The New Improved Sorceress

by Sara Hanover

  “Yes, sir. And thank you. I’ll let you know.” A smile flickered across my face, and I left before the unbetter part of me started to rant at him about the lack of support to either my mom or myself when my father disappeared. He’d been vice principal at my high school and had frowned more heavily than most at me whenever we’d crossed paths. My mom and I had both held the title of probable ax murderer, here and around town, for months until the next city scandal popped up. Scorn and pity, in equal measures, and I was pleased to duck out of it all as soon as I could. Hence the early graduation.

  Norma put her hand out as I passed her desk. “Everything all right?”

  She never changed. Her light brown hair stayed twisted and pinned in its updo, her seemingly starched blouses always had clean cuffs no matter what office work she’d been doing, and her pencil skirts always ended mid-calf. She wore fashionable but sensible shoes, and her manicured nails were finished off squarely so they wouldn’t be susceptible to chipping or breaking. I think Moreno had been hired by Sky Hawk, just to poach Norma and bring her with him. When a student came in who lacked cafeteria funds or owed back debt, she had a cash drawer always full of just the right amount needed, no questions asked. No one went hungry at our high school. A lost or stolen or maimed textbook got replaced without recriminations. And whenever I’d needed to hide somewhere, away from reporters with cameras who wanted to know why my father disappeared, she always had a secure corner office available. I had no doubt she worked similar miracles at Sky Hawk.

  I waved the brochure at her. “I’m just baffled.”

  “Life can be like that.”

  “Seriously.” I tapped my paper. “Ever heard of these people?”

  She took it from me. “Silverbranch Academy? Can’t say that I have.” She flipped through the five pages, ending up at the back, where the brochure now proudly proclaimed internships and scholarships available for the qualified. Diversity encouraged. And so forth. Norma put on her reading glasses and studied it closer. She returned it. “As they like to say: Google it.”

  Oh, I intended to. “As my mother would say, it merits consideration.”

  Norma winked at me. “That’s our girl. Now get on with you, classes start in about”—she consulted her watch—“forty seconds.”

  I skedaddled.

  Despite my promise to scour the Internet on Silverbranch, I held doubts. That blank page suddenly popping up with encouraging propaganda? It reeked of the professor’s brand of wizardry. For that matter, as I thought back, so had the two agents. I rubbed the stone under my palmed glove. Not only my shield, it seemed to be my b.s. locator.

  In English, my teacher said not a word about the supposedly outstanding essays I’d written in the past, even if they’d attracted Silverbranch. Evelyn sat behind me, slender enough she could cross her legs at her desk and still have seated a squirming toddler on her lap with room to spare, and sent little texts to me whenever she thought she could get away with it. A row closer to the teacher’s desk and podium, I had trouble reading what she sent, let alone replying. I drew enough attention from Mrs. Gill that I caught the privilege of diagramming not one but two very complex sentences. I managed to pull it off with only one correction from her.

  Out of Mrs. Gill’s domain, I caught Evelyn by her earlobe.

  “Ow!”

  “Stop texting in class!”

  “It’s important.”

  “Dean the wonder boy can wait till lunchtime.”

  Her cheeks pinked. “Maybe.”

  “I know, and maybe I’m just a little bit jealous.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “Then you need to. Save me a seat for lunch, and don’t you dare invite Dean over if you want to talk about him.”

  She agreed, and we split up again. I had a break before my next class and ducked into the library for research. As I suspected, the Internet provided pretty much the exact same pictures that the brochure offered up, along with two glowing recommendations from former students, and a “Study Overseas for a Semester!” opportunity. I went through the tabs, not finding anything substantial or even interesting until I caught the barest glimpse of a familiar face among students crossing the picturesque grounds. It wasn’t even a glimpse, really, except I knew that face. Crushed on it, misplaced cleft and all.

  A younger, paler, but just as compelling Carter Phillips strode along those hallowed halls of Silverbranch Academy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WHAT DO I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE?

