by Tess Lake
As I told her my problem, she tapped away at her phone.
“Sent, done, the boyfriend is on it,” she said, waving her phone.
“I’m going to ask him some other stuff too,” I told her. I then described what had happened with John and seeing him change into the straw boater hat and red stripes, how he’d repeated the same things he’d said in the park.
“And I think he saw something around my head, a red light, as though there is a spell cast on me,” I finished with. At this, Luce leaped up from her chair and started pacing; Molly went from lounging back on the sofa to sitting up, clenching her phone in her hand so tightly I was afraid it would shatter.
“Are you serious? Someone has cast a spell on you?” she said.
“Okay, so what we’re going to do is dispel it. Me and Molly will get rid of it right now,” Luce said.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said. Getting rid of spells is a tricky business. It takes almost as much energy to get rid of a spell as it took to cast it. The more powerful a spell is, the harder it is to destroy. A long time ago, a growth spell I’d cast on Luce’s eyebrows had come free and ended up growing a jungle in the mansion dining room. It had taken all of us, including the moms, working together to break that spell.
“Pish-posh, it’ll be fine,” Molly said, utilizing one of Aunt Cass’s favorite statements. Adams leaped off me and down onto the floor to start having a bath.
“Okay, but be careful,” I said.
Molly and Luce came to stand in front of me holding hands. A counterspell is really quite simple. It’s intention, power, and a word. I took a deep breath and tried to relax as I felt the magic begin to swirl around me. Magic came from both within and without, and as Molly and Luce drew on it, it was like being in the ocean and the current suddenly turned the opposite direction. Both of them closed their eyes as the power grew, and then as one, they looked down at me and whispered, “Counter” at the same time. I felt the spell wash over me. It was a perfect mixture of Molly and Luce’s magic. They’re both nature witches at heart, so I could feel sensations of growth and greenery, the natural processes of rot and decay. The irrepressible desire of life to grow and bloom and flourish. It was comforting and lovely. The spell hit me and washed through before dissipating harmlessly into the air. Molly and Luce were both smiling down at me, but that quickly turned to confusion. They let go of each other’s hands. Molly returned to the sofa and Luce followed her.
“I couldn’t feel a spell on you,” Luce said.
“Me neither,” Molly added. Luce yawned a little into the back of her hand, and I wasn’t really sure if it was from a long day of work at Traveler or the effort of casting the spell. Part of me was disappointed that nothing had happened. At least if my cousins had hit some crazily powerful spell that had defeated them, we would have something to work with and I could recruit the moms and Aunt Cass when we finally woke her up. But this? All I had so far was Hattie saying months ago that someone had cast a spell on me, and now John Smith apparently seeing evidence of it.
Thinking about Hattie, I realized I’d kept that particular piece of information to myself. There has always been an enmity between Hattie and Aunt Cass for as long as I can remember, and I certainly didn’t trust Hattie, nor even particularly like her, but I was starting to realize that she’d always been honest with me no matter what. She’d helped me when I’d stumbled into using some dangerous magic, and I realized in that moment that I was still behaving like a child carrying a grudge against a parent for no good reason rather than making up my own mind.
As I thought about Aunt Cass, my eyes strayed across to the kitchen counter, where there was a pile of shopping bags. Sticking out the top of one of them was a bunch of red roses. The spell that we were to cast to unfreeze Aunt Cass demanded fifty red rose petals.
“Did you get your ingredients already?” I asked.
“Yup. Even the tears of a nine-year-old boy,” Luce said proudly.
“Seriously? How did you do that? When did you find the time to do that?”
“The coffee machine shut down about half an hour after you left because it needed that part, and once we figured that out and got in contact with Sergei, we had nothing better to do, so we shut up the shop and went collecting ingredients. We’ve got almost all of them now,” Molly said.
“Seriously, where’d you get the tears, though?”
