by Martha Carr
Making Magic
The Witches of Pressler Street: An Urban Fantasy Action & Adventure series
Martha Carr
MRC Publishing
Copyright © 2019 by Martha Carr
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Ljiljana Romantic
Editing by Joe Martin
Created with Vellum
Thank You
To the Early Readers Team
Kathleen Fettig
Michael Robbins
Debi Sateren
Michael Baumann
Special shout out to Grace Snokes, Jynafer Yanez and Kayla Curry for their general badassery behind the scenes to keep everything
running so smoothly.
To all those who love to read, and like a good puzzle inside a good story
To Michael Anderle for his generosity
to all his fellow authors
To Louie and Jackie
And in memory of my big sister,
Dr. Diana Deane Carr
who first taught me about magic, Star Trek,
DC Comics and flaming cherries jubilee
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
About Martha
Author Notes
1
“Are you kidding me? A five-year-old could draw a better map than this.” Laura Hadstrom turned the piece of paper sideways, upside-down, and back to what she thought was right-side up. “Okay, maybe that five-year-old was me. But still. Dad didn’t even put a compass in the corner…”
Her hand reflexively went to her back pocket, but she stopped. “Right. Left my wand at home because, apparently, we don’t need them anymore.” Squinting at her dad’s crudely drawn map, she tilted her head to see it better beneath the dim glow of a 12th Street West streetlight.
The moment she wanted more light, the silver ring on her thumb—her own physical piece of the Hadstrom family legacy—flashed, and her dad’s map glowed from within, a single point on it illuminated brighter than the rest. “There we go. Next time, I’m gonna tell him to at least put a big star or something so I know where to start.” Laura glanced at her ring. “Wonder if my sisters have figured out how to use their rings better than the wands.”
With a shrug, she looked at the back of the Bullock Texas State History Museum. “Okay. Ten-thirty at night. Doors are locked. Lights are off. If there’s anybody watching…guess I’ll just cross that bridge later.” She walked along the long stretch of the museum’s back wall until she got to what could have been the illuminated spot on the map—if her dad had drawn anything to scale. But she didn’t see anything. No back door, no shed, no outbuilding. Shaking her head, Laura puffed out a sigh, then glanced at her ring. “Let’s try again.”
She tapped the illuminated space on the map, then pointed at the back of the museum and drew her finger through the air like she would have with her wand. “Ostendo.” The same muted glow rose from her ring, moved through her pointing finger, and shot out toward the building. “Hey.” She grinned at the ring. “I think we’re starting to get to know each other. Now where is it?”
For a few seconds, she thought she’d missed the mark, then her gaze fell to the asphalt of the employee parking lot. A circle of muted light pulsed on the ground. Laura wrinkled her nose. “Why does it have to be a manhole?” With a sigh, she folded the map, stuck it in her wand-less back pocket, and headed toward the glowing manhole cover.
She glanced around to be sure no one was watching, then whispered, “Patentibus.”
The silver ring flashed brighter, and the glowing metal disk set in the asphalt jumped from its place over the manhole and tossed itself two feet to the side. The loud clang echoed against the building and over the parking lot as the cover spun several times like a wobbly top before coming to a stop. “Okay, so there’s still a learning curve. That was way stronger than I wanted.”
After a few seconds of listening for a warning shout or footsteps headed toward her—and only hearing the buzzing insects in the summer heat, even at night, plus a yowling cat a few blocks away—Laura stepped toward the gaping black hole.
“Down the rabbit hole, then.” She pointed into the blackness. Before she could utter the spell she’d always had to say with her wand, her ring summoned a bubble of soft light that beamed down into the darkness. Laura blinked away her surprise, then smirked and turned around to lower herself onto the now-visible rebar serving as ladder rungs.
The glowing light moved as she moved, illuminating a radius five feet around her. “Man, this thing goes down forever. Like the time I went through those caves up north.” She chuckled. “I thought I was never gonna reach the bottom, then bam. There I was, right where that eighth-century potion’s bowl had been hanging out for five hundred years without ever—oh!” Her right foot missed the next rung, and she realized it was gone.
Laura wobbled on the rebar ladder and tightened her grip. “Pay attention.” She peered down and saw the ground three feet beneath her, so she steadied herself and dropped nimbly the rest of the way.
When she stood, Laura found herself in a concrete cavern with three branching tunnels on the far end. She fetched her dad’s map out to check which way the first arrow pointed. “Okay, standing here…yep. We’re going with the right tunnel.” The light followed her across the cavern and into the tunnel on the right, which narrowed around her until she felt too big for the tiny passage. “It’s like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory down here,” she muttered. “There’s no way I can keep going.”
