“Joey!” screamed Leanora. The others wanted to help him, but they were too far away. Together they started moving down the line to Joey, but they had to go slowly and carefully so as not to lose their own grip. Looking up at them, Joey knew they wouldn’t reach him in time. Manchester’s weight was too much, especially on top of the cosmic force of the black hole. It was like being caught in a tractor beam. He couldn’t get away. Manchester’s fingernails dug into Joey’s skin, stabbing through the soft bandage on his ankle. The pain was too much. He was going to let go. He could feel himself getting ready to give up.
Then the black hole flickered. It was only for a fraction of a second. It was barely even noticeable, but Joey felt the pull of death rest behind him and knew that the end was near. That knowledge gave him strength. He didn’t have to hold on forever. Just a few more seconds, that was all. This was it. His one chance to get rid of Manchester.
“Joey, hang on!” Shazad shouted as they worked their way down to him.
“Don’t let go!” Janelle shouted.
“You’re coming with me,” Manchester said through gritted teeth. “I told you before, Joey, we’re in this together.”
“Sorry, Grayson!” Joey threw his foot back at Manchester’s face. “I’m breaking up the act!” He kicked at Manchester once… twice… three times. The first two blows missed as Manchester twisted to avoid Joey’s wild kicks, but the third kick landed squarely on his nose. With each kick that followed, and each subsequent turn from Manchester, the bandage on Joey’s ankle loosened. Finally it came undone. Joey’s shoe popped off, and Manchester screamed, clutching the bandage as he went sliding backward into the center of the black hole. His cry cut off mid-shriek as he disappeared into nothingness. It was as if someone had hit the mute button on his voice.
As glad as Joey was to see him go, he couldn’t celebrate just yet. The black hole was still active and still pulling on him with all the force of a rocket trying to leave the atmosphere. Joey was just barely holding on. The black hole flickered again, just for a second, and Shazad inched closer, with Leanora holding tight to his cape and Janelle holding on to Leanora. Shazad reached out to Joey. Their fingers touched. Shazad almost had him, but Joey slipped away before he got there. Joey went flying backward…
…and slammed into the closet wall with a whack.
Huh?
Joey sat up, looking around in a daze. He was shocked but grateful to still be alive. The black hole had blinked out of existence just in time. He sighed and melted into the wall, grinning broadly.
After a few seconds, Janelle crept away from the wall. “Is… whatever just happened… over?”
Joey blinked his eyes open and took stock of his surroundings. The black hole was gone, and Manchester had gone away with it. The threat was in their rear view. There was no one there but the four of them. “It’s over,” he confirmed, feeling like he could sleep for a year. “It’s all over,” he added, thinking about what they had lost.
“The wand…,” Shazad said, edging toward the empty closet. “You… You just let it go.”
Joey’s face was grim. “I had to.”
“Why didn’t you use it?” Leanora exclaimed.
“I did use it—as bait. I knew he’d go after it. When you’ve got a problem you can’t solve and no time to work out the answer, all you can do is simplify the equation. You look for values that cancel each other out, like Manchester and the wand.”
“That’s no solution,” Shazad said, mourning the loss of the world’s most powerful magical object.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Joey asked. “It’s better this way, Shazad. You said yourself, the wand had more power than any one person should have.”
“You seemed to manage it pretty well,” Shazad replied, simultaneously giving Joey credit and condemning his decision to abandon the wand.
“Who taught you how to do all that?” Leanora asked.
Joey shrugged. “Some of it I learned by watching Redondo. The rest of it… ‘open sesame,’ ‘nova,’ the thing with the bees… I used my imagination. By the way, Janelle, you can tell your friend Sandy she doesn’t have a bee problem anymore. I took care of it for her.”
“This is too much,” Janelle said. “What the heck did I just see? Were you all just fighting over a wand? Like, a real magic wand? Who was that guy who just…? He just…” Janelle gulped and trailed off, pointing a shaky finger at the empty closet that Joey was still sitting in.
