Witches & Words

by Elle Adams

  I halted at the end of a row of doors. These ones weren’t marked with X symbols, but instead bore marks which looked similar to the symbol on the book’s spine. Now this was more like it.

  “You’re painfully slow,” said the book. “I’d like to reach my destination sometime this century.”

  “All right, no need to be rude.” I checked the book’s spine again, and my gaze snagged on a door on my right, which was marked with the same symbol as the book. There it is.

  I pulled out my Biblio-Witch Inventory and opened it, revealing the words I’d learned to infuse with magic. Tapping the word open with my fingertip, I braced myself and focused on the door. The wooden door sprang open and I held up the book as a shield, but there didn’t appear to be anything inside the room except a single wooden table. I didn’t blame my aunts for putting the book in isolation, considering its argumentative nature. A relieved breath escaped when I stepped into the room and left the book on the table without anything jumping out and biting me.

  “Well, it’s been fun getting to know you,” I told the book. “Have fun in here.”

  “Wait,” said the book. “Hang on. It’s awfully dark in here, isn’t it? Waaaaiiit…”

  I closed the door and locked it, dusting off my hands with satisfaction and making a mental note to warn my aunts not to open that door without using an earplug charm first. For now, I checked the time. Almost midnight. I’d have to run if I wanted to make it back outside before the clocks struck twelve.

  I took the stairs two at a time—skipping the ones that tended to vanish without warning—and ran through the dusty stacks of the ground floor. Then I skirted the front desk, pushed the oak doors open and halted on the doorstep, my eyes on the clock tower as it struck midnight.

  Loud cheers rose from the crowd near the beach, audible across the town square in the lull between fireworks. In the velvet sky, a bright shape stood out among the surrounding stars, dazzling enough to draw the eye. Estelle was right.

  The star detached itself from its fellow sparkling lights and tumbled towards the sea before winking out of existence. A small selfish wish rose, expanding inside my chest as the first fireworks of the new year exploded across the sky.

  Speaking quietly, I voiced my wish aloud, following the barely visible trail of the star with my eyes.

  As the clock tower chimed midnight, I wished for Xavier to come back.

  2

  I’d planned to sleep in late on the first day of the new year, but Sylvester woke me by singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in my ear at full volume.

  “Hey!” I sat bolt upright in bed. “You know we’re not open until noon, don’t you?”

  “I’m bored,” said the owl, landing on my bedpost in a flutter of tawny wings.

  I yawned. “You’re bored? Go and annoy someone else. Aunt Adelaide always gets up early.”

  So did Estelle. Aunt Candace and I were not morning people, as Sylvester knew well. Unlike most owls, he rose early and slept at night, which was one of many small clues that he was no ordinary bird. Considering he had the entirety of the library’s knowledge at his beck and call, you’d think he’d have more interesting hobbies than trying his level best to annoy me.

  “You talk in your sleep,” said the owl. “You sounded rather miserable, so I thought I was doing you a kindness by waking you up.”

  “I did?” Please tell me I hadn’t been dreaming about Xavier again.

  The owl sprawled dramatically on my pillow. “Oh, Reaper. Don’t leave me, Reaper.”

  My face flushed crimson. “Shut up.”

  Sylvester hooted with laughter. “Reeeaaaper!”

  “Quiet,” I snapped. “If you don’t want me to give away your big secret, you’re not to repeat any of that again to anyone, including my family members. Is that clear?”

  He hopped into an upright position and fluffed his feathers. “There’s no need for that, Aurora.”

  I shooed Sylvester out of my room, then I showered and dressed, trying to reboot my brain to optimism mode. Dreams notwithstanding, I would not be starting the year off by lamenting what I couldn’t have. After all, I had three hundred and sixty-five days of a new year ahead of me and I planned to make the most of every single one of them. If I had it my way, my first full year in the library would be one to remember.

