And none of them knew that I was different from all of them. None of them knew that I had a horrible witchy home life and that I just needed a quiet place alone with my one real friend to process it. I mean, why would they know they were intruding? They were all theater people, like Jenah. They were all friendly and loud and prone to breaking into funny accents at the slightest provocation. Even now, Olivia was busy telling a humiliating story about the time she was dress coded in kindergarten for taking her overalls off to use the restroom and then forgetting to put them back on. And, I mean, I would have died before I told that story to a group of people I barely knew. Morosely, I pushed my kale around on my plate. The kale didn’t care about my existential crisis. It went on being disgusting.
“Nobody tells the boys what they can and can’t wear,” said Henny.
“We do have a rule against baggy pants that show your underwear,” said Bryan.
“Sadly,” said Bobby.
“So the boys have one rule,” said Jenah. “One. I looked up all the rules for girls. No yoga pants. No spaghetti straps. No midriffs. And a really ancient one that says the teachers can have you kneel down to check the length of your skirt.”
“Catch me kneeling to anyone,” said Olivia.
“You break that one at least once a week,” I put in. I meant it as a joke, but I found that when it left my mouth it came out shrill, like I was trying to claim a history with Jenah over all these new people.
“True,” said Jenah easily. “They’ve never enforced that. But then why have it? It should be gone. And none of these laws should apply to just girls. No baggy pants for all, fine. No midriffs for all, fine. It makes me mad.”
“It should,” said Henny.
“Hear, hear,” said Olivia.
“The question is, what can we do about it?”
Across the room I saw Poppy sitting with her junior friends, the ones who were Going Places. Talking and laughing and apparently having the time of her life. Able to hide all her worries. Able to put everything from the weekend aside. How could she compartmentalize so well? She was way better at this than I was. I was lousy. She didn’t even glance at me.
I stood up abruptly. “I, uh. Better go,” I said.
Jenah waved absentmindedly at me as she listened to Olivia recount some involved story about a protest she went to once.
I ran outside, rather blindly. I had this terrible feeling that I was going to burst into tears at any moment, and I did not want that to happen in the middle of the Kit Kat revelry.
I made it to a private corner of the hedge. Of course, there, the tears did not come. There was a terrible tight feeling around my temples, all through my sinuses. I felt like a good cry would help, and I equally felt that I did not want to be caught having one. I looked in my messy backpack for something to make the headache go away and instead found the manila envelope from the principal’s office this morning. I had forgotten it, in the distraction of seeing Jenah get dress coded.
Numbly I opened it. I had hoped to convince Sarmine to let me do something with my summer this year, something other than hanging snakeskins and dusting Gila monster skeletons. I had hoped a scholarship would sway her. Now there was no reason to even think of science camp. Sarmine was gone, maybe for a long time, maybe forever. I could see my summers stretching out, me searching for her like she had searched for my dad. And where would I live, anyway? Go back home with Wulfie; resign myself to missing school three days out of every month? Have Pink make me a holo of Sarmine to answer the door and smile at the neighbors?
I looked at the scholarship form for a long time before I realized that it was not, in point of fact, a scholarship form. It read:
Dear Camellia,
If you receive this, then the worst may have happened.
Enclosed is a record of my Class Thirteen spells. It may give you a clue as to what has happened to me. If you can find me, do. If you cannot, please do not waste your life moaning about it. I wasted entirely too much time searching for your father and I do not intend you to repeat the same mistake.
The house, of course, is yours, as well as the contents of my storage locker, Moonfire, and care of the small burden known as Wulfie.
Sincerely,
Sarmine Scarabouche
There were a number of oddities about this letter, but the one that really got me was the sign-off. “Sincerely?” I said. “Sincerely?” No one answered my question, though, so I breathed, counted to ten, and read the letter again. The real strangeness was in the last sentence. Moonfire the dragon—she had left us last Halloween. And the final phrase—“care of the small burden known as Wulfie”—that part was written in, in blue ballpoint. The rest of the letter was typewritten, the page bumpy with it. Yet I hadn’t seen her typewriter in years.
