by Daley, Lysa
Problem solved.
Then I pretended like it was a big surprise to find the backdoor open.
“That’s so weird. I already tried that door?” my human roommate mumbled, totally confused. She had no clue that I was a witch.
“Yeah, sometimes it sticks,” I said, hurrying out with my backpack. “Don’t feel bad.”
I felt guilty about that for a week.
Twenty minutes later, I climbed the steps to my one-bedroom, garden apartment right off campus. It was small, but for a college student, it was also pretty swanky. Twenty units surrounded a cute Spanish courtyard, where a single all-fruit tree grew lemons, limes, apples and mango, depending on the season. It was planted by a faerie that used to live here.
Climbing the open air stairs to the second floor, I saw a folded note taped to the door. The familiar smoke-scented stationary belonged to my landlord, Mr. Gulch. I unfolded the note and read the scrawled handwriting.
It said: Lacey, your rent check bounced. Call me ASAP.
Chapter Two
After leaving half a dozen messages for my father on his cell phone, and at his office, and at his London flat, I gave up.
It was close to 9pm in England, so I wasn’t really expecting anyone to still be at his office, but I thought I might catch him on his cell.
Of course, I hadn’t been able to get ahold of him for months, so I wasn’t sure why I was expecting him to just pick up now. I could only cross my fingers and hope that he’d eventually reply to one of my desperate emails or phone messages.
A wave of regret washed over me. I should have been paying more attention to the fact that I hadn’t heard from him for so long. Maybe something was wrong.
Except, the truth was, it wasn’t all that unusual for my dad to go off-the-grid for an extended period of time. When he headed off into the wilds on a research project, he could go for months without any communication.
Regardless, I absolutely had to get in touch with someone in his office. And soon.
I flopped down on my oversized couch to think, thrusting my feet up on the coffee table. After turning the problem around in my head a couple times, I knew there was only one thing to do.
I’d have to go old school.
It took twenty minutes of rummaging around in every nook and cranny of my apartment, but I finally found my grandmother’s old scrying glass in the very back of the hall closet.
Most mortals would probably call it a crystal ball.
Honestly, I would've gotten rid of it a long time ago if it hadn't belonged to my beloved grandmother. It was one of the only thing I had left from her.
The scrying glass was wrapped in tissue, nestled in hay and locked in an old hand-carved wooden box. I carefully took it out and set it on its black ebony stand.
Next, I scanned my bookshelves, trying to find the oldest book that I owned. For a frightening moment, I feared that I hadn’t even brought it with me to school. Or the little book could’ve been at the bottom of a box of junk out at my mom’s house, two hours away in Palm Springs.
Finally, I got lucky and stumbled upon it sandwiched between two paperback mystery novels. A Primer of Basic Spells and Incantations had belonged to my great, great, great grandmother and had been handed down to the eldest female child in the family for over a century. As an only child, that would be me.
Using an old fashioned scrying glass was basically elementary school witchcraft. The simple spell was one of the first things they teach a young witch.
I just didn’t exactly remember how it went anymore.
Flipping through the yellowing pages of the spell book, I had a flashback of being seven years old and using it to follow my cat around when he went out into the woods.
Of course, there was the more embarrassing use of the crystal ball: to follow around Jackson Hayden, my middle school crush, a few years later. That turned out to be a bad idea when I saw him secretly kissing my best friend, Sarah Wittenberg, who had sworn to me that she didn’t like Jackson. Probably served me right for spying on him.
Anyway, I picked it up and moved the glass ball to the middle of my kitchen table. Then I took a seat, paged through the primer, and reread the simple spell. Closing my eyes, I concentrated. I hadn’t done this in a while.
“Here goes nothing.” I muttered the simple spell quietly to myself. “Ostendus verumus.” Then I opened my eyes and peered into the round crystal orb. Everything was still. Nothing moved.
“Ostendus verumus. Ostendus verumus.”
Maybe this wasn’t as easy as I remembered.
I was ready to repeat the spell, when the clear glass ball suddenly went cloudy. It was working. What looked like a tiny dark thunderstorm began swirling around inside the ball.
I felt a shiver of worry. Lightning crackled inside the ball. The storm seemed like an ominous sign. Wherever he was, the weather was dreadful. I concentrated on my father and repeated the spell.
If you use the scrying glass to locate a non-supernatural human, they don’t know they’re being watched. But any witch or wizard, probably even a vampire and faerie, would feel the energy of the scrying glass focusing in on them.
The harder I concentrated, the faster the storm swirled and the darker the glass became.
The image of a wintry landscape formed. Soaring, jagged snow capped mountains plunged down to an icy sea. Thick winter clouds dropped swirling snow. I held my breath, waiting for the glass to reveal my father.
My nerves tingled. I had so many questions for him.
But a moment passed. Then another, with no sign of him. Only the harsh wintry landscape.
I concentrated harder. Focused all of my energy. Still nothing. No sign of any life.
But the glass wouldn’t show me a specific image if he weren’t nearby. Or if he were dead. The terrible idea of a vampire or were-beast attack flashed through my mind. Could he have been resisting my energy? He was much stronger than I was so he could if he chose to. But why would he?
