Magic, Madness, and Mischief

by Kelly McCullough

  It wasn’t until I had almost completely covered the hare that I realized I had nothing to light a fire with. I looked at Sparx and saw that he’d stopped breathing. I had to fight back tears at the thought of him dying to save me. I briefly considered trying to breathe fire again, but I was terrified instead of angry and even if I could muster up the rage I might do far more harm than good here.

  I needed control, not power … but I hadn’t really gotten much of a grip on any of the things Sparx had been trying to teach me except how NOT to start big fires with my breath or compel people to believe my lies. And he hadn’t even begun to teach me any of the rhymes and spells he said I would need to know once I’d learned how not to muck things up.

  If only I … Wait, what was that rhyme my mother had recited? The one my grandmother used to sing? Could that be a spell?

  Right. “Ash and char, sun and star, wind and smoke, ash and oak…” That was all I had, and I could feel in my bones that it wasn’t enough. It needed a closing rhyme. Think! “Fires bind for fire’s kind, fires bright and fires light!”

  Nothing.

  Don’t panic. Think!

  Oh. Could it be that simple?

  Forcing myself to think in meaning and not in words, I tried it again. This time I spoke in the language of fire, and when I finished, the piled wood burst into a gentle flame. Now, if only it would work …

  Time passed without any apparent change in Sparx’s condition. Hope faded in my heart and I felt tears well up at the corners of my eyes and run silently down my cheeks. I made no move to wipe them away as I stared blurrily into what I now feared was nothing more than a funeral pyre.

  Then, just as I sighed and started to turn away, I heard a faint little cough. A puff of deep-green smoke curled out of Sparx’s mouth and his sides began to move with his breath again. Though he made no other sign, the fire started to burn faster now, and I hurried into the nearby trees, looking for more to feed it.

  I don’t know how long that went on—the fire burning bright and fast, with me scurrying back and forth to add wood—but finally the flames settled down to a more normal pace and Sparx sat up in their midst.

  He started to stretch and almost instantly stopped with a sharp indrawn breath. “Ow, I hurt all over. It feels like someone froze me solid and left the ice in my joints when they thawed me out.”

  All that was said in the language of fire, and I responded in the same way. “That’s not too far from the truth. Thou wast cold and gray when I set thee there, more an ash hare than one of fire.”

  He reverted to English. “Then I owe you my life.”

  “No, we’re even. I was just paying you back for saving mine from the Rusalka.”

  The hare nodded. “My name is *sprths*al*erarha.” The word was in the language of fire, with three sharp crackles punctuating it.

  “Tell me the words to free you.”

  The hare leaped out of the fire. “Perhaps later. First, I want to see what you become.”

  * * *

  I had briefly considered going back to Free, but it was late in the school day, I was exhausted, and home was much closer. I checked the garage to make sure neither Oscar nor my mother was home before I crossed the yard to the back door and let myself in.

  As soon as it closed behind me I released Sparx from my bag and headed for the fridge to look for a snack. I ended up digging a couple of waffles left over from Sunday breakfast out of the freezer.

  “What are you doing?” Sparx demanded as I took my first bite.

  “Eating a waffle…”

  “Frozen?”

  “They’re homemade.”

  “But frozen.”

  “I like the way they crunch.” I took another bite.

  The hare shivered and made a disgusted face. “Humans!”

  I ignored him and continued to eat my waffle. I’d learned to eat a lot of things cold or how to heat them up myself when I was little and mealtimes were less … reliable. I learned a lot of things about how to take care of myself back then. Before Mom met Oscar. Say what you would about Oscar being a big jerk, but he could really cook. Better than Mom, even. A lot of things had gotten more regular, too, though they could still go a little weird when he was traveling for work, or deep in a project and holed up in the basement. Oscar’s basement, hmmm …

  “Kalvan?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  “Have you come to your senses?”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “You stopped eating that horrible waffle and started staring at it instead about three minutes ago.”

  “I did?” I realized the waffle was starting to go floppy on me and quickly took another bite. Frozen is fine and hot is fine. Cold and soggy, not so much. Once I finished it, I immediately began to feel a bit better and started in on the second. Maybe Sparx wasn’t the only one who needed fuel for the fires. “I just had a thought.”

  “What a novel experience that must be for you. No wonder you were rendered immobile.” Though his words had lost none of their typical bite, I noticed a softening of his tone—less acid, more exasperation.

  I stuck my tongue out at him. “Oscar made the waffles.”

  “I’m very happy for him, and with the simple application of a toaster they could be rendered edible once again. Your point?”

  “That they made me think of him, and I realized this is the first time since school started when I’ve really been home alone, and we’ve got at least two hours.” My mom usually arranged her freelance work so she got home within a few minutes of me.

  “Annnnnd…”

  I ducked into the back hall and looked at the big antique door that led to the basement. I hated going down there under the best of circumstances, but I found myself checking the handle anyway. Locked, of course. I turned to Sparx, who had followed me into the hall.

  “How are you with locks?”

  “Picking them?” He rocked back onto his haunches and crossed his front legs across his chest. “No thumbs. Why do you ask?”

