Small Town Witch

by Kristen S. Walker

  I kicked him. We were all sitting around Ashleigh’s living room, and he’d insisted on being on the couch next to me, which put him in harm’s way if he was going to make insensitive comments like that. I glared at him and hissed, “Don’t pick on her parents.”

  “Ow—I wasn’t!” He shrank away from me.

  Heather just smiled thinly. “It wasn’t my parents. I’ve had a lot of time when they’re not watching me because they aren’t very active during the day, and since they always wanted me to stay at home where I’d be safe, I was always looking for ways to sneak out.”

  “Right,” said Ashleigh, standing up. “So the plan is that we’re breaking into Rosa’s mom’s store in town and searching there. We’ve got to think this through. It’s in a public area, so we’d better work at night. We’ll need time to prepare, so could you all see if your parents will let you come hang out here on Friday? That gives us a few days, plus we won’t have school the next morning if we get stuck out very late again.” She looked at me. “I don’t want you getting in trouble again.”

  We all agreed. I tried not to think too hard about how it would feel to be without magic for three more days. I didn’t normally use it very often or rely on it, but it was something that had always been a part of me, and I took it for granted even though I didn’t want to practice as often as my mom told me to. Without magic, I was just a normal human like everyone else. It made me feel helpless compared to my friends who all had their own abilities—apparently even Heather made up for her lack of vampiric abilities by learning how to pick locks and who knows what else.

  We tried to make a list of items that we’d need for Friday—Heather’s lock pick set, flashlights for everyone, charms and potions to help Glen get past any magical locks and alarms. I also decided to bring my camera in case there was anything important that we wouldn’t be able to take with us, to take pictures that we could look at later.

  Before long, I had to head back home to get started on my homework and have dinner with my family. “We’ll all keep thinking about this for a few days, in case there’s anything we’ve missed,” Ashleigh said when we were saying good-bye. “Just be careful not to say or do anything that would let people know. This is not only dangerous because of Rosmerta, it’s also illegal, so we really don’t want to get caught.”

  I shivered a little when she said that. I’d never done anything illegal before. It was too important for me not to risk it, but the thought of what my friends were doing—

  I cleared my throat. “If anyone wants to back out of this, just let me know. I don’t want to force anyone to take a risk for me. You all have the option to walk away if you just promise not to tell anyone what I’m doing.”

  Heather threw her arms around me and squeezed. “Of course we’re helping you, Rosa,” she said. “You’re a good friend and we want you to be happy.”

  I looked around and saw Glen and Ashleigh nodding in agreement. “You’ve done just as much for us,” Glen said.

  I glanced at Kai, who shrugged and smirked. “I told you to trust me and let me help you,” he said. “If this is what you need help with, I’ll do it.”

  I blinked back tears and smiled. “Thank you guys,” I said. I squeezed Heather back, then went around and gave each of the others a hug, too.

  When I sat back down, Ashleigh and Glen shared a look. “There’s one more thing,” Ashleigh said gently. “We’re running out of time.”

  My smile faded. “What do you mean?”

  Glen cleared his throat. “You know your mother’s spells violate her oath to the Faerie Court. We’ve given you time to try handling the problem on your own—”

  “But we have to report what we know sooner or later,” Ashleigh finished for him. “If we know about it and we don’t do anything, then we’re breaking the Faerie law, too. What your mother is doing is dangerous and illegal, and she could be hurting other people, too.”

  My eyes widened. “So if we can’t find the spell and break it, you’re going to report my mother to the magical authorities and get her in trouble? That would rip my whole family apart!”

  Ashleigh put her hand on my arm. “We have to report her even if you break the spell first, because she’s still breaking the law. I just don’t want your family to get caught in the crossfire. I also think that since you’re her daughter, you probably have a better chance of breaking the spell than anyone else. You need to warn your family first.”

