by Amy Boyles
I blinked my eyes open. “It’s done.”
“Let’s go.”
We sneaked around to the back door. I placed a hand over the lock and heard a snick as the tongue surged into the bolt.
Roman pushed open the door, and we crept inside. I paused, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Roman slid past me and started shuffling over a stack of papers on the table.
“Find her phone,” he whispered.
“Good idea.” It would be the best way to get the information we needed.
I padded around the house, looking for a cell. I sighed, knowing Daisy’s phone would probably be sitting right beside her bed. Where she was at.
I released a low growl. Annoyed that I’d have to go in and do something I didn’t want to do, I turned to Roman.
“I’m going into the bedroom.”
Roman grabbed my hand. “I’m going with you.”
We crept through the house slowly. I poked at my magic, making sure the spell was strong. The last thing I needed was for Daisy to wake up and find us snooping.
I turned a knob and slowly pushed. The door gave, scraping over carpet. Bingo! This was definitely a bedroom. Whether or not it was hers, I didn’t know, but I had hope.
And sometimes in life, hope is all you need.
I wedged the door open enough that the both of us could pass through. A moonbeam filtered through thin sheers, slitting directly onto the bed. Under the bedsheets, Daisy’s stomach bulged, which was creepy given what I knew.
A slice of moonlight highlighted the phone, which lay in Daisy’s open hand on the bed. I sighed. This called for care. I had to pull the device from her open hand without waking her.
I released a deep breath of air and moved forward. Roman’s hand curled around my bicep. I turned to him. He shook his head as if to say he would retrieve the phone.
I shook my head right back at him. This was mine—my plan, my reward. Not that I didn’t think he could do it, but if someone was going to get in trouble, I wanted it to be me. In fact, it would be. I’d been working magic long enough that I could transport Roman from the house if I needed to. I’d have to, if it came down to it.
He wouldn’t get in trouble because of me.
I smirked, indicating that I would take the lead. He nodded, though solemnly. It was an idea he didn’t like, but I wasn’t going to give in.
I crept over to the side of the bed. Daisy breathed easily, her chest rising and falling peacefully. For a moment I wondered why we were here. Why Roman had gone along with my crazy idea. Surely we could just expose her during the daylight hours, reveal what we knew. But now we were knee-deep in illegal activities, so I’d better pull through and get a number.
Sweat sprinkled my brow and dotted my back. It was cold outside, but you couldn’t tell my body that. I flexed my fingers, said a little prayer and placed my hand on the phone.
Daisy sighed.
I resisted the urge to jump back and instead tightened my grip on the phone. Daisy turned, twisting to the side. The phone slipped from her palm. I encircled it and snatched it from the bed, noting how my own heavy breathing filled the room.
At that moment Daisy moaned; she shook her head to one side, then the other. Her eyes blinked open.
I held my breath, probing for the spell that I’d put her under. It felt strong, so why was she awake?
Daisy squinted; then her head turned and she stared straight at me.
I didn’t dare move as she sighed and relaxed back onto her pillow, adjusting her posture until she was quietly snoring again.
Roman tapped my shoulder. I padded from the room until we were in the kitchen. I handed it to him, for the first time realizing that I actually had no way of getting into it.
He pressed a series of number, and it opened.
“How’d you do that?” I said.
“People tend to make their passwords 1-2-3-4.”
My eyebrows peak. “Good to know. Guessing I should change mine.”
A smile curved on his lips. “Probably a good idea.”
Roman scrolled through the phone, found the information we were looking for and took pictures of it with his own phone.
I slipped the device back into Daisy’s room, and we crept out quietly, getting back into the SUV without any problems.
Once we were safely tucked inside the cabin, I released a shot of air. “So. What do we do now? It’s going on midnight.”
Roman cranked the engine. “We could go to Maisie’s. See what she’s got in there.”
I frowned. “What about getting you in trouble?”
He shrugged. “The only problem is we’ll be searching in the dark.”
I shot him a wide grin. “Let me handle that.”
We drove over to Maisie’s house and parked around back. I wiggled my fingers and worked a cloaking spell so that not only would Roman and I not be seen, but we’d be able to turn on any lights in the house and no one would see them from the outside.
“You’ve been practicing,” Roman said after we got inside.
I shot him a smug smile. “I have no choice with a family like mine. Grandma keeps me on my toes.”
We started riffling through paperwork left on her desk. “Nothing here but bills,” I said. “What about her computer?”
“Let’s see if I can find it,” Roman said. He moved down the hall. A moment later he called from a back room. “It’s in here.”
I followed the sound of his voice until I found him in a bedroom. The computer sat on Maisie’s nightstand.
“Think you can get us into that?” I said.
Roman shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll have to.”
I trotted over to him. “Why not?”
He pointed to a stack of papers next to the computer. They looked like old recipes, but as I stared at them, I realized the ingredients weren’t the usual things like allspice and flour.
“Frog eyes, rotten robin’s eggs? What’s this?” I said.
“It’s a spell book,” Roman answered. “Well, not an actual book, but lots of spells.”
