Gotcha / Magic Camp #2
Angie looked around her friend and echoed the cussing. Overnight, their garden patch had wilted and turned brown.
Mud started breathing hard. Her fists clenched.
Leaves pushed out of her scalp and out of her fingernails and, Angie knew, out of her toenails to bunch up in her boots.
Mud bent and put her fingers into the ground, digging into the dirt.
She was reading the land, and Angie wondered what that might feel like, to be so intimately attuned to the land.
Mud cussed again and when she spoke it was nearly a growl, her accent different, her words slow and vicious.
She stood upright and slammed her walking stick tip into the ground as if she was claiming the earth beneath her feet.
Or casting a working that Mud wasn’t supposed to be able to do.
Or making a pronouncement like a queen or something.
“Theys murdered my plants,” she snarled.
“They used the herbicide in the Earth Magic Shed.” Her gaze met Angie’s and it almost seemed as if there were vines snaking inside of Mud’s greenish eyes.
“You’un know that revenge we’ns been talking ’bout?
” Her voice was so soft it was like a whisper, talking in the “hillbilly” accent she saved for friends and family.
“They’s gon’ pay and pay big. And I don’t care if I get thrown outta magic camp forever. ”
That sounded a lot like vengeance, and revenge was dangerous if it was magical. But Mud wasn’t magical in the way Angie was so . . . “Okay,” Angie said, not knowing what Mud might do, but knowing that she was in.
Angie broke the visual contact and walked to the near corner of their garden and stooped.
“They even killed your basils. You loved your basils.” Angie saw a strange pattern beneath a dead tomato plant, green and yellow coiled together like .
. . “Oh, no. Mud,” she whispered. Pushing aside the wilted leaves, she revealed a green snake with yellow-green stripes along its length.
Its head had been neatly severed from its body.
“What are you girls doing?” a voice called.
It was Mirilis, of the Richardson witch clan, an eighteen-year-old witch counselor in charge of the gardens. When she reached them she said, “What the heee-ck happened here?”
“Herbicide,” Mud spat.
“No. How could that happen? Who would put herbicides onto a garden plot?”
Angie picked up Mud’s murdered snake, its body limp in her hands. “Same people who killed a peaceful garter snake.”
“Awww. Thamnophis sirtalis,” Mirilis said. “An Eastern green garter snake. Someone must have accidently hit it with a hoe.”
“Must have,” Mud said, her voice cold as a winter ice storm. Green leaves poked through her brown hair and rustled as if with a hard wind. “Huge mishap. Just like the accident of the herbicide on our garden patch.”
Mirilis avoided the dangerous glint in Mud’s eyes, turning away from the weirdness of the leaves moving on Mud’s head and fingers, and shoved her hands into her pockets.
“I’m sure it was.” Her shoulders went up high, as if she knew she was telling a lie but didn’t know how to deal with the truth.
“You two can start a new garden patch over there.” She nodded to the back of the garden.
“Just requisition some seeds from the Earth Magic Shed.”
“Sure.” Mud took a slow breath and the rustling of her leaves calmed. “We’ll do that. Thank you, Mirilis.”
Mirilis gave a quick nod and walked away, fast.
“She knows. But she’s scared of the girls in Cabin A too,” Mud said.
“We can’t prove it was them,” Angie said, placing the dead snake and its head into Mud’s leafy hands.
“We’uns gon’ find out exactly who done this,” Mud murmured. “Exactly. Who. Did. It. And then I’ll get back my own.” She lifted her eyes to Angie’s again. “I’m gonna get in bad trouble.”
“I guess that’ll mean we both get expelled,” Angie said, thinking that wasn’t really a bad thing, in her opinion.
“You’un still in?”
“I’m in. If no one’s touched the pesticide container since the person who did this, I might be able to pick up a hint of who used it last. They taught us how to calculate a touch working in geometry class. I just need some string and a stick.” The last part was a lie, if a necessary one.
“Imma bury Sir Thamnos first.”
“Okay. I . . . need to go by the cabin and get my stick and string out of my locker.” Angie needed nothing from her cabin except an opportunity to cast an obfuscation working over herself, though she would grab the stick and string anyway.
It was hard to keep secrets. There was no reason to burden her new friend with any of hers.
