Pawsitively Cursed

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “Oh, I cast a sleeping spell on the whole street,” Neil said. “Had to be sure no one intervened. That no one saw what they shouldn’t. I’ll plant a few memories in their heads later so they think they saw the fire. And I promise to take care of all that once I get what I came here for.”

  “I don’t know where the book is,” Edgar choked out, knees pulled to his chest now. He rocked slowly back and forth.

  Neil sighed. “Oh, do stop your sniveling. They really don’t make witches like they used to. Just tell me where it is, and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “I don’t know!” Edgar snapped, his tears drying in an instant. “Annabelle made sure I wouldn’t remember. If it’s anywhere, it’s up here.” He angrily jabbed at his temple. “But not even I have the key.”

  Neil reached out, quick as a snake, and grabbed Edgar’s skull, just as Miles had done to Neil decades before. Edgar cried out and thrashed while Neil’s forehead scrunched in concentration.

  Then Neil snarled, shoving Edgar so forcefully that he tipped over, and then stood to full height. He turned around to glare at the burning house. “Leave it to Anna to screw me over even in death.”

  Another choked sound came out of Edgar as he pushed himself back to a seated position.

  “Get out of here, you useless wretch,” Neil said. “Call the fire department too if it’ll make you feel better. They’re gone, though. Nothing anyone can do about it now.” When Edgar had yet to move, Edgar whirled to face him, his back against one of his truck’s tires again. “Go before I change my mind, Henbane!”

  Edgar scrambled to his feet. He had just rounded the front of the truck when he was shoved. He yelped, arms thrown up to break his fall as he crashed to the asphalt. Amber saw snatches of things then. The grill of his truck, the unscathed houses across the street, the dancing flames. She realized then that this was the moment Neil had hit Edgar with his magic—when Edgar had his back turned.

  His thrashing stopped abruptly when Neil’s face swam into view. The cursed witch had Edgar’s jaw clasped in his hand. “I could have hit you with a force strong enough to kill you, but I showed restraint. Why? Because a dose of cursed magic will slowly eat away at your mind. It will open you up, will reveal secrets you keep even from yourself. And when my magic unlocks the place where the book is hidden, you and I will find it together.”

  Edgar could only whimper in response.

  “Run on home now,” he said, focus returned to the house. Edgar watched as Neil dug his hands into his hair. He tore at it. Then Neil started to scream. A sorrowful, angry, pained scream. He shouted Anna’s name over and over. He pleaded with her to forgive him, then in the next breath, said she brought this on herself.

  Edgar drove away as fast as he could, but the unhinged Penhallow didn’t seem to notice. Even after Edgar was blocks away, he could still hear the witch howling his grief at the night sky.

  Chapter 21

  When Amber came to, she was, unfortunately, flat on her back again, looking up at a ceiling. Had she fainted?

  Once the two men on either side of her noticed she was awake, they talked at the same time.

  “Oh my God. Amber? Are you okay?” from a worried-sounding Jack, and “What did you see?” in a clipped, flat tone from Edgar.

  Perhaps he was annoyed she knew pieces of his past that were hidden from him, or perhaps he was upset that her magic had weaseled its way into his mind without permission.

  Amber pushed herself to sitting, trying not to think about how utterly disgusting Edgar’s floors likely were. “I know where the book is.”

  Edgar immediately squatted in front of her, his brown eyes wide. “Really?”

  “It’s not actually in the house.”

  Edgar’s slightly bushy brows pulled together. “I’ve been warding the house all this time for no reason? Is it safe? Did I—”

  “It’s still on the property. Right next to the house,” she said quickly. “Your wards have worked. Kieran doesn’t even know you’re here, let alone the book. He followed the traces of the grimoire to Edgehill, but he can’t tell where they’re coming from.”

  He nodded slowly at that. “I think the cloak on the book is fading. That’s why he’s here. I don’t know how long your parents wanted it to be hidden, but that thing has been cloaked for over a decade and the Penhallows are only recently crawling out of the woodwork. Your parents were really, really powerful to be able to craft a spell that held even after they died.”

