by Sara Hanover
If I’d known then what I know now, I might have done things differently. Yes, he had an illness, and magic had a grip on him as well, for he’d used it to increase his luck which fed his addiction. Can’t do that. The House always wins.
Magic has a price; when it comes to take its due, it can be fairly messy. It’s not pretty. Don’t ever believe it is. It is the stuff of blood, sweat, and tears. Add a little cursing—but that will lead you into the dark side. Avoid that, if possible. Because the price is high enough as it is. I lost a father . . . and gained a family I never expected.
Power imbues all of us, like sunlight and shadow, and those who can see it, sense it, or bend it hold a definite advantage over those of us who cannot. I want to use it to right those wrongs in my life that changed everything—but magic doesn’t work backward, only forward. There’s a balance to the powers of life, and then there’s chaos which thrives on the messy bits. The forgotten pieces. The ragged overlaps.
I wouldn’t have magic at all, but it chose me for reasons I have yet to understand. Chaos decided to burrow into me and stick. It seems permanently attached, and don’t think others haven’t tried to take it any way they can, including over my dead body. As for devouring . . . well, my stone has inhaled a cursed ring and a book on Dark Arts, as well as those bits of the Eye I mentioned. As for why the breakage of the Eye of Nimora didn’t really seem to hurt it, well, the darn thing is a gem big enough to choke a horse.
Sorcery struck me, not that differently from a bolt of lightning, but forgot to leave me with a set of directions, and I’ve been struggling ever since. Lightning not only struck twice, but it darn near incinerated me.
There’s a steep learning curve to dealing with my new reality and, if not for my sake but others, I’m running out of time. The power I have to manipulate is stubborn, sometimes angry, possessive, and impatient. Chaos stones are adept that way, I’ve been warned, although there are excellent moments. I’ve also been told by those who know that magic mirrors the person who wields it, but I don’t think so. Maybe. Maybe not.
Magic can’t mend things, well, magically. Not in reality. It’s like pulling a piece of elastic to change its shape. The form will change, but conditions alter and oftentimes—abruptly—everything snaps back. The snap can be killer. Like super glue, power is best used in small, very careful doses, trying not to get your fingers stuck together. I can’t trust magic to do the ordinary stuff I need done, but I have this situation.
Two floors below me, in the basement of this creaky old house, I found my missing father, fallen into a crack between dimensions. He’s out of place. I drove him into that jeopardy, and I need to get him free. I’m fairly certain a conjuring put him there, and it’s going to take the same to pull him out—and it needs to be soon. He’s a poltergeist in our cellar, and he’s fading. I can’t get him out without knowing how he got in, and I haven’t been able to determine what happened. It’s time for me to go visit my father and see how he’s faring. It’s one of those not pretty, very messy moments I hate.
I fell asleep in a tangle of thoughts and emotions and didn’t wake until Scout put his damp nose to my cheek, signaling he needed to go outside and be fed. I got up and prepared for my day, deciding I could wait no longer to check on my father.
I sat down on the cellar steps, pulled my glove off my left hand, and put my palm out, hoping the little red slits highlighting the marbled stone set in my hand would open, which they often will not do. They glow red. They also bring heat into the marble of the stone. One sees, the other consumes, and all of it is a pain in my existence. I hadn’t known about any of this until I met Professor Brennus Morcant Brandard, a crusty old guy on a charity senior meal route. When he set his house (and himself) on fire, the phoenix wizard called me for help, and I answered. I’ve never been certain why it was me he called. Maybe no one else answered his first or second attempt, but then I showed up. Life has not been the same since. I’ve met a host of magical beings, good and bad, and been infested myself. It’s rather like having a virus that can cure one fatal disease but gives you another, highly troublesome one, in exchange.
While I sat, hand open in the air, thoughts stampeding through my brain, I took stock of my current situation, including the apparition which had awakened me.
