“Here they come,” she smiled, walking gracefully across the many tables around the bakery, putting the tray onto the table.
All of a sudden, all of them grabbed one cupcake.
“You may as well take it easy. There’s nothing but time here.”
Time?
“What is this place?” Anwen seemed to tremble into contemplation.
“Hmm? A bakery—duh.”
“No, I mean…” she wrinkled her eyebrows. Was it weird that she forgot what she just meant?
Yeah, weird.
"So what do you think?" asked Trisha in the most delightful way, expecting their opinions on the cupcakes.
“They’re amazing.” He was already eating his third cupcake.
The tray, once inundated with cupcakes, was now empty.
“I told you so,” she giggled excitedly like a little girl.
Anwen looked down for a moment and was shocked by what she found beneath her legs. Was Apricot really eating that piece of cupcake? He hated cupcakes or any other kind of sweets for that matter. Maybe these red thingies were so good, so he couldn’t resist them. But still, she couldn’t deal with how strange this fact really seemed.
“What’s wrong?” Eudora asked.
“Um?” she wrinkled her forehead.
What was wrong? She couldn’t remember.
In a spark, everything that was connected to the moment disappeared. It was like she transmigrated to another dimension.
What was that place? Augh, it was so cold there. She shivered and covered her body with both hands. It was strange. And colder than before.
Was that a graveyard?
Boy, like, what the heck?
There were noises afar. Frightfully she wandered to where the sound came from. Through a bunch of bushes and stumps, she could make out three people…wait; there were four of them, and a cat.
A cat?
Why did it resemble too much to Apricot? Was it him?
Apricot?
“Apricot?” Anwen shouted as soon as she realized her pet was partaking in some weird gathering in the graveyard.
But the cat didn’t even give the slightest damn about his owner calling him.
He always begged for attention. This was weird.
“Apricot?” she yelled again, in hopes that this time he would respond, but nothing. Until something made her stop.
Was that her mom?
“Mom?” she yelled louder this time. No response at all.
Was that a dream? How could she explain that her pet, her mom and…her godmothers, were ignoring her every call?
She was convinced that it was a dream at the moment she saw a replica of herself. She fringed as if the coldness had made every atom in the air freeze. That's how she felt.
This copy of herself was like, four years old.
She was scared to approach them, but she had to, otherwise, all her suspicions would remain unsolved. And there were a lot of uncertainties that she was dealing with.
As Anwen walked towards them, she was careful not to step into any branch. She didn’t want to draw their attention; not that this was a possibility, but she didn’t want to take that risk anyway.
They were there, in the darkness all so real, but also so distant.
That was weird.
After all, what wasn’t?
She got closer, and closer and closer, until she was near enough for them to see her. But they didn’t even make the tiniest reaction. As if they didn’t notice her.
Even her four-year-old self seemed to ignore her.
Now, what was she supposed to do with that?
If she thought that everything in this place was weird, this exceeded all that definition.
She stood there quietly and could hear them talking.
“Here, this is the first gift for your upcoming coronation.” Her mother said.
“A brush?” the little girl replied.
It was like a hologram, but she recognized it.
No, no, no. This couldn’t be real, could it?
Horrified by that memory, she fell off on her back, finding herself on the ground.
Chapter Eighteen
The sweet, embracing scent of red velvet cupcakes indicated that she was back to the bakery. What just happened? At first, she was terrified because she just discovered a part of her life she’d almost forgotten about, but then this seemed like a piece of cake compared to what she learned at the end of that dream, or vision, or whatever that thing was.
Her friends were still there, even Apricot. Trisha was standing in front of them with a goofy, wide smile on her face as if nothing strange had ever happened.
“What was that?” she asked, horrified.
“What is wrong, dear?” the pretty bakery girl asked.
“I was…and then… I—I…” she was stuttering.
Eudora looked at her suspiciously and frowned.
“You too?” she asked her.
Anwen nodded.
“What? Did you guys partake in the strangest hologram?” he intruded.
“It wasn’t a hologram, silly. It was my life.” Eudora yelled.
“What is this place?” she asked the bakery girl.
“This is a bakery shop.” She smiled, serenely.
“You know what I mean.” Anwen insisted. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Darling, everything’s fine. Don’t freak out.”
“What was in the cupcakes? What happened?”
Trisha smiled knowledgeably and turned around to face them.
“These cupcakes you just enjoyed, are not just random cupcakes. Besides being exceedingly scrumptious, it so happens that they’re also charmed.”
“And you dare say that now?” Eudora holloed at her.
“Well, it must have slipped my mind.” She shrugged.
“No, these kinds of things don’t just slip your mind. You did that on purpose.” She accused her.
“Now, that’s tough.”
“Damn right it is, you just put a spell on us and you expect us to congratulate you? You’re lucky I didn’t turn you into a rat.”
Brayden giggled.
