Holiday Witch

by Tess Lake

  Mom passed me the family crowbar and then crept forward and carefully took the shotgun out of his lap before expertly cracking it open and removing the ammunition.

  I had only seen Arnie in a photo when he was a teenager, him beaming at the camera, his arm around Mom. This man in the chair looked nothing like his teenage self, not in a single feature at all.

  Once Mom had emptied the shotgun and placed it on the table behind her, she reached forward and flicked Arnie on the end of his nose with her finger.

  He woke with a yelp and put his hands over his nose.

  “Owl! Don’t kill me!” he wailed. He dropped his arms once he focused on Mom, his eyes still watering somewhat from being flicked.

  “Dalila? You haven’t come to kill me, have you?”

  “Where is it, Arnie? Do you have it?” Mom said.

  I’d seen my mom angry and I’d seen her scared and I’d seen her furious, but I’d never seen her like this before. She could have frozen entire planets with the chill in her voice.

  “It’s not me, I swear. I never went back there,” Arnie said. He looked at me as though only just realizing that I was there.

  “Is this your daughter?” he asked.

  Mom flicked him on the end of the nose again and he flinched back in his chair as though he’d been punched.

  “Did you tell anyone, Arnie?” Mom said in that same chill tone.

  “I never told anyone. I promise. I swore to you I never would. But…” Arnie looked at the darkened window as though he was scared of what might be out there, but evidently the sight of my mother in front of him was more terrifying than whatever he was imagining. “I saw Marla.”

  “She died,” Mom said.

  “No, she didn’t. I swear it was her,” Arnie said.

  “You’re swearing a lot of things tonight, Arnie. It sounds like the type of thing a liar would do,” Mom said.

  “Who is Marla?” I asked, earning myself a glare from Mom.

  I saw Arnie glance between us, but he obviously wasn’t brave enough to risk Mom’s wrath.

  “One more chance, Arnie. Do you know where it is?” Mom said.

  Arnie shook his head, two tears trickling down his cheeks.

  Then Mom stepped forward and placed her palms against the sides of his head. She looked directly into his eyes and I felt the magic surge around her.

  “You will leave Harlot Bay right now and you will not come back until I tell you it is safe. You must drive more than five hundred miles away,” Mom said to him. She let him go, and Arnie nodded at her and then jumped up from his chair and began grabbing things around him, clearly packing for a long trip. He ignored us as though we didn’t exist, and although I didn’t know what spell Mom had cast, I guessed it was entirely possible that she could have put one on him that made it as though we weren’t there.

  Mom took back the family crowbar and this time we went out the front door. We were walking away from the house when I stopped her.

  “Who is Marla? What is it you were asking Arnie about?”

  Mom looked at me, and for a moment, as a cloud moved across the moon, I saw a dark shadow slip across her face. “You need to get back to Jack before he awakes and discovers you gone,” Mom said and then walked away off to her car.

  I checked the time. It was one thirty, the last half hour having passed with incredible speed. I rushed back to my car and drove to Jack’s, my mind full of questions.

  Chapter 21

  In the morning Jack was rushing around getting ready for a big renovation job he had scheduled, and I was trying to be normal, but I knew I was walking around the place like a nervous cat.

  Last night when I’d come to his home, he’d been so loving and understanding and had taken all the shock and fear of seeing someone die away. Jack had even told me he was still looking into teenagers around town and felt like he was making progress, and he’d also told me that if I wanted to take a vacation someplace far away, warm and sandy, he would be on board for that and we could come back when this whole thing was done.

  I’d tried to warn him off doing any further investigation because I didn’t want him to get pulled into anything supernatural, and given there been two deaths so far, it certainly wasn’t safe, but also given I hadn’t told him I was a witch, I didn’t really have any strong reasons I could present to him to tell him why he should back off.

  He’d told me he knew I was worried but not to worry because he had been a police officer for many years and had done this kind of thing many times.

  Now in the morning, with him rushing around and me acting skittish, that guilt from last night was weighing down on me. I’d come back and crept into Jack’s home and slipped back into his bed to find him sleeping soundly. Although it appeared I’d gotten away with it, I wasn’t feeling very good about it.

  Jack met me in the kitchen, where he was having a final quick coffee, and it was then that I realized I hadn’t gotten away with anything at all.

  “So, can you tell me why you crept out last night?” Jack said, looking at me over his cup.

  Despite my thoughts on lying, I’d come up with two lies that I could possibly use if Jack asked me. The first was that I was meeting a confidential source. That was incredibly weak because, honestly, I wasn’t really that much of a journalist at the moment. The second, and much riskier, option was to say it was a family emergency regarding Aunt Cass running out into the forest again. I considered that the far riskier option because if Aunt Cass found out I was basically saying she was senile and losing her mind, I was sure she would curse me back into the Stone Age. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I let my first lie go.

  “I had to meet a confidential source,” I began.

  Jack put up his hand as though to stop me and I came to a halt.

  He stepped closer and took hold of my hands. I realized I was still chilled, perhaps even still from last night, and his hands felt incredibly warm against mine.

