I mulled it over while sipping on lemonade. The tartness stung my tongue in a pleasant way that wakened my mind. “I think I get it. Morgan has been more of a mother and a sister to me than anyone else in my life. I don’t care that I’m not related to her.”
Pilar twirled a fork full of lettuce but didn’t eat it. “I made a mistake when I decided to deal with the wish demon. I wanted to change my past. I thought if I was a different person, my future would shine more brightly. Now, I realize I wouldn’t be the person I am today without all the things that happened to me in my past.”
I traced the scars that ran up and down my wrists. I used to hate them, covering them with long sleeves even in the middle of summer. But the more time I spent with Morgan, the less I cared about showing my scars. Morgan knew about them, but she didn’t judge me for them. None of the witches did, not even the ones who thought I didn’t belong in the coven.
“You have a point,” I murmured to Pilar.
She patted my arm. Like Morgan, she didn’t balk or flinch at the marks on my skin. “Morgan and her sisters care deeply for you. You’re a part of this family regardless of whether or not the other witches agree. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Remember the town meeting right before the spring festival? You had at least five little kids with you. The Summers trusted you to keep their children safe. That is the biggest compliment you could ask for. Don’t change who you are to please people who don’t believe in you, and don’t think your past defines you either. This is where you belong, but you have to stop doubting yourself and own it.”
A shower of gold and orange sparks rained from the porch ceiling. Pilar yelped and pushed herself out from under the storm, but the sparks turned into glittery confetti and landed harmlessly on the table and in our food. Pilar placed a hand over her chest, breathing loudly.
“My goodness, what was that?” she demanded.
I grinned and swept a handful of confetti off the table. “That was a congratulations for the epiphany you just gave me. My fatal flaw” —I braced myself with a deep breath— “is the shame I carry about my past. You’re right. I never let myself believe that I could be a true part of this family.”
Now that the confetti had been deemed safe, Pilar scootched her chair closer to the table to finish off what was left of her salad. “How do you plan on fixing it?”
“I think I want to find an adoption ritual,” I said, ruminating on the idea. “There’s gotta be one out there somewhere. If I finish the coming of age ritual, I could ask Morgan to bind me to the coven permanently.”
Pilar shook confetti off a piece of lettuce. “I’m not sure I understood half of that, but I’m proud of you for living your truth. However, not to shift the focus to me, but I believe we’re still in flux regarding the wish demon. If Zenon will not severe the bond between me and the demon, how are we supposed to defeat it?”
“You have to fight it,” I informed her. At her horrified expression, I added, “Demons are dangerous, but a lot of times, they’re too dumb to cover all the loopholes in the dark magic they use. All you have to do is find the wish demon’s weak spot and exploit it.”
“I don’t know anything about demons,” Pilar said. “When it came to me, it didn’t even show its face. How am I supposed to know what to look for? Why are you throwing tomatoes?”
I chucked yet another one into the bushes. “Because I don’t like them, but the sprites do.”
Pilar looked over her shoulder in time to see the tiny fairy being snatch the tomato out of the air, giggle, and disappear beneath the leaves. Pilar’s mouth dropped open.
“I must be losing my mind,” she said.
“You’re not,” I assured her. “That’s the thing about the craft. It’s literally all around you. The demon, those sprites, our coven. Whether they know it or not, mortals are surrounded by ancient power. You just have to be strong enough to wield it.”
Pilar shuffled excitedly in her seat. “Are you saying I could be a bruja?”
“Not quite,” I said apologetically. “People who meddle with magic too much end up warping the ancient power. Then it turns dark, along with the person who crafted it. Believe me, you don’t want that.”
“I used a ritual to call the demon.” Pilar’s voice shook through the admission of guilt. “Does that mean I’ll turn dark?”
“Probably not,” I answered. “That ritual was made for humans. Most likely, it drew on the earth as a source of power, and you’ll probably have to do it again to fend off the wish demon. Think you can handle it?”
