Seriously Hexed

by Tina Connolly

  “Hey, she did a good thing,” said Valda. “There had been bloodbaths. Now everyone was protected.”

  “You mean the witches were protected,” said Poppy.

  “Exactly,” agreed Valda. “But no sooner had she worked with Malkin to get those laws in place than—”

  “Than what?” I said, expecting to hear some new atrocity.

  “Than she met Jim.”

  My dad. I tensed, wondering what Valda would say next.

  “And what, she changed overnight?” said Poppy. “A love story?”

  Valda snorted. “No. But she did change. Became a thorn in everyone’s side. Everyone who’d been her ally was now her enemy. And she didn’t have much of anyone left to become a new ally. A few hippies, like Jim.”

  “But you still hang out with her,” I said.

  “Oh, well. If witches stopped associating with everyone they disagreed with we’d never see anyone at all,” Valda said candidly. “There’s not a single witch that wouldn’t do me in if they had the opportunity, and vice versa. And now—” She broke off. “What was that?”

  An ominous rumble was coming from upstairs.

  Poppy shrieked as a diamond windowpane shot out of one of the front windows and streaked past her face, barely missing her. Pop pop pop went the rest of the window, and three more diamonds shot themselves at us.

  “Is your house firing at us?” I shouted at Valda.

  “Thinks there’s an intruder—”

  “Tell it we’re not intruders!” shouted Poppy.

  “You are, though,” Valda shouted back as she fumbled for her spells. All the lights were going on and off and fan blades were spinning. Probably next they would—yes, there the fan blades went, detaching and shooting themselves toward us. The hall clock was adding to the din, striking noon: bong bong bong …

  “It’s like all your defenses are backfiring on you!” I shouted.

  Valda whirled. “What did you say?”

  “All! Your! Defenses!” I hollered, but then the rumbling grew louder.

  “The stairs!” shouted Valda. She gave up on her ingredients, grabbed her broom, and flew out the first window that had popped itself apart.

  Leaving me and Poppy standing there like idiots, wondering what was going to come down the stairs.

  I ran to the door and tried to wrestle it open. But I realized, too late, that it had rearmed itself. My hand froze to the doorknob. I couldn’t move.

  “Move!” shouted Poppy, and I turned to see my doom hurtling down the front stairs, straight at me.

  5

  Hurtling Doom

  It was one of those moments where your life passes before your eyes. Or it would, if that sort of thing actually happened. Maybe it only happens in books. I’ll tell you what did happen. Everything got all slow. And yet it didn’t stop the giant boulder from coming at me like a freight truck. I was about to get smashed into the door that I couldn’t let go of.

  I didn’t know any spells to stop a boulder. Valda surely did, but she had bailed on us. I cursed her. I cursed Sarmine. I cursed the door. I started to curse the boulder, but then I heard another voice shouting something about wasabi—saw a powder dazzle my hand—a flash of light—a person pulling me the other way, away from the door, out of the path of the boulder.

  I tumbled down hard, cracking my elbow on the floor and my shoulder on the coffee table. Poppy went into the TV tray, and Valda’s tomato soup went all over us. I didn’t know it was tomato soup at first, though. I blinked hard through red haze as I watched the boulder splinter that door into smithereens and roll right out the front.

  “Ugh,” said Poppy as she blotted tomato soup out of her hair. “I literally just washed it. Totally wasted on a coven I couldn’t go to and the stupidest haunted house in the world.”

  “Poppy…” I said. I fumbled for words but could only come up with the basic ones. “You saved my life.”

  “Yeah, well.” Her fingers were unsteady as she rubbed her glasses on her shirt. “I had just looked that antidote up, you know.”

  “And you did it, when it counted.”

  “I guess so.” A slow smile crept onto her face. “You think that counts as an epic witch battle?”

  “The first of many,” I said dryly.

