Small Town Witch

by Kristen S. Walker

  I turned and left the kitchen, going upstairs to my room.

  Up in my room, I started pacing back and forth. I thought I knew what I was doing before I went to talk to my mom, but then everything had gotten confused. Something was wrong here. Was I so spineless that I couldn’t stand up to my own mother? Yet, I felt like I didn’t really want to fight with her. It made me uncomfortable now just thinking about it. But I didn’t agree with her, either. She was right to worry about me, but I knew that if I just gave in to her, I’d be unhappy. I was already unhappy. I wanted to be my own person.

  I had to clear my head. I had a sudden urge to go out flying. I didn’t want my mom to know that I was leaving the house, so I opened my bedroom window. I slipped outside onto the garage roof, crouching as I crept down the slope. At the edge of the roof I found the backyard fence. I climbed down onto the fence and dropped the rest of the way to the ground.

  I tiptoed around the side of the house, checking in the windows, but no one was there. I slipped into the shed where my mom and I kept our brooms and grabbed mine.

  I took the broom with me away from the house, into the trees at the edge of the garden and through the forest until I was sure that I couldn’t be seen anymore. Then I hopped on the broom and flew up into the sky.

  It was still light out—the sun hadn’t even started to set yet. Up here in the sky, everything was laid out below me, far away where it couldn’t touch me. It all seemed so small and uncomplicated, like the pieces just fit together naturally. If only my life would fall into place like that.

  I ran through everything that had happened in my mind. Something about this situation felt familiar. Hadn’t I tried to argue with my mother about something before? Something about Akasha—about Mom reading her diary. Or was it like the time I told my parents Akasha should go to a different school? That time, too, I’d just given in to what Mom said. And the time that Dad told me I should make up with Lindsey, and I wasn’t going to apologize to her until Mom came and changed my mind. Every situation where I tried to stand my ground, she’d found a way to distract me and just drop the fight without really convincing me it was right.

  That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t confused at all. I couldn’t think about fighting with my mother when I was in the house. And my mother had insisted that we go home before we talked about anything. She knew I wouldn’t be able to argue with her there.

  Something in our house let her control the situation—something magical. I remembered the other weird spells that I’d found in my room: the tracking spell, and the one that kept me from getting pregnant. They wouldn’t be so bad if she’d talked to me about them, but because she’d hidden them from me, they felt wrong, like she was trying to control me without me knowing. Spells that controlled another person’s behavior were strictly against the rules of the Faerie Courts, but if she went so close to the line, who could say she hadn’t crossed it?

  It was the best way to explain a lot of the strange things that had happened lately. Thinking back over the years, there were other incidents, most of them minor, but some of them larger—like all the times that I tried to ask if I could meet other witches or maybe get a second opinion about witchcraft. Like when she told me to stop spending so much time with Lindsey and I hadn’t fought to keep that relationship, which led to Lindsey leaving me and breaking both our hearts. I was never going to get that back again.

  That made me wonder if the spell was just affecting me, or if it was our whole family. We all seemed to get along pretty well and no one really argued about anything. I bickered with my sister every now and then, but it was always small and we always made up after. I’d never heard her stand up to Mom, and I’d never heard my parents fight.

  How dare she do this? I knew that my mom was a witch and she could do a lot of great things to help our family, but that didn’t give her the right to control us. Did the others even suspect what was going on? How long had she been doing this? What other kinds of spells could she have on us to control us against our wills without us even knowing about it?

  I had to find the source of the spell and break it. There was no way I could keep living like this, and if they knew about it, my father and sister probably wouldn’t want to live under a spell, either. I knew that confronting my mom probably wouldn’t work, because she’d just get upset, and she might even cast a harsher spell on me to keep me from stopping her. I had to learn about magic without relying on my mom and find a way to free us.

