by Cassandra
“Mmmm. Yeah, that means he’s already escaped, then,” Pastor Norman said and scratched his chin thoughtfully.
The old lady revised her answer. “Well, there’s nothing to do but fight it when it shows up then. Either that, or we actively hunt it down. Right now, though, it doesn’t matter. You have school. And after school, you can continue tending to the garden.”
“Grandma,” Jessica said, exasperated, “does the garden work really still matter? We should simply hunt the demon after I get out of school. You know—catch it before it causes any trouble. Plus, we need to get Roger back.”
“Yes, that’s all very true. But I said garden work for a week, so I mean garden work for a whole week. You won’t make me go back on my word, young lady. Doing so is completely against the reputation I’ve worked so hard to maintain.”
She sighed and turned away, preparing to head back upstairs so that she could get ready for school. But then she came to a halt as an idea came to her when she thought of school and subsequently, Christa. She didn’t see the girl much during school hours and therefore hardly ever had a chance to talk to her there. Besides, Christa hadn’t known much about the cards anyway. “Is it all right if we at least go back to the magic shop? I want to know more about where the cards came from.”
Pastor Norman and Grandma Ethel exchanged glances.
“That’s actually a really good idea,” he commented.
Her grandmother nodded. “I like the way you’re thinking there, girly.”
Jessica sighed again, satisfied. At least that was one victory. She’d take it.
When she left the kitchen, she spotted Chad, still knocked out on the couch. He exhaled a ridiculously loud snore.
Life isn’t fair, she thought when she reflected on how Chad no longer had to be bothered with mundane school. His attendance had only been an act anyway.
She couldn’t wait until she reached that point.
“Ugh! For the first time ever, I’m so not ready to go home yet,” Ashley complained as she walked to where Jessica stood in the hallway at her locker, preparing to leave for home.
Jessica had to admit, the school day had gone by unusually quickly. She didn’t know if this was because the hours had actually gone by more rapidly or because she hadn’t been fully mentally present for the whole day. Her thoughts too preoccupied with the demon cards, demons in general, and rescuing Roger.
“Why don’t you want to go home?” she asked.
“Well for starters, Sara can’t give me a ride home since her car has been taken away. And I sure as hell don’t want to ask you for a ride in that old cold-ass truck of yours. No offense.”
She huffed. “None taken.”
“And secondly,” Ashley continued, “my mom is making me clean out the attic. It’s disgusting up there. I guess it could be worse, though. Sara’s mom got pissed at her when she overslept because of her hangover, so now, in addition to having her car taken away, she has to clean out her basement. She said it’s full of spiders down there.” She shuddered.
“That sucks,” Jessica said. “And here I was, thinking I had it bad with garden work. Attics and basements are both creepy. I don’t know which one of you has it worse.”
“Tell me about it. Well, I better get going. The last thing I need is to get home late. With my luck, my mom would make me clean the attic, the basement, and the yard if I’m late. See you later, Jess.”
“See you,” she said, waved goodbye, and hoisting her backpack over her shoulder.
Jessica drove back to Grandma Ethel’s on autopilot and thought about what the rest of the day would bring. As soon as she stepped through the door, she found Grandma Ethel, Chad, and Pastor Norman waiting for her.
“So does this mean I don’t have to do garden work first, then?”
The old lady smirked smugly at her. “Maybe not quite this minute. Put your books away and go get those cards. Let’s head to this magic shop to get some answers. I want to know what kind of lunatic would sell demon cards out in the open like that—and to a minor, no less.”
Well, Christa’s a minor too, and she didn’t know what they were. Jessica thought before she raced up to her room, where she tossed her backpack on the bed and grabbed the cards from her desk. She hurried back downstairs, as anxious as her grandmother to get some answers.
“Hold on,” Chad said before they set off for the door. He reached for the cards and Jessica handed them over. He located the card with Roger on it. “I’ll hold on to this one. It wouldn’t do to have it disappear on us.”
“Good thinking,” Pastor Norman said.
“Yeah.” The younger man sighed. He stared at the two-dimensional depiction of his friend and shook his head. “I still can’t believe this happened. I want to be ticked off at him for being so stupid, but I halfway feel like this is my fault. As his mentor—hired by the Academy, no less—I’m supposed to teach him how to be a better witch. Maybe I haven’t done my job well enough if he let himself get sucked so carelessly into a damned demon card.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Grandma Ethel said.
“Right,” the pastor agreed. “Roger was investigating, and sometimes, investigations go wrong. We’ve all had them go wrong on us.”
Chad raised an eyebrow. “So wrong that you were sucked into a demon card?”
“Well, no. Maybe not quite that wrong,” Ethel said.
“How many of us have actually been around demon cards in person, though?” Pastor Norman argued.
He nodded. “Fair point.”
“All right, now. Enough of the Roger pity-party. Let’s find out about these cards so we can save the boy,” the old lady said, clutched her purse under her arm, and marched toward the door.
“I swear, these people here better tell me something,” Ethel muttered as she clambered out of Pastor Norman’s truck after he parked in front of the magic shop.
The others followed closely behind her as she opened the shop’s door. The bell above it chimed.
