Sleight: Book One of the AVRA-K

by Jennifer Sommersby

  “You said there were seven books. Weren’t there seven families, then? Where are the other five?”

  Henry paused. “They’re…dead.”

  “Al of them? How?” As soon as the word crossed my lips, I realized I knew how. “Lucian…?” Henry nodded and looked away.

  “Holy…”

  “Lucian is a very powerful magician, and he knows the book inside and out. And his intentions are, let’s say, less than honorable.

  Where Marku and Thibeault and the others have used it for good, to help people, Lucian is different,” Henry said. “He wants all of the books, and if he succeeds, he wil become very powerful. Like, scary powerful. He wil use it to promote his own agenda.”

  “Which is?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Henry, back up—you said that your grandfathers, Marku and Thibeault, are initiates. Are they members of the Original Seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “So…you’re teling me that they’re as old as the books.” Henry’s head was down, his eyes on his hands as he brushed one thumb over the nail of the opposite thumb. A few seconds passed, and I realized I was holding my breath. He looked up at me, eyes wide, honest.

  “A little older, actualy. They were grown men when they wrote it.”

  “Right…so that makes them, what, three thousand years old?” I was smiling, soaked in disbelief. Amusement may not have been the appropriate emotion given the circumstances, but this story he was teling was nothing short of ridiculous.

  “Marku was born in 832 BC, Thibeault in 829 BC. Just under three thousand.”

  The smile dissolved from my face. I stared at him, scanning for evidence that he was going to start cracking up, howling because he was puling my leg. But there was no sign of funny, no curl of his lip.

  He didn’t blink, his eyes fixed, face tight and concerned, brow creased. It was the silence in his stare, the set of his jaw and shoulders that confirmed it for me.

  “Henry, how old does that make Lucian?”

  “Old. He and Jesus Christ would’ve been schoolmates,” Henry said. My breath caught in my throat. I suddenly felt like I was choking.

  “Unlock the doors.”

  “Please, Gemma, don’t run again.”

  “I won’t. I just need some air.” I opened the car door and stepped into the lot. There were other kids skipping class parked nearby. A couple I’d seen groping one another at their lockers just before lunch watched me pace next to Henry’s car and for a moment, I froze, worried they’d narc to Mrs. Thyme when the unexcused absences roled into the office. But that was a dumb thing to worry about. They were skipping, too. Besides, none of that crap mattered in the face of what Henry had just told me.

  “Gemma…” Henry walked around to my side of the car and placed a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off.

  “I’m going inside, to use the bathroom. I’l be right back.” He looked worried, probably scared I’d bolt once I was out of sight.

  “I’l come back, I promise.”

  Inside the café, Becca Bristol and her clique of makeup mavens were busy primping and gossiping around a table. She cast a dirty look my way as I waited at the counter for the bathroom key, but it hardly fazed me. Three thousand years old? No one can live that long. They just cannot.

  In the bathroom, I locked the main deadbolt and propped myself against the door for a few seconds, studying the incredulous expression staring back at me from the dimly lit mirror. Turning on the cold water ful blast, I splashed my face and replayed Henry’s story in my head. The motion-sensor paper towel dispenser activated on its own; I hadn’t swiped my hand near its red eye. I spun around as strip after strip of towel unspooled, and came face to face with a shade. The beautiful woman who trailed Henry around the school. The face from the mirror in his car.

  His mother, Alicia Delacroix.

  I backed into the metal garbage can, toppling it with a loud crash onto the tile floor.

  “Gemma, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I flattened myself against the steel wal of the toilet enclosure.

  “What do you want?” My chest tightened with fear, breaths short and shalow. Did you know that you can talk to them? The lining of my nose stung and I smeled blood.

  “Trust my son. Claim what is yours,” she said, extending a hand toward me.

  I clamped my palm over my mouth to bury a scream as she hovered ever closer to me. The temperature in the smal room had plummeted, yet my hair stuck to the sweat trickling down my neck.

  Someone pounded on the exterior door.

  “You okay in there?” a voice said. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

  “Open up!”