“Went to that playground that’s off the main street around the corner. Waited around until a kid fell off a slide. Quick bit of magic and I got the tears,” Luce said. She went over to the bag and rummaged around in it before finally pulling out a small vial. It was hard to see, but at the very bottom, there was the tiniest amount of liquid.
“Well, so I guess it’s a relief you didn’t have to go to the school to flick someone on the end of the nose,” I said.
“Hey, I was only joking about that,” Luce said, stuffing the vial back into the bag.
We talked for a while about all things at once until we eventually circled back around to Sunny Days Manor, the nervous Mr. Sharp, and the cameras.
“So what are you thinking? Break and enter?” Molly asked.
“We need to get on the inside. Can’t we visit Hilda, just saying we’re checking on her? Then we can have a look around and see if we can discover a room where they keep all the recordings,” Luce said.
I was little confused. This afternoon, my cousins hadn’t seemed too keen on the idea of tracking down exactly what was happening at Sunny Days Manor and what supernatural thing might possibly be causing it.
“So you’re pro getting into an investigation now? Didn’t you say it was dangerous?” I asked.
“The coffee machine is going to be out of commission for a few days, so what else do we have to do?” Molly said.
“The girl is right,” Luce said, pointing at Molly. “Besides, maybe you convinced us a little. Plenty of weird things keep happening around town, and our family seems to be drawn into them. With Aunt Cass out on Truer Island exploding goddess knows what, it seems that maybe we should start getting involved in things,” Luce said.
I felt a sudden prickle of tears, gratitude, maybe, which I quickly wiped away before either of them could see. Luce made cups of cocoa and then we sat on the sofa, idly watching some junk television in between the three of us occasionally messaging with our boyfriends. It had been a fraught day, but there, safe in our home, I felt surrounded by love, and the comfort of it soon washed away the stresses of the day. By the time I went to bed, despite all the mysteries and odd things piling up, I wasn’t worried at all. Adams walked in a circle at the end of the bed and then settled down, curling his tail around himself. I nestled into my pillow and let the day slip away.
Chapter 13
I awoke with fire in my belly and a newfound sense of purpose. I also awoke to a well-chewed brown toy mouse sitting on my pillow and a message from Mom saying that there was an important announcement tonight and asking me to come to dinner, which was a surprise in itself because usually such things were worded as an instruction rather than a request.
“Good morning, George,” I said to the brown mouse and then flicked him off my pillow onto the floor. Adams appeared from nowhere under the bed, scooped him up and then disappeared again. I got out of bed feeling energized and fresh. Partially it was the nap I’d taken yesterday and then all the sleep I’d had last night that had revived me, but also it was the sense that I would be able to solve whatever this was. With the help of my cousins, progress would be made, mysteries would be unraveled.
I left my room and found said cousins making breakfast and scheming how to get their boyfriends to take an unauthorized day off work. Since the coffee machine was out of action for a few days until the part arrived, Molly and Luce were definitely at a loose end, so they were both tapping away on their phones, messaging Ollie and Will.
“Morning, family,” I said and took a seat at the breakfast bar, stealing a piece of Molly’s toast.
“Where would you go if you wanted to go out but you didn’t want to be seen by anybody?” Luce asked.
“Harlot Bay is a small place. I’m not sure that’s possible,” I said, stealing a bit of Molly’s omelet.
“I think one of us should get this end of the mansion and the other one should have to find somewhere to go,” Molly said, clearly meaning it was her who should get use of the mansion and Luce should find somewhere else to go.
“If you want to rock, paper, scissors for it, I’m game,” Luce said.
“No way, you always cheat,” Molly said.
“How can I cheat? Just because you lose all the time doesn’t mean I’m cheating,” Luce said. It was true that Molly had a terrible history of winning rock, paper, scissors against Luce.
