“Where is that baby holder sling?” Mordon asked.
I squinted, trying to remember where I had put it down last. By the bed? Was it on the floor? I told him, and he went to go get it. I stayed sitting on the floor, feeling like I'd been squashed by an elephant. I leaned against the bench.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Lilly and Mordon working out how to wrap Anna up to his chest. Lilly was doing it wrong, Mordon had it almost right. Across my shoulders I wore the throw blanket which usually decorated the couch. My muscles hadn't liked the position but I felt better for my nap.
“What's up?” I asked.
The armchair creaked and shifted as Barnes got out of it. He said, “The constabulary has gone through King's Ransom. We're going to help Mordon clean up.”
“I'll come.” I stretched my limbs. “Sure you want to hold Anna?”
“Yes,” Mordon said. “You stayed up all night and morning with her. Sure you don't want to sleep?”
“So my schedule will become nocturnal? I'd rather not.”
Mordon hesitated. I knew that he didn't like tired people doing detail work, he said they made too many mistakes. And he was right about this, so I said, “I can sweep and wipe down counters or whatever. Nothing heavy, nothing like picking up busted pottery.”
He agreed, and as soon as Leif entered the commons lounge, we all descended into the shop.
When I saw what was beyond the door, I felt like someone had smacked me over the back of the head. My ears even started ringing, but it might have been the silence. Broken glass was everywhere, shards shining on top of ripped-up book pages, tangled necklaces littered the floor, hung up on gouges in the wood. Entire shelves toppled over. Vases and urns alike were smashed and their contents scattered. Ghosts stirred from their piles, sucking the warmth from the air as they formed and giving me goosebumps.
Years of bogey busting kicked in. I found myself at the front of the procession, saying, “Be at rest. We are here to clean and put you at peace.”
One ghost wavered, but the others continued to gather power. Mordon repeated the message in Saxon, then Leif in Latin. All of the last ghosts shrunk back to their ashes, except for one.
“What is it doing?” Lilly whispered, hiding behind me a little bit and walking in exactly the same places that I did.
“Probably ensuring that we're not being disrespectful or causing trouble. They had a big shock with the grotesque and the reaction from the shop wards. It was a traumatic event,” I said, speaking loud enough that the ghost could hear me if he wanted, yet still slowly and calmly.
“But why does it care?”
“Every ghost is as individual as living people are. If they appear to be irrational, it could be because they're old or have had a bad day. For the most part, they are no more good nor evil than you or I. Why it cares is impossible to know. Maybe he was a law enforcement officer. Or a decent person, one who doesn't like to be messed around with.”
I must have drawn too close to the ghost because Lilly wasn't behind me any longer as I crouched to search through the rubble for suitable vessels to place ashes within. One pile was obviously on its own, spilling from a busted urn. Gently as I could, I started to scrape the ashes into a vase, keeping an eye on the ghost who was a little close.
“I need another replacement urn for the next pile,” I said, accepting another vase and advancing slowly to a scattering of ashes which had been rolled in. Handling human remains was not high up there on my comfort list. If I started to think about what I was handling—the burnt remains of a human body which had once moved and breathed and lived—I began to feel lightheaded and my mouth would go dry. So I started to hum. Singing seemed like a bad idea, both by opening my mouth around ashes and with the possibility of blowing the ashes away. Which was what gave me the idea to use my wind magic to sweep the ashes into the containers.
All the while the last ghost stood watch while I hoped he would not turn violent. A violent ghost could burn and scratch and grasp throats. That gave me bad memories. He—it was impossible to tell for certain, as the form hadn't solidified enough to be sure—just stood guard as Barnes and I put any remains we could find into new containers. When the ashes were taken care of, the final ghost faded away.
With him gone, the rest of the shop laid out before me, presenting a long, arduous cleaning task. Not merely for the simple reason of the mess, either. As Mordon collected and sold antiquities instead of antiques, a great deal of the items had enchantments or curses which had been released to do their worst. Wards had kept anything from leaving the confines of the shop, but that meant that they were all here in tight concentrations for me to fix.
Not that I was supposed to be the one doing the fixing, but I soon realized I was the person who had the best knowledge of what to do.
Lilly demonstrated this when she lifted a box and out of it came a loud buzzing. She stood there, her brows pinched together in confusion, then we both placed the noise at the same time.
“Bees!”
Lilly dropped the book she'd been holding and grasped her arm. A red, angry welt formed. She said, “I never saw it.”
Then Leif was stung, and Lilly was stung four more times while we hopped through the shop, trying to see where their hive was. When I closed my eyes and felt the air, I felt their little bodies humming this way and that.
“They're invisible,” I said, stunned. “Can someone make this place cold, like cold enough to see my breath? It'll slow them down.”
Barnes stepped forward and said, “Frigus locus.”
