The Fascinators

by Andrew Eliopulos

  “You think it was some kind of spell?”

  “I do. But it would have to be a very advanced one. To make not only a whole building but the land it was on disappear? I didn’t believe Delia when she said they were more powerful than the Keepers, but maybe I should have.”

  “What if it’s still there, but hidden?” Denver said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I agree—I’ve never heard of magic that could make a whole tract of land just not exist. But I have heard of plenty of cloaking spells. Spells that make something functionally invisible, by drawing the eye away. A sleight of hand on a major scale. It’s still complex magic, but not impossible.”

  “Maybe we should let some adults handle it from here,” Amber said. “Tell Ms. Berry, or better yet, the police, that the four fugitives they’ve been looking for are hiding behind a cloaking spell in Friedman.”

  “No, we can’t do that,” Sam said. “Negotiation 101. If they’re arrested, they’ll never tell us the spell they used on James.”

  “Not even Delia?” Amber said, horrified.

  “Especially not Delia. She learned her negotiation skills from my mom, same as I did.”

  “Cool, cool,” Amber said. “So, the plan is literally to negotiate with terrorists. What could go wrong?”

  “What choice do we have?” Sam said.

  Amber shifted uncomfortably but said nothing.

  Finally, Denver said, “Well, I’m not sure what sort of spell we need to break through a cloaking device, but if it would mean saving James, I’m all in.”

  “Thank you, Denver. I appreciate that show of solidarity. I know the group hasn’t exactly been a happy family for a minute.”

  “I’m doing it for you as much as anything. If James doesn’t wake up, you’ll never get over it. You’ll compare every guy you ever date to him, and wonder what you could’ve had, if things had gone that way with James.”

  Now Sam stared at him bug-eyed, shocked that he would say this in front of Amber. But Amber was looking at everything else in the room but Sam right then. It couldn’t be clearer: this wasn’t news to her. It dawned on Sam that it wasn’t news to anyone. He’d only wanted to think that it would be news to James, because that was better than the alternative.

  Nevertheless, Denver was right. Whatever the truth of James’s feelings, Sam needed to hear it from James. He hated that it took his friend being in a magic-induced coma for Sam to finally feel up to the task of talking to him about it.

  “I have an idea of where to get some help,” Sam said. “Are you two free to come with me to Atlanta after school tomorrow?”

  Emma was thrilled to see him again for the second time in two months—especially with new friends—even if she could tell right away from the looks on their faces that they weren’t there for Monday movie night.

  “Is Liv here, actually?” Sam said, after making a round of very quick introductions.

  “She is. She’s upstairs. Why?” Emma looked suspicious and even a little protective, like maybe Liv had opened up to her about some of the things she’d mentioned to Sam last time, and now Emma was hoping this wasn’t the reason Sam was here. Sam had seen her go into Momma Bear mode before, and he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of it, ever.

  “It’s about our friend, James. He’s in a bit of trouble, and we think Liv might know some magic that could help him.”

  “I don’t suppose you mean her knack for storms,” Emma said, frowning.

  “We wouldn’t ask if it weren’t really important,” Amber said.

  Emma eyed Sam carefully, until finally she seemed satisfied by what she saw, and stepped aside to let the three of them upstairs.

  Just like last time, Liv was sitting off by herself, oblivious to the four younger kids huddled in front of a horror movie projected onto the far wall. She didn’t even look up when Sam, Amber, and Denver walked in, but she said, “I knew you’d come back, sooner or later.”

  “The warehouse,” Sam said, cutting right to the chase. “We think it’s covered by some kind of cloaking spell.”

  “You’re quicker on the uptake than most, aren’t you?” Liv said. “Though if you were really smart, you’d stay the hell away from there.”

  “That we can’t do,” Sam said. “Our friend’s life depends on us getting in there.”

  “Must be some friend,” Liv said darkly.

  “He really is,” Sam replied.

  “Well, I saw on the news you put Mr. Grender behind bars, so I guess I do owe you for that.”

  One of the movie watchers turned to shush them, but Sam just raised an eyebrow in a look that said Try me, and that was that.

  “We know it’s a big ask, bringing you back into all this, but you truly would be saving a life,” Amber said. “And trust us, we’ll make sure word never gets out that you helped us.”

  Liv looked at Amber so long it was almost uncomfortable.

  “You know what’s funny?” she finally said. “Even when they were at their most heinous—even when they told me, repeatedly, I was going to hell—I really believed that my parents loved me, somewhere deep down in there. That if I ran away, they would realize how wrong they were and come crawling back. But it never happened. They didn’t even call. Emma keeps telling me I have to learn to trust other people regardless. That even after my parents, and what happened at the compound, I’m still supposed to try to see the best in each new person I meet, because not everyone’s like them. But it’s really fucking hard.”

  Sam knew what she meant. He didn’t have it even a fraction as bad as she did, but he got where she was coming from. Eighteen years of living in Friedman had seen to that.

  “Sorry, I guess it’s not so much funny as sad,” Liv said.

