Kelly McClymer-Salem Witch 03 She's A Witch Girl (20 page)

Mom sighed and put her book down. “You have
been best friends with Maddie for so long, Pru.”

I should have known Mom would totally back Dad up without letting him know that she was perfectly aware that Maddie and I were ex-BFF. She’d known the way the wind was blowing for quite a while. Mom was content to let me chill out anyone—as long as I didn’t throw a zit spell on them. When she heard about
that,
she made me take it off.

Dad, however, believed in treating good friends like gold. He had no time for girl drama and never had.

You see, Dad had two older sisters, my aunts Sylvia and Donna, and he’d had all the girl drama he could stand by the time he was five.

Not that I was as bad as my aunts. No way. Mom even called them the Agony Aunts before they visited on Thanksgiving and Christmas. And Dad let her get away with it.

“I want you to call Maddie and make up,” Dad said.

I looked to Mom to stop the insanity, but she nodded as if it was a fine idea.

“I am absolutely not going to make up with that back-stabbing crush-poacher!” I crossed my arms.

Dad started lecturing me, but I tuned him out. (Literally. I said a spell to turn his words into music.)

Dad stopped lecturing me about twenty minutes after he started. I thought I’d survived relatively unscathed, until I undid the spell that tuned him out and heard, “We’re going to Beverly Hills for a visit. You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said.”

Mom, Dorklock (who’d wandered in to watch the carnage), and I did the whole freeze-frame thing.

Dad noticed and waved his hands. “Pru and I. Not all of us.”

Dorklock unfroze and said, “Good. Hannah and I are scheduled for a tournament of champions, and I can’t let her down.”

Mom and I stayed frozen. I waited for her to shoot Dad down. Instead, she said, “Do you really think that’s wise? We always said we wouldn’t interfere in the children’s squabbles.”

Dad raised his eyebrow and looked at me. “Pru is not a child, she’s about to be a young woman, and she needs to learn to be the best young woman she can be. Even if she is a witch.”

Mom sighed. “True. We don’t want to raise someone who would take delight in hurting others.”

“Mom!” I thought maybe she’d forgotten the most important thing. “Maddie’s a mortal, I can’t apologize for the zit spell. Or the”-oops, she didn’t know about the argument spell; fortunately, I recovered in a flash-“fact that I don’t like how she snuck around behind my back and ended up with the boy she knew I had a crush on.”

Dad really had made up his mind, though he didn’t object to a little more lecture. “In this world, honey, there are two kinds of people: the kind who choose to hurt others, and the kind who don’t.”

Blah blah blah. And turn the other cheek. Blah blah blah. “I’m not a people. I’m a witch.”

Dad shrugged. “Just because witches do magic doesn’t mean they have to hurt others with that magic.”

“It was no big deal. I didn’t really hurt Maddie.” I couldn’t make myself sound too convincing. Maddie was going through a rough time with that boyfriend of her mom’s ragging on her all the time. She probably could have used another friend-or, at least, not had to fight with her boyfriend all the time.

“Really? Then it won’t hurt us to check it out.” Dad so meant it. I thought, for the first time since I was two, about zapping him with a nice time-freeze until I was all grown up.

I knew he was serious, but I didn’t know how serious until he asked, without a single twitch of his eye, “Pru, your mother was going to pop me to a meeting tomorrow in L.A. Why don’t you just pop us there together, and we can work in a visit to see Maddie as well.”

Okay, things were really getting weird. I knew Mom had been popping him instead of him flying—he said it gave him more time with the family—but this was my dad, asking
me
to do magic that included him. My dad, who still didn’t trust me to drive him anywhere. Welcome to my life on an alien planet.

“Should I show up in their living room?” I didn’t want to encourage him, but outright stonewalling never went well with Dad.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea, now would it?”

Mom had decided to be helpful. “What about that nice hotel we put your parents in when they visited us in Beverly Hills?” Yay, Mom, way to problem-solve . . . soooo not.

“What if the room we go into is already occupied?”

Mom looked at me, then sighed. She swirled her finger in the air and made a tele-vortex. “Beverly Hills Arms, please.”

“One moment.” The nasal whine was barely finished before the ringing of the line began and ended.

Another voice, more welcoming, if a bit haughty, echoed in our living room. “Welcome to the Beverly Hills Arms. How may I be of service?”