“How would you do that? Witches in progress aren’t able to do such things.”
“You know about that?” Anwen’s eyes opened wide.
“Of course, I do. I know everything. I knew you were going to come to the bakery shop, and I knew you were going to enjoy my cupcakes, and it might come as a surprise, but I even know what y’all saw on your holograms.”
“So you admit you lied to us and you tricked us into eating your cupcakes and that it was all on purpose?” Anwen raised an eyebrow, miffed.
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“Guys, gather your stuff, we need to leave immediately.” Eudora got up from her seat.
“Well, we have pumpkin spice latte. Anybody want some?” she joined her hands, cherishing them all to stay a while longer.
Such a weird girl.
Though really pretty.
“We’ve had enough of you. I cannot believe you expect us to drink something else you’d offer.” Eudora looked at her critically.
Another man appeared from the baking room with another tray of three paper cups of PPL which he held gracefully in his hands.
“Can’t we just, you know, like, have a taste at it?” Anwen asked them.
“What?”
“I mean, the cupcakes were delicious.”
“Of course they were. They were also charmed.” Eudora couldn’t believe how naïve her roommate could be sometimes.
“Guys,” Trisha intruded. “This is a classified bakery…”
"I can see why. No one in their right mind would want to have anything to do with this place. Duh.”
“But,” she proceeded, “what I mean is, you don’t just visit Trisha&Co randomly if you’re not predestined for it. It’s so fortunate that you dropped by. There are no ph
ysical coordinates on the map for this place.”
“Some fortune!” said Brayden.
“This is not a random bakery. This is a bakery that appears only to those in need.”
“But we weren’t looking for this place at all. We’d rather be anywhere but here.” Anwen said.
“The bakery follows your inner needs, mainly those that don’t appear to your consciousness. The truth was waiting for you.”
That word reminded Anwen of everything she’d seen in her hologram. She wouldn’t have liked to have known that truth. The truth she’d discovered was shocking and horrifying. She shouldn’t share it with them. Drenched in disquietude, she determined to deal with this concern later, because now there was another problem that needed to be solved.
“I wouldn’t have ever wished to have come to this place willingly.”
Eudora was as horrified as Anwen. There was concern in her voice. What had she seen in her hologram?
“It’s not you who can make that call. The bakery does.” Trisha was so quiet and nothing concerned her whatsoever. “So, enjoy these scrumptious pumpkin spice lattes, would do?”
“I bet they’re not scrumptious,” Eudora said mockingly. “And I will never drink something I don’t trust.”
“But how do we get out of here? She said there are no physical coordinates on the map.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Eudora said. “And just for the record, I will not pay for those cupcakes.”
As soon as they got out of the bakery, each of them was free to express their thoughts on the place. Well, they'd all shared a terrifying, unexpected experience.
“I cannot believe we fell for that. We should be wiser the other time. Note to self: don’t ever eat some amazingly delicious red velvet cupcakes that a bewitchingly pretty girl gives you.”
“What are the chances for the same exact experience to happen again?” Anwen corrected her roommate.
“Guys, what did you see there?” Brayden interfered.
“I don’t feel comfortable sharing it with you right now. It was so terrible I can’t even deal with it myself.” She was mumbling and looking at the trees. “Well, someday I’ll be able to share it with you guys, though now I cannot…”
“We understand,” he consoled her.
There was a moment of soundlessness that captured all the atmosphere, except for the noises of the night birds upon the trees, and then out of nowhere Anwen decided to share her experience with them.
“Guys, I’m not a witch.”
“That’s silly,” Eudora said. “None of us are.”
“I mean, I’m not now, and I will never be.”
That seemed to draw their attention.
Apricot walked around, uninterestedly. That was a piece of cake for him. Something he'd known for fourteen years now.
“How come?” he asked.
"I was never accepted to the academy in the first place. Basically, I've been enrolled here because of some trick my mother would have performed, and, well, she's not my real mother."
“Say what?” Eudora holloed.
“I’ve been adopted.”
“Adopted?”
“What does that mean?” Her eyes magnified in surprise.
“It’s when non-biological parents take care of a child and they treat them as their own.”
“I know what it means. I mean, how could this happen? It is forbidden for witches to adopt other people; that’s strange.”
“I can’t decide what is stranger; the fact that I’ve been adopted, or that I’m not a witch in the first place.”
“Oh, darling.” She put her hand on Anwen’s shoulders, comforting her.
That was the first time her roommate was actually being…nice.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll figure something out. The good news is, nobody knows besides us.”
"You can't just abruptly turn into a witch," Eudora yelled at him.
It didn’t take long for Eudora to go back to her stone-cold, careless self again.
"I mean," he proceeded, "I wasn't meant to enroll in the academy myself. And yet here I am."
“They’ll probably cast you out as soon as they find out.”
“So I’m sharing my room with a human.” She squinted. “That makes sense.”