I turned the page over, but it was empty on the other side. I reached into the manila envelope, shook it, and out fell one other thing: a black square, about five inches by five inches, with a hole in the center. I picked it up. It was floppy. No, not just floppy. This was literally an old floppy disk, wasn’t it? I had seen pictures in computer class last year. I hoped Sarmine didn’t expect me to track down a forty-year-old computer to run it on.
There was a white label on the disk—it had the notations for a brief spell.
Honestly, if you had told me a giant man-eating sloth was liable to pop out of the bushes as soon as I cast that spell, I still would have done it. The spell required three ingredients. I had those three ingredients in the pockets I had painstakingly stitched into my backpack.
I combined the ingredients and touched my wand to them. With a breath that caught in my throat, I blew on the powder in my hand. It coated the floppy disk. A light shot up from the circle of the disk, filling the hedge.
A life-size picture of Sarmine flickered into sight.
12
The First Recording
I knew it was some sort of recording, and yet that didn’t stop the flicker of hope. Stupid hope.
It was Sarmine, but a much younger Sarmine. A Sarmine in a T-shirt and long hair—a Sarmine from forty years ago. She was smiling, and she said, “This is for Jim, who is off in Africa saving the whales or something and says I have to leave a record of any Class Thirteen spells I perform, in case things go wrong.” A familiar dry arch to the eyebrows. “Of course, my spells never go wrong, so this is nonsense.” She reached out to me and I jumped back. She must have been picking up the floppy disk, because the view swung away from her, around her workshop, while she said, “As you can see, I’m working on Ye Olde De-Smoggifying Spell to help clean up the city. I will leave this recording running, in case anything goes wrong.” Eyebrows. “I think what is far more likely is that someone will crack this holo and uncover my secrets. Is that you, Jim? Is this all a ruse?” She grinned and turned back to her spell.
Voices in real life, behind me. A wave of kids running by, and the hologram was playing right out there in the open. Before I could think what to do, they ran right through it, as if they didn’t see or hear it.
I sank back, heart beating. The holo was still streaming from the disk, young Sarmine laughing and chatting away.
This was something only I could see.
It was something sent to me, coded for me.
It had been set up long ago.
Something really had happened to Sarmine. This was what the witches had been talking about at the coven, with Malkin’s nasty surprise. Some witches had spells set up to trigger on their deaths, like human wills. Sending things around to people.
This wasn’t anything Sarmine had planned out this week. The letter wouldn’t have mentioned Moonfire if it were.
Sarmine really was gone.
I desperately needed to cry, but the tears were stuck too tight to get them out. I flung myself facedown in the grass, in the hedge, wanting to press myself right into the ground and never come out. Above me, Sarmine kept prattling on about beetle wings and the proper use of sunflower petals and I just let her.
Noon came and went, and the sixth witch got a hex, and I didn’t care.
The bell rang for the end of A lunch, but I didn’t go.
Saganey’s terrible American History class could carry on without me, I thought, but in truth it wasn’t even as conscious as that.
I lay there, and when I got tired of the ants trying to crawl in my nose, I rolled over. But then I could see Sarmine’s holo, with happy, young Sarmine. I told it to pause, and it obeyed me instantly. The tears finally started to come, but now I didn’t want them. I rolled back into the dirt, refusing to cry.
That was Sarmine before she had lost my dad. Before he had vanished mysteriously and she had tried everything to get him back, and failed. She had told me long ago to accept that he was dead. And now she was basically telling me to accept the same thing about her.
A light touch on my shoulder roused me from one of the times I was facedown. I sat up, wiping dirt from my face. Jenah was looking down at me with a concerned expression. “Hey,” she said. “Do you need my help?”
