“You’re breakin’ up with me?” My voice comes out timid and low, not at all the sassy and proud tone I usually call about the bayou with. I swallow threatening tears and fold my arms across my chest.
Jorge looks anywhere but at me. The final rays of day shine on his slicked black hair as he cocks his head, one hand absently picking at our splintering wooden porch rail. “There’s someone else. She’s not… like you.”
Like me. An angry huff works its way out of my red-painted lips, and I turn my narrowed gaze to the lake. Pond Cypresses cast shadows over the dying plants and specter-like shapes ripple over the water. The humidity cakes my skin. I wipe a bead of sweat from the tip of nose and sniff. “Must be nice being boring.”
“Emma,” he scolds. “Don’t be like that.”
Leave it to him, to make me feel awkward and wrong in my skin. I comb a hand through my tangled raven hair and frown at my black dress and wild bare feet. Perhaps if I wore regular necklaces, instead of my pet snake, Fang, coiled around my neck, Jorge wouldn’t be breaking my heart. But I am what I am. No boy can change that.
“Fine.” I lean on the porch rail and grit my teeth, determined not to ask him anything else. It does nothing to stop the magic tingling the ends of my fingers.
Green water laps at our porch stilts and for a long moment that’s the only sound. Seven months of my life? Wasted. My first kiss? Wasted. Though the silence grows uncomfortable, I can’t bring myself to break it.
Jorge stuffs his hands into his pockets and lets out an exaggerated sigh. “I better get home. Night, Emma.”
“Night.”
His footsteps crack over the porch floor, turning and heading towards the bridge which leads out of the swamp and into the town proper. Fang hisses, her thoughts filtering into my brain through my skin. Don’t wait too long. I let him get halfway across the bridge before I snap my fingers—Jorge vanishes in a puff of jade smoke.
I jog over to examine my handiwork. Sitting on the bridge in a puddle of fine clothes is a frog, eyes wide with disbelief.
“Ribbit.”
I scoop him up and fight to hide my grin. “Don’t be mad, Jorge. You broke my heart. I’m merely inconveniencing you for a bit.”
“Ribbit.”
“Oh, please.” I saunter back towards home. “I could have done so much worse. You’ll be fine.”
“Ribbit.”
“What do you mean, what are you supposed to do? Breathe. Eat some flies. I don’t care.” I pluck a glass jar from Grandma Mudine’s moonshine stash behind the porch swing and dump its contents into the water. Then I drop Jorge into the jar and set it on the porch rail. Once I’ve screwed the top back on and magicked some holes for air, I step back, feeling a little better than before. Fang approves with a chortling hiss.
Frog Jorge glares and croaks a hoarse, “Ribbit.”
Ouch. “You don’t mean that. Anyhow, I’ll change you back after dinner.” Now think about what you did.
I enter our living room just as Grandma Mudine calls, “Dinner!”
At his desk, Daddy pauses his mortar and pestle and stands up, brushing nightshade dust from his hands. “Coming, Ma.”
Grandma Mudine is actually my mom’s mom, but that doesn’t trouble Daddy. He’s the illegitimate son of some King from a place I’ve never heard of and he’s never met any of his blood relatives. He was smuggled away as a baby “for his protection.” How he wound up in the swamp he won’t say. My mom and grandma came here from town, looking for a place to do magic where people wouldn’t notice so much. Turns out a house in the middle of a bayou is a pretty swell place to be a witch.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hey, Princess.” He presses a kiss to my hair as he passes me on the way to the kitchen. “Whatcha been up to?”
“Nothing.” Nothing I’ll ever tell. Daddy wouldn’t want me using my magic to teach Jorge a lesson, even if I have good reason.
“Alright.” He eyes the tracks of my tears, but doesn’t push. Daddy always knows when to leave well enough alone.
