B*witch

by Paige McKenzie

  “Gofflesby? Where are you?” Greta shouted, over and over again.

  Iris covered her ears.

  “I don’t see any houses that look like the one we saw in the scrying bowl,” Greta said, chewing on her thumbnail as she glanced this way and that.

  “We have a bunch more streets to go.” Ridley spoke up. “I walk here on my way home from school sometimes, so I kind of know the area. Kind of.”

  “What about that red pickup truck? That was part of the vision, too. If we can find it, then we should be able to find the house, right?” Binx pointed out.

  Greta nodded. “The red pickup truck… right! Ridley, have you ever seen a red pickup truck around here?”

  “Umm… not that I remember. But this is a pretty big development, so…”

  Soon, they turned the corner onto another deserted street. There were no streetlights at all, and the block ahead seemed even gloomier than the previous one.

  Binx pulled something out of her backpack and pointed it at the ground. Iris was confused; it looked like a gaming console.

  “Malorna!” Binx called out. “My wand,” she explained to Iris.

  “So cool!” Iris replied.

  As Binx’s gaming-console-slash-wand cast a bright circle of light on the pavement, Iris pulled her own wand out of her backpack. “Maloona!”

  “Malorna,” Binx corrected her.

  “Oops. Malorna!”

  An even larger and brighter circle of light lit up the pavement.

  “Wait, why is your light bigger? Did you use a hack?” Binx asked curiously.

  “A hack?”

  “Yeah, a hack. As in, a shortcut to achieve—”

  “We can debate about hacks later. Come on, we need to find Gofflesby!” Greta interrupted.

  She and Ridley illuminated their wands, too, and the four girls hurried down the street.

  “Gofflesby, where are you? Come back to me.”

  Still no answer. Greta’s lower lip trembled. Iris could sense the distress radiating from her—even the light from her wand dimmed.

  A strange whirring noise cut through the stillness. Binx reached into her pocket and held up her phone; today’s case was an orange dragon, which Iris recognized as Nyala’s favorite Pokémon, Charizard.

  “This is weird. My security-alert enchantment is vibrating like crazy.”

  “Your what?” Greta asked.

  “It’s an enchantment I put on my phone to warn me if something’s up. It’s like off the charts. But that doesn’t make sense because I disabled it, like, two days ago. Why is it doing that? Why are you doing that?” Binx asked her phone. “I wonder if there might be a—you know, like a malevolent magical presence nearby. Something that woke up my enchantment.”

  Greta stood a little straighter. Her distress had sharpened and became something else. Resolve.

  “Formation,” she said quietly.

  Without a word, Binx and Ridley flanked Greta on either side. The three of them turned so their backs were to each other, their wands directed toward the north, east, and west. They reminded Iris of The Last Jedi when Kylo Ren and Rey had positioned themselves that way and fought off a rushing hive of Praetorian Guards, just the two of them. Except Greta and Ridley and Binx were three.

  Greta locked eyes with Iris. Iris understood. She quickly joined the formation and directed her wand toward the south. Now they were four.

  “I wish Penelope were here,” Ridley whispered.

  “Lights out,” said Greta.

  The four witches darkened their wands. They waited, barely breathing. The only sound was the vibration of Binx’s security alert.

  A cool breeze stirred, carrying with it the scent of pine needles and sawdust and… something else. Iris’s senses, including her sense of smell, were on overdrive. What was that smell? Was it roses?

  “Guys, there’s the red truck!”

  Binx had turned her wandlight back on and was pointing it down the block. A vehicle was parked on the street next to a construction site—the red pickup truck from the scrying bowl.

  The girls began sprinting in that direction. As they ran, Binx’s security alert grew more frenzied. Iris covered her ears again.

  They soon reached the pickup truck. Just beyond it was an unfinished house—the stucco and wood frame one, the one from the vision.

  “Gofflesby!” Greta shouted, arcing her wandlight in a wide sweep.

  All of a sudden, soft music began to play. Piano music. It seemed to seep out the bones of the house and drift toward them.

  Iris uncovered her ears. “Does anyone hear that?” she whispered.