This was my chance, my moment. Here Jenah was, and here no Kit Kats were. I tried to find words to tell Jenah what was going on. But I am not good at sharing things. I knew this, and Jenah knew this. So it didn’t matter how much I wanted to tell her things. All the words still had to get together, deep inside, and form sentences, and the sentences had to coordinate into a reasonable paragraph and come marching out of my mouth.
And I could not do that with Henny coming up behind her. And Olivia behind that. What, were they following Jenah around from class to class now?
I stood up, brushing off my shirt, putting my mother’s floppy disk back into the manila envelope, where its glow (to me, anyway) was muffled.
“I saw you from Latin class,” Henny said breathlessly, pointing at the windows above us. “And I texted Jenah to see if you were dead, and she didn’t know, so we figured we’d better check on you at break.”
“I said it was pretty thrilling to cut class in front of the whole school like that, and maybe you were protesting something,” said Olivia, braces flashing. “End sleeplessness! Naps for all!”
“Or you were attacked by a wit—” Henny said, with far too much excitement and far too little tact. She broke off. “Attacked by bees. Maybe you were attacked by bees.”
“I am sorry to disappoint you,” I said coldly, “but I was not attacked by anything.”
Henny shrugged. “It would make a good comic.”
Olivia said, “If you do want to join our protest, Jenah’s making plans for a sing-along tomorrow. You can come be an honorary Kit Kat and join with us as we support her cause.”
I looked at Jenah. She was looking at me. “Take a stand with me?” she said.
I couldn’t be one of her sidekicks, one of her hangers-on. Jenah’s story was a funny little comedy, a lighthearted journey of optimism and punk rock and leg warmers. Mine was a tragedy, with orphans and witches and a nasty rock bottom. We neither of us fit into the other’s story, not now, maybe not ever.
I turned away from my best friend. “I gotta get back to class,” I said.
* * *
I told the office the final remnants of the food poisoning had reared its ugly head during lunch, and I think between how ghastly I looked and the reports that had trickled in of me lying in the shrubbery, the secretary believed me and marked my fourth period as excused. I told her I didn’t need to see the nurse and thought I could make it through the rest of the day.
I probably should have taken her offer to lie down. I wasn’t any good in AP Biology, and I was unspeakably terrible at volleyball in gym, two things I usually do very well and passably well in, respectively. I finally asked the gym teacher if I could sit down for the second half of class, and maybe she had also heard the horror stories, because she took pity on my pale face and red-rimmed eyes and let me sit down. I was calling in all my good girl favors this week, all my street cred I had built up over so long juggling everything at once. I had found my breaking point, and maybe it was going to stay broken.
I retrieved the floppy disk from my backpack and sat down on the bleachers. Whispered to it to play. Was it true that no one could see it? But no one pointed at me, no one looked around.
While I had been lying facedown in the dirt, the holos had been moving inexorably forward, year by year. I told the disk to play at twice the speed, and it obeyed me. A couple of the scenes were in the RV garage—I slowed it down, heart in mouth, when I saw a demon appear—but it was only that time when Sarmine had summoned a minor demon to heal Moonfire’s wing. I had heard that story but had not seen it.
I stopped the recording suddenly. There was another figure moving around in the background—who was that? I told the recording to pause, looked hard at the blurry image.
Dad.
It was Dad. I had never seen a video of him. He kneeled by Moonfire, soothing her as the demon Nikorzeth mended the torn wing. The segment went briefly white, showing that the scene was ended, and then Dad was gone again. Too soon. I replayed that section, waiting for that small glimpse of my father.
He had loved that dragon. I had loved that dragon. She had known both of us, and I had never really thought about it. Sarmine darted around, keeping an eye on Nikorzeth, making sure everything was going smoothly, but Dad was the one talking to Moonfire, telling her she would be all right. Somehow it brought him home to me in a way that stories hadn’t. This was someone I had missed knowing, because of some malevolent witch business. He had dedicated his life to “foolishness” like helping shifters get to safety, and it had done him in.