  Amber knew they’d wanted her to have it by the time she turned eighteen—a dozen years ago—but she didn’t want to tell him that now and make him feel even worse. As it was, even if she’d known at that age about the grimoire, she wouldn’t have had the first clue how to go about finding it.

  “So you know where it is?” Edgar asked, redirecting her attention. “What do we need?”

  “A shovel and lanterns.”

  A few minutes later, Edgar let them out of the house. They each held a battery-powered lantern, and Edgar had the shovel. Amber led them to the place she’d seen in Edgar’s memory. When they reached it, Edgar cast a spell to keep the three lanterns floating in midair so they had better light and free hands.

  Jack’s mouth had hung open as the lantern he’d held rose on its own out of his hand and then hovered above his head. Somehow that was the display of magic that got to him. “I think I liked it better when I had no idea what was going on,” he muttered, staring at the lantern.

  Amber involuntarily slumped a little at that. Jack wouldn’t be able to handle this any better than Max had. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised.

  She’d have to deal with that later. She just needed him to keep it together until they got rid of Kieran. Assuming they could even figure out how to do that.

  The spot in question was piled even higher with debris and odds and ends now than it had been in the memory. Among the flotsam was a rusty bike, a pair of broken lawn chairs, piles of rotted wood, and a literal kitchen sink. The shovel now rested patiently against the side of the house.

  “This ended up being the place I threw all the stuff over the years that I needed to haul to the dump,” Edgar said, staring at the rather daunting mound on the side of his house. “Guess I never got around to it.”

  “Can’t you just … magically move all of it?” Jack’s skin looked pale in the bluish glow from the lanterns.

  “We can do that for the heavier stuff, but the more we use our magic, the more chance we run of Kieran sensing it,” Amber said. “And if he can sense it, he can track it.”

  “And Kieran is the one who wants to rewrite history and incinerate people?” asked Jack.

  “That’s the one,” Edgar said.

  “Fantastic,” Jack muttered.

  His stricken expression almost made Amber want to tell him he didn’t have to stay, that she would understand why he’d want to hightail it in the other direction, but then he bent down to grab a few planks of rotted wood and tossed them out of the way. Amber and Edgar joined him, using their magic to lift the bigger items when necessary.

  Amber kept waiting for a buzz or trill from her phone alerting her that Willow had sent a message. But she hadn’t heard anything since the text from half an hour ago, sending her—and, indirectly, Jack—to Edgar’s house. Amber hoped no news was good news.

  When the spot was cleared, sweat beaded on Amber’s upper lip and trickled down her back despite the chilly air. She was sure she had half a dozen splinters embedded in her fingers.

  Wordlessly, Amber grabbed the shovel and started to dig. When the hole was half a foot deep, she hit something hard. She thunked the spade in the same spot a couple more times, then looked up. Both men were grinning.

  Amber dug faster. When the shape of something rectangular was clearly visible, Edgar and Jack dropped to their knees, wiping away dirt from the top of the object, and scooping handfuls of damp earth from around the sides until they found handles they could grab hold of. They counted to three and heaved t
he trunk out of the hole, dropping it just in front of Amber’s now-dirty boots.

  Her magic thrummed.

  When Amber had just stared at the trunk for several long seconds, Edgar stood to full height and asked, “Well, are you going to open it?”

  She nodded, wiping her sweaty palms down her pant legs. “If I open this, is he going to know?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  But their only hope for stopping Kieran lay within the book. Either in handing it over or using its contents against him.

  With the aid of her magic, she lowered one of the lanterns so it hung a foot above the trunk, then she squatted before it. It was padlocked, but the moment her fingers touched the rusted metal, the lock sprang free.

  “Only Amber or Willow can open it,” her mother had said.

  The trunk’s hinges groaned loudly as Amber flipped the lid open. And there, lying inside the black-velvet-lined trunk, was her mother’s grimoire. She tentatively ran her fingertip over the slightly sunken letters spelling HENBANE across the cover. The book was wide enough that when she grabbed onto either side, her fingers didn’t touch in the middle. To her surprise, just beneath her mother’s book lay a similar grimoire, this one with a deep maroon cover stamped with BLACKWOOD.

