Gotcha / Magic Camp #3
The gallon-sized herbicide sprayers were in a pile in the far corner with the backpack harnesses worn by staff when they needed to sweep a large weedy area.
There was only one reason a place with so many earth witches on staff would need herbicide, and that was kudzu.
Kudzu was the devil’s sidekick, according to her mama.
Even death magic (another thing Angie had to keep secret) couldn’t kill its roots.
The spades, clippers, hoes, and other gardening hand tools were hanging from sturdy hooks on the front pegboard wall. Angie started there, using an illumination working to spot a tool carrying a smear of blood.
The premade working landed on a hoe blade. It was the means of snake murder. She already had motive—the girls in Cabin A were full of it. Now, she just needed to know who. Angie backed carefully away, not touching the hoe.
She scuffed a clean spot on the wood plank floor and sat, still holding the threads that were attached to the bunks in Cabin A.
She also had the worthless stick, so she might as well use it.
She tied the strands to it, using the stick as an anchor.
She reached out to the handles of the gallon-sized poison containers.
One by one, she touched the handles of each poison spray container, waiting for the residual magic tied to a bunk to recognize itself on a handle.
There were ten girls in Cabin A, and Angie hit it lucky on her sixth try, the strand tied to one particular bunk in the cabin.
The strand of residual energy tingled and quivered in her hand.
She didn’t stop there, however, and, on strand eight, she got another hit on a different bunk.
Strands nine and ten were duds. Two of the ten girls in the mean girls’ cabin, were guilty of plant murder.
Using the same method, she touched the strands to the handle of the bloody hoe hanging on the wall.
Not surprisingly, one of the same two girls had killed Mud’s pet snake.
Now, all she had to do was figure out which bunks went with which witch.
She released the eight strands that were no longer of interest to her.
Her magic disconnected from theirs and dissipated.
She sent a tiny mental vibration along the snake-killer’s magic to turn it faintly more red, leaving the other yellow, so she could tell them apart.
She pulled the two strands tight, backing up in the shed, shuffling her feet toward the seed locker.
When they were tight as wires, Angie sent a buzz of heat along the two strands. The heat of raw magic. Where her magic touched a bunk, the trace of the marking magic changed.
The marking slid into the wood of each bunk, into the grooves and the grain, penetrating the cut ends of the boards. Angie drew on her inner power, feeding the energies, altering them on the fly. When she was done, the residual magic in each bunk had transformed.
Residual energy was faint, what her mom called subtle.
No one would see it, even with a seeing working, unless they were specifically looking for a marking working that had been twisted into a different kind of working, one close to a claiming working, but not quite.
It wasn’t a working that had actually existed until now.
That was Angie’s gift—altering raw power into a purpose.
Using raw magic, without a working, meant Angie had broken the family rules.
Altering magic was one of the many things Angie was not allowed to do.
She had combined two workings without knowing the outcome. Except, she did know. She always knew.
Now, the two bunks were marked with her own residual magical energies, with her own power. By morning, the girls who slept in them would carry Angie’s magic around. After they slept in the bunks, the snake killer’s residual magic would be red, the other girl’s would be orange.
Angie had a hunch—not exactly a knowing, not like precog or anything—just a hunch, that one of the residual-marked magic strands would be tagging along attached to Carm come morning. Carmelina, the mean witch who had given Angie bad mathematics, causing Angie herself to turn her hair puke green.
All she had to do was watch and see who carried her energies at breakfast in the morning and she would know which girl was the plant poisoner and which girl was both poisoner and snake killer. After that, she’d figure out the next steps.
But . . . Angie curled a puke green strand of hair around her finger.
This strand had a few Pepto-Bismol pink hairs woven in.
Gross hair she could fix when she got home.
Puke hair was nothing. Mud was grieving.
Mud was Angie’s friend. Maybe her only friend in all the world who liked her for herself.
And someone had hurt Mud. Therefore . . .
Therefore Angie was hurt. This was a strange feeling, to hurt for someone who wasn’t family, but she did.
Angie still held faint traces of residual magic in her hand. Studying the threads, she twirled them in her fingers, thinking.
