Brandon rematerialized next to the palm tree. He looked around with a confused expression (the same expression he’d worn after Div cast praetereo on him at lunchtime) and got back into his SUV.
The memory-erase spell seemed to have worked. Whew. Ridley slowed to a jog and cut across an empty construction lot to Briarwood Street.
“Ridley! Hi!”
Now what? Alarmed, Ridley stopped and pivoted in the direction of the voice. A girl was walking toward her on Briarwood. Short, blond, pretty—
Penelope Hart.
“Hi!” Ridley said. She was pleasantly surprised to run into Penelope, but also worried—had she seen Ridley’s interaction with Brandon? Was another memory-erase spell in order? She quickly checked out the line of sight between them and Coyote Way. She couldn’t see the palm tree or Brandon or the silver SUV.
“Hey! Hi! Do you live around here?” Penelope called out.
The girl seemed cheerfully unaware. Maybe the memory-erase spell wasn’t necessary.
“Yeah, sort of.” Ridley gestured vaguely toward the east. Her house was on the other side of Seabreeze, in an older neighborhood full of raised ranches and bungalows. “How about you?”
“We just moved here from Ojala Heights. Well, not ‘just.’ Back in June. Our house is at the end of Blackberry Lane.” Penelope pointed. “It’s that one on the corner that looks like an ugly French castle. Sort of a dog-puke color.”
“Dog-puke, that’s one of my favorite colors,” Ridley joked, folding her arms over her chest.
Penelope laughed. “Right? Couldn’t they have picked a nice shade of brown, like Sienna or Twig or Aphrodite Blush?”
“Aphrodite Blush?”
“Sorry. It’s a lipstick color. I’m a little obsessed with makeup, can you tell?”
Penelope cupped her hands around her chin, framing her face. She wore two—no, three—shades of beigey eye shadow, so artfully applied that it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began. Her lashes were long and curled ever so slightly, and her brows were perfectly shaped. She wore a rose-pink lipstick and matching blush.
Staring at Penelope’s face, standing so close to her (there was that really nice perfume again), Ridley felt a little wobbly inside. She swallowed once, twice.
“And I’m also a beautuber,” Penelope was saying.
“Beautuber?”
“I have a beauty channel on YouTube. It’s called Just Face It with Penelope! You should check it out. Not that you need it; you’re already gorgeous!”
Ridley’s cheeks grew hot. “Um, thanks.”
“You’re welcome!”
“So where are you—”
Ridley’s words were drowned out by the sound of an approaching car. She turned and saw the silver SUV speeding down Brentwood.
Oh no!
She instinctively grabbed Penelope’s arm and pulled her back from the curb, then frantically ran through various defense spells in her mind.…
The SUV neared, EDM on full volume, then kept going. Brandon hadn’t even glanced at them.
The praetereo spell had held.
“Thank you! Wow, that person was going way too fast!” Penelope exclaimed.
“They should get a ticket,” Ridley agreed.
Penelope closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Whew, okay, that’s better.” She opened her eyes. “What are you doing now? I was on my way to Starbucks for my pumpkin spice latte fix because, you know, September. Do you want to come along?”
“Definitely!” Ridley said eagerly. And then she remembered the coven meeting. Could she skip it? No. Not with the whole shadow message issue looming. “Oh, wait. I can’t. Sorry. I have to go to my friend Binx’s, for this, um, thing.”
“No worries. Another time. Oops, I have to get this, I’ll see you at school!”
Penelope turned and spoke softly into her phone. “Hey, Colter. No, I’m not home, I’m on my way downtown.”
Colter. Right. Boyfriend. Instagram model.
Ridley waved to Penelope and walked away. She felt exhausted suddenly; the Brandon encounters had wiped her out physically and emotionally, and then to pile on a chance encounter with Penelope? It felt like the universe was messing with her. Was this what everyday life was going to be like now? Having to be even more secretive and careful about her witch identity? Enduring ugly confrontations with Antima members? Casting memory-erase spells constantly?
And why did Penelope have to have a boyfriend?
Her phone buzzed with another text. She pulled it out and glanced at the screen.
Now Hello Kitty was sinking her fangs into the neck of someone who looked a lot like Ridley.
“Ha ha,” she said, cracking a smile.
On the other hand, being a witch definitely had its benefits. Like having witch friends (especially ones who made her smile). Like being able to live as her true self. (She knew there were other paths to achieve that, but this was her path.)
She hurried her steps toward Binx’s house, making a mental note to look up Penelope’s YouTube channel later.
9 BROWNIES, MILK, AND MAGIKARP
The consequences of Magical work can sometimes be unpredictable; even the strongest intention can result in the unintended.
(FROM THE GOOD BOOK OF MAGIC AND MENTALISM BY CALLIXTA CROWE)
“Come on, ShadowKnight, where are you?” Binx snapped at her phone.
“I do not understand what you are saying,” her virtual genie/assistant Uxie replied in a robotic voice.
“I need to find ShadowKnight. Where is ShadowKnight?”
“I do not understand ‘Shallow Night.’”
“Never mind, Uxie.”
Sighing, Binx sat down on her bed and scrolled through her DMagic app again. She’d developed it to send and receive encrypted messages. Not just encrypted, but super, super, magically encrypted. She’d sent her technomancer friend four messages in the past four days, and he hadn’t answered any of them—or even read them, as far as she could tell. (Read messages were indicated by a nerd-glasses icon.)
Binx took a beat to fire off another enchanted Hello Kitty meme to Ridley, then checked the Witchworld Sub9 discussion board, which was deeply buried in the cyber-recesses of the game. It was where she’d stumbled upon the temporary link to C-Squared’s witchcraft book back in March 2016. It was also where she’d first met ShadowKnight, this summer. After a few weeks of group posting, the two of them had started sending private messages to
