Small Town Witch (The Fae of Calaveras County)

by Kristen S. Walker

  Once I was sure that she was gone, I pulled out a notebook and started making notes about what I’d learned. There had to be something that I was missing. I sketched out a map of the house and marked every spot where I knew that there was a spell. On another page, I noted what I thought every spell did and how she’d put it together.

  I sat there staring at the finished product. There wasn’t really a lot of information. Worse, I wasn’t any closer to finding this spell than I had been when I discovered it the week before. It was tempting to think that I might have imagined it, but Lavender had shown me proof—I still remembered the sight of the thorny vine wrapped around me. So it had to be real, right? And I could trust Lavender when he told me that my suspicions were true—right?

  Then I thought about how surprised Glen and Ashleigh had been when they met Lavender, and the suspicious questions they asked about who he was. They hadn’t said anything since then, but I didn’t really have any proof that he was worth trusting or knew what he was talking about. He was just a Fae who showed up at parties, flirted with me playfully, and played chess against my sister. I was comfortable talking with him about my private life and he gave me advice—but why? I considered him a friend, but as I got older, he kept pushing for a romantic relationship. Wasn’t that kind of creepy?

  But I never had any reason not to trust him, either. I must be jumping at shadows. I was getting too nervous and stressed about all of this. I couldn’t deal with my immediate problem until I knew more about it and second-guessing everything else was not getting me anywhere.

  I put on headphones and listened to music until it was time for bed. Although I kept looking for her, my mom never came by to talk to me about what I had been doing in her bedroom. Eventually I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Powered Down

  When I woke up the next morning, my head felt weird. It wasn’t a headache, because there wasn’t any pain, and I wasn’t lightheaded or dizzy. The best way that I could think of to describe it was that the back of my head had been hollowed out in some way.

  I touched the spot, but I didn’t feel anything besides the usual mat of tangles in my hair from sleeping. When I brushed out my hair, I checked my head in the bathroom mirror, but it looked just the same as always.

  I hoped it would go away as I woke up more. I made myself black tea with breakfast, thinking that caffeine could help with a tension headache, and ate a big breakfast: toast with jam and scrambled eggs with cheese.

  When I got to school, my friends approached me with looks of concern.

  “Did anything happen last night?” Ashleigh said.

  I shook my head. “My mom never came to talk to me, and I don’t think she did anything.”

  Heather squinted at my face. “Do you feel any different?”

  I touched the back of my head. “No, just this weird head thing. It hurts a little.”

  Glen frowned and began to quiz me on the details of the control spell that my mom had put on my family.

  My memory was fine. I answered all of his questions, then reached into my bag and pulled out my notes from the night before. “Actually, I started writing things down to see if that would help me find any holes in my search. Maybe you guys can help me look them over.”

  “Wow, these are detailed,” Ashleigh said when she got a glance at the map.

  Glen nodded. “Save it for now and we’ll talk about it at lunch. We don’t have enough time or privacy before class.” He looked pointedly over my shoulder.

  I turned and saw Kai trying to peek at my notes.

  He smiled. “Hey, what are you guys looking at?”

  I closed the notebook and stuffed it back into my bag. “Just some stuff. Gee, it’s a nice day out, isn’t it? The temperature is finally going down but it’s still sunny.”

  I looked up at the sky, and my friends chimed in with other comments about the weather, but I felt like an idiot. I wasn’t trying to make Kai feel left out by not talking to him about my problems, but this one was really big and we were just starting to get close. I didn’t want to dump all of my family drama on him before we were even dating. A little voice in my head said that Heather hadn’t been my friend for very long either and I hadn’t hesitated to confide in her, but I argued to myself that that was different. Heather and I had gotten close quickly because of all the time we spent together and she confided her problems with me, too; I’d just kissed Kai. Even though I’d known him for years, I didn’t really know much about him except for how he acted at school.

  It was awkward again later when Heather, Glen, Ashleigh and I went to take our lunch outside to find a private place to talk, and Kai saw us leaving. He hurried to catch up with us. My other friends glanced at me but didn’t say anything.

  I would have to do this myself. I stepped in front of him and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Kai, but we have something to talk about and I’m not sure if you should be there.”

  He jutted out his lower lip in a pout. “Why not, Rosa? Don’t you trust me?”

  “I—” I paused and took a deep breath. Saying that I couldn’t trust him yet would just hurt him more. Maybe he would understand the direct approach. “I don’t want to dump all of my problems on you. They’re just giving me some advice on some family issues. Don’t worry about it.” I tried to smile reassuringly.

  “You don’t think that I could help you, too?”

  I shook my head. How could Kai help, anyway? Just because he could use magic to shapeshift between a human and a fox didn’t mean that he knew anything about other types of magic.

  Ashleigh came back to help, but I held up my hand. “You guys go ahead.” I waved them away. Behind me, the door creaked open and closed as they went outside.

  I shook my head and stared down Kai. “I think that this is something that doesn’t concern you. Maybe I’ll be willing to tell you about it later, but right now I need the people who have already been involved to talk to me about this. I appreciate you wanting to support me, but I don’t need you for this.”

