Valleys, Vittles, and Vanishings

by Samantha Eden

  “No, we didn’t!” I yelled. Then, looking over at Lucas, I repeated myself, this time in a bit of a softer tone. “We didn’t.”

  “Look, Gayle,” Charlotte said, stepping in line with me and grabbing my hand. “I get that this looks bad, but we didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but if you let us, we can help you.”

  “That’s rich, Charlotte Lockheart,” Gayle said, her hair lifting from her head and floating about as though she was underwater. The breath caught in my throat. Never in my life had I ever seen so much sheer energy radiating from a single witch, and if I would have, I certainly would have never imagined it would come from Gayle Mangrove. She was a fine witch and all, but she had never been anything special when it came to magic. Or at least, that was what I’d always thought before tonight.

  “Gayle, you need to calm down,” Lucas said, lifting the end of his shirt, wiping the shaving cream from his face onto it, and moving toward his sister. “Whatever’s happening here, we need to face it with a clear head. It’s what Grandma would want. It’s what Mom would want.”

  “You shut up about our mother, Lucas!” Gayle said. “You’ve made your feelings on her very clear in the past!”

  Lucas looked over at Charlotte and me, blinking hard, and then turned to his sister.

  “That’s not something we need to talk about now, Gayle, especially in front of company,” he muttered nervously.

  “You never want to talk about that,” she roared. “You never want to talk about any of it. You just sit there with your video games and your blind dates and think the entire world is going to take care of itself.” She shook her head hard. “And then you wonder why Grandma put you last in line!”

  “Well, I’m not technically last, am I?” he asked, though I could tell from the way he moved that he instantly regretted the comment.

  “You’re a joke, Lucas!” Gayle said. “You never saw the Lockhearts for what they were. You were always too soft on them, always telling Grandma that the feud was stupid and that she needed to make peace. Does it look stupid now? They took our grandmother, they took our sister, and you’re not going to do anything about it! What kind of man are you, anyway?”

  “The kind who’s trying to figure out what’s going on here, Gayle,” he said. “The kind who’s trying to stop you from going nuclear with all your newfound power.”

  “This power is mine!” she said. “And I’m not about to silence myself because you or anyone else is afraid of that. In fact, I’m never settling for less than I deserve ever again. I’m taking what’s mine. I’m taking what should have belonged to our family in the first place.” She sneered at her brother. “And since you’re so keen on the Lockheart coven, you can stay with them.”

  “Stay?” Lucas asked. “What are you talking about? Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I told you, brother,” she said, her voice sounding every bit like rolling thunder. “I’m taking back what belongs to us. I’m making it right, and I’m starting at the beginning.”

  And, with that, Gayle Mangrove disappeared into a puff of black smoke. As it turned out, she wasn’t the only thing that left.

  “Where’s the house?” Lucas asked as we looked around, finding ourselves standing in the same spot but devoid of the structure we had once been encased by. The house, all the walls, the roof, and the floor, had disappeared from around us. That meant two things. Gayle meant business, and she was somehow powerful enough to move an entire house on her own.

  “How is she doing this?’ I asked, swallowing hard and looking over at Lucas.

  “She’s upset,” he said, like it was an explanation or something.

  “That’s not a good enough answer, Lucas,” I said. “I’ve been upset before, too. The most that ever happens is that someone gets an earful from me or at worst, a finger snap.”

  “Her finger snaps are brutal,” Charlotte muttered.

  “This woman is bursting with power,” I said. “Literally bursting with it. So, I need you to tell me how. I need you to tell me what exactly is going on here. Because if you don’t, I’m afraid we might not be able to stop this.”

  “I can’t,” he said flatly, taking a deep breath and steadying himself.

  “Well, you had better,” I answered. “And don’t tell me about family secrets or loyalty, because none of that matters right now. Did you see her eyes? Did you hear the rage in her? Obviously, she’s having trouble holding whatever this newfound power is. So if you really care about your sister, then maybe think about doing what’s best for her.”

