by Rhys Ford
Thomas and his mother’s attention was drawn toward the thicker trees when they heard shouting.
“Kevin-James! Kev!”
“Dude, where are you?”
“Come on, man. We’re going to be in trouble!”
Both hunkered down on their heels while Kat drew the wards that protected their spell circle to conceal them from the search party. Thomas’s magic was new. He’d only started practicing with any sort of confidence since puberty hit. He wasn’t weak, but he could be sloppy, which was why Kevin-James was staring at them both with wide-open eyes instead of drooling and snoring. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Shhh!” she hissed, reaching over to cup the side of his face and press her thumb over his lips to silence him. Thomas could see the strain in her eyes. She had to balance the magic of the coven while borrowing from the wards to keep them hidden. It was like trying to direct a fire hose with your bare hands, and he wished he could do something to help her. He prayed to the goddess that being quiet, and keeping Kevin-James from becoming more alert, would be enough.
He nodded silently and watched as the trio of Boy Scouts came loudly toward them, no longer trying to be cautious in their midnight wandering. Unlike Kevin-James, they didn’t seem to notice the singing and dancing, nor the blue flames reaching toward the full moon. They were focused on keeping each other in sight, which made sense since he could only assume that Kevin-James had wandered off by himself or been left behind.
Inches beyond the glamour that was shielding the three of them, Thomas noticed something shiny in the dirt. Darting toward it, he carefully reached through the shimmering magic to grab a brass-cased compass with the initials KJB etched on the back. He tucked it into the pouch he had slung across his body and scooted backward when one of the boys came toward him. He barely made it to safety without getting his hand stepped on.
He met his mother’s dark eyes, hoping she understood why he took the chance. If one of them found the evidence that Kevin-James Whatever-the-B-was-for was near, they’d never get rid of them to bring the boy back to the Boy Scout camp. She tilted one hand and gave him a thumbs-up that made him beam at her.
It seemed to take forever for the trio to give up, but neither Thomas nor his mother dared speak out loud or move until the calls for the missing boy faded in the distance. And it couldn’t have happened soon enough, since Thomas’s original spell was starting to crack. Kevin-James was blinking, and he looked like he was trying to talk.
This time Thomas was calmer, and he did the right spell, sending the kid into a deep sleep while his mother let the glamour she’d been holding twinkle away in the night like a swarm of fireflies. “He’s out. I should’ve let you do it, since you can make him forget us. But he was coming to.”
“It’s all right. Make him think it was a dream,” she said as her shoulders slumped from holding the spell for so long. “I’m worn out. You can do it, sweetie. Just concentrate. It’ll be easier. You know his name now. Names are power.”
“LET’S GO, Kevin-James,” Thomas said as he shook the boy, breaking the spell he’d cast on him. While Kevin-James slumbered, Thomas had raced into the camper he and his mom had driven from San Diego and pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of Converse. If Kevin-James remembered anything, it’d help if it wasn’t being walked through the woods by a naked guy.
“Who?” The kid blinked at Thomas and pushed his glasses up his nose with a frown.
“I’m a counselor,” Thomas told him, and it wasn’t a lie. He did help with the younger kids at the coven’s camp, which included his pain-in-the-ass younger sister, who’d insisted on tagging along to bring the Boy Scout home. “I’m going to take you back to camp.”
“What’s that smell, Thomas?” Jules asked as she helped Thomas pull Kevin-James to his feet. “It’s icky.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas answered.
“Skin So Soft,” Kevin-James muttered. “Keeps the bugs off.”
“And it does a stellar job of it too.” Thomas looped his arm around the younger boy’s shoulders to help guide him through the woods and looked at his sister. “You can come, but be quiet. The more he hears, the harder it’ll be for me to make him forget. Okay?”
“Okay.” Jules trotted to Thomas’s other side to keep out of the Boy Scout’s view as much as possible. “But can I say one more thing?”
Thomas let out a heavy sigh, rolled his eyes, and nodded.
“He’s cute.”
“He is,” Thomas agreed. “Keep an eye out for trouble, please. I need to make sure I have the spell right.” He was nervous. He’d never cast a spell on a normal human who didn’t know it was coming before. This wasn’t him practicing the work. This was him doing it, and it was a big responsibility. If he messed up, they might have hordes of Boy Scout parents storming their camp with pitchforks and torches, stringing up the witches to keep them from corrupting their little angels.
Humans were not nice to people who were different or things they didn’t understand. That was something every different person on Earth knew.
KEVIN-JAMES woke up just outside of the picnic area of the camp. His hair was full of twigs and pine needles. Any exposed skin was welted from bugbites and scratches. His mouth tasted horrible, and he wanted a big bottle of water. And a shower, because he smelled like he’d been rolling in a campfire.
“He’s over here!” One of the counselors ran toward him, wearing his official camp T-shirt along with the scarf from his Boy Scout troop tied around his throat. “I found him!”
“Not so loud,” he said as he rolled onto his stomach and slowly climbed to his feet. A wave of dizziness hit, and he had to grab the nearest picnic table to keep from face-planting into the turf. “My head hurts.”
