by Tess Lake
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. It must have been someone else.”
“I want my box of mint chocolate chip cookies. Until it is delivered, there’s not going to be any discussion with anybody,” Aunt Cass said.
I’m sure Dominic had planned to come up here and stay calm and happy the whole time. He just hadn’t counted on Aunt Cass, who can rub anyone the wrong way, including a real estate agent dedicated to keeping that fake smile plastered on.
“As I understand it, April Torrent is the legal owner of this land, and as I further understand it, no one has seen her for a number of years. Perhaps she moved away? I’ve been trying to get in contact with her and I can’t find any other addresses for her other than this one. You know, the funny thing is it looks like she just vanished. My investigators can't find a trace of her. Could you imagine that? She vanishes and her family pretends she’s still around? So how about you get her to give me a call when she’s available.”
Dominic marched his way back to the car, leaving us standing there speechless. It was only once he was driving away that Aunt Cass slammed the door shut.
“Oh Goddess, is he threatening us?” Luce said.
“It sounded like a threat to me,” I said.
“He’s not gonna do anything,” Aunt Cass said. Even though she said it with her usual bluster, I could see she was shaken. She certainly hadn’t expected he would come back at her so hard.
“It’s easy – one of us calls him and pretends to be Grandma. Say we don’t want to sell and that’s it,” Molly said.
“Forget it, it’s fine. Now put down the glasses of wine and come with me back to the so-called East Wing.”
I think we were all in a state of shock: first at the investigator turning up, and then at the confrontation between Dominic and Aunt Cass. So that’s why we followed her directions to hurry up clearing out the spare room pronto.
“What do we have to empty this for?” Molly asked, waving her arm at the assorted boxes and random bits of junk that had collected at the end of the bed.
We heard a car pull up outside our end of the mansion.
“Someone staying here. She’s here now,” Aunt Cass said, looking out the window.
We followed Aunt Cass to the front door to find Hattie Stern dropping off a sullen teenage girl. I didn’t know her name, but I knew she was Hattie Stern’s granddaughter. I’d only seen her once, sometime ago at Hattie’s when I’d gone there for training (which was now finished, hooray!).
She got out of the car and shuffled her way around to the trunk, where she pulled out a bag. Hattie was staring straight ahead. As soon as the girl closed the trunk, Hattie nodded to Aunt Cass, who, incredibly, nodded back. Then Hattie drove away, leaving us with the teenage girl standing in front of our house. Aunt Cass immediately took charge.
“Okay, now that the old biddy is gone, let’s get moving. I’m Cass, that’s Harlow, Luce and Molly. Everyone, this is Kira Stern. She is a Slip Witch and will be staying here for a while to train with me. Okay?”
“Hi,” Luce said.
“Nice to meet you,” Molly said.
Kira was maybe sixteen or seventeen. The last time I’d seen her, she’d had purple dye in her hair. Now it was blond with a pink streak in it. She had a silver nose ring as well.
She looked so young and fragile that for a moment I wanted to rush over and give her a hug. Then, like all teenagers, she opened her mouth.
“Great, get to stay with some old people. Love being dumped off.”
“Old people?” Molly muttered.
“Welcome to our home!” Luce said, walking over to her.
Kira did the typical looking-up-and-down-with-disdain teenager thing.
It was Aunt Cass who came to the rescue.
“Put your bag inside, and then you and Harlow come with me to the main house,” she instructed.
Kira turned her disdain towards Aunt Cass, but then quickly looked away. She had enough sense to know not to tangle with her.
Kira followed us inside. We did a very quick ten-second clean of the bedroom that she’d be staying in, hauling boxes out and dumping them in the common area. She threw her bag on the bed and then followed us back out to the kitchen.
“So you guys, like, live here?” she asked, looking around. That teenage disdain was back.
“Yeah, we do and it’s awesome,” Molly said a little snarkily.
Before that could develop any further, Ollie and Will pulled up at the front door in Ollie’s car. There were five seconds of introductions where Ollie and Will both said hello to Kira and she shyly smiled back at them. Then they were gone, leaving me and Kira alone. She turned to me.
“So where’s your boyfriend?” she asked.
Was I this annoying as a teenager? I don’t remember being a judgmental little snark, but who knows? Maybe I was.
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Right…” Kira said, drawing the word out.
“Do you remember me? I saw you at your grandmother’s house. I was training with her.”
“Nope.”
Kira’s phone buzzed in her pocket and she had it out in a flash, tapping away and ignoring me.
“Okay, well, come with me down to the main house and we’ll see what Aunt Cass wants.”
Kira ignored me, continuing to tap on her phone.
Fine, two could play that game. I walked out of the house and made my way down to the main part of the mansion. When I was about halfway there, I heard Kira come out and rush after me. When she finally caught up, I didn’t say anything.
“I was coming, I had to talk to someone,” she muttered.
We went in through the dining room to find Aunt Cass sitting in front of the television, watching yet another police detective show. She flicked it off as soon as we arrived and stood up.
“The two of you are not going to talk about what you’re about to see today, okay?” Aunt Cass said, pointing a finger at both of us.
