She drew in a breath and pushed away the regret, grief, and anger that threatened to drag her into darkness. If she let it, she’d never get out again. So she stepped forward, over the trash and debris, through what had been the living room. But those demons of pain are persistent; and while she was lacking memories, this place was filled with them. She wept, quietly, when she saw the spot where the Christmas tree had gone every year.
She kept walking, past the dining room where her mother had made sure they always ate dinner together. Glancing into the kitchen, she saw the refrigerator, and tried to ignore the visions of paintings and report cards that had once hung there with pride.
Knowing it was a losing battle, she let the grief in. It was going to have lots of company anyway. And she did the only thing she could: she looked past the broken windows, torn open walls, and instead drew each memory into her heart, capturing it so she could take it with her. Memories were all that was left here.
“My inheritance,” she said and laughed ruefully.
Turning away from the kitchen, she walked down the hallway. Unconsciously, she stepped over a spot on the floor that she knew would creak and wake her parents.
“If only,” she said to herself.
She passed the bathroom, not daring to look inside, and continued on to her parents’ room. The door was missing. A glance inside turned her stomach. More detritus, including used condoms, covered the dingy floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the lingering fragments of a ward on the doorframe, now dead and useless. Clenching her jaw, she stepped inside, careful to step around the disgusting remnants of youthful lust.
The room felt both larger and smaller at the same time. Even empty and torn apart, she still felt that odd sense of invasion kids feel going into their parents’ room when their parents aren’t there. Once she reached the center, she turned, scanning the room.
“A secret place,” she said to herself, repeating her mother’s words. The floor was carpeted, so it couldn’t be a loose floorboard. The closet doors were broken and hanging useless. Holes ranging from fist-sized to more than a foot in diameter covered the walls.
Hopelessness welled up from her heart.
“There’s no way anything could’ve stayed hidden here,” she said to the empty room.
A thought came to her. She drew the goggles from her bag and slipped them over her head. Adjusting the lenses, she shifted the scene. Faint traces of strong emotions drifted like motes of dust in the air. The walls and ceiling were crisscrossed with wisps of faded magic.
She didn’t see anything.
After ten minutes, she finally gave up and pushed the goggles back onto her head. Happily, she left the room and the desecration of her parents’ most sacred and private place behind. She was about to turn to leave, when, without meaning to, she turned toward her room. The door was closed, and though it had some holes and dents from where someone had kicked it repeatedly, it also still bore dozens of stickers.
Without her telling them to, her feet carried her there until she was looking over the door that, to her, read like the history of her childhood. Her very young years were represented by unicorns, flowers, and pixies. All were faded and old. The newer ones were almost entirely bumper stickers. The oldest were jokes relating to inside fantasy jokes.
“One sticker, to rule them all,” she read aloud and chuckled.
The newest of all were math or science jokes.
“ ‘The speed of light: not just a good idea, it’s the law,’ ” she read.
Wraith appreciated the irony, considering how she’d gotten here. When she’d looked over every sticker several times, she couldn’t avoid it anymore. She reached out and ran her fingers over the letters across the middle of the door. Someone had started to peel them away, but years had practically bound them to the wood, and the vandal had apparently given up at removing the word Room, leaving only the adhesive residue to tell what had been there. Janey’s was still intact though. She ignored the rather unflattering note someone wrote with a Sharpie below it.
Drawing in a slow breath, she pushed the door open and stepped in. As she did, she felt a faint tension slide over her. She blinked and looked around. Her room was practically untouched. Turning back to the door, she could see the lingering wards woven into the doorframe. She touched the smooth wood, tracing over the equation that was still strong. That didn’t make sense. Why would the wards in this room still be intact, but not in any others? The answer came to her almost immediately. Her parents would’ve placed the most powerful and most lasting wards to protect what mattered most to them.
She studied the ward, realizing it was a connection to her parents. It was elegant in its efficiency and effectiveness. It wouldn’t explode, or set the intruder on fire. It would nudge the person to go somewhere else, a whisper that nothing of importance was in here. Deeper still, she could see that if someone was set on entering, once inside, a nagging fear would fill them. It would be a like a splinter in the mind, and the only way to remove it would be to leave. Wraith tried to imagine the willpower the people who’d taken the furniture from here must’ve had.
She found herself smiling with pride. Her parents hadn’t been slouches— they’d been real, honest–to-goodness wizards.
Her eyes drifted down the inside of the doorframe and she saw lines drawn in intervals; the one starting at maybe three feet from the floor was marked with a 2.
Her fingertips touched the black mark. “I guess I was always tall.”
She followed the lines up with progressing ages, jumping two or three inches every year. The last three lines were spaced better than four inches apart. She stared at the last line, 15, just above eye level. Her eyes closed, and she leaned her head against the doorframe, letting a few tears fall to the carpet.
Her mother’s voice drifted through the years and she could almost feel her gentle touch wiping tears away.
