Pawsitively Betrayed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  Amber laughed to herself as she watched them go.

  Back upstairs, Amber floated between the groups while periodically checking on Betty and Bobby, who looked on in wild-eyed wonder. Amber supposed Kim, Jack, and especially Bianca were used to being around witches at this point, but it was all new for the Harrises.

  Amber’s phone buzzed on her nightstand, and she excused herself from the group, who were in a heated argument about the feasibility of reverse-engineering a headache tincture into a debilitating, airborne vapor. She expected it to be Jack or Kim calling about an issue with the large food order, but instead saw Edgar’s grumpy face staring back at her.

  “Hi, Edgar, is everything all right?” she asked in greeting. She could tell from the background noise that he was driving, likely with the window down.

  “No,” he said, voice tight. “Something is wrong with Neil. Well, more wrong than usual. He says he’s close to finding the Henbane grimoire and when he does, he’ll have to break the bond he and I have. And apparently the only way to do that is for one of us to die. He said something about a ritual and that in order for it to be successful, he has to be whole again.”

  “That’s not happening,” Amber said. “Where are you?”

  “On my way to you,” he said. “Maybe it’s stupid of me to be moving, since I’m sure there’s a way for him to track my location with this so-called bond now that he’s loose in the world. I just couldn’t stay by myself anymore.”

  “Well, you’re heading to the right place because my apartment is currently full of witches. You’ll be safe here. That guy would have to go through all of us to get to you,” she said. “Kim and Jack just went to get food. I may or may not have told them to order you some pancakes just in case you decided you wanted to join us. It should get here the same time you do.”

  It took him a moment to speak. “I appreciate it, cousin,” he choked out.

  “See you soon.”

  Within fifteen minutes, Edgar and the food arrived, briefly disrupting the brainstorming session. Amber, Jack, and Kim passed out food while Edgar explained his connection to Neil and the message Edgar had just received from him. Because it was still unclear how and what Neil was able to view or learn from Edgar through this connection, they decided it was best to keep Edgar as far away from the discussion as possible. So, once everyone got back to work, he, Betty, and Bobby had a picnic on Amber’s bed with the three cats, away from the group at large.

  It was while Amber was walking around the studio with a trash bag, collecting sandwich wrappers, empty chip bags, and biodegradable containers, like an attendant at the end of a flight, that a horrible buzzing made her come up short. Something crashed in the kitchen and Willow stumbled out, her hands over her ears. The buzzing wasn’t so much painful as deafening, like a swarm of thousands of insects had just poured into the room. Amber dropped the half-full trash bag to clap her own hands over her ears, but it didn’t help. It was impossible to block out a sound that came from inside your head.

  She was vaguely aware that the others had noticed. They were on their feet. Mouths were moving and brows were furrowed and the tension in the room was mounting, but Amber couldn’t hear anything over the horrible buzzing.

  No one seemed to hear it except for herself and Willow.

  And then just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The silence left in its wake was almost as loud as the buzzing had been. Amber and Willow stood directly in front of each other; Amber didn’t remember making her way over to her sister, but they’d been pulled together like magnets.

  Before Amber could voice a question, Aunt G bustled out of the kitchen, put a hand on either of their stomachs, and violently shoved them apart. Amber stumbled back a step.

  Willow yelped, “What the—”

  CRASH!

  Amber flinched.

  There, on the floor, directly between Amber and her sister was the trunk of grimoires they’d hidden in Quill. A few seconds of stunned silence passed as Amber stared at the dusty box. Her wild gaze flicked from her aunt to her sister and back again.

  She couldn’t process what she was seeing.

  Either the Penhallows or the WBI had found the chest, gotten through all the cloaking and defensive spells, and then triggered the boomerang spell that sent the books back to their owners: Amber and Willow.

  Who had found it first?

  Edgar let out a growl on the other side of the room. He was on his feet now, hands on his knees. “Neil is … furious.” He slowly stood and stared at Amber. “He knows it’s in Edgehill now. He’s coming for it.”

