by Keary Taylor
“Wow,” I said, nodding my head with a smile. “That was quite the jump, Mary-Beth.”
“Well, think about it,” she said with a laugh. She was saying all of this for fun. “There’s you and Nathaniel, and anyone looking at the two of you knows you’re going to be together forever. And Borden doesn’t really make sense, considering everyone knows David was trying to get with you last year. Now Borden just follows the two of you around. And here I am now. So, what am I supposed to think? Or is this just a really poorly executed date set-up for him?”
“What, are you saying you wouldn’t date me?” Borden asked with a mocking smile and a raised brow.
Mary-Beth actually took several long moments of evaluating him openly. “I mean…you are kind of hot, in that good boy way. Classically pretty. And I know you’re rich. But I think I kind of have a thing for bad boys with dark hair and brooding eyes.”
Borden just laughed, shaking his head.
“Say what you really mean, Mary-Beth,” I teased her. “No wonder you were let down by that guy last year. Bad boys tend to have their reputations for a reason.”
“But they make life oh so exciting,” she said with a smirk and a shrug of her shoulder.
We got to the bank leading up to Asteria House and turned up onto it. Nathaniel pulled me up, followed by Borden who extended a hand down to Mary-Beth.
“Don’t be getting any ideas, pretty boy,” she said as she took his hand and let him pull her up.
“You are ridiculous,” Borden said, and from his tone, I could tell he was playing, but also a little bit serious.
“As long as I’m not boring,” she said, winking as she walked past him and came to my side. She looped her arm through mine and followed me without question to the steps leading up into the abandoned house.
“I literally don’t even know how to react to the dynamic going on here,” Nathaniel said from the other side of me.
I just laughed and hugged into his side more, rising onto my tiptoes to press a kiss to his cheek.
“You better get used to them,” Borden said to Mary-Beth. “It gets a little stomach churning at times.”
“Don’t be jealous,” she said. “They’re ridiculously adorable.”
“So, what if I am a little jealous?” Borden said. “I’m a senior in college, and the most serious relationship I’ve ever had is with my financial advisor.”
Mary-Beth gave a pitying noise. “Okay, fine, I’ll go on one date with you, but you’re paying.”
“It’s too late,” Borden said, shaking his head. “You’ve already told me you aren’t attracted to me. You’ve bruised my ego. Let’s all just move on with our lives.”
As we all laughed, I felt…good. Peaceful. Like things were falling into place and that even though we were all so different, this was how things were meant to be.
I kind of loved the four of us together as a crew.
We stepped into the emptied bedroom and as Mary-Beth and Borden both looked around, I knew neither of them had ever been here before. We worked our way through the bedroom, into the massive living room.
Nathaniel and I had nailed sheets up over the broken window in an attempt to keep out the cold, rain, and snow. They flapped slightly in the breeze, but it was indeed warmer in here than outside.
“This place is kind of freaky,” Mary-Beth said as she let go of me and walked around. “Didn’t the Asteria family just walk away from this place after that storm?”
Nathaniel nodded. “It’s been about twenty years since anyone lived here.”
“So, you guys are the type that likes abandoned houses and spooky graveyards?” she asked as she ran her hand over the back of a chair that had no bottom to it anymore.
“Not exactly,” I said as my heart rate started spiking. “We’re the type that has something to share with you, and it’s about yourself. Something you never knew.”
Mary-Beth looked back at me then, and for the first time, she got a look of concern on her face.
I glanced at Nathaniel and wondered if this fear and uncertainty was how he felt the first time he told me.
“We have a common ancestor,” I said, turning my attention back to Mary-Beth. “Mare McGregor was killed in Salem for being a witch. Because she really was one.”
For the first time ever, Mary-Beth didn’t have anything to say. Her eyes slid from me to Nathaniel, and then to Borden, as if she was waiting for either of the two of them to laugh at my joke.
“There was a surge of magic between 1500 and 1700,” Nathaniel said, stepping in and filling in where I was lacking. “You’ve heard of the trials here in the States, but there were full on witch hunts in just about every part of the world between those years. Europe, Asia, much of Africa. My ancestors were killed in England. Borden’s in Scotland. All three of us are descendants of people who had magical abilities.”
I slid the bag from my shoulder and pulled out the telekinesis book. “I made up all that stuff the other day,” I said as I opened it and walked toward Mary-Beth, who still stood there silent and staring. “I have no idea if your grandmother donated it. But Nathaniel found it almost a year ago. And only certain people can read it.”
I set the book down on the table in front of her, open.
“Can you read it now?” I asked, and my heart continued to hammer and race.
Mary-Beth’s eyes dropped to the book. Her eyes darted back and forth, and the longer she looked at it, the more her brows furrowed together.
“Wait, the other day I could read it just fine,” she said, looking up at me for a brief moment. “Is this a different book?”
I shook my head. “That’s why I asked if you knew Gaelic. That’s what it’s written in, though we found out it’s just utter nonsense.” I stepped forward, and gently grabbed her wrist and moved her hand toward the pages. “Touch it.”
She gave me an uncertain, questioning look. But she did it.
