The Girl and the Witch's Garden

by Erin Bowman

  “She’s not usually like that,” Kenji said.

  Piper wasn’t sure she believed him, but the moment felt so warm, so full, so positively pleasant compared to the courses with her mother, that she tucked her locket away and picked up her fork. She wasn’t used to being seen like this, being included. Not at school, where she sat alone at lunch since Bridget had pulled away, and was always picked last for gym teams. Not at the hospital, where nurses and doctors moved around her like she didn’t exist. Not even at home, where Atticus and Aunt Eva had begun making all his medical decisions without Piper, never giving her a say.

  She smiled despite everything and stopped only when Camilla commented that the ham was a little dry and why did Piper think this was even remotely amusing?

  It was a wonderful meal, all things considered.

  Chapter Six The Garden’s Prize

  When dinner was over, Piper helped clear the dishes.

  The kitchen was large enough to hold the entire first floor of the bungalow, and it had twice the number of appliances. There was a pair of double ovens, a walk-in freezer, two fridges, and racks hanging from the ceiling that held additional cookware and dried herbs. You could easily prep a dozen Thanksgiving meals in here.

  “Thanks for coming to eat with me,” Piper said as she wiped down the central counter.

  Camilla shrugged. “It was Julius’s idea. He’s so nice it’s sickening.”

  Julius blushed.

  “Do you seriously have to cook my mom a three-course meal every night?” Piper asked. “And when and where do you guys get to eat if she stays in the dining hall for the full meal?”

  “We eat back here, between courses,” Julius said.

  “But we used to all eat together. And she used to cook with us,” Kenji said, using a step stool to hang a skillet from the rack suspended above the counter. “She kinda took Camilla under her wing, taught her everything she knows.”

  “Your mom could be a chef at a five-star restaurant,” Julius added, “but like I said, she’s been acting strange lately.”

  “Really demanding,” Kenji agreed. “Almost cruel.”

  Camilla straightened, hands on her hips. “Hey, not all of us mind having to tackle meal prep alone.”

  Julius rolled his eyes. “And not all of us want to be professional chefs.”

  “So she’s only been terrible recently?” Piper asked. “Why?”

  Camilla shrugged. “It’s a lot of work to keep this place running. We all pitch in; she’s probably just overwhelmed with your grandmother stepping out for so long.”

  Piper brushed some crumbs into the garbage and moved on to the stove top. Some of Camilla’s honey glaze had dried on the burners. “You should say something. It’s not right the way she’s treating you.”

  The children shared a quick glance. “We can’t say anything,” Julius said.

  “Did she threaten you? That’s all the more reason. She shouldn’t be a foster parent. She’s a terrible mother, and if you just tell the social worker or whoever checks in with you what’s happening, I’m sure that—”

  “Piper, cool it,” Camilla interrupted. “Mrs. Peavey is great.”

  “And we’re not going to say anything,” Julius agreed, but Kenji’s mouth quirked in a slant, like maybe he didn’t fully agree.

  “Why not?” Piper pressed. “Doesn’t someone check in on you? Isn’t that how foster care works? They should know what’s going on here.”

  “No one checks in,” Julius said. “Mrs. Mallory pulled a few strings or something. I’m not sure how, exactly, but we’re lucky.”

  “Lucky?!” Piper practically screeched.

  “I’m sure things will go back to normal once Mrs. Mallory returns,” Camilla insisted. “Your mom’s just … stressed.”

  Kenji frowned. “But what about—”

  “We’ve talked about this,” Julius said firmly. “We keep working together and stay focused on the garden. That’s the only way forward.”

  “My mom’s not stressed, she’s a monster,” Piper insisted. “And clearly unfit to be anyone’s parent. What’s the Wi-Fi password? I’m e-mailing my aunt and telling her everything.”

  “Only Mrs. Mallory and Mrs. Peavey know the password,” Kenji answered.

  “We’ve asked for it before, but they won’t give it to us,” Julius added.

