Amber Uncovered (Amber Preserved Book 1)

by Tom Larcombe

  “Assuming we're still around to consider it,” Kathryn replied.

  “Really? You think Amber would do something like that? She despised Eric and look how torn up she is over him.”

  “You really think she has enough control to not do something like that? Sure, she'd feel bad after, but that wouldn't help the target of her magic.”

  “Besides, her body might be going into puberty, but her mind is much older if we're right.”

  “And you think that's an improvement?” Kathryn asked.

  Amber and Alicia were waiting at the door to Charles' apartment. He let everyone in, then went rummaging through the desk where he kept spare keys. It took him a while, but he found the right one eventually.

  “Remember, we aren't a hundred percent certain that this apartment belongs to Amber's family. So don't touch anything right away, alright?” he said.

  They took the elevator upstairs, Charles joining them when the saw the other three all getting into it. On the third floor, they got off and walked down the hallway.

  He unlocked the door to the apartment and swung it open. A musty smell came drifting out and, when they entered, the air smelled stale. Dust lay thick on all the surfaces, undisturbed.

  When Amber stepped into the apartment, she stopped dead. Her head swiveled, looking around.

  “This is bigger than yours, isn't it?” she asked.

  “Yes, 3-E is one of the two largest apartments in the building. It has three bedrooms and two baths. It takes up this entire corner of the third floor.”

  “My room was... this way,” Amber said pointing.

  She walked down the hall she'd pointed into and opened a door. It was set up as a child's bedroom, the furnishings were in bright colors and there were toys on the shelves. Amber nodded, then had to catch herself against the wall.

  “Are you okay?” Charles asked.

  She nodded.

  “Memories. A lot of them flooding back in. My head hurts,” she replied.

  “Do you want to go rest, then come back?”

  “No, I want to see my parent's bedroom. I remember they set up one wall as an office and dad was always there, writing or working.”

  “Where's that one?”

  “It's down the other hall. My grandmother's room was the one beside mine in this hallway.”

  Charles pushed open the other doors in the hallway as they left it. One was a bathroom and the other a bedroom set up for an older lady. The furnishings and decorations told him that much easily.

  Kathryn caught him as he passed through the living room.

  “So?” she said.

  “She identified the rooms right off, with the doors still closed. Said she has memories coming back. I think she's right.”

  “Is there any other way to verify that?” she asked.

  “I can't think of one offhand. Wait, do you think it was her grandmother that gifted her with the Dilectis Caeli? I don't remember Molly and Peter as being that powerful and have no idea what elements they had.”

  “If her grandmother was a powerful Air Wizard, it would make sense.”

  “Well, we can at least see if the older lady who lived here was the one that gave Amber that gift.”

  “How?”

  “I'll ask Rose. She said she could smell another person's magic on Amber. That would be the gift, right?”

  Kathryn nodded.

  “That might work. It would definitely prove that there was a connection between them at least and I can't think of another one.”

  “You stay out here, I'll go try,” Charles said.

  Kathryn sniffed but didn't follow as he returned to the room he'd just seen. He cracked open the window in the room and called out softly.

  “Rose?”

  It took a few moments before a hummingbird darted in through the open window. It shimmered and was replaced by Rose.

  “Yes Charles?”

  “I need you to do something for me, if you don't mind.”

  “Whatever you need Charles.”

  “Remember you said something about smelling a different magic on Amber?”

  The fae nodded.

  “Was that the magic that makes her Dilectis Caeli?”

  “Yes.”

  “It's been a long time, but can you tell if the person who lived in this room was the one that gave that to Amber?”

  “Perhaps. Let me look and see if I can find something with a part of their magic to check.”

  The fae darted about the room, finally halting in front of a bureau.

  “Open this drawer,” Rose said, pointing.

  Charles slid it open, revealing some ritual magic instruments, ones designed to help a wizard focus. But there was also a crystal, still glowing dimly, in the middle of the drawer.

  Rose landed on the crystal for a moment, then took to the air again.

  “It is the same magic that is on Amber,” she said.

  “Thank you, now we know that Amber's family lived here.”

  “You are most welcome Charles. Come visit me again soon, I enjoy your company,” Rose said before darting out the window.

  He returned to the living room and nodded at Kathryn.

  “Rose confirmed it. So it was Amber's grandmother, rather great-grandmother I guess, that gifted her to make her Dilectis Caeli. And with Amber receiving the gift that way, we can be pretty sure she's dead now, but what about Peter and Molly? And what would make her grandmother willing to do that?”

  “Charles, has Amber asked you to get involved here?” Kathryn asked.

  “No...”

  “Then why are you taking such an interest?”

  “Because part of my job is keeping an eye on the city for things regarding magic.”

  “From forty years ago?”

