Life's a Witch

by Val St. Crowe

  As for Fox himself? He had a Facebook, and it wasn’t even set to private or anything. But he hadn’t posted on it since sometime in May, and before that, he tended to post sporadically, anyway. Didn’t seem to be much of a Facebook person. When he did post, it was mostly pictures of his cat.

  Which was weird, because he didn’t have a cat.

  I asked him about the cat the next time I saw him. We were examining the mop-things with Logan, and despite the water and the waiting, they weren’t doing any better. Three of them were shriveled now. Only one looked vaguely healthy.

  “They’re dying,” said Willoughby.

  “What happened to Mr. Mittens?” I said.

  Willoughby gave me a very strange look.

  “What do you mean they’re dying?” I said.

  “Oh, you mean my cat,” said Willoughby. “He, um, passed away. It was those scribble things.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s awful, I’m very sorry.” Poor Mr. Mittens. “What do you mean they’re dying?”

  “They don’t have enough energy,” said Willoughby. “Something about our water isn’t right. They need some kind of power. Life, exuberance, that kind of thing.”

  “Can we get it to them?” I said.

  “Maybe through more blood,” said Willoughby. “Animal blood?”

  I made a face. “I don’t know. I mean, they took the vampire blood, but after they had it, they started withering.”

  “She’s not wrong,” said Logan. “I’m sorry about your cat, incidentally.”

  “It’s okay,” said Willoughby. “It was months ago.”

  Okay, that didn’t seem right. From Willoughby’s posts, he’d been head over heels for that cat. Maybe he was just putting on a brave face or something?

  Willougby turned to me. “How did you know about my cat?”

  I shrugged. “Facebook.”

  “Right,” he said quietly. “Facebook.”

  “Back to the mop-things,” I said, not wanting Willoughby to have too much time to try to figure out that I was looking into him. “There’s got to be something else we could to do to give them energy.”

  “We’d need to bottle energy,” said Willoughby. “Turn it into a liquid we could feed these things.”

  “I actually might know a spell for that,” I said. “I learned it in one of my summer classes.”

  “Liquid energy?” said Logan. “Interesting.”

  “Well, it’s controversial, because you have to take the energy from somewhere else,” I said. “Taking energy from another person and using it yourself, it’s not exactly ethical. But our professor said that it could be okay if you skimmed some off of a crowd, like at a sporting event or a big concert or something. He also said that it’s a useful spell for subduing mobs.”

  “Sounds like quite a spell,” said Willoughby. “Can we find a sporting event or a concert somewhere?”

  “Don’t the local high schools have sports teams?” said Logan.

  “We’re not stealing energy from high school kids,” I said.

  “So, what are we going to do? Just convince a bunch of people to be in a place and expend a lot of energy?” said Logan. “How?”

  “Maybe a party?” I said.

  *

  “Well, I still have some themes I’d like to do,” Reid said over the phone. “Like an Ugly Sweater party? But it’s not really sweater weather. Or maybe Arabian Nights?”

  “Reid, it doesn’t have to have a theme,” I said. “It just needs to be a party. A big one. With a gazillion people all dancing and talking and drinking, so I can skim some energy off the top.”

  “Arabian Nights is kind of like Disney Aladdin shit,” Reid said. “That’s not very cool. I kind of wanted to do a Casino night, with card tables and chips and all that, but I don’t know how much energy that would—”

  “It doesn’t need a theme. It’s college. You can have a party because the day ends in Y and people will show up.”

  “Oh, please, Petra, it’s not that easy,” he said. “You think I can just whip up a party on no notice with no theme? You have no idea what goes into a good party.”

  “How about this for the flier?” I said. “‘Come party at Reid’s house. Why? Because it’s hot outside. BYOB.’”

  “Petra.” He sighed.

  “I’ll make them up,” I said.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “But I’ve got to skip my afternoon classes to make a playlist at least.”

  “Don’t you always skip your afternoon classes?”

  “And your point?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Estelle

  Estelle knew that this party Reid was throwing was to help Petra, but it was still nearly unbearable. As usual, the thing was way too loud, and she didn’t like having all the strangers in her place. In fact, the party seemed bigger than usual, louder than usual, possibly because Petra had gone all around the area, handing out fliers to people they didn’t even know.

  The party had barely been underway an hour before Estelle couldn’t stand it anymore. She left, and she went for a walk. She thought about walking by Fox’s apartment, but she talked herself out of it. She wasn’t supposed to see Fox, and she had to honor that promise she’d made. Besides, Fox himself hadn’t so much as said two words to her since he’d left her apartment the morning after they’d been together.

  She understood why, but it still hurt.

  She could have gone to Barley and Bells, but she didn’t really want to drink—and besides, no one was there, because they were all at her house for the party. So, she went to Ravenridge. She was working on that project for her magic history class. She was still trying to turn insects into tiny shifters, like the early mages had supposedly done with dragons and humans. She figured she needed a creature that was magic in and of itself, like the dragon was, so she had picked an insect from the other world, and she was trying to merge it with ants.

