Third Time is a Charm

by Cate Martin

  But letting this little mystery go?

  Not even.

  Chapter 7

  Long, slow breath in. Long, slow breath out. Long, slow breath in.

  I narrowed my focus to just the air filling her lungs like I was supposed to.

  The air filling my lungs had an earthy smell to it. It was strong enough to be distracting.

  I usually did this meditation outside, in the garden, but not when it was this cold. But even in full autumn with the leaves drifting down all around me, the air had not had such a thick smell of growing things and decomposing things to it.

  The solarium was full of potted herbs and little plants. I think Mr. Trevor harvested some of them to use in his cooking. Usually, when I would sit at the table in the solarium to drink coffee and look at the morning paper, I didn't really notice the smell. Now, sitting on my meditation mat in the middle of the floor, I couldn't seem to tune it out.

  But I had to. I was supposed to not be thinking. Not any thoughts at all, and smelling the earth was giving too many thoughts.

  I refocused. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

  I managed a few more cycles of breath, but a sudden cracking of noise made me jump. It sounded a bit like an old steamboat had crashed into the basement with crunches of metal and hisses of escaped vapor.

  But I knew what it was. It was the heater. The heater wasn't as old as the house, which had fireplaces in every room for a reason, but it couldn't be a whole lot younger. It was a great monstrous thing that kicked on with a tremendous amount of noise, like gears grinding, like some metallic thing about to breathe its last breath and then die.

  So, another thing I had to tune out. But I knew that after a minute or two the worst of the noise would quiet down to just a blast of air running through vents.

  Deep breath in.

  Ugh. The first blast from the heating vent had that burned smell, and sitting on the floor as I was, the vent was at my level and just behind me. The first time you fire up a house's heater in the fall always smells like burnt dust, of course, no matter where you live. But in this house, it was like every day was the first day of fall when you ran the heater and cooked everything dwelling in the ducts. That smell.

  Okay, focus. Deep breath in (ignore the smell). Deep breath out.

  Suddenly, just as I was getting into the groove of it, sunlight hit me full on the face, so bright it turned my eyelids deep red.

  The southern sun, much lower in the sky than when I had first started meditating here, had found a gap between the shrubs and a little narrow pathway between the clusters of plants that lined all the glass walls.

  With a sigh, I shifted my position to turn my back to the sun.

  Not a bad idea, actually. Aside from getting the light out of my eyes, the warmth of it on the back of my neck was soothing. I closed my eyes, determined now to truly tune out the world around me.

  I focused on my breath, the feeling of my chest rising and falling, the feeling of the air moving through the passageways of my nose and throat.

  I wondered if the police had figured out that that body was from 1927?

  Ugh, thoughts again. Still, what had they figured out? I knew it was early yet, only about six in the morning, but I also knew that Nick was an early riser. If he knew anything important about the police investigation, surely he would've called me.

  I was curious if they had figured out anything about the wardrobe. I was certain it was a magical artifact, but I had no idea what the magic was. Was it the sort of thing only I could perceive? Or did it have larger effects that anyone could perceive?

  The crystal ball that Mina Fox had owned had done both kinds of things. It had an energy only we witches could feel, but it had spoken with a voice all could hear, and shaken the walls of the Fox house and far more. But it had been very obvious to me from the moment I looked at the web of its threads that it was a deeply magical item with its own agenda.

  The wardrobe had seemed rather benign. No intent, no traces of sentience. But I didn't know what that meant.

  Was Nick going to call me? Or was I going to have to call him?

  Was the reason he had not called me yet because he was arrested as a suspect? Did they think he had something to do with it because he was there in the apartment?

  What if they had arrested him for breaking and entering?

  My eyes flew open. My heart was pounding, and there was no getting back into a deep meditative state now.

  I told myself I was being silly. There'd be no reason for them to arrest Nick. He lived next door, his story was completely plausible, and he'd probably called his friend Nelson Fisher, a detective with the police force. Nelson knew Nick was trustworthy. And besides, there'd be no evidence against him.

  Still, why hadn't he called?

  Of course, I could always call him. But my phone was upstairs. And it was, after all, just after six in the morning.

  I took a few deep breaths and resettled myself on my mat. I could at least wait until eight to call him. Eight in the morning was a normal person time of day to be up and about. In the meantime, I had work to do.

  I settled back to just an awareness of my breath. This time I was so focused I didn't even notice when the heat stopped running. I only had a vague sense of the hot air that had been blowing across my knees dying away.

  I focused on my breath for an immeasurable amount of time, but then I had an idea. I want a little deeper, shifting my consciousness like I'd done in the hallway outside of the apartment door. I moved myself outside of my body, but this time I stayed close to it.

  I looked at the glowing threads that joined into a pattern of tangles and knots to form my body. I observed all the threads, how they interacted with each other but also how they interconnected with the form of myself that I was in this place. I couldn't actually see myself in this place, but I could see threads that interacted with me.