  “No, but I've never heard of anything explaining it since then, so how do we know that whatever did this isn't still out there? I'd go with just the car crash explanation, but that wouldn't explain why Amber was given the gift. That sounds more like someone trying to protect her. So what were they trying to protect her from?”

  “Well, if there haven't been any more incidents since then, it's probably not still around.”

  “Kathryn, we didn't even know about this incident until just now. We still don't know much about it. How do we know there weren't any others?”

  “We don't, of course, but until we do, aren't you overreacting?”

  “No, I don't think so. Amber is my student now and this is going to affect her in some manner. I'd like to be able to give her some closure of some sort if it's over. And if it isn't? Then I want to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Ah, I see, so it's that white knight syndrome again, is it?”

  “I don't believe that my desire to protect my students until they can protect themselves qualifies as white knight syndrome,” Charles said.

  Kathryn just nodded and didn't say any more. Charles took that as a sign that he was winning so she didn't want to continue the discussion. He turned and went down the other hallway towards the room Amber was in now.

  When he peered in, she was seated at a desk at a side wall of the room. She had a book open in front of her, it looked to be a journal of some sort, and was reading. Charles stepped into the room.

  “So, will you want to move up here? I'm certain that this was your parents' apartment and since it's paid for and not rented, that would mean it's yours now most likely.”

  Amber looked around the room.

  “This place is too big. Even this room is bigger than the efficiency down in the basement. I don't want to be rattling around up here and it's way too big for just me, so if you don't mind, I'd rather stay in the efficiency.”

  “That's perfectly fine,” he said.

  “And I'd like to bring these books down there with me. Both my mother and father kept journals. I want to get to know them and the only way I can do that is by reading about what they thought.”

  Charles nodded.

  “Let's go then. We
can figure out what to do with this place some other time.”

  Amber nodded, sniffed a couple of times, then wiped her cheeks and nose before standing up. She and Charles made their way out into the living room where Kathryn was convincing Alicia to come away from the window.

  “But you can see lots out there,” Alicia said. “Over a bunch of the close by buildings and everything.”

  “We're going Alicia,” Charles said. “I think Amber wants to get out of here, too many memories.”

  “You be done crying girl?” Alicia asked. “Never seen you cry til a few days ago, now the waterworks won't shut off.”

  “Well, I never knew anything about my family, didn't have a home, none of that. Now I do,” Amber replied.

  “I only be crying if my family found me,” Alicia said, “Happier not knowing anything about them.”

  Amber's voice was frosty when she replied.

  “I wouldn't know, I can barely remember mine at all. Now I might be able to remember, so I'd prefer to have the choice, you know?”

  “Whoa girl, didn't mean it that way. Meant you lucky you have family you wanted to know bout.”

  Amber seemed to lose a bit of the tension that had been building in her.

  “Well, I don't know that yet. I just think that. These should let me decide,” she said brandishing the pair of journals she was carrying.

  “Come on,” Charles said. “Let's get out of here. I need to get a cleaning service up here one of these days. It needs that much whatever we do with the place.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  Amber took the journals and retired to her own apartment. She settled in on her futon and started reading.

  So dad worked in construction and mom worked as a counselor? Oh, I see, lots of people thought they were nuts because they'd seen some magic they couldn't explain. She could fix that, make them think they hadn't seen it or help them explain it away. She used magic for that. She must've been a Spirit Wizard from what Charles told me. Dad used his Earth and Fire Magic in the construction business to make the things he built stronger. So, they both did their magic without anyone the wiser and used it in their daily lives. Now I see what Charles was getting at when he talked about that.

  Amber got up and pulled a Coke from the refrigerator she and Charles had acquired, then sat back down and continued with the journals. As she read, she got a much better feel for her mother. Until she got towards the back of the journal, then she started worrying about her.

  What is this? She kept getting people with the same problem here. They'd go and do something they couldn't explain, that didn't benefit them, and claim that they weren't in control of their bodies while doing it? And they all happened in the same area of town. Any of them that took something while they weren't in control couldn't remember what they did with whatever they took and didn't have it any more when their memories started up again. That's just weird. And there's only a few pages after this one until she stopped writing.

  She set her mom's journal aside and picked up her father's. For whatever reason, it wasn't as interesting to her and she found herself skimming it. Maybe it was the fact that he kept making notes about how to use Earth and Fire Magic to strengthen steel girders, load-bearing pillars, and the like but his journal didn't grab her until near the end when he started writing about his worries for his wife. How a recent rash of cases had her at her wit's end and was wearing her out.

  His final entry was about how they'd decided to investigate what was causing all the problems that had his wife so worried. That they had a potential lead to follow and would start doing it in a few days.

  She closed the journal and sat back on her bed.

  Did they actually try to investigate something and get caught doing that? If they did get caught, I don't think it was by the police, it would've had to be by whoever they were investigating. Do I tell Charles about any of this? He's responsible for wizards in the city, but this was so long ago.

