by Geof Johnson
Something important was happening. Jamie didn’t know exactly what it was, but he could feel it, down in some sacred recess of his heart. Everyone else must have felt it, too, because no one spoke, not even the youngest child, the crowd silent as a church congregation. All eyes were on the old Cherokee as he sang and danced in a slow circle, twice around the bonfire, which seemed to burn brighter, the magic in the special wood expressing itself in a vivid, mystical way. Flames danced with him, ancestral spirits revealed as light — flitting blues and yellows, and at their hottest, dazzling white. Jamie hardly breathed as he watched Uncle Charlie make his way around the blaze, and Jamie felt connected somehow, not just to Uncle Charlie, but to Annie, too, who continued her duet with her father. Jamie felt connected to everyone there. He was sure they felt the same way, a deep, spiritual, timeless thing, which had no name but had been around for generations beyond numbering. Uncle Charlie seemed to be ensuring the connection would continue for the next generation, for all generations, for eternity.
At the end of his second cycle around the bonfire, Uncle Charlie abruptly stopped and the drumming stopped with him, and Jamie realized that it was over, and his mouth was open.
“Oh,” Annie cried, “I haven’t seen him dance in years.” She went to her father and embraced him near the fire, and Jamie heard the whispering of ten thousand sighs.
The bonfire had burned down to a pile of coals by the time they started cleaning up. Most of the school families had gone home, with tired children sleeping in the wagon beds or carried back to town in the arms of their parents. The Hendersonville clans and both track teams were still there, working by the light of Jamie’s floating suns, filling black plastic bags with trash or repacking boxes and ice chests to take home. Sammi was asleep in a lawn chair with a blanket draped over her while Larry and Lisa worked nearby, and Mrs. Tully had taken a bleary-eyed Aiven away in the carriage.
Granddaddy Pete and Granny Darla were there, too, but they didn’t help much. Instead, they wandered among the remaining people, chatting with them and shaking hands, schmoozing. Coach Dave had returned from walking Miss Duffy home, and now he was standing off to one side with John Paul and Brinna, deep in conversation.
Jamie’s teammates all seemed to be in a good mood, joking and laughing while they worked. As Jamie walked around with a plastic bag, scouring the grounds for trash, he found Coach Harrison, standing with his hands in his pockets near the front corner of the building.
“Hey, Coach. Where’s your wife?”
He angled his head toward the door. “Using the restroom.”
“Did she enjoy herself tonight?”
“Yeah. I think everybody did, but she was having a pretty hard time there at first, a lot worse than I expected.”
“It’s a lot to take in, all the magic and everything, and we didn’t give her much of a chance to adjust.”
“No, but she calmed down after we took a walk into town. It’s a real pretty place, and I think she liked it. We ran into a few of the locals who were on their way here, and they were nice and friendly. In fact, everybody we met was. That seemed to calm her down.” He nodded slowly and smiled. “She even wants to come back sometime.”
“I’ll make a doorway for you whenever you want. You can stay in my house. Dr. Tindall’s going to be there during the week for a while, but you can have it on the weekend.”
“We couldn’t do that.”
“Sure you could. I let my family and our friends use it all the time. It’s probably better to stay there in the spring or early summer ’cause it’s so pretty here with all the flowers and crops in the fields. But it’s still nice now, and it’s not too cold yet. Even when it does get cold, you’ll be fine. We put electric heaters in the house, and there’s plenty of firewood.”
“My wife would like that. She’s been bugging me about us getting away some weekend, but I’m always so busy with track.”
“We don’t have meets every weekend. You should try it, Coach. It’s relaxing.”
“I’ll think about it.” He looked around the school grounds at the people cleaning up. “Good party, Jamie. That was just what we needed.”
Jamie turned and watched his teammates. “It was a pretty good party, wasn’t it? I was worried there for a while, but everything turned out okay.”
