by Tess Lake
“We need to get out of here!” I yelled, looking around for any exit. I looked over to the side of the room and saw a pile of Adams’s toys. There were his well-chewed mice and Mr. Stretchy, some kind of rubber man that I’d completely forgotten I had bought him.
“Help me with Mom,” I yelled to Jack and Sheriff Hardy. I grabbed her and flinched at the amount of blood on the back of her head. The injury was more severe than I’d first assumed. I looked up at Slink and then right in front of everybody pulled a fireball out of nowhere and hurled it straight at him. To my eyes, I hit my grandmother in the chest with the fireball. It exploded harmlessly and all it did was add more heat to the room. I saw Jack’s face go pale and Sheriff Hardy’s mouth fall open. It didn’t really matter if they’d discovered that I was a witch. Soon we would be dead and the house burnt down on top of us.
“You!” I heard a voice of pure fury echo across the cavern, and then suddenly there he was, Adams standing in the middle of the room with his fur puffed out, a vicious, feral look on his face. He moved like lightning and jumped, kicking Marla in the head and knocking her across the room. A moment more and the two teenagers were down as well, unconscious, and then there was just my cat standing in front of what appeared to be my grandma.
“You stole Mr. Stretchy! You stole my cheese!” Adams yelled.
“This isn’t real,” I heard Jack mutter.
Adams scraped his claw along the dirt, which for some reason brought up a burst of sparks. I knew my little cat was brave and possibly crazy, but I didn’t think he would be able to defeat such a creature.
“No, Adams, don’t!” I yelled out. Adams didn’t even look at me, but instead launched himself toward Slink. He was a black blur, and I felt that sharp jagged magic as Adams slashed a claw across Slink’s face. The image of my grandma rippled and then vanished, replaced with the black ink in the shape of a man. Adams leapt again, but this time Slink brought up an arm and swatted him away, flinging Adams across the room to crash into a television set, which exploded in a burst of sparks.
As we pulled Mom over to the side of the room, the temperature spiked as the fire above us raged. There was no exit over here, and I was just hoping we might find something so we could get out. There was another great ripping sensation as Adams shot across the room and up onto Slink’s chest and began slashing at his face with his sharpened claws. Slink swung wildly and screamed, an unearthly sound that made our ears hurt, and I felt it down into my very bones.
“That was my cheese! My friends!” Adams yelled. Chunks of black ink were being pulled off Slink as Adams swiped, and as he did, the creature was reduced in size.
“This can’t be real. It’s not real,” Jack said.
Mom began to stir and then opened her eyes, and we managed to get up onto her feet.
“Where’s Marla?” she asked in a dazed tone.
“Adams knocked her out,” I said, hardly believing it myself.
Slink had been whittled down from the size of a man to now the size of a dog and was shrinking fast. The unearthly screams were fading as Adams tore him to pieces, each chunk of black ink landing on the ground and then dispersing into nothing. Finally Adams had a piece of him in his mouth and he shook it in the way a dog would shake a rat, and the last shred of Slink broke into tiny pieces. As it did, the magic around us that was holding this strange room in place shuddered, and our reality reasserted itself. We were in a basement deep underneath the house, surrounded by stolen goods, two unconscious teenagers and Marla, who was beginning to stir. She still had Sheriff Hardy’s gun in her hand. The temperature around us was incredible, the flames above us roaring. There was only one set of stairs up and out, and it was fully ablaze.
I knew there was no way out for us, not if we tried to run up the stairs to escape, and I could feel the fire burning above us. I also knew with absolute certainty that the fire department wouldn’t be able to put this out in time to save us.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Jack for some reason.