  More banging on the door, folowed by the click of the deadbolt from the outside.

  “Be brave. Get to Rouen,” Alicia said, before evaporating into nothingness.

  The bathroom door flew open. A green-aproned Starbucks employee stared at me, then the mess on the floor, her disapproval obvious.

  “Are…are you okay? What the heck happened?”

  I was stunned, immobilized. I couldn’t respond.

  “Helooo!” She snapped her fingers in front of my face. “What’s going on in here?”

  “What? Oh…uh, nothing. I slipped. The floor was wet.”

  “Whoa, you’re hurt. Your nose is bleeding,” she said. A brush of my fingers under my nose confirmed her observation. “I’l get the manager. You’l need to fil out an incident report.” I surveyed the spiled trash bin, the reams of unwound paper towel curled into a pile on the floor, stil attached to the dispenser.

  A crowd had gathered in the doorway, curious faces peeking over the employee’s shoulders, trying to catch a glimpse of the crazy chick who wrecked the bathroom.

  “I’m fine. I’m not hurt.”

  “I realy should get my manager. You don’t look so good.” I pushed my way past her and ran from the bathroom, through the onlookers, pausing only at the counter to grab a wad of brown paper napkins to shove under my nostrils.

  “Hey, wait a second! Come back!” she holered after me. I didn’t stop but jogged back to Henry’s car. He was sitting behind the wheel, head in his hands, when I climbed in.

  “How much of this does Ted know? I mean, really know?” I said, wiping at my nose.

  “Al of it, I’m sure. He has to.”

  We were al in some very serious trouble. Getting the book from one of the Original Seven, Thibeault Delacroix? Never going to happen.

  I looked out my side window to see a manager walking from the front of the store, a clipboard in his hands.

  “Drive.”

  “What?” He looked up at me, his eyes widening when he saw the bloodied wad in my hands.

  “Drive! Now!”

  Henry turned the engine over and squealed onto the street, leaving the manager dumbfounded in the near-vacant lot. Guess I wouldn’t be showing my face there again for a while.

  “What happened to your nose?” He looked back and forth between me and the road.

  “I saw her…I saw Alicia.”

  “Did she hurt you?”

  “No. It…it just started bleeding. Did you know she’d be there, Henry?”

  He fixed his gaze forward. “Yes.”

  We managed to make it back onto school grounds with about ten minutes to spare before the last class ended. I’d missed cooking and philosophy.

  I scrunched up the bloodied napkins and checked my nose in the mirror. The bleeding had stopped. I grabbed my backpack and started to climb out of the car.

  “Wait,” Henry said, his hand on my arm. “There’s something else.”

  “Seriously? Haven’t I heard enough?”

  Henry reached behind the passenger’s seat and hoisted his backpack onto his lap. He unzipped it and puled out a book. La Una, the text from Harbourne’s philosophy class, only Henry’s copy didn’t look like mine. His was old, the thick pages brown from age, the binding dark oiled leather, the embossed title and author name in gold lea
f. If it hadn’t been so packed ful of hate, I’d say the book itself was a treasure.

  Henry handed it to me and studied my face.

  “Yeah? So? It’s an old copy of La Una,” I said.

  “Stare at it for a second. Look at the author’s name.” I did. Cailum Tridin, in fine script. “Okay…what about it?”

  “You want to know why it matters if Lucian gets his hands on that seventh book? Having al the AVRA-K in one place wil give him powers no one man was ever meant to harness.”

  “What does La Una have to do with it? It’s just a bunch of insane ravings of a delusional tyrant. I mean, come on—have you read this garbage? I can’t believe it’s actualy part of our mandatory curriculum. I think the people in this town are loco,” I said, twirling my finger in the air next to my head. Crazy. Eaglefernies were nuts.

  “Look at the cover, Gemma. Look at it.”

  “I’m looking, Henry.”

  He tightened his grip on my upper arm. The energy radiating from his skin was cool, edgy.

  “Look at it.”

