Valleys, Vittles, and Vanishings

by Samantha Eden

  That didn’t mean I was without options, though. A twinkle of something came to my mind, and I knew what I had to do.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing Riley’s hand and pulling him forward. “I’ve got an idea.”

  11

  “I can’t believe you just let him go,” Charlotte said, shaking her head at me from across the lobby of the B&B. “I mean, I naturally assumed men ran from you, but I thought that was more of a metaphorical thing. I didn’t realize you had graduated to the literal interpretation of the word.”

  I huffed at Charlotte, leering at her as I answered. “I didn’t just let him go,” I answered. “Wes is a vampire. He’s like, six times faster than me. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Locating spell,” Charlotte said, shrugging and tapping her long-nailed fingers against the countertop.

  “Oh, right,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Like I just carry the supplies for a locator spell on me all the time, not to mention the fact that I’d need a lock of his hair or a personal item.”

  “You went out with him for almost an entire month,” Charlotte said, narrowing her eyes at me. “You mean to tell me you didn’t keep a lock of his hair?”

  “I love you, but you scare me sometimes,” I said, nodding at my cousin. “Besides, even if I’d have had the stuff needed for a locating spell, including the weirdly hoarded lock of hair, there’d be nothing to hold him in place. He’d just run off again. No, if I was going to get any information out of Wes, it would be because he wanted to talk to me.”

  “Then make him want to talk to you,” Charlotte suggested, shrugging at me.

  “And how am I supposed to do that?’ I asked, shaking my head from behind the front desk. The B&B was free of guests this week, and assuming we got all of this taken care of before the usual weekend rush, my family and I wouldn’t have to worry about bringing innocent mortals into harm’s way.

  “With your feminine wiles, of course,” Charlotte scoffed, smirking at me.

  “My feminine wiles?’ I balked. “I haven’t used those in so long I forgot where I put them.”

  “You’re not giving yourself enough credit,” Charlotte answered, eyeing me up and down. “I mean, sure, you’d look a lot better if you’d let me pick out your clothes every once in a while and let me do something with your hair, but you’re still a solid eight, maybe a nine, depending on what company you’re keeping.”

  “Charlotte,” I sighed. “All of that is beside the point.”

  “It most certainly is not beside the point,” Charlotte said. “You’re a beautiful vibrant woman who could most certainly seduce the information she needed out of a two-hundred-year-old vampire with the mind of a teenager. Like I said, though, you’re not giving yourself enough credit.” A sly smile moved across her face as she continued. “Go ahead. Tell her, Riley.”

  A nervous lump formed in my throat as I turned to my friend who, up to this point, had stayed pretty silent on the issue. He wasn’t looking at me, but I couldn’t help but notice the way his cheeks were going red and his right foot was tapping nervously.

  “You’re not giving yourself enough credit,” he repeated in a soft voice. “Though, if I can toss my opinion in for a second, I, for one, think there are better ways of extracting information than to seduce someone.”

  “I’m not seducing anyone,” I answered.

  “You can say that again,” Charlotte muttered.

  “Shut up, Charlotte,” I said, glaring at my cousin. “The point is, Wes is gone. I called his phone, and he’s not answering. He’s a dead end.”

  “Of course, he’s not answering,” Charlotte said. “He’s being chased by a Lockheart witch and a police officer who doubles as a secret agent for supernatural affairs.”

  “There’s no way he knows about The Order,” Riley said quickly.

  “We don’t know what he knows,” Charlotte reminded us. “I mean, if I remember correctly, the fanged moron could barely read, let alone piece together some weird master plan. For all we know, though, he might hold the key to all of this.”

  “She’s right,” I said, a sentence that sounded weird coming from my lips.

  “Of course, I’m right. I’m me,” Charlotte scoffed. “But being right doesn’t mean we’re any closer to the truth.” She took a deep breath. “I think we need to bring Dallas home.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s out of the question.”