And exactly like I had, like Borden had, she leaned in closer, her brows concerned. She withdrew her hand, and then touched it again.
“You can read it when you touch it, can’t you?” Borden asked.
She glanced over her shoulder at him, awe and confusion on her face. She looked back at the book and did it again. “How did you guys do this? I’ve never seen this kind of circus trick.”
“It’s not a circus trick,” Nathaniel said. “You share Mare McGregor’s blood, just like I share William Nightingale’s, and Borden shares Christian Stewart’s. They were mages. And so are all four of us.”
Mary-Beth looked back at us, and for the first time, I saw something new in her eyes. A mix between concern, and maybe just a little bit of fear. “Okay, I thought you guys seemed fun and maybe a little weird and adventurous, but I didn’t realize you were all delusional.”
I didn’t even have to say anything. Borden turned for the massive fireplace which still had a few logs in it from the last time Nathaniel and I came here. He rubbed his hands together, and they instantly sparked with electricity, something Nathaniel and I couldn’t do. And then he snapped his fingers, staring intently at the logs.
They instantly lit on fire.
There was a rustle of paper from upstairs, and two seconds later, a train of four paper airplanes came swooping down the stairs and circled around Mary-Beth.
I closed my eyes for a moment and reached out to every speck of dirt that was lying on the ground and asked it to lift.
When I opened my eyes, there was a massive amount of dirt floating in the air.
“Trust me, we all know how you’re feeling,” I said, even as I kept my concentration. “But we’re not delusional.”
Mary-Beth’s breath was coming in and out in sharp, unsteady pulls. She kept looking around, from the airplanes that continued to fly around the house, to the dirt I was making levitate, to Borden’s fire that had leapt to life.
“How are you doing this?” she breathed shakily.
“We’re mages,” I said, trying to keep my tone calm
and soothing. “And we can teach you how to do it, too.”
A laugh percussed out of her chest, startling me. It was followed by another one, and then a whole string of them. Her hand darted out and she snatched one of Nathaniel’s paper airplanes out of the air as it passed by her. She turned it over in her hand, checking for wires.
I gathered up all the dirt in the air, and I sent it out one of the broken windows upstairs. Mary-Beth watched as it raced up the stairs, and then we all watched through the window as it fell to the ground outside.
“Show me,” she said in marveled wonder. “I want to know how he started the fire.”
In the end, Borden didn’t learn anything new. We went over the same things we’d taught him. The coin of compulsion. Which didn’t work for Mary-Beth. And then fire starting. Which Mary-Beth also wasn’t able to do.
Yet.
The three of us hadn’t had a hard time with either of those things to start with, but maybe we’d just gotten lucky. Maybe for Mary-Beth it was just going to take practice and time.
She had a million questions. We answered what we could. Nathaniel told her the history, our speculations that we’d been hunted to extinction. We told her that we thought there were others out there, but that we needed to figure out what we were doing first.
We told her the plan. We told her about the pencils we planned to enchant to test with.
I told her why after this semester I was dropping out of school.
And she was fascinated with it all. She was no longer scared.
“I’m in,” she said as the day outside grew dark. “Apparently, I’m garbage at this, but I’m in. This is the most crazy, insane, beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m with you all one hundred percent.”
I beamed with excitement at her acceptance. I crossed the space and wrapped my arms around her shoulders. “Welcome to the crew, then.”
Over her shoulder, I just saw Nathaniel shake his head with a smile.
Chapter Seven
Maybe we’d bitten off more than we could chew with Mary-Beth.
From the moment we told her what she was and showed her what we could do, she was all over it. Within days, she had a record of her family history tracing back to the seventh century. Which of course Nathaniel drooled over. We were able to target the mage line exactly, going from Mare, all the way back up the McGregor line. We found they were clan leaders at one point and had a large family. Most of them were killed in a war in the Battle of Flodden.
However, Nathaniel was unable to confirm the possible Foster line. The name he had considered, the one he knew was killed, was nowhere to be found in Mary-Beth’s ancestry.
But with all of these branches, I had to wonder how many of them were mage lines? How many of these direct descendants were mages? All of them? Or did it stem from one particular ancestor? Did anyone with a mage ancestor become a mage? What if it was limited to only certain people? How pure and direct did the blood have to be to carry it on?
In the end, we were left with more questions than answers. But no one was complaining.
And Mary-Beth had hired a personal librarian to go through her family’s books and make a catalogue of the ones that could possibly be related to magic. The books were to be shipped directly to her dorm here at Alderidge.
And every night that first week after we told Mary-Beth what she was, we all met in my mother’s secret office after Nathaniel got off of his shift. We worked for an hour on enchanting the pencils.
We studied that glamouring book. We practiced glamouring all kinds of things. In the end, we found hiding text was actually easy, so long as we had another book filled with another language. It was almost like psychic copying. We made it so every book my mother had found couldn’t be read by anyone but a mage.
But no matter how much Mary-Beth tried, she wasn’t successful at accomplishing anything. Though we weren’t all that worried, because Borden couldn’t make the glamour work either.
We moved onto the wands.
