by Elon Vidal
Dawn coughed when it got worse and closed her eyes. "Elijah, stop it!"
He always lost control of his magic when he got angry but this was too much. Expending this much power was bound to make him sick.
"It's not me!' He called back, lost somewhere in the rising whirlwind.
Dawn lay on the ground and covered her head, waiting for it to pass. And just as sudden as it had begun, it stopped. Everything became quiet and still as the dirt fell back to the ground, and she slowly opened her eyes. It was darker now, and she wondered for a second if her eyes were playing tricks on her.
"Do you see that?", remarked Elijah.
Dawn sat up and saw Elijah standing not too far from her, looking at the sky. She looked up as well and gasped when she saw it, a shadow eclipsing the sun. It was beautiful and scary at the same time, and Dawn ran her hands up and down her arms as goose bumps formed on her skin.
"Is it me or is it getting colder?" Elijah asked.
Before she could respond, their teacher, Mrs. Jefferson appeared and she looked scared out of her mind.
"Are you two alright?" she asked, her eyes darting back and forth between the two of them.
"We are good," Dawn answered, then pointed to the sky. "Did you know about this Mrs. Jay, that there was going to be an eclipse?"
Mrs. Jefferson shook her head, her snow white curls bouncing as she did so. "I think we should go home," she said with the fakest smile Dawn had ever seen. "Camping time is over."
"Where is everyone?" Elijah asked.
"Still by the river. So you two just pack up and I'll get everyone back to do the same."
The woman was gone before Dawn could say anything else, and she noticed it was getting sunnier again. As she looked up, the shadow around the sun was lessening.
"Dawn, did she seem weird to you?"
"Mrs. Jay is always weird. I'd be more worried if she was acting normal. And I can’t really dispute going back to civilization."
As if he had just been reminded that he was not happy with her, Elijah huffed and turned away from her. She didn’t understand why he was being this way, if the tables were turned Dawn would support him. She thought back to the time when they were twelve and he had wanted to join the wrestling team. And the time he wanted to shave all his hair because he thought it made him look like an old person. She had not supported him then, but that had been her younger selfish self. Besides, this was a completely different issue.
Elijah disappeared into thin air before she could say anything to calm him down and she rolled her eyes because he knew that she couldn’t do that.
“Show off.”
What a weird turn of events, with sudden bursts of dirt and eclipses, as if nature was having an effect that reflected on her friend’s gloomy behavior. She grabbed her stuff and walked in the direction of the river. Elijah would come around. He had to. She certainly wasn’t going to change her mind about this, not when she was so close to getting the job of her dreams. EOS was doing groundbreaking work with botanical research and she wanted to be part of that.
She would be contributing to the good in the world too, just on the other side of the magical veil.
TWO
D awn couldn't help but smile as she closed the door behind her, it felt great being back home. Despite Mrs. Jefferson's small panic earlier, everything was right with the world again. A roof over her head, check. The promise of a hot bath, check. And most importantly access to her phone, triple check.
The mobile phone was definitely one of humanity’s greatest inventions, even though it hadn’t exactly been a human who came up with it. Same with many great developments throughout history, there was almost always a magical being behind them. Most of them were warlocks, as they were some of the smartest creatures around. They were extraordinary at making weapons and all sorts of gadgets while looking like they had just stepped off the pages of a magazine. With their trademark long, white hair and blue eyes, they were already walking and talking weapons of mass destruction. Of women’s common sense that was. Dawn knew that better than anyone, she saw how girls behaved around Elijah.
Ghoulish groans and gunshots drew her attention and she followed the sound of the TV to find Nathan lying on the floor with a joy pad in his hands.
"Hey," she announced her presence, getting a grunt in response.
Her brother was in full video game mode and she knew better than to take his distraction personally. He was fourteen, caught in between that awkward zone of being the sweet little brother he had always been and this budding mini adult who wanted nothing to do with anyone unless they were giving him a Wi-Fi password. So Dawn turned and made her way to her room, eager to be reunited with her phone charger.
The house was quiet save for the sounds of zombies meeting their doom at Nathan’s joystick skills and Dawn was looking forward to a long soak in the tub as she tried to get over the past two days camping. Sure, it hadn't been all bad, but nothing beat being back home and out of the woods. She needed to relax after that weird dream and even weirder ending to their trip, not to mention her fight with Elijah.
"You're back!"
Dawn winced as Maggie appeared, her loud voice ruining whatever plans she had for some quiet time.
"And so are you," she responded in a flat voice.
Margaret, or Maggie as she liked to be called now, always appeared and disappeared as she willed. At times she was gone for months and always returned with the craziest stories. Dawn hadn’t seen the ghost for a few weeks now, and although she would rather die than admit it, she had missed her a little.
"Oh cheer up, I come bearing gifts."
