Seriously Shifted

by Tina Connolly

  “Now wait a minute,” said Sarmine, rising. “I can’t let you do this.”

  But the other three witches must have had their plan all worked out. Malkin was busy working some sort of transportation spell, but Valda and Esmerelda each had one free hand. Valda held out a green powder and Esmerelda scraped her wand through it and blew it straight at Sarmine.

  The green powder turned into vines that wrapped around Sarmine’s arms and legs, covering up her wand and her fanny pack. She stumbled backward, the vines tripping her. The mean girls had momentarily bested her.

  I didn’t know exactly what they were doing but I knew it involved Leo. And I knew I was the only one left.

  I scrambled across the hallway, grabbing the witches’ hands just as Malkin chanted the very last word. Behind me I heard the glass of the tubes breaking as Sarmine fell across them. Her head went down hard as the glass shattered on the floor. “Mom,” I shrieked. But it was in the distance already, because we were zooming through the school, around hallways, through doorways, until Malkin brought us to a sudden stop in the gymnasium.

  I rolled and came up again with my wand. My ingredients were still in my backpack in the hallway, but maybe they wouldn’t realize that immediately.

  But Valda was quicker. She had her wand out and on me.

  Esmerelda pulled the bunny out of the purse and set him down on the basketball court, keeping her hand on him. Malkin pulled out a marker and began drawing the pentagram.…

  And then the back door to the gym opened. I craned my head—was it Sarmine?

  Sparkle and Henny rushed into the gym, disheveled and panting. Sparkle’s black ponytail was in tangles around her face and Henny’s glasses were at an angle. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere,” shouted Henny. “I’ve got Leo!”

  Everyone turned at that. Each of the girls was cradling a bunny.

  “No, you don’t,” shouted Sparkle. “I do!” They came closer, arguing back and forth.

  Esmerelda laughed. “Girls fighting over a boy,” she said. “How amusing.”

  But I saw the girls’ eyes flick to each other. They were coordinating. As the witches laughed, Sparkle said, “Now!”

  They released the bunnies. All three bunnies bounded in different directions.

  Esmerelda swore, and all three witches dove for the bunnies. I raised my wand.

  Then Malkin had her wand at my throat. “I wouldn’t,” she said.

  “Hunnngh,” I said. Esmerelda came up behind Malkin, a frightened rabbit kicking in her arms. Valda had another one by the ears.

  Malkin grabbed the third. “We’ll solve this,” she said. She pulled out a jar of cardamom from her jacket pocket. “Which witch has the shifter?”

  “Maybe none of them,” I said as she waved the jar under the nose of her bunny, then Esmerelda’s. “Maybe he’s still on the field, and … and … he got away.”

  Malkin held the jar up to Valda’s bunny.

  Suddenly Valda was holding a very naked boy by the ears. “Ew,” she said, and jumped back.

  “Mm,” said Esmerelda.

  Malkin rolled her eyes and finished inscribing his pentagram. Valda magicked him up a towel, which he wrapped around himself. Esmerelda focused her wand on Sparkle and Henny while dusting rabbit hairs off of her pink suit. Sparkle was still in her cheerleading uniform and her hands were empty—if her wand was with her, it must be in her kneesocks or something.

  “I was watching him,” said Sparkle, “And then she tricked me.” She glared at Malkin, who shrugged.

  “C’est la guerre,” Malkin said. She advanced on Leo, who was looking like he was only a whisker away from bunnying himself. “And now you, my little lion, are going to become a very special animal for me.” She grinned. “The lindworm.”

  “I want him to be a unicorn first,” said Esmerelda. “If I just shave the hairs off of his neck I’ll be set for life. You don’t need the neck, do you, Malkin?”

  “Dibs on the tail,” said Valda.

  Leo swallowed.

  “But you can’t make him turn into a lindworm,” I pointed out. “Not if there aren’t any more.”

  “It is true I have been searching for the lindworm for a while,” Malkin said. “And it is true that they are, sadly, extinct. But halfway through my search it occurred to me that I didn’t have to find a lindworm. All I had to find was a shifter … and some lindworm DNA.”