“Sweetie, I know you loved Mr. Cuddles,” her mother said, “but he wouldn’t want you to cry; he’d want you to remember all the good times you had with him, and how lucky you were.”
“Lucky?” Jane asked, the shoebox-turned-hamster-coffin held tight in her small hands.
Her mother smiled and nodded, wiping the tears away. “Out of all the little girls in the world, Mr. Cuddles was your friend. That’s pretty special, don’t you think? Almost like magic.”
Wraith smiled the smile of that little girl, and her mother’s comforting words wrapped around her like a warm cloak. She stood up straight, drew in a breath, and turned from the doorframe, then she stopped.
“Almost like magic,” she said, casting the words out like a net, hoping to ensnare a memory she knew was there but could quite see.
Pieces were all that came at first: doing geometry homework, struggling to figure it out. She held fast to that memory, closing her eyes to focus more intently. Slowly, it expanded in her mind.
“Didn’t your teacher tell you about pi?” her father asked.
Jane shrugged.
Her father smiled, scooted his chair closer to hers, and pointed to the math problem. “It’s a magic number,” he said writing it out.
“Magic?” Jane asked, dubious.
Her father looked at her seriously, continuing past the tenth digit. “Oh yes. It goes on forever, and never, ever repeats with any kind of pattern.”
Jane thought about that and furrowed her brow. “But that’s not possible.”
Her father smiled. “Why?”
“If it goes on forever, it has to eventually repeat,” she said. “Even if the pattern was a trillion places, it would have to repeat. Just by ever deceasing probability.”
Her father smiled at her. “Except its magic, so it can defy the standard models of probability.”
Jane rolled her eyes. “Dad, I’m nine and a half,” she said. “I know there’s no such thing as magic.�
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He smiled more. “Oh, don’t be so sure about what you know. Before Einstein, everyone knew that time was constant.”
Jane considered that. “I suppose, but—”
“Magic is just a term we use to describe something we can’t explain with our current understanding,” her father said.
Jane considered that too, and nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense.”
He leaned in close. “There’s another reason I know it’s a magic number,” he said.
“How?”
“Look at the first three numbers,” her mother said as she came up from behind and set a glass of milk on the table.
Jane did, but didn’t see anything.
“It’s your birthday,” she said and kissed Jane’s cheek. “March fourteenth.”
Jane smiled, then realized she was smiling and forced it back. That of course made her smile more. “Does that mean I can do magic?” she asked, trying to put some skepticism in her voice.
Her parents shared a smile, obviously seeing past the ruse.
Wraith held to that memory for a long time before tucking it away in her heart for safekeeping, letting it fill her with warmth and comfort. She smiled, soaking in the simple joy of just knowing her birthday.
She opened her eyes and looked around the room. Could that be another reason why the wards here were so strong? It made sense. If you were going to hide something, what better place than somewhere you had built to protect that which was most precious to you.
“A secret place,” she said to herself, scanning more slowly.
After a moment, she sighed in exasperation with herself and lowered the goggles over her eyes. She made a few minor adjustments to the lenses and then the tendrils of magic that wove over the room came into glowing clarity. She stopped and stared in utter amazement. It was beautiful. Thousands of individual lines, some white, others gold, blue, green, purple, red—every color imaginable, wove together all around the room. Each pulsed with something akin to, well, a pulse, a heartbeat. Her gaze moved to the closet, and it seemed that the threads grew brighter there.
She opened the door and was washed over with memories of hiding there as a child, door closed and sure no one would ever find her there; as if the spot she occupied was outside normal space. That’s when she saw the lines of glowing power that squared off one corner, the same corner she’d always chosen. She reached out and touched a filament of magic. It thrummed like a guitar string, resonating with the others until the whole room seemed to hum in a clear and perfect tone.
Along the middle of the back wall, a line of numbers appeared in shimmering script: zero through nine. Her heart raced with excitement and she was smiling broader than she had in recent memory. Reaching out slowly, and carefully, she touched the three.
The number grew brighter and a new tone, lower in pitch, filled the room. She could almost see the wave form on the threads of power, its frequency slowing.
She touched the one. The amplitude increased, but the frequency slowed; the tone grew louder, but lower in pitch.
She touched the four. The vibration in the magic around her grew higher in pitch and more powerful still.
Moving faster she pressed one number after another: 3.14159265358979
Upon touching the sixteenth digit, the previous—well, sounds was the only word she could think of, even though she wasn’t really hearing them—began to play together. The “music” it created washed over Wraith and filled her with awe. It was beautiful, like the sound of the entire universe resonating. It was also incredibly familiar. Then it dawned on her. It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, her mother’s favorite song. Wraith closed her eyes, remembering her mother playing it on the piano and teaching her to play it. Then she remembered the wizard, and her promise to him.
“No more broken promises,” she whispered to herself.
