Familiarity Breeds Witchcraft (8 page)

 
He took the burden and hefted it onto his shoulder.

Fern bounced over and opened her arms, as though begging to carry a basket of her own.

Smiling at her daughter, Orianna handed the smallest container to her. “Be very careful. This is the most important one of all. We’ll be in trouble if we don’t have the ingredient for our spell.”

Fern held the tiny basket she’d been given to her chest with both hands. Gemma tried hard not to smile at the child’s serious look and expression.

That kind of personality was what Gemma desperately wanted to nurture in the coven’s witchlings. The world needed more brilliant, passionate, hard-working people like Fern.

The school needed to be rebuilt. In order to do that, she needed to get her wayward feelings under control.

Secret Hallow needed Fox’s help more than Gemma wanted to reserve Fox for herself.

Orianna ruffled Fern’s hair and gathered up the rest of the supplies. She smiled at Gemma as she walked past. “See you later?”

 
“Sure.” Gemma couldn’t continue to hide away. She had to get over herself.

 
She watched the trio walk away, both sorry to see them go and relieved to be on her own again. Gemma felt easier with only her own raw emotions to handle, even with no idea how to handle what she felt, and couldn’t deal with the happiness of the burgeoning relationship between Orianna and Caedmon at the same time she felt so much angst.
 

Gemma stepped out of the ruin onto the grassy field. Golden light warmed her skin, the sun chasing away the chill, though a few clouds in the distance foretold of a possible weather change later on in the day.
 

Closing her eyes, she took a couple deep breaths. She pushed all her jumbled and confused thoughts into the back of her mind and focused her magic.

As a direct descendant of Emilia Ash, carrying traces of her blood and power, she might have more success restoring the structure than the rest of the coven. Of course, she forgot to consider the fact that her sister, also a blood Ash, had participated in the previous failed rituals.
 

She pressed her palms flat against the warm earth as she leaned back, supporting her stretched-out form with the strength of her arms as she drew power from the ground below her. Sunlight caused her to see red on the backs of her closed lids.

Though she was a techno-witch, she only needed to draw on her most basic magic skills to see the lines of power flowing throughout Secret Hallow.

It was a beautiful thing, the magic of the village. A spiderweb that linked herself with the coven, the Samhain Grove, the Elder Tree, and the world outside. It sparkled in her mind like cascading fireflies.

“Let’s see what we can do,” Gemma murmured to herself.

She tapped into her specialty: summoning and generating technology.

Power radiated out from her toward the ruins. In her mind she saw the progress of the myriad decaying wires dangling within the crumbling wall remnants as they twisted and stretched, reforming into complete pieces before reconnecting to the various junction boxes, switches, and outlets. Any magical practitioner needed to maintain the delicate balance between spells and their specialized powers; since Gemma had an affinity for all things wired she did better with this part of the reconstruction than she would with the restoration of the foundation, walls, and roof.
 

She hummed under her breath to help her workings. Since she hadn’t set up any formal circles or supplies, she needed all the help she could get. A theory nagged at the back of her mind that the coven’s previous failure may have been due to their too-fussy castings, so she tried hard not to become too rigid with her own working. While the group had been having fun during breaks, they hadn’t seemed to enjoy the actual spell work, so any progress they’d made may have been too brittle to stand firm. She hoped channeling joy into her own spells might produce a different outcome.

Gemma felt tendrils throughout the Academy coming together, almost as though she were touching every part of the building with her bare hands, supporting wires with little effort on her part.

She sensed definite progress and felt if she could just get in just a little deeper…a little bit further…she’d reach a point where the entire place returned to the glory of its’ heyday without a hitch.

She felt the exact instant things started to break down.
 

As she approached the peak of her spell work, she sensed holes in the building where wiring and other vitals pieces hadn’t reconnected, the gaps so large they prevented the building from attaining structural integrity. She never should have attempted such a big job on her own. Of course, she didn’t come to that realization until the structure once more began to collapse.