Mud blew what might have been agreement though her nose, or might have been a sniff. Angie was pretty sure the older girl was crying.
Acting casual—she hoped—Angie walked to Cabin L, which was empty this time of day.
She opened an obfuscation over herself—not actually disappearing from sight, but simply making people not notice her—and made the short trip to the cabin where Carm, Jessa, and the mean girls slept.
Once inside, Angie touched each bunk, tying a slender thread of a marking working to the residual magic on each mattress.
Residual magic was another of the secrets Angie had to keep because her family was planning to patent a residual magic seeing working, mostly because of her.
Three years ago, Angie had pointed out that her Basset Hound, George, always came away coated with EJ’s magic cooties when they played together, magic cooties later being explained to her as, possibly, residual magic.
She would never be credited on the patent, because of those stupid secrets, but her family knew who had led them to a money-making working and her parents planned to put her share of the proceeds into a college fund.
Angie would rather have had a horse, but no one asked her.
Carrying the filaments of her magic in a closed fist, like strings, Angie slipped out of Cabin A and back to Cabin L, where she dropped the obfuscation working and took the path back to Mud, nodding her puke green head at some of the other girls here and there.
Most stared at her hair; a few giggled. All were heading to activities for free time—at the barn or in hammocks, reading, or whatever.
Angie was using her free time to help Mud find out who had killed her plants, her snake, and, maybe, find out who had given her puke green hair. Because it could be the same person.
◆◆◆
Mud gave her a tiny nod, indicating the path was clear, and Angie untied the latch of the Earth Magic Shed, slipping inside.
Magic was energy, math, matter, and intent. A witch or coven could create new workings from scratch, using math, but it was tricky. Most witches spent hours, sometimes weeks, generating the exact maths for a new working.
But a witch didn’t have to create a new working to do magic.
Most witches used older workings with known mathematics.
Using pre-made, confirmed workings and their own stored power, they infused amulets with the workings.
Amulets were like charms, or like bombs, targeted with specific effects that changed reality when activated.
Old maths, deliberately altered, had given her green hair.
She tugged on her heavy, puke green mane.
If Angie had been better at math and less desirous of making a VIP friend, she could have prevented the attack on her hair.
Even now, she could turn her hair back, and she really, really wanted to.
But couldn’t because of the stupid secrets.
Only a very, very few witches, like Angie, could use raw magic.
That was her most important secret, and if that got out, people who wanted to exploit her magic would come looking to recruit her, and they might not take no for an answer.
So Angie never did magic, real magic, as she thought of it, around other witches.
Like other witches, she used mathematics, but in her case, it was to hide her power, not guide it.
Taking the risk of using raw magic, Angie could get back at Carm for turning her hair green, or she could help her new friend and never get caught. Mud wasn’t a witch. Mud would never know how Angie figured out who had poisoned the garden and killed Sir Thamnos.
Through the crack in the Earth Magic Shed door, Angie saw Mud digging Sir Thamnos’ grave, using her own spade, which she kept in a loop in her overalls. She was planning to bury the snake at the edge of the woods.
As Mud dug, she cast her gaze back and forth between the shed and the path to the garden. Mud’s job was to keep away everyone who might be capable of a seeing working—a working that let witches see the energies of magic being used—away from the shed.
Turning her gaze from Mud, Angie pulled the string and stick from her pocket, just in case someone came in, and carefully brought up a witch light to illuminate the shed.
The Earth Magic Shed was more of a warehouse, backing up to the barn and tack room.
It smelled of horse, hay, leather, strong drying herbs like camphor laurel, mint, and rosemary, and also like chemicals.
The floor was swept only now and again, and was littered with clumps of mud from boots, spilled seeds, a balled-up kerchief that looked as if it had been used to wipe down a sweaty horse, loose hay, straw, and pine needles, each kept in different areas of the shed, but all carried through the same door for use.
Horse halters, bridles, and reins hung from hooks.
Dusty saddles rested on racks high on the wall.
The seeds were kept in a locked metal cabinet beneath the horse stuff, which made no sense at all, but Angie wasn’t sure logic had ever played a part in the Earth Magic Shed.
It contained a confusing mixture of garden and horse stuff.