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SIX

From the looks on their faces, it was clear the two police officers didn’t expect any of this. Not the breaking-and-entering suspect voluntarily emerging from the residence, nor the suspect being a grandma goth.

“Please go away, or you shall be covered in pustules.” The potion in the flask Thorn brandished was coagulated and ineffective, but these men were none the wiser. She wasn’t going to sit back and watch more intruders trample all over her home.

“Ma’am, put down the bottle and come with us,” one called out from where he stood by their car. “Do you know this is not your house? What’s your name? Do you have family I can call?”

Thorn stayed on the porch. “This is my house.”

The other police officer spoke into his shoulder radio. “Female in her sixties. Disoriented. Seems to be under the influence of alcohol.”

“How dare you!” Thorn waved the flask around. “I’m nowhere near sixty.”

The police officers looked at each other and nodded. They strode toward her.

She took a big leap forward. Usually, the sight of a crazed witch was enough to get people to back off.

The police officers were definitely surprised, but they did not back off.

“I curse your potatoes to always be undercooked!” She was about to hurl the flask at them when another car screeched up the driveway.

“Do not curse their potatoes!” Meg screamed as she pulled up next to the police car. She hopped out and shuffled toward the police officers in her furry slippers. “I’m sorry, Officers. This is a misunderstanding. I was the one who called about the breaking and entering. Here’s my ID.”

Meg pulled out her wallet from her flannel pajamas and handed the police officer a card. While he made a dispatch call, she hurried onto the porch.

Thorn was ready to crack the flask over Meg’s head if it came down to it, but Meg placed an arm around her shoulder. “She’s my aunt.”

“I’m not her aunt,” Thorn said, squirming to get away from this unsolicited contact.

Without taking her eyes off the police officers or her smile off her face, Meg whispered, “These are constables. You’re either my aunt, or you’re a burglar to be sentenced to flogg-ing.”

Thorn put her arm around Meg. “My dear lovely niece.”

“How did this happen?” the police officer asked, looking skeptical.

Meg didn’t skip a beat. “She’s practicing for Halloween. We’re having themed tours of the house in October.”

Meg was smiling so widely that Thorn felt compelled to help by doing the same, but from the police officers’ reactions, her smile must have come off as less family reunion and more familial killer.

“And you called the police on your aunt because…”

“It totally slipped my mind that she was supposed to stay here. I mean, look at her. Obviously she doesn’t normally dress this way.”

“Have a good night, ma’am,” the police officer immediately said and returned Meg her ID.

Thorn was equal parts relieved and annoyed. After three centuries, her personal style still hadn’t come into fashion.

When the police drove off, they took Meg’s smile with them. Meg yanked her arm back as if Thorn were really made of thorns. When she spoke next, her voice was an octave lower. “We need to talk.”

“A spying ball!” Thorn, balancing precariously atop a ladder, studied the black crystal ball stuck to the ceiling.

“First, let me text my husband to bring over some necessities for you.” Meg whipped out a flat rectangular contraption from her pocket.

“And that… um… crystal ball isn’t for spying, it’s for security.

It records all the time, but once the house is empty of tourists, it tells me when there’s movement in the house, and I can then watch what’s going on in this room on my cell phone.

Your entry through the window triggered the camera’s motion sensor, and I received a notification.

I assumed you were a burglar, and after calling the police, I continued watching you explore the house.

But you moved around with such a curious familiarity—nothing like a burglar’s random ransack.

I recalled your claims of being a witch and replayed the recordings from earlier this afternoon to see the moment when you had joined the tourists. ”

“All this new magic is amazing,” Thorn said as she climbed down the ladder and joined Meg.

The table and chair Meg was sitting in were Thorn’s, but not the other near-identical dining chairs.

They must have been added by the Historical Society.

Thorn recalled how Madam Maude had always lamented about her lone chair at a round table designed for gathering.

“Did you hear a word I just said?” Meg asked.

“Absolutely. You said, ‘Moo.’?”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me. I understood nothing.”

“On this cell phone,” Meg said, holding up her device, “I can watch the security footage.”

Thorn mooed.

“Er… it’s a recorded video, a playback of something that already happened.”

Thorn was about to make like a cow again, but Meg stopped her.

