“Devin?!” I was disgusted again. “Why is he bothering in my business? And how would he have seen me unless he was at the market too? I should just—”
Killian put up a hand. “It’s fine, I’m on your side, I’m just here to keep you company.” She nearly pushed past me into the apartment and then stopped as her eyes landed on Apollo. Her demeanor darkened. “Unless you already have company.”
Apollo took a deep breath. “It’s not like that, Killian. I’m just—”
Killian shook her head. “It’s fine, you do you, Apollo. I’m not judging.”
I looked between the two of them. “You guys, uh…friends?”
“Sorta,” They replied in near-unison.
I felt immediately quite awkward and kept myself out of it while I closed the door and turned on the rest of the interior lights. “So what are you two doing, anyway?” She asked Apollo.
“Scrying. Andy thinks that they might have missed something when they were scrubbing this place clean of magic stuff.”
“They?”
“Yeah. You folks, 50 Thousand. Or maybe just the Sorcera Society. Either way, Andy’s doing some snooping. And I had some useful spells.”
Killian nodded in something that seemed like approval. “Let me see what you’ve got.”
Apollo handed over the scrying spell and Killian looked it over. “Wow, this is an older one. Did you steal it from an old lady or did you find it in someone’s attic?”
“It was my grandfather’s, if you must ask,” Apollo replied acidly. “He was really big into Sorcera magic but never really had a knack for it, so he studied it academically. I have some of his notes, that’s all.” For some reason, the tone of Apollo’s voice suggested that he might not be telling the complete truth, but I had no intention of pressing him on the subject. I ignored the two as they continued to bicker in the background and distracted myself by running a hand up the wallpaper of the kitchen. This had all been Dad’s at one time, and I don’t think I had ever seen it until now. I was once again taken in with a feeling of loss—not just for my Dad himself but for a lifetime of silence that could have been an adventure shared. I guiltily thought about calling Mom, but the idea also chilled me given our bad relationship. Plus, if she ended up being ignorant of the whole thing, then the Moddey Dhoo would just shut my phone off again and probably berate me over it.
I was torn from my thoughts by a loud, sarcastic laugh from the living room. I peeked in the door and saw Apollo looking particularly disgruntled. “Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t such a—”
“Everything ok?” I asked innocently.
They both looked at me and nodded almost in unison. The third-wheel awkwardness was starting to get to me. “Well if you want I can just screw off somewhere if you two want to keep bickering like a married old couple.”
Killian turned a deep red and opened her mouth with a look that could kill, and Apollo snorted loudly as he busied himself with filling a saucepan with ingredients. I dodged back into the kitchen as Killian tried to throw something at me—a shoe maybe— and cackled as I went to retrieve some water from the tap.
“Are you sure tap water’s going to be okay?” I called into the living room.
“It should be. If it’s from this apartment that’s best because it’s, like, connected or something.”
“‘Or something?’” Killian repeated with an incredulous tone.
“Hey, do I look like a wizard to you? I’m entirely theoretical over here.”
I returned to the living room and knelt on the floor. Apollo had set up the saucepan over a portable burner and filled it with the dirt and other ingredients he had in his own bag. Killian was watching with a critical look.
“An induction burner?” She inquired. “That’s a new one to me.”
Apollo glared. “I figured Andy might not want a hole burned in the hardwood. Besides, the source of the heat doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Killian shrugged and kicked off her remaining shoe. “What are you expecting to find, anyway?”
I was quiet for a moment as I formulated a response. Once again, I realized I was so caught up in the investigating part that I hadn’t considered what I was actually looking for. “An answer, maybe. Not only was my dad murdered but now I know it happened while he was working. And someone’s trying to cover it up and discourage me from investigating. And that’s…that’s worth looking into.”
“So you think the safest course of action is to meddle in something where someone was murdered? In a world you don’t even really understand? I mean, let’s be honest. You’re a week into this stuff.” Killian raised her eyebrows at me.
