“Off to Bramblewine,” said Claire happily as the twins sat together on the train the weekend after what they both referred to as Bad News Night. “Grandy will know what to do about old Fluff.” She squeezed her sister’s hand reassuringly. Luna could be a worry wart.
“I just hope it’s okay to go during a middle weekend,” worried Luna. “As long as I can remember, we’ve gone on the first weekend of the month.”
“Grandy said it was fine,” said Claire. “You’re such a worrywart.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“Am not, I was crossing my fingers against what you said.”
“No crossies count, no takebacks,” said Claire quickly.
Luna stuck out her tongue and Claire stuck out hers.
Luna rolled her eyes and so Claire rolled hers back. She knew it annoyed Luna when she copycatted.
“Maaaaay-rose!” called the conductor, stepping into the car as the train heaved to a stop in front of the flagstone station that marked Mayrose. Claire stared out the window and counted as a dozen people got out. Five minutes later, the conductor shouted, “Silvertoad!” and six more people stepped off the train.
Now there were two stops left before Bramblewine; Langham and Dillweed. Claire counted as three more people detrained in Langham. That left the usual last person, an elderly man wearing a felt hat and a pea coat on the train bound for Bramblewine. He was sound asleep as always.
And just as the train creaked around a narrow bend, the man woke up with a start. Just as he always did.
“Diiiiill-weed!” hollered the conductor as the train rolled to a stop. Claire watched as the man touched his hat, collected his newspaper, and departed.
Poor man. He always looked sad to get off the train, Claire thought. Sad, and a little confused.
And now (as always) she and Luna were left all alone.
After Dillweed, the countryside changed. The trees became taller and twistier, the grass grew wild and curled like seaweed. Birds seemed to know things; their eyes watched roundly down from high, bare branches. Even the train itself seemed to feel the extra effort to get to Bramblewine. Its wheels ground heavily on its tracks; it squeaked and hissed a final weighty sigh as it pulled into Bramblewine station, which was just an unmarked tin shed and a wooden bench.
As was his habit, the conductor did not even step into their car for this last stop. His voice floated vaguely from somewhere up front.
“Braaamble-wiiine …”
“I see Grandy!” Luna picked up her overnight bag and jumped down the aisle and out the door. Claire knew that her sister was a scaredy-cat as well as a worry-wart and was always nervous to be alone on the train. Claire, who wasn’t frightened at all, followed casually behind.
Grandy was waiting in her Lincoln Continental. Her Maine coon cat, Wilbur, was curled up in the back seat. Grandy herself was dressed up in a tasteful dark suit and silver star earrings. She looked businesslike and slightly preoccupied as she gave each twin a birdlike peck on the cheek.
“Be extra sweet to Wilbur. Yesterday, he ate a quarter pound of dryer lint, thinking that it was a mouse, and he hasn’t been himself since,” she told them.
Wilbur opened one glossy green eye, yawned, and then settled back into sleep. He was sixty-eight human years old and could eat anything, and he was almost never awake. Secretly, Claire hoped that when the time came to get her one-star-witch kitten, it would be a whole lot cuter than fat, bored Wilbur.
“Grayer than gray makes a beautiful day” sang Claire as they sped along one of the hundred long, snaking country roads that led to Grandy’s house. In Bramblewine, none of the roads was marked, but all of them could lead you to where you needed to go if you concentrated hard enough.
“Claire, please put on your seat belt,” ordered Grandy.
“You’re not angry?” asked Luna. “That we came in the middle of the month?”
“Of course not,” snapped Grandy. “It’s always scrumptious to have my twinnies with me.”
Claire crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue at Luna as if to say I told you so, although she was not convinced. She could tell by Grandy’s distracted face and slightly grumpy mood that this weekend just might be the wrong time to ask Grandy for a favor. Especially a witch favor.
With witches, timing is everything.
The car pulled up the rutted drive that wound all the way to Grandy’s house. The driveway was filled with several other musty, dusty, dark old Lincoln Continentals.
“What’s going on?” asked Luna.
