In the garden behind Emily’s house, their typical haunt with its lattice-climbed vines and old stone well, the three friends explored middleschool sorcery. Tarot was old news by the time Scarlet found the leathery tome under a bridge, and alchemy had long since become second nature. Talia pulled back her shoulder blades and tilted her head to the sky.
They spent the chilly October day away from school, and would continue this mandated vacation for the remainder of the month. Their small community was shocked when a janitor found Mr. Whitney’s body contorted beneath the bleachers, reeling further when police discovered the contents of his second floor closet. Classes were, for now, canceled.
Talia slid her navy blue boat shoes across the boards covering the well, widening her stance. She closed her eyes, and her two friends did the same.
In unison, the girls whispered incantations in a language they had taught themselves, scraped and scaffolded together through endless hours online, in libraries, in dusty bookshops they didn’t tell their parents about. A gust of autumn wind cartwheeled through the back yard, billowing Scarlet’s long jacket and drawing chaotic music from the chimes hanging in the trees.
The sounds subsided and Talia relaxed her posture. Emily checked her dainty wristwatch, gold plated with her birthdate engraved on the back, and took a few steps toward Talia, still standing on the pedestal of the covered well.
“My mom won’t be home for another two hours. Do you think we did it?”
Scarlet joined her friends, fixing the auburn braid that hung over her shoulder. In the past, they never knew if the spells were successful until well after, from the evening news or a hushed rumor moving ghostlike through halls of Evergreen Middle.
The yellowed, handwritten tome felt different, though. Its ominous arrival in their lives seemed too well timed, an offering of power they would be foolish to refuse.
Emily picked up the book that had blown closed at Talia’s feet, thumbing through the pages to find their spot. The paper was brittle, filled to the margins with roughly drawn symbols and diagrams in ink of every color. Somehow, it was heavier than it should be. Emily stopped reading and looked up with worry scrawled across her face.
“We did it right, but we missed something. Something important.”
Scarlet jumped at the sound of snapping planks, and barely had time to scream as Talia plummeted out of sight. Emily dropped the book, and the two friends embraced with a sob under the consequential weight of their ritual.
The rest of the afternoon was consumed with authorities, distraught and scrambling back and forth across town attending to two apparently simultaneous accidents. By sundown, Scarlet and Emily sat holding hands on the front steps of the house, both crying quietly and relieved to finally be away from the adults.
Scarlet looked at the tattered book in her lap.
“You know what it says in the old texts. The coven can change, but as long as one lives, the pact survives.”
Emily wiiped her eyes and looked down the street at the neighborhood she’d grown up in, at the familiar trees she’d climbed, the family homes where she’d played with dolls and gone to birthday parties, noting which of the foundations she’d discretely marked with white chalk.
“We need to find a third.”