Chapter 19

As Sawyer sulked,I drove us to pick up the Crafting Ladies where they waited for me at the witch-hat house at the end of the cul-de-sac on Weaver Lane. Flora, who’d been sharing the windowsill with Ame as a lookout, turned around to holler at the women inside as I pulled into the short driveway.

The ladies left the house with all their supplies—Flora hauling a backpack behind her, which Daphne graciously picked up and added to her own gear (a wicker picnic basket with snacks in case we needed a nibble, plus her shillelagh), Shari bringing up the rear with an extra-large black trash bag fit to bursting. They wrangled, stuffed, and stomped it all to fit into the trunk, then piled into the sedan. Flora made Sawyer share the front seat, and Ame joined the ladies in the back, sitting in Shari’s lap.

All settled, we headed into enemy territory: the town of Tussock.

While Mayor Robert might have a thing or two to say if he found out the residents of his fine town were sneaking off to perform magic in their rival’s backyard—for wasn’t Redbud perfectly sufficient for our magical needs?—we were only going to Tussock to throw the fiáin off my scent. I would take my parasite bracelet off, cause a stir, and then let the fiáin do the rest. The magic hunters would terrorize another town, and the fact that it was Tussock should make the mayor of Redbud very happy indeed.

Flora knew of a park with very little foot traffic in the northwest part of town—very hilly, narrow paths, boggy in the spring, mosquitoey in the summer, murky in the fall—and when we parked in the parking lot, we had to force our doors open with our feet to combat the thickness of the weeds growing out of the gravel.

“Good gracious,” Daphne said, beating back the weeds with her shillelagh. “At least with the cold we don’t have to worry about ticks!”

Forming a line at the trailhead, and Flora’s pack strapped to my back, we trudged onto the overgrown path and deeper into the forest. We were immediately greeted with an incline, boots scraping over the rocky trail. At its narrowest, it was twelve inches, at its widest, sixteen inches. A steep slope covered in leaves and fallen trees rose to our right, and even sharper decline plummeting to our left.

“Don’t nobody trip,” Flora said, plowing ahead with confidence, the tiny garden gnome completely unaffected by the narrowness of the trail.

The two cats took turns racing ahead of us and backtracking to make sure we weren’t being followed. Overhead, a few winter birds twittered, a handful of squirrels rustled around making last-minute preparations before the deep cold set in, and besides the crunching of our feet on leaves and rocks, there were no other noises except for the low murmuring of Shari’s audiobook through her headphones.

With most of the trees having already shed their leaves for the year, it was easy to see for miles, had it not been for the hills. We were all in fairly decent shape, but we were all blowing hard by the time the trail widened to reveal an overlook and a decrepit picnic table that was only one more season from finally succumbing to decay. It groaned and buckled when Daphne heaved her picnic basket on top, thankful to be rid of the weight.

“I bet that’s really pretty when the leaves are all in color,” I wheezed.

A bare outcropping overlooked a valley of—you guessed it—more rolling hills, bare trees like hundreds of supplicating arms straining for the sky. A stream lazily threaded through the hills, winking intermittently whenever the sun decided to show its face through the gray clouds.

“Sure,” Flora said, “if you want to brave tick season to come up here to look next year. Not me.”

“Shall we have a snack before we begin?” Daphne asked, opening the picnic basket. “Replenish our strength? There’s water, and I’ve got deviled eggs and tuna fish sandwiches, a jar of pickles and some macaroni salad.”

“Who brings tuna fish sandwiches on a hike?” Flora demanded.

“The cold kept it all cold,” Daphne protested.

“Um, I’ll just have some water, please,” I said. I’d have a tuna fish sandwich later. Maybe.

“Daph, I love you, but you’re never allowed to pack a picnic basket again,” Flora said gravely.

“See”—Daphne pointed as Shari shuffled forward for the container of deviled eggs—“Shari likes it.”

The quiet crafter started scooping out the whipped yolks of the deviled eggs with her finger like a bear would honey from a hive, tossing the egg white halves on the ground for Ame and Sawyer. The two cats sniffed them, wrinkled their noses, and backed away.

“Hmph!” Daphne helped herself to a garlicky pickle spear before slapping the lid of the picnic basket shut.

“When you’re all done, let’s form a circle here, where it’s flattest,” I said quickly, hoping they’d focus on the reason why we were all here and not on the snack choices.

Sloughing Flora’s pack off my back, I extract the gold-dipped tongs and the gold-covered cigarette holder, plus a set of old oven mitts. From my own pockets, I withdrew the bottle of masking sand, the jar of the pink granules of the Seeking Spell, and the worry stone crystal I’d forged from selenite and tiger’s-eye. I wiggled the willow charcoal into the cigarette holder then wiped the soot from my fingers.

When I was finished, the women had all clustered around me, wide-eyed with anticipation.

“I’ll keep watch,” Ame announced, stalking a little ways back down the trail.

It took only a few minutes to explain the weaving. It was simple in theory, but it would be more complex in practice. I just hoped it worked.

