Cattywampus Read online

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO WITCHES OF ALL AGES WITH

  HOMEMADE WANDS. YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH AND

  STRONG ENOUGH.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Delpha

  Chapter 2: Katybird

  Chapter 3: Delpha

  Chapter 4: Katybird

  Chapter 5: Delpha

  Chapter 6: Katybird

  Chapter 7: Delpha

  Chapter 8: Katybird

  Chapter 9: Delpha

  Chapter 10: Katybird

  Chapter 11: Delpha

  Chapter 12: Katybird

  Chapter 13: Delpha

  Chapter 14: Katybird

  Chapter 15: Delpha

  Chapter 16: Katybird

  Chapter 17: Delpha

  Chapter 18: Katybird

  Chapter 19: Delpha

  Chapter 20: Katybird

  Chapter 21: Delpha

  Chapter 22: Katybird

  Chapter 23: Delpha

  Chapter 24: Katybird

  Chapter 25: Delpha

  Chapter 26: Katybird

  Chapter 27: Delpha

  Chapter 28: Katybird

  Chapter 29: Delpha

  Chapter 30: Delpha

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THERE WAS A SWEET SPOT IN DELPHA MCGILL’S week, between the hustle of school and the hard work during the weekend, that had no floors to sweep, no leaky faucets to tighten, no homework to riddle, and no lawn to mow. It was her time, and she fully intended to spend it in a blissful expanse of quiet, working on a secret whittling project in her bedroom. Finally. She started up the staircase in the hall, taking two steps at a time, careful to avoid the bad spots in the wood. A leaky roof meant rotted steps, and fixing shingles wasn’t something she’d worked up the courage to tackle yet.

  “Delpha, darlin’?”

  Delpha winced at her mama’s voice, her fingers clutching the worn bannister. A crack in the ceiling blinked out a tear that splattered her nose as she froze in place. She can’t know you’re fixin’ to make a wand, Delpha reminded herself. She can’t read minds. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Go into Mamaw’s closet and bring out the three flower garden quilts. Careful not to get ’em dirty, please.”

  Delpha’s stomach instantly churned. She had avoided her grandmother’s room since Mamaw passed away a month ago, even though they needed the space.

  It wasn’t the smell. It wasn’t even the sad memories. It was the quiet. Mama knew danged well why Delpha didn’t want to go in. Delpha had enough depressing empty spots in her life, and ignoring this new one seemed like a good idea, no matter what Mama’s bedside copy of Embracing Loss claimed. “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, and you’d best watch your tone! Thank you, darlin’.”

  Delpha sighed, then held her breath and darted into the shadowy room, rushing past the empty bed and her grandmother’s walker to the closet. She scowled. Her mother planned to sell the quilts to the Hearn family’s Appalachian Culture Museum near downtown Howler’s Hollow, where tourists would coo over the intricate stitchwork and fork over their cash. Mama had put it off for days, and Delpha had secretly hoped she wouldn’t go through with it. It was like they were trading a part of her grandmother away. But she and Mama needed the money to keep the lights on, especially after paying for the funeral.

  Just get it done, Delpha told herself. Don’t overthink it. She yanked the string for the closet light and stood on her tiptoes, reaching for a stack of folded quilts. As she eased them from the shelf, something heavy and brown slid off the top of the stack and clocked her senseless, right across the forehead.

  Delpha lay dazed on the wooden floorboards for a moment, constellations swirling before her eyes. A tender spot throbbed just above her hairline. She muttered dark things under her breath and pushed herself upright. What was that?

  “Delpha?” her mother called. “Everything all right in there, baby girl?”

  “Yeah, fine,” Delpha replied. She reached up and tested the tender spot. A furious bump the size of a sparrow’s egg greeted her fingertips. “Be even better if Mama would use her healing magic for once,” Delpha muttered to herself. But that was out of the question. Magic was strictly forbidden in the McGill household, bruises or not. It had been ever since her mama’s siblings had been killed decades ago in a spell gone bad. Delpha’s grandmother had whispered muddled stories to Delpha about “the old witchin’ days” sometimes when Mama wasn’t listening.

