Page 17 of A Witch’s Guide to Surviving Halloween

Chapter Eleven

Beneath the light of a bare bulb hanging from the basement ceiling, I read over Grandma’s words again and again. The bulb casts long, dark shadows between boxes of books and all sorts of seasonal decorations and other inventory.

“Oh . . . poor Grandma,” I sigh, studying the shaky swoops of Grandma’s angry, drunken handwriting.

“Poor Grandma? She cursed two families,” Lucy sneers, finally calming down after her big reveal.

“She was heartbroken, Luce.” Grandma was one of the proudest people I’d ever met.

She was fearless and never let anyone tell her what she could or couldn’t do.

At least . . . that’s what I thought. But these words, this choice to cast a drunken spell, aren’t the actions of a confident person.

Not really. They reveal her confidence for the front that it was.

On the inside, Grandma was just as broken as the rest of us. Completely and utterly heartbroken, and she couldn’t let it show for even a second. As a trailblazing woman of her time, in a time where the world was against her from the start, she had to be strong.

Any show of weakness would have been blown so far out of proportion that she could have lost everything.

Instead, she buried it. She buried the loss of her family beneath a determined front, burying the pain of her breakup beneath a cool exterior.

It must have killed her to show up every day without her father, to a store she may lose with a full view of the man she’d walked away from—a man who had been handed everything she wanted.

Who had offered to hand her the same things, only to turn him down so she could hold her head high and know she had earned it herself.

My fingers brush the page, hovering over a discolored splotch on the October 30th entry; a tear from the woman who never cried.

“‘The curse shall cease,’” I mutter, reading over the curse once again. “She left a fail-safe. She wanted him to come back and fight for her.”

“Except, he left instead.” Lucy pulls the diary from my hand and flips forward.

“Turns out, the spell worked a little too well. ‘Old grief shall sever passion’s ties.’ The magic seemed to take that as a personal challenge, probably because she cast it on Halloween, which, of course, made it all the more potent.

She talks about how the bakery became plagued with magical misfortune, making it impossible for him to run his business.

She tried to stop it, tried to reverse the spell, but no matter what she did, nothing worked.

It needed to be undone the old-fashioned way.

“But Richard left before she could fix things, and since she wasn’t talking about her and Richard, but the Blackwood men and the Nova women, it still holds. Which means . . .” She trails off, not wanting to finish the thought.

I take a deep breath, letting everything sink like a boulder deep in my gut. “Which means either Oliver and I need to break the curse, or we’re going to be drawn together just to be torn apart.”

Lucy nods. “That’s the common denominator. Not me, or you, or him. It’s the two of you together. As soon as he came back to town, the magic brought you together, so it could tear you apart. And since it was Grandma who cast the spell . . .”

“Oliver will be the one it tries to drive away.”

I plop onto a stack of boxes, not caring if I dent the cover of the books within, and let my head fall into my hands.

“And the chances that Oliver has any idea what’s going on? Is there anything to indicate he’s also a witch? Because that would make explaining this so much easier.”

Lucy shakes her head, absently flipping through the pages of the diary.

“Not yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

I went straight to the dates from around this time of year, so if there is anything in previous entries that might indicate there’s a magical lineage, I haven’t gotten to it yet. But I’ll keep looking.”

My fingers find the hem of my shirt, rubbing the fabric, deep in thought.

I need to figure something out before the magic starts trying to drive Oliver out of town and possibly ruin his life.

He must have invested so much money into starting this new business.

If it fails within the first couple of weeks because Ashwood Haven’s magic made his cookies dance and ovens burst into flames, he could lose so much more than a long-lost love. It could send him into bankruptcy.

“So, aside from trying to reverse this thing without breaking it and running right over to spill all my secrets to a guy I’ve known for less than seventy-two hours, what are my options?”

Lucy shrugs, her lips curling into half a pout.

“I don’t think you have any. Theoretically, if we can figure out what ‘masks descend’ and ‘their stories lend’ allude to, then we can break the curse without telling him about it.

Do it all stealth-like. But messing with magic like this, something powerful enough to drive a man to close down his family business and leave his hometown, just days before Halloween, when it’s already acting weird?

That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

“That just leaves total avoidance,” I sigh.

“If the magic is trying to force us together just to keep us apart, and I can’t reverse it, then I have to fight it until we can figure it out.

” I must look as dejected by the idea as I sound because Lucy’s shoulders slump, and her brows turn down with pity.

“You really like him, don’t you?”

I can’t stop another sigh from escaping my throat as my heart twists and squeezes until I think it might pop like a sad Valentine’s Day balloon.

