Christmas Witch List--A Westwick Witches Cozy Mystery Page 13

  “Huh?” Tyler frowned. “What do you mean by partner in crime?”

  “You think I wanted to wear that dumb Santa suit?” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Pearl made me do it. She told me that everybody else was getting dressed up for the costume party. Except I was the only one. She tricked me.”

  Mom nodded. “She’s good at talking people into things they would never do otherwise. Though I have to say, Earl, you really did look the part.”

  Earl sighed. “Was it something I said? One minute she was here. Then the next…gone.”

  Mom patted his arm. “It’s not you, Earl. She does stuff like this all the time. You’ll get used to it.”

  Though Earl had farmed on the outskirts of Westwick Corners all his life, only recently had he kindled a friendship with Aunt Pearl. That friendship had quickly turned romantic. They made a strange couple. Aunt Pearl was ornery and dramatic, while Earl was calm, romantic, and easygoing. Maybe it was a case of opposites attract.

  “She’s gone, all right.” Brayden pointed at the petite footprints in the snow that ended across the driveway.

  The tracks didn’t stop where Dominic’s Escalade had been parked. They continued onto the other side of the driveway. Maybe the footprints, and the missing SUV, were all for show, a diversion tactic. While the poisoned tea had probably wreaked havoc with her powers, we couldn’t be sure of that.

  As long as Aunt Pearl was functioning normally, she could go anywhere. She could transport herself through portals with a little effort and a bit of magic. I doubted she was far away, though. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if she were watching us right now.

  I scanned the garden and the parking lot for any sign of her but saw nothing.

  Gail, her phone game finished, joined us on the porch. She put her arm around Brayden’s waist and steered him a few feet away so they were a safe distance from Aunt Amber.

  “Pearl knows that everyone makes mistakes,” Mom said. “She’s just incriminating herself by running away. I wish I could just talk some sense into her.” She spoke louder than usual. Like me, she probably suspected that Aunt Pearl was hiding nearby.

  Brayden snorted at the thought. He jabbed his thumb in Tyler’s direction. “Too late for that. How could he let her get away like that?”

  “You could have stopped her too,” I pointed out. “You saw her leave.”

  Brayden shrugged. “Not my job. I’m not the sheriff.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Brayden. Take ownership for once.” Aunt Amber said. “We’re all in this together.”

  “No, we’re not, and don’t criticize me, Amber. I wish Gail and I had never come here in the first place. You and your crazy family…” Brayden threw up his hands before pressing his palm firmly onto Gail’s back. He steered her toward the door. “C’mon Gail. Let’s go inside.”

  Brayden’s indifference was the final straw. His self-centeredness remained in full force, even after Merlinda’s death. He didn’t seem to care that Pearl was missing and possibly freezing to death. He lacked compassion for anyone but himself. He berated Tyler, criticized Aunt Pearl, and barely lifted a finger to help anyone. And to think I had almost married him. While I was glad to have dodged a bullet on that one, I was furious at Brayden’s thoughtlessness.

  Brayden paused at the door. He let go of Gail and motioned for her to enter ahead of him.

  I fought to contain my anger, but I was so enraged that before I knew it, I was whispering the transport spell under my breath. I just wanted Brayden and his self-absorption gone.

  As in far-away gone, like Vanuatu. That would serve him right. I pictured him running frantically up and down the beach in a state of confusion, yelling for help.

  I knew the spell by heart—I had practiced it for hundreds of hours without success. Reciting it was harmless enough since I wasn’t actually capable of enacting the spell. I often said it as a form of witch-swearing. I channeled my anger into an almost mindless incantation:

  Make yourself scarce and go away

  Don’t dilly dally, be on your way

  Up, up, and away you go

  Far from here to a place I know

  Aunt Amber gasped. “Cendrine, what on earth are you doing?”

  “Hey, what the—” Gail’s voice wavered before she went silent. Her lips moved but no sound came out.

  My timing was a little off, because Brayden had still been touching Gail’s arm at the exact moment my spell was cast. The couple faded into transparent silhouettes before us.

  Then…Poof!