All things considered, Joey thought she was handling the situation very well. Naturally, she had questions. She had just seen a grown man get sucked into a black hole, and she was smart enough to realize it had been Joey’s plan to get rid of him that way, but she wasn’t hysterical. The fact that Manchester had threatened to kill everyone in the room had probably muted any sympathy she had for him, but still, Joey was impressed by how well she was keeping it together.
Leanora was impressed with her as well. “I’d like to know what that was,” she said, pointing to the spot where the black hole had been. “Joey never told us he knew any other magicians.”
Janelle looked at Joey, impossible realizations forming in her head. “I’m starting to understand why you weren’t sufficiently freaked out by the idea of a localized unstable black hole in a basement closet.”
Joey smiled. “You’re doing pretty good in the not-freaking-out department yourself.”
“I’m getting there. We need to talk, Joey.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, completely drained. “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
“You’re coming back, then?” she asked.
“I’ll be here,” Joey promised. “But first… there’s something I have to show these two.” He turned to Leanora and Shazad. “We need to go back to the theater.”
19 The Majestic Legacy
Leanora was visibly relieved to find that Manchester had dropped her magic doorknob when he had reached for the wand. It had rolled underneath Exemplar Academy’s furnace and narrowly avoided the black hole’s gravitational pull. Joey was even more relieved to learn that his shoe had followed a similar safe trajectory, sliding back to the wall beside the closet rather than into the closet itself.
“Thank God,” he had said, lacing his sneakers back up. “I can’t afford to lose any more shoes. My father would be out of his mind.”
They used Leanora’s golden doorknob to return to the street where the Majestic Theatre stood once more. Back on the street, Joey, Leanora, and Shazad found the Majestic Theatre right where they had left it. The empty lot and plywood fencing were gone, but the three of them were the only people who seemed to notice anything had changed. People walked by it, oblivious. For all they knew, the theater had been there forever. It was still run-down, the letters on its marquee only half lit up. Joey, Leanora, and Shazad stared up in silence at their fractured glow:
_ _ _ MAJ_ _ _IC
The front door was open. They let themselves in. Joey locked the door behind them, just in case. The lobby was dark and empty, as he had expected. He led the way up the stairs to the office, clinging to a hope he didn’t dare say out loud. Thinking of the Phoenix card he had pulled from Redondo’s deck before he had entered the crate, Joey imagined Redondo might be there sitting behind his desk when they opened the door, ready to applaud them on a job well done. But the office was empty, just as before. The mess of Redondo’s ideas and procrastinations… the playing cards, Post-its, and papers… They had all been cleared away. The partly sketched-out tricks on the chalkboard had been erased, and the desk, once buried beneath a mountain of notebooks, letters, and half-assembled magical props, was now completely bare save for the book he had left behind. Joey looked around, struck by how un-Redondo-like the office now felt.
“He’s really gone,” Leanora said. “He sacrificed himself to save us.”
“To save the wand,” Shazad corrected her. “It was all for nothing.” He hung his head. “What a waste.”
Joey wiped a tear from his eyes with t
he heel of his palm and sniffed. The idea of Redondo sacrificing himself in vain weighed on Joey like a cannonball strapped to his heart. He wondered if he had failed him, as Shazad surely thought he had. When Manchester was breathing down his neck, Joey didn’t have time to think about what to do with the wand. He had just acted. Now that he did have time, he didn’t know how to act—or how to feel. Without question, the wand was the most wondrous magical object in the world, but it was also heavy with a power he had never once craved and the kind of responsibility he had shied away from all his life. “I don’t know if I did the right thing, Shazad, but I know one thing for sure. It wasn’t all for nothing.” Joey handed him the book on Redondo’s desk. “This is what I wanted to show you. Redondo told me this theater was a treasure trove of magical objects. Take a look; he wrote them all down.”
Shazad turned the pages with wide-eyed interest. “There must be hundreds of relics here in this book.”