  Piper peered at them, trying to determine if they were lying.

  “We understand,” Camilla went on. “It’s important that the garden remains a secret. And Mrs. Mallory doesn’t want us slipping up, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

  “People will come looking for it if we do,” said Julius in a serious tone.

  “For the garden?” Piper frowned. “Who cares about a dead garden?”

  “Your grandma doesn’t want anyone to know about the garden, period,” Julius clarified. “If the truth about it got out … If people knew what was inside …” He bit his lip. “Like I said, we’re really lucky she’s trusted us to help her.”

  “What’s in the garden?” Piper asked.

  The kids shared a knowing look. Were they all in on Julius’s spyglass trick? This was starting to feel very elaborate.

  Julius nodded toward the door, and Piper followed him into the hall, Camilla and Kenji padding along beside them.

  “The garden holds something too powerful to be trusted to hollows,” Julius explained as they headed for the stairs. “So powerful that the High Order of Magi didn’t even trust their own kind to use it wisely.”

  Piper cocked up a brow. “What?”

  “An elixir of immortality,” Julius whispered. “Whoever drinks it can live forever.”

  Piper examined them again, skeptical, but their expressions remained serious.

  “And if we find it, we get adopted,” Kenji said eagerly. “Imagine a permanent home here, at Mallory Estate!”

  “Why would you want to live here?” Piper glanced at the sweeping staircase before them, shivering as her voice echoed in the lonely house. The place was so empty and big and … cold. Plus, her mother was the worst.

  “I promise: it’s not really that bad,” Julius insisted. “We get to be ourselves here, don’t have to hide our affinities. If you’d arrived before Mrs. Mallory left, you’d understand. You’d have seen how great your mom is.”

  They reached the landing and Piper paused, staring out the window that overlooked the garden. In the twilight glow it looked more skeletal than ever, like a graveyard of bones and weeds.

  “Didn’t you say my mom and grandma were these superpowerful magi? Can’t they get this elixir themselves?”

  “They’ve been trying,” Kenji said.

  “For years,” Camilla added.

  Julius nodded in agreement, tapping a thumb on the side of his spyglass. “The High Order of Magi really hid it. This was ages ago, around the Civil War. But one of the current HOM members recently tasked Mrs. Mallory with extracting it, and she couldn’t figure it out on her own. That’s why the HOM helped pull strings in the foster care system, getting us placed here so we could help. I was first, about five years ago. Kenji and Camilla followed. You’ve been here about, what?” He glanced at them.

  “Almost two years,” Camilla answered.

  “Three now for me,” Kenji said.

  “Why do these High Order people want the elixir out of the garden so badly?” Piper asked.

  “To protect it. Think of how powerful a magic like that is!” Julius was staring at Piper as though she were brainless for not following. “In the wrong hands, it would be sold to the highest bidder. Or replicated and reproduced on a massive scale. People will only seek it out of greed!”

  “But it sounds like it’s protected just fine,” Piper argued, feeling more confused than ever. “My mom and grandma can’t get to it, and neither can you guys. If this is all true, the original High Order of Magi hid the elixir perfectly.”

  Camilla shook her head. “They left a back door, a way to access the garden.�
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  “It can be found,” Julius concluded. “And the HOM knows that magi artifact hunters are after the elixir, so we have to get to it first.”

  If extracting the elixir was so important, Piper didn’t understand why the current members of the HOM weren’t at Mallory Estate too, helping with the task instead of entrusting it to a bunch of kids. But before she could ask this, Camilla’s eyes narrowed. “And let me tell you right now, princess. You already have a family. I know your dad’s dumped you here for the summer—Julius explained everything. It stinks, but you don’t need a home like we do. So don’t bother even trying to get into that garden.”

  “Come on, Camilla,” Kenji groaned. “Don’t be like that. We need all the help we can get. Especially with—”

  “Fine. Try to get into the garden,” Camilla said, cutting him off. “But if you make any progress, you better tell us. We need this. Me and Julius and Kenji. We should be the ones to find the elixir, not you.”

