Seriously Hexed

by Tina Connolly

  “Any time,” I said.

  “I was worried about you,” said Poppy, looking sideways at me. “Disappear in the middle of the night like your mother and all that.” I realized then that she had only pulled her pink suit jacket on over her lavender PJ’s. Her hair was still in its scarf, now a little disheveled.

  “Oh,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about that.” Truthfully, I wasn’t used to the idea of a new person caring about me. I mean, I had Jenah, and I sort of had Sarmine, and was trying to rely on Devon liking me because after all he had said it many times, but yeah. I don’t know. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged and looked uncomfortable at having admitted that. Maybe she was slow to make friends, too. Or maybe she had been set to dislike me since I had gotten into the coven, and would have preferred to continue happily disliking me forever. Maybe I needed to do a better job at extending the olive branch.

  “Did you walk?” I said.

  “Oh hell no. I took the station wagon. Did you want to bring back your bike?”

  “Poppy,” I said, “I am a great admirer of your organization and efficiency. Teach me your ways.”

  She smiled, genuinely smiled at me. “Help me wipe up the basilisk guts and we’ll call it even.”

  * * *

  So that was the Saga of How Cam and Poppy Cleaned Up the Second Mess That Day. It was just as riveting as the first. Poppy started to ask if I wanted to be quizzed on American history and then stopped, remembering that that had caused a rift last time. “Please,” I said. “Please do help me. I don’t want to flunk out of everything this week.” So she shot questions at me while we worked. I made a real effort to not sound like an idiot, and she made a real effort to not call me one. It went much better than before.

  We finished mopping up and put our tools away.

  Poppy looked sideways at me. “And now…?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The garage.”

  We crept out the back door, struck out across the yard. The moon was quite full now, and it shone white across the black night, made smaller moons out of Poppy’s glasses. I shivered in the spring air, wondering what Poppy would think of my fancies about not knowing what age you truly were. She would probably look at me askance, and I didn’t want to disturb our tenuous bond.

  I unlocked the RV garage and we went inside. Even though my strongest memory should be of the disastrous coven incident of the night before, I couldn’t help thinking of all the years the garage had held a friendly sky-blue dragon. I would rather have her around than any number of covens.

  “Cam,” said Poppy in an odd voice. She was standing next to the cauldron.

  “What now?” I peered into it, expecting to see some bubbling goop perhaps, an unknown spell that had been started after that fiery explosion. But it was empty.

  Then I realized what Poppy was pointing at.

  “The votives,” she said, pointing to the glass cups that had encircled the cauldron. They were scattered now, some pushed under chairs. Sarmine’s was still dark; we had seen that last night. But the rest were glowing—weren’t they?

  “I don’t see,” I said, and Poppy impatiently pointed, directing me to examine the glass under the chair next to Sarmine’s, the glass that stood in place of Valda.

  It was not lit at all.

  It was shattered into a million pieces.

  6

  Full Moon

  I practically jumped out of my skin. I would have jumped into Poppy’s arms if I had known her better. Witches seemed to be crowding around me from the shadows, pressing in. Some witch—someone was doing this now.… Who was it?… Where were they?… Surely they were here!

  “Deep breathing,” said Poppy, who was busy practicing it herself. “Reviewing what we know.”

  “Sarmine disappeared during the coven meeting.”

  “And then her glass went dark.”

  “Then, today, all Valda’s traps backfired, and I thought it was just her terrible witchery—”

  “But maybe it wasn’t,” said Poppy. “Because there was that boulder.”

  “And if we hadn’t been there, it would have rolled right through her TV tray.”

  “Squash,” said Poppy.

  I shuddered.

  “Two in a row,” said Poppy. “It could be coincidence.…”

  “Or?”

  She took a breath. “Sarmine said Malkin said to open the box at the coven. If that’s true—”

  “And who knows, given my mom—”

  “Then don’t you think it’s funny that something happened to the first two people in the circle? Like, in order?”

  “Yes?”

  “Cam. What if that hex is designed to get every member of the coven?”

