by Martha Carr
The dining room fell silent a few seconds, then Emily patted the table and stood. “I’m gonna go to bed. I’m not as tired as the witch who literally played ‘til she dropped.” She nodded toward the living room. “But I’m super tired.”
“Long day at work?”
Emily laughed. “You could say that.”
“What happened?”
“Um…you could say I practiced my stronger ring-magic in the kitchen. And it totally backfired.”
“Didn’t go well?”
“I mean, I got everything squared away eventually. Just had to swallow my pride first.” She snorted. “Literally.”
31
The next morning over breakfast, Laura and Emily sat down with a refreshed Nickie to explain everything their sister had missed the night before, including the wand on their dining room table and the kidnapped witch or wizard who owned it.
Pulling up in front of Hopkins’ Antiques, Laura thought over that conversation and frowned. “Yeah, I think I’d be just as upset if I’d missed all that too. Now we know what mistakes not to make.”
The bell tied to the front door jingled when she stepped inside. Carl looked up from the glowing chalice he was studying on the counter and blinked in surprise. “Laura.”
“Good morning, Carl.” She strode to the counter. “Good to see you too.”
“Sorry.” He shook his head and chuckled. “I just didn’t expect to see you. Thought you’d be busy…you know. Locking it back up.”
“Yeah, me too. Turns out we only have part of the answer. Which is why I’m here again so soon.”
“Sure.” Carl folded his hands on the counter and nodded. “What can I help you with?”
“First, just because…” Laura took out her phone and pulled up the picture she’d taken of the two iron spheres sitting on her dining-room table. “You ever seen one of these before?”
He squinted. “Nope.”
“That’s okay. Figured it was a long shot, anyway.”
“What are they?”
“Some kind of weapon. I think. It’s a long story.” She dropped her phone back into her purse. “I’m pretty sure you can help me with this, though.” Reaching into her back pocket, she pulled out the abandoned wand and set it on the counter.
Carl raised his eyebrows and smirked. “Well, yes, I’ve definitely seen one of these before.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Oh.”
“I need to find the person this belongs to.”
He sniffed and nodded, then reached out for a long sip of already-cold tea in the chipped teacup. “That I’m quite familiar with. Just a sec.” The man turned and looked over the long shelf behind him overflowing with random objects.
How does he keep track of where everything is?
“Ah.” Carl held back a tower of dull, rusted crowns with one hand while pulling another item out from beneath them. He reached into a separate pile of things, rummaged around, and withdrew a second piece. He turned toward her and set down a heavy metal bowl and a wooden mallet, the round end wrapped in purple wool. “This’ll do it.”
“What’s this?”
“This is a Tibetan singing bowl. Observe.” Carl picked up the mallet and drew its head around and around the lip of the bowl until a low, warbling pitch rose from the counter.
“Isn’t that used for meditation or something?”
“Traditionally, yes. This one, though, was crafted by an incredibly talented Buddhist monk in the mid-1700s who also happened to be a wizard. The…ringing of this bowl attaches itself to different magical frequencies, depending on anything to which its focus is directed. Such as…may I?” He gestured toward the wand.
Laura nodded. “Please.”
“Excellent.” Carl picked up the wand and gingerly set it inside the bowl.
Laura pointed and let out a surprised chuckle. “Did it just shrink that wand to fit inside?”
“Like I said. Incredibly talented.” Carl drew the mallet around and around the lip of the bowl, and when the tone rose from the metal, the wand lit up with a red light. A faint streak of that same red glow flashed out of the bowl and shot toward the door to his shop. Laura watched it travel a little farther before it disappeared. The minute Carl stopped moving the mallet, the red glow around the wand faded. “That would be the magical frequencies. It’s the best thing I’ve found for tracking them short of complicated spells I just don’t have time to work on. And it’s color-coded.”
Laura laughed. “Really?”
“Yep. Red for anything over ten miles away, I believe. Orange for five to ten miles. Yellow for one to five miles. White, of course, is less than a mile, and when it starts flashing? Well, that’s when you know you’re close.” He reached into the bowl and removed the wand, which elongated to its normal size. Then he set it on the counter and nodded.
“Carl, you just sold me another artifact.” Laura reached into her purse and smiled at him. “What’s this one gonna cost me?”
“Is it part of helping you find the”—he glanced around his empty shop and whispered, “Gorafrex?”
“Yes. And you don’t have to whisper. It’s not the boogeyman, Carl.”
He shrugged. “Might as well be, coming after wand-users.” He rapped his knuckles on the counter. “Since this will help keep us all out of danger, I won’t charge full price. I still have to charge you something.”
“I’d be worried if you didn’t.”
His mouth went to the side and he tapped the counter with a finger as he appraised the situation. “Two hundred.”
Laura’s eyes widened, but she shook her head and opened her wallet. “I appreciate you knocking it down for me.” She handed him her card. “They’re always worth it when I get ‘em from you.”
