The Wizard

by Karen Ranney

  There had been times when she’d been able to see Angie or Paul, but never her son. She’d seen their love and dedication toward Derek, but that had never made up for having to give him.

  If she had learned nothing else all these years it was that the universe insisted upon a balance being maintained. If she owed someone ten dollars, then ten dollars would be extracted from her in another way. If she did something wrong to another individual, she would be paid back in a like manner.

  She had caused someone else pain —– Millicent, Jeffrey’s wife —– and therefore the universe delivered pain back onto her. Her first sin had been loving a married man. Granted, Jeffrey had been as foolish and he would have to pay his price. Millicent had not deserved the anguish the two of them had caused her. Although she’d retaliated with vindictiveness, the universe didn’t care. Balance had been achieved.

  Although Millicent was no longer among the living, Jeffrey was still as vital as he’d been forty years earlier. Still as handsome, if the photos she’d seen hadn’t been photoshopped. She’d never tried to see him in the bowl, only because he would’ve known. He would have felt her curiosity. Why give the longing life again?

  Had he been behind the destruction of Derek’s car? He could have easily killed his son if he wished. The explosion had been a warning. She’d known that immediately. Except that she didn’t quite know its nature. Was the warning to her or to Derek? Was it to caution him not to attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps?

  She composed herself, taking time to stare off into the garden, concentrating on her breathing. Fear was not a good companion to scrying. It made the vision murky and she lost important details.

  Instead of sitting, she stood at the table, both hands flat on either side of the bowl. The words she spoke were those she’d learned sixty years ago from her grandmother. She knew them so well that she never even thought about the spell anymore. It was simply something that must be done automatically, like breathing or blinking.

  This time, however, she added an imploration. “Teach me. Show me. What lesson do I need to know? Who did this thing? What dangers lie ahead?”

  The water in the bowl immediately turned crimson. Not a gradual color change, but an immediate one, as if she’d poured blood into the water. She stepped back, horrified. Nothing like that had ever happened. This, too, was a warning. One that she couldn’t mistake the meaning of, however much she wanted.

  The knowledge was not hers to have.

  13

  The Uber driver didn’t ask one question about what he’d seen at Grace’s house or Derek’s appearance. For that, Derek tipped him generously.

  He got out of the car, thanked the guy, and entered the front door of the oil tycoon’s house. Maybe one day he’d begin to think of it as his. Or maybe he never would. In a decade or two he might grow tired of the sprawling expanse of it enough to apologize to Breanna’s memory and sell the damn place.

  For now, he entered the front door, closing it behind him. There was no sign of life. No sounds. Nothing but silence. The silence of the grave. He put the book Grace had given him down on the entrance table, and looked at himself in the ornate Ormolu mirror. His hair was dusty and his face was a strange color of gray.

  Good thing he’d called and told Billy that he was going to take the rest of the day off. If his manager wanted to fire him, fine. Maybe he could buy his own newspaper. Hell, he could buy the Herald and publish all those stories that had been nixed in the past few years.

  That was a thought he should seriously consider.

  However, before he spent any time thinking about future employment he needed to do a few things more important. He needed to do some research on NASACA and his biological father. Those tasks should keep him busy for a while.

  He followed the main corridor door to a smaller hall, turned left and entered the room Breanna had always used as her office. The oil tycoon liked built-in bookcases and three walls were filled with those while the fourth held a window with a view of San Antonio in the distance.

  There was a haze over the city today. Maybe fires from Mexico again. Or just pollution wafting north.

  He sat behind Breanna’s desk, the first time he had since her death. His initial reaction was to want to apologize for invading her privacy.

  Every time he thought something like that it was a kick to the gut. He would never see her again. They would never talk again.

  He put his hands flat on the desk, not as large or as ornate as the desk in his study. Yet it was a beautiful piece of furniture: mahogany with pillars carved into the sides of the main desk. The L-shaped section bore a motto written on the end panel: All things are possible.

  He didn’t know the provenance of the desk or whether Lionel had purchased it for her. It looked like something a doting father would present to his daughter on a significant birthday.

  Her iMac — with a USB bar, along with a sound bar, — sat in front of the desk and a printer to the left of that. She loved technology, but she backed up everything. Plus, as she once said, “Never trust a computer with your life.” That’s why she had a physical calendar as well as the one on her Mac. He opened it to find each day filled with notations and some with doodles. He sat there for a few minutes, reading her handwriting, each swirl of a letter feeling as if it was inscribed on his skin.

  He remembered the days she had marked. An appointment here, a meeting there. She noted when he had to stay in Austin overnight because of an important interview. Two weeks before her death she’d written: need ideas on anniversary present. There was nothing in the calendar about being pregnant, however. Nor was there any indication that there was trouble at work. The only thing unusual was the meeting on the last Tuesday of every month. He didn’t know if it was business or personal. Nor could he remember her ever discussing it. No time was marked, so he didn’t know if she took off work.

  Early on in their marriage they’d given each other their passwords, a sign of mutual trust. He didn’t care if she went through his contacts, text messages, or his emails. Neither did she. Her phone hadn’t been recovered from the accident, but he could access most all the information on her desktop machine.

