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I got the children off to school in the morning, without letting Angie discover that the teapot had returned to her toy box, and texted my sisters: 911 my house. Hurry soonest after breakfast crowd. They’d all get here as fast as possible. The 911 call was used only for extreme emergencies. Meanwhile I set four loaves to rise and made salad enough for all of us, all my sisters. There were seven of us, or had been until our eldest had died after turning to the black arts. We were still grieving over that one. Four of us were witches, and the remaining two were human. Four of the youngest were taking classes at various universities and colleges in the area, but they’d get here any way they could after the 911 text. Family always came first.
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Carmen Miranda Everhart Newton, my air witch sister, set her toddler Iseabeal Roisin—pronounced Ish-bale Rosh-een—down at the door. Ishy ran, shouting for the cat—“Kekekeke”—her arms raised. The witch twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, had called in sick for their morning classes and closed the herb shop. Our wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were the last to arrive, having cleaned up the café after the last of the breakfast crowd.
When we were all sitting in my kitchen, the toddlers happily talking to each other in incomprehensible kid language, I realized how long it had been since we’d sat like this, working on a magical problem. Since our eldest, Evangelina, had died as a result of consorting with demons. Well, at the hand of my BFF, but that was another story. We were all red-haired, some more blond, some more brown, some of us flaming scarlet. All of us with pale skin that simply couldn’t tan. All of us rowdy and chattering and happy to be together again. We had to do this more often. Not the teapot part, just the playing-hooky-and-visiting part.
To capture their attention, I centered the teapot atop the old farmhouse table, then caught them up on the teapot problem, the vamp problem, and the time limit problem. I had been studying the teapot for hours, so I already had some new things to share. “It isn’t, strictly speaking, just a teapot. It’s both a teapot and not a teapot, the result of a spell, and is magical, in some way, on its own. I can’t tell why it keeps coming back here and I can’t make it stay away.”
“Yeah,” the human Regan said. “That whole not having a magic wand really sucks.”
“Ha-ha,” Liz said, sounding bored with the oft-used banter.
“What I want to do is to raise the wards on the house, make a magic circle, and study it together.” I looked at the human sisters. “You two will have to babysit and keep watch. Pull us out if anything strange happens.”
“We always get stuck with babysitting duty,” Regan complained.
“Word,” Amelia said, sighing her agreement. “Fine. I’ll go play with the kiddies.” To her sister she said, “If you need help hitting them with a broomstick to break a circle, lemme know. I want in on some of that.”
I raised the house wards and my witch sisters made a protective circle around my kitchen table by joining hands. It wasn’t as formal as the circle in my herb garden, but it was enough to study the current situation. The combined magical power of the Everhart sisters is weighty, intense, and deep. It tingles on the skin, it whispers in the air, and in this case, it made a teapot spill its secrets.
Half an hour after staring, we broke for tea and slices of fresh bread with my homemade peach hot, untraditional peach preserves with chili peppers. While I put the snack together, Liz said, “His name is George.”
“Not he, as in a human he,” Cia said, “but a male something.”
“He stinks,” Carmen said. “A bit like muskrat. Or squirrel. Something rodent-ish.”
“I got wet dog out of the scent,” I said.
“Whatever he is, he’s alive,” Liz said.
“And not evil,” Cia added. “Trapped. The result of a hex.”
“Only a witch could have done a spell that captured a soul with a hex, and a blood witch at that,” Liz said, exasperated. Blood witches spilled blood to power spells. The bigger the spell, the more blood needed. Human sacrifice had been known to be involved in black-magic ceremonies.
As we talked, I passed out plates, butter, and the peach hot, and topped up our mugs. “It feels like wild magic. Something not planned, but the result of something else. As if the incantation is sparking off all over the place.”
“Why did it come here?” Cia asked.
“Opposites attract?” Carmen asked. “Your house is free and happy and he isn’t?”
“Maybe he thought you could free him?” Liz asked.
“Or the death magics pulled him in against his will,” the human twins said, nearly synchronous, walking into the kitchen together.