  “Yeah. What the hex? Is someone in there?” Binx replied.

  “Maybe it’s coming from somewhere else… you know, like a real house with real people in it,” Iris said hopefully.

  “I know that piece. It’s by Schubert. ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen,’” Ridley said, looking confused.

  “Doesn’t the word tod mean death in German?” Greta asked.

  “Um, yeah. The translation is ‘Death and the Maiden.’”

  “What a stupid title for a song,” Binx remarked.

  “Death and the Maiden.” A wave of dizziness swept over Iris. Tiny electric zaps buzzed at her brain.

  “Iris?” Greta touched her arm.

  A woman’s voice joined in with the piano music. She sang in German, her words low and heavy.

  “Seriously, where is that creepy caterwauling coming from?” Binx demanded.

  From somewhere far away, a dog began howling mournfully. Iris squeezed her eyes shut. The electric zaps were more intense now. She felt sick, delirious. Her feet—had they been hypnotized? Enchanted?—began moving toward the house. The singer’s voice and the piano music twined around each other and grew louder. The smell of roses was almost sickly sweet in its intensity.

  Something—a force field? a magical barrier?—stopped Iris when she got close to the house. Greta and Ridley and Binx slammed into it, too. It wasn’t transparent but manifested as a field of translucent gray, like some sort of mechanical fog.

  “What is that?” Binx exclaimed. She stepped back and aimed her wand forward. “Elido!” she ordered.

  Nothing happened.

  Greta held out her wand, too. So did Ridley. So did Iris.

  “Elido!” they all commanded at the same time.

  It worked. Shards of gray light and shadow rained upon them, stinging and hissing. The four witches rushed up to a narrow opening in the Sheetrocked walls and shined their wandlights inside.

  A person lay on the ground, eyes staring up blankly at the ceiling beams and the twilight sky. A young woman. A teenager.

  A golden cat lay next to her.

  “Gofflesby!” Greta shouted.

  “Penelope!” Ridley, Binx, and Iris shouted at the same time.

  Greta squeezed through the narrow opening and hurried inside. Binx, then Ridley, then Iris hurried in after her. The eerie German music swarmed at them and smothered their ears. The rose fragrance mingled with the smells of sawdust and roof tar.

  Greta rushed over to Gofflesby and scooped him up with a cry. His eyelids fluttered, and he meowed weakly at her.

  Ridley bent over Penelope and gently touched the side of her neck.

  “Guys? She’s…” Her voice caught in her throat. “Penelope’s… dead.”

  Greta leaned forward, still cradling Gofflesby; he was awake now and blinking up at her. “What?”

  “She’s… oh my god…” Ridley’s words dissolved into wild sobs. Binx wrapped her arms around her.

  And then they all saw it at the same time.

  A shadow message on the ground, near Penelope’s body. The words, in glossy black ink, said:

  YOU AND YOUR KIND DON’T BELONG HERE.

  Then the words began to shimmer and fade away. A few seconds later, a new message emerged in curly script, the ink glittering and purple:

  I’m so ashamed of who I am. Please forgive me. Goodbye.

  A suici
de note?

  The German song was fading to a close. “Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!” the invisible woman sang—except it wasn’t a woman anymore, it was a man.

  Iris knew a little German, too, from her old school. Softly shall you sleep in my arms.

  Death was singing to the maiden.

  Death had claimed poor Penelope. Death and who else?

  Iris swayed, on the brink of fainting. She fell to her knees and grasped her smiley-face moon pendant. But its light was gone. The darkness had extinguished it… extinguished everything.

  A crow sat above them on a ceiling beam, watching.

  PART 2

  A MURDER OF CROWS

  A murder of crows is a poetic term that describes a group of crows, like a flock of birds or a gaggle of geese. The use of the word murder here has several interpretations. One interpretation comes from a folktale that suggests that crows will sometimes come together to decide on the fate of a single crow—as in, should it live or should it die?

  (FROM THE GRIMOIRE OF DIVINITY FLORESCU)

  21

  SYSTEM CRASH

  Someone is always watching.

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

  “Thank you for coming in to see me.”

