Charm His Pants Off

by Cate Martin

  "But you'll be back," he said, not quite putting a question mark on the end of that.

  But we were already at the school. Otto slammed on the brakes and bumped up against the curb. Brianna and Sophie had their doors open even before the car came to a stop, but Edward grabbed my arm, not letting me follow them out of the car.

  "I don't know," I said. "But I swear, if it's at all possible, I will."

  "But how will I know?" he asked. "I either see you or I don't? Forever?"

  "I'll find a way to get word to you. But you have to let me go."

  He looked down at his own hand as if not realizing he had been detaining me and quickly let me go.

  "They're here," Otto said. "Go, quickly!"

  But I needed to do something first. Even though I didn't have enough time to do it properly, I kissed Edward good-bye.

  I looked into his eyes for what I was really afraid was going to be the very last time.

  And I ran to join Sophie and Brianna at the edge of the time portal.

  Chapter 21

  "Do we have a plan?" Sophie asked as we stood together under the fruit trees. Without any of us making a conscious choice to do it, we had gotten into our usual formation.

  "Yes," I said, hoping they didn't notice that the hand I used to push back my hair was trembling like mad. "I just need you two to channel power into me. I can take it from there."

  "Is that going to be enough?" Sophie asked. "There are thirteen of them and only three of us."

  "But the difference is, they don't work together," I said. "Not like we do. They can't help each other or flow energy between each other like we do. We've got this."

  "What if we don't even need to fight them?" Brianna asked.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Let's go into the time portal. We can stand on the bridge and hold that position. We don't know they can even get that far, do we?" she asked.

  "Patricia can," I said.

  "But will she, though?" Sophie asked. "I'm with Brianna. Let's not face them here."

  I wasn't so sure that was a good idea. Just the thought of facing Patricia again in the world of threads made my blood run cold. But I couldn't tell them that. Even if I had the time to describe it right, what would be the point in making them afraid before the fight even started?

  "Let's go," I said, lifting my arms.

  We had never done this before, just lingered between 1928 and 2019. I could sense both worlds. I could feel how 2019 was ever so slightly colder. How the school in 1928 was filled with people while in 2019 it was just Mr. Trevor.

  I could sense Otto and Edward. They hadn't fled. They were in Coco's yard, looking for a place where they could see into the charm school backyard.

  They weren't making it easy to keep them safe.

  Then the witches were there, flowing around both sides of the house to spread out across the backyard.

  The three of us couldn't speak, but we could sense each other's thoughts. Not in words, more like in the raw idea form.

  Brianna was focused on the wards. We had been bolstering and strengthening the ones Miss Zenobia had left behind for months, and adding several new ones. That investment over time was going to aid us now. She was pleased the effort had been worth it.

  Sophie was noting what I had suspected, that none of the coven witches seemed to even sense the portal, let alone have access to it.

  None, that is, until Patricia arrived.

  She advanced on the fruit orchard, looking straight at the point where the time bridge touched the ground, and without even slowing her step, she started pulling at threads, unraveling months of our careful work.

  The wards around us were popping like those firecrackers had before.

  I caught onto the threads that formed the bridge and began reinforcing them. Patricia was still going after the wards, but we could always redo those later. Without the bridge itself, we'd be cut off from 1928.

  Sophie and Brianna sensed I was using my magic and immediately began channeling energy into me. I could feel Brianna's despair at the loss of the wards, but she was keeping a restraint on it. Nothing like the torrent of thought she'd hit me with before.

  By the time the last ward fell, I had the bridge itself so full of power it was glowing.

  I was also sinking into it. I hadn't intended to do that, but it felt like the right thing to do. The bridge bound with me would be stronger.

  Patricia paused to reassess now that the wards were gone. I could feel her sensing me, probing at me. Angry, I thrust back at her.

  I didn't really know what I was doing. It felt like something burst, and suddenly I was overrun with images. Thoughts. Feelings.

  Memories.

  I saw my mother. I saw all of our mothers, and Patricia and Linda and Debra too. I saw them all fighting.

  But it was a jumble that made little sense and disappeared from my mind as quickly as it had appeared.

  I could tell that the fact it had happened at all was making Patricia very angry indeed. Someone had let her down. That was the feeling I was getting. That feeling of something bursting, was that me breaking into her mind, or a walled-off section of her mind suddenly breaking open?

  It really felt like the second thing.

  Her anger was pulsing darkly, warping the threads around her as if they wanted to escape her presence. Then she turned her attention to the bridge, pulling threads by the fistful and trying to tear them to shreds.

  They held fast, but the effort was draining me faster than Sophie and Brianna could feed me more power.

  And yet I could see the effort was draining Patricia as well.

  The question was, which of us was going to collapse first?

  I was determined that it wouldn't be me. I put all my focus into just holding the bridge together.

  Then I got a tiny bit of thought from Brianna. A little sliver of that memory blast I had just triggered. Apparently it had washed over her and Sophie as well, but Brianna being Brianna, she had held onto at least a part of it.

