by Harper Lin
Cath gave something like a human version of an anxious meow, then she surrendered. “All right. How do we do this?”
Cats can shift between this world, that world, and the other. We don’t normally take up the gatekeeper role, but my human is a witch, so I did that. That’s why I can use magic. Treacle and Peanut Butter are too young to do it like I can do it.
We cast three large spells, both a stretch of the two humans’ usual talents. First, I would need to pull the other dimension over this one. This would make witchcraft easier for my humans to do, but even then, this spell would not be easy.
Cath would pull some of this dimension around both of them so that anybody who was watching would not be able to pay attention to them, would not be able to remember, and would not even know that they forgot when the two ended the spell and joined the solid world again. This would come from Cath’s talent with minds, even though she had never played with the mind of a human before and wouldn’t want to do that ever again.
My human would do the same kind of magic, except with time. Any marks they left, footprints or strands of hair, would stay missing in that place until three days later. This comes from her talent with time and because the future is mostly not set.
None of these things were normal manifestations of our usual powers. This was going to be difficult for all of us.
Time Travelers
I was afraid that I was going to die. Marshmallow and Aunt Astrid were obviously both worried that they wouldn’t be able to pull this off, but still, they had this quiet determination that comes from knowing why they would have to try in the first place. I didn’t have that, and I still had to do a big spell—my first big spell since witnessing the one that took both my parents away from me.
When Marshmallow started to pull the other dimension—or some magic from the other dimension—in over this one … it was like being a little kid again, watching the monster come out from under my bed and feeling helpless as my mom tried to keep it at bay by waving her quartz crystal wand. She’d drawn a protective circle on my bedroom floor and told me not to leave it. My dad had run into the room—
I forced myself to focus. I told myself that was then and this was now; this wasn’t an explosion of evil beings out of a portal; this was just a phenomenal effort to tweak people’s minds.
Besides, Aunt Astrid was the one who had to do the magical heavy lifting and move us into the Brew-Ha-Ha of the future, just enough that we wouldn’t leave a trace in it today and not enough that we would cause some temporal paradox that collapses every dimension in on itself.
That wasn’t as comforting a thought as I’d like it to be. First of all, a big spell was a big spell. Second of all, could we really end the world by doing this? Bea would know the risks better because she reads about quantum physics. Aunt Astrid was just convinced that it was worth the risk.
Anyway, Marshmallow began to let the other worlds into our default one.
It felt a little bit like standing under a waterfall as the numbingly cold water beats down at the top of your head. I forced myself to open my eyes against the flux and to start to move.
Aunt Astrid and I began to walk to the back entrance of the Brew-Ha-Ha. Bea caught sight of us, cloaked in magic. I saw Jake turn towards us, and my breath caught. He looked right through us and returned his attention to Bea, to my relief. Blake was in the police car, speaking into the two-way radio. He didn’t take any notice of us, either.
I gritted my teeth against the waves of magic as Aunt Astrid began to fold time in on itself. I saw a corpse in the kitchen with the same height and buff build that Ted had. In the next step, it faded into a chalk outline, and in another step, it had become clean new tiling. I began to feel dizzy.
Aunt Astrid led the way out of the kitchen and behind the bar, which was badly burnt but still standing. Behind the bar was a trapdoor. Aunt Astrid pulled it open just enough that she could squeeze through and make her way down to the stairs below. The trapdoor remained open at an angle that should have been physically impossible to keep up if it weren’t frozen in time.
As I was about to follow, something on the ground caught my eye. It was a pendant on a chain, glinting silver against the soot and char. With the time manipulation, it flickered in and out of existence, but there was something about that necklace that burned against the magic.
It could only do that if it were magic itself.
I took my phone out of my pocket and snapped a few pictures of the pendant. I don’t know how physics and technology work when they’re mixed with magic. Maybe Bea’s developed some grand unifying theory, but I just do what I hope works out well in the end.