“I think team morale is good right now. I’d say it’s at an all-time high. I talked to Frankie and Alberto a while ago, and neither of them wants to quit anymore, and William has decided not to transfer. I’m looking forward to having a good indoor and outdoor season, this year and the next.”
“Speaking of which.” Jamie bit his lower lip hard for a moment. “Have you decided if you’re going to let me off the hook for indoor season, or at least until we take care of this business with Phillip Cage?”
He stared at Jamie with narrowed eyes for what seemed like forever before he said, “I talked to that CIA guy, Eric. He made a strong case for the severity of the situation with the assassin and his witches, and he said they really need your help because of your magic. After watching that replay of you and Rollie and Fred dealing with that demon, I can understand it. Is that what you guys do, get rid of demons and evil wizards and witches and whatever?”
“Like Rollie says, somebody has to do it. And it looks like we’re going to have to do something about Phillip Cage, too, since nobody else seems to be able to.”
“All right, then. You can train on your own some.” He held up one firm finger. “But you have to follow my workouts, and you have to run in the indoor meets whenever you can. And you have to let the team train here once in a while. They seem to like that a lot.”
Jamie breathed a mental sigh of relief. “That’s fair enough.”
Coach turned and looked across the school grounds again, then gestured with one hand. “You ought to build a track for this school, over on the far side where the ground is already level, near your neighbor’s fence.”
Jamie followed his gaze and said, “I don’t know about that. I’d have to hire somebody to do it, and I bet it would take a fair-sized crew to install the surface. They’d have to do the oath, and I don’t want to tell any more people about my magic unless I have to.”
“Put in a gravel track. Spreading gravel’s easy. You just need somebody to drive the dump truck. I can do that.”
“My dad can, too. He’s going to do it when we build the park, because we’re putting in gravel pathways.”
“A park? Where?”
Jamie pointed past his grandfather’s headquarters. “Over that way, on the other side of the road. It’s my Grannie Darla’s big project. She wants to do it because there isn’t one in this town, and she thinks it’ll be fun to plan it out, kinda like redecorating, only outdoors.”
“A park. That would be nice.” His face grew thoughtful. “Really, though, you should think about putting in a track. I’ve got a manual that shows how to lay it out, so you wouldn’t have to pay anybody to do that. It’s not hard at all. The only expense would be the gravel.”
“My granddaddy can probably get a discount on that. He gets a discount on everything.”
“It could be a backup training facility for the team, in case the weather’s bad in Cullowhee. I wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to train here anyway.”
“What about the pole vault and high jump and long jump pits, and the discus and—”
“Don’t over think it. Just a track, for now. That’s all the kids here at this school will need, anyway.”
“I guess we could put a soccer field in the middle of it, too. Just a couple of goals. That would be cheap. The kids here would like that. They love to kick balls around.”
“There you go.” Coach grinned. “Then you could get ’em some uniforms and they could start their own league.”
“Not yet. One thing at a time, please.”
Jamie ran into his grandfather soon after, and Pete seemed pleased with himself. “Jamie, I’m glad I found you. I meant to tell you that we
got a down payment yesterday from the mining company.” He smiled and nodded. “We’ll get payments regularly after they start hauling out the ore.”
“Does that mean we can build an all-purpose facility for the school soon?”
“Why don’t we get together over the holidays and talk about what you want, exactly? A gym or whatever. Then we’ll take that to an architect. And if it’s okay with you, I’d like to hire a landscape architect to help Darla design the park. We don’t have to tell him that’s it’s gonna be on another world.” He chuckled. “In fact, we should have ’em work up a plan for the whole facility, the school, the park, the grounds around my headquarters, everything.”
“Why?”
“To give it a more unified look. We don’t want it to seem like a hodge-podge collection of properties, do we? We should do it right, make it nice. Something to be proud of.”
“I’m already proud of it.”
“Me too. We all are. But think about what we’re doing.” Pete turned and gestured loosely with one hand at the moonlit fields. “All of this area is going to bear our mark, our stamp, so to speak. We’re making a statement here, whether we mean to or not.”
