A Perfect Spell Read online

  In short, she was the ideal roommate.

  Part of that was probably because she didn’t want my guests knowing they were sharing a house with the Lara Lancaster, but I liked to tell myself it was because she was just a chill person.

  No sooner had I set my mug down on the railing again than my phone buzzed in my pocket. I furrowed my eyebrows and took it out, wondering if I’d jinxed my hopes of having a quiet single guest for the near future.

  Instead, I saw Diana’s number on the screen. My heart sank. My sister usually only texted unless something was going on, and for a high-strung person like Di, something going on was never anything nice and relaxing.

  “Hey Di,” I answered the phone, pretending my nerves weren’t already on high alert.

  “There’s been a kidnapping!” my sister’s voice shouted through the receiver so sharply that I had to hold it away from my ear and wince.

  “Wha-”

  “Arti, one of the kindergarteners is gone!”

  My eyes widened, and my heart hit the bottom of my chest.

  The past year in Midnight Cove has been a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. We had gone from being a quiet little vacation town where nothing ever happened to having three murders over the course of just a few months. And in a sense, I understand that - times were changing, and crime happened, even in a sleepy town like Moonlight Cove.

  But a kid?

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’, Di? Deep breaths, remember what your therapist said.”

  “My therapist was useless!” she snapped. “What good is a therapist if I can manipulate her?”

  “Wait, why did you try to manipulate your therapist? What does that even mean?”

  “To see if she knew what she was doing, obviously,” Di said. “Arti, that’s not the point -one of my kids is gone, a six year old girl!”

  “Did she just not come in this morning?”

  “Exactly. The teacher called her dad, and the dad panicked. Can you get down here? Help work your magic on Xander?”

  I made a face at the phone, then rolled my eyes.

  “What do you mean, ‘work my magic’?”

  “You know what I mean, Arti,” Di said. “Everyone knows-”

  “Everyone had better not know!” I corrected her with growing alarm.

  “Okay, okay, sorry,” she said. “Just me and mom know you have a thing going on with Officer Tall, Blond and Handsome. Point is, this is your ballpark now, and I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I swear, PTA parents have mods on their broomsticks to get here faster than the speed of light.”

  “I’ll be there in ten,” I said, glancing back into the kitchen.

  “Thank the moon. I’ve got to go, bye,” she rushed in a single breath, and the call ended. I took a deep breath.

  My sister might have been one of the most overachieving people I’d ever known, who had upstaged me in just about every aspect of life, but I took comfort in knowing that without me, Di probably would have died of stress.

  By age eleven.

  I tried to gulp down the rest of my coffee in a couple of big mouthfuls, but my eyes went wide as I ended up having to catch some of it before it ran down my face toward my shirt.

  Praying that nobody had seen that, I wiped my mouth and hurried inside to scribble a note for Daphne and stick it on the fridge where she could easily see it.

  “What’s going on?” Luna asked, her tail flicking back and forth precociously. “You’ve got your emergency face on. Has there been another murder?”

  “Don’t say that,” I chided her. “I’m going to the Academy. Hold down the fort, will you? No cats allowed on school property.”

  “Discrimination!” she huffed, sitting indignantly and turning her nose up. “But fine, fine, I’ll take care of your responsibilities for you yet again.”

  “You can’t even change your own litter,” I called back to her as I pulled my coat on and grabbed my broomstick.

  “Half the time, it seems like you can’t either,” she retorted smugly.

  “I will turn you into a dog for a day,” I warned her, narrowing my eyes and pointing my finger at her. She put her ears down and hissed before I disappeared out the front door, kicking off on my broom and zipping down the cobblestone streets toward the school.

  This time of year, the roads were almost completely covered in snow. It wasn’t much of a problem, thanks to broomsticks, but the town still liked to keep things nice and presentable, so there were a few workers out using their magic to help clear the stuff.

  I honestly felt bad for the people of the non-magical world who had to use big shovels and machinery to clear snow. It was one of the most desirable jobs for teenagers in Moonlight Cove. Wind whipping around my magically-warmed clothing, I passed a small group of the workers, two of whom had enchanted the snow to make a couple of snow-golems to fight each other. The big lugs were clumsily whacking each other with arms made of snow, which fell apart almost immediately on impact.

  Another boy had the idea to make a golem to push the snow out of the road for him, but the golem just ended up adding more mass to its arms until it couldn’t move, the poor thing.

  After a winding ride, I finally made it to the Academy grounds, and I realized straight away that Diana hadn’t been kidding. There were at least three rows of broomsticks piled up outside against the wall, almost all of them presumably belonging to concerned parents. There were students still milling around the campus, meaning class wasn’t cancelled, but I had a strong feeling I’d find what I was looking for in the grand hall where announcements were usually made.

  I propped my broom up with the rest and hurried to the hall, where I could indeed hear my sister’s voice magically resonating through the room. My sister was the principal of the only school in the town, meaning she got to bear the brunt of every parent’s wrath during times like this.

  And it could get ugly. I really hoped that this was all just a misunderstanding, and the girl would be found safe and sound, having decided to go to a friend’s house or something instead of school that day.