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m hosting a retreat,” said Grandy. “Just a gathering of some of my nearest and dearest of the coven. Tonight’s topic is about saving the Goodacre Nature Preserve, where we hold our annual Inspirational Tales Evensong. And to think those greedy developers are trying to replace it with a car dealership! Well, they don’t know what they’re up against.” She got out of the car and slammed the door so hard it creaked and fell off with a thunk.
Quickly Grandy snapped her fingers and cast:
Oh, what a bore—
Repair yourself, door!
And the door jumped back to place and rebolted itself to its hinges, good as new.
Grandy was a whiz when it came to spells.
She’ll fix the Fluffy problem, easy, thought Claire.
In the kitchen, Claire’s nose (which was good enough to smell an avocado) picked out crescent cookies, sugared popovers, and chicken soup made with garlic, rosemary, barley, and allspice. She could also sniff out that all of the food had been made with spells. It had that special, no-mistakes whiff to it. Regular cooking was filled with spill smells and burn smells and oops-I-added-an-extra-teaspoon-of-lemon-zest smells.
Witch creations, on the other hand, were perfect right down to the last minute and milligram.
Voices flowed from the parlor. Loud, bossy voices. Grandy’s nearest and dearest had been around for a long time, and they all had a lot of opinions.
“Don’t be shy, you know the gang.” Grandy shooed them. I’m just going to doctor up this dinner. Well be eating in a few minutes.”
“Grandy, will we have some time alone with you, later?” asked Luna. “Because we have a terrible prob—”
“Anything you have to say can wait until later,” said Grandy. She sniffed first with one nostril, then the other. “Go, twins, go.”
Which was actually a little spell, as Grandy had sniffed them right into the parlor. The other witches were upon them instantly.
“Well, if it isn’t our favorite twin set!”
“My, how they’ve grown!”
“Come closer, let’s see your palms!”
And so Claire and Luna were passed and poked and prodded as Grandy’s friends Diana, Aerianrhod, Isis, Demeter, and Mikki all grabbed at their palms and looked into their eyes, trying to tell their fate and fortune.
“You’ll have to let me cast your runes,” exclaimed Isis. She was a magnificent old witch who, it was rumored, had stopped the last two hurricanes that had swept the Carolinas. “I’ve got some sublime new stones.”
“And I’ll read your cards,” said Diana, who was Grandy’s oldest friend from college and the most elegant of all. Diana had long, gray hair that she kept in a twist, and she was always wearing something snakeskin. Today she had on a pair of snakeskin spike heels.
Usually it was fun to be around other witches. Since one of the most important rules of the Witch Decree was No Telling, Claire and Luna had to be extremely secretive about even their smallest witch habits (like keeping one eye open when they sneezed or yawned). Grandy was always warning them that if their powers ever became known, the Decree Keepers up in Maine would snatch them away, pronto. So it was only in the company of other witches that the girls could feel truly comfortable.
But this weekend, the Fluffy problem was too distracting for Claire to feel too at ease.
After an early dinner served at the long cherrywood table in Grandy’s dining room, the
witches got down to business. They decided that, in order to save the Nature Preserve from developers, they would invoke a five-star spell. To Claire and Luna, the spell sounded complicated—all about hexing the topsoil so that it would be too rocky to break ground. There was lots of talk about soil components that was very boring for the twins.
With so much excited conversation, the girls were forgotten. Claire nibbled a crescent cookie that tasted too perfect. Secretly, she preferred her father’s cooking, burns, spills, and all. Last weekend, he had made buckwheat pancakes with huckleberry syrup. And every time he flipped the pan, he said “Voilà!”
Soon he would be making pancakes in Texas. Saying “Voilà!” for Fluffy and Houston, his new family. Claire’s eyes filled with tears, which she brushed away quickly, because the other witches could be nosy about why you were crying, and they always hoped it was about boys so they could get you to try out their latest love potions.