  Mrs. Feathers, the school social worker, waved Iris and Greta and Binx into her office. They took the couch while she sat down on… was that a big old yoga ball? Weird.

  Binx glanced around the room. The shelves were crammed with books that had titles like The Power of Positivity and Dare to Dream and The Self-Esteem Workbook for Teens. A bright yellow wall clock on the wall indicated that it was eight a.m. Another clock next to it had mood words instead of numbers. HAPPY, SAD, MAD, and so on. (CALM seemed to be in the eight o’clock space. Yeah, no.)

  Binx wondered how old Mrs. Feathers was; it was hard to tell, with her grayish-blond hair and makeup-less face. Her mom’s age, maybe? Or older? Or younger? Her frump-chic outfit screamed L.L.Bean outlet and grandma hand-me-downs. (The school social worker from last year had not been a fashionista, either, preferring cargo pants and T-shirts with sayings like YOU’VE GOT THIS!)

  “Will your friend be joining us?” Mrs. Feathers glanced at a clipboarded form on her lap. “Ridley Stone?”

  “She’s out sick today,” Binx explained. She eyed the new doge backpack at her feet—her phone was in there—but decided to wait. It probably wasn’t cool to be texting in Mrs. Feathers’s office. As soon as they were done with this group-therapy crisis-intervention sesh, though, she would send Ridley another text. The girl had been holed up at her house since Friday night, saying she had the flu or something and didn’t want to be bothered. Binx had been checking in with her regularly all weekend but gotten no further responses. She was worried; she didn’t buy the flu excuse for one second, and her best friend was obviously in bad shape.

  Although who could blame her, considering? They were all in bad shape.

  Except that Ridley and Penelope had grown close.

  “Anyway, so… how are you girls holding up?” Mrs. Feathers asked kindly.

  Iris reached into a brown ceramic bowl on top of Mrs. Feathers’s desk and picked up a yellow M&M. She nibbled on the corner of it like a rabid chipmunk. “We’re holding up, Mrs. Feathers. Actually, we’re not holding up. Well, some of us may be holding up, but I’m definitely not holding up. That’s kind of a strange expression, isn’t it? Holding up? Anyhoo, I haven’t slept much since the… and yeah, when I do sleep, I have these nightmares about demons attacking the school plus the entire country plus the entire planet. Plus the oceans turn into boiling-hot soup. And we all die and it’s basically the Apocalypse. The. End. My mom made an emergency appointment with my new therapist—her name is Deanna Ranger, Dee Ranger, and what kind of name is that for a therapist? Right? Dee Ranger, as in, Dee-Ranged? On Saturday. Her office smells like Dr Pepper and talcum powder.” Iris paused and examined the yellow M&M dye on her fingers.

  Greta touched Iris’s arm gently and whispered something in her ear.

  “True,” Iris said, nodding.

  Mrs. Feathers nodded, too. “Thank you so much for sharing that, Iris. I know it’s not easy. There’s a lot of trauma and grief happening in our community right now. Everyone here is trying to process Penelope’s passing, and they didn’t find… they didn’t have a firsthand experience, like yourselves. Plus, I believe that Penelope was your friend?”

  “Kind of. She seemed cool,” Binx replied. “Ridley knew her a little better than the rest of us.”

  “Well, in any case, you’re all very brave.”

  Greta nodded and wept quietly into her handkerchief. Iris took off her glasses and pinched and unpinched the bridge of her nose, then shook her head and began sobbing into a crumpled wad of tissues. Binx, on the other hand, was doing all she could not to cry. Crying was a waste of emotion. Crying made it more difficult to defeat the thing that was making you cry to begin with… which in this case was solving the mystery of Penelope’s death.

  They had called 911 that night and, when the police arrived, endured endless questioning. What were they doing in the Seabreeze development wandering through construction sites? How did they happen to find Penelope’s body? Greta had told them that they’d been searching for Gofflesby. Ridley had explained that she lived nearby, and added the little white lie that she’d seen a cat resembling Gofflesby running around the neighborhood.

