by Tess Lake
“Speaking of rich, do you remember Richie Coldwell from school? Goddess, that guy was an arrogant little dishrag,” Molly said.
“Wasn’t he the one that kept trying to get us to come around to see his so-called awesome hot tub?” Luce asked.
“Yeah. That was all he did, try to get people to come around to his dad’s house to show off how rich he was. So glad he left town,” Molly said.
“So do you really think that Sylvester could be behind some of the fires?” Luce asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t like him. He’s a sleazy little toad, but then Aunt Cass said it was a fire spirit. We even set up beacons to catch it.”
I’d forgotten the beacons up until now! If the fire tonight was the fire spirit, perhaps Aunt Cass knew where it was now. Right on cue, my phone rang, coming from an unlisted number. “Hello?”
It was Aunt Cass.
“You and Kira need to collect the beacons in the morning and bring them here,” Aunt Cass said.
“When did you get a phone?” I asked.
“None of your business. Are you going to get them in the morning or not?”
“Okay, okay,” I said before Aunt Cass hung up on me.
“Sheesh, she’s in a mood. I have to collect the beacons in the morning with Kira. So it looks like it was a fire spirit,” I told Molly and Luce.
“I don’t like the idea of fire spirits burning things down,” Luce said. “But then, what if it’s like a baby or something? He could be scared or lost.”
I saw Molly rolling her eyes behind Luce. No matter what evil thing existed in the world, Luce was always sure it had a good side. She especially cared about small animals, even if they could kill you.
I went to bed after wiping off my makeup and taking out my earrings. I could still smell the faint scent of Jack where he had touched me. His cologne was on my hands. As Adams settled in at the foot of my bed, again smelling like lavender quite strongly, I drifted to sleep with the faint scent of Jack helping me float away.
Chapter 10
Kira was one grumpy sleep-deprived teenager who barely said a word to me until we reached the lighthouse. It was seven in the morning and I’d been awakened by Aunt Cass demanding I get out to recover the beacons as soon as possible. I hadn’t even had time to shower, so I’d made some toast and gulped down a coffee as fast as I could while a very tired Kira did the same.
At the lighthouse, it was still quite cool this early and there were no tourists around.
“Can you unlock it?” I asked Kira. She grunted something at me, but then cast an unlocking spell. We made our way inside and found that someone had been cleaning during the week. It appeared they’d been using a pressure washer against the walls to remove the soot from the fire. There was a pile of new lumber and other bits and pieces over against one wall. Was someone restoring the lighthouse?
“I guess I have to float the beacon down too?” Kira said to me with about as much snark as anyone could possibly have at this time of day.
“If you want to,” I said. Kira didn’t answer again. She cast a levitation spell and managed to lift the beacon off the high windowsill and float it down. Although she was still very much in her silent sarcastic teenager mode, I could see she was very happy at having cast a spell and lowered the beacon without any problem.
“Cool,” Kira said, catching the beacon in her hand. It had a crystal in the middle of it that had been pure white. Now it was tinted with orange, like tiny sparks of fire. Kira carefully put it in her pocket and then gave me an apologetic smile.
“Sorry, didn’t sleep very well last night,” she said.
I remembered that I’d seen a girl with pink hair and a silver piercing last night in Harlot Bay. I also realized that Kira hadn’t been down on our end of the mansion when I’d come home. I guess I’d assumed that she was already in bed, asleep.
What did I do with these realizations? Did I relax about it and not ask Kira questions about where she was last night and hope that eventually she would trust me enough to talk openly? Or did I blunder in like an idiot?
Ding ding! If you chose blundering like an idiot, you win a hundred dollars!
“Did I see you last night in Harlot Bay? What were you doing out?”
The look Kira gave me could have frozen the sun into a block of ice.
“Let’s get the other ones,” she said.
“It’s okay if you were out. I’m just asking. In fact, I know you were out because when I came home you weren’t there.”
Yep, that’s right. Compounding error upon error.
“I went to bed early and I was asleep. I guess you just didn’t bother to check on me,” Kira said.
I knew teenage obstinacy well. My cousins and I’d been exactly the same way. Doing that dumb thing where you tell lies even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Rather than push it, I let it go.
We recovered the second beacon as easily as the first and then we were at the creepy murder house. Kira hadn’t spoken a word to me since the lighthouse. That was fine with me. I had bigger things on my mind than a teenager being upset at me.
We rushed in, recovered the beacon and rushed back out. We returned to the mansion and Kira sullenly followed me inside. Aunt Cass was waiting for us. Kira handed over the three beacons.
“Excellent, this is perfect,” Aunt Cass said, examining one critically. It was even darker than the first we’d recovered, appearing to have small flames embedded in the crystal.
“You can track down the fire spirit now?” I asked.
“Maybe. You two can go now. I need to study these,” Aunt Cass said, dismissing us with a wave of the hand. She walked away, heading for the kitchen, obviously going to her underground investigation room.
