Mis-Spelled

by Stacey Alabaster

  Teddy gave me his number at the end of the evening and promised me he would be calling me for a second date. But he’d also claimed to have only downloaded the app the day before. That meant he wasn’t a suspect. Still, I nodded politely and agreed that we would be in touch.

  The following night, Vicky was staring into the full-length mirror in my room, looking at her reflection like she was a stranger. I’d just passed her a pair of my dangling ruby earrings, and she was wearing a tight-fitting black dress that she had borrowed from my mum, now that her old fuller-figure wardrobe didn’t fit her any longer. Not a hair out of place, which was unusual for Vicky. She looked really quite stunning and a lot more mature than she usually did. It was a great outfit—she had a long roster of dates that evening, and so I gave her hair an extra spritzing of hairspray. I had done the Thursday night shift, but Friday was her time to shine

  It was time to leave, but she was still staring into the mirror. Her feet were rooted in place. Even when I tugged on her arm gently and told her that her first date, Ryan, was waiting for her, she just shook her head sadly and kept staring into her own eyes in the reflection.

  I finally got her out the door and into the car, but by the time we were at the front of the coffeehouse again, she went back to full-on stuck mode. It was like someone had performed a freezing spell on her. I waved my hand in front of her face and asked if everything was all right.

  “I’m sorry,” Vicky said in a quiet, shaking voice. “I just don’t think that I can do this . . .”

  “You mean work on this case?” I asked. We had been primping and preening her for over an hour, and this was the first sign I was getting that she had cold feet about going on any of the dates.

  She shrugged and kept staring at herself in the reflection of the window, the same way she had done at home in the mirror, as though the very image of herself was cursed. “Ruby. What if I go on another date, and another guy dies?”

  “Vicky, you know that is not going to happen, right?” I asked her as I spun her around and gripped her by the shoulders. But I could see from the look on her face that she did not know that at all. So, I knew what I needed to do. I let go of her shoulders and nodded. “Don’t worry. I will take care of the dating side of this case. You just take care of the other stuff.”

  “Oh, I will take care of it, all right,” she said in this strange voice, and turned around and disappeared into the night.

  I was still shoulder to shoulder with people in my own dining room. Well, every room lately. Squeezing past people to get to the bathroom, never being able to find a clean plate to eat off, always tripping over pairs of shoes at the front door. I felt like I was living in a boarding house. I had no idea how Teddy and his six kids did it, all under the same roof. But he was right—at this point, adding a few extra people to my house would barely make a difference.

  I’d told mum about a couple of my dates. “You don’t want to date a guy who already has so many kids,” she warned me. “You’re still very young. That’s too much baggage for you.”

  Well, it wasn’t as though she hadn’t left me with enough baggage. These weren’t even real dates. If I started thinking about real dates, I would have to start thinking about how I would ever date a human and explain to them the rather delicate matter of me being a witch.

  It was Saturday and the farmers’ market was on in town, which I knew Mum and Vicky would both be going to, as would all the witches in town. I was looking forward to getting some peace and quiet for the first time in a week, but Taylor was still in the kitchen puttering around while he heated up his oatmeal, and Mum was hovering around too, even though if she didn’t move quickly, all the good items from the farmers’ market were going to be sold out and gone.

  I was in the next room over, the dining room, eating my cornflakes and scrolling through my phone, but Taylor was in the kitchen in full view of me, and I heard him let out a loud gasp. I put my phone down, and I could see him standing there with a shocked look on his face. He seemed frozen in place. I was dealing with a lot of that lately.

  He called me over, his voice filled with worry.

  “What is it?” I asked as I rinsed out my bowl, and Mum followed me curiously to see what was going on.

  Taylor pointed toward the clock, which was a meter to the left of the fridge. His arm was shaking, but it was another arm I was focused on—the second arm on the clock. It was moving backward, and Taylor was asking what on earth was happening. At first, I just thought that he was so young that he didn’t know how to tell analogue time—but that wasn’t what was going on. The second hand was spinning very quickly in a counterclockwise direction. Just looking at it made me feel dizzy.

  “Must be a faulty clock,” I said, but I had never seen a clock doing anything like that in my life.

  Mum stepped up and added, far too quickly, “Or maybe the magnetic fields are off . . . Hmm, yes. There is a certain phenomenon that can cause this sort of thing to happen. I wouldn’t worry too much, dearie. Just a strange little thing. Why don’t you enjoy your porridge, and don’t worry about it, hey?” She sounded far too defensive, far too eager for Taylor to believe her.

  I glanced over at her and saw that there was real fear dawning on her face. This was not something that human ears should be allowed to overhear, that was the impression that I got. I put my clean bowl in the rack to dry and excused us to the living room—“Some girls’ business that we need to discuss”—so that it was just her and me in the room. Taylor nodded and said that he had to give the cows their feed anyway.

  Mum looked grave. “What is it?” I asked her. As the elder witch, she had far more experience in any sort of paranormal activity than I did. And at that moment, I was grateful to have her to look up to, to show me the ropes. Maybe we had missed a lot of time when I was younger, this sort of witch-mother witch-daughter bonding time, and even though that was time we couldn’t get back, we could certainly make up for it now.