“Hmm?”
“All your quirky behaviors are not because you’re squishy, it’s because you’re a human.”
Anwen disregarded it. She hadn’t spent a lot of time with her roommate, but it was long enough for her to get used to her obnoxious comments.
Apricot meowed and ran away.
"Apricot," Anwen called him.
He didn’t respond.
She was so attached to that pet, she couldn’t handle something bad happening to him, that’s why she chased after him.
“Look, she’s crazy,” Eudora told Brayden as soon as Anwen ran away. “He’s the pet, and she obeys him. Where do you get to see that happen?”
Well, it was somewhat true, wasn’t it?
When Anwen spotted her cat standing in front of a vortex that swiveled around itself, she stopped and gawked at it.
“That must be it. You’re a genius.” She grabbed the cat and hugged him.
"And now she's having a conversation with him," Eudora commented as soon as they approached. "You see what I'm talking about?"
“Look, guys, there’s a vortex. I think it is a portal we should follow.”
“What do you mean? Are we following weird portals now?” Eudora was shocked.
“It’s not like we’ve never done it before,” he mocked her.
"Wait…" she holloed, though it was too late since Anwen had already walked through the vortex.
“God, her craziness exceeds all the limits.”
“I think we should follow her.”
“You too?”
“It’s not like we have another plan.”
He made a good point.
“So what? Even if we find another strange coffee shop, we drink whatever they have to serve us? I made a note to myself. I will not overrule it…at least not so soon."
As Eudora was making that resolution, Brayden hopped to the vortex and brought himself to the other part of it.
“I should’ve taken this trip alone,” she concluded, and it was the hundredth time she’d said that.
Chapter Nineteen
“You gotta be kidding me!” Eudora scoffed in the most irritable way, and boy, she was constantly so miffed.
“But how?” even he couldn’t explain it.
“It makes no sense.” Anwen took a look around and decided that there was no reasonable explanation as to why, of all places, the vortex would drop them in front of the chamber of ointments in the palace.”
“Maybe it does,” Eudora looked at the wall that was still nowhere to be found.
“I’m lost.”
“Brayden didn’t solve his problem. Maybe that’s why the vortex brought us here in the first place.”
“Good point,” she congratulated her. “Now we need to find a way to go in.”
“Well, don’t look at me. It was you who opened the door the first time we were here.”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember what I did.”
“But I do.” He barged into the conversation. “You were saying that you’d spend the rest of your life here, and then I gave you the brush…”
“That’s creepy.”
“The brush?” Anwen rummaged into her pockets and grabbed the rusty thing. She should have known it before. It was the brush that had opened the door to the chamber and it was the brush that’d made her invisible to the guards. There was something about this brush that she hadn’t figured out yet. And she’d spent fourteen years with it wondering if it’d be of any use whatsoever.
She held it tight and walked across the wall which was just a charmed hologram in front of the chamber. Suddenly, the whole charm melted and she c
ould access the other part of it. They followed her.
“Now what do we do?” she asked. “I opened the door, but Apricot was the one who found the ointment.”
“Then let that thing do its job.”
Apricot hissed at her.
“Come on, lovely piece of fur, would you be dear and help us find what we’re looking for?” she cajoled her pet.
In no time Apricot waddled around the shelves inundated with ointments and souvenirs and charmed files. While messing up the well-organized objects, and throwing down all sorts of laboratory containers without giving the tiniest damn about it, he waddled to the next shelf and stopped at a box filled with all sorts of files.
Anwen remembered that the last time she was there, the cat had caused such a mess; the floor was filled with broken containers, splashed liquids, and pieces of glass. That kind of mess needed such a long time to clean up. But to her surprise, everything was in order, like nothing disastrous had ever happened to it.
“Guys, I can’t believe it, these are the files I messed up. Here in this box.” He looked inside the box enchantingly.
“What is this place?” Eudora looked around, captivated.
“We better leave now, before the guards catch us.”
“Good idea,” he congratulated her.
Apricot rubbed his body against her leg, waiting for cajoling. She petted him and then proceeded to the entrance.
"That's it. Now, all we have to do is figure a way out."
“You say that like it’s a trivial problem, it’s starting to get me worried. Do you realize there’s no way out?” Eudora added.
On the way out, Anwen wished this thing was over; she just needed to get out of there. Then she walked through the enchanted door and looked at the vortex that had decided to appear again.
“Why is that thing over here, again?” Eudora looked at it suspiciously.
“It’s probably a sign.”
"What do you say? I won't go into it again. I swore I wouldn't pay another visit to that bakery, ever."
“I’d rather get out of this place,” Brayden added.
There was a little hesitation in the room for a moment, until Apricot ran to the vortex.
"Apricot," she yelled and followed him.
“Great. Here we go again.” Eudora scoffed.
An Academy for Witches (A Witch in Progress Book 1) Page 11