  I’D SEEN PICTURES of Carter in his military gear, tanned and face grizzled with beard, and this barely caught image of him at Silverbranch showed him thin, pale, and clean-shaven as though he’d been ill and recovering. He fit in with the other students, which I now noticed ranged from my age to middle age. He’d been gravely wounded, though, which accounted for his early exit from the service, although I imagined knowing now what I did, that pressure brought by none other than the Society on the Department of Defense to give him an honorable discharge because they wanted him saved for other purposes aided. I imagine that he’d hardly known what he was then or what he could do. Had Silverbranch helped or hindered him? As for the wound, he had no lingering effects that I could see, but I studied the barely seen personage on the academy website. This shot had to have been taken right after his release. So that begged the question: what was he doing there, and did he have anything to do with the agents waiting for me today? I hoped he didn’t because I didn’t particularly like those two and how they operated.

  If he did, why didn’t he tell me to expect them? Nothing I saw on the monitor screen would give me the answers I had to have. But if I wanted to check out the Society and find who might have taken Germanigold and where, this seemed my perfect opportunity. She’d said a judge, though, and my intuition, otherwise known as Andrews family common sense, told me that he was likely a rogue within the Society. Unless the lot of them were malevolent, but Carter wouldn’t be a part of it if they rolled that way, so this abductor had to be operating outside their laws. Or I hoped he/she would be. The professor’s dislike of them did not mean that they were corrupted. He disliked a lot of people. But I’d have to be very careful about anything I did, and I might be alone in doing it.

  Without allies. That made helping Germanigold seem a much tougher problem. I could possibly convince Steptoe to help. He might like a look at that Dark Arts booklet I’d found in the old cabinet in the mudroom, but I hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet myself. Steptoe had a way of convincing others to give him items he wanted, even if they didn’t feel like it. I might be so persuaded but not until I’d had my own good look at it first. There were questions needing to be answered, like: Who had the booklet belonged to and why? I couldn’t see either my dad or Aunt April tied to it, but then, a lot of odd things had been happening in the past few months. What if it held the answer to the question of my father’s predicament?

  Learning that magic existed was the proverbial can of worms being opened, and boy, did they wriggle out everywhere. Also, being worms, it stayed extremely difficult telling the good ones from the bad ones. Sometimes it appeared strictly situational.

  Which brought me back to Steptoe. Going without him seemed only slightly riskier than going with him. He, undoubtedly, would have his own opinions about the august magical body, but he’d do it stealthily behind me and I, hopefully, would be none the wiser. Simon could be, and had been, like that. Still, he’d had my back on several occasions, and if I were going up against a judge on the Society no less, I’d need that alliance.

  So Steptoe would be invited.

  And Evelyn. I definitely needed a wingman. Steptoe had ways of moving about relatively unseen, and he actually had a jacket that could function as a cloak of invisibility, although I had no idea of its limitations. Magic was not a bottomless well. It had to be fed and coaxed from what I’d seen. If I used it, who paid th
e price, him or me, and what would the cost be? So he could follow according to his skill and hopefully not taxing that wondrous item, while Evelyn would give me the perfect disguise of two coeds interested in transferring to a unique academy.

  She could keep up a stream of seemingly inane patter that would make both of us appear conventional and clueless. She was no more harmless than I was, although her skill came mostly from her background of having a father extremely well connected in law enforcement and politics, and she could wield her stilettos with deadly results. I’d seen that firsthand. Also, she had good instincts about people. After all, she’d stayed friends with me when everyone else seemed fairly certain I might have dropped my father down a sinkhole, never to appear again. She had money to burn, but that didn’t motivate her whatsoever, although she occasionally forgot that others didn’t. If I could find an angle that would keep Dean away while she came with, we’d have a date.

  * * *

  • • •

  It ended up being easier than I thought.