  She was showing us a fragment of a memory, of our mothers working together. Like us, they were fighting Patricia on her own. And like now the fight was on the bridge between times.

  But unlike us, they weren't trying to hold the bridge together. They were the ones trying to destroy it.

  Why?

  Sophie was thinking the same question.

  But Brianna was thinking something else. She was thinking maybe we should be doing the same thing. Destroy the bridge, trap Patricia in 1928 and we could rest easy in the present.

  I didn't like it. It was exactly the opposite of what Miss Zenobia had asked us to do.

  There had to be a reason that Miss Zenobia had told us that the bridge couldn't be destroyed, when I had realized from the first moment I had my power that that simply wasn't true.

  But there also had to be a reason our mothers had attempted to do just that.

  I wasn't sure if that was my thought or Brianna's. Maybe it didn't matter anymore.

  Patricia's energy was flagging, her attack slowing. I felt like I was moving through rapidly drying cement myself, clumsily catching hold of threads before they slipped away from me. Holding it all together.

  I was certain that destroying the bridge was the wrong choice. And yet, I was equally certain that whatever reason our mothers had had for what they tried to do, they hadn't been wrong.

  They certainly hadn't meant to do wrong.

  Patricia was still chipping away at the bridge, and I knew even if she fell away in exhaustion, the moment she had recovered, she would be back.

  Unless she couldn't find the bridge again.

  All at once, the three of us saw what we had to do. We moved as one, all three of us part of the bridge now. We stretched, longer and longer, extending the bridge like we were rolling a bit of dough into the thinnest possible rope.

  Then thinner and then thinner still.

  I'm not sure at what point Patricia fell away. I could just bare
ly sense her lying on the snow under the trees in 1928. Cursing our names.

  Sophie and Brianna tried to stop then, but I kept going. Maybe Brianna understood what I was doing better than I did, but it felt like I was trying to make a tunnel through time rather than a bridge. And this tunnel would be so narrow only something the size of a bacterium could squeeze through it.

  Certainly not a witch.

  Brianna thought the word “wormhole” at me. I guess that might be what we were making. Only in movies those were how starships got around, and in this case nothing was ever meant to pass through it.

  It was a compromise. The bridge was effectively destroyed. And yet the essence of it was still there.

  The moment I stopped working the tube ever smaller, I heard a sound. I think it was Juno crying out, but whether in pain or alarm or something else, I don't know.

  Then we were under the trees, each of us collapsed on the snow, completely spent.

  I didn't even try to get up. I just closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.

  Chapter 22

  The three of us spent the better part of a week mostly sleeping. Partly this was because we were exhausted. We had never done that much magical work before. And partly this was because we just could. With the time portal shrunken down to almost nothing, there was no reason to do more than verify the few wards we had cast over it were still there and check Brianna's detecting equipment for any other sign of change. Our morning ritual was no longer necessary.

  But mostly it was because, in that moment, the work we needed to do had to be done sleeping.

  Brianna had crafted a special bedtime tea, which we all drank early in the evening. It was nasty, like drinking the runoff from a flooded graveyard, muddy and putrid. It took a lot of honey to get it down. A lot of honey.

  It was meant to give us lucid dreams, dreams where we would know we were dreaming and could steer the events. In the dreams, we had access to memories. We could steer our dreams away from skating penguins and keep them focused on the past. We could relive those moments and remember it all with complete clarity when we woke.

  I relived my childhood from my very first memory of a goat peeing on me when I tried to pet it at the county fair to the last moment I spent with my mother, watching the life go out of her eyes.

  I remembered nothing useful. My mother had never given me any hint of her past at all, and if she had been afraid of that past catching up with her, she had never shown it.

  The three of us also tried to recapture that burst of memory we had gotten from Patricia during the fight on the time bridge, but none of us could summon up more than a few fragmentary images.

  By the end of the week, we all agreed. What we needed to know wasn't hiding from us inside our own heads.

  "So what do we do now?" Sophie said as we all sat in the library comparing notes. Brianna had succeeded in turning both Sophie and me into obsessive journal-keepers. What had started as a way of recording what we had dreamed the moment we woke up was becoming a growing addiction to write down any thought any time it struck.

  "Could we get back to 1928 if we needed to?" I asked. "That's my main worry."

  "Why would we need to?" Brianna asked.

  "We left a lot of people potentially in danger," I said.

  "Otto will look after Edward," Sophie said. "They're both young and unattached. They could blow town and start a new life in a different state or even country if they had to."

  "And the school is safe," Brianna said. "We warded it well. And Miss Zenobia is still there."

  "Doesn't it seem strange to you that we can't see her when she's there?" I asked. "Surely it's within her power."

  "Maybe it is, and she chooses not to," Sophie said. "For her own reasons."

  "Like she's hiding from us," I said.

  "If we have to we can expand the portal back to the way it was," Brianna said. "We didn't destroy it. We just changed its form."

  "It's probably safer for the others if we stay in our own time," Sophie said.

  "I feel like we're surrounded by potential time bombs," I said. "There are all sorts of things they can do to attack us, but we can't get at them."