“That’s why I’m here.” Carl grinned and moved down the counter to run her card.
Once she’d finished explaining how the bowl worked, Laura sat back and spread her arms. “You guys wanna come with me to find the owner of this wand?”
“Duh.” Emily bit into what was left of her apple with a loud crunch.
Nickie stared at the magical singing bowl in the center of their kitchen table and folded her arms. “You know, I haven’t heard the drums in over twelve hours. You think we’re gonna find the Gorafrex when we find who that belongs to?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But since you played yourself to exhaustion trying to draw the thing to us last night, we should probably wait a while ‘til we try again.” Laura nodded at the bowl on the table. “Right now, this is the only way for us to find out where it’s hiding. And we need to help whoever it snatched up last night.”
“So how does this thing work?” Nickie asked.
“Just like this.” Laura set the wand into the bowl, smirking when her sisters leaned forward to watch it shrink. She moved the mallet around until the sound rose from the metal and the wand glowed orange. A red streak shot across their kitchen and went right through the dining room wall and the front of the house. “Still over ten miles away.”
“That doesn’t really narrow it down,” Emily said.
“Right. But the direction that light just went is like a big arrow. Let’s follow it.”
They piled into Emily’s car—not without Laura switching over the extra daggers from her glovebox—and Nickie took the backseat. “So, you just keep spinning that thing in circles, and we’ve got a magical GPS?” Emily glanced at the bowl and frowned.
“I guess so. Shall we?”
Emily shrugged and waited for the next flashing red streak from the bowl to tell them which way to go. She pulled a U-turn on Pressler Street, and they were off.
The bowl’s magical-frequency signal took them across the river and through South Austin. By the time they passed the Roy Kizer Golf Course, the streaks of light had gone through orange and into yellow.
Emily tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “I think I’m gonna start screaming if I have to keep listening to that sound.”
Nickie chuckled in the back seat. “Try drums in your head for hours, then talk to me.”
Laura peered out the side window. “It has to be consistent, Em. Would you rather drive in the wrong direction and have to backtrack because I wasn’t doing this often enough?”
Emily sighed. “No. I just think my eardrums are getting singing-bowled out of place. Sympathies, Nick.”
“We’re less than five miles. So just a little longer.”
They followed the flashing and disappearing lights another few miles and turned left on Panadero Drive away from the Onion Creek Metro Park. Nickie whistled and gazed out the window. “Nice area.”
Laura gazed at the large two-story homes and manicured lawns. “You know anybody who can afford living in South Austin?”
“Not well enough to have been to their house.”
“Okay, where am I going?” Emily asked.
“Right.” Laura ran the mallet around the singing bowl one more time, and a bright white light pointed ahead of them. “Hey. Looks like we’re in the one-mile zone.”
“That makes me so happy.”
They slowed to follow the lights every thirty seconds or so and finally pulled up in front of a gorgeous house with two large trees in the front yard, and the light streaked past Laura’s face and toward the house. The wand inside the bowl could have been a strobe light in a club, and she stopped making the bowl sing.
“This is it.” Laura removed the wand, and set the bowl and mallet on the floor of the car between her feet. “Whoever this belongs to is inside that house.”
“All right.” Emily turned off the car and unbuckled her seatbelt. “Daggers?”
“Yeah.” Laura grabbed them one by one from Emily’s glovebox and handed them out. “And if the Gorafrex’s inside, we just have to keep it inside until it has to find a new host. Then we can grab it without hurting anyone.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
The sisters stepped out of Emily’s car daggers in hand, magically concealed from human eyes despite the nice, quiet, calm, empty neighborhood. Everything about the house looked meticulously maintained and put-together…except for the shattered purple front door and the huge splinters of wood spilled into the entryway.
“That looks like it took some power,” Nickie said, peering over Laura’s shoulder.
“Just be careful and keep your eyes open.”
“I’m not gonna close them—”
“Em, this is serious.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Laura stepped across the fractured remains of the front door, cringing when her shoe sent a large piece of debris skittering across the hardwood. Her sisters followed her into the clean, quiet home, the AC on full blast. Nothing looked out of place until they stepped into the living room.
Emily swallowed loudly.
“Oh, my god.”
32
Two bodies sprawled across the living room rug. A shattered table and a broken armchair were toppled in the far corner, as if they’d been tossed aside to make room for the display. One was a young woman none of them recognized. A pool of blood soaked into the rug in a halo around her head, staining her blonde hair. The woman’s eyes were wide open and unseeing. They couldn’t make out the second body until they’d stepped farther into the room.
“That’s her,” Emily said, bending over to look at the woman with brown hair spilling across her face. “That’s the second host.”
“Oh, man.” Nickie ran a hand through her hair. “Then this is the witch?”
“A dead witch. And a human who’s just about to wake up in more ways than one.”
“Guys?” Emily pointed toward the fireplace on the far wall. “What’s that?”
