Three's a Coven

by Samantha Silver

  We had him.

  Chapter 21

  As the four of us followed Anton, the only light coming from the small lamps on the side of the road, I tried to make as little noise as possible with my feet. After all, we weren’t visible, but we weren’t soundproof either. If Anton suspected something might be up, there was a chance that he would stop what he was doing and try to reach Aquila differently.

  From time to time, he would stop and look around, and every time he did that the four of us would stop and I would hold my breath, hoping against all hope that he hadn’t figured out we were here. We did stay reasonably far behind him; we were about thirty feet back at any given moment.

  I had no idea where we were headed, but eventually we reached what appeared to be the main center of town. A large fountain that seemed elaborately out of place given the western theme of the rest of Desert Plains shot water high up into the air while onlookers gasped at the sight.

  To my surprise, when the water shot up from the fountain, it didn’t simply come back down. Instead, it created shapes in midair: a shot of water turned into hundreds of coins, which dropped back into the fountain amid the happy cries of onlookers. The next shot turned into a horse, which galloped around the perimeter of the fountain for a moment before diving back into the water and disappearing.

  “Tina come on,” Sara said to me, feeling around until she grabbed my hand. “He’s over there.”

  I was a little bit surprised that Anton would dare leave things for Aquila in such an open environment. After all, this seemed to be the center of Desert Plains. I had expected their hand-off to take place somewhere empty, where no one would see them. But at the same time, I supposed in a way this made sense. It was easy to hide in a crowd, after all.

  Sara pulled me away until we reached a quiet corner underneath the entrance to a souvenir shop that was closed for the night.

  “Can you see him?” Ellie asked.

  “I do,” Amy said. “He’s by one of the corners of the fountain. I suspect that’s their drop-off point.”

  “Whatever they drop-off, couldn’t anyone find it?” I asked.

  “No,” Amy said. “In all likelihood, they’re using magic to hide the money. It’s possible to cast a spell on something so that only the intended receiver can see it.”

  “So it doesn’t matter if they do their hand-off in the middle of the busiest part of town,” Ellie nodded.

  “Exactly. It makes it much more difficult for law enforcement to find them, since it’s not like they’re hiding somewhere handing things off in secret. They’re doing it right out in the open.”

  “Surely, Aquila is using the same spell as we are, though,” Sara said. “There is no way whoever it is - whether we are right about Aquila being Professor Lei, or if it’s someone else - is coming out into the open to collect anything.”

  “Agreed,” Ellie said. “So if we can’t see Aquila, and we can’t keep an eye on the package because it’s been magically enchanted, how are we going to be able to tell if Aquila even came?”

  “I think there’s a spell,” Amy said, squeezing her eyes shut. “It’s not a Jupiter spell. But I read about it not long ago. It comes from the coven of Saturn, which is an air coven. The spell essentially covers an area and negates any spells cast in that area.”

  “So we would be able to see not only Aquila, but also the bag?” I asked.

  Amy nodded. “Yes. And not only that, but Aquila would be unaware that we have cast the spell. Only the person who cast the spell can see any difference. So to Aquila, everything would look normal.”

  “Great,” Ellie said. “Let’s do it, quickly, before Aquila comes and we miss our chance.”

  Amy nodded. “Everyone, link arms. I’m going to cast this spell, and if we link together, the magic will affect us all and so you will also be able to see Aquila when he or she comes.”

  I couldn’t help but notice Amy’s use of the word ‘when’. She was obviously still 100% convinced that Professor Lei was not Aquila. I was ready to see if she was right. The four of us spent a few minutes trying to hook arms; it was a little bit difficult given as we were all still invisible, but eventually we were all hooked up.

  “All right, everyone focus your energy towards me,” Amy said. I didn’t really know what Amy meant by that, and I didn’t want to waste any time by asking, so I simply cleared my head as best as I could and felt the energy build up inside of me. To my surprise, the energy inside of me felt like it wanted to escape through the arm I was linked to. This must’ve been exactly what Amy wanted. I relaxed my body and let the energy go, feeling it rush away from me and towards Amy.

