by Tess Lake
“We might. I’ll check with them and call you back as soon as I can.”
“Thanks, Harlow.”
I hung up the phone and told Molly and Luce as quickly as possible what had happened. Both of them were dancing from one foot to the other like hyperactive chipmunks.
“Finding spell!” Molly said.
“We could use a photo of her. Do you have anything?” Luce said rapidly.
I didn’t know where my copy of the Butter Festival flyer was, but I’d taken some photographs of Harmonious Twang yesterday. I got out my camera and clicked through the images until I found a close-up of her face. She was wearing an intense look of concentration as she carved her butter.
“We can try that, it might work,” Molly said.
I put the camera down the table and we all joined hands. We focused on Harmonious’s face. The magic tingled up through my legs and into my body. It raced down my arms in a golden flood.
“Find,” I whispered.
Molly and Luce echoed me.
The magic swirled around the photograph, concentrated on it, and become a tiny ball of golden light. It floated up in the air and began drifting away, hopefully heading toward Harmonious Twang. It drifted through the front wall.
“Go, go, go!” I shouted.
“Shotgun,” Molly said.
We ran out the front door. The golden light was drifting toward Harlot Bay. We jumped in my car and gunned it (as much as you can “gun” such a slow car).
“C’mon, we’re going to lose it,” Molly said. She was in the front, having called shotgun first.
We reached the top of the big hill and gained speed on the way down. The golden light was only visible to witches, so it was okay to float over Harlot Bay—well, Hattie Stern and a few others might see it, but they probably wouldn’t care much. Finding spells are fairly harmless.
The golden light picked up speed as we did, as though it knew we were moving faster. There were no cars around this time of night, so I very illegally drove through a stop sign.
We kept following the light, heading across town to the gardens. They were manicured and beautiful and backed on to wild land.
We stopped outside the gardens and walked on in.
“Should have brought weapons,” Luce whispered.
“It’s fine, we’re witches,” Molly whispered back.
It was sorta true, not the witch part, but the “it’s fine” part. Luce and Molly were nature witches, and if push came to shove, they could definitely figure out how to shove. Well, maybe. Sometimes nature didn’t like to be told what to do. Me? I wasn’t so sure. Slip witches have no control over what their powers are in many cases. I could accidentally summon up a fireball or haul in a water monster from the ocean.
The short answer was: don’t rely on magic.
We crept through the dark, following the golden light that was weaving and bobbing through the trees.
I’m sure Molly and Luce could feel it too—the magic in this area was unsettled like a rough sea. It was churning, moving quickly back and forth as though simultaneously trying to escape something and being drawn toward it. We moved further into the gardens following the light. It was darker the further we went from the street. The gardens hadn’t really been set up for nighttime walks, and although that was part of the plan, obviously the landscapers hadn’t gotten around to installing extra lights yet.
The ball of light vanished between some trees. We kept moving in that direction when suddenly I glimpsed another ball of light in the distance. No, it wasn’t light, it was energy.
It was glowing white, and I knew immediately that I had to be near it.
“I’ll be right back!” I yelled, giving chase.
I ran through the trees swift as darkness, dodging branches and jumping fallen logs. The sound of my cousins shouting faded away, and all I could see was the ball of energy.
I sped past a tree and then suddenly I was in a clearing. Harmonious Twang was lying on the ground, barely breathing. The ball of energy I’d been following came to a rest above her. It began pulsing. Her lips parted, and a tiny white droplet of life force shimmered into existence. It rose up from her mouth and joined the ball of energy.
The ball began to contract and expand.
It shrank down as small as a marble and then expanded to the size of a basketball. I felt it pushing and pulling on the magic around me. It was breathing in and out, a living thing. Beneath it, Harmonious was weakening. The tiny ball of energy had been her life force, and this thing had drained it. Soon she would die.
I had to stop it!
The ball took a deep breath, pulling magic into itself and life out of Harmonious.
I thrust my hands out and the world narrowed to a single point. Just me and the ball of energy. It was going to burst, but I stopped it, holding it in place. The energy radiated outwards, burning hot like a fire. I let some of it go, releasing steam from a kettle, air from a balloon.
The rest I directed back into Harmonious, feeding her the life it had stolen.
The energy ball swelled, but I was far too strong for it. I grinned as it struggled against my grasp. It pulled one final time and then faded like a dying ember. A moment more and it winked out of existence.
Harmonious coughed on the ground and took a shuddering breath. She was alive.
I rushed over to her. She was disoriented and fell over when she tried to get up. I laid her down and called the police.
It wasn’t long before flashlights appeared between the trees. Sheriff Hardy was leading his officers and my two very upset cousins. The police attended to Harmonious while my cousins ran over to me.
Molly grabbed me and squeezed me so hard it hurt. Then Luce did the same.
“Where did you go? You were gone for ages!” Luce said.
“It wasn’t that long. I was here with Harmonious.”
Molly pinched me.
“Ouch!”
“That’s what you get for vanishing into the night!”
“I wasn’t gone that long! You two have been having too much coffee and you’re on hyper mode or something.”
