Seriously Hexed

by Tina Connolly

  I paused the holo. Was Sarmine actually in league with Ingrid? I couldn’t believe that my mother would be on the side of true evil when it came to Sentient Magicals. I knew her ethics were more … flexible than mine, but still. Was this recording about to show me that Sarmine had been a terrible person, give a reason that someone on the side of good might have been willing to hex her this week?

  I grimaced. In that case, the answer might well be Lily, meaning she had been lying to us all the time. I didn’t want to believe that, either.

  Volleyballs thumped on fists, on the floor. Shouts of laughter.

  If I found out the worst, then at least I would know the truth. I unpaused the holo, heart in mouth.

  “This will delete your tracking spell,” Sarmine said to the shivering pup. “They’ll never be able to find you.”

  “Who?” I said silently. “Who won’t? His mom?” I stared into the holo as if it would answer me. “Why did you adopt Wulfie?” I whispered.

  She turned from the puppy, as if she could hear me. I was sure she couldn’t, but it still made me catch my breath.

  “Why am I risking myself for you?” Sarmine mused. She sank to the floor, awkward in her usual pencil skirt, studying the tiny puppy curled on the sofa cushion. As if she couldn’t help herself, she reached out a hand to stroke his fur.

  He lifted his head weakly, gave her a grateful lick.

  Sarmine stroked him again, then stopped, picked something off his fur. “Damned puppy mills,” she said, and her lips tightened. “Jim would have never stood for it. Would have broken his own neck if he had to, to try to save your whole litter. I’m not that foolish.”

  I sucked in breath. Sarmine was trying to save him. It was like Dad trying to rescue Leo’s mom, the shape-shifter, so many years ago. Werewolves were not as in jeopardy as shape-shifters—only their hairs were valuable. There would be no point in killing a werewolf, no pressing need for us to keep Wulfie hidden, but I wouldn’t be surprised if other witches had guessed his nature and surreptitiously swiped werewolf hairs off the couch the few times they came over.

  “Did you steal him from Ingrid?” I said to the light. “Tell me how you saved him, Mom. Tell me what you risked.”

  She didn’t answer, of course. She balanced a small saucer of something on the sofa cushion. “You’d better eat that,” she said sternly. “I’m not in the mood to hand-feed any puppies.”

  Wulfie made a valiant effort to lap up the milk, or whatever it was. It clearly was hard for him.

  Sarmine sighed and tapped her wand into the saucer. A stream of milk rose up and went into the small puppy mouth. He sucked on it greedily. A minute or two and he stopped whimpering, but seemed too exhausted to continue.

  “You want your mother, don’t you,” whispered Sarmine. “I told you, I’m not that foolish.” She reached down and unbuckled his collar—pulled it off and dropped it. I caught the flash of words as it fell. Ingrid’s Purebreds.

  There was a sound, and Sarmine suddenly tensed, looking around. Her fingers stilled. “Damn fool anyway.” She stood, arms wide. There was a sudden flash of green light, followed immediately by the scene going white, ending.

  Except, this time, the white stayed. No new scenes cued up. “Don’t tell me this is the end of the disk,” I said to the empty air. As usual, there was no answer. Surely that was not the last time she had recorded something. She had worked at least one Class Thirteen spell since then—the demon that she summoned last October. Had she given up on running the recording, knowing that my dad was never coming back to check her work? And who would try to save her, if she failed? She didn’t have any real friends.

  I suddenly shuddered. Was this my future if I stayed in the witch business? Was this what I was destined to become? Angry and alone, my only friends some paranoid witches? You couldn’t call them friends, not like Jenah.

  Maybe my mother had never had a Jenah. Maybe you couldn’t have a Jenah, not if you were a witch. A Jenah could never understand your world, nor you hers. All the more reason to leave the witch world behind. Make that choice.

  Sarmine had only had my dad to trust; he had been everything, and now he was gone.

  But my father had disappeared when I was little, and she was still making these recordings. Who did she expect to come save her?

