Page 6 of School Spirits
I had always looked younger than I was. “I’ll be sixteen next month,” I told her, and she gave a low whistle. “My, my, time is flying. When I first met you, Ash, Izzy was what? Five? Maybe six? It was right after her daddy died, and—”
“We didn’t come here to chat, Maya,” Mom broke in. “I wanted to go through the file.”
Maya rolled her big blue eyes. “That’s it? You could’ve e-mailed, you know. You didn’t have to hike all the way out here for that kind of thing. I thought at the very least you wanted another locator spell. See if we’d have any luck finding your girl this time.”
CHAPTER 4
With that, she rose to her feet and went back into the kitchen. While she pulled things out of cabinets and drawers, I leaned closer to Mom. “A locator spell? For Finn?”
“Hush, Izzy.” She said it calmly, but her shoulders were stiff, and she was bouncing one foot up and down.
“She’s awitch?” I hissed. “You went to a witch looking for Finn and you never told me?”
“It was none of your business.” Mom’s voice was sharper now, her hands digging into her thighs, and I jerked my head back like she had slapped me. To be honest, I kind of felt like she had.
Then Mom sighed and leaned closer to me, her voice softer as she said, “Iz.”
I shook my head, biting off anything else I wanted to ask about Finn. Instead, I said, “I couldn’t feel her. Maya. And I can always sense witches.”
“I’m ahedgewitch,” Maya said, coming back into the living room holding a folder overflowing with paper despite all the rubber bands wrapped around it. “Which is why your mother is insulting me greatly by using me to gather this sort of stuff.” She waved the folder a little, and few Post-it notes fell out.
“What’s in there?” I asked, and Maya sighed, pulling the rubber bands off the folder.
“Articles, weird things that popped up on the Internet… Basically, I keep an eye out for any news story that seems to involve the supernatural.”
I turned to Mom. “This is how you find cases?”
Mom had never looked sheepish in her life, I was willing to bet, but something really close to that expression crossed her face now. “Not always. But sometimes it makes sense to…outsource.”
I knew Mom had friends who helped her out on cases from time to time. There was the guy who got her the boat when she had to find those killer mermaids, and we always seemed to have plenty of money that came from some mysterious source. But a middle-aged lady in the middle of nowhere collecting articles about possible supernatural happenings? That seemed kind of…lame.
As Maya sat down in front of the coffee table, I pulled the sleeves of my shirt over my hands and asked, “What’s a hedge witch?”
Clearing all the feet away, Maya opened the folder. “The kind of witches you’re used to are born that way. What is that stupid word they have for themselves?”
“Prodigium,” Mom and I answered in unison.
“Right, well, Prodigium come into their powers at what, twelve? Thirteen? And they can just do magic. No wands, no spell books necessary unless they’re trying to do the super-dark crap. Point is, it’s an inborn ability.” Maya began paging through the papers. Some were newspaper articles with big garish headlines. I spotted one that blared,SEA MONSTER SPOTTED AT NEW ENGLAND RESORT!
“Now, it strikes me that this is incredibly unfair,” Maya continued. A pair of glasses dangled from a beaded chain around her neck, and she picked them up, balancing them on the end of her nose as she continued to scan the papers. An article that seemed to be about crop circles drifted to the carpet.
“Why should some people be born gods while the rest of us poor mortals have to struggle through the mud of humanity, trying—”
“Enough, Maya.” Mom turned to me. “A hedge witch is someone who can do magic, but they’ve learned it from books. And their abilities are severely limited compared to natural witches.”
“I resent the termhedge witch,” Maya said with a haughty lift of her shoulders. “What I do is every bit as natural as what fancy Latin witches can do. If anything, hedge magic is more elegant.”
I glanced at the little pile of feet on the carpet and bit back a sarcastic comment.
“Ah,” Maya said at last, pulling out a large piece of paper. “Here’s the one I was looking for. Caught my eye because it happened so close by.”
She handed it to Mom, and I leaned so that I could read it over her shoulder. It was a photocopy of a newspaper piece. There was a grainy photo of stretcher being pulled out of a large brick building, police tape everywhere. The caption read,STILL NO LEADS IN ATTACK ON POPULAR TEACHER.
“What happened?” I tapped the picture.
“Was just a few months ago,” Maya said. “I remember it because that town in Mississippi was close enough to here that it made the local news. The science teacher was found nearly dead from a blow to the head.”
“Okay, well, that seems awful but not necessarily supernatural,” I said, but Mom shook her head. Pointing to a section of the article, she said, “Read this part. ‘Police are particularly baffled as David Snyder was found in a roomlocked from the inside.’ No witnesses, no fingerprints. And he swears he was alone in the room.”