  She came in closer toward me and lowered her voice. “Someone has cast a reversal spell . . . and they just might have messed with the fabric of space and time while they were at it.” She glanced back at the clock and shivered, and then looked up at the ceiling warily, as though it might collapse at any second. Or like the sky might start falling.

  “A reversal spell?” I asked.

  She nodded. “They have tried to undo a very important event. Something serious. Not just a minor thing that no one would really notice and thus have little impact, but an event that is life-altering. Maybe even life and death itself.”

  I gritted my teeth and nodded.

  I knew exactly who had done it, as well.

  Vicky.

  4

  Just two witches out on the town. Mother and daughter. Like it always should have been. Oh well, we were working together now. Maybe we didn’t even need to have that serious conversation about why she had hidden the truth from me. Maybe that was all redundant now that we were working together and sharing this part of our lives. We could move forward instead of dwelling on the past, and who had and hadn’t done what.

  We were driving around Swift Valley looking for clues as to what may have gone wrong. What things may have been reversed, and just how bad it was. For instance, would there be buildings around town that had suddenly disappeared? Would there be people who were aging in reverse, Benjamin Button style? I could see from the grave look on Mum’s face as we made the drive into town that all manner of things were possible. This was not the kind of magic that was meant to be messed with lightly. If at all.

  “We need to check the damage,” Mum told me as I brought the car to a stop. I glanced out the window. We were a few blocks away from the farmers’ market, but I could see the park from there. The leaves on the trees had almost completely dropped, leaving most of the trees bare, even though it had only been fall for six days. In real time, those leaves should not have turned brown and fallen that quickly. It was a like a month’s worth of events had taken place in o
ne day.

  Mum stepped out of the car and craned her neck to check out what I was staring at. “It's overcompensating. Mother Nature, that is. So, some things will move too quickly forward in time, and some things will move backwards. Trying to find the balance again,” she told me, before she turned her attention to the sky where there was a strange squawking sound. She pointed up to the source of the noise and confusion. I froze when I saw that a crow was flying backward, like someone had hit the rewind button. There was a weird noise coming from it as well. Even its squawking noise was in reverse.

  “These are the signs to look for,” she said in a solemn voice as she lowered her head and turned to face me. “We must see how bad the damage is before we take any action to correct it. If it isn’t too bad, we may not have to take any action at all. Mother Nature is pretty clever, and balance will find a way to be restored one way or another. I know this is the kind of thing the leader of our coven, Geri, takes very seriously indeed. But we may be able to minimize the damage before anyone else finds out.”

  She reached down and picked a handful of leaves up, then threw them into the air. She stood back and observed the direction they blew in and took note that the wind was still behaving as normal. I couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but Mum looked solemn as she observed. Then she nodded as though she understood. “A serious attempt at time reversal has been made,” she said. “But we are not quite in dire straits just yet.”

  I let out a sign of relief. So, I wasn’t about to revert to a newborn baby. The wind was blowing in the right direction, and the basic laws of physics hadn’t been altered. Mum gave me a reassuring nod, a motherly smile to let me know that everything would be all right.

  This was a side of Mum that I had never seen before. I mean, not the maternal side—she’d shown me that often enough. But the witch side. This was a life that she had always kept hidden, secret. But it wasn’t just that she had hidden the truth about herself being a witch. That would be one thing. The reason I was so hurt and betrayed was that she had kept the truth about myself from me. Wasn’t this something I had a right to know?

  I almost forgot that we were supposed to be bonding.

  “I don’t get it—we’ve done reversal spells before, and nothing like this has ever happened,” I said as I watched the way the leaves fell. Even though I believed in Mum’s skill, I still didn’t understand why this particular reversal spell was so different from all the other times Vicky or I had made a mistake and then tried to undo it.

  Mum glanced over at me. “I am assuming that the other times you reversed something, the thing you were reversing was a spell?” She waited for my response, and I nodded. “That’s one thing. But this was a reversal of time itself. So that is quite different. That can have a ripple effect that can cause chaos to be unleashed.” Mum’s voice suddenly sounded like it was coming from a place very far away, and I wondered if we were in those dire straits after all. “I just hope that your friend hasn’t tried her hand at necromancing . . . then we will all be in trouble.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. So to speak. I wondered if what she was saying was true. “What? Are you saying that Vicky may have actually brought Eamon Barnes back from the . . . from the . . . ?” I was stuttering, unable to get the actual word out. I sounded like Vicky had on the night of the most disastrous first date of all time.

  Mum nodded gravely. “Your friend may have tried to raise her date from the dead.”

  Jeez. Talk about the worst date ever getting worse and worse.

  I glanced up at the sky. Something was up—it was like day was night, and night was day. Even though the forecast had been bright and sunny, there were dark clouds hovering all over the farmers’ market as I walked toward it, trying to find my naughty best friend.

  And then I saw a face that I had been hoping to avoid.

  Ah, well—the hazards of dating in a small town.