“Cath?” Aunt Astrid called.
I snatched the necklace from the ground, pocketed it, and then followed Aunt Astrid down the stairs and into the cellar.
The magic faded as we reached the bottom of the stairs. I leaned on the railing and waited for the nausea to pass.
“Marshmallow should keep the spell going on above us.” Aunt Astrid’s voice sounded frail in the pitch darkness. “I built this to stand up against a nuclear war. Fire wouldn’t have touched it.”
There was a click, and a flashlight flickered to life, the silver beam of light illuminating the room. It was a bunker—grey, concrete, and bare except for a shelf of dusty canned goods. I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days. That’s what magic burnout does to you, and we were only halfway through.
“What was so important that we had to do this?” I groaned miserably.
Aunt Astrid beckoned. She handed me the flashlight. “Hold this for a moment.”
I shone it on the corner that she approached.
“I needed to keep something here that was very important,” Aunt Astrid told me, as she opened up one of the fuse boxes. “It’s a spellbook that we’ve kept in our family for generations. Do you know the spell that we’re casting now? It’s a cantrip compared to the weakest spell in that book.”
She wrenched back a panel of switches and wires—a false display. I held my breath as she reached into the back of the fake fuse box.
She drew her hand back and gave a sharp exhalation. “It’s gone. Someone’s taken it.”
“Who would do that?” I asked, but I knew the answer to that. “Somebody who wants to do magic more powerful than we’re doing.”
“Somebody,” Aunt Astrid added, “who knows that we kept it. Somebody who knows that we’re witches.”
I gulped. What could have given us away? We’d all been so careful, and this was such a safe town.
“Turn the light onto the floor.”
I jumped back, startled, when I saw the faint footprints leading from the stairs to the fuse box.
“Those are new,” Aunt Astrid said.
“They don’t belong to us,” I observed. “The size of the shoe is too big.”
I took note of the outsoles’ imprints, too. They looked smooth, like they would belong to formal shoes, not patterned like hiking boots or sneakers.
“Maybe…” My mind spun. “Maybe it was just an eccentric collector, or a mook of one. Maybe they’ll leave us alone now that they have what they want. It was a family heirloom, sure, but not one that we ever used, so…”
Aunt Astrid muttered a word, and a blast of magic came out of the fake fuse box. It gave the air a fresh tang, like ozone or Freon.
“Protecting that book is a duty that I take very seriously,” Aunt Astrid said as she reached into the fuse box once more. She drew out an old, leather-bound tome. “The thief stole a fake copy. I had this one hidden in a pocket dimension, guarded by the Maid of the Mist.” She turned to me and said harshly, “We’re all in great danger, Cath. Whoever found this set this whole place on fire, and now Ted is dead. Just remember that.”
We made our way back outside to Bea’s car, with Aunt Astrid knotting time tightly behind us. We wouldn’t want investigators to walk onto the scene, disappear for days, and then reappear with the insistence that no time had passed at all to them. We o
nly wanted any evidence that we’d been there moved away somewhere safe.
When all that was done, Marshmallow flicked her ears and tucked the other dimension away, back where it belonged. Aunt Astrid and I raised a sort of magic wall that would stop magic coming through, even though the wall itself was magic—it’s easier to do if you don’t think about it too much. I don’t usually think about “how” except when I repeat what Bea’s figured out about how it works, but that day I was thinking about “why?” and “should we or should we not?”
So I didn’t do this easily. Most magic walls that we cast are actually walls of spells, for example, to make a nonwitch afraid to go near a place for a reason that they couldn't explain. They take a long time to grow, but they tend to stay up for a while. We needed that sort of power in crunch time, which even Aunt Astrid—who had worked with time magic all her life—had difficulty with.
With a final burst of power, I could feel the wall align.
Aunt Astrid clapped her hands and looked from Marshmallow to me. “Well done, team!”
I had to lean against Bea’s car to stop myself from fainting.