  “It’s okay to say you can’t tell me, but don’t lie to me, okay?” Jack said lightly. “Anyway, it’s time to go,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek, and then I followed him out the door. He locked it behind us and gave me another kiss before walking off to his truck.

  I wanted to call out the truth, to call out an apology, but instead I walked to my car and got in. I started the engine just as my phone chimed in my pocket. I checked it and found a message from Mom: Come home now and I’ll tell you everything.

  Not feeling very good about life or relationships or myself at all, I drove home through the cold morning, the winter outside matching the feeling of desolation I had inside of me. I arrived home to find Molly and Luce trudging up to the front of the house, bundled up in warm clothes.

  “You get the summons too?” Luce asked.

  “I am so not in the mood to be yelled at again,” Molly said.

  “I don’t think we’re going to get yelled at today. I think this is something else,” I said.

  We went inside to find our mothers and Aunt Cass gathered in the living room. They’d pushed aside some of the furniture and wheeled in a giant whiteboard from somewhere. Aunt Cass was currently pinning a large map of Harlot Bay up on it that was covered in red dots clustered around certain areas.

  “I don’t want to get yelled at today,” Molly announced loudly.

  Mom looked at the three of us standing there and then shook her head softly.

  “No one is going to get yelled at. It’s time we all told the truth,” she said.

  We retrieved cups of hot coffee while Aunt Cass finished setting up the map, and soon we were all gathered in the living room, slowly warming up from the cold outside. Everyone else sat down except for Mom, who stood next to the map. She looked at it for a long while and then turned toward us and let out a sigh.

  “It’s okay, tell the truth,” Aunt Cass said to everyone’s great surprise, given her position on lying and telling the truth.

  “This one calls itself Slink. It’s kind of the thi
ef entity. It gathers people to itself and imbues them with limited magical power, and they go and do its bidding. This particular one, I locked away forty years ago, sealing it, I thought, for a few hundred years. It appears to be repeating the murders it was involved in last time, which is unusual. We need to work together so we can find it and lock it away again or figure out a way to destroy it,” Mom said.

  Adams appeared as if from nowhere from behind the sofa.

  “Slink is its name, is it? More like Stink. I can’t wait to kill it,” he said and then scratched his claws on the rug.

  Aunt Freya shooed him away from pulling up threads, so Adams jumped over to where Aunt Cass was sitting and up onto the arm of her chair. His small interruption had let a little bit of the tension out of the room.

  “So you locked it away forty years ago after it burned those kids to death?” I asked gently.

  “I was dating Arnie and he was friends with some boys who were on the rowing team. I don’t know precisely how they came in contact with Slink, but at some point they became distant and formed a little trio with Marla. It was exactly like it is now. They started breaking into places, stealing valuables, anything they could, using an extension of the magic power granted them. They could cut holes in reality and step through to other places,” Mom said.

  “Being stupid teenagers, they thought it was fun and exciting and dangerous. But then they killed a man by trying to scare him to death, and then punching him in the chest. And then they killed another, hanging him by a rope from his back porch. It finally all came to a head in a house where they’d been storing all the stolen goods and where Slink was hiding. There was a fire and the three of them died, burned to death. I only just managed to lock Slink away, sealing him into a stone before escaping myself. Arnie was with me and saw it all. No one else could have known where we went. I took the stone and buried it far away from Harlot Bay.”

  “He said he’d seen Marla. Wasn’t she the girl who died in the fire?”

  “He drinks… I don’t think it’s true. It can’t be. She died.”

  Aunt Cass made a kind of dismissive snorting sound, which felt entirely out of place given that Mom was being soft and quiet and revealing herself.

  “Those type of things draw people to them. After you locked it away, you should’ve come to me or your grandma and we would have gotten rid of it,” Aunt Cass said.

  “Oh yes, we were really going to do that, considering how much the two of you used to yell at us for sneaking around and doing things apparently behind your back. We were young and trying to live our lives, and it was like everything we did was a capital crime! There was no way we were going to tell—” Mom looked at Molly, me and Luce.

  “Oh, how the wheel turns and it all happens again,” Luce said.

  “Wait, I need to get my phone out so I can record you saying that and play it back to you the next time you decide to yell at us,” Molly said, fumbling in her pocket.

  “It’s different now! You three are actually involved in really dangerous things that aren’t like anything we ever did,” Aunt Ro snapped.

  My sense of warmth, camaraderie and kindness toward my family was taking a severe beating at the moment, so I couldn’t really help myself.

  “Oh really, Aunt Ro? Why are you and Sheriff Hardy stalking a house in the middle of the night? Aren’t you currently out doing things you shouldn’t be doing?”

  “I’ve been keeping him company while he’s been doing surveillance at night. Is that okay by you?” Aunt Ro said so quickly that I was absolutely sure it was a lie.

  “Have you told him we’re witches?” Molly asked.

  “No! Not yet…”

  “You’re going to tell the fuzz that we’re witches? Are you crazy?” Aunt Cass said.

  “I feel like we’re getting off the point. Have a look at this map here,” Mom said, but no one listened to her.

  “Have you been sneaking around doing anything? What about this farmer you’ve allegedly been seeing?” Luce asked Aunt Freya.

