorated Christmas tree straight to my room.
CHAPTER THREE
I flung myself on my bed but was too anxious to sit still. My room was huge and at first I paced, but then, as I cooled down, I started to think. My eyes fell on the antique snow globe that Noelle's friend Sarah had given me the year before. It was right after our Aunt Adelaide had passed, and I’d been so lost.
Sarah said it had comforted her when she needed it most, and hoped it would do the same for me. Surprisingly, it had.
When Addy showed up a couple of weeks later as a ghost, it was the happiest day of my life. She was pretty much the only mom I'd ever known; my real mom—her sister—died when I was four. Noelle remembered her, but all I had were flashes. When Sarah gave it to me, Noelle said that anytime I ever needed a quiet place to go, just shake the snow globe and pretend I was skating my worries away on that pond. Since then, I'd used it as a kind of thinking piece.
I flipped it upside down and watched as the snowflakes drifted silently onto the village, coating the shoulders of two couples skating on a pond in the center of town.
"Sure does look perfect in there, doesn't it?" I jumped when Addy appeared beside me. Since becoming living-impaired, as Noelle liked to say, she'd pretty much lost her respect for boundaries.
"Yeah, it does," I said, not taking my eyes from the village.
"It's not, you know. There's no such
thing as perfect, baby. At least not in the way you think of it. Every dog has a few fleas."
No matter what she said, it looked a whole lot better than here. There was a man sitting on a bench beside the pond, watching the skaters. I always thought he looked a little out of place because he wasn't smiling and carefree like all the other people in the snow globe were. He looked more ... thoughtful, I guess. A little dog lay on the bench beside him, resting his head on the man's leg.
"Well I know for a fact nobody thinks I'm perfect," I said. "They all pretty much think of me as a screw-up. Even Em. She stayed in her room when Camille threw me out. I had to wait for Noelle on the porch and it was freezing." Tears welled in my eyes and I brushed them away, irritated that I was letting it get to me. "She said I had to stay away from Em for a while."
Addy heaved a sigh that was a habit left over from when she was living. "Sugar, don't nobody think you're a screw-up. We're just worried about you because you sure don't seem none too concerned about yourself. You could have killed Em tonight, or yourself. You know that, right?"
I lowered my eyebrows and focused on the snow globe, fighting tears. I was used to Noelle getting her tail all twisted, but Addy was usually on my side, or at least not against me.
"And I know why you were rushing, too."
I glanced up at her, startled.
"Me and Belle"—Belle was the former owner and current resident ghost of the Clip N Curl beauty parlor—"were out lookin' at Christmas lights and saw you three sneakin' up the hill to the school and decided to follow."
I gave the snow globe another good shake. "Awesome," I said, voice flat. "You gonna rat me out?"
She moved closer so that I had to look her in the eyes. "No. But I am going to punish you myself for lying to Noelle. Schoolyard hijinks are the least of your problems right now, and I don't wanna give the council any more ammunition, but it does fit a pattern, Shel. It's almost like you're trying to get into trouble, or just don't care. What's going on?"
