1 A Hiss-tory of Magic

by Harper Lin

  “We need to know more about this Order,” I said. “How many members could come to Wonder Falls? Is our town secretly being invaded by frat boys?”

  Bea sat up. “What can we do? Look them up on their website? Run ‘the order’ through a search engine? Ask Blake Samberg and trust he isn’t lying?”

  At that moment, there came a knock on the door of the hospital room.

  I opened the door to find Blake waiting outside holding a pet carrier badly hidden by his coat. Inside the carrier, Treacle put his paws against the grid bars and meowed.

  “I’ve made a mistake,” were the first words out of Blake’s mouth.

  “No, I have,” I said, taking Treacle from him. “Come in. Shut the door behind you.”

  I set the cat carrier down at the foot of the hospital bed.

  Blake came into the room. I gently shut the door, turned, and slapped Blake across the face.

  I seethed. “Confidant and informant, did you say? It was a huge mistake to trust you!”

  “That was one mistake—not saying that, but not following through on it.” Blake rubbed his jaw and flinched.

  Bea stood up, trying to calm us both down. “I did not,” she said, “just witness my cousin and soul sister assault a law enforcer!”

  “As if he’s to be trusted!” I was answering Bea, but my eyes were on Blake. That time, he lost our staring contest. “You’re as crooked as they come, Blake Samberg.”

  Blake held his hands up as if he were the one under arrest. “Not usually. Only this time.”

  My jaw dropped. “Oh,” I said, sarcastically, “that makes it all better, then!”

  “I thought I’d cracked the case. I thought that it was only about me.” He glanced over to Bea. “Can I say anything more specific with her around?”

  “You’d better,” I said to him. “Because it’s her mother who was getting assaulted while you had your showdown with Min.”

  Blake groaned. “I thought he wasn’t going to say anything!”

  Bea and I glanced at each other.

  My outrage faltered at the idea that he didn’t know that Treacle was my magically mind-linked pet cat—or, apparently, that I had any magic at all. I mustered up my outrage again and said, “Min Park didn’t say anything about this club except that he was in it. I just figured some things out. So, tell us about the Order. No, wait, first tell us how you knew this was my cat.”

  Bea squatted to slide the latch open and let Treacle out of the carrier.

  Blake answered, “Cats are the one thing Jake and I can talk about without fighting. He mentioned that if I saw a black cat with a star-shaped scar on its forehead, then he was probably yours.”

  “Right.” I sat myself down at the edge of the hospital bed and gestured to the armchair in the corner. “Now tell us about the Order.”

  Blake took his long coat off the carrier. From one pocket, he drew a palm-sized, leather-bound journal with a pyramid embossed on the leather cover.

  “This is what they give to the legacy members of the Order. My father was a member, and he wanted me to join because he’d made some good friends there. He paid my dues at first. We host charity fundraisers, help entrepreneurs, give each other a leg up on the job network—that sort of thing. Country clubs. A few parties.”

  I said, “You did strike me as a party person.”

  “Never.” He traced the triangle on the cover with his fingertips. “The pattern on this pyramid shows where in the hierarchy my father was. Until you get pretty high up, you usually only know who’s immediately above you.”

  Bea asked, “How does the Order decide on hierarchy?”

  “The higher-ups pick and choose who’s going to be directly beneath them. If you progress with something called the Mysteries, then you get…”

  “Higher up?” I offered.

  Blake corrected, “Deeper in. Attending solemn rituals in robes, drawing circles on the ground in chalk, dribbly candles, and saying the same thing as everybody else in the room at the same time in a language that nobody really speaks anymore…”

  Bea smiled. “The Mysteries! You figured out how to do magic!”

  Blake’s eyes flashed with resentment. “Mrs. Williams, there is no such thing. My father got too deep into it. I’m a man of science and reasoning.”

  I believed his last sentence. “So you don’t mind if we keep that book?”

  “Borrow it. I’d rather not forget how much it messed my dad up.” He tossed the journal to me. I caught it. Bea, with her magic burnout, edged her chair away. It wasn’t like the Greenstone spellbook, where every page and especially the cover had some seal that had to be unlocked for the magic to flow. Somebody had been careless in making this. The pulp of the pages twisted this world into the other worlds.

  Blake continued, “I wanted out. After my father passed away, I quit paying my dues. The members would come to where I used to live and say something about legacy, how it means that you can never leave the Order—I filed complaints against them, even restraining orders, and finally I changed my name and moved here,” he concluded, “where I thought that I could leave all that behind me.”

  “So,” I said, “When you recognized the necklace—”

  “I thought it was a warning from them. Min made clear that it wasn’t just me who was from the Order. I met up with him in secret—I admit to that. I told Min to tell the rest of them that I was ready to barge into their chapter with guns blazing.” Blake laughed. “Min’s left the Order, too! They let him, though, because he wasn’t a legacy. He didn’t need any of their help to become a success, obviously.”

  I stifled a sigh of relief. I still had to play it cool. “You said that you cracked the case.”

  From his other jacket pocket, Blake drew the chain and pyramid pendant. “Min gave me the Order’s membership amulet you found. It isn’t his. The pattern shows somebody too high ranking.”

  Bea suggested, “Could there be DNA on it still?”

  “It’s been passed around too much,” Blake pointed out. “And Cath did say that she picked it up after the fire.”

  “Is it all my fault you can’t catch them, then?” I challenged, “For tampering with evidence? What about the way you withheld crucial information pertaining to the case—and not for anybody else’s sake but yours?”