  “Hurry!” Aunt G said. “Every cloaking spell everyone has. Cast it onto the books—now!”

  The room filled with spells, witches casting cloaking spells one after the other. The words flooded Amber’s head like the buzzing had earlier.

  A few minutes later, Edgar growled again. “The book dropped off their radar again. But they still know it’s here. Geez. He’s never been this angry.” He started to pace in front of the window bench seat. “I have to get out of here. I’ll do what I can to block him from reading my thoughts, but he knows how to get past my defenses. As soon as I get tired or slip even a little, he weasels his way in. It’s only a matter of time. I need to get out so I don’t put any of you or the books in danger. Maybe if I keep moving it’ll help distract him.”

  Amber hated this idea. “Where would you go? You’re safer here.”

  “Am I though?” he asked, stopping to stare at her across the small expanse of her apartment. “This is the first place they’d check, right? Sure, we can layer this place with as many soundproofing and alarm spells as we’ve got, but they could easily trap us in here. And we already know Neil isn’t above burning a place to the ground with people still in it if he thinks it’ll get him what he wants.”

  Amber’s stomach churned.

  “There’s no need to be cruel, Edgar,” Aunt G snapped.

  “No, he’s right,” Amber said, holding up a hand. “Neil wants the spell and Edgar for the ritual. It’s probably not smart to keep both in the same place.”

  Edgar visibly swallowed and lightly wrung his hands. “Where do I go?”

  Before Amber could reply, Willow said, “Don’t even think about it, Amber. You can’t leave. And neither can you, Aunt G. You need to finish making those tinctures. Edgar and I can each take a Penhallow-specific one, glamour ourselves, and go hide out in the crowd. This is still the first night of the festival. I’m guessing the WBI took care of the giant cats. Where better to hide than in a sea of people? The Penhallows do it all the time.”

  Amber still hated the idea. But at least they’d have each other as magical backup. “Do it. Keep each other safe.”

  Aunt G went into the kitchen to grab the tinctures. Amber heard the crunch of glass as her aunt trod through whatever mess Willow had made when the sudden buzzing had incapacitated her and Amber. Amber noted how badly her aunt’s hands shook as she handed a vial each to Edgar and Willow.

  Within ten minutes, Willow and Edgar, wearing the faces of average-looking middle-aged men, and still shuddering from the aftertaste of the tinctures, headed for the stairs. Amber followed them out. She stood on the sidewalk and scanned semi-deserted Russian Blue Avenue. She didn’t see any of the iterations of Patrice Penhallow lurking about or peering in windows.

  As Amber watched Willow and Edgar drive away, she hoped that keeping Edgar as a moving target would increase his chances of not being found.

  When she turned to head back into her shop, she found her aunt standing there, her face pale. “Am I too late?”

  “What do you mean?” A moment later, Amber noticed that her aunt tightly held two tincture vials in her fist.

  “I gave them my tincture, not Simon’s,” Aunt G said. “They won’t be able to detect Penhallows. My premonitions keep changing because the variables kept shifting. If something happens to Willow because I’m not thinking clearly, I …”

  Amber quickly pulled out
her phone and sent a group text to Willow and Edgar. You have the wrong tincture. Trust no one.

  That ship already sailed, Edgar replied.

  Despite the hollow feeling in her gut, Amber smiled faintly. Then she wrapped an arm around her aunt and guided her back inside. “It’ll be okay,” Amber assured her.

  She just hoped that wasn’t a lie.

  Chapter 26

  Amber had always known intuitively that contact with a subject made a spell that much stronger. What she didn’t know was that powerful spells worked best when cast as a group. Some spells only worked that way.

  “Forming covens was a more common practice in the days before the witch council broke magic,” Zelda said. “Not only did the ley lines splinter that day, but so did families, covens, and communities. Witches felt safer spaced apart, since it made Penhallows have to work twice as hard to find them. Witches became scared to live in witch communities as well. After all, they wouldn’t have suffered from magic sickness or been driven out of their homes had they been in magic-free towns and cities.”

