Witch Rising

by Paige McKenzie

  “How’s she doing, anyway? I mean, is she happy in your coven, or…”

  “Dunno,” Aysha said, shrugging. “If it were up to me, I’d send her back to your coven ASAP. She’s a bad fit. You guys are into your cute l’il healing potions and world-peace spells and all that crap. Our coven is into much more hardcore stuff. Real magic. But I’m not the leader; I don’t make those decisions.” She added, “Besides, don’t you and the laptop witch hang out? Ask her yourself.”

  “Yeah…”

  That was another piece of Ridley’s recent stress, upheaval, etc. Binx’s coven switching hadn’t been an easy, amicable transition. Rather, it had been triggered by a drama-filled falling out with Greta. Binx had wanted their coven to be more aggressive against the radical anti-magic groups—the Antima, not to be confused with Antifa, which stood for “antifascist”—that were proliferating across the country. Binx had suggested to Greta that their coven join forces with a secret witches’ rights organization called Libertas, which she’d apparently learned about from an online gamer friend named ShadowKnight. In response, Greta had read Binx the riot act, saying they couldn’t trust some random Internet stranger who might or might not be who he claimed to be. They’d argued, and Binx had stormed off, saying that if Greta wouldn’t support her in her quest against the Antima, she knew a coven leader who would….

  It was so bizarre. Binx had always disliked, even despised, Div. Not to mention, she’d had a not-so-playful prank war going with Aysha and with Div’s other underling, Mira Jahani, since forever. Although, it wasn’t like Binx had a lot of options. As far as they knew, Div’s and Greta’s were the only covens at their school… and in all of Sorrow Point.

  Mostly, Ridley just really, really missed Binx, who’d been her closest friend since beginning of freshman year. Sure, they saw each other at school, and they still texted lots and exchanged goofy memes and GIFs. But soon after Penelope’s death, Div had upped the frequency of her coven meetings to practically daily. So between those meetings and everything else in her life, Binx always seemed to be too busy for shopping, sleepovers, and their other beloved rituals.

  Aysha was jabbing Ridley with her elbow.

  “See him?” Aysha jutted her chin in the direction of a red-haired guy who was standing near Mr. Terada. Francisco something. “He’s wearing that ugly camo hoodie now, but, this morning—he’s in my homeroom—I noticed he had an Antima patch on his T-shirt. There.” She touched a spot on her left shoulder. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t have a patch on his clothes last week. Might be a new recruit?”

  “Another one?”

  “Right? It seems like there’s another new recruit at our school every day. Soon, it’ll be the entire student body.”

  Ridley shuddered.

  “I think those two girls are new recruits, too,” Aysha said with another chin jut. “Valerie Yeargan and that girl with the ponytail who’s talking to the blond dude. Sylvia… no, Siobhan. I saw them with Orion Kong yesterday, and as we all know, he’s basically the Antima poster boy of Sorrow Point High.” She sniffed. “I could have predicted Valerie. She’s a jerk and a racist. It makes sense she’s anti-magic, too.”

  “This is why we need to be using calumnia right now, okay? Even though we’re not supposed to,” Ridley said in a tense voice. “That’s three possible, probable, Antima members on this field trip. At least. If they figure out we’re witches, they’ll turn us in to the authorities in a heartbeat.”

  Just then, Mr. Terada caught Ridley’s eye and gave her a small wave. Ridley smiled uncertainly and rainbow-waved back. What did he want? Was he signaling to her—and Aysha, too—that they should stop chatting and pay more attention to his index-card commentary about pig wars and such? Or was he simply being friendly? Or…

  They’d reached a fork in the trail. Oh, so maybe that’s why he was waving. Because we’re stopping. Mr. Terada turned to consult a worn wooden sign at the intersection of the two paths. The students bunched up in a semicircle behind him, waiting. Ridley and Aysha joined them at the rear.

  “All right, the Union garrison is this way,” Mr. Terada said, pointing. He untied his denim jacket from his waist and shrugged it on.

  That’s when Ridley saw it. Mr. Terada’s jacket was decorated with patches and enamel pins. Wedged between a Super Mario Princess Peach pin and a Star Trek United Federation of Planets pin was a patch with a cage suspended over a bonfire.

  An Antima patch.