The local EMTs had arrived and connected Harmonious to a saline solution. One was holding it up in the air while the other checked her.
Sheriff Hardy came over. He nodded to my cousins.
“Good work, Harlow. I presume you found her while you and your cousins were out for a late-night stroll around the gardens.”
Oh right, he was giving us the reason we were there.
“That’s right. We were out for a walk and saw her through the trees.”
“Good, I’ll have one of the officers take your statement in a minute.”
He waved a young woman over—Officer Hartwell—and I recited my false statement to her. She asked me a few questions (did I see anyone, notice anything unusual) but I didn’t have anything else to add. By the time we were finished, the EMTs had taken Harmonious away to the hospital.
We returned to the car and I saw that it was almost midnight. Time flies when you’re casting finding spells, containing explosive balls of magical energy and bringing people back from the brink of death.
“I’ll drive,” Molly said.
I didn’t argue. Stopping that ball of energy had really taken it out of me. I got in the passenger seat, and in the blink of an eye Molly was waking me up to walk inside the house. I must have fallen asleep.
We went in and I took myself straight to bed.
I didn’t even remember my head hitting the pillow.
Chapter 24
In the morning we were three very sad witches. I was tired and sore from whatever it was I had gotten up to yesterday while under the influence of some unknown drug. Molly and Luce had finally come down from their super-caffeinated high and were essentially zombies sitting at the breakfast counter, their faces pale and eyes red.
“Good morning,” I mumbled when I went into the kitchen.
“Muh,” Molly said.
“I feel like I’m g
onna die,” Luce groaned, her head in her hands.
I knew when coming down from a major caffeine boost that cold turkey wasn’t the way to go. I made them coffees, which they drank with a grimace. Apparently my instant coffee wasn’t as good as their super-duper Italian machine. It worked a little, however, and brought them halfway back to life.
I was eating breakfast when my mother and aunts came storming into the room. As usual, Aunt Cass calmly followed them and sat down on the sofa.
“I told you to stay home! I told you to watch television and that was it!”
“We were going for a midnight stroll,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me. You were not.”
“Okay, fine. We were helping find someone who was missing. If we hadn’t found them they might be dead,” I pleaded.
Mom narrowed her eyes at me.
“Was that boy who died in the warehouse missing his blood?”
“Um,” I said.
“I knew it!”
She turned to her sisters. “We need some phosphorus, boron, willow—”
“I’ve already made the balm,” Aunt Cass said calmly and removed a small jar from her cardigan pocket.
“What type is it?”
“I’m not sure. But I am sure it will be over soon.”
“How did you know?”
“The magic told me.”
I saw my aunts roll their eyes. This was a standard Aunt Cass answer when she didn’t want to tell the truth. Some mystic force told her. Uh-huh.
Mom took the jar from Aunt Cass and opened it. The balm inside was a pale yellow, the color of honeycomb. She dipped her finger in and then rubbed a spot of it on the back of my hand. The magic tingled through me as the balm dissolved into my skin. Freya and Ro did the same with their daughters, who largely stood there and took it, given that they were still coffee zombies. Then the mothers dabbed some of the balm on themselves.
“Everyone needs to stay together. We’ll be catering the Grand Finale today and you two are coming to help. Harlow, you’re with us as well.”
“But our store—” Luce said.
Freya pointed at her daughter.
“No arguing. A soul sucker is very dangerous. The three of you gallivanting around in the gardens after dark . . . you could have been killed. You’re coming with us to the carving Grand Finale.”
“Harlow will come with me,” Aunt Cass said. “I’ll make sure she comes to the festival.”
Molly and Luce groaned when they realized they were caught. Now they’d have to man a bakery table rather than recuperate in their shop and dose themselves with coffee again.
I faced another ten minutes or so of comments and complaints that I largely let wash over me. They ranged from “How can I be so reckless?” to “How could I be so foolish?” Eventually Mom, Freya and Ro gave up, gave my cousins very strict instructions to quickly get changed to come to the festival to help set up, and then they marched out the door.
When they were gone, Molly and Luce went off, complaining at the unfairness of it all, but at the same time they decided to eat food, get changed and go. It was easier to give in than to fight. Sun Tzu couldn’t help now: he’d never faced three very angry witch mothers.
Soon only Aunt Cass and I were left in the house.
“Are you still seeing auras?”
“I am, but I think it’s fading. Yesterday I took a photo of Zero Bend’s girlfriend. But it looked very weak.”
“Come with me right now to the main house and bring your camera.”
I grabbed my camera and followed Aunt Cass down to the main part of the house. Adams came jogging along behind us, interested in what we were doing.
We went into the house and down the stairs to the basement, where Grandma stood frozen in time.
“Take a photo,” Aunt Cass commanded.
I switched my camera on and waited a frustrating ten seconds before it came to life and I could take a photo of Grandma. Then we stood there waiting another twenty seconds until the image appeared.
Grandma had a beautiful sky-blue aura surrounding her, but it was very pale, and I knew it wasn’t her aura that was weak, but the power itself. It was fading rapidly. Stretching out from her hands were thin red streaks of light that rose up and went through the ceiling above her.