Laura and Nickie stepped toward the ball of fur in the empty fireplace, which was also matted with blood. “Jeez. Is that… a cat?”
“Why would the Gorafrex kill a cat?” Nickie grimaced.
“Probably for that.” Laura stepped back and nodded at the nasty mural painted on the soft-yellow wall—a huge circle cross-sectioned into four pieces, with twelve smaller circles drawn around the outside. One of them, where the number one would be on a clock, was filled in with a pearly, opalescent substance that looked a lot like the Gorafrex’s glowing light when it was about to change hosts. The rest of the diagram had been painted on the wall in blood.
“What the heck is that?” Emily stepped away from the human on the floor for a better look.
“My guess is either some kind of rune for performing Gorafrex magic…or a message. Nickie, do you have your phone?”
“Yeah. On it.” Nickie pulled her phone from her back pocket and took a picture. “Did that thing leave this here for us?”
“I don’t know.” Laura shook her head. “But I bet if we can figure out what it means, we’ll have a much better idea of what it did with that witch and what it’s planning to do with others.”
A low moan came from behind them, and the sisters spun around.
The brown-haired woman on the floor took a deep breath, then pushed herself up and blinked around. When her gaze landed on the blonde witch dead on her rug, she scrambled backward.
“Hey…” Emily extended a hand. “Bet you’re wondering what happened here, huh?”
“I-is she…” The woman looked like she was about to hurl. Then she seemed to notice three strangers standing in front of the blood drawn on her wall. “Who are you? What are you doing in my house? Is that blood?”
“We know you have a lot of questions,” Laura said. “We can’t really answer them for you—”
“Your…your eyes. Why are your eyes silver?”
“Yep. Another awakened peabrain,” Emily muttered, and shook her head.
“Oh, my god. I can’t believe this. I don’t—what? What am I…” The woman glanced at her hands, just like the last host once the Gorafrex left him. “This…”
“Like I said. We can’t answer all your questions. You’ll have to figure those out yourself. But we can help get your house cleaned up.”
“We can?” Emily asked.
Laura raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you want regular humans all over this place, trying to solve a magical case without even knowing magic exists?”
“Good point.”
“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” the woman screamed, then she started hyperventilating.
“Okay.” Nickie stepped toward her and reached out to help the woman to her feet. “We’re gonna go into another room, just so you don’t have to look at all this. I’ll stay with you until everything’s taken care of. Right now, I just wanna know if anything hurts. Any scrapes or cuts or anything that you don’t remember getting?”
“Uh, no. I feel fine. I just—oh, my god. Is that my cat?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Nickie turned to her sisters and shot them an exaggerated grimace as she led the awakened woman out of the room.
Laura waited until they were out of earshot. “Let me see your phone a minute?”
“You need more pictures?”
“No, I left mine in the car. But I’m gonna make a phone call to see who can help this poor woman clean up her house.”
“Yeah. Here.” Emily handed over her phone and gave herself some time to gaze at the carnage they’d stepped into. “This is awful.”
“I know.” Laura had called Carl Hopkins so many times, she knew his number by heart.
“Hopkins Antiques.”
“Hi, Carl. It’s Laura.”
“Oh, hi. Didn’t recognize the number. How’d the singing bowl work for you?”
She sighed. “Exactly the way it was supposed to. Now I need to find someone who can come help us…well, clean up before anyone else gets wind of this whole magical mess.”
“Oh. I gotcha. Yeah, I know a few people. You wanna text me the address, and I’ll send someone your way?”
“That would be great, Carl. Thank you.”
“Sure. Any luck finding what you were looking for?”
Lau
ra pursed her lips. “Not quite yet.”
“Well, I know you’ll stop by if you need me.”
“Yep. Thanks again.”
Before she could hand Emily’s phone back, their dad called.
“I don’t think I can talk to him and keep it together right now,” Emily said. “You can answer if you want.”
Laura glanced at her sister’s phone. “I should.” She hit Accept. “Hey, Dad. It’s Laura.”
“Oh. Laura? I thought I called Emily. Hey, kiddo. How’s it goin’?”
“Oh, this is Emily’s phone, and, well, things have been better.”
“Aw. I’m sorry. Are you with your sisters now?”
“Yep.”
“Good. I can ask you all at the same time. We still on for going down to the Greenbelt today so I can show you that… well, the place we talked about? I’m just out to lunch, but I figure if you girls are free, we can meet down there at—”
“Yeah, Dad, maybe we should meet somewhere else.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the call. “Why’s that?”
“We need to have another conversation about the family legacy.” Laura glanced at Emily, who widened her eyes and nodded. “There are a couple things you don’t know.”
The story continues. The trio of sisters now have a second problem to solve in addition to tracking down the ancient creature hunting witches and wizards to steal their magic. It’s now trying to power an ancient ship that could destroy not just Austin, but everything. Can the sisters master their magic to destroy the energy cores of the ship before the Gorafrex fires it up? Find out in Making Magic - on preorder now!
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