A Handful of Hexes

by Sarina Dorie

Thatch made no attempt to help me out of the ditch. I scrambled out and lugged my bag behind me as I trampled after him. I tripped through the brush and collided into a tree. Dragging the bag proved ineffective. It got caught on branches and roots. I attempted to carry it, but only made it about ten feet before my back grew too tired, and I needed to set it down.

  Thatch crossed his arms, glowering at me as he leaned against a leafless tree. Any hint of blossoming friendliness he might have shown me in the past was gone.

  Despite the chill of cold, my exertions warmed me. I wiped away a mixture of sweat and rain from my brow. “I’m too tired to walk and carry this bag anymore. Would you help me?”

  “You made this bed for yourself. Now you get to lie in it.”

  I heaved it over a broken limb and then slipped in the mud, falling on my butt. I tried the magic word. “Will you please carry it for me?”

  “No. This is the punishment you deserve for your stupidity.”

  I rolled over and pulled myself up. “Okay, fine. You want to punish me. Why are you punishing yourself? You could use that one spell to transport us. The one that Josie said makes her toes tingle.”

  “I have no intention of wasting my magic on your foolishness. You should have cleared this little excursion with me before you left the school.” He turned and started back into the woods. I scrambled after him as quickly as I could, which was the pace of Marcel the Shell.

  I called after him. “I cleared it with Mrs. Keahi and Jeb. Khaba walked me here.”

  “Jeb is senile and less astute than he used to be. Mrs. Keahi probably wouldn’t care if the Fae snatched you. Mr. Khaba has more urgent matters to see to than waiting here for you for an hour before going to Darshan to ask if he would use his crystal ball to see if you’re in danger.”

  Khaba had gone to the divination teacher? “Did Pro Ro tell him I was fine?”

  “No. Darshan refused to do any favors on your behalf. Khaba went to Vega next, who laughed at the request, and then claimed to use clairvoyance. She told him you were dead—and that meant she would get the room to herself.”

  I must have been more tired than I’d thought. I actually laughed at Vega’s humor. Wait until she saw what I had brought her from my mom’s house. She was going to love those brownies as much as I did. She would become my friend and mentor, gosh darn it!

  “So how did you find out?” I asked.

  “Jeb came to me. Not you coming to me to ask for help ahead of time. Not Khaba who went to everyone else except me. Not even Vega who is tasked with looking after you. No one told me you had left the school this weekend.” He rounded on me. His voice remained calm, but anger burned in his eyes. “Do you know what it is like to discover your charge has snuck out behind your back and put herself in a dangerous situation—again—and now you’re being ordered to go find her?”

  I winced back. “I wasn’t trying to sneak behind your back. I didn’t want to bother you. You said you didn’t want to be my mentor anymore.”

  “If only I could get rid of you that easily.”

  I yanked on my bag hard enough that I lost my balance and skidded back into a tree. “I’m sorry you’re stuck mentoring me and I’m such a nuisance.”

  “Don’t try to make me feel guilty for calling you that. You are a nuisance.”

  I dragged the bag again, this time pulling so hard on the handle that it snapped off. Great.

  I tried to push the piece of plastic back onto the metal rods, but all that did was push them in. I shoved my arms through the straps of the backpack and heaved it onto my back. Mud soaked into my coat and dripped onto the back of my already wet pants. I had to lean forward so I didn’t fall over.

  I didn’t think I had packed that much in there. The pie and brownies couldn’t have weighed that much. Maybe my mom had packed me extra food.

  I followed Thatch in his sullen silence.

  I still didn’t know what I’d done that made him change his mind about teaching me originally. I had been improving in my lessons before Julian’s attack. He’d even been nice to me after Julian had attacked me. Maybe he’d used up his quota of niceness. Or I had used up his quota of patience. He did have to put up with a lot. I had never intended for him to have to walk me two miles to the school in the dark on a soggy night when he could have been in bed sleeping.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling especially low. “I didn’t mean to ruin your evening. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want a brownie?”

