Charm His Pants Off

by Cate Martin

  "Maybe the complexity was the purpose," I said. "They're trying to confuse you."

  "Do they even know who I am?" Brianna said.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "They know you. Evanora saw you with her own eyes, and they all were watching you on New Year's Eve. I think it's a safe bet they know your powers. Up until now I didn't think they were even really aware of Sophie or I. I mean, I would guess they knew you weren't alone, but did they know about our powers?"

  "I assumed they did," I said.

  "Why?" Sophie asked.

  "They took all of our memories, right?" I said. "It seems like it would've been easier to just take mine if that was all that mattered to them."

  "Can they see us here?" Sophie asked. "Can they be watching us now? Are they somewhere in the present world?"

  We all looked around the gloomy corners of the library, as if we were going to see the shadowy forms of spies there. Something about the intensity of our mood set off the kittens, who all went charging away from us at once as if in response to a starter's pistol only they could hear.

  "Ow," I protested, a row of red welts rising up from the skin of my forearm from where Duke had used it as a launch pad.

  "If they could be here, there'd be no need for the time-delayed magic they've been using in 1928, would there?" Sophie asked.

  "Well, if confusion is part of their plan," Brianna said with a shrug. "At any rate, I also spoke with Sephora in Boston. The coven that raised me is not so modern, but she can stop in and visit them in person for us. I loaded her up with questions about my mother, your mothers, and Miss Zenobia. I actually wrote up that timeline in the first place because it helped Sephora and I focus on the important bits."

  "And what did they say?" I asked.

  "I'll know tomorrow," Brianna said.

  "Great. Waiting is my favorite," I said glumly.

  "What about you, Sophie?" Brianna asked. "Did you find anything?"

  "Just this," she said, and lifted a massive tome onto the table, where it landed with an echoing thud.

  "What is that?" I asked as Brianna immediately started turning the pages.

  "It's definitely full of magic," Sophie said. "Can't you feel it?"

  I blinked into the world of threads, and the light coming from the book was blinding. I blinked back into the library.

  "Definitely," I said. "But it's not out of time. The threads were connected to everything around us."

  "It looks like a journal," Brianna said, pointing to headings on top of blocks of text. "See, these look like dates."

  "Look like?" I asked, leaning forward. Then I saw what she meant. It did have the format of someone writing the day of the week followed by a month, day, and year. Only I couldn't read a bit of it. "What language is that?"

  "What alphabet is that?" Sophie countered.

  "It's some sort of code, I think," Brianna said. "But it's not the same code throughout the book. It keeps changing."

  "How can you tell?" I asked.

  "I'm scanning for patterns. Things like the year should be consistent, right? But if this is indeed a date, the symbols for the year is different each time. And I don't see a pattern to the change."

  "So if you were going to decode it-" I started.

  "I'd need to decode every section separately," Brianna said. "With all of the work that that implies."

  My brain started to throb with a fatigue headache, just thinking about it, but Brianna sounded eager to dive into a particularly thorny problem.

  "That's going to take time," Sophie said. "And it might not lead to anything. We don't even know what this is. It could just be some student's angsty journal from a totally different time period."

  "Not with this kind of power," Brianna said, holding her hands spread before it as if warming them before a fire. "This has to be Miss Zenobia's work."

  "So potentially important, but still maybe not," Sophie said. "Miss Zenobia lived for centuries. She probably filled a dozen tomes of that size before she even came to America."

  "Can we carbon date it or something?" I asked.

  "Maybe," Brianna said, and I could hear the gears in her mind spinning up to full speed.

  "Hold on," Sophie said, putting her hands over the pages of the book as if that would stop Brianna. "Maybe that's not what we focus on first."

  "What do we focus on first?" Brianna asked.

  "The coven," I said, and Sophie nodded.

  "You want to go looking for Evanora and the others?" Brianna asked, touching the little watch amulet she was still wearing around her neck.

  "Not yet," I said. "But we need to learn more about them."

  "How?" Brianna asked.

  "I'm thinking two things," I said, leaning forward. "The first is just mundane, but might help. We get photos of all of them. Maybe someone in your circle of witches might recognize them. Maybe we already have their faces on the walls here, among all the class photos. Faces might give us names, and names could give us a sense of who they are and what they can do."

  "How are we going to get photos?" Brianna asked, and I could see she was still nervous about physically hunting down a bunch of witches of unknown power.

  "Otto," Sophie said, and now it was my turn to nod.

  "He already knows them," I said. "Before New Year's Eve, they were letting him see them around, watching him. If he doesn't have photos of them already, it'll be simple for him to get them."

  "Assuming they're still being visible like that," Brianna said.

  "Assuming," I said with a shrug.

  "It can't hurt to check," Sophie said.

  "But that means going back to 1928," Brianna said.

  "Yes, but we don't have to leave the school to contact him. And we don't have to hang around until he gets back to us. We can do just as before, only staying as long as we have to and then getting back home before those witches even know we're there," I said.

  "Okay, so what's the second thing?" she asked.

  "You told me once that few witches are generalists. Most focus on a particular kind of magic, right?" I asked.