Joey nodded. “I think he wanted us to take care of them after he died. Magic still needs protecting, right? This here…” Joey blinked back tears. “This is Redondo’s legacy.”
“That’s not my legacy,” a familiar voice called out. “You are.”
Joey turned toward the voice, afraid he might be imagining it. “Redondo? You’re alive?”
The matter was open for debate. Redondo was not there in the flesh. “I wouldn’t exactly say alive,” he replied. It was his reflection in the office mirror speaking. “I will say this much. I’m feeling better than I have in years.” The faded, partially transparent image beckoned them to come closer. Puzzled, Joey and the others approached the mirror.
“I don’t understand. What is this?” asked Leanora.
“Didn’t expect to see me again, did you?” Redondo asked.
Joey shook his head. “I wouldn’t say I expected it, no. But I did hope a little. Very little,” he added, a smile forming on his lips. He held his thumb and forefinger close together. “This much.” He didn’t know how this was possible, but he didn’t care. So what if Redondo wasn’t 100 percent alive? Right now he’d take what he could get.
Redondo smiled back at Joey. “I had my own hopes as well. Seeing the three of you here together, it’s clear that they were well-founded. Now I want to hear all about what happened after I blew up. Please. Tell me everything.”
They told Redondo the story of how Joey defeated Manchester first in the theater and then again in the basement of Exemplar Academy. The fact that it was Grayson Manchester they had been fighting came as an incredible shock to Shazad, who was still under the impression that Redondo’s old assistant had burned to death onstage twenty years ago. Redondo, Joey, and Leanora had to pause to catch him up on everything he had missed by being the first one sucked into Manchester’s top hat. Once the truth about Manchester came out, Shazad apologized profusely to Redondo for thinking he had gotten his old assistant killed. Redondo assured him his apologies were completely unnecessary, especially now.
“Where are you?” Shazad wanted to know. “How are you still here?”
“It’s the wand,” Redondo explained. “When it changes hands, the memory of its former master stays behind long enough to pass on any wisdom they wish to share.”
“But I lost the wand,” Joey said, feeling awkward. “I gave it up.”
“I know. That’s why I won’t be allowed to linger much longer. Just enough for a proper goodbye, and then I’ll be gone.”
“But not forgotten,” Leanora said. “You saved our lives. We can’t ever repay you.”
“Never,” Shazad agreed.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Redondo said. “Just make them good lives, all of you. Full of magic for yourself and others. That’s payment enough.”
“Redondo,” Joey began, not knowing what to say to someone who was not dying but was already dead. “I… I hate to see you like this.”
“Don’t be sad,” Redondo said. “For a long time I didn’t like what I saw when I looked in this mirror either. It’s all right, really. Thanks to you…” He paused. “Thanks to all of you, I finally stopped hiding. I spent years in this theater, right here in this room, thinking about how to make a comeback. How to restore the Order of the Majestic. I told myself that’s what I was doing, at least. Really, I had no intention of doing any such thing. Don’t get me wrong. I thought I was trying my best. But I recently realized there was something… someone holding me back. That person was me.”
“I don’t understand,” Leanora said. “Why did you hide away all those years if you knew you didn’t get Manchester killed?”
“For a long time I thought I had killed him,” Redondo explained. “Later, when I realized the truth… that knowledge only added insult to injury. Manchester had fooled me. Me! The greatest magician alive!” Redondo let out a grim laugh. “If you want an honest answer, I was embarrassed, and not just about that. I had inspired such hatred in that boy, unwittingly. He was so angry… I had no idea. Perhaps if I had been less concerned with myself and paid more attention to the world around me…”
“No. He made his own choices,” Joey said. “What he turned into wasn’t your fault.”