  Thus far, she hadn’t had much success. Even though she didn’t need to make the project successful in order to get a decent grade on her project, she found that she was interested in trying to make it work. A late night in the lab experimenting might be exactly what she needed.

  It was no problem getting into the Ravenridge building at night, but getting into the lab itself was a little trickier. However, considering she was such a diligent student, she’d managed to get the counter spell to the lock on the lab from the professor of her class.

  Once inside, she got out her supplies, which she kept in a cabinet in the back of the room and began to work on the latest iterations of the spell she’d been trying. She had to kill one of the insects to get the spell to work, and she’d tried killing one of the otherworldly insects and that hadn’t worked. She’d tried killing two, but that wasn’t enough either. Then she’d tried killing an ant, but that was also unsuccessful. Tonight, however, she decided that she would try to kill one of each. Maybe that was the ticket.

  She was so focused on her work that she didn’t much think through the implications of it. Sacrifice magic was dark stuff. It was all but outlawed these days, but there were mages who still did it. Those who did it through authorized means did it to create magic prisons. A prison seeded with dragon sacrifice sucked all magic out of every magical creature and every talisman that crossed into its walls. It was the only way to keep dangerous magical creatures contained.

  There were others who created certain illicit objects seeded with dragon sacrifice. Handcuffs were particularly popular. Also things like arm bands or chains or rings. Anything that could be placed on a person. Better if it couldn’t be easily removed, of course. Those sorts of objects were not strictly allowed, but obtainable through nefarious means. Estelle knew about them, but she’d never actually seen one. She was fairly sure that Logan had been in possession of one once. He’d mentioned it offhand once when he was telling stories about his past.

  Anyway, there were mages who would take a dim view of her project, and she knew that it was right on the
edge of the moral spectrum of magic. But Estelle loved knowledge. She loved discovery. She wasn’t the kind of person who would use the things that she had learned for power. She wouldn’t hurt anyone. She would only do combat magic if she or someone she cared about was in danger.

  As she breathed the words of the spell over the two crawling insects, she felt power surge through her.

  At once, both the otherworldly insect and the ant stopped moving. They were dead. The magic had killed them, sacrificed them.

  The insect bodies floated into the air in front of her, lifeless. They began to twirl in a circle and there was red smoke emanating from their bodies. Estelle breathed it in—not on purpose, but just because it was in the air—and she felt excited. Nothing like this had happened before.

  She began to speak rapidly in Latin, calling for the bodies of the two creatures to merge, for that essence to go into the other specimens she had.

  And then she felt something on the edge of her periphery, a strange darkness.

  It seemed to be composed of the red smoke, but it was almost alive, as if it had a mouth. A hungry gaping maw that sought to devour. Its yearning to consume was alarming.

  She faltered in her speech, and one of the Latin phrases came out mangled.

  Suddenly, she was losing control of the spell.

  The smoky open-mouthed thing was stronger, and it was coming for her.

  The dead insects twirled around each other like dead leaves caught in a cyclone.

  Estelle fought for calm, to bring the magic back under her control, but she was frightened, and she made more mistakes in the spell. Her voice faltered and she began to panic.

  She had to put this back. Whatever it was that she’d summoned, she had lost control of it, and she couldn’t let it roam loose. It was dangerous, and she could feel that.

  But she was at a loss to how to do that. Even as she tried to think of a counter spell, the smoke creature seemed to grow larger, its mouth growing wider, and now—deep in its throat—she could see a swirling emptiness. It would suck her in and it would tear her apart. Her flesh would be ripped from her bones, her muscle stripped bare. She would die in agony, screaming.

  She began to babble a simple counter spell, the simplest she knew. “Retexe! Retexe!” It meant to unravel.

  But the spell wasn’t enough. It had taken something far more complicated to construct this thing she’d unleashed, and it would take something far more complicated to take it apart or shove it back wherever it had come.

  And now, it closed over her hand, its smoky mouth biting into her wrist.

  It was hot, like fiery teeth.

  Estelle shrieked. She struggled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I stood on Reid’s balcony, Reid and Logan flanking me on either side, and I stretched out my hand.

  Inside the apartment, the party was raging. Music was pounding, people were dancing and talking. The liquor was flowing.

  I repeated the words to the spell that I had learned in my summer class, one of the rare spells I’d learned that actually wasn’t in Latin. This one was a simple spell in terms of the words I spoke, but it required a complicated set of movements that accompanied it, and they had to be set at precise angles or they didn’t work.

  They looked ridiculous, though.

  I moved my hand back, curling in my fingers. “Bring to me the energy. So mote it be. So mote it be.” Then I touched my head and my shoulders and my belly button. I looked like I was doing the hokey-pokey or something. I even had to turn myself around. “Bring to me the energy. So mote it be. So mote it be.” Then I put my arms above my head, kind of like I was doing the YMCA, but I had to concentrate really hard on making sure my arms were in the exact right spots.

  If they were just a bit off, I could feel it in the air, the magic sort of ebbed out, like a radio station going out of range. If that happened, I adjusted.

  “Bring to me the energy. So mote it be. So mote it be,” I said, and now I stretched both hands out towards the party-goers.