I gave a sheepish look. “At least I’m not doing it alone?” I gestured to Apollo.
Killian rolled her eyes. “That makes it better. Now the bad guys have three targets instead of two.”
Apollo looked up. “Three?”
Killian stopped, her mouth hanging open as if she was considering backtracking. “Yes. Three. Because I’m going to be honest, there isn’t a lot of excitement in my department, and I’m interested, too.”
I smiled and looked down at the pot of brown gloop. “So what now? Do I need a wand or something?”
“Oh, right.” Killian dug in her bag and pulled out a padded envelope. “I was supposed to hand these out Monday, but I snagged yours.” She handed it over and I eagerly unwrapped it. Inside, in a small cardboard carton, was a wand. But it was the most plain, uninteresting cylinder of wood I had probably laid my eyes upon. Painted a corporate grey, it was a single, thin dowel rod about a foot long, with a serial number near the side I assumed was the handle. “This is it?” I looked incredulously at Killian as I tapped the wand with my fingers. “Is this particleboard?”
She nodded. “If you want better, you have to buy your own. This is a standard-issue corporate wand. No bells or whistles.”
I tried to hide my growing disappointment about how boring the world of sorcery was turning out to be, and focused my attention back at the sizzling pot and Apollo’s recipe for the spell. “‘Extinguish heat and place the quartz crystal in the mixture,’” I read out loud, “‘and circumvolve thrice along the solar rotational axis.’ What…?”
“It means to swirl your wand around it clockwise 3 times,” Apollo translated.
“So why don’t they just say that?”
Killian snorted. “Because wizards love paperwork. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
I rolled my eyes and kept reading. “‘After allowing the crystal to soak for 60 minutes, retrieve it before submerging in an ice bath.’ That part seems pretty easy. But that’s where it ends. What am I supposed to do after that?”
Apollo took the recipe and flipped the page over to look at both sides. “Huh. I dunno. Maybe at that point it’s self-explanatory? I’ve never actually done this.”
“Great. Well, here goes…” I picked up the crystal and dropped it into the pot of mud with a plop. The mixture bubbled but nothing else particularly interesting happened. “OK…so we have an hour. Anybody for pizza?”
Thirty-five minutes (or it’s free) later, the three of us had gotten pizza and beers, and were sitting in wait around the no-longer-bubbling pot of mud which had begun to solidify into a dirty mess at the bottom of the saucepot.
“And your dad never told you anything about this at all?” Apollo was asking. “No bedtime stories or prophetic, foreshadowing ominous statements?”
I shook my head. “I barely knew anything about him except that he lived in Cincinnati.” I took a bite of the pizza and turned to Killian. “Did you ever meet him?”
“LaFayette? Not really. I saw him every week in Casting, but I don’t really remember seeing him around the office or even at office parties. He really kept to himself.”
“What did he do? I know he was a Wizard but what was his job, exactly?” It occurred to me that I probably sounded slightly desperate. But to be honest, I was. Any dreg of information was like a drop of water i
n the desert now, and my inborn impatience was not helping me handle this situation with any level of grace.
Killian considered the question for a minute as she took a swig of beer. “If I remember right, he mostly worked in Reclaim—basically, recovering stolen magical property and turning it into the authorities—the Dragon or one of his deputies. 50 Thousand does some work with helping magical things get transported, because we can be trusted to have major defenses in place. Now if stuff went missing, on the other hand, like reagents or artifacts or something, your dad and his team would be the ones handling it. In fact,” She added thoughtfully, “I think he was the head of that department. It’s called the Vaultkeeper.”
“So why might somebody want 50 Thousand’s Vaultkeeper dead?”
“Any number of reasons. Maybe he crossed somebody that was doing some kind of black market artifact deal. Maybe someone double-crossed him over some kind of transportation. I honestly don’t know. I wish I had a better answer.” She stirred the put of mud, where a better answer was still soaking.