  “No. You can’t bribe me with food.”

  “Is there anything I can bribe you with? Blood? My firstborn child?”

  “Don’t joke about that. It isn’t funny.”

  I panted, the bag growing heavier with each step. It had to be the rain soaking into the fabric like a sponge and weighing it down. I hoped the plastic wrap and Ziploc bags would be enough to keep the food from getting soggy.

  “We’re on Womby’s property.” Thatch said. “You are safe from Fae, and you don’t need my escort any longer. Let’s hope you can find your way at night.”

  I certainly wouldn’t miss his friendly conversation. Maybe I would miss the light from his wand, but I could do that with my Elementia fire spell. Of course, it didn’t usually work.

  The worst part of walking back was going to be the bag. I really didn’t want to ditch it, but it was slowing me down. Every bone in my body felt like it was ready to break.

  The light of Thatch’s wand faded away. I suspected he was about to use his transportation spell if he hadn’t started it already. The shadows were too thick to tell.

  I spoke quickly, hoping he was still there. “Can I give you something before you go? Your present? And Vega’s present? I guess you can eat it all if you want. I just don’t want to leave it out here.”

  “What present?” Thatch asked. His wand brightened like a ninety-watt bulb.

  I wrestled with the zipper, not caring if I broke it at this point. “I brought you pie and brownies. There’s also some turkey in there. We made an ice pack so it would stay good all day.” That might have contributed to the weight. The zipper remained stubbornly stuck in place. I shoved the entire bag into his arms before he refused. “Some of it was supposed to be for me, but you can take it all. I just don’t want the rain to make it soggy and ruin it. I hope it didn’t get jostled around too much as I was dragging it.”

  He sighed in exasperation. “Why must you do this to me?”

  “Do what?”

  “Tempt me to be nice to you with your selflessness and unending kindheartedness. And pie.”

  He shoved the bag back into my arms. I feared I’d blown it. Thatch lifted his wand. He circled it around me, lassoing me with black mist.

  “Oh no!” I said, expecting the worst.

  The air was sucked from my lungs, and the world spun around me. My feet felt as though they went out from under me. I stumbled and dropped the bag. Thatch caught my arm. I blinked as a light above me momentarily blinded me. I was in my classroom. Candles in the chandelier above had been lit.

  Thatch lifted the dripping bag onto a table. “What do you have in here? Bricks?”

  “No.”

  He tried opening the bag, but he couldn’t wrestle the zipper into submission either. It unjammed with a tap from his wand. He removed a large stone the size of my head. The gray was the same color as the walls. I gasped. He pulled out several more and set them on a student table.

  “How did those get in there?” I asked. “Who would play such a dirty trick on me? That wasn’t you, was it?”

  “Contrary to popular belief, I’m not that evil.” Thatch removed the bags of food and set them on a table, examining the contents.

  I lifted a gray stone with crusts of mortar stuck to it. The rocks had come from the school, maybe from the section that my mother’s experiments had left in ruins. Someone at this school had played this practical joke
on me. If Thatch hadn’t done it, then who had?

  Who hated me that much? I thought about Hailey, but she hadn’t known about my trip.

  Thatch unzipped one of the bags and inhaled. I shivered in my sopping clothes. I’d lost my hat, either in the forest or with the transportation spell. Hopefully the unicorns didn’t find it and accuse me of litter.

  I shrugged out of my coat, but my arm got stuck. I tugged again. Fabric ripped, and I realized it was one of the sleeves of my blouse. Thatch scowled and shook his head. He flicked a hand at me. A burst of warm air blew against me, drying out my hair and clothes in a rush of magic. I raised my arms as hot air blew in my face like a hair dryer.

  Thatch shouted over the roar of wind. “I’m banning you from traveling home by bus.”

  “How will I ever get to see my mom again?”

  “From now on, you need to ask Vega or me to take you home. We’ll use magic.” Thatch held up a bag of smashed pie. “Is that pumpkin pie?”

