His nostrils flared as he breathed out, bracing his hands against the island. “Now look who’s saying all the right things,” he said softly.
“Well said, miss. Many a woman has tried to change me. But alas…” Mr. Tom held out his hands. “I am who I am.”
Sometimes I wished Niamh lived in Ivy House so she could always be on hand to laugh with me.
“Right. Fine. Edgar, showtime.” I motioned for him to speak.
“Yes! Of course.” Edgar spun around to face me, still cradling his arm. “What?”
I gave him a little numbing agent for the pain so he could focus.
“Why did you wake me up at two in the morning?” I asked.
“Oh yes.” He gave a sheepish smile. “Follow me.”
We entered the secret passageways near the back door, following the blue-lit halls until the path sloped downward, the wood of the walls turning to stone and then rough-hewn rock. I watched out for the jagged edges that in the past had left scratches across my arms.
After I ducked through the last bit of tunnel, directly behind Edgar, the ceiling curved up into an arch and the passageway opened into a vast chamber under the house. A wrought-iron light fixture hung from the bottom of a chain connected to the ceiling, the light within glowing the same pale blue that lit the secret hallways. Below that, rising on a pedestal, were large crystals in a plethora of colors.
A large volume lay open on a bookstand in front of the crystals, something I hadn’t seen before. The familiar text Edgar had been working on sat on the ground beside it, also open, with a piece of paper covered in Edgar’s rough scribbles and a pen lying on top. A small round table had been brought in, covered in papers bearing various notes and pictures. A TV tray, badly leaning, sat off to the right, also covered in papers, strange symbols written on some of them in purple Sharpie. Pieces of colored construction paper, cut in strange shapes, were taped to the legs.
If that all wasn’t weird enough, more papers—colorful and not so much—were taped to the rock walls, connected by lines of purple and orange yarn. A bunch of oddly shaped doilies sat in a leaning pile in the back.
“Wow.” My mouth dropped open as I took it all in. “Edgar…this is an A Beautiful Mind-type situation.”
“Why, thank you.” He beamed, standing next to the volume on the bookstand.
“That wasn’t a compliment. I think you might be crazy, buddy.”
“Crazy amazing, right?” He chuckled to himself. “All jokes aside, I think I have it, Jessie. With Ivy House’s help”—he laid his hand on the open volume—“I’ve looked through all the house’s failures. Now, the information was not easy to find. She has a sense of humor, the ol’ gal.” He chuckled again.
“He might have to be put down after this,” Mr. Tom whispered.
Edgar hovered his hand over the volume. “This book is much too advanced for you, Jessie. I dare not read much of it. But it seems our enemy doesn’t have any consideration for the benefits of slow learning, and so we must speed a few things up. So, in the section entitled ‘Life’s Funny Little Jokes,’ I found out about a whole host of the house’s vulnerabilities. One of those is a certain spell that renders her sentry systems useless against trespassers. It’s an obscure little note…” He walked around the pedestal with the crystals and approached a scrap of paper taped to the wall, cut through with orange string. “The volume also chronicles which of the house’s various secrets have filtered into the world. Only one reference to this particular vulnerability has made it out of this book and into another. There’s one copy, handwritten, unless it has been duplicated, but there is very little chance of that.”
“Why?” I asked.
He turned back. “Because it is in Elliot Graves’s private library, bought from Jessup and James’s Fashionable Relics bookstore in London some decades ago. The bookstore keeps track of their items for authenticity, and Agnes knows some people who are very good with computers. She is being very helpful. We should have her over for dinner.”
“We’re paying her, right?” I asked Mr. Tom. “The deal was—”
“She’s charging by the hour, yes, miss.” Mr. Tom waved it away.
“The book he purchased was a complete history of this house and its various…interesting assets, complete with a great many of the house’s little jokes, a.k.a. vulnerabilities. He purchased a different book from the store about the various heirs. That led me to question what else he might have snapped up about this house.” He traced the orange string around the room. “From what Agnes’s friend’s people could find, most of the sources containing the house’s secrets were acquired by Elliot Graves.”
“He has a great fascination with this house,” I murmured.
“A fascination he had before it even chose a new heir,” Austin said.
“Yes.” Edgar followed a different string, leading him back our way. “We can rest easy in the knowledge that he is not the kind of man to collaborate with other masterminds. He has never joined forces with anyone, neither during his climb to the top nor in the years he’s spent fighting to stay there. He’s also known for taking his time when he wants something. He studies. He plans. He moves in slowly, corralling his target, cornering them, and only then pounces. He’s as meticulous as he is powerful, as organized as he is persistent. So… What’s the good news?”
“You have the spell and a way to get around it?” I asked, holding my mug between both palms.
“No, but I do know the spell exists.”
“Well, we all know it exists,” I replied, frustrated. “The house knows it exists. We saw it with our own eyes.”
“All this madness for hours on end”—Mr. Tom gestured around the room—“just to tell us what we saw in plain sight?”
“Why wouldn’t the spell be in there?” I asked.