At least, I knew he was alive.
In my thoughts, I called out to him, opening my mind for him to hear. Father, please, I need your help.
If he were nearby, he would hear my plea. But I got no reply. Finally, I sat back in my kitchen chair and sighed. The image faded away and the scrying glass cleared.
Perhaps he wasn’t the one blocking me. Maybe it was someone else.
An hour later, my phone buzzed. It was a text from my best friend, Ellie.
I thought we were meeting for lunch?
Shoot! With everything that happened this morning, I’d totally forgotten about our lunch plans.
I thought about canceling. Even if I was her maid of honor, I was not in the mood to talk about the appropriate length of a traditional wedding veil, vanilla vs. buttercream frosting, or the pros and cons of handwritten invitations.
On the other hand, I was starving.
“Wait, what?” Ellie said, setting down her caramel latte. “I’m sorry, but I thought your family was loaded? Old Merlin money and all that?”
“I wouldn't exactly say loaded. But my dad is pretty well-off,” I replied, averting my eyes.
The subject of money always made me uncomfortable. My dad inherited what some people might call a fortune when his mother passed away.
“What about your mom?”
I laughed. “My mom won’t pay for grad school. She thinks I’m not using my talents. She wants me to work with her in her potions business. Plus, she’s practically broke.” I took a sip of iced green tea. “This whole thing with my dad doesn't make any sense. I feel like something else is going on.”
“Like what?” Ellie asked quietly, leaning closer. My best friend, Ellie Sanchez, instinctively knew that whatever was bugging me was something I didn’t want the whole world to hear.
The trouble was I wasn’t exactly sure what I thought yet.
“I don't know. I have a really weird feeling.”
“Let me see that business card again—the one from vampire girl.”
I handed her the plain white card. She reread it and frowned. “This address is in a pretty sketchy neighborhood.”
“That’s what I figured. You know this area?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s on the fringe of downtown. Like, the really old part. Not the bright, shiny, hip Arts District part.” Ellie grew up in Los Angeles and knew the city a whole lot better than I did.
I’d been living is Southern California for almost two years, and it seemed to me that L.A. was one of those places that's so big and spread out that you could live here for twenty years and still not know your way around.
“What kind of a business would be down there?” Ellie asked.
“I have no idea.” I shrugged. “But vampire girl said it wasn’t illegal or immoral.”
“Do you believe her?”
I considered the question. “Yeah, I think I do.”
“That’s too bad. So much for call girl assassin,” Ellie replied. “You’d be great at that.”
“I know, right?” I nodded, playing along.
“Okay, my ladies,” interrupted Mrs. Radagast, the owner of the cafe, carrying our lunch to our table. “I have two Chinese chicken salads. You girls talking about the wedding?”
We exchanged looks and Ellie said, “We’re arguing over the color of the bridesmaid dresses. Do you think they should be lavender or plum?”
“Oh no.” She held up her hands. “I’m not getting involved in any of the important questions. You girls are going to have to work that out yourselves.”
Radagast’s Book Store and Bakery was less than two blocks from my apartment. Mr. R ran the book store that specialized in first edition and antique books. He carried both enchanted and regular merchandise, but in order to get your hands on the enchanted merchandise, you had to be a registered member of his book club. That allowed you access to the private reading room. I joined as soon as I got to California. I think Mr. Radagast may have had the best collection of used magical books in all of the Western United States.
Mrs. Radagast was a simple hedge witch. Her mother had been a half witch, and her father was mortal. Still, with only a quarter magical blood, she was able to combine some of the best cooking I’ve ever had with basic herbal spells.
“Thanks, Mrs. R.” Ellie eyed her salad, inhaling the herbal aromatics. “Wow, this smells amazing.”
“I added a pinch of rose hip and bee pollen to help you girls focus and stay calm,” Mrs. R winked, setting down an extra container of her homemade dressing. She was one of those creatures that seemed to only live in L.A.: at least fifty-five years old but looked more like forty. Whatever magic this entailed was closely guarded by these West Coast ladies of both supernatural and human. “And I think Lacey would look lovely in teal. Goes with her chestnut hair and brown eyes.”
I smiled. “Thanks, Mrs. R.”
After Mrs. R went back behind the coffee bar, Ellie returned to the topic at hand. “Okay then, what’s your plan? Are you going to check out this mysterious address or try to find another way to get the money for school? I mean, what kind of job could you get?”
“With my undergrad degree, I could probably get a job teaching high school English.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You? Teaching English to a bunch of teenagers? You’d turn them all into newts by the end of the first week.”
She wasn’t wrong. Patience was not one of my virtues. Neither was my ability to relate to kids. Or, come to think of it, my love of traditional literature.
“Then what should I do?”
She shook her head like I was a total idiot. “You should check out the address on that card. What do you have to lose?”
The navigation on my Honda Civic guided me through the maze of L.A. freeways from Westwood to downtown.
It was January and the rolling hills and canyons were green and lush. In a month, these same hills would bloom with an explosion of native wildflowers. The sea of orange poppies and yellow mustard flowers would be gorgeous, even if they did promise to send everyone’s allergies into overdrive.