In the kitchen, Mama’s setting the table. She hums and waves her hands like she’s conducting music, sending the plates, forks, and cups dancing to their places. I join in—not the humming, just the hand waving—and put napkins at each seat.
“Thanks, Sugar.” Grandma Mudine sets a pot of crawfish boil on the table and gestures for us to dig in.
We peel and slurp and munch. I suck the oil from the back of the crawfish heads, the way Daddy taught me, then lick the greasy seasonings from my fingers. I’m working on a corn cob when a whistling sneaks into our open window.
In unison, we stop eating and groan. “Mama Ursula,” Daddy whispers, then stands to get the door.
“Hi there, Handsome,” Mama Ursula says coming in before she’s even invited. “Ariel, good to see you.”
Mama nods in hello, her smile not quite reaching her eyes. Mama Ursula is a fellow witch. She lives in a cave deeper in the bayou and does all sorts of unspeakable things to the wildlife in the area. We’ve seen egrets come out of her cave with their feathers stripped and their flesh cut in crisscross patterns. She plucked the eyes from all the catfish one summer and set them loose at the local swimming hole. Once, she strung up some truly dead possums by their tails, painted with their own blood, and said it was to ward off the plague—but that’s not a spell any of my kinsfolk were familiar with.
“How can we help you?” Daddy asks, in his slow and even way.
Mama lost her voice many years ago. She’s never told me how. I was real sick, almost near death, and no magic seemed to help. Mama said she’d make it right. She left, came back hours later with a potion—and no voice. I got better, but Mama hasn’t spoken since. We begged and begged her to write down what had happened, but she wouldn’t pen a word. And every time Mama Ursula comes round to borrow something, like now, Mama gets real somber.
“Oh,” Mama Ursula says, patting the back of the bright purple beehive piled high on her head. She turns side to side, the hem of her purple gown swishing against the floor. She always reminds me of a corpse in need of burying. “Just need a handful of lizard tongues, if you can spare ‘em.”
“I’ll get them,” Grandma Mudine snaps. For larger woman, Grandma’s sprier than me. She’s up, with the tongues jarred and handed over before I can say ‘curses’.
“Thanks plenty.” Mama Ursula’s gravelly voice sends a pinch of fear down my spine and into my toes. “Do enjoy your evening.”
“Will do.” Daddy closes the door behind her, then retakes his place at the table. He reaches over and squeezes Mama’s hand. Mama smiles, for real this time, and my heart pangs. Foolish, foolish Jorge.
I don’t feel much like eating now, so I excuse myself, looping Fang around my neck and heading back outside. “I’m gonna take a walk,” I call.
“Don’t be out too late, Princess.”
I better let Jorge go before the sun sets much lower. Already it’s a red thumb print against the horizon, casting the water and trees in a spray of blood. I exhale and reach for the jar—oh no.
“It’s gone!” I lean over the rail to search the shallow water under our porch. “Jorge?” Could he have tipped the jar? He isn’t daft enough to go hopping around the bayou with so many predators about, is he? “Jorge!”
My gut knows what happened before my brain figures it out. I don’t have time to waste. With a sinking heart, I twinkle my fingers and mutter an incantation. Glittering gold smoke twirls and swirls from my fingers, then recreates the last five minutes of activity on the porch. The glitter shows Jorge, frumpy and squatting in the jar. It shows Mama Ursula canter onto the porch and enter the house. A moment later it shows her leaving. Her eyes catch on my frog, and she grins. Jorge cowers against the glass. Then Mama Ursula pockets the jar and the smoke vanishes.
“Mama Ursula,” I hiss. I should have known.
Fang coils around my neck and kisses my cheek. She thinks Jorge honestly deserves whatever he has coming.
“But Mama Ursula’s gonna kill him.” As hurt as I am, I don’t think he deserves that. I eye our tiny boat and squint out towards the cave. Getting there should be easy enough. I can whack a gator with the best of them, and anything else can be magicked away. It’s the other witch I’m not looking forward to contending with. Though every step is a struggle, I trudge to the ladder and lower myself into the boat.
