The Witches Three Cozy Mysteries 4-6

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

"Wait!" I cried even as power was beginning to crackle all around Brianna's wand. She dissipated it with a flick of her wrist.

"What?" she asked.

"Remember what happened with the locator spell that led us to the hatpin?" I asked. "That thing moved so fast. I want to be down by the time portal before you break the glass, in case it goes back over the bridge to the past."

"I don't see how the spell could've worked that way," Brianna said with a frown. "Memory spells are very tricky, and strictly short range attacks."

"But we never saw an attacker," Sophie said.

"No, but there must have been a trigger," Brianna said. "And assuming the simplest solution, it must have been something that hit all three of us at once."

"A trigger, like a bomb?" I asked.

"Maybe more like a tripwire," Sophie said.

"More like that," Brianna agreed.

"So the three of us together set off a magical tripwire?" I asked. "But when?"

"I don't remember anything like that," Sophie said.

"It may have been something super subtle," Brianna said. "An enchanted sugar bowl when we were all drinking tea together."

"Or anytime we ate dinner," Sophie said.

"Was it something we ate?" I asked. "A magical parasite hatched inside of us and made that?" I pointed at the swirling mass inside the glass sphere.

"It's a possibility," Brianna said. "But I think tripwire might be closer. Someone not here had to have a way to be sure of the timing."

"And when you say someone, we're all thinking of Evanora, right?" I said.

"Or her mysterious employer," Sophie said.

"We know she has access to the present," I said. "Or she did have in November, and probably still does now. But did she earlier than that?"

"If she can do it at all, I don't know why it would have started only in November," Brianna said.

"Amanda drew her attention to the present," Sophie said.

"I never said a word that would lead her to that conclusion," I said.

"We're not going to find the answers to this through discussion and argument," Brianna said. "We have to smash the sphere."

"No, I have to smash the sphere," Sophie said.

"Is this a revenge thing?" Brianna asked.

"No," Sophie said. "It has to be me because Amanda is going to be watching the threads that form the time portal, and you're going to be back there making sure the wards we put on that wardrobe are as strong as ever."

"The wardrobe," I said, having pretty much forgotten it existed. "Can a witch cast spells through it?"

"I don't know," Brianna admitted. "That's why I put so many wards on it."

"Maybe we should have destroyed it rather than keep it," I said.

"No," Sophie said. "We still might need it. Today or someday."

"In the meantime," Brianna said, getting up from the floor, "I'll check all the wards first, then when I yell you can smash the sphere and we'll see what happens."

"I'll get down to the time portal," I said. Sophie drew her wand and aimed it at the sphere as if warning it to behave.

Brianna was halfway across the library when a thought struck her, and she turned to look back. "Amanda, you're not going to be able to hear the signal to go."

"I'll be watching," I said. "I'll see."

"Don't cross the bridge without us," she said. "Even if it rushes past you. Don't go back to the past alone."

"I won't," I promised, hoping that my resolve on that wouldn't be put to the test.

I quickly exchanged house slippers for boots and pulled on my coat, still getting my hat and gloves on as I tramped across the snow to the orchard. We had a nice little path formed from our daily treks, although if we got any more snow, I'd have to stop calling it a path because it was already closer to a trench.

Once under the fruit trees, I pulled the hood up over my hat to block out the wind. This confined my vision to a narrow tunnel directly in front of me, but that didn't matter. A single breath and a closing of my eyes was all it took for me to get to the world of threads these days.

I looked to the bridge first. I had examined it just that morning and had noticed nothing unusual about it then, but I was looking with a different eye this time. Was there anything in there like the scribble that had been within our brains? Anything I noticed now with my memory restored that I hadn't noticed this morning still under the effects of the brain cloud?

I still didn't see anything off, but I felt uneasy. That cloud had been in my brain for longer than I had known I was a witch. Every time I had tried a spell or even just opened myself up to the magic in the world around me, that spell had been in there, fogging my brain. How could that not make everything I thought I knew suspect?

I turned my attention to the charm school, always a bright glow of magical threads. Small objects of power filled the rooms, especially Miss Zenobia Weekes' office, but it was more than that. The walls themselves had a power. I knew this from the very first time I had touched magic. The only reason I was still alive now was that power flowing from the house itself into me. It had saved me. And then that power had returned to the house. It was there now.

We might need to find a way to call on that more deliberately. I made a mental note to talk to Brianna about it later.

At the moment I could easily pick out the places where threads coalesced into the people I knew best in the world. Mr. Trevor, closest to me in his office. Brianna, near the complex twisting of threads and knots that formed her wards, so dense I could sense nothing of the wardrobe I knew was within. Then Sophie herself, and beside Sophie, the angry scribble that even as I looked was released from its confinement.