  She decided to put that decision off for the time being. Whatever happened, it was forty years ago and a day or two wasn't going to make any difference at this point.

  She went back and read her mother's journal again, this time focusing on the thoughts her mom had put in writing. When she got to the back part, where her mom started writing about the patients she couldn't help, she noticed something new.

  The names of the patients kept changing. There were a lot of them, but with the ones her mom couldn't help, those names just stopped getting mentioned.

  Did they stop coming to her, just up and disappear, or what? Here's one that stopped coming, but she refers to him later on again, but that's the only one like that. I wonder who this Al is she keeps referring to. He sounds like a real dick. I guess he was in charge of something since she says he was handing down new rules left and right.

  Amber drifted off to sleep, wondering what it would have been like to grow up with a real family, instead of the series of strong men, pimps, and gang leaders she'd grown up with.

  * * *

  In the morning it was time for more lessons on magic. She hadn't finished the reading Charles had given her yet, so he was still keeping her on the basics.

  “This is so boring!” she burst out with, the fifth time Charles had her try to visualize a perfect circle. “I don't understand how this applies to magic at all!”

  “Amber, you work on visualizing at the start, because later on your mind will need to know how to visualize the affects it wants to create. It also helps limber up the mind for later lessons on how to project your consciousness, which allow you to do things far away from your body.”

  “Yeah, but why would you? I was reading those journals and my mom just used her magic to help people forget things or explain them away. She was a counselor of some sort.”

  “How do you think she'd know the exact things that were bothering her patients?” he asked. “It sounds like she had Spirit Magic, so she'd have been able to work with their minds. But how do you think she determined exactly what the problem was? She'd have had to project herself into their minds, that's how in-depth mind reading works, to find the problem. Somehow read the memory, or see it, or experience it, however she did that, but any of those use visualization. Then work on isolating the problem and removing it or redirecting around it. So that example uses both the projection and visualization that I was talking about.”

  She stared at him.

  “How, exactly, do you know all of that?”

  “Some of it is guesswork, but some of it isn't. Greg has some Spirit Magic as well and he and I have talked about it and its potential for misuse.”

  “Okay, then how would it have applied to my dad? You said it applies to all types of magic. He used his Earth and Fire Magics to strengthen parts of the buildings he worked on. He did construction.”

  Charles grinned.

  “That's a lot more familiar ground to me. I've got Earth Magic myself and used it to strengthen the supports for this apartment building. See, I was worried about putting the solar array and the garden on the roof, because that's a lot of extra weight. So I projected my consciousness into the load-bearing supports and anywhere I found them to be less than optimal quality, I used my magic to make them stronger. Just the act of projecting your consciousness uses visualization as well. You don't actually see with your eyes there, your mind creates a visualization of what you would normally see with your eyes and presents it as the real thing.”

  Good, at least I have him talking instead of making me try to visualize more.

  “Do you know of some guy named Al? He sounds like he was in charge of something back when my mom was writing.”

  Charles chuckled.

  “Yeah, back then that would probably have been Algernon. Quite the stuffed shirt from what I've heard. I never dealt with him directly that much. He had the position I do now, in charge of keeping track of the wizards in the city. From what I heard, the wizards didn't much like him and wh
en they found out he hated the nickname Al, everyone started calling him that.”

  “What about a bunch of wizards disappearing back then? From the way my mom's writing reads, a lot of the people she couldn't help just disappeared. I mean, they might not have gotten back in touch with the counselor who couldn't help them, but out of more than twenty, she only mentioned one of them again by name, and that was because she heard he was moving out of the city.”

  “Huh. You know, that's kind of weird. Algernon disappeared as well. There was a big fuss about it because it took months before anyone actually reported it, then another couple of months before they offered me the position. There isn't a lot of record keeping involved in my position, only a log of wizards coming to or leaving the city, plus any major infractions of the Council rules. But the records for those months, plus a year or more earlier, were missing when I took over. It looked more like Algernon had just stopped recording things than someone took them, but there were no mentions of missing wizards in the logbooks I got with my position.”

  “When was all that?”

  “I don't know, I'd have to look it up. I know I took over my position thirty-nine years ago. So that would've been just after you were on your own.”

  “So my parent's accident might not have been one? If a lot of people were going missing, then they did also...”

  “I thought you said they were in a car crash, not gone missing.”

  “We were in an accident, at least I think I was in it too, but Andrew told me that it was strange. The article in the paper that he gave me said that there were no bodies present even though there was some blood at the accident scene.”

  “So you think they went missing from the accident?”

  She shrugged.

  “I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have just left me wandering alone in the city at night when I was just six years old if they hadn't.”

  “You've got a point there. From what I saw of them with you, they treasured you. But your grandmother is the one that never would've let that happen. She watched you while your parents worked. She doted on you.”