  Maybe my friends could help. I also had an idea about where I could start. If there were spells that let me control my own memories and emotions, like the sigil that my mom had helped me to make for myself, that meant there was a spell that Mom could cast to help her control our whole family. And that was the key that was going to let me break this spell.

  With my broom, sneaking back into my bedroom was easy. I flew up to my window, left the broom on the roof, and slipped inside. I dug the paper with the sigil out from underneath my mattress and took my cell phone out of my bag. When I was back in the sky, I speed-dialed Ashleigh.

  She picked up after the first ring.

  “Hey, Ashleigh,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I have another magical problem—actually, sort of magical and sort of family-related. It’s complicated. Can I come over and talk to you?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Glen’s here for dinner. Do you want to talk to him too?”

  “Yeah, maybe he can help me with this, too,” I said. I knew I could trust both of them. Then what she’d said sank in all the way. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t want to interrupt your plans for the evening.”

  “It’s okay. We’re actually finishing dinner right now. We’ll be done by the time you get here—”

  “Even if I’m flying there instead of driving?”

  “I knew you were flying. I can hear the wind.”

  “Oh.” It was obvious when she pointed it out to me. “Right. Okay, I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  “Fly carefully,” she said, and hung up.

  At Ashleigh’s house, her dad answered the door. “The kids are in the kitchen,” he told me. “There’s leftover lasagna in the oven, so help yourself. I was just on my way upstairs.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Quinn,” I said. “I really appreciate you letting me come over on such short notice.”

  He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “You’re always welcome here, Rosa. Make yourself at home.” He turned and headed up the stairs, leaning on the railing.

  I hurried into the kitchen. Ashleigh and Glen were clearing away the dishes from the table. When Ashleigh turned around and saw my pale face, she frowned and came over to me.

  “You look even more serious than you sounded on the phone.” She reached out and took my arm. “Come sit down and tell us what’s wrong.”

  I let her sit me down in the chair that Glen pulled out. As they took the seats on either side of me, I took the paper out of my pocket and unfolded it to show them the sigil. “My first question is this: have you ever seen this before, and do you know what it’s supposed to do?”

  Ashleigh examined it for a few moments and then shook her head. “Sorry, it’s not any type of magic that I’m familiar with.” She passed it to Glen.

  He took it and held it up to the light. “Hm. I’ve seen a few sigils before, but I don’t recognize this one. I’ll have to look through my books to find a reference.”

  We both looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you studied witchcraft,” I said. “That’s what this is, right?”

  “Actually, this is arcane magic—sorcery.” He lowered the paper and looked at me. “Where did you get this?”

  “My mom helped me draw it.” A wave of shock washed over me. “It’s—it’s sorcery? That doesn’t make any sense. My mom doesn’t use sorcery. We’re witches.”

  Ashleigh squeezed my arm. “Witches use the powers granted to them by the Fae, but there’s nothing that prevents them from using other methods of human magic. Anyone can use
sorcery if they know how to do it right.”

  Glen nodded and pointed to the sigil. “What did your mother say this would do?”

  “It’s part of a binding spell.” I chewed on my lip, because I hadn’t wanted to explain this part to anyone else.

  He folded his arms and tilted his head to one side. “For what?”

  I sighed. “It’s a binding spell for memories or something like that. My mom explained to me that you can’t make your thoughts or feelings just go away, because messing with your heart or your memory is a dangerous thing. Instead, it’s supposed to encourage me to think about something else if I start thinking about—” I looked at my hands on the table. “If I think about how I feel about Lindsey.”

  Ashleigh smacked her forehead. “Rosa, I tried to tell you that getting over that was going to take time. Trying to take a magical shortcut is just stupid. You’re smarter than that.”

  “But it’s been working really well these past two weeks!” I hunched up my shoulders. “It’s been much easier to be around her at school and everything. I feel so much better now. It’s like there’s a weight off my back and it lets me see the rest of the world a little clearer now, you know? Things that I didn’t notice—” I broke off, thinking about Kai that afternoon.