Mom watched Dad’s face as she answered. “I’d like to make a reservation, please.” Even I noticed he didn’t wince once.

“Certainly.” There was the sound of tapping on a keyboard. “For when?”

Mom didn’t hesitate. “Today.”

The haughty voice frosted up, as if he thought this might be a joke. “Today?”

Mom lowered her voice, as if to prove she was truly sincere in wanting a reservation. “Yes, in an hour.”

“Let me see if we have anything available on such short notice.” More clacking on keys. This time I hoped he would say no. Not that I believed they were full. Just that I hoped they would decide, completely on a whim, that we were undesirables in their neighborhood. “Very well.” Too bad.

“Excellent.” Mom smiled at me. “I’d like to reserve Room 525, if that’s possible.”

“Let me see.” There was some clicking. “That room is free. I have reserved it for you.”

“Wonderful.” Mom gave them the particulars, which
included Dad’s AmEx number. She asked for a fruit bowl to be delivered, then said cheerfully, “My husband and daughter will see you in an hour then.”

Dad gave her a kiss. “You’re better than a secretary. Thanks for thinking of the fruit bowl.” He looked at me. “Go pack, Pru.”

“Why? We have to wait an hour.”

Mom looked at me. “No, you have to pack so that you’re there in an hour. And that means you need to hurry. Even being able to pop from one location to another doesn’t mean you don’t need prep time.”

“Good old prep-time. Can’t live without it.” Dad swallowed once, hard, but he didn’t wince. And then he smiled. “I’ll bring my good suit so I can catch up with Harry while Pru mends fences with Maddie.”

Mends fences. Hah. How about break them down and build a great big brick wall so tall, I couldn’t scale it, even though I can fly.

We followed Mom’s scenario, popping into the room she’d reserved for us so that we could be certain that there was no one in it. Then Dad went downstairs to formally check us in. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be using my cell phone to call Maddie. I’d gotten it back from Samuel with all the numbers intact. Not that I needed it. I’d had Maddie’s number memorized for so long, I couldn’t forget it—no matter how hard I tried.

She answered, which I hadn’t expected, since she had to know it was me. There’s not a lot of anonymity in the cell phone calling game. “Hi, Pru.” She didn’t sound all that friendly, but she wasn’t hating on me either. Of course, she had no idea I was the one responsible for her recent inability to get along with the bf.

“Hi, Maddie. I’m in town with my dad for a whirlwind business trip of his.” My cover story—I had been so used to thinking up cover stories growing up among mortals, I’d become a whiz at it. Living in Salem, mostly among witches, I’d gotten rusty fast. I guess there are things to appreciate about Agatha’s. No cover stories necessary.

She was silent for a second, as if she was trying to decide how to handle the call. I suppose she was trying to think what to say to me. “Your mom let you skip school?” I guess she’d decided an apology wasn’t going to cut it.

“As if.” I said it without thinking, because I’d already had to switch around my scheduled study sessions. The trip wouldn’t cut into school or practice time, which would have at least made it bearable. No, it would only make me have to study harder when I got back home.

Fortunately, Maddie filled in the blank with a mortal explanation. “In-service day, then?”

“You got it in one.” I knew my tone was a bit cold, but really, she deserved it.

I guess she didn’t agree, because her tone was just as cold as mine. “How nice you decided to call me.”

Okay. Some snark going on there. But I can handle snark—I wouldn’t be a good cheerleader if I couldn’t. “I thought you might like to get a Frappuccino at the coffee shop. My dad’s treat.”

“I don’t think so.”

That was unexpected. Maddie never turned a Frappuccino down—that I knew of. Of course, people change a lot in a couple of months sometimes. I didn’t know what to say.

She did, though. “Maybe next time you’re in town?” Wow, she had the frost-beeyotch tone down almost as well as Agatha. And she wasn’t even a witch.

There was only one thing to say to that. “Kewl.” I grabbed an orange out of the fruit basket and ordered a movie.

At first I thought my cell phone was vibrating, but when I realized it wasn’t, I remembered that Samuel had said tracking devices would vibrate when you got close to the person you were tracking. I was near Maddie, so I looked for the lip gloss, intending to throw it away. With my squad banned from attending Nationals, I had way more to worry about than what Maddie and Chezzie were up to. But then I felt the vibrating cardboard under my fingers and pulled out the card Daniel had given me.

