Life's A Witch

Chapter Twenty-Five

When I finally made it downstairs, about a half hour later, I found that everyone was awake and already practicing the spells in the backyard. My heart swelled with pride as I realized that I was no longer going to have to convince the other kids to train; they actually wanted to get better.

As I walked into the kitchen, my eyes drifted to Asher. He was sitting on the counter near the sink, sucking down a bowl of cereal. When he saw me, he shot me a grin, a line of milk dribbling down his chin. Heading straight to him, I leaned up against the counter, jutting out my hip as I looked up at him.

"I thought Trix were for kids," I said, nodding to the box of cereal on the counter next to him.

"That's just what they want you to believe. Trix are actually for everyone."

"You're kind of tricky yourself, aren't you?" I asked, raising my eyebrow at him.

He paused briefly before shoveling more food into his mouth. The break in eating was so imperceptible that I wouldn't have noticed it if I weren't looking for it.

"How so?" he asked, his mouth full again.

"Well, the plan you had to crash with me last night was pretty sneaky. You must've known that if you got into my room, I'd let you stay," I said.

He smiled. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "I was just coming to hang out. You're the one who invited me in."

"Liar!" I hissed, in mock shock. The truth was I'd have let him stay whether he'd asked or not.

"You can act like the jury's still out on me, but I know you think I'm awesome."

"A little overconfident, don't you think?" I asked.

"I like to think of it as realistic."

"Mmm," I murmured.

"Hadley? Are we learning new stuff today or going over what we learned yesterday?"

I turned to see that Asher and I were no longer the only ones in the kitchen. Emory and Peter stood by the back door, looking at me expectedly.

"We'll review a few things, but I thought we'd go over hand-to-hand combat today," I said, still staring at Asher.

"Cool," Peter said, cracking his knuckles. Then, looking over his shoulder nervously, he took another step toward me. "Hey, Had, you may want to take a look outside before we get started."

"Why? What's up?" I asked, not liking the way Peter sounded.

I walked quickly over to the back door, sweeping past them. Scanning the yard, I looked for anything out of place or potentially dangerous. My eyes landed on a crowd that had gathered off to the right of the yard.

In the middle of it was Fallon.

I immediately became suspicious as I watched him talk in hushed tones to the group. "What is he up to?" I wondered to myself.

Ever since we'd made it back from the run-in with Samuel and his crew at my house, Fallon had kept a pretty low profile. He was still showing up to all of our training sessions, but he'd barely been talking to anyone and there were whole chunks of time where I'd forget he was ever around. I wasn't sure what had caused his sudden desire to fade into the background, but I was too busy to worry about it. Besides, a little time off from our constant bickering was kind of nice.

But now it seemed like he was back to his old self, which was not a good sign.

Crossing the yard, I thought about what I wanted to say. The group was in such a great place now—we were finally acting like a true coven and not just a bunch of latchkey kids—that I was hesitant to do anything that would take us two steps back. We needed to be fully unified if we were going to win this fight against the Parrishables. It would be bad if Fallon and I butted heads again now.