The Magician's Dream (Oona Crate Mystery: book 3)

by Shawn Thomas Odyssey

  “Birch root . . . elder twig . . . night moss and elm. Essence of juniper and . . .” And something else she could not make out. An essential ingredient. She increased her awareness, opening herself even more to the house’s masterful influence as she followed the magic down into her blood and the cells within. For a long moment she was no longer in the boat but swam deep within her own body, so small that she could see its workings as if they were giant machines churning their endless work: the beating of her heart, the breathing of her lungs, the miracle of life spread out before her . . . and yet the final ingredient of the potion eluded her.

  Yet there was a smell. A familiar smell. Something she knew well. How strange that she could not place it. This was not plant, nor metal . . . it was, in fact, animal in nature. Something dark . . . and light . . . .and . . .

  Oona snapped her fingers, coming out of her magical trance. She had it. She knew the final ingredient. It was no wonder she had had such trouble identifying it because it was something so familiar that she had thought it was a part of herself and not a foreign substance at all.

  “Feather of crow,” Oona said. “Very similar to feather of raven.”

  Samuligan grinned at her from the other end of the floating boat and thumbed back his cowboy hat. “Very good.”

  Her link with the house told her this was a sleeping potion. “You’ve put me to sleep. That’s why you keep saying that you aren’t creating the illusion.”

  “Illusions created by others are easily detectable,” the faerie said as he pushed himself to his feet. The boat rocked unsteadily beneath him. “But self-made illusions are the hardest to sense, and even harder to break. That is why faeries love potions. Let your enemies defeat themselves, and the act of war is so much easier. Of course, once you know what ails you, the antidote is easily made. The Magicians of Old knew this, and so do you.”

  Oona shook her head, confused. “But if this is all a dream that I am creating . . . how am I supposed to create an antidote?”

  Instead of answering, Samuligan tipped his hat and smiled his mischievous grin. “You know, they say that when you fall in a dream, you always wake up just before you hit the ground.”

  And with that, the faerie leapt out of the boat and dropped through the clouds like a stone through water.

  Oona screamed.

  “Nothing to be frightened of,” said a voice. Oona’s scream stuck in her throat and she turned, casting about for the owner of the voice. To her surprise, she discovered a man in a long coat sitting atop one of the tombstones. Even more of a surprise was the fact that she recognized him . . . a man who had been dead for years but who looked just as alive as he had on the last day Oona had seen him. Her mouth fell open as she stared into the clever, handsome face of her father.

  Reading the startled and confused look on Oona’s face, he smiled reassuringly. “Samuligan will be fine.”

  Oona searched for words. “But . . . but . . . you’re . . .”

  “Dead?” her father said. “Yes.”

  “Then how are you here?” she asked wonderingly. Her heart felt as if it were about to explode with joy at seeing him so close, and yet her mind was terribly confused. Her throat constricted as tears began to well in her eyes.

  “Come now, Oona,” her father said, and tapped the side of his head. His short brown hair looked just as it had on the last morning she had seen him. “How is it possible I’m here? Use your brain, little one.”

  Her breath hitched in her throat. “Little one” had been his nickname for her. It was something she had nearly forgotten, a fact that now made her feel quite sad. What else had she forgotten?

  “Not so little anymore,” Oona said. “I’ve grown.”

  He pulled his magnifying glass from his pocket and peered at her through it, making one eye look enormous. “And so you have grown. Though not quite a giant.”

  Oona nodded thoughtfully. “Still short, you mean.”

  He spun the magnifying glass playfully in his fingers. “Just right, I’d say.”

  Oona peered at the magnifying glass and then reached into her pocket, pulling out an exact duplicate. She held the magnifying glass that she had inherited from her father up in front of her and looked from the glass in her own hand to the one in her father’s.

  “How can we both be holding the same glass?” she asked.

  “Think,” her father said.

  Oona considered the conundrum, though it did not take her long. “You are a dream. You’re not real.”

  “A dream, yes. Real? That’s another thing altogether.”

  “So I brought you here. But why?”

  “What do you need?”

  The question struck Oona like a brick in the chest. It was unexpected and terrible—terrible because she knew the devastating answer.

  “I need you,” she said, and her voice cracked with emotion. “I need you, and Mother, and Flora to be alive.”

  Her father dropped his finger from the side of his head and tapped his chest. “You have us, always. Here.”

  Oona shook her head. “It’s not enough!”

  “It is more than enough,” he said, and though he sounded suddenly stern, his voice never lost its edge of care.

  Oona stared at him for a long moment. After a while she asked: “Can I just stay here with you?”

  “That’s part of the test.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The potion put you to sleep. Will you sleep your life away?”

  Oona ran a hand through her hair, thinking. “It’s why Samuligan brought me here, isn’t it?”

  “Samuligan didn’t bring you here,” her father said. “You did. And you have a purpose. That is why you won’t stay.”

  Oona began to nod, understanding blooming like a flower in her mind’s eye. “I need something. Okay, I see. What I need to know, right now, is who killed you. Can you tell me that?”

