Hexes and Exes Read online

  Thatch set off across a hallway, gazing at school banners with team colors, but his eyes didn’t actually fix on anything. He stared into the past more than the present. “I teased Gertrude and told her she was too beautiful. The night she told me I could kiss her, I asked her how did I know I wanted to kiss her?

  “How did I know I wished to kiss her of my own free will and it wasn’t her using magic to seduce me? She might have bewitched me, I said. For all I knew, she intended to lure me into the forest to drown me in the stream.” A bitter laugh erupted from his throat. “When I told her that, I thought I was being funny. Flirtatious. Can you believe it?”

  I could hear him saying this in his dry British way, thinking he was clever.

  He waved a hand at a painting of an old wizened man on the wall. “Some Witchkin age slowly and others quickly. Some mask their wrinkles with glamour. It all depends on the kind of magic they specialize in and the intensity of their affinity. Those with more Fae blood age slowly.”

  I wondered which was the case for him: slow aging or glamour. He had to be close to a hundred years old.

  “Miss Periwinkle was very good at glamour spells, as good as a Fae, I’d wager. She had to be with the amount of fertility magic she possessed, or she would have driven everyone around her mad with pining.” His lips thinned into a bitter smile.

  “Your mother had a gift for drawing out and magnifying the affinity of others. You may have noticed this in yourself at times. Gertrude—ahem—Miss Periwinkle wanted your mother’s assistance with her glamour spells. She wanted to diminish her siren magic. Every day she had to reapply the same glamour to get rid of her siren beauty, and it never fully masked what she was. If she could make a permanent glamour, she wouldn’t have to do it every day. She could make herself not just give the illusion she was like everyone else, but be like everyone else.

  His lips flattened into a grim line. “I’d touched on Gertrude’s sore spot. She yearned to be like everyone else. She thought I would be more apt to love her if she changed for me. Not that she told Alouette this was the reason why she wanted help with the glamour.”

  “Your mother agreed to assist Miss Periwinkle with a complex spell to try to alleviate her siren magic. Instead, something went terribly wrong. Perhaps it was a flaw in the spell, or maybe it was simply Alouette Loraline’s natural . . . proclivities giving her too much magic to know what to do with. In any case, the magic multiplied all the energy your mother had funneled into Gertrude to diminish her beauty. Miss Periwinkle aged overnight. She was still in her early twenties but now looked seventy. In the process of this spell, much of her magic was drained, and it has taken her years to recharge her affinity.

  “For some reason, she cannot find fault in me when I was the one who made her think she needed to become something other than what she was. She blames your mother for the accident, and through association, you.”

  I nodded in sympathy for him and Miss Periwinkle.

  When we had brought Maddy to the school, other teachers had hinted Miss Periwinkle was a siren, but I hadn’t believed it. At the time, someone had mentioned the siren’s lovers who had died. Thatch had been the one to change the subject.

  “One of the staff said there were a bunch of murders when the siren had been at the school,” I said. “They said she killed them.”

  “Sebastian Reade said that. He was merely repeating what he heard, and he didn’t have all the facts,” Thatch grimaced. “Miss Periwinkle never killed anyone. It was some bedazzled youth who had fallen for her beauty. He thought he should kill off his competition. She was horrified when she learned about what he’d done. It was one of the reasons she left after high school, and probably a contributing reason she desired to diminish her true self with glamour after my careless remark.”

  He fell into silence. We passed the portrait of Alouette Loraline on the wall. Green serpents coiled around the sleeves of her black dress. They looked still and static when I stared at it straight on, but out of the corner of my eye they shifted. Alouette Loraline’s eyes, such a dark shade of indigo they appeared black, watched me slyly.

  “Perhaps you can grasp the importance of Miss Periwinkle’s role in Maddy’s education. Glamours are not my specialty, but I can do them. Vega teaches minor glamours, mostly camouflage and practical illusions that come in handy when escaping Fae. Masking a siren’s beauty is a different matter. Every day we must renew the spell, and it takes energy to do so.