  But… that suicide note. It had started out as a shadow message, identical to Greta and Div’s—the same words, the same handwriting, the same color ink. Then, somehow, it had changed into a goodbye message in Penelope’s curly script, and the black had changed to glittery purple.

  No, not somehow. It was magic. And the freaky German singing and the bizarre energy barrier around the house must have been magic, too.

  Which meant that a witch must have killed Penelope.

  But why would a witch take the life of one of their own?

  Also, why had Gofflesby been at Penelope’s side? Or the crow with its beady, staring eyes? Binx wondered if it could be the same zombie crow from her driveway. No, it couldn’t be. Could it?

  At least Greta’s cat was okay. She was apparently keeping him locked up in her bedroom with his food and toys and other cat stuff. She’d reported that, miraculously, he wasn’t sick anymore; his respiratory infection seemed to be gone.

  “That’s right. Just let it out.” Mrs. Feathers was nodding sympathetically at Greta and Iris as they dabbed at their eyes.

  When the crying had subsided, Mrs. Feathers shifted and straightened on her yoga ball or whatever. “Are there any other feelings or insights you girls would like to share with me? How about you, Beatrix?”

  Binx counted to ten in binary so as not to utter a swear at the mention of her full name. “No, thanks.”

  Greta sniffled and cleared her throat. “Have the police… Did they figure out… They asked us a bunch of questions that night, but I don’t think we were very…”

  Mrs. Feathers hesitated. “The school superintendent will be sending out an e-mail to all the parents in the district today. Penelope…” Her chin trembled slightly. “Penelope did take her own life. With poison. They think it’s because… well, it turns out that she was a witch. Her parents had no idea.”

  Greta shook her head. “No. That is not what happened.”

  Everyone stared at Greta. Binx held her breath.

  “What do you mean, that’s not what happened? Do you have some information that could be helpful to the police?” Mrs. Feathers asked. Greta’s face shut down. She sat back in her chair. “Did you girls know? That she practiced witchcraft?” Mrs. Feathers prodded, looking at each of them curiously, probingly.

  “Totally not?” Binx said with a pretend-shocked expression.

  “No way!” Iris added. “Witchcraft, blech, that’s awful!”

  Enough of this. Binx scooped up her doge backpack and stood up. It was time to end the interrogation; it was
also time to strategize with her coven-mates. Plus, she didn’t like the idea of having to talk to the police again; she didn’t trust them. Just last night, she had seen President Ingraham on TV, talking about his proposed new law to crack down on 6-129 violators. He said that once it was passed, he would be assigning hundreds, maybe thousands, of federal agents to help local police precincts catch witches. ShadowKnight was right; things were heating up fast. “This has been so helpful, thanks, Mrs. Feathers. But would it be okay if we left now? I, uh, think I already have two tardies in homeroom.”

  “No need to worry. Your teachers know we’re meeting. I can give you all passes, though, in case you’d like to take a few minutes to center yourselves, get some fresh air.” Mrs. Feathers reached for a pen and pad. “Or do you girls need to go home for the rest of the day? Perhaps that would be best. Self-care is so necessary during a time like this.”

  “I want to be with my friends,” Iris replied, hooking her arm through Greta’s.

  Greta nodded. Binx nodded, too.

  “Of course. But if you change your minds, let me know. And I’m here anytime you need to talk. My door is always open to you… and to Ridley, too, when she returns. I’m so sorry about all this.”

  The girls said goodbye to Mrs. Feathers and walked out of her office. They heard the door closing softly behind them. The hallway was empty except for Becky the cafeteria lady and Seth Zeloski, who was always tardy for who knew what reason.

  Iris blew her nose into her wad of tissues. “I think I’m going to need another emergency appointment with Dee Ranger. Do you guys think—”

  “Calumnia,” Greta said in a low voice. “Okay, we can talk now.”

  “Sorry,” Iris said. “Do you guys think Mrs. Feathers believed us? About Penelope not being a witch, even though she totally was? And was she looking at us funny, like she suspected that we might be witches, too, which we totally are, and maybe we should go back in there and cast a memory-erase spell on her? Or maybe a please-stop-suspecting-us spell? Does Callixta have one of those?”