  “Why?” Charlotte asked, throwing her hands out at her sides. “She’d want to know this was happening. Certainly, she’d put it before some stupid vacation.”

  “It’s not a stupid vacation,” I said. “Austin and Jake have been looking forward to spending the week in Pigeon Forge for months, to hear them tell it. You know how important it is for Dallas to have time with her sons and husband on their own. I’m not going to pull them away before they’ve even had a chance to go to Dollywood.”

  “They can go to Dollywood anytime,” Charlotte said. “But if we don’t put this particular fire out, then they might come back home to find their favorite aunt no longer exists,” she said, motioning to herself.

  “Wow,” I muttered. “You really are banking on being my favorite person in the world, aren’t you?”

  “I’m just saying, Dallas is the smartest of us,” Charlotte said. “If anyone is going to fix this, then it’s going to be her.”

  “It’s not her problem to fix, and I won’t lay this on her,” I said, watching Savannah bound down the staircase with my tarot cards in hand. “Thank you,” I said, pulling them from her. “I lived in Chicago for years by myself, you know. Do you think I never had a problem there? Do you think every day was one big, happy occasion?”

  “Of course not,” Charlotte answered. “But something tells me that you didn’t have a hundred-year-old witch feud on your plate back in Chicago either. We’re family. Family helps each other. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I think she might be right, Izzy,” Riley said, nodding at me.

  Charlotte right twice in one day. Oh, no. It was an epidemic. At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to fit her inflated head through the door by this time tomorrow.

  “Let me just look, okay?” I said, holding up the cards. “Let me look and see what they say. If it’s bad enough, you can go ahead and call her.”

  I sighed as I tossed the cards up in the air, letting them float around. All of them fell save for three, the three that would tell me what the future held for us. I touched the first one, but it didn’t turn toward me. That was impossible. This was how the spell worked. It was always supposed to turn toward me. I touched it again. Still nothing. So, I touched the second card and then the third. They didn’t react to my commands either.

  “What on earth?” I muttered. I reached for the first card again, and all three of them caught fire in front of me. I leapt backward, watching as the three cards, the signs of our future, burned away into nothingness before my very eyes.

  The ash of the cards fell across the lobby desk and I looked up at the others, breathing heavily.

  “Well?” Charlotte asked, her lips pursed smugly. “Can I call her now, or is that not bad enough? Maybe you’d like to wait until a malevolent floating head tells us we’re all doomed before we call in the cavalry.”

  “No,” I answered. “No. Let Savannah call her. Riley, I need you to contact The Order and find out if they’ve heard anything about what’s going on from their sources.”

  “I’ll also see if they can broker some kind of meeting with the vampires. I think Wes might have more to do with this than we think,” he said.

  “And me?” Charlotte asked.

  “Oh, I have something special planned for us,” I said.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Charlotte muttered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Me either.”

  12

  “This is the worst idea you’ve ever had,” Charlotte said, tightening her grip on the steering wheel as we pulled onto the long ro
ad that led out of Spell Creek Mountain and into Viper Valley, the offshoot of town the Mangrove coven called home. I couldn’t remember the last time I came here, and not just because the valley was home to the Mangrove coven. In truth, I had spent most of my time since returning to Spell Creek Mountain fixing up my restaurant, an effort which (thanks to the Mangrove witches) was now back to square one. What little free time I had outside of that was used getting readjusted to being home and goofing around with my family. Though I loved the Smokies dearly, I hadn’t had much time to explore them, and that included Viper Valley.

  “What am I supposed to do, Charlotte?” I asked, looking over at the woman whose entire body had tensed up since we’d left the town limits. “Crystal called me. That means she hasn’t been kidnapped. It means she’s in control of all of this, and it also means that Eloise’s anger is misplaced. I have to tell her that.”

  “Eloise’s anger was always misplaced,” Charlotte said. “You think coming over here and telling her that you had a terse conversation with her granddaughter is going to change that? What makes you think she’d even believe what you have to say?”