“We need it to recognize mage blood,” Nathaniel said one night. He was leaned against the desk, his arms folded over his chest. He looked exhausted and I knew how little he was sleeping these days. Between school, work in the library, our work here, and his homework, I was getting worried. “We can’t have it reacting to normal, human blood. I think we need to do something with actual, physical blood.”
“Everyone, come here,” Borden said as he grabbed an empty glass and set it on the table. He then pulled a pocket knife out with a box of matches. He pricked the pad of his thumb and squeezed it into the jar, letting out a few drops. He wiped the knife off, held the blade over the flames for a moment, and then passed the knife on to Mary-Beth.
She didn’t even hesitate as she pierced her skin and let her blood run into the glass.
Nathaniel and I looked at each other. Apparently, neither of us were as bold and brave as Mary-Beth or Borden. We hesitated.
But after just a moment, Nathaniel pierced his skin and dropped his blood in the jar, and then I did the same.
“Now what?” Borden asked as he watched our blood, which all looked the same, mix and mingle in the glass.
We each stared at it for a few moments.
We didn’t know what we were doing.
We had no instruction manual. No wise old teacher.
It was just us. Four college kids, trying to do magic.
“What if we soak the pencils?” Mary-Beth said. “The blood needs to saturate into it, and I don’t think any of us wants to pour in that much blood. But even if it’s diluted, it will still soak in.”
She grabbed a glass of water that had been sitting on the other end of the table and poured it into the glass, turning it pale pink as our blood mixed. Nathaniel grabbed one of the pencils that lay on the desk, stirred it till it was all blended together, and then dropped it into the glass. It sank all the way in, covered from tip to eraser.
“The glamour reveals what’s real,” Nathaniel said as he held his chin on his balled fist. “So, we’re going to have to transfigure it to look the way we want it to when it reveals a mage.”
“I like your glowing idea,” I said, glancing over at Borden. He just smiled.
“Right,” Nathaniel said with a nod. He stood and held his hands over the glass. His focus was intense as he looked at the glass. And I watched as they glowed, gold floating in the air. It didn’t matter how many times I’d done this or seen Nathaniel use magic. It seemed impossible every single time.
It changed from tip and then to eraser. The pencil turned white and then clear, as if it were made of glass. And then it started to glow a soft blue, and grew brighter by the moment.
“That is incredible,” Mary-Beth said in a bold statement as she watched it happen.
Nathaniel just smiled, pleased with himself. It was by far the best transfiguration any of us had yet done.
“Now the glamour?” I asked.
Nathaniel stepped back, indicating his hand for me to do the honors.
I held my hands around the glass and let my eyes slide closed. I pictured it looking like a normal, everyday pencil. I pictured it having yellow sides and a rubber eraser. I imagined it looking like any pencil I’d ever used in my entire life.
“Brilliant,” Mary-Beth breathed out.
I opened my eyes, and there it was. It looked like any normal pencil again.
Cautiously, Nathaniel grabbed it by the eraser. The second his fingers touched it, it looked crystal clear and glowed blue again.
“What does it look like to you?” Nathaniel asked, looking around.
“Like a glowing, blue wand,” Mary-Beth said with a smile of amazement.
“It’s a wand,” Borden concluded in agreement.
I just smiled at Nathaniel and nodded my head.
“Now we need to test it,” Nathaniel said, holding it firmly in his grasp. He turned for the bookshelves and the boxes discarded in the corner. He wrapped the sleeve of his shirt around the wand, and instantly, i
t looked like a normal pencil again.
Nathaniel touched it to the spine of the fire-starting book, and it faintly glowed blue, and looked somewhat opaque.
“Not the same reaction as touching an actual mage,” I said. “But still a change.”
Borden grabbed a handful of the books from the boxes and set them on the shelf next to the fire-starting book.
Nathaniel touched the eraser to the spines.
And it still looked exactly like a pencil.
He looked back at all of us in awed wonder.
He reached over and touched it to the book on altering and stealing memories.
Once more it changed, turning crystalline and blue.
“It works,” Nathaniel said breathily. “It works.”
“We need to test it on a person next,” Borden said.
“Come on,” I said, gathering up my things. “We’re going to my house. We can test it on my dad.”
“Won’t he wonder why we’re acting like lunatics?” Mary-Beth questioned as she gathered her things as well.
“Professor Bell knows everything,” Nathaniel explained as he carefully slipped the wand into his breast pocket. “We thought he deserved to know, considering what happened to his wife.”
We hadn’t told either of them what that meant. So on the walk over, I got to explain the whole painful backstory of how my mother disappeared. How the police thought my father did it, then had no explanation. And how all of us, Nathaniel, my father, and myself thought she disappeared because of something to do with magic.
I explained how I couldn’t keep it from my father. How Nathaniel and I told him everything.
Neither of them could complain. What would they say?
So, they didn’t hesitate when we got to my front door and I walked in.
Dad was in his usual place by the window, reading a book. I couldn’t tell what kind it was, but it didn’t matter. He read them all.
“I was wondering when you’d be getting home so I could go to bed,” Dad said as he lowered his reading glasses. And then he watched as the other three marched in. “I see you’ve brought company. Nathaniel.” Dad nodded to him in greeting.