I watched as frost formed on the surface of the shelves and across the backs of books, spreading through the entire shop at a rapid pace. Shivering, we all watched as the bees became visible by the frost on their bodies. They fell to the ground.
“Congregabo apes,” Leif said, holding a box open. The spell gathered all the bees together and shuffled them into the box, where he folded the flaps and added, “Calor.”
At Lilly's surprised expression, he shrugged. “I know a beekeeper. He'll take them. They'll be a novelty.”
“Succenderetur locus,” Barnes said, and the frost began to melt then evaporate.
Leif took the bees away, to the relief of everyone who had been stung.
The rest of the day wore on and on. It was one thing after another after another. With Leif gone, our productivity slid, particularly as Lilly had an allergic reaction to invisible bees when she claimed to not have a reaction to normal bees. Her face puffed up and her eyes watered so she couldn't see.
While she was gone giving herself medication, we encountered other troubles. Most memorably, a rag which dripped water at the rate of a leaky sink, and a spell which acted like a cat which was particularly fond of clawing its way up a person's legs and perching on their shoulders.
Barnes was the only other person who could find and take care of the broken item so that its spell stopped bothering us. Despite my promise to Mordon not to take care of any detail work, I found that was what I was doing. Things which would have confused me a few years ago, I had no problem in tracking and tending to. As the coven had been accustomed to thinking of Barnes as being a professional, they were awed to see me in action.
Lilly returned to us in good health except for a slight puffiness about the cheeks and a purple welt at the site of each sting. Much to the relief of everyone, she brought food and had acquired Leif along the way.
“You know this is what I usually did when I was busting bogies,” I said when we stopped for a sandwich lunch. The bread tasted like gummy dough, but I ate it anyway, same as Mordon.
“I thought so. That's what you've told us, anyway. But I never realized how good you were at it,” Leif said. He was sitting on a folding chair he'd conjured up out of thin air, one chair for us each.
“I'm just glad the grotesque had enough sense to leave the sarcophagus alone, that would have been a frightening thing to contain again.”
“What was the worst?” Lilly asked.
“The ghosts,” Barnes said, and I nodded in agreement. Barnes continued, “They aren't yet shades, but if they'd been angered, they could have crossed into that.”
“Shades?”
Barnes started to pass water around. Our stash of water bottles behind the counter hadn't been damaged, but it was whittling down now that it had so many people taking from it. “Some people call them evil, but that isn't right. They're ghosts, and they've been pestered into feeling like they need to protect themselves.”
“Like the last one? He watched us pretty closely.”
“Good thing you explained matters to him, then.”
A thought occurred to me, something which had been bothering me for a while. “I haven't seen the grotesque anywhere.”
“Yes. The grotesque.” Barnes did a poor job of hiding a smile. “It seems that a certain sheriff is having a royal headache dealing with a mess much like our own in an upper-end show home. The police got there in time to see something prowling around on the roof.”
I shuddered to think about how good of a tracker it must have been in order to have followed us through that many jumps.
Leif continued, “But they caught it once the spell stopped working. I think they are trying to explain it away as an experimental drone gone wrong for a university's technology class.”
That was as good of an explanation as any, and I felt reassured that the grotesque wouldn't come ripping through the commons lounge—though I did worry about escaping a stronger one. How long had that grotesque been chasing Josephina? How many portals could it navigate before it was worn out? If I had to run away from another one again, how would I do it?
It was then that another letter burned to me, and this time I didn't bother to check who sent it, I just ripped it open, read it, and said to everyone, “They're calling my eligibility as a guardian into question.”
“They?”
“The letterhead says 'Welfare and Family Department, Merlyn's Market Council.'”
The news crushed my chest and I sighed, too tired to want to over think what this could mean. Mordon did not seem at all surprised by the notice. Neither did Barnes. Leif frowned and brought out a piece of paper, which he started to write upon.
Lilly said, “Oh, how terrible. No one cares about foster children, but whenever someone wants to keep another child out of the system, they always get into all kinds of red tape. No good deed goes unpunished. Leif, you're missing Form 35-C. Wait, no, you're going with a combination of Blue-50 and W-12, I see. That is better, you're right.”
“Do I want to know what you're talking about?” I asked.
“If you start asking questions you'll just slow us down,” Leif said.
“Is it a lost cause or not?”
“Not.”
With that one word, I knew that they would want to have space to think and act, so I drained two water bottles and then took my turn at changing and feeding Anna. Really, it seemed that was all she did: sip at milk, burp, throw up, poop, sleep, and cry. She also made a range of noises, but the only thing she repeated was her cry. Despite what other people kept saying, she wasn't an adorable baby. Much too thin for that. I fancied her stomach was bulged and she was a little less gaunt, but I couldn't tell. I wanted to swoon when she held my finger, but Mordon said it was a grasp reflex, not affection. Pretty much everything cute that she did was reflex, everything not-cute was biological need.