  "Time is an arrow," Brianna said, but mostly to herself.

  "None of us had anything useful in the memories that they stole," I said. "So, what does that mean? Was Patricia being honest when she said it was just to get our attention?"

  "There are a lot more direct ways to get our attention," Sophie said.

  I got up from the table and walked over to the chalkboard. We hadn't discovered any of the others' names. Brianna and Sophie had made some guesses about some of the powers the others had from the spells they had deflected during the car chase, but because the witches had all been cloaked and hooded, we didn't know who had which power.

  There was so much we didn't know.

  "Patricia lies," I decided. "There was a reason they went through all of that trouble instead of just sending us a letter or something."

  "They would've had to prepare," Brianna said. "And they would've had to wait in that state of preparedness until Miss Zenobia was gone and they were confident of how long she'd be away."

  "So they started planning after New Year's Eve?" Sophie asked.

  "Maybe sooner, but definitely by then," Brianna said. "Two months of waiting. Miss Zenobia must have gone into the time portal, because she certainly didn't leave the city or even the house."

  "Were the students still in the school, do you think?" I asked.

  "I think so," Brianna said, paging through her notes. "A lot of the spells we undid were specifically to cloak them. One thing we know for sure is that Linda was a master of glamour. She hid an entire skyscraper from us, inside and out. She hid it from everybody."

  "How did they even build the thing?" Sophie said. "Maybe it wasn't real. Maybe it was just an illusion."

  "It looked real," I said. "It felt real. But the warehouse did too. I touched that tile covered in layers of dust, and I touched that marble floor. I could feel the texture. They were both completely real."

  "Debra seems equally powerful with memory," Sophie said. "For all we know, we can't remember anything helpful because we only thought we got our real memories back. Maybe she just put another spell in our heads to make us remember false memories."

  "Oh, don't say that," I said, clutching at my head. "I don't want to be constantly questioning everything."

  "How can you not?" Sophie asked.

  "That's the problem," I sighed. "I already was. But don't rub it in."

  "While it's certainly true that she could put such a spell on us and even make us forget she had ever done it, I don't think that's the case," Brianna said. "She didn't have the opportunity during the fight, and none of them can pull another heist inside the charm school. I promise you the wards will keep them out now."

  "I hope you're right," I said. "But I can't help remembering how badly we got tricked. We were right in their lair the entire time, and none of us had a clue."

  "That eats at me too," Sophie said.

  "I know I could've seen it if I had gone to the world of threads," I said. "But I didn't. Not even once. And I don't know why I didn't."

  "It wasn't part of the plan," Brianna said. "That's all."

  "But how do I know I never did because some sort of hypnotic suggestion hiding in my mind was telling me not to? I didn't hear it like a voice in my head, but I obeyed it all the same."

  "Now you're making me paranoid," Sophie said.

  "I don't think so," Brianna said.

  "But doesn't it make sense that they would do that? To keep me from realizing we were walking into a trap?"

  "No," Brianna said, "because the whole point of that trap had been to make you do just that. To go to the world of webs and unleash your power. That's what Patricia wanted. All of that talk about the two of you working together, I think that was all a ruse."

  "But time magic does take two witches, doesn't it?" Sophie asked.


  "For the complicated stuff, yeah," Brianna said. "But think about it. The moment Amanda reached for that power, Patricia immediately started cutting her off from the world. I think that was her plan all along."

  "She didn't try talking to me there," I said. "She just jumped me."

  "But why?" Sophie said. "You're saying she and the others stole our memories, lured us into the past and into a trap, all just to cut Amanda out of the world? Why? Does she blame you for something your mother did?"

  "I wish I knew," I said.

  "Maybe one or all of us does have a memory they don't want us to have, we just don't recognize its significance," Brianna said. "If we could dig up other clues, it might trigger something."

  "But dig up clues where?" Sophie said, lifting her hands to indicate the library and house around us. "We've looked everywhere."

  "No, we haven't," I said. "Not remotely. We've only searched this one place. Maybe it's time to expand that."

  "What are you talking about? We can't leave," Sophie said.

  "Can't we? We no longer need the ritual to watch the time portal. It doesn't take three of us to just check on things every so often," I said.

  "But where would we go?" Brianna asked. "This is where our mothers last were before they disappeared. Where else could there be clues?"

  "Where they died," I said. "Not mine. My mother never did magic after I was born. But your mothers met with other witches. Those witches might know something."

  "I can call Sephora and talk to her," Brianna said.

  "You could, but I think you'll find out more if you actually go to Boston. Talk to everybody. Get your mother's full story. Ask every witch what she knows about Miss Zenobia, even if it's all rumor or innuendo."

  "You want to investigate Miss Zenobia?" Brianna asked.

  "No, that makes sense, Bree," Sophie said. "I agree with Amanda. It feels like she held out on us. She didn't tell us the whole story about the time portal and what happened with her sister. And I really think she could see us and talk to us in 1928 if she wanted to. There must be a reason she doesn't."