  Aysha elbowed her again, harder this time. She must have seen it, too. Ridley responded with an almost imperceptible nod. Up until now, they’d been aware only of Antima students at their school. There were Antima teachers, too?

  Aysha, who usually exuded total fearlessness, showed a glimmer of fear as she pivoted toward Ridley.

  “Soooo. Are you going to the Homecoming Dance?” she asked casually.

  It was not a calumnia-scrambled question. With this new revelation about Mr. Terada, Aysha had apparently abandoned any attempt at magic talk, calumnia or no. Ridley was right there with her.

  “Um, maybe? How about you?”

  “Yeah, I kind of have to. I’m on the organizing committee.”

  “Excuse me, what?” Ridley couldn’t picture that. “You’re on the organizing committee?”

  “Yeah. Long story. Div’s on it, too, and Mira and Binx just joined. Anyway, you should go. It’s gonna be lit.”

  “Um… okay?”

  As the two girls continued fake-discussing homecoming, Ridley side-eyed Mr. Terada and wondered how many other adults at Sorrow Point High wanted to see witches rounded up and arrested…

  … or eliminated. Like poor, sweet Penelope.

  The afternoon sky, or what Ridley could see of it through the dense canopy of moss-covered hemlocks and cedars, had turned an ominous dark gray. An approaching storm. The air felt thick and charged with electricity, and mist blanketed their feet. Ridley wondered if they would make it back to the school vans in the parking lot before the rain started.

  Aysha was up ahead, snapping photos of birds and insects with her phone. The other students were scattered about, taking pictures or just talking. Ridley and Aysha had decided that it might look suspicious for them to be huddling and whispering during the entire field trip, even with calumnia obscuring the true nature of their conversations, and so they’d split up before lunch and barely spoken to each other since.

  Now, in hindsight, Ridley wished she hadn’t deployed calumnia at all. Just recently, Greta had made the executive decision that their coven shouldn’t use witchcraft in public unless it was an emergency, and Div had declared the same for her coven. The two covens had always used magic surreptitiously because of 6-129, but now, they had to restrict themselves even more. After what had happened to Penelope, and with the ever-increasing Antima presence, they couldn’t afford to be discovered.

  You have to be more careful, Ridley chided herself.

  A shimmering haze through the trees caught her attention. She blinked.

  Is that…?

  No, it can’t be.

  But it is.

  Tucked away in the middle of the Hansel-and-Gretel rain forest was a house. Not an ordinary house—a mansion. Gothic-style, with a steeply pitched roof and gables.

  And Ridley wasn’t seeing just the outside of the mansion. She could see the interior, too, as though the walls were invisible. A roaring fire in the grate. A velvet settee. A round mahogany table.

  Ridley gritted her teeth to stifle any emotion, any reaction, lest she call attention to herself. There couldn’t possibly be a mansion in the middle of the rain forest. Or any structure… granted, there was the Union garrison that Mr. Terada had shown them earlier, but that had been just a pile of ruins, the crumbling remains of a stone wall. Surely, this “mansion” had to be an optical illusion? An alchemy of mist and Ridley’s own agitated mood?

  She blinked again.

  On top of the round mahogany table, thirteen unlit candles suddenly materialized, encircle
d by a ring of gems and herbs.

  “Aysha!” Ridley burst out before she could stop herself.

  Aysha was a few yards away, photographing a cluster of dark purple mushrooms. She rose to her feet and scowled at Ridley. “Yeah? What?”

  Ridley noticed that Valerie and Siobhan and Francisco had stopped midconversation and were looking with interest at her and Aysha. Mr. Terada was, too.

  Quick, make something up.

  Ridley pointed in the direction of the mansion. “Um… could you take a picture of those cool trees? My phone’s out of battery.”

  Aysha cocked her head. “Sure, because I’m your personal photographer?”

  “Please?”

  Aysha sighed and snapped a few quick photos. By her bland demeanor, it was clear to Ridley that she couldn’t see the mansion.

  “I’ll text them to you when we have service,” Aysha said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re not welcome.”

  Ridley turned her attention back to the mansion. Someone—or something?—had lit the candles on the mahogany table. Thirteen tiny flames flickered, illuminating the gems and herbs—black onyx, bloodstone, mugwort, wolfsbane….

