by Martha Carr
“Oh…nice double standard.” Nickie waited for her older sister to look up at her so she could wink at Laura.
“Yeah, okay. I still don’t know what it does.”
“Wait, lemme see.” Emily stood beside Nickie, peered down at the second orb, and pressed the small round button. The little door at the bottom opened like the other one did, letting out that tiny, glowing strand of iron. “See?”
“Hey, maybe your ring’s magic is making broken things work again,” Nickie said. “Actually, that kind of makes sense.”
“Except for the first time the ring did something weird on its own—just a blast of air when Speed stank up my room.”
Nickie shrugged. “Maybe it thought our dog was broken. I think Chuck’s said the exact same thing once or—ah!” She jerked her hand away from the silver-glowing string, and the iron orb toppled onto the table with a thunk.
“What was that?”
“It shocked me.” Nickie shook her hand out and tried to relieve the pain.
“I don’t know.” Emily eyed her with an unsure smile. “The other one was just fine. Let me see.” She set her orb on the table and turned Nickie’s hand over. “Oh. Ouch.”
“Told you.” Nickie frowned at the purple streaks across the pads of her thumb and index finger. “That flipping hurts.”
“It actually shocked you?” Laura set down the dagger and walked around the table to see for herself. “Whoa.”
Nickie prodded the marks with her other finger and winced. “That’s not good. Can’t hold a pick if two of the fingers I need feel like they’re on fire.”
Emily reached toward the shorter iron thread protruding from the second orb. No one stopped her from poking at it, but nothing happened, either. “Huh. So I’m immune to electric iron string? Laura, you give it a try.” She grabbed the orb and held it out toward her sister.
“Uh, no thanks. I like my fingers the way they are.”
“Yeah, I get that.” Emily touched the dangling thread again, then pulled it out as far as she could stretch her arms. “Weird.”
“Hey, be careful with that.” Nickie backed away. “I’m gonna go put some ice on this.” She headed into the kitchen.
“You know, despite the fact that I’m still not gonna test this theory myself, I think it’s safe to assume that maybe my ring helped me make those specifically for you.” Laura folded her arms and nodded at the iron spheres.
“You mean, like, I’m the only one who can touch these things?”
“Em, look at your hand.”
Emily glanced down to see the copper ring on her thumb pulsing with a soft orange light. She dropped the string, and the light faded. “That’s cool and everything.” When she touched the string again, the light on her ring returned. “But I don’t think an iron yo-yo’s gonna do much to a Gorafrex.”
“Well, if it’s shocking or burning everyone else, you’re still the only person who can figure it out.” Laura shrugged and eyed the length of glowing iron string Emily spread out on the table. “Do they go back in?”
Which was what they did when Emily pressed the tiny round button on each orb. “Like a retractable tape measure. Just apparently not as useful.”
The sound of ice clattering into the sink came from the kitchen, followed by Nickie shouting, “What the—” Whatever word she said next was muffled, and Laura and Emily exchanged a worried glance before rushing into the kitchen.
“Nickie?”
“Are you—holy what?”
A small purple bubble floated just in front of Nickie’s face as she turned toward them, then it drifted down onto her hand stretched over the sink. When it landed on her burned fingers, it settled into the wounds and disappeared beneath her skin. “Guess I don’t need a wand for healing anymore.”
Nickie gestured at her hand over the sink, and with a flash of her ring, another healing purple bubble formed at her fingertips and headed for the burns. That was the last one, the marks on her thumb and index finger were gone.
“Is that what the rings are for?” Laura asked, drawing hers and frowning at it. “To replace our wands?”
Emily cocked her head. “Aw. I like my wand.”
“Well, yeah. But maybe we don’t need them.” Laura set hers on the kitchen counter, then stepped back and scanned the kitchen. She focused on the bunch of bananas in a bowl beside the fridge. She reached out toward them, her silver ring flashed, and a banana snapped from the bunch and drifted across the room into her hand. Grinning, she pointed the fruit at Emily. “This was exactly what I meant to do. No wand. No spellcasting; at least, not the way we’re used to doing it.”
