The Romeo Catchers

by Arden, Alys

  My giggles abruptly stopped. “Wait a second.” I looked at him. “What are you even doing here?”

  He rolled his neck. “I was looking for you.”

  “Why would you ever think to look here?” My tone slanted with suspicion.

  He smiled. “Simple. I put a tracking app on your phone.”

  “You what?”

  He was only able to hold the deadpan expression long enough for Désirée’s arms to cross before he laughed. When neither of us responded, waiting for the real explanation, his laughter trailed off into an awkward throat clear. “What kind of idiot do you take me for? I used a location spell.”

  “Someone’s been practicing their magic,” Désirée said.

  “What kind of location spell?” I asked.

  “An incantation from Susannah’s sketchbook. All you need are the magic words, and . . .” He opened his bag and pulled out the copy of The Shining I’d lent him. “A possession belonging to the person you’re trying to find.”

  “One of my faves,” I said of the tattered paperback, courtesy of Mr. Mauer at an age when I was far too young for King.

  Désirée looked at him with something like approval. “Nice. Though now I’m wondering how effective the invisibility spell is if magic can get through it—”

  “Don’t worry, it didn’t reveal you—even with my location spell.”

  “Then how did you find us?”

  “The spell showed Adele on the map at the Voodoo shop, but as I headed there, you started moving down the street on the map—which was freakin’ cool.”

  “You could have just called me like a normal person, you know?”

  “You could have just answered your phone like a normal person, you know?”

  I pulled my phone out of my bag: 3 missed calls: Isaac Thompson.

  Plus, three messages:

  Isaac 6:17 p.m. You off work yet??

  Isaac 6:40 p.m. Are we still training tonight?

  Isaac 7:15 p.m. I’m heading to Dee’s.

  “Oh, sorry. We were . . . held up.”

  “Excuse me,” Désirée said. “Location spell. Finish.”

  “Right—you were moving down the street and then boom. You disappeared. Gone from the grid. At first I figured the spell crapped out; I was doing it from memory, since Adele has my grimoire, but for kicks I walked to the point on the map where you disappeared, and what do you know, I was right in front of the brothel. The invisibility spell. I flew over the gate and through a broken transom on the third floor.”

  He looked back and forth between us. “Now, I think the real question is . . . what are the two of you doing here? I thought breaking and entering was more my thing?”

  “Note to self,” Désirée said, “look into shielding against location spells.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything weird!”

  “I’m not worried about you. I don’t like any old witch with a location spell being able to track us.”

  “Since when do we need to worry about other witches? Now, vamps, on the other hand, I don’t want them sniffing us out.”

  “They’re locked away, Isaac,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed.

  “They can’t be the only six vampires in the world, Adele.”

  Dee’s hands went squarely to her hips. “I don’t care if they have bloodlust or magiclust, privacy is a key component to being a witch.”

  “Good point,” said Isaac. “I don’t like the idea of anyone being able to track us either.”

  I was pretty sure he thought Dee was speaking obtusely, but I assumed she meant hiding from her family.

  “That’s why we’re here,” I said when Dee offered him no further explanation. “We got kicked out of the shop.”

  “Whoa. You set something on fire?”

  “No!” I smacked his arm.

  “Gran caught us spycasting on her coven’s circle and went all Wicked Witch of the West on us.”

  “Spycasting?”

  Désirée let out a loud sigh and hopped off the counter. “It’s a long story. I want to see more of the house.”

  As we explored the other side of the mansion—through a kitchen, a dining room that sat eighteen, a ballroom, and a double parlor, where we decided to camp out—Désirée went on a diatribe explaining her grandmother’s obsession with keeping their family’s magic line strictly inside the family coven. The parlor’s baby-blue ceiling and navy-blue velvety damask wallpaper felt ethereally sea nymph and Versailles at the same time. I investigated the fireplace as they both sat on the couch.

  “I’m the chosen one to take over after Gran,” she said, “but does anyone ever ask me what I want?”

  When it seemed reasonably safe, I lit the hearth with magical flames and then took a seat on the floor next to Isaac’s legs. As he listened to her go on about the Borges, I slipped my hands into his backpack to find his sketchbook. I knew he was watching me in his periphery. When I leaned up and slid away the pencil from its permanent place behind his ear, he glanced at me, trying not to smile.

  I settled back on the floor, propped against the couch, and opened the sketchbook to a new page, feeling a little warm and fuzzy, like I always did around the two of them and talks of magic. But it wasn’t just the conversation. Isaac would twist someone’s wrist for messing with his sketchbook, one of the few material possessions he cared about—that and his grandfather’s watch—and I loved that he didn’t twist mine.

  CHAPTER 13

  Magic vs. Mundane

  Despite magic talk being one of my favorite things, it grew harder to pay attention to Dee with Adele pressed next to my leg, sliding my pencil over a fresh page in my sketchbook. I don’t know when we slipped into this level of personal-space invasion, but I liked it.

