by Keary Taylor
They danced with excitement and desire. But he nodded, a little smile forming on his lips.
I crawled off his lap and pulled him off of my bed, to his feet. I turned to the shelf to one side of my room and grabbed a flashlight, two candles, and a box of matches, just in case. I grabbed an empty shoulder bag from the hook on the wall and dumped them into it. Carefully, I set the novel, the card, and the key inside.
Nathaniel reached out for it and slung it over his shoulder and chest.
“Come on,” I said, going to the window. Nathaniel stepped up to it and slipped out, lithe and elegant, like a leopard. He shimmied his way down the roofline a way and held out a hand for me.
It wasn’t as easy as he made it look. I was terrified I would slip and fall right off the roof, but I made my way down to him, and watched as he stepped one foot back into the oak tree behind the house. He held out a hand and helped me do the same thing.
In two minutes, we were down on the ground. I slipped my hand in to his, and together, we set off at a jog down the sidewalk and hooked around the fence toward Alderidge. Hand in hand, we ran across the lawn, keeping an eye out for security guards.
My heart was racing by the time we made it to the doors. Nathaniel fished the key out from his pocket, and I kept watch while he fiddled with it. Relief washed over me when I heard the click. And I was eternally grateful that the grounds keepers kept the doors well-oiled when we pushed it open and it did not creak. We stepped inside and Nathaniel re-locked it behind us.
I’d been in Alderidge after hours plenty of times before. I’d even slept in my father’s office overnight once. We’d stayed late and I’d helped him grade papers. We’d both fallen asleep and hadn’t woken till morning.
But it felt different tonight. It felt like anything could happen. And suddenly the school felt much larger and foreign, having a key that opened some secret lock within it.
We cut immediately toward the library. We passed empty classrooms and passed through silent halls. I could barely see through the dark, but I had this school memorized like the back of my hand. We had no issue at all navigating our way in the dark.
When we got to the library doors, Nathaniel retrieved another key and unlocked it while I held the flashlight.
I heard the sound of footsteps down the hall, sending my heartrate skyrocketing. Both our heads ripped that direction and we saw the approaching halo of a flashlight.
We slipped inside and silently helped the door close. Nathaniel clicked the lock back into place, and we quietly backed away from the door.
We stared at it, holding our breath.
The footsteps hesitated just outside the door.
I thought my heart was going to explode.
I’d get expelled.
My father would be disgraced if his daughter was caught sneaking around the school after hours, with a boy.
Nathaniel would lose his scholarship.
But soon the footsteps resumed and kept walking down the hall.
I let out a sharp breath, my heart beginning to calm.
Nathaniel looked over at me, and I saw how I felt on his face.
He extended a hand to me, and together, we cut through the study area toward the back of the library.
The McCallum room was one at the very back of the library, on the south side. It was an area I rarely went to. With the flashlight on, we walked down the hall, and there, up ahead, my eyes fixed on the door.
The doors to the rooms were never closed unless someone was studying in them. So, they were wide open when we got there.
This room was little more than a nook. There was one single chair pushed in the corner to the left, and there wasn’t much room for anything else. But the shelves were packed, packed as tight as they could be.
“Let me see that,” Nathaniel said, reaching for the flashlight. I handed it over, and he looked down at the card. And then he shined the light on the spines of the books, looking for the number.
First, he scanned the left side of the shelves. And then he looped to the shelves straight ahead from the door. Down one shelf, and then the next.
And then he paused, about a third of the way down the next shelf. The light moved slightly from one book to the next.
“I was right,” he said. “This number doesn’t even exist. The book for this card should be right here.”
I stepped forward and looked at the number on the card and then the numbers on the shelf. It skipped from one to the next.
Something sparked in the back of my mind. I reached forward and grabbed the two books to the right and the left of the non-existent book. I pulled them from the shelf.
And there, in the backing of the bookshelf, was a lock.
Chapter Eleven
I darted forward and started digging through the bag around Nathaniel’s chest. My fingers fumbled around the candles and the matches, and finally, they gripped the cold metal of the key. I drew it out, and the room was utterly silent as Nathaniel and I stared at it.
My hands shook just a little as I reached for the lock.
All the air in my lungs left my body when I slipped it into the lock, and it fit.
I twisted the key, and there was a click.
Immediately, the entire bookcase popped out toward us, just a little.
I caught Nathaniel’s eyes for just a moment. His gaze perfectly reflected the wonder and fear and excitement I felt inside.
He gripped the edge of a shelf and pulled back.
The whole thing swung open with little trouble, hinging back toward us. We stepped to the side, and Nathaniel shined the light behind it.
It was a small space. Maybe six feet by six feet. Two other bookshelves lined the walls on either side, though they were only maybe half filled.
There was a window straight across, and to my surprise, it wasn’t boarded off or blacked out.
