by Tess Lake
Jack leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Maybe one day we should do this,” he said. I felt a burst of goosebumps over my body. I wanted to shout out yes! as though that had been a wedding proposal. I just squeezed his arm and rested my head on his shoulder.
He turned towards me and for some reason I expected him to whisper something romantic again, but it wasn't to be.
“Your aunt is over there in the trees,” he whispered.
I looked out through the floral gate and sure enough, there was Aunt Cass in the trees, fiddling with something.
“Oh goddess, please don't let her disrupt this wedding,” I whispered.
“She wouldn't do that would she?” Jack whispered to me.
“I honestly don't know,” I said.
The priest started speaking, introducing the couple and talking about what marriage was, but I was only half listening. Aunt Cass finished whatever she was doing and then I saw her moving across between the trees before ducking down to do something again. I had an intense urge to sneak out of the wedding and go into the trees to find out what she was doing. I took a quick look around seeing everyone was focused on the priest, the bride, and her husband-to-be. I looked back to the forest but Aunt Cass was gone. I suspected she was hiding somewhere or had cast a concealment spell possibly.
While the priest spoke I took a few deep breaths and allowed myself to feel the magic that was swirling around me. Today the magic was calm, a serene lapping, like gentle waves on the shore. Because we were in a garden, I could feel the plants and trees around me catching hints of memories of happy times, picnics and children running and laughing. I let my awareness expand outwards until finally I felt the faint edge of something, another type of spell behind the tree line. From where I was I couldn't quite detect what it was, but it was all the confirmation I needed. Aunt Cass had cast a spell out there and was doing something.
I snapped back to the here and now as the couple exchanged rings and then kissed, the wedding ceremony quickly over. I joined everyone cheering and clapping and yes, the moment was incredibly happy but somewhere in my stomach, anxiety bubbled. Aunt Cass hadn't disrupted the wedding but yet again, there was something going on. She'd been up to something last night too at the dinner, inviting the moms' boyfriends along and even though she appeared shocked when Molly had invited Art, she had said that it fit perfectly in her plan.
The assorted wedding guests moved away from the makeshift aisle and over to an area to the side where there were benches crowded with platters of food and a large tent filled with tables and chairs. As Hilda and Arlan signed their wedding certificates, everyone gathered and mingled, eating food and starting to open bottles of champagne. Waiters in white shirts and black pants began to circulate carrying bottles of wine and trays of glasses.
“I'm going to quickly sneak off to the trees to see if I can find anything,” I said to Jack.
“I'll come with you,” Jack said.
We turned to find a beaming Amaris standing there, the girl from the play who’d told the three boys to steal something for her to prove their love. She was dressed in black pants and white shirt and was carrying a tray full of wine glasses. Beside her was a teenage boy I didn't know, carrying bottles of champagne.
“Harlow, you look beautiful! Would you like some champagne?” Amaris said.
“No, I think we're okay,” I said, glancing over her shoulder. I caught a flash of yellow hard hat between the trees. Aunt Cass was going back picking up whatever she had put down.
“It's delicious,” Amaris said, smiling at me. “We should have something like this at our cast party when we finish the play. Isn't that crazy about those sandbags?” she said. Seeing we weren't going to be able to get away quickly, Jack grabbed two glasses of champagne off the tray and handed one to me.
“Thank you so much for the champagne but we have to talk to someone over there right now,” he said and gave Amaris a charming smile.
The poor girl didn't know what hit her. I swear her knees went weak and she blushed from that tip of her toes to the top of the head. She mumbled something, possibly about blue eyes, and I saw the teenage boy next to her scowl at Jack. He grabbed my arm and hauled me off, leaving Amaris standing there somewhat starstruck.
I quickly downed my glass of champagne, which was quite delicious, and Jack did the same before quickly depositing the glasses on an empty tray that another teenager was carrying around. We were moving away from the gathering, heading for the treeline where there was only scattered guests when one of them called out.
“Harlow, so happy to see you!”
It was Eve. She said goodbye to the guest she was talking to and rushed over. I was glad to see her, but my heart sank. I could see Aunt Cass's yellow hardhat moving through the forest. She was faster now, whatever it was she was doing.
I couldn't be rude to Eve, so we had a few moments of chitchatting about the wedding, about the weather and how amazing it was before she said goodbye and rushed off to talk to other people. We quickly walked off into the treeline and I found the tree that I thought Aunt Cass had been meddling with something behind.
“Anything there?” Jack asked.
“No, whatever it is, it's gone,” I said. I could feel a faint imprint of magic. There had been something there but whatever it was Aunt Cass had taken it.
“She’s over there,” Jack said, pointing through the trees into the distance.