  “I’ve tried to talk to them,” I said, shaking my head. “The spell is too strong. Even when I point out the obvious problems with my mom, they excuse it and tell me to stop criticizing her. You have to let me break the spell and then talk to everyone, including my mom. If I show her how serious this is, then maybe she’ll change.” The threat of losing her whole family, let alone going to jail, had to be enough to make anyone change.

  “I think you can find a way,” Glen said. “You’ve already made it this far. Don’t stop trying.”

  I looked down at the floor. “How much time are you giving me?”

  “Glen and I talked it over.” Ashleigh took a deep breath. “Next week is Halloween, and a lot of our Fae relatives will be visiting for the party, but also for official business. It’s one of the biggest Court sessions of the year. We decided that’s when we have to tell them.”

  I shook my head. Halloween was on Wednesday. If we didn’t find the spell in my mom’s shop on Friday night, then that left only a few days for me to find it somewhere else and figure out how to break it—with no leads, and maybe without any magic. “That’s not enough time. I’ve only even known about this spell for a week, and in that time all I’ve managed to do is make my mom suspicious enough to bind my powers.”

  Ashleigh gave me another hug. “That’s why we’re doing everything we can to help you. Please don’t be mad.”

  I hugged her back, burying my face in her shoulder. “I’m not mad, I’m just—scared. I don’t know if I can do this.”

  Kai reached over and patted my back. “We believe in you, Rosa. Don’t give up hope.”

  While I waited for Friday night, I kept thinking about my dad’s journal. Had he written more about my mom? Was there more that he understood about what she was doing than I realized? In the end, my curiosity overcame my guilt, and I decided that I had to read more of it.

  I sat down on Thursday after school and pulled the little notebook out of hiding. Reading his handwriting was difficult at first, and I couldn’t figure out every word, but as I continued, it got a little easier. My dad mostly seemed to sit down and write when he was upset about something—not unlike Akasha and her diary, or me and my poetry. I guessed we all found ways to let our feelings out.

  Sometimes what he wrote about was normal stuff, like when he had an argument with one of his coworkers or lost a patient at the hospital. One old woman struck him in particular, because none of her family came to visit when she was dying. “I wish that I’d gone to see Mom when she was sick,” he wrote. “Or at least gone to her funeral. Rosmerta said we couldn’t afford the plane tickets, even though she promised she’d get our finances under control and stop sinking all of her money into her shop. We had a fight so big that I was worried the girls would overhear us. When I threatened to go by myself, she said that I wouldn’t have a home to come back to.”

  I almost threw the journal across the room in shock. I couldn’t believe that Mom would say something so harsh to Dad! Didn’t she love him?

  But as I read on, I learned that Mom was just as harsh to Dad as she was to me. “I told Rosmerta that she was working too hard on her garden all the time, but she said I neglected the family when I worked at the hospital late,” he wrote one day, and another time, “I said we could trust the girls to be good and we didn’t need tracking spells on them, but she said I didn’t know anything about magic and to leave it all to her.” There were other little things that she did that made him suspicious, like avoiding the Faerie Court and controlling the family finances so he never
knew how much money they had.

  By the end of the book, I knew I had to try to talk to my father again. Ashleigh and Glen were right to encourage me to convince him about the spell. Akasha might not listen, but Dad already knew a lot of this stuff. All I had to do was help him put the pieces together.

  On Thursday afternoon, I found my dad alone in his study, but I wanted to get him out of the house. I knocked on the door and went in without waiting for a response. “I need to talk to you. Can we go for a walk or something?”

  He looked down at the pile of papers on his desk with regret, but he nodded. “Okay, sweet pea, I’ll be right there. Let me just put this paperwork away.”

  He met me by the front door in a few minutes, and then the two of us headed down the street on foot. Leaves were scattered across the road, crunching underfoot, and I could smell a fire coming from one of the neighbors’ houses. The smoke hung low over the trees without a breeze to blow it away.

