“Well, weren’t you just MADE FOR EACH OTHER?”

“Stop mocking me!”

Sam was laughing loudly. Despite the gravity of the situation, I had to admit she had a fair point.

Claire had been missing since that morning. A friend went to her room, and found the door open and all her clothes gone. The resemblance between what Claire had done and what I had been planning to do just a few hours ago was rather striking.

Sam and I had just joined Ruth and Agatha at Agatha’s room. This time it wasn’t a girls’ night. It was a strategy meeting for our newly formed rescue task force.

“What do we do now?” I asked the group.

“We track her down,” said Ruth. “How’s that tracking spell of yours, Sam?”

“Still can’t find anyone farther than a few hundred meters away. Which is useful if she’s still at school, but pretty useless if she took a bus to the city or to another town. And I don’t have a bug on her anyway, so it’s useless, one way or the other.”

“What do you mean, a bug?” I asked her, curious.

“Remember that time you fled the cafeteria because you didn’t want Claire to see you, and then you locked yourself up in a bathroom?” I nodded. “Well, I was able to track you down because I had a bug on you, and a tracking spell on me that can find these little critters.”

Sam whistled, and a small cat plush jumped out of her backpack, and started purring and rubbing it’s tail on us. It acted exactly how a real cat would have, only it was definitely, 100% a plush.

Sam took it on her hands, and rubbed her nose on the plush’s.

“Hello, Furball. You remember Anamaria, don’t you? Can you track her bug for me?”

Furball, the plush, leaped off Sam’s hands, falling on my lap. They then began to climb on my t-shirt, their nails as strong and useful as a real cat’s. They sniffed my chin, then my armpits, then climbed on my shoulders, and started sniffing my hair. Moments later, they jumped off me and walked proudly back to Sam, carrying something in their mouth.

It was…

“A butterfly?”

Well, it resembled a butterfly, a little. But it didn’t look real, or at least, it didn’t look like it was made of matter. If I had to guess, I’d say it was made of the same thing as Claire’s anarchic blue flame.

“So that’s a bug?” I asked Sam. Then I looked down at her animated plush. “And that’s your tracking spell?”

“Furball is an excellent tracking spell, if you must know,” said Sam.

She took the ethereal butterfly from the plush’s mouth, and whistled again. Furball immediately jumped from their owner’s lap and dove inside her backpack. Then she released the butterfly. It flew above our heads for a few seconds, fluttering here and there, before it landed on my own head again. Once it did, it disappeared.

“Back where it belongs,” said Sam, proudly.

“Nice to know I have a bug on me,” I said, sarcastically.

“Don’t complain,” Sam told me. “Suppose you went away before I got to you, this afternoon? How would we find you then, eh? These little things come in handy.”

“But you don’t have one on Claire, though?”

“Of course not,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the planet. “She’s a witch, even if she sucks at it. She’d have known.”

“You know… it doesn’t add up.” This was Agatha, who had been muttering stuff to herself for a while now. “We know that Claire got in trouble this morning, at the cafeteria. Big trouble, at that, which is unusual for miss shy nerdy workaholic. But even then, when you look at the outcome, she got off pretty lightly, didn’t she? Just a warning. They didn’t even take her out of the student council. And I remember what she was like, when I took Arts class with her. She was all joyful, and eager to do several different things. Everyone could tell that she wanted to pursue that as a career. It’s not like a warning is going to do much harm to her career in Art. So then… why would she run away?”

Sam and I exchanged apprehensive stares.

“Beats me,” Sam lied.

“Yeah… I really don’t know why?”

Ruth raised her eyebrows at that, quickly picking up on my deception. Sam noticed it, and facepalmed.

“Spill it, Ana!” said Ruth.

“But… how?” I asked.

“I told you,” said Sam, “your thoughts are always written on your face. And you’re a terrible liar anyway. Come on, just tell them. The cat’s out of the bag anyway.”

Furball meowed from inside Sam’s backpack.

“Not you,” she said. “You stay in there.”

Agatha was looking at me with confusion. And Ruth, with disdain.

“Okay…” I said, feeling a bit uneasy. “Should I start with what happened this morning? Or with last night?”

“Go back to that night when the two of you kissed,” Sam instructed me. “They won’t get it if you skip that one.”

“What?!” Agatha exclaimed, completely taken by surprise.

“Oh ho, this is getting juicy,” said Ruth, chuckling. “Can’t say I didn’t see it coming, though. Was it that time you two had a date? That’s when you started avoiding Claire at school. I had been wondering if that was why.”

I nodded. Ruth, as usual, had a remarkable sensibility when it came to those kinds of things.

“I kissed her… but it was wrong of me, because she has a lover. So I panicked, and began acting like a coward, running away from her.”

“And that led to Sam getting angry at you,” Ruth deducted.

“Right. Up until yesterday.”

Ruth would remember that bit. I had to explain to the others how she stopped me before Economy class to give me advice, telling me I should fix my relationship with Sam, or the four of us could fall apart. The I told Agatha and Ruth about meeting with Claire after student council hours, and of how we had both agreed that it was better if we stopped having any kind of relation with each other.

“Do you think that’s why she snapped, this morning?” Ruth asked Sam, who shrugged. “I hear she slapped a girl.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, bleakly.

“Is that why she ran?” Agatha asked. “Because you two stopped being an item?”

“We were never an item to begin with, Aggs… And no, that’s not all of it.”