After dinner, she and Luna cleared the table and, because they were at Grandy’s, they were allowed to perform a joint kitchen cleanup spell. Cleaning spells were almost as easy as repair spells. For this one, they held their hands crossed over the sink and chanted,
Everything dirty
And all that went stray—
Be washed, be dried,
And put away.
Dishes floated through the air and stacked themselves in the dishwasher. Counters were wiped; leftovers wrapped up and slid into the refrigerator as if by invisible hands. But that still left the jobs of sweeping the floor, which is actually a very hard spell, and sorting out the recycling, a modern spell still being test run up in Maine.
From the dining room came shouts and laughter.
“I don’t think now is the time to bother Grandy with our Fluffy problem,” said Claire as she put away the broom and dustpan.
“It’s only seven o’clock. Maybe in an hour,” agreed Luna.
So they went upstairs to Grandy’s library and looked through her Big Book of Shadows. To get into the right mood, they dressed up in Grampy’s velvet smoking jackets and hats, which were kept on hooks on the back of the library door. The girls had never known their Grampy, who had been a nightclub singer and had disappeared mysteriously ten years ago. But Grandy and their mother missed him horribly.
“I think we would have liked him,” said Luna. “At least, his clothes are very stylish.”
When the clock struck eight, the coven was still downstairs, hooting and hollering, eating bonbons, and talking all about Old School. They were telling Miss Buzzard stories. Miss Buzzard had been their Old School Head. “Twice as charming as a werewolf, and half as attractive,” Grandy liked to say about her.
The twins leaned over the banister and listened.
“Not now,” said Claire.
“Maybe in an hour,” agreed Luna.
When the girls crept downstairs at nine o’clock, Grandy was banging on the piano while Demeter, Isis, and Mikki sang three-part harmony to their favorite old show tunes.
“I’ve heard better voices from the seals at Seaworld!” Luna covered her ears.
“Daggers and druids, somebody stop them!” Claire covered her ears, too. “Let’s check back in an hour.”
But by ten o’ clock, the coven had gathered in the kitchen to play poker.
“Aces are wild, and bedtime for twins!” Grandy yelled up the stairs.
“She’s not even going to come up and tuck us in,” said Claire as they folded Grampy’s clothes and changed into their pajamas.
“What did I tell you?” Luna scoffed: “This was a bad time for us to visit. It’s mid month, and we weren’t invited.”
“We weren’t not invited,” answered Claire indignantly.
“Yes, but we weren’t especially invited,” said Luna.
“I don’t see the difference,” said Claire, who did, but hated to admit when she was wrong. “Anyway, we can ask what to do about Fluff tomorrow. We’ve still got plenty of time.”
But the next morning, Grandy slept late and came down to breakfast with an ice pack over her eyes.
“I can’t tie it on the way I used to,” she grumbled. “If only your grandfather were around. He had a good cure for morning headaches. Something with seltzer water and salt. I can’t remember. Oof, I’m hungry.” She raised her pinkie and cast a quick breakfast spell.
Hens in the hen house,
Chickens on the loose.
Fry my eggs and pour my juice!
But Claire knew immediately she’d got the spell wrong (it’s supposed to be fox on the loose) and Grandy was served a saucer of juice with a raw egg floating on top of it. The thing about those easy pinkie spells is that if one word is lost, a lot of mess is made.
Claire and Luna, who’d got up early to clean up last night’s poker chips, piano music, and bonbon wrappers, sat very still and polite at the kitchen table. After Grandy had recast the spell and taken a few bites of fried egg, Claire could no longer wait. As they had planned, she began one sentence, then let Luna take the next, and so on.
“Grandy, a very horrible thing has happened to us.”
“Dad is getting remarried.’”
“And Fluffy is from Texas, which is two thousand miles away.”
“And we know she’s going to want to move back there.”
“Especially after she has Houston, because she’ll want to raise him in the traditional Texan style.”
“With dogies and spurs.”
Claire took a deep breath. Here came the hard part, which Luna had been supposed to say—only she had lost her nerve and put in that unimportant piece about dogies and spurs instead. “And so, it behooves us to call on you, as Head Witch Arianna of Greater Bramblewine, to please help us with our trouble.”