  I pulled a vial from my pocket. It was half-full of a faint pink liquid. “This,” I said, swallowing hard. “She’ll believe me when she sees me take this.”

  Charlotte looked over. The gasp and jerking motion she experienced after seeing what was in my hand was almost enough to send us careening off the road, which was never a good thing when you lived up in the mountains. One wrong turn, and you’d find yourself spilling off a cliff.

  “Are you out of your mind, Charlotte? Pay attention to the road!” I said, my heart squarely in my throat.

  “Am I out of my mind?” she squawked, almost jumping up and down in her seat. “Did you just have the audacity to show me what you just showed me and ask me if I was out of my mind?”

  “That’s about the size of it, yeah,” I answered.

  Charlotte veered hard to the right, pulling off the main road and into a driveway with a large black gate that held the letter M over it. Charlotte must have been going faster than I’d realized, because we were already here. We were at the entrance to the Mangrove coven’s stronghold. Charlotte didn’t seem to have any interest in actually pulling in, though, seeing as how she put the car in park and turned to me, whipping her seatbelt off.

  “Give that to me right this minute,” she said, opening her palm and looking at me, equal parts angry and expectant.

  I reared back, closing my hand around the vial and clutching it close to my chest. “I absolutely will not! I need this!”

  “You need that like you need a slap in the face,” she answered. “Which, come to think of it, might do you some good, given the way you’re acting.” She growled at me as she continued. “That’s truth serum, Izzy.”

  “I know what it is,” I said, still clutching the bottle. “That’s why I have it.”

  “There’s nothing stronger than that,” she said. “A drop of it, and you’ll be spilling your guts. It’s like if Tawny the Truth Teller worked on us,” she continued, bring up the magical doll that forced anyone outside the Lockheart coven to tell the truth when it was in their presence.

  “Yeah. Well, if Tawny worked on us, I wouldn’t need this, would I?” I asked, shaking my head. “You were right, Charlotte. There’s no reason for Eloise to believe me. I have a personal stake in making her believe that Crystal did this to herself. But if she sees me take this, then she’ll know the answers I’ll give her are the truth.”

  “No wonder you waited until Grandma Winnie was out of the house to bring all of this up,” she said. “You know she’d whoop your behind if you came to her with this nonsense.”

  She had a point there. I would never have been able to explain this to Grandma Winnie. Heck, she wouldn’t have even agreed to let us come this far if she hadn’t been otherwise occupied tonight. Still, I had to do what I had to do.

  “I don’t have a choice, Charlotte,” I said plainly and slowly. “This is our best option.”

  “Your taking a potion that leaves you at the mercy of our greatest enemies is our best option?” she asked, looking at me like I was the stupidest thing this side of the Mason-Dixon. “Even you don’t believe that, Izzy.”

  “I believe we’re in trouble,” I said. “I believe that if I don’t end this by tomorrow night, Grandma Winnie is going to take the fight to the Mangrove coven.”

  “Then let her do it,” Charlotte said, beating the steering wheel with an open palm. “It’s about time those vile valley vagrants learned they can’t just steamroll over us because they think we’re too polite to stop them. Maybe a dose of Grandma Winnie’s magic is just what they need to turn themselves around.”

  “This isn’t about politeness and it’s not about the Mangroves turning themselves around,” I sighed. “This is about the people of Spell Creek Mountain. It’s about our home and making sure we have one to come back to after this.”

  Charlotte narrowed her eyes at me. “You don’t think we can win, do you?”

  “It’s not about that,” I said. “It’s that we shouldn’t have to win. This feud has been going on since before any of us can remember. It’s stupid. It’s useless. The Mangroves are witches, Charlotte. They’re like us. Who cares if they live in the valley and we live at the peak? We’re the same.”

  “We might all be witches, Izzy, but we’re definitely not the same,” she said. “And if you’re asking who cares about valleys and peaks, the answer would be them. They’re the ones who started this feud, so if you think it’s stupid, then that’s on them.”

