The New Improved Sorceress

by Sara Hanover

  We went into the room one by one, sending Hiram in first to test floor strength, knowing that all of us might collapse what was left of the fragile building, especially with the weighty bulk of an Iron Dwarf. After a few minutes I couldn’t smell the soot and char anymore, although I sneezed every time we cleared a shelf. Hiram found himself a good, solid spot in the corner, where two great bookcases intersected, and began to unload whatever whole or decent remains of manuscripts could be found. I cleared a shelf of charcoal briquettes, basically, with two crisp pamphlets the only items left. I couldn’t sit on the floor, so I settled for squatting, but when I tried to move away, my left hand went to the shelf and stayed there. I tried to tug myself loose and couldn’t. The maelstrom stone might have been Thor’s legendary hammer, fastened in place. I couldn’t move it away but I could push it deeper along the shelf. Pondering, I tapped it. A hollow sound answered me.

  I balled my stubborn fist up and crashed it into the back of the bookcase. My knuckles stung as my hand sank into a hollow, but now the stone would let me pull back. I cleared the splintered boards away from the hole as I did. A row of spines met my eyes.

  A whole hidden bookshelf sat behind the first. And it was full of items. Books, rings, crystals. Not a lot, maybe a dozen, but a potential treasure trove. I wondered if the professor had remembered them, and if he had, why he hadn’t gotten them out?

  Or, for all I knew, every bookcase in the room was a façade for the real thing. I looked over my shoulder to see that everyone had stopped working to see what I’d done.

  “Should have guessed.” Steptoe began working on his shelves as they emptied, but he found nothing similar.

  Hiram, though, found two solid display cases at the foot of each bookcase in his area. And a ward.

  Behind him, the floor exploded as he stood on the brink, tipping dangerously backward. Carter leaped across and steadied him. Steptoe and I grabbed boxes and the two tossed relics to us, which we promptly packed. Four additional crates’ worth of goodies sat near the fire-shadowed threshold when we finished.

  We got five more salvaged boxes out. I set off a ward that sent arrows thhhping through the air, narrowly missing Carter’s broad shoulders. Steptoe tripped another, but he threw his jacket on it and all we heard was a muffled boom as his jacket billowed up in the air. He caught it, shook it out, and put it back on. Then he did a slow turn on his heels. “Looks like we’re done.”

  Indeed, it did, as the flashlight beam wavered on the room, and shadows jumped up and down to catch the light. Carter thumped a hand on the end of the massive desk. “Except for this.”

  The great oak monstrosity crouched there like a mammoth animal, ready to stampede if angered. I blinked at it. A certain familiarity tugged at memories of dreams.

  “Surely, the professor would have gone through that first.”

  “Who knows? I can see someone’s been through here, but we’ve boxed up a lot, so that someone must have been awfully picky.”

  “Or looking for something in particular,” Hiram offered.

  “Or that.”

  “We’ve all set off a trap. Are we still protected?”

  Carter considered. I could see him reaching back in his mind before he inclined his chin. “Another fifteen minutes or so.”

  I wondered how he calculated that. Not by sunset or moonrise. Maybe the protection he’d set on us had its own limit, and he’d divided that by the four of us. An uneasy shiver crawled down my spine. I don’t like having to depend on something I know very little about.

  We gathered around the desk. Hiram did a quick survey for hidden drawers and panels by judging the various depths and hollows of the structure. He did find one hidden drawer, lined in dark velvet when he pulled it out, but it was empty. I couldn’t tell what had been stashed in there although there were indents on the fabric.

  Carter looked, and his eyes narrowed. “Bones,” he muttered. “And what would the old guy be doing with bones?”

  “A valued pet, mayhap,” Steptoe answered. “Who knows?” He pulled a file drawer out which divulged a stash of empty hanging folders. Whatever had been filed there then did not reside there now.

  We got down to the last center drawer, long and short in depth: the pencil drawer, it’s often called. It yielded a map, which Carter took carefully and wrapped one of the empty folders about it for protection.

  Hiram checked his watch as did Steptoe. Hiram wore his on his wrist, one of the shiny metallic tech innovation watches, while Steptoe took his out of a vest pocket, on its chain, and flipped the cover open. What each found on their timepiece, they didn’t say.

  Carter wiped his hands on his trousers. “I’d say we’ve done all we could.”

  “Without knowing all the nooks and crannies, I agree.”

  “We can’t just let them knock the place down.”

  Warm and strong, Carter’s hand rested on my shoulder and squeezed a little. “We don’t have much say in that. This is a battle we’ve won, here, and that will have to do. I should be able to get Brian out tomorrow morning and he’s going to have to make a last stand to be allowed to search the ruins. I know he doesn’t remember much, but someone’s been through here and we have to hope it was him.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Scout met us at my back door, butt wiggling as much as the tail wagged, and he followed us in and out each trip we took with a box. I taped them shut and stacked them in the far corner of the basement. He snuffled them, sneezing as he did, and then sat and looked at me.

  “I know. They belong to the professor and may be important. There may even be something in there to help me get my dad back.”