  And with that, Camilla turned and strode for her room.

  * * *

  At night, Mallory Estate sounded like a sleeping giant. The radiators clacked and rattled. The walls exhaled and groaned. When a toilet was flushed nearby, a whoosh of water moved through the pipes overhead, like blood pumping through veins.

  Piper stared at the pale, sweeping canopy above her four-poster bed, Carl the penguin tucked beneath her arm. He’d faded greatly since being purchased at the aquarium, but Piper’s love for him hadn’t. Bridget said twelve was too big to sleep with a stuffed animal, but Bridget had been a crummy friend recently, and she didn’t like reading, on top of everything else. How could Piper possibly care about the opinions of a friend-abandoning book hater?

  What she cared about, in that moment, was what the kids had told her on the stairs.

  An elixir of immortality.

  Hidden in the garden.

  Locked away because the world couldn’t be trusted with it.

  It sounded impossible. But so did magi and affinities and amplifiers, and everything the kids had told her had been in such detail; it was getting hard to believe they’d go to such lengths for a prank. If magi were real, then maybe magi artifacts were real too.

  An elixir of immortality …

  Piper pictured her father in the hospital. His halfhearted smile. His bald head. His frail, weakening body. The cancer was taking everything from him—from her—but an elixir could change all that. It could end Atticus’s suffering and make him immortal.

  Don’t do this, Piper thought. Every time her father started another round of chemo or the doctors proposed a new treatment, she had let herself hope. And every time, she’d been disappointed. She couldn’t do it again—believe there was a solution only to have her heart crushed. If no one had found a way into the garden after all this time, there was no way Piper would either. She didn’t even have an affinity!

  Then again, Julius had said that before he found his affinity, he’d thought something was wrong with his vision. Piper sometimes felt like something was wrong with her, as a whole.

  People would often stare at her, looking straight through her, as though she weren’t there. The nurses did this all the time at the hospital. She’d ask how her father was doing or when he’d last eaten, and they’d gaze absentmindedly at her, then leave without answering. Other times people would do a double take, like her mother had that day Piper had played peekaboo in her closet.

  Most recently, this had happened at school. Piper had shown up late to homeroom, and her teacher had glanced at the door when she walked in. Rather than reprimanding her as he usually did tardy students, he simply went back to taking attendance, so Piper proceeded to her desk. Then, when she called out “here” after he said her name, he literally flinched, staring at her as though her existence wasn’t welcome.

  She shook her head, feeling ridiculous. She was searching for moments of wrongness in her past when everything was wrong—her cruel and distant mother, her sick father, the fact that she was stuck at Mallory Estate for summer vacation.

  She needed fresh air.

  Piper slipped from her bed, grabbed a hoodie, and then padded to the French doors, floorboards creaking underfoot. Out on the balcony, the stone was cold against her bare feet. She folded her arms across her body, shivering.

  The garden stretched out before her. Mist hung low, curling around statues, and the dead oaks glistened almost silver in the moonlight. Dried leaves skittered across the dirt paths. Piper observed them again, following their twists and curves. If she ignored the overgrown weeds, if she strained her eyes to follow the faded walkways, she could see the same butterfly shape she had through Julius’s spyglass. The wings, the body, the head.

  Something moved at the far end of the garden and she froze. From this distance, the Persian was little more than a speck of white fluff, but Piper watched it circle around the algae-covered pool that made up the butterfly’s head. Without warning, the cat jerked toward the balcony. The distance between them seemed suddenly small as the animal’s yellow eyes pierced through the night and locked with Piper’s.

  She drew back, stumbling into her bedroom and shutting the French doors. She stood there a moment, pulse pounding. Was it really out there—a cure for her father’s suffering? If the garden held an elixir that could save Atticus, didn’t Piper owe it to him to try to find it?

  She climbed into bed and told herself not to get too excited. It was just a dead garden. …

  Wasn’t it?