  “Geeze, Henry, I am! What am I supposed to be seeing? Is it going to do something magi—” Before I could finish the word, the letters rearranged themselves in my head.

  Cailum Tridin.

  Lucian Dmitri.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “With the AVRA-K, Lucian wil unleash a torrent the world has never seen.”

  “But it’s BS! This whole book is nothing but trash talk. How can people—no one in their right mind wil believe this shit!”

  “They do, they wil, and they have in the past,” he said, removing his hand from my arm. “Think of the most vicious, most sinister, and the most successful dictators and politicians throughout history—

  Machiaveli, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler. People believed them. The world has been shaped, and ruined, by the works and actions of these men.”

  “But this is such a stupid book!” I shook La Una in front of me.

  “If Lucian wrote this, he’s no better than al of those psychos you just named. He’s just copying them.”

  “Think about how old Lucian is. Those men—who do you think they studied?”

  I looked at the antique in my hand and dropped it onto the car floor as if it were on fire.

  “Holy shit.”

  Henry stretched across and retrieved the text and stuffed it back into his bag. The bel echoed through the parking lot announcing the end of last period. Marlene would be arriving any second, and I was stil sitting outside of the school, in Henry’s car, again.

  “We…I gotta go in. I need to go to my locker.” Henry jumped out and opened my car door for me. We started toward the side entrance of the building, separate but together. The trickle of exiting students sweled as we moved against the flow.

  The volume of their excited voices increased in the remaining seconds before that final three o’clock bel.

  I should’ve stopped at the bathroom to wash off the blood.

  I should’ve stopped in to check with Mr. Harbourne about homework.

  That’s what I should have done, but I didn’t. I walked back to my locker, Henry at my side, our hands to ourselves, neither one of us speaking. Enough words had been spent over the prior two hours.

  “Cal me later, wil you, please?” he said, stopping in front of locker 451.

  “Yeah…okay.” I was beyond overwhelmed, my brain so tired.

  Henry leaned over and kissed my cheek before walking away. He disappeared around the corner without looking back, leaving me standing alone in the halway. Everyone else was happy the day was over, looking forward to going to sports practice or band rehearsal or some after-school club meeting. They were right where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing in their young, carefree lives. Their realities hadn’t just been rocked, deconstructed and reassembled into a terrifying, surreal new structure.

  But mine had.

  Welcome to your new world, Gemma.

  :20:

  Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always.

  —Dante Alighieri

  Marlene dropped me off near the trailer and trotted back to the stadium to finish rehearsal. We weren’t scheduled to do the Roulette until the Sunday show, but with only two and a quarter days left to work out the kinks, the three of them had spent every waking moment under the big top, going over and over the routine.

  It was good for me. More work for them meant less meddling in my life. And I wasn’t ready to tel Marlene about my latest discovery.

  Not yet.

  With them busy in the stadium, I knew it would be the perfect opportunity to look for the envelope. A quick look through the window confirmed everyone was busy otherwise, no one hanging around, the meal tent quiet. If I went into Ted’s trailer, it didn’t matter. I went in there al the time, and no one ever questioned it.

  Why would today be any different?

  I sauntered across the courtyard and hopped up the steps. The trailer was unlocked, as usual. Inside, the tabletop was its regular explosion of papers and receipts, newspapers stacked on the floor, dirtied whiskey glasses tossed into the sink. Carefuly, I lifted piles of correspondence, scanning for the manila envelope with my mother’s distinctive handwriting scrawled across the front. I was apprehensive, my hands shaky, my heart racing. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. After al, it was my letter. But the fact that I was being sneaky, in Ted’s office without Ted or Marlene around…

  icky. Deception wasn’t my thing—I was a terrible liar and a lousy sneak. Even as a kid, Marlene could always tel when I’d snuck into the kitchen and stolen an extra cookie. And not because I’d have chocolate smeared across my lips. “I can see it in your eyes, Gemma. Tel Auntie the truth.”

  But I was on a mission.

