by Tess Lake
“If I want to wear a low-cut top, I’ll wear a low-cut top,” Molly declared. I could see she was already working up a head of steam about it. Despite the fact that Aunt Ro often sent such messages to her, Molly took the bait every time.
“Ignore her,” I advised.
“I’ll ignore her, alright,” Molly said, storming off to her bedroom.
“Here we go,” Luce said. I took myself off to the bathroom for an ultra-quick shower and then got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. We were just coming into summer, so the days were mostly warm but nighttime temperatures were still quite cool. I came back to the lounge to find Luce waiting for me. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt too. Molly was still in her room.
“It’s nearly six thirty, are you coming or what?” Luce asked.
“Go ahead, I’ll be there in a minute,” Molly yelled through the door.
Luce and I shared a look, both of us raising our eyebrows.
“Don’t be late,” I called out.
We walked down to the main part of the mansion.
Parked out front was a gigantic RV about the size of a bus. The thing was obviously built for luxury and from the look of it was probably worth more than the whole mansion and everything we owned combined. The thing was so long I had no idea how they ever got it to turn a corner.
Emblazoned down the side in giant letters was THE LINCOLN TOURING CO.
“Well, the Lincolns are here,” Luce said, looking up at the enormous RV.
“Why are they staying here when they own this?”
“Our unique historic charm?” Luce said, quoting the website our mothers had set up. We walked around the front of the RV and into the main dining room. The Lincolns were already sitting at the table, with Aunt Cass at the head. I could hear our mothers in the kitchen, whispering to each other in sharp tones. It didn’t sound good.
Harvey and Mary were in their sixties. Harvey was bald with a round jolly face and looked slightly sunburned. Mary was short and round but clearly cared more about sun protection than her husband. Her skin was milky white.
“I’m Harv and this is Mary,” Harv said. His accent was pure Deep South. Huuurv and Muhry.
“I’m Harlow and this is Luce. Our mothers run this place.”
“Already told them that,” Aunt Cass said. She was watching the pair of them as if they were thieves and might make off with the silverware at any moment.
“What will we serve them?” I heard my mother hiss from in the kitchen.
“Nice to meet you. I must go to see if I can help with dinner,” I said. I scuttled away to the kitchen. Inside were three very frazzled witches going through the cupboards.
Resting on the counter was a delicious roast beef with roast potatoes, carrots and parsnip. It smelled amazing.
“What’s up, family?” I asked.
My mother and two aunts stepped close to me.
“They’re Buddhists,” Mom whispered.
Aunt Freya nodded solemnly in agreement.
“Okay, so they’re Buddhists?”
“They don’t eat beef!” Mom whispered. “We didn’t know they were Buddhists, so now we have to give them something else!”
“We have some prawns, but they’re frozen,” Aunt Freya said desperately. Mom and Aunt Ro looked at her in horror. Serve frozen food to their very first guests? Serve frozen food to anyone?
“I was going to make a gumbo with it,” she muttered.
“They’ll work with chili and garlic and rice,” Mom said. Within a minute they had a wok going with prawns, chili, garlic and butter while they prepared a quick rice pilaf.
With the emergency meal underway. I went back to the dining room.
The Lincolns were smiling and chatting away with Luce. She’d served them two enormous glasses of red wine, which no doubt was helping them relax. Aunt Cass was still watching them like a hawk but drinking a glass of wine, too.
“Dinner will be served shortly,” I announced and sat down beside Luce. She silently pushed across a glass and filled it with red wine.
“Is that roast beef I can smell in there?” Harv asked.
“Roast beef with potatoes and carrots and parsnip,” I said.
“I love roast beef!” Harv said, smacking his lips.
He loved roast beef? Where on earth did the mothers get the idea that he wouldn’t eat roast beef? Had it somehow come up that they were Buddhists and they assumed?
I had no good way to work the topic of their religion into the conversation, so I let it go.
“So it’s thirty-two states and counting,” Mary said to Luce, continuing their conversation.