  “Yes. And apple.”

  The hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Do you have any forks in your desk?”

  Probably that was as close as I would get to gratitude.

  It was after midnight when I snuck up to my dorm room. I tiptoed in, afraid I might wake Vega. Instead, I found her pacing the length of room in her black silk pajamas.

  “There you are. Now I can finally go to sleep.” She threw back the covers of the bed and plopped down.

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t have to wait up for me,” I said.

  “If I hadn’t, you would have woken me up two hours after I went to bed, and then I wouldn’t have been able to fall asleep again.”

  I set the backpack on the floor and removed a baggie of brownies. “I brought you a present.”

  “Did you?” Vega sat up, her eyes wide with childish eagerness. “What did you bring me? A human heart? A dragon egg?”

  “No. I brought you some brownies from my mom’s house.”

  She lifted her nose at the bag, as if she was too good for brownies. “Those are probably two thousand calories.”

  “Probably,” I said, fighting the urge to be disagreeable. “And worth every gram of fat.”

  Her eyes narrowed to slivers. “Did you make these for me? And only me?”

  “No, I brought some for Thatch too.”

  “I see. You made them for your enemies. You probably poisoned them. Am I right?”

  “Yep,” I said. I turned away and rolled my eyes. “I’ll bring these to Josie and Khaba tomorrow.”

  “Go ahead. Let them get fat and die.”

  So much for trying to make friends with Vega. After all that work, it was a letdown. I was pretty certain Vega didn’t have a heart. Maybe that was why she wanted someone else’s.

  “One thing I learned early on was that if there was something I wanted, I needed to learn how to help myself.” Vega blew out the lamp before I had a chance to change into my pajamas. “Then there’s you, relying on your smiles and brownies to make everyone like you so you don’t have to learn magic. You’re pathetic.” The ice in her voice could have preserved Frosty the Snowman on a summer day.

  I fumbled in the dark for my pajamas. “That’s not why I made you brownies. I just wanted to be nice. And I do want to learn magic.”

  “Take tonight for example. Thatch was in a pissy mood because you didn’t ask his permission to leave the school to go spend the holiday with your mother.”

  “My mom,” I corrected. My mother was Alouette Loraline.

  “I bet you didn’t even stick up for yourself. You let him bully you and tell you what to do. You’re not even his student anymore.”

  I undressed in the dark. “But he was right. I did something stupid. I should have told him.” If I had, he could have transported me quickly and easily without risk of danger. The Raven Court had followed me. I was fortunate I hadn’t been abducted. “Besides, he is my mentor.”

  “Not anymore. He dumped you onto me. And you aren’t trying very hard to get me to teach you. I’ve given you plenty of motivations and opportunities to learn from your mistakes.”

  “Are you talking about the mouth-glue spell again?”

  “Didn’t you even think to check once tonight why your bag was so heavy?”

  I had, but the zipper had gotten stuck. Realization crept over me. “You put the stones in my bag?”

  “Aren’t you clever for figuring that out?”

  Irritation festered inside me. When had she done that? I was certain there were no stones in my backpack when I’d unpacked it at my mom’s house. If it had been on the way back, I would have seen her. Unless I had.

  “Were you following me?” I asked. “That shadowy figure was you, wasn’t it?” That meant she had known where I was the entire time and hadn’t told Thatch. “Do you like to stir up trouble?”

  “Of course I do. Especially if I think a teachable moment might come out of it. But you manage to do exactly opposite of what any logical person might do every time.”

  “Logic? How am I supposed to logically guess someone put rocks in my bag? How was I supposed to figure out you were the one stalking me?” I thought of everything else that had gone wrong that day. “Did you make it rain too?”

  “No, that would be too much work, but it wasn’t too much work to make your bus late.” She cackled.

  My loathing for her grew.

  “What about the Raven Court? Was that a trick, or did you call them so they would try to snatch me?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “You saw the Raven Queen?”