He sank onto the bench and scrubbed at his face with both hands, not looking up until one of the counselors tilted his face back to get a good look at him in the early morning sunlight. “What were you thinking? Going out in the woods alone at night!”
“I wasn’t alone,” Kevin-James mumbled. He was going to tell them his cabinmates were with him and how they’d left him behind all alone, but then he caught their eyes from where they were standing behind the adults. None of them looked like they’d gotten any sleep. At least that meant they’d looked for him—right?
“There were witches.” He snatched a plastic bottle of water from the camp nurse when she held it out to him and chugged down half of it all at once, which sent him into a choking and coughing fit. Stupid shit. “I saw them dancing. Heard them singing.”
“That’s just a story they tell every summer,” the camp leader said with a frown that reached right past his eyes and up to his forehead. “Did he hit his head? Should we take him into town?”
“I don’t think I hit my head.” Kevin-James ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair and winced when he got them caught in tangled hair and twigs. The back of his head was covered in debris and crap. “I think I fell down a hill?”
They didn’t believe him. He knew he’d seen witches and fairies. There was magic. “I can show you where I saw them!” He halfway stood, digging into his pockets for his compass, but it wasn’t where he usually kept it. It wasn’t in any of his other pockets either. “My compass is gone.”
“Mrs. Ramirez, I’m going to call Kevin-James’s mother and have her come get him. I’d like you to drive him into town to the doctor. I’ll have her meet you there.” The leader hunkered onto his heels in front of Kevin-James and patted his knees. “Mrs. Ramirez and your cabin-mates will help you pack. We need to make sure that you’re all right.”
“But I am okay! Please don’t call my mom.” But it was obvious he was fighting a losing battle. His mother would drive at supersonic speed to come to his rescue. He’d never get to go to the witches’ circle to find evidence to prove what he saw, and he’d never find the compass either. Summer was over for Kevin-James Beshter.
One
HIS SNEAKERS slapped on the damp pavement of the Pan-Pacifi
c Exposition section of San Diego’s famous Balboa Park. KJ Beshter could still smell the green scent of the trees he’d raced through at dawn as he’d started his run, when fog still shrouded his favorite trails. The sun had just come up over the mountain, casting golden light that shone through the century-old buildings that were the foundation of the historic park. Every step and breath he took cleared his head.
It was easy when the air was still cold with the chill of the desert night, unlike the stifling heat that would choke the life out of him in a few hours. Normally it didn’t get hot in June. It was traditionally the grayest month of the year, and it was hard to tell which was more depressing—May Grays or June Gloom. Both seemed to warp reality, when you couldn’t tell what time it was with the sky being overcast for weeks at a time. But this year a Santa Ana wind snuck in from the desert. The hot air would rip the clouds and fog away in no time, and then the heat would go up.
“Jesus,” he scolded himself as he stopped to stretch his aching calf muscles at the big circular fountain that rested between the Natural History Museum and the Fleet Science Center. Propping one foot on the edge, he leaned over his knee and closed his eyes while his knee popped and the burn in his leg lessened.
“Feel better?” asked another runner. KJ recognized the guy. They seemed to be on the same schedule, but this was the closest thing to a conversation they’d had. He was dressed in running shorts, with compression ankle wraps and a shirt tight enough that KJ could easily see the cool air was toying with his nipples.
“Yeah, stepped wrong about half a mile back, but it’s okay now.” KJ, on the other hand, was wearing sweats that he’d bought at Target a decade ago and a T-shirt that wasn’t much better than a rag. His shoes were the only part of his running gear that were new, and even they were a few years old. “I can’t run during the school year, so I have to cram it all into the summer.”
“I hear that from a lot of teachers.” The well-dressed runner glanced at his smart watch and then gave KJ a nod. “See ya around. I’ve got a few more miles to go.”
WITH A heavy sigh, KJ pulled shut the sliding glass door of his apartment. The air conditioner would start in an hour or less, stripping all the fresh air he’d let in the night before. His reddish-brown hair was still damp from his shower as he made his way to what passed as his kitchen to get a cup of coffee and a bagel before he settled in for a little internet research. The bagel was a cheap national brand, which meant it was barely better than a slice of bread, and probably its only redeeming quality was its capacity as a cream-cheese delivery device.
His coffee, on the other hand, was the good stuff, beans from Kona and ground for each pot. He’d set it brewing the second he’d come home. All showers were better if the steam smelled like the coffee you had dripping away. He drank it black. It had to be quality.
Things were easier in the summer, and he could take the time to eat slowly. No need to pour the coffee into a steel jug to drink throughout the day—it was never enough—or try to find a clean sandwich bag for the bagel. Usually he ended up wrapping it in a paper towel and tucking it in with the leftovers he was bringing for lunch, since teachers didn’t have time for a food run. It irked most of the staff that the students got a longer break than they did and could hit the myriad of fast-food and taco shops in the area.
