All-Season Edie by Annabel Lyon Read Free Book Online Page B

book has a fancy letter B on it.
    â€œAm I allowed?”
    â€œWe’ll just slip it in with these others.” Dad squints and shifts his eyes around like a spy. “Tell no one,” he says. “If I am captured, eat your library card.”
    â€œDad,” I say.
    â€œThey won’t take us alive!”
    â€œDad!” I say.
    At the counter, the librarian says, “Wow.”
    â€œAct normal,” Dad says, winking and waggling his eyebrows.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” the librarian says.
    â€œResearch,” I say grimly, pushing Dad through the security arch.
    Eye of newt, I decide, is going to be a problem.
    Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog ...
    On second thought, maybe I should start with something easier than a “charm of powerful trouble,” which makes me feel queasy anyway. I get into enough powerful trouble without dragging dismembered amphibians into it, and I like dogs—even their tongues.
    I sit on my bed, surrounded by books. So far, the herb book seems the most promising. It tells you how to cure a headache, ease a cough and purify the skin with things like peppermint and marigold. Fine. But it doesn’t tell you how to make things happen— how to cause a headache, for instance, not to mention how to break a wineglass. But then, if you could find out how to do it from a book, surely people would be casting spells more often. So there has to be some secret element, something I’m missing. Not knowing what else to do, I keep reading. I read about gathering plants by midsummer moonlight. Well, that’s out— it’s September, and my bedtime is nine o’clock sharp. I read about the town in America where they burned witches at the stake four hundred years ago. But the book thinks they weren’t real witches, just smart annoying women who got on people’s nerves, and what killed them was not fire so much as smoke inhalation. “Come on ,” I say, impatient. I read about curses. That seems more promising, but the books are maddeningly vague. There’s something about burying the hair of your enemy in a secret place, along with a cherished object, and whispering a secret formula.
    I look up “cherished” in the dictionary. Then I go to the bathroom.
    Dexter’s hairbrush lies on the counter next to the sink. People think Dexter is pretty, and Dexter thinks so too. She spends hours in front of the mirror, brushing her hair and looking at her teeth and watching herself blink and breathe. She leaves grungy spots on the mirror, that’s how close she stands. Normally this is very aggravating, especially when I have to pee, but the advantage for an apprentice witch is that it leaves an awful lot of useful pale yellow hairs in the brush. I pick out a few long ones, wrap them in a piece of toilet paper and put them in my pocket.
    My thinking is, I can’t make any mistakes on Grandpa, but I can practice on Dexter. Isn’t that reasonable?
    The next step, a cherished object, is trickier. That means a dangerous journey to a dark, forbidden land: Dexter’s bedroom. I slip from the bathroom, stealthy as an assassin, and glance up and down the hall. The coast is clear. At the entrance to the Cave of Doom I pause, pressing my ear against the door, but all is silent. It’s now or never.
    BRATS AND CATS KEEP OUT!!!!!!!!!! The sign on the door is plastered at Edie-height. I ignore it. I turn the handle as quietly as possible, in case Dex is lying on the bed with the headphones on, oblivious to intruding witches. But the light is off and the room is empty. She must not be home from school yet.
    Dexter’s room is tidy, like mine—we’re sisters, after all—and one wall is completely lined with books. But there the similarities end. First of all, the walls are pink. Pink! There’s a full-length tilting mirror on a fancy iron