  “Not to mention,” Simon’s gruff-looking friend, Gary, said, “the council had been a government-level coven, in a way. They’d argued that a group of witches working together would be in the best interest of the community as a whole. Yet, as a group, they’d made the worst collective decision magic had ever seen. It put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Though there are still witch towns, there are far fewer than there used to be. Then, with the ever-present Penhallow threat—because they had shown up unexpectedly and picked off whole communities—people went their own ways. It’s essentially what’s happening right now. When Penhallows are around, it feels safer splitting up. They can’t pick everyone off like fish in a barrel if there are multiple barrels.”

  It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  “Well, I’m grateful this many of you showed up to help,” Amber said, “especially when the threat is so closely tied to my family.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said a contact of Zelda’s, “there are only two choices at this point: be proactive or stick my head in the sand. Too many witches for too long have chosen the latter. It doesn’t really matter how we got into this mess—it only matters how we get out.”

  Amber smiled appreciatively at the woman, Irene. She was a kitchen witch like Simon and Aunt G, and was still convinced that a weaponized headache-causing tincture was their best course of action.

  “I have to admit that part of why I’m here,” said Zelda’s daughter Scarlett, “is because I’ve never met a time witch before. The possibilities of how your power could be used blows my mind. Have you ever frozen time?”

  Amber had only done this once and it was largely by accident while at the junior fashion show. Kieran, wearing Olaf Betzen’s face, had taunted Amber to the point that her frustration had bubbled over. She’d inadvertently poured all her magic into the word “Stop!” Everyone in the room had frozen in place—even Kieran had frozen, but not for long. “I don’t know if I actually stopped time and Kieran was more resistant to it than others, or if he had frozen time and made me believe it had been me.”

  But then his words came floating back to her. “You froze nearly a hundred people! And with only a single word. Annabelle had been a prodigy with time magic, and it seems she passed it on to you. It took three decades to unleash it, but here it is. I figured you’d need a highly emotional situation to wake it up.”

  It had been her. And it had been yet another way the Penhallows had been working behind the scenes to push her in the direction they wanted. All of it leading up to this ritual to manipulate time and history to get an outcome they liked better than the reality they were living in now.

  “I can guarantee it wasn’t Kieran who froze time,” Zelda said. “I can’t stress enough how rare time magic is, Amber.”

  Several others sitting around the table nodded.

  “It’s the type of magic most witches wish they could do solely because so many of us can’t,” Simon said.

  Amber supposed a witch other than herself would have puffed up in pride at this. She was unique. She was rare. A unicorn like her mother. But the truth was, it felt like too much responsibility. Time magic would have been in better hands with someone like Simon or Zelda. Really, anyone sitting at this table with her would have been a better fit.

  “I think what we should try to do instead of blizzards or a coordinated throwing of sleep tinctures or a widespread confusion spell,” Scarlett said, “is a coven-driven power-funneling spell. If we can funnel all our magic into Amber, maybe it’ll give her the equivalent of that strong emotion Kieran bullied her into. And then she can channel all that extra juice into a time-freeze spell.”

  “Turning me into a human super-charged battery. Got it,” Amber said, mildly queasy.

  “Magic from ten other witches flooding into someone simultaneously is just as likely to cause magic sickness as eruption from the ley lines,” Zelda said.

  “But,” Gary said, “Amber said the magic at the ley lines communicated with her, right? I’m sure you remember spells of permission, Zelda. Perhaps that could work here.”

  Zelda smiled ruefully. “Oh, how I hated spells of permission!” Addressing Amber, she said, “Back when I was a child, there was a school of thought that we needed to ask magic to use it. Scarlett has a really great analogy that people younger than me might better understand.” She affectionately patted her daughter’s hand.

