by Sara Hanover
Steptoe held his brolly like a sword, having fetched it out of nowhere, or maybe the inside flap of his suit coat. It hummed with the pitch of a nest of angry hornets as he swung it. The noise settled in my eardrums, annoying and lethal. My shield developed a whine of its own, no less lethal as I used it, but growing ever heavier.
I tired just swinging it, and whatever in me that manifested it, well, it seemed to be draining. I went to one knee and couldn’t get up. Whatever it was we fought had tentacles to spare. And stink, too. Something gaseous and marshy, backed up by sulfur and brimstone. I gagged as the greasy smell coated the back of my throat.
Steptoe felt me slip. He let out a string of curses that I could only translate if I was fluent in gutter speech of old London, but they didn’t need to be interpreted. Then, boom! Boom! Boom! He tossed out a handful of flash-bangs, and the fight exploded out of private and into the neighborhood night, loudly and in vivid color.
As did our opponent. Between us and the ruins, something ghastly off-color grew. And grew. And grew until it towered over us. I pulled my shield up and over my head.
Steptoe answered it by slamming his umbrella point first into the ground, where a massive crack opened up, flames edging the ripped earth. The crevice threatened to swallow both of them up. He ripped off his suit coat and threw it to me, before turning about and launching himself at the rippling monstrosity to hug it tightly. He took a leap, pulling them both into the chasm in the ground.
Flames roared up, and then the gap closed with a snap and all went quiet. Very quiet.
“Steptoe?”
Not that I expected an answer, though I would have appreciated one.
I stayed on one knee for a very long minute, blinking, covered in slime, and wondering if Steptoe would come back. If he could come back. The brolly had gone in with him, but I clutched his jacket in one hand and my shield in the other. He would expect, perhaps, that I’d go after him. I clutched his coat closely, in case something would rise out of the wisps left along the ground and try to snatch it from me. Nothing more happened, though I could see lights from nearby houses snapping on, one by one. We hadn’t gone quietly, at the end.
I ran home. Covered in ichor, I had no intention of inflicting myself on my new-to-me car. I’d come back for it in the morning. Safely, more or less, in my yard, I hosed myself down, dancing in the chill of the water. Scout watched from the window of the mudroom door, nose pressed to the glass, my only witness.
Two thoughts slammed into my brain: now we had to rescue Steptoe as well, and two, would Evelyn and I be able to pull off a visit to Silverbranch without him?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GRATEFUL IS AS GRATEFUL DOES
“WHY DOES EVERYONE keep saying I should be a little grateful?” Brian paused long enough to mop up his fifth fried egg with his third piece of raisin bread toast and stuff it in his mouth. Scout watched him with absolute fascination, brown puppy dog eyes going from plate to lips and back again. Or perhaps the intensity came from waiting for a miss, but I hadn’t seen even a close one yet.
“Perhaps,” my mother stated, “because a thank you is due.”
He flicked a glance at her, shrugged, and reached for another piece of toast.
“Carter called in a few favors to get you out without charges.”
“I didn’t ask him to, but perhaps if he’d done his job properly in the first place, there wouldn’t have been an incident to worry about.”
I put a hand out and shoved the toast plate away from him. “Those were fire department and city personnel. The police don’t employ them. The place has been cordoned off for months, and we’ve been lucky to sneak in so far.”
“My house should never have been scheduled to be razed.”
“Professor, it’s totaled. Maybe you need a reality check.”
“Reality check? The reality is that I have a lifetime woven in there, knitted into the very fabric of my home, in every stick and stone and bit of metal used to fabricate it. I can’t afford to lose it. I don’t want to lose it.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have set yourself on fire.”
The fork clattered out of Brian’s hand as he shook it at me. It hit the table, and a half a piece of raisin toast went flying as if catapulted. Scout leaped after it like a Frisbee disk and chomped it down happily.
“It’s not your place to lecture me, young lady.”
“All we’re saying is that Carter went to a great deal of trouble to get you out of jail, and a little gratitude would be nice. Instead, you’re making us think he should have let you cool off a few more days.”
“Bah. I need to get my things out of there.”
“There’s a restraining order against you.”
“What?”
“You can’t enter your property.”
“Why—why—who ever heard of such a thing!”
Mom slid another egg out of the frying pan and onto his plate. “The paperwork came early this morning before you were released. It’s for your own safety. For everyone’s safety, really.” She eyed me briefly. She hadn’t missed the fact that I’d made an early morning jog to bring my car home. No questions were asked, but I deserved the sidelong look she gave me.
I took a breath. “I should let you twist in the wind.”
He squinted at me.
“We boxed up what we could find of your library and brought it home last night. It’s all sitting in the basement.”
“All? How could you know what was all?”
“Well, we found the hidden bookcases, so I think we have an idea.”
His jaw tightened. “And who is we?”
“Me, Carter, Steptoe, and Hiram.”
His gaze swept me in examination. “And you’re still in one piece?”