Pilar hiked her shoulder back and threw her last tomato as far as she could. It soared across the backyard until three different colored sprites leapt out of the wildflowers and each caught a piece of it. They bickered in high, incoherent voices over who it belonged to, tugging it to their chests. When Pilar laughed out loud, the pixies gasped and parted. The tomato dropped to the ground.
“I can handle it,” Pilar declared.
14
I spent the next several days confined to either the Summers house or the archives library. Now that Pilar was determined to put the wish demon to rest forever, we needed a plan to accomplish it. Unfortunately, it turned out that vanquishing a demon older than Pompeii wasn’t exactly a piece of cake. I combed the archives for any scrap of information, but the wish demon was as elusive as it was annoying.
“Here’s something,” I said, pulling a handwritten note out of a textbook on demonology. Morgan had given me permission to check a certain number of volumes out of the archives so Pilar could help me look through them. Pilar wasn’t the most helpful for gathering information, particularly because she didn’t know about our culture, but she could find keywords faster than anyone I knew. While she skimmed, I paraphrased the passage out loud. “In 1956, a housewife named Lola Puller summoned a wish demon and bargained for respect in her marriage. The demon obliged by forcing the couple to divorce, but Lola claimed the demon did not fulfill its end of the deal. As such, the demon had no choice but to leave Lola unharmed.”
“She found a loophole,” Pilar noted. “Like you said. That’s what we need to do.”
“Hang on.” I squinted at the cramped notes in the margins of the textbook. “This says outsmarting the demon doesn’t stop it from moving on to its next victims.”
“Are we trying to kill it?”
“We’re trying to vanquish it,” I corrected her. “Demons can’t die. They’re not made of flesh and blood, but we can send them back to their own dimension in the otherworld.”
“How do we know we’re dealing with the same demon from Vesuvius?” Pilar questioned. “And if we are, how are we supposed to defeat it? No one else has managed so far.”
I went back to reading the passage on the1950 wish demon, checking for information I might have missed. At the bottom of the page, the notetaker had scrawled a terrifying note: If you pay the demon back, no harm shall come to you, but beware the white ghost of your soul. Beneath the warning, someone had drawn two oval dark spots, like black eyes watching from the page. In a frenzy, I opened a book I’d already skimmed.
“What is it?” Pilar asked, sitting up straight to look at my desk. “Did you find something?”
I held up a black and white picture. It depicted a man in a suit and tails, a top hat, and a cane lying in a puddle of his own blood on the curb of a London alleyway. On the inside of his wrist were two small black dots.
“The demon’s mark,” I said. “It’s mentioned in almost every account of the wish demon. Do you have it?”
“I would have noticed.” Pilar rolled up her right sleeve. Nothing. She rolled up her left sleeve and rotated her wrist for a better look. “I’ll be damned.”
On the outside of her arm were a pair of black dots that could have passed for large freckles if they weren’t so bottomless in color.
“There’s the answer to your question,” I said. “Demons that leave marks all have a distinctive signature. We’re looking for Vesuvio, for sure.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Chances are it’ll vanish if we get rid of the demon.”
Pilar took the book I’d been studying and peered at the bottom of the page. “Beware the white ghost of your soul. What does that mean?”
I chewed on my tongue, hesitant to answer.
“Tell me, Gwen.”
“If you uphold your end of the bargain,” I began, “it means you agreed to hand over a piece of your soul to the demon. The soul isn’t meant to be separated into segments. Once it’s ripped from you, you’ll be hard-pressed to find the person you were before you met the demon. People with a damaged soul lead half-lives full of emptiness and despair.”
Pilar swallowed. “I suppose that was in the fine print I didn’t bother to read.”
“Don’t feel too bad.” I sank into Morgan’s cushiony office chair and flipped the cover of yet another book. The aroma of lemons wafted over me from the pages. “It’s not like the wish demon would tell you something like that up front.”