Bea walked briskly over to meet us. “I convinced Jake to take his partner on the beat and interrogate us after.”
She still looked visibly shaken by what she’d seen. That much was no act. I gave her a hug. She looked like she needed it.
As she hugged me back, she sniffled and said, “I want to go home. You can catch me up on whatever you just did when we’re there.”
“Just don’t forget to lock your car doors from now on,” Aunt Astrid told her as she got into the driver’s seat. “This neighborhood isn’t as safe as it used to be.”
Bea’s Books
Bea’s house looked more like a library. In every room except the kitchen and bathroom, she had bookshelves instead of walls. The shelves reached the ceiling and had side-rolling ladders mounted on them.
In the kitchen, there was a trolley—a trolley!—full of books, and they weren’t even all cookbooks. I rolled them into the living room.
“I read over those when I have a midnight snack!” Bea objected when she saw me.
“What, all of them at the same time?” I furrowed my brow. “That’s impossible. Besides, it’s a fire hazard. I’m kind of concerned about that now, you know.”
At that, Bea gave a sad smile and laid out a serving platter of cold smoked salmon beside avocado sauce and toasted crumpets. “When were you going to tell us about that spellbook, Mom?”
“It’s in my will,” Aunt Astrid answered her from the sofa, where she sat reading. “If anything happened to me, then it would go to you and Cath—technically. You’d be advised not to move it or remove it. You’re both talented and intuitive enough that you would’ve been able to figure out the rest.”
Bea munched on her crumpet thoughtfully. “Could the lawyer have caught on that this heirloom spellbook was so valuable?”
Peanut Butter hopped up onto the sofa where Marshmallow sat curled up. They sniffed each other’s noses and rubbed their heads together.
Aunt Astrid replied, “I only said that it was a book, that it was part of my collection. If it was a spellbook of ultimate power, people would expect me to say so.”
“My mother,” Bea said, with a flourish of her hand. “Master of the triple bluff.”
“However it got out… Why act on that information only now, though?” I wondered. “This is such a tiny, quiet town. What changed?”
Bea hummed, getting into bookworm mode. “I can only think of two things. First, somebody who was close to us, who could catch every moment that we slipped—who’d catch enough of those moments to wonder if there wasn’t more going on…”
“You think Ted did this?” I asked with disbelief.
“Well,” Bea said, “That’s only one of my thoughts. How nice was the author who wrote the fake book, the one that actually got stolen? Did she write spells that simply wouldn’t work, or did she write spells that made sure that whoever tried them wouldn’t get a chance to steal the real one? Try to conjure up a magic fireball, and it could backfire and …”
“There would have been a book beside the body,” I said.
“And whoever thought up the fake spellbook was very nice. A downright tree-hugging hippie, as a matter of fact,” Aunt Astrid said, pointing to herself. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, girls. I’ve only bought us time.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” I told her. “The only one doing anything wrong here is this power-hungry thief, arsonist, and murderer who’s meddling in things that not even we completely understand.”
Astrid sighed. “I will blame myself if it turns out to be Ted himself—an accomplice might have double-crossed him and made away with the book. Ted didn’t like to talk about his family or what was going on in his life, and in the decade he’s been with us—I never pried!” Aunt Astrid heaved the spellbook over, back into her bag, and joined us at the dining table. Bea poured her mother a lemonade. Astrid gulped it down.
On the sofa, Peanut Butter and Treacle curled up beside Marshmallow. Marshmallow seemed to have been exhausted by the spell, too. Treacle always found a way into the house.
“It can’t have been Ted,” Aunt Astrid said decisively. “He wasn’t interested in magic. Not at all. He’d always refuse my astrology readings.”
“The other thing I’m thinking,” Bea said, “is that it’s a newcomer. Maybe a tourist pretending to have come to see the falls.”