She held out her long, pale fingers and a jewel appeared, or rather, an impression of a jewel. As a ghost, Maggie couldn't touch anything in the real world, but she could imitate almost anything she saw. The blue diamond sparkled as if it were real, and it took Dawn a moment to realize what she was looking at.
"Is that the Ocean Diamond?" she asked with wide eyes.
It had to be, no other diamond could be as blue and as beautiful, and it was the stuff of legends. The history books said it was passed from generation to generation of Neptune’s daughters, but no one had seen a god in centuries so they couldn’t know for sure. It was said to have the power to grant anyone who had it the ability to live underwater. Although why anyone besides mermaids would want that, Dawn wasn’t sure. No one had seen a mermaid for centuries either, if they even still existed.
Maggie giggled and nodded, the diamond rotating in her palm. "It's beautiful, isn't it? It’s like someone captured the reflection of clear, summer sky perfectly."
“Where did you find it? Do you know how many people would kill to know where that jewel is?”
“There was a handsome fellow,” Maggie sighed, slipping into her old manner of speaking and beginning to float a little.
Dawn knew that she would never get any information out of Maggie when she got all dreamy eyed, and there was a strong possibility that the jewel was a fake anyway. What were the odds that Maggie would come across it when it had been missing for eons?
“I think I have something that you will like,” Dawn said, grabbing her laptop and power cable.
Maggie clapped her hands in excitement, “Oh goodie, I so love getting presents.”
Dawn didn’t correct her as she switched on the laptop, wondering why she had never thought of this before. “Have you ever watched Titanic?”
Maggie frowned, “The ship that sank a few years back?”
Dawn cleared her throat to disguise her laugh. “Maybe just a little bit more than a few years back, but yes.”
Yet another horrible thing in history that Maggie had probably lived through. Again, Dawn wondered why Maggie stayed. The always cheerful ghost had told her it was her choice to stay, that there were so many things to explore on earth. There were indeed a lot of amazing things on earth, but also many tragic moments too. No wonder Maggie seemed to lose it once in a while. It was all too much for one mind t
o store.
“Why on earth would someone make a movie about that? It was awful accident!”
“Relax, you’ll love this. I promise.”
Maggie didn’t look convinced, but she settled down to watch the movie and Dawn made her way to her bathroom. Her mother’s homemade bubble bath was just the soothing potion she needed and as she settled in, she heard Maggie exclaim, “Oh, he’s beautiful!”
She smiled and forgot about everything except her warm water.
“They both could have fit on that raft you know!” Maggie sighed dramatically as Dawn walked out of the bathroom to the rolling credits.
Dawn resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “There is a whole online community dedicated to that theory, you can take comfort in the fact that you are not alone.”
She was feeling more refreshed from that long bath which included a doze off into dreamworld. She had now mustered enough determination to get on with sorting her dad’s home office. Their dad had moved out of the house three years ago, when Dawn was sixteen and Nathan eleven. In all those years their mother hadn’t made an attempt to move things out of his home office, and now packing everything away suddenly made his absence in the house seem final.
In a way though, it served as a distraction for Dawn, because she hadn’t been quite able to shake the distant feeling that something was wrong. She just didn’t know what exactly, or if it was just the day’s events finally getting to her. Spending some time with two of her favourite people was just what she needed. Well, her favourite person, her brother Nathan, and her favourite ghost to be accurate.
Maggie gave Dawn a pointed glare as she floated around the room, making the temperature go down a notch. Who knew that being dead came with refrigeration superpowers?
“Mock me all you want, but you will never understand these things. You are far too young,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
That made Dawn chuckle, Maggie looked younger than she did. Sure, she had been around longer after her death, but she still looked like a sixteen-year-old despite the old dress and pearls around her neck.
“You are being way too emotional about this, you know? That movie is older than I am and old news already. Besides, you love Shakespeare,” Dawn reminded her, “and he is like the king of romantic tragedy.”
“Oh, Shakespeare was a total sweetheart despite all the gloom he tended to write,” Maggie sighed again, this time Dawn could almost see the hearts in her eyes.
This was not the first time that she had alluded to the fact that she knew Shakespeare personally, and Dawn had given up on trying to figure out just how old the ghost was. Maggie drifted in and out of reality sometimes, and it was pointless trying to get her to focus on anything for a long period of time. It didn’t matter how old she was anyway, the information wasn’t going to do both of them any good.
“Did I tell you that Romeo was inspired by a real person?”
Only about a thousand times, Dawn wanted to reply. Just one of the upsides to living with a centuries old ghost; hearing the same stories over and over again. The only interesting thing about Maggie’s stories was that they always seemed to change, she never got the same version twice.
“Let me guess, you were betrothed to him as well?” Dawn asked as she looked up from the books that she had been sorting.
Her brother giggled, drawing her attention away from the pouting ghost.
“You know it’s really weird when you talk to yourself like that,” Nathan shrugged.