Other life projects loom in front of me, besides rescuing my father, which include falling in love with Carter Phillips, finding our now missing phoenix wizard professor, establishing world peace, and curing childhood hunger. Oh, and declaring my major at Sky Hawk CC. I really don’t count on any other burdens because these seem tough enough as it is. Well, Carter isn’t tough. I mean, he is tough, but loving him isn’t, and I’ve had strong hints that he might feel the same way back.
I sat in a moment of quiet and searched the cellar for my father. I felt it the moment the Eyes opened in my palm, and a subtle warmth traveled from my hand to my face and eyes. What was dim was now illuminated. Storage boxes piled hither and yon glowed with magical possibilities—they belonged to the professor and were all we could salvage of his former life and burned-out house. Although the boxes are battered and look like ordinary cardboard, I can see the auras that dance about them. Tiny motes of starlight have drifted in from upstairs, whirling about like fireflies. And there, in the corner, stood my transparent father. He lifted a hand in greeting. A green haze surrounded him; if he were a tree, I might think that was good. But he’s not, and it looked sickly to me.
“Dad.”
A small gust of cold air surrounded me. “Don’t try to talk,” I tell him. “I’m just checking in. Goldie and I are visiting Broadstone Manor tomorrow, so I’m hoping to finally get some of the information on how this happened, so we can undo it.”
The ghost reacted not at all. Did he understand what I said? I waved my palm. “Goldie is the harpy who was married to Mortimer. She knows he kept journals, and he told me once he thought he knew how all of this might have happened, so I am thinking he noted it down before he died.” My dwarven friends were detail oriented, and the Broadstone clan was a pillar of their community. I counted the late Mortimer as a friend and his son, Hiram, as a close friend.
My see-through dad cut a hand through the air, a negation, a warning, a signal to stop, as emphatically as he could.
“No? Why not? This is good news.”
He drifted closer but stopped halfway across the cellar as if the maelstrom stone put up a barrier he could not cross. And it might. It’s a very defensive item and has saved my life more than once. Now I needed it to save his. I might add that any saving it had done was probably self-preservation of its own interests and not necessarily mine.
But he halted and shook his head.
“The Broadstones are friends. So is Goldie. I’ll be fine. You can’t wait much longer, and this is the only break we’ve had.”
The air about me grew so chill I expected snow or hail to start falling.
“I did this to you,” I told the apparition. “We fought and I sent you away, and you got into some kind of trouble and shoved between dimensions and this is all my fault. I’m the only one who can fix it. I thought . . . I thought you’d taken everything away from me that I’d planned, but what I have now instead is . . . well, it’s better. I have friends I could never have believed even existed, and Mom is doing well, finally, and we not only survived, we thrived. But you belong here, as part of us, and I have to find a way to bring you back. I won’t lose you again. So you better get used to the idea that I intend to undo what I did.”
My father held both hands palm up and stood watching me.
“You’re not going to talk me out of this. If I do nothing else with the magic I’ve got, I will free you. I will.”
He sliced a finger across the air again, an unmistakable gesture, killing my plans.
I stood up abruptly. “Look. I know what I’m doing. I’ll be fine. You’re the one I’m worried about, all ri
ght? I have the stone and my bracers for protection, and a harpy warrior on my side, and the Iron Dwarves, not to mention Carter and Steptoe, and you’ve no one but me. I’d say I’m in good shape. I’ll check in with you tomorrow when I get back.”
Upstairs, I heard Scout’s toenails clicking on the floor as he scrambled to go bark at someone at the front door. I closed my fist, shutting down the Eyes, and although I could feel the ghost-touched cold, I couldn’t see him anymore.
“I’m doing this,” I finished. “And you’ll be happy I did.”
As I shut the cellar door in the kitchen behind me, I half-expected to see the lesser demon Steptoe looking like the dapper chimney sweep he emulates, or my mom, or just about anyone else appear but my best friend Evelyn Statler.