Then she spied steps at the end of the tunnel. Metal grates led down one step at a time. Laura moved slowly down, taking care not to hit her head on the low ceiling.
“Now this looks like a ship.”
The incredibly large room before her descended hundreds of feet into the darkness; even her trailing bubble of light couldn’t reach the bottom. The grated stairs led right to a narrow catwalk stretching across the gaping hole. On the other side, she discerned a storage room without any walls or railings. Four more grated staircases descended through the nothingness toward other platforms at various levels. Ropes and nets hung from every metal beam and pillar, creating a lattice that gave the illusion of enclosed walls—only she could see everything through the nets.
“Good thing I’m not afraid of heights.” Laura cocked her head and set off across the catwalk toward the first platform on the other side. Her footsteps echoed through so much space, an
d she leaned over the side to try to glimpse the bottom. “Nothing.” With a nod, she walked the other half of the grated catwalk and stepped onto a wide, circular, concrete platform. A huge metal column stretched from the platform to the ceiling of the cavern, though even that was too far above to see. Boxes, metal crates, dusty tarps, more draped netting, and a collection of unfamiliar metal tools lay strewn about without any rhyme or reason. Laura lifted her foot when she made out something soft beneath her shoe. It looked like…a pelt?
“What kinda place is this?”
The map came out again, and she turned it every which way to orient herself. She squinted up the metal column and took a few more steps forward. “Hello?” She hadn’t raised her voice that much, but with the echo she might as well have shouted.
Dad said she lives here. I think he forgot the facts about this just like everyone in the world forgot how to lock the Gorafrex back up in its prison…
“My name’s Laura Hadstrom,” she called. Her name echoed back a dozen times. “My father Gregory Hadstrom told me I would find you here, that you might be able to help with a little Gorafrex problem.”
She took a few more steps across the platform, then stopped to listen for a response. “Come on,” Laura whispered. “This can’t just be another dead end—”
Beside the metal column, a pile of tarps shifted. Then it rose at the center, all the material shifting and sliding around. A few scattered newspaper pages slipped out and fluttered to the floor, and the pile grew and grew. It looked like a massive bear rising out of hibernation, though covered in canvas instead of fur. Laura stared as all the tarps slid away.
The Engineer might have been nine feet tall if she wasn’t bent over with age; as it was, she hunched at around seven feet. A huge mop of tangled gray curls fell to her shoulders, partially hiding the dirty, wrinkled face beneath. The giant woman shook the hair out of her eyes, which glistened huge and bug-like in her face, then Laura realized she wore some kind of magnifying goggles. Or really thick glasses… The woman’s jumpsuit was a patchwork collection of tan, dark-green, and faded copper, covered in zippered pockets and straps and buckles. Those huge eyes behind the goggles blinked slowly, and the Engineer took a shuffling step forward. Laura felt the concrete platform shudder, but she stood her ground.
The Engineer caught sight of her and craned her neck forward, squinting. “You are so loud,” the old woman said, her voice deep and coarse with age and infrequent use. “I could hear you all the way from the surface.”
“Oh.” Laura smiled and gave a little shrug. “Sorry about that. My name’s—”
“Laura Hadstrom. Yes, I know.” The Engineer turned away from Laura and took another shuffling step in the other direction. “I haven’t heard the Gorafrex mentioned in eons. Why are you coming to me about this?”
“Well…I—”
The Engineer’s huge hand came slapping down with incredible speed onto one of the metal crates in front of her. When she lifted it again, she’d caught something that looked an awful lot like a cockroach three times bigger than Laura thought they should ever be allowed to grow. And that brown, glistening bug went into the Engineer’s mouth with a loud crunch.
Ew. Laura swallowed. She forced herself to speak through the crunch and wet smack of the bug between the Engineer’s teeth. “I came to you because my sisters and I need your help.”
“Is there such a shortage of knowledge these days?” A glob of something thick and yellow dribbled down the woman’s wrinkled lip.
Laura’s nostrils flared, and she pulled her gaze up to the Engineer’s magnified eyes behind the goggles. “It definitely seems that way. Yes.”
The woman swallowed with a loud glurp. “And you came to me for such knowledge of the Gorafrex. Why?” That last word was a harsh, hissing whisper.
Better go with the truth this time. It’ll come out anyway.
Laura took a deep breath. “Because, well…I accidentally set it free.”
2
The Engineer blinked her huge eyes behind the giant goggles. Quicker than seemed possible, the giant of an old woman stormed toward Laura. The entire platform shook with every massive step, sending items and papers toppling from the piles of crates. A few loose wires and heavy rope nets laden with all kinds of odds and ends broke free beneath the force of the Engineer’s movement. The old woman stopped in front of Laura, blocking out almost all the light, and loomed over her. “Your ancestors put that creature away to protect this ship and everyone on it!” Her roaring voice echoing through the cavern brought a few sheets of dust falling down all around them. “Why would you let it out? You foolish child!”