  He stood there looking at me, but he didn’t say anything else, so I turned to go. I reached for the door and pulled—

  The door jerked out of my hand. It would not move. At the same time, the hollow place in the back of my head filled with a stabbing pain. I cringed and recoiled away from the door, shutting my eyes against whatever had happened. As if from very far away, I heard a tray hitting the floor and realized that I had dropped my lunch.

  When I blinked and came back to myself, there was an arm around me, holding me up. I turned my head and saw Kai there, looking pale with worry. “Rosa, I said, are you okay? What happened?”

  I straightened up and pulled myself a little away from him. My knees felt like jelly, but not in a good way, and I had to concentrate to keep my feet under me. “I don’t know. I just tried to open the door—”

  Kai took a step back and opened the door. It moved easily under his hand.

  I frowned. I reached out to take the door from him, closed it, then tried to open it again.

  Once more, it refused to budge. I felt the stabbing pain in the back of my head again. I stopped trying the moment that I felt resistance. When I took my hand from the door, the pain stopped.

  I said quietly, “I don’t think that the door locks are recognizing me or something.”

  I could feel Kai staring at me. In five years, I’ve never had a problem with the doors. Could they have been tampered with?

  I know next to nothing about magitek, but I can tell when a spell has been messed with recently, so I bent down to take a closer look at the door handle. I reached for my magic and—

  Ow. The stabbing pain flared again, and the feeling of emptiness—that hollow that I had been trying to ignore all day. My eyes widened. It wasn’t the lock, but me. Something was deliberately blocking me from using my own magic.

  I straightened up. “Open the door,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and calm.

  Kai opened the door and I
marched out without a backwards glance. I could hear him following a step behind me, but I couldn’t worry about him right then. I looked around to find where Glen, Ashleigh, and Heather had gone—they were at a table at the far side of the patio. I hurried over to them. “I know what she did. She put a binding on my powers.”

  They all looked up and stared at me in surprise. “How do you know?” Glen said.

  “I couldn’t open the door,” I said. “It’s the first magic that I’ve tried to do all day. When I try to do something, my power isn’t there, and it hurts like something is stopping me.” I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. “Who else would do something like this, especially right after she found out that I was looking for something where I wasn’t allowed to go?”

  Kai had caught up to me then. As he came up beside me, my friends all stopped and stared at me, waiting to see what I would do.

  “Oh, fine,” I said, taking my notebook out and shoving it at Glen. “You explain it to him, then. I’m obviously in over my head here, because now I can’t even find this new binding spell or break it without any powers of my own.” I slumped down into a chair, dejected.

  Glen said gently, “Why don’t we help you look?”

  I looked up at him and frowned. “How? It’s suspicious enough for me to be looking all over my house, since she caught me at it. I can’t exactly just invite everyone over for a snooping around my house party.”

  Heather cleared her throat. “It’s Tuesday, right? Are you still taking your sister to the library after school?”

  “Yeah, she would never let me skip it without a really good reason,” I said.

  “Then give us your house key and let us search while you and your sister are still out. You’ll already be downtown by your mom’s store, so if she decides to go home early, you’ll see her leave and you can warn us.”

  I looked at Glen and Ashleigh.

  Glen opened the notebook and looked at the map of my house. “I think we can pull it off.”

  Ashleigh nodded. “We can look for both spells at the same time. Maybe a few pairs of fresh eyes will be able to see something you’ve missed. We’ve got your notes, so we’ll know what other spells to expect, and now we know to be careful about tripping magical alarms.”

  I nodded. “Just be really careful. I don’t want my mom to catch you and start doing bad stuff to you guys, too.”

  Kai was listening to this whole exchange with a look of total confusion. Glen looked at me, then pulled out an empty chair next to him and gestured for him to sit down. “I’ll tell you what’s going on first and then we can figure out if you want to help and what you can do.”

  That afternoon I waited for my friends in town, sitting alone in front of the coffee shop and trying to keep an eye on my mother’s store. I’d asked to see if someone could come along and keep me company, but Glen, who had taken over organizing the whole operation, decided that it would be better to have more people helping at the house. Even Heather, who wasn’t adept with any particular type of magic, could still help look around for anything out of the ordinary and keep an eye out for either of my parents coming back to the house.

  Being by myself just gave me more time to be nervous and worry about what was happening. What could they find? Was this going to work? Would it be worse if they found nothing, or if they found something horrible?

  I kept glancing at my mom’s store, trying not to be obvious about it. I wasn’t going to see much from the outside, but I would see her if she left. Not many people come by to visit her store, because it’s a small town and we don’t really get tourist traffic. I couldn’t see in the window, so I didn’t know what she was doing. I also kept glancing at my phone, even though it hadn’t buzzed, in case my friends wrote to tell me what was going on at the house.