But there she is, with Scout doing half-grown Labrador puppy circles around her feet, in hopes of 1) tripping her or 2) getting a treat. She is as slender as a willow sapling, dressed in expensive casual, and her blonde hair is tousled down below her shoulders. She puts me to shame. I’m taller than she is, but lanky, with a dusting of freckles accenting my blue eyes, and my brunette hair cascades down also but somehow never looks so casually wonderful and windblown as hers.
Before she could be knocked over by Scout, she plopped down in a kitchen chair. “You’re going to the Broadstones tomorrow and I need you to take me with you and you have to introduce me to Hiram’s folks, and then you have to come home with me and introduce Hiram to my parents.”
I’d obviously had other plans after my visit and had no idea how she’d found out about any of them. Needless to say, I was not expecting to get my ears assaulted with what I’d just heard. Nor had I any idea their dating had gotten this serious sounding.
“Please,” Evie coaxed. “You’ve got to help me on this.”
Scary as it is, I’d rather wrestle magic to a standstill again than get in between Evelyn Statler, her new boyfriend the dwarf Hiram Broadstone, and her parents. Even if she did plead for help.
I’d also rather stand on my head and poop bricks, but she is my best friend on the human side and Hiram on the magic side. There shouldn’t really be “sides,” but that appears to be a major facet of my current life. And there she sat, eyes open wide and slightly weepy, begging me to be a bridge. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know Hiram is an Iron Dwarf which means he hasn’t decided to share his antecedents with her yet, and that tells me I shouldn’t get concerned. Why get involved in a fight sooner than necessary, right?
I shifted slightly. Evelyn’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. She stood up and held her hands out.
“You’re not going to do it, are you?”
“What does Hiram think about this?”
“Oh, he . . . ah . . . well . . . he’s fine with it.”
“You didn’t tell him.”
She swung her chin away from me, and her light blonde hair bounced about her shoulders. “Not exactly.”
Hiram is what I would call a grown-ass man. More grown than Evelyn has any idea because Iron Dwarves live about two hundred years near as I can figure and, although he’s a young man in his clan, he’s probably close to Evelyn’s father’s age. All of which means, if he wanted my help and thought he needed it, he’d be here asking for it.
“I think you’re jumping the gun on this,” I told Evelyn.
She still wouldn’t look at me. “Meeting my family?”
“Not that, but making a big enough deal out of it that you feel you need muscle on your side. You don’t need muscle to say ‘Hi, Mom and Dad, this is my date Hiram. We’ll be back before midnight and bye!’” I told her.
“I don’t have a midnight curfew.”
“Maybe you should. I can advocate that when I handle everything else if you wish.”
“Oh, shut up.” Evie sat down again and twisted her hands in front of her. “It isn’t a casual date. I’d like him to escort me to the swearing-in, and that’s a big deal.” Her father had won the mayoral electoral contest in November, and she was right. It was a big deal. Hiram’s presence there probably would need parental approval.
I thought I still might be able to dodge the bullet she aimed at me. “The party celebration? Or the actual inaugural?”
“Either. Both.”
I sat down next to her and bumped shoulders. “You guys have been going out for two months now and he’s not met your parents?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Her fingers knotted. “We agreed we weren’t going to date. I had classes and he’s in business. But we just couldn’t stay away from each other.”
“Awwww.”
She punched me in the arm. I pretended to rock away from the blow. Actually, it wasn’t bad. She’d taken up some self-defense classes since getting caught in a political riot and having someone bash her in the shin. Seriously, though, I couldn’t believe the honor bound and solemn Hiram hadn’t taken steps to meet the parents early on. Time for me to narrow my eyes at her.
“Wait a minute. You haven’t told them you’re dating at all. You’ve been . . . oh, I dunno . . . at study groups or cheer practice or over at my place.”
Evelyn blushed, a lot deeper than I ever have, starting at the hollow in her throat and working its way up her neck and turning her face a cherry color.