  “I believe Miss Periwinkle’s knowledge of glamours would be invaluable in masking Maddy, if only I can convince her to do so.”

  “That’s . . . practical,” I said. What else had I expected from Thatch? That he still fancied Miss Periwinkle?

  I had mixed feelings about everything he’d told me. I understood all the details of what had happened to Miss Periwinkle—but there wasn’t anything I could do to change that. I felt bad for her, and worse that Thatch was leading her on to convince her to remedy a student’s magical problem. I got he was doing it to help Maddy, but I couldn’t help feeling like Miss Periwinkle was going to feel used. It reminded me of what Bart had said the other night, about Thatch asking for a favor in return for doing a good deed.

  The one good thing out of all this was that Thatch had been more forthcoming about his plan with Miss Periwinkle than anything else. Maybe he was starting to trust me, and we were becoming friends. He didn’t seem to have a nefarious motive in telling me this.

  I offered him a smile. “What happened between you and Miss Periwinkle after her accident?”

  “That is none of your business.” His face remained expressionless.

  “Are you still . . . interested in her? Or are you just friends?”

  He lifted his nose up into the air. “I don’t have the time or energy for friends. I have no interest in Gertrude Periwinkle other than as a mentor for Maddy.”

  He might have been telling the truth, but he had been warm and friendly with her in a way he rarely was with me. I would have sworn there was more to his pandering than to use her as a mentor. I could never tell what was the lie and what was the truth with Felix Thatch.

  He walked briskly on. “Now if you will leave me be, and stop snooping, I will be able to continue working on Miss Periwinkle and try to convince her to help us with Maddy.”

  “Right. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to snoop.” That wasn’t my original reason for being in the library anyway. “I was looking for you. I got a dragon egg for you.” Sort of.

  His brow lifted in surprise. “It’s the last ingredient for the spell. The last ingredient—aside from virgin’s tears.”

  I hadn’t achieved that one yet either.

  I pulled the glass jar out of my pocket. It looked like someone had tried to prep an omelet, only forgotten to take out the egg shells. “Is this going to be a problem?”

  He gave me a sharp look that said, Duh. He held the jar up and squinted at it in the bluish light cast by a sconce on the wall.

  Abruptly, he turned away and descended the steps two at a time and quickly, so I had to run to keep up. I followed him through the ancient stone depths of the dungeon. The light from the sconces alternated between gold and blue flames.

  “How did you come by this egg?” he asked. “Please tell me you didn’t crawl into a cave and risk being burned to retrieve it.”

  “Bart gave it to me last night. He made me meet him out in the forest alone. I thought Josie was with me—she was supposed to be—but something happened. I didn’t even know she wasn’t there because I heard someone out there with us. I think someone followed me. At first I thought it was a ghost, but—”

  I hesitated upon seeing his reproachful look. “I know it isn’t a ghost. It’s the invisible man.”

  He nodded.

  “Then the ghost—invisible man—attacked me!”

  The alarm on Thatch’s face turned to annoyance as I went on. “He grabbed my phone, and I tried to wrestle it away from him. The egg was still in my pocket, and he crushed i
t. I did the best I could to get all of it out. I probably lost half the yolk and albumen, but I got all of the shell.

  “You keep telling me the ghost is in my head, but he’s not. He’s real, and he’s been ruining my life.” I stopped to take a breath. “And he’s Fae. My phone burned him. That’s how I know. He’s evil like Julian. That’s why he wanted my phone and crushed the dragon egg.”

  “Such impeccable logic.” Thatch waved his wand at the door to his classroom, which unlocked and opened. “What you fail to understand is how magic truly works.”

  As we approached the door on the other side of the room, the door behind us closed and the next one opened. “Invismo isn’t Fae. Your phone burned him because it reacted with a powerful glamour that makes him invisible. His invisibility is an asset to Mr. Khaba, which is why he hired him on.” We passed through the dungeon full of torture equipment to his office. “Additionally, I must remind you, I told you not to let the school’s disciplinarian catch you with electronics. In the future, I would suggest you follow the school rules.”