Silence fell as we returned to the task at hand. The clock ticked annoyingly in the corner. The sun arched from one end of the window to the other. Footsteps and creaky floorboards echoed overhead, while the Summers sisters hollered to each other about one town matter or another. With each passing day, the secrecy spell grew weaker, and the sisters had to work harder to conceal the magical accidents that occurred more and more often in town. Yesterday, Morgan had sent an emergency message to the coven members, urging them to keep their powers in check until we could rebuild the secrecy spell. Apparently, not everyone obliged. As Pilar and I studied in Morgan’s office, the coven leader and her closest confidantes left the house to deal with a misplaced spell that had caused it to rain ice cream in the town square.
“I might have found something,” Pilar said a few hours later.
I jolted out of my studying reverie and smacked my cheeks lightly to wake up. The moon was on its way up, the Summerses had returned from their excursion covered in mint chocolate chip, and the house smelled of Malia’s famous gazpacho and Laurel’s favorite sour cream and chive drop biscuits. My stomach rumbled as Pilar held up a large, leather-bound journal.
“It’s a diary from a man named Darman,” she said.
“A mortal?”
Pilar nodded and pushed her square glasses up her nose. “He writes about following the demon from one town to the next in an attempt to warn people of dealing with it. Apparently, he first witnessed its effects on his sister, who wished the demon for a handsome man to marry.”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “What happened to the sister?”
Pilar cleared her throat and read from the text: “‘Would that I could change my sister’s pale visage and sickly pallor, but she suffers from an incurable condition. Her eyes are as vacant as a reflection of the moon, her speech slurred and unintelligible. Mama can no longer look at her, and there’s gossip of my sister’s transfer to Saint Michael’s for medical care. I fear it will do her no good. There is no treatment for a demon’s kiss.’”
“Great,” I said sarcastically. “Did this guy ever prevent anyone from dealing with the demon? Did he figure out a way to save the ones who made wishes?”
Pilar flipped through the pages until about midway through. Her shoulders fell. “No, the last entry is his suicide note. Looks like watching the demon ruin so many people was too much for him. ‘I regret my initial decision not to step in earlier. Had I questioned my sister’s hasty marriage, the beast might have been thwarted. Alas, the time has come for me to accept defeat. I cannot bear this mental anguish, and I long to join my sister in a place of peace.’”
“So the sister died first,” I said, “and he killed himself out of guilt. We’re on a lovely journey, aren’t we?”
Pilar wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know about you, but I refuse to leave this world without saying my piece. This man—Darman—followed the Vesuvio for years. There has to be something useful in here.” She buried her nose in the journal, starting from the very first page. My stomach growled so loudly that Pilar jerked her head toward the office door. “Go,” she instructed. “Take a break. I’ll be here when you get back.”
With a relieved groan, I unfolded myself from Morgan’s chair and made a break from the office. We’d been shut in there for so long that it felt like weeks had passed. I followed my nose to the gazpacho and found the Summers sisters enjoying another balmy spring evening on the back porch.
Morgan tossed me a biscuit. “Eat that. You look like you haven’t seen the sun in at least a week.”
“I haven’t.” I caught the biscuit, took a bite, and let the moist, flaky taste temporarily melt away my worries. I propped my foot on the porch railing and stretched out my hamstring while I chewed. “This is awful. I don’t know how anyone got these stupid challenges done in time. If I read one more sentence about demons, my eyeballs are going to fall out.”
“You can stew and preserve those, you know,” Karma said. She mimicked twisting the lid of a jar shut, complete with sound effects. “Then you can put them anywhere you want and see everything.” She opened her eyes wider than the whites by pulling on the skin around them with her fingers. “And I mean everything.”
“You’re twisted,” I informed her, spraying biscuit crumbs across Karma’s lap. “What’s the deal with the town square? Does it look like candy land out there?”
“I wish,” Laurel grumbled.