  “It is sad,” Sam said. “It totally sucks that all that happened to you. But Liv? You got out. And I can’t promise that you’ll always be safe. The faceless ones will be at the edges of your vision, always there in your head when you try to go to sleep. But you have help now. You have Emma. And you have us. And if you need us, we’ll be there, just like we need to be there for our friend now. That’s how this works.”

  “I really want to believe you,” Liv said.

  And then, with a deep breath, she told them the spell.

  This time, when they reached the spot on the road where Sam remembered seeing the field open up onto the compound, he muttered the words Liv had told them, and then he let out a gasp. There it was, hidden in plain sight.

  They’d driven straight here from Atlanta, and while it wasn’t too late, it was already dark out. Knowing what he was looking at, he realized he could see a faint shimmer in the sky where the moonlight coming down should have been continuous but was broken instead, its glow split where it intersected with the cloaking spell.

  “I think we should leave your car here,” Denver said. “If we drive up to that parking lot, everyone inside is going to hear us coming.”

  “If they’re as powerful as we think, they might know we’re here anyway,” Amber said.

  “Let’s hope that their numbers are down enough that they’re overwhelmed with other things, or at least distracted,” Sam said.

  “They weren’t too overwhelmed to put up this insane cloaking spell,” Amber said pessimistically.

  “You can still turn back now if you want. I wouldn’t judge you or hold it against you.”

  Neither of them budged from Sam’s side.

  “I don’t suppose either of you knows even a low-level camouflage spell we could use on the walk? Delia taught us one ages ago, but I can never remember it.”

  Denver laughed darkly. “I think we’ll just have to be as quiet as we can and cross our fingers.”

  Which was exactly what they did. Sam could hear the intense kree-kree of crickets and not much else as they crept along the short-grass field separating them from the compound. It was chilly enough that Sam felt his muscles constricting, though surely some of that was from nerves.

&nbs
p; There was a large set of double-doors in the front of the compound, and Sam remembered from James’s story there was a back door near the parking lot, but he figured both entrances would be watched and warded. Instead, he led them around to the side of the building, where there were no doors but there were windows on three distinct floors. They were boarded up, so all Sam could see was that lights were shining brightly on the first floor and less so on the upper floors. Sam remembered from James’s description that the interior was shaped around a main room almost like a courtyard. Like a prison. What they were seeing would make sense if the light was coming from there.

  “Maybe we should go in there with our white flag and beg,” Amber said.

  “No way,” Denver said. “You didn’t see them at the dance. These people don’t care if you come in peace. They’ll take you out without a second thought.”

  “There’s a spell James did the night that we went to the fall festival—it lets you project your voice. If we can find a spell like that in one of the apps, maybe we can talk to Delia without alerting the others.”

  “I don’t know about a spell like that,” Amber said, “but I know that exact spell. James showed it to me before he got his cell phone back from his dad, just in case.”

  Denver watched Sam for his reaction, but Sam was past the point of being petty. Mostly, he was relieved.

  He said, “Do you think you’d be able to do it now? To get Delia’s attention?”

  “I’m not sure,” Amber said. “I never ended up doing it. In theory, if you know generally where a person is, you can target them pretty closely with what you want to say. But I’ve never seen the inside of that building. And if Delia is anywhere close to another person, they’ll probably hear it, too.”

  “What if we do a finding spell first, to pinpoint Delia’s location?” Sam suggested. “Would that help?”

  “Maybe?” Amber said.

  “Let’s try it, then.”

  Sam reached out for their hands, and they formed a circle where they stood. Without the benefit of his singing bowl, he was hoping against hope that with their numbers and their power diminished, the True Light people wouldn’t be ready and waiting for him.

  “What object are we looking for?” Denver said. “I don’t think the finding spell works on people. It works best if the object is unique.”

  “Her friendship bracelet,” Sam said immediately. And then, considering it for a moment, he added, “I have to believe she’s still wearing it.”

  Denver and Amber squinted, trying to remember and picture the bracelet Sam could see so clearly. When they were as ready as they were going to get, they all focused on the bracelet and let their minds wander. Perhaps because of the proximity, or perhaps because Sam had helped to create this bracelet in the first place, his mind went right away to a bedroom whose furnishings were a step below particleboard furniture out of a box, where Delia sat on the edge of a plywood bed with her head in her hands. Judging from the distant pine trees peeking through a window behind her, she was almost definitely in the compound, but it was so dark, it was hard to say exactly where.

  “Good enough?” Denver said, snapping out of the vision before Sam and Amber had.

  “I think so,” Amber said, her eyes darting to the building beside them. She pointed to the far-right corner of the compound. “It seemed like she might be somewhere in there?”

  “That’s what I was getting, too,” Denver said.

  Sam shrugged, impressed.

  “What exactly am I saying to her?” Amber asked.

  “Tell her that she’s not in trouble, but Sam is here, and James needs her help.”

  Amber covered her mouth as if she were one of those football coaches on TV, whispering a top-secret play into her microphone. It took her a full minute to say whatever she was saying, which meant the spell must have included all kinds of words beyond the message itself.

  “Did it work?” Sam said when she finished.

  “Hard to say,” Amber said. “The only thing we can do now is wait.”