They started bickering a bit as they plotted and planned, and amongst that I stole enough of their breakfasts to fill myself up. I got myself ready, said goodbye and left them to it. When I walked out of the front door, I was feeling energetic, well fed and possessed of a plan that I was sure would work. By the time I was driving down the hill, I was starting to have second thoughts about going to see Hattie. I could all too easily remember her whacking me across the knuckles with a ruler. I’d also remembered that I didn’t really trust her that much and that she’d crept into my office on her own, according to her to check if a spell had been cast on me.
By the time I reached the middle of town, those small doubts had grown in size. My plan for today was to see her to dig into the problem that I had a spell cast on me, and then after that I was going to go to Mr. McGregor’s Herbology to see if I could buy most of the list of ingredients Mom had given me. Now I was thinking I could just grab the ingredients, ignore Hattie entirely and probably have a much better day. Who knows, maybe I could convince my own boyfriend to take a day off from work.
For some reason I couldn’t really explain, I kept driving, heading out of town and over to Stern Farms, the lemon orchard where Hattie and her family lived. I swear I went through about a hundred moods on the way there, from thinking this was a stupid idea, to being bored by it, to suddenly wondering if I should just go and visit Jack, to thinking maybe I should make a plan for how I might get hold of video footage at Sunny Days Manor, to even thinking I should just turn around and go and visit Ollie and see if he’d uncovered anything about the files that had been stolen from Sheriff Hardy’s office.
My mind became a chattering monkey offering up a thousand diversions, and for no particular reason at all, I ignored them until I arrived at Stern Farms. Hattie was waiting out in front, wearing a flower-printed apron. She waved at me and then, shock horror, actually smiled. It was that final thing that pulled me out of the car, because at that moment I was seriously considering turning around and driving back to town.
Against what I felt was definitely my better judgment, I followed her inside. I’d only been inside Hattie’s house once a long time ago, leading through the living room, through the kitchen and out the back. Then, every other time I’d visited to continue my training with her, I’d gone around the side of the house to the small shed out in back.
“Come this way, would you like a cup of tea?” Hattie asked.
“Um, sure,” I said, feeling that I’d suddenly slipped through a wormhole into an alternate dimension where Hattie was a lovely, kindly grandmother. We went into the kitchen, which was filled with the scent of baking cookies. They smelled sugary and buttery and absolutely delicious. Hattie directed me to the kitchen table, where I sat down and then looked around while she busied herself making tea. The kitchen had a comforting feel to it, but sort of felt scrubbed clean, as though every surface had been wiped multiple times over. Underneath the scent of the baking cookies, I could smell lemon, which wasn’t unusual considering this was a lemon grove after all.
Up on a shelf above the kitchen counter were carefully labeled canisters of herbs and spices. I ran my eye along them, seeing the standard ones you might expect in a kitchen, such as thyme and rosemary, cumin and paprika. Then there were a few witchy ones, like desiccated elm bark, dried toad skin, and one alarmingly labeled “Fire.” Somewhere far below the sense of the kitchen and the calming sound of Hattie preparing cups of tea, the clinking of glass and spoon, I could detect traces of magic as well. I could sense Kira had been here, and another woman as well, who I assumed was her mother. I let myself relax and my senses expand.
“I can feel that, you know,” Hattie murmured.
I blinked at her, feeling myself surprised that I’d forgotten for an instant that she was there.
“Feel what?” I stammered.
Hattie turned to me and gave me another smile which was, incredibly warm.
“You're snooping,” she said.
Hattie brought over two cups of tea with no milk in them and then a tray with a giant golden lemon and a sharp knife. She brought over a small jug of milk and a plate of cookies before finally placing down a container of raw sugar. I watched, sort of mesmerized, as she took the sharp knife and sliced the lemon into pieces. Juice dripped off the knife and the scent of lemon in the kitchen strengthened. It was delectable, a kind of cleanness about it. I looked up at the kitchen wall and saw the clock had dogs on it instead of numbers. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought Hattie was just a standard kindly grandmother rather than an incredibly powerful witch who as far as I’d known had spent many years trying to get the name of Harlot Bay changed to Calm Water Bay.