  Glen turned the paper around in his hands. “But now you need help because it’s backfiring in some way?”

  That reminded me why I was there in the first place. Another shudder went up my spine. “No. I came to you because I think there’s another spell already on me like this one, except it’s stronger and I didn’t ask for it. I want to find out if it’s there, who it’s affecting—because I think it might be more than just me—and how I can stop it.”

  Glen frowned. “Spells that affect someone’s memories can be pretty insidious. It’s bad enough to put one on yourself.”

  “I know, but I was kind of desperate. Now it’s creeping me out. I think that the big one is one that my mom cast on our whole house. I think she’s controlling my family so that we don’t argue with her or anything.”

  I hid my face in my hands. It was worse to hear myself saying it out loud. I still didn’t want to believe that it was true.

  Ashleigh sat down in the chair on my other side and put her arm around me. “Rosa, that’s—awful.”

  Glen said, “What makes you think that there could be such a spell? Do you have any evidence?”

  I took a deep, shuddering breath and looked up, staring straight ahead at the wall. I had to think about how I could word this so it would make sense to someone else. “It’s just—there’s stuff that hasn’t been adding up lately. I realized it because I started to argue with my mom today, but something was making me stop,” I said. I leaned into Ashleigh’s arm. “When I thought about it, I remembered other things that have been happening where we all went along with what my mom told us to do, even if it didn’t really make sense.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Glen re-fold the paper with the sigil and put it on the table. I heard the creak of wood as he leaned back in his chair. “Can you tell me anything more specific?”

  I began reciting the list of what had happened in the past month—Akasha having trouble at school, Dad telling me to make friends with Lindsey again even though I wanted to back off, Mom convincing me that I shouldn’t start dating even though I felt like I was ready.

  Ashleigh made a noise of surprise at the last one. “You always tell me that you don’t want to date anyone. I thought that was how you really felt about it.”

  “That’s the thing. It feels like all of this is my idea, a decision that I made,” I said. “Especially when I’m at home, I talk myself into believing that’s how I feel. It wasn’t until my heart was telling me that something was really wrong, and I couldn’t get my head straightened out, that I realized some of my thoughts weren’t really mine.”

  “Oh my gosh.” Ashleigh gave me a squeeze. “I can’t imagine how horrible you must feel right now.”

  I nodded slowly. “The worst part of it is, if I’m right, this is my own mother who’s doing this to our family. I’ve always known that she was kind of the one in charge and we went along with her decisions on most things, but I didn’t realize until now that she could be making us do things that we didn’t want to do.” I felt tears filling my eyes again and blinked them back. “I mean, a few years ago, when my grandmother died—I thought we would go to the funeral, of course, until Mom convinced us all that it was a bad time for us to take off from school. We loved my grandmother, and we missed her funeral! I’ve barely seen my dad’s family since then.”

  “You definitely need help with this,” Glen said. He pushed his chair back and stood up. He started to pace the room. “If you’re right about this, there’s a very serious spell at work here. Your mom has the mage’s mark, so we know that she knows a lot about magic, way more than any of us. If she showed you that sigil, that also means she knows more than one type of human magic. She’s been your only magic teacher, except for the little tricks that Ashleigh and I have shown you, so she could have left huge gaps in your knowledge so you could never figure out what she was up to, let alone hope to break it.”

  He walked back to the table and pointed at the folded-up piece of paper. “I don’t know if what that thing is has anything to do with the spell that your mom has on your family. It looks pretty simple, so I don’t know if it’s capable of that kind of large scale manipulation—”

  I remembered something else that my mom had told me. “She told me it was sort of a watered down version of something else. She didn’t want to give me anything too powerful because she was afraid of me hurting myself.”

  He picked up the paper and unfolded it again. “Okay, so maybe we find the complete version of this sigil and that will give us a clue about what’s going on. My point is that your mom is very powerful and very experienced compared to all of us, and even if we found her spell, I don’t know if we could break it.”

