Wood Sprites - eARC

by Wen Spencer

  Downstairs there was an odd sound, growing louder. As she listened, she realized it was children shouting and screaming.

  The PA clicked on and Principal Wiley said “All students are to report to their homeroom immediately. Teachers are to take attendance and report all absences. No one is to leave the building. I repeat. No one is to leave the building. All students are to report to their homeroom so attendance can be taken.”

  He said nothing about injuries. Who had called 911? Who had been hurt? It was still another ten minutes until the homeroom bell. Anyone could have been out on the street when the blast went off.

  Jillian ran into the room. “Lou! Lou!”

  Louise reached out and gripped her twin’s hand tightly. “I’m okay.”

  Miss Gray came into the room. “Louise. Jillian. You need to report to your homeroom.” Her voice quavered; a frightening thing to hear in an adult. Then again, Miss Gray hadn’t been “an adult” for very long. At the moment, she looked no older than some of the senior students. “Mr. Kessler? Kevin?”

  Mr. Kessler turned from the window, his mouth still open in soundless protest to what he was seeing.

  “The windows blew out on the first floor,” Miss Gray said. “A lot of the children were hit with flying glass.”

  Mr. Kessler blinked at them. “What?”

  “Go to the first floor!” Miss Gray cried and caught Louise’s shoulder. “Come on. We need to go now.”

  “Miss Gray, we know first aid. Our father is a medical technician.”

  “You need to go to your homeroom.” Miss Gray steered them toward the stairways. “First things first. Miss Hamilton has to know that you’re here and safe before you can do anything.”

  They went down the stairs without talking, seven flights, the crying on each level growing louder. Each floor was a lower grade. Younger students. Closer to the destruction on the street. With each step down, Louise wondered, “Who would do this?” The gutted building had been nondescript with offices on the upper floors and a failed art gallery on the first floor. Nothing that seemed to warrant a bomb of that level. What was the real target of the bombers?

  When they reached their floor, Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton were in the hallway.

  Mr. Howe was shaking his head but then pointed toward them. “There they are.”

  “Oh, thank god, they weren’t out on the street!” Miss Hamilton pointed across the hall to Mr. Howe’s room. “We’ve moved rooms.” Mr. Howe’s windows looked over the auditorium’s roof toward the school’s loading docks and the back alley. The teachers didn’t want them seeing what was on the street, barely fifty feet away.

  Miss Hamilton reported, “Room 501, all students accounted for,” via her headset as she herded them into the room. Mr. Howe, however, headed downstairs to help with the younger children hurt by the blast.

  “We can help,” Louise said. “We know first aid. Our father is a medical technician.”

  “No, that’s very good of you, but no. This is our responsibility.”

  “We took the first responders test.”

  “And probably aced it; yes. I know. You two are very, very smart but you’re still children. I know this might be hard for you to understand, but it is the right of every child to grow up innocent. And it’s the duty of adults to protect that innocence.”

  Louise eyed her with confusion. “Is this a sex talk?”

  “No, it’s not about sex. This is about growing up enough that you can make wise and intelligent decisions for yourself instead of having decisions forced on you. It’s something that being smart doesn’t help you with without time to know yourself and the world around you.”

  “But we can help.”

  “You can’t be a child if you’re being an adult for another child,” Miss Hamilton said. “You can’t be a child and make life and death decisions for another child. And for me to allow you to be put in a situation where you have to act as an adult, I’d be denying your right to your full childhood.”

  “We know what to do…”

  “Yes, I know. And the fact that you don’t understand what I’m trying to explain just makes it all the more important that I do my duty and protect you. Now, go sit down.”

  Zahara was waving at them. Her little brother from kindergarten was clinging to her. Her eyes were bloodshot with tears. She hugged them tight, her whole body shaking. She didn’t seem anything like the girl they knew, usually so calm and sure. It was like her little brother had sucked away all that was Zahara and left something fearful in her place. Was this why Miss Hamilton wouldn’t let them go downstairs?

  “We were late,” Zahara cried. “We’d just started up the stairwell to the first floor when it blew up!”

  “It’s okay,” Louise said. “You’re not hurt.”

  The frightening thing was how easily she could have been killed.

  17: SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  As if smoke and sirens washed away all thoughts, they didn’t remember the magic generator until late that night. By unspoken agreement, they were both in Louise’s bed, after a long hot bath to scrub away the lingering smell.

  Jillian suddenly sat up with a gasp. “Did you get it?”

  “Huh?” Louise had been already dreaming. She was babysitting several dozen of their baby siblings who all looked like Jillian miniatures. The babies were taking turns using the gossamer call and they had a host of monsters trying to break into the house. Louise was chasing the babies through the house, trying to get the whistle off them while arguing with a 911 operator who wouldn’t believe that they had a black willow in the backyard. She wasn’t sure if Jillian meant the whistle or the operator’s cooperation, or film for Nigel Reid as evidence that the monster call actually worked. “Get what?”