  But Mamaw was gone now. People got old. They got dementia and died, even old witches. If there was one thing in the world reliable as rain, it was that everybody left eventually. Delpha breathed deep, feeling the tight clamp of sadness in her chest. It was just her and Mama.

  Presently, she twisted around this way and that to find what had fallen on her head. Crackled with age, a thick leather book lay splayed open beside her like a bird shot from the sky, mid-flight. Delpha’s brows furrowed. She squatted and gathered it together, her tight bootlaces creaking. Flipping it right side up, her heart jittered in her chest.

  In neat letters, tooled into the leather cover, were the words Macgeil Booke o’ Spelles. Delpha blinked in disbelief.

  “You had it all along, Mamaw, you old devil,” Delpha whispered. She’d spent dozens of afternoons combing her grandmother’s bookshelves when she was little, looking for her family’s book of spells, curiosity burning a hole in her. Magic had sounded exciting. Forbidden magic had been even more tempting. She’d even sneaked up to scour the moth-riddled attic once, though the rafters of the old cabin were as unstable and off-limits as McGill magic. And now the spellbook was here, in her lap. Leave it to crafty Mamaw to put it somewhere casual, knowing Delpha would never look any place so boring.

  The book called to her now, and every atom of Delpha’s body thrummed back in response. This book knew her. She knew it, too. It lived in late-night arguments between her grandmother and Mama, atop the laps of grim, sharp-eyed old crones in yellowed family photographs, and—most powerfully—in the lonely corners of Delpha’s own imagination. Passed down from firstborn to firstborn, the book kept record of the homemade charms and hexes of cousins, aunties, and sisters across several centuries. Delpha’s long fingers trembled as they traced the binding.

  The McGill spellbook.

  “Delpha? If we don’t carry those quilts to the Hearns’ museum soon, it’ll close! Shake a leg!”

  Quiet as a deer, Delpha slid a threadbare pillowcase from the linen trunk and nestled the spellbook inside it. She gripped it in her hands a few seconds, wishing she could read it right then.

  If she could study magic on the sly, things might start looking up for her and Mama. Maybe Delpha could fix things up around the house with magic. Maybe there were even spells for money! They might have plenty, for once.

  “Comin’, Mama.”

  The weight of Delpha’s secret tugged at her gut, promising to rearrange her life nine ways to Sunday if she’d let it. Delpha slid the wrapped book back onto the shelf and cracked her knuckles. “I’ll be back later tonight,” she promised the book in a low voice.

  She gathered the quilts up neatly, then hurried out to Mama’s rusty old Buick.

  KATYBIRD HEARN THANKED THE STARS THE BATHROOM counters at her family’s Appalachian Culture Museum were sturdy—because she was standing atop one. Katybird’s mother hummed as she stocked shelves in the gift shop outside the bathroom, calling for Katy’s help every so often. Just in case Mama came looking for her, Katy had locked the door for good measure.

  Tugging her iPhone from her pocket, she clicked it on and held it up toward the skylight window next to the ceiling. In exactly this spot, she could connect to
the neighbor’s Wi-Fi and use the internet. In private. And today, privacy was important.

  She pecked out hands glowing magic into the search engine. After a minute—the neighbor’s Wi-Fi was slow as molasses—Tumblr links for Wiccan spells popped onto the screen.

  “That ain’t it,” Katybird sighed. Maybe she needed to be more specific. She started the search over: witch hands glowing stuck.

  This time, the internet treated her to dozens of buy-links for glowing Halloween witch decorations. Katybird deflated like a balloon. No one in the world could help her. She clicked the phone off, her heart sinking. A tingle prickled at her fingertips. Katy glared at them as she climbed off the counter.

  It was happening again. Why couldn’t her magic be easy? Why couldn’t anything be easy, just this once? Her hands had been glowing like lightning bugs on and off for a week, filling Katy with an uncomfortable buzzing that reminded her of an electric cattle fence. The magic is trying to happen, Katy, she told herself. Maybe you can work with it. She thought of her favorite Roald Dahl book and stared down the paper towel dispenser with her best Matilda face on, willing it to shoot out napkins or burst into flames.

  But of course, it didn’t work. Instead, eerie light glowed around her fingernails, then crept up both her hands. Her fingers looked bizarre, like electric-lime Jell-O. The glow wasn’t soft blue and flowing, like her mama’s. Katybird held her hands out, afraid to touch anything. They weren’t giving off heat, but they grew brighter by the minute.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered. Her hands were shedding sparks now—dad-blasted sparks.