“What about you?” I asked. “Didn’t that goblin say something about a huge debt you were owed? I don’t mean to pry, it just caught my attention.”
Killian rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t even get me started. Gnomes…following me everywhere, giving me things, telling me I’m so awesome…” She seemed genuinely irritated.
Apollo stifled a chuckle. “Killian’s a chosen one,” he whispered.
“Oh shut up, you,” Killian snapped, shoving Apollo with her foot. She saw my inquiring look and sighed. “So sometimes people are born with some kind of destiny thing, right? Something that’s big and important enough that it gets ‘foretold’” —Killian made the most sarcastic-looking air quotes I had ever seen— “and the person’s a chosen one. It’s really common. Common enough, in fact, that I got sent to a school for chosen ones which sounds cool except that everyone shows up with some kinds of powers manifested and don’t follow school rules. Half of them have this whole worldview that they’re the chosen one and the world revolves around them, while the staff are all clueless, and something attacks the school like once or twice a year and the students get instructed to leave it alone. But of course a handful go and investigate and there’s a big fight and if the staff had just listened in the first place it would’ve—” Killian stopped herself and took a deep breath to dismiss her tangent. “—but I’m getting off track. So I was born with this whole destiny thing that I was going to defeat some dark lord who was subjugating the Gnome nation. So off I go to Chosen One School where I learned to fight and got a lot of practice hedging. I got assigned an old man mentor like everyone else and after what was probably a very amusing training montage I was totally ready to go fight this dark lord guy.” She swigged her beer again and became very quiet.
I pressed. “So did you? Defeat the dark lord and free the gnomes?”
She grimaced down at her beer. “No. He had a brain aneurysm while I was at school and I never got to defeat him. But the leaders of the gnome nation thought I did it, so they offered me life debts and I got all kinds of fame and fortune…which isn’t really as cool as it sounds. So I ditched the gig and moved to Cincinnati, where nothing ever happens.”
I looked over at Apollo who was busying himself with a set of copper tongs to pull out the quartz crystal. He glanced at me and mouthed the words she’s super sensitive about it.
While Killian downed the rest of her beer and cracked open another, Apollo handed me the copper tongs. I checked the recipe once more and picked up the wand with my other hand. “Okay. How do I even pronounce these magic words?”
Killian and Apollo looked over my shoulder. “That one’s ‘oss-ten-dee’ I think,” Killian offered.
“Yeah, that one’s ‘soo-pell-ectil-um.’” Apollo put emphasis on the syllable “pell”.
Killian shook her head. “No, it’s ‘supil-ECK-till-um’.”
“No,” Apollo corrected. “The stressed syllable needs to come in the first two. Su pell ectil um.”
“Where did you hear that stupid rule? It doesn’t even sound right. It’s—”
I interrupted both of them with a glare to each one. “Do not make me turn this spellcasting around.” They both went quiet. I took a deep breath, pointed at the pot of dry mud, and tried to pronounce the best something-that-sounded-vaguely-like-latin that I could. “Ostende mihi facium supellectlum.”
The room went very quiet and I felt that motor-like hum deep inside my ears. I wasn’t sure if it had worked at all. I glanced over at Apollo, who shrugged. Gripping the copper tongs tightly in my fingers, I pulled the quartz crystal from its mud covering.
The crystal was glowing softly with a light blue color. I stared at it in awe, admiring the fluorescent facets under the surface. “I did it,” I whispered. “I…I cast a spell.”
Apollo reached out with his fingers and gently pulled the stone from the tongs. “Nice job,” he remarked, brushing some of the dirt off. “This looks like it’ll last a while. But let get started, huh?” He handed the stone back to me. It felt slightly cold, like it had been sitting in an icebox for a few minutes. I stood up and held the stone out.
As I continued to brush dirt from the crystal, the light from the stone bathed the walls and the ceiling with an unearthly glow. “So…what now? What are we looking for?”