When she opened her eyes, the square in the corner of the closet had changed. The wall itself didn’t disappear, but Wraith could see beyond it, into a space outside of space. Inside, she saw something glowing bright in shades of white and blue. She reached in, her hands passing through the matter of the drywall as if it didn’t exist, and touched something smooth. She drew out two . . . somethings, rectangular and completely covered in a dense weave of magic lines. It took her a moment to realize they were books, but with the goggles on she couldn’t see their material form under the intense magic in them. Her heart raced and she ran her hands over them reverently, then stepped out of the closet. Around her, the music faded into silence, and she could see the wards over the room began to dim slowly. It occurred to her that the wards must’ve been set up to stay until someone found the books.
She pushed the goggles up and the world now looked as if it was painted in muted grays—crude shadows of the beautiful light she’d just seen. Dimly, she thought of Plato and his Allegory of the Cave. Maybe he was on to something.
Pushing that thought aside, she focused on the two books in her hand. They were bound in old leather, dark and worn, but well cared for. There were no titles, not even embossing left behind from gold leaf that had worn away. She didn’t know how, but she knew the bottom one was her father’s and the top one her mother’s.
She opened her mother’s book slowly, holding her breath.
It came out in a slow, whisper. “Wow.”
Epilogue
Private Bobby Collins smelled the familiar scent of antiseptic and heard the beeping of machines. Being in the hospital was a good thing. It meant he wasn’t dead, which hadn’t been a certainty when things went down. He tried to move and instantly regretted it. He let out a grunt of pain.
“Easy, soldier,” a man said.
Collins opened his eyes and saw the commanding officer of the Legion of Solomon, his commanding officer, standing over him, stone-faced as ever. The man, simply called One, was in his early forties, but they’d been a hard forty. His face wore lines that showed every mile, and his brown hair was peppered with gray that was just as earned. He wasn’t tall, or built like a linebacker, but he was made of military-grade steel and could take apart half a dozen men years his junior.
“How bad is it, sir?” Collins asked.
One reached out and pressed a button on a machine. A moment later, Collins felt the sharp edges of his pain dull and a faint euphoria fill him.
“Bad enough to need morphine,” Collins said, his words a little slurred.
“You got burned up good, son,” One said. “I honestly don’t know whether to give you a medal or kick your ass.”
“Sir, if it’s the latter, may I request a deferral.”
One chuckled. “You’re going to be fine, Private Collins. Or should I call you Ovation? You’ve been using that name for a while now.”
Collins drew in a breath, not too deep. “No, sir. He was killed by the Theurgic Order. The body, or rather a body, was burned beyond recognition.”
“Who was he?” One asked. “Did he have any family?”
“No, sir,” Collins said. “He was a street kid. Some poor slinger with the bad luck to be a suitable doppelganger for me.” Collins shook his head. “He wasn’t supposed to die in there, sir.”
“What happened?”
Collins went over the events. The plan had been for him to observe and direct from the cover of his version of invisibility. Not that he’d really been invisible; he’d just manipulated everyone into overlooking him. It was a trick that had saved his bacon a number of times in Afghanistan, and got him noticed by the Legion in the first place. Safely hidden in plain sight, he was supposed to weave the complicated illusion. After seeing the illusionary execution, Wraith would then take out the Order. With that done, she’d go to release the captives, or take Geek and teleport out. Once clear, Collins would collect the unconscious double, set the charm to change one of the Order members into his corpse, and get clear. He had
n’t expected the place to turn into a scene from hell. The only reason he hadn’t suffocated or been killed himself was thanks to the charms he’d been carrying.
Collins shook his head. “It wasn’t a normal fire, sir. Not even a normal magical fire. I couldn’t keep it away from the kid, and I couldn’t let him get up and run, or go and grab him without—”
“Without sacrificing the mission,” One said.
Collins nodded
“Well, it’s probably not much comfort,” One said, “but that one boy’s death saved countless others. That operation had killed hundreds of kids that we know of, and sent dozens more into the world with power they couldn’t control. Thankfully, none the likes of the asset.”
Collins nodded, but didn’t look up.
“I told you it wasn’t going to be much comfort,” One said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You did good, private,” One said. “I’ll admit I wasn’t sure you could pull it off, but you did. This was a tough mission, but you got it done.”
“Thank you, sir.” Collins thought back to how it all had played out. Manipulating two changelings and a wizard hadn’t been easy, but he’d managed. He was impressed how well his mental magic had worked. All he had to do was tweak some memories, and insert himself to create a shared past. Of course, he also had to make sure they didn’t remember anything from the last few weeks. After that, he’d only needed to nudge them every once in a while to say or do what was needed to push Wraith in the right direction—the one that had led to her going after the Order. It would’ve been easier to just get inside Wraith’s head, but he couldn’t risk it. Those phantoms of hers would’ve tipped her off. Collins knew he was just lucky that she’d decided to go to the market alone, which had given him a chance to set the scene.
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