  My phone buzzed as I left my room with a message from my best friend, Laney, wishing me a happy new year. Laney was my one remaining friend from my life before I’d moved to the library and had no idea the magical world existed, due to the strict rules forbidding me from sharing the existence of the paranormal with any non-paranormal. I had mixed feelings on said rules, which were the reason it’d taken twenty-five years and a brush with death at the hands of a group of vampires for me to learn I had a whole other family I’d never met. I dashed off a response to Laney, hoping the message didn’t take two days to reach her this time, and went downstairs. To my surprise, I found Cass sitting alone in the living room. Maybe she couldn’t sleep, either.

  “Why do you look so miserable?” said Cass. “Don’t tell me you’re still moping over the Reaper. What did you expect when you invited him to a party?”

  “I didn’t invite him. He just showed up.” I left the room and headed to the kitchen in search of coffee. “Besides, if I look miserable, it’s because Sylvester woke me up early for no reason. Why doesn’t he sleep during the day, anyway?”

  “I imagine he keeps the same sleeping hours we do because it gives him more hours to annoy us,” said Estelle from the kitchen. “The good news is, my mum left us breakfast, and since we’re both awake, we can go and practise spells with your new wand.”

  “I like the sound of that.” I walked in the kitchen and found someone had already set out plates of toast and mugs of coffee. I picked one up and inhaled the delicious smell of coffee grounds. One year I might try to kick the caffeine habit, but it wouldn’t be this one.

  “You’re seriously excited about doing extra work?” Cass said from behind me.

  “Hey, all my lessons have been on hold since Christmas Eve.” I sat down and dug into my toast and jam.

  Now I had my dad’s old wand, I’d finally be able to start learning how to use it. And as Cass had caustically noted, I liked learning and practising magic. Cass didn’t seem to like anything except the magical creatures she took care of.

  On cue, she said, “I’m off to the third floor. Have fun with your schoolwork.”

  “Wonder which animal she’ll bring in this year?” I said to Estelle when she’d left. “Probably a chimera.”

  “Don’t give her ideas,” said Estelle. “The boggart and the minotaur were bad enough. And the kelpie. He came to the beach last night because he was freaked out by the fireworks, so she decided to go for a swim with him.”

  “I figured.” I sipped my coffee. “Did Aunt Adelaide have to fish her out of the sea again?”

  “Pretty much.” Estelle took her plate to the sink. “To be honest, I think she swam out there so none of us would hear her saying her wish aloud. You know, the first wish of the year. You saw the falling star from the library, right?”

  “I did, but I didn’t think it would be Cass’s thing,” I said. “She isn’t the whimsical sort.”

  “No, she isn’t,” said Estelle. “But Cass does like to keep things to herself. What did you wish, then? I won’t tell.” She winked at me.

  My face heated. “I don’t know if it counts if what you wish for is impossible. Even magic can’t work miracles.”

  “You never know what might happen.” Estelle gave me a sympathetic smile, as though she’d guessed the direction of my thoughts.

  “I guess not.” I took another sip of coffee. “It won’t take me as long to get through the next round of magical exams now I have a wand, right?”

  Estelle was a natural-born teacher and she enjoyed having a new pupil to work with, even an absolute newbie who’d crashed into the magical world by accident. It was a step down from working wit
h undergraduates like she normally did, but Estelle had been nothing but patient with me.

  “I doubt you’ll have any trouble,” she said. “You’ll get through the Grade Two exams easily enough. You just need to learn some basic potion-making. And then in the Grade Three exam, you’ll need one ‘extra’ skill. I think familiar training will work perfectly. You and Jet are already doing well, so that shouldn’t be an issue for you.”

  “And there’s a theory test at each round, right?” I was lucky Estelle didn’t make fun of me for reading my schoolbooks over the holidays. I’d got used to being the weird bookish outcast when I was a kid, but who wouldn’t want to learn everything about the paranormal world? Magic might not be novel to Cass, but it was to me.

  “There is,” said Estelle. “You’ll have separate theory and practical exams. We used to do both at the same time, but thanks to Cass, my mum banned pens and paper from the practical magic exams, after she kept using biblio-witch magic to cheat because she couldn’t use a basic levitation spell. Don’t tell her I told you that.”