“Milk, tea, lemon and a cookie, whatever you want,” Hattie said. I’m normally a milk-in-tea type of person, but the lemon was too delicious to resist, so I squirted some into my tea and then took a cookie, which was buttery and dissolved in my mouth. Hattie took a sip of her tea and looked up at me before suddenly frowning.
Ah, there was the Hattie that I remembered. Then she glanced away, seeming to lose her train of thought and looking out the window before she suddenly reached into a pocket of her apron and pulled out a white index card. She read whatever was on it before focusing back on me.
“You have a spell cast on you and you want to see if we can remove it together,” she said, seeming a bit uncertain.
As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have a spectacularly useless skill in that I can read upside down quite well. I glanced at the card Hattie was holding. Written in thick letters on it was: “Harlow Torrent has a spell cast on her. Help her.”
“Why do you have that card?” I asked.
“Sorry, what?” Hattie said. It seemed she’d lost her train of thought.
“That card in your hand. Why do you have it?” I asked again.
Hattie looked at the card again, virtually repeating what she’d done a moment ago. She looked back up at me and frowned again.
“I’ve been having trouble remembering this fact,” she said.
“Well, I do want to talk to you about the spell,” I said.
Although I might have been on my own personal journey of trying to tell the truth, I felt a very strong compulsion not to tell Hattie about the creepy old mansion my cousins and I’d found out on Truer Island, and the lights I’d seen around their heads. So I told her about John Smith instead and how he’d looked at me and apparently seen a red light surrounding my head for a moment. I told her that I’d seen the same on him, leading down to a wound over his heart, some time ago when I’d had the ability to see auras.
Hattie took this news rather well, sipping her tea and eating a cookie, and nodding as I spoke.
“That’s one of the ways it can appear. When I saw you near Christmas, all I caught was a glimpse of light around your head, so fast that it could’ve just been a flash of sun, and I knew in that moment that someone had cast a powerful spell on you,” Hattie said.
It was a good thing I was sitting down and somewhat relaxed from the cup of hot tea and the buttery cookie, because I felt a gnawing of dread, something deep in my very bones. Witches cast spells on each other all the time, although there is somewhat of a gene
ral prohibition against cursing. Sometimes you can feel it the moment you awake. It’s like the moment before the flu that you’re going to get takes you down, where you start feeling a little odd, a bit more tired than you would expect, and the first aches hit you.
The idea that there was a spell upon me that I couldn’t detect filled me with horror. It felt like I’d just been told I had a terminal illness, that somewhere deep inside me, my very cells were turning against me. I gave myself a quick pinch on the back of the hand to try to pull myself out of these morbid thoughts. At least if it was a spell, perhaps it could be undone.
“What do we need to do?” I asked Hattie and took a sip of my tea. She appeared not to hear me.
“It was the oddest thing,” she said in somewhat of a dreamy voice. “I met you in the street, saw that there was some powerful spell upon you, and then almost immediately forgot about it. It’s only when I remembered that I then went to your office to see if there was something I could find. But then after that I forgot again. It seemed to be inconsequential, none of my business, why should I care that one of the Torrent witches has a spell cast on her? For a long time, I didn’t give it a single bit of thought. Isn’t that odd?” she asked. She looked down at the card again as though trying to remind herself of the fact she’d written down.
“I’m not sure. I’m just another witch, so why is it for you to help?” I said.
“The very powerful spells, this is how they work. They hide. Anything that can reveal them will slip out of your mind. You will think it is not important. Facts are hard to hold, and what to anyone else would seem obvious, to you will be boring or unimportant. You will need to return to those facts over and over again to study them. Others will tell you to disregard it. You will tell yourself to disregard it,” Hattie said.
The thought crossed my mind that she’d gone crazy. Closely following that one was an even more horrendous idea: what if she’d been the one to cast the spell on me? And now she was lying, being sneaky, trying to lure me into something else?