  Fighting the impulse to holler to her mother for help, Katybird ran for the sink. She slammed the stopper into the marble basin, slapped the faucet on, and plunged her hands into the growing pool of cold water. Tiny green comets sputtered from her fingertips and chased one another around the sink like radioactive tadpoles. Katybird chewed her lip, tears welling. This wasn’t how her magic was supposed to start, all of a sudden and weird.

  There were rules. In the Hearn family, your gift showed up early and slow, unless you were a late bloomer like Katybird. Or you refused to use it, like Katy’s cousin Echo. Katy was Echo’s opposite. She longed for her magic to work, but instead it stayed trapped inside her, useless. Katybird nibbled a strand of cherry Kool-Aid–colored hair, staring at her own wobbling reflection. “Your conjure gift cannot be rushed, and when it shows, we keep it shushed,” she whispered.

  She’d learned the silly rhyme when she was three years old. Lately her mama always followed it with, “But you might not even have to worry about it at all, darlin’.”

  Those words cut Katy like a hot knife through butter. Katybird wanted to yell, “You mean because I’m different, Mama, so I might not be a witch. You can say it, if you think that’s why!”

  Instead, Katy smiled and answered, “Fine by me!” That’s what Mama and Nanny wanted to hear Katybird say, so they could pretend having a non-witch girl in the family wasn’t a bitter disappointment. But their too-big smiles and nervous chuckles told Katy it did matter. She couldn’t blame them. It mattered to her, too.

  Unlike most girls, Katy’d caterwauled her way into the world with a pair of XY chromosomes instead of double X’s. But her body hadn’t had much use for hormones like testosterone—the chemicals that give people whiskers and let them sing bass in church choir.

  In fact, Katy’s body converted them straight to buckets and barrels of estrogen, even before she was born. At nearly twelve, Katy didn’t shave her legs, because she didn’t need to. Her friends from swim team called her lucky. Katybird never got zits, either, which was pretty handy for an almost-popular girl in seventh grade. She was impeccably, fabulously Katybird. But that one Y chromosome haunted her still, for one pesky reason: Her family’s magic craft—witch’s magic—was passed from mother to daughter.

  Katybird was a daughter. She was, wasn’t she? She was. Her heart knew that. But as she hunched in a sad ball over the sink, doubt ran circles around her mind. If I ain’t a good witch, Katy thought, does that mean I’m not a girl? Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, things were knotted up and complicated.

  In the sink, the sparks dwindled. Mascara-black tears dropped and spread like ink through the water. She kicked the pipe beneath the sink with her purple sneaker. One thing was for sure: This wasn’t the sort of “magic” she wanted to show off to anyone. Her family’s safety rested on keeping their conjure secret. People in Howler’s Hollow were good folk, but they were scared of magic. They politely pretended not to remember that a few generations back the Hearns had been witches. And Katybird’s magic, if you could call it that, seemed weird at best—freaky Day-Glo hands weren’t a great advertisement for normal. She pictured the pity in her family’s faces, too, and knew this had to stay secret until she fixed it.

  Katybird pulled the stopper, and the water spiraled down the drain. Trembling, she muttered her favorite Elizabeth Taylor quote, “Put on some lipstick and pull yourself together.” Then she pulled a tube of peach sparkly gloss from her pocket, coated her lips, and cleaned her runny eyeliner with a wet paper towel.

  Time to go be Super Katybird, she told herself.

  Plastering on a dimpled smile, Katy soldiered out of the bathroom, sleeves rolled back to help arrange shelves for another big tourist weekend. That was Katybird’s job: smiling, being a good kid, and making folks proud.

  Her spirits brightened when she heard voices from the gift shop. It was too late for visitors, but artists often came by to restock their wares after-hours. Katybird liked the way other people took her mind off her own problems. She hurried past the copper stills in the moonshine exhibit and around the corner.

