Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Dowser Series) by Meghan Ciana Doidge Page B

beating wildly. I looked up at Sienna and stuttered, “It … it… breached the circle. Could you see it? Sienna?”
    Sienna didn’t answer. She wasn’t looking at me at all. She was staring behind me, her eyes wide and her mouth forming a small O. Then she smiled. A smile full of satisfaction, and something else I couldn’t quite figure out through my own adrenaline rush and fading panic.
    I turned and looked back. I must have thrown the spell hard enough that it hit the eastern wall of concrete and brick behind me. But instead of dissipating as it should have, though I hadn’t given it specific direction, my ‘get thee behind me’ intention must have been clear. It had spread its glow — a glow that was now slowly fading into an outline that looked to be the height and width of a large door or doorway. A doorway revealed by the spell I had commanded and then haphazardly flung away. I had never manipulated magic in this fashion before.
    “Now what do you think is hidden behind that door?” Sienna asked, her voice husky with anticipation as she rolled to her feet.
    “If it’s a door,” Rusty answered. He quickly leaned over to snuff out his candle.
    “Don’t,” Sienna said, but Rusty had doused the candle and scuffed his edge of the circle before she spoke. The magic within evaporated.
    Rusty shrugged apologetically but didn’t actually seem contrite. Sienna narrowed her eyes at him, but then returned to gazing at the outline. Its glow, slightly fainter than before, still held its rectangular shape on the wall.
    Sienna skirted the dormant circle and crossed by me toward the outline. Still cross-legged on the dirt floor, I grabbed her hand as she passed. She looked down at me with just the tips of her teeth showing in a smile. The light was behind her head and I couldn’t see her eyes, just two deep shadows carved out of her face.
    “ ‘Show me who I am,’ you said, Jade. And look what it has shown you.” Sienna’s voice was heavy with implication.
    “No, Sienna. The two things aren’t related.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I don’t see a handle or anything,” Rusty murmured, making me start badly. I hadn’t realized he’d moved from the edge of the circle.
    “It’s a door,” Sienna said, as she brushed off my handhold. “And I can’t wait to see what’s behind it.”
    Oh, God. That sounded like the opposite of a good idea. Hidden doorways, if that was what it was, were always hidden for a reason … ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ reasons.
    “Do you think Gran knows it’s here?” I asked.
    “Of course, she knows, dummy,” Sienna answered. Then she reached out to touch the brick wall in the very middle of the outlined rectangle.
    I waited for something to happen but nothing did. Rusty and Sienna continued to run their hands around the door outline. The glow continued to fade.
    They turned to me in unison.
    “No,” I answered before they asked. Sienna opened her mouth to cajole me and I said, “That’s enough!”
    The glow around the door abruptly disappeared.
    “Jade!” Sienna cried, as she turned to run her hands over the now blank wall.
    I stood and brushed off my jeans. I had no idea if I had shut down the spell or if it just blinked out on its own, but I wasn’t sticking around to be bullied further.
    “You know your way out,” I said as I crossed back to the basement stairs.
    “Jade!” Sienna cried again, but I didn’t look back.
    “If I don’t get in touch with Gran tomorrow, I’m sending the hotel staff, or the police, or someone to look for her. Clean this up. I’m going to bed.”
    I left them there, even though I was pretty sure Sienna was about to throw a fit. I was certain they couldn’t replicate the spell without me, and I had no intention of ever going into that basement again. I wasn’t remotely interested in secret doors that led to hell knows where, and was actually pretty freaked that I had one of them two floors below my living room.