  What. The. Hex.

  A second later, the sky flashed silver, and it began to rain—huge, pelting drops.

  “This way!” Mr. Terada shouted as the students covered their heads with their backpacks and began running in the direction of the parking lot.

  As Ridley turned to go, she swiped the rain out of her eyes and glanced at the mansion one last time.

  It had vanished.

  2

  KRUSHING

  Feelings are a potent weapon.

  (FROM THE GOOD BOOK OF MAGIC AND MENTALISM BY CALLIXTA CROWE)

  Alone in the girls’ bathroom, Iris peered into the mirror and smiled. She tried a smile with teeth, then without teeth, then with teeth again. Definitely with teeth.

  “Oh, hey, Greta! Fancy meeting you here!” Iris said to her reflection.

  Sounds forced.

  “Oh, hey, Greta! Long time no see!”

  Same.

  “Sup, Greta?”

  Ugh. No.

  “Hi, Greta!” Better. Iris added a hair flip. “So, yeah… what are you doing on November eleventh? Oh, is that the Homecoming Dance? Gosh, I totally forgot! Well… uh… so, since we’re on the subject, do you want to go? You know, as friends? We could invite Ridley and Binx to come with us. Except, oops, I forgot, Binx is our mortal enemy now. You’re right, maybe ‘mortal enemy’ is a bit harsh. How about just plain old ‘enemy’? It’s a dilemma either way, or quel dilemme, as we say in Madame Moutillet’s French class. Anyhoo, so, maybe we could just go, the three of us? You and me and Ridley? Or it could be just the two of us, you and me, and… and… and…”

  Iris’s voice was rising in a semihysterical crescendo. Breathe, relax, she told herself.

  “… no, it wouldn’t be a date, exactly,” she continued in a lower, slower voice. “Unless you want it to be a date. Do you want it to be a date? Because if you want it to be a date, well, I’d be down with that. I’ve never been to a Homecoming Dance with a date. Actually, I’ve never been to a Homecoming Dance. Actually, I’ve never been on a date with another person, I mean, I’ve never been on a date not with another person, either, since by definition dates are with other people, and… argh!”

  She stopped and face-palmed and shook her head. In the mirror, her doppelgänger was blushing—not an attractive blush but a splotchy, beet-red, ugly blush. The homecoming thing was a bad idea. An awful, terrible, horrible idea. What was she thinking? Greta didn’t like her in a romantic way. She liked her in a friendly, witch-sister way.

  Things used to be so much easier when Iris had liked Greta in a friendly, witch-sister way, too. When had her feelings morphed into this messy mess? Could she unmorph them somehow?

  Iris sighed and returned her shoulder-flipped hair to its original position, then peeled a strand that had gotten stuck to her Red Any Good Books Lately? lip gloss, which she’d seen on a “Brown Girl Mini-Makeover” tutorial. She needed to give up and move on, maybe ask someone else to the dance. But how? She wanted only Greta. Kind, smart, pretty Greta, who talked to animals and who smelled like lavender.

  Lately, Iris had been experiencing crush symptoms every time Greta was around, like sweaty palms and a racing heart and major awkwardness. She knew they were crush symptoms because that’s what the Internet said. Of course, sweaty palms and a racing heart and major awkwardness could also be symptoms of Iris’s generalized anxiety disorder and sensory processing disorder.

  Maybe she should ask the Internet how to tell the difference. And also how to get Greta to romantic-like her back.

  A toilet flushed.

  Iris made a choking sound in her throat. Someone had been in the bathroom the entire time? Listening to her make a fool of herself about…

  Noooooo!

  Thinking quickly, she began reciting a memory-erase incantation, praetereo. Then stopped and faked a coughing fit. Greta had forbid their coven to use witchcraft in public.

  Greta. Swoon.

  A stall door opened, and a girl walked out, pushing her backpack onto her shoulder. She glanced at Iris with a bored expression as she headed for an open sink.

  “Oh, hey!” Iris called out nervously. “I was just… uh… practicing lines for drama club”—she searched her memory for a play, any play—“yeah, that was from The Crucible by Arthur Miller.” No, not that one. “Actually, they made a musical out of The Crucible and combined it with Mamma Mia! and—”

  “You should just text her,” the girl cut in.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It would be a lot easier than whatever you were doing.”

