It was awkward again later when Heather, Glen, Ashleigh and I went to take our lunch outside to find a private place to talk, and Kai saw us leaving. He hurried to catch up with us. My other friends glanced at me but didn’t say anything.
I’d have to do it myself. I stepped in front of him and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Kai, but we have something to talk about and I’m not sure if you should be there.”
He jutted out his lower lip in a pout. “Why not, Rosa? Don’t you trust me?”
“I—” I paused and took a deep breath. Saying that I couldn’t trust him yet would just hurt him more. Maybe he’d understand the direct approach. “I don’t want to dump all of my problems on you. They’re just giving me some advice on some family issues. Don’t worry about it.” I tried to smile reassuringly.
“You don’t think I could help you, too?”
I shook my head. How could Kai help, anyway? Just because he could use magic to shapeshift between a human and a fox didn’t mean that he knew anything about other types of magic.
Ashleigh came back to help, but I held up my hand. “You guys go ahead.” I waved them away. Behind me, the door creaked open and closed as they went outside.
I shook my head and stared down Kai. “I think this is something that doesn’t concern you. Maybe I’ll be willing to tell you about it later, but right now I need the people who’ve already been involved to talk to me about this. I appreciate you wanting to support me, but I don’t need you for this.”
He stood there looking at me, but he didn’t say anything else, so I turned to go. I reached for the door and pulled—
The door jerked out of my hand. It wouldn’t move. At the same time, the hollow place in the back of my head filled with a stabbing pain. I cringed and recoiled away from the door, shutting my eyes against whatever had happened. As if from very far away, I heard a tray hitting the floor and realized that I’d dropped my lunch.
When I blinked and came back to myself, there was an arm around me, holding me up. I turned my head and saw Kai there, looking pale with worry. “Rosa, I said, are you okay? What happened?”
I straightened up and pulled myself a little away from him. My knees felt like jelly, but not in a good way, and I had to concentrate to keep my feet under me. “I don’t know. I just tried to open the door—”
Kai took a step back and opened the door. It moved easily under his hand.
I frowned. I reached out to take the door from him, closed it, then tried to open it again.
Once more, it refused to budge. I felt the stabbing pain in the back of my head again. I stopped trying the moment I felt resistance. When I took my hand from the door, the pain stopped.
I said quietly, “I don’t think the door locks are recognizing me or something.”
I could feel Kai staring at me. In five years, I’d never had a problem with the doors. Could they have been tampered with?
I knew next to nothing about magitek, but I could tell when a spell had been messed with recently, so I bent down to take a closer look at the door handle. I reached for my magic and—
Ow. The stabbing pain flared again, and the feeling of emptiness—that hollow that I’d been trying to ignore all day. My eyes widened. It wasn’t the lock, but me. Something was deliberately blocking me from using my own magic.
I straightened up. “Open the door,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and calm.
Kai opened the door and I marched out without a backwards glance. I could hear him following a step behind me, but I couldn’t worry about him right then. I looked around to find where Glen, Ashleigh, and Heather had gone—they were at a table at the far side of the patio. I hurried over to them. “I know what she did. She put a binding on my powers.”
They all looked up and stared at me in surprise. “How do you know?” Glen said.
“I couldn’t open the door,” I said. “It’s the first magic that I’ve tried to do all day. When I try to do something, my power isn’t there, and it hurts like something is stopping me.” I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. “Who else would do something like this, especially right after she found out that I was looking for something where I wasn’t allowed to go?”
Kai had caught up to me then. As he came up beside me, my friends all stopped and stared at me, waiting to see what I would do.
“Oh, fine,” I said, taking my notebook out and shoving it at Glen. “You explain it to him, then. I’m obviously in over my head here, because now I can’t even find this new binding spell or break it without any powers of my own.” I slumped down into a chair, dejected.
Glen said gently, “Why don’t we help you look?”
I looked up at him and frowned. “How? It’s suspicious enough for me to be looking all over my house, since she caught me at it. I can’t exactly just invite everyone over for a snooping around my house party.”
Heather cleared her throat. “It’s Tuesday, right? Are you still taking your sister to the library after school?”
“Yeah, she’d never let me skip it without a really good reason,” I said.
“Then give us your house key and let us search while you and your sister are still out. You’ll already be downtown by your mom’s store, so if she decides to go home early, you’ll see her leave and you can warn us.”
I looked at Glen and Ashleigh.
Glen opened the notebook and looked at the map of my house. “I think we can pull it off.”
Ashleigh nodded. “We can look for both spells at the same time. Maybe a few pairs of fresh eyes will be able to see something you’ve missed. We’ve got your notes, so we’ll know what other spells to expect, and now we know to be careful about tripping magical alarms.”
I nodded. “Just be really careful. I don’t want my mom to catch you and start doing bad stuff to you guys, too.”
Kai was listening to this whole exchange with a look of total confusion. Glen looked at me, then pulled out an empty chair next to him and gestured for him to sit down. “I’ll tell you what’s going on first and then we can figure out if you want to help and what you can do.”