  Beside a set of rustic shelves stood a tall girl with a long pitch-dark braid. Delpha McGill. Delpha was striking, Katy thought, but in a grim way. Her jet-black eyes were solemn daggers, and Katy had known Delpha long enough to know that a tiny, lopsided smirk was more or less the extent of Delpha’s smiling ability. Today, Delpha’s straight eyebrows gathered like thunderheads. Katy shivered.

  Delpha was the only other young witch in the Hollow, from the only rival magic family in the state, the McGills. Neither family did magic in public. There had once been bad blood between the two clans, and even now they maintained a polite distance, which Katy found silly. Sure, the McGills and the Hearns had thrown hexes and burned each other’s barns to cinders and would have torched the whole valley if a truce hadn’t been called a century ago. But traditions died hard in the hills, even if the tradition was acting plain old cranky. No one actually knew how their feud started—something about a stolen cow, or was it a jinxed washtub? When Katybird Hearn’s relatives repeated the dusty family lore over sweet tea, only one fact stayed consistent: The McGills had started it.

  To the non-magical folks in Howler’s Hollow, it was the stuff of local folk legend—fish tales with a microscopic grain of truth. Katy’s family did magic at home now, just for fun and away from prying eyes. She figured that’s what the McGills did, too. Their herbs and advice were considered mountain wisdom now, not conjure. That left Katy and Delpha, last of their magical lines.

  Across the room, Delpha stood motionless, staring at the folded quilts in her arms. She looked even more serious than normal, and Katy remembered Delpha’s grandmother had passed away several weeks ago. Katy bit her lip. She wanted to say something nice to Delpha. They could forget their families’ prejudices, couldn’t they? Before she lost her nerve, Katy cleared her throat and stepped forward. Delpha tensed. She shot Katy a sideways scowl, then slid her quilts into an empty place on the shelf, fingertips lingering on the perfect stitches. For a hair’s breadth, Delpha’s lower lip trembled. Katy remembered how she’d felt after her own cousin Echo had died a year ago. Katy bit back a “Sorry.” A person got sick of hearing that sort of thing. So instead, Katybird slid a cheerful smile onto her face. “Hey, Delpha. Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Delpha grunted. “Saw you yesterday at sc
hool, didn’t I?” She hunched next to the cardboard box by her feet and removed half a dozen elderberry whistles, each with a neatly penned price attached.

  Katybird’s eyes flitted to Delpha’s hands. Not glowing. Not even trembling. Delpha was rock steady. Katybird wished all the way to her toenails she could ask Delpha point-blank whether her magic had … arrived, too. Delpha didn’t bother looking at Katy, keeping her sad eyes forward. Katy tried again. “You carved those whistles yourself, right? They’re gorgeous.”

  Delpha sighed hard. “Yup. Got bored after about the third one.”

  “Oh, but tourists love ’em!” Katybird reassured her. “They fly off the shelves faster than anything! No one ever believes a twelve-year-old girl did ’em. Anyway, must be nice, havin’ the pocket money.” Katy recalled her own joy last summer, when she’d been paid for cleaning glass in the museum every week. New Chucks in her color of choice had been pure bliss. She wondered what sort of things Delpha McGill got joy from. Knives? Another pair of steel-toed boots?

  Delpha’s eyebrows raised. “Sure. Pocket money.”

  Suddenly, the fraying hem of Delpha’s shirt and her well-worn boots stood out. One of Delpha’s bootlaces was even broken and tied together in the middle. Katy looked away, cheeks burning, and berated herself for being so stupid.

  She needed to change the subject, and fast. “Delpha, can we talk? About magic?”

  Delpha’s eyes widened. Before she could answer, the bell on the entrance door jingled, and both girls clamped their mouths. Katy withered as their chance to talk about magic evaporated. Tyler Nimble, a stocky boy with glasses, and his moms, Muzz and Honey, shuffled in, swatting off moths that tried to hitchhike a ride into the store. Tyler spotted the girls right away and grinned. Katy waved a half-hearted hello as Tyler helped his moms haul in crates of hand-turned wooden bowls, made by Tyler’s uncle for the museum shop.

  Tyler set down his last box and walked over, wiping sweaty palms on his shirtfront. “Hey, Katybird! Hey, Delpha! Y’all got big plans for the weekend?” He asked as if Katy and Delpha were sort of friends who might do things together. Katy toed a knothole in the floorboards with her sneaker.