Trick or Treat, Goblin Feat by Jeanette Lynn

It’s all Hallow’s Eve, Trickster’s Night.
The veil is at its thinnest.
It’s the one night a year when beings of other planes can enter the mortal humans’ realm.

Ru doesn’t think much of it when she’s tasked yet again with watching over her older brother. It’s silly, really, and pointless in Ru Ella Grymbick’s opinion. Not only is she not a practicing witch, but she thought this whole Trickster’s Night thing its own kind of created fairytale of warning/conspiracy to keep children from acting up. She’d long ago left her childhood behind her. Gammy Grym’s tales no longer held that kind of sway over her.

Gams claimed it was true, all of it—demons, trolls, ogres, banshees, goblins, any and all banished beasties come to return to the world they’d tried to rule and the puny humans that inhabited it, if only for one night. Ru wasn’t buying it. She’d yet to encounter a one. Witches and Warlocks notwithstanding, creatures roaming this world for one night to play tricks on hapless humans, she was supposed to buy that? Pfft. Pull my other leg, why don’t ya, she thought of all of that.

Ru Ella had the genes for casting, the magic was inside of her, but she severely lacked the skills required to conjure, ward, or any of the other things expected of a Grymbick witch of her family’s prestigious line. That was exactly why she’d given up trying to find her spark. She just didn’t have one! The poor woman could barely make a puff of smoke, forget casting protections spells.