The 405 Freeway ran through a carved-out passage in the Santa Monica mountains. Coming up and over the mountains revealed a spectacular view of the San Fernando Valley below. Then the 101 Freeway snaked past some of the nicest neighborhoods in the valley. This suburban bliss continued east, transitioning past Hollywood into the urban grit of downtown L.A.
The drive took me thirty-five minutes. People in Southern California didn’t measure distance in miles. Instead, they did it by time. And thirty-five minutes was good time for this distance.
My car’s navigation had me exit at Wilshire Blvd. A couple blocks later, I found street parking less than a block to 1 Ironwood Way.
I was in the heart of one of the oldest parts of Los Angeles. I had no idea what this area used to be, but now it was clear that it was home to a combination of fashion industry businesses, toy manufacturers, and flower wholesalers.
Nothing magical about this area at all.
The sidewalks hummed with activity as deals got done and business was transacted. I stopped, looking across the street at a tall, pale fortress of an old building shaped vaguely like a rocket ship with rows of small windows. The building seemed ancient, especially compared to the forest of shiny glass and gleaming chrome younger buildings that had sprung up in recent years.
Carved in an art deco font above the front entrance were words: The Ironwood Building.
No one paid any attention to me, expect a homeless woman sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk.
“Don’t go in there,” she said, seemingly to no one at all, not looking at me but straight ahead.
“Excuse me?” I looked around to see who else she might have been talking to, but the street was empty.
“You’ll regret it,” she continued, gently shaking her head.
“Are you talking to me?” I said sharply.
“Who else is thinking about going into that there building?”
She had the milky white eyes of a blind person. A tattered slushie cup sat near her feet, with a sign that read, Seeking Human Kindness: Bills over $50 will not be accepted after 9pm.
Everybody’s a comedian.
“What’s wrong with going in there,” I asked. “Is it dangerous?”
“Darling, there are all kinds of dangerous in this world.”
“Okay, that’s not helpful.” I sighed, glancing back at the Ironwood Building. People came and went. Regular looking people. Nobody seemed dangerous or weird. I should’ve known better than to get sucked into a conversation with a crazy homeless lady.
When traffic cleared, I stepped off the curb, mid-block, to cut across the street.
“Just remember,” she called after me. “There are some doors, once opened, that cannot be closed again. No matter how much magic you use.”
I stopped in the middle of the lane. Magic? How could she know?
I spun around, ready to question her. But she now sat slumped over asleep. Or passed out.
What was going on?
A Prius with an Uber sticker sped around the corner honking at me. My heart raced as I leaped back on the curb.
The homeless woman snored loudly, with her Seeking Human Kindness sign resting on her chest.
I started toward the corner to cross at the light but hesitated and reached into my pocket. I only had a five dollar bill, three quarters, and a dime. What the heck. She needed it more than me.
I slipped the money into the plastic cup and dashed across the street.
Despite the overall rundown appearance, the Ironwood Building had a very grand entrance, with old-fashioned brass revolving doors. I pushed through them into the tiled lobby, stopping to take in the unexpected interior of the building.
Behind its modest light-filled Romanesque exterior sat a courtyard that reminded me of the set of a Victorian movie, all green ferns and brass. The courtyard soared up fifty feet with three old-fashioned open cage elevators, flanked by marble stairs and their ornate iron railing.
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Not so shabby on the inside.
A petite girl with fine features sat primly behind that reception desk to the right of the entrance. An official board behind her listed all the companies that had offices in the building. Quickly scanning the list, it appeared that most of the occupants were accounting, law, or investment firms. There were also two escrow companies and an agricultural auditing group - whatever that was.
If there was nothing but boring corporate firms, why was I here? I was starting to think this was one big mistake.
“Can I help you?” the girl behind the reception desk called to me as I stood looking around.
I hesitated, the business card tucked into the palm of my hand. Maybe I should’ve just left. Instead, I said, “Um… well, I was given this address and told to come here.”
“By whom?”
“I’m not really sure.” I stepped closer and handed her the card.
She read it with no reaction, then looked back up at me. Up close, her violet eyes had a shimmer of gold dust in the irises. Only pixies had gold dust eyes. She was using a glamour to hide the rest of her faerie appearance, not to mention her delicate wings.
It was hard not to stare. Pixies were exceptionally lovely creatures.
“Oh yes.” She nodded, opening a narrow drawer to retrieve a small black box. “Mr. Stroud will be expecting you.”
“Who’s Mr. Stroud?”
“Mr. Stroud is the man who’s expecting you.” The pixie blinked her long black lashes and handed me a coin. “Take this to the elevator and insert it in the coin slot inside the car. Then punch the 13th floor button.”
“The 13th floor?” I asked. This seemed a little odd because most high-rise buildings don’t have a 13th floor. People thought it was bad luck. Superstition.
“Yes, the 13th floor.”
I examined the nickel-sized gold coin with the snake-haired face of Medusa on it. It must’ve been foreign. I’d never seen anything like it. It was heavier than a regular coin, which made me wonder if it was real gold. But who would hand out real gold coins to random elevator riders?