  “It!” Jillian cried and pointed at Tesla parked stoically in the corner of their bedroom. A sign of how rattled the bombing had made their parents, they had hinted that the twins could sleep with them, something that the twins hadn’t done since they were five. Secretly, Louise wanted to but she knew that their mother needed to get up early. She suggested a compromise of leaving Tesla on guard instead of setting him to privacy mode that shut off all his spy hardware.

  Louise blinked sleepily at the robotic dog for a minute before understanding sunk in. “Oh! Oh, that! Yes, I got it.”

  Jillian threw off the blankets and scrambled out of bed.

  “He’s still broadcasting!” Louise whispered.

  “I know.” Jillian got her tablet and hacked into Tesla’s systems. “There, he’s looping the feed from two minutes ago.”

  “What about the time stamp?”

  “I fixed that. Don’t worry.” Jillian tossed her tablet onto her bed and went to open Tesla’s hidden storage compartment.

  “We’ll have all tomorrow to play with that.” School officials had decided to suspend classes since the city had closed the street down.

  “I want to see if it works. Besides, Aunt Kitty will be here babysitting us and she’s not going to let us ‘play quietly in our room.’ She’ll want to do fun things.”

  Louise had to admit that was true.

  Their grandmother had been a firm believer that love made a family, not blood. She’d taken in her daughter’s best friend, Kitrine Green, when the teenager’s mother chose her drug dealer boyfriend over her child. Despite being poor, their grandmother had supplied Kitrine with an electronic keyboard and encouragement to follow her dreams. Now a successful composer and songwriter, Aunt Kitty had an extremely flexible work schedule and often acted as their emergency backup parent. Her babysitting, though, came at the price of entertaining her.

  When they were little, she told them that she was their fairy godmother, appearing as if by magic with plastic glass slippers and costume ball gowns. Their first introduction to creating videos came on Aunt Kitty’s visits as they acted out fairy tales complete with original scores. Lately they had found themselves at fascinating places like behind the scenes of a Broadway musical production, or a
t a recording studio, or at the NBC television studios. Aunt Kitty would think that the twins were truly upset by the bombing if they resisted any adventure that she could cook up.

  And if their parents thought they were emotionally troubled, there be no privacy for them until they’d “dealt with the trauma.”

  “What should we try to test it?” Louise slipped out of her bed.

  “The ley line mapping spell.” Jillian pulled out the package of transferable circuit paper they’d ordered online. The printer that could use the paper to print out digital circuits was hidden in the back of their closet. They were quickly running out of hiding spaces.

  “It’s not going to find any ley lines.”

  “Probably not, but we could be sitting on top of one of those fissures that Dufae talked about and never know it.”

  “In Pittsburgh, weird things happen around ley lines, especially with machines. Metal conducts magic and it does nasty things to active spells.”

  “It’s the one spell we know works with the generator. Kensbock used it to test his prototype.”

  Which would be more comforting if he hadn’t vanished into thin air shortly afterwards. It had been his invention that caused his disappearance, not the spell he used.

  Jillian continued on, getting the printer out of the closet. “We should make sure that our work environment is magic-free prior to any large scale experimentation.”

  Jillian had a point and of all the spells they could cast, the mapping spell was probably the safest. Louise abandoned her reluctance with a sense of relief and growing excitement. They were going to cast their first spell!

  Louise quickly copied the spell for printing while Jillian loaded the paper into the printer.

  “Okay, hit it!” Jillian whispered with excitement.

  Louise hit “print” and—the longest thirty seconds that Louise had ever experienced later—the spell printed out. “Okay, now we need to get the pastry board.”

  Dufae had spent a page talking about building his spell casting room. He needed a stone surface to act as insulator. Dufae had bought several four-foot by twelve-foot slabs and laid them as a floor, complaining about the seams he needed to bridge on the larger spells. The twins had ordered a twenty-four by eighteen inch white marble pastry board that weighed a whopping thirty-six pounds. It had taken both of them to carry it upstairs and hide it between Jillian’s mattress and box spring.

  Getting it back out was harder than Louise expected. Things at rest stayed at rest, especially with a twin-size mattress on top of it.

  “If we just had a pulley and a rope…” Jillian whispered.

  “…Mom would bitch at us for putting a hole in the ceiling!” Louise finished. “Wheel your chair over, we’ll use that.”

  “We can just put it on the floor.”

  “We need to plug the generator in.”

  Jillian swore softly. “How long is the plug?”

  Kensbock designed the generator with a stupidly short 220 plug. The only 220 outlet in the house was in the basement for the dryer. They had bought a step up and down voltage converter transformer. Unfortunately, it too had a short plug.

  “We need to make this a battery-powered unit,” Louise whispered.

  “Yes!” Jillian cried in agreement.

  “Shhh!” If they got caught with evidence scattered all across their bedroom, they’d be so grounded.

  Jillian slapped hands over her mouth.

  They froze in place. Jillian’s eyes flicked right to left, a million miles per second as she thought up lies to cover what they were doing, just in case. After two minutes, it was obvious that they hadn’t been heard.