Her extremities trembled with exertion as she tried to push beyond her impending failure.

The few walls she’d reconstructed fell in with a whooshing sound and a cloud of dust.

With a sigh, she refocused on her own body, the remnants of magic returning to her. She felt alone with the loss of connection to the powers of the outside world.

To her regret, she hadn’t done any better than the rest of the coven.

“Shame,” she said aloud as she got up, dusting off her hands and knees. She shook the dust out of her skirts and straightened her hair. A fine sheen of sweat covered her from head to toe from her exertions. When she got home, she’d need to shower and do a load of laundry, something she hadn’t done in a few days. She’d been too caught up in the idea of rebuilding the school to think about her personal hygiene.

She pulled out her phone and turned up the brightness so she could see the screen out in the brilliant daylight. Still somewhat weak and trembling, she leaned against a post for support as she loaded the ComePayMe site.

Gemma stared at the bar graph with the red line near the top of the page.

It was full again. More than full.

Hadn’t Fox retracted her donation?

A further inspection of the page revealed that not only was the project fully funded again, they’d received over
250 percent
of their goal.

She toggled another page and found dozens of unfamiliar names and comments.
Love Foxy and Friends! A friend of Fox’s is a friend of ours!
Can Foxy and Friends do a story about a magical school?
 

Fox!
 

Clicking through to the Foxy and Friends site, she brought up the most recent blog post.

One of my best friends in the world is trying to put together a magical school for kiddos who started out the way I did
, she’d written.
The town where she lives is amazing and this is a great project headed by a fantastic person. Your support would mean the world to me.

Somehow, Gemma felt worse than ever. She’d been so fixated on her own pain while she tried to keep her feelings under control and Fox was…well, being
Fox
. A wonderful, thoughtful person, looking to Gemma for help.
 

“Gem?”

She looked up to see Enid walking toward her at a brisk pace with a concerned expression. Enid must’ve been feeling Gemma’s tumultuous emotions, which wasn’t a surprise since the two of them tended to be so in tune with each other. They’d always been very close.
 

“Enid.” A wave of relief washed over her as she held out her phone. Her sister’s matter-of-fact ways could be a calming influence. “Did you see what Fox did? After I asked her to take the donation back and everything. I think she’s doing too much.”

“I did.” Enid ignored the phone as she looked into Gemma’s eyes. “But Gemma—”

She looked back down at the screen. “This is really nice and all, but …”

“
Gem
,” Enid said again in an unfamiliar and insistent tone of voice.

Gemma looked up with a frown. She sensed something odd. “What?”

Enid motioned over her shoulder with her thumb. In a low voice, she said, “Behind me.”

Her eyes followed her sister’s movement and her heart skipped a beat as she saw…

“Hi!” FeistyFox95 stood back on the sidewalk, just beyond the fence, smiling and waving.

Gemma blinked once, hard, hoping to clear her vision. But her eyes weren’t playing tricks.

Fox, in the flesh, bounced in place a couple times before jogging through the gate and across the field to join the two sisters. As usual, she wore black from head to toe, the outfit hugging her curves. Gemma’s glance dropped to the low neckline of the form-fitting tank showing off Fox’s chest piece: the tattoo of her cartoon fox, tangled in cobwebs, sitting in an oversized cauldron.

“She wanted to come find you right away,” Enid said. She cleared her throat. “If you want to complain to her about the donations, now’s your chance.”

FOX, WAS
HERE
, and
real
.
 

Gemma felt the way she imagined she might if she met some kind of celebrity. She knew Fox was a real person. They’d spoken a bunch of different ways and she’d seen a million places online proving Fox to be a person, but seeing her online friend in Secret Hallow seemed unreal somehow. She couldn’t reconcile the person she knew from their online interactions with the one who now stood in front of her.

In a funny coincidence, Fox seemed to feel the same way.

“Isn’t this weird?” Fox moved closer and looked up with an amused expression as they both realized Gemma towered over her. Neither of them had given a thought to possible height differences when they’d talked in the past so the discovery came as an unexpected surprise.