  “His name is Boris and he’s a lovely man,” Aunt Freya snapped back and then put her hands over her mouth, as though she hadn’t intended to let that secret slip out.

  “Boris? Boris the farmer?” Luce squealed.

  “You can see here Aunt Cass has plotted all of the thefts,” Mom tried again.

  “Wait, is he that one who sells the cheeses?” Aunt Ro said to Aunt Freya.

  “Yes, and they’re delicious,” Aunt Freya said and then put her hands back over her mouth.

  “So my new father is going be Boris the cheese farmer? Boris the cheesemaker?” Luce said, her pitch heading up to somewhere where only dogs would be able to hear her.

  There was a giant crash as Mom grabbed a bag that had been sitting beside the whiteboard and upended it onto the floor, twenty or so crystals with bits of feather attached to them thudding to the ground. We all stopped arguing for a moment.

  “So you’re the one who stole my crystals!” Aunt Cass said.

  “I borrowed them!” Mom said, using the same kind of Torrent logic that all of us possessed.

  “If by borrow you mean steal,” Aunt Cass said.

  “Can we use them to find this Stink?” Adams said, flexing his paw and showing his claws.

  Mom seized on Adams’s question like a lifeline.

  “Very good question, Adams,” she said and picked up one of the crystals. She turned back toward the map.

  “Aunt Cass has been tracking break-ins around town, and we found that they are clustered in two separate locations which, given the thieves are likely to be teenagers, we believe will lead us to an address where they live. What we need to do is take these crystals and go out every single night, using them to track down their movements to see if we can find one or both of them. Then we need to get it out of them where Slink is hiding and if he has been fully released from the stone,” Mom said.

  “I’m in! I want my coffee machine back,” Molly said.

  “Me too. I want to see Stefano and I want my catapult back,” Luce said.

  “So this doesn’t count as ‘incredibly dangerous things that we shouldn’t be involved in’?” I asked, still somewhat miffed to discover that the moms had behaved exactly as we did and then were doing the same thing to us as Grandma and Aunt Cass had done to them.

  “We’re all working together from now on. No one is going to go off alone. Got it? Good,” Mom said.

  Aunt Cass got out of her chair, stretched her arms and looked around at us.

  “Well, looks like my job here is done. I’m going out to Truer Island, so I’ll see all you chumps later,” she said. She started moving to the door.

  “Chumps?” Luce muttered under her breath.

  “But what if we need you?” I asked.

  Aunt Cass turned around and waved an arm in the general direction of the moms.

  “The three of them can seal this thief entity into stone again, and this time once it’s done, and I’m finished with this frog slip power, I’ll destroy it so it can never break out again. But till then, au revoir.” Aunt Cass saluted us for some reason and then marched off outside. By the time we reached the front door to find out exactly how it was she planned to get to Truer Island, there was no sign of her, not even footsteps in the snow.

  “Okay, we’ll all work together and we’ll find this thing,” Mom said. We followed her back to the map and began making our plan.

  Chapter 22

  “I cannot spend another night with my mother. I can’t do it, man,” Luce complained as she tried to rub the tiredness from her eyes.

  “You think your mother’s bad? I spent a solid two hours the other night fending off questions about why me and Ollie aren’t married yet,” Molly complained bitterly.

  “Oh really? Last night we talked about what clothes I wear for four hours. Four hours! I’m not kidding,” Luce said.

  I grunted and sipped my coffee, not looking forward to tonight. Since the grand announcement of our plan two
weeks ago we’d been going out in pairs with our respective mothers, using the crystals trying to track down the teenagers who were breaking into people’s homes. It was one witch mother and daughter per night, which meant every third night you were out in the freezing cold, sitting around with a bored mother who had nothing better to do than talk about why you weren’t married, what you were wearing, and what you should be doing with your life. It was definitely the least fun any of us had ever had. I was even starting to wish Aunt Cass was back, because at least she would break up the What’s Wrong with Harlow’s Life? show that my mother seemed determined to produce every third night. But she was still out on Truer Island and as far as we knew still dealing with a severe frog problem.

  “Will is getting suspicious. I don’t know what else to tell him. ‘We’re out trying to find our coffee machine’ isn’t going to work for much longer,” Luce said.

  “I told Ollie that Aunt Cass went crazy and we have to look after her,” Molly said.

  “I didn’t tell Jack anything except that I couldn’t tell him,” I said, and felt a touch of that sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “We should tell them we’re witches, it’ll make it all that much easier,” Luce said.

  Jack, for his part, had still been trawling online profiles of teenagers of Harlot Bay and actually found connections between some of them, so his list of twenty or so suspects was starting to shrink. I’d taken a look at it a few times and compared addresses to the map that Aunt Cass had constructed. It wouldn’t be long before we would have a few suspects we’d be able to look more closely at.

  “Okay, time to go,” Luce yawned.

  She and Molly were off to the chili business today, which Aunt Cass was still running from Truer Island. The orders were still coming in from all over the country, and given that Traveler had hardly any business at all, they were spending more and more of their time packing chili to be sent around the country.