by Libba Bray
Theo said, “Scott’s helping Cecily, but I can still beat them both!”
Kathleen sighed. “I guess there’s no helping Cecily, is there?”
“You were doing your nails?” Cecily said. “Again?”
“Yes.” Apparently Kathleen didn’t even register that as an insult. “This color is much better, I think. I want to do my toes too. Scott, lend me a hand, okay?”
“Okay.” Scott winked at Theo. “You and I are going to have a rematch later. Cecily—good talking to you.”
“You too.”
Already Scott had turned away—willing to drop everything to give Kathleen a pedicure. He had to be absolutely crazy about her to do something like that.
How can he be so into her? Cecily thought in despair. How can any guy so right for me be in love with the peroxide piranha? This just can’t be for real.
Wait—THIS CAN’T BE FOR REAL.
Cecily’s eyes went wide. Adrenaline made her heart thump crazily, and nothing around her seemed entirely genuine. Although she remained at the foosball table occasionally spinning her men, she couldn’t pay any attention to what was going on; for once Theo beat her fair and square.
As soon as the game ended, Cecily hurried upstairs to her room. She needed a couple of seconds of privacy to think. Because if what she suspected was true—
It isn’t. It couldn’t be. Kathleen Pruitt’s awful, but not even she could be that awful. Could she?
Being a bitch was one thing. Actually misusing the Craft to force someone to fall in love with her—that was something else altogether. That was serious. That was bad. Maybe it wasn’t as awful as murder, but Cecily had been brought up to believe that subverting someone’s will was more or less in the same general category.
That would explain why Kathleen had skipped the afternoon coven meeting too—the enchantment on Scott would’ve been a powerful one, so much so that traces of it might have lingered and affected the coven’s work. Kathleen’s cover would have been blown, and all the other witches would’ve known what a horrible thing she’d done.
The thought of Kathleen publicly shamed gave Cecily a little thrill of satisfaction, and almost instantly she felt ashamed.
If you really thought she’d done it, you wouldn’t be happy, Cecily told herself. You’d be horrified, and worried about Scott. But you don’t really think Kathleen’s that wicked. You just enjoy thinking that she could be, because it’s easier than thinking that Scott might actually be in love with her for real. Which he obviously is. So get over it.
But the idea wouldn’t quite go away.
Finally, Cecily decided that she’d prove to herself how ridiculous her theory was. Quickly she pulled her Craft supplies from beneath the bed and grabbed a small plastic spray bottle from her luggage. On hot days at the beach she filled the bottle with water so she could cool down while remaining in the sun; obviously, she wouldn’t be needing it for that anytime soon.
A simple solution would be best. Something she didn’t have to cook up. Thinking fast, Cecily realized that a couple of the elixirs from this morning might do the trick if she poured them together in the right proportions. It was difficult without a measuring cup, but she managed to get it close.
First she tested the solution, tiptoeing into Theo’s room. Cecily determinedly didn’t look at Scott’s things on the bottom bunk; instead, she took the Game Boy she’d used for the spyglass spell. After glancing down the hall to make sure that nobody was watching, she squirted the bottle over the Game Boy.
The mist of liquid turned briefly brilliant pink—proving the Game Boy had been the subject of a spell or enchantment in the recent past.
Cecily nodded, satisfied. If nothing else, at least she’d learned how to work up a spell-detection elixir on short notice.
Are you actually going to spray this on Scott? she asked herself. What are you going to do when nothing happens? Remember, he’ll also think you’re a complete weirdo who goes around stalking guys with squirt bottles of pink crap.
“Hey, everybody!” Mr. Silverberg called. “Who wants to go out for pizza?”
“Thank god!” shouted another of the dads, and everyone laughed. Cecily wasn’t the only one who had cabin fever, apparently.
And if they were all headed outside that gave Cecily her chance. Nobody would notice a few drops of water in the middle of a driving rainstorm.