I chuckled at Laurel’s dejection. It was hard to sweep the youngest sister out of her perpetual good mood. “Uh oh. What happened?”
Malia smoothed Laurel’s wild hair. “She worked very hard to clean up all the ice cream, but the earth was not happy about all that dairy and sugar.”
“Laurel fell out of a tree,” Karma announced with absolutely no tact whatsoever. “Actually, she was kicked out of the tree as she was trying to get ice cream out of its branches.”
Laurel rammed her shoe into Karma’ chair, jostling the older sister from her seat. Karma held firm to the armrests as she snickered.
“Everyone shut up,” Morgan said tiredly. “I’m beat, and I don’t want to relive every fiasco at the end of the day.”
“Guess who did it though?” Karma asked me.
“Karma…” Morgan warned.
“Who?” I demanded.
“Aunt Thelma,” Karma declared. She rolled her eyes in such a large arc that her entire head rolled too. “That woman is such a hypocrite. She acts all scandalized about Gwen joining the family, says it’s too risky to welcome an outsider, then pours ice cream all over the town square. If that’s not threatening our secrecy, I don’t know what is. Ow!”
Morgan had kicked Karma under the table, but it was too late to shut Karma up now. Rage boiled in my chest, and the heat of it spread to my face.
“You okay, Gwen?” Malia asked. “You just crushed that biscuit into crumbs.”
I unfurled my fist and let the ruined biscuit drop to the ground. Karma shook her head and clicked her tongue.
“Wasteful,” she commented.
“Thelma is behind all this?” I demanded. “All the dumb pranks that are happening in town? She’s the person causing the messes you guys have been cleaning up all week?”
Morgan refilled her glass of wine to the very top. “We’re not sure. We traced the ice cream spell, as well as a few others, back to her house, but she babysits a lot. It could have been one of the kids. This stuff happens all the time when the young ones are learning their craft. The secrecy spells keep the mortals from noticing, but since they’re down—”
“They’re officially down?” I asked. “I thought they were weakened, not gone.”
Morgan closed her eyes and took a long sip of wine before she replied. “That’s why I made the announcement yesterday to check your powers. The secrecy shields are, as you might say, offline. I tried putt
ing some temporary ones in place, but they won’t hold. We need the yew tree.”
“And the yew tree won’t comply until I finish my tasks,” I realized. “This is all my fault.”
“It’s Thelma’s fault,” Karma corrected. “She’s the one who engineered this. She should be the one to clean up the mess. I hate that she’s smart enough to frame the kids for all these illegal spells. We should banish her.”
“Calm down,” Malia said to her middle sister. “We’re not going to banish Thelma.”
“Why not?” I grumbled.
“Because she has a right to speak her mind and make her intentions known,” Morgan announced. “Even though her intentions suck. Excuse me. I’m exhausted.” She drained the rest of her wine in one gulp, pushed her chair away from the table, and cleared her plate with a snap. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, everyone.”
Once Morgan had gone inside, I asked the rest of the group, “What’s going on with her? She’s never this agitated.”
“She’s worried,” Laurel said. “I can feel it.”
“About the secrecy spell?” I asked. “Yew Hollow knew about us before. If we cleared their heads once, we could do it again if we need to.”
Karma propped her feet on Morgan’s empty chair. “Laurel didn’t mean she’s worried about the secrecy spell. She’s worried about you.”
“Me?”
Karma nodded and summoned a local beer from thin air. She popped the cap, took a swig, and offered the bottle to me. I shook my head. “You’re halfway to your deadline,” she reminded me. “In a week, you’ll turn twenty-seven, and if you haven’t completed the ritual by then, Morgan will be forced to banish you from the coven. It’s one of her worst nightmares.”
“She’s right,” Malia said gravely. “I haven’t seen Morgan in a funk like this since she was a teenager. If you leave, Gwen, I’m not sure she’ll be able to handle this.”
Lost Magic Page 18