With school out for the summer, he could stop thinking about the repetitive act of spreading historical knowledge to his students. It got harder every year to keep the regular classes interested in the county-issued curriculum. Luckily his AP class allowed him to set his own lessons. He focused on the presidents who had been assassinated, their assassins, and his favorite project, the presidents who had been impeached. As he told his students, you study history to make sure it doesn’t repeat itself, which was sadly a lesson few of them learned.
KJ plopped in front of his laptop, making sure his bagel didn’t knock over his coffee, and opened his browser. At the corner of his screen, a pop-up announced for the fourth day in a row that it was his friend David’s birthday, although it no longer said it was coming soon. He’d pissed around for a week plus, and now he was going to have to go shopping. But it was early yet, barely 8:00 a.m. Plenty of time to work on his YouTube channel.
His email was full of comments from his last video, in which he’d toured Seaport Village, where there were supposed to be ghosts hanging out near the old jail. It’d been a bust, which wasn’t unusual. So far he’d failed at proving anything actually went bump in the night, and it bugged the shit out of him. KJ knew it was real. He’d seen witches and fairies cavorting when he was twelve. No one believed him then, and according to his comments, not many people believed him now. That didn’t matter, though, because whether they believed in it or not, his audience was starting to bring him in a little money. In fact, it was enough money so far this year that he didn’t need a summer job to make ends meet.
“No online shopping for you, you jerk,” he told himself as he let out a sigh that set his bangs fluttering and then took a drink of the coffee. It was perfect, and he closed his eyes to focus on its rich, nutty flavor. “You are a horrible friend, but a horrible friend with a cunning plan.”
A few of his students had given him gift cards at the end of the school year, and while he’d used the multitudes of Starbucks cards to charge his app and Amazon cards to give him a summer filled with basically free books, he had a few cards left.
“If I can find them!” he reminded himself, since he’d been putting off the search since the birthday alerts started, sure that he knew where the card for Equinox and Occult Shop was hiding. If he couldn’t find it, he’d see if they had it on record. It was a family business owned by the parent of one of his favorite students, Star Anders. He’d go buy a birthday card at Target and then shove the gift card inside and give it to David on his way to Pioneer Park.
“Has to be around here somewhere.”
It took KJ half an hour to find the gift card tucked in one of his folders from the AP class. Estelle “Star” Anders was brilliant—literally brilliant. She’d skipped three grades and was heading into her junior year of high school at thirteen. Nothing got past her. He loved reading her papers and listening to her theories in class. He was going to miss the hell out of her.
Star also had a hot dad who might be on the right team, but parent night was hardly the right place to cruise for a date. Also, it’d be awkward to date a student’s parent. That was a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
With his plan for the minimum possible shopping time set, he went back to work on his next video, calling up the plans for Pioneer Park and the rest of the research he’d gathered. Amazon was delivering the equipment he needed sometime that day, but after three notices from UPS in his email, each with a different delivery estimate, he had no idea when they’d be there. He still had two days before the solstice, so that was okay. It wasn’t as if he had to rush anything.
But the clunking sound of his AC starting made him get off his ass. He was also finished with his second cup of coffee, and the bagel had been gone at least an hour earlier. After the run he’d had, he was still a little hungry. It was time to go out before it got any hotter. He sent the marked-up map to his tablet, placed it and the Equinox card into his messenger bag, and headed out the door.
Two
“I DON’T want to go to summer camp, Dad. You didn’t make me go last year!” There was a whine in Star’s voice that was rubbing one of Thomas’s many nerves the wrong way. Normally she didn’t make him angry, and he bit the inside of his lip to quash the temptation to whine or shout at her in return. It didn’t help that she was throwing her clothes into her suitcase with enough force to nearly knock it off the bed.
“I didn’t make you go last year because you were with me in Scotland.” He leaned his lanky body against the doorframe, his arms folded across his chest. He could taste the anger and hurt radiating from her, but then she’d never been able to hide her emotions from him even when she tried.
“You were seven,” he pointed out after glancing at the hairless thing licking his privates in the bay window with one paw stretched high over his head. “And I wasn’t here when that happened.” He still thought about wringing his sister’s neck for not keeping a better eye on Star and the cat.
“That’s my point. Dad, you won’t be at camp either.” She was pouting as she shoved three different pairs of sneakers into her suitcase and then pulled out the pair she’d planned on wearing for the bus ride.
The cat met his eyes after taking one last long lick between his legs and rolling onto his side. Between the dark and light patches on his skin were small x’s from where Star had stitched up her pet after bringing his lifeless blood-covered body home. In the right light—or maybe the wrong light—you could see tire-tread marks that ended his normal life running across his stomach.
“Don’t use me as your excuse, Princess,” the cat said. Its voice was clear as a bell without any silly hint of the melodic meow he’d had before. “You love me.”
“I do love you, Nate.” She turned around and gathered her undead, sentient, talking cat into her arms and gave him a hug.
“Why don’t you tell me the truth, then?” Thomas asked as he mumbled a harmless spell that pulled everything out of her suitcase, folded it properly, and gracefully settled it all back inside. “There, now you can close it. Nation’s right. If you’ve got a reason not to go, I’d like to hear it.”