“Quick, come outside. We need to find out where those red lines go!”
We raced up the stairs and outside, where I took a photo of the general landscape and waited again. The image appeared, showing the red lines coming through the front wall and up into the air like ribbons, stretching to some distant source.
“I knew it,” Aunt Cass whispered.
As we looked at the photo, the lines glimmered away and vanished.
I took another photo. This time it was only the scenery: no red lines, just blue sky and green fields, the distant blue ocean and Truer Island.
“What was that?”
Aunt Cass sighed.
“April bit off more than she could chew—very much more. If we could find where the end of those ribbons went, we might be able to wake her.”
“It looks like it’s heading toward Truer Island to me.”
“Could be the caves by the beach, underwater, across on Truer Island, or any of the houses between here and there.”
“How did you know there would be an aura?”
“I didn’t. I only thought of it today. Must be getting old.”
Okay, so there was a murderous soul sucker roaming Harlot Bay, and that didn’t scare me as much as Aunt Cass admitting she was getting old. What was happening?
“Keep this to yourself. We need to go to the Butter Festival now.”
As we started to walk back, Aunt Cass asked me what I’d seen last night.
“It was ball of light.”
“A small one, like a marble?”
“Uh, yeah. How did you know that?”
“There are a few entities in the same family who follow that pattern. This one is called a morchint. They make a deal with a human—usually promising wealth and power—and latch on as a parasite. The human host has to kill to feed the parasite. Only a few at first, but then it becomes hungrier. This can go on for decades. It feeds until it releases a tiny ball of energy that will often explode.”
“What was it?”
“An egg. Or a test egg, really. The first one isn’t anything. It’ll explode, maybe cause some harm, but nothing else. It’s the big one you need to watch out for. Within a day of the test egg it’ll feed again, consume the host and transform into a big egg. When it explodes, it gives birth to its next form.”
“Can an entity actually give you wealth and power?”
Cass snorted.
“Nope. It’s a trick—the dumb host makes the deal, believes it will work, and then it does work.”
“Like a placebo?”
I couldn’t resist.
She pointed her finger at me.
“That cracking sound is the ice you’re standing on. It’s very thin this time of year.”
“I support the small businesswoman, you know that.”
“Hmmf.”
I told her about finding the ball of light in the park.
“You didn’t try to contain it, did you?” She waggled her finger at me.
“No . . . it exploded.”
I don’t know why I lied about it. Maybe because I wasn’t in the mood for another lecture.
Aunt Cass visibly relaxed.
“Good. Don’t try to do that. We need to discover who it has latched itself to. Morchints are devious. They love causing conflict. Betrayal and deceit are their tools. They can’t help themselves but to stir things up. You can always tell a morchint because all around it is strife while it sits innocently in the midst.”
That sounds like someone I know. I wisely kept that thought to myself.
“Will a finding spell work?”
Aunt Cass shook her head.
“They’re hidden in their host. This one could be twenty, thir
ty years old and will be experienced in staying hidden. Look for anyone rich and powerful and then say Calypso to them.”
“Um . . . Calypso?”
“Yes, you just need to say Calypso to it. If it is the morchint, it cannot help but repeat you.”
“Really? That’s weird.”
Aunt Cass threw up her hands.
“I don’t make the rules. It’s a lot better than some of the other variations. One of them you can only detect by touching it with something more than two hundred years old. Do you know how hard it is to get something that is actually two hundred years old? You’re running around trying to snap parts off old buildings or breaking into museums.”
“A lot of the competitors are famous and rich. The sleazy agent, Fusion Swan, is rich. So is Preston Jacobs. What am I supposed to do if I find the morchint?”
“You tell your mother, aunts and me immediately. We can handle it together. Okay?”
“Sure, not a problem.”
“Well, we better get moving. If you saw the light ball yesterday, then today it’s going to hatch. My bet is it’s going to be at the Butter Festival Grand Finale.”
Aunt Cass sat on the sofa while I got changed for the day. Molly and Luce were already gone, dragging their sorry selves to the festival to help their mothers set up. I took a quick second look through some of the photos on my camera. All the auras were gone. They’d only been in the images as long as I had the power.
I drove Aunt Cass to the Butter Festival. We parked a number of streets away—they were packed with cars, and we had to walk into the festival.
There were people everywhere. It was more like a rock concert than what you’d think a butter-carving festival would attract. The Ice Queens were out in force, wearing their ridiculously skimpy outfits, cheering and screaming. The town hall was slowly filling up as people made their way inside through the narrow doors.
When we got inside, Aunt Cass told me she was going take a look around and to keep my eyes open.
In the center of the hall there are two glass cases. Each was piled high with butter. One would contain Zero Bend, the obvious favorite, and the other would contain The Slice, a short, cheerful-looking brunette in her midthirties who looked like she’d fit right in working at the bakery. Multiple food stands were set up around the perimeter of the hall. Hot dogs, ice cream, Dutch pancakes, Chinese food, Indian food, sausages and bread, and then the Big Pie Bakery. My mother and aunts were over there working furiously. Molly and Luce stood at the end collecting money and passing baked goods over the counter. Both of them were still pale.