  Teddy. And his six kids. Uh-oh. This was super awkward. The kids ranged in age from two to ten. I tried to duck behind a very thick tree, but it was too late—he had already seen me. And there was no leaf coverage to hide me anyway.

  “Ruby!” he called out and waved me over as the gray clouds turned even darker overhead. Wow, he was going to introduce me to his kids—all six of his kids—after just one date?

  “It must be difficult for women,” he said as he gave me a strange smile.

  I looked around a little uncertainly. There was no one else close by. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged and kept his voice low so that his kids wouldn’t overhear him. “You know, the online dating thing. Putting yourself out there. You never know who you’re going to meet,” he said in this low, creepy tone.

  I tried to laugh it off, even though I was getting majorly creeped out. “I can take care of myself.”

  Teddy nodded, but it was like he wasn’t even listening to me. “And I’ve heard all the rumors . . . You know. About what happens to people who use that app. But you don’t have to worry about me, Ruby. I can promise you that. Hey, you should be flattered, actually. After what happened to Eamon, I wasn’t sure I would ever go on a date again—but your profile really caught my eye, Ruby.”

  I wasn’t sure about feeling flattered. But that was beside the point right then. He spoke about Eamon like he knew him, using his first name only. I actually took a step forward, but tried not to seem too interested in this turn of events, lest he go all quiet on me.

  “You knew Eamon Barnes?” I asked as Teddy’s youngest daughter tugged on his leg, trying to get him to take her on a merry-go-round ride that had been set up in the center of the park. But Teddy told her to be patient while he spoke to me, someone he referred to as his “good friend.” I wasn’t sure that I was that.

  He nodded and looked sad. “Eamon and I were on the same basketball team. We’d played together for five years. Always good buddies. But things hadn’t been that good between us toward the end, and we’d had a bit of a falling-out. I guess I’ve learned a good lesson about not holding on to grievances. You never know when it’s the last time you are going to see somebody.”

  I nodded and tried to pretend that nothing he had said was of all that much importance to me. “That is a very good lesson,” I said, my mind turning over the possibilities of what might have happened between Teddy and Eamon. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned being a detective in my dating profile. Otherwise, he would probably never have been as candid with me about his issues with Eamon.

  “So, what about a second date?” he asked me with a hopeful grin.

  “Er, I’m gonna have to check my calendar and get back to you on that one,” I said.

  I’d sent a text. I was meeting Vicky in the middle of the market. But by that stage, the bad weather had turned people away. Half of the stands had already shut up shop and exited for the day, and it wasn’t even eleven a.m. yet. There was a small stage to the right of the merry-go-round and a sound system set up where Vicky and the rest of the band were supposed to be playing some feel-good background music for the shoppers. But because it was dangerous to have electrical equipment set up during a storm, that idea had been abandoned as well, so Vicky was standing there twiddling her thumbs. She waved to me when she saw me approaching, but then dropped her hand when she noticed the grave look on my face.

  Mum was coming toward Vicky from the other side of the stage so that she had nowhere to run when she was confronted—a sort of intervention over what she had done. And I thought it was well overdue.

  As I’d said to Mum, it wasn’t the first time that Vicky had done something like this. In fact, I felt like I spent half my time fixing her mistakes and covering for her with Geri. I was the amateur witch compared to Vicky, but I was definitely the one who was more responsible with magic. Vicky could be downright reckless when it came to casting spells. Most of the time, it was harmless enough, sometimes even funny. This time she had really gone too far, though.

  Messing with life and death. I was pretty sure
as “good” witches—witches who only used white magic—we were not supposed to go anywhere near those issues.

  It seemed liked something May would do. I wondered if Vicky had asked May for help.

  “Victoria,” my mum said in a disappointed voice as she used Vicky’s full name. She shook her head and sighed deeply. Vicky looked stricken when she realized that we knew what she had done.

  We took on the roles of good cop, bad cop. I had to be the bad cop, because Mum took one look at Vicky’s distraught face and completely lost all anger that she may have had previously. She just felt sorry for Vicky.

  But I was not quite so motherly. “Vicky, what were you thinking?” I asked her in a stern voice. “Don’t you realize that by trying to save Eamon’s life, you could have hurt every single person in Swift Valley?”

  “I am so sorry,” Vicky said, her bottom lip trembling. “I just felt so awful. So guilty. I just thought, well, if I could undo Eamon dying, if I could just turn back the hands of time, then everything would be all right.” She wrung her hands. “I mean, every single person has done something they wish they could undo, right? Well it’s just, as witches, we have the chance to actually do that, don’t we? I had to take the chance. I had to at least try . . .”

  My mum reached out and tried to comfort her. “It’s okay, dear,” she said, patting Vicky on the shoulder. “You were just acting in a very human manner. I think sometimes the heart takes over, doesn’t it? But that is where witchcraft can be dangerous.”

  Vicky hung her head. “Just like with detective work.”

  I sighed. Vicky had definitely taken this case far too personally. That was why we were in this mess, all of us. Things had been thrown out of whack. And now, Mother Nature was trying to find the balance. But what if it couldn’t? As witches, we were supposed to be lying low for a little while, not casting spells that made the whole town seem like a scene out of Alice in Wonderland.