  I looked more closely and observed which threads glowed with my heartbeat, and which threads flanked it but were growing dimmer. I was sure those representing my lungs, not currently working. I reached into my own chest and snagged some of those dim threads. Then I tweaked them, giving them a little tug.

  I saw the chest part of the body in front of me rising and falling with even breaths, timed to how I was pulling on those threads.

  I had figured it out. I could keep an attachment to my body even as I ranged away from it.

  Well, I wasn't sure. It seemed to be true, but if I trusted it and was wrong, I'd be dead.

  I should stay close to my body, pay attention to it more often than I had back in the apartment building. I couldn't get distracted, couldn't wander off for longer than I could hold my breath.

  So I stayed near my body, hovering over it, but I shifted my awareness to the larger world around me.

  I expanded my awareness, further out from my body inside the solarium, spreading out throughout the house. I sensed Brianna already working in the library. Then I expanded further and felt Sophie going through the motions of her wand work in the attic. Then I expanded further until I was aware of the world outside the walls of the house. I sensed Mr. Trevor just coming up the front walk with his arms full of groceries.

  I contracted back until I was once more aware of the body in front of me, my own body. It was still breathing evenly, just as I'd intended it to.

  So far, so good. Now to expand a bit further.

  I shifted my focus, expanding ever wider. But just making a larger sphere of perception was going to be too tiring, I was sure. So instead, I shifted it sideways, centering on the building next door.

  I was no longer aware of Brianna or Sophie or Mr. Trevor. All I knew of inside the school was the single thread of awareness attached to my own body.

  But mostly I was focused on Nick. Was he in the building next door?

  If I lost my focus for even a moment the world of webs would fall into a pattern of chaos. I could not make heads or tails of it. I had to really focus, to see the things as
they appeared in the real world. This was easier to do with living things like people than it was with the walls of the building. Its threads were so cold and unmoving I could scarcely see them.

  I wasn't sure how exactly I was going to find the correct apartment when the walls and floors were so vaguely defined to me. But then I saw the brighter pattern of a person. The pattern felt familiar. Orderly, calm, kind.

  Nick's grandfather.

  And in case I wasn't sure I looked at a different, smaller pattern nearby, at his feet, a more chaotic pattern of energy. Finnegan. He appeared to be waiting for something to fall to the floor.

  I guessed that Nick's grandfather was making his breakfast, something with bits that Finnegan liked. Probably something with cheese.

  But there was no sign of Nick. I moved my awareness through the building, always paying just a little bit of attention to the thread connecting me to my own body, to feel the slight tug that meant it was still breathing. But there was no sign of Nick.

  Behind his grandfather and Finnegan, I found a space that contained whispers of his presence, like a ghost he had left behind. I guessed that I was perceiving the room that he slept in. He had left little bits of himself and his personal energy behind, but he wasn't there now.

  Did that mean he had been arrested after all? Or had he gone in to answer questions and was still at the police station?

  That nagging worry was starting to snowball on me, and I knew that real panic would throw me out of this meditative state. Instead, I focused back on Nick's grandfather, the calm and orderly energy that was the pattern of his threads.

  That was comforting, but not just because of the kindness that it radiated. It told me that Nick's grandfather wasn't worried about anything in particular. And if Nick had been out all night and never come home, I didn't think that would be true.

  Perhaps Nick had just gone the class. I had no idea what time he started classes, or if he went in early to get a run in or workout in the gym before the first class started. It sounded like the sort of thing he would do. I knew he was still very early to rise and early to bed, an artifact from his time in the military.

  In the end, I had to make the conscious decision not to worry about that anymore. Which sounds easier than it was. But I did it.

  Finally, I moved my consciousness into the empty apartment next door. That energy was familiar; I had been there before. Not just physically, I had perceived its web pattern of threads before. It was like coming back to a very familiar place.

  The body was gone. That I was sure of. Even though the body was no longer living, I would still have seen remnants of its former living shape in the world of threads more clearly than I perceived walls. But it was gone.

  And so was the wardrobe. I wasn't sure what that meant. I know the police take things from the scene of a crime, to process as evidence, but the wardrobe seemed awfully large for that.

  I felt the thread in my hand, the attachment to my body, still tugging at my awareness with each breath. My body was doing okay. I took one last moment to pass my awareness over the empty apartment rooms.

  Why was I attacked when I had passed in the hallway? How was this related to the body, which didn't even appear until hours later when I was attacked for the third time? And how had it attacked me the second time, when I wasn't even in the building?

  Maybe attack wasn't the right word for what happened to me. After all, I hadn't been physically harmed myself. It was more like I was aware of something happening to someone else.

  So does that mean three people had been attacked? Three people, and only one body to show for it?

  I started to wonder what had been going on inside that wardrobe before I found it. Maybe bodies had been winking in and out of existence the entire time, and I hadn't realized until I opened the wardrobe door.

  Still, why me? Was it because I passed too close?

  Or was this something to do with my magic being the rare kind of time magic?

  I could ask Brianna, but I didn't think she would know any more about it than I did.

