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 will 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 don’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 anyways. 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 had 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, Kai, without looking at me, 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 inside 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 see 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 door 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 then 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’ve 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’s 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.”
I took more pictures of everything before we touched anything, and then I reached up to the records on the shelf first while Glen started on the spells. There was a whole row of thick, white binders with no labels on the outside. How did my mom know where to look for anything? The first one that I pulled down just held sales records from last year. The one next to it had sales records from this year. The theme repeated: they were all full of records of what my mom bought for the store and what she sold each year, going back the past ten years that the store had been open. I lifted the last heavy binder back onto the shelf. “You’d think it would be easier to keep all of this information on a computer or something.”
“I guess she just likes to do it the old-fashioned way,” Glen said. Then he stepped away from the shelf behind the work table and held something up. “I think it’s pretty obvious what this is.”
I came over to see what he was holding. It was a small cloth doll with my own black hair on its head, a piece of blue cloth wrapped around it, and chalk symbols marked all over its body. The whole thing had a thin metal chain, like a necklace, wound around it. I shuddered when I took it from him.
“What should we do with it?” I asked.
Glen took the flashlight out of my other hand. “I think it’s better if you do it yourself. Destroy it. Start by taking off the chain.”
I turned it over in my hands looking for a clasp or something that was holding the chain together, but it looked like it was unbroken all the way around. I bent the doll in half so one of the loops came loose and pulled that free, then used the slack to continue unwinding it. I put the chain down on the table and looked back at the doll. I took off the strip of blue cloth, which was made from one of my old shirts. I ripped off the hair and smudged the chalk symbols away as best as I could.
I was left with a crudely-shaped figure. The cloth was lumpy, like it was stuffed unevenly. I looked at the table and saw a small cast iron cauldron. I put the doll, the hair, and the cloth inside, saving the chain, and then glared inside at the mass.
At first, I was afraid that nothing was going to happen, but then I felt the power coming back to me. The pile inside the cauldron burst into flames. The room began to smell like burning hair and herbs.
When the fire had completely consumed everything that it could and went out, Glen handed me back my flashlight. “That’s done. One spell down, one to go.”
“I’m going to start digging through the file cabinet,” I said, so he turned back to the spell shelf.
When I started thumbing through the files in the first drawer, I couldn’t figure out what kind of organization system my mother was using. There were definitely notes about spells—many, many different spells. Were they all just spells for her clients? Some of them were labeled by moon phase, some of them were labeled by what the goal of the spell had been, and some were labeled with the client’s name. None of them were from the same year, and none of them seemed to be spells for our family.
The second drawer down was just as disorganized
and I still couldn’t find anything personal. Then, in the third and final drawer, I found a black leather-bound book tucked in the back. I pulled that out and opened it to get a closer look.
“All of these spells are too small scale to be what we’re looking for,” Glen said, coming over to join me. “What’s that you found?”
“This looks like a gardening journal,” I said, thumbing through the pages. “When she put new plants in, when the harvest happened and how much she got, when she pruned—and there’s all these sketches of where she put the plants in, which other plants they’re next to, how much shade they get—”
“I can tell that your mom is very stuck on details,” Glen said. “Are you sure there was nothing else?”
I stepped back from the cabinet. “Go ahead and see if you can find something that I missed, but it all just seems to be records of the spells that she did for her clients.” I handed him the garden journal and went back into the front room.
I found Ashleigh and Heather on the floor looking into the open safe. “Did you guys find anything?”
Ashleigh sat back and looked up at me. “Cash, mushrooms, bottles of dust and dirt and who knows what else, and other esoteric ingredients. I think some of these might be illegal. No complete spells, though. What did you guys find?”
I leaned against the counter and sighed. “She keeps notes on her clients’ spells, but nothing for hers that I can find. There are some spells, too—we destroyed the one that was binding my powers—but all of them are small, according to Glen. I can’t find any other clues. I don’t know where else we can look.” I let out an involuntarily yawn. “Besides, it’s getting late and Kai is waiting outside in the cold. Should we call it a night?”
Heather closed the safe and looked at me. “That’s up to you. We didn’t find what you wanted, and I don’t know if we’ll get the chance to come back here again. Are you satisfied that we checked everything we could?”
I thought that over for a few minutes. We’d looked pretty thoroughly between the four of us, and something was telling me that what we were looking for wasn’t here. If we missed anything, odds were that it was at the house, which was much bigger. I still believed that the spell was stronger at home, so that had to be the source.
“We did find one thing that we were looking for--the binding spell,” I said finally. “I think we’ve done everything we can. Let’s get out of here.”
I knew that I was running out of time. It wouldn’t be very long before my mother discovered that I had broken her binding spell on me and gotten my powers back, and I didn’t know what her next move against me would be. I wasn’t ready to confront her directly because she was more powerful, more prepared, and knew more than I did about witchcraft. Glen promised that he would look for a sorcery solution, but he didn’t seem hopeful.
At best, I probably had until Monday when my mom was bound to go into the shop again, and she would probably discover that the spell was missing.
When I got home from Ashleigh’s house on Saturday morning, I wanted to get straight to work, but I waited until my mom left the house. I grabbed the scrying crystal and went over the house another time. This time there were no surprises.
There were two possibilities left: either the spell was something that my mother carried around with her, which I might never be able to get my hands on, or it was hidden in the garden. I stepped outside.