That afternoon I waited for my friends in town, sitting alone in front of the coffee shop and trying to keep an eye on my mother’s store. I’d asked to see if someone could come along and keep me company, but Glen, who’d taken over organizing the whole operation, decided that it would be better to have more people helping at the house. Even Heather, who wasn’t adept with any particular type of magic, could still help look around for anything out of the ordinary and keep an eye out for either of my parents coming back to the house.
Being by myself just gave me more time to be nervous and worry about what was happening. What could they find? Was this going to work? Would it be worse if they found nothing, or if they found something horrible?
I kept glancing at my mom’s store, trying not to be obvious about it. I wasn’t going to see much from the outside, but I’d see her if she left. Not many people come by to visit her store, because it was a small town and we didn’t really get tourist traffic. I couldn’t see in the window, so I didn’t know what she was doing. I also kept glancing at my phone, even though it hadn’t buzzed, in case my friends wrote to tell me what was going on at the house.
I was so busy watching the store and trying not to appear too nervous or obvious about what I was doing, that when someone stepped up beside me and said hello, I nearly jumped out of my chair.
My head snapped up—and when I saw who it was, I was even more surprised. He was dressed in normal human clothes—a plain brown business suit with an ugly blue tie—and he was slouching so he didn’t look quite as extraordinarily tall, but there was no disguising a Fae. “What are you doing here, Lavender?”
He smiled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Can I join you?” He watched me until I nodded, then pulled out the patio chair next to me and sat down. “And you said you didn’t like Lavender. I’m going by Mantis now.”
I’d forgotten to ask his new name. �
��Mantis?” I raised my eyebrows at him. It sounded ridiculous.
“I thought that sounded more masculine.”
I stared at him, but he looked completely serious. I shook my head and said again, “What are you doing here, then, Mantis?”
He smiled and leaned back casually in his chair. “I just haven’t heard from you in a while, so I wanted to check up on you and see how you were doing with that, ah, personal issue.”
I wrinkled up my face. “Well, that issue hasn’t gotten any better. Actually, it’s worse right now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. How so?”
I glanced around, then leaned closer and whispered, “I’ve been looking all over my house but I can’t find anything. My mom caught me yesterday, because she had some kind of alarm set up, and now she put a spell on me to bind my powers. My friends are at my house right now trying to find something, anything, but I don’t know if they’ll get anywhere.”
Mantis frowned. He looked thoughtful for a long moment, leaning back in his chair again and rubbing his chin. “I gave you those powers to help you, but not to be a crutch. You have to think of another way without them.”
There was no use in pointing out to a Fae, a being made entirely of magic, how impossible it was to fight magic without powers of my own. I picked up the cup from the table and took a sip, but it was nearly empty and had gone cold. I put it back down with a sigh.
Mantis saw the gesture and nodded at me. “Let me buy you a refill. I could use some refreshment as well.”
We stood up and went inside What a Drip. The after school crowd was mostly gone by now, and the owners were both lounging behind the coffee bar. When they saw me come in with a man that they didn’t recognize, they glanced at each other. Then the tall, skinny one, Frank, came up to the register. “Hello. Who’s your friend, Rosa?”
I looked at my patron, who was smiling in a friendly manner, and hoped he wasn’t going to embarrass me in public. “This is Mantis,” I said, trying to keep a straight face. “Mantis, this is Frank, and his partner, Tom. They own the shop.”
Tom came up to the counter and extended his hand across to Mantis. “Why, hello, Mantis. I love your name. It’s so—burly. Do you go by Manny for short?”
Mantis hesitated only a moment before he remembered to take Tom’s hand and shake it. “Thank you. Your shop also has an interesting name. Who came up with it?”
Tom and Frank exchanged a grin. “It’s kind of an inside joke,” Frank admitted. “We had the idea since college.”
Tom stepped closer to Frank so he could slip an arm around his waist. “Yeah, he’s always picking on everything, so I tease him about it. When we dreamed of starting our own business together, it was either going to be What a Drip Coffee or What a Drag Smoke Shop and Cabaret.”
Frank rolled his eyes and laughed good-naturedly. “You were the one who wanted the second idea. That might have worked if we’d found the space to rent in San Francisco, but out here I don’t think we’d get enough customers for something like that.”
They laughed again, and Mantis smiled. “You two have been together for a long time, then,” he said.
I grinned. “Yeah, they’re a regular old married couple, whatever the law says. They also make good espresso if you like that sort of thing.”
He glanced at me and then at the menu. “Is that what you drink?”
“No, I usually get the spiced chai latte,” I said.
Mantis ordered me another latte, and then made the mistake of asking Frank and Tom to recommend a drink for him. A few minutes later, Frank had to help us carry our order outside with a tray because he’d ended up with several different small coffee shots, three kinds of mini donuts, a slice of carrot cake, and a plateful of cookies. The selection filled the small patio table that I’d been sitting at.
When we were settled and Frank had gone back inside, I finally gave in to temptation: I pulled out my phone again and sent a text message to my friends asking if they’d found anything yet.