  I admit, there was that small flicker of hope that said, What if my dad were still alive? What if she held out hope that he would come back? I mean, I knew he couldn’t be. It’s not the way the world works, not in real life. It’s only in stories where you have a joyful family reunion, the family restored, everyone happy. No, Sarmine and I had had to learn to get along without him. We had reacted badly. I had retreated into denial. Sarmine had gotten cold. But we had come to accept it.

  No, she wasn’t still making these for my dad.

  I stared through the white holo, out into the thump and squeak of volleyball.

  I knew the answer. I had that letter. I knew why she was still making these videos, even if I wasn’t ready to face what it meant. It was all wrong to learn this kind of thing too late. To see that I did mean something to her, that I had meant something to her for a long time. To tell her that she meant something to me.

  Because my dad had disappeared, and Sarmine had kept on going. She had still had someone to believe in, someone to fight for, and who she hoped would fight for her in return.

  Sarmine had me.

  * * *

  After school, Poppy found me at the bike rack. “Ready?” she said. She looked suspiciously cheerful and my miserable self resented it.

  “Ready for what?” I said grouchily. “Ready to go back to your place and fuss over things like American history quizzes and calc derivative thingies while our moms get taken by demons? No, wait, I’ll just imagine I’m normal. Now I can worry about things like dress codes and cast lists instead of despairing that I’m now an orphan in charge of a werewolf. Awesome.”

  Poppy raised eyebrows at me. “Do you want to talk about whatever that was?” she said.

  “Poppy,” I said, and the words came tumbling out in a way they hadn’t been able to with Jenah. “I got a recording from my mother. Something she had triggered to go on her…” I couldn’t say it. “You know, like she got the gravy boat from Malkin.” I pulled out the letter from the envelope. “See, she wrote it ages ago.”

  Poppy’s face was serious. I could tell she was trying to spin her answer so I didn’t lose all hope. “This means it’s even more important that we go to your garage,” she said. “We have to ask the demon where he took her—”

  “Or what he did to her—”

  “Uh-uh-uh. Where he took her, and why that would have caused this letter to trigger.” She pulled out her phone. “And here’s the other reason we have to go. Look what I found on WitchNet this afternoon, all over social media.” She started a video, and I focused my misery to pay attention.

  It was someone’s cell phone footage, set against the gray backdrops of city buildings. A blurry figure was running down the street, hollering, as an enormous grizzly bear ran behind her. As she turned the corner, I thought I caught a flash of the maple leaf emblem. Sports Team. “The Canadians were next in the circle, weren’t they?” I said.

  “And that’s not all.” Poppy restarted it. “Look at that rainbow flash, zipping out of frame, just there. That’s not a hex firing. Someone put that bear there.”

  “The demon,” I said.

  “Our guess was right,” she said. “He’s not just hanging out in the lamp in your garage. He is actually the one performing these hexes.”

  “Pretend my brain is mush and explain to me why you’re so excited by that.”

  “I thought one witch had set in motion thirteen hexes, and Sarmine getting disappeared—”

  “Destroyed—”

  “Disappeared by a demon was just one of those hexes. All set up in advance by the witch. But no. One witch has made a deal with this demon to carry out the thirteen hexes.”

 
“Slightly different,” I conceded.

  “So, for one, it explains why the hexes are firing every twelve hours,” she said. “Demons can’t live on earth without bodies for more than five, ten minutes at a time. That lamp was specially crafted to be a demon container, like the book said. So it can hold him. But he can only stay out for a few minutes. Then he has to go back and recharge. It must take him half a day to build up to full power again.”

  “And for two…?”

  Poppy’s eyes lit up as she seized my arm. “It means the hexes aren’t inevitable. We have the chance to stop him.”

  Somehow we had progressed from having a chat with a demon to overpowering him. The escalation was making me dizzy. Besides, would overpowering him bring back Sarmine? “How do we do that?” I said warily.

  “Pentagram, of course.”