She tucked the spray bottle in the pocket of her jean jacket as everybody got ready to go. Theo, always restless, ran out into the rain before anybody else, and Mom had to chase after him with an umbrella. Kathleen hurried out next, her own umbrella in hand, whining about what the humidity was doing to her hair. Scott was about to follow her, but Cecily grabbed his arm at the door. “Oh, Scott—” she said casually. “Did you happen to see Theo’s Game Boy? We should really take it along tonight so he won’t get bored.”
“Yeah, I think I saw that in our room.” Scott smiled at her. “You’re a good sister, you know?”
As Scott jogged inside to search their room, Cecily took her own sweet time slipping into her sandals. After she had fastened the last buckle, the only people left in the house were she and Scott.
“Come on, you two!” Dad shouted through the cracked-open window of their rental car.
Scott emerged, Game Boy in hand. They both dashed out into the rain, and Cecily made sure to be a few steps behind him so that nobody would be able to see what she was about to do. Quickly she took the spray bottle, reminded herself that this was slightly nuts, and squeezed the trigger.
The mist turned pink, sparkling for one moment before it vanished.
Cecily froze. For a moment she simply stood there, rain pouring down on her; in her shock, she couldn’t feel anything.
Kathleen had done it. She actually had done it. She had broken one of the Craft’s strongest laws.
Scott doesn’t really love her.
“Cecily!” Dad yelled. “What are you doing?”
Haltingly Cecily managed to make her way to the car and get inside. By the time she shut the door behind her, she was sopping wet. “Ugh. Honestly,” Kathleen huffed. She sat in the center of the backseat curled next to Scott, who was smiling at her sort of vacantly. “Stop dripping on me, Cecily.”
Cecily said nothing. She couldn’t even look at Kathleen for fear of revealing that she knew the truth.
It was funny, sort of: she’d always thought Kathleen Pruitt was a horrible person. And now it turned out she hadn’t known the half of it. Kathleen wasn’t just vain, shallow, and cruel—she was really and truly evil.
Cecily stole a sideways glance. Kathleen sat with her head against Scott’s shoulder, and she smiled smugly when she saw Cecily watching.
Somehow Cecily managed to smile back, but she was thinking, Smile while you can. Because you won’t get away with it.
Part Three
SELF-IMPROVEMENT GOALS: NOW TOTALLY REVISED DUE TO STATE OF EMERGENCY
At this time of crisis I will:
talk to Mom about how best to handle freeing Scott from the enchantment, because breaking a magical tie strong enough to make a great guy like him fall for Kathleen is probably out of my league
resist the urge to say “I told you so” to Mom when the evil of Kathleen Pruitt is finally demonstrated to be objective, verifiable fact
enjoy my moment of triumph over The Loathsome One, but not so much that I don’t pay attention to the enchantment-breaking, because that is going to be high-level magic of the first degree
“Cecily, honestly.” Mom folded her arms. “We’re out having a good time, and you’re making another of your lists on a napkin?”
“We need to talk,” Cecily said, quickly tucking the napkin in her skirt pocket.
“No, we need to enjoy ourselves.” Mom put her hands on Cecily’s shoulders, pushing her to turn and look at the small stage in the corner of Mario’s Karaoke Pizzeria. Several of the fathers from the group, with Theo standing in front of Dad, were all bellowing, “We Are the Ch
ampions.”
This would normally have been enough to make Cecily cringe with embarrassment, but larger concerns were at stake. “Mom, it’s about Kathleen. She—I—well, we have to do something, because—”
“Do what, Cecily? Break it up every time you two start to squabble?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Her mother didn’t seem to hear her. “You act like Kathleen’s the most horrible human being who ever walked the face of the earth. You’ve always acted like that, ever since the two of you were four years old and she knocked over your sand castle.”
Cecily had been proud of that sand castle. “But Mom—”
“I don’t want to hear it. Yes, I know she says catty things; I have ears too, you know. Kathleen has never been as mature as you are, and I guess it’s going to take her a few more years to catch up. But I really wish you could act like an adult and let that kind of thing roll off your back.” Mom lowered her voice. “I realize that you seem very…well, taken with Scott, so it must be difficult for you. But that’s no excuse to keep obsessing about Kathleen Pruitt. Now come join the rest of us, all right? You don’t have to sing if you’ll just listen to everybody else.”