  My eyes widened.

  “See, I could’ve been a velociraptor,” Leo said under his breath. Gallows humor.

  “I found the last scale known to man in a tiny museum in Italy,” continued Malkin. “Mislabeled, of course. They didn’t know what they had. And it just sat there gathering dust. But I recognized the tint, the shine, the sparkle! All so clear to anyone with witch blood. It was exactly as it had been described.” She pulled out a small vial from her pocket. She was right. To me, the scale emitted a glow. “Once you touch this, you will be able to change,” she said to Leo. She uncorked the vial and slid it through the pentagram to him.

  “And then what?” I said. “You’ll pluck his canines out, start a plague, and call it a day? He can go to the dentist and we can go home?”

  She shook her head. “Of course not, Sarmine’s daughter.” She looked up at Leo, her eyes soft and caressing. “I need his heart.”

  16

  If You Fail …

  “Can’t give you my heart, I’m afraid,” said Leo. “It’s already taken.”

  “Oh, Leo,” cooed Sparkle.

  I admired his bravery even as I wanted to tell him to shut up. Malkin wasn’t joking around.

  “You will turn into a lindworm for me,” Malkin said. “Or else.”

  “Or else I’ll turn into a rabbit?” said Leo. “I’m good at that one.”

  “Or else I’ll go strangle your fathers,” Malkin said coolly.

  Leo shut up.

  “The legendary lindworm,” rhapsodized Malkin. “With it I can rule the world.” I settled back against my heels. This could take a while.

  “All the world?” said Henny. “I didn’t know wicked witches were usually so vague about their plans.”

  “You shut up, too,” said Malkin. “I plan to use the catalyzing power of the lindworm to gain control of all the remaining oil in the world. It’s the sympathetic resonance spell I’ve been working on my entire career. Without the lindworm, the spell had very limited range—a few feet. Now, scales will definitely give me the range, but not the long-lasting control. But with the heart … I work my spell on one drop of oil, and it gives me control of every single drop, everywhere, forever. I’d consider that ‘ruling the world,’ wouldn’t you?”

  Oh, Sarmine would love to hear that. I wondered if I had had the choice again, if I would have chosen differently. Picked Sarmine’s evil instead of Malkin’s.

  “Now, where did I set the cardamom?” mused Malkin.

  “You’d better be careful,” I said. “Leo and Sparkle were practicing at the zoo. Who knows how many vicious creatures he’s touched by now? He might rip you from ear to ear.”

  Malkin glanced over at me. “So you do have some witchy knowledge in that mundane little head. Did your father teach you about shifters?”

  “I never knew my father,” I said.

  Malkin snorted. “That’s rich.”

  “What?”

  “Your father is the one who helped his shifter mother get to ‘safety,’” she sneered. “The witchness protection program, such as it is.”

  “But he’s not … I mean, you’re not…” I looked at Leo. I didn’t want to date him, but that would be a little too weird for comfort if he were my half brother.

  Malkin rolled her eyes. Witches do that a lot. “No, your father was just a bleeding-heart softie,” she said. “We could never figure out what Sarmine saw in him.”

  I saw hope forming in Leo’s eyes. “Is my mother … Is she still alive?” he said.

  But we both knew the answer. How else had Malkin finally tracked Leo
down?

  “She died well,” Malkin conceded, and I shuddered.

  Leo’s chest was rising and falling, huge racking breaths that echoed in the basketball court. He looked like he was only controlling himself from shifting with great effort. Even I wanted to smash Malkin’s face in and I am ordinarily the least violent person there is. “She would never have told you where I am,” he managed.

  “Nah,” said Malkin. “I had to ransack her place. Her problem was she was unwilling to cut you off forever. See, her apartment was clean and tiny and had almost nothing in it. But she had two laptops. One that was brand new and one that looked, oh … how old did you say you were?”

  Leo did not answer this.

  “Well, you know how long laptops last. And why would she have two? She wasn’t in tech. She wasn’t a hoarder. Most importantly, she wasn’t a witch. She didn’t have any way to check up on you. That is, unless a certain softhearted witch had bespelled her a device that was brand-new seventeen years ago. Her only possible connection to you.” Malkin shrugged gracefully, like a cat. “Once I cracked the password, there you were.”