“Carter put a protection on us, a displacement. It didn’t last long, but long enough.”
This time he set his fork down carefully, but somehow a slightly burnt edge of crust managed to slip off his plate and float off the table. It never made it to the kitchen floor. “My desk?”
“We went through that, too. The map of whatever it is, we put in a folder in the box marked ‘books and map.’”
“Hmmm.” Brian chewed and swallowed. “You all seem to have thought of everything.”
“Look, we know we probably didn’t get everything, but we got most of it, and Hiram says the basement is a kind of safe room, so it’s protected for the moment. I seriously don’t think we can go back to your house.”
“Perhaps I cannot, but why wouldn’t I be able to send you?”
“Because something is there that Steptoe is familiar with, and it’s got tentacles and it’s stinky slimy. It attacked us.”
Brian nearly choked. “Perdition.”
I added the kicker as my mother turned an alarmed expression toward me. “And it’s got Steptoe.”
“Really? How on earth?”
“He threw himself at it to protect me.”
Brian dabbed a napkin to his lips, finally pushing his plate away. “Thank you, Mary. That was most appreciated. As for Simon, that is most astonishing.”
“It is not.” I defended my friend. “He’s done it a number of times before.”
“Oh, not that he guarded you, but that she sent someone after him. His change in allegiance has evidently not gone unnoticed.”
“Why wouldn’t it be noticed? It seems obvious.”
“Steptoe comes from a world where the long game is always played, and it can last for centuries. Simon’s reformation can be measured in decades, as I count it, and probably hasn’t registered with other powers. No, the thing came to my place and no doubt came after me. The two of you just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time, and he resorted to desperate measures on your behalf.”
“You know, not everything is about you.”
“No, but many things are, and it seems to me that this one might well be. Zinthrasta can be counted as an enemy of mine even as she once used to be a mistress of Steptoe.”
“Zinthrasta?”
The professor made a slight face. “The glop is one of her trademark minions. You described it accurately?”
“I left out the fog.”
“Definitely a glop.” He stood to carry his plate over to the sink, rinsed it, and put it on the counter to wait for the dinner dish loading. “I should check the boxes over before making any decisions of any kind.”
I fetched a tape gun from the mudroom, along with a cutting knife. “Right behind you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps I wanted privacy.”
“I can always call the police department and tell them you’re still belligerent.”
“Brat.”
“Professor.”
He opened the pantry door leading to the basement, and I clattered down the stairs behind him. Scout followed.
I expected the fire stink to fill the room, but surprisingly it didn’t. One of the boxes had leaked a small, inky puddle onto the new tile floor, but on examination, it turned out to be fine ash that had filtered out of a crack in the box. Brian examined it closely with an odd expression and ran a finger through it, sniffed it, but said nothing to me of why that might have happened. I wondered if he knew, himself. Scout didn’t alert to it, so I decided it might be nothing, although I’d learned in this new reality that hardly anything was nothing. There was always something and often a nasty surprise.
The box that had fallen off and gotten restacked had jumped the pile again. I stood and looked it over to see if we had written anything on it to ID its contents, but nothing stood out. Brian located his “Map” box quickly and put his hand out to me.
“Scalpel.”
I slapped the box cutter across his fingers. “Scalpel.”
He sliced the tape open quickly and returned the box cutter before kneeling down to examine his rescued treasures.
Brian in his new reincarnation stood tall, carried himself with broad shoulders and, when occasionally shirtless, had six pack abs to admire. The frizzled, thinning hair of the professor was gone, as was the bristly, almost alive mustache and the thicket of hair from the canals of his ears. So his current resemblance did not remind one of a dragon unlike the other persona. I saw it now, though, as if the great mythological beast found his hoard restored. He ran his hand over the box’s contents.
“If you say ‘my preciousss,’ I’m outta here.”
“What? Oh. Hmmm.” And Brian smiled slightly. “It would give you a start, wouldn’t it? But all of you did an admirable job. I doubt there is much left for me to salvage.”
“You’re going back?”
“Just for a quick sweep. Just in case.” He put a finger alongside his nose. “I have my hidey holes, you know.”
His finger left a charcoal stripe along his face and I ducked my head, trying not to laugh.
“I’ll go with you.”
“Best not. If the glop is fixated on associates of Steptoe as well, it will come after you.”
“What about you?”
“It dare not.”
“Taking your blasting stick?”
“I might, although that will tax its recovery. No, there is something in this box that will aid me a bit.” He tapped the cardboard before reaching in and pulling out a copper bracelet. Without telling me what it was or did, he fastened it on.
I thought of Steptoe’s suit coat and how he’d stripped it off and tossed it to me, shoving his shirt cuffs up his arms, before throwing himself at that thing charging at us. It was and wasn’t part of him. I very rarely saw him without it and I knew it had, at least twice, provided invisibility. But other than that, and truthfully that was enough, I had no idea what else it could do. I also didn’t want to try it out here, in front of the professor. What if he took it from me, for my own good? Magic users seemed notorious for looting each other’s items. Or using it made it unusable for another time when I might need it? Yet I had questions. What if I could find Steptoe through it?