I gesture at the diary in her hands. “Does it matter? It’s not even real.”

Lucy’s lips purse, twisting to the side in thought as she taps a sparkly black fingernail against the cover of the diary: an expression that never leads to anything good.

“What?” I ask, not sure I actually want to know the answer.

“Well . . .” She pauses thoughtfully. “We could try reversing it.”

“Okay, that sounds like a tremendously stupid idea. If Grandma couldn’t reverse it, what makes you think we can do it four days before Halloween? And with the magic acting up the way it has been?”

“I hear you, but just consider it for a second.” Lucy holds out an appeasing hand as she jumps to her feet, suddenly full of frantic energy and a need to help.

“All witches know that magic grows stronger every day leading up to Halloween and then falls back to its lowest strength the day after. Grandma cast the curse on Halloween, but tried to reverse it after. It’s possible she didn’t have the magical oomph to back up what she was trying to do, and then the bakery boy left before the next Halloween came around.

She had no reason to believe he’d ever come back, so she probably let it be.

But we are right around the corner from the biggest magical powerhouse of the year, and there are two of us.

” She flashes me a conspiratorial smile.

“Luce . . .” I start, but she gives me those puppy dog eyes I can never say no to.

“Oh, come on! What’s the worst that could happen?”

I throw my arms out to the side as if one gesture can encapsulate the entire town. “Um, hello? Have you not been paying attention? Flying ballerinas, dancing skeletons, gibberish-speaking tourists, and a total blackout?”

“I know, but . . .” Lucy bites her lip as if holding back words that she might regret.

“But what?” I ask reluctantly.

“But you like him.”

I laugh in disbelief because of all the reasons to risk the entire town’s safety, and the festival, that must be the saddest one. “So? It’s quite literally magic. If this were a young adult book, it’d be the type of insta love people tear to shreds for being too cliché.”

“I just want you to be happy.” Her voice becomes quiet and cautious, as if her next words might break what little composure I’ve been holding on to. “You haven’t been happy for a long time.”

“I’m happy,” I argue, but the rebuttal is weak, my posture falling as I lose all resolve.

“No, you’re pretending to be happy. It’s not the same thing. Ever since Grandma’s health started to decline a few years ago, you changed. You don’t smile or laugh anymore. Not really. Not like you used to.”

My gaze falls to the floor, and my shoulders start to cave in on themselves.

Her words punch me in the chest, and tears instantly start hovering on the edge of my lashes.

I want to argue, to tell her that she’s wrong.

I want to straighten my spine the way Grandma would’ve done, just as I’ve been doing every time someone asked if I was fine, but I can’t.

I’ve been trying to hide it, to bury the emptiness so far beneath my work ethic and fake smiles that no one would find it.

But clearly, I’m not as good at hiding my pain as Grandma was.

Just like with everything else, I can’t live up to the legacy Grandma has left me. Not even in this.

“Please,” she pleads quietly, a shadow of only moderately forced optimism behind her small smile. “Let’s just try.”

“Fine.” I push myself to my feet, swiping at my eyes as I shake off the weakness I’d let enter my posture. “But if we blow up the whole block, I’m blaming it all on you.”

Lucy rolls her emerald eyes and throws the diary down on a nearby box. “Oh, please, like everyone won’t be thinking it already anyway.”

We both roll our shoulders and shake out our arms as if preparing for an Olympic event.

She holds her hands out to me, and after one last moment of hesitation, I take her fingers in mine.

“Ready?” She beams, a mischievous glimmer in her eye.

“No.”

“Oh good! On three. One . . . two . . .” We nod in unison as she counts, never breaking eye contact.

“Three,” we say together, and then, as if in a trance, we repeat the curse in reverse.

Reversal spells are always an odd one because sometimes they take all my concentration, and other times, they come as easily as breathing.

This time, it feels as though the magic is feeding me the words, placing them on my tongue like precious drops of chocolate.

With each one, the air between us starts to hum, a rumble that starts deep in our chests until it becomes a palpable thing in the space between us.

We have to shout the last words at each other as Ashwood Haven’s magic—an invisible swarm of swirling energy—surrounds us. The moment we finish, it explodes.

There’s no white light or deafening noise like in the books. It’s a ghostly force that surges out from where it has gathered in the small space between us. It plummets into our chests and then through us in a wave that has even our hair lifting on a phantom wind.

We share identical expressions of shock and awe as the wave of magic expands out, past the walls of the bookstore and across town with enough force to shake stray dirt and dust from the ceiling. We stand in frozen silence for one second and then another.

“Do you think it worked?” Lucy whispers.

Then Marilyn screams.