  “And maybe get your self-defense spells ready in case she doesn’t come alone,” Denver said, squaring his shoulders for a fight.

  Sam couldn’t bring himself to follow suit. He still hadn’t fully processed what Delia had done at convention—what more she had been prepared to do—but if she came out here flinging spells, flanked by more of those people, well—Sam wasn’t sure that was a world worth defending.

  Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.

  They’d hardly waited five minutes before Delia stepped out of the darkness. Quite literally, at that. Sam had been watching the compound closely, but that wasn’t the direction from which Delia came; she appeared behind them suddenly, mists swirling about her feet.

  She looked frightened to see them, and while at first Sam thought it was because she was afraid of what they might do, he quickly realized it was because she was afraid of what might happen to them.

  “Are you insane? What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Good to see you, too,” Sam snapped back.

  “James is unconscious,” Amber said, trying to get them back on track. “We need whatever spell you did at convention so we can reverse it.”

  “Yeah, Arnold’s Axiom,” Sam said haughtily.

  “Arnauld’s,” Delia corrected.

  “Just give us the spell, please,” Sam said. “Give us the spell, and we won’t bother you anymore. We won’t drag you down with our inferior high school magic. Because that’s what this is about, right? The power? And in return, you won’t have to lose sleep for the rest of your life, knowing that you killed James.”

  Delia winced. Which, good. Sam was going for the jugular. “No one was supposed to get hurt,” she said quietly.

  “And yet here we are. I don’t understand it, Delia. I truly do not understand it. All you had to do was wait nine months, and you’d be long gone from here. Friedman. Me. James. You’d never have to see any of us again if you didn’t want to, in your new life at Pinnacle. All that careful work. You just couldn’t wait, huh?”

  “I didn’t get in, Sam.”

  “What?”

  “To Pinnacle. I got my decision two weeks ago. I wasn’t even wait-listed—just a short, sweet no.”

  “Aw, shit, Delia. You could have told me.”

  “Yeah? And what would you have said? No—what would you have done? I don’t need sympathy. Not from anyone. I can take care of myself.”

  “Yes, I see you’ve done a bang-up job of that. Really set yourself up for life.”

  “What was it you said, Sam? ‘You don’t judge your friends by what they do one time’? I guess that only applies to boys you think are cute.”

  “How can you—”

  “Guys?” Denver said. “Do we really have to do this now?”

  “You’re right,” Delia said. “I don’t have to explain myself to any of you. I’m leaving now, and I suggest you do the same.”

  “Not without that book,” Sam said.

  Delia frowned. “Even if I wanted to, there’s no way in hell I could sneak that book out here. They are guarding it with everything they’ve got. I only made it out here by pretending to go to the bathroom.”

  Sam had suspected it would come to this eventually. There was no other option—they would have to make a run for the room. Hope they could get out with their lives.

  But Amber put up a hand to stop him before he took his first step. She turned to Delia. “You don’t have to sneak the book out here at all,” she said, at first in surprise, then in bitterness. “You have a copy of the spell with you.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam said, looking back and forth between her and Delia, who had crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Elements of Empathy. I may have bombed at convention from nerves, but I’m actually a pretty good empath when I put my mind to it. And you”—she said to Delia—“could give us the spell right now if you wanted. You just don’t want to.”

  “Is that
true?” Sam asked Delia.

  In response, Delia sighed, then pulled out her phone and typed something quickly. Sam’s phone dinged with a message, and when he opened it up, it was a series of photos. Zooming in, Sam saw that the photos were of the spell book. He remembered now that she’d taken one of the spells to post on the Pinnacle message boards—that was how she figured out the Enochian.

  “Please be careful with those,” Delia said. “You don’t understand what they’re like. How powerful they are. If they find out that I took those photos—let alone shared them with you—it would mean serious trouble for all of us.”

  “Dang, Delia,” Sam said. “I hope the power is worth it.”

  “Not that I would ever expect you to understand,” she said, “but it really, really is.” Then she turned on her heel and vanished back into the night.

  Chapter 23

  THERE WERE TEN MINUTES LEFT OF VISITING HOURS when Sam, Amber, and Denver arrived at the Friedman Hospital, and they could tell from the annoyed look on the receptionist’s face that he didn’t trust the three of them to take only ten minutes.

  “If it weren’t crucially important, we’d come back tomorrow,” Sam said.

  The receptionist quirked a very world-weary eyebrow.

  “We’re his best friends,” Amber cut in to explain, throwing Sam a look to remind him that they very purposefully were not mentioning their true intentions to anyone else, lest the doctors try to test their counter spell or get in their way. Sam felt sure that if even one more person caught wind of what they knew, True Light would come after their copy of the spell, and Delia really would be in more danger than she already was. In spite of everything, Sam wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  “Room 103,” the receptionist finally said. “You have nine minutes.”

  When they rounded the corner into the hallway where James’s room was, they stopped short at the sight of James’s dad, pacing outside his door. It might have been endearing, if he weren’t an obstacle to their goal.

  “No way he’ll let me in there,” Sam said.

  “Maybe we should come back tomorrow?” Amber said. “Give ourselves more time to work on this counter spell?”