“What?” Ridley prompted her.
“It’s entirely possible that they’re just wearing the shoulder patch and acting like bigoted jerks, but not engaging in any of the more extreme and violent Antima activities. Not yet, anyway. We think, though, that there’s a more serious Antima presence in Sorrow Point. Some bigwig who is organizing and financing a powerful new Antima faction.”
Binx would have said something smug to Ridley about how she’d been right—Orion and Axel were posers. Except she wasn’t happy to hear about this other news.
“Who’s this bigwig?” she asked Ms. O’Shea.
“We don’t know. We’re trying to find out who he—or she—is.”
Ridley was tearing her pepperoni pretzel into tiny pieces. Binx noticed that her friend sometimes did that with food (or a piece of paper or whatever she happened to be holding) when she was anxious. “Can’t you and your coven just do a superpowerful scrying spell and uncover this person? You guys must be really advanced witches, right?”
“I wish we could do that,” Ms. O’Shea said with a sigh. “But as you probably know from Callixta Crowe’s book, and from your own experiences, too, I’m sure, the practice of magic is imperfect. And unpredictable. Otherwise, we witches could just scry and memory-erase away the Antima. Disable them, even. Them, and all other evil in the world.”
Binx began tearing her own pretzel into tiny pieces, too. It was kind of therapeutic. But it also made her feel more agitated. And angry. It wasn’t fair that she and other witches had to meet like this, in secret, strategizing ways to keep from being terrorized by a bunch of random witch-haters who had no reason for their prejudiced attitudes. Just before the Great Purge, there’d been a plague that had killed tens of thousands of people, and the government had decided (wrongly) to blame witches for it and order their arrests and executions.
But that was then. This was now. Witches weren’t a threat to anyone, and they deserved to have equal rights.
The Antima had to go. The 6-129 law had to go, too.
Binx gathered all the torn-up pretzel bits and popped them into her mouth. She remembered to fake-smile. (Someone really needed to create a calumnia 2.0, to cover visuals.)
And then she smiled for real. An idea had come to her.
There was a way to fight back. ShadowKnight had told her all about it. She had to get in touch with him ASAP. If only she could figure out why the hex he’d disappeared.
14 THE SEARCH FOR LOLLI MCSCUFFLE PANTS
The act of finding your Familiar is an individual endeavor.
No spells are needed; just an open mind.
(FROM THE GOOD BOOK OF MAGIC AND MENTALISM BY CALLIXTA CROWE)
“You must hand over the Sapphire of Truth immediately or face the full wrath of the High Council!”
“You mendacious maenad! You wouldn’t know Truth if it hit you over the head like Hedren’s Hammer of Halcyon Magic!”
“How DARE you!”
Iris pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and hunched over her laptop as Ilyara and Draska, the two most powerful witches on the Valkyrie Valley High Council, squared off. Should her own character, Skotadi of Sirren, intervene or stay hidden behind the Crystal Cauldron? The wrong decision could mean instant death, or worse, being demoted to her previous level. Death was the lesser of two evils here because she could just respawn at her prior position outside the Fortunale Fortress. Losing a level was a huge problem because it had taken her forty hours of play to achieve the jump.
Her room was a crazy mess—clothes spilling out of dresser drawers, pools of hardened candlewax, and empty Pasta-in-a-Cup containers everywhere. Her gems, potions, and tarot cards (homemade by her… art wasn’t her strong suit, but oh, well) were all hidden away in her closet in an old cardboard box marked WINTER CLOTHES/DO NOT THROW AWAY. She really should do a major cleanup; she still wasn’t completely unpacked from the big move last month, and what she had unpacked was a chaos salad. But today was Wednesday, and Wednesdays from six to nine p.m. Pacific time meant triple XPs (Experience Points) for battle wins and double value for newly acquired Firx, which were the currency in the Witchworld world. Her character had already accumulated 1,200 XPs in the battle against the Enochian Elves and banked an additional 500 Firx—enough to buy a new scrying mirror at Beeble’s Bazaar or maybe even a Shadow Shield, if the merchant Mungledoc was open to bargaining.
The IRL cleanup could wait. So could her English, history, and French homework. She—or rather, Skotadi—needed to come out of hiding, put on her big-girl pants (an expression her therapist Francesca used to use), and join the fight; the question was, on whose side?
If Francesca were here, she would probably point out that Iris was in extra-intense gaming mode because she’d had an extra-intense day. It had been Day 1 at her new school. She’d been harassed and assaulted by three jerks (Antima jerks). She’d revealed to another human being that she was a witch. She’d received scary images (and the word no in secret code) from a shadow message.
Experiences like this tended to fire up Iris’s anxiety, and gaming was a good way to throw a blanket on the flames.
Of course, Francesca didn’t know that she was a witch. Iris had always been super-extra-cautious about keeping that part of her life a secret, even from her therapist, who was a cool person, and even from her family members, who were (besides her little sister Nyala) mostly cool, too. She didn’t want to take any chances that someone outside her family-therapist circle, someone not cool, might find out.
Iris cranked up the volume on her Tegan and Sara album just as the song “I’m Not Your Hero” came on. Argh. Not exactly the right sentiment for dealing with this stuff. Or for going into a