“I guess you’re right.” Jamie fingered his chin and said, “Do you think we’ll have enough money to build a research facility someday?”
“If we sign another mining deal, we will. I talked to Dr. Tindall for a bit tonight, and she said she’ll start the environmental impact study of another site as soon as she’s done with her research here.”
“So we’ll have plenty of money?”
“Eventually. We can’t build it right away because we’d run the risk of becoming overextended, and we have to keep enough cash on hand to pay salaries and other expenses. More and more people are starting to depend on us now.” He nodded again, slowly. “We’re growing fast, Jamie. We’re going to need more help soon. I took the liberty of talking to your teammates about their career plans, and some of them might fit in nicely with us.”
“My teammates?”
“Sure, why not? We need people who are competent and that we can trust. You trust them, don’t you?”
“Of course, but…I hadn’t thought about us having to hire more people.”
“We’re gonna need all kinds of folks. Lawyers, accountants, IT people, you name it. The bigger you get and the more money you have, the more help you need. I can’t do it by myself, you know.”
“But I don’t want to tell anybody else about the magic. I’m worried that too many people know already.”
“You may not have to. I told the seniors on your team to send me a resume and talk to me before they take a job somewhere else. They seemed pretty excited about the idea.”
“What…where will they work? Here? Do we have to expand your headquarters?”
“I thought we’d buy one of the warehouses that are next to mine in Hendersonville. We can probably get one pretty cheap. We can use that until we can build something of our own.”
“Build? Like an office building?”
Pete nodded again and grinned. “That’s down the road, of course, but we need to think big, Jamie, to do the things you want to do.”
“I haven’t really thought of the logistics of it, just the idealistic stuff.”
“They go together, if you want to accomplish something. And we’ve already accomplished a lot, don’t you think? Let’s see what else we can do together before I finally retire for good.”
Retire. Jamie hadn’t considered that, either. His energetic grandfather seemed like he’d go on forever, wheeling and dealing and making plans. But now Jamie knew that he couldn’t. It was inevitable.
“Who’s going to take your place?”
“I’ve been giving it some thought, and I know it has to be somebody that we really trust, one of your closest friends, but probably one of the non-magical ones. You wizards and witches need to be concerned with the magical problems and let us ordinary folks handle the rest.”
“Somebody like Bryce?”
“Or Melanie. Maybe both.”
“Huh.” Jamie thought about it for a moment, and realized that either of them would be a good choice. Both were intelligent, competent, and Jamie trusted them completely. “Have you talked to them yet?”
“I asked them if they’d intern with me this summer so they can start learning the ropes. We’d pay ’em, of course. They seemed interested.”
“I guess we are getting bigger, aren’t we?”
“Yep, and it’s going to be harder to stay off the radar, if you know what I mean. And not just with the spy agencies, but everybody’s radar. We need somebody to help keep folks from snoopin’ into our business. I guess you’d call ’em a Misinformation Director. I talked to that CIA fellow about it, and he had some suggestions. What do you think about hiring him for that job?”
“Eric? I can’t imagine him leaving the agency.”
“You never know. Doesn’t hurt to ask. Are you okay with him?”
“Sure, I suppose. If you think it’s necessary, and that we’ll have the money to pay him.”
“We’ll have the money. We just have to make sure we’ve got the personnel lined up as we grow. Our little community is expanding, Jamie.”
Community. Jamie had never looked at it that way before, but that’s what they were becoming. “I probably shouldn’t have given the oath to the whole track team. We might be getting too big.”
“Nah.” Pete pinched up his mouth and gave his head a tight shake. “Not if they can be useful. I like ’em. I’m glad you brought ’em into the fold.” He chuckled again and said, “Though I don’t know if community is the right word for it. After watching Uncle Charlie dance, I think we might turning into a tribe.”
“I kinda felt the same way. That’s so weird that you said that.”