“Good afternoon,” a voice greeted them.
Jessica looked toward the checkout desk and saw Christa. When she noticed Jessica, she smiled cheerily and waved. “Hi, Jessica.”
“Hi, yourself,” Grandma Ethel said rather harshly and stormed toward the girl. “Where’s the owner of this shop?”
“My mom?” Christa said. She looked worriedly at Jessica before her gaze darted quickly to Pastor Norman and Chad. “Um… Is something wrong?”
“Yes, very much so,” the old lady said. She snatched the set of demon cards from Jessica’s hands and placed them on the counter. “Where did these come from?”
Christa stared at the cards for a moment. “Oh, yeah…” She looked at Jessica again. “You bought these last time you were here. Like I said then, I really don’t know where they came from. I forgot to ask my mom.” She glanced at Ethel once more. “Was something wrong with them? Do you guys need a refund?”
Grandma Ethel huffed and appeared to be milliseconds away from making a smart retort, but Pastor Norman intervened before she could say anything. “Excuse me, young lady,” he said, “is there a chance you can call your mother for us?”
“Well, she’s not in at the moment, but I can take you to the back room and call her for you.”
“Yeah, just do that then,” Grandma Ethel said.
“Um…okay.”
“Thank you,” the pastor said and nodded politely.
Christa looked at Jessica again, and Jessica shrugged apologetically and tried to convey the message that she would explain as soon as she could. She seemed to understand and nodded before she turned back to Pastor Norman and Ethel. “Follow me, please,” she said.
Jessica pivoted on the spot, uncertain whether to go with them or not. On one hand, she wanted to listen in on the conversation. However, she could see her grandma was in a difficult mood and felt it might be better to wait for them to finish the phone call and report back to her afterward. Plus, she halfway hoped Christa would give P
astor Norman and Grandma Ethel some privacy during the phone call and return to the front of the store so that she could apologize for her grandma’s rude tone.
“Will you wait here?” Chad asked and interrupted her thoughts.
She nodded. “Yeah, I think so. You?”
“I will if you will. Somehow, I’m not very keen to leave you unsupervised in this shop. I mean, last time you were here, you bought a pack of demon cards.”
“Ha, ha.” Jessica rolled her eyes. She glanced around the store and wondered vaguely if she had somehow been set up. It seemed unlikely, though. After all, how could anyone have had the foresight to know she would come to this particular store and find those cards?
I wonder if there are any psychic witches? she pondered. She was about to ask Chad when she heard Christa return, having left Pastor Norman and Ethel in the back, presumably on the phone.
“I’m really sorry if something went wrong with the cards,” she said. “I don’t know where they came from. And based on how things sound back there…” She nodded to where she’d left the pastor and Ethel. “Well, my mother doesn’t seem to know either.”
Chad sighed. “Well, that’s unfortunate.”
Christa looked from him to Jessica. “What happened?”
Jessica exchanged glances with Chad. She could tell from the way he looked at her that he didn’t want her to disclose that information. Christa continued to stare expectantly at them.
She shook her head. “Sorry, Christa. They’re a little…complicated, that’s all. The magic was more advanced than any of us anticipated and um… We want to know more about them.”
A silence stretched between them and Jessica knew Christa hoped for more elaboration. She honestly didn’t know what else to say, and Chad wasn’t much help. He had cleared his throat, stuffed his hands in his pocket, and now paced back and forth.
In the quietness, she suddenly noticed the music playing in the background. The current song had just ended, and a song from the band she and her friends had seen in concert came on. “I love this song,” she said, thankful for an abrupt way to change the subject.
“Me too!” Christa said. “Did you know they were in town for a concert? I’m so pissed that I missed it. Ugh!”
“You won’t believe this…” Jessica smirked.
“What?” Christa asked.
“I was there. At the concert.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
At this point, Chad rolled his eyes and ventured farther into the store, not interested in hearing a couple of teenage girls discuss their rock star crushes.
“How was it? Are they any good playing live?” Christa asked.
“It was awesome,” Jessica said. “And yes, they sound great live. Some friends and I went. I wish I had known you were into them. I would have invited you along. One of my friends won a bunch of tickets off the radio.”
“Next time, I’m all in,” her companion said. “Even though they don’t tour much, do they? Next time they come around, I’ll probably be at the Academy.”
“The Academy?”
Christa nodded. “Yeah. After finishing at Fenwick, I’ll go to the Academy of Advanced Witchcraft.”
“Me too,” Jessica said. She simply stared at Christa for a moment, so relieved that she would know someone else when she started at the Academy. Knowing Chad would have its perks, of course, but it wasn’t the same as knowing someone her own age. And female.
She pulled her phone out. “Okay, we have to exchange numbers and keep in touch because I don’t see you enough around Fenwick.”
“Right.” The girl retrieved her phone as well. “So, do you know what coven you’re in, or going to be in?” she asked after they’d exchanged numbers. “I’m in the First Coven. The nature one.”
“Really? How is it?”
Christa grinned. “Pretty cool. I can talk to animals and stuff.”