  “Saturn, ruler of time, hail! Whatever spells there be, uncover the veil!”

  I wasn’t sure if anything was supposed to happen, but a thin, white mist began flowing from Amy’s wand and towards the crowd. Eventually, the mist covered the entire main square, but no one else seemed to notice anything.

  “Did it work?” Ellie asked.

  “I think so,” Amy said. “Everything underneath the white mist should have its magic revealed to us.”

  “There,” Sara said. “By the edge of the fountain, a couple of people just moved and I got a look at a black bag that wasn’t there a minute ago.”

  “Excellent,” I said, a grin crossing my features. “That means the spell worked. Now, all we need to do is wait for someone to show up - or, more likely, not show up to pick up that bag.”

  “Just you wait,” Amy said. “I guarantee you someone will be here. Professor Lei was not Aquila.”

  Two minutes later, Amy was proved right.

  I let out a gasp and pointed, even though none of the others could see what I was pointing at, as Alex, the professor I had met in the coven chapel, strode through the crowd and grabbed the bag off the ground.

  Chapter 22

  “No way,” Ellie said quietly, noticing the same thing that I had.

  “Not Professor Lei,” Amy whispered, the betrayal in her voice evident.

  “Well, you were right, Amy,” Sara said. “Professor Lei wasn’t Aquila.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Amy said.

  “Well, what are we going to do?” I asked. “Believe it or not, I think we know who Aquila is now.”

  “We need to follow her,” Ellie said. “But first, we’re going visible again. This is going to be way too hard to manage if we don’t know where we all are.”

  Ellie and Amy quickly cast the spell making us all visible once more, and when we turned to look, Alex Lyn was just leaving with the bag of money.

  “Let’s go,” I said, rushing towards where she was. I had no idea what we were going to do, but I knew we had to do something. After all, if nothing else, Alex Lyn was almost certainly responsible for Chief Enforcer King’s disappearance. We had to stop her.

  The four of us began moving towards her, passing through the throngs of people. On the bright side, there were so many people around that we just melded into the crowd and didn’t stand out at all. On the other hand, it made it harder to keep an eye on Alexandra as she moved away from the fountain.

  I could see the edge of the white mist not far from where she was; if she passed through it, Amy’s spell would no longer be functional, and she would be invisible once more.

  “Professor Lyn!” Amy called out. It was a good idea; Amy was the one of us who probably knew Alex the best, given all the time she spent in the Academy.

  Alex paused for a second, then looked down at herself before looking around carefully. I could imagine her confusion; she must have expected that being invisible, no one would know she was there.

  “Professor Lyn, it’s me, Amy!” Amy called out once more, and she must have realized something was wrong and she was visible after all, because Alex stopped and put on a polite smile, hoisting the bag over her shoulder like it was nothing.

  “Ah, Amy. What a lovely surprise. I wasn’t expecting to see you here at all.”

  The four of us caught up to her
, and Alex looked at us all with a small smile on her face. I imagined she couldn’t figure out at all how we had caught up to her.

  “What have you got there, Professor?” Ellie asked, motioning to the shoulder bag.

  “This? Oh, nothing. Just some stuff I need to take back to Western Woods.”

  “Are you sure that’s all it is? Listen, we were here looking for Chief Enforcer King, and we were wondering if you knew anything about it,” Sara said.

  “Chief Enforcer King? Why would I know anything about that?”

  “Well, you know, what with you being Aquila and all and Chief Enforcer King working to break up your little gang of gamblers, we figured the two might very well be linked,” Ellie said.

  Okay. So we were definitely going with the ‘tell her straight away what we knew’ method. That was fine. After all, we were in the middle of the busiest square in Desert Plains. There was a limit to what Alex could do to us here.