  Lucas stepped toward me, anger filling him as well. “First off, you don’t know me. You’ve never known me. So when you assume that I would put some old feud in front of what’s obviously best for my sister, it hurts. I don’t care about family secrets, and the only thing I’m loyal to is what’s right and wrong. That’s why I wasn’t chosen by my grandmother. Not because of my video games of blind dates. It’s because I could never look at our family and put it ahead of what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong.” He shook his head. “I never have, and I never will. So when I tell you that I can’t say, it means I literally can’t. It means that Grandma Eloise put a spell on me, on all of us, to stop us from talking about this. That’s how serious she thought it was. And if you—”

  “Guys,” Charlotte said, her tone full of worry.

  “Oh, come on!” Lucas said. “I was in the middle of my big, self-righteous monologue.”

  “Can it wait?” Charlotte asked.

  “Wait for what?” I asked, looking over at my cousin and finding her eyes pinned to the air. I followed them and saw a huge block rushing down toward us from the heavens.

  “For the house to fall on us,” she murmured.

  16

  “You just had to talk about The Wizard of Oz, didn’t you?” Charlotte muttered, looking up at the house as it plummeted toward us. “I swear, if a farm girl from Kansas comes bouncing out of that thing, I’m going to be so mad at you.”

  I tugged Charlotte’s arm hard and pulled her away. “How about we worry about living through the fall before we concern ourselves with who comes out of the stupid thing?” I suggested.

  I could hear the whistle of the mammoth structure as it lumbered downward in our direction. Darting my eyes over to Lucas, I nodded as I saw him following Charlotte and me out of the path of danger. We scurried to the tree line at the edge of the Mangroves’ yard just as a loud boom signaled that the house had completed its descent and was now sitting on the yard where it had once been.

  “Is everyone okay?” I asked, still turned toward the trees.

  “I think I chipped a nail, though I’m not entirely sure how,” Charlotte said.

  “I’m fine,” Lucas answered. “I think we’re all fine. Though I can’t say you’ll be happy about any of this.”

  “Happy about what?” I asked, swallowing hard and thanking my lucky stars that no one was crushed by the reappearance of the Mangrove house. As I turned around, though, following Lucas as he pointed in the direction of the fallen object, I saw that what had just plummeted to the earth wasn’t the Mangrove house at all. It was also probably the reason Lucas thought I would be upset.

  He was very right.

  “That’s my house,” I said, my eyes wide and my pulse racing as I took in the B&B where I grew up. It had been ripped out of its place on Lockheart Estate atop Spell Creek Mountain and slammed here in Viper Valley, in the place where the Mangrove house had been. That’s when it hit me. As I looked at my home, displaced and disheveled, just what Gayle had done. In her overpowered state, she’d promised to set everything right, to take back all my family had taken from her. My grandmother had always told us the Mangrove family felt as though the Lockheart coven had planted their flag on this place before them by duplicitous and underhanded means. She told us the Mangrove coven felt this place was their birthright, and as such, it should be them on that peak. That’s what she had done. S
he had switched the houses. She had set right what she perceived to be an old wrong.

  “Oh, my goodness!” I said, remembering how hard the house had crashed and realizing that if it was my home, then people I loved were very likely rattling around in it. If that was the case, was there any chance they’d survived what just happened to them? My eyes moved over to meet Charlotte’s quickly. “What about Savanah and Grandma Winnie?” I shrieked. “If they were—”

  Before I could finish the sentence, my cousin was darting toward the house. I had never seen Charlotte move this quickly, and that was including that Christmas Eve when Makeup Mountain had a two-for-one sale.

  I found myself following suit, terror rising in my chest and shaking my very train of thought as I neared the house. It looked to be intact. If the fall would have been damaging to the people inside it, wouldn’t it also have been damaging to the structure of the house itself? Wouldn’t the windows have shattered? Wouldn’t the beams have snapped and the roof caved in? All I could hope, all I did hope, was that the house had been protected by whatever magic Gayle used to swap them out.