  I paced back and forth, trying to make my brain work more like Poppy’s and less like mush. “Do you think Malkin hexed the votives somehow?” I said. “Squash a candleholder, poof, Valda gets squashed?”

  Poppy shook her head. “Valda didn’t actually get squashed, as far as we know,” she said. “She was supposed to get squashed. I read about a similar case in Emmetrine’s Grimoire. I bet the glasses are showing the status report on what’s supposed to be happening with the spell.”

  “So that’s better, right?” I reached down to touch my lit glass.

  Poppy grabbed my arm. “I wouldn’t,” she said. “I trust my logic, but there’s a big difference between trusting my logic and having you snuff out your life just to check our work.”

  I pulled my hand back into my chest. “You have a point.”

  We walked around the garage, looking at the cauldron, the spill of packing peanuts. The gravy boat still lay buried in the peanuts, but neither of us was going to touch that with a ten-foot pole, or even with a push broom, like Lily.

  Finally: “We’d better get home,” said Poppy. “It’d be just like my mom to come home at the exact time we’re gone.”

  “What time is it?” I said.

  She looked at her phone. “Eleven fifty-nine. Almost—”

  “The witching hour. I know, I know.” I gathered my wits and walked to the door. At least we could leave this place and go back to Poppy’s house. Sleep had never sounded so good.

  That’s when a shattering sound broke the silence of the night.

  This time, I really did jump toward Poppy. I grabbed her shoulder and she grabbed my arm. “What was that?” I said shrilly. I had some excuse for sliding up into shrill, I think.

  Poppy dragged me back toward the circle of lights, step by reluctant step. We peered down at the floor, and what we saw made my blood run cold all over again and my fingers go so numb I no longer knew whether I was gripping Poppy’s arm.

  The third glass had shattered.

  “Ohmigod,” I said, and “Run,” I said, and though Poppy was more levelheaded than I was, she was sufficiently freaked to agree that was a good idea. I locked the doors with trembling fingers, grabbed my bike, and shoved it through the gaping back windshield hole into Lily’s station wagon. The back wheel hung out, but I thought it would hold. We jumped in ourselves and peeled out, all the while feeling like witches were breathing down our necks. The cold air blowing through the missing rear windshield didn’t help. Poppy’s database hadn’t had a spell to fix that. She shivered in her PJ’s.

  The moon shone into the car, bright and full.

  “Midnight,” Poppy said as she drove.

  “What?”

  “The third glass shattered at midnight. And your mother disappearing, last night—that was also midnight.”

  I thought back to Valda, who had been eating lunch when we arrived. “Valda’s clock,” I said. “I thought it was just rocking in the spell. But it was chiming noon.”

  “So whatever these spells are, we just learned something. They’re firing every twelve hours.”

  “Ohmigod,” I said. I leaned my head back against the vinyl headrest. The moonlight flashed on a nail that had buried itself in the dash earlier. “And we don’t even know who was standing next
to Valda. Do you think, whoever it is, they’re…”

  “I don’t know,” Poppy said grimly. She looked like she was bracing for bad news. “Tell me you have some idea where my mother was standing.”

  Oh no. “Poppy,” I said. “Your mother.”

  “Where was she?”

  I made my mush brain work. I had seen her. I had identified her. “She was standing on my side of the circle,” I said firmly. “If Sarmine was twelve o’clock, then I was at eleven o’clock and your mother was at eight or nine o’clock.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I am.”

  Poppy’s fierce grip on the wheel relaxed. “If the spell is going clockwise around the circle, then you two will be near the end. That gives Mom time to get back from whatever she’s researching. The moment she’s in contact again we have to tell her everything we know so far. We’ll be able to count down the hours to figure out when her thing is coming. Give us time to stop it.”

  “This settles it,” I added. “If the hex designed to hit everyone, it must all be Malkin’s doing.”

  “One last nasty gotcha,” Poppy said. She furrowed her brow. “Well, unless one of the witches in the circle gets skipped. Or hexes themselves, too, as a red herring.”