  You could have heard a pin drop in the gym.

  “It was set up to grab little videos of you now and then. Seemed to be keyed in to important events. It got your first bike ride, wobbling around a long driveway. The first book you read all by yourself—Go, Dog. Go! wasn’t it? First trip to the zoo. There were about a hundred of them, all neatly labeled and dated.”

  My eyes were filled with tears and Leo’s didn’t look much better. Sparkle’s teeth were clenched. She really had cared for her shifter friend.

  “The most recent one was labeled Homecoming Game. But when I clicked on it, it only showed me a second before the screen went black and an error message popped up. Then the laptop fried itself. It knew what had happened.”

  Go Dad, I thought.

  “But I had seen a flash of the team colors. Orange and forest green. I have to tell you that narrowed it down considerably. And when I realized that one of those schools, Hal Headley High, was in the exact same town where my dear old friend Sarmine lived—well! I knew it couldn’t be coincidence.”

  “Evil villain monologuing,” said Henny under her breath.

  But Malkin had heard. She snapped her wand over to Esmerelda and ordered, “Bring up the girlfriend.”

  “Excuse me?” said Sparkle. “I am a wicked witch in my own right, you know.”

  Malkin shrugged. “You’ll bleed like any old human.” To Esmerelda she said, “Threaten her.”

  Esmerelda held her wand on Sparkle. Sparkle, to give credit where credit was due, looked more pissed than terrified. Mean girls of different generations, squaring off. “What threat would you like?” inquired Esmerelda. “Purple boils? Slugs down your neck? Public humiliation?”

  Sparkle sneered. “Pathetic.”

  “Fine,” said Esmerelda. “How about good old-fashioned torture?”

  “Ugh,” said Sparkle as the wand tip poked into her throat. “So … very … gauche.…”

  “Stop!” said Leo. “I’ll change.”

  “Don’t do it, Leo,” I shouted. “You’ll save Sparkle but we’ll lose everything.”

  “Gee, thanks, Cam,” said Sparkle. The wand dug in. “Huunnngh. I mean, she’s actually right. Don’t do it.”

  “I have to do the right thing,” Leo said. “No one else should die for me.”

  He reached down and touched the lindworm scale. His eyes closed and I wondered what he saw. Did he see that exact lindworm from so many years ago? Did he see it slithering around in the wild; see the end of its life? There was an imploding feeling as if he was sucking all the air toward him.

  And then rearing overhead was the lindworm.

  Violently it strained forward, attempting to swat the witch with its massive white bulk. It slammed into the invisible sides of the pentagram and slid down. Malkin laughed. She held her wand high.…

  And then there was a terrific noise behind us. Some sort of cavalry, I thought, someone coming to save us. Sarmine, perhaps. Malkin had too much sense to turn, but we all did, just in time to see Jenah zooming up the stairs from the locker room on a flying bicycle.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!” she shouted. She had a baseball bat in her hand and I almost cheered. “How do you stop this thing?”

  She crashed right into Valda and bowled them both over. Malkin gracefully hopped over the bat that came sliding across the floor. She did not move her wand from Leo, and Esmerelda did not move her wand from Sparkle’s throat. “Over there with the others,” she barked at Jenah, and Jenah eeped and ran to us as my last hope fell.

  I looked down at her. “You tried,” I whispered.

  “No talking,” barked Valda. “Malkin needs to work the spell.”

  Malkin started laying things around Leo’s pentagram. A mermaid fin. A Bigfoot claw. Uncooked bacon.

  Jenah’s hand found mine. If I was going to die with someone Jenah was a good person to do it with. Although of course I wasn’t very interested in dying at all. I would much rather … wait, what was Jenah putting into my hand?

  My fanny pack.

  It had an unpleasantly greasy feel to it … oh. Jenah had rubbed eels all over it. It was invisible.

  That was what Jenah was really bringing. The baseball bat was a red herring.