  Désirée’s voice grew louder until she was fuming, comparing the idea of preserved-magic families to everything from incest to hate groups. I glanced at Adele’s array of mismatched circles; as she began to shade them, they quickly became bubbles. Adele tensed up when we had to draw still lifes, but when it was something from her head, her fingers flew across the page. I couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like to grow up with Mac as a father. My pop didn’t hate art; he just acted like it didn’t exist, because it had been my mom’s thing. For him, art died with her, no matter how much it meant to me.

  “Hello?” Désirée said.

  “Sorry.” I turned back to her and asked a question to show I was paying attention. “So, what about other witches outside of your family with the same base magic? Would she have freaked if you’d joined a non-Borges all-Earth coven?”

  “That would have been a lesser sin than consorting with a mixed-magic coven. Or a Symbios—or worse, an Aether.”

  “Dee, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Adele silently shook against the couch, laughing.

  “Certain elements are more symbiotic with each other. Earth goes with Water, and Air goes with Fire.”

  Air and Fire? Hmm.

  “The fifth element, Aether, is more like a wild card; it’s symbiotic with all of the other elements. So Aether witches are seen as weaker to the rest of the witching community—that they’re flippant, hard to trust, always moving on to the new shiniest thing.”

  “Cosette Monvoisin was an Aether,” Adele said without looking up from the sketch—her wisps of smoke were so good they looked like they were floating off the page. “And she was fiercely loyal.”

  “As far as we know she abandoned the coven,” said Dee.

  “Mourning her triplet sisters who died because the coven wasn’t strong enough to fight the Medici without casualties!”

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “And it seems disrespectful to call her a deserter in her own house—if this is her house.”

  Adele turned around with a raised eyebrow.

  “What? We still need proof.”

  “Whatever,” Désirée said. “I’m not judging. I’m just saying that Aethers are the least respected in the witch world, a
nd if I’d joined an Aether coven, my gran might have actually killed me.”

  “So we’re a mutt coven?” I asked.

  “I prefer to see it as highly curated. La crème de la crème. All my gran can see is that I’m breaking family tradition. But Marassa Makandal joined a mixed-magic coven in 1728, and to this day she’s been the strongest witch in our family line. So really, I’m just going back to our roots. If Marassa can do it, I can do it.”

  She’d clearly given this a lot of thought, which wasn’t surprising. Désirée might come across as indifferent, but if you paid attention, you’d know she made every decision with diamond-cut precision—like the way she let slang slip into her carefully articulated speech, letting you know that she was born into the elite but was firmly grounded in the real world. Cool and calculated, just like her legacy political family.

  “I get why witches would stick together,” I said, “but who cares if everyone’s magic isn’t the same? I mean, it’s magic. It’s all effing awesome.”

  “Witches are supposedly at their peak when they bond elementally—in life and in magic—which is why historically most witch power couples always match up element to element. For covens, there’s an old belief that group magic is diluted by bringing in new Elementals. Of course, the biggest fear for any witch is diminishing magic or—Goddess forbid—losing it. So in theory, preserved-magic families are always at peak strength after centuries of purity.”

  “But the three of us are stronger together,” Adele said.

  “Yeah, stronger together than we are individually, but who’s to know your magic wouldn’t be infinitely stronger if you joined an all-Fire coven.”

  My pulse skipped imagining Adele with a different group of witches.

  “I guess we’ll never know,” she said, smiling back at us, and then continued the sketch, which was starting to look like a bubbling cauldron.

  “According to all the witch history my cousins and I endured growing up, back in the Old World, magical families went to extreme lengths, even rearing spies from birth, to infiltrate other covens to steal their secrets. Witches burned other covens’ grimoires, breaking their bonds. Powers tumbled. People stopped mixing.”

  “So your gran thinks we’re infiltrators?” Adele asked, turning around again. “We’re the kids from the wrong side of the track?”

  I laughed.

  “Or does she think we kidnapped you and your magic? Magical world-domination agenda?”

  “I’m sure it’s more like lost witchlings without direction or proper magical upbringing,” Dee replied.

  Adele looked up at me. “We are the kids from the wrong side of the track!”

  I pulled her up onto my lap, my arms circling her waist. She immediately tensed. It was a big move in front of Dee. Maybe too big.

  I loosened up a little in case she wanted to move away, but she didn’t; she even relaxed a bit, trying to be casual, as if I might have just pulled any girl onto my lap, which I thought was funny. “Then why doesn’t Ritha just, like, adopt us?” she asked. “She could be our magical godmother?”

  “That’s what I thought was happening,” Dee said. “But something changed. Clearly. And now I’m stuck on the outside. At first I thought it was just her exerting authority, or being paranoid about family secrets, which I can understand. It’s taken centuries to perfect the magic in our grimoire, but it’s not like I’d just do magic with any bozo off the street!”

  My arm tightened around Adele’s waist. “Aw, she loves us . . . even though we’re street urchins.”

  “Someone get it on vid—” Adele started to say, but then Désirée stood and both legs on our side of the sofa snapped, and we toppled onto the floor.

  “Dee!” Adele yelled. “That’s an antique!”

  Dee smiled slyly, and she mended the wood.

  Adele resumed her place on the floor and picked up the sketchbook again. I climbed back to my seat next to Dee. “If you’re so hell-bent on rebelling from the family coven, then why were you spying on their circle?”