  “Did you know this one was here too?” she asked Edgar.

  He was smiling. “Nope. Your parents were crafty.”

  Some small part of her felt like she had them back now. And she supposed she did, at least in part. Every spell book held a little of their owners within its pages.

  A muted yellow light pulsed from both books, then went out.

  Seconds later, Amber’s phone beeped. With one arm wrapped around the grimoire, she grabbed her phone out of her back pocket with her free hand. She had a text from Willow. Just two simple words.

  He’s coming.

  “All right, boys, back inside!” Amber said, scrambling to her feet. “Cursed witch incoming!”

  “I really don’t want to be incinerated,” Jack half-whined, wide gaze focused out onto Edgar’s dark property.

  “Then you better get your butt inside, lover boy,” Edgar said, using his magic to make the three lanterns float into a single-file line and then follow him inside like obedient ducklings.

  Jack grabbed the shovel and hightailed it after them.

  Amber plucked the Blackwood grimoire out of the trunk and dropped it on top of the Henbane one she already held—which was a feat in itself given how thick they were. It was like hefting two phonebooks or extensive encyclopedia volumes. She hurried after the guys.

  Edgar was ready to lock the door and re-ward the house the second she got inside. Once done, and the house gave three magnificently loud shudders, he turned to her. “What now?”

  “You take the Blackwood book and see what you can find that might help us,” Amber said. “I’ll go through my mom’s. There’s gotta be something in here about severing powers. Aunt Gretchen is sure Mom would have had spells like that as a failsafe should Neil ever get his powers back.”

  “Wouldn’t she have used said spells when Neil showed up fourteen years ago?” Edgar asked.

  “I’m pretty sure spells like that need physical contact,” Amber said, remembering Miles placing his hands on Neil’s skull, and Neil placing them on Edgar’s. The thought made her vaguely nauseated. “Which means we need spells that will help me get close enough to touch him.”

  Edgar recoiled. “I don’t envy you, cousin.”

  “What about me?” Jack asked.

  She’d almost forgotten about him. Why, oh why, had he followed her tonight?

  Because you’re a liar, her mind informed her. And not a very good one.

  She needed to give him a task that would keep him safe. She thought of Wilma’s shrunken body, of the starburst marks on people’s skin, and another brief wave of nausea rolled through her stomach.

  “You can help me keep an eye on my phone and be our lookout,” she said. “We need to know when Kieran shows up.”

  He still looked deathly pale. “I think I can handle that.”

  Edgar took Jack upstairs to a bedroom overlooking the property. It was the window Amber had seen light shining out of earlier, and had the best vantage point to see someone coming even before they turned onto Edgar’s tiny road. Before he headed up there, Amber had handed him her cell phone, which he clutched tightly in his hand as if it were a life raft that would keep him from drowning.

  “If Willow texts, come get me,” she said. “If she calls, answer it.”

  He’d nodded numbly and followed Edgar without a word.

  When her cousin joined her downstairs again, she was standing at the kitchen island, the closed Henbane book in front of her. The Blackwood book was turned the other way, waiting for Edgar across from her.

  Edgar really didn’t look much better than Jack did. His skin had paled and sweat beaded at his hairline.

  “You up for this?” Amber asked. “I can search them myself if—”

  “I’m good,” he said, taking the spot opposite her. “This is just a lot of excitement for me.” He paused. “But, I figure, if I’m not supposed to protect the book anymore, then I’ll protect you and Willow. Your parents would have wanted that.”

  She managed a smile at him. He quickly broke eye contact and focused it instead on the Blackwood book.

  After a mini mental pep talk her father would have loved, Amber flipped open the cover of her mother’s grimoire. The spine gave a muted creak, but fell open easily enough.