“That old Cherokee has some sly magic, even if you can’t figure out what it is.”
“I don’t think I ever will, Granddaddy.”
Jamie shook Eric and Terry’s hands before making a doorway for them back to their house. “Next time,” Jamie said, “bring your kids.”
“My kids would’ve loved it,” Eric said. “My wife would’ve, too.”
“I’ll do the oath with them, if you want.”
“I thought you didn’t want to tell anybody else about the magic.”
Jamie shrugged, so Eric said, “Okay, I’ll think about it. When’s the next big event here?”
“The Founders’ Festival, but that’s not ’til April. But it’s a big one, much bigger than this. You should definitely bring them here for that.”
Terry’s chin fell slightly and then she looked away.
“How about you?” Jamie said. “Do you want to bring Stacey?”
She opened her mouth for a moment before answering. “We’ll see.”
“Okay,” Jamie said slowly. “Well, at least maybe we can figure out a way for you guys to spend Christmas with your families.”
“Doesn’t look likely,” Eric said. “Our boss wants us out in the field.”
“Even if you have magical intervention?” Jamie wiggled his eyebrows.
“Not unless you can figure out who Phillip Cage’s next target is and how to protect them.”
“Can’t you work out of your headquarters in Langley? You’d be staying at your own homes, at least, even if you had to go into the office.”
“If we went back to Langley, Cage could strike a target while we’re home and we’d be called back into the field immediately, even if it were Christmas Day. And our boss wants us to stay in Cullowhee so we can maintain contact with that so-called witch that Nova’s mother knows, the one who lives in Sylva.”
“We’ll get you home for Christmas, somehow. There’s got to be a way.”
“We’ll survive if we don’t make it,” Terry said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Jamie regarded Eric and Terry, whose attempts at hard, stoic faces were betrayed by a subtle bitterness in their eyes, like faint light s
eeping under the bottom edge of a closed door. I need to do something to help them.
The group from Cullowhee was the last to leave that night. While they made a final check to make sure that they had everything, Jamie took Coach Dave aside and said, “If you want to see Miss Duffy, I’ll do what I can to help.”
The young coach smiled bleakly. “Thanks. I talked to John Paul and Brinna about it, and they said I should go for it, and Shauna said she’d like to see me.” He cleared his throat. “If I can get here.”
“Here’s what we can do. Since I might not be able to make a doorway when you need me to, you can drive to Hendersonville on your day off and go through the permanent one in my granddaddy’s warehouse. It comes out over there.” He pointed at the yellow building across the road. “It’s only about an hour-and-fifteen minute trip if traffic’s not bad. We’ll have to get Fred to make you a counter charm bracelet so you can get through it, though. It’s protected by a hex. That’s the best I can offer right now because I don’t want to make another permanent doorway unless I really have to.”
Coach Dave shook his head slowly. “It’s so weird to hear you say things like that and take them seriously. Magic doorway. Counter charm. Weird stuff, Jamie.”
“You’ll get used to it fast, especially when you see how convenient it is.”
“I guess it is pretty inconvenient trying to date a woman on another world, huh?” He blew out a long gust of air. “Am I crazy for trying this?”
“It worked out pretty well for John Paul and Brinna.”
“They seem really happy.”
“There’s a phone here at the school so you can call Miss Duffy when she’s at work.”
“Thanks. I’m going to pursue this. I like this woman and something tells me I should give this my best shot.”
It’s probably the Big Cosmic Whatever at work, Jamie thought, but decided not to explain it to his coach. Jamie turned when he heard Rollie call his name. “We’re waiting on you,” Rollie said. “Time to go home.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Jamie and Coach Dave joined them, and Jamie started to outline a doorway.
“Wait!” Allison waved at the school grounds and said, “Bye-bye, Rivershire. We’ll see you soon.” Then she smiled at Jamie. “I’m gonna work here next year. Your grandfather already offered me a job.”