“Wait, I need to talk about something that happened last night!” I said.
Aunt Cass gave a dramatic sigh and then turned around and came walking back.
“Well, what is it?”
“It was last night, when I was on the beach with Jack,” I began. I told her as quickly as possible about the feeling of the hot coal and the pull that led me to the fire.
“The very short answer is you’re a Slip Witch. The fire spirit is a magical entity. You probably felt the pull because you were nearby.”
“Do you think that’s going to happen again?”
“It might. Could be useful in tracking the fire spirit. Don’t be so worried about it.”
“I’m not worried about it!” I said, at a much higher volume than I intended. I heard Kira make some sort of dismissive snorting noise behind me, but before I could say anything to her, she walked out the front door.
“I need to look at this right now. Take Kira to work with you today,” Aunt Cass said.
I groaned.
“It was fine last week, but now she’s being so… annoying,” I said.
“Yes, teenagers can be annoying,” Aunt Cass replied evenly. I could feel the tone in her voice and hear the unspoken sentence: just like you were.
“Okay, okay, I get your point. Please hurry up and find the fire spirit, because I don’t want to get pulled to another fire and I definitely don’t want that detective seeing me at one. Okay?”
“Fine,” Aunt Cass said and marched off through the kitchen.
I sighed a sigh that covered cranky great-aunts and frustratingly annoying teenagers. I’d take Kira to work with me, but what I was intending to do was send her to the beach as soon as possible. That plan disappeared when Aunt Cass pushed the kitchen door open.
“No letting her go to the beach. She has to stay with you,” Aunt Cass said and then vanished before I could retort.
Feeling like this day was going to suck in about six different ways, I trudged my way back to our end of the house and got myself ready for a day of suckage.
Chapter 11
We were ending hour two of the silent treatment when John walked through the closed door. Kira was slumped on the sofa tapping away on her phone. She gasped in shock and dropped
it.
“Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” John said.
Kira quickly recovered, grabbing her phone and diving back into it.
“I wasn’t scared,” she said, tapping away furiously.
“You can see ghosts?” I asked.
“Ah, yeah,” Kira said at maximum sarcasm.
“You look familiar to me. Do I know your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Her grandmother is Hattie Stern,” I said.
“Hmm… nope, doesn’t ring a bell.”
A while ago, John had seen Hattie Stern walking past the office and had suddenly remembered he disliked her intensely. He’d called her an interfering busybody but had very quickly forgotten this and thus far hadn’t remembered it again.
John sat down beside Kira and looked with interest at the phone in her hand. Although he’d seen mine plenty of times, it seemed this particular piece of technology didn’t stick in his mind. He was always fascinated by them.
“What is that?” John asked.
Kira looked at me and gave a dramatic sigh.
“Can I go to the beach now?”
“Nope. Sit over here while I do the counseling session,” I said.
We swapped positions, Kira taking my place at the desk. Today I was asking more historical questions about Harlot Bay. Sometimes John gave interesting answers that indicated he had most likely been living in Harlot Bay when he died. I’d planned to talk about the old businesses, but then I remembered all the fires that I’d researched, so I started with that instead.
“A long time ago a skating rink burned down. Do you remember?”
“Oh yes, I remember that. The fire burned for two days before they could put it out. When they scraped the ashes away, they built shops there.”
“Do you remember if they thought someone had started it deliberately?”
“Started what?”
“The fire.”
“What fire are you talking about? The one at the house?”
Kira gave another exasperated sigh from her chair. I shot her a glance to tell her to shut up but honestly, it was easy to get frustrated with John’s memory problems. He could literally forget what he was talking about between one sentence and the next.
We carried on the counseling session over the next hour but like pretty much every other session we’d ever had, we didn’t really get anywhere.
Soon we were done. John pulled a twenty-dollar bill from somewhere (still wasn’t sure where they came from) and left it on the table. He said goodbye to Kira, who merely grunted in return.
“So, this is like your job or whatever?” Kira asked as soon as he was gone.
She was being intensely sarcastic again and after hearing her being rude to John, I was in no mood to take it. I grabbed the arms of her chair and pulled her towards me. I was getting angry but I didn’t want to yell at her.
I took her hands between mine and looked directly into her eyes.
“Kira, I know you’re angry at me about what I said this morning. I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have said that. But enough is enough. You cannot spend hours sulking and giving people the silent treatment. You cannot be rude and mean to people, even dead ones. You’re stuck with us for who knows how long, so how about you make it nice and easy for all of us?” I said.
Kira bit her lip and then frowned before looking away. I was still holding a hand when I felt the jolt of magic. She Slipped. Hazy lines of color appeared around us, like auras stretched out into string. There was a blue line running across the floor, and a green one with pink stripes sliding out the window. A deep red string seemed to emerge from my stomach and run out through the door and down the stairs.
“Not again,” Kira whispered.