  She narrowed her eyes at us. “I’m afraid I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Right. That bag on your shoulder totally isn’t filled with money, and it totally didn’t get dropped off here by Anton the vampire.”

  Alex looked over at Amy, imagining that she would be the most likely to be on her side. “You can’t honestly believe any of this,” she said, but Amy simply crossed her arms.

  “How could you do something like this? You’re a professor at the Academy, doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “That’s why I did it,” Alex said suddenly. Apparently, realizing that even Amy didn’t believe her was the last straw, and she was willing to admit to everything. “I’ve spent my entire life teaching the next generation of witches and wizards everything they know. Do you know what state the coven would be in if it wasn’t for me and the other professors? We would be in shambles, because no one would know how to use magic. We are the most important people in the coven, because we teach the next generation to use magic, and to use it well. And yet, they pay us a pittance. Sure, it’s enough to live on, but shouldn’t somebody in a position as important as mine make more money? So, I started coming to Desert Plains for fun. But I quickly realized there was a market here. It was prime for the taking. Sure, there was plenty of spells and magic to prevent cheating, but since when has math been cheating? You can’t test for it, because it’s an ability somebody has in their brain.”

  Suddenly, things began to make sense. “So when Chief Enforcer King realized that Aquila had to be somebody from Western Woods, she asked Professor Lei for help,” I said. I was shooting in the dark, but I had a sneaking suspicion I was on the right track.

  “That’s right,” Alex said. “It was too bad, too. Chief Enforcer King had been trying for ages to find out who I was, but she never got anywhere close to figuring it out. She must have realized somehow that Aquila was simply using advanced math to win all of that money, and brought in Professor Lei to help her figure out who.”

  “You were in coven headquarters the day Professor Lei was killed,” I said, my mind going back to the list of people in coven headquarters that Amy had brought home.

  “I was,” Alex said. “I didn’t have any classes to teach that day, so I went in on the guise of preparing for the next day. But Mai wasn’t being very talkative. I realized she had figured out who I was. She had to. The two of us shared classes from time to time, and if anyone knew how my mathematical brain worked, it was her. And if anyone else in the coven had the mathematical skills to figure out what was going on, it was also her. So I had to get rid of her.”

  I let out a sigh. The murderer had nothing to do with Mai Lei cheating on her husband, or with Kelly and her problem. It was all greed with Alex trying to hide her criminal activities for a little while longer.

  “You had to know that killing Professor Lei wasn’t going to be a permanent solution,” I said. “You had to get rid of Chief Enforcer King, too. What did you do? You made Kelly do it, didn’t you?”

  Alex laughed, a cold laugh with not a trace of humor in it. “That idiot. She thought I would let her get away with owing me thousands of Abras? Of course not. I didn’t make her kill Professor Lei; I figured she was too much of an idiot to handle that without getting caught, and I imagined if she did get caught she would flip on me immediately. Instead, I had her call Chief Enforcer King to lure her into a trap.”

  “Have you killed the Chief Enforcer?” Amy asked.

  “No. It would look too suspicious. I’m brewing a potion, instead.”

  Ellie gasped. “A forgetfulness potion? That’s incredibly cruel.”

  “It’s what needs to happen. I realized I couldn’t kill both Mai and Chief Enforcer King without the two of them being linked, but I can make Chief Enforcer King disappear until the potion is ready.”

  “It takes a full month for a forgetfulness potion to be created,” Ellie said.

  “That’s right,” Alex replied. “In a month, Chief Enforcer King will wake up in a town far away from here, with no memory of anything. Eventually, she will be taken back to Western Woods when they find out where she’s from, and everyone will assume that she had her mind wiped in the course of doing her duties.”

  “What about us?” I asked. “We know everything now.”

  Alex laughed again. “No one knows I’m here. No one knows I ever come to Desert Plains. When your bodies show up, there will be no suspects. Maybe Anton. But who cares, he’s just a stupid vampire.”