  “Ha.” I smiled. “I’m guessing she got the hang of it eventually.”

  “Not without a huge fuss,” she said. “This is Cass we’re talking about, after all.”

  “What’s she done now?” said Aunt Adelaide, poking her head into the kitchen.

  “Nothing yet, but she has a whole new year in which to get up to mischief,” said Estelle. “Where’s Aunt Candace?”

  “Sleeping in, I imagine,” she said. “Or fishing for rumours to give her a head-start on her next book.”

  “Oh, so that’s where Jet disappeared to.” My familiar liked catching up on the town’s latest gossip, and Aunt Candace was the only person willing to listen to him for an extended length of time. Mostly because his chattering about the neighbours’ lives gave her endless material for her books. “Guess some people had a wild night out.”

  Not me. I’d gone back to join the others on the beach until the fireworks finished and then retired to bed early. Estelle had stayed out longer, but she was always perky and wide-awake no matter how little sleep she’d had.

  “I didn’t see anything too outrageous,” said Estelle. “A few people went swimming at midnight and had to be levitated out of the ocean before the tide swept them away.”

  “Happens every year, the fools.” Aunt Adelaide retreated from the room. “I’m sorting this year’s paperwork until we open. Give me a shout if you need me, okay?”

  “Sure thing,” said Estelle. “There aren’t any other books that need returning, I don’t think. Oh yeah, you did manage to return that book on time yesterday, Rory? I never asked.”

  I finished my coffee. “I’ve never had a book strike up that much of an argument with me before.”

  Estelle frowned. “The book talked to you?”

  I put down my mug. “It didn’t just talk to me, it turned itself inside-out to stop me from shelving it in the right section.”

  She grimaced. “Oh, no. I should have dealt with it instead.”

  “Nah, it would have been fine if I’d shelved it before the guy in the cloak disappeared,” I said. “As soon as he was gone, the book started giving me grief. It probably knew I was a newbie and assumed it didn’t have to show me any respect.”

  “Some of those old tomes get restless,” she said. “You could have left it on the desk to sort out later.”

  “It would have started screaming if I’d been late putting it in the right place, so I reckon I got off easy.” I shuddered. “What kind of book was it, anyway? It bit my fingers when I tried to open it and look inside, and the text on the cover wasn’t written in English.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “I have no idea, actually. I haven’t dealt with a time-sensitive book for a while.”

  “That explains why there was nothing else in the room where I had to take it,” I said. “It gave me a weird vibe, come to that. Should I not have gone in there alone?”

  “If the room was empty, it’s fine,” she said. “Sylvester would have taken over if it’d been beyond your level.”

  “I didn’t ask him for help because I figured he and the book would get into an argument,” I admitted. “Let’s just say the book made even Sylvester look polite, and that’s saying a lot.”

  “Oh, boy.” She waved her wand, and our plates and mugs levitated over to the sink. “All right, let’s put that new wand of yours to use.”

  Since the library wouldn’t open to the public until later, we opted to practise in the Reading Corner, a cosy area at the back of the ground floor filled with bean bags, hammocks and comfy chairs.

  “Here will do,” said Estelle. “We won’t use any spells that might damage anything, but the library is used to students practising magic in the classrooms.”

  I pulled out my wand, anticipation building within me. While the long stick of wood looked the same as any other wand, the rush of energy that tingled through my palm when I held it was unmatched by anything except for my Biblio-Witch Inventory. I’d spent a few weeks practising basic wand movements ready to put them into practice, but my wand classes with my aunts weren’t set to begin until later this week. If Aunt Candace’s approach to practical lessons was anything like her theory classes, though, I’d be left to my own devices. Luckily, I’d always been a fast learner.

  “Which spell do you want to start with?” Estelle asked.

