Cast a Spell

by Stacey Alabaster

  She looked at me in sympathy and shrugged. “Maybe he has gone back to Swift Valley.”

  I got a sinking feeling in my belly as I realized that she could be right. Had he really left without even saying goodbye to me? Was this really the end of everything for us?

  I sat there sullenly for a little while. Maybe I wouldn’t even go back to Swift Valley at the end of the course. What did I have waiting for me there now? Akiro was out of my life. And if I didn’t pass my PI exam, then I wouldn’t even have my business to go back to. And as for passing my witch’s license? Ha. I didn’t think I had much chance of that.

  I glanced over at my best friend, studying diligently. Maybe Vicky was the chosen one after all. She could take over Sparrow Investigations, name and all, even though it was my surname up in lights, so to speak. She would be the qualified one, and I would be the lowly assistant.

  The next morning, my head hung low as I entered the empty classroom where Joe was waiting at the front. I had something to say to him. I was dropping out of the course.

  “I’m not going to pass,” I said flatly.

  “And so you are just not going to take the exam?” He didn’t sound disappointed. Just disapproving and neutral. But that was Joe. He never showed much emotion

  “I couldn’t solve the case either—so maybe this PI thing just isn’t for me.”

  He peered up at me. “What will you do instead?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and stared around the classroom. “I could always return to teaching.”

  “I heard that when you took over, you had trouble sticking to the allotted class time. And that you had trouble taking control of the class.”

  Wow. Was he purposely trying to make me feel bad? “Kids are a lot easier to deal with than adults.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he retorted.

  The stupid thing was, he was right. And I knew it. I could not go back to teaching the third grade. I had to figure out a way to pass without using magic. And without cheating.

  I headed to the library as soon as class was dismissed. I was ready for an all-nighter. But other things got in the way, as they had a habit of doing.

  Maddie was hanging around the school late that night, well after everyone else had left. And she was looking very suspicious, glancing around the corridor like she was trying to see if anyone was following her. I got out of my seat.

  I decided to follow her. She was up to something; I just knew it.

  Right then my phone rang. It was Akiro.

  “Ruby, I really need to talk to you. This is important.”

  I was sure it was. And I wanted to talk to him as well. Needed to talk to him. There was so much I needed to say, and to also hear from him. But I had this drive in me that couldn’t be turned off, and I had to see it through. Joe would understand. It was the detective instinct . . . the one we had to have if we were going to make it as PIs.

  I let the phone slide into my pocket after hitting the power button.

  ECL College was dark at that time of night. But Maddie heard me behind her and snapped on a light in the corridor. And suddenly, I was blinded by the lights that flooded the hallway. I blinked a few times and lost her. My eyes were seeing stars. But maybe that was her intention.

  I couldn’t see her at all. It was like she had vanished into thin air.

  I felt a stabbing in my stomach, like someone had punched me. I pushed my hands out, creating a defensive blocking spell, dampening the effects.

  And that was when I realized—she was still there. But there was a reason that I couldn’t see her any longer.

  Remember that cloak of invisibility that I had been thinking about?

  Well. She had one. Or last least something like it.

  It was Maddie.

  She had been playing us all along.

  But how was I going to track an invisible killer?

  11

  The last thing I had heard was a slamming door as I entered the hotel room. I spun around, thinking that someone has followed me home. But the room seemed to be empty. Even Vicky was gone.

  But how did I know that Maddie wasn’t in the room with me right then?

  A shiver ran down my spine. My abdomen was still tender from the punch, although my powers had blocked it, and I was not hurt as badly as Joe had been. But it was scary. I would have done anything for my familiar, Indy, to be there with me. She was a cat, but she would have been able to tell me if there was a presence in the room. Cats, especially familiar cats, have a sixth sense for this sort of thing.

  But Indy was being looked after by my housemate Taylor. Just as Vicky’s familiar, her turtle, was being watched by her housemate Shu. And even though we could in theory communicate with them from a distance, it wasn’t the same as having their physical presence with us, and I missed it.

  So, I tried to call her to me by closing my eyes and picturing her face in my mind. Telling her that I needed her to join me in Melbourne. But she was probably asleep or purposely ignoring my call because when my eyes opened again, I was still alone in the room.

  Just as I was giving up hope, I saw a little black tail disappearing around the other side of the mattress. At first, I wondered if it was just wishful thinking. Surely Indy was asleep back in Swift Valley. But then I saw her little face pop up, her ears fully pricked, and she was jumping up onto the bed beside me.

  “Is she in here?” I whispered to Indy once I had told her about Maddie and her ability to disappear.

  The hairs on Indy’s back were sticking up which I was sure was a sign that there was a presence, and I sat bolt upright. But it was just that she was on high alert, on the lookout for a presence, not that there was actually one there. She shook her head, and I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed. It wasn’t as though I wanted an invisible witch skulking around my bedroom late at night, but if she’d been there, then I would have at least known where she was.

