AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The girls hang their heads, but Willow persists with the charade, “Huh. Well, any hypothetical idea how you might fix that as a much wiser, more seasoned witch?”
Nessa rubs her throbbing temples, “I would probably use a very strong banishment spell. Where might this hypothetical body be?”
“He’s in, I mean, he would be, in this completely hypothetical situation, in the really deep cavern behind the house.”
Eyes growing wide with shock, Nessa lets out a hysterical laugh, “You can’t be serious.”
Willow’s breathing becomes labored, “Is that, hypothetically, bad?”
“Well, it’s not good,” Nessa exclaims, nearly hysterical. “That place… it’s not just a hole in the ground. It’s basically a spiritual portal. Why do you think our family owns the land it’s on? We have had to protect people who don’t understand it from using it for things like dumping bodies there.”
Sam laughs now. Uncontrollable giggles spill from her body as she holds her face in her hands. All of the women stare at her in this completely not funny moment.
Emily glares, “How can you possibly be laughing right now?”
She snorts out an end to the laughter, “Because, of course, we threw him a spiritual portal. It just wouldn’t be us if we didn’t do something so incredibly unlikely. Like, how does that even happen?”
Nessa takes a full appraisal of the girls in her kitchen now, seeing for the first time the bruising across Sam’s swollen face and the strangulation marks around Emily’s neck. Her irritation and shock now give birth to concern and understanding, “Sam… Emily… the body. Did that person do those things to you?”
Sam touches her own face and a sob escapes her, “I had actually forgotten what started this whole thing.” Biting her lip, she ducks her head, letting the tears fall as all of her emotions finally come to a head.
Nessa searches their faces for any sign of darkness and sees only what she knows them to be. Good. Kind. Frightened. She recalls the conversation with her daughters about the boy they knew to be evil for no reason but his own satisfaction. She has no doubt in her body that intentions were in the right place and she knows she will help.
“I need to know exactly what happened. Moment by moment. Leave nothing out. We’ll find our way through this.”
“That’s actually a really great plan,” Nessa concedes as she evaluates exactly what these bright young minds had concocted to save one another, “Had you stashed him away literally anywhere else, that is.”
“We can’t all be perfect,” Sam quips with a shrug.
Nessa gives her a motherly look, eyebrows raised and then she and Sam share a smile.
Running over all the details in her head, Nessa tries to piece together all the ways to a working solution. There must be something she’s overlooking because she keeps coming up completely blank. Unless… a light bulb goes on over her head and she gets excited as she puts it all together.
“Our absolute best option would be to remove his body from there and bury it somewhere else. Break his connection to what’s giving him the power to come back and he can’t do anything, especially if we consecrate the new grave to keep him tucked in nice and tight,” Nessa pauses, talking herself right out of the idea, “but I just don’t think that’s an option. That hole is easily a hundred or more feet deep and who knows how stable or unstable it is down there.”
Willow, Raven, Callie, Sam, and Emily all watch on as intently as they used to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Nessa is in her own world of thought, talking only to herself. She barely even notices they are there, so absorbed in her thought process.
“What if,” she smiles to herself and knows she has the answer, “we just lock him in?”
Callie whispers to Raven, “What does that mean?”
Raven gives a wide-eyed shrug of her shoulders.
Willow shoots up from her chair, hugging her mother, “Of course! I don’t know why I didn’t think of that!”
Mother and daughter beam at one another. The others glance around, completely clueless.
“Uh, guys,” Sam speaks up, “it’s a literal hole in the ground. How do you lock someone in a hole in the ground?”
In unison, Nessa and Willow say, “An entrapment.”
Still completely in the dark, Sam nods, “Sure. Okay…”
Willow’s excitement is so all-consuming that she nearly has stars in her eyes, “Have you ever done one before?”
Nessa chews her lip, “No, but I’ve seen it done. Once when I was a little girl.” She is distracted, her mind moving a hundred miles an hour trying to piece it all together. Suddenly she bursts from her chair, “My mom’s grimoire! I know she has the curse we need in there somewhere.”
Raven and Willow lock eyes. Their grandmother is someone they never knew, but they have listened to countless stories of the life she lived, of the witch that she was, but curses? Curses are a type of magic they have never performed and have been warned away from their entire lives. Curses take a part of who you are when you cast them. A sort of balancing of the universe. When you take from someone, the universe takes from you.