  * * *

  Poppy thought one more witch would be a valuable addition, so we went down to the football field to collect her, even though I would rather have gone home to bed. What was the point of doing anything anymore? Sarmine was gone, and had been gone from the moment that demon took her on Saturday. The only thing I could do now was get myself in trouble as well, and then who would watch Wulfie?

  No, that wasn’t true, I sternly reminded myself. I had Devon to unhex. And I had to help Poppy rescue her mother. She couldn’t do it alone, and I couldn’t quit now. Besides, maybe the Sarmine holo was a clue after all. There was the episode with tiny Wulfie that had ended abruptly—and Poppy and I had just seen Ingrid’s black market puppies. Maybe Ingrid was the mastermind of all of it, striking back for Sarmine’s long-ago theft. And even if we couldn’t find Sarmine, we could find the puppies and bring Ingrid to justice.

  Except why would Ingrid have destroyed her own house? No, it was all a dead end. Everything was a dead end.

  I will tell you right now that it is very hard to buck up if you think your mother might be gone forever. Even if she’s a wicked witch with whom you are frequently extremely annoyed. But for the sake of the others I made the effort. There was still time to help them.

  I told Poppy some of what I had seen on Sarmine’s recording as we headed to the locker rooms. Sparkle had admitted via text that that’s where she was, and of course Sparkle was not going to go to the trouble of walking out to meet us, so we were going in.

  Voices from the back, one high, one low. Laughter. Low rumbles. Music? Someone must have their iPod on.

  “Ugh,” I said. “I am not in the mood to see a Sparkle make-out session that she totally could have stopped. She had oceans of warning.” I hollered down the hall. “Sparkle!”

  A low song, drifting out: “Each drop of rain will raise the sea…”

  No scuffles, no bodies jumping apart. We rounded the corner into the open area. I saw Devon’s backpack on the floor, saw his guitar hanging in the air. He was clearly sitting there, strumming it, even if I couldn’t see him. And did that mean he was wearing his invisible clothes, or no clothes at all?

  Because sitting on the bench, an inch away from the invisible boy-band boy, was Sparkle.

  13

  Superior Witch Is Superior

  “Well,” I managed, as the song came to a sudden stop.

  Sparkle rolled her eyes at me. “It’s not what you’re thinking, so don’t be a nitwit. Unless what you’re thinking is that a superior witch is trying to take off the curse you hexed him with.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” helpfully put in Poppy.

  I glared at Poppy, who was supposed to be on my side. Back to Sparkle: “I remember asking you for help at the pizza parlor, thank you very much. I thought you were through being a witch.”

  “I can’t resist the call of a young man in distress,” drawled Sparkle, clearly enjoying this.

  “I asked her for help,” put in Devon. “She told me to bring my invisible clothes to wear.”

  “Spoilsport,” said Sparkle.

  “Charming,” I conceded. “Well, did the superior witch manage to take off my inferior little curse?”

  She looked disgruntled. “No. It’s like you glued it on. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “She’s been working really hard at it too,” said a deep voice. I looked up to see Leo watching the whole thing with an amused expression. I could see that Sparkle and Devon’s closeness didn’t bother him one whit, and I wished I could feel as manly and secure as he obviously did.

  Sparkle, meanwhile, was looking at me with an expectant expression. I knew what she wanted.

  “Thank you for trying to break my hex,” I muttered, my humiliation complete.

  “Any time,” she said grandly.

  “In the meantime, we have something you can definitely help us with,” said Poppy. She outlined what we had figured out so far. “So we want to, first, make a pentagram, and second, summon the demon out of the lamp. I figure the more witches, the better.”

  But Sparkle’s face was grim. “I’ll go,” she said, “if only to stop you two idiots from destroying all of us. But Leo is absolutely staying here.”

  “And Devon,” I put in. “You’d better stay here, too.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Leo in a rumble.

  The guitar rose as invisible Devon stood up. “I’m not staying behind.”

  “Leo,” said Sparkle. “You don’t understand. If anyone finds out what you really are—”

  “What I really am?” said Leo, his eyebrows raised.