  Poppy flipped open her messenger bag to make sure nothing was broken, and then we hurried out of the ruined house. It was a disaster on the outside, too. Orange smoke was pouring from the upstairs windows. The chimney was disassembling itself brick by brick, each one popping off and crashing to the grass. We ran toward the front gate, which had turned into a gate made of snakes, but was at least hanging open so we could carefully squeeze through.

  We stood outside Valda’s fence, panting.

  “The snakes don’t look too happy,” I said. “Should we help them?”

  Poppy ran her app over them. “They’ll revert soon enough,” she said. “And I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary. Let’s get home and take a shower.”

  “Dibs on the shower,” I said, but Poppy shot me a look of death and I shut up. “Dibs on shotgun?”

  “Dear god, what is that?” said Poppy.

  “I don’t want to know,” I said as I turned. A perfectly enormous hailstorm of roofing nails was flying at us.

  “Into the car!” shouted Poppy. We dove for it and slammed the doors. A rain of nails hit the car—tink tink tink—the first few denting the metal and bouncing off. Then screech, screech, as more of them slammed so hard they plunged into the car and stayed there. Poppy slammed her foot on the accelerator and we tore down the street. “Still after us?”

  I risked a glance behind me. A cloud of metal nails obscured the back window. I figured it must be a rhetorical question. “Go around the corner,” I said. “Maybe we’ll lose them.”

  But the nails kept following, through the streets. Poppy weaved and dodged cars—and blew through several yellow lights—until finally we were on the back highway between the two towns, which was relatively straight and empty. It had only been a couple minutes on city streets but it had seemed like an hour.

  Poppy’s breathing calmed, although neither of us were what you’d call calm about being tracked by seven thousand roofing nails. “Do you know any spells to stop a cloud of nails?” she said.

  “Not unless you think the pear self-defense spell would work,” I said.

  “Very funny,” retorted Poppy, but she was concentrating on the road while a storm of nails followed us, and I forgave her.

  I breathed. “Okay. Let’s break this down into smaller pieces. When we stop, all those nails are going to catch up with us.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Watson.”

  “If we can’t stop them, could we at least make them softer somehow?”

  Poppy concentrated while she drove at that insane speed. I was glad there was hardly anyone on the back highway. “There’s a super-cold freezing spell on my phone that I have the ingredients for,” she said. “You’ll have to cast it.”

  “I don’t think making them cold will slow them down,” I said. “They’re not alive.”

  “It encases them in ice,” Poppy explained. “It’ll be like a hailstorm, but at least they won’t pierce us or the tires. Anyway, do you have a better idea?”

  “Ice it is,” I said. I picked up her tomato-smelling messenger bag and her phone’s avatar directed me through the correct measurements.

  “Make sure you get the orange powder, not the red,” Poppy said.

  “Because…?”

  “Instead of frozen nails we’d get superheated ones. Slide right through steel like it was butter.”

  I shuddered. My hands may have shaken a little as I put the compound together, but I tried to keep that from Poppy.

  “We don’t have a sunroof,” Poppy said, “so you’re going to need to lean out the window and throw that powder all over the nails. The avatar will give you a sentence to shout, but this one needs a witch’s mental oomph. You have to think hard about where yo
u want that powder to go.”

  “Easy as pie,” I muttered. “All right, then.” I took a breath and stirred the ingredients in my hand with my wand, as Poppy directed. Rolled down my window, fist closed tightly over the powder. “Okay. Give me the sentence.” I stuck my face out and looked back. There was a nail a few inches from my nose. “Uh, and Poppy? Don’t slow down.”

  “There’s a stop sign up ahead!” she shouted at me.

  “What?”

  “Ick vella du schtott farum!” said the avatar.

  “Ick vella du schtott farum!” I shouted, concentrated hard on the circumference of the nails, and flung my powder in their general direction. FYI, it’s hard to fling powder over a whirlwind of nails when everything’s moving sixty miles an hour.

  “In, in,” shouted Poppy.

  I turned to see the stop sign rapidly approaching us—and my face. Beyond that, a semi, lumbering through the intersection. I flung myself back into the seat as Poppy slammed on the brakes.