Flora perched on Daphne’s shoulder, holding on to her long white braid for support, the uncapped bottle of pink granules in her hand; Daphne, her right hand covered with an oven mitt, held the jar of masking sand in the gold-dipped tongs; Shari, her headphones around her neck and her brown eyes sharp and focused, had the other oven mitt on the hand that pinched the cigarette holder and the willow charcoal; Sawyer sat on my shoulder, claws digging deep into my jacket; and I held the crystal flat in one palm, my amazonite crystal in the other. My parasite bracelet was tucked away in my pocket.

“On three,” I murmured. They were standing so close a whisper could’ve been as loud as a shout. “One… two… three.”

The magical tree erupted from my core as my friends began their work.

All at the same time, Shari traced the locator rune she’d memorized on the white surface of the selenite crystal with the charcoal as Daphne released a continuous sprinkle of masking sand. Flora had plunged her whole hand into the pink granules of the Seeking Spell and now gripped the edge of the crystal in my hand, seizing the magic I had infused in it to send out the spell’s seeking pulse. As Sawyer intoned,

“Soft as feathers and a firefly’s light,

follow the steps of the walker this night,”

I performed the Scouting Spell, sending that sonar ping deep into the essence of the crystal. Into the Hunting Spell itself.

A wind rose as we repeated our individual tasks a second time, our attention riveted on the crystal that had started to glow in my palm.

That wind started to swirl, whipping in our hair and into Sawyer’s fur as we performed it all again a third time—we witches really loved our multiples of three—and then we began to chant.

“Five as one, let it be done. Five as one, let it be done!”

My words were automatic, my focus solely on the crystal in front of me. The glow of the crystal split into five threads, each writhing like a tentacle, one end bound to the center of the selenite. But they weren’t weaving together. They’d been tacked into place, but that was all.

“C’mon, girls!” Flora gasped. “With feeling!”

“Five as one, let it be done!”

I poured all the magic I could out of my core, letting it rip down my arm like lightning, channeling it all into crystal.

Instead of weaving, the five silver threads burst away from each other, each latching on to one of the five within our circle. Mine and Flora’s instantly turned green, Sawyer’s a honey-like amber, Daphne’s the faintest blue, but Shari’s turned ruby red.

She paled at the color, stumbling over her words.

“Keep going,” I rasped.

“Five as one, let it be done!” We were screaming now over the wind, squinting as it lashed dirt and debris into our faces.

Sawyer’s claws bit down even further into my shoulder, but I barely felt it. I had to channel the magic of the amazonite pendant into the crystal soon if my core failed.

Sucking in another breath, I shifted my focus from the magic coursing through me and to the magic I wanted to create: a selenite lens, much like the one I’d used to discern the secret of the grimoire, to insert an overlay over your vision with the trail of your prey. To see it as clearly as if there was a gold thread connecting you together, one that would never break until you were directly in front of whatever you sought. A gold thread completely imperceptible to anyone but the wielder of the lens. A gold thread that could never be severed, never obscured, never hidden. A true arrow seeking and finding a heart without fail.

“Five as one, let it be done!”

In one fluid motion, the threads snapped from their holds on our hearts, our life essences, wove themselves into a beautiful braid of multicolored light, and disappeared, sucked into the selenite crystal.

I had the good sense to close my fist over the crystal when we were blasted apart, lest the wind pluck it away and hurl it over the outcropping and into the valley below.

Groaning, I shoved up on an elbow to find the wind hadn’t blasted us so much as it had shoved us to the ground. Our feet and legs were all a tangled mess, Daphne’s braid had somehow coiled around Flora like a fuzzy albino boa constrictor, Shari’s wing-tipped glasses had cracked, and Sawyer looked like he’d stuck a claw into an electrical socket.

“Well, you certainly put on a magic show for the fiáin to track, and you all survived, it seems,” Ame drawled, padding close to lick Shari’s pale cheek. The quiet crafter quickly fumbled her headphones over her ears and escaped into an audiobook.

“Since when did green magic involve wind?” Flora groused, untangling herself.

“Did it work?” Daphne asked.

Lifting the crystal to my lips, I whispered, “Sawyer.”

A gold thread appeared in my vision, disappearing only when I blinked, guiding me to the left. I turned my head, following the trail, and my tabby cat, grooming his fur down just a few feet away, shimmered gold in my vision.

Sensing he was being watched, he hunched, tucking his tail in tight. “What’s wrong with your eyes? You look like a shifter about to shift, but your eyes are gold instead of amber.”

The contact made with my “prey,” the golden shimmer left Sawyer’s body, floating away like dust, and the thread between us winked out of existence.

“They just went back to normal!”

I turned back to the Crafting Circle ladies, all of them now on their feet. Daphne gave me a hand up, and when I rose, my lips split into a smile so happy I felt like my face would crack. We had done it. And while this Hunting Spell didn’t release my family from the chains of their curse, it could bring me to the one who could.

“That smile looks like it’s a win to me!” Flora whooped. “Now let’s get our fannies outta here. Forget the tuna fish sandwiches and the pickles. You’re gonna use some of that hearth witchery to bake us up something worthy of celebration. To the farmhouse!”