“Wow, that’s amazing. Are you enjoying it?”
“There is no better life,” Mary said and squeezed Harv’s arm.
Mom and Aunt Ro emerged from the kitchen carrying the roast beef and vegetables on a large silver dining platter. Aunt Freya was carrying chili garlic prawns with the rice pilaf. They set them down in the middle of the table. Both looked and smelled absolutely delicious.
“Where’s Molly?” Aunt Ro asked me.
“She was still getting dressed,” I said.
Mom and Aunt Freya sat beside the Lincolns. I was beside Luce and the empty spot next to Aunt Cass where Molly should have been.
“Roast beef!” Harv said, rubbing his hands together. The mothers looked at each other but quickly recovered.
“We hope you enjoy it,” Mom said. She quickly carved the roast beef and served it. Harv and Mary both took large servings and also took some of the spicy chili garlic prawns.
Just as everyone got down to the business of eating, the front door opened and in slinked Molly.
Aunt Ro inhaled air so swiftly beside me she was lucky she didn’t suck up the entire dinner table directly into her mouth. Molly was wearing a very low-cut red dress that showed off a lot of cleavage and skin. It was also short on the bottom. She’d put on a pair of sheer black pantyhose and bright red glittery high heels. Her lipstick was blood red and she shaded her eyes with smoky eye shadow. She glided in, looking Aunt Ro directly in the eye, daring her to say something.
The Lincolns stopped eating and watched every step to her chair.
“This is my daughter Molly,” Aunt Ro said sweetly. To anyone else it would have sounded like a normal introduction, but we could hear the subtle inflections and knew that the bright, glassy look on her face meant trouble later. Molly leaned over the table and put a hand out to Harv, giving him an eyeful of cleavage.
“So lovely to meet you,” she cooed, channeling a movie star sex siren.
Harv shook her hand and mumbled something through his mouthful of roast beef. Then Mary shook her hand and Molly sat down next to Aunt Cass.
I focused on my plate and prayed that everyone would stay on their best behavior because the first-ever guests of the Torrent Mansion Bed and Breakfast were sitting at our dinner table.
Aunt Cass shifted her gaze to Molly.
“How is the coffee shop going?” she asked.
Molly was thrown off balance by the question. I presume it was because she was so deeply into the role of sex siren she was playing to annoy her mother.
“Oh. Um… it’s good. We had a few full tourist buses today. That coffee machine is paying for itself.”
Just like that, the sexy seductress was gone. Aunt Cass turned her gaze back to Harv and Mary.
“There have been some murders up and down the coast and across the country. The police think it might be the work of a traveling couple of serial killers. Ever come across anyone like that?”
“Aunt Cass!” Mom exclaimed before Harv and Mary got a chance to answer.
“What? They’ve been on the road for more than two years. Chances are if there’s a couple of serial killing travelers out there, they might have come across them.”
“She watches a lot of crime shows,” Aunt Freya explained.
“This isn’t a crime show – it’s real life. There are murders happening all over the place.”
> “Well, we have run into some pretty crazy characters,” Harv said, glancing across at me with a twinkle in his eye.
Oh no, was he making fun of Aunt Cass? This couldn’t end well.
“Like who?” Aunt Cass demanded.
“Don’t worry about answering her. She doesn’t have anything to do except watch too much television. Ignore her,” Molly said, taking a gulp of wine.
Another intake of air, this time from the three mothers together.
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all,” Aunt Cass said.
“If you followed that advice, people would think you’d taken a vow of silence,” Molly replied. She took another gulp.
“Tell us about your travels!” Mom blurted out desperately.
Harv and Mary shared a look between them that really said it all. I had no doubt that we would be added onto the list of crazy people they’d encountered.
“Well, down in Florida…” Harvey began.