“Please, Grandy!” Luna implored. “We don’t want Dad to have a new family. We were first!”
Their grandmother pushed back in her chair and frowned so hard it was as if her whole face had sunk into her mouth.
A bad sign, thought Claire. She should have known. There had been plenty of warning. First, she and Luna had come to visit on the wrong weekend. Second, Grandy was not feeling well this morning. Third, Grandy had just miscast a spell, which usually made her think that she was losing her touch. The saying goes that powers wane as wisdom waxes, but when all was said and done, Grandy liked her witch power better than her witch smarts.
Now Grandy cracked her knuckles.
“Hear me out,” she began in her forceful Head Witch voice that could freeze a summer raindrop in midair. “The fury of the moment plays folly with the truth. Keep your wits, Luna and Claire, before you speak so strongly.” Then in her regular, Grandy voice, she said, “Now who is this woman, this Fuzzy?”
“No, Fluffy. Fluffy Demarkle,” Claire corrected. “She’s a fashion editor. She eats mostly soy products. She’s allergic to bees. She calls us ‘sugar’ and ‘gals.’ And she is our soon-to-be-stepmother who is stealing Dad off to Texas.”
“Well, it’s of no interest to me. If your father wants to marry a pygmy and move to—wherever pygmies live—then by all rights he should.”
“If we could just learn a small spell, Grandy,” Luna pleaded. “Nothing against Fluffy. Just a simple Keep-Dad-in-Philadelphia spell.”
“Nonsense. Your father’s life is not a game, and you girls know very well that No Destiny Changing is almost as important a rule as No Telling. That’s all I have to say. If you need me, I’ll be in the greenhouse.” With that, Grandy stood up, collected her ice pack in one hand, Wilbur in the other, and stalked out the kitchen door.
“Grandy’s sure in a bad mood. I guess we could have waited until the right weekend.” This was the closest Claire came to a you-told-me-so apology, and she was relieved when her sister decided to take it as one.
“What are we going to do now, Clairsie?” asked Luna gently.
Claire walked around the kitchen in a slow circle, her hands on her hips and her head tilted back.
“Methinks we will have
to put this one in the brewing vats,” she said. “And if Head Witch Arianna can’t help us, then we shall take matters into our own hands. But for the meantime, we shall boycott Fluffy.”
“Agreed,” said Luna.
“Let’s keep the boycott a secret from Justin. Because I think he likes old Fluff.”
“Agreed,” said Luna.
And they hooked pinkies on it.
3
The Pinkie-Spell Anti-Pulverizing Love Powder
“HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT Justin’s been in a bad mood lately? I think he’s in trouble,” Luna mentioned one morning as the girls walked behind Justin to school. All three Bundkins went to Tower Hill Middle School, but while the twins were in fifth grade, Justin was two grades higher.
“Fluffy trouble?” asked Claire.
“I don’t think so,” said Luna. She exchanged a frown with her sister. It had been over a week since Bad News Night, and neither she nor Claire had figured out a single way to stop their father from marrying Fluffy.
The problem was still brewing in the brewing vats.
Claire looked down the street. Even though Justin was supposed to walk next to them so they could all cross the lights together, he preferred to walk a block ahead. He said he was scouting for muggers, but the twins knew the real truth: a seventh grader didn’t want to be seen walking with a couple of fifth graders, even ones who came from his own family.
“What kind of trouble, then?” asked Claire.
“Well, he’s stayed inside the past two recesses.”
“Ugh!” said Claire. Both girls hated indoor recess. “How do you know?”
“Because sometimes when I leave lunch early, I go watch him play that game, Destroyer, and he hasn’t been playing all week. He’s been in the library.”
“Oooh, Destroyer!” exclaimed Claire. “I love-love-love that game.”
“I hate-hate-hate that game,” said Luna, who was terrible at all sports. “It hurts. I always get bopped on the head.”
“Justin’s great at Destroyer,” said Claire. “Kids sometimes cheer when he plays it.”
Witch Twins Series Page 2