by Cassandra
There was no branch. In fact, there wasn’t even a tree.
Jessica stood, confused. It had taken her until then to realize that for as long as she’d visited Grandma Ethel’s house—and even lived there—no tree had ever been near that window.
She closed her eyes for a second and tried to wrap her mind around this somewhat startling fact. It had been so easy to explain the tapping sounds with a non-existent tree that had never been there, to begin with.
With her hands on her hip, she looked upward and her face contorted in confusion. The rain had grown steadily worse again and the storm clouds in the sky darkened relentlessly.
More than a little uncomfortable now, she took a good look around the yard and was forced to admit that the closest trees were on the opposite side, nowhere near any of the house windows. Even if a strong wind blew, it wouldn’t be enough to make any branches reach clear across the yard and tap against any of the windows. The trees were simply too far away.
“What the entire hell?” she muttered, unable to make sense of it all. The only way any of those branches could tap her window was if the tree fell over completely—which of course was dumb as they’d then be laying on the ground and the limbs wouldn’t reach the upper floor. Yet she knew without a doubt that a branch had knocked on her window for several nights in a row. She’d seen it and she’d heard it.
Jessica shuddered, and it had nothing to do with the rain or cold wind.
Eager to get back inside, she hurried to complete her yard work, unable to shake the unnerving feeling that had settled over her. She tried to ease her mind and tell herself that maybe someone had simply played a trick on her, standing outside her window and tapping it with a branch.
Or maybe it had been Kacey trying to be romantic—the equivalent to guys on TV throwing stones at a girl’s window to get her attention at night.
But no matter what pretty lies she tried to tell herself, she couldn’t be fooled. She knew something was wrong. There was a sinister spark in the air that was stronger than even the lightning that flashed through the sky.
When Jessica finally went back into the house, she was panting and chilled to the bone.
“Grandma?” she called, desperate for her to whip her up a warm cup of tea to soothe her nerves and warm her body. But to her dismay, the house was quiet.
Too quiet.
Dumbfounded, Jessica was almost out of the kitchen when she paused and noticed a note taped to the refrigerator door. On it was Ethel’s hurried handwriting, telling her there was food in the fridge.
She placed her hands on her hips and scowled.
As if the day hadn’t been strange enough, now her grandmother had snuck off on her again. With a definite frown, Jessica thought back to how Ethel had been dressed while sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.
In hindsight, she realized the newspaper hadn’t really been reading material but rather a means to hide Grandma Ethel’s outfit, which had been a little too extravagant for simply lounging around the house.
“All done?”
Jessica jumped before she noticed Grace slink into the kitchen.
“Grace, what is my grandma up to? Where does she keep sneaking off to?”
“I believe that’s her business. Now, why don’t you open that fridge? What do we have for dinner?”
After scraping together some left-overs for herself and Grace and leaving kibble out for the other cats, Jessica retreated to her room. Despite her weariness, she still felt particularly unsettled.
She closed the door behind her and balanced her plate in her hand as she headed to her desk, where the cards were still spread out. Irritated, she pushed the cards aside in one swipe, placed her plate on the desk, and crossed the room to the window.
With a deep breath, she straightened and pushed the curtain aside.
No tree branch. No tree, period.
I don’t get it. Jessica shook her head. But with how tired, hungry, achy, and hungover she still felt, the mystery of the tree branch was something she would have to figure out at a later date.
Incapable of thinking any further about anything, she flopped down in her desk chair and ate her food hurriedly. She stripped off her layers of damp sweaty clothes, balled them up, and threw them into the corner of her room to be washed later. A quick search through her dresser drawers brought out a pair of warm flannel pajamas and she pulled them on quickly.
Sufficiently warm and snug, she then retired to her bed, where she fell asleep almost the instant her head hit the pillow.
Jessica rolled over and snuggled deeper into her pillow, grateful that the nagging headache she’d battled all day had finally started to subside. She was on the brink of falling back asleep when she heard the scratching sound again.
.Her eyes shot open and she sat bolt upright in bed to peer through the pitch-blackness surrounding her. She blinked rapidly until her eyes adjusted and she noticed a shadow move across the window.
She stared at it and tried to make sense of what she saw because from where she sat, it so clearly looked like a tree branch.
But there is no tree, she reminded herself, and the detail only made her feel worse.
Oh, my God…I’m hallucinating. That has to be it. I’m going crazy. She squeezed her eyes shut and reopened them, hoping to clear her vision.
Hoping that she would stop seeing what obviously couldn’t really be there.
But it remained and tapped persistently at her window.
Slowly, she climbed out of bed and shoved her reservations aside. The only way to solve the mystery was to investigate it. The carpet felt unusually cool under her bare feet as she crossed the room, and her stomach twisted in knots. The air itself felt unusually cold, and her skin broke out in goosebumps under her warm flannel pajamas.
When she reached the window, she stood before it for a moment to work up her nerve. With a long, slow exhale, she reached forward, grabbed the curtain, and jerked it aside.
