Watch Me Burn: The December People, Book Two (6 page)

“You’re sure it will wear off? Some things you can’t get back.”

“When I reminded you about stuff, you remembered. So the memory isn’t gone. So, probably some kind of misdirection, or confusion spell, like I said. Those aren’t permanent.”

Xavier turned away towards the living room.

“Wait,” David said. “Can I talk to you about something?”

“It wasn’t me.”

“What wasn’t?”

“I didn’t cast the spell.”

“Oh, I know. It’s not that…you know, I don’t remember what it was.”

“Okay,” Xavier said. He started to turn away, and then stopped. “What happened yesterday, after you came back from the mechanic’s?”

David shook his head, trying to make sense of a jumble of disjointed memories. After he searched his memory for a moment, he forgot why. Xavier stared at him, with the same no-color grayish brown eyes David had. Xavier rarely looked at him so attentively. Or at anything so attentively.

“Okay,” Xavier said. He nodded and pursed his lips together, looking maybe…worried? David had trouble reading Xavier on a good day. “I’m going to go watch TV.”

Too confused to do anything useful, David spent most of the day in bed trying to sleep off the spell. He occasionally wandered out to count his children. However, even this confused him. He had lived most of his life with three children, and then lived with five for awhile, and now lived with four. So he found it difficult to remember how many should be there today. How could he love his kids so much and still manage to be such a crappy parent? He couldn’t even remember how many he had.

By the time six o’ clock rolled around and Amanda came home, David’s headache had passed. He still felt confused, but had gained enough coherence to hang on to the fact that someone had cursed him. And he suspected his wife.

In that tiny house, he had nowhere to yell at her without being on display in front of all his kids. He settled for sitting on a kitchen stool and arranging his menacing eyebrows into a glare that would say it all.
I know what you did to me. How dare you?
And several other choice words he would never say aloud, but felt comfortable communicating with his eyebrows.

Amanda put her purse on the counter in front of him and sighed. Maybe winter witches didn’t do well in the oppressive heat, but she didn’t look well. Her skin seemed too pale and gray, especially for the summer. She put her head on the counter.

His concern distracted him again. He put his hand on her head, smoothing her pale blonde hair.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She picked her head up, and smiled at him—the transformation too quick. Forced.

“Just tired,” she said. “You know, the usual.”

“The usual,” he repeated.

“How…are you?” she asked.

Something in the tone of her voice and the way she examined him brought David back to his coherent thought.

“What did you make me forget?” He punched each word, so he could give the emphasis of yelling while still keeping his voice down.

“What do you mean?” she asked innocently.
Liar. Liar. Liar.
He had no doubt now. Maybe she could get away with this stuff before he knew he was a wizard. But now, he could see right through her.

His narrowing eyebrows must have said as much, because she sighed. “Calm down. It was a silly little spell. You’ll be fine.”

She turned away from him and went into the bedroom. David wanted to shoot death rays out of his eyes, and as a dark wizard, he couldn’t shoot death rays but he could cause some damage with a look.

She could ignore him if she wanted. He might have forgotten something, but he wouldn’t forget she had been the one to take it. Just in case, he had written it down in several places.
Amanda made you forget something.

“Where’s Emmy?” Amanda asked, continuing to ignore his rage. She came back out of the bedroom and had already pulled her hair back and changed into yoga pants.

“What?” David asked.

“Emmy…you know, your daughter. Where is she?”

“She’s not here?”

Amanda’s pleasantness melted away and she gave him a few curses with her own eyebrows.

“You have got to be kidding me. Your only job is to sit on your ass and watch the kids. And you can’t even do that.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Okay, he gave up. He didn’t stop himself from yelling now. “This is
your
fault, Amanda. You did this to me. And then you left the kids with a man who could barely figure out how to feed himself today. You did this.
You!
”

“She’s fine,” Patrick said, turning around from where he sat on the couch. “She went out with friends.”

“What friends? Where did they go?” Amanda demanded, while she dialed Emmy’s number. Emmy’s phone trilled in her bedroom.