Damn witches anyway.
I suddenly wondered if I would see myself on these videos. We must be close to my birth. Would I see me as a baby, sitting in a carrier, watching Sarmine? I could imagine her cooing to me about pentagrams and demons while I waved a rattle.
The next holo started.
Sarmine ran into the room, clothing disheveled, face white. I sat up straighter, looking at the details. Had we skipped to this week? Was I about to learn something? She started a mixture going in the cauldron, something that was silver and mirrored, and I heard her mutter something about a scrying pool. Why, when I most wanted her to narrate, was she doing nothing?
She peered into the cauldron, and it suddenly hit me who she was looking for.
My father.
This was his disappearance. Thirteen years ago … I would have been two. Where was I? Asleep, perhaps, or simply left to my own devices upstairs.
It was clear from her expression that the scrying pool was doing her no good. She could not find him.
The holos grew repetitive after that—Sarmine in a different outfit on each new day, trying some new spell. The lines in her face grew deeper. Her black hair turned salt-and-pepper as the months went by.
Finally, she tried the worst spell of all. A spell where she actually sacrificed a small animal in a smear of crimson blood. It was the spell that Sparkle and I had seen when I was five. We had squeezed into the window well, peered through the small basement window to spy on my mother’s secrets. I had been excited, I remembered with shame. Sure, deep down, there were really no secrets to be found. And then … we had seen that. I had been horrified. Sparkle, trying to repress forgotten witch memories herself, had also been appalled. Together we had concocted a new story, blocked out that horror, disassociated ourselves from witches and my mom forever. Even our own friendship had fractured—the beginning of its end.
I could hardly bear to watch that spell from a different vantage point. It had already been burned in my eyes once before.
But all that happened was that the spell ended and she had still found no sign of Dad. I knew, from things she had said since, that that was the day she gave up looking for him. Three years of searching. Done.
The volleyballs thumped. The sneakers squeaked.
Sarmine still went into the basement, she still worked spells, but she no longer spoke of Dad. Her face became drawn, lined.
Her hair went silver. I told the disk to speed up by two and watched the moments of her life flicker by.
Sarmine was aging now. Aging faster since Dad had disappeared. I didn’t know for sure what year any of these were. I could occasionally make a guess by her hair or clothes.
I slowed the holo to regular speed. This Sarmine looked like the one I remembered from middle school. Hard to narrow it down further. I scanned the background, searching for clues—and then I saw that one of our sofa cushions lay on the basement floor. A small lump lay in it.
“Roses,” Sarmine was saying as she picked up ingredients. “Eye of newt. Shredded basil.”
The lump lifted its head and whined. I recognized that whimper, even in its newborn puppy state.
Wulfie.
I clapped a trembling hand to my mouth. What was she doing to Wulfie?
Sarmine crisscrossed the room, narrating as she found ingredients. From the daylight streaming in the small basement window, it must be day. I must be at school—seventh grade. Yes, I remembered coming home from school one day in September and finding that she had brought home a puppy. Typical Sarmine, she didn’t explain what he really was until a couple weeks later, when the full moon hit and he suddenly became an infant for three days. I was woken from a sound sleep and dispatched to the grocery store for formula and diapers.
“Homo sapiens werewolficus,” Sarmine was saying to the recording. “Most of the time you’ll be a shaggy gray puppy. Easy enough to hide. But those three days around the full moon … we’re going to have our hands full, aren’t we.”
I knew all that. But why did she have him in her workroom? Sarmine always had ulterior motives. She had rescued our dragon in large part so she would have a steady supply of dragon tears. That easy access to an elemental’s power had increased her own power, and trading them had been a comfortable source of income all these years.
She had always told me that Wulfie was a stray she had adopted. But, looking at him with the perspective of time, it was clear that this tiny pup was too young to leave its mother. Had she stolen Wulfie from his mother in order to use him?
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