  One of the boxes fell off its stack, startling the pup, who flinched and skittered away. I picked it up and put it back. “I know, Dad, I know. We’re working on it.”

  I left the basement while a cool breeze swept around me in an ethereal hug and Scout looked warily over his golden shoulder.

  The others had left already, but Steptoe waited in the kitchen, dusting bits of dust and lint off his dapper suit coat. He looked up.

  “Now we go back.”

  “What?”

  “There’s something there that only one of my ilk could sense, and it’s waiting for us.”

  “Ummmm . . .”

  “Coming or not?” he challenged as he plucked my car keys off the table.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CURSE WHAT SHADOWS LAY

  SCOUT STAYED HOME again, out of protest, but I told him he had to guard. He looked dubiously at the door to the basement and then at my mother’s workroom, went over to her door, and lay down, chin on his paws.

  “Good boy.”

  His tail thumped once, but then he looked away from me and closed his eyes. He didn’t watch as I put my bracers on.

  Steptoe sat in the car waiting, rubbing his thumb over the cover to his pocket watch. He put it away when I got in and started it up.

  “What do you think it is?”

  He shrugged. “It could be something living or another object of some kind.” He rubbed his chin uneasily.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re not afraid to go there alone with me?” he answered.

  “You’ve proven yourself.”

  “Not to all.”

  I said emphatically, “To me.”

  “I’m not used t’ being believed or befriended. I haven’t deserved it for a while, but I’ve moved myself in this world, I have, and I’m trying to find the good side of things. It’s because you accept me, the others do. You cannot know what that means to me.”

  I didn’t answer that, only slightly understanding because my recent experience wasn’t the same as his, but close enough, and I knew he needed to talk.

  He stared out the window at the dark neighborhood as it slid by. “I was responsible, you know.”<
br />
  “I know. I was there. But it was those two who work for you that scared the professor into regenerating without his ritual. You hadn’t told them to kill him.” No, but in fairness to my memory of the night, he had told them to bring him the professor’s head, horrifying me. That was only if the unthinkable happened, which it had, but I hadn’t known that then. Steptoe’s minions, or at least one of them, had gone in for the kill. I couldn’t hold Simon responsible for that, and as awful as the “off with his head” bit seemed, I knew now that it was one of the ways to resurrect the phoenix wizard if they had to. As for Brandard’s overreaction and immolation— “He thought they would kill him,” I said aloud.

  Steptoe’s nail scratched the stubble of his beginning beard. “Too eager they were and too stupid to heed what I’d told them. An’ one of them, I’m certain now, had another master ’e answered to first. He attacked the professor. I hadn’t sent them in to use fisticuffs and beatings. I was only hoping to persuade him a bit. The other one, though, had different ideas and orders.”

  I considered who that might have been and offered, “Malender?”

  “Mayhap. I can’t be sure who. There’s others about, Tessa, who oughtn’t to be. Old ones, ones that used to be great when times were different, wanting to rise up again. They want to send the world back into darkness. Primitive times.”

  I thought about running to the fire that night, to hear voices railing in the night, Steptoe so thick with his cockney accent I could barely understand him and the two cohorts scarcely human at all arguing with him. I’d been scared of him, myself. He’d been hopping mad, and all I’d known was that he seemed to have directed the professor’s death. I knew better now, but I didn’t know everything and wasn’t sure I ever would. The professor, trapped inside Brian, still hadn’t all his memories or wasn’t sharing if he did. I couldn’t think of what it might be that Simon Steptoe needed so desperately from the professor.

  “If the world is tipping . . . aren’t you on the wrong side?”

  That brought Simon around to face me, as I pulled into the long driveway and stopped the car.

  “It would seem so, eh, ducks? But it’s where I want to be, this time around. Where I need to be. And wot kind of friend bows out when you need him?”

  “Nobody I want to know. So.” I pointed out the window. “Ready?”

  “Not quite. The eleventh hour is best for what we’ve in mind. Wait a few, then we’ll go in.” He patted his vest pocket where he’d stowed his pocket watch and seemed to be mulling something over. “I want you to know what I was pestering the professor about. Told you I was centered here, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Centered is a polite word that guv’nors use. I’m chained, but it’s a long chain. Not sure ’ow far it stretches but it’ll do me a fair bit of harm to get to the end of it, as it were.”

  “What gets you free?”

  “Don’t know. Yet. I thought the professor might know. That’s what I was about that night, trying to get him to tell me.” Steptoe paused for a long moment. “He’s the one that chained me, see?”

  “He did?”

  “Seems likely. Don’t it?”

  I thought about it before answering, “Probably. But he doesn’t remember or doesn’t want to remember.”

  “See? You understand.”

  “He wouldn’t help Mortimer either.”

  “Crusty old git.” Steptoe sighed. “So I don’t know what it is that will free me, or even who, to be sure, did it, although Brandard’s the best guess.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know I’m shackled to that church, the famous one, at t’other end of town.”

  My eyes widened. “St. John’s Church? The one where Patrick Henry gave his ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ speech?”

  “One an’ the same. A movin’ piece, it was.”

  My town is steeped in historic places and that one ranks among the top. I’d been there a handful of times on school outings, feeling all patriotic as we were traipsing through. “Wow. You’re sure?”