Gemma gave a weird bark of a laugh. The one she knew Enid would recognize as her nervous tic. She couldn’t help herself.

Fox’s smile widened. She wore a purplish shade of lipstick that wouldn’t look very good on most people, but accentuated her snakebite piercings in a beautiful way. She’d also dyed her mohawk a similar shade and the slight breeze ruffled her lavender hair. As usual, she outlined her eyes with dark slashes of liner in a way that reminded Gemma of the images she’d seen of ancient Egyptian queens. Forcing herself to look away, Gemma struggled to tame her racing thoughts.
 

“How?” She stopped to take a breath and clear her throat when her voice cracked. “I just…you didn’t say anything last night.”

“Surprise!” Fox clasped her hands behind her back, rocking back on her heels, mohawk swaying. “Enid asked if I could come out!”

“
You
?” Gemma whirled to find Enid grinning at her. “You didn’t say a word.” She knew her sister would easily read her
you’re in so much trouble
look. In fact, if Enid weren’t Gemma’s favorite person on the planet, she would be in big
trouble.
 

Crossing her arms over her chest in a move Gemma well recognized from past disagreements, she said, “I thought we should consult with Fox about the spell in person. That way we don’t have to send you off to Seattle as an intermediary. This will be much easier with everyone involved in the same place.”

“Spell?”

“The love spell, silly. Remember.” Enid moved close enough to lay a comforting hand on Gemma’s arm. “I’m glad she came out because we’ve figured out that she wants a love
seeking
spell. We’re not trying to make anyone fall in love at all. This is all about her finding the potential of a relationship. We’ll just point Fox in the right direction, like a super accurate dating app. Isn’t that better than what we thought we’d be casting?”

“I…” Gemma couldn’t seem think straight. Would it be any better to point Fox toward potential love than hooking her up with it directly? “Sure. Yeah.” She looked over at the newcomer and realized she could never expect someone as gorgeous as Fox to be interested in her as anything other than a friend. “Is that really what you want?”

Fox gave an eager nod that stirred the taller strip of hair atop of her head.
 

Gemma couldn’t stop staring at her: the twinkle in her eye, the skimpy tank
 

top revealing most of her chest tattoo, the curves accentuated by her black outfit. She looked even more gorgeous in person than she had in all the photos she’d sent. How could anyone be so perfect?

She started when Fox spoke again. “I want you to do this because you know so much. You’re familiar with the spell—and know more about me than most other people. You’re the perfect choice.”

“But…I didn’t think about a love seeking spell. I thought you meant something else.”

“You do know how to do them, don’t you?”

Gemma gave a non-committal shrug, feeling weird again. She couldn’t believe she’d misread Fox’s intentions. That Fox would still want her to cast the spell after the misunderstanding boggled her mind.
 

As though understanding how Gemma felt, Enid came to the rescue. “We’re standing on school property right now. This used to be the Ash Academy, and hopefully will be again soon! Would you like to look around?”

Fox clapped her hands with delight. “Please.” She smiled at Gemma. “I’m jazzed to be here!” For such a petite person, she exuded a boundless energy that seemed too big for her, like an adorable cartoon character.

“After you.” Enid waved them forward.

Taking the lead, grateful for the chance to regain some sense of self-control, Gemma started them on the usual circuit of the ruins: through the front entry to what remained of the stairway where they climbed the few existing steps to see the nice view of the outline of the ground-level rooms. They then took the full circuit of the exterior to put everything in perspective. As it had when she was a child, the site once again came alive for her.
 

Fox “oohed” and “ahhed” at everything; she even gave an extra ‘ooh’ of glee and clapped her hands when a tree dropped a golden-red leaf at her feet. She bent and picked up a handful, tossing them in the air, then whirled a circle as they fluttered to the ground around her. Each of her movements looked model-worthy enough to be photographed and published in some high fashion magazine. She seemed very at ease with herself and right at home in her new surroundings.