  The first handful of pages were dedicated to herbs, listed in alphabetical order. Amber had never seen her mother draw much, but these pages were filled with intricately detailed sketches of plants. Herb names were written in a calligraphy style, the letters swooping and curling. Her handwriting was neat and legible. Amber knew where Willow’s artistic side had come from now. Amber felt a pang that her mother had kept her talent, along with so much else, sequestered between these leather covers.

  Next came tincture recipes. A tablespoon of this, a pinch of that. Amber knew from Aunt Gretchen that her mother hadn’t been any better at tinctures than Amber was, but Amber liked that she catalogued some of them anyway.

  The majority of the grimoire was filled with spells, organized by type. Spells for sleep, good dreams, banishing nightmares, and cures for sleeplessness were all clustered together. But Amber wasn’t sure how the spells as a whole were organized. They weren’t in alphabetical order—that much she could tell, at least.

  She glanced up at Edgar half-slouching across from her, one elbow on the counter, his dark brows knitted together, as he carefully flipped through the Blackwood grimoire. “How you doing over there?”

  He didn’t move his head, merely shifted his gaze from the book to her face. “Fine.”

  Amber pursed her lips. She couldn’t help but remember how he’d been the last time she’d seen him: back pressed against the cabinets, hands clutching at the hair on either side of his head, and groaning in pain.

  “Your pitying looks are worse than your persistence,” he said.

  “I just don’t want you to push it, you know?” Amber said, sure she was already saying the wrong thing. “I know none of this has been easy on you either and I’m sorry I kept harassing you when you clearly wanted to be left alone.”

  His furrowed brow relaxed a fraction, as did the tension in his shoulders. “At least you cared enough to harass me,” he said. “Even if it was relentless and very annoying.”

  She cracked a smile. “I’ll take it.”

  They’d only been silently flipping through their spell books for another few minutes before he spoke again. “I hear voices. Well, a voice.”

  Amber looked up, tucking her lips between her teeth so she wouldn’t say something and make him stop talking. Edgar Henbane wasn’t one who shared information freely.

  “It’s a male voice, but it’s not mine,” he said, gaze focused on the book again, though he clearly wasn’t reading it. His thumb
idly flicked back and forth against a corner of one of the grimoire’s thick pages. “It’s been there ever since I was attacked the night of the fire. When I talk about that night or the Penhallows, the voice gets louder. Yells at me to not share ‘our’ secrets. It says I can only talk to him about the book. That the book belongs to us and only us. If I stay by myself, I don’t hear the voice as much.”

  Amber frowned. “Is he saying anything to you now that the book is here?”

  “He hasn’t shut up.” Edgar wiped the back of his hand across his sweaty brow.

  “And he was yelling at you the last time we were here?”

  He nodded. “He started telling me what to say to get you guys to leave. Told me to talk slower and more controlled. If I went off script, he started screaming at me again. I don’t know how he can see me. I don’t know if he is me.” He chewed the inside of his cheek. “But ever since you started back up with being your annoying self, I’ve started to wonder if the voice is him. Neil. Or his magic. You heard him say that it would poison me like it poisons him, right? So I think it is me—the voice I hear, I mean. But it’s also his magic at the same time. I don’t really know where it ends and I begin anymore.”

  As if Amber needed any more reason to hate Neil Penhallow.

  “Once we figure out what to do about his brother, we’ll see what we can do to help you, too,” she said.

  Maybe Aunt Gretchen could come up with a tincture to slowly cure the infection caused by the cursed magic in his system.

  But it had been infecting him for fourteen years. Amber hoped it wasn’t too late—assuming it was possible to purge him of the foreign magic to begin with.

  Edgar nodded awkwardly, then went back to the Blackwood book.

  Unable to avoid it any longer, Amber started flipping more quickly through her mother’s grimoire until she found the infamous spell. It was a long, complicated one somewhere in the middle of the book; it was built of several smaller spells, though they got progressively more complex. Amber thought of it like leveling up on a video game: you had to master level one before you could get to level two. This one had nine “levels.” Intent with spells like this was crucial. Any falter in one’s resolve could result in the spell failing and the witch needing to start over.