Redondo disagreed. “I should have seen it. I thought Grayson would be my successor, but he never understood why we put on shows and played for people in the audience. I failed to teach him that working magic for yourself isn’t enough. You have to share it with others if you want to give it meaning. There’s a reason he could never pull anything out of my old hat to fill that hole he had inside him. It’s the same reason why he thought the wand was the thing he’d been lacking all these years. I knew better, but I figured it out too late. After Grayson left, I didn’t want to start over. I didn’t trust anyone, myself included. Magic had always come easy to me. Grayson’s betrayal was the first real failure I had ever met with. Then I met a boy who found magic in a world that had none. Who dealt with failure at every turn in this theater and kept coming back for more. Even though he was scared. Even after I threw him out! You never stopped trying, young Kopecky. I needed to see that kind of fire again. Thank you.”
“Did I do the right thing?” Joey asked. “With the wand? I still don’t know.”
“You did what was right for you. That’s all that matters.”
“Why did the wand pick me?” Joey asked. “Leanora and Shazad know way more about magic than I do. What if they were the ones in the mirror world fighting Manchester with you? Maybe it would have picked one of them. Maybe it should have been one of them.”
“I know this is hard to understand, but I don’t think the wand chose you because of anything you did. I think it chose you because of what you were going to do.”
“But, what did I do with the wand?” Joey asked. “I lost it.”
“Who knows?” Redondo countered. “Maybe there’s something more you’re still meant to do. You’re young.… I don’t think you’re done making magic just yet. I don’t think any of you are. The show must go on. You all have your parts to play. As for what they will be, who can say? Don’t go thinking you have to know everything right now. That was my mistake. I lost years wondering how to dazzle audiences… how to make them fall in love with magic again… how to help the world see the magic that exists in every breath we take. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know where to begin. I wasted so much time trying to put it all perfectly together in my head before starting.” Redondo shook his head ruefully. “Trying to be perfect? That is a recipe for doing nothing. I tried, but I never really went for it, because I was scared. Once we try to create something, it becomes real. And we worry, what if it’s not good enough? If we never start, an idea can forever retain the promising, boundless potential it has here in this environment.” He tapped at his temple. “Up here, it remains a pure, perfect intention, before it gets muddied up with action and failed attempts. But until we do that—stain and tarnish an idea in an effort to bring it to life—it is nothing. It’s just an idea, and ideas are easy. It’s the execution that makes
them matter. That is what makes them special. The magic gets mixed in during the process. There is magic to be found in figuring things out! I understand that now. You can spend all your life waiting for inspiration and the right moment, but in the end there is no right moment. You just have to find your way. And you will. You’ll make your magic. They’ll help,” Redondo added, gesturing to Leanora and Shazad. “I’m leaving the theater to all of you.”
“What?” Shazad said, shocked.
“You’re leaving us the theater?” Leanora added, struggling to comprehend the breadth of Redondo’s postmortem generosity.
Redondo pointed at the desk. “Center drawer.”
Leanora was closest. She opened the drawer and took out an envelope. Opening it, she read aloud: “The final will and testament of Melvin Kamitsky.”
The three of them looked at Redondo: “Melvin Kamitsky?!!”
Redondo shrugged. “What, you thought my parents named me Redondo the Magnificent?”
“If you’re Melvin, where did Redondo come from?” Joey asked.
“Melvin came from Massapequa, Long Island. Redondo Beach is out in California somewhere. I think it’s technically part of Los Angeles, but I don’t know. I’ve never visited. I just liked the way it sounded.”
Joey had to laugh. He had always assumed that Redondo had some fantastical magical origin. “You think you know a guy…,” he said, pleasantly surprised to learn that Redondo’s past was every bit as normal as his own.
“I don’t get it,” Shazad said, frowning.
“What’s to get? I thought it was catchier than Melvin the Magnificent.”
“Not that,” Shazad said. “Why are you leaving the theater to all of us? Joey won your competition, even if he did lose the wand. Leanora and I… We didn’t even get that far. We failed.”
“Failed?” Redondo made a face like he’d just been hit in the forehead with a Ping-Pong ball. “Shazad… you didn’t fail anything. The competition was never just about the wand. It was about bringing the three of you together. I had to learn who you were… what you were made of… and you three had to learn about each other.”
Order of the Majestic Page 25