  After I’d opened every drawer and cupboard, lifted every cushion from the smal couch, shook out the few books on the shelves, and checked under al the stacks of papers, there was only one other place left to look: Ted’s locked cupboard. It wasn’t a true safe but the lock wasn’t much more than those found on the trailer doors. And I’d picked those a hundred times, just for fun.

  A quick scan of the trailer revealed Irwin’s toolbox sitting about a foot from the wal in front of the pantry cupboard. I searched through and found an Alen wrench and the smalest screwdriver he had. I needed a paperclip or bobby pin. The bathroom had to have leftover hairpins from Marlene. I crawled into the bathroom, my pulse pounding in my ears. Sure enough, I found a rusted pin wedged in the crevice where the linoleum met the floor molding.

  I scooted back over to the cupboard and set to work, applying the sheer force that would enable me to identify the binding pins in the lock. After a half-dozen attempts, the sweet click of success.

  With a quick peek out the window, I hurried back to the now-opened cabinet and sifted through the contents. Papers, passports, medical cards, even a few rubber-banded bundles of money. A musty cigar box near the back held mementos from Jonah, Ted and Marlene’s deceased son: a pair of knitted baby booties, his bracelet from the maternity hospital, a stack of yelowed photographs, one of which contained a grown Jonah with a young, radiant, red-haired woman wrapped around his side. My mother.

  Interestingly, I came across a white padded envelope addressed to Henry. Henry? The postmark was French, the date recent. Very recent. Just days ago. I couldn’t take it, though. They’d know.

  A muffled voice outside the trailer made me jump. I placed the envelope back where I’d found it and held my breath, waiting for the teltale sound of feet on the metal steps and the rocking of the fifth wheel as a body climbed toward the door.

  Silence. Just the whooshing of my pulse in my ears.

  I replaced everything as I’d found it and was just about to close the cabinet door when a Bible caught my eye. A Bible? In Ted’s trailer? Blasphemy.

  I reached for it, surprised by its lack of density. Opening the front cover revealed it to be a false book. Holow guts, filed only by the manila envelo
pe, my name in heavy print across the front.

  Delia’s handwriting.

  I puled it out and turned it over in my hands, surveying the front for a postmark date. If it had gotten lost in the mail somehow, the postmark might be old, closer to the date of Delia’s death. But the postmark was just the other day, the day before I’d seen it in Marlene’s hands. Someone from New Horizons must’ve found it, mailed it. That happens…right?

  The envelope’s outer seal had been broken, and inside were seven smaler envelopes, each addressed to me individualy and numbered—1, 2, 3—written in heavy black. She’d traced over the contours of the numbers with such force that the paper of one of the letters, number 4, was torn clean through from the wet weight of the ink. Wrapped around the bundle was a handwritten note, my mother’s script elegant and clean.

  My sweet Gemma-Juliet,

  The face in these drawings, it is the face of your father. I couldn’t tel you. Auntie Mar, Uncle Ted, and Uncle Irwin have done everything to keep your true identity a secret.

  They knew he’d come for you, sooner rather than later, just as he came for me when I was suffering in the months after Jonah’s death. He found me in my dreams, promised he would give me a baby who would grow to become powerful and gifted, the most gifted of al. An heir to a dynasty…that is you.

  But he only found me, and created you, to settle his own vendetta. When we kept you from him, he made my dreams and my days a nightmare. I haven’t the strength to stand against him anymore. He torments me with a ceaseless vengeance. And I know there is peace on the other side. I wil find you from there.

  Fight him. Fight for al of us. You are the most gifted of al.

  Your destiny awaits.

  I love you always, my baby girl, my Gemma-J…

  Mom

  What the hell…?

  I placed the note aside on the table. Starting with envelope number 1, I turned it over to break the seal. Like the outer mailer, it had been opened, too. They al had. So not only was Marlene keeping my mail from me but she was reading it, too?

  I puled a piece of thin tracing paper from the envelope, mad scribbles strategicaly placed around the edges of the page’s drawing, letter number 1 nothing but the outline of a face. Just a two-dimensional sketch of a head, cheekbones, ears, and chin.