“No wonder it’s awkward.” I ticked facts off on my fingers. “One, Hiram doesn’t know you’ve been fibbing about him and two, your parents don’t know you’ve been lying to them, and three . . .” I raised an eyebrow. “These things come in threes. What have I missed?”
“Nothing.”
“Hiram doesn’t know you have been sneaking around to see him.”
“No.”
“And your parents truly have no idea?”
“They’ve been busy getting Dad ready to take office. It’s a lot of work. I didn’t want to bother them.”
“A relationship with Hiram is a bother?”
“No, no . . . he’s wonderful. Fun. Intelligent. A gentleman.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I waggled my raised eyebrow.
She sighed. “I might have asked him to marry me.”
“What?!”
“We agreed that’s too serious too soon, but . . . it feels so right, Tessa.”
I felt as though a brick wall had fallen on me and it was difficult to get words out. “What are you thinking? You hardly know each other. Nothing about this is going to feel right to Hiram when he finds out they don’t even know about him. And your parents—” I stopped, not finding any words to describe her parents’ probable reaction.
She drew close and leaned her head down onto my shoulder. “I know,” she said miserably. My shirt grew wet under her cheek as she wept quietly. If I were in the same spot, I’d need friends who wanted to help. I couldn’t not help her.
Plus, I wanted to stay on Hiram’s good side. The invite to his home was not easy to come by; the harpies and the clans have been at odds for decades, and Mortimer’s and Goldie’s marriage had gone against all those bad feelings. But I needed her to find his journals. Those diaries could hold invaluable information on what had happened to my father and how to help him. This, for me, was literally a matter of life and death. Putting Evelyn in the middle of it would complicate things horribly. But it would be worse to try and put her off. She could be relentlessly determined.
“All right,” I said, not altogether selflessly.
She pulled back, her face lighting up. “Great!” Evelyn had another thought and gathered up her purse onto her lap. The purse in question is the size of a briefcase that could hold a small elephant or maybe even Scout, and her entire arm disappeared inside it as she reached for something. “I almost forgot! This was on your front porch.”
The envelope she withdrew was sized 9 x 12, a beautiful parchment structure with a wax seal on the back flap, and my name in calligraphy on t
he front. No address, though, which made one wonder how it had gotten delivered, and that gave me a Harry Potter flashback.
I slid an invitation out.
YOU ARE SUMMONED, TWO EVENINGS HENCE, TO THE SOCIETAS OBSCURA. AN ESCORT WILL PROVIDE TRANSPORTATION.
The black borders edging the paper seemed both appropriate and threatening.
Aaaaaand here came more trouble, right behind the shock and awe.
CHAPTER TWO
NO RSVP REQUIRED
WITH THE PROFESSOR no longer in my daily life—well, that wasn’t quite true, we spent a lot of time searching for signs of him—I couldn’t ask his advice on the Society. I knew only that he had disdained it and did not trust it, but I didn’t know if I should hold the same opinions. I was as curious about the governing group of magicians as they were about me. And I needed a teacher. Every time Nimora opened her eyes in my stone, I could feel a surge of power and a sharp hunger to do things that I might possibly regret. I needed to know how to tame those impulses. I needed to have the discipline to change the things I should and bear the things I should not, like that popular saying. Plus, once I had Morty’s journals in my hand, I might need their assistance with setting my father back in his true dimension. Carter, I knew, would help me, but I also knew he worried about backlash from the Society.
“Who died?” Evelyn leaned close and ran a polished fingernail along the edge of the invitation.
“Nobody. Why?”
“It looks all solemn, like something a funeral home might send out.” She gave a little shiver. “Glad nobody died.” Then she added, in a different tone: “Yet.”
Evelyn dipped a shoulder as if she thought to either take the invitation from me or read it, either one of which I couldn’t allow. But she didn’t notice my defensive maneuver to keep it away. Instead, one of her dark blonde eyebrows arched and she added, “More good than ill will come from that, and yet it’s up to you to make the choice which gives you the best destiny. Death and doom fall before you. Beware.”