  I had just remembered that connection I’d sensed between the model and the thing under the capitol. Add that to Sparx talking about hungry shadows in the tunnels below the bluff, and I found myself wondering about exactly why my stepfather might have something like that in his workshop. Oscar as Oscar was plenty bad enough to make my life miserable, but more to be endured than fought because my mother. But Oscar as dark sorcerer … that was something else entirely. But I didn’t say any of that in case it turned out I was wrong about a connection and was just freaking out over nothing. No one wants to look dumb in front of their magic rabbit.

  “Just come on,” I said.

  Sparx rolled his eyes but followed me as I went back through the kitchen, grabbed the LED flashlight out of my backpack, and went into the dining room. There was a weird little closet there under the front stairs. As some point, a previous owner had put shelves in, and now we used the upper ones for towels and linens.

  When I was little it had been one of my favorite places to hide. The second shelf up was so deep we never filled it all the way back. So, I would crawl in behind the stacked towels, pull the door shut behind me, and read Mask comics on the old tablet computer my mom handed down to me when she got a new one.

  This time, I wormed my way through boxes full of various holiday decorations and odds and ends that filled the bottom of the closet, making my way to the very back. There, under the landing at the bend in the stairs, I pushed aside a small trunk to expose a trapdoor in the floor. When I pulled on the ring, it moved slowly and reluctantly.

  Sparx flattened his ears at the noise and frowned. “Squeals like a banshee with one ear caught in a bicycle chain.” I looked a question at him and he shrugged. “Once heard, never forgotten. Also, you’d think she’d have learned her lesson the first time, but no.”

  I finally got the door up, exposing a dark void—the crawl space under the house. I leaned into the hole and shone my flashlight around. There was a concrete
floor about two and a half feet down and cobwebs everywhere. Pipes and wires ran through and between the floor joists. Ducts hung beneath them, all leading toward the back of the house, where a narrow hole in the concrete passed through to the furnace in the ancient cellar some yards below.

  An old broomstick handle lay on the floor about a foot away, and I used it to clear cobwebs as I crawled toward the back. Two big sheets of plywood marked what I was looking for. Pulling the nearer one aside with an effort, I exposed a sort of round well in the concrete. It was six feet deep and six across, its sides walled in with rough limestone blocks. The bottom was covered with an old rag rug.

  Now, how to get down there … I could easily have jumped, but I’d never have gotten back up if I did so. I flashed the light into the joists above. These were arranged differently than in the rest of the house, with a rough square of two-by-sixes set into steel cradles so they could be lifted out. I knew that the floor above them was removable as well, though it involved moving the dining room table, taking up the Oriental rug it sat on, and maybe some other steps—it had been years since it was last opened.

  That was how Oscar got some of the bigger stuff for new models down into the basement, through the well where the beer kegs used to come up. A vague memory from one of my previous explorations returned to me then and I pointed my light toward the edge of the square overhead. Yes! There on the far side of the well, beside a duct where someone had screwed a big stainless-steel eyebolt into one of the wooden joists, a few inches of heavy rope were visible going from the bolt up onto the top of the duct.

  Reaching into the space above, I could feel more rope coiled there—thick and pliable, like the kind used by mountain climbers. When I pulled, it came free with a heavy slithering noise, followed by a thump as considerably more than six feet of it bounced off the edge and landed in the bottom of the little well. Someone had tied big knots into the line fifteen inches or so apart, making it super easy to climb. Jackpot!

  “This has to be the weirdest house I’ve seen in the last hundred years,” said Sparx as I started to climb down into the well.

  “Built on the ruins of an old brewery,” I replied. “The cellar’s original to the previous construction.” The rag rug was square, so the corners were rucked up. Grabbing one and pulling it aside revealed thick oak planks.

  Before I could do anything further, Sparx, who had been looking down over the edge of the wall, gave out a sharp hiss. “Don’t touch those planks!”

  “What? Why?” I glanced up at him.

  “Without touching the wood underneath it, can you pull the rug back a little more?”

  “Sure.” When I did as he asked, Sparx let out a low whistle, but I couldn’t see any reason for it even though I’d exposed more than half the planks. “What?”

  “Turn out your light for a second, and it may become clearer to you.”

  “All right, but I don’t … oh.” With my light off everything should have gone pitch-black, and it did, except …

  So, magic is weird stuff. A rough brown line traced its way along the edge of the plank floor just within the circle of the stone wall around the well. A second line was inscribed about a foot in from the first, and a series of wavery symbols had been drawn in between the two. I shouldn’t have been able to see them in the dark, but … well, they all glowed. Only, glowed isn’t the right word because they didn’t add any light to the well.

  Try this: imagine something drawn with a rich brown earth tone on bright-white paper. You’re looking at it in bright sunlight so you can really see the richness of the color. It practically shouts. Now take away the light and the paper and fill it all in with black, except you can still see the brown. Like that.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Earth-sign, a warding, and powerful. I can’t say much more than that. I speak the tongue of earth, but I don’t feel it in my marrow. That’s a very dangerous piece of magic.”

  9

  Mischief’s Child

  I STUDIED THE spell for several long seconds. “How do we get past it?”