Apollo and Killian both shrugged and I started to move around the mostly-empty condo with the crystal held out like a lantern. In the light of the stone, tiny sparkles darted here and there though the air, but I had no idea what it meant. From the living room to the kitchen I walked, sweeping the light back and forth, and as I entered one of the back rooms of the condo, I took in a deep breath.
Some of the sparkles were congregating in the corner of the room, pulled there by some unseen force. As I watched and moved closer, the sparkles began to form a cohesive shape—first an outline, and then slowly filling in details. As I crept ever closer, thankful to hear Apollo and Killian behind me, I realized that the shape was of a person, sitting in a chair and hunched over a desk. “D-dad?”
Apollo put a hand gently on my shoulder. “It’s an impression left over from him living here. He must have spent a lot of time at this desk and it’s left a kind of a…shadow. But that’s all it is.”
I shrugged Apollo’s hand off and stepped closer. The face was slowly becoming more detailed as the sparkles drifted into place, and when my heart could take it no more I turned and walked out, holding the stone as the sparkles dissipated behind me. I caught a glimpse of Apollo’s concerned face and what looked like Killian glaring at the glowing shadow of my absent father as I passed out of the room into the next one. Neither said anything but I think that they realized there wasn’t much consolation to be had at the moment. My angry and distraught thoughts were shaken away, in any case, as I walked into the bathroom.
Clean and spotless, I was about to turn and move on when I spotted something on the floor. I bent to look, and it definitely looked like some of the sparkles in the air were slowing as they passed a spot on the floor, which looked kind of like it was reflecting the quartz’s light. “Hey guys…” the other two crowded into the bathroom behind me. “Is it me or—”
“Something’s under the floor,” Apollo confirmed, reaching out to touch the vinyl tile floor with his fingers. “It might have been missed if they thought it was a reflection or something. We just need something to—”
He was interrupted by a snikt sound as Killian flipped open a knife. “May I?”
Apollo and I stepped back to let the redhead with a knife take point on the situation. Killian felt around the floor for a moment with a finger and then dug the blade into the vinyl flooring, which carved away with ease. Beneath the surface, resting on the floorboards underneath, was a single silver coin. In the light, I could barely make out the shape of a wheel carved into one side. Killian stared at it for a moment, and I caught what looked like a greedy look shadowed across her face, before she composed he
rself and spoke up. “It’s a Greek Drachma,” she said softly.
I tentatively reached out and picked it up. “What does it mean?”
Killian stood up and put her knife away, her eyes watching me carefully as if to gauge my response. “Might have to do something with the company’s history. Maybe this is some kind of souvenir given to wizards of the firm? But I’m not a wizard. I don’t know.”
I ran my thumb along the design on the face of the coin. In the light of the glowing quartz crystal, I could see the speckles of energy in the air lingering near the coin, but I had no idea what, exactly, it meant. I pocketed it and moved on to the next room.
The condo wasn’t large, when it came down to it. A few bedrooms and a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room—basically a small apartment, even if the placement in downtown Cincinnati made it prime real estate. The remaining rooms in the condo heralded neither secret objects nor glowing shadows of my father, and as we returned back to the living room I felt a profound sense of having missed something nagging at the back of my head.
The three of us went back to eating pizza and drinking beers. I stayed relatively quiet and listened to Killian and Apollo bickering over the best way to dispose of the pot of mud, and whether the pot should be used for cooking afterward (The answer, they finally agreed, was probably not).
Killian looked at her watch. “It’s getting late. I should probably…” She gestured to the door.
Apollo raised an eyebrow. “It’s Friday. You don’t stay out late on Fridays?”
Killian opened her mouth to respond, looking mildly irritated. “It is late. It’s like…ten.”
Apollo checked his phone. “I mean, yeah, which is way too early.”
The Wizards on Walnut Street Page 10