“I’ll just show you. I must have replayed it a thousand times before I admitted that maybe you weren’t lying.”

In the video, no one was in the kitchen. And then out of thin air, Thorn and Bandit appeared. She fell harshly onto her butt. He dashed under the bed. A few seconds later, the tourists entered through the front door. Bandit made his escape.

Thorn snatched the cell phone and pressed her nose against the screen. “That was me! Earlier this afternoon! Is this contraption a time travel device? Bandit, maybe we can be back in 1690 for dinnertime.”

Bandit hopped onto the table. Before we go, let’s find that mad warlock and ask for some of that food. Just a crate to take back to 1690. Or several crates.

Meg put a hand out toward Bandit, and he sniffed it. “Are you Thorn’s familiar?”

If familiar means “overlord.”

Meg turned to Thorn. “What did those meows mean?”

“He is my familiar,” Thorn said. Though there was a familiarization ritual that witches performed to beckon their animal partners, familiars often spontaneously sought out their witches.

It happened more frequently with cats. A sleek black kitten had appeared to her in the woods when she was five years old, and he became her first familiar.

Her second was an orange cat who’d simply sauntered into the cottage.

She’d gotten her third, Bandit, ten years ago.

Back then, Bandit was a skinny bedraggled white kitten who was running through the Sunday markets’ crowd with a whole leg of lamb in his mouth and the butcher hot on his tail.

The kitten jumped onto Thorn’s stall table just as the butcher caught up and snatched away the lamb leg.

But the little cat held on to the meat for dear life with his teeth.

When the butcher threatened to add cat sausage to his menu, Thorn paid for both Bandit’s freedom and the lamb.

“Meg, please use this device to send me and Bandit back to 1690.”

Meg gently removed her phone from Thorn’s clutches. “I’m sorry, we haven’t invented a time machine yet. How did you even get here? Could you go back the way you came?”

“Provided I still have my magic, I could brew a Time Travel potion. I will need these ingredients.”

As Thorn rattled off the list, Meg’s eyebrows furrowed deeper and deeper. “I have no idea what those things you just said are. Except for the two pinches of salt. And the feather of vampire parrot.”

“I will gather the other ingredients. It would be a great help if you could just get that feather for me.”

“I can’t.” Meg typed into her phone. “Vampire parrots are extinct. A quick web search confirms that the last one died in a zoo in 1921.”

Thorn clunked her forehead onto the table. Bandit slunk away.

“I’m sorry,” Meg said gently, but in a way that Thorn knew more bad news was coming.

“But you can’t stay in this house. Even if I could somehow convince the rest of the Historical Society that I didn’t doctor the footage and that you’re a witch from the seventeenth century, they’ll veto my recommendation to let you live here, because they’re getting ready to sell this house.

It isn’t bringing in enough tourists to justify the mortgage.

The society runs on a very lean budget of donations and government grants. ”

Adjusting to being a modern witch would be hard enough, but it would be much, much harder without her house. She’d have to fly around to find another quiet forest where she could build a shack. “I can’t even fly right now.”

“Why not? Was your broom… enchanted?”

Thorn kept her forehead pressed against the table. “Yes, the wood was made from an oak that was watered in Flying Broom potion.”

Meg went to the door and grabbed the broom and hat. “Maybe you can’t fly because China made this broom.”

Thorn rested her chin on the table. “That isn’t the broommaker’s name.”

Meg flipped the broom around and pointed to a little cloth tag sewed to where the handle met the brush. “This is a replica of brooms made around that time period. When the Historical Society inventoried the house, they didn’t find a broom.”

Thorn sat up. “It looks similar, but now that I look closely, the whorls on the wood are different. This isn’t my broom. Maybe I still have my magic, then!”

Thorn took a deep breath. She would leave the house on foot tomorrow.

She would gather ingredients, brew a Moats Everywhere potion, return to reclaim her house, and then try to compose a different recipe for Time Travel potion, one that didn’t require the feather of an extinct bird.

She would do all that, but right now she was so tired.

“Before you chase me out of the house, could I at least have my cup of tea?”

“Of course. And you can stay until my husband gets here in a bit with some basic necessities for you.” Meg headed to the cabinet by the window. “I hope you figure out a way to get back to your time. Everyone must be worried about you.”