In short, she was the world's most demanding, least appreciative boss ever.
Yet I still smiled when I looked at her and I never, ever wanted to let her go.
Go figure.
There came a rap-tap-tap on the door, which Barnes turned to scowl at even before a woman's voice called through the heavy main door, “Yoooou-whooo! Can I talk to Miss Swift?”
No one answered.
Rap-tap-tap.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“Trouble,” Barnes said.
“Tell me it isn't who I think it is.” Mordon stared at the door as though he could make it disappear just from disbelief.
“If I said that, I'd be lying, even though I'd love to give you a little white lie about now.”
The door was fairly jumping under the rap-tap-tap of the woman's knuckles, seeming to leap on its hinges to get away from her. The woman also seemed to know who lived here. “Constable Barnes, you can't refuse to see me, I am a citizen who you must hear out to protect and serve.”
“Regrettably,” Barnes said. “However, I don't have to see her while clearing a contaminated zone. There should be someone outside... Ah, there they are.”
We heard another person join her, talking in a low tone, then taking her away from the door.
“Who is she?” I asked.
Even Lilly was interested. Barnes checked the peephole in the door before answering. “That was Shelly Johnson, primary spokesman for Safe Streets.”
“Why did she want to talk to me?”
Barnes crossed his arms and gave the door a sad sort of grunt, as though he wished very much that she would put a toe out of line and be caught doing it.“I have a feeling that you'll find out some time or another.”
Much as I regretted to think it, I was going to have to find out more about this Safe Streets group, and preferably the sooner the better. The only chance I had of surviving an encounter with them would be to know more about them than they knew about me. Normally I would have started with Mordon's library, but that was in pieces across the floor and would take a very long time to put back together. This meant I'd need to start with the Merlyn's Market Public Records, which also meant that I would have to be very good at sneaking or else risk being trapped by Shelly Johnson or her helpers before I was ready.
Chapter Ten
. . .Rapping at my window stirred me from sleep, the urgent rap-tap-tap-thunk that Railey created as her signature sound. She came often enough in the night, her house was over two picket fences and between the scraggly hedges. Her parents never understood that her terrors were as real as the packrat in their attic.
Railey tugged at the window angrily. “Open up, Fera! It ain't no kiddin matter. It's bad this time.”
She was dead. Not yet, but she would be before the sun rose in a few hours. I knew that even while in the dream. This was how it started. This was the night I'd failed her. I hated reliving this moment. Seeing her pigtails shine in the moonlight, the way her all-black eyes stared at me from the other side of the window dusty with last week's rainstorm. As a dark elemental, Railey needed support when the spirits found her. Sometimes they were rough, powerful, and cruel.
On this night, I felt weak and dizzy. The day had been hot, so my parents had assumed the obvious: too much time in the sun, too little water. They'd poured me extra water and sent me to bed. It wasn't heat stress, though. I wanted to tell the younger-me that. It was a curse. It was the start of what happened when the body was barricaded from accessing magic.
It would be this block which sacrificed Railey while simultaneously saving me.
Helpless, I watched myself as I flung the purple fairy bedspread off and crossed to the wooden window frame. Sometimes I slept with it open, but on that night the mosquitoes had been out in full biting force. When I opened the window, Railey didn't climb inside. She pointed down. At the base of the tree she'd climbed to reach my window, there were two shovels.
“Railey?”
I'd been so sleepy. So tired. I felt that way again, pain in my muscles, cramps in my calves, chilled skin on a sultry summer night buzzing with moths flying to their deaths at the electric bug zapper above the back door. I hadn't wanted to go.
“He won't leave me alone.”
“Who?”
Railey scrubbed a grubby sleeve under her eyes. “Jacob Heimer-Snitzgoodle. Remember?”
She'd told me about him two nights ago, when we'd gone through the same drill—only she hadn't brought the shovels the first night. The second night, she'd agreed with my suggestion and come inside. Jacob had harassed Father's
warding spells all night long both nights. Though he hadn't made it inside, Railey was still aware of his presence.
I knew from that gleam in her eyes that tonight would be different.
“I'm goinnna do it, Fera. I'm goinna dig up his bones. It's what he needs. You comin or not?”
It was so like her to do this. Once she set her mind to something, that was it.
I couldn't be sure what I'd thought. That I didn't want her to be alone. That my parents wouldn't believe me. But I hadn't thought that there would be bones.
I tried to yell, to break through time and the dream, to change things. No sound came out. I yelled louder.
“Don't. No.” I felt my vocal chords vibrate in real life, a faint utterance bringing me truly awake. It was night, too early to think about getting up yet, light from the stars filtered through gauzy curtains onto a bedspread with shiny silk woven into a floral swirl. Mordon had me pinned to his side. One leg wrapped around both of mine, a heavy arm kept my shoulders flat to the mattress. Goosebumps spread across my exposed arm.
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