  “I’m not sure we can. I don’t like finding it here in a house of fire, but I’m reluctant to try to break or bypass it if we don’t have to. It could have been here for a hundred years without causing any problems. Why do you suddenly want to get past it now?”

  I turned my light back on so I could see him. “The basement is Oscar’s domain.”

  “Your stepfather, right? The one you’ve been making very sure to keep away from me and vice versa.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think he’d be happy to see you even if he thought you were a regular rabbit. Oscar’s the reason we don’t have any pets. He says it’s because he’s allergic to everything, but I’ve never seen him have any kind of reaction. I think he just doesn’t like animals.”

  “Which I’m not.”

  “I know, but I’m pretty sure he’d like elemental spirits even less. I don’t think he really likes anybody except maybe my mom. Also, he says you shouldn’t believe in anything you can’t see and touch. I remember when I was little my mom and I used to go to this church or temple or something—I don’t know which; it was almost as hippie as the Free School. But as soon as she started dating Oscar, that stopped cold. He says any time you hear a priest clear their throat you should get a tight hold on your wallet.”

  “He’s not wrong. But you still haven’t explained what that has to do with why we’re down here.”

  “Sorry. Oscar … well. Let me tell you about Oscar and what’s under this.” I pointed at the hatch. I’d already long ago related my experience under the capitol to Sparx, and now I told him how the model in the basement echoed that terrible feeling of presence. And because talking about it reminded me of the morning I’d seen Oscar as a man of stone, I mentioned that, too.

  Sparx leaned back on his haunches. “That does put a different spin on things.” He peered down at the planks again. “I don’t like this at all, but after what you’ve told me, I like not knowing what’s on the other side of that ward even less. Can you roll the rug back farther without touching the wood?”

  “No problem.” I was soon standing on a little mound of rug against one wall of the well. “I’m going to turn the light out again, so I can see the lines.”

  But I still didn’t actually know anything about spell casting, and the dark kind of started to freak me out after a little while, so I turned it back on. Meanwhile, Sparx simply sat on the edge of the well and stared down at the drawing.

  “Do you want me to lift you down?” I asked after maybe ten minutes. “So you can get a closer view?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not going to help, and I’d rather not get too close. There might be something in there that would notice.”

  I glanced at the planks with fresh alarm. “What about me? I’m already here.”

  “Too late to worry about that now. I’m pretty sure you didn’t trigger anything when you first went down there.” He flicked his ears forward and back. “From what I can tell, I don’t think it’s all that sensitive, but it’s very powerful. I’m really not seeing any way to crack it. I think we’re going to have to let it go and find another way in.”

  “No.” I didn’t mean to say anything; the word just sort of welled up from somewhere down deep in my heart, a reflexive denial.

  Sparx cocked his head to one side. “No what? Do you have some idea for breaking the ward without setting it off?”

  “Not at all, but there’s got to be a way.” I thought about something I’d learned at Free. “If you can’t see a solution to a problem, there’s a good chance you’re looking at it the wrong way.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Look at Alexander the Great.”

  Sparx raised an eyebrow. “Still listening, but very confused.”

  “The Gordian knot.” Another one from my mythology class. “It was this big thing back in ancient days—a knot no one could untie because it was impossible to find the ends. Alexander
just took out his sword and cut the knot, making the ends he needed. He found a solution to the problem by looking at it from a different angle.” That last bit was the point of the lesson, according to my English teacher.

  The hare crossed his forelegs across his chest. “All right, smart boy, so what’s the solution?”

  I deflated a bit. “I don’t know. I don’t really understand the problem.”

  “Well, it’s a nasty ward designed to prevent people from getting through the well.”

  “How? I mean specifically. What’s it supposed to do?”

  Sparx shrugged. “I don’t read earth sign well enough to get into the depths of it, but if any of those boards is moved, it’ll sever the circle and all sorts of hell will break loose.”

  “All right.” I nodded. “We can’t break the circle. What else?”

  “If anyone touches the warded planks, that’ll set it off, too. I don’t know what exactly will happen to whoever does that, but it will be bad.”

  “But I was able to walk on it with the rug here, and that was all right.”

  “Well, yes, but standing on it won’t get you into the basement.”

  I turned out my light and looked at the outer circle of earth magic. “It doesn’t go all the way to the edge, does it…”

  “Huh?”

  “The circle, it’s not actually touching the stones of the well, is it?” In the dark I couldn’t be sure.

  “No, it’s not,” said Sparx. “Does that matter?”

  I flicked the light back on so I could see the hare. “What if we could lift the planks all together, like a trapdoor? Would that set off the ward?”

  There was a long, thoughtful silence before he spoke again. “I wouldn’t think so, but how would you do that? It’s big and heavy and there’s nothing holding it together.”

  “Yet,” I replied. “Come on!”

  I scrambled back up the rope and led Sparx through the house and out to the garage. Oscar was an engineer, and he kept a pretty good set of tools out there, as well as some lumber and hardware for projects around the house. He’d even installed one of those special ventilation systems for the bigger power tools, like the table saw. Sawdust was one of the main reasons it was all out in the garage instead of down in the basement with his design stuff.