Then, around the time when Div started teaching herself about necromancy, Greta had left their coven and formed her own.
Div looked down at her phone. There was Greta’s name in the middle of the Ns. Greta Navarro.
No. She didn’t need Greta anymore. They were the past. She had her girls now.
Mira Jahani. Aysha Rodriguez.
She fired off a text to them; the last period should be wrapping up.
My house, ASAP.
K, Aysha wrote back immediately. Mira responded with a car emoji.
Good. They were, as usual, respectful of her status as coven leader and never disobeyed her.
Div had met Mira and Aysha at the beginning of ninth grade. The pair had been BFFs since elementary school, and even as their interests began to diverge (while Aysha grew into martial arts and wolves, Mira grew into fashion design and celebrity blogs), they’d stuck together because of their history. And because it turned out that they were both witches—the only ones they knew of in Sorrow Point or anywhere else. (Their discovery moments had happened during a game of two-person flashlight freeze tag that had resulted in Mira actually freezing Aysha’s shirt, and vice versa.)
Div had never really noticed them before last September, when they’d all ended up in the same freshman history class. One day, she overheard the two friends planning to use a spell to alter their report cards to give themselves all A’s. Later, Div had confronted them privately and pretended that she was going to report them to the principal. They’d immediately tried to cast a double memory-erase spell on her, to which she’d responded with a powerful counterspell along with the words Nice to meet you, too. She’d then suggested that the three of them form a coven with her as leader. (Mira and Aysha were the first witches Div had ever come across aside from her mother and Greta, and she liked the idea of bossing lesser witches around, just as her mother had done to her before she moved to Barcelona with her boyfriend.)
Setting her phone down on the dressing table, Div gazed at the shadow message that lay, unchanged and unshimmering, on top of Ridley’s hair jar. She swallowed nervously. She needed to distract herself while she waited for the girls to show up.
Holding up her hands, she regarded her French-tipped nails. “Blancus,” she commanded, and the French tips morphed into a dark purple, the color of bruises. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”
She reiterated the spell and at the same time pictured a silvery-white shade in her mind, changing her nail color again. “Better.”
Leaning back in her chair, Div blinked at her reflection in the mirror. She was pale. So pale. She looked like those women in Victorian England who ate arsenic wafers to make their complexions ashy-white. (Another poison called belladonna, which was Italian for beautiful woman, was used for this purpose, too, and also to enlarge the pupils—big pupils had been, for some reason, desirable back then.)
Div could appreciate the application of poisons for beautifying purposes, although she herself had little need for them. She preferred to use her toxic concoctions to hinder and harm her enemies, her detractors. She got her recipes not just from Crowe (who, like Greta, had been too virtuous and earth-motherish to go there) but from her own research and experiments. Of course, she couldn’t imagine actually killing someone with one of her potions, unless it was in self-defense or in defense of one of her witches.
Still, she wondered… could she kill, say, an Antima member? Not in self-defense or defense of others, but because the Antima were scum? She tried to picture herself doing this. Maybe? Probably not. Although it was an interesting idea and reminded her of something her uncle mentioned once. A legal concept. Choice of evils. Sure, it was evil to kill someone, but what if that someone himself was evil?
Outside, car doors slammed. Mira must have driven herself and Aysha over in her Miata. Mira wasn’t supposed to drive anyone under twenty who wasn’t a relative, not until she’d satisfied a few more Washington State DMV requirements, but the one time she’d been pulled over, the police officer had let her go (without magic intervention) because she was the daughter of a local political VIP. (Mr. Jahani, a councilman, was running for mayor of Sorrow Point in November.)
The police. Div frowned into the mirror. With the new anti-witch US president and now Antima in their community, would the Sorrow Point Police Department start cracking down on witches and witchcraft? And what did this mean for her coven? Extra measures might have to be taken to hide their magical identities and activities. (Mira had some pull with the police, but not that much pull.)
She texted the girls and told them to come up. A minute later, they bustled into her room.
“There was an accident on Pine, otherwise we would have been here even sooner,” said Mira breathlessly. She plopped down on Div’s bed and adjusted her gray snakeskin boots. “These are killing me, they’re way smaller than when I bought them. I wonder if Binx cast a shrinking hext on them?”
Aysha crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “So what’s up?” she asked Div. Aysha wasn’t big on small talk.
“We need to figure out who wrote the shadow messages, of course,” Div replied.
“I still think Binx fake-wrote both of them,” Mira said.
Div was about to tell her the results of the aequo spell she’d just cast. But she decided to hear Mira out, in case she had new information.
“Do you have any proof?”
“Um, her personality? That’s your proof. She loves to pick fights with us.”
Okay, so no new information.
“That girl seriously needs to get a life,” Aysha piped up.
“Actually, I find her quite interesting,” Div said.
Mira and Aysha exchanged a glance. “Of course, if you say so!” Mira said quickly.
“Interesting how?” Aysha asked.
“She’s a cyber-witch,” Div pointed out. “I don’t know any other cyber-witches, do you?”
“Yooooou’re not thinking about trying to