I took a deep breath, stood over the first bed of herbs, held out the crystal and concentrated. It immediately began to swing wildly back and forth in my hand. I tried to move it around to see if it would move faster or slower as I went in different directions, but it didn’t change. Was it just reacting to the power of the plants themselves? This wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
Maybe a better view of the garden would help. I went to the shed and took out my broom. I stood there staring at it: what if my powers had not fully returned? What if I could not control them well enough to fly—or if I suddenly lost control in midair? I had flown without thinking about it for years, but now after knowing what it felt like to be powerless, I had lost confidence in my own abilities. The thought of falling made a chill run up my spine.
I shook myself. Now was not the time to be second-guessing. My power was back, and I had no reason to doubt that it was any different than it had been the week before. I tucked the crystal into my pocket for safe-keeping and climbed astride the broom, then flew straight up to the treetops without glancing down.
A fresh breeze touched my face as I rose, reassuring me, and I had no more trouble steering the broom than I did controlling my own hand: my power was an extension of me, and through that magic, the broom responded under my touch easily. There was nothing to worry about.
I looked down and studied the garden. I’d never given much thought to the layout of the plants before, but now as I viewed it and remembered the sketches that I’d found in the filing cabinets at my mother’s shop, I realized that there was a pattern to the way that the different herbs, bushes, and flowers were planted, more than just the needs of sunlight and shade. From this high up, the individual plants merged into abstract shapes that radiated out from the house.
I drifted over the roof so that I could see the front yard as well. Yes: although the plants in the front yard were more ornamental than magical, they were also part of the pattern from the backyard, completing a design that spread out with the house as its center.
As I traced the lines and shapes, it seemed to me that they kept drawing my eye inward to the house, pulling in tighter, holding it close, constraining it . . .
Suddenly, although I’d never seen this design before in my life, I realized what it must mean. This was the spell. I, and all of my friends, had been unable to see it because it was so large, but as I looked at it with growing horror, I knew that the power required to cast and hold such an enchantment could not be contained on a small scale like a bottle in the walls. This whole garden, carefully planted and tended by my mother on a daily basis for years and years, was devoted to controlling the minds of me, my father, and my sister.
I hovered on my broom, staring in shock. It had been right there all along—but now knowing what it was, I had no idea how I could possibly break it. The garden was that large: our family’s property was several acres, and the garden took up at least one full acre of its own. It was my mother’s life’s work, full of protection spells and wards against any kind of tampering or damage, and with the connection that she maintained to it, her power probably ran through every root and branch and leaf.
What could I possibly do in the face of all that in just five days before Halloween—two days until my mother found the broken spell at her shop?
This was bigger than any spell that I had ever seen before, and I could not do it alone. I pulled out my cell phone and called Ashleigh as I flew toward her house. I needed help, advice—anything.
When I talked to Ashleigh and Glen, there was only one possible solution that we could think of: destroy the garden.
How could I destroy the garden? I’d seen from most of my mother’s previous spells that simply destroying the physical materials of the spell was enough to destroy the power of the spell itself, but this one was full of protections, it was very old, and very powerful. If I just tried to destroy the garden alone, it could backfire and end up hurting me instead.
The second question was, how could I get my family safely out of harm’s way while I destroyed the garden? If I did succeed in breaking the spell, my mom was bound to freak out. I needed my mom to be gone so that she wouldn’t interfere with me, and I needed my dad and sister to be somewhere else—
“The three of you will need a safe place to stay for a little while, at least until you can find a new home,” Ashleigh said.
“Of course, you are all more than welcome to stay at my grandfather’s house,” Glen jumped in quickly. “There’s plenty of space for guests, and we can offer you the protection of the court.”
That pulled me u
p short. “Wait. Are you saying that we should leave—leave my mother? Like, permanently split up my family?”
Ashleigh and Glen exchanged a glance. “Your mom has been using magic to manipulate your family for years,” Glen said gently. “Do you really think that you can trust her after this?”
I knew that I couldn’t just give up on my mom without giving her a chance first. “I can talk to her. If I remove the spell—”
“Then she will do something else, maybe worse,” Ashleigh said. “It’s not a safe place for any of you to be. You need to get away from her.”
“But if she realizes what’s at stake, she’ll change. We have to give her a chance to fix this, not just report her to your grandfather and get her in trouble.”
Glen shook his head. “I don’t think that’s very likely. This wasn’t a little spell, this was a full-scale, life-altering spell that she’s maintained for years. Think about what kind of person would resort to using that on their own family. Do you think someone like that could change?”
I started to breathe faster. “But—she’s my mother.”
Ashleigh said, “Just because someone is a parent doesn’t mean they have to be a good person. I had to accept that my mother was never going to change. I think your mother could be seriously unhinged, since she’s doing things that are dangerous and illegal.”
I stood up. “I just don’t think that I can give up on her that easily.”
They stood up too, and tried to stop me from leaving, but I was done talking with them. “I appreciate your help, but this is my decision to make—mine and my family’s. We don’t need to break up our whole family over this. We can get through it.”
Glen spread his hands apart. “We still have to tell the court. We can’t let her keep doing this.”
I glared at him. “Then you’re not my friend. I wouldn’t turn a member of your family over to the police for making a mistake.” I turned and starting storming out of the house.
Small Town Witch (The Fae of Calaveras County) Page 22