“Tell me about using a part of something to find the rest of that something,” I said to the professor.
Elbow-deep in a second box, carefully shuffling through items like a card shark stacking a deck, Brian lifted his head and stared blearily at me once or twice to get me in focus. “Hmmm? That would be a form of what we call sympathetic magic. More or less.”
“Why more or less?”
“It is a convention which believes that compulsion or influence can be had over an object through a similar or connected part of it. The hair of a dog might rule the dog, for instance.”
“Might?”
“I’ve found it’s not a reliable magic.”
“Oh.”
“Why do you ask?”
“It was mentioned to me, and I hadn’t heard of it, and they then said you were behind on my studies.”
He scrunched up his nose. “I believe in learning actual magic and then, when one is a master, one can dabble in learning about fakery.”
“So . . . voodoo is fake?”
“No, no. But that involves another matter altogether. What I’ve been attempting to teach you, Tessa, uses will, disciplined and educated and imaginative. It’s a finer art than herbology or learning spells by rote or making sacrifices to harness another’s power, often demonic.”
I stared at him. Then made a sign of passing my hand over my head. He, now purely Brian, grinned.
“I know, right? Welcome to my life.” He dipped back into the container and many rustles followed.
My mother bellowed down the staircase, “Tessa! Classes!”
I hit the stairs. “And welcome to mine.”
* * *
• • •
Evelyn dressed in camos for the day, shocking me and nearly everyone else, although I could place a bet and win money that girls would be dressing in camos in every classroom before the week was out. She did look fetching, thin with curves in the right places while I simply wore jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt with the cuffs rolled up and my sneakers. She nudged me.
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
“The outfit, duh. I’ll blend in if we need to do some spying.”
“Ah. Stunning.” I shifted my backpack and tried to look admiring.
Despite the professor and Brian’s viewpoint on sympathetic magic, I hoped to try it out. I had Germanigold’s feather in my backpack and with any luck, could figure out a way to utilize it while on the computers in the library. Google had magic of its own: information. Tons and tons of it, some of it real and some of it so far from the mark it made fake news look credible. I just needed enough time to sift through it all. “I’m just going to get a look at the campus. No spying involved.” Not for her, anyway.
Evelyn pouted for about twelve seconds. “I can go home and change at lunch break.”
“Why? You look adorable.” I thumbed open my phone. “See? You’re already trending on Instagram.”
“Am I?” She peered at my cell and laughed. “Guess I’ll go as I am.”
I shelved my phone. “Good. Did you look up the academy last night?”
“I did but, well . . .”
“What?”
“I think you deserve better.”
“Evie. Thank you. But the place looked like a brain trust to me.”
“Oh, no doubt of that. But it’s small. It seems to be quite conservative. I don’t know—I should think you’d want to spread your wings and fly.”
I pondered telepathy and wondered if she’d honed in on my plan to find Germanigold at Silverbranch. Despite the suspicious use of words, I decided there wasn’t a chance. She can be good people, but often Evelyn considered herself first and a lo
t more frequently than she considered other people. It wasn’t her fault; she’d been taught to do so by her image-conscious parents. I patted her shoulder. “Thanks for the thought.”
“Welcome. See you later.”
We split in the hallway.
By the end of the day, the Internet had vomited wordage all over me, and I decided that I might have been better off not knowing most of it, because my early impulse of simply holding the feather and willing myself to be able to find Goldie and free her seemed the best, most positive, not to mention sane, way of rescuing her. Philosophers are sometimes right: the simplest solution is often the best. My only worry now seemed to be getting Evelyn out of the way at the critical moment in time when I hoped to accomplish the feat. Turning her around in a circle three times, taking a blindfold off, and pointing in the direction of the nearest good-looking guy didn’t seem feasible. Not that it wouldn’t work, but she might be a bit annoyed at the blatant manipulation.
One doesn’t want Evelyn Statler or either of her parents annoyed at them. Especially her father, who will probably be elected mayor in November.
I could, however, probably convince her to decoy for me in a dire situation. I’d just have to think of what it could be if/when I located Goldie.
We linked arms and walked to the parking lot where my shiny, only somewhat faded red car waited for me, along with Dean the bad boy leaning on its fender. He had a new haircut, faded on the sides with a luxurious curling wave on top. He’d found a vintage athletic jacket from somewhere and had that on, along with hip-hugging jeans, a black shirt, and shoes too cool to bother lacing up, even if they tripped him somewhere down the block.
He reached for Evelyn. “Hey, babe.”
As fast as she could be, Evie dodged him. “Not now, sugar, I’ve got a road trip with Tessa.”
“But we had plans.”
She poked her finger into his chest. “You had plans. You forgot to ask me, and I’m going to be busy. Maybe tomorrow.”