“Um… okay?” Kira said.
“Enough with the dramatics,” I said.
“Snitches end up in ditches,” Aunt Cass said, wiggling her finger at me. “This way.”
We followed her back through the kitchen and down the stairs into the basement. Grandma, as usual, was standing in the back corner, still frozen in time with her hands out in front of her. She had a concealment spell on her, which excluded family members. Aunt Cass waved a hand and Kira gasped as Grandma appeared.
“Oh my Goddess,” she said.
“Tell anyone and I’ll curse you back to the Stone Age,” Aunt Cass said. She grabbed the flashlight by the door that led to the underfloor of the house.
“What happened to her?”
“She attempted some dangerous magic,” Aunt Cass said.
Unbelievable. She won’t tell us a thing, but the moment someone from outside the family shows up, she spills that Grandma attempted some dangerous magic?
Aunt Cass flicked on the flashlight and opened the old door, and we followed her in.
“Be careful where you walk. Some of the floorboards are rotting and there’s another entire story below us,” I told Kira.
She didn’t say anything but did turn on her phone light.
At first I thought we were heading for Aunt Cass’s underground laboratory, but then we took a right instead of a left and headed down a corridor I was sure I’d never seen before. It ended in a heavy door. Aunt Cass grunted when she opened it.
We followed her into a room that looked like something out of a serial killer’s fantasy.
You know in those cop shows how there is always a moment when they have the big map covered with strings and pins and there are photographs stuck to the wall and random newspaper articles all over the place? Aunt Cass done that to this room. One entire wall was a gigantic map of Harlot Bay and its surrounds. I counted at least eight different pin colors. Tangled around the pins were bits of crisscrossed thread with no apparent pattern. The map had question marks and notes w
ritten all over it.
I walked over to the map to take a closer look and then felt a push of magic from behind me. Between one blink and the next, most of the pins on the map vanished, leaving only a few red ones behind.
She’d seriously cast a concealment spell to stop me from looking at the map?
“What did you do that for?” I asked, turning around. I saw the rest of the walls were blank now too.
“I need you to help me with this, and all the rest of that stuff would just confuse you,” Aunt Cass said, fixing me with a challenging look.
Or you just like showing off, I thought.
“You need us to help you?” Kira asked.
“Around the beginning of the summer, something set off a magical fire in my stash of fireworks up in one of the cottages behind the mansion. They destroyed many hundreds of dollars’ worth of stock and cost me possibly thousands of dollars’ worth of profit. I have been investigating this for some months and have come to the conclusion it appears to be a magical entity of some type. Given the recent fires in Harlot Bay, I believe we are dealing with a fire spirit of some kind, and I need your help, both of you, to track it down.”
“A fire spirit? So all the red pins are recent fires?” I asked.
“All reported and unreported fires I’ve been able to discover. Whatever it is keeps moving around, so what I need you to do is take the three beacons over there and place them in three specific locations so we can triangulate a position for whatever this thing is. Understand?”
The beacons were essentially pieces of carved crystal, with a raven’s feather and some other bits and pieces, bound up with string.
“You think the fire yesterday out on the coast was caused by a fire spirit?” I asked.
“Duh, that’s what she just said,” Kira said to me.
“I like her. She gets it,” Aunt Cass said. She picked up the beacons and handed them to Kira while I tried not to glare.
“You’ll be in charge of these. Here are the addresses of the places where I need you to put them up. Now get going. I need it done right now.”
Aunt Cass waved the list of addresses at me.
“Wait, I want more information. If there is a fire spirit somewhere in Harlot Bay, what are you going to do with it when you find it?”
Aunt Cass shrugged.
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe trap it and deport it. Or if it won’t cooperate, I might have to extinguish it.”
“Let’s do it. I’m ready,” Kira said.
Teenagers. So easily swayed and so desperate for approval.
“Okay, give me the addresses,” I muttered.
Chapter 4
The first location on Aunt Cass’s list was the old lighthouse. It was on the far side of Harlot Bay, out on the bluffs overlooking the ocean.
I drove down the hill, heading into town, and it’s fair to say at this point that I was definitely in a mood.
No answers, just more questions – Aunt Cass giving me instructions without handing over information with it. Having a teenager snark at me sealed the deal. So I decide to play the silence game until Kira cracked.
We were on the edge of Harlot Bay when Kira finally started talking.
“Your aunt is way cooler than my grandma,” she said, examining the three beacons. She ran her fingers over the soft black feathers before picking one up and brushing it against her face.
It was so cute I cracked immediately.
“Sometimes she is. She cursed Molly to only say nice things about her a while back.”
“She actually curses people? My grandmother is all about control, control, control. She doesn’t let us use magic for anything.”
That matched up pretty closely with what I knew about Hattie Stern. I’d been going to her for training to learn how to control the power to pull heat or cold out of anything. It had first happened by accident when I’d helped Aunt Cass put out the cottage fire using ocean water. I’d quickly discovered the power was incredibly addictive. The first time I’d been in training with Hattie and reached out my hand to pull some heat from a kettle, she’d whacked me across the back of the knuckles with a wooden ruler.