  And as the door of our house swung open a full ten feet before I reached the knob, I got my answer.

  Grandma Winnie stood there, her arms folded over her chest with an irritated look on her face. That was all that was on her face, though. There were no bruises. There were no scrapes or cuts. She was like the house, unhurt and unaffected by the move. I just had to hope that looks weren’t deceiving in this case and that her good fortune had extended to Savannah.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, slamming into her and wrapping the old woman in a bear hug.

  “That depends,” she answered. “On what in Merlin’s beard is going on here.”

  “It’s Gayle,” Charlotte said. She was close, though she hadn’t managed to get the hug in on Grandma before me so she was still a few feet back. “She lost her marbles when Eloise disappeared. She’s super-crazy-powerful for some reason, and I guess she used that power to try to kill us with our own house.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s kind of poetic when you think about it.”

  “She wasn’t trying to kill you,” Lucas said, though he was keeping his distance from us. He had such an easy way back when we saw him earlier. That had all disappeared now. He was all business, even if he did still have globs of shaving cream on his face. “My sister wouldn’t kill anyone. She doesn’t have it in her.” He looked from one of us to the next. “Not even someone she thinks is responsible for hurting a member of our family.”

  “Yeah, right,” Charlotte said. ‘Which is why she put a vanishing spell on a flower on our front porch and why she helped set Izzy’s restaurant on fire.”

  Instinctively, my eyes went to the flower. It was half-empty now. It wouldn’t be long before the most important person in my world disappeared, whoever that was.

  “The flower wasn’t Gayle. That was my grandmother,” Lucas said. “And she never intended on actually going through with it. It was just a bluff. She was just so frantic about Crystal’s disappearance and she thought Izzy was responsible. She was never going to actually let something like that happen. Whether you came clean or not, she was going to undo the spell she put on the flower before it actually harmed anyone.”

  “There’s nothing to come clean about,” I answered. “I didn’t have anything to do with Crystal’s disappearance.”

  “I believe you,” Lucas said, shuffling nervously. “Unfortunately, the only person who has ever been able to undo one of my grandmother’s spells has been my grandmother. She’s a master at crafting them, and without her, the spell on the flower will prove completely unbreakable.”

  “Why?” Charlotte balked. “If she was just playing a game of chicken, then what’s the point of actually pulling out a real destructive spell?”

  “Because you’re you,” Lucas said instantly. “Because you are the Lockheart coven. Do you really expect me to believe that Winnie Lockheart wouldn’t smell a fake spell from a mile away? It had to be real. It was the only way there was a chance of it working.”

  “Well, it didn’t,” I answered angrily. “And now look at where we are.”

  “In the valley,” Charlotte scoffed, turning her nose up and her mouth down.

  “That’s not exactly what I meant, but yeah,” I said.

  Just then, a thought crossed my mind, causing me to flare up in panic again. “What about Savannah?” I asked, looking at my grandmother and then at the open doorway. “Is she okay? Did something happen to her?”

  “I sent her out for milk a couple of minutes before the house my ancestor built with his bare hands was ripped out of the earth and tossed around like a ragdoll,” she said. “She complained, of course. She told me her favorite show was coming on and she didn’t want to miss it.” Grandma Winnie shook her head. “Turns out she missed the program and a whole lot more.”

  “As long as she’s okay,” I said. “Though someone had better call her. She’s in for a rude surprise if she heads back home.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte said. “We wouldn’t want her to find a gaping hole where the house used to me.”

  “She wouldn’t,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Charlotte, you do know what’s happened here, don’t you? You understand that Gayle Mangrove has effectively switched our houses and our places.”

  “Wait, what?” Charlotte asked, her hand colliding with her mouth. “Are you telling me that Gayle Mangrove is trying to turn us into valley people?”