She supposed it was, but it had been eleven years since Maggie had first appeared and she had stopped worrying about how it looked like when she spoke to someone no one else could see. Of course her power would be to see ghosts, she thought, she had always had an overactive imagination as a kid. Nathan had yet to discover his power, but as a Halfling she didn’t have much hope that it would be any more useful than her own.
“I feel the same way when you shout at your video games,” Dawn replied, “at least Maggie is a real person.”
The ghost in question walked through a chair making Dawn smile. Well, almost real. She looked at her brother again and nodded towards the open albums in front of him.
“Making any progress?”
“Is there a spell we can use to make all these photographs digital? Everything is so old and we can’t keep all of this.”
“That’s a good idea, maybe mom can do something,” Dawn agreed. She wouldn’t attempt it herself, not after the last time she tried to clean the house using a spell and ended up setting the kitchen on fire.
“Good call, you are terrible at spells,” Maggie said, echoing Dawn’s thoughts.
Dawn ignored her and walked to her brother’s side, her eyes widening when she saw the photo of her father on a motorcycle.
“Dad had a bike?!”
He looked very young in the picture, around sixteen or seventeen, with full riding gear. Leather jacket, leather gloves and dark sunglasses. It was hard to picture her father as some cool guy back in the day, especially one who rode a motorcycle. Her dad was afraid of everything. He wrote the textbook on phobias. Yet the way he was confidently sitting on the bike told a different story. She wondered what had happened to change him so drastically.
“You look so much like him there,” she said to her brother, making him smile.
“Do you think mum will let me have a bike when I turn sixteen?”
Dawn scoffed, “Not if it doesn’t have two training wheels in the back.”
Nathan laughed, “And full body armor?”
“Made of bubble wrap.”
Their mother was typical Fae; fiercely protective and overly cautious. There was nothing she loved more than fussing over her children, especially her youngest. It didn’t matter that Nathan was not a little kid anymore; seeing him on a motorcycle would probably be too much for their mother to handle.
“I had no idea dad kept so much stuff; we’ll never get through all of it in one day.”
“Maybe we should call your boooyfriend,” Nathan said in a singsong tone, batting his eyes for effect.
Dawn shoved him playfully and did the one thing she knew her brother hated more than anything, getting his hair ruffled. He laughed and raised his hands in surrender, making Maggie mutter something about foolish children before disappearing.
“Elijah is not my boyfriend, dummy. He’s annoying like you.”
“But his magic is really good and he could help us pack everything in minutes.”
Nathan made a valid point, but Dawn wasn’t in the mood to speak to her friend after the way they had left things. Her decision to leave training for enlistment in the First Guard and apply for an apprenticeship had not been accepted well by anyone in her life. Well, except for her father whose opinion was probably biased since he wanted nothing more than for his children to be more human. It didn’t get any more human than botanical horticulture and Elijah had a few things to say about that.
“We can’t rely on magic for everything, we just need to come up with a systematic way to pack everything.” She moved to the bookshelf and took out a dusty book. “We can put all the books in boxes and give them to a library. Dad took the texts important to him and the rest he can always get eBooks if he wants. We can put all the files and papers in another box and he can sort through those himself. Then mom can spell the albums for us, which leaves the trophies.”
Nathan nodded and went back to the albums again, crying out in excitement when he found yet another interesting photo of their father. Nathan and his father shared the same green eyes and wide smile, and seeing these pictures made Dawn miss their dad even more. Even though he lived twenty minutes away and they talked on the phone all the time. It just wasn’t the same. She missed having breakfast with him in the morning, he made the best pancakes. She missed doing mundane human things with him, like going to the park or to baseball games. She even missed having someone in the house who actually bought the newspaper, and watched the news to see the weather report instead of
using magic.
“I miss him,” Nathan said as if he’d read her thoughts.
“Do you want to go by his house later to drop off some of his stuff?”
“I mean I miss having him here. Do you think mum and dad will ever get back together? It’s cool if they don’t but it would be so cool too if they did, you know?”
She did, and if she could then she would have found a way to get them back together. Her mother hadn’t dated in the three years she had been separated from her father and neither had her dad. It wasn’t lack of love that had made them drift apart but rather the pressure of the two worlds they lived in.
“Maybe we could brew a love potion,” Dawn said with an exaggerated evil laugh to make her brother smile.
To her surprise, Nathan perked up and nodded in agreement. “Could you do that? That might work.”
Technically, she could. Reality was a different matter though and if she got one thing wrong it could have disastrous results. It could be anything from having her parents fall in love with different people or turn into goats. The potion had to be perfect and the only people who could do that guaranteed were Fae and warlocks. The problem was that fairies were incapable of doing anything selfish, and the one warlock she knew well enough was a stickler for rules. And the first rule of magic was to never use it harmfully against an innocent. Using a potion on her parents without their knowledge could be technically considered as violating that rule.