Brittany Geragotelis - Life's a Witch

Finally, my fingers grazed something cold and hard. I pulled my arm back reflexively. As I willed my heartbeat to slow down and the pounding in my ears to go away, I realized that if there was any chance that Christian’s stuff was hiding under this roof, I had to do whatever I could to find it. It would be worth touching something icky in the process.

Taking a deep breath, I reached back down and began to feel around again. It didn’t take long—what I felt was small, hard, round, and cool to the touch. Based on my dream from the night before, I was pretty sure it was the ring that had glowed when Christian had put it on. Wrapping my hand around the jewelry, I pulled it out and looked at it triumphantly.

The ring itself was stunning. With a thin band of gold encrusted with tiny diamonds, the ring glittered under the lights in the room. All these details led up to the traffic stopper: the enormous ruby sitting right in the middle. It was at least six carats, in the shape of a soft square with more diamonds surrounding it like a little army protecting its queen.

It was the kind of ring I’d dreamed of owning one day. Preferably given to me by my incredibly wealthy and attractive boyfriend, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. This was pretty cool too.

I wanted to sit and stare at the ring all day long, but I hadn’t forgotten that in my dream, Christian had also been hiding a book. With the ring firmly in one hand, I reached back down into the darkness with the other.

My fingers searched the space, at first coming up with nothing. Finally, I touched something long, thin, and soft, like a string, and I had to force myself to grab hold of it, even though I was scared of what it might be. It was dragging something along behind it that made the tiniest scratching sound as I pulled it out.

Please don’t be attached to a rat, please don’t be attached to a rat, please…

But as my hand came back into view, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw that what I was holding on to was a silk ribbon being used as a page marker for a book. The book that Christian had been writing in.

Crawling back across the floor, I sat down cross-legged against the bed, mimicking the position of Bridget’s daughter. Slipping the ring onto my middle finger—no way was I wearing it on my ring finger, since it’s totally bad luck—I waited for something spectacular to happen.

But nothing came. No heat. No tingling sensation. No magical surge of power. No glowing red light. Just a gorgeously expensive ring that would’ve been the envy of my friends. With a shrug, I turned my attention to the book.

The worn, leather-bound book was heavy in my hands. The pages weren’t numbered, and there were too many to count. A quick flip through showed that not all of them were written on. Some were blank, but most were filled up with scribbles. At first glance, I thought maybe it was poetry because of the way the words were positioned on the page, all gathered in the middle with lots of white space on the sides. But a closer look proved it to be something much different.

What I was holding in my hands wasn’t a diary or a compilation of poetry.

It was a spell book.

“Holy magic, Glinda,” I mumbled.

There was page after page of spells. Each was labeled at the top; some pages held multiple incantations. We’d been taught only around fifty spells through magic school, but there were hundreds in here. More than we could ever learn in a lifetime, probably. And it appeared like more than one person had contributed to it. At first glance, I could see that some of the spells were seriously outdated, reflecting the time that Christian would have been growing up. Some, however, could span generations… and did.

Turning to a page that had been dog-eared, I read carefully through the words. As I began to understand what I had here, my adrenaline started pumping.

Wicked. I’d never heard these spells before, and although they were a bit old and the wording was outdated, I was psyched to try them—I definitely didn’t doubt their potency.

In other words, I couldn’t wait to see how well they worked.

Bustling around to put everything back in its place, I was already working out what I was going to do with this newfound knowledge. Should I bring it to the entire group and try to have everyone learn as much as they could before the Parrishables found us? Or would I be better off keeping this news to myself, considering the traitor in the house?

Wait. Maybe there was something in the book that could help me with that .

I had my hunches of who was planning to betray us, but I still didn’t feel comfortable shunning him without seeing the proof for myself. And though my mom hadn’t been much help in telling me who the culprit was, it didn’t mean that Bridget and Christian wouldn’t be.

In fact, I was counting on it.

With a fire lit inside me, I opened the book back up to take a closer look and see if we couldn’t find the stranger among us.

When I finally made it downstairs, about a half hour later, I found that everyone was awake and already practicing the spells in the backyard. My heart swelled with pride as I realized that I was no longer going to have to convince the other kids to train; they actually wanted to get better.

As I walked into the kitchen, my eyes drifted to Asher. He was sitting on the counter near the sink, sucking down a bowl of cereal. When he saw me, he shot me a grin, a line of milk dribbling down his chin. Heading straight to him, I leaned up against the counter, jutting out my hip as I looked up at him.

“I thought Trix were for kids,” I said, nodding to the box of cereal on the counter next to him.

“That’s just what they want you to believe. Trix are actually for everyone .”

“You’re kind of tricky yourself, aren’t you?” I asked, raising my eyebrow at him.

He paused briefly before shoveling more food into his mouth. The break in eating was so imperceptible that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I weren’t looking for it.

“How so?” he asked, his mouth full again.

“Well, the plan you had to crash with me last night was pretty sneaky. You must’ve known that if you got into my room, I’d let you stay,” I said.

He smiled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I was just coming to hang out. You’re the one who invited me in.”

“Liar!” I hissed, in mock shock. The truth was I’d have let him stay whether he’d asked or not.

“You can act like the jury’s still out on me, but I know you think I’m awesome.”

“A little overconfident, don’t you think?” I asked.

“I like to think of it as realistic.”

“Mmm,” I murmured.

“Hadley? Are we learning new stuff today or going over what we learned yesterday?”

I turned to see that Asher and I were no longer the only ones in the kitchen. Emory and Peter stood by the back door, looking at me expectantly.

“We’ll review a few things, but I thought we’d go over hand-to-hand combat today,” I said, still staring at Asher.

“Cool,” Peter said, cracking his knuckles. Then, looking over his shoulder nervously, he took another step toward me. “Hey, Had, you may want to take a look outside before we get started.”

“Why? What’s up?” I asked, not liking the way that sounded.