  “Right. Like you’re going to kill us in the middle of this crowd,” Ellie said, crossing her arms.

  “You think I haven’t realized that you’re the only ones who can see me?” Alex asked. “I don’t know what kind of magic you did, but no one’s ever going to know that it was me.”

  She lifted her wand just as Ellie shouted, “Run!”

  Chapter 23

  I didn’t need to be told twice. As soon as Ellie shouted to run, I did exactly what my instincts told me to: I ran headlong into the fountain. After all, the one thing we did know was that I came from a water coven, and I was inherently more comfortable in the water than anywhere else.

  Just as I splashed into the water, I heard a roar and a flash of light passed before my eyes a split second before I closed them, holding my breath as the water enveloped me. I could only hope that my friends had gotten away from whatever Alex did as well.

  I came back up for air a moment later, and the scene that greeted me was one of complete chaos. Everywhere around me, people were running. Everyone who had been in the square was running for cover and a giant hole in the ground told me exactly why: someone had been attacked.

  My eyes scanned quickly, trying to find my friends. Sara was running with the crowd; I could see her trying to get away without being seen. Ellie was lying slumped against one of the wooden buildings. My heart dropped, but a moment later, I saw her hand twitch. She was hurt, but she wasn’t dead. Thank goodness.

  As the crowd moved away, two forms near the crater in the ground stood out. One was Alex, her wand pointed directly in front of her. The other, in the same position, was Amy. They stood facing one another; the tips of Amy’s hair was burned, but she stood strong.

  “You killed one of my favorite professors,” Amy said through gritted teeth. “I’m not going to let you get away with this.”

  “Please. You’ve always thought you were a way better witch than everybody else, but the reality is you’re just a little bit above average. How could you possibly think you could defeat me?”

  “Like this,” Amy said, waving her wand towards the professor. I suddenly realized that Amy’s ability to cast spells without saying the words was incredibly handy; Alex had absolutely no way of knowing what spell Amy was using until it was on her.

  I jumped out of the fountain and began moving towards Ellie, trying subtly to sneak past the battleground where Amy had just shot a bolt of thunder towards Alex. Alex, however, had managed to put up a shield blocking the thunderbolt from hitting her and was attacking
back.

  I had to trust that Amy could hold her own; Ellie was the one who needed help right now.

  Making my way towards her, my eyes widened as I saw a deep pool of blood forming beneath her. Looking closely, a large gash on her arm was the source. What on earth was I going to do?

  I didn’t know any spells that could help. I didn’t even know if there were any spells that could help with this. What I did know was that Ellie was losing blood, and fast. If something didn’t happen soon, she was going to die right here.

  Looking over at Alex and Amy, who were still deep in their fight, I suddenly remembered what Amy had taught me only a couple of hours earlier.

  I needed to get to the desert.

  Silently apologizing to Amy for not helping take on Alex - though it wasn’t like I was going to be a great help anyway - I rushed away from the scene and looked around wildly. Where on earth was the desert? I needed to get out of town and find an elgans blue plant.

  One of those golden chariots popped up in front of me right then and there, and I climbed in like my life depended on it. Technically, it was Ellie’s life that depended on it.

  “Go, go,” I shouted at the chariot, and it darted off, faster than normal. “As fast as you can!”

  The chariot darted through the streets of Desert Plains so quickly I was starting to feel a little bit carsick, but that didn’t matter. Less than two minutes later we were out of town and the chariot screeched to a stop, sending me flying over to the other side and into the far wall. Gathering myself up off the floor, I practically leapt out of the chariot, yelling at it to stay there. I didn’t have time to wait for another chariot to arrive.

  The magical chariots that took you exactly where you needed to be were perfect. I found myself standing directly in front of an elgans blue plant. Ripping the whole thing out of the ground, I leapt back into the chariot and slammed the door close behind me.