  Breanna was better at sorting through her email than he was, and handled all of her incoming items immediately, either sending them off to Dropbox or Evernote or deleting them.

  In her Sent folder he found a few emails to Darla, but there was nothing in them that could be construed as strange. No secret messages. Nothing that indicated she was a witch.

  He would never know if she was carrying their child when she died. Never know if she planned to tell him with a grand gesture. There hadn’t been an autopsy before her body was released to the funeral home. The accident had caused enough damage that there hadn’t been any doubt as to the cause of death.

  Why hadn’t he asked Grace if Breanna was pregnant? Would she have known? Would Breanna have told her?

  He hadn’t wanted Grace to know something so personal, that’s why. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to know the answer.

  Standing, he walked around the desk to the window. Masses of blooming flowers flourished in the beds directly outside Breanna’s office. Life went on. The world still turned. People went about their days in blissful ignorance that death could ever happen to them. Or maybe they knew and simply pretended that they were immortal, at least as long as they could.

  He’d never considered that his life might be cleaved into two parts: before Breanna and after her death.

  He’d always felt as if he and Breanna had meshed from the beginning. According to Grace, Breanna had been assigned to him. He’d pushed that comment away, not wanting to think about it. Now he did, wondering if Breanna had been briefed on him and that's why it felt like they had such a connection. Had someone learned what kind of books and movies he liked, who were his favorite comedians and actors? Who had provided that information to the NASACA? Who’d known him that well? Maybe past girlfriends. Maybe work friends. Maybe Paul and A
ngie.

  The more he thought about everything the angrier he became. Not simply because people weren’t who they were supposed to be. He faced that every day in dealing with politicians. He wanted some certainty that he hadn’t been a fool, some desperate to be loved idiot who’d ignored any warning bells about Breanna.

  The truth was that there hadn’t been any warning bells.

  He could remember the first time he’d seen her. She was gorgeous. Men stopped talking when she entered the room. Women frowned at her. Guys smiled and bought her drinks, even when she was out on a date. He’d lost count of the number of times her drink had been comped by someone at the bar.

  He’d felt an attraction to her from the first. Were there love spells in actuality? It had felt like magic from the beginning. He told her, later, that he thought it was love at first sight. She’d only laughed, patted his cheek, and told him he was sweet. She’d kissed him then and his irritation had faded beneath desire.

  Sex had been another way they’d always meshed. Had her pleasure been fake, too? Had she said some incantation over their bed? Had he been fed something during one of the dinners she’d made for him, complete with candles and violins in the background?

  The bottom line, his wife was a witch, someone who was a member of the NASACA.

  Even though he didn’t want to continue looking he forced himself to go back to the desk, sat and opened the rest of the drawers. Nothing yielded any magical information. The only odd thing was that the bottom left hand drawer was locked.

  He had some expertise in convincing locks to open, thanks to a series of reports he’d done on crime in San Antonio. He’d been surprised at the willingness of more than one criminal to share what he knew. He’d spent one afternoon learning how to pick a lock. Consequently, with the help of a paper clip, he opened the lock in less than five minutes.

  The drawer was shallow, containing a few notes he’d sent Breanna before they were married. He opened two of them and felt an acute rush of embarrassment at the evidence of his ineptness and incompetence at courtship. He’d been desperately in love, but hadn’t known how to convey what he felt like he wanted. She’d evidently thought he’d succeeded because she kept the cards.

  A wave of grief rolled over him again.

  The only other object in the drawer was an ornate, gilded key. What had she locked up so tightly that even the key was hidden? He didn’t have a clue what it unlocked. He suspected it wasn’t a trunk or chest, but something more substantial, like a door.

  There was one place the key might fit. One room Breanna had told him about, but which he’d never visited. The room containing Lionel’s belongings. After her father’s death, Breanna had moved all of Lionel’s favorite possessions into that room, from the stuffed baby giraffe he’d had imported from Africa as well as the various deer and elk heads that had once been mounted in the dining room.

  Mary was given orders that none of the maids were to go inside it. Only Breanna. Up until now, though, he’d never seen the key.

  He climbed the stairs to the third floor. There was an elevator hidden behind the panels at the end of the hall, but he rarely used it. The last time had been to carry his suitcases from his last junket to DC up to the master suite. He wasn’t a masochist.

  The third floor held guest rooms, with two or three rooms set aside as storage areas.

  Lionel died two years before Derek met Breanna. The oil tycoon had dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of ninety-six at a hotel while he was entertaining three highly paid females, listed as consultants on the police report.

  The man hadn’t been a saint. Nor had he pretended to be one. In fact, the oil tycoon had taken a great deal of pride in being an iconoclast. There were countless examples in his biography of ways in which he had tweaked the noses of the elite in San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston. He gave money to causes that no doubt outraged them. He refused to be associated with one political party over another. Instead, he supported third party candidates.