My magic hums around the craft, gliding it through the water. The entrance of Mama Ursula’s cave looms large beneath a copse of giant bald cypresses—darkened behind tangles of vines and swamp webs.
I press on, into the darkness and summon a glowing orb to light my way. Aside from the dancing water, burbling and a deep-throated song echo over the river, soft and far away. We pass twin lines of stone eel statues, guarding the walls of the entryway. Mama Ursula’s glamoured them to have green glowing eyes. She’s also made them dart and hiss at anything passing by. But I see through the ruse, and choose to be unimpressed.
The deeper we go into the cave, the louder the song gets. It’s Mama Ursula, singing a spell about the weather. The notes send a bone-chill straight through me and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. There’s sure to be a hurricane in a day or two, courtesy of the deranged witch I’m about to face.
We round a curve and find Mama Ursula on a stone platform, the base covered in a tangle of weeds and moss. The giant walls behind her are carved into shelves, all stuffed with bottles. Some are empty, but most are full of ghastly bright liquids or fermented animal parts. A giant stone caldron sits in the center of the platform, spewing green and purple bubbles as Mama Ursula tosses in fistfuls of random ingredients—toad livers, fish eyes, mermaid scales, and the lizard tongues from earlier.
Slouching low in my boat, I search for the jar holding my frog.
“A dash of venom,” sings Mama Ursula. “Aaaaaand the wart of a frog.”
I withhold a gasp, as Mama Ursula tugs the glass jar from a pocket in her robe and magicks a pair of tweezers into her other hand.
Jorge. I gulp.
Mama Ursula pokes the tweezers into the jar, nearly stabbing the poor frog. “Now, just hold still and this won’t hurt… much.”
Even from here, Jorge’s fear glows like a bright yellow cloud of worry around him. He bobs and weaves to avoid the sharp end of the tool. Fang tightens on my neck, and I raise a hand to pat her. But my worry is growing, too, spreading like a virus all through me.
“Ribbit,” Jorge pleads. Another jab, another dodge.
Mama Ursula sticks her tongue out in concentration and narrows her eyes. “I’m losing my patience. I’d just as happily kill you and then take the wart, you little—”
“Mama Ursula!” The boat rocks as I launch to my feet. I throw out my arms to find balance, then toss my best angry scowl at the other witch. “You’ve got something that belongs to me. I’ve come to retrieve it.”
She looks over, not at all surprised, and I wonder how long she knew I was sitting here. “Well, Miss Emma. Good to see you again. And so soon. I hate to disappoint you, Princess, but your daddy gave me those lizard tails, fair and square.”
“I mean the frog.” I set my jaw.
Mama Ursula harrumphs, and her fingers spark with magic. “Finders keepers, Little Witch.”
Red hot anger boils in my gut. What a childish, ridiculous thing to say! I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but she leaves me with no choice. “Then… then I challenge you to duel.”
Fang hisses her protest. I’m not nearly as experienced as Mama Ursula, and we all know it. But I’m too proud and stubborn to back down, even when Mama Ursula starts laughing, a deep cackling sound that sets my teeth on edge.
When her laughter dies out, she turns her purple eyes on me, glittering with a deadly sparkle. “So be it.”
Whoosh. I gasp, and barely duck out of the way of a blazing fire skull. The boat rocks beneath us. Fang hisses and I sniff the air.
A snarl rips from my lips. “You singed my hair.” I mutter an incantation, chucking a thousand creeping spiders from the cave roofs onto Mama Ursula. She claps twice and they fall, helpless as petals to the ground.
“Try harder,” she laughs. Then my boat shutters as the water breaks into a thousand grey-washed hands, their cold fingers clawing at the boat, reaching for me.
Curses! I frantically search the cave for my next move. Maybe a ledge, or a giant rock, or—my gaze lands on a vine spouting from the cave roof.
