Brittany Geragotelis - Life's a Witch

Luckily, we’d prepared for this exact moment.

“Now!” I yelled out.

In perfect unison, all the Cleri who were still left joined hands, creating a band of twitches all linked together, and we said the spell we’d rehearsed earlier that day.

“Sluggashim deliberum!”

The moment it was out, everyone who’d been rushing toward us seconds before stopped in their places, as if frozen. I couldn’t help but smile as I saw that the spell had worked, and we’d managed to buy ourselves a little more time to take care of the next phase in our plan.

“Okay, guys, we don’t have long before this wears off. Do you have this?” I asked, turning my head to the left and then the right to look each of them in the eyes. I didn’t want to leave them, but I knew I was the only one who could do this next part and I needed them to hold the Parrishables back until I could get in place to do the next spell.

“We’re fine. Just go do what you have to do,” Fallon said, a smile playing across his lips. “We’ve got this.”

“You sure?”

“Piece of cake,” he answered.

Torn between wanting to stick around to help and knowing that I needed to go if we were going to have any chance of winning this thing, I gave my coven one last reassuring look and then ran back into the house, leaving them outside without me.

It wouldn’t be for long, though. I sprinted through the kitchen, narrowly missing the table as I passed, and then around the corner and up the stairs. Busting through the door to my parents’ room, I stopped in front of the window and threw it open. Climbing out onto the roof, I looked down at the crowd gathered on my lawn, hoping to see that they were still where I’d left them. Sighing with relief because they were still in place, I carefully made my way across the shingles and came to a stop at the edge of the roof, directly behind my coven.

Now standing ten feet above everyone else, I had a better view of what we were up against. And it wasn’t pretty. The Parrishables outnumbered us two to one and they mostly consisted of adult witches. Though age didn’t matter much in terms of how powerful a witch was, it did mean they had more experience under their belts. My only hope was that after what I was about to do, the odds would no longer be against us. In fact, I was pretty much banking on it working because it was all we had.

As I prepared myself for what I was about to do, I saw that the freeze-frame spell the others were casting was beginning to weaken. Their hands were shaking now and some of the Parrishables were starting to move as if they were in slow motion and not just frozen anymore. I had to move quickly if I was going to get this done.

Closing my eyes, I put all my concentration into the spell I was about to do. Finding a calm within myself I hadn’t tapped in to in a while, I began to say the words:

I could feel the power building up, beginning to burn inside me as I said the words. This spell had been the last one written in the family book—it was the one I’d witnessed Christian scribbling down in my dream. I hadn’t thought much of it until after my dream with Bridget, when she’d mentioned that the whole family was there for me and that all I needed to do was ask for help.

The burning feeling inside me was growing, and I looked down at my hands, half expecting them to be on fire. Instead, Christian’s ring—which I assumed had at one time been Bridget’s—was glowing like when Christian had worn it in my dream. The power radiated through my body even more intensely than the last time I’d performed one of my ancestor’s spells, and I wondered if I might actually explode. Luckily, the universe had different ideas.

Suddenly I felt the energy leaving my body in spurts. It came from my hands, my sides, my head; it was spilling out of me every which way. It didn’t hurt. In fact, it felt good, as if I were letting go of a pressure that had been building up inside me for a long time. As I watched, the bursts of energy started turning into outlines of light, and the concentrations of light were taking on shape. Before my eyes, they began to look more and more human, clearly taking on hands and legs and heads. It was hard to make out their features at first, but as I continued to stare, even those became more prominent.

The last of the tendrils of light burst from my body, and the force was intense enough to throw me off balance, but just as I was teetering precariously toward the edge of the roof, something pulled me back and steadied me.

Looking behind me for the answer, I nearly yelped out in shock. There, standing close enough to touch, was my mom.

“Mommy?” I asked in a tiny voice, unable to believe what I was seeing.

It was her, that much I could tell, but she was sort of hazy around the edges, and staring at her kind of hurt my eyes, almost like I was staring at the sun.

“Hello, Hadley,” she answered back, making me nearly choke with happiness. The sound of her voice awakened feelings that I’d been trying to get a handle on ever since she was taken from me. I wanted to cry, but knew there wasn’t time for that. I could feel the magic below me wavering and I knew the Parrishables were about to be freed from our spell and pick up their pace.

“I miss you.” Stupid, I know. Of all the things I could possibly say to her, I miss you was what came out.

“I miss you, too, baby,” she said, leaning her head to the side sadly. “And I’m so proud of you.”

I smiled as a tear slipped down my cheek. “I’ve been trying really hard to do what you asked me to,” I said.

Now it was her turn to smile. “And you have. Now you must finish it.”

“I don’t know if we’re strong enough,” I answered, biting my lip.

“You’re not,” she said, “if you’re alone. But with all of you together and with our help, we will send Samuel to the place where he belongs.”

“Your help?” And then it was as if a lightbulb had gone off in my head. I looked down at the Cleri below and saw that now, standing beside each of them, were their parents. Not quite as they’d been before, but shining brighter and just a little bit blurry so their features weren’t entirely clear. By this point, Fallon, Jasmine, Sascha, Peter, and the others were barely holding on to the freezing spell and had turned most of their focus to the ones they’d thought were gone forever. They seemed as surprised to see their parents as I was, but no one moved from their spots.

Out of everything in the book, we’d chosen this particular spell as our last defense against the Parrishables because it was meant to invoke the power of our ancestors. Allow them to work their magic through us, so we could be a force much bigger than we actually were. There was nothing in the spell book that had said we’d actually be visited by our family members. That they would appear to us in person. This was a surprise.

Since we were all focusing on the spell to invoke our ancestors and their power, the magic we’d been doing to keep the Parrishables at bay began to dissipate, and as a group, the Parrishables began to gain use of their limbs again. But as soon as they saw the glowing outlines of the Cleri on the porch, they slowed to a stop on their own, confusion on their faces. Then their eyes moved up to the roof, where I was perched. They began to point in surprise and talk in hushed whispers as their gazes fell just behind me. I hesitantly looked back and saw that my mom and I had been joined by dozens of other figures. Each was radiating light and there was a wide range of time periods of dress. And then I recognized two faces.