  I was so busy watching the store and trying not to appear too nervous or obvious about what I was doing, that when someone stepped up beside me and said hello, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

  My head snapped up—and when I saw who it was, I was even more surprised. He was dressed in normal human clothes—a plain brown business suit with an ugly blue tie—and he was slouching so he didn’t look quite as extraordinarily tall, but there was no disguising a Fae. “What are you doing here, Lavender?”

  He smiled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Can I join you?” He watched me until I nodded, then pulled out the patio chair next to me and sat down. “And you said you didn’t like Lavender. I’m going by Mantis now.”

  I’d forgotten to ask his new name. “Mantis?” I raised my eyebrows at him. It sounded ridiculous.

  “I thought that sounded more masculine.”

  I stared at him, but he looked completely serious. I shook my head and said again, “What are you doing here, then, Mantis?”

  He smiled and leaned back casually in his chair. “I just haven’t heard from you in a while, so I wanted to check up on you and see how you were doing with that, ah, personal issue.”

  I wrinkled up my face. “Well, that issue hasn’t gotten any better. Actually, it’s worse right now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. How so?”

  I glanced around, then leaned closer and whispered, “I’ve been looking all over my house but I can’t find anything. My mom caught me yesterday, because she had some kind of alarm set up, and now she put a spell on me to bind my powers. My friends are at my house right now trying to find something, anything, but I don’t know if they’ll get anywhere.”

  Mantis frowned. He looked thoughtful for a long moment, leaning back in his chair again and rubbing his chin. “I gave you those powers to help you, but not to be a crutch. You have to think of another way without them.”

  There was no use in pointing out to a Fae, a being made entirely of magic, how impossible it was to fight magic without powers of my own. I picked up the cup from the table and took a sip, but it was nearly empty and it had gone cold. I put it back down with a sigh.

  Mantis saw the gesture and nodded at me. “Let me buy you a refill. I could use some refreshment as well.”

  We stood up and went inside What a Drip. The after school crowd was mostly gone by now, and the owners were both lounging behind the coffee bar. When they saw me come in with a man that they didn’t recognize, they glanced at each other, and then the tall skinny one, Frank, came up to the register and said, “Hello. Who’s your friend, Rosa?”

  I looked at my friend, who was smiling in a friendly manner, and hoped that he wasn’t going to embarrass me in public. “This is Mantis,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “Mantis, this is Frank, and his partner, Tom. They own the shop.”

  Tom came up to the counter and extended his hand across to Mantis. “Why, hello, Mantis. I love your name. It’s so—burly. Do you go by Manny for short?”

  Mantis hesitated only a moment before he remembered to take Tom’s hand and shake it. “Thank you. Your shop also has an interesting name. Who came up with it?”

  Tom and Frank exchanged a grin. “It’s kind of an in-joke,” Frank admitted. “We had the idea since college.”

  Tom stepped closer to Frank so he could slip an arm around his waist. “Yeah, he’s always picking on everything, so I tease him about it. When we dreamed of starting our own business together, it was either going to be What a Drip Coffee or What a Drag Smoke Shop and Cabaret.”

  Frank rolled his eyes and laughed good-naturedly. “You were the one who wanted the second idea. That might have worked if we had found the space to rent in San Francisco, but out here I don’t think we’d get enough customers for something like that.”

  They laughed again, and Mantis smiled. “You two have been together for a long time, then,” he said.

  I grinned. “Yeah, they’re a regular old married couple, whatever the law says. They also make good espresso if you like that sort of thing.”

  He glanced at me and then at the menu. “Is that what you drink?”

  “No, I usually get the spiced chai latte,”
I said.

  Mantis ordered me another latte, and then made the mistake of asking Frank and Tom to recommend a drink for him. A few minutes later, Frank had to help us carry our order outside with a tray because he had ended up with several different small coffee shots, three kinds of mini donuts, a slice of carrot cake, and a plateful of cookies. The selection filled the small patio table that I had been sitting at.

  When we were settled and Frank had gone back inside, I finally gave in to temptation: I pulled out my phone again and sent a text message to my friends asking if they’d found anything yet.

  Mantis saw me staring at my phone waiting for a reply and passed me a cookie. “You don’t think they’ll find anything,” he said.

  I took a bite of the cookie, which was quite good—chocolate chip, but not too sweet—and shook my head. “I swear I’ve been over every inch of that house myself,” I said. “I know they’re going over it with fresh eyes, but I know that house better than any of them and I don’t think there’s anything they’ll see that I could have missed. What do I do?”

  Mantis sipped at one of the coffee shots and shrugged. “Try another tactic. Maybe it’s not in your house after all. Especially if your mom knows that you’re looking there, she might have wanted to put it somewhere else.”

  “Where else could she hide something like that?” I said. “If it wasn’t at home, then someone else in town would notice it. There aren’t any other witches here, but there’s quite a few good sorcerers, and some of them are very suspicious about strange spells.”

  “I don’t know your town well enough to answer that,” Mantis said. “I’m just making a suggestion. I am also going to recommend that you eat another cookie. You’re too short.”

  I stuck out my tongue at him. “I’m not that short! How are cookies going to make me taller?”