  Maddie was out there somewhere. An invisible killer. I just shook my head. I had known from the start that she was trouble. I just wished that I had trusted my instincts right from the start. Instead, I had started to feel sorry for her and second-guessed myself, thinking that just because Maddie was a witch, that deep down, she couldn’t be so bad. Maybe that had just been wishful thinking.

  She’d even gone so far as to set up John. Made him look guilty so that she could get away with it and solve the crime at the same time.

  “No one in here,” Indy said after she had inspected the entire room. She said it was safe to go to sleep, and now that she had done her duty, she would head home.

  But when neither Vicky nor Akiro came back to the room that night, and I started to get jittery, Indy said that she would sleep on the end on my bed and keep guard against all things that went bump in the night. “Thanks, Indy. You’re the best cat a witch could ask for.”

  She woke me up several times during the night, stepping on the ends of my toes and hopping around, doing whatever it was she was doing. Maybe keeping watch. But that was just how cats were . . . they didn’t exactly sleep through the night, kinda like newborn children. I felt like I could sense a presence even though Indy kept telling me to ignore it, and everything was fine, and I should go back to sleep

  But sleep only came in fits that night, and my eyes kept springing open.

  At four a.m., I decided to just call it and threw off the blankets, made myself a pot of extremely cheap motel coffee, and gulped it down as I stared around the dim room, looking for items that might be moving of their own accord. The coffee was stale, but it was better than nothing. But it made my heart ache a little. Even the scent of coffee reminded me of Akiro. I missed him. Why hadn’t he come back to the hotel the night before? Was he done with me for good?

  Indy came and settled on the small table and listened to my troubles.

  “Seriously. How am I supposed to catch someone when they are invisible?”

  Indy’s nose was crinkled up, and her whiskers were twitching as she
thought it over. At first I thought she was coming up with the wisest answer for me, but when nothing actually came out of her mouth, it slowly dawned on me that she didn’t actually have the answer.

  “Oh, please don’t tell me this is your first time dealing with something like this,” I said to her as I finished off the last of my coffee and put the mug down with a thud.

  “No, of course not,” she said, trying to keep her pride as she puffed out her chest. She was a very prideful cat, and she liked to maintain a sense of superiority over me as much as she could. Like she was the one who was guiding me through my early days as a witch. She was the master, and I was the apprentice. “I know all about invisibility spells.”

  Yeah, right.

  “So, Maddie could have been here last night after all! You have no real way of telling . . .”

  But Indy was firm that her instincts would have picked up a presence. She looked a little offended, but I sighed heavily and told her not to be so sensitive.

  “You know, I could really be a big asset to you,” she said

  I was confused and told her that she already was a big asset to me. “I wouldn’t have called you here in the middle of the night it you were a totally useless familiar . . .”

  “No,” she interrupted me. “I mean to your business.”

  I couldn’t help but burst out into tears of laughter. “Yeah, right—like I am going to solve mysteries with a cat in tow!”

  She looked a little hurt. Again. “I am being serious Ruby. Why not?”

  I was a little stunned. “I thought you told me that it was dangerous to mix the worlds of magic and humans,” I said to her. “I am only playing by the rules that you taught me.”

  Indy lowered her head a little and spoke wisely. “I have been thinking it over . . . and I believe it would be best for you to embrace both sides of who you are. Come out of the shadows and into the light.”

  I stared at her, stunned for a moment. This was something that I had never expected her to say to me—she was going against the whole coven with this contradictory advice.

  “Ruby. You need to be your own witch. Do what is right for you. These traditions that have been around for hundreds, thousands of years? Well, they were just rules that someone made up one day, weren’t they? Do they need to apply to you? That is something only you can answer.”

  I felt the truth hit me in the gut. I knew what I had to do. I had to tell Akiro the truth . . . well, not the whole truth. But part of the truth. The thing that was right for me. I needed to tell him that I loved him.

  “Hold that thought,” I said to Indy and grabbed my phone. Even though it was only five a.m. by that stage, I needed to make the call. My heart was racing, but I was grinning. I knew that wherever he had gotten to that night, that this was what he wanted to hear. It would bring him back to me, it would make everything all right with those three little words.

  Even if he couldn’t say them back to me yet, that was okay. I wasn’t saying it just to get a reciprocation. This was just me saying my truth.

  Indy was grinning at me from where she was still perched on the table. “You can do it, Ruby.”

  But he wasn’t answering the phone.

  “Strange,” I said and looked over toward Indy for help, but she had this weird expression on her face. It seemed as though something was dawning on her, and I begged her to tell me what it was.

  “There is a reason Akiro is not coming back to you.” She was staring straight into space, as though she was in a trance. “He had been put under some kind of spell. He is being drawn like a magnet . . . away from you.”

  My blood froze in my veins, because I knew exactly what she was talking about. He was with her. Again. I had more than just Maddie’s invisibility to worry about. She was stealing my man. She had already stolen him.