Surprisingly, no one took any swipes at anyone else during the rest of the meal as Harv and Mary told us about their travels around America. Aunt Cass kept glancing at Molly and Molly kept studiously ignoring her. I had no idea what had come over my cousin. Clearly she had intended to annoy her mother for sending that text message earlier, but what then? Had the dress, cleavage, lipstick and eye shadow driven her crazy?
With the main course over, the mothers cleared the table and returned to the kitchen to fetch dessert. I was refilling my glass when there was a sudden loud whistling sound outside, swiftly followed by an explosion and then several smaller ones. A red glare lit up the room through the front door.
“Are those… fireworks?” Harv asked.
“Oh no!” Aunt Cass said and bolted up from the table.
We all rushed outside, emerging into a flickering green-and-red light storm as more fireworks burst in the sky. They were shooting from the grounds behind the mansion. The moms rushed out too, Aunt Freya holding a full dish of custard trifle.
“You did this for us?” Mary asked.
It was clear to every witch there what had happened. Aunt Cass had been busted before with illegal fireworks, and although I didn’t have very much proof I was fairly sure she had a network of teenagers around the town that bought from her and sold them on. She must have been storing them in one of the abandoned cottages on the back of the property and something had gone terribly wrong. I had to act quickly.
“Ta-da!” I said, stretching my arms wide. “You’re our first guests and we thought we’d celebrate that!”
“This is incredible,” Harvey said, beaming at us. Aunt Cass took off like a rabbit, running into the darkness.
“She’s going to check on the fireworks,” I said and bolted after her.
Aunt Cass is in her eighties and can certainly put on the old lady act whenever she doesn’t want to do something (this includes a lot of groaning and moaning and holding her back as though she spent a lifetime laying brick or something). But when she wants something, she can move like the wind. I chased her around our end of the mansion and into the forest. As soon as I turned the corner I saw the flames. The cottage I’d passed earlier today on my way to find Holly was fully ablaze. Fireworks were exploding and shooting out through the roof. The bursts of light almost blinded me. I didn’t see Aunt Cass until I almost crashed into her.
“Hold my hand, we’re going to draw on the fire’s power to pull some water out of the ocean!” Aunt Cass yelled.
“What? You can do that?”
She grabbed my hand and stretched her free hand out towards the fire.
“You held the ball of energy. Pull on the fire. Follow my lead,” she said.
I stretched my free hand down towards the blazing fire, although I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be doing. Drawing on the fire’s power? I’d never heard of this type of magic before. I felt the magic moving around us as Aunt Cass reached out with her power. Normally when I cast spells I reach into myself and the magic surrounding me helps. It felt like doing that but reaching outward instead. I concentrated on the blazing fire, even as more fireworks exploded and shot up into the sky. We were at a distance but the radiating heat stung my face.
I felt Aunt Cass draw heat out of the fire, pulling it towards us in a giant cloud. I joined my power to hers. As I did, the fire dimmed in intensity, but it wasn’t enough to put it out.
“Now compress it!” Aunt Cass yelled. With her free hand she pushed in on one side of the ball of heat and I pushed in on the other. Within a moment it was the size of a car. A second later, the size of a basketball. As we compressed it, the temperature went up thousands of degrees until we were holding an invisible burning sphere.
“Now we’re going to push towards the ocean, exchange it and haul the ocean water back,” Aunt Cass said.
We were at least a few miles from the ocean and I had no idea that we even had the power to do this but I followed along with her. We pushed the ball of superheated air out across Harlot Bay. I could feel it connected to us as though by burning strings.
Once it reached the ocean Aunt Cass pushed on it and I felt an enormous shudder ripple through the magic. It was like changing gears in a car that wasn’t quite ready for it. There was a gigantic jerk and I almost lost control but managed to hold on at the last moment. Something happened at the other end and suddenly we were no longer holding a ball of superheated air but thousands of gallons of seawater.