  "I'm about as close as it comes to a generalist," Brianna said. "But that's a matter of study, not practice. My actual magic tends to be verbal and short-range impact, or infused in objects."

  "Okay," I said slowly, not entirely sure I grasped what she was saying. Energy bolts and amulets, I guessed. "But my magic is related to time, and Sophie does that wind thing when she dances."

  "I'm working on Brianna's verbal and short-range impact stuff too," Sophie said, tapping the wand nestled against her forearm.

  "I'm not following you," Brianna said. "What do you want to do?"

  "Look at the spells," I said. "You said they were all intertwined and layered and meant to confuse you. It all looked like a blast of power to me too. It was overwhelming. But what if we tuned out the big picture and just started picking those spells apart?"

  "Most of them were random distractors, I'm sure," Brianna said.

  "But even that might tell us something," I said.

  "We'll observe their details when we dismantle them," Sophie said. "Catalog them. Look for patterns."

  "Oh," Brianna said. "That might help. Even minor spells meant to be a distraction could tell us a thing or two about the witch. What she thinks is minor, how she manifests it. Yes, this could be very interesting."

  "So we're agreed, then?" Sophie said, and she and I both got to her feet to join Brianna, who had never sat back down after consulting the chalkboard.

  "Yes," Brianna said. "It's back to 1928. But promise me we're not leaving the school grounds."

  "Not until we know what we're facing," I agreed.

  "We need more intel before we go looking for a fight," Sophie said. Brianna looked at us both, chewing her lip in a worried sort of way. I could see a conflict starting to form between us. Sophie and I were going to be ready for a fight long before Brianna was done gathering intel.

  That might become a problem later,
but not yet. In this moment, we all agreed what needed to be done next.

  We went back to 1928.

  Chapter 11

  When we came in through the back door in 1928 Brianna headed straight up the stairs to the library to set up the spell circle, but Sophie and I stayed behind in the kitchen, looking at the very old-fashioned phone on the wall near the butler's pantry.

  "I know how to use a rotatory dial," Sophie said. "I even get that you hold that bit to your ear and talk into that bit megaphone bit there. But you know what I forgot?"

  "That we don't have his number?" I said. "He named his club after you. There must be a directory around here somewhere."

  "Would an illegal club be in the directory?" Sophie asked, raising an eyebrow.

  "I see your point," I said. "A shame we can't just walk over. Would Brianna notice we sneaked off?"

  "You know she would," Sophie said. "And she's right to be cautious."

  "I guess," I agreed. I remembered every magical fight I'd already been in. I'd not yet faced anyone who was actually a witch, but what I'd nearly done on more than one occasion made me shiver just in the remembering. "Right, so what can we do from here?"

  "A letter," Sophie said, catching at my sleeve. I followed her into the parlor where she went through the drawers of an incidental table until she found a fountain pen, a stack of stationary and an envelope.

  "We don't have his address either," I pointed out.

  "We don't need it," she said. "Think about it, we never see them because of that protective time spell thing, but this place is full of students. Most just normal young ladies, but a few witches like us, right?"

  "Maybe," I said. "Were there always witches? I would think they'd be rare."

  "Well, even if there weren't, someone around knows about their existence. Miss Zenobia herself must be around at least some of the time, right? She's the teacher."

  "So what are you thinking?" I asked.

  "We just leave this envelope out with his name on the front and a little note. 'Please deliver' or something like that. Once we walk out of the room, it becomes a thing that they can see too, right?"

  "I don't know," I admitted. "It's certainly worth a try. If that doesn't work, there's always running next door and getting Coco to help. But I'd rather leave her out of it."

  "No, we want her out of harm's way as much as possible," Sophie agreed. I knew we were both picturing the newspaper photo of her house, half reduced to rubble by something blowing out from the charm school. Did she still live there in the 60s? She'd be a middle-aged woman, but it wasn't inconceivable.

  "What are you saying to him?" I asked as Sophie wrote in her elegant script. Even bent over from a standing position her writing was perfectly formed.

  "To gather everything he knows, photos if possible, and bring it here to the school," she said, talking and writing at the same time.

  "And how will we know he did it?" I asked.

  "Stuff gets forwarded to us through time all the time," Sophie said. "Like our invite to the New Year's Eve party. The students or perhaps Miss Zenobia herself in 1928 just put it in a cubby, and when Mr. Trevor lays out the morning papers, he also sets out that mail. It has dates."

  "And he has all of this in his office?" I asked. "Why don't we just take everything and read through it all now? Some of it might be important."

  "We could ask him," Sophie said. "I'm not sure it would make much sense with no context."

  "But some of it could be useful," I said.

  "Maybe," Sophie said. "I just keep thinking of what Brianna said. Light touch with this time travel stuff. Maybe when you understand your power better, we'll know what's safe to meddle with."

  "Maybe," I said. Brianna's warnings were why I had never done even the most basic research, like whether Coco really did still live in her childhood home in the 60s. Or what happened to Edward after 1928.