And right in the middle of the space, there was an intricate, metal, spiral staircase that rose up.
I didn’t hesitate a second. I grabbed the flashlight from Nathaniel and started up the stairs.
I wound up and up. The ceilings in the library were tall. I had always assumed there were classrooms on the second floor above the private rooms of the library. But this was a secret door and a hidden staircase.
There was no door at the top of the stairs. It simply stepped out into a room.
And tears instantly pricked my eyes the second I took one breath.
It smelled exactly like my mother.
As I shone the light around the space, I saw her in every inch of it. There was a desk in the very middle and on it there were pages full of her handwriting. There was a vase of long dried daisies. My father brought them for her every Monday when they were blooming in our window boxes.
There were bookshelves wrapping around all the walls, except for where the window was. Though they were mostly empty. There was a bench below the window, and on the dusty cushion, lay one of her sweaters. A macramé swing was hung in one corner. There was a trash can in one corner, half full of food things. She always worked while she ate.
I couldn’t stand any more. I sank back and crouched, wrapping my arms around my shins. Tears immediately welled in my eyes and started rolling down my cheeks. I pressed my lips together, holding it all in.
Nathaniel knelt beside me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders.
I looked around, and I could see pieces of my mother in every corner of this hidden office. I could smell her just like she was here, herself. If I closed my eyes, I could swear she was here.
“We’ll find your answers, Margot,” Nathaniel said, rubbing his hand up and down my arm. “We’ll figure out what happened to your mother.”
I nodded my head, but I was still holding my breath. When I realized, I sucked in a sharp one and wiped the tears from my face. I took three deep breaths, in and out. I told myself that I could do this. I could do it for her. I could do it for my dad. And I could do it for me.
And Nathaniel, because he was a
part of everything, too.
Nathaniel pulled me back up to my feet and waited for my cue. Cautiously, I stepped forward toward the closest bookshelf. Really, it was strange how few books were on the shelves. At the far side of the room, I saw a dozen boxes that looked filled to the brim with books.
My father said she’d been collecting more and more books. I wondered what my mother’s organization was. Why were some on the shelves, and some in the boxes?
I reached for one of the books on the shelves. I opened it to somewhere in the middle.
I thought it was in German. I didn’t know anything besides English and Latin. But I understood enough to immediately recognize the word hexe.
Witch.
I extended it out to Nathaniel, who took it and started looking over the words.
“My German is still terrible,” he said. “But I think this is an account of family history. Of the witches in the Kroger family being hunted.”
He looked up at me and there was a spark in his eyes.
There was wonder and hope.
I walked a little further down the shelf and pulled another book off.
This was a journal. The dates read 1699. I would have to search the entire thing for what we were looking for. But at the very end, it was signed by Tavin McGregor. Mare’s son.
We divided. Nathaniel and I went in opposite directions, pulling out books and scanning. Though in reality, there were only about 30 books on the shelves.
It wasn’t always obvious, what the books were about. Some seemed like they were fairy tales, or just regular history. Some were obvious instruction books. But as we’d learned, not everything could be taken at its face value.
Nathaniel called me over and I looked down at the thin book he held. He laid it flat on the desk, and then touched the pages. He looked over at me, and then I did the same.
It changed from some language that had no Latin origins, to something I could easily read.
Just like the book of telekinesis.
It was a book about glamouring.
I stood up, and my heart pounded.
This was it. This was what we had been looking for. What we needed to learn…everything. Anything.
We’d had nothing.
But my mother must have spent years collecting and learning.
“How long did she know?” I asked aloud as I turned and looked around. I realized then, the books in the boxes weren’t anything. They were nothing. False leads and hope. My mother had gone through hundreds, maybe thousands of books, looking for anything to do with being a mage. This curation didn’t happen overnight. “This…she had to have known for years. Why…why didn’t she ever say anything?”
Nathaniel looked around. He reached for another book, another journal. “She knew a lot more than we do, obviously. She was a historian. She knew how many people were killed over the centuries. She knew the danger.”
And for the first time, it hit me personally. That there really were people killed for being able to do the same kinds of things Nathaniel and I could do.
Our abilities were dangerous.
They made us a target.
These were modern times, things were different.
But were they? When it came down to it, would the government, the military just look the other way if somehow either of us were exposed?
And for the first time, it dawned on me that something really, really bad could have happened to my mother because she was a mage. Someone could have hurt her. Taken her. Anything. Because she could do things that should have been impossible.
I wrapped my arms around my waist and told myself I couldn’t let my imagination run away with itself. We had to handle this logically. We had to be diligent.
I crossed to the desk and sat down in Mom’s chair. I scooted in and looked down at what she’d lain upon it.