  “I’m saying it looks like she’s succeeded,” I answered.

  Charlotte slumped against the wall of the house and it looked, for all the world, like she was about to pass out.

  “I should have just let the stupid house crush me after all,” she lamented.

  17

  “So, let me get this straight,” Grandma Winnie said from behind the front desk of our newly relocated bed and breakfast. “Eloise Mangrove has also disappeared, but not before you convinced her that you weren’t responsible for Crystal’s disappearance.”

  “Maybe,” I said, sighing loudly. “She was starting to come around but before I could really bring the realization home, all the lights went out and she vanished.”

  “Right,” Grandma Winnie said. “An act which cemented Gayle Mangrove’s belief that you definitely are responsible for both disappearances?”

  “Oh, for sure,” I said, leaning against the bar and shaking my head. “She totally believes I did it. She definitely wants me dead.”

  “And she’s also enormously powerful for reasons we still don’t know,” Grandma said.

  “This is correct,” I answered.

  “And this one does know why she’s so powerful, but Eloise spelled him. So, he can’t give us the information we need?” Grandma Winnie said, shaking her head and jutting a finger in Lucas’s direction.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “And she moved our house to take the peak because she thinks it’s her birthright?” Grandma Winnie said.

  “That’s about the size of it,” I answered. “I think we’re about up to speed now.” I tilted my head to the side. “Oh, except for the vampire. Wes, a vampire I used to date, is involved in this somehow, too, but we can’t find him. It’s a whole thing.”

  “And does this one know how the vampire is involved?” Grandma asked. “Or is that spelled as well?”

  “Nope and nope,” Lucas said. “Sorry about that.” A sly half-smile spread across his face as he ran his hand through his hair. “It looks like I’m not going to be of much help to you guys.”

  “Don’t worry, Son,” Grandma Winnie said. “I’ve come to expect that from most men, but Mangrove men especially.”

  “Really?” he asked, his half-smile blossoming into a full-blown grin. “I wasn’t aware you had much experience with Mangrove men. Then again, I always heard my Uncle Hector was a bit of a player.”

  Lucas said that as though he had gotten something over on my grandmother, which of course, was his first mistake. If he
’d have known even a little about Winifred Lockheart, then he’d have been all too aware that no one gets anything over on her . . . least of all some wet behind the ears Mangrove boy.

  “I remember your Uncle Hector,” Grandma Winnie said without missing a beat. “He used to steal apple pies from the orphanage and try to resell them at his fruit stand off the highway. It would have been infuriating if it hadn’t been so sad.”

  “So, not much of a player, then?” Charlotte asked, chuckling under her breath.

  “This is all beside the point,” I answered, shaking my head and looking to Grandma Winnie. “The point is, unless you can fix the spell Eloise put on that flower as well as drain some of the insane magic from Gayle, we’re not only back at square one, but we’d have to grab a telescope to even see square one.”

  Grandma Winnie grimaced, sighing loudly. “Lucas is right. Eloise has always been a perfectionist when it comes to her spells. She ties them in knots and then ties those knots in more knots. The truth is, I don’t think I could undo one of her spells. I certainly couldn’t before the last petal on that flower falls off.”

  My heart sank as my jaw set.

  “And Gayle?” I asked.

  “Gayle is another issue,” Grandma Winnie said. “Figuring out how to get the power out of her will be contingent on figuring out how the power got into her in the first place.” Her gaze turned back to Lucas. “And since Opie Taylor here has been spelled not to speak, I’m going to have to find another way to get this information out of him.”

  “It’s because of the red hair, right?” Lucas asked. “That’s why you’re calling me Opie?”

  “It’s actually because I always found Opie Taylor to be insufferable,” she answered. “Come with me, Son. We have work to do.”

  Lucas shot me a worried look, but if he was looking for help, he wasn’t getting it from me, not with a cocky attitude like that.

  Still, I didn’t have any time to waste. So I made my grandmother an offer.