If Carm was one of the witches who had hurt Mud, a dangerous part of Angie wanted to cast a dark working—known as a curse—to get the girl back.
Her parents had told her that revenge often metamorphosed into dangerous magic, not simply against the intended recipient but against the caster of the curse.
Curses tended to backfire, and when they did, the backfire bounced back and delivered more curse damage to the caster of the curse than the intended recipient.
Angie shoved the thought of a curse away and tied off the last of her residual magic, before anger and desire became intent, but .
. . it was a little too late. A tiny bit of her longing for vengeance blended into her shadow, as if it were alive.
She had to remove the intent and the darkness.
Now! Angie popped the last of the threads attached to Cabin A off and sent them spinning back to the cabin and reached to her left foot. She began to unweave the dark intent.
Before she could completely remove the desire to do harm and separate it from her shadow, Mud said hi to someone, speaking loudly enough for Angie to hear.
Holding the intent, Angie gathered up her stick and string, carrying them out of the shed and into the daylight.
Two girls from Cabin B, a cabin where mostly second year students lived, entered the shed, ignoring her as if she wasn’t alive.
Angie was a kid so, to the older witches, maybe she wasn’t alive. “You’re dead to me,” was a real thing for some people. Mud said her family called it shunning.
Mud and a witch her age were walking toward the far field for archery class, talking. Pivoting on her walking stick, Mud glanced back once in question.
Angie gave her a thumbs up and Mud offered her a rare, big grin.
But the short exchange slowed Angie down just enough.
By the time she got to a safe place where she could work at unbraiding the thread of dark intent—a quiet corner to the side of the greenhouse door—the intent was gone.
Angie couldn’t see the dark thread attached anywhere.
Which meant one of two things: it had lost power, broken free, and disappeared, or it had merged with her magic.
Currently, the greenhouse was empty, so Angie took a chance, opened the unlocked door, and slipped in.
On tables and the sloped concrete floor were the flowers, herbs, and veggies the sixteen- and seventeen-year-old earth witches worked on, teaching plants to do new things—grow bigger fruit, ripen faster, be less water dependent.
There were also dwarf trees and bonsai, and stone sculptures all over the place.
Instantly, Angie spotted the table used by the girls from Cabin A, the familiar residual magic a pale haze around the flowers and the stone sculptures.
Angie walked around the table, knowing that Mud could probably name every flower, tell her what its medicinal qualities were, what nutrients it needed to thrive, and probably its Latin name.
Mud was way better at some forms of earth magic than regular witches were.
Some of the girls had also been experimenting on stone magic workings, as evidenced by the small stone statues on the bench.
A fist-sized black marble bunny had recently been altered to have long floppy ears, an onyx pig had six tails, several fish had been carved from geodes, and a dog had been carved from some white striated rock.
The bunny was coated with Carm’s and Jessa’s residual magics.
Its ears were crooked and showed evidence that they had worked multiple times to straighten them.
Thoughtfully, Angie slipped out, her shadow of dark intent behind her, following.
◆◆◆
Along with the other girls from Cabin L, Angie and Mud were sitting together at breakfast, their assigned picnic style table loaded down with pancakes and waffles, juice, and Mud’s side bowl of fruit. Mud ate more healthy than the rest of them did.
Across from them, on the other bench, and facing the big front doors of the barn-like meal hall, were the girls of Cabin H.
Suddenly their table mates went silent, all eyes on the open doors.
Mud swiveled in her seat and whispered, “Shit. Shitshitshit.” She put her mouth to Angie’s ear and said, even softer, “What did you do?”
Angie twisted around and saw them, the girls of Cabin A. All of the girls from Cabin A. The mean girls. All of them were bald-headed.
Angie’s mouth fell open. Her head shook back and forth all by itself.
“Not me,” she whispered back. Cabin A marched forward like an army, faces furious, their magic ringing and spitting from them in a display so bright most of the young witches could see it even without a seeing working.
The silence spread out like a wave, and the witch girls at their table grabbed their breakfasts and scuttled away, all except Mud.