“Please, call me Mildred,” she insists, patting Mei’s hand, before turning to teach the other students.
While Mei looks like she’ll never wash that hand ever again, I whisper in her ear, “What’s the matter with you? I mean, you were a little excited that I was a Volkov before, but you didn’t act like you were just touched by God or something.”
She turns, grips my shoulders, and while shaking me gently, stage whispers, “You didn’t tell me you were part of the main family. Like you’re not just a random Volkov. You’re one oftheVolkovs. That shit is huge.”
When I shrug and blink at her dumbly, Mei groans and slides her hands down her face, the flesh of her full cheeks dragging down with the motion.
“Okay, I don’t know why Mildred—oh my God! I can’t believe she told me to call her by her first name,” Mei gushes for a second, before shaking her head and getting back to the point. “I don’t know why she hasn’t explained it yet. Maybe she’s humble like that. So cool!”
“Focus,” I order, trying to figure out how she knows how important my aunt is when no one knew beforehand—including me.
“Right,” she answers, shifting in her seat. “So that big book right there with your family crest on it, it’s only trusted to those who are in the direct line of succession to the matriarch. We’re talking daughters. Granddaughters. Shit like that.” She shakes me again, explaining very slowly, “Callie, you’re pretty much witch royalty.”
“Oh,” I croak, staring at the book that exposes so much about me.
Technically I knew this, but it’s different when it’s spelled out by someone that isn’t my aunt. Mildred didn’t just make a small power play today. She dropped a goddamn gauntlet.
“I’m best friends with witch royalty,” Mei sings, wiggling in her chair. I think I just found where her confidence to verbally spar with Gina came from.
“Best friends?” I question teasingly, pulling a hair tie from my pocket and styling my hair into a messy bun of my own.
“You know it!” She grins, showing off her silver collection of braces. “Don’t worry. I’m an excellent best friend. Hey, I’m already cool with your harem of boyfriends.”
“Not my boyfriends,” I correct automatically, even though I’m unsure how true that statement is anymore.
“Suuuuure. Whatever you say, bestie,” she leers, and I giggle as she bounces her brows suggestively. Becoming serious, her fingers reverently skim along the edges of the Volkov grimoire as she asks, “So where do you want to start?”
I grin wickedly and answer, “Levitation, of course.”
∞∞∞
Witch Sunday School ends with a bang… well, more of a violent gust. Turns out casting Levitation isn’t as difficult as I thought it might be. Unfortunately, I didn’t simply levitate some feathers like I was supposed to. I levitated everything in the backyard—tent, tables, potted plants…people. All of it now floats about fifteen feet up in the air, with me on the ground wondering how the hell I’m supposed to get everyone down without hurting anyone.
Mei, of course, is gripping her stomach and cackling, finding all of this amazing and hilarious. She keeps giggling, “It’s Wing-GAR-dium Levi-O-sa. Not Levio-SA.”
Everyone else isn’t nearly as amused.
“Don’t panic,” Mildred orders, as she flies toward me Mary Poppins style.
“Too late,” I squeak, my whole body shaking because I don’t feel a thing.
My necklace is cold. There’s a distinct lack of the fuzzy feeling of magic gathering inside me. I did this with literally zero effort, and I know I could send everything skyrocketing into outer space without trying. Ice slips down my spine as I fear the possible outcomes if I actually tried.
Maybe the real challenge is going to be trying to raise only a single feather and not the whole backyard… and who the hell knows what else.
As the adults pour out into the backyard, gasping at the sight of all of their children doing somersaults in the air, Gina screeches at her mother, “Get me down! I said she was out of control and now look!” She flips in the air, trying to push her skirt down, and seethes, “I’m going to sue for emotional distress. And damages! Don’t think I won’t!”
“Daughter, for once in your painfully short life—shut up!” Neva shouts while she marches toward me, and I don’t know if I should laugh or be scared.
“Everything is just fine,” my aunt soothes, gathering the family grimoire and then floating back to the ground. Well, not quite all the way down. She still hovers about an inch off the grass, and the book has the ‘floating in zero gravity’look with pages swaying within its binding.
Mildred opens the grimoire to the correct page and holds it out for me to read. She doesn’t look nervous, so I try not to be nervous too.
Wiping my sweaty palms against my jeans, I imagine everything gently gliding back down, then out loud, in what I hope sounds like a commanding voice, I read, “Mighty air, what I have risen, I now ask to be returned to the earth.”
I’m scared everything will ‘return to the earth’ a little too well and everyone will be buried up to their necks, but thankfully, just as I imagined, everything falls relatively easily back to the ground. With the disaster averted, there is a lot of cheering, laughing, and a few guys asking if I’ll do it again. Apparently, it’s pretty awesome to get to do backflips in the air without having to go to space first.
Through gritted teeth, Neva requests, “Mildred, would you be so kind as to give me a few minutes of your time. We can go inside. Maybe have a cup of tea.”