  They were gone.

  Just like that.

  “Oh no! It’s never worked for me before…” I stood trance-like and stared at the empty doorway where Brayden and Gail had stood seconds earlier.

  I had practiced the spell hundreds of times without success. Now, when I hadn’t even tried very hard, it had worked flawlessly. Not only had it worked, it had taken two people at once. I was stunned.

  Earl jumped backwards, surprisingly fast for a seventy-year-old. “Did you see that? Brayden and Gail just vaporized! Where the heck did they go?”

  “Cendrine, bring them back!” Mom pleaded, but it was too late.

  “I-I can’t! I don’t even know what I did. It’s never worked before, so I must have done something different this time. I just don’t know what it is.”

  I was still so completely focused on the spell, so stunned that it had actually worked, that I repeated it as I tried to figure out what went wrong.

  Poof! Poof!

  The same sound as moments earlier, but no sign of the couple.

  If I couldn’t figure out what I had done, how on earth could I ever bring them back?

  23

  Earl rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “What the heck was in your eggnog, Amber? I don’t feel so good all of a sudden. You saw it too, right?” He searched our faces for an answer.

  We all remained silent. Too bad we couldn’t give him one.

  Earl sighed. “Great. Now my eyes are playing tricks on me.”

  It troubled me that we had three suspected poisons, and each pointed to a member of my family. In fact, I was the only witch not connected to a suspicious food or beverage.

  Aunt Pearl’s poisoned tea, Aunt Amber’s spiked eggnog, and Mom’s poison-laced Christmas cake created more questions than answers. And the answers started with Aunt Pearl, who was now missing. I feared where those answers could lead us, but we had to know the truth.

  We had moved inside to the living room so we wouldn’t freeze to death while we figured out how to locate Brayden and Gail.

  Earl rubbed his forehead. “You didn’t see what I saw? I had the weirdest hallucination. Brayden and Gail faded away into nothingness, just like that.” He snapped his fingers for effect. Funny how ordinary people interpreted witchcraft when there was no other logical explanation.

  “How odd.” Mom’s voice was flat, but the corners of her mouth turned up in an involuntary smile.

  Mom was secretly proud of me, though she tried not to show it. I was pleased too. I had successfully executed an advanced spell on my own without any help. Now was no time to gloat, though. My focus was on getting Brayden and Gail back.

  “Where did they go?” Earl scanned the living room. “I didn’t just imagine it, did I?”

  “Um, no.” I was at a loss for words and so, apparently, was everybody else.

  “Merlinda dies, Pearl disappears, and now Brayden and Gail are missing.” Earl’s voice cracked. “Geez, am I next?”

  Mom shook her head. ”Of course not, Earl. You’ll be fine. But stay inside the house just in case, okay?”

  I slipped my arm into Earl’s and guided him to the sofa. “Mom’s right, Earl. Why don’t you relax a little?”

  Earl frowned and sat down. “I’m worried about Pearl, Cen. You know how she gets these crazy ideas. What if she’s gone off and done something dangerous?” His affection for ornery Aunt Pearl was so sweet. It practically bordered on sainthood.

  “
I’m sure she’ll turn up, Earl. Don’t you worry,” Mom said in a soothing voice. “She’ll be back before you know it.”

  Earl wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “No more booze this year. It does something terrible to my head.”

  It was just as well that Earl thought he was seeing things instead of witnessing magic. He’d question that assumption if I didn’t bring Brayden and Gail back quickly, though. You’d think that between Mom, Aunt Amber, and me we could figure out how to reverse my spell. But apparently, three witches aren’t any more powerful than one.

  What we really needed was the antidote, or reversal spell. Trouble was, this spell couldn’t be undone by another witch. That self-protecting mechanism was designed so that one witch couldn’t interfere with another witch’s spell, either on purpose or otherwise.

  That witch was me.

  The only problem was that I had no clue how to fix things. While I had practiced the spell many times, I hadn’t mastered it. Not by a long shot. Minor variations in the original spell meant modifications to the reversal spell too. Aunt Pearl hadn’t even shown me the reversal spell yet.