We rushed off, away from the wedding and cross-country through the Botanic Gardens. Aunt Cass was out on the street and had set up traffic cones before pulling a manhole cover up and climbing down into it. I called out but she either ignored or didn't hear me. We ended up betting blocked by a low hedge and had to find a way around it, and by the time we made our way to the traffic cones and the open manhole, Aunt Cass was gone.
“Are we going down there?” Jack asked me.
“Your suit is too beautiful. What if we ruin it?” I asked.
“Well we can take our clothes off and go down in our underwear, but I'm not sure how that's going to look,” Jack said. I looked around and saw there were still a few people in the street, so quickly cast a concealment spell over Jack and me. It pulled on me quite sharply as though someone had just thrown a twenty-pound bag of concrete at me and expected me to catch it.
“Go now,” I urged Jack.
He climbed down the small rusty ladder and I followed, letting the concealment spell go as soon as we were both underground. Halfway down the ladder I let light go from my palm. We climbed down the ladder into the sewer system of Harlot Bay. I say sewer system, which sounds gross, but it was just stormwater drains. They smelt of dirt and wet and mold.
At the bottom, there was no sign of Aunt Cass but somewhere in the distance we could hear a tapping sound of footsteps and something splashing.
“Let's go aunt hunting,” Jack said.
I let the light drift up above us. We walked along the narrow concrete pathway that was beside a deep flow of dark water. It hadn't been raining much but apparently whatever water had been coming down was enough to make a fast moving current. In it there were small sticks and also some bits of rubbish that had been washed down into the stormwater drains. As we walked we passed open archways that led off in other directions and then there was even a set of stairs that went further down and another ladder.
“I bet Ollie would love to come down here to see some of this,” Jack said, pointing at some etchings on the wall.
“Provided he can get down here when it isn't raining and is unlikely to drown,” I said. Sometime in the past some people had etched their initials and a date (1872) into the wall.
We kept moving following the sound of footsteps, until eventually we turned a corner and there she was, Aunt Cass in her coveralls and her hardhat, a light hovering above her shoulder. She tied a rope to an iron grill on the wall which was connected to her belt, and she was leaning out over the water with a long stick with a glass tube on the end of it.
“D
on't stand there gawking, give me another one of those test tubes,” she said.
I walked up and saw she had an open toolbox full of small glass vials.
“This is so super dangerous. What are you doing?” I said.
“I have a rope, it's not dangerous at all,” Aunt Cass argued. She scooped up some water in the test tube and then turned to hand it to me. She gave me a small rubber cork that she had been holding in one hand. I quickly pressed the cork into the test tube and then gave her an empty one from the box. She used it to get another sample and then she used the rope to pull herself back in so she wasn't leaning out over the water.
Once she had put the rubber cork in place, she looked us over.
“Quite well dressed for a trip into the storm drains aren't we?” she said.
“Well you know how it is Cass. A suit is perfect for weddings or hunting down aunts doing magical things,” Jack said with a twinkle in his eye.
“I'm not doing anything illegal in case that policeman sense of yours is tingling,” she said.
“Do you want to explain what it is you are doing because you were just up there outside that wedding doing something magical and now you're down here collecting water samples. And I'm fairly sure last night you invited all those people for some reason connected to this,” I said.
Aunt Cass shrugged and put the water samples back into her toolbox.
“You, James Bond, carry that. You get the ropes,” she instructed. Jack picked up the toolbox and I gathered the ropes.
“Let's get out of this place,” she said.
We walked back, heading to the surface our lights bobbing along above us.
“No, seriously, you need to tell us what you're doing,” I said after a minute of silence.
“Cryptobranchus amarebelle is what I'm doing. It's a magical salamander,” Aunt Cass said.
“You mean those little lizard things?” I said.
“Twenty dollars to the girl in the floral dress,” Aunt Cass said. “I suspect that one has come to town. This particular species cause feelings of love when they’re small. It seeps from their skin. It causes people and animals and anything alive really to experience feelings of love, which it then feeds from. It absorbs this love and grows bigger. But it's never enough. The love gets more intense and then you get more fights, more problems, eventually leading to violence. The salamander grows, feeding on these emotions and amplifying until eventually you end up with hatred and death. At that point the salamander will lay its eggs and go into hibernation for a few decades.”
We climbed the ladder, Aunt Cass emerging into the light and then casting a quick concealment spell over Jack and me who, in our suit and dress, looked like we definitely shouldn't be down in the water system. We walked a little away from where Aunt Cass was as she heaved the manhole cover back into place and then collected the traffic cones, all of which I noticed were inscribed with Harlot Bay Traffic Authority. Once she had gathered them Aunt Cass waved us over to the side of the Botanic Gardens and took a seat on a park bench there. She waved Jack over with the toolbox, which she opened, and rummaged around in until she found a set of small plastic strips.