  Chapter Seven Laundry Duty

  Tuesday morning dawned golden, sunbeams hitting the bedsheets and warming Piper’s face.

  She dressed quickly, pulling on a pair of jean shorts and a T-shirt from a gymnastics competition two years earlier. It had been the last one she’d competed in.

  “If you’re quitting because of me, that’s a really bad reason,” her father had said.

  “I’m just over it,” ten-year-old Piper had replied with a shrug. The truth was that gymnastics wasn’t cheap and Atticus’s hospital bills were getting expensive—Piper had overheard him and Aunt Eva talking about how to stretch his budget—and really, what was the point? She could win every gold trophy and it wouldn’t heal her father. All gymnastics was doing was taking her away from him, to all corners of the state and even remote parts of New England every month.

  Tucking her hair behind her ears, Piper pulled on her Yankees cap and made her way downstairs. In the entry hall, a set of grand French doors opened directly onto the patio, but she carried on to the kitchen, stomach growling. It was still spotless from last night’s cleaning—and empty. Clearly, no one at Mallory Estate was an early bird, which suited Piper just fine. She wanted to get a look at the garden alone.

  She scrambled an egg and cooked it in the microwave instead of on the stove (which Camilla probably considered a deadly sin). Then, after shoveling down her breakfast, she slipped out the kitchen’s side door and onto the patio. The garden looked as dead as ever.

  Because it is dead, she reminded herself.

  Standing between the two headless stag statues, Piper angled her cap to avoid the morning sun, then descended the steps.

  Nothing changed. The oak alley was still skeletal, the grass brittle and dry, and of course it was. She had to hand it to Julius and the others—they’d almost worn her down.

  Piper passed through the oak alley. The dead branches cast a cobwebbed shadow of teeth and claws on the dirt. The path split eventually, branching out to create the butterfly’s wings, and Piper followed one of the walkways past a rectangular pool. Several inactive fountain spouts were positioned throughout the water, protruding from the algae-covered surface. In the center of the pool, three raised pedestals each held a statue of a woman wearing sweeping robes. Their golden finishes were dull, tarnished, and flaking. Piper backtracked to the main path and explored the other side of the garden, finding another rectangular pool with inactive fountain spouts and statues identical to the first.

  The next time that P
iper returned to the central path, her feet carried her north, away from the oak alley, the estate. This main walkway cut between the long rectangular pools she’d just explored. She could see them to the left and right, each stretching away from her, their weathered statues no larger than her thumb from this distance.

  Soon she was approaching the pool that made up the butterfly’s head. This was where she’d seen the Persian last night, she realized.

  Like the others, this pool was stagnant and covered in algae, but there were no fountain spouts, only a pedestal in the pool’s center. If a statue had once sat there, it was long gone. Piper dropped a pebble into the water and listened, but it was impossible to guess how deep the pool was.

  A tiny meow at Piper’s back sent her twisting. The Persian sat in the walkway, flicking its snow-white tail.

  “Get out of here! Scram.” She shooed the cat with her hands, then froze. Her mother was approaching. Sophia wore an ensemble almost identical to the one from yesterday, only today her shirt was emerald green.

  “Why are you out here?” Sophia said, looking between Piper and the pool.

  Piper frowned. “You didn’t say the garden was off-limits.”

  “You should be inside with the others. It’s laundry day.”

  Piper stared at her mother, certain this was some kind of joke. Then again, her mother had mentioned that Piper would need to help the others with chores.

  “You’re not moving,” Sophia drawled, impatient.

  A lump swelled in Piper’s throat. She darted around Sophia and broke into a jog.

  It was only when she was inside, searching out a set of stairs to the basement (because she hadn’t seen a laundry room anywhere else in the estate and assumed it must be downstairs), that she remembered what Julius had said about the Persian. Next time you’re someplace you’re not supposed to be, the Persian will appear. He’ll look at you, and blink his yellow eyes, and within minutes, Mrs. Peavey will show up.