Mom walked off, leaving Cecily alone at the end of the long table, her cheeks flaming with both anger and shame.
The anger was because her mother hadn’t listened to her. The shame was because Cecily knew it was her fault Mom hadn’t listened.
Every year, as long as she could remember, she had griped about Kathleen. She’d tried to skip the Outer Banks vacation altogether; once she’d locked herself in her room when Kathleen arrived; she even remembered holding her breath as a very small child until her mother agreed that she and Kathleen didn’t have to sit next to each other at dinner. Their dislike had always been mutual—but Kathleen had never made a scene.
Too late Cecily realized that she’d complained about Kathleen so often, and for so many trivial (if entirely valid) reasons, that not even her mother would listen to her on the subject any longer.
The witch who cried wolf, she thought. Great. Now Kathleen’s actually gone evil for real, and nobody will believe me.
She glanced at the group and saw Scott sitting next to Kathleen, a vague smile on his face. He squirted ketchup on her French fries in the shape of a heart. Clearly, for the sake of his dignity, something had to be done.
Cecily would just have to do it herself.
“We Are the Champions” concluded, with the men holding their fists over their heads and Theo jumping up and down with excitement. Everybody in the place applauded, and Cecily absentmindedly joined in. She almost didn’t hear the announcer say, “Next up is—Cecily Harper!”
Wait—what?
“Cecily Harper? Where is she?” The announcer peered out into the group, then smiled as Theo pointed out his sister. “Let’s give the lovely young lady a hand!”
Running did not seem to be an option, and it was too late to hide. Cecily rose, unsure what to think—until she saw Kathleen hiding her smirk beneath one newly manicured hand.
She signed me up for this. Why wasn’t I watching her more closely?
“Go for it, honey!” Dad yelled, clapping vigorously. He and Mom looked so happy that she’d decided to join in.
Cecily cast a glance at the crowd—at least one hundred people in sandals and T-shirts, all of them slightly stir-crazy from the bad weather, waiting to hear her sing. At this point she figured they were pretty starved for entertainment. She wasn’t a particularly gifted singer, but she didn’t suck either. Depending on the song, maybe she could get through it. As Kathleen-Pruitt-Brand Evil went, this wasn’t all that bad.
Hesitantly she made her way to the stage and took the microphone in hand. The prompter screen came up with the lyrics to the song that was about to play—the song Kathleen had chosen in her name.
In horror she saw the chorus: “My hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps.”
Gripping the microphone so tightly she could have used it for a club, Cecily forced a smile onto her face and thought, This means war.
They got back to the beach houses fairly late that night. The rain hadn’t stopped, but it had finally tapered to a light drizzle. Nobody needed umbrellas to get from the cars to the houses. Cecily walked with Theo, who was unsteady on his feet; he wasn’t used to staying up to this hour. Although Cecily was fairly tired herself, her mind was far too wired for her to fall asleep.
I need to break the enchantment on Scott. I really don’t have any idea how to accomplish that. I can’t count on Mom to help me out. So what do I do?
The best possible resource was her mother’s Book of Shadows.
Every witch kept a Book of Shadows. Cecily wasn’t old enough to have started hers yet—that began when apprenticeship ended. Nobody ever completed a Book of Shadows; witches worked on theirs throughout their entire lives. The books contained lists of spells but not only that; they would also hold each story of how the witch had learned the spell, when and how and why she had used it, and what the results were each time.
When she was younger, Cecily had planned to keep her Book of Shadows in electronic format—that would make it harder to destroy and easier to update and organize. (She sometimes thought dreamily of the Excel spreadsheets she could create of magical ingredients.) However, she’d learned that the book itself was important. It was to be kept near any time a powerful spell was being performed, and over time the nearness to magic seeped into the pages. The Book of Shadows of an old powerful witch almost had powers of its own.