  “No. But I saw her emissaries right before Thatch showed up.”

  “Right. Saved by Professor Fucktard.” She shifted in her bed. “My point is, you had an opportunity to tell Thatch what a dickwad he is, and you didn’t. You gave him brownies instead.”

  “Is that the lesson you were trying to impart? To be rude to people and not care if I make them worry?”

  “No, the lesson I want you to learn is to be smarter, tougher, and more resourceful. If I really wanted to do something, it wouldn’t matter if Thatch approved of it or not. I would do what I wanted, when I wanted, and I wouldn’t let anyone stop me. If Thatch told me I could only learn what he gave me permission to learn, I’d tell him to go screw himself.”

  Her words sent chills down my spine. How did she know Thatch wasn’t teaching me about my affinity? Or was she just speaking in general?

  I was pretty sure Thatch had underestimated Vega’s defiance and uncompromising thirst for spite. She was not a good role model or a mentor. She was like my biological mother, ambitious and stopping at nothing to achieve her goals.

  I had a lot of goals too, but I could resist the urge to achieve them by hurting people like she did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Favors

  I stood at my chalkboard, demonstrating the difference between hatching, cross hatching, stipples, and scumbling that students would be using on their upcoming pen-and-ink projects.

  Thatch ran through the door of my closet, his clothes drenched, and his usually immaculate hair rakishly mussed. “Miss Lawrence, I have need of your assistance.”

  A class of thirty students sat around the horseshoe-shaped composition of tables, taking notes and copying vocabulary.

  I blinked at him in surprise. “I’m in the middle of teaching.” I couldn’t leave thirty students unattended. He was the one who had yelled at me for that on the first day.

  “This is more important.” He raised his voice. “Class is dismissed.” He clapped his hands twice. “Now.”

  Students jumped up from their seats. Before they could get too excited, I raised my voice. “No, you aren’t. Class is definitely not dismissed.”

  Ben O’Sullivan whined, “But Mr. Thatch said—”

  “Professor Thatch is not your teacher for this class.” I gave Thatch my best stink eye before turning back to the other students. “Everyone stay in your
seats and keep working on your pen-and-ink projects. I am going to have a word with Mr. Thatch out in the hall. If anyone leaves or does anything mischievous, I’ll assign a detention.”

  “Define mischievous,” some smart-alec called after me.

  Thatch shifted from foot to foot in agitation as he waited for me outside the front door of the classroom. I followed him to the landing, closing the door behind me. “What’s all this about?”

  “I need you to hurry. There’s a female student I need assistance with. A potential student.” He grabbed me by the elbow, ushering me down the stairs. “If we take too long, she won’t be there anymore.”

  He took the steps two at a time, causing me to stumble and trip into him. Blood dripped from under his sleeve and rolled down his hand.

  Concern flooded over me. “What happened to you?”

  “She bit me.”

  “The student? And you want me to help? Let me guess, you plan on using me as bait?”

  “No. I need a female teacher. She’s a siren. You’ll most likely be immune to her magic, and she’s more likely to trust a woman than a man. My preference would be someone Amni Plandai like Grandmother Bluehorse, but she won’t come recruiting with me anymore after that one time we were hiking. She fell and hurt her hip. Josie would be my second choice because she’s petite, cute, and pathetically nonthreatening, but she won’t go into secluded areas with me anymore.”

  “That’s what happens when you insist on being an island surrounded by burnt bridges.”

  He steered me out of the classroom wing and toward the dormitories. “That leaves you.”

  “I’m not Amni Plandai. I don’t know much plant or animal magic.” I had to run to keep up with his long legs.

  “You’re the only teacher who sometimes listens to me, and that will have to suffice.” He stopped in front of my dorm room.

  I shook my head. “Do you know why I only listen sometimes. It’s because you act like this.” I waved my hand at him, the gesture encompassing his tweed suit and haughty expression. “You barge into my class and boss me around like you own the place. Try asking for once, and maybe you’ll get what you want.”