  Her sandwich sagged in her hand. Sprouts looked ready to tumble out in a green waterfall. “And this academy is a university campus?”

  “Yes, with all the handsome privileged guys you can count. Never mind, forget I asked, you always outshine me. People will be looking at you and not me and Dean will be jealous, probably. Maybe you shouldn’t come with me, after all. Besides, you’re doing well here at Sky Hawk. I doubt you’d want to transfer.”

  She put the sandwich down carefully, so as not to bend or chip a nail. The cafeteria noise around us seemed to mute as she centered all her concentration on me. “A little jealousy does a relationship a lot of good. I should look valuable, not desperate. I want him to know he has to appreciate and pursue me if he wants me. I don’t wait around for just anyone.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but, “Then you’ll think about going with me?”

  “You couldn’t keep me away!”

  I smiled at her. “Great! When shall we plan this? Don’t forget, I’ve got a car now. I can drive.” She had a car too, a neat little older BMW, but her parents didn’t let her drive on school nights. She was an adult, but as she’d told me more than once, she picked her battles with her parents. Being chauffeured wasn’t that difficult on her.

  We decided on Wednesday as we both had short days, athletic practice intruding, but we’d take a day off to do our academy scouting. If anything, her spot in cheerleading was even more athletically demanding than my field hockey team. Perfect, because now I had to figure out how to reach Steptoe. I had no direct way of signaling him, we’d never arranged anything, but I had a feeling the tell-tales might get through to him if we didn’t all get together on Tuesday night.

  Monday after practice I ate dinner, did the dishes, and disappeared to my room to finish assignments and study the curious booklet. Preoccupied with her new class and the various glitches in her university’s web setup, my mom left me pretty much alone, and the professor took the opportunity to sneak out. He came back, trolling the smell of smoke and ashes down the hall that even I could scent, and Scout and I decided he’d either gone to a cigar smoker’s convention or he’d been back to his house, sifting for whatever he could find. As Evelyn would say, not my circus and not my monkey. Scout curled up to my bare feet as close as he could get, and I enjoyed his puppy warmth. He’d greeted my return from school with wild, enthusiastic leaps and running about the yard in great circles, finishing with a jump into my arms that knocked me over. We both agreed that I needed more training as he would only get bigger, heavier, and possibly even more enthusiastic in the future. I needed to be prepared.

  The found book looked even more fragile than I remembered. Paper crackled under my fingers as I gingerly laid the book out, wearing my gloves to protect them and the article from oils and contaminants, although a silverfish ran out of the thing only to be thoroughly squished by me before it got very far. I wiped my desk down with a shudder and a tissue. I wanted to shake the thing before I opened it any further, but it didn’t look like it would survive it. I settled for spraying it with air freshener. Trust me—air freshener is a pretty good bug spray and smells tons better.

  Scout didn’t agree with me and sneezed twice before abandoning my feet and crawling in under the desk away from the mist.

  The fading ink proved to be only part of the difficulty in reading each page. I also ran across a major language barrier even more than S’s being written as F’s. Mrs. Gill of college English fame had lectured, albeit very briefly, about the changes in the English language since we’d become a nation. I hadn’t listened a whole lot because, frankly, it didn’t seem interesting. Now I wished I had. I sat in my chair and looked at a page whose unfaded half I could see made no sense. The faded half couldn’t be interpreted at all. I went over and over it until my eyes blurred. This was worse than writing in lemon juice and putting it over a candle flame to make it appear like we used to do in summer camp.

  The professor could probably decipher it if I wanted to show it to him or explain where I’d gotten it from, but I didn’t care to. Not yet. It was mine, my secret and my discovery. When, and if, I started showing it around, I would lose it. Even if I shared it, I would lose it, and chances would be good that Brandard would take it from me. That was the way he operated. He liked to hoard his magical items and seldom explained the purposes of any of them. He was sneaky like that, quiet but self-serving . . .