  “I don’t suppose you might be able to convince Mr. Khaba to give my phone back?”

  He didn’t answer. In the closet of his office, Thatch removed a wooden box from a shelf. His shelves were full of supplies: beakers, vials, cauldrons, labeled jars of herbs, and eyeballs. I wasn’t able to get a good look at all he had in there before he closed the door.

  He took out a pair of copper goggles with long lenses like binoculars, only he had to slide lenses out until he found his preferred adjustment. He used tweezers to lift a shard of eggshell from the jar. “This doesn’t come from a dragon. It’s a golden goose egg. You’ve been duped.”

  “What? No!” Bart had said it was a dragon egg, hadn’t he? Had I misunderstood? “Will that help Derrick? Can you use it as a substitute?”

  “No.” He removed his steampunk goggles. “What about the tears? Have you at least managed that one?”

  My shoulders sank in defeat. “No.”

  “You do understand a Fae curse is practically unstoppable. There’s only so much I can do to suppress the effects of the Raven Queen’s spell through temporary remedies.”

  “But he’s not getting worse, right?” I asked. “She’s not torturing him, is she?”

  “Derrick is a ticking clock about to explode. All I can do is keep him from the variables most likely to trigger his deterioration. Like you.”

  “What do you mean? Deterioration?” I swallowed. “How is he deteriorating?”

  “This spell might be the only viable solution to keep him from killing you and turning him into one of her minions forever, and you can’t even manage to bring me the simplest of ingredients.” He pushed the jar of shattered dragon egg away from himself.

  My day just kept getting crappier. How was I supposed to save Derrick now?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Flight of the Bumble Pegasus

  Maddy accompanied me to Coach Kutchi’s pegasus-flying class during my fifth-period prep. I really wanted to learn to fly on a broom like a real witch, but I’d missed that lesson, which she’d covered during the first semester. I would have to wait until the following year when she taught the class again to learn that. Then again, pegasus flying sounded like it would be fun.

  “Have you ever ridden a horse?” Maddy asked, as we walked to the stables situated across the grounds.

  I glanced back at the ruined remains of the tower my mother had destroyed on the other side of the school. “Not a horse. Just a unicorn.”

  “Sweet! Will I get to learn that too? Hailey told me the unicorns in the school stables are way better behaved than the feral ones.” Her breath came out as a cloud in the chilly winter air.

  “By better behaved, I think you mean they don’t talk. The school unicorns are more of an equestrian-team kind of thing. You’d have to be in after-school sports for that.”

  “Oh,” she said, her shoulders deflating. “There are fees for that, aren’t there?”

  “Probably for sports.” I grimaced. “But there isn’t a fee for art club. That’s fun too, isn’t it?”

  She nodded glumly.

  We assembled outside the stable with the rest of the students. Our feet crunched over frozen blades of grass as we shuffled around and huddled together for warmth. I scanned the crowd, looking for familiar students who would make Maddy feel welcome.

  I waved to Chase Othello, a teenager with purple hair who had taken my class both semesters. The boy standing next to her waved, his eyes locked on Maddy. Chase punched him in the shoulder and glared at Maddy. Several of the girls stared at her, their mouths set in flat lines that didn’t invite conversation.

  “Hi, Maddy,” one of the boys said, winking at her.

  She glanced away shyly. Some of the mother-of-pearl beauty of her natural skin broke through the magic hiding her true self. When Maddy peeked at the boy, he was still drooling. The glamour Thatch and Vega had enchanted Maddy with wasn’t working anymore. She needed a different kind of magic. Thatch had said Miss Periwinkle would make a good mentor because she was a siren and knew how to control that affinity. Obviously the offerings of library books and paste weren’t enough to get on her good side.

  More students gathered. Boys vied for Maddy’s attention. Girls glared at her.

  Maddy hugged her arms around herself. “Can we study in your room today? I don’t want to learn about pegasi anymore.”

  I didn’t blame her, but she was going to have to learn to deal with this. I hated saying no. “Let’s try a couple more minutes.”