  All told, it took them half an hour to get the pastry board within range of the plug, the protective sheet peeled off the printed circuit, the spell carefully positioned on the marble, and the transformer plugged in. After a great deal of consideration, because the magic generator didn’t have an on/off switch, they decided to connect the leads to the spell prior to plugging it in. Since Louise had more experience with the soldering iron from set making (still something their parents didn’t know), she connected the leads to the spell. She had noticed that some of Dufae’s spells were used for healing—how would they connect the leads to that spell without burning the patient? Obviously they would have to use something like clay or paste.

  Finally it was time. They plugged in the generator. Louise noticed nothing different but Jillian gave a slight “oh” of surprise.

  “Is it working?” Louise asked.

  “Doh. Yes.”

  Louise frowned at the generator, wondering how Jillian could be so sure.

  According to the Codex, each spell needed a certain frequency of magic to operate. Apparently, naturally occurring magic was like light in that it contained a wide spectrum. Written spells used a narrow frequency to both limit and channel power. Dufae’s description of “dirty magic” probably was because the magic that leaked across consisted of constantly shifting frequencies. It would be like trying to use a flashlight as someone kept switching the type of batteries. Dufae complained about the fact that his “magic cleaning system” gave him one steady source of magic at the cost of being limited to one frequency. Luckily for the twins, the next section of the Codex was devoted to taking that one frequency and stepping it up or down via translation spells that Dufae created through trial and error. Because of it, every spell in the book was available to them.

  Louise wondered how Kensbock ended up matching his generator to the one spell in his possession. Had he set the generator to the spell? Or had he rejected several spells before finding one that matched his output? The more she thought about it, the more she felt sure that his kidnapper had selected the spell and given it to him on a silver platter. Someone had been tracking his progress and acted quickly after he reached a successful conclusion. Kensbock had made extensive notes on everything, except where he had found the spell. Dufae had noted that the spell was one of the first ones taught children; he’d dissected and reconfigured it in trying to deal with his situation on Earth with the dirty magic. Had Kensbock been given it because it was so simple—or because it matched the frequency of another spell? If Louise had been the one manipulating the man, it would be the latter. But what spell would it be?

  “Lou?” Jillian whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “Are you okay? You look like someone hit you with a cattle prod.”

  “Huh?”

  “Lights are on, but no one’s home,” Jillian whispered.

  Louise shook herself. “I’m fine.”

  Jillian watched her closely for another minute before leaning close to inspect the spell. Dufae stressed that the lines of the spell had to be solidly drawn without blemishes and that all conductive material, even fine dust, must be kept clear of the tracings. Jillian gave two thumbs up to indicate that they were ready to activate the spell. She turned her right hand sideways and tucked in her thumb to make a fist.

  Jillian wanted to play “rock paper stone” to see who activated the spell.

  Louise clenched her jaw in frustration. Part of her felt like she should let Jillian do it since it was obvious her twin wanted to—but she wanted to, too. Jillian gave her a look that was a clear mix of impatience and confusion. Louise jerked up her fist.

  Five games later—because Jillian was a sore loser—Louise took a deep breath and spoke the activate phrase as loudly as she dared.

  The black lines of the spell suddenly gleamed like gold light. Jillian gasped. A glowing sphere rose over the spell and a confusion of landmasses and rivers and buildings took form in ghostly holographic perfection.

  This of course called for a Dance of Joy, which consisted of leaping from bed to bed, with their mouths open in silent screams of delight.

  Several minutes later, they were able to examine the spell in relative calm.

  Louise was used to seeing the map of New York City as a clean, orderly collection of lines and labels with Manhattan at the center. T
his was a tiny exact miniature with their house in Astoria smack in the middle. The northern edge was the Bronx and the western edge was a thin slice of the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River. The southern tip was just beyond the East River Park.

  “What’s that?” Jillian pointed out a rare spot of flat.

  “Some kind of park in—Flushing?”

  Jillian scooted away from the spell and got her tablet to compare it to a map of the city. “It’s Corona Park.”

  “Dufae said that ley lines were denoted by blue lines, the width and brightness indicating…oh no!” Louise jerked the plug of the transformer out of the wall outlet and the gleaming spell collapsed.

  “What?”

  “Mom and Dad!” Louise slid the marble slab across the floor and under her bed, vaguely aware that she ripped the leads free.

  Jillian quickly set the transformer and generator into the shadows under her desk and scrambled into bed with her. They lay side by side under the covers, trying not to pant, feigning sleep.

  “Are you sure?” Jillian whispered after a minute of silence.

  “Shhhh,” Louise breathed, eyes closed tight.

  A moment later, the door latch clicked open. A slant of light spilled into the room from the hall as their parents silently looked in on them.

  Jillian faked a restless turn, threw her arm over Louise’s shoulders and pressed her forehead to Louise’s. They probably looked like sleeping angels. If Louise weren’t so scared, she would have started to giggle.

  “Oh, they’re so cute,” their father murmured.

  Normally their mother would snort at his naivety. This time she said, “yes, they are,” in a voice that was close to tears.

  The door closed as quietly as it had opened. Louise felt at once relieved and horrible that they’d fooled their parents. Jillian started to shake with silent laughter. She rolled onto her back, hands against her mouth to keep the giggles in.

  Louise smacked her.

  Jillian leaned close and whispered into her ear. “We’re elves! We did magic!”