  We were silent for a while, and Dad didn’t pressure me to start talking, but I knew that I had to say something. “Don’t be mad. I—I read your personal diary, which was wrong, but I need to talk to you about it.”

  Dad frowned. “I’m not sure how you found that. It couldn’t have been an accident, and you must have known when you saw it that it was private.”

  “Actually, I was looking for something else.” I took a deep breath. “I was looking for one of Mom’s spells. She’s actually got them hidden all over the house.”

  “I know that she has spells to prevent bugs and things—”

  “Not just that.” I looked over at him to watch his reaction. “Spells that control us, too, and invade our privacy. And I know, from reading your journal, that you already know about some of them, and you feel uncomfortable about them and some of the other things that she’s done.”

  Dad stiffened and his face turned pale. “Look, Rosa, the things that I wrote down were just one side of how I felt, written when I was particularly angry or upset. I wrote them to get them out of my head and help me work through them, not list a litany of your mother’s faults. You can’t judge the situation based only on a few things I wrote down years ago.”

  “I know—you always find a way to talk yourself into agreeing with her and not pressing the issue. Do you ever wonder if it’s really you thinking those things when you give in, or if it’s some kind of spell that she’s put on you to make you stop questioning her?”

  Dad stopped short in the middle of the street and looked at me. “Rosa, you can’t go making wild accusations just because you and your mother aren’t getting along right now. Using magic to control people like that is against the law.”

  “I know.” I folded my arms. “I thought it was crazy, too, but then I found all of the other spells she cast on us—to track where we are, to keep me from dating anyone, to keep you attracted to her—” I looked down and cleared my throat. “You can, uh, check under your bed if you don’t believe me about that one. But the worst proof of it is, when I started looking for this spell, Mom cast another one to bind my powers and keep me from using any kind of magic.”

  His eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  I threw up my hands. “I can’t even open the doors with the magitek locks at school, and I should be able to do that even without witchcraft. I have less magic in me than a rock.”

  Dad glanced at the curve in the road, where our nearest neighbor’s house sat, and lowered his voice. “How do you know that it was your mother who did that? Maybe another one of your spells backfired.”

  “Because I wasn’t doing a spell, Dad!” I shook my head. “I was looking for her spell in your bedroom, and I triggered a magical alarm that let her know I was snooping there. She didn’t say anything, but the next day all of my magic was gone.”

  His eyes darted away to the side and then back to me. “Did you ask her about it?”

  “No, I can’t. I can’t confront her, because she always has more power and knowledge than me when it comes to magic, and I’m realizing that there’s so much she never taught me, maybe deliberately so I could never figure out what she was doing. And—” I wrapped my arms around myself. “I’m scared of her, Dad. I don’t know what she’s capable of or how far she’s willing to go in order to keep us under her control. This stuff that she’s messing with could get her in big trouble with the Faerie Council, and I think she’s worked very hard to keep all of this a secret from them.”

  Dad shook his head slowly. “Even if all of this is true, sweetie, what can I do? I don’t have any magic to stand up to her, either. If you think that confronting her with it is just going to make her angry and lash out, what can we do?”

  I stepped closer to him and gripped his arms. “You have to believe me, Dad. You have to resist her influences and look at what’s really happening to our family, because we’re not the perfect happy family that she wants us to be. When I find this spell and break it for good, then you have to help me talk to her so we can get her to stop doing this, okay? Promise me.”

  Dad looked down at me, and I thought that his eyes were starting to look a little too wet. He wrapped his arms around me and stroked my hair. “I don’t know, Rosamunde,” he murmured into the top of my head. “I just don’t know what to believe. I’m sorry.”

  I pressed my face into his chest and struggled to hold back the tears. It felt like I was crying a lot lately. “Just try, Daddy, please. Try to think about it.”

  “I’ll try.”