“For what?” I said.
“Read on, but don’t say any of the incantations out loud.”
My eyes slid over the words at the top. “This is a balloon spell, like what we just saw happen to Maisie.”
Roman nodded. “Exactly.”
I brushed my thumb over the frayed and yellow vellum. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would it be here? Maisie is the one who blew up. Why are we finding these spells at her house and not someone else’s?”
Roman shook his head. “I’m not sure. Perhaps she started to work it on someone else and it backfired. Perhaps she worked the magic on herself. Maybe she wasn’t murdered after all.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think she intentionally killed herself,” I said. “That makes no sense.”
Roman shuffled through the papers. His gaze raked over them, seeming to study each and every one. He then placed them down and started opening the drawers beneath.
“Black candles, incense—it doesn’t look like Maisie was into the white arts of magic,” he said.
I watched as he pulled out item after item—ebony tapered candles, vials of a dark substance that appeared to be blood, objects that appeared devilish, dark and evil. “So she was dabbling in this stuff? But where did the papers come from?”
I scooped the stack into my arms and started going through them. The pages were old, and they weren’t bound as if they were some sort of book that had been passed down. I turned the pages over, trying to piece all of this together.
Finally, on the last page that I flipped over, a name appeared. I gasped. “Well, it looks like the mystery is solved, but it also appears that someone’s been lying to us.”
Roman peered over my shoulder. “Is that so? Now why didn’t Caroline Applebury tell us that she’d given Maisie her spells?”
I shrugged. “No idea.” But that’s what it looked like had happened. Because on the back of the la
st slip of paper was Caroline’s name. “I don’t know,” I said. “But she’s got a lot of explaining to do.”
Right then, the lights flickered off.
I held my breath and reached for Roman. He pulled me to his side.
“Leave the papers here.”
We crept into the living room. The front door of the house blew open, and a tornado of power hurled inside.
Y’all, when I say it was a tornado of power, I’m not kidding. A whirlwind of dark, inky magic burst into the house and started knocking over furniture and knickknacks.
Roman pushed me into a corner. “Don’t let that thing touch you.”
The mass ripped forward. We huddled in a wedge of wall as the cyclone pitched erratically across the room. It wove a beeline pointed at us. Wind whipped up my hair. My shirt ruffled at the breeze it created. I felt a dark, foreboding presence, one that seemed so heavy I had a hard time breathing. It was like that tornado was sucking my breath away.
I scrambled to catch another shot of air as the thing jerked back. Papers fluttered, furniture overturned as it wove away, heading back toward the hall.
It carved a path of destruction all the way to the back bedroom. The commotion it made sounded like the bed had been flung to the opposite wall while cushions were shredded to bits and the window trimmings yanked right off their screws.
After a minute the sound stopped. The only thing I could hear was mine and Roman’s breaths as we waited patiently to see if the raucous would restart.
A couple of minutes passed before anyone said a word. Roman pushed up from the corner. He took my hand, and I rose. I probed the air, trying to find my spell that I’d originally cast on the house. It was still there, meaning that probably no one else had witnessed whatever it was that had swept into the home.
Roman clicked on a lamp, and a warm yellow glow took hold of the home. “Stay close.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I practically glued myself to him as he led me to Maisie’s bedroom. He pushed open the door and snapped on a light.
The destruction was severe. The bed had been ripped in two. Feathers from the duvet and pillows covered every inch of surface.
But we weren’t interested in that. Roman led me to the side of the bed, where the pages had been. Every slip of paper with a ritual on it was gone.
“Where’d they go?” I said.
“That thing took them,” he said.
I spat out the bit of bottom lip I was nibbling. “What was that thing?”
Roman caught my gaze. His green eyes studied me as if searching the depths of my soul. “You really don’t know?”
I shook my head. “No clue.”
“That,” Roman said, his tone heavy, “was the embodiment of black magic. Someone summoned that thing here. Now whether or not they were looking for us, I don’t know. That’s why I pulled you away from it.”
I narrowed my eyes until I felt worry lines etch in my forehead. “What would’ve happened if one of us had touched it?”
Roman closed his eyes. “If you’d touched it, that thing would’ve sucked you into it, dematerializing you.”
I grimaced. “You mean—”
Roman nodded. “It would’ve killed you instantly.”
TEN
It was after one AM by the time we found a motel room and got settled in. I called Milly even though it was so late. I figured risking her wrath over the phone was better than risking whatever craziness we were actually dealing with.
“This better be good,” she said upon answering after the fourth ring.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” I said.
“Like I said, this better be good, toots. Or bad, whatever it takes to receive a phone call at this time of night.”
I sighed. “Well, Grandma and Reid are in jail, as is Sera, and we’re dealing with some kind of magic the likes of which I’ve never seen before.”
Long pause. “Tell me everything.”
So I went into all of it. It must’ve taken at least fifteen minutes to explain what had happened over the course of the day. After I was done, I felt winded, as if a great boulder had been pulled off my shoulders and thrown into a ravine.
“I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere without me.”