  “I mean—”

  He forestalled his girlfriend. “It’s only the witches who want to get me. Demons don’t care, right? They don’t cast spells?”

  “No,” Sparkle admitted.

  “Then I’m coming with.” He crossed his arms in a way that said it was final.

  “And I’m invisible,” said Devon. “He won’t even know I’m there.”

  I could see we were being overruled. “If you promise to stay safe,” I said.

  “I will,” promised Devon.

  “You know what happened last time,” I said.

  “What happened last time?” said Poppy.

  “Demon took over his body,” I said.

  “Briefly the most popular boy in school,” said Devon.

  “Devon…”

  “I’m kidding. I’ll be careful.”

  * * *

  Leo had a convertible, but it wouldn’t fit five. We piled into Ingrid’s SUV. Sparkle took one look at the dog hair all over the backseat and called shotgun. I got in the back, sandwiched between the two boys. Given that the football player took up more than his fair share of the backseat, and Devon didn’t appear to be there at all, anyone who looked at us would probably have thought I was intentionally cuddling with Leo. Sparkle, content in the front seat, didn’t seem to feel threatened by this a bit.

  I sighed and leaned my head against invisible Devon’s shoulder. For the first time since I had hexed him, he didn’t pull away. An invisible hand stroked my hair.

  “I really do forgive you, you know,” he said in a low voice.

  “You do?”

  “I know it goes with the territory. Besides, I’ve been thinking.”

  “You have?”

  “I have to have something to do while applying a heavy layer of base each morning. How do girls manage it?”

  “I don’t,” said Poppy from the front.

  “I enjoy it,” said Sparkle. “Speaking of…” She pulled some glittery eye shadow out of her purse and began reapplying it in the mirror.

  “Turn on the music, will you?” said Devon. “I want to talk to Cam.”

  Poppy laughed. “We’ll talk about demons. Sparkle, have you summoned one?”

  “No, but I know the theory.…”

  “Anyway,” said Devon, his voice low and in my ear, “the point is, I know I have to solve this myself. The stage fright part, I mean. It’s always been true, and it’s still true. It’s not your problem to solve.”

  “I’m only trying to help—” I started to sit up, but he gently pul
led me back to him.

  “And I appreciate it. But you have enough going on. Sparkle caught me up on everything. I should be helping you.”

  “You do?”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week. I can’t sit around singing about butter and ignoring everything going on around me. I want to help.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “You never know,” he said, and I could hear the amusement in his voice. “Invisible guys might be useful.” Invisible lips brushed my cheek and I blushed.

  “Can’t you save the invisible kissing till after we trap the demon?” drawled Sparkle. She was looking at me in the mirror.

  “You’re just jealous,” Devon told her, amusement in his voice.

  “Fighting words,” Leo admonished Devon, but I could tell he was laughing too.

  “Don’t make me pull over,” said Poppy.

  I snuggled closer into Devon’s arm, and for a moment just let myself imagine that none of us were witches or shifters or invisibly hexed. Friends, hanging out together. Off to get ice cream or go skiing or do any of the things that normal people did.

  Sparkle sniffed. “So sue me that I don’t want to encounter this stupid coven hex. That food poisoning spell I did made everyone sick for a week.”

  “I’ll hold your hair, babe,” promised Leo.

  Or maybe, in some way, it was better that we all had this bond. We all knew what it was like to deal with the witch world. We understood things about each other that no one else ever would.

  I wondered if the coven had ever been like that, once upon a time. A group of witches that actually cared about each other, had the same goals.

  And I didn’t mean goals like taking over the world.

  “Was it always terrible?” I said to Sparkle. “The Cascadia Coven?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Only I enjoyed that, the first time around.”

  “Wait, how are you still on the coven anyway?” I said. “If the last time they met was right after my father disappeared, then I would have been three-ish and you four-ish. Hadn’t you already taken your amnesia spell and regressed to being a kid?”