“So you think one of these - what did you call it? Cryptobranchus what now? You think one is in town?”
“Its common name is the Love and War Salamander, and yes, I was doing something… and I thought I detected it. Seeing as it's going to be a problem for the town and interfere with other things, we need to catch it,” Aunt Cass said.
She had paused in the middle, about to blurt out what she’d been doing but then covered it up. But I hadn't missed it, and neither had Jack.
“What is it you're investigating Cassandra? You know, the more people who work on an investigation, usually the faster it goes. We can help you,” Jack said.
Aunt Cass gave me a sharp look that seemed to say “you should have kept everything secret” but then her face softened.
“Let's just focus on the salamander first,” she said to Jack. She took out the small glass vials, opened them, and then dipped the strips into them. The first one turned a pale pink instantly. The second one stayed clear, but then, as we stood there watching, slowly turned brown. Aunt Cass sealed the water back up and put it back into the toolbox.
“So what is this meant to mean? What are the pink and brown strips?” I asked.
“One is measuring the amount of, basically, love, the substance that's in the water. The other one is measuring what you would call war, how much conflict it's going to produce. From this, I'd say it's about one quarter grown,” Aunt Cass said.
A sudden thought struck me and I understood exactly what had been going on last night.
“It's attracted to places of high emotions isn't it, where there's a lot of love and conflict and things like that? That's why you had the dinner put on and that's why you invited the moms' new boyfriends, and that's why you weren't upset that Art came,” I said. I may have taken it a little too far because I practically leaped on the spot and pointed my finger at her as though I was a judge bringing down a sentence.
“Oh yes, brilliant, you figured it out. Now here, take these,” Aunt Cass said, handing me a bunch of test strips.
“What am I meant to do with these?” I said.
“You're going to share them with your cousins and then I'm going to give you a map of all the storm drains across Harlot Bay and you're going to go down into them, take a sample of water and test it and tell me what color it is and how saturated. Hopefully we'll be able to discover where the salamander has its nest before it moves to the final stage and we get blood on the streets,” Aunt Cass said in a very sarcastic tone as though it was incredibly obvious what it was I should be doing.
“I do have a life you know. I have things to do other than going down into drains to take water samples,” I said.
“I know you do, darling, but other people have a life too and if we want to keep them having lives, we need to find the salamander,” she said.
“I'll help. We can do it together,” Jack said.
“So what was it you were doing behind the trees, though?” I asked. I handed Jack the test strips because my dress didn't have any pockets.
“I thought Hilda's wedding might attract it with so many people and such a large dose of love. So I set up a trap of sorts. I thought at least I could mark the salamander if it appeared and trace it back to its nest. But it didn't work; nothing came. Just the same as last night. I don't know, maybe something is interfering with it,” Aunt Cass said with a frown.
I remembered the birds last night fighting like crazy, pecking, feathers fluttering down with droplets of blood on them.
“So those birds last night, was that love or war?”
Aunt Cass stood up, gathered her tools, her rope, and the traffic cones.
“Who said there was a difference?” she said and gave both of us a wink before walking away down the street.
Chapter 7
“Snitches get stitches. Pass me that plate,” Mom instructed, turning the bacon.
“I'm not snitching! I just think it's important that you and Aunt Freya and Aunt Ro are aware that Aunt Cass is going down into the stormwater system to collect water samples to track down a magical salamander!” I said.
“Plate please. Besides, we already know,” Mom said. I passed her the serving plate and she piled it high with bacon. From the main dining room came the hubbub of guests who had all arrived yesterday at the last minute. There were at least twenty of them and they had booked every room in the Torrent mansion, some of them sleeping on the floors of the bedrooms. They'd arrived yesterday in a giant orange bus, which was now parked in front of the mansion.
“Well if you already know about it then it's not snitching,” I said.
The morning certainly wasn't going the way I thought it would. I’d been downstairs to touch Grandma on the arm but hadn’t heard a sound so that was a bust. I had to go to rehearsal soon but I thought I'd talk to mom or whoever else might be around
about the job that Aunt Cass had laid on us. Yesterday after Jack and I had returned from the wedding, we'd come home to find a map of stormwater drains sitting on the kitchen table, a pile of magical testing sticks, as well as instructions from Aunt Cass, giving us dates and times. Molly and Luce had arrived home from seeing Will and Ollie, and then I had to explain to them what Aunt Cass had told me about the salamander. We tried to find Aunt Cass but she'd been nowhere to be found that evening, and we had to stop looking when the busload of guests had arrived, piling out of the orange bus like they'd been stuffed in there like tuna. My plan had been to come down in the morning, talk to Mom or whoever else, and see if we could get some family help on this salamander problem, only to find out that they already knew and were apparently completely fine with us traipsing around the stormwater drains.