  I stopped trying to read and raised my chin. Nasty thoughts whirled about my head.

  My eyes ached and I rubbed them carefully, and then reached for my lukewarm glass of sweet tea, which had been forgotten on the edge of my desk.

  What had I been thinking? Miserly, closed little thoughts, even bitter ones. I shut the booklet. Without even knowing the words it held, or spells, or curses—whatever they were—it affected me. Dark Arts, indeed. Suddenly, I wasn’t even sure I wanted the thing in the same room with me.

  I looked down at Scout. “What do you think?”

  Scout thumped his tail on the floorboard at my query, but he raised his head to look at the desktop where the booklet was and peeled his lips back from his teeth. I didn’t think he was smiling.

  “I agree.” I stood up and went to my closet, where I found a nearly empty shoebox. Nearly because it had one shoe in it. The other undoubtedly rested in a pile of shoes in the corner. Dumping the other shoe into oblivion, I dropped the booklet in the now empty box, rubber-banded it, and tucked it under my arm.

  “Time, I think, for your evening break, and a visit to the garage.”

  Scout jumped to his feet, and we trotted out to the backyard, did our various duties, his in the grass and mine in the garage hiding the box on the tool shelf, pushed to the back, and then we returned to the house. I found Mom in the kitchen, hand-squeezing some orange juice so as not to make much noise. She gave me a tired smile and fixed a glass for me. We clicked juice glasses.

  “Bedtime?”

  “Just taking Scout out.”

  “He’s not sleeping in the mudroom, is he?”

  “Nope. I mean, he starts off there, but he’s an escape artist. He usually ends up on the foot of my bed. But he is when you go to work, right?”

  “Yes. At least, I think so. But the catch on his crate seems to be broken. I keep finding him in it, door unlocked, when I come home, with little things around the house misplaced here and there.”

  We both looked at the dog. The pup hung his golden head and licked the evening dew off one paw carefully.

  “We’ll see how it works out,” my mother said, still staring at Scout.

  His ears flexed, but he kept his head down, ensuring that his paw was immaculately clean.

  “Right.” I snapped my fingers. “Let’s go.”

  We went. I had Tuesday to get through, and two teachers to make excuses to for missing class, and then a strategy meeting on the Eye of Nimora
.

  * * *

  • • •

  Steptoe wore his bowler hat to the meeting, its dark felt sprinkled with raindrops from a light drizzle outside. He’d folded up an umbrella when he came in the door, leaving me a bit confused. Why the brolly when he had a hat and vice versa? The reason came to me immediately. Either one or both was not quite what it seemed to be, in tune with Simon’s entire persona. I determined not to handle either without knowing what they were or could do just in case I could set them off—lessons learned the hard way.

  Mom had cleared the dining room table and set up a pitcher of sweet tea, a carafe of hot coffee, and a tray with cream, sugar, glasses, mugs, and a dish of cookies. I was helping bring chairs into place when the house did a familiar shimmy and shake, and I could hear a deep voice at the door.

  “Hello the home!”

  “Come in, Hiram, come in.”

  He entered cautiously, I could tell from the shuffle of his steps and the noise of something hitting the various doorways between here and there. When he finally appeared in the dining room, he held that ginormous redwood chair in his arms, a bashful look on his broad face. “All right if I bring this in to sit on? It seems a waste just sitting there in the professor’s backyard.” It seemed he had read my mind.

  “No, no, ah—there. Put it at the end of the table there, and we can shift it easily to the kitchen whenever you come by.” Mom recovered adeptly and pointed where she wanted it. Hiram obliged and sat down with an enormously pleased and tired look.

  “I’ve been around and about all day,” he explained. “Don’t know how my father did it, all his responsibilities and stonework and such. A mason’s job can be tiring.”

  Mortimer did much more than masonry, and Hiram knew that I knew that, but I liked his sharing with me.

  My mother smiled back at him. “How about a Coke?”