  On Friday night, the five of us all went to hang out at Ashleigh’s house for the evening. To pass the time, we ordered a pizza and watched a couple of movies. I didn’t remember what any of the movies were about, partly because I was nervous, and partly because everyone was talking over them and making fun for most of the time anyway. I could tell that they were nervous, too, because they all talked a little louder and laughed a little harder than they normally did.

  We’d decided to wait until midnight. By then, Ashleigh’s dad was already in bed and we knew that Madrone would be empty because everything was closed. We collected our gear and went out to Glen’s father’s car quietly. To fit the five of us in, we had to put three people in the back seat. Somehow I ended up in the middle squished in between Heather and Kai. I felt awkward. I’d sat next to Kai on the couch and stuff before, but always with a few inches between us. Now his thigh pressed up against mine. My heart started pounding.

  I looked sideways at Heather to see if she noticed. She gave me a sly smile. I realized that the seating arrangement must have been planned.

  About halfway through the drive, without looking at me, Kai reached over and took my hand. I stayed very still, but I started to smile, too. I felt warm all over. My face must have been bright red, but I didn’t care who could see it.

  When we finally got into town, Glen parked the car on a side street and we walked to the shop. We kept our eyes open and looked in every direction, but we didn’t see anyone else. There wasn’t much light from the setting half moon, and there were only a few dim streetlights along the road with a lot of dark spaces in between.

  Kai gave my hand a final squeeze and moved off to act as our lookout. Transformed into his fox form, he’d have the best hearing and night vision of all of us. I turned to watch him go, but he disappeared behind a tree and I couldn’t see him. I’d just have to trust that he could see us.

  Ashleigh turned on a small flashlight and cupped it in her hand so it was just shining on the door handle. Glen took out his scrying crystal and held it up to watch for any alarms that could be triggered.

  Heather crouched in front of the door and pulled out two thin metal bars from her pocket. She slipped the smaller one inside the lock, then nodded to herself. “This shouldn’t take long,” she whispered.

  “Do you need more light?” Glen asked.

  “No, this is all by touch.” Heather slipped the second piece of metal inside the lock and turned her wrist a little so she was applying tension to the lock. I couldn’t s
ee what she was doing next, but there was a series of faint clicking sounds as she manipulated the lock pick inside. Then the lock turned.

  Without moving, Heather looked up at Glen and nodded. “Your turn,” she whispered.

  Glen handed his crystal to Ashleigh and opened a bottle of a strong-smelling liquid. He tipped a little out onto his fingers, then reached over Heather and traced a sigil on the wood of the door. Then he stepped back and nodded. “It should be okay now.”

  Heather turned the handle and the door swung open. We all paused and looked at the crystal, but nothing else happened. Heather stepped inside first, did something else to the lock, and put her tools away. “Okay, let’s start looking.”

  Glen went in next, followed by Ashleigh, and I came in last. I closed the door behind me.

  “It won’t be just lying around the shop where anyone can find it,” I said. “It’s either behind the counter or in the back room.”

  Ashleigh took her scrying crystal to examine the space behind the counter. Heather followed her and started to work on the lock to the cash register. “I’ll do this one, and I see a small safe under the counter that I’ll work on next.”

  Glen followed me through the door into the back room, where I’d never been allowed to go before. When we shined our flashlights around, I saw that she had a much larger work area set up with more tools than she had at home. I looked over everything with a mixture of awe and disappointment. Then I remembered my camera and started taking pictures of how everything was set up. “I don’t think I even know what half of this stuff is,” I complained.

  “I think if you’re serious about becoming a fully-trained witch, you’re going to have to look for a better teacher than your mother,” Glen said.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Where do we start? There’s so much stuff here.”

  Glen turned around and looked over the room. “Well, that half of the room all seems to be stock for the store, so I don’t think we need to go through it all. There are records up on those shelves we can look at, and probably in that file cabinet, too. Everything on this table just seems to be tools, but that shelf over there is all spells that she’s made. It will take me a while to go through them and guess at what each of them does.”