I saw Sheriff Hardy rush across the room, which seemed to be shrinking by the minute, the stolen goods crowding in around us. He retrieved his gun and dragged Marla over to where we were and then went back for the teenagers. Hattie might have taught me how to pull heat out of a fire and then control myself without using my hands, but at the moment I needed every ounce of magic and help to what I was about to. I stretched my hands up to the ceiling and pulled as hard as I could, draining every last bit of heat out of the raging fire. For a moment it resisted me, a leftover vestige of Slink intent on burning the house down with all of us inside it. But like my power to conceal myself, my power to steal the heat from the fire was incredibly strong, far stronger than I could have ever known. As I pulled the heat out, the flames were extinguished—first the upper floor and then the middle and then the ground. I pulled it all down, shrinking it into a single sphere of heat.
As soon as the flames were gone, I yelled at everyone to get up the stairs and then ran up in front of them and outside to find Molly and Luce and Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro leaping out of their cars. I saw Hattie Stern appear out of nowhere and then close behind her Aunt Cass, surrounded by at least a hundred happy croaking frogs. I had no time to take all this in. I could no longer hold the heat from the fire, so I threw it directly up into the air as high as I could. It shot up above Harlot Bay like a firework and then I let it go. For a moment there was a glare of heat in the freezing cold outside as all the power of the fire burst high above the town and then dissipated harmlessly into the air.
“Harlow, are you okay?” Luce called out.
I saw my family running toward me but then they vanished. There was a darkness closing in, and all I could feel was warmth in the shape of humans. I could snatch it out of them in an instant, pull it from all the ones around me and take that power for my own. I detected a shape of heat beside me, and some part of me knew it was Jack. But that part was quickly fading and all I could see was the heat flooding through his veins, ready for me to snatch away. As the world around me darkened, I saw the shadowy figures surrounding me and I knew what they were—slip witches who had gone bad and stepped into the darkness. They were grinning and waving, daring me to join them, calling to me.
Somewhere behind them all I saw a lone figure, more powerful than the rest, a shape made out of pure night. It was a woman, a slip witch, watching me with a calculated expression.
“Who is that?” I heard the body full of heat beside me say. What was his name again?
I took a deep breath, ready to slip once more and take all of the heat that was rightfully mine, when I felt something warm down by my leg, and then a sudden searing pain as a pair of fangs sank into my calf.
The cold reality of winter in Harlot Bay snapped back and I was standing there with Adams’s fangs dug so deep into my leg that it felt like they went down to the bone. He let go finally as I screamed.
“Stop it! I’m hungry. We need to get Mr. Stretchy home,” he said.
I felt that insane desire to take all of the heat, to have all the power for my own, fade away as my family came to surround me. Mom was still staggering, her head bleeding, and Sheriff Hardy was busy handcuffing the teenagers and Marla. The house I pulled the fire out of was a smoking wreck, but at least it wasn’t on fire anymore.
“Your coffee machine is in the basement,” I said to Luce and Molly, and then I suddenly sat down very quickly, falling into the snow, a deep exhaustion coming across me. I looked around for Jack but I couldn’t find him.
Chapter 24
Somewhere between my mother arguing with everyone about whether she needed to go to hospital, the police swarming the scene, the firefighters standing around with nothing to do, staring at the smoky house and wondering how it was no longer burning, someone bandaging my leg and my family crowding around me, I realized I desperately needed to see Jack. Despite my tiredness, which seemed bone-deep, it took barely any effort at all to cast a concealment spell and virtually vanish in front of ev
eryone.
I lifted Molly’s keys from her pocket, and soon I left them all behind, driving away in her car, the scene of the firefighters and ambulance and police cars disappearing into the distance. I headed across town rehearsing opening lines, but I knew I would probably use none of them when I saw him. After all, what could I really say? A joke? “Hey, that was some fireball I threw!” Nothing would really capture the magnitude of what we had experienced.