“Now pull,” Aunt Cass said. We pulled together on the block of ocean water. It glided out of the ocean, over the town and towards our mansion. It was difficult, like trying to direct a heavy shopping cart. It really wanted to fall to the ground. We had to apply all of our energy to keep it on a straight path. Soon the water was within eyesight and I saw how enormous it was. We were hauling as much as an Olympic-size swimming pool. As it drifted closer I felt a concealment spell surrounding it. Aunt Cass had cast it without me even noticing.
“Lower it slowly onto the cottage,” Aunt Cass said.
We pulled the water across until it was directly above the blaze. It was halfway down when there came an explosion inside the cottage and some of the fireworks shot up into the water and then exploded inside of it. It was too much and I lost my grasp. The thousands of gallons of water dropped straight down into the blazing inferno.
The cottage was instantly obliterated, the front wall smashed flat and the heavy stones flying outward at high speed. One came shooting towards us with blinding speed. It would have killed us both, but Aunt Cass threw up her forearms and the gigantic stone suddenly bounced off a glowing golden shield that appeared in front of us. It diverted and smashed into a tree, taking the entire thing down. There was an enormous crash as the tree fell.
The water flooded towards us and I fell over, for a moment underwater, getting washed along with rocks and branches. Then it was gone and I was left on my back, soaking wet and gasping for air.
Aunt Cass appeared next to me with her hands on her hips. She’d summoned a ball of light that was drifting near her shoulder.
“I said to gently lower it.”
I sat up and coughed a wet leaf out of my mouth. The fire had been completely extinguished.
“Alright, don’t make a big deal out of it,” Aunt Cass said.
Chapter 6
In the morning I had a ridiculously early breakfast and then went out to survey the wreckage of the destroyed cottage. Last night I’d declined dessert, going straight back to our end of the mansion to have a shower and go to bed. The exertion of directing the magic had caught up with me and I didn’t hear Molly and Luce come home.
Today I was feeling a bit strange. Now that I knew I could pull power from a fire I had the urge to do it again. The only thing stopping me was the very explicit warning Aunt Cass had given me last night that included all the curses she would bring down on my head if I “even so much as thought about doing it again.” On the lighter side she’d warned me I’d feel like this an
d said I should see her immediately if I was tempted.
In the very early morning light, the scene of the fire was terrible. The cottage stones were blackened and many of them had cracked into pieces from the intense heat and then being doused with freezing ocean water. The entire area smelled of burnt wood, wet fireworks and the ocean. There were bits of rubbery kelp scattered everywhere. I didn’t see any fish or any other sea life, though. How exactly did that spell work? If someone had been swimming in the ocean would we have picked them up too? Aunt Cass had cast a concealing spell over the area that didn’t apply to the Torrent family. If Harv and Mary came up here they’d only see forest.
I walked to the spot where the cottage used to stand. It was little more than a blackened square of cracked cobblestones. The scent of burnt everything filled my nostrils but there was something else underneath it. It was sweet, kind of like honey, but incredibly faint. It felt like the leftover touch of a spell. Had the fire been set by someone? Maybe a witch?
Despite my history with magical fires, I definitely knew it wasn’t me. I’d been very calm during dinner and hadn’t felt any magic lash out before the fireworks started exploding.
Scattered amongst the remnants of burnt wood and broken cobblestones, I found a pack of cherry bombs stuck up against a tree. They were wrapped in plastic and appeared to have survived both the fire and the deluge of water. I brushed the ashes off them and slipped them into my pocket.
I was wandering around the ruins when Holly appeared. She shimmered out of nothing quite slowly, at first appearing see-through and then brightening until she appeared solid in full color. She walked over to me, looking around.
“You can do really big spells,” she said.
“Too big sometimes. How are you today, Holly?”
She looked at me for a moment, puzzled. Then she smiled.
“Holly? I forgot. I’m okay. I went back to the island yesterday to see if I could find any clues.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Not yet. But I will.”
I smiled at her, feeling somewhat amazed. Yes, she was a ghost, and as far as I knew ghosts couldn’t be hurt by anything, but she was also a five-year-old girl and I thought she would have been scared to go back there alone.