Jessica’s heart leapt into her throat so quickly, she wasn’t even sure how she had managed to scream.
Outside her window was the stick-man demon she’d seen on one of the cards. He stood outside there, his mouth wide open in a scream to reveal sharp teeth coated with a sticky fluid that looked like tree sap.
Forget all the other demons she had faced in the past few weeks—this was the single most horrifying thing she had ever seen. His body looked humanoid, which made his skinniness all the more unsettling. That aside, his limbs resembled branches and his skin mimicked tree bark.
And his eyes… It was too dark for Jessica to be sure whether they merely looked like beetles or really were beetles. There was enough light, though, for her to see the worms that crawled all over him.
As if doing so would help matters, she yanked the curtain closed. She stumbled backward on her wobbly legs, at a complete loss as to what to do.
Had he been any of the other demons she’d faced before, she’d likely go out of the house and fight him. But this? She had no idea how to deal with him.
“No, no, no, no, no…” she muttered and shook her head in disbelief. But there was no denying it. She could still see his shadow and could still hear him scratching outside her window. His shadow moved under the moonlight, where he stood, covered in worms, directly outside her room.
Her heart almost stopped completely when something scurried across her feet. Afraid to drag her gaze away from the window, she forced herself to look down and immediately swore.
Branches—the demon’s hands—somehow came through the air vents on the floor.
Think, Jessica. Think.
She wracked her brains in a desperate attempt to think of any spells she knew that could possibly help.
The reversal spell.
Jessica seemed to remember her grandmother talking about reversal spells before, and if she wasn’t mistaken, she had read something about one in the deck of cards when she had skimmed through them some days ago.
With it being
the only thing she could think of, she felt she had no choice but to use it.
Another round of scratches on the glass prompted her to mutter what she could remember of the spell as quickly as possible. Her voice trembled with each word. Still, she forced herself to chant as if her life depended on it because in that moment, for all she knew, it probably did.
As she continued to chant, she caught movement in her periphery and briefly turned her head. The deck of cards on her desk was suddenly airborne and they scattered and drifted all over her room.
Startled, she lost focus and the reversal spell chant died in her throat.
Her mouth gaped in shock, and she stared at the cards as they glided and swooped like the deck had a mind of its own.
The blank card landed on the floor before her, and it appeared to be glowing. For a moment, she thought it was merely her imagination. The thought was rapidly followed by the painful realization that a stick-figure demon lurked outside her window and tried to break in through the air vents. The harsh reality forced her to accept that nothing was likely to be merely the product of her imagination at the moment.
Her own imagination would never be so demented.
She had no sooner accepted that she couldn’t possibly see anything more absurd when the demon’s hand pushed even farther through the vents. Instinctively, she recoiled but remained frozen when she realized something was clearly wrong—other than the obvious, of course.
Jessica took several steps back and struggled to fully comprehend the bizarre spectacle.
The demon’s hands, as if pulled by some force against his will, moved toward the blank card on the floor.
At first, it was only the hands. Then the arms emerged, followed by a hideous head.
A skinny torso, hips, gangly legs, and finally, feet were all sucked into the blank card.
She wasn’t even aware that she’d moved, but her back was pressed against the opposite wall of her room as if she thought she could disappear right through it.
Her heart thudding painfully, she blinked and stared at the card on the floor as she tried to wrap her mind around the fact that somehow, it had literally swallowed the demon.
In a state of shock, she flattened herself against the wall.
The deck of cards suddenly swirled in a wide arc until they returned to her desk and landed in a neat pile.
“What the hell—” Jessica said as she slid down the wall until she sat on the floor in a stupor.
Chapter Seven
Minutes—or perhaps hours or days—went by while she sat on her bedroom floor, propped against the wall, and tried to figure out what had happened.
Jessica pressed her lips together and stared at the spot on the floor where the card had swallowed the demon as she attempted to summarize the events that had transpired.
The stick-man demon came to my window, tried to grab me through the vent…and was eaten by my magic playing cards.
She blinked and felt ridiculous reciting that in her head. But it was true. She had seen the whole bizarre thing with her own eyes.
Or am I really still hung-over?
Swallowing nervously, Jessica rose to her feet and turned toward the desk. She studied the cards that had arranged themselves into a neat pile after swallowing a whole freakin’ demon alive.
As she approached, she saw that naturally, the card at the top of the deck was none other than the one featuring the stickman demon. She snickered even though she didn’t find anything remotely funny about the situation. Her emotions were simply all over the place and her nerves were shot.
Recalling what she had gone through—the way the demon had looked with his open mouth dripping tree-sap and the feel of its branch-like fingers reaching for her toes—she shuddered.
She grabbed the card and flipped it over so she wouldn’t have to see the creature anymore, even if only on a card.
“What in the world is going on?” she mused out loud and her skin still crawled. She also had a headache again but knew it wasn’t from the hangover.
Before she could think any further on it, the next card in the deck caught her eye. She immediately recognized it as the black card that had initially read, Do you want to learn about the thirteen covens? Now, however, the message was completely different.