  “Uh… good question.” I’d gathered quite a few words in my Biblio-Witch Inventory by now, including spells for levitating books, unlocking and locking doors, and all the other vital skills necessary for navigating a magical library. Memorising words came more naturally to me than complex wand movements, but I’d already mastered the light spell and I had no doubt I’d get used to my wand with practise. “I guess conjuring and levitation spells will be the most useful on the job. Is conjuring too advanced?”

  “For you? No.” Estelle lifted her own wand. “You shouldn’t have any trouble envisioning a particular book and summoning it. It’s not that different from the way you use biblio-witch magic.”

  “Only if the books don’t talk back to me.”

  She grinned. “Don’t worry, they won’t, as long as you don’t summon the one you put in that room.”

  “Believe me, I don’t plan on ever setting eyes on it again.” I faced the towering shelves and pictured a volume of poetry I’d picked up the other day. “Okay… let’s try this.”

  I moved the wand in a complex zigzag pattern as I’d practised. There was a flash of light, and the book appeared in my hands.

  “Perfect,” said Estelle.

  I lowered the book. “How do I send it back to where it came from?”

  “Don’t look at me.” Sylvester flew over our heads, his huge feathery wings casting shadows on the carpet of the Reading Corner. “I’m not going to carry all the books you move around back to their shelves. I have better things to do than act as your carrier pigeon.”

  “If you hadn’t appeared just then, we wouldn’t have known you were around,” I pointed out. “Anyway, you’re the one who woke me up early in the first place.”

  “Practising spells, are you?” said Aunt Candace’s voice from nearby. “Try not to break anything.”

  My other aunt stepped out from behind a bookcase. She was tall and thin with a wild nest of curly red hair which looked like it hadn’t been brushed in several years. As usual, her pen and notebook floated in mid-air beside her, scribbling notes for her next project. It seemed she wouldn’t be kicking the habit of spending most of her time hiding behind bookshelves eavesdropping on people. When she wasn’t listening to Jet recount the town’s gossip, that is.

  “I’m sure you’d manage to get a good story out of it if I did.” I crossed the Reading Corner to the shelf where the book belonged and slid it back into place. “Do conjuring spells get harder the further away your target is?”

  “They do,” said Estelle. “There’s also a limit as to how far away you can go. Not outside the town’s bounda
ries, I wouldn’t think.”

  “Nonsense,” said Aunt Candace. “The library would be bigger than the whole town if you laid out all the rooms side by side. Let’s see if she can conjure something from the upper level.”

  “Even you can’t conjure something if you don’t know what it looks like,” said Estelle. “Stop taunting her, Aunt Candace.”

  “I’m not taunting, I’m challenging her,” said Aunt Candace. “She’s the most powerful biblio-witch in a generation.”

  Heat crept up my neck. Only Aunt Candace could make that sentence sound like a taunt instead of a compliment. “Really?”

  I was still a newbie to the world of magic, and as far as I was concerned, knowledge was power. The library contained much more of that than I did, and so did Sylvester, come to that. Sure enough, the owl let out a disapproving clucking sound. “Don’t get big-headed. You can’t hold a candle to Adelaide, and your grandmother could cast better spells with her eyes closed and her wand lying on the floor.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not getting big-headed. Also, are you implying Grandma was more powerful than you?”

  “Oh, even her skills were paltry compared to mine,” the owl said, landing on a bookshelf and ruffling his feathers. “I am a superior being, after all.”

  “You’re not a biblio-witch, you’re an owl.” Or rather, you’re the Book of Questions. It was beyond me to figure out whether he was trying to taunt me into spilling his secrets to the others, or he was just being, well, Sylvester.

  “And you’re a—”

  “Sylvester!” said Estelle. “Why do you stay here in the library if you think we’re all stupid? Because we feed you?”

  “You don’t feed me,” he said.

  “That’s because you only let Cass feed you,” she said. “The last time I tried, you bit my fingers and accused me of treating you like a common animal. I don’t know why you make an exception for Cass.”

  “I humour her. She respects me, after all.”

  “Because she likes animals more than people.” Estelle folded her arms. “And she’s the one who cast the spell that made you talk. If not for us, you’d be flying around hooting and nobody would understand you.”