  I could feel the energy coming to me. It attached to my fingertips, and it felt fizzy, like champagne. But it wasn’t liquid yet.

  I took a deep breath. “Water to water, ashes to ashes, power to liquid, so mote it be.”

  Immediately, in front of me, the magic began to take a physical form. It was bright white and shimmering and it beaded up against my fingers like condensing dew. It began to drip down my hands.

  I nodded at Reid.

  Reid got the container we’d brought, an ancient wineskin that Reid said had been in his family for generation, which was capable of holding magic liquid. We had to use a funnel to make sure we didn’t spill any.

  The energy began to drip into the wineskin.

  I sucked in breath, channeling the power, letting the spell flow through me as best as I could.

  And it was like I’d turned on the waterworks. The magic began to gush into bright liquid, splashing off my hands and into the wine skin.

  The wine skin sprung a leak.

  Magic began to seep out of the side of it.

  “Gah!” I couldn’t say much else, because I was still keeping the spell going.

  “Oh, shit,” said Reid. “It’s cool. It’s cool. I got this.” He pointed at the wine skin. “Sarcire.”

  Nothing happened.

  God damn it, Reid. Conjugate the freaking verb, I thought. But I couldn’t say that out loud. This spell didn’t take well to improvisation. It had to be exact. I couldn’t say anything except the precise words of the spell until I spoke the counter words to end it.

  Reid furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t that work?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Estelle

  Estelle had never felt the kind of burning pain that was rushing into her body now. Something was severing her hand at the wrist, and she couldn’t stop it. She used every spell she could think of. She stopped with words, and just tried good old fashioned telekineses.

  The smoke creature wouldn’t be moved.

  She conjured weapon after weapon. But blades and bullets passed through the smoke like nothing. She couldn’t make any kind of difference.

  The smoke creature began to move up her arm, biting into the soft flesh of her forearm.

  She screamed.

  Her conjuring had brought skitters, and they were scampering down the walls, coming for her.

  And then someone was there, someone moving too quickly for her to make out anything other than a dark blur. There was a deep, guttural pronouncement, something in a language she didn’t understand.

  And the smoke creature detached from her and flew across the room to pin this other figure to the wall.

  The creature and her rescuer collided with a shelf of books and cauldrons. Everything went flying, clattering and thudding against the ground.

  And now she could see who it was.

  Fox.

  His head was thrown back, his teeth clenched.

  The smoke creature was attached to the front of his body, mouth wide, fiery fangs sunk into his shoulder.

  The skitters were still coming, crawling down over the shelves, heading for Fox.

  Fox spoke rapidly again in the guttural language. Just the sound of it made her feel dark and dank, like she was trapped underground.

  The smoke thing didn’t let go.

  Fox grunted, then let out some kind of horrible noise—so much pain in it.

  The skitters were inches from Fox.

  Estelle started across the room for him. She had to help. She conjured a gun, and began to shoot skitter after skitter.

  Fox was still wrestling with the smoke monster. He cried out again.

  And then the smoke thing suddenly disappeared, just winking out of existence as if it had never been.

  Estelle gasped.

  Fox collapsed against the ground among the scattered books and cauldrons. He let out a groan.

  She ran to him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


  Reid was fumbling through various Latin spells, screwing them up entirely, and the rip on the wineskin was widening. Energy was pouring out of it. At the same time, the energy I was siphoning from the party was still coming fast and hard, and it was all I could do to keep it turning from pure energy to liquid.

  I wanted to kill Reid. I wanted to scream at him what he was doing wrong.

  But anything I spoke that was not the spell could ruin it.

  For his part, Logan was using his talisman magic to pick up the liquid and try to force it back into the wineskin, which wasn’t really working, because more was coming out all the time, but at least he was gathering up the liquid, containing it and keeping it from going anywhere.

  “Fuck this,” said Reid. “I’ll be back.”

  What? Where was he going? Seriously?

  I gasped, having almost lost control of the spell, feeling the magic start to tune out and static creep in. I adjusted, tuned back in, kept it going.

  And Reid dashed through the doors on the balcony, disappearing between the dancing bodies.

  I couldn’t believe this.

  “Hell, Petra,” Logan grunted. “I’m having trouble here.”

  I nodded at him to let him know I understood.

  If the liquid went everywhere, this whole spell had been for nothing and we’d be back to square one. Who knew if the mop-things would hold on long enough for us to try this again?

  But then Reid came running back out, pushing people out of the way as he ran for us. In his hands, he was holding a filmy, long something-or-other. It looked like a scarf, honestly. Not one for warmth, but the kind of thing you wear with a prom dress or something.

  But then he knelt beneath the wine skin and peeled the edges of it apart, and it was a bag of some kind. It was huge. It stretched to surround the wineskin and it contained everything.

  “There,” said Reid, panting.

  “What is that?” said Logan.

  “It’s made from some fairy stuff,” said Reid.

  Logan arched an eyebrow. “Fairies?”

  “In another dimension, they apparently exist,” said Reid. “My great-grandfather or something found a portal and brought stuff back. I inherited the bag.”