  “I’m not placing blame here,” I said.

  “You should be,” Charlotte said. “It’s their fault. They’re the ones who did this, and if Grandma Winnie wants to go toe-to-toe with them, what happens will be their fault too.” She shook her head. “But this won’t be.” She snapped her fingers, and I felt a rush of something. Then, as quickly as she’d snapped, something strange happened. The entire car started to lift off the ground.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, grabbing ahold of the sides of my seat.

  “I’m ending this,” Charlotte said. “If you want to go telling Eloise Mangrove what happened, then that’s one thing, but I won’t let you go spilling our family secrets to them because you want her to believe you.”

  “I would never do that!” I said.

  “A drop of that potion and you won’t have a choice,” she said. “So I’m not giving you a choice now. I’ll fly us back home like E.T. on a bicycle if you don’t hand that vial over to me. Or you know what? Maybe I’ll meet Dallas in Dollywood. Maybe we can give them an idea for a new coaster.”

  “It could be you,” I said, blinking back tears. “I know we’ve made jokes about it, but the truth is, it definitely could be you, Charlotte. You might disappear forever.”

  She blinked at me as we lifted into the air even farther. “I know that, Izzy, and the idea scares me. It doesn’t change the fact that we can’t bow down to these people. They’re terrorizing us. We can’t negotiate with that. If she believes you, then she believes you. If she doesn’t and I go up in smoke, then that’ll happen too. I won’t let you do this for me, though. And I’m sure the rest of the family would agree with me.”

  I stared at Charlotte for a long moment. Then, biting my tongue, I handed the potion over. “Would you stop being right already?” I asked her, shaking my head.

  She shrugged. “You know, it’s surprising to me too.” She twirled her finger and the car turned around. Still in the air, it flew past the gate and up the driveway toward the Mangroves’ house.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember them calling ahead when they crashed our dinner,” Charlotte said, smiling and looking forward again, her hands on the wheel. “I don’t reckon we need to give them the courtesy either.”

  13

  Charlotte landed her flying car with a thud right on Eloise Mangrove’s rose bushes.

>   “Was that really necessary?” I asked, wincing as I looked around at the mess she’d created.

  “What?” she asked, smiling like a cat that had gotten into the cream. “Looks like a perfect parking job to me.”

  “Well,” I said, opening the passenger-side door and stepping out, careful to maneuver around the crushed roses and upturned ground. “I’m not sure exactly how the feud started, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how it ends.”

  “Probably not,” Charlotte said, laughing as she strode out of her car. I heard the beep as she pressed the keyless entry, making sure to lock the vehicle. “Then again, it was never going to end tonight anyway.”

  “That’s not very ‘glass half-full’ of you, Charlotte,” I said, my palms sweating as I walked toward the front door. Though I hadn’t seen much in the way of nerves from the Mangroves when they came to my house, itching for trouble and looking for retribution I couldn’t give them, this situation was doing a lot to make me anxious. I just wanted all of this over with, and I knew how much was at stake here tonight.

  “On the contrary, Izzy,” Charlotte said, practically skipping as she caught up with me. I guess someone wasn’t as nervous as I was tonight. “The glass is completely full. It’s just not their glass.”

  I pulled to a stop, grabbing Charlotte’s arm and turning her toward me. I had plastered on my ‘this means business’ face as I spoke to her. “You be nice. Do you understand me?”

  “I’m always nice,” she answered. “I’m just not always pleasant, and to that matter, I’ll be as pleasant to them as they are to me.”

  “I knew I should have brought Riley,” I muttered, shaking my head and letting go of my cousin’s arm.

  “No, you shouldn’t have, and you know it,” Charlotte said. “Riley is great and all, but he’s not family, and this is family business.” She turned her attention to the door of the Mangrove house, blood-red with one of those weird Gothic-looking knockers on it. “No one’s going to fight for us like we are. Besides, I might be crazy, but that’s why you brought me.”