Laura stood her ground, craning her neck to meet the Engineer’s bug-like eyes. “I didn’t know.” She said it calmly and evenly enough. “I found the prison in the Greenbelt, and I wanted to find out what was behind those wards. I didn’t figure it out until after the Gorafrex escaped it was a prison, or that the Gorafrex was what came out of it, or even that my family are the ones responsible for keeping it locked up.”
The Engineer hissed down at her, then stopped abruptly. Her large eyes flickered down to Laura’s hand and the silver ring on her thumb. “Your family. Yes.” She straightened, took one step back, and gave Laura enough space to breathe again. “And they told you everything you needed to know when you received that channeling trinket you wear, hm?”
“Well, not exactly.” Laura glanced at the ring. “My sisters and I got our rings from our dad. And he told us about the Gorafrex. Why it’s here, what it wants, and why my ancestors made that prison.” The Engineer grunted. “He told us what he knew, but it’s not everything we need to put that thing back before it…” I have to talk about this, don’t I? We need this woman’s help.
“Before it consumes the body of a human? Before it kills a witch or wizard? Before it fully escapes this ship and takes us all down with it?”
Okay, I definitely didn’t expect us to go down that road. “The first two have already happened,” Laura said. “I don’t want them to happen again, if I can do anything about it. And I definitely don’t want it to get to the whole escaping-the-ship part—wait. Can you clarify that one for me?”
“Can I—” The Engineer took another step back, cocked her head, then threw it back toward the black, gaping chasm above them and let out a shrill, dusty-sounding cackle.
Laura pressed her lips together and waited for the woman to finish. We are dealing with some serious mood swings, aren’t we?
Finally, the Engineer hunched over again and fell into dry chuckles. “Oh, Laura Hadstrom. You are so young. It is very endearing, you know.”
“Well, I’m glad you think so…um…I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“You may call me Rutilda.” The Engineer shuffled back toward the stacked crates and slumped her massive behind down on the tarps covering them. A huge puff of dust shot out beneath her, and she rubbed her large hands up and down her thighs over the mottled green jumpsuit. “Come sit. Make yourself comfortable, Laura Hadstrom. I shall clarify for you.”
“All right. Thank you.” Laura moved farther onto the platform, taking care to step around the various tools and coiled cables and odd implements that had scattered across the floor at Rutilda’s outburst. She found what looked like a footlocker just in front of the Engineer and used it as a chair—since there definitely weren’t any chairs down here.
“It’s clear you know that the stone above the surface is a door into the Gorafrex’s prison,” the old woman began. “One of many doors, yes, but all the others have long been thoroughly sealed. Not so easy for any being to get much farther into the bowels of this ship. Unless one is an Engineer like myself. Or one of the Mechanics.”
“You mean the Huldu?” Laura had met only a few of the short magical gnomes, who spent a lot less time in the world above than their more human-looking cousins. “And the Kashgar?”
“Yes. Those.” Ratilda bowed her head. “Just like them, a number of my people helped t
o build this ship. We set out on its maiden voyage and looked to the stars for our next destination.” A loud sigh escaped her. “No one expected us to end up so far off course, orbiting for millennia around this star.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard this story.” Laura pressed her lips together and waited for the Engineer’s reaction. Don’t push her too hard, Laura. You still need her help.
“It’s all the same story, Laura Hadstrom.” Ratilda sucked a bit of giant cockroach from between her teeth. “One very long, very tedious story, in the end. But everything is connected. It’s been ages since I’ve told or heard a story, mind you. All the other Velikan, my people, have since given themselves to the dust and the darkness of the vessel we created. I am the very last. Unless another snuck aboard the ship and hasn’t come to visit once in billions of years.” Ratilda chuckled again, sucked in a deep breath, and flicked her sharp gaze toward the witch sitting in front of her. “If I want to tell a bit of a story, Laura Hadstrom, I’ll tell it.”
“Right.” Laura nodded. No wonder she’s losing her mind. Ancient and all alone down here. “Please continue.” She fought the urge to look at her Expedition watch.
“Yes. I will continue.” The Velikan closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes. The Gorafrex prison was not a part of this ship’s original design, you understand? When the first Hadstroms of your line discovered the creature had stolen aboard, thirsting for the magic of your kind, Laura Hadstrom—the magic of witches and wizards—to sustain it, your ancestors came to me and mine. They asked us for help in building that prison, and we obliged.”