  “Ugh, stop pointing out loopholes,” I said. “This case is complicated enough.”

  “It is important to think through all the logical possibilities—What?”

  “Sparkle,” I said, sitting up straight. “Sparkle’s a member of the coven, too. And I have no idea where she was in the circle. We’ve got to warn her.”

  “We’ve got to warn all of them,” she said.

  I might hate all the wicked witches, but in that moment I knew I was in total agreement with Poppy. You could hate someone and still not want them to be shattered into a thousand bits like that glass cup. What calamity did that represent? I shuddered at the thought.

  We pulled into Poppy’s driveway, got out of the well-ventilated station wagon, and walked to the door. The night was clear and the full moon gave us plenty of light. I thought I knew all our problems at that point. I ticked them off in my head. Missing Mother number 1. Missing Mother number 2. Cascadia Coven Hex. Invisible Boyfriend. That was enough for anybody, right?

  And yet … I had an uneasy feeling, like I had forgotten something.

  Poppy opened the door and felt around for the light. “What the—” she said, for the second time that night.

  The kitchen was to the left of the stairs, the living room to the right. Both rooms looked like a tornado had hit them. The kitchen floor was covered in cereal from the bag Poppy and I had left out on the kitchen table. And the living room was worse. All of Lily’s dolls were off the shelves—heaped on the chairs and floor. I wouldn’t have a clue how to put them back in the right order.

  “Do you think this is part of the hex?” I whispered.

  “You thought my mom was standing near you!” hissed Poppy.

  We crept into the living room, through the piles of dolls, terrified of what we might find. I hadn’t seen a disaster of this proportion in a long time. It looked as if a small child had—Oh. Oh dear.

  I suddenly remembered exactly what I had forgotten.

  Two more steps took me to the armchair. There was a small boy curled up on it. A small boy who, until an hour ago, had been in his shaggy, puppy form.

  Wulfie.

  * * *

  Poppy, behind me, eeped at the sight. I didn’t blame her. After a night full of surprising things, the cherry on top was finding a small boy in your living room when as far as you knew there were no small boys in your house. “Did you—did you bring a poltergeist with you?” she said.

  “That’s Wulfie the werewolf,” I said grimly. “Around this time every month he changes to boy for a few days. It’s horrible—” I caught myself. He was a werewolf, not deaf. “I mean. He’s a very good boy and we love him lots and he’s, um, a three-year-old. It’s exhausting.” And then, “Are poltergeists real?”

  Poppy straightened up. “Oh jeez. Of course it’s Wulfie,” she said. “Full moon and all. I—Don’t tell anyone I said that. About the poltergeists. It was a joke.”

  Her lips were pressed firmly together and I didn’t push it. “You’re exhausted,” I said reassuringly.

  But our whispering had attracted attention. Wulfie sat up. “Cam!” he said, and bounded off the armchair and through a pile of no doubt valuable and irreplaceable dolls, over to me. “Cam Cam Cam Cam Cam!”

  “Oh, sweetie pie,” I said, and swept him up in a hug. “What on earth are we going to do with you?”

  * * *

  It took an hour to get Wulfie back to sleep, and even then he refused to sleep in his dog bed. Not because he was in human form but because sometimes he got clingy and refused to curl up anywhere but at my feet, and this was one of those times. It didn’t matter to him that Poppy’s bed was only a double and we were already squished in there without a squirmy three-year-old boy. I finally got him tucked in on top of my feet, under a spare blanket. I draped a corner of the blanket over his nose to stand in for his tail and then I lay down myself. Of course, I now wanted a drink of water. But I wasn’t disturbing Wulfie for anything.

  Besides, at this point it was nearly two a.m. on a school night and even wanting a drink wasn’t going to keep me awake that long. Poppy picked up some of the dolls before giving up and coming up to bed herself. I ran through the day’s woes in my head, bullet points on an imaginary list. Sarmine gone. Lily gone. Almost squashed by boulders and nails and dolls and small boys.