  I breathed. Now was the moment when I needed to be Sarmine and have an army of spells in my memory. She would be able to combine what she had and come up with something to save the day. What had I learned this week? I already knew my Power spell couldn’t stand up to Malkin’s. And I seriously doubted that the Possibilities potion would suddenly open her up to the idea of being a good witch.

  And then I knew.

  The spell itself was the longest of long shots, and worse, it would involve me changing my Good Witch Ethics list yet again.

  Don’t use animal parts in spells—unless it’s to save a life.

  I hadn’t been willing to work Showstopper to help Devon sing. But I would work it now.

  Luckily I was really familiar with the ingredients by this point. I stuck my hand into the invisible fanny pack and combined the parsley, rutabaga … and pixie bone. I pretended to cough and spat in my hand.

  Esmerelda was busy enjoying the intense gazing going on between Sparkle and Leo the Lindworm. Malkin was preparing her spell. But Valda was watching us, smoking a cigarette.

  I nudged Jenah’s foot and she knew what I meant. That’s the best thing about best friends. They know when a foot nudge means “distract that wicked witch right now.”

  “Hey, the school’s going to be pissed about that,” Jenah said to Valda.

  Valda laughed. “So?”

  “So, uh. They’ve got sensors all over the school. The sprinklers will kick in any moment.”

  Malkin looked up from her work. “Put it out, Valda.”

  “This is not like the good old days,” said Valda.

  “Now,” said Malkin. “I don’t need anything messing up my pentagram.”

  Valda sighed and threw the cigarette on the floor. She pulled her skirts aside to rub it out with her shoe, and as she did, Jenah “accidentally” tripped into her. Valda swore as she went down.

  I swiped my wand through the spell on my hand and flung the Showstopper formula all over the lindworm.

  Immediately Leo turned into the most charming lindworm I have ever seen in my life. I mean, it was sheer animal magnetism. And Leo was already kind of charming, so trust me when I say that this was the most charming entity in the northern hemisphere at the moment.

  Lindworms unfortunately lack the power of speech, but he turned his great, soulful, puppy dog eyes on Malkin and she melted. I mean figuratively, not literally, as nice as that would have been. Her wand lowered. Her lip quivered. She walked up to him in a daze and began to scrub out the chalk outline of the pentagram with her toe.

  “Malkin, it’s a trap!” shouted Esmerelda.

  Leo swung his giant puppy dog e
yes over to Esmerelda and her wand lowered, too. Just enough that Sparkle could wiggle out of her grasp, and get a headlock on her, just when Leo needed to turn back to Malkin, who was beginning to suspect something was not quite right.

  “Kiyah!” said Henny, and she jumped on Valda, sending her sprawling again. Jenah sat on her head.

  Malkin rubbed some more chalk outline free …

  And then Leo was out.

  I thought he was simply going to turn back into Leo, but lindworm instinct is apparently a powerful thing. He seized Malkin’s vest in his teeth. He slithered with her, down the hall, heading down the stairs. He humped along rather quickly for a giant worm.

  “Whoa, is he going to eat her?” said Henny.

  There were chomping and slurping sounds from the stairwell, punctuated by some howls from Malkin. I didn’t really want to know, to be perfectly frank.

  Sparkle had magicked up a rope and was busy tying up the witches.

  “What are we going to do with them?” I said. “We can’t let them go, or they’ll come back to get Leo. He’ll never be safe.”

  “I’ll take them,” said Sparkle. “I can do an amnesia spell that will take out just this week.” She glanced at me. “It’ll take my last vial of dragon tears, though,” she said. “Amnesia’s tough.”

  I sighed. “I’ll give you one of ours.” Even though the dragon had left us, we were still the main source in town for dragon tears.

  “Monday morning,” Sparkle said. She considered. “You can give it to me at lunch if you wish.”

  Sparkle was allowing me to come up to the cool kids’ table? To be seen with her? It was so unbearably condescending I almost called her on it. Except … I wouldn’t mind repairing our friendship, at least a little bit. “I will,” I said.

  She trained her wand on the witches and they left.

  I turned to look for Henny and Jenah. “This was totally awesome,” Henny said. “I have enough emotional material for a million comics.”