  Aunt Pearl.

  We had to find her, and fast. What if she had somehow been caught up in my spell? If she had been standing nearby and I hadn’t noticed… No, that couldn’t be it. Others had stood much closer to Brayden and Gail, and they were still here. I had no idea where to even start looking for any of them.

  Aunt Amber paced back and forth in the living room. “Tell me exactly what you did, Cen. Every single detail. Maybe, just maybe, I can help you reverse everything. I doubt I can, but it’s worth a shot.”

  Her lack of confidence worried me. Another witch couldn’t undo this particular spell, so she would have to teach it to me. As the spellcaster, only I could bring them back. To do that I had to master the reversal spell, but how could I possibly do that in time? I had to learn in a matter of minutes what normally took months of practice.

  “I have no idea what happened,” I said. “All I did was recite the words Aunt Pearl taught me. I wasn’t even trying hard, so I never expected it to work.” The reason the spell had actually worked this time could be due to anything. A blink of an eye, a slight movement of my hand, or maybe even how I pronounced the words. All I remembered was that I had stood with my weight more on my right foot than my left. But that couldn’t be it. I was at a loss as to what I had done differently compared to my prior failed attempts.

  I walked over to the Christmas tree and stared at Merlinda’s tropical snow globe. I squinted and peered inside hoping against hope. Brayden and Gail were nowhere to be seen. Aunt Pearl wasn’t there, either. The tropical paradise appeared the same as before: a white sandy beach dotted with palm trees bordering the ocean. It was troubling since that beach was where I thought I had sent Brayden and, accidentally, Gail. But they weren’t there. Where had they gone instead?

  “You did your best, and that’s what counts, dear.” Mom was encouraging even at the worst of times. “Just visualize them when they disappeared and concentrate on their faces. You can do it.”

  “You really did make them disappear.” Earl sat at the far corner of the sofa, arms crossed. For the first time I noticed that his hair was dishevelled, and he looked as though he had just survived the perimeter of a bomb blast. He was completely freaked out. “All this craziness must run in the family. Pearl’s done some crazy crap, but this takes the cake.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Earl,” Aunt Amber said. “Cen knows what she’s doing.”

  Aunt Amber leaned in close and said to me, “You better know what you’re doing.”

  Actually, I didn’t, and I felt terrible for scaring Earl. I had no words to reassure him, but just being around Aunt Pearl should have prepared him for anything. I refocused on the emergency at hand. “I really screwed up, didn’t I? How will we find them?”

  “We just need to figure out what went wrong with your spell, Cen,” Mom said. “Where did you intend to send them?”

  “To Merlinda’s globe. It was only supposed to be temporary.” As I stared at the globe, I felt this weird force repelling me. It felt opposite to the pull of a magnet. In fact, it was more like the repulsive force field of two magnets being pushed together. The globe had an opposing force. Whenever I neared the globe, the strange force pushed me away.

  It suddenly dawned on me that there wasn’t anything wrong with my spell. It had worked just fine, only to be counteracted by a much stronger force. Merlinda’s. I suspected I wasn’t the first to fail.

  Aunt Pearl hadn’t intended to send me outside in a blizzard to freeze to death. She had planned something entirely different, only her spell had hit a stronger opposing force just as mine had.

  Aunt Pearl meant to send me into Merlinda’s Vanuatu snow globe when something or someone interfered. Of course. Like any expert witch, Merlinda had placed a protective shield around her tropical snow globe to prevent unauthorized entry.

  Merlinda’s protective shield hadn’t only prevented anyone from gaining access to her Vanuatu snow globe. The protective shield was so strong that it had also repelled those who came close and sent them in the opposite direction. I hadn’t been close enough to the globe to notice the force before.

  What Merlinda had lacked in years of sorcery experience was more than compensated by the sheer strength of her magic. In fact, her witchcraft was strong enough to not only counteract Aunt Pearl’s spell but also to send me in a totally different direction.

  I had ended up in the wrong place when I had landed outside in the freezing cold. The same thing must have happened to Brayden and Gail too. Aunt Pearl hadn’t owned up to her misdirection because she had been too embarrassed to admit that her spell had gone awry.