Walking up and saying, “Hi, Mom, can I borrow your Book of Shadows?” was completely out of the question. Cecily had been allowed to look at it before but only in her mother’s company and only on special occasions.
That meant she’d have to steal it.
Well, not “steal.” Borrow. It seemed better to think of this as borrowing; after all, Mom would get her Book of Shadows back. She just wouldn’t know that it had been gone.
Everyone was getting ready for bed, which meant they were wearing their pajamas in the hall and pretending not to mind that other people were using the bathrooms. Cecily put on a T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants—believable as sleepwear but also ideal for sneaking around the house, or sneaking out of it.
She wandered through the house, trying to look casual, which shouldn’t have been so difficult in a T-shirt and yoga pants. Mom and Dad, where are you? Please don’t already be in bed—
They weren’t. They were sitting in the front room, each drinking a glass of wine, being sort of disgustingly mushy with each other. Cecily averted her eyes, the better to avoid witnessing the dreaded parental make-out session. The point was they were distracted, which gave her a window of opportunity.
Quickly she tiptoed down the hall toward her parents’ bedroom. Nobody saw her except Theo, who was rubbing his eyes and probably too tired to notice.
Cecily peered around the bedroom, considering and then rejecting possible hiding places. Dad might look in any of the drawers or under the bed, so her mother wouldn’t have put the book there. Same thing with any of the suitcases. It would have to be someplace really safe, yet unexpected.
Cecily’s eyes lit up as she noticed the shadow box above the bed. It was merely decoration—a kitschy beach scene, which was pretty much the kind of thing that had to count as style in Ocean’s Heaven—but it stood out from the wall a bit, and it was big enough….
She tugged the shadow box from the wall, and the Book of Shadows flopped onto the bed.
Just when it looked like she’d pulled it off, Cecily heard her mother in the hallway. “You know, it’s kind of sexy when you sing.”
Dad laughed softly. “I would’ve spent all night on stage if I’d known that.”
Horror froze Cecily to the spot. What was worse: being caught stealing Mom’s Book of Shadows or having to hear her parents flirt? She’d never find out, because she was about to do both at the same time, which was as bad as it could possi
bly get.
Then she heard Theo. “Mommy, Daddy, come read me a story!”
“You want a story before bed? You haven’t asked for one in a while.” Dad sounded affectionate. “We don’t want to keep Scott awake.”
“He’s off kissing Kathleen,” Theo said scornfully. “Come read to me!”
Their footsteps approached the doorway—then went past it, heading toward Theo. Cecily caught her breath for a second before she clasped the Book of Shadows to her chest and sneaked out.
As she went, she looked behind her. Mom had Theo in her arms as they walked toward his room. He smiled at Cecily from over their mother’s shoulder and winked.
I can’t believe it. Theo saved me! Her little brother couldn’t possibly have guessed why she needed to be in their parents’ room, but he’d covered for her anyway. Just because. It was definitely the least bratty moment of his life to date.
Cecily grinned at her brother, proud that at least one of her self-improvement goals had paid off.
Now to fulfill the most important goal of them all: taking Kathleen down.
Part Four
DISENCHANTMENT SPELL CHECKLIST
moth’s wings
red wine—located in wet bar of beach house
purified ash
broken glass—smash a glass in kitchen, leave a couple dollars for house owners
essence of verity
cauldron—will improvise
crushed beetle shells
virgin’s blood—depressingly, can provide this myself
The wind whipped in from the ocean, chilling Cecily as she sat on the still-damp sand. Although the rain had finally stopped, the skies overhead remained ominously clouded, without any stars.
Her mother’s Book of Shadows sat next to her on a beach towel. Although it wasn’t decorated as elaborately as some witches preferred—Mom liked to keep things simple—the book possessed a kind of power just sitting there. Maybe it was Cecily’s imagination, but the pale gray cover seemed to glow a little even without any moonlight.