“Huh.” Emily eyed the banana with a raised eyebrow, then pointed at it. Her copper ring flashed, the banana peel split open in Laura’s hand, and yellow-white goo fell from her hand onto the floor.
“Ew.” Laura stepped away from the splattered mess, then sighed when she realized her hand hadn’t escaped the banana gloop. “Em, I realize you’re just trying to be funny—”
“Taste it.” Emily’s eyes were wide with excitement above a tiny smirk.
“What?” Her oldest sister eyed her warily. “I’m not gonna taste your squashed banana.”
“Do it.”
“No. I’m gonna clean up this mess. Better yet, why don’t you clean it up—hey.”
“Oh, fine. I’ll taste it.” Nickie reached out and swiped her finger along Laura’s hand before sticking it and the gelatinous goo into her mouth. She laughed. “Oh, my god.”
“Right?” Emily grinned and nodded.
“Laura, you have to taste it,” Nickie pushed Laura’s own hand toward her.
“Ugh, you two.” Laura licked the back of her hand, the empty banana peel dangling in her fingers. “There. I tasted it. So now let’s cut it with the—” She smacked her lips, recognizing the taste. “Is that…”
“Banana pudding.” Emily looked like a madwoman about to enact her master plan for world domination. “Without any other ingredients. Or a wand.”
Laura licked the back of her hand again, then tossed the banana peel in the trash beside the fridge. “Okay. Are we agreed the no-wands theory is a go?”
“I’m gonna agree with you one hundred percent on that,” Nickie said, tearing off a paper towel from the roll.
“I got it.” Emily took the paper towel from her sister and squatted to wipe up the banana pudding she’d made with the ring’s help. She glanced up at her sisters. “This makes a lot more sense now, doesn’t it?”
“What’s that?” Laura cocked her head, smiling.
“The rings make the best of our magic stronger. Focused. They take what we’re really good at doing and make it better.”
“Right.” Laura squinted in thought as Emily finished cleaning up and tossed the paper towel. “Nickie’s is pretty obvious.”
“My music.”
“Isn’t it always?” Emily laughed.
“Mine…” Laura frowned.
“Artifacts,” Nickie said. “Objects. Finding them, making them, using them. That’s always been your thing.”
Laura grinned. “True. And Emily?”
“Makes a mean banana pudding.” Nickie laughed.
“Why, thank you.” Emily stepped back and gave her sisters a low, dramatic bow. When neither of them continued the revelation of her personal specialty with magic, she folded her arms and smirked at them. “I’m just really good at creating something better than what’s already there.”
“There it is.” Laura grinned at her sisters. “You know, Em, it’d be super great if you could create us a way to track down the Gorafrex before it starts wreaking human havoc all over Austin.”
Emily snorted. “Oh, yeah. Sure. I’ll get right on that.”
25
The Gorafrex reached into its host’s mind to be sure the house in front of it was the right place. Even in the middle of the night, the purple front door was unmistakable, as were the numbers nailed to the exterior wall beside it. The Gorafrex moved insid
e the woman’s body toward the door. The woman, however, was missing some sort of key to enter her quarters. Hardly an obstacle. With a flick of its host’s wrist, the Gorafrex summoned a large crimson bubble with streaks of crackling red energy around it and sent it at the purple door.
The wood split on contact, exploding backward into the human’s house in a burst of sawdust and wood fragments. The Gorafrex snapped its fingers, and all the lights within clicked on at once.
“This is what they’ve become?” the woman muttered in a voice that wasn’t completely her own. She brushed her fingers over the back of the brown leather couch in the living room, then glanced at the splintered debris on the floor. “After all this time, they’ve forgotten what they are. Why they’re here. And they’ve forgotten about me.” The woman’s face twisted into a vengeful sneer.