  “You have all the clues,” her father said, and once again peered at her through the magnifying glass. “Think. Who knew about the Rose Knot?”

  Oona considered the question carefully. When she thought it through, she realized that there were only two people who knew for sure how to tie the knot.

  “Isadora Iree,” Oona said. “But she was only ten years old when you were murdered, and besides, she only just learned the knot from the book.”

  Her father adjusted his position on the gravestone. “All right, so through a process of elimination, who does that leave?”

  Oona pounded her fist on the edge of the boat, causing it to rock slowly back and forth. “That leaves only the man who wrote the book: Abraham McGillicuddy . . . but the book was published almost forty years ago, and according to Deacon the man never lived on Dark Street.”

  Oona paused for a moment, a new idea blossoming.

  “But perhaps . . . ,” her father began for her.

  And as if the two of them shared one mind, Oona finished: “But maybe he taught the knot to someone. Perhaps his son . . . or grandson. I had Deacon check the Who’s Who specifically for an Abraham McGillicuddy when I should have asked if there were any McGillicuddys living on Dark Street at all.”

  “It’s where I’d start,” her father said.

  Oona beamed at him. “Then it is where I will start, too.” She looked around the boat and frowned. “Ah . . . just as soon as I figure out how to get down from here.”

  “Now that I can help you out with,” he said, and reached into his pocket. From it he extracted a single black feather.

  “Feather of crow,” Oona said. “The crucial potion ingredient.”

  “It’s a good thing you figured out what it was; otherwise, I wouldn’t have found it.” He held up his free hand as if about to cast a spell.

  “I didn’t think you knew any magic,” she said.

  “Oh, but I am the magic, don’t you see?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will . . . one day.”

  Her father hopped from the tombstone�
��which Oona now saw had his name upon it—and held his hand over the feather. His fingers began to glow orange from within, as if he held some tremendous energy.

  “But wait!” Oona cried. “I don’t want to leave yet. I want to talk some more . . . I miss you so much.”

  “I know, little one,” was his only response before several bolts of lightning exploded from his fingertips, shooting into the feather. The explosion of thunder was like cannon fire in the sky, causing the boat to rock from side to side.

  He held out the black feather, which appeared to have been unaffected by the lightning. Oona reached tentatively out and took it. For the briefest instant she felt her fingers brush against her father’s—those familiar fingers that had held her as a baby and clasped her hand as she grew—and then they were gone. She took the feather in her own fingers. It felt as heavy as a mountain. The weight caused the boat to tip violently to one side and then capsize completely.

  Oona shrieked, her free hand groping for purchase and scratching gouges along the edge of the boat as it tossed her into the vast openness of the sky. And then she was falling, tumbling end over end, out of control. She tumbled through the clouds—forks of lightning crisscrossing the air in a horrifying web of electricity—and then out the bottom, where all of Dark Street zoomed up to meet her. The sight was too terrifying to watch. Oona clamped her eyes shut, still gripping the inky black feather, and dropped to the street like a stone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Shoe Fly

  Oona awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed. She peered around, at first confused about her surroundings before realizing that someone had brought her up to her room. The sun was just beginning to rise through her window, revealing that she had been sleeping on top of her covers and was still wearing the same dress from when she had sat down at tea that afternoon.

  She shook her head. No, that was not right. By the light, she could tell that it was now morning, and tea on the sidewalk had happened the previous day. She had dreamed the night away.

  Something pricked her palm, and she looked down to see the black feather her father had given her clasped tightly in her right hand. Had it been a dream? If it was, then how could she still be holding the feather? She had brought it with her.

  “Was it really him?” she wondered aloud.

  “Hmm?” sounded a voice.

  Oona looked around to find Deacon just coming awake upon her bedpost.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” Deacon said, and stretched his long black wings. “Your uncle said you might sleep for as long as twenty-four hours, after which time he would administer the antidote to the sleeping potion. Though he suspected that you would figure out the antidote yourself before that was necessary. It appears he was right.”

  “It was my father, Deacon,” Oona said. She stared amazedly at the feather she had brought back with her from her dream. “He found the key ingredient and did something to it. Some powerful magic. I only figured out what the ingredients were. He’s the one who broke the enchantment.”

  “Your father?” Deacon asked. “Are you sure you didn’t just—”

  “Dream it?” Oona said. “Of course I did. But it was real. Look. Here is the feather he gave to me.”

  Deacon shook his head from side to side. “I don’t understand. Where did you get that feather? It’s not one of mine.”

  Oona twirled it in her fingers. “No. It’s similar to yours, but different. That’s what made it such a difficult ingredient to figure out. The two of us are together so much that I thought it was a part of me, that it was not a foreign substance. But this is not a raven feather, it is the feather of a crow.”

  Deacon hopped to the bed to get a closer look. “Ah, I see, it is smaller than mine, and feather of crow has been used in many potions throughout the years. But I still don’t see how you could have brought it out of your dream.”

  Oona opened her mouth to explain further but stopped, realizing that she did not understand it, either. She decided to change the subject.

  “Deacon, what can you tell me about McGillicuddy?”