I don't hear things in the world of threads, but something was buzzing in my head like a nest of angry wasps. The scribble couldn't make a sound that would travel to me, but somehow it was conveying its anger to me.

The bright threads that formed Sophie moved back from the scribble as it expanded, but as it expanded it became less and less dense. It flowed around Sophie, not a single scribbled filament interacting with her threads. It was giving her and her power a wide berth.

Then it reached the walls of the library itself, and then the expansion sped up. In the blink of an eye it was distributed through the house, hiding within the walls, the angry scribbles pulled thin to the finest of lines that were almost, but not quite, impossible to discern.

I stood out in the yard, looking at the house for quite some time. It was clear the spell wasn't going to try to get past me to the time portal. It wasn't moving at all. But still, I stood there, examining every bit of the house over and over again.

Did it look different than when I had looked at it before? Or was it the same?

I felt like it was the same, but I couldn't be entirely sure. I had never looked so closely at the walls of the house before, at the power that pulsed quietly through every brick and bit of plaster. The lines of the spell were so thin, so easy to overlook, especially now that they lay so quietly dormant.

I turned my attention back to the bridge. I had seen something similar before when I had watched Juno disappear into the fabric of the time portal. Was this something she had done?

No, I didn't think so. She had asked me to be her student, her protégée. And she had asked me that months after I'd come to the school. She might have the power to cast a spell to tamper with our memories, but I felt like she would have saved that until after she'd tried to win me over after I had turned her down.

Finally, I went back into the house, hung up my coat, and set my boots near the radiator to dry. Mr. Trevor was in the kitchen just turning on the oven.

Right. It was still Valentine's Day.

"Is everything all right, Miss Amanda?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. "We got our memories back."

"Excellent," he said. "Do you know how they were lost?"

"Not lost, taken," I said, with perhaps more vitriol than I intended. "We're working on who did it."

"Another mystery to be solved," he said.

"Yeah. Not a murder this time, though."

"A theft."

"Maybe more like a heist? It seems pretty elaborate. We'll tell you all about it once we figure it out ourselves."

"I have complete confidence in the three of you. Everyone still planning for dinner?"

"Definitely," I said. "We might have a few things to finish up first, though. Might have to step out for a bit."

"Here," Mr. Trevor said, disappearing behind the refrigerator door then emerging with a plate of cheese and cold cuts covered in plastic wrap. "If you've been doing magic, you're going to want some protein and fat."

"Perfect," I said, taking the plate. "Thanks."

I probably should have waited until I got upstairs, but I hadn't realized how ravenous I was until I had that plate in my hands. I did manage to confine my nibbling to a few squares of cheese that were near the edge of the plate, clearly in danger of being dropped on the steps.

Working magic did make me super hungry, but you could always count on Mr. Trevor to have planned ahead.

"Anything?" Brianna asked the moment I was in the doorway.

"What did you see?" I asked, setting the plate on the newspaper table and peeling back the rest of the wrap. We all rolled cheese and cold cuts together and started eating before we spoke again.

"Nothing with the wardrobe," Brianna said. "I felt like something moved around me. Like literally pulled apart to move around me without touching me."

"Pretty much what I saw," I said.

"It's still here, right?" Sophie said, looking all around. "In the walls."

"In the walls," I agreed.

"But was it always here?" she asked, then looked directly at me to be sure I knew the question wasn't merely rhetorical.

"That I don't know," I admitted. "But I have a plan."

"I don't think I'm going to like this plan," Brianna said with a frown.

"We just need to make a short trip back to 1928," I said. "Quick as a flash. I just need a look. And I didn't do it without you two-"

"You don't get cookies for doing what we agreed," Brianna said sharply. Sophie looked at the plate as if cookies might be hidden there.

"One quick look. Then we come back up here and process all the data we have," I said.

"We can't let this go," Sophie said, because Brianna was still looking like she wanted to argue against it. "Someone tried to take our memories from us. And if they could do that, we could be sitting ducks here for whatever else they want to roll out next. We have to know so we can protect ourselves."

"All right," Brianna said. "But we stick together, we're only there for a moment, and we're warded against witches."

"Warded against witches?" I asked. "How long is that going to take."

"No time at all," Brianna said. "Up until now it was just a little side project, but I've been working on a thing since New Year's."

"What thing?" Sophie asked.

"Well, remember Cynthia's amulet?" Brianna asked. "The one that did so much more than just let her cross the time bridge?"

I looked up at Sophie. I was pretty sure the grin on my own face was a match to the one she was sporting.

The theft of our memories might have been of heist-like scope and complexity, but it was starting to feel like we could summon up a nice counter-heist of our own.

This might end up being kind of fun.