“Or…” A thought occurred to me, and I spoke it slowly. “A new detective in town, taking the perfect position to try to turn the tables and pin the blame on us?” I remembered the necklace that I had found, and I took it out of my pocket. “Could this have been a clue? I found it while we were walking through, and I thought it was magic…”
Bea peered at it. “Weird, but not magic. Not anymore, at least.”
“We were covered in magic,” Aunt Astrid pointed out. “Maybe you imagined that part.”
“It wasn’t there when I swept the place up yesterday,” I said. “It was charred. This definitely wasn’t Ted’s.”
“Maybe a locator spell—” Bea began, and Aunt Astrid and I interrupted her with synchronized groans of misery. “All right! All right. Not yet. Not like that’s any of our talents, anyway.”
Aunt Astrid told her, “There are no locator spells in the Greenstone spellbook, although there are other spells I’m aware of.”
“But,” I added, “if there were a locator spell in that book and two out of three of us weren’t recovering from magic burnout right now, would we be able to cast a locator spell? What about spells in this book that would help witches so their powers weren’t limited to one or two talents?”
Aunt Astrid said, “That would mean that even nonwitches wouldn’t be limited. They would have magic. The words, the ingredients, the gestures—all designed to create an intersection between this world and the worlds beyond, no matter what. So, yes, it also means that witches would work outside their talents. You see how important it is to keep this spellbook out of the wrong hands.”
I sent the clearest pictures of the necklace from my phone to Bea’s, and I deleted the rest.
Bea leaned back in her seat. “So, then… All we can do is guess until we know more.”
“No,” I said. “We need figure out what’s going on. We can’t just wait around—not with so much at stake!”
Bea added gloomily, “We’re at stake. As witches have a historical tendency to be. Ha, ha.”
“It will be a witch hunt at best,” Aunt Astrid agreed. “At worst… Well, that worst won’t happen, not as long as they don’t have the book. I’m taking this home with me to personally ensure its safety!”
“We just have to wait until we know more,” Bea said. “Do you really want to go home, Mom? Are you sure?”
Aunt Astrid nodded. “The Maid of the Mist is more powerful than most of us, but she couldn’t move the dimension pocket. There are generations of protection s
pells in the old Greenstone house. That’s the second-best option.”
“Cath—” Bea turned to me. “You know, we’ve got a guest room. You’re welcome to stay overnight—and Treacle is, too.”
I was just about to protest that it wasn’t that bad when Treacle spoke into my mind.
“Well,” I said instead, “Marshmallow says she’s not going anywhere, and Treacle isn’t leaving Marshmallow.”
“And you don’t want to go back to your place alone,” Bea finished, warmly.
It wasn’t until she said it that I realized it was true, never mind what was going on with the cats. I’d inherited the house from my parents. I hardly think about what happened there because it was decades ago, but after the big spell today, going back there now would remind me of the monster under my bed.
Most kids have imaginary friends or monsters. In a family line of witches, these imaginary beings usually turn out to be real.
So Bea went to drive Aunt Astrid back to her place, and I stayed in the guest bedroom.
Bea spent the afternoon making calls and drafting letters to the insurance company, and Treacle kept watch over the sleeping Marshmallow. Peanut Butter pawed at the bottom of the door until I let him into the guest room, and we talked. Yes, I had magic burnout, but I guess that it’s sort of like waiting tables when you feel as though you’re about to come down with the flu or feeling as if you’ve pulled an all-nighter.
Peanut Butter was so insecure that he really needed a chat, so I exerted the effort to do so, even though I would be completely drained of all magic for the whole next day.
Our talk was mostly just me reassuring Peanut Butter that Jake didn’t dislike him and that Bea and Jake weren’t going to split up and abandon Peanut Butter in a cardboard box on the side of the road. I told Peanut Butter that all the stereotypes that humans have about cats being proud and independent just didn’t fit him.
Neither Treacle nor I told Peanut Butter about the fire, Ted’s death, or the big magic spell.