My face felt hot, I averted my gaze from the others, feeling ashamed that I’d have to admit the next bit in front of my friends. And not just my friends, they were Sam’s friends too. I could bet Sam was feeling just as disconcerted about that as I was.

There was an awkward silence.

“This isn’t what I think it is, right?” Ruth said.

“I have no idea what you think this is, Rue…” Sam told her, “…but yeah, I think it might be.”

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Ruth looked between me and Sam, repeatedly, putting together the clues that our faces were telling her. Sam might talk about how I’m always easy to read, but this time she looked just as vulnerable and predictable as I did. “No shit… How on earth did you two…?”

“What?” Agatha asked. “What’s going on?”

“Samantha and Anamaria kissed,” Ruth declared, deadpan.

Agatha began to laugh, loudly.

“Bullshit!” she said.

Then she realized she was the only one laughing, and that it really wasn’t a joke. Her face dropped.

“Wait, you’re serious?”

“How did Claire find out?” Ruth asked us, completely ignoring Agatha’s bewilderment.

“She, uh…” I cleared my throat. “She kind of walked in on us.”

“Oh, shit, you guys. No wonder Claire ran away, after being hurt like that. Try to be a little more discreet next time. For the sake of other people’s feelings.”

“Wait wait wait, stop right there!” said Agatha, mildly angry after being blatantly ignored. “Let me get this clear. Sammy, you like Ana? And you,” she pointed at me, “you like Sammy?” She looked between us, waiting for someone to reply.

“Sammy likes Anamaria,” Ruth told her. “It’s been pretty obvious for a while now, even more so during these past few days. By now, I think you’re the only one who hadn’t noticed it, Aggs.” Agatha’s chin dropped. “Still… I’m not sure about the other way around. Ana, do you like Sammy? I honestly can’t tell.”

My stomach dropped again, and I felt scared and miserable. I wish she didn’t ask me that question. Ruth could usually get a good feel of the situation, enough to skip the thorniest questions, but I guess this time she really wanted to force an answer out of me.

“I…”

“Ana likes me as a friend,” Sam saved me. “Which is fine by me, because I’ve been thinking about it since this morning and I really think I’d rather stay friends with her, rather than try and do the whole romance thing,” she sounded lonely, but I had no doubt that she was being completely sincere. “Claire can have her body for all I care, I just want my best friend.”

I blushed furiously at Sam’s remark.

“I’m not dating Claire, everyone!”

“Well that’s rather obvious now, given the circumstances,” said Ruth. “Which brings us back to the main point: How do we look for her? Spells?”

“No good,” said Sam. “Can’t track someone without a bug, and I’m pretty sure even Claire the lousy witch wouldn’t leave a bug on herself on purpose.”

“Wait, wait, wait! Say that again,” I asked her.

“What? About the bugs?”

“No. You said Claire’s a lousy witch. I think… That kind of gives me a weird idea. What if instead of looking for the girl, we began to look for her spells?”

“What does that mean, exactly?” Ruth asked me. She didn’t really like magic, I forgot about that bit.

“Well… we all know what Claire’s spells look like,” I explained. “They never do what she wants them to. They often just run around causing a mess wherever they go, just like the blue flame today in the cafeteria. If she’s hiding somewhere, I bet her spells will blow her cover.”

“That… might actually be a good idea,” Sam said, surprised. “You’re thinking like a witch, Ann. I’m even a bit jealous that I didn’t think of that before you.”

“But is that going to work?” Ruth asked. “We can’t just wait around for a rogue spell to hit us on the head, can we?” I imagined Ruth sitting on a park bench, unsuspecting, and being hit by the blue ball of Claire’s stubborn flame. I snorted. For some reason that mental image was surprisingly funny.

“We don’t wait around,” said Sam. “We track her. It’s much easier to track a spell than it is to track a person (which honestly, is the whole point of those bugs I use). Did you know every witch leaves a sort of fingerprint on every one of their spells?”

I shook my head negatively. Ruth and Agatha followed suit.

“We call it a caster artifact,” Sam explained. “they’re little bits of your personality that stick onto the stuff you cast. Every spell has them, they don’t go away, and they usually follow a predictable pattern for each witch. Of course, that’s useless knowledge if you don’t know what someone’s caster artifact looks like, but if you do, there’s all sorts of things you can do with it. Unspells, Binding Enchantments… and I’m pretty sure we could use that to track down Claire’s spells. That’s basic enough that even Furball could do it.”

I nodded, trying to absorb all that magic knowledge Sam was throwing at us.

“So should we try to find out what Claire’s caster thing looks like?” I asked her. She shook her head.

“No need. I’ve been learning witchcraft in this school alongside Claire for the last three years. I’ve undone enough of her spells that I already know by heart what her caster artifacts looks like. It’s a cotton pattern.”

Cotton.

That explains a lot of things.

“I might have to spend some time teaching Furball what to do, though. I’ve never tracked someone else’s spells before, and I’m scared they’re gonna take us to laundries and other places filled with cotton clothes. I need them to understand they’re going to look for cotton on spells, not on clothes.”

I nodded, agreeing. “How long will this take? An hour? A day?”

Sam chucked at that. “Honestly, Ann, don’t look down on me, ‘kay? I’m a professional,” she was boasting. But she really was a good witch, I’d give her that, so she had the right to boast. “Give me fifteen minutes alone with Furball and the two of us will be ready to go.”

We all agreed, and walked out of the room to wait.