  “Ironic, is it not?”

  “Considering we’re talking about liberty, I’ll say.” I gestured. “I can’t see how we can search St. John’s for your curse, though. Especially if we don’t know what we’re looking for.”

  “Too right.” Steptoe’s vest pocket sounded a little chime from the watch he carried there. “Eleven. Let’s go.” He paused outside the car, one hand on the fender. “Tessa.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I take it back. I have a pretty good idea what was taken from me that ties me down here.” He looked a tad embarrassed.

  I waited.

  He cleared his throat. “Lyin’ comes a bit too easy to me still.”

  “Change takes a while.”

  “It does. I had a tail once. Barbed. Demon-like.”

  I couldn’t help it, I glanced behind him. He showed no sign of having had a tail once. “Must have been hard on the suit.”

  “Glamour, lass. Does wonders for a dapper man.” His mouth pulled wryly. “And now it’s gone. I know. There was a battle, a bitter one, and I was already thinking I’d taken the wrong side, so I went down.”

  “You got defeated on purpose. That made you some enemies on both sides.”

  “You have the right of it.” He shifted. “Woke up without my tail and bound to old Richmond.”

  “That must have been a long time ago.”

  “’Twas. I stayed in hiding for near a century while I regained my power and worked on my humanity. I saw things. Learned them. Decided what to make of them. Looked to the Light and found out there’s good and bad everywhere, so it begins and ends with one being. I do what I can, but it’s a struggle. You called me chaotic good. There are times, my girl, when the chaos rears up and wants to take me with it.”

  “One day at a time.”

  He said, “But there’s another lesson here. If you’re looking for something, it helps to have a piece of it already. So I’m looking for meself, as it were.”

  I thought of the feather Goldie had left me and the possibility that just opened. “Does it call you?”

  “Sometimes.” Steptoe saw the expression on my face. “The professor didn’t teach you that?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I need to have a word with the old man, then. He’s been neglectful.”

  “But if you’re bound to St. John’s, wouldn’t your . . . erm . . . tail be there?”

  “Not that I’ve found. The thought finally came to me that I might be wrong about the binding, so I sent my lads to shake the professor down about whatever he knew. It might not have been me tail, and it might not have been him, though it seemed most likely. And this happened.” He indicated the ruins of the old house.

  “We’ll find it,” I told him.

  “Thanks, luv. I knew you might be tellin’ me that, as one friend to another.” He took a deep breath. “Well, we’d best get on with it.”

  The ruins seemed to be waiting for us.

  We approached the place quietly from the backyard, me on edge thinking we were asking for trouble and Steptoe because he had all his senses primed to find what he thought he’d detected earlier. Whatever it was. I hoped we wouldn’t find anything, except if it helped Steptoe, I was in.

  A low fog had come rolling in, just enough to cover the backyard with mist and dew, and make the place look spooky. Tendrils reached up as if to grab whatever they could, before dissipating and dropping back down into the condensation. It broke apart reluctantly as we waded through.

  My voice dropped to a whisper. “This can’t be good.” I shook a vine of fog off my ankle.

  Steptoe agreed. I didn’t feel much better to hear him whispering as well. I stripped my gloves off and stuffed them deep into my jean pockets. I could feel my stone growing warm in t
he palm of my hand. My bracers set off a faint but comforting candle glow about them.

  “Setting up a shield?”

  “If we need one.” I tapped the bracer.

  “Good idea, that.”

  A wave of fog rolled up and caught him, knocking him down and covering him almost instantly. Steptoe bounced up with an indignant sputter.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Pass your hand through this naughty bit of cloud, and I will be.”

  I swept my left hand through the mist circling around us, and it shredded away. I thought I heard a faint hissing as it did.

  “You’ve had your bit of fun. Now show us what you wanted and we’ll be on our way,” Steptoe announced.

  Curling away from us, the fog climbed the last remaining pillars and then across a surviving and sagging eave of roof, framing an entrance. I watched the performance warily.

  “I think we’re being invited inside.”

  “Not until we know what we’re dealing with.” Steptoe put his hand out in front of me, in case I started to go without him, and frowned into the night. “Show yourself.”

  It might have been the wind, or maybe the faint and far away howl of a dog, but something answered. “Only to you, Shimon.”

  His name, in an olden accent. He growled softly in answer, still holding his arm out to protect me. “Bring up your shield. Now.”

  I did, the metaphysical one and the actual one that I’d dispatched Joanna’s Kitsune with, balancing it in my hands. Simon’s intense gaze moved to view it, and his eyes widened slightly in surprise. I twirled the shield in answer.

  “At least he’s taught you something.”

  “Damn straight. I just hope we won’t need it.”

  “Remember when I told you about masters. This one used to be mine.”

  And the mist erupted about us.

  I fought without knowing what I struck at. It had body and substance and could hurt me even as I hurt it, but I never saw it. I kicked and used the shield to slice and dice, wielding it right and left without a target. But it hit, and hit hard, and something wet and slimy spewed around us. The grass, already slippery, became nearly impossible to move on without sliding, so we anchored ourselves, back to back, and battled.