There were two books stacked on each other. There were a dozen loose papers spread over the desk, each with her handwriting on them. Three seemed to be pages of notes about what I assumed was in those two books. Others were totally random notes. A stray thought, an appointment with the dentist. A school assignment of mine that I would need Mom’s help with.
But to the left side of the desk, there was a book entirely filled with her handwriting. I pulled it closer and read the page it was left open to.
I traced the last English line, her writing read. It dated up until 1701, and then the trail went cold. Months of letters and phone calls and assistance from the very kind people in England, and that was it. I can’t find any evidence of magic users past that date. They all left for America or they died out. I think all traces of magic disappeared within years of when it did in America.
I looked up at Nathaniel, who was leaning over my shoulder, reading along as I did.
“My mother was a linguist. That’s what she taught. But she was also renowned as a historian,” I said. “She never gave up. The discoveries she made…she could have traveled the world with archeologists. She knew how to do her research. I would believe every word she’s written in this book.”
Nathaniel reached forward and turned the page back and his eyes quickly scanned. My mother talked about trying to track down the last of a mage family from Germany. The trail had gone cold with the death of two people in 1692.
“I think I was right,” he breathed. “I think all traces of magic disappeared right around 1700.” He twisted and sat on the edge of the desk, his eyes distant as he thought. “One by one they were hunted into extinction.” His voice grew far away, breathy. “But blood is almost impossible to squash. It was all just…forgotten, because the ancestors who knew what they were doing were killed. We’ve just lain…dormant, for centuries.”
His eyes slid back over to mine, and I saw something big there. “I think there are more of us out there, Margot. Maybe not many. But you and I, we can’t be the only ones. I don’t know if anyone else has found what we have. I think it’s up to us to resurrect magic.”
My eyes cast around the office. There were books here, so many things to be learned. But this couldn’t be the entirety of it. We were talking about the entire history of mankind.
I felt another shift then. In what my future would look like. I’d always had it mapped out. I’d had it planned.
I would become a professor, like my parents. I would marry a nice man. I would have my own children. I would live a simple but happy life.
But I felt all of that change. I felt it get bigger. I felt it get darker. I felt it get a lot harder.
I was the descendant of witches. I had powers. Abilities. I wasn’t normal. I wasn’t simple.
As I looked around my mother’s office, I felt it. This was my heritage. My mother’s legacy.
This was something big that I knew I could do with my life.
And I wanted it.
I suddenly wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.
“We have a lot of reading to do,” I said, giddy with the possibility of it.
Chapter Twelve
The coming weeks seemed to pass by in a blink.
Nathaniel and I spent three days going through the books on the shelves. There were twenty-eight of them. Four were journals. Nine were historical books. Nine seemed to be some kind of instructional books. And six we could not categorize.
We went through my mother’s desk, searching for anything and everything. What we found were more books and more notes and things we didn’t understand yet.
But before we went through my mother’s journal, we brought my dad here. His reaction to seeing the hidden office was much the same as mine. He’d cried. He’d taken a solid five minutes just to take it in. He’d had to sit down.
But I saw something like peace in his eyes when he took it all in. I saw something lift off of his shoulders.
He knew he hadn’t done anything to her, despite what the police had believed for a while. But he had always wondered if he’d made her unhappy. If she hadn’t been content with her life.
Now he
had more closure. Now he knew.
It was nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with the magic she had discovered.
I believed it. Nathaniel believed it. And now I thought my father believed it.
And together, we read through my mother’s notes.
This book was concerned with the history of magic, which surprised no one. She’d traced every person who was killed at the Salem Witch Trials. Only Mare and one other had been true mages, so far as she could find. She’d gone back through her lineage and picked out the others. She’d done endless research.
She studied the witch hunts of Germany, Scotland, England, Denmark.
Her conclusion was that there was a surge of magical ability that began around 1500. That the knowledge of the mages had been shared, that their study had been furthered. She believed they grew more confident in what they could do.
And in the end, it got them killed.
The witch hunts got intense and were widespread throughout the world between 1536 and 1693.
After that timeframe, she couldn’t find any evidence of magic users.
She too thought the mages had been hunted into oblivion. She thought we were the descendants of those motherless and fatherless children who were never able to teach their children what they could do.
It was overwhelming and heartbreaking. So many lives had been lost. So much knowledge was now lost to the world.
We didn’t notice it at first, but as we sorted through the twenty-eight books, we found there was a note written on the inside cover of each of them. It was written in my mother’s handwriting. And it described where she’d found each one.
Three were from the Salem Public Archives.
Two were from the Boston Public Library.
Two from Alderidge University.
And the rest were from singular locations.
We thought we’d discovered all my mother’s secrets. Until my father bumped into her desk, and from a shelf inside the top of one of the drawers, another book fell out.
When we pulled it out, my eyes stung for just a moment. It was her personal journal. A record of her personal experiences as a mage.