Page 6 of A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums

“Simmer down,” I whispered to my fingers. The magic didn’t listen. It never listened.

The problem with the wholevegging-outplan was that once I reached my house, ordered takeout from my favorite Chinese place, and plopped down into my favorite chair with a tall glass of icy-pink lemonade, the condensation dripping down the glass—the best way to drink it—my curiosity got the better of me again and I opened Jeffery’s phone again. I open the Dropbox app. All boring finance-related files. I couldn’t pretend to understand all the jargon, but I understood enough to see that there didn’t appear to be any funny business.

File after file, I read for hours. Only stopping to answer the door and pay the delivery driver. Then I hit a file related to a client named “B. el-Zebu.” That was an interesting name. I’d seen al-Whatever names before, but never el-Whatever. I clickedon the file. Every word was written in a language that I didn’t understand. Not one that I recognized. Yet another dead end, or so I thought. I thought about it until I reached the bottom of the file, only to find a second file. This filename caught my attention because Jeffery had named it “Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe.”

This seemed like a weird spot to put a cookie recipe. I clicked on it. My magic went haywire, burning under my skin, boiling my blood until I feared I’d pass out. “What the—” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut and shaking out my hands, trying anything I could think of to get rid of the burning.

The words in the file began to rearrange themselves and I blinked several times to rid myself of the hallucination. They rearranged into an address. Similar, eerily similar to the address I’d gone to today, but it was located in a town like four towns over. Could this be why I’d found nothing at the abandoned building? Because it was the wrong location?

Quickly, I shoved the remnants of my dinner into the refrigerator, slipped on my ballet flats, grabbed up my purse, and headed out to my jeep. In so much of a hurry, I even neglected to turn off the TV and lights. Before I backed out onto the road, I plugged this new address, with the new ZIP Code, into my map app.

The closer I drove to this new address, the more my magic tried to rip itself from my body. It hurt so badly I was forced to pull over two different times to get a grip on the pain. It had never behaved like this before. Once I reached the town of Raven, the town where I needed to be, I took each turn going slowly. Not a star shone in the sky, but the moon burned full and bright.

And then I heard the robotic voice of my map app:Destination on the right.

Chapter

Three

This couldn’t have been right. The only thing on the right was a cemetery. One of those incredibly old ones without modern amenities like streetlights. A wrought-iron gate attached to a rock wall, the kind without mortar, stood proudly stacked with seems tight enough that the thing wasn’t ever going to crumble. Too tall to see over. My fingers felt ready to explode wide open.

Part of me immediately got a case of the willies. But another part of me felt compelled to go inside as if returning home. I didn’t understand it. I also couldn’t resist it. The magic refused to let me.Refused.A large padlock kept the townspeople out. I wrapped my hand around the lock to see if I had any chance of unlocking it and the thing popped open. Just like that. As soon as I touched it, the magic escaped my fingers. It pulled me forward, moving my feet for me.

The unbearable pain changed to this weird, out of control tingling sensation that didn’t hurt one bit. What. In. The. Hell? Like it or not, I felt that I needed to push on and I sighed, shot a quick prayer into the universe that I came out of this little excursion unscathed and started walking.

Tombstones older than my great-great-great grandmother—I imagined her to be the first of us to immigrate to the US from the old country, as the United States only went back as far as the 1600s—speckled the ground along with looming, dead trees. They had to be dead; otherwise, they’d have been full of leaves and not just twisted, spindly branches. These had none. And forget about asking which “old country” my ancestors arrived from because I didn’t have a clue. My parents never said because they’d died, leaving me to go into the foster care system with only a small, ancient, handwritten diary as my sole possession of their lives.

As I grew and asked questions, I found out that a woman who identified herself as being from CPS placed me in an emergency foster care home. That my parents had been killed earlier that night. From what I was told, the journal had been strapped to me, under my clothing. Made from leather, the spine cracking from age. I treasured that book. I just wish it had gone into a little more detail. Oh, I’d asked it too many times to count. The book simply ignored me. Seeing as books didn’t speak. As a kid, I’d wanted to know in order to give myself roots, a family history I could connect with. But then, when the magic began to manifest, I became desperate to know. Was said old country Transylvania? Or possibly Ireland? What other countries were known for magic?

A path lit up for me. Fiery footsteps led the way. I followed diligently because one didn’t simply ignore fiery footprints and my magic made me do it. I followed the trail deeper into the dark. Even my magic started to get a little nervous, twitching along with the tingling, or maybe that was my imagination. Maybe it wasn’t as much nervousness as anxious anticipation.

The path led me to a second, smaller wrought-iron gate, this time attached to a wrought-iron fence surrounding a cement building. A mausoleum. Ihatedmausoleums. They freaked meout in a major way. I just knew some disgusting zombie thing waited inside to suck my brains out.

And then the door creaked open. A red light the color of flames lit the space. I struggled to back away. My feet tried to help me run away, back to my car. My magic pulled me forward. The largest dog probably ever in existence lunged from inside the crypt, snarling and gnashing his jaws.

“Good doggy,” I said, trying and failing to move out of teeth range. He looked exactly like the dog running away from the gas station earlier this afternoon. The dog blinked. Not kidding. It stopped trying to eat me and blinked as if confused by the situation.Join the club.

The twitching and tingling abruptly stopped as my magic stretched out in front of me to run specter-like fingers over his ruff. The moment the magic made contact, a huge, invisible explosion shot out, rippling the air like an atomic bomb, knocking me on my butt, knocking me out. When I came to, Connor, my kidnapper, held me in his arms against his warm body.

I tried to scramble away, but my head still felt dizzy and he held on tightly.

“Settle down,” he ordered.

“Letgo!” I shouted.

Connor looked to the sky. “Is this how it’s always going to be?” he asked no one.

“Howwhatis going to be?”

He sighed.Sighed. Like a hugely affected one.

I rolled my eyes. “Will you please let me go now?”

“No,” he said.

No? What did he mean,no? “I asked nicely.”

“And I turned you downnicely. Now that we both know how to be nice?—”

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