  I clenched my fists together. “I have to try. Not just for me—for my dad and my sister, too. They aren’t magic users, and I don’t know if they even suspect this. My mom is messing with their heads and their lives so they can’t do what they really want, and it’s not fair!”

  “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try,” Glen said. “We might just need some extra help on this one. Adult help.”

  Ashleigh took her arm from around me and stood up. “Of course we’ll need help,” she said. “If you’re right about the spell, then your mother is breaking her oath to the Faerie Court. It’s illegal to use magic to manipulate others, which means that we’ll have to report her, but we need proof as well.”

  I put up my hands. “Whoa. I don’t know if I want to report my mother to anyone. I just want to break the spell, or at least keep it from affecting me, and then talk to her, I guess. Really talk, once I know that she isn’t going to just change my mind with a wave of her hand or whatever she’s doing.”

  Ashleigh looked down and smiled at me. “It’s okay. I have an idea. We’re lucky that it’s a new moon tonight.”

  “Are we going to do our own spell?”

  Ashleigh glanced at Glen, and I saw something pass between them. He nodded. She looked back at me. “We’re taking you into the Faerie Realm.”

  Traveling to Faerie was dangerous. Time ran differently there, and it was easy to spend a month there without even realizing it. Humans could easily get lost or trapped, and if they upset the Queen or any of the other inhabitants, they could end up in big trouble, like getting turned into a tree or worse. Being on the wrong side of the Veil too long also caused madness. There were all kinds of human folklore about things that people could bring as protection to travel safely through Faerie—everything from bread to rowan to cold iron—but none of them were guaranteed to work all of the time.

  Fortunately, when traveling with people who had Fae blood, it could be pretty simple. Ashleigh and Glen had charms to protect them when they went to visit their Otherwo
rldly relatives. Ashleigh gave me a spare that she had, hung from a white ribbon. “Put it around your neck,” she told me. “You want to keep it close to your heart. As long as we’re careful and we don’t stay for too long, these are usually reliable. With these precautions, the guardian will let us pass unchallenged.”

  I glanced at her. “The guardian?”

  Ashleigh looked at Glen, who smiled as if at some private joke. “Because the castle is such a powerful place, there’s a guardian who keeps people from just passing through.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t want to meet her. But since this is a safe time to travel, and you’re with us, it should be fine.”

  Ashleigh also tied lengths of white ribbon around each of our wrists and ankles. “Don’t let any of these come off,” she warned. “The other rules are: don’t wander off by yourself, don’t eat or drink anything, be careful about who you accept presents from, be very polite and try not to insult anyone, and do exactly as we tell you. And be careful who you talk to. You never know who could be Unseelie.”

  “I think I can remember all of that.” This was probably going to be the biggest magical thing that I’d ever done, not to mention the most dangerous, and I hoped that I wasn’t going to screw it up in some way. “How many Unseelie are there in Faerie? Do you run into them a lot?”

  Glen coughed. “They shouldn’t be on the paths we travel, since they’re not allowed anywhere near the gates. The guardian is one thing that keeps them from crossing over. But to the Fae, there’s still a war going on. The Unseelie are always looking for a new pawn to use.”

  When we were ready, Glen drove us up to Doe’s Rest. Servants greeted us at the entrance, but left us alone when Ashleigh explained that we weren’t there to visit the count. Both of them were allowed to have free range of most of the grounds. We went around the front building and walked up the hill to the Grove.

  We all looked up at the sky. The sun was slipping down below the horizon, and there was no moon. I was surprised by how late it had gotten already; I hadn’t been keeping track of the time I’d spent at Ashleigh’s house. I realized that I didn’t know what time my own family was having dinner—Mom could be really upset right now that I was missing it. I’d already turned my phone off when I left home. I would just have to face the consequences later.