“Vinea huc!” I yell, calling it to lift me into the air, seconds before a hand latches onto my ankle. With my momentum, I propel myself onto Mama Ursula’s platform. With another flick of my wrist, I whirl around her like a hurricane, tangling the vine around her throat. With hands on either side of her face, I bring my mouth to her ear. “Yield!”
But the old witch only laughs.
I pull the vine tighter and Fang slithers down to my arm. Why isn’t Mama Ursula struggling? “Yield!”
Mama Ursula’s laughter shakes her whole body. It shakes the platform, and I lose my footing. My heart races, as her crackle shakes even the cave itself, and stalactites pour from the roof. I release the vine and throw up my hands, changing the deadly spikes to fish. Some flap around the platform. Others land among the hands and are ripped to bits. I’m distracted for a second, just one second, but it’s enough. I freeze, as Mama Ursula holds a diamond blade to my throat. Diamond, the one substance that can’t be magicked into something else.
The sharp edge bites into my skin, and a prickle of blood begs to slide down my throat. Still, I don’t want to yield. If I do, she’ll kill Jorge just to spite me. Stuck between a witch and a dagger, I chew my bottom lip, debating my limited options. Fang looks up at me with terrified eyes.
“You wanna yield, Princess?”
“Rot in hell.” I spit on her pointed shoes for good measure. I don’t miss how the blade pushes farther into my skin. Guess this is it. Losing Jorge will be the death of me after all.
Mama Ursula laughs again, but this is a tiny laugh, a mere chortle. “I like your spirit.”
“Well, I hate all of you, so kill me and get it over with.” I stare out over the groping hands with tears blurring my vision.
A thoughtful rumble passes through the thick body behind me, and the hands melt back into swamp water. I furrow my brows.
“Tell you what,” Mama Ursula whispers. “How about we make a trade?”
My gut curls first in disgust…but then in warning. Any trade I make will not leave me for the better, of that I am sure. But I can’t help wondering… “What sort of trade?”
Don't. Fang shakes her slithery head, still coiled protectively around my arm. I ignore her.
“I’ll give you the frog—if you give me your voice.”
“My what?” Without thinking, I jerk to turn and look at Mama Ursula, but she tightens her hold on me. I swallow against the blade, my whole body trembling. “What would you want my voice for?”
“Voices catch a pretty price on the black market, Little Witch. It’s a permanent trade mind you, you’ll never get it back, but you’ll have your frog, and no harm will come to either of you.”
“I…” I don’t know. My mind races through possible loopholes. I can’t see it but I know the witch has me trapped.
She clears her throat. “Do we have a deal, or not?”
Mama Ursula’s purple magic floats Jorge in front of me, his webbed hands pressed against the side of the glass, his eyes pleading.
Fang shakes her head again, harder this time. Don’t do it.
But I realize now where all this went wrong, what I have to do now to fix it. What I shouldn’t have done is turn Jorge into a frog in the first place. I exhale, and speak my final word. “Yes.”
“Done.”
Snap. It’s like a hand enters my throat and physically tugs the cords from my body. Pain, so much pain. I see stars and blood fills my mouth. I fall to the floor in a heap, but it’s not the cave floor. It’s my front porch, and I’m clutching Jorge’s jar close to my chest.
Fang carefully coils around my neck and snuggles behind one ear. Why?
Because I had no choice. I can’t help the tears spilling down my face and into the cracks of the porch. I dump the frog and swirl my fingers, my gold-dusted magic changing him back into a human. A silly human that felt like the whole world to me just an hour ago.
Naked and shaking, Jorge thanks me over and over, but I can’t bring myself to meet his eye.
My throat is raw as my nerves. How will I tell my parents what I’ve done? How will I live every day with the consequences of my foolish heart? My Mama will… wait. Mama came back with a potion and no voice.
And now I think I know why.
Commentaires