“What is this?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes the strings go places where bad stuff happens. Like that one there,” Kira said, pointing at the deep red string that was coming from me. I let go of her hand, but the strings didn’t disappear. Maybe I could see it if I stayed close to Kira.
“Do you mean something bad is going to happen to me?”
“I don’t know, but it probably leads somewhere bad. I think that one is a fire,” she said.
I could see she was almost on the verge of tears. I stood up and pulled Kira up out of the chair and gave her quick hug. She stiffened at first but then relaxed, clasping her hands behind my back.
“It’s okay. The best thing to do with Slip magic is confront it. We’ll follow the line and see where it goes.”
“Okay,” Kira said in a muffled whisper. We locked up the office and went outside. The deep red string stretched off down the street and around the corner. It was strange it didn’t go through buildings but rather went the way a person would out on the sidewalk or road. Outside, I noticed Kira had a red line attached to her as well that was tangled up with the deep red one. There were other lines on the street running in all directions including a vibrant yellow one that seemed almost cheerful.
“What’s that one?” I asked.
“Probably my grandmother,” Kira said.
“Seriously? I get happy feelings from it,” I said.
“She probably got a neighbor in trouble for leaving their trash can out for an extra day or something like that. She’d be happy about that,” Kira said and then gave me a little smile.
We got into my car and after a few false starts finally got going. The streets were still packed with tourists who were oblivious to the magic lines running through them. We followed the red line down the street and around the corner and to the edge of town, where it entered a lot of empty warehouses.
It was surrounded by a fence and a locked gate, but that wasn’t going to stop two Slip Witches. We got out of the car, and a moment later the gate was open.
Making sure no one was around, we followed the red line past stacked pallets and a row of dumpsters until we finally came to a warehouse with a locked door. This one was barred from the inside, so we walked around until we found a window we could open.
“Isn’t this illegal?” Kira asked as I prepared to lift her through the window.
“I’m a journalist and you’re my assistant. It’s not illegal, it’s newsgathering,” I said. “Now get inside before someone sees us.”
I help Kira through the window, and then after a few minutes she found some boxes to stand on. She reached back to pull me up and in.
Inside the warehouse was mostly empty. There were pallets lying about the place and some drums in the back corner. The red line went up some stairs and finally terminated in an old abandoned office, stopping in the middle of the floor.
“Well, this is a big bust,” Kira said, poking around the office. She looked through an old filing cabinet while I searched the desk drawers. All I found was a very faded receipt for some car repairs. The filing cabinet was empty.
We left the office and spent maybe ten minutes walking around the entire warehouse, looking for anything that would give a clue as to why the red line was there, but we didn’t find anything. The place was unused and certainly didn’t look to be a candidate to be burnt down anytime soon (apart from it being an empty warehouse). We did discover that if I was more than ten feet away from Kira, the lines vanished for me. It was definitely her Slip Witch power, not mine.
Our investigation at a dead end, we drove back to my office and went upstairs. Kira slumped down on the sofa, obviously bored, and I sat at the desk. We talked about what the lines might mean but didn’t come up with anything new. In fact, a few minutes after we returned, the lines vanished entirely.
“Will they come back?” I asked.
“They probably will. It usually seems to go for a few days at a time,” Kira said.
I was searching the Internet to discover who owned that warehouse when Kira gave another dramatic sigh and then stood up from the sofa.
“Being a journalist and breaking and entering is awesome and fun, but this is sooooo boring. I might go to work at the bakery in
stead.”
“Yeah, it’s not as exciting as people think,” I said.
“See you later,” Kira said.
She was gone in a flash. She’d obviously learned the lesson that most children and teenagers grasp quickly: as soon as an adult agrees to let you do something, get out of there before they can change their mind.
The rest of the morning passed quickly. I found the owners of the warehouse, but it didn’t really tell me anything special. Soon it was lunch and I wandered out over to Traveler. Molly and Luce were behind the counter today and both shook their heads at me as I waved through the window.
Over the last week some of the renovations had been done at night and now there were chairs and tables built in that were filled with chatting tourists. The big renovation, which was taking the entire cash register counter area and moving the whole thing back to allow more space, would be coming in a few days. They’d have to shut down the shop for that.
I ended up having lunch alone, once again wishing Jack and I’d actually traded phone numbers, which for some reason we hadn’t.
Despite the fact that the Harlot Bay Reader was going very badly, I could feel the excitement of the journalistic chase inside me.
Carter was possibly on to something with the history of fires in town. Aunt Cass was tracking a fire spirit. There would be a break in this case any day now.
I spent the rest the day researching the Coldwell real estate agency and family, digging into their background and pulling up anything I could find. It was true that they’d bought some of the sites that had burnt down, but so had other real estate agencies, including Dominic Gresso’s (presumably his father) and some others. It seemed people didn’t particularly want to buy land where the previous house or business had burnt down. The real estate agents would buy and develop them.
Carter had said last night he’d see me today but he didn’t turn up. I wasn’t too upset about it. The idea of working with him was not the biggest thrill of my life.