I daydreamed as I drove and then found myself on the street where Jack’s house was—not where he was living; the one he had bought and was renovating over time. I stopped the car and got out and saw the house was lit up from within. Somehow I had found him without knowing where he had gone. I crunched my way through the thick snow and up to the door, then let myself in. Inside, every light was on and Jack was standing there with a sledgehammer in his hands, covered in dust and plaster, having smashed an entire wall to the ground. He turned to face me and I saw his fingers clench on the handle of the sledgehammer.
“What you saw…” I began.
“What I saw? I saw a woman disappear in one place and appear in another, and then I saw a cat tear apart what I first thought was my brother but then it turned out to be some kind of weird living ink. And, oh, by the way, that cat talks. And I saw you throw a fireball and then apparently put out a fire. Did I miss anything?” He said it without malice, without anger, without much emotion at all, really.
“That’s most of it,” I said. Jack turned away from me and swung the sledgehammer at what remained of the wall, bringing a huge chunk of it crashing down onto the ground. A cloud of dust and bits of plaster scattered across the floor.
“So when I asked you where you had gone that night, it wasn’t off to meet a source, but it was something to do with being a—”
“Witch,” I said, completing his sentence.
I held out my palm and with a thought summoned a golden butterfly made out of light. It shimmered into existence and then took off fluttering across the room. When it reached him, he held out his hand and it landed.
“This is extraordinary,” he whispered.
“No, you’re extraordinary, and I never want to lie to you again,” I said. “I’m a witch from a family of witches. Me and the moms, Molly and Luce, and Aunt Cass. Hattie Stern is one too, and so is Kira, the teenage queen of sarcasm. We live in Harlot Bay because there is a magical confluence in the air that calms and comforts us. We’re witches, and sometimes that means we keep secrets for no reason, and we’re too mysterious by half. I understand this is a bit of a shock,” I said.
Jack let the golden butterfly float up into the air, where I let it go and the golden light twinkled away into nothingness. He swung the sledgehammer at the wall again and knocked down another chunk, raising another cloud of dust.
“A shock? This? You think I’m shocked because I’m at my house in the middle of the night, smashing down walls with my sledgehammer?”
“It sort of looks like it,” I said, feeling the first embers of hope somewhere in my body.
“I’m not shocked. I suddenly realized I needed extra room for a cauldron, that’s all.”
He winked at me and then put down his sledgehammer, and in an instant I was across the room and in his arms, raising a cloud of dust of my own as he fiercely hugged me to him.
“This has been a weird day,” Jack murmured.
“It’s been a weird life,” I murmured back.
Chapter 25
I sanded the table as Jack crashed around in the next room, and through the dust and grit I smiled at myself. A week had passed, and life—well, life was simply grand. Jack had recovered his equilibrium surprisingly quickly after I had told him I was a witch. We’d spent every single night since then together, and I had shown him I could summon butterflies of light from my palm, vanish into the air, and pull the heat out of a candle, among other things. He was amazed by all of it and immediately understood our need for secrecy. Now, a week later, he would still occasionally ask me to float a butterfly around the room, but it felt like things were back to a kind of normal, and a far better normal than it had been before because I was no longer hiding my true nature from him.
Things were looking up for everyone else as well. Mom got out of the hospital after only a day when it turned out her injury wasn’t as serious as anyone thought. Privately I thought she had cast some kind of healing spell on herself to get out. Molly and Luce had recovered their coffee machine, and it was back in place making delicious coffees. Unfortunately for Molly and Luce, the Donaldsons had also recovered their coffee machine, so now they had a direct competitor who was taking half of the coffee business. So they weren’t back to the days of making hundreds of dollars, but things on the financial side of life were certainly looking up. Aunt Ro had told Sheriff Hardy the truth about us as well, and apparently he had taken it quite well, although we hadn’t seen him since that night as he had been quite busy dealing with the aftermath of the thefts and deaths.
The two teenagers turned out to be nobodies. One was James, the other Lachlan. They had met Marla, who had shown them some small magic and brought them along to the twisted world of Slink and his evil desires. Sheriff Hardy had questioned Marla after speaking to my mother, but she had been a ranting and raving mess by then. She was currently under psychiatric hold, screaming about witches and all kinds of mysterious things.