  “So, think of the ley lines a bit like the internet,” Scarlett said. “It’s out there for anyone to use as long as you have a way to access it. Magic is part of everything on earth, and witches especially have an easier time accessing it. But just like with the internet, things can get clogged up if too many people are using it at the same time in the same place. So, a way to keep things from getting clogged up—especially when witch communities were more common—witches used to ask magic if it was okay to use it. Spells were said to be more powerful when magic gave the witch permission first.”

  Emerging from the kitchen, Aunt G said, “Perhaps you have a bond with the magic there now, little mouse, because you asked for permission rather than making demands.”

  Amber pursed her lips. “Maybe …”

  “I like this idea a lot,” Simon said. “Once Amber freezes the Penhallows, they can be transferred to the memory where you can heal them.”

  They made it sound so easy. That much magic was sure to knock her flat on her butt—and she might not be able to get back up. But if it meant it could finally put an end to the Penhallows’ reign of terror on the witch community at large, she was willing to give it a try.

  She wondered how much the WBI knew about the ritual. Clearly they’d known why the Penhallows were ramping up this weekend, but did they know when it was happening? Were they chasing down leads? Had they abandoned Edgehill altogether when they lost track of the book? Were they on their way here now to tear the place to its foundations?

  Shaking that thought loose, Amber got to work on a time-freezing spell, while Simon and Aunt G went back to their tincture-making operation, and the remaining witches settled into brainstorming the best way to funnel their magic into Amber without short-circuiting her system like the witch council had short-circuited the ley lines.

  She stress-ate the three remaining cupcakes, even though one of them was an experimental sweet potato cupcake. Not even Betty could make that one work.

  Jack and Bobby were crowded on the bed with the three cats draped over various laps. They’d set up Amber’s laptop to watch a movie, but within twenty minutes, both men were passed out in a nearly identical fashion: heads tipped back against the wall, hands folded in their laps, and their mouths hung slightly open. Kim, Bianca, and Betty were sitting side by side on the window bench seat, deep in conversation about something. Bianca and Kim weren’t currently trying to strangle each other, so there was that, at least.

  As Amber wrote and rewrote the time-freezing spell, she cast furtive glances
at the trunk of her parents’ grimoires, still sitting where the boomerang spell had dropped it. No one had wanted to move it, worried that any shift in its location would also shift the cloaking spells layered on top of it. Amber wished she could study her mother’s spells—she almost surely had something in there Amber could use as a starting point. But Amber knew it was too much of a risk. For all she knew, the building was currently surrounded by Penhallows waiting for a single pulse of magic from the grimoire to confirm that what they wanted was here.

  Contacting the WBI meant admitting she had the grimoire. They’d likely conk her over the head, make off with the book, and never look back.

  So she was on her own for this.

  When her cell phone buzzed by her arm, she jumped; she’d been so lost in her task that everything else had fallen away for a while. Edgar’s grumpy mug stared up at her. “Hey,” she answered, wedging the phone between her ear and shoulder while she flipped the page on one of Willow’s legal pads. Maybe she needed a thesaurus for the word “freeze.” Too many of the words she chose had a temperature connotation attached to them.

  “Willow is gone,” Edgar said, voice edged with panic.

  Amber dropped her pen and sat up straight. “What do you mean she’s gone?”

  “I mean … I woke up and she was gone,” he said. “I’m … in her car, in the back seat. And she’s not here. Her purse and phone are gone. The keys are in the ignition.”

  Shooting to her feet, she called out, “Aunt G? Can you call Willow?” Then to Edgar she said, “Where is the car?”

  “Uhh …” The sound of fabric on leather echoed through the phone and she could picture him adjusting himself on the back seat as he peered out the back windows of Willow’s car. “It looks like I’m in a parking lot near the Manx Hotel. I’m near the alley by that weird brunch place that was only open until three.”

  “In Gravy?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that one.”

  The place had recently folded. It had been the brainchild of some celebrity chef known for his decadent sauces. Every breakfast and brunch dish featured his sauce in one way or other, but the prices were so outlandish and the hours so weird that not even the high-end clientele that usually stayed at the Manx could keep the place afloat.