Mantis saw me staring at my phone waiting for a reply and passed me a cookie. “You don’t think they’ll find anything,” he said.
I took a bite of the cookie, which was quite good—chocolate chip, but not too sweet—and shook my head. “I swear I’ve been over every inch of that house myself,” I said. “I know they’re going over it with fresh eyes, but I know that house better than any of them, and I don’t think there’s anything they’ll see that I could have missed. What do I do?”
Mantis sipped at one of the coffee shots and shrugged. “Try another tactic. Maybe it’s not in your house after all. Especially if your mom knows that you’re looking there, she might have wanted to put it somewhere else.”
“Where else could she hide something like that?” I said. “If it wasn’t at home, then someone else in town would notice it. There aren’t any other witches here, but there’s quite a few good sorcerers, and some of them are very suspicious about strange spells.”
“I don’t know your town well enough to answer that,” Mantis said. “I’m just making a suggestion. I’m also going to recommend that you eat another cookie. You’re too short.”
I stuck out my tongue at him. “I’m not that short! How are cookies going to make me taller?”
He winked. “Just listen to wise old Manny. You worry about too many things. Let’s talk about something happier.”
I tried to ask him what he was doing there, but he managed to dodge the question yet again so I finally gave up. We talked about school and the weather changing.
He got me to relax and I lost track of time talking. When my phone finally buzzed with a message, it turned out to be Akasha, done at the library and ready to go home. Mantis said good-bye and cleaned up our dishes while I sent a warning to my friends to get out of the house. Whatever had happened at home, the window of opportunity was gone now. We’d have to figure out the next steps later.
Mantis ended up walking with me to the library and said hello to Akasha. “You owe me a rematch,” he reminded her. “I’d better see you at All Hallows’ Eve.”
Akasha nodded, suddenly too shy to say anything. When he was gone and we started driving home, she said, “What was he doing here?”
I shrugged. “He was just stopping by to say hello, and I guess to cheer me up.” I smiled. He did make me feel better.
Akasha just shook her head and pulled out a book.
I dropped Akasha off at home with her library books and then went over to Ashleigh’s house to meet up with my friends to find out the details of their search. Ashleigh’s dad wasn’t home from work, but we also knew that he didn’t ask questions or pry when Ashleigh had her friends over. I already knew that they hadn’t found the binding spell or the mind control spell, but maybe there was more information that they could give me. We also had to plan the next step now that the search had failed.
They showed me another map of the house that Ashleigh had made. Hers looked better than mine—she was in the art class at school, after all—and when we compared the two, we found a lot of overlap, but there were a few things that I’d missed. They were all small and nothing was surprising, though, so I didn’t feel bad.
“What I thought was odd,” said Glen when they’d finished telling me about the afternoon, “was that she didn’t really seem to have that much stuff. I mean, all the basic witchcraft tools were there in the attic, and between that and the kitchen I was able to find most of the herbs that she was growing in the garden, but I thought your mom was a more advanced practitioner and I didn’t see anything she would need for these kinds of powerful spells. She also didn’t have any notes on any of her work.”
Heather shrugged. “Maybe she just memorizes everything so that Rosa or someone else can’t find her notes and figure out what she’s doing.”
Glen shook his head. “I doubt it. Most magic users take notes, especially the good ones like Rosmerta who have the mage’s mark. If it’s a spell that she did a long time ago, like a mind control that�
��s been in place since before Rosa was born, then she wouldn’t want to forget all of the subtle details of how she performed it in case something went wrong and another spell interfered or she had to recast it.”
I looked down at the map. “I don’t know of any notes that my mom takes. She’s never told me to write anything down.” Yet another thing she’d failed to teach me. “But I do know that she keeps a lot of her stuff in her shop. That’s where she does all of the magic for her clients.”
Glen looked up at me and frowned. “Have you looked in her shop?”
“No, I’m sure the spell has to be at home—” I stopped short. My earlier conversation with Mantis flashed through my mind. What if she’d put it somewhere else so I couldn’t find it?
“Why do you think it has to be at your house?” Glen said carefully, watching me.
“Because I thought it felt stronger when I was there. But you’re right, I don’t know for sure, and we’ve run out of places to look at my house.”
Kai said, “Do you have a key to your mom’s store that we could use to get in there?”
I shook my head. “I could try to get her keys at home, maybe, like take them when she’s not looking.”
Glen frowned. “She’ll probably have some kind of magical ward on the door, too, with another one of her alarms. It’s a good thing that she doesn’t really like magitek, because that’s harder to get around, but we’ll still need to be prepared.”
Heather said quietly, “If you can’t get the key, Rosa, I have a set of lock picks.”
We all turned and stared at her in surprise. I picked my jaw back up off the floor and said, “I—I don’t think I know how to use those.”
“That’s okay, I can do it,” Heather said, which just made everyone stare at her more.
Kai said with a snort, “Did your parents teach you that? I thought vampires had to be invited inside, not breaking and entering.”
Small Town Witch Page 20