“Play again to free your loved ones?” Jessica read out loud and frowned at the card. The blood drained from her face when the implication of the question dawned on her.
Her legs still shaking, she stumbled across the room, opened her door, and stepped out into the hallway to peer toward Ethel’s room. It unnerved her to see the door ajar, the lights off, and the room quiet.
Breathing unsteadily, she moved to stand at the top of the stairwell. There were no noises downstairs.
Calm down. Grandma Ethel left a note. She wasn’t kidnapped by anything. Someone like her couldn’t possibly ever get kidnapped by a magic deck of cards.
She held onto the thought in the hopes that it would soothe her and returned to her room. Just to be certain, though, she approached the cards and flipped through them again.
None of them contained a picture of Grandma Ethel, thank goodness.
There was, however, a picture that she certainly didn’t like seeing.
There had always been a picture of an imp in the deck—one that looked suspiciously like Frank. Now, however, there was no doubt in her mind that the picture she looked at was Frank, not merely a look-alike. She knew her familiar well enough to recognize his unique and distinguishing features.
Dread rippled through Jessica’s entire body.
First, she found it startling that Frank was considered a loved one. Nevertheless, she knew she didn’t want anything to happen to him, regardless of whether she loved him or not.
She picked up the card and turned it over. Roll the dice, the back said.
“No way. There’s no way in hell that I’ll let another demon come out of these cards.”
Thinking fast, she grabbed her cellphone. She’d had enough of the strangeness and needed her grandma.
Her fingers shook across the screen of her phone before she pressed Ethel’s name on speed dial and began pacing the room. When the old lady didn’t answer after the fourth ring, Jessica swore at the top of her lungs—and regretted it afterward, hoping her profanity wasn't recorded onto her grandmother’s voicemail.
“Grandma,” Jessica said breathlessly when she decided to leave a message, “call me back ASAP. I… Look, Frank has been kidnapped by some evil demon from a deck of cards I bought at that magic shop you took me to. I’m sorry I never told you about them but… These cards—something’s wrong with them. A stick-man demon who looks like a tree came out of one of them. He tapped on my window for the past few days and today, he came through the vents on the floor. I think he tried to get me but the cards ate him… Except now, they have Frank and… And call me back, okay? Or even better, come home! Okay…bye.”
She ended the call, knowing she probably sounded crazy, but she didn’t care. She simply needed help. Fast.
Her fingers moved automatically across her phone and she was one finger-tap away from calling Chad’s number. She stopped herself before she could.
It was too soon to talk to Chad. He had, after all, seen her making out with Kacey. Worse, he had stepped in and acted like an over-protective big brother hell-bent on embarrassing her in front of friends. On some level, she knew it was childish to avoid him. But that, too, was a concern she would have to deal with later.
Finally, it came to her who she could call.
Pastor Norman.
She dialed his number quickly and prayed silently that he would answer.
“Hi, Jessica.” His voice was warm and friendly.
“Pastor Norman!” she cried and a flood of relief washed over her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately when he heard the panic in her voice.
“I need help,” she said.
“What’s happened?”
Jessica took
a deep breath and prepared to launch into the story as sensibly as she could. “Okay, look—a few days ago, Grandma Ethel took me to a magic shop, and I saw this really cool deck of cards. So I bought them. And the other day, I looked through them. They’re about the covens…and demons. One card in particular, though, that had this demon on it that looks like a super skinny man made out of tree branches. He’s been snooping outside my window lately. A little while ago, he was here and tried to break into the house. He came through the vents in my room and he tried to grab me. But then the cards… They floated off the desk and one of them… It…it swallowed him. But now, one of the cards is claiming that he took Frank. You know, the imp? My familiar? The cards want me to roll the dice again, but I’m scared they’ll release another demon if I do.”
Jessica paused, out of breath. Even as she briefly reflected on what she’d just told the pastor, she still felt ridiculous. She sighed and noted that he had yet to respond to her. “Look, Pastor, I know it sounds crazy but—”
“Don’t do anything else, Jessica,” he interrupted. “Leave the cards where they are. Don’t touch them and don’t follow any more of their instructions. Wait for me to get there. I’m heading your way now.”
She nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Pastor.”
After she’d ended the call, she paced the room.
Why do I keep landing in the most bizarre situations? she asked herself.
For a girl who had virtually never been in serious trouble prior to a few weeks before, she certainly kept finding more than her fair share of it now. It seemed like every time she felt positive that she wanted a witch’s lifestyle, something would happen to let her know that she was in way over her head.
She paused from pacing to pick up the card with Frank’s picture on it. Her heart suddenly seemed to weigh a ton, and her bottom lip trembled. The more she looked at the picture, the more she felt like a terrible witch.
How had she not realized sooner that something was wrong with her familiar? She hadn’t seen him in a while, and she knew good and well that he would normally have been around to hog her bed and watch more of the Kardashians by now.