“She leaves her phone at home so you can’t track her GPS. We know you do that, you know,” Patrick said.

“Dammit, that little…” Amanda trailed off into incoherent hissing. “Who picked her up?”

“Some creepy guy in a van,” Patrick said.

“What?”

“Are you guys ever going to get jokes?”

“That’s not funny,” David said. Adding the only coherent thought he could manage.

“It was a couple girls. In my grade. A Cassie, or Chrissie, or something. Or maybe it’s Erica.”

mmy dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the garage as noisily as possible. For leaving the house without permission, she had been sentenced to vacuuming and shampooing the inside of the truck. Her mom was such a bitch. She had gotten home at 8pm.
8pm
—when nuns and babies came home. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Mom claimed she smelled cigarettes and alcohol on her, but she had no proof. But Mom didn’t care about proof. She was crazy. And Dad wouldn’t stand up to her.

Whatever.

The truck still smelled of Jude—a mix of sweat and body wash. Cleaning the truck was good because she wanted that smell gone. She didn’t like thinking about him.

She plugged in her earbuds and listened to angry music—not hard to find in her playlist. She started by vacuuming the air in the cabin as if trying to catch ghosts. She cleaned the dashboard and the windows and mirrors, and found she didn’t hate it. She might volunteer to do this every night, for the chance to be alone in the dark and quiet with something to do.

Then she pulled out the floor mats to vacuum and shampoo them on the driveway. Some small pieces of trash had accumulated under the mats and she reached for something silver she mistook for loose change.

The significance of what she held washed over her immediately. The object dripped in magic—an abhorrent magic that felt familiar. Her stomach squeezed into knots. She held Julie Prescott’s charm bracelet.

Emmy put the bracelet in her pocket and continued cleaning the truck, with more dedication than she had before. She cleaned everything at least twice, until her hands stung from the chemicals in the carpet shampoo. She stayed out there so long, Mom had to come and call her in to go to bed.

Emmy avoided speaking to anyone when she came in. They probably assumed she was continuing to sulk about her punishment, but her throat felt too tight to speak. She headed straight for the bathroom. When she changed out of her khaki shorts and into her sleeping shorts, she kept the bracelet grasped in her hand.

The bracelet felt hot and pointy, as if she had shoved a cactus covered in fire ants in her fist. She felt about the bracelet as she felt about the girl. She couldn’t stand it, without a good reason. Some of the girl’s energy stuck to the bracelet, which meant this was Julie’s object talisman, a protective symbol wizards kept with them at all times, which accumulated bits of their magic. A talisman Julie had lost. Emmy touched her own object talisman, a glass orb filled with holy water she wore around her neck.

Even though she found the thing innately distasteful, she didn’t want to put it down, not even long enough to take a shower. Instead, she turned on the water on so people would think she was showering while she examined the bracelet in the full light of the bathroom. She laid it on the counter, arranging it into a circle. She didn’t know what to look for. Some kind of answer. Some kind of information. She tried her usual senses first. She saw some clay mud crusted on some of the charms, but nothing helpful.

If it was Julie’s object talisman, she could get some information from it by magic. Maybe get a sense of what spells Julie had performed or where the bracelet had been. She’d never tried to extract information from a talisman and no one had ever taught her how, but it seemed possible.

She held the bracelet between her palms and concentrated. She got an uncomfortable hot feeling behind her heart, but no insights. She tried putting the bracelet on. Other than feeling like the abhorrent bracelet might contract and lop off her hand, nothing seemed different.

Finally, she turned off the water and concealed the bracelet in her balled fist so she could leave the bathroom. If anyone noticed she still had dry hair, they didn’t say anything.

Emmy crawled into her bed and Evangeline hovered over her.

“What’s wrong?” Evangeline asked.

“Nothing.”

“You haven’t said anything since you came in. And you usually talk a lot.”

“I’m just tired.”

“Okay.” Evangeline didn’t sound convinced, but went to her own bed without saying more.