Page 22

Alonso

ALONSO CAN FEEL THE MAGIC AS HE APPROACHES MRS. EMBERLY’S hospital room. It’s palpable around Penny’s mom, visible but not, kind of like an aura. He doesn’t realize he’s hovering in the doorway until Penny asks him what’s wrong.

“Nothing,” Alonso says. “Let’s see it.”

“Here,” Penny says, touching a small black charm at her mom’s throat. A shiver passes through her, and she withdraws her hand. “It keeps doing that.”

“Doing what?” Alonso says.

“It feels kind of… alive.”

Alonso takes the ward in his hand. At first, the cold of the crescent moon charm makes goose bumps rise on his arms—and then the ward’s enchantment shows itself.

Alonso feels the true weight of the ward’s magic. The strength of the ward’s creator, like no power Alonso has ever felt in his life. The echo of the other person who wore it. When Alonso closes his eyes, he sees her face.

Tanya Barrion. Corey’s mom.

The aura Alonso sensed when he walked into the room wasn’t the curse; it was the protective barrier of the ward.

A weird smell is filling the room—a smell like singed flesh.

Penny gasps. “Alonso, your hand!”

Alonso flinches and drops the necklace, clutching his hand against his chest. His skin is smoking as if he stuck his open palm on an electric stovetop.

“Fuck fuck fuck,” Alonso says.

Penny runs to the sink and turns on the cold water. Alonso shoves his hand under the tap, sighing as the water meets his skin.

“I’ll get a nurse,” Penny says, but Alonso grabs her arm before she can walk away.

“They won’t know what to make of this.” He holds up his hand. “How bad is it?”

Penny reaches up and grabs his wrist.

It’s not romantic, the way she touches him. She’s just angling his hand toward the hospital window so she can see better. But Alonso’s magical nausea is very quickly replaced with a different kind of nausea, and now it isn’t his hand that’s burning. It’s his entire body.

When Penny looks up, his eyes immediately lock with hers. This always happens, whether he wants it to or not; his eyes find Penny like a fire finds gasoline. Alonso has the same thought he’s had a million times before: She would be horrified if she knew how he really felt about her.

Penny’s voice brings Alonso back to himself. “The burn looks strange. It has a pattern.”

Alonso pulls his hand away, but he’s too rough, and Penny takes a step back, creating distance between them. He ignores the guilt he feels at the look on her face as he shakes out the pain. Why can’t he be normal around her? Every little thing Penny does sets off a chain of wild reactions, like he’s a human Rube Goldberg machine.

Focus , Alonso reminds himself. He sucks in a breath and looks at his palm.

Penny is right; this burn isn’t the same crescent shape as the charm hanging around Anita’s neck. It’s rectangular, but it’s what’s inside the rectangle that makes Alonso grimace.

Before his family gave up on their quest to teach Alonso about the world of witches, his mother and aunts made him memorize the crest of every coven in the world. There were 277 last time Alonso checked, but only 13 have permanent seats on the Council of Witches. These are the covens Alonso’s mother speaks of with reverence, even though it was the Council that sealed the De Lucas’ magic.

Alonso used to run his fingers over the crests, committing them to memory not because his family said it was important, but because these people had the power to take Alonso’s magic away. He could’ve contacted them. He could’ve confessed everything and asked them to make him mortal. That way, he wouldn’t have to be afraid of himself.

The only thing that stopped him from contacting the Council was the big unknown: What would they do if they discovered Alonso had his magic back? Would they simply seal it away—or would Alonso receive an additional punishment for keeping this secret for years?

So Alonso had never called them. But he spent enough hours staring at the crests of those thirteen families that he never forgot them.

Which is convenient. Because one of those crests is now burned into Alonso’s palm.

“Of course,” he says through clenched teeth.

“Do you recognize it? It looks like some sort of cross.”

Alonso turns his hand around and points. “You see that letter, under the cross? It’s a P . This is the crest of the Pierres.”

“Are the Pierres another coven?”

“They’re not just another coven, they’re the coven. They’re the most powerful family of witches in the world, and their specialty is ward magic.”

Penny goes quiet as she considers his hand. “Why did they help Corey’s family?”

That’s a question Alonso can’t answer. How the hell did the Barrions manage to find the Pierres? And why would the Pierres have meddled in this curse? Witches stay away from other covens’ dark magic. It’s not just a superstition; since curses can only be broken by the witch who created them, any witch who tries to break a curse or even mitigate its effects is putting themselves at risk of being touched by that dark magic. Which, in turn, can manifest as weakened magic for an entire coven.

What would’ve convinced the Pierres to take that kind of risk?

“Maybe Corey’s family paid them a lot of money?” Penny says.

Alonso closes his hand into a fist, letting the heat from the burn seep into his bones. “Except the Pierres don’t need money.”

“Then why do it? Did they want to help the Barrions?”

“That’s my guess. The Pierres might be soft. That could work in our favor.” A plan quickly forms in Alonso’s mind. “If we can get a Pierre to help us break this curse, that could make a huge difference. They train in magic every day from the moment they learn to walk and talk. If we get one of them to help us when we do the curse-breaker, it would make the spell much more powerful.”

“But what are they going to say if they find out you can… you know.”

“They might take my magic away,” Alonso says. “But this isn’t just about breaking the curse. I’ve been thinking about what you said at my place—about how we might not know for sure it was my grandpa who cursed the Barrions.”

Penny bites her lip. “You think I was right?”

“Probably not. But I want to look into it, to see if there were any other covens in Idlewood when the curse began. My grandma Allison died a few years ago, but she was always convinced my grandpa had been framed, that someone else had actually cursed the Barrions. She spent years looking for proof, like a blood oath or something.”

“Blood oaths sound ominous.”

“Think of them like legal testimony signed in blood, and if anything you write down is a lie, you burst into flames.”

Penny’s mouth falls open. “Actual flames?”

Alonso nods. “My grandma always said Gio was an asshole, but he never would’ve cursed anybody.”

“And you believe that?”

“I want to make sure we’ve got all the information we need before we attempt this spell. If it doesn’t work, I don’t think we’ll get another chance to try.”

“Why not?” Penny says. “We can use different items, write different incantations…”

“Remember how I said magic always has a cost? If this were a video game, the curse-breaker would only be available to witches who are at level one hundred. It’s going to drain me, and I don’t know when I’ll be strong enough to try again. It could take a year. And who knows if your mom…” He trails off, pointedly not looking at Mrs. Emberly across the room.

Penny’s face falls. “Okay. Then how do we contact the Pierres?”

Alonso cracks his neck. “We’ll have to go to their store. Second World Emporium. It’s where they proffer their wares .”

“Is it even in the US?”

Alonso snorts. “They’re in Bloomington. I guess we’re going on a road trip.”