Vacations from Hell

Running did not seem to be an option, and it was too late to hide. Cecily rose, unsure what to think—until she saw Kathleen hiding her smirk beneath one newly manicured hand.



She signed me up for this. Why wasn’t I watching her more closely?



“Go for it, honey!” Dad yelled, clapping vigorously. He and Mom looked so happy that she’d decided to join in.



Cecily cast a glance at the crowd—at least one hundred people in sandals and T-shirts, all of them slightly stir-crazy from the bad weather, waiting to hear her sing. At this point she figured they were pretty starved for entertainment. She wasn’t a particularly gifted singer, but she didn’t suck either. Depending on the song, maybe she could get through it. As Kathleen-Pruitt-Brand Evil went, this wasn’t all that bad.



Hesitantly she made her way to the stage and took the microphone in hand. The prompter screen came up with the lyrics to the song that was about to play—the song Kathleen had chosen in her name.



In horror she saw the chorus: “My hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps.”



Gripping the microphone so tightly she could have used it for a club, Cecily forced a smile onto her face and thought, This means war.



They got back to the beach houses fairly late that night. The rain hadn’t stopped, but it had finally tapered to a light drizzle. Nobody needed umbrellas to get from the cars to the houses. Cecily walked with Theo, who was unsteady on his feet; he wasn’t used to staying up to this hour. Although Cecily was fairly tired herself, her mind was far too wired for her to fall asleep.



I need to break the enchantment on Scott. I really don’t have any idea how to accomplish that. I can’t count on Mom to help me out. So what do I do?



The best possible resource was her mother’s Book of Shadows.



Every witch kept a Book of Shadows. Cecily wasn’t old enough to have started hers yet—that began when apprenticeship ended. Nobody ever completed a Book of Shadows; witches worked on theirs throughout their entire lives. The books contained lists of spells but not only that; they would also hold each story of how the witch had learned the spell, when and how and why she had used it, and what the results were each time.



When she was younger, Cecily had planned to keep her Book of Shadows in electronic format—that would make it harder to destroy and easier to update and organize. (She sometimes thought dreamily of the Excel spreadsheets she could create of magical ingredients.) However, she’d learned that the book itself was important. It was to be kept near any time a powerful spell was being performed, and over time the nearness to magic seeped into the pages. The Book of Shadows of an old powerful witch almost had powers of its own.



Walking up and saying, “Hi, Mom, can I borrow your Book of Shadows?” was completely out of the question. Cecily had been allowed to look at it before but only in her mother’s company and only on special occasions.



That meant she’d have to steal it.



Well, not “steal.” Borrow. It seemed better to think of this as borrowing; after all, Mom would get her Book of Shadows back. She just wouldn’t know that it had been gone.



Everyone was getting ready for bed, which meant they were wearing their pajamas in the hall and pretending not to mind that other people were using the bathrooms. Cecily put on a T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants—believable as sleepwear but also ideal for sneaking around the house, or sneaking out of it.



She wandered through the house, trying to look casual, which shouldn’t have been so difficult in a T-shirt and yoga pants. Mom and Dad, where are you? Please don’t already be in bed—



They weren’t. They were sitting in the front room, each drinking a glass of wine, being sort of disgustingly mushy with each other. Cecily averted her eyes, the better to avoid witnessing the dreaded parental make-out session. The point was they were distracted, which gave her a window of opportunity.



Quickly she tiptoed down the hall toward her parents’ bedroom. Nobody saw her except Theo, who was rubbing his eyes and probably too tired to notice.



Cecily peered around the bedroom, considering and then rejecting possible hiding places. Dad might look in any of the drawers or under the bed, so her mother wouldn’t have put the book there. Same thing with any of the suitcases. It would have to be someplace really safe, yet unexpected.



Cecily’s eyes lit up as she noticed the shadow box above the bed. It was merely decoration—a kitschy beach scene, which was pretty much the kind of thing that had to count as style in Ocean’s Heaven—but it stood out from the wall a bit, and it was big enough….



She tugged the shadow box from the wall, and the Book of Shadows flopped onto the bed.