  I ducked. She ducked.

  A tremendous hailstorm hit the car. A thunderous drumming—the roof, the sides, and then, with a tremendous crack …

  “The back window!” Poppy shouted. “Stay down!”

  “I wasn’t going to look!” I shouted back. And then yelped, as a hailstone bounced off the backseat and hit my elbow. The car was a station wagon, so the trunk and the backseat slowed the hailstones down. Still, I could feel the temperature dropping as ice filled the back and the chill surrounded us. I huddled in Poppy’s tomato soup–covered jacket.

  Slowly the crash-bang died away as the hailstones rolled to a rest. The semi rolled past, the driver not even looking back.

  We got out and looked at the car. The back windshield was smashed in. The trunk and backseat were filled with hailstones. I picked one up, marveling at the roofing nail embedded in the middle of it. Poppy had saved us, but the car was a disaster. Also, it smelled like tomato soup.

  “Your mom is going to kill us,” I said. “What does she do to you for things like this? Sarmine would probably turn me into a solar panel for a week.”

  Poppy eyed me strangely. “She’s not that sort of person,” she said. “But she will make us clean it.” She looked down at the ice. “We should do that right away, before everything melts and ruins the car.”

  “We should have gloves,” I corrected. “Look at the broken windshield. Plus, we can’t leave that stuff here on the road.”

  “We can’t drive like this, either. We’ll get pulled over.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I have an illusion holo I made a while ago, specifically for this car,” she said. “It doesn’t fool anyone with witch blood, but it’ll fool the human police. Hang on while I reactivate it.” She pulled out her phone and scrolled to a picture of the car in its pristine state. With her wand, she seemed to draw the holo out of her phone. The holo drifted slowly over the car until it looked like new again—freshly washed, even.

  “The glass and nails are still there,” Poppy cautioned me. “Blink a couple times and you can see it both ways.”

  I squinted until I saw what she meant. “That’s impressive,” I said, sincerely.

  “Yeah, well.” She sighed. “This holo I can do. I had plenty of time to sit and work on it. But you defused the bomb when it was necessary.”

  “You got me loose from the doorknob,” I said. “That was an adrenaline-filled kind of situation.”

  “I’m afraid there’s going to be more of those,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  Rather glumly, we got back in the car and Poppy started the engine. “Okay, back to work.” I could tell her voice was trying to be cheerful and positive. “What did we learn?”

  “Everyone hates my mother.”

  There was silence for a minute. I pulled my phone out and turned it over and over, thinking how much I’d like to see one of Sarmine’s all-cap texts right about now. Or even just to be able to text with Jenah and Devon like a normal person.

  “You’re fidgeting,” said Poppy.

  “My mom won’t let me have a real phone,” I said. I held it out. “I mean, it looks real enough. But it only connects to WitchNet and the witch phone system. I can’t call Devon and see if he’s looking any better. Er. More visible.”

  Poppy gave me the side-eye. “Are you saying you want to borrow my phone to talk to your boyfriend?”

  “Maybe?”

  She passed it over. “Don’t do anything dumb like break it.”

  I put in Devon’s number and listened to it ring. No answer. Tried twice more for good measure. Finally I passed the phone back to Poppy.

  We drove a little more, and then she said, as if it were being dragged out of her, “Do you want to swing by his house?”

  “Can we?”

  “I can try to fix him.”

  “Oh, Poppy!”

  “I don’t know that I can,” she said gruffly. “Don’t get too excited yet.”

  “Thank you,” I said. There was a lot of sincerity in that.

  “Mm,” said Poppy, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

  * * *

  Devon’s parents were backing out of the driveway when we arrived. His mom leaned out the driver’s side window and smiled and waved at me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Maguire,” I said. “This is my friend Poppy. Is Devon home?” I tried to smile and look like Devon would totally be happy to see me, as usual.