“I don’t know what coven I’m in yet. Talking to animals does sound pretty neat, though. I think—”
At that point, Chad suddenly returned. He cleared his throat loudly and interrupted the flow of the girls’ conversation. When Jessica looked at him, she was confused to see an expression that looked suspiciously like jealousy. Then it dawned on her what his problem was.
The coven talk. He still wanted Jessica to be a part of his coven, and obviously didn’t want anyone to sway her decision.
“Come here for a second, Jessica,” he said and pretended to need her for something.
She blinked at him. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” He blinked back and tried to look innocent. “I want to show you something.”
she sighed. “Sorry,” she said to Christa. “I’ll be right back.”
“No problem.”
Jessica momentarily caught the girl eyeing Chad again and realized that like her other friends, she probably thought he was cute.
If only they knew he is nearly thirty years old, she thought in real amusement. “What is it?” she asked once she reached him.
“Um…” He stood before a tall shelf and did his best to feign interest. “Crystal balls. Have you ever seen them before?”
She rolled her eyes and glanced at the crystal balls. Even though she actually did find them fascinating, she didn’t want to show her interest because she knew this was so obviously a ploy he had concocted to get her away from Christa and from learning more about the nature coven.
Before long though, Jessica found herself swept away by the magic of the shop as she roamed the aisles and marveled at all the supplies there. Somehow, it seemed even bigger than the first time she’d seen it. She could only assume that she’d been so excited to step foot into a magic shop last time that she hadn’t been able to process the vastness of it all.
“Jessica! Chad!” Grandma Ethel’s voice rang out from the front of the store. She and Pastor Norman had obviously finished their phone call with Christa’s mother.
“Come on,” Chad said, ready to reunite with their elders to find out how the call had gone.
“Just a second,” Jessica said, captivated by a book of spells for beginners. It looked exactly just the kind of thing she needed. She grabbed the book and headed quickly to the front. “Guys, I think I want to buy—”
“No!”
Jessica jumped. Chad, Pastor Norman, and Grandma Ethel had all yelled at her at exactly the same time.
“Put it back, now!” Grandma Ethel ordered. “You are not to purchase another item from this store until you’re thirty-five! We can only take cleaning up one mess from you at a time.”
Her face flushed a deep red.
Chapter Ten
On the ride back to Ethel’s house, she and Pastor Norman disclosed precisely what Jessica and Chad had feared they would—Christa’s mother hadn’t known anything about the demon cards.
Jessica sighed. “So back to square one, then—wait for the demon and see what happens.”
“No, not see what happens. Kill the blasted thing and carry on,” Pastor Norman corrected her.
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Grandma Ethel said with an approving nod.
They all exited the truck and headed inside the house but came to a screeching halt the moment they stepped through the door.
It took her—and the rest of them, judging from the looks of it—several seconds to understand what they heard. Jessica initially thought one of the cats was screeching in an abnormally loud manner. Then she realized what she heard was no sound she’d ever heard a cat make.
It was an unmistakable scream.
Her blood ran cold when she realized it came from upstairs. From her room.
There was only one person who would be upstairs in her room—Frank.
The demon is here. It’s attacking Frank.
Jessica reacted in the blink of an eye and raced for the stairs with the others hot on her heels.
She burst into her room and held her hands forward, ready to cast the smoke spell Chad had
taught her to kill the particular beetle-demon they expected.
But there was no demon, only Frank, who screamed for no apparent reason.
“What the hell?” Grandma Ethel said, panting behind Jessica.
Frank, however, seemed to hardly even register their presence. His eyes were glued to the TV as he jumped up and down and threw popcorn at the screen.
“How dare you?” he shrieked. “Why leave Lord Discake after all you’ve been through together? Why? Think of the kids—the kids, for God’s sake.”
Jessica looked at the screen, confused for a moment before it dawned on her. Frank was watching the Kardashians, as usual, and he now screamed at Kourtney over her decision to officially break things off with Scott Disick.
“Frank,” she said, her voice filled with exasperation, “you have to be kidding me.” Her eyes scanned the mess he’d made. Popcorn was everywhere—not only on her bed this time. It was on the floor, a considerable amount of it under the TV, and some had unfortunately fallen into the basket of clean laundry she’d set there. Even worse, it was covered in brown streaks. Jessica tensed at the sight of it. “Frank, what is that? What is that on the popcorn?” she asked and pointed with very real fear.
“Chocolate syrup. Duh,” he responded, as if eating popcorn with chocolate syrup was the most normal thing in the world. Then, as if so disgusted with Kourtney and Scott’s failing relationship he couldn’t take it anymore, Frank snapped his fingers. The channel changed instantly and he began to lick the chocolate syrup off his hands.
Chad snickered.
Jessica turned, having almost forgotten that he, Grandma Ethel, and Pastor Norman stood behind her, crowded in the doorway.
Frank continued flipping through the channels with mere flicks of his finger, and as annoyed as Jessica was, she also couldn’t help being halfway impressed.
I really need to learn how to do that, she thought and reflected on all the times she either couldn’t find the remote control or was too lazy to get up and get it to change the station. How does the TV know which channel to turn to?