She stepped into the living room and turned in a slow circle, taking in the pictures on the mantle of a woman standing alone with mountains in the background, a river, the beach, tall white buildings. “Pathetic.”
Another blood-red bubble crackling with fiery energy rose in her palm, and she threw it toward the center of the room. The low coffee table and the loveseat flew backward to crash into the far wall, and the rug beneath let off a thin curl of acrid smoke from singed fibers.
The Gorafrex moved its host into the center of the room and sat cross-legged on the rug. “They will come.”
A soft mewl rose from behind her, and she glanced sideways at the floor to see a small, lithe gray cat padding curiously toward her. “At least I found something useful in this waste.” She held out her hand, and the cat rubbed its face against her fingers before climbing up into the woman’s lap. It sat there, purring beneath what felt like its owner’s calming affection.
“They will come,” the Gorafrex repeated. It stopped stroking the cat and instead took a firm grip upon the back of the animal’s neck. “Then I will take from them what I need and finish what I started.”
The house pet let out a strangled croak, and the woman squeezed even tighter.
26
Emily showed up to work the next morning feeling like a million bucks. “A wand instead of a ring.” She chuckled and finished mincing the garlic for the soup Chef Ansler had added to the menu. “Sure, I sewed all those pockets for a wand…” She shrugged. “Fair trade for a super-boost of my strongest magic.”
“Hadstrom!”
“Yes, Chef.”
“Five minutes, and we need to move on to the wild mushroom.”
“Yes, Chef.”
She didn’t look up from her workstation in the bustling kitchen, moving as quickly as her fingers and her knife would allow. “I’ve already got soups down,” she muttered, sliding the garlic off the cutting board and into a large stainless-steel pot. “Obviously. But they’re gonna keep me here as long as they had me on vegetables. Or longer.” She grabbed the lemon in front of her, quartered it, measured out the juice. “I need to blow him away with something incredible if I want to move up. Can’t do that if he’s already got the menu down…”
She stopped cutting and glanced at her hand wrapped around the handle of her Shun chef’s knife. The copper ring on her thumb glinted at her as if it had winked. Lifting her head, she glanced around the bustling kitchen at every head chef and assisting chef, all of them focused on their work, completing their part of Chef Ansler’s vision of a menu. “I can do so much better than this. Screw the rules.”
Everything she needed was right in front of her. Her magic through her ring could take care of the rest. “Today, I’m going all out.”
She tapped her workstation and nodded at the prepped vegetables beside the pot. Her ring flashed, the produce disappeared, and a muffled plop rose from the pot of soup. Stifling back her enthusiasm, she pointed to each ingredient in turn; every item minced, diced, pared, sliced, and shaved itself into the pot the way she wanted. In less than a minute, she’d completed what would have normally taken her five minutes.
Emily bit her lip and eyed the pot again. “Just make it good.” She tapped the edge of the pot, her ring flashed, and she grinned.
The flame still flickered beneath the burner, and she stirred her creation a few times.
“Three minutes,” her advising Potager Chef called.
“Finished,” Emily told him. “Moving on. Wild mushroom.”
“Really?” Anthony stepped toward her station with a suspicious frown.
With a nod, Emily turned from her station to grab the tray of ingredients she’d set aside for the second soup option. She snuck a glance at her supervisor at the potager station, who’d brought a tasting spoon of her first soup to his lips. He blinked, and when Emily set down her tray, Anthony stormed off across the kitchen with a side dish of her soup. She bit back a smile and got to work on the wild mushroom soup.
Two minutes later, Chef Ansler stood behind her, watching. Emily didn’t look up, and of course she couldn’t use her magic now. “Hadstrom, what did you do to the garbanzo-leek?”
“I made it exactly the way you wanted, Chef.” She fought to keep her voice even and her face expressionless as she cut the wild mushrooms into thin strips. From the corner of her eye, she saw him take another bite from the side dish.
“Hmm. You didn’t add anything? Change it in any way?”
Just a little magic. No big deal. “No, Chef.”