  “Because.” She nearly snorted. “Something is up, and they won’t tell me anything! Gran’s paranoid about my friends, our coven, and us looking for any other witches in town. It’s like she wants to build this magical cage around me so I can’t interact with anyone other than Earth witches.”

  “Did you get any intel?”

  As Dee began to explain how the spycasting spell worked, Adele’s hand moved furiously against the page, finishing the sketch. And then just as Dee went on about a smoke braid, Adele flipped the illustration around to me. Floating on the surface of the bubbling cauldron’s potion were letters spelled out by its ingredients:

  A

  DISRUPTION

  TO SPIRIT WORLD

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

  “No clue,” Désirée said.

  “Maybe we need to get a Ouija board,” said Adele.

  “I have one.”

  “Of course you do.”

  As they jokingly batted back and forth, I fixated on the last line. “Spirit world? There’s really a spirit world?”

  “Of course there’s a spirit world,” Désirée said, as if it were a place she visited every Sunday afternoon for high tea.

  “The spirit world, the magical world, and the natural world are all connected—or more like layered. If something bad happened in the spirit world, it could cause a ripple effect everywhere else.”

  “The magical ecosystem . . . ,” I said, my voice tapering off as I remembered that night in the Borges courtyard.

  “Yes, exactly. That’s what my gran always calls it.”

  “That’s where I heard it.”

  Désirée smoothed her hair. “Excuse me?”

  “Last week I was flying around in the middle of the night, patrolling for looters, and I heard someone in your courtyard, so I went down to check it out. It was just your gran—like in a trance or something.”

  Désirée’s eyes grew wide. “You interrupted Gran when she was talking to the Loa?”

  “I didn’t interrupt! At least I don’t think I did.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “Nothing really. Most of it sounded like mumbles about the crime rate. About something not being right in this town.”

  “And you’re just now telling us this?”

  “What’s there to tell? Everyone’s always grumbling about the crime rate.”

  “But she didn’t see you?”

  “Well . . . she saw me, but I don’t know if she saw me. She called me a witch. An Air witch.” I shrugged, leaving out the part where she’d called me a ghost witch, because it freaked me out.

  Désirée muttered to herself.

  “Disruption to spirit world,” Adele said. “It’s so ominous.”

  Dee folded her legs beneath her. “So that’s why all the Borges coven members have been popping into town. Usually the family coven only meets in full once a year, maybe twice, on St. John’s Eve or Ganga-Bois, but not randomly.”

  Adele twisted around, draped her arms over my knees, and softly smiled. Magical excitement tingled from her fingertips through my jeans where her hands pressed. “Speaking of coven members . . .”

  “What? I’m totally committed to the coven.” I shifted the position of my legs, moving her before the feeling got too exciting.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that”—she got up and sat on the couch next to me—“because we need to find the rest of our coven members.”

  “What?” My arms crossed. “Why?”

  “We’re a mutt coven. We might as well reap the benefits of diversified magic. How cool would it be to have a Water witch and an Aether?” She turned to Dee. “Plus, we can prove to your gran that you did not join the wrong coven.”

  “Exactly, more coven members equal more knowledge, and knowledge equals power. And more power is always a good thing in the witching world.”

  They both looked at me.

  I popped my knuckles. I was defini
tely into my magic reaching its full potential, but that piece of origami metal also burned a hole in my pocket, never letting me forget about the attic. Nicco. The curse. I couldn’t let it ever be broken.

  Adele’s back shot straight up. “Wait, I have a condition.”

  She has a condition? Dee and I both looked to her.

  “We—we can’t tell the other witches about the curse, or the convent. Nothing about Halloween night.”

  “Why wouldn’t we tell them about the curse?” Désirée asked. “It’s part of their magical legacy.”

  “We can’t tell them, because we don’t know anything about these people.” Nervousness poured out with her words. “What if they don’t think the slumbering spell is a strong-enough punishment?”

  “Or what if they’re vampire sympathizers?” I said, really starting to wonder where Adele was coming from with this.

  “Either way,” she said, “it’s not a risk we can take. Our secrets need to be earned, not doled out to witches with the right surname.”

  “Bringing new witches into the circle under false pretense won’t bode well for our collective magic,” Désirée said. “Covens are about perfect loyalty and trust.”

  “We can’t tell them!” Adele shouted, drawing both of our gazes again. She quickly composed herself. “What we did—locking the Medici in an attic to essentially starve to death—it’s a multitude of felonies.”

  “Felonies are against humans, Adele,” I snapped. “Those things are vampires.” Disgust filled the room with that single word.

  Adele sank back deeper into her corner of the couch.

  I leaned back too, my hands on my head. “But still . . . it’s a good point. I’m eighteen; I don’t need cops sniffing around us.”

  “So, we’re all in agreement,” Désirée said, holding her hand out in front of me. “We’re going to find the other two descendants, then, assuming they aren’t psychopaths, bind them into the circle. Later, whenever we collectively deem it appropriate, we fill them in on the past.”

  We piled our hands on top of Dee’s, and a pact was made.

  “Laissez les bon temps rouler,” she said, standing up. “I’m going to get my things.”