As far as we could tell, somehow forty years ago, when those two boys and that girl had died in the fire, it hadn’t actually been Marla who had died but someone else, as of this date unknown. Marla had escaped and then had spent the next forty years searching for the stone my mother had hidden. We weren’t quite sure how she had found it, but at some point she had, and she’d brought it back to Harlot Bay and begun stealing small objects, eventually discovering that the more gold she piled up around the stone, the weaker the spell holding it became until it began to crack open. As it did, it gave her power and she recruited the teenagers.
The more they stole, the more powerful they became, and soon they were able to cut holes in reality, step into people’s homes, steal things, and then disappear without a trace. This was how they had committed all of their crimes around Harlot Bay, including stealing the catapult from one very annoyed Luce Torrent. It came out through questioning that Marla had instructed the boys to scare the old man to death, but when it came to it, neither of them were brave enough, so she had done it herself. She had also been the one to kill Ryan Layton, hanging him by the neck, and if she had gotten away with it, she would have been the one to burn the house down on top of us, killing us all.
As far as we could tell, it was she who wanted these things and not Slink, although it was hard to know with her ranting and raving. So she was on psychiatric hold awaiting medical assessment, and the two teenagers were currently locked away on theft charges. With Slink dead, torn to pieces by Adams, it appeared the spell he had had over them was broken and the two of them were mostly confused about what they had done. Sheriff Hardy was working as hard as he could to shift most of the blame onto Marla to see if he could get the two young teenagers out without too many problems attaching to them.
Aunt Cass had returned to Truer Island, still in the grip of her slip power, surrounded by frogs. On the night of the fire, the pull of the magic had called virtually every witch in town and it wasn’t just Molly and Luce and Hattie and Aunt Cass who had turned up but many others.
The official story was that Marla had coerced the two teenage boys into performing robberies around town, whereas she was responsible for the deaths. A fire had broken out at the house but then had extinguished itself due to the extreme cold, and most of the stolen goods had been recovered. There was still a lot of missing jewelry (which Slink had absorbed as he had broken out the rock) and it didn’t look like that was ever coming back.
All in all, I was glad it was over and now very much determined to take a holiday from such supernatural things. I’d pushed what had occurred with the fire and my
pulling heat out of it out of my mind. I knew I had seen slip witches from the past calling to me, beckoning for me to join them, and some dark figure behind them all, but I simply didn’t want to think about it. All I wanted to do was what I had wanted in the first place: go to work, have a boyfriend, eat meals, be on vacation, and maybe sand a table or two. I didn’t care about Hattie and her claim that I had a spell on me.
“Hey, where do you think we should go to lunch?” Jack asked, strolling out of the other room, covered head to toe in plaster dust.
“The Soup King is pretty good,” I said, and then my stomach growled in hunger.
Jack was about to say something else when there came a rumble from under our feet and the entire house shook.
“Earthquake?” Jack said.
“Yeah,” I said. He dropped his sledgehammer and I dropped my sandpaper. We both ran for the door as the rumble came again and the house shook. I know you’re supposed to stand in doorways when there’s an earthquake, but the house Jack had bought was seriously run-down and neither of us wanted to be inside when the proper earthquake hit.
We ran out into the street and saw it filled with people coming out of their homes. There was another rumble, this time not from under our feet but in the distance. It was coming from over on Truer Island.
I felt a push of magic so strong it knocked me over flat on my back. I recovered and sat up, soaked from head to toe from the wet slush I’d fallen into.
“Are you okay?” Jack asked, helping me up.
“It’s something magical,” I managed to say before there was another gigantic rumble and then, somewhere far over on Truer Island, what sounded like a tremendous explosion, like a volcano erupting. I felt another shudder of magic, and this magic had a scent and tone that I knew well.