For a few seconds, he stood there, then he leaned toward her and whispered, “You’ve got my attention, Emily. Do something important with it.”
He clapped his hands and rushed away. “Change of plans. We do things a certain way in this kitchen, but today, we’re going to break the rules. I want every station to go taste the garbanzo-leek. I want this week’s menu paired to what you pick up in there. If you can add a dish to it, excellent. If not, scrap it and start over. We’re gonna blow this outta the park.” Then he left the kitchen for reasons only Chef Ansler knew as the chefs swarmed Emily’s station.
She ignored them and kept working on the wild mushrooms as one after another of her superior chefs at Meadowlark Tavern dipped their spoons into the stainless-steel pot on the burner and learned what they could from what the junior chef had done.
Creating from what’s already there. She forced back a smirk and glanced at the copper ring again. Let’s do this.
Nickie pulled her guitar case out of the backseat of Laura’s car and closed the door. She peered through the open passenger side door and smiled. “Thanks for dropping me off.”
“No problem. It’s good to have your own car again.”
“Yup.” Nickie lifted her keys and dangled them by her face. “Time to get going.”
“Where’s Chuck?”
“Oh, he’s got meetings all day. I’ll probably see him tonight.”
“You have a show, right?”
“Yup. At Tina’s.”
Laura squinted. “The laundromat.”
“That’s the one. Before you ask again, I’m doing it ‘cause it’s fun. And she’s a friend.”
Her sister shrugged behind the wheel. “Sounds like good reasons to me.”
“What are you up to?”
“I’m gonna see if I can find anything else on the Gorafrex. Maybe there’s some kinda history book, some account of what happened before everyone got on this ship.”
Nickie widened her eyes. “You think something survived from that long ago?”
“Maybe. I have a few ideas of where to start.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. See ya.”
Nickie closed the car door and watched her sister drive away before she went to her black Camry and stuck her guitar case on the passenger seat. Then she headed out of Chuck’s neighborhood.
She parked relatively close to Shoal Beach, just east of where Barton Creek intersected the Colorado River. Her Dad used to tell her when she was a kid, “There’s no better place to practice than in public. Most people pretend they don’t hear, and you get to pretend you don’t care.”
<
br /> A little sliver of sandy grass ran along the river right off the bike trail. It was as secluded and unoccupied today as Nickie always found it. She settled in the grass, a thick cluster of trees at her back and listened to the sounds of the city and the occasional whir of rubber bike tires passing behind her.
With a sigh, she gazed across the river and enjoyed the cool shade. Then, she opened her guitar case, lifted her guitar into her lap, and tuned the strings. “Just a little break,” she reminded herself. “Then I can help Laura look for information.”
Nickie closed her eyes and didn’t take out her pick this time. Just a little gentle strumming on the strings, and she let her fingers take over. The wind rustled through the leaves around her, casting flickering shadows and lifting her hair away from her face. She played, and a small pressure built behind her temple.
The drumming started in her head. Her fingers slipped off the strings, and she took a sharp breath. “Again? I thought I figured this out.” Nickie gritted her teeth and recalled her discovery yesterday. She ignored the pain and the deafening volume of the Gorafrex’s chaotic rhythm—did her best, at least— and her fingers formed the chords to the song her Dad had sung all her life.
The branches shook overhead, rustling violently. Nickie hummed the lullaby proven to make the pounding in her head stop, then something thumped onto the ground beside her. She opened her eyes and felt a warm, gentle hand on her shoulder. She paused playing as a Tree Folk crouched beside her, golden whiskers fluttering around his face. He pressed a finger to his lips, and his brow furrowed in a dark frown.
“Uh, hi,” Nickie whispered, staring at him.
“We heard your song.” The elf spoke in a low voice and glanced around at the trees between where they sat and the bike path on the other side. “We shouldn’t have.”
“My—how’d you get here?”
The elf smirked. “We are the Tree Folk. Not the Boggy Creek Folk.”
“So you…live in all the trees?”