“The vulnerabilities are not spelled out,” Edgar said, “probably because she doesn’t know how it is done. If she did, she would be able to circumvent it. If a past heir figured it out, they never amended the book. I think that is something you should do—find the spell, find the counter-spell, and make note of them in the book. But that is for another day.” He held up his finger. “There is good news. Elliot Graves has been moving slowly. Incredibly slowly, considering he started all of this before you were chosen. He’s testing his theories on you. That’s the best-case scenario, given the speed at which you’re growing with Austin’s help. You’re ahead of the curve.”
“Until this spell…” I reminded him.
He paused. “Well, yes. But that is okay. The spell itself is not in here, but there’s information about the nature of it. This second book is a breeze to translate—only two languages, and one of those is English. It is meant to be consumed more than studied. I see now that the first book is the training wheels. We’ll have plenty more work to do once you finish with it.”
“Fine, so if Agnes doesn’t come through with anything helpful, I’ll at least know more about the spell Elliot’s using. If I figure out how it’s fooling Ivy House, maybe I can reverse engineer a way to dismantle it. I mean, that’s just logic, right?” I scratched my head.
“The other good news is, as far as Ivy House knows,” Edgar said, “it has not been leaked that the heir is capable of fully controlling the house’s defenses. He might not know you’re just as deadly without it.”
Austin crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed the dark brown stubble on his chin. “That’s smart.”
“Who…” Edgar backed up a pace and put his fingers to his chest before looking around. “What is?”
“Even if Elliot knows or suspects you have the power to control the house defenses,” Austin went on, “he might not know you are able to yet.” He held out a finger. “You are brand new to magic as a whole.” A second finger. “You didn’t know anything about this house before you moved here by other means.” A third finger. “You just learned to fly a couple months ago…” He put his hand down again. “You should lean into that. Lean into your see
ming inexperience when you’re dealing with him. Make him think you’re behind where you currently are. It’ll give you an edge.”
“What if they were around, watching me train?” I asked.
Austin shook his head. “I would’ve sensed the presence. Shifters have the sense that animals possess, to sense danger even though they might not have proof of it. Some of us are better at it than others, but I do possess that skill. I rarely have to use it, since I have keen scent and hearing, but it is a good backup. They would not have been close enough to see you train if they were on the property.”
I nodded. My inexperience wouldn’t be hard to sell. If those damn dolls were running wild, or the basajaun was celebrating victories, I’d probably look terrified or disgusted as a normal part of my day. I could whip up a little dumb blond schtick as the cherry on top. Men fell for that, regardless of hair color.
“We do still need to know how to tear down the spell, though,” Mr. Tom said. “Edgar, I sure hope you didn’t write your findings on one of these scraps of colorful paper. We have whole sheets in the craft box.”
“We have a craft box?” I asked.
“Yes. It is in the office you never enter.”
Did I hear a tone? Now that I knew a little more about the office, I was pretty sure I heard a tone…
“Oh, I…” Edgar lowered the half-formed, fuzzy-edged orange slip of paper he’d grabbed before putting it behind his back. “Let me just quickly go over it one last time, and I’ll deliver it to you right away.”
The blue-painted porcelain of the bottom of my coffee cup looked up at me accusatorially. I’d just drunk a whole cup of coffee, not to mention my mind was whirling from what I’d heard. No way could I got back to sleep.
“Just give me what you have.” I held out my hand.
“The power to combat the assault is within you,” Ivy House whispered to me. “The clues are there. You can piece them together. You must.”
No pressure.
“I’ll get working on this spell.” I took the paper from Edgar.
“Well, then.” Mr. Tom pulled at his lapels. “I’ll make breakfast.”
The sense of urgency settled onto my shoulders like a great weight, something in me knowing that my time was running out. I took off for my room, jogging all the way there, and then spread the page onto the table and sat down to study it.
“I’m going to head into town,” Austin said, peeking his head in. “I don’t have any sort of organized pack yet, but I have people there who can help. I’m going to put them on alert, if that’s all right?”
He clearly felt the press of expectation, same as me.
“More the merrier,” I answered, “as long as you can handle them.”
He spared a moment to walk in behind me, laying his hands on my shoulders and kneading.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
I closed my eyes for a moment. “Yeah. Just feeling the pressure.”
“Have faith in yourself. You are an excellent problem solver. You can crack the code.”
I wrapped my hand around one of his wrists, needing the contact. He stopped kneading with that hand and took mine, entwining our fingers. We stayed that way for a moment as the night peered in through the windows, all silent. The calm before the storm.
“Okay,” Austin whispered, pulling his hand away. “I’m going to head out.”
“Yup. And I need to work miracles.”
“It’s not a miracle—it’s a challenge. You’ll rise to it.”
“Sometimes your supportiveness is just plain annoying,” I groused.
“I concur.” Mr. Tom came into the room with my coffee mug, steaming once again. “Much too supportive. Who needs someone to believe blindly in us? What a bore.”
I had a sneaking suspicion he was mocking me.