  Three witches down.

  Who was next?

  * * *

  “Esmerelda.”

  “What? I said groggily. It was early dawn, from the looks of the light, and Poppy was shaking me awake as if we hadn’t gotten to sleep well after midnight.

  “Esmerelda,” she repeated. “It was bugging the back of my mind. I saw the soles of her high heels under her black robes. They were bright green. I remember thinking there was only one person who would have green-soled spike heels.”

  “That would be her,” I said. “But we got four hours of sleep, Poppy. Wouldn’t it be nice to let Esmerelda fend for herself?”

  “We saw her glass shatter,” said Poppy. “Something happened to her, and I feel like it’s going to give us a clue about how to stop this before it gets to you and my mom. At the very least, she’ll know who was standing next to her, so we can warn them.”

  “Email,” I said. “You can email people from bed.”

  “Do you have everyone’s email?”

  “Sparkle does,” I said, remembering the message she had shown me. “Except she’ll kill us if she finds we’re talking to the other witches. She’s petrified of Claudette discovering that Leo’s a shifter.”

  “This Leo–Sparkle thing sounds like amazing gossip,” said Poppy, “and you should tell me in the car. But right now we’ve got to go visit Esmerelda, because somebody else’s curse goes off at noon and we don’t know who. Do you know where she lives?”

  “I know where her mother Rimelda lives,” I said. I had been at their house for a disastrous pool party once. “We could drive out and ask her, and additionally warn her. She’s not a bad sort, for a witch.”

  Poppy looked at me strangely. “They’re not all bad, you know. The Geneva Coven actually does a lot of good for the world.”

  “What, somewhere in Switzerland?” I said. “The ones I’ve met are terrible.”

  “My mom. Your mom.”

  “My mom?”

  “I mean, she’s uptight and cranky.…”

  “And she wants to take over the world.…”

  “But she wants to make it better, though?”

  I sighed. “I know. She’s not the worst.” I looked at Poppy. “That doesn’t mean we get along.”

  “I know.”

  “Mothers.”

  “Mothers!”

  We groaned in unison, and this time I didn’t ruin it by saying, “J
inx!”

  Poppy looked down at the small boy curled up at our feet. “What about him?”

  “We’ll have to take him,” I said. “Unless you want him to destroy more of your mom’s stuff. We should get that cleaned up before your mom gets home.”

  “Except, school,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said dubiously. “Only, Sarmine would have my head if I left her house like that. I mean, like one time she literally took my head and made it study some horrid witch dictionary while my body cleaned up the study I left messy. She really has a thing about her study.”

  Poppy rubbed her forehead. “Maybe we can do like thirty minutes of cleaning before Wulfie wakes up.”

  Which, of course, was his cue to roll over. His eyes popped open, and then with one bound he was across the bed, tackling us.

  “Cam Cam Cam Cam Cam!” he shouted, and then, studying Poppy for a second, “Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop!”

  “Wulf Wulf Wulf Wulf Wulf!” she hollered back, and tickled him till he shrieked. “All right, let’s feed him and get out the door. If all goes well we can check on Esmerelda and still get to school on time.”

  It was a fine plan. Doable. Except …

  “And then what do we do with him?” I said slowly. “I mean, after we get to school.”

  We looked at each other blankly. Wulfie had never been a problem as a dog before. And now—he was practically insurmountable.

  “What do other people do with three-year-olds?” she said.

  “Don’t have them,” I said.

  We discussed and discarded a pile of ideas as we ate breakfast. Spring break was over for the public schools, and there were not a lot of good options for taking care of a small tornado.

  Finally I said, “Well, he’s my problem. If we can’t come up with anything, I’ll stay home today.”

  “Okay,” Poppy said. “And I’ll stay home tomorrow. Fair?”

  “More than,” I said.

  One thing I’ll say for Wulfie: he found the rice puffs all over the kitchen floor vastly entertaining. Chasing and eating them kept him occupied for a good half hour while we got dressed and rounded up our half-done homework.