  Two petite figures joined the class, both so bundled up over their uniforms that I didn’t recognize them. Only when I saw Greenie’s mossy skin nestled between her hat and scarf did I realize the other figure was Imani. Both girls came over to us smiling.

  “We just switched to this period! Isn’t it exciting?” Greenie said, jumping up and down beside me.

  Imani readjusted her beanie over her black braids. Standing next to Maddy’s pale complexion made the earthy shade of her skin glow. “This is going to be the best! I’ve always wanted to learn how to ride a horse. Do they really fly? Aren’t you excited, Miss Lawrence?”

  Maddy visibly relaxed now that she was surrounded by other girls she knew.

  Coach Kutchi exited the stable, leading a white pegasus as pale as the ice that clung to the blades of grass under our feet. Students oohed and aahed. I stood on tiptoe to see the immense wings folded on the pegasus’s back. A boy with a shaggy mop of hair slipped up to Maddy and handed her a note. I snatched it away and tucked it into my pocket. His face turned crimson.

  “We need to review,” the coach said. “If all goes well, we will be flying next class.”

  The advantage of a rotating A/B block schedule was that it allowed a ninety-minute period for classes at the greenhouse and stable, which took longer to walk to than the main building. The disadvantage was that having odd classes on A days and even classes on B days meant students pretty much forgot everything they’d learned two days before. Coach Kutchi assessed what students remembered about pegasus etiquette.

  A boy with red hair sidled up to us. Of course Ben O’Sullivan would be in this class. He still owed me a favor from when I’d given him the Heimlich maneuver last semester, as was the tradition in the Unseen Realm after you saved someone’s life. If I asked him to stay away from Maddy, I wondered if he actually would.

  He leaned closer, his breath clouding over Maddy’s face. “My friends tell me I’m too short for you.”

  Maddy was a head taller than him.

  “Shh.” I held a finger to my lips and gave him a stern glare.

  He waited a minute before continuing. “I think I’m the perfect height for you, if you catch my meaning.” He ogled her breasts, which were eye level for him, though she was so bundled up he would have had to be Superman to get an eyeful.

  I elbowed myself between them. “Shame on you for that inappropriate remark. Five points from your team.”

/>   He laughed like he didn’t care.

  “Go to the other side of the group where you’ll be less distracted,” I said.

  Coach Kutchi cleared her throat. “Ahem, Miss Lawrence, if you could refrain from speaking while I’m giving instructions, perhaps my students would be able to hear.”

  Boys continued to wave at Maddy while the P.E. teacher reviewed expectations. Maddy stared at the ground, avoiding the gaze of boys who waved at her. Something had to be done for Maddy. But if I talked to Miss Periwinkle on her behalf, it might make everything worse. There had to be someone else who could help her.

  Coach Kutchi allowed a group of twelve students to walk a dozen pegasi out of the stables, showing off their memory of how to handle the animals as they led them by their reins. The animals all looked the same, and none of them talked. They weren’t like the feral unicorns.

  I was in the last group with Maddy, keeping an eye on her and her steed as they marched immediately in front of me. Because I was last, I benefited from watching everyone else’s failings. Out of thirty-two students, only ten were deemed worthy of demonstrating enough memory to be ready for riding. It didn’t surprise me Imani and Greenie were selected; they were good students and studied. Maddy and I had reviewed together in study club the afternoon before, so I was pleased both of us made Coach Kutchi’s cut.

  My pegasus was white like the others, but with a glittery mane. I checked the saddle, the reins, examined the hooves, and did all the preliminaries for flight as if I was actually going to fly.

  Coach Kutchi gave me the go-ahead to mount. “Remember, all you are doing is riding on her back and walking her to the goalpost and back today.”

  I nodded. I guided my horse to the starting point and mounted. Other students had already set off toward their goal at a leisurely pace.

  “Him,” the pegasus whispered.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She said her. I’m a him.” The equestrian had a Bronx accent that sounded a lot like Bart.