  “And so,” Diana was saying as I slipped into the hall, where scores of parents with anxious looks on their faces were watching her up on her podium intently, “what we at the Academy and the Moonlight Cove Police Department urge you all to do is to communicate any relevant information you have about Tina Frost’s whereabouts to the police directly. While the search for Tina is technically a literal witch hunt, we don’t want this to become a metaphorical witch hunt. So please, use established channels to voice your concerns.”

  Looking up towards my sister, I immediately recognized the two people up on stage with her.

  Morgan and Xander Forsetti flanked Diana, both of them standing at attention with their hands folded behind their back. Xander’s eyes scanned the crowd, while Morgan looked as stone-cold and serious as a statue.

  The Forsettis were the town’s police force, and they had been for generations. The siblings’ parents were retired, but their kids were filling those shoes very well.

  As soon as Xander’s eyes fell on me, he glanced at Di and Morgan before quietly slipping away from the podium and moving around the side of the crowd toward me.

  And as much as I hated to admit it, my heart fluttered annoyingly.

  Okay, so maybe I didn’t hate Xander Forsetti. In fact, maybe I liked him a little bit. Or a lot. Maybe I couldn’t get that stupid, handsome smile of his out of my head for hours after I saw it, and maybe I smiled back like a huge dork right back at him for that split second before he started coming toward me. It wasn’t my fault. My face just did things sometimes.

  And no, I had no idea how to handle a crush.

  But it turned out that solving three murders together in a small town wasn’t the best way to get to know someone, so we finally agreed that we should spend a little time getting to know each other over something besides a dead body and a police investigation that I was legally absolutely not supposed to have anything to
do with.

  Most people would call that a date.

  It hadn’t happened yet, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I was dreading it or excited about it. Probably a little of both.

  Xander reached me and nodded for me to follow him outside the hall, away from the crowds. I followed him just as Morgan took to the podium and started to talk about neighborhood watches.

  “Your sister gives a good speech,” Xander said once we were in relative privacy outside.

  “Thanks, she loves talking,” I said without thinking. Xander gave me a puzzled look, but I waved it off. “What’s up? Is there a change of plans? I mean, about our thing? Our dinner thing? Wait, no, you wouldn’t leave in the middle of a speech to talk to me about that. Would you? Of course not, no. Wow, I’m still talking, aren’t I?”

  During the course of my ramble, I was pretty sure my cheeks started doing a great impression of an overly-ripe tomato, while Xander just stared at me blankly with those ice-blue eyes of his.

  “No,” he said finally with a polite smile. “But don’t worry, I’ll get to you soon enough about that.”

  My heart did a somersault.

  “Anyway,” he went on, crossing his thick arms, “I thought we could just cut to the chase on this one and drop the pretext. Let’s work together on this one.”

  I would have been less surprised if he had stepped out to talk to me about our date. I cocked my head to the side, fluttering my eyelashes.

  “What, are you getting tired of threatening to arrest me for meddling?”

  “No, I like that part,” he said, somehow managing to make my face go a shade even redder. “More like tired of holding Morgan back from actually arresting you. Seriously though, we need all the help we can get, because we’re on a time crunch this time. I don’t know how much of the announcement you caught, but a girl named Tina Frost was reported missing by her father, Renaldo.”

  I nodded, and Xander went on, taking something out of his pocket. It was a small glass vial with magical markings etched all over it, and inside was what looked like a lock of hair.

  “Thanks to the recent increase in crime here in town, I got approval for a Quarentenaroa enchantment to be made for Moonlight Cove, and I put it into effect at nine this morning, just after Tina was reported missing.”

  My jaw dropped. That was something I never expected to hear.

  A Quarentenaroa enchantment was a quarantine spell that could be cast over a large area, and it was so hard to work with that magical law enforcement strictly regulated its use and distribution. In practice, it was the witching world’s equivalent of an amber alert. My guess was that the hair in the vial belonged to Tina. As long as Tina was missing, the enchantment worked so that nobody could enter or leave Moonlight Cove.

  Using the spell for too long or too often obviously disrupted the local economy in a big way, so naturally, using it meant the police were taking this very seriously.

  “I know,” Xander said to my reaction. “And believe me, I know this won’t be good for your B&B, but I’m doing this for the sake of the parents.”

  “No, no, totally, I understand,” I rushed to say. “Where did you get the hair?”

  “Her father, when he found out Tina wasn’t at school and reported it,” Xander said, frowning at the vial. “Her hairbrush had some strands in it. Anyway, interviewing Tina’s father is next on my agenda this morning. He was a nervous wreck when he reported it, and working the enchantment took time, so I had to put it off. Want to come along?”

  I had to fight to keep a big smile off my face. Apparently, I wasn’t doing a great job, because Xander rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t get too excited - you need to ride a ways behind me, and if anyone asks, you’re just creeping on my tail. This is definitely not official.”

  “So, the usual. Got it.”

  Chapter 3

  I was getting pretty annoyed with myself.