I slept fitfully that night. Even though Roman’s arms were around me and that made me feel safe, I was still filled with worry. My knotted stomach kept me up half of the night, and my anxiety kept me up the other half.
By the time dawn cracked open the sky, I had dark circles under my eyes and was exhausted. I figured it would take at least a pot and a half of coffee to feel anywhere near human.
“I’ll go get some breakfast,” Roman said. He showered and left, leaving me alone in the room.
A knock came from the door a few minutes later. Gleefully excited for the first time in my life to see Milly, I crossed to it and threw it open. There she stood, support hose wrinkling around her ankles, heavy black coat wrapped around her shoulders and a wooden Polly Parrot perched on her head.
“I was really hoping you would be normal,” I said.
Milly caned her way into the room. “Polly has a gift when it comes to these sorts of things. He can help us.”
“Great, we need all the help we can get. So,” I said, clapping my hands, “what are we going to do first?”
Milly thumbed her nose. “First thing we’re going to do, toots, is eat some breakfast.”
Roman arrived a few minutes later with an awesome buffet of food. Warm scrambled eggs, cheesy grits, and thick biscuits filled my stomach in a matter of minutes. I had to admit, that made me feel a lot better.
I brushed crumbs from my hands. “Are we going to the jail?”
Milly shook her head. “I need to teach you a protection spell. There are some dark forces at play in this game, and you must be protected.”
I nodded. “Okay, tell me what I do.”
Milly scratched her chin. Her hawkish nose looked particularly hawk-like this morning. “Polly, go sit on Dylan’s shoulder.”
Polly fluttered his way over and perched himself on me, his little claws piercing my skin. “Ouch. Not so hard, Polly.”
“The next thing you need to do is imagine a field of flowers covering you from head to toe.”
I stared at Milly. “A field of flowers?”
She nodded. “I know how it sounds, but trust me, you’re going to need those flowers. They will help.”
I shrugged. Whatever she said. If she wanted me to imagine a wall of poop, I would’ve done it. I needed whatever I could get to stay secure and keep my family safe.
I closed my eyes, cracked my knuckles and imagined myself wrapped in a field of flowers. It resembled a blanket, covering me. I felt a gurgle of magic in my gut. It swelled until it popped like a balloon, drizzling power over my head.
Milly clapped her hands. “Great. Good job. Now we go see this Caroline woman.”
I quirked a brow. “We? I thought you were going to the jail to help Grandma.”
Milly shook her head. “Sometimes an old witch needs to meet a young witch.”
Roman threw the last of the breakfast in the wastebasket. “Let’s roll.”
“Not you, Roman,” Milly said. “You need to go to the jail. See what’s happening there. Dylan and I will go talk to this Caroline. We’ll catch up with you later.”
Roman’s gaze flickered from me to Milly. “You sure about this?”
Milly nodded. “One hundred percent.”
I exhaled a shot of air. “But how are we going to get there? I don’t even know where Reid and Grandma left my car.”
Which reminded me, I really needed to find it. But I had no time to ponder on the actual necessities of life with my family in jail and scary mini-tornadoes jutting around.
Milly’s lips coiled into a devilish smirk. “We’re going the exact way I arrived here. By magic.”
I closed my eyes when Milly lifted her hand and zapped me with a strea
m of power. I felt a surge shoot down my body. Heat flushed through me, and my skin pricked like it was aflame, yet only for a moment.
A few seconds later we stood outside Caroline’s door. The sun was shining brightly. I couldn’t hear movement, so I didn’t know if it was too early to rouse her. I stared at the door.
“What’re you waiting for, toots? An invitation?” Grandma said.
I scoffed. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
Milly rapped her knuckles on the wood. “Well, don’t wait too long; life will pass you by.”
I glared at her as she wiggled her caterpillar eyebrows and shot me a toothy grin. “It’s just early, is all. I didn’t know if she’d be awake.”
The door swung open, and there stood Caroline, fully dressed in leggings and a black sweater. Her cat threaded itself around her legs, purring and mewing.
“I talked to you yesterday,” Caroline said.
Milly pushed her way inside. “You didn’t talk to me, kid. I’m on the case now.”
The cat’s eyes widened when it saw Polly. The animal hissed. Polly fluttered its wings as it maintained balance on Milly’s shoulder.
“Come in,” Caroline grumbled. Milly was already well inside the home when Caroline spoke.
My paternal grandmother sat down on the couch. She placed her cane between her legs and tightened her grip on it.
“Something nasty visited my granddaughter last night,” she said.
“It did? Is Sera okay?” I said without thinking.
Milly shot me a look that said really?
“Oh, right. Yes, I saw something very strange last night,” I said quickly.
Caroline waved her hand, and a service of hot coffee appeared. She poured herself a cup with cream and sugar and floated the service over to us. I declined, fearing that she might poison me.
Yes, I know it was an irrational thought, but part of me felt like it wasn’t completely irrational. Milly, on the other hand, built herself a cup with extra sugar and creamer.
I hoped she wouldn’t regret that.
“What sort of thing visited her?” Caroline said.