  Suddenly I was back in my body, eyes open, pushing myself off up onto my feet before I even realized that I'd made a plan. I slipped out the back door, shivering almost at once. I had come downstairs to meditate dressed in yoga pants and a tank top. Clothes nowhere near warm enough for this kind of weather.

  Plus I had no shoes on. But I would only be outside for a moment. I went out to the orchard and stood amidst the trees. This was always where I could sense the time bridge, the one that permanently connected our world to 1927.

  It was getting easier and easier to switch to the perception of the world as a web of living threads. This time it happened almost instantly, and my body was still on its feet. I looked up at the bridge spiraling over me.

  It never ceased to be awe-inspiring, not just in concept but in execution. So few could perceive it, but it was a thing of great beauty, all shimmering with inner light, at once a piece of architecture and a living thing. But I forced myself to look not at the whole of it, but at every single part, combing over it with all the care and attention that I could muster, examining every orderly thread that made up its matrix.

  Sophie was right. I saw nothing out of order. And I knew that Brianna trusted her own detection equipment completely, and none of them had raised an alarm. Still, I felt more reassured having seen it with my own eyes. Whatever was going on with that wardrobe, it had nothing to do with our time bridge.

  Now there was just one more thing I wanted to do.

  "Juno?" I called. I waited a moment, awareness moving over the structure as I looked for any sign that Juno had heard me.

  I called her name three more times. Each time there was no sign of anything changing. I could still sense her presence there, but she was such an integral part of the bridge itself. The threads that made up who she was as a person were thoroughly intermixed with the threads of the structure itself. I couldn't really grasp one part of it to direct my calls to. None of it was more or less her than any other part.

  I knew she heard me, but she was ignoring me. And that was annoying because if there was one person who could explain to me what all this meant, it was the one person who shared my special power.

  But clearly, she wasn't interested in talking to me.

  I was on my own.

  Chapter 8

  The moment I came back into the house and felt the heat on my skin, I started shaking all over. Nope, definitely not dressed warmly enough.

  Still, I couldn't stop shaking. It was excessive, and I don't think it was just from the cold. All of the shifting of m awareness back and forth from the web world was more exhausting than I expected.

  I had left a hoodie on the chair in the solarium before I had started meditating. I quickly pulled that on before going into the kitchen.

  I heard the voices and identified each separately. I knew they were all in there, my fellow witches as well as the steward of the estate Mr. Trevor. But the look of alarm when they all saw me standing in the doorway was a bit more extreme than I had expected. Sophie and Brianna, waiting for the coffee machine to finish dripping, gaped at me in open-mouthed shock. Mr. Trevor had just loaded up the refrigerator with his purchases and froze in the act of folding the paper grocery bag to store with the others in the cupboard in the butler's pantry.

  "Miss Amanda, are you quite all right?" he asked me.

  "Yes, I'm fine," I said. But I was very aware that my hands were still shaking. I shoved them deep into the pockets of my hoodie.

  Sophie raised a single eyebrow. Brianna's eyes narrowed as she studied my face. I wasn't fooling anybody.

  "Perhaps this will help," Mr. Trevor said, setting a Styrofoam container on the kitchen counter. "It was a bit of an impulse buy for me, especially as I wasn't even sure if you were awake yet and these really are best when they're hot. But I thought you might like these."

  If there was ever a concept and a person that completely failed to fit together in my mind
, it was "impulse buy" and "Mr. Trevor."

  He opened the catch on the box with the squeak of Styrofoam on Styrofoam then flipped the lid back to release a cloud of steam. The smell hit me: egg and cheese and bacon all on fresh-baked English muffins.

  "Oh, that smells perfect," I said. Sophie quickly handed me one, and I ate half of it in one enormous bite.

  "Sometimes my instincts are good," Mr. Trevor said, clearly pleased. He took one sandwich for himself, wrapped it in a cloth napkin, and giving us his usual little nod that felt like a bow, he disappeared up the back stairs to his personal office.

  I wondered just what it was he did all day. Besides, hone his psychic powers to be attuned to knowing in advance just what I was hungry for.

  "You were in the backyard?" Brianna asked.

  "Briefly," I said. "I wanted to take a look at the time bridge. Not that I didn't believe you," I quickly said to Sophie.

  Sophie waved the remark away with a hurried gesture. "No, we should all back each other up, right? And Amanda, I'm sorry about the things I said last night. I didn't really mean–"

  "No need to apologize," I quickly said. "You weren't entirely wrong, were you? I do need to start doing more on my own. I can't keep expecting the two of you to do all the heavy lifting for me. No, you weren't wrong."

  "I wasn't kind, either," Sophie said.

  I couldn't answer right away, as I had stuffed the rest of the sandwich into my mouth. It was so good, the heat of it quickly calming the last of my shivers that had come from the cold. I could feel it refueling me after the magical strain as well. The effect was instantaneous.

  The warmth of the food warming my body, and that delicious mix of fat and protein and carbs flooding my bloodstream...

  Okay, technically I was only just starting to digest it. None of it could possibly be in my bloodstream that fast. But you know what I mean. Sometimes food just feels that way.