  Deacon looked up at her, cocking is head sideways. “I thought we already looked into that.”

  “No, we didn’t,” Oona said, remembering the conversation she’d had with her father. She felt a sting of sadness at having spent so little time with him before having to go. Her fingers clamped on the end of the feather he had handed to her. Their fingers had touched, for only the briefest of moments, but the touch, she was sure, had been real.

  “I beg your pardon?” Deacon asked, clearly confused.

  “You looked up Abraham McGillicuddy,” Oona explained, “but you didn’t look to see if there were any other McGillicuddys living on Dark Street. Like, perhaps, a son of his, someone who might have learned the art of knot tying from his father and then moved to Dark Street.”

  Deacon fell silent as he consulted the Dark Street Who’s Who. After a moment he responded: “There are two living McGillicuddys registered as residing on Dark Street. Husband and wife. Victor and Jezebel.” Deacon’s eyes widened. “And Victor McGillicuddy just so happens to be the same Victor who works at the Museum of Magical History. He is the daytime watchman!”

  Oona swung her feet off the bed and leapt to her feet. “Of course, Deacon. He’s the one who found the night watchman the next day, and cut him free. He knocked Hackelsmith out the night before, tied him up using the knot he learned from either his father or grandfather, and stole the Faerie Carbuncle.”

  “According to the Who’s Who, his family came to Dark Street when he was a boy.”

  “He and his wife must be the thieves!” Oona said so loudly she was nearly shouting. “Come, Deacon, we must contact Inspector White.”

  “But just because Victor has the same last name as the author of the knot-tying book doesn’t constitute enough proof to arrest him. It doesn’t even prove that he knows how to tie the knot. Remember, the knot was so complicated that he was unable to untie the night watchman in the morning, and so he had to cut the rope off.”

  Oona began pacing the floor, catching glimpses of her disheveled hair in the mirror as she moved. “Maybe there is no way to untie it. I saw no mention of it in the book. Or even if there is, maybe he left it there on purpose. That would be in keeping with the Rose Thieves’ method of operation.”

  “Their modus operandi,” Deacon said.

  “Precisely,” Oona said, and then a new thought occurred to her, and she began to nod. She moved to her dressing table, where she found the book of knots, and began flipping through the pages. When she came to the page she had been looking for, she pointed accusingly at the illustration, as if the knot itself had committed some heinous crime.

  “I remembered seeing this when I was looking through the book,” she said. “This is how we will prove that he knows these knots, Deacon.”

  Deacon hopped to the tabletop. “But that is not the Rose Knot.”

  Oona slapped the book shut. “Trust me, Deacon. This is it. But first we should send a note to police headquarters. I want Inspector White there at the museum when I confront my father’s murderer.”

  ***

  Oona opened her bedroom window and tied the note she had written to Inspector White to Deacon’s leg.

  “Get this to police headquarters as quickly as possible, Deacon.”

  Deacon ruffled his feathers in the cool morning breeze. “I don’t see why you need me to take it. Why not just send it via flame?”

  Deacon was referring to the standard method of sending letters on Dark Street, which involved writing the receiving person’s address upon the letter or envelope and then setting it on fire.

  “Because, Deacon,” Oona said impatiently, “Inspector White has told me countless times to stay out of police affairs. He might ignore my request. I need you to make sure he comes to the museum at once.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?” Deacon asked.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Now off wi
th you. And I’ll meet you there.”

  Oona shooed him out the window, and Deacon took to the air on smooth black wings. A moment later Oona threw open her bedroom door, only to discover her uncle approaching from down the hall.

  “Ah, you are awake,” he said, looking very pleased. “I was just coming to check on you. So you figured it out, did you?”

  Oona held up the black feather, which she still held tightly in her hand. “Feather of crow. That was the key ingredient.”

  Her uncle’s expression went from pleased to confused. “Well, yes. That was the key ingredient, and you obviously counteracted it. But what is that you have there?”

  Oona looked at her uncle, puzzled by the question. “It’s the feather of crow. I just said.”

  The Wizard began to stroke ponderously at his beard. “You brought it physically back with you?”

  “Wasn’t that supposed to happen?” she asked.

  “I won’t lie—it is quite extraordinary, don’t you think? You carried it out of a dream.”

  “My father gave it to me.”

  The Wizard’s bushy white eyebrows shot up. “Bradford? You saw him?”

  Oona nodded. “Just after Samuligan jumped out of the boat. Where is Samuligan anyway? Is he all right?”

  “I am perfectly fine,” the faerie said, emerging from the shadow of a nearby doorway. “I see you brought back a souvenir.” Samuligan pointed a long finger at the black feather.

  “I did,” Oona said, and as much as she wished to know more about why she had been able to bring the feather back with her, she was also boiling inside with anticipation for catching her father’s killer. “But that’s not important right now. We need to get to the museum. Samuligan, can you fetch the carriage?”

  “At once,” he said, and he was gone, moving down the hallway with uncanny speed and disappearing down the stairs.

  “Is everything all right?” the Wizard asked.