Austin slipped out of the room, leaving my line of sight, but I could feel him making his way to the side door—and then changing shape and darting into the trees in the side yard, hopefully slipping into the wood before anyone noticed. Speed was clearly on his mind, and he could move fastest in his polar bear form.
“I wish we had an idea of the numbers that might come at us,” I said, looking down at Edgar’s sloppy scrawl.
“Here.” Mr. Tom sat in the empty chair and fished a sheet of paper and a pen out of his interior jacket pocket. He pulled the orange piece to him. “Let me make this legible. Austin Steele thinks the secret is out about you in the magical world. That people will start to take a greater interest. I happen to agree.”
“This isn’t the time to increase the pressure, Mr. Tom.”
“My advice? End this coming battle hard and fast. Make a statement. Show both factions, if there are indeed two, that you will not be easy to cow, kidnap, or intimidate. If someone is coming for you, they’d better have their big-boy pants on, because you won’t play nice when threatened.”
“Make a statement, sure, sounds easy. Except I’m still brand new to magic, and I’m potentially up against a master and some other guy that isn’t afraid of a master. How am I supposed to stand out when I’m the underdog?”
Mr. Tom chuckled. “I doubt even Elliot Graves can so easily blow someone up. Trust me, miss, you have more at your disposal than you think, including imagination.”
Eighteen
Based on what Edgar had found, Ivy House could sense living things through a sort of heat signature, and it identified the nature of those creatures based on the type of energy they put out. Just like with scent, animals had a different energy than people, shifters had a different energy in their animal form, and so on.
Somehow, Elliot was wrapping his people up in spell bubbles, containing their heat signatures and their energy.
My job was to pull those bubbles away. Something I was still in the process of figuring out in the underground cavern. I stood in front of the pulsing crystals at the core of the house, working magic in a spinning motion that sent sparkles tumbling through the air (a pretty effect that had a practical purpose—it helped me figure out if the magic was rolling in the right direction). My aim was to grab hold of the bubble spell and essentially unwind it. Once the person was exposed, even for a moment (I was working on the assumption that they could reapply the spell at will, aiming for our worst-case scenario), Ivy House could quickly capitalize on their vulnerability.
“You need a way to dig into the spell,” Ivy House said in our special communication. She had some good ideas on how to rip away the spell. Apparently this type of spell had been attempted many times in the past, but those other attempts had always been flawed. This was the first time someone had locked it down. Elliot was clearly very good at his craft.
I had to be better.
“Otherwise your spell will just whoosh by. It won’t catch.”
I nodded, watching the sparkles tumble away before washing against the bare walls. I’d long since stripped the walls of the paper, my spells creating whirlwinds that the tape couldn’t stand up to.
“What if ripping away the spell isn’t the right way to play it?” I took up Mr. Tom’s handwritten page for the millionth time, looking over the verbiage I’d all but memorized. “What if I should be counteracting it instead?”
“You don’t know what to counteract.”
“Yes, exactly.” I shook my head. “Maybe I’m spending all this time, going without sleep, for a spell that won’t work.”
“You have the power to rip that spell off. If he’s using it on lesser-powered shifters, it can’t be a volatile spell. You should be able to use might.”
“I want to use brain, not brawn. I want to do this the right way.”
“We all want something.”
I glared at the crystals before stuffing the piece of paper into my pocket and leaving the room. Sure, it could very well work for most people, and the beauty of the spell we’d devised was that it would rip off other spells, too—ones that might be dangerous. But what if I came up against Elliot? He wouldn’t succumb to such a simpl
e tactic.
My gut told me I needed a counter-spell. A reveal spell. Maybe not for this battle, maybe not even for the next, but until I could properly counteract Elliot’s masking spell, I’d always be vulnerable to it. For that, though, I’d need some idea of the composition of the spell he was using. Agnes hadn’t locked anything down.
“Oh, hello,” my mom said when I made my way into the kitchen for more coffee, “you’re up already.” She beamed at me as she laid some bacon into a hot pan.
“Yeah, what time is it?” I looked around. “And where is Mr. Tom?”
“It’s almost eight o’clock, and your caped crusader of a butler was scurrying about upstairs last I saw him, headed up to the third floor. He seemed a bit more animated today, and he hasn’t once tried to shoo me out of the kitchen. What’s up?”
I thought about just telling her and Dad to go home. To pack up and get out of here. But I knew they wouldn’t go without a fight. Besides, the prowler had lurked from the front yard. If they were still out there somewhere, watching, I didn’t want to deliver them hostages. Even though my parents would be in the middle of a battle zone, at this point, the house was probably the safest place for them.
“It’s a pretty long story, but basically, we might have some trouble later on. When things heat up, we’ll need to move you to a safe place within the house.”
My mom’s movements slowed and a crease formed between her brows. “What do you mean, some trouble?”
There was no easy way to say it, so I just went for the direct approach. “Long story short, this house is magical, and in accepting to live here, I became magical, too. Now some people want to use me for my power, I guess. They are here to take what is mine, and we’ll be fighting them off. So we’ll need to get you to safety.”
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