I didn’t know if I’d be able to break up with someone. So much of my life had been trying to get people to stay. I couldn’t quite imagine telling one to go away; it seemed impossibly hard, even if Cal hadn’t really chosen me to begin with. So I decided to go to the hekamist and get his hook broken, and then I wouldn’t have to talk to him or worry about him ever again.
When I heard my parents turn on the TV in the living room late one night, I crept to the front hall where my mother leaves her purse. I pulled out the snakeskin wallet and removed the black AmEx card. If she looked at her bill—which she, on principle, does not—she would assume she’d bought extra fertilizer or dirt or something that month.
I’d tucked the card in my pocket and was returning the wallet when Mina appeared in the doorway behind me.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Pizza money,” I said. “She won’t mind.”
“You just ate dinner.”
“For tomorrow, duh.”
Mina watched me, suspicious, but she let me go.
The old hekamist who’d given me the hook wasn’t home.
“Is your mom around?” I asked the girl who answered the door, even though there was nowhere for anyone to hide in their small house.
“She’s not available,” she said.
“Well, when will she be?”
The girl crossed her arms over her chest. “That depends.”
“That’s not really good enough for me. I’m a loyal customer.”
“Oh yeah? You’ve got money?”
“Sure,” I said.
The girl looked me over, from my lime-green flip-flops to my sundress to my swinging perfect hair. It was a totally normal outfit, especially compared to her biker-esque dirty-looking black coat and asymmetrical short haircut. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but she must’ve found it. “If you have money, I can help you,” the girl said. At my doubtful look, she added, almost casually, “I’m a hekamist.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. She seemed Mina’s age at most.
“You are?”
The girl leaned back, tapping her black-nailed hands on the doorframe. “Joined the coven when I was thirteen,” she said. “Do you want a spell or not?”
I followed her through the cramped living room and sat at the kitchen table. She bustled around the kitchen making tea. I pulled the black AmEx out of my jeans pocket and placed it between us on the chipped table.
She glanced over and laughed, though it sounded sad. “What exactly do you want me to do with that?” She picked up the card and twirled it in her fingers. “I can’t believe I told you I was a hekamist for nothing. This isn’t Barneys. We take cash or nothing, Ms. Lila Charpal.”
“It’s Kay,” I said, then snatched the card out of her hand and crossed my arms over my chest and flared my nostrils. It’s a look my mother gives salesladies and doctors when she’s not given the answer she wants, and it covered my embarrassment. “I can get cash.”
“I don’t work on installment. At least, not for you.”
“I don’t know what installment is, but I’ll get you cash. As long as you can actually deliver.”
She sat across from me, mug of tea in her hands. “What do you need?”
So I told her about my spells: the beauty one and then the hook for friendship, and how I’d given the hook to my two best friends and a boy, and how I didn’t want him to be in the spell anymore.
The girl—the hekamist—listened and drank her tea.
“There are two ways to do this,” the girl said when I had finished. She still hadn’t told me her name, and no way was I going to ask for it. “The first is you take a spell to cancel out the effects of the hook. Not a reversal—you won’t go back to normal—it’s more like another layer of spells over the one you’ve got.”
“What kind of a layer?”
“The hook needs to know who you are in order to hook onto something. So this spell would make you sort of . . . invisible. Not actually invisible. Just harder for people to notice, especially if they don’t really know you or care about you. And it would affect everyone, not only your boyfriend.”
I shivered. It sounded awful, and I couldn’t risk losing Diana or Ari. No. “What’s the other way?”
“It’s a bit harder. I’d brew something that you’d have to sneak to him to eat. A spell to disconnect from you and really break it.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“It’s dangerous. I can’t be sure it would work. Spells protect themselves. They don’t want to be broken.”
Sounded like typical hekamist warnings I’d heard every time I’d gotten a spell. “I know.”
The hekamist grinned, but not from amusement. “You don’t know what other spells he’s taken already—you don’t know the types of reactions that could take place. Plus if I’m not careful the original spell will lash out at me, and then I’ll probably get caught and my mom and I will go to jail until we both go crazy and die.”