“Food delivery guy,” Michael explained. “They’re taking a break.”
“Hmmm.” Emily wondered what the plan was.
“Aunt Anastacia is just about to cast the cloaking spell,” Michael informed her. “I have to cast the confundus spell first, so that when she cloaks us, the Alfreds will see a version of us in the house still.”
“Great, let’s do this.”
“I’m not done,” Michael continued. He still had the smile on his face, which appeared to be plastic now and not-at-all genuine. And he maintained his expression even though Emily was staring right at him. Guessing it was part of the deceptive ploy, she looked away.
“Once I cast the spell, we’re going to go out the back,” Michael explained. “Silently—we make no noise. There’s a back door in the library that leads out to the back. We’ll take that.”
“Okay. . . ,” Emily muttered, committing the information to memory.
“Your dad is upstairs in his room,” Michael continued. “He’s in clear view of the Alfreds.”
“How will he know to come down?” Emily suddenly worried that her father might not make it out of the house with them.
“Aunt Anastacia will come for him,” Michael replied. “They’ll come join us out back.”
“How?”
Michael shrugged. “She’s a witch. She’ll have her ways.”
“Okay, I’m ready!” Emily felt excitement and anxiety boiling in her blood.
“That’s the easy part,” Michael went on. “The hard part is that we’ll have to go outside and engage the Alfreds in a discussion.”
That was where Emily’s heart froze. “What?”
“Aunt Anastacia’s idea,” he said. “No one has spoken to them since last night. They might get suspicious of a confundus spell. But if we engage them, even if it’s just for a few minutes, they’ll be reassured we are still in the house—”
“—giving us more time before they realize we’re gone,” Emily concluded.
“Obviously, the more time we have before they find out, the more time we have to get away from here and get to Aunt Anastacia’s hideout downtown.”
Emily’s eyes widened. “She told you where it is?”
“Of course, and she told me how to open it. Who do you think is driving the Beetle?”
“Aunt’s Beetle?” Emily was getting offended that Michael seemed to know so much about the plan when it was her idea in the first place. And the fact that he seemed to have been placed in charge of the expedition when Emily had been on the team way longer than he had. Emily made a mental note to ask Aunt Anastacia about that. “Isn’t she coming with us, though?”
Michael shook his head. “She’s the contingency plan. In case something happens, and they realize we’re making a break for it and we don’t have enough time to get out of here, she’s going to delay the Alfreds. Give us enough time to get to the Beetle and get the hell out of dodge.”
“Fair enough, I guess.” Emily simply nodded. “Let’s do it.”
23
“And what if they get her?” Emily asked. She was genuinely worried about her aunt. Yeah, sure, she and Aunt Anastacia had their differences—but what family didn’t? If Emily had been in on the discussion, she would have argued that there was a better way than Aunt Anastacia offering herself up to give them a chance of escape.
“If they get to her, they’ll have the fight of their lives.” Michael sounded as though they had a secret weapon. Emily’s heart skipped a beat when she remembered the tunnel through the land of the dead. The fact that Dad was going to be with Aunt Anastacia didn’t make things easy for Emily either.
Aunt Anastacia was nothing if not practical. She was all about the end goal, and she wasn’t really one to fuss too much about the process. As far as she was concerned, the end always justified the means. As long as the world was safe, she was willing to make any sacrifice necessary. Would she give up Emily’s father to tunnel through the land of the dead?
“Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?” Michael asked, his eyebrows arched.
Emily hissed. “Aunt Anastacia is overly logistical sometimes. I hope she’s not hiding anything from us.”
Michael frowned at her. “You’d be stupid if you thought she wasn’t hiding anything from us.”
Emily was taken aback by the biting tone in his words. She looked him up and down, not sure whether she should be enraged or not. She remembered they’d not really had time to talk about the fact they were half-siblings. She might have informed him of what transpired between his dad and her mom, but they hadn’t really talked about how it affected them as siblings.
Technically, he was her little brother. Just one year. Still, she felt a sense of responsibility for him. She was beginning to see him as the brother she never had. And being in the same class didn’t help matters. She was beginning to see him as her responsibility. That just put her in a confusing spot, because sometimes all she wanted to do was smack him in the head. Like right now.
“What, no sassy comebacks?” Michael sounded surprised.
“You’re my brother,” Emily proclaimed. Her voice was hollow and void of emotion.
Michael rolled his eyes. “That changes nothing. We still hate each other.”
“Is that what this is?” Emily asked. “Hate? You’ve hated me all this time?”
“Stop acting like you didn’t know,” Michael replied, looking away.
Emily was even more bewildered. “Know that you had an unfounded hatred for me?”
Michael scoffed. “You started it.”
“Started what?” Emily asked, genuinely surprised. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The night of Drake’s party,” he growled. “Last year. Summer. Ring any bells?”
It did. One that Emily was not too proud of. She looked away from him, the nasty memories dredging themselves up.
She and one of the other cheerleaders, Nikki Albright, drank too much and threw themselves at some senior boys from a visiting football team. It was quite the scandal. Although it was before Emily’s relationship with Jamie, it was still humiliating because these