  “Um…” Iris dropped her gaze and frowned at her feet.

  “Or, if you need a date for homecoming, you should just look on Krush.”

  “Krush?”

  “It’s a dating app for teens. Krush with a K. That’s how I met my”—she counted on her fingers—“last six boyfriends. People use it for prom dates and stuff, too.”

  “Oh!”

  The girl finished washing her hands and left the bathroom. I guess she didn’t buy my story about drama club. Iris pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and searched for Krush. She was directed to a hot-pink web page with lots of X’s and O’s and the headline FOR ALL YOUR SHIPPING NEEDS. Cute.

  Conversation, laughter, and other hallway noises seeped in, reminding Iris that lunch period would be over soon. She checked her reflection one last time, straightened her glasses, and headed out the door. Her Greta scheming and plotting would have to wait.

  Really, though… maybe she should stop daydreaming about Greta and homecoming altogether, not just because there was zero hope on that front but because there were way more important priorities. Like solving Penelope Hart’s murder. Like dealing with the growing Antima presence in Sorrow Point—and across the entire country. According to the Internet, witch arrests were higher than they’d been in decades. And on October twenty-eighth, the president of the United States planned to roll out a new-and-improved 6-129 law to increase the penalties for practicing witchcraft and beef up enforcement nationwide. Which meant things were bound to get much worse.

  There was another matter, too. A few weeks ago, Iris had inadvertently touched Greta’s velvet scarf, and scary images had flooded her brain….

  “Come to our meeting?”

  In the hallway, a guy thrust a flyer at her. He had dark hair with blue streaks, and his brown eyes were earnest bordering on uncomfortably intense as they laser-focused on her.

  It was him. Orion Kong. He was Antima—not just Antima, but one of the most active and vocal members at Sorrow Point High. On the first day of school, when Iris had been trying to get her bearings as the new girl from New York City, he’d bumped into her—deliberately?—and treated her like a pariah, making her worry that he’d somehow sussed out her witch identity. Later, he and his Anti
ma buddies Brandon Fiske and Axel Ngata had drunkenly cornered her on the street and tried to intimidate her.

  Did Orion remember that she was that same girl? She had gotten new glasses, so maybe he was confused? Or had Greta done a memory-erase on him? She had, hadn’t she?

  “Um…” Iris took the flyer from him with a trembling hand. For a brief second, she shuttered her eyelids to try to glean information from the piece of paper. Nothing.

  She opened her eyes. The flyer said:

  IF WE DON’T PUT AN END TO THEIR WAY,

  THEY’LL PUT AN END TO OUR WAY.

  JOIN US THIS SATURDAY AT 1 P.M.

  COMMUNITY CENTER, MAIN STREET.

  At the top of the page was a picture of a cage suspended over a bonfire. The Antima symbol, just like the one on Orion’s shoulder patch. It was how they used to execute witches 140 years ago, during the Great Witch Purge.

  Iris bit her lip so hard that she could taste blood. What should she do? Run? Scream? Hide? Kick Orion in the shins? But she knew that the only way to stay safe, to keep Greta and her other witch sisters safe, was to pretend to go along.

  “Wow! Thanks! This is… just so cool, and you guys are so cool, and wow! I’ll definitely try to be there. Tomorrow afternoon, right? That is, if my grandma doesn’t need me to work the lunch shift at her restaurant, or my mom doesn’t need me to watch my little brother and sister. But hey, we all have to make sacrifices for the cause, amiright? This very, very supercool cause? Go, Antima! Woo-hoo!” Iris pumped her fist in the air.

  Orion stared curiously at her. “Sure. Yeah. Feel free to bring your family and friends. Here.” He offered her some extra flyers.

  “Thanks, you, I mean, thank you, I have to run now, ’k, bye!”

  Iris grabbed the flyers from him, turned on her heels, and began speed-walking in the other direction. She felt rattled, dazed, queasy, having been in such close physical proximity to Orion and also having had to lie so, so outrageously. She was a witch. She was proud of being a witch. That she couldn’t say those things openly—on top of which that she’d had to pretend to be pro-Antima just now—was enough to make her want to projectile vomit her PB&J and baby carrots.