  As much as I tried over and over again to convince my brain to focus on the very real and present issue of a vulnerable little girl going missing in my quiet hometown, there was something else pressing very insistently into the forefront of my thoughts. And that just happened to be the fixation my brain had on the cute butt zooming around on the broom in front of me. The butt that just so happened to belong to a very attractive police officer who had asked for my help in helping to find poor Tina. I needed to get myself together, but by the moon it was hard to tear my eyes away. I was starting to wonder if I should just break protocol and zoom up next to him, just so I wouldn’t be as tempted to ogle him from behind. Xander was on a mission, and so was I, but being stuck several yards behind him was not proving to be easy.

  He glanced back at me as we turned a corner to fly down a cozy cul-de-sac and my eyes widened as my face went beet-red. So much for being subtle.

  Averting my eyes, I squinted up at the sky as though totally enchanted by the puffy grey clouds. It looked like the snow was going to start up again any moment now. Winter in Moonlight Cove was beautiful for sure, but sometimes the cold and snow tended to outstay their welcome. I was grateful for the insularoa spell I had cast over myself, which kept me warm, as though my broom and immediate vicinity existed under a perfectly-maintained heat lamp. At this time of year, it wasn’t enough to simply wear a jacket and call it a day. I needed a little more protection than that from the elements, and, as usual, my magic could be called upon to help out on that front. Still, I was more than ready at this point for the spring months to come around. There was a reason I lived in Washington and not Minnesota, and the intensity of the winters had a lot to do with it.

  It was a short flight, thankfully, from the Academy to the Frost household; only about six blocks. Did that mean Renaldo Frost usually let his daughter walk to school? It wasn’t far. If my sister and I had lived this close to the school growing up, my parents no doubt would have wanted us to walk. We lived just far enough away to be better suited for a broom ride, the two of us hunched on the back of my mom’s broomstick with our backpacks dangling off the handle.

  When we were finally old enough to have massive amounts of homework and books to haul, my dad rigged her broomstick to have a magical basket attached to the fanned-out brush end of the stick. It was only about the size of a regular bicycle basket, but it was charmed to hold items many times its size. Once you dropped a book into it, the book would magically shrink to fit in the basket. Sometimes I thought it might be nice to have my dad put that same charm on my own broomstick nowadays. It would certainly make it easier to carry a bunch of groceries at once.

  However, my father’s genius little charm did have a downside - sometimes the basket would temporarily “eat” an item. One time, it decided to gobble up my apothecary-chemistry midterm paper for about two weeks. My teacher, Professor Hollingsworth, definitely did not believe me when I told him that I had done the homework but just could not turn it in. I ended up with a late grade for a while.

  Xander pulled his broom up a driveway to a small, quaint cottage. I followed suit, leaning my broomstick next to his against a dainty rose bush out front. “This is the house,” he told me, a serious look on his face.

  I nodded. “Okay. So, how are we going about this?”

  He smirked. “As if you haven’t held an interview before without me a hundred times.”

  “Not a hundred,” I muttered. “Besides, you’re here with me, and you’re in uniform with a badge and all that, so I assume we will have to follow some kind of official guidelines.”

  “To an extent, yes,” he answered quietly as we walked up the steps to the front door. “But part of the benefit of having you along with me is that you seem to possess a raw talent and knack for this kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I know the “right” way to do things. But sometimes, I have to admit, sticking to the rules just makes you a little resistant to working outside the box. That’s where you come in. You’re not bound by the same rules, and you follow your instincts instead of a rulebook.”

  I sq
uinted at him, smiling wryly. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m detecting there might have been a subtle hint at something resembling a compliment in there somewhere.”

  Xander patted me on the shoulder, which instantly made me blush. “See? You’re playing detective already.”

  He reached over to ring the doorbell, which chimed prettily with a seemingly-homemade tune. Only a few seconds later, the door opened with a creak, almost as though the man inside had been waiting for our knock. He pulled it open and peered at us with wide, stricken eyes.

  The man was tall and rather handsome in a solemn, sorrowful kind of way, like he was a tragic character in a dramatic soap opera or something. He had purplish bags under his eyes and a downturned mouth, a shadow of stubble over his jaw. He raked his fingers back through his sleek dark hair, looking nervously back and forth between Xander and me.

  “Are-are you the cops?” he asked in a deep, soft voice. “Have you found Tina?”

  “I’m afraid we haven’t found her yet. Chief Forsetti, nice to meet you. My partner Artemis here is helping as well. She’s here in an official capacity. You can depend on the both of us. We’re here for you, Mr. Frost. May we come inside?” Xander said, sounding very formal.

  Renaldo looked lost for a moment, as though his mind was elsewhere, and then he blinked rapidly, coming back to reality. He nodded. “Oh. Yes. Yes, of course. Come on in.”

  He opened the door wider and the two of us walked in. He led us into a cozy, well-decorated little sitting room. “Would you like anything? Tea? Coffee?” he offered.

  Xander shook his head and gave him a reassuring smile. “No, sir. Thank you.”

  “You?” Renaldo asked, fixing me with those heartbroken greenish eyes.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine,” I said quickly. Renaldo sat down on one sofa, leaving Xander and I to plop down on the love seat across from him. I tried not to think about the fact that Xander was so close to me I could feel the heat from his body.