  Only her spell hadn’t misfired at all. It had been counteracted by Merlinda’s magic.

  I ran to the living room window and scanned the yard and driveway for any sign of the pair. They had to be outside somewhere nearby.

  I focused my gaze in the same general direction of where Aunt Pearl’s spell had sent me earlier.

  A flash of movement caught my eye but disappeared just as quickly before I could get a better look. Then nothing. My pulse quickened. “Somebody’s hiding by the lawn ornaments.”

  “That better be Pearl. I’ll go check.” Earl jumped from the sofa and ran outside.

  He returned within minutes, gripping a shivering Aunt Pearl by the arm. “Look who I found. Turns out she was close by after all.”

  “I told you not to tell anyone.” Aunt Pearl shook her arm loose from Earl’s grip but seemed secretly pleased that he had rescued her. A pool of water formed at her feet from her dripping wet green velvet pantsuit. “Just like before, you had to go and mess things up.”

  Mom gasped. “Pearl! Don’t talk to Earl like that. He just saved you from freezing to death.”

  Earl waved his arm in dismissal. “Blame me all you want, Pearl. You’re the one who asked me to set up the Santa sleigh in the first place. Not my fault.”

  “Wait—what happened before?” I turned to Aunt Pearl. “You mean when you were out-spelled by Merlinda?”

  “Absolutely not!” Aunt Pearl sat on the edge of the sofa and leaned over to roll up her pant legs. “Nothing went wrong with my spell. Earl wasn’t supposed to be by the sleigh. That’s why everything got screwed up.”

  Realization dawned on me as I turned to Earl. “You were Santa in the sleigh outside!”

  Earl shrugged. “I was just doing what Pearl told me to. I wanted to add a few finishing touches.”

  “Yesterday, Earl. You were supposed to have those lawn ornaments finished yesterday.” Aunt Pearl always had to get the last word.

  Innocent bystanders who were too close to the action had altered both of our spells. In my case, Aunt Pearl’s transport spell was intended to send me to Merlinda’s tropical snow globe. Instead, I had landed outside on the lawn where Earl was still working on the Santa sleigh. I guessed that Aunt Pearl had been thinking about
Earl when she had cast her spell.

  But what about my case? I couldn’t remember thinking about anything other than wanting to banish Brayden to Vanuatu, and Gail had simply been collateral damage because she had been standing too close to him.

  Merlinda’s globe had a redirection safeguard built in. It was designed to ensure that no one else could enter her tropical snow globe. But it didn’t just repel intruders. Her spell packed such a punch that it sent would-be intruders off in a completely different direction.

  But if that was the case, where had Gail and Brayden gone? They weren’t outside like Aunt Pearl and I had been.

  Someone was lying, and I had no doubt who it was. But now wasn’t the time for petty arguments. We had to find Brayden and Gail before it was too late.

  24

  “You gonna lock me up, sheriff?” Aunt Pearl stood defiantly in front of Tyler, arms crossed.

  “Nope,” Tyler chuckled. “Nothing to worry about. You’re a terrible escape artist.”

  “Help me find Brayden and Gail, Aunt Pearl,” I pleaded. “Tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t know, Cen. What’s in it for me?” Aunt Pearl tapped her foot as she waited for an answer.

  I didn’t bite.

  I was tired of going in circles with Aunt Pearl and never getting anywhere. With or without her help, I would get Brayden and Gail back. I ran to the hall table and motioned for Mom and Aunt Amber to follow. There was no time to waste.

  “Ready, Cen?” Aunt Amber handed me a scrap of paper. “I wrote it out for you. All you have to do is visualize them while you recite the words.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and recited the reversal spell, imagining Brayden and Gail at the doorway as they had been earlier. The required concentration coupled with the almost instant hangover effects of too much Christmas cheer had given me a splitting headache. If I could somehow get it to work, I promised myself I would never cast another spell. They were incredibly hard to undo and nothing but trouble. I simply wasn’t cut out to be a witch.