  A love spell—the most dangerous spell of all. And not just because the heart was involved. There could be great danger involved if Akiro could not break away from Maddie’s clutches. I knew what she was capable of.

  “What are you seeing, Indy?” I asked her as I kept one eye on the clock on the wall.

  “She has him,” Indy said with that same faraway look still in her eyes. “And she is not planning to let him go.”

  Time seemed to be speeding up that morning, and it was bad timing. Class started early that day because we were no longer just learning lessons, we were showing what we had learned. It was the first day of our final exams. And Joe had already warned us that anyone who was more than five minutes late for an exam would be locked out.

  “In the PI world, when you are late, you lose a case,” he had warned us. “Five minutes late in the real world? Well, you might as well not have turned up at all. Those five minutes are the difference between life and death.”

  The thing was, he was right—and that was why I had to make a call. Because those five minutes could be the difference between life and death for Akiro. It could be the difference between him loving me back, or me losing him to Maddie forever.

  And if I didn’t get a move on, I was going to be late.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Indy asked, as though she was reading my thoughts.

  “This is more important.”

  But it was the most important exam of the course, and the clock was ticking.

  But what if Akiro was still under her spell?

  A breathless woman named Victoria came bursting through the front door of the hotel room. “Sorry! I was up all night studying at the library for the exams . . . I fell asleep and got locked in, and my phone ran out of battery . . . Well come on, what are you waiting for? We’ve got to get to class.” Her hair was sticking up all over the place, and she looked panicked.

  I just stared at Vicky and wondered what I would do. I could let her go on ahead like nothing had happened. Not tell her what was going on, let her take her exams and pass . . . she could take over the business. Maybe it was always meant to be this way.

  But I needed my best friend by my side. And I knew that she would want to be by mine when I needed her the most. If she found out I had left her out of this showdown, she would be cross at me forever.

  “Vicky, I know you are not going to believe me, but Maddie is the one who killed Eddie Ian. And now she has Akiro. Wait, let me explain . . .”

  Vicky was already shaking her head, and she interrupted me to reassure me. “No, you were right about Maddie all along.” She dropped the backpack she’d been carrying. “She was supposed to meet me at the library last night to study, but she never showed up. And when I called her, there was silence, and then a weird cackling on the other end of the line. I never knew she had Akiro. But Ruby, you were right all along.”

  It was a satisfying victory. Or, it would have been, if my boyfriend wasn’t in terrible danger.

  She stared at me. “What do we do?”

  We had a choice.

  And we made it.

  Indy looked right at home in the ancient Egypt exhibit. She had led the way. Maybe she really would make a good addition to the team. And hey, who else in the detective world had that going for them—a cat that comes along and solves mysteries with them?

  “This is where she takes her victims, huh?” I commented as we entered the dimness of the exhibit.

  And there was a reason she was there, as well. If she was going to frame John for the murders, she now had to kill in the place where John worked.

  The only confusion was, John was on the run.

  John stepped out from behind a mummy, and I gasped. He blinked and said that he didn’t know how he had wound up there. “It is like something drew me back here outside my will.”

  I nodded. “Maddie.”

  Vicky, Indy, and I were all creeping around, trying to see where she was. John was still in a daze. He desperately asked us what we were doing and if we were in danger.

  “Do you want a chance to redeem yourself?” I asked him with raised eyebrows.

  John nodded. “Just tell me wha
t I need to do.”

  I told him to keep quiet and to follow me. And my cat. “What is that doing here?” John asked when he realized that Indy was not part of the exhibit and was, in fact, a real-life cat.

  “She’s my little helper,” I said.

  Vicky grabbed my arm and pointed up ahead, and I froze. There she was. Maddie, standing over Akiro in front of one of the display coffins. He was deep in a trance. It wouldn’t be long now, and he might never wake up from the love spell.

  Maddie stared at me with a smug smile on her lips. But it dropped a little when she saw John.

  “Why did you do it, Maddie?” I asked her, creeping a little closer. “Why did you kill Eddie Ian?”

  She just stared back at me with disdain. “He saw me performing magic. And he was very close-minded about it. I told you he was not such a good guy. Tried to throw me out of the course. Said he didn’t want my type to ever become a detective . . .” She stopped and waited for my reaction. “And so, I did the right thing. The thing I needed to do.”

  I gulped and nodded down towards my boyfriend. “And why are you doing this, Maddie? Is this the right thing?”

  She looked at me with strange eyes. “He will never accept you for who you are. I could tell that the day I met him. I am doing this for you. Can’t you see that?” She started to put him deeper into the trance.

  “Maddie!” I called out, trying to appeal to her senses. “This is not right. Witches can’t just kill because they want to!”

  She scowled at me. “What do you know about being a witch?” she called back.

  “I know the difference between right and wrong.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You just know what other people have told you is right and wrong. At least I have my own mind, and I think for myself.”

  Was she right? Was Indy right?

  I was just hoping and praying that Akiro couldn’t hear any of this. That these words couldn’t cut through the trance he was under. I hoped that the same would be true of John.