When Tara and I had met with Agatha, I’d put a tracking
spell on the card Daniel had sent me. I’d hoped, if things went badly, I might find him and get him to convince Agatha. But I hadn’t dared hope it would actually work.

I forgot everything Samuel had told me about trackers for an entire minute. During that time I just stared at the buzzing tracker, willing it to stop. Or not. It didn’t stop buzzing.

Briefly I dreamed of what it might mean if I found Daniel. Me, tracker queen of the witches. Agatha my new BFF. Daniel . . . well, anywhere from sitting behind me in math to stuck in the quicksand of detention until he was a hundred.

Then I remembered that Agatha and all the witches’ council couldn’t track Daniel. The thing was probably malfunctioning. Still, as I watched it continue to buzz, I wondered . . .

I tapped the tracker and said:

I blinked and found myself on an L.A. street corner. I didn’t see Daniel anywhere, but that wasn’t surprising. There was a small crowd listening to a musician play, so I started scanning faces.

I didn’t recognize Daniel’s sly smile or even his fascinating
eyes. The man closest to me was too old, the one across from me too fat. I looked at the women. Not really Daniel’s style, but he was in hiding, so it would be foolish for me to rule that out and miss finding him.

I really did need an ace in the hole when it came to dealing with Agatha. Finding Daniel for her would probably make her agree to let us compete at Nationals. I don’t think it would ratchet her up to grateful, but how could she not at least move to reasonable?

There were only a few men in the crowd, and the rest were women. Or looked like women. You could never tell in L.A., so I scanned closely, trying not to be too obvious.

They all seemed like women, not like Daniel in disguise. For a minute I was truly stumped, and then I focused idly on what had brought them all to a halt on this particular corner: There was a musician on the street, playing a saxophone in a smooth and sexy way.

I had dismissed him at first, because he was short and Daniel was tall. But then I noticed he was straddling a low wall. His face was painted in red and yellow diamonds, and his eyes were closed. There was something about the music, though, that kept me there, listening and looking and waiting for the musician’s eyes to open, so I could be sure he wasn’t Daniel.

As the music came to a halt, and the crowd drifted away, his eyes opened. It
was
Daniel. Sleepy, sexy, and definitely Daniel.

“Lovely music,” I said, when he just sat there smiling at me.

“Thank you.” He ran his fingers lightly along the saxophone. “My newest passion. Have you run away too?”

“No.” I wanted to say something smoky and sexy back, to keep the moment going. Instead, I said, “I’m here with my dad to see my old best friend, the mortal who stabbed me in the back. I have to make nice with her because we Stewarts are supposed to treat our friends like gold.”

I was appalled to hear myself babbling, but not all that surprised.

“And you just happened on me here? It must be fate.”

I decided not to confess that I’d tracked him. Instinctively, I knew it would ruin the moment. Big-time. “Must be. Want a cup of coffee?”

He stood up and stowed the saxophone in its case, then slung it over his shoulder. “My treat, seeing as how you’re my guest.”

“That’s okay, I-” I looked at the cup of change still at his feet, unsure how to indicate I knew he was poor.

He laughed when he saw me and picked up the cup to pour the change into his backpack. “Pru, I’m not mortal. I don’t need money, except to pay for a random cup of coffee with a pretty girl when fate brings her to my door.”

We found a seat at a table in the corner of the nearby coffee shop. Daniel, as always, made the space our own
by putting a privacy bubble around us. We could speak freely, no witch-whispering necessary.

I hadn’t known him very long before he’d run away from Agatha’s, but seeing him here, like this, made me realize how much I’d missed him.

“Do you ever think of coming back? It would make Agatha happy.” And my life easier, especially if I got credit for the prodigal’s return.

“Sure. G isn’t so bad.”

I made a face that indicated I wasn’t so sure.

He laughed. “To me, anyway. If only she’d lay off the family tradition stuff. She’s killing me with the expectations of generations, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I hear you.” I wasn’t even happy to follow the witch tradition and move to Salem, so I wasn’t just saying what I knew he wanted to hear. I felt his pain, and it was mine. Except, maybe, I had gotten lucky in the parent department. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have Agatha as a great-grandmother and failed. “I thought about . . . not running away exactly ... but just refusing to move.”