  “He’s up in his room, sweetie,” she said. “Been working on some big project all day.” She hit the garage door opener button and it went up, revealing a mountain of boxes and stuff that no car would ever fit among. “You kids have fun. We’ll be back by dinner.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and waved.

  “Why are they looking at the car?” Poppy whispered to me. “They’re not witches are they?”

  “I think they’re looking at us,” I said. We were still drenched in tomato soup. I wished I didn’t have to visit Devon looking like I had been in a vegetarian bloodbath. But then it finally occurred to me that I didn’t. “Unicorn spritzer,” I crowed, and retrieved it from my backpack. I sprayed both of us, and immediately we were restored to fresh, pressed, and clean. My shirt still said Newt Nibbles, though. Can’t fix everything.

  “Not bad,” admitted Poppy. “My mom won’t keep it in stock because she hates Ulrich. Do you mind if I spritz the car before I come in? You probably want to see Devon first anyway.”

  “Fair trade,” I said. More cheerful now that I was clean, I entered the garage, walking between all the boxes and junk toward the back door.

  I took a deep breath, knocked once, and gently pushed open the door to the kitchen.

  No Devon. But would I know?

  I moved through the kitchen, took a left toward the stairs. The sounds of his guitar drifted down from his bedroom. “Devon?” I called up. The music stopped.

  From far off I heard a door open, and then I saw a pair of jeans and a shirt walk down the stairwell. They stopped near the bottom.

  I wrinkled my nose. “Still invisible, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say after that. “Working on your music?” I ventured.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve been doing some recordings, haven’t you?” I said. “Music videos to put online?”

  The empty clothes looked at me. I could feel it.

  “You can’t do that now,” I said. “Right.”

  “Writing a new song,” the clothes said. There was silence for a moment, and then he said, “So, your mom…?”

  “Ah. Good news and bad news.”

  The clothes slumped. “Give it to me.”

  “She said she would come fix you—”

  “Yeah?”

  “But she disappeared.”

  “Invisibled, or…”

  “Gone.”

  His sleeves tensed. “Those witches?”

  I shrugged tightly. “Probably.”

  The clothes moved
at that. Came all the way down the stairs. The shirtsleeves came up and wrapped me in a hug. “I’m so sorry,” the shirt collar whispered in my ear.

  There was a moment then when I thought I could just forget all my worries and relax into the nothing’s arms. Imagine we were finally having that date.

  But Devon released me and moved away. The clothes grew stiff and angry. “You get into all these dangerous situations and I can’t even protect you. What good am I?”

  “You’re a musician, not a witch,” I said. “I’m the one who’s upset I didn’t protect you.” I took a step closer, hoping he would return to my arms.

  “And a musician is good for…”

  “Other things?” I suggested. I waggled my eyebrows, but he didn’t seem to take my meaning.

  “Entertaining five people having pizza on a Friday night,” he scoffed. “At least you can do things with your talents.”

  “Whee,” I said. “Look what’s already happened to you from witch talents, and that was from a witch who likes you.”

  The clothes slumped at this reminder and turned toward the stairs. “I guess I’ll have to try that costume after all,” he said. “Jenah texted me that she had a wig and stage makeup I could use. I better get going before my parents get back.”

  I sighed as he moved away. No invisible kissing for me.

  I squelched that thought. That was a seriously unethical take on the situation. You don’t go around invisibling boyfriends just so you can invisibly kiss them.

  “Before you go,” I said to the clothes, “I met a new witch. Well, it’s Poppy Jones, if you know her. She’s going to try to unhex you first, okay? Then at least we’ll have tried everything.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” he said, and he came back. “Tell her I’ll wait for her in the kitchen.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be the invisible one.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  I turned just as Poppy came around the corner from the kitchen. She tossed the half-empty bottle of unicorn spritzer to me. “So where’s—Oh. Oh, wow.”

  I made a face, and Poppy hastily put on a calm, competent expression.

  “We’ll get this figured out,” she assured us. She ran her phone over the empty clothes. “Phone, tell me what spell is on here.”