  Brianna's warnings didn't come with a terribly specific idea of what would happen, just a general sense that it was better not to know. No, the real reason I hadn't looked was because I was afraid. I couldn't think of a single fate that wouldn't upset me to read about it. That he died young, perhaps even because of something I had done with my magic? That he remained a bachelor for all of his days, pining for a certain witch who never appeared again in 1928? That he grew old and died surrounded by generations of loving family he had with someone else?

  Yeah, there were no happy endings for me in this one. But I was very sure the moment I gave in and started looking stuff up, that would be the ending for me. My part in the story would stop with that act.

  Sophie left the envelope and the note on the incidental table in plain view of anyone heading towards the front door, then went upstairs to join Brianna in the library.

  "Ready?" I asked.

  "Yes," Brianna said. "This is going to be exhausting."

  "I'm sure you're up for it," I said.

  "No, it's going to be exhausting for the two of you," she clarified. "I know what to do to pull the spells apart, and I'll keep a mental catalog until we're done and I can write it all down. But in the meantime, I'm going to need power. So much power, a constant supply. That's where you two come in."

  "It sounds like a little tweak to what we usually do," Sophie said. "We flow power through each other all the time. This is just hitting pause at the moment where you are the focal point."

  "Yes, exactly," Brianna said. "But I will actually be draining you, both of you. We should have a signal, if it all gets to be too much."

  "I think collapsing on the floor is a pretty good signal," Sophie said. "We've got this Bree."

  "Just be careful with the brainstorming thoughts," I said.

  "I will," she promised. "I'll need all my focus on what I'm doing."

  We sat together in a circle on the floor, pretty much in the same spot where we'd removed the brain fog from our own minds in 2019. I controlled my breath, shifted my awareness, then expanded it until I could feel Sophie and Brianna on either side of me. Their magic was like a pulsing glow, warm and familiar.

  Sophie's hands began to dance, and I saw her catching and pulling little threads of light, gathering them up and feeding them into Brianna, then attracting more with her graceful movements.

  My own methods were a lot more blunt, but I slowed my motions down, careful not to burn Brianna with power.

  I could see the clockworks of her own power around her as she began to speak arcane words, her wand summoning the first of many spells from the walls of the house to the center of our circle where she poked at it, never ceasing her chanting, until the tight knotwork of the spell unraveled and the threads broke away, the light within them dying as they drifted off to the far corners of the library.

  As we worked, I tried to see if I could tell what the spells were. Some I could see were time spells from the way they pulled the threads of magic into elaborate braids that just made sense to my eyes. But most were more like the brain fog spell, just angry squiggles of power that had no order to my eyes, no story I could tell.

  We worked for hours. Occasionally I would sense Sophie's energy beginning to flag, and I would catch up a ball of magical light and pass it to her. I don't know if she was aware, but each time her back would straighten, and her hands would become more fully expressive as they teased the threads into dancing through her fingers.

  But even I couldn't keep it up forever. I was narrowing my focus to just gathering the energy and feeding it to Brianna. I wasn't trying to watch the spells as she dismantled them anymore. I certainly wasn't paying attention to the world outside of the three of us.

  So it came as a bit of a surprise when Brianna untangled one last particularly brutal knot of magic, and there was no spell to pull into our circle after it.

  We all opened our eyes. "Is that it? Did we get everything?" I asked, but Brianna just held up a finger to ask for silence.

  Sophie and I watched her scribble away inside her notebook, filling page after page at a furio
us pace. She even had to switch pens at one point as the first ran dry.

  By the time she was done, it was well past midnight, but her eyes were bright with energy. Maybe we'd given her too much. There'd be no sleep for her now.

  "Did we get it all?" Sophie asked her. Brianna tipped her head then gave a qualified nod.

  "Everything else around us felt like older magic," Brianna said. "I didn't want to risk damaging the spells Miss Zenobia wove into the house itself. We need that protection, all of us over all of the decades of the school." Then she launched herself to her feet, putting out a hand to help each of us get our own weary legs under us.

  "Now what?" Sophie asked, but Brianna just pulled us along, out of the library to the door of Miss Zenobia's office. She dropped our hands as she looked around. By square footage, it should have been a rather spacious office. But long decades of acquiring magical objects had crowded it full of more things than I could even name. I did recognize a few things we had managed to destroy in the present, releasing spells I wasn't anxious to tangle with at the moment. I hugged my arms close to my sides and stayed in the doorway.

  "Ah!" Brianna cried, running around the desk and standing on tiptoe to reach something on the top of the shelf behind the desk chair.

  The box she set on the desktop was very, very familiar. The last time I had been in this office with that box was the night I had seen the ghostly form of Miss Zenobia Weekes. The night I had found out I was a witch.

  "Should you be touching that?" Sophie asked. She, like me, had opted to stay close to the door.

  Brianna ignored that question, but she did seem to change her mind about lifting the latch to open the lid. "This was the focal point of the real spells," she said.

  "Wait, are you saying everything was a lie?" I asked.

  "What? No!" Brianna said. "I told you, Miss Zenobia's spells have a very different feel to them than anything this coven whipped together. And what Miss Zenobia did, to send a piece of herself into the future to speak to us on that night, that was very advanced magic. No one in that coven is remotely at that level. And it had a cost. Years of her life, remember?"