  He was proud of the money he’d earned through oil, but that didn’t stop him from sponsoring a five hundred acre solar farm. The only reason he hadn’t erected a wind turbine on his own property was because of his fight with the zoning board.

  Derek got the impression, from reading the voluminous biography of Lionel Adams, that the man delighted in confusing people. The minute anyone seemed to be able to figure him out he deliberately changed course.

  Had Breanna done the same thing to him? He pushed that disloyal thought aside and put the key in the lock.

  Jeffrey North sat quietly as he listened to the report. He didn’t reveal his thoughts about what he was hearing, a habit he’d perfected over the past ten years.

  He hadn’t advanced to the head of an organization whose main strength was magic because of his organizational ability. He could immolate any of the three men in this room by simply flicking his wrist.

  They knew it, too, which was why all three of them were terrified.

  “Did you hire an idiot?” he asked calmly, allowing himself to reveal a little of what he was feeling. “I thought you said that the man we hired was excellent, Donald. I would venture an opinion that he was not as proficient as you implied.”

  Donald bowed to him, a not unimpressive gesture given that the young man was well over six feet and built like an American football player. His mane of blond hair flopped over his forehead, but with a jerk of his head it fell back into place.

  “I will take responsibility, Mr. North. I will see to it that he is punished.”

  “I care less about retribution than about the job being performed, Donald.”

  Donald bowed once more. The hair flopped again and with a jerk it was back in place.

  Donald was a perfect example why nepotism didn’t work. Although he was not a blood relation, he was the son of a close personal friend. Jeffrey wouldn’t have hired the young man but for Alice. In the future he would not allow himself any bittersweet memories of past relationships.

  “No, Mr. North. I will rectify the situation. I will fix it, you’ll see.”

  On the whole, he didn’t like words like fix it used in his presence. Normally, situations shouldn’t have to be repaired, especially in this instance. Anyone who’d been in his employ for longer than a minute figured out that there were some areas of his life in which mistakes were not allowed.

  This situation was primary among them.

  Donald didn’t realize how dangerous his current position was or how close to the precipice he was standing. The only thing that saved him was the fact that Jeffrey had learned to manage his emotions, especially his rage. Donald really should’ve gotten down on his knees and kissed the rug in front of his desk when Jeffrey raised his hand and flicked his fingers toward the door. Donald and the other two men were saved, at least for the moment.

  Once alone he turned in his leather chair, stood and walked toward the windows that overlooked London. Of all the cities in the world London was his favorite and the place he’d made his home for the past thirty years. He’d witnessed the skyline change as the city thrust itself into the modern age.

  He never involved himself with the city fathers and he didn’t intend to do so now. On the whole, he never interfered with civilian life. Unless, of course, they interfered in his. Or prevented him, somehow, in achieving what he wanted. Then, just as Donald had intimated, punishments must be meted out.

  Who did he punish in this situation? Perhaps himself, for being so shortsighted.

  He had an excuse, if you could call it that. He hadn’t known about Derek immediately. Not until Millicent had died, perished in a puff of smoke and flame. He didn’t miss her and doubted if anyone did.

  Thanks to Grace’s machinations no one had known about Derek all these years. She’d single-handedly routed him and while it had enraged him initially he had come to respect her audacity. She wanted to protect her son from him. Wise woman. Wise and incredibly stupid at the same time.

  Still staring
at the skyline he sent a thought to his PA. Within seconds Gloria entered the room, and stood waiting for his command.

  “I think that I shall travel to America, Gloria.”

  “To Texas, sir?”

  He turned and smiled at her. There were times when she understood far more than all the brilliant mages under his command.

  “Yes, I think to Texas. Tell the pilot that we’ll leave tomorrow.”

  She nodded and made a notation on the tablet that was always with her. Before leaving, however, she startled him by raising her head and looking straight at him, something she rarely did. He understood why. Most people were afraid of him. He’d gotten used to that reaction over the years. Power conveys with it an aura and the power he possessed was substantial.

  He wouldn’t be surprised if she realized why he was traveling to America. He couldn’t see what was happening and that infuriated him. He was, however, no match for the Atlantic Ocean. Large bodies of water had the ability to neutralize magic, even that of powerful wizards.

  “Would it not be safer to lure him to London, sir?”

  He was right. She was perspicacious, the ideal personal assistant. He might have to replace Samuelson soon.

  “I’ve been given to understand that that isn’t possible, Gloria, which is why I’m going to America. I do believe the situation calls for my intervention.”

  14

  The key turned easily and Derek pushed open the door. Why the necessity of keeping the room locked? Other than Mary, who came three times a week, they didn’t have any staff. It wasn’t that they wanted to clean the house themselves. It was more a privacy issue. They didn’t want people milling around. Plus, they only used a small portion of the house. He hadn’t been to the third floor in months.

  He entered, but to his surprise there wasn’t one bison head or stuffed giraffe in sight. The room was empty. The flooring was a shiny black, something that looked like slate. There weren’t any windows. The walls were covered in cloth, but it was a strange fabric. When he looked at it in a certain way it appeared silvery, but if he turned his head just so it was black.