I’d finished my training with her only recently and was looking forward to never going back.
“Sounds like she lives up to her last name,” I said.
We kept driving, going somewhat slower now thanks to the summer traffic. It was pretty much peak vacation season, and tourists had flooded Harlot Bay, filling up all the hotels and motels and all the campsites over on Truer Island.
Since the lighthouse fire, the lighthouse had been blocked off to tourists because it was considered structurally unsound. Tourists still visited, though, because the lighthouse was still listed in all the guidebooks. I was hoping we’d get enough privacy to set up the beacon.
I took a detour to bypass the main part of town, which would have so many tourists crossing the street it would be virtually at a standstill. This took us along the Esplanade so we could look out on the pristine sands and calm Harlot Bay. The beach was filled with swimming and sunbathing tourists, and I saw Kira glancing more than once at cute teenage boys.
“Do you want to go to beach later?” I asked.
Kira immediately looked away from a particularly cute group of boys who were throwing a ball around and wrestling with each other.
“Maybe, I don’t know,” she said, looking down at her lap.
I didn’t push it. I didn’t have the whole story, or really any of the story, but given that she was a Slip Witch and a teenager, I knew what she was going through. Aunt Cass had helped train me when I was a teenager so I could find ways to control most of my powers (or survive them without too much trouble).
“I’m a Slip Witch too, you know. So is Aunt Cass.”
This was obviously the wrong approach. Kira frowned and pulled out her phone, tapping away on it. We drove in silence the rest of the way out to the lighthouse and parked in the almost-empty parking lot.
“Okay, time for the first beacon,” I said.
I took a look at the instructions Aunt Cass had given me. The biggest one, written in bold with multiple exclamation marks after it, was: PUT THEM UP SOMEWHERE HIGH!!!!!!!
Together we walked up to the lighthouse and skipped under the string of warning flags surrounding it. There were two other cars in the parking lot, but there was no one around. They must have walked down the cliff steps to the beach.
The door to the lighthouse was blackened and warped but still intact. It was chained shut and there was a thick padlock attached to it.
“How do we get in?” Kira asked.
“Like this,” I said, and cast an unlocking spell. The lock opened and I swiftly removed it and loosened the chain so I could open the door.
“My grandma was right about the Torrents. You really don’t care when you use magic, do you?” Kira said. There was a little bit of attitude in it, but I got the distinct feeling that it wasn’t from her.
“If Slip Witches don’t use their power, it comes out in other ways. That’s lesson one,” I said and went through the door. Kira followed me in.
The interior of the lighthouse was burned black from the fire that had been set by Jason Greenway, the husband of the couple who’d murdered Kyle and Holly Morella. He’d burned the lighthouse down in an attempt to kill me, apparently in some hope that he could stop me from investigating the skeletons that had been found out on Truer Island. But the idiot hadn’t realized the investigation was going ahead whether I wrote any articles about it or not. The halfwit had even attacked Carter Wilkins and another man behind the soundstage at the Festival of Lights, as though if he could somehow debilitate both reporters in town he’d get away with murder.
“The stairs are broken. How are we supposed to get the beacon up to the top?” Kira asked.
During the fire, the stairs that led to the top of the lighthouse had collapsed. Someone must have removed the wreckage, though.
“Do you know how to do a levitation spell
?” I asked her.
“Um, sort of. Not really allowed to use magic for no reason at home.”
“You’re not at home anymore. You’re living with the Torrents, and we use magic for any reason we want.”
“Where am I levitating it to?” Kira asked.
I pointed up to the highest window, which had a ledge a few inches wide below it.
“If you floated it up there, no one would be able to get it down easily, even if they could see it. Since the stairs are out, I’d say it would probably stay hidden up there for a long time.”
Kira took out the beacon and held it in the palm of the hand. I could see her working herself up to using her magic. She took three quick breaths and I felt the magic around us ripple. The beacon floated up out of her hand and began to slowly make its way up.
She got it about halfway up before the magic started to jerk.
Kira was biting her lip in anxiety and looking at the beacon as though she could push it up to the windowsill by sheer force of will. That’s not entirely too far off when it comes to magic, but she needed to learn to relax as well – squeezing too hard can cut you off from the source of the power.
I stepped closer to her and touched her on the shoulder, then took a slow breath myself.
“You got this,” I said, giving the beacon a bit of a nudge myself.
The beacon floated upwards. It quickly reached the window, where Kira slowed it down and then landed it on the sill, incredibly gently. Once it was in place, she let the magic go and turned to me, grinning.
“I did it!” she said and then held out her hand for a high five.
I slapped her palm.
“Good job. Let’s set up the others,” I said.
On the way back to the car, Kira started chattering away about how amazing it was to lift the beacon up onto the shelf. Since the ban on magic at her house was pretty much complete, she was probably feeling giddy after having used her magic properly for the first time in ages.
The second stop was an address high up in the hills of the rich district. We drove over there and found an empty parcel of land with a lone tree growing on it. This was a little trickier. I had to cast a concealment spell on both of us, and then Kira floated the beacon up to nestle in the hollow of the tree high above us.