  “I’m saying that was a mistake! You don’t have to forgive me, but just to start making it up to you, I thought you should be the first one to know what the next course of action is, and it won’t be a DNA test.” Blake stood up. “They—the Order—do have a website directory, and the Wonder Falls police force does have an IT team. We can cross-reference what I know about these patterns, what they signify, and narrow down who it might be. They might not categorize every member, but…”

  I finished, “It’s worth a try.”

  “The only problem is…” He heaved a sigh. “I’ll have to tell Jake. And Chief Talbot, of course.”

  Bea and I started talking at the same time.

  “Just do it.”

  “He doesn’t bite!”

  “Good luck.”

  Blake shrugged on his coat. “I just thought you deserved to know what this was all about.”

  I saw him out the door. “Thank you,” I told him, “for trusting me with this after I slapped you in the face. I really hope it turns out all right for you.”

  “I hope your Aunt Astrid gets well soon.”

  Then Blake left.

  Inside, Treacle batted at the journal with his paw.

  “The Order stirs up trouble in more than the magical way,” Bea remarked. “That could be all they need to get caught.”

  “But they have magic,” I said. “They have our magic, and it’s powerful!” I picked up the journal. “This has a blocking or privacy spell on it. That’s why I couldn’t get to Treacle when the carrier was covered. It’s definitely effective, but whoever wrote the spell didn’t put any safety catches on it so that it would only apply to somebody trying to read the journal.
They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “We can’t get the Greenstone spellbook back until we know which member of the Order came into Wonder Falls, killed Ted, and attacked my mom.” Bea sighed. “You know this is the hardest thing for me to say, but we have to let them do their jobs—Blake and Jake and Talbot. Everyone.”

  “They can’t do it properly if we don’t tell them everything. They could be running out of time, and not even know it!”

  “Mom would know what to do.” Bea moved a few stray wisps of hair from her mother’s forehead. “I wish she’d wake up.”

  With that, Bea and I lapsed into the same gloomy silence that we’d shared before Blake came in.

  Trial by Fire

  Jake urged Bea away from the hospital bedside with the fact that he had a gun license and was in the better position to protect Aunt Astrid in case any agents of the Order tried to attack again.

  “You think they’d attack again?” I asked him. They had what they wanted—the spellbook.

  Jake answered, “She might have seen something. The attacker wouldn’t want to be identified.”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Fine,” Bea said, to my surprise.

  Jake nodded. “Blake will drive you. He should be right outside.”

  I gave Bea a confused look on the way.

  She mouthed, “They have the book. They won’t bother Aunt Astrid.”

  On the way out, I whispered, “How can you be so sure?”

  Seeing Blake, Bea took on a more normal tone of voice. “They’re in over their heads, drunk with power. Isn’t that right, Blake? About the Order? They wouldn’t hound Aunt Astrid like they did you, since they don’t know her personally.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Blake murmured.

  So Blake drove us: Bea, Treacle, and me. Marshmallow and Peanut Butter were already in the car. He said that it would be safer if Bea and I were in the same place and that he’d stake out the house in case any members of the Order tried to attack us, just in case the Order was targeting everyone connected to the Brew-Ha-Ha.

  The entire case had turned him and Jake into real partners again. The safety of innocent civilians was more important than arguing over attitudes.

  “What makes caution so important is that even I don’t understand the motive,” Blake said. “A couple of officers followed the gang violence that made up Ted Lanier’s history and came to a dead end. Darren Castellan, Darla’s ex-husband, has a solid alibi, and Jake says that the marriage had run its course for him—he wasn’t jealous. So Ted’s death had to have something to do with the Order. Why set one person on fire and leave another concussed?”

  I played along. “You did say that Ted had a concussion. Maybe when Bea brought Peanut Butter home, she’d interrupted the arsonist.”

  “And nothing was burgled?”

  I lied, “No, nothing.”

  Bea supplied, “It makes no sense.”

  “Well, Bea, Blake did describe them as basically a mob. Maybe they like to cause destruction, and they believe it’s not that bad because they’re all doing it together and laughing about it afterwards.” I reasoned, “They’ll still go about it in different ways because they’re different people.”

  The car pulled into the driveway. Bea carried Marshmallow in the cage into my house, with Treacle and Peanut Butter following.

  Blake stopped me at the door. “I can’t shake the feeling that you’re holding out on me, Cath. After today, I swear, I have no secrets from you.”

  “I don’t have secrets, either. I never did! I have privates.” That sounded really bad. What was the noun form of secret, again? I blamed Blake’s cheekbones and the composition of the rest of his face for distracting me. Wearily, I added, “You know what I mean. The day’s not over until I’ve had some sleep. Then we’ll talk. Yeah?” Without waiting for a reply, I patted his arm and then walked past him.

  Treacle walked me up to my room. “In the cellar below the place where the fire happened, I smelled something.”

  I wanted to theorize and think some more until everything fell into place, but I was too exhausted. I fell into bed without changing my clothes.

  * * *

  I dreamed that Aunt Astrid and the Maid of the Mist were one person and that I felt silly for not realizing that they were. Aunt Astrid’s braids cascaded in a loud hiss of flowing water that was more like rain. From the balcony of the Parks’ grocery store, I watched a meteor shaped like the pyramid pendant of the Order tumble from the sky and crash into the estuary of the three waterfalls.

  Blake stood at a chalkboard like a teacher and said, “But you see, it isn’t possible for this to happen.”

  From my school desk, I raised my hand so that it would be my turn to talk. “It did happen. My Aunt Astrid is in the hospital now because of it. You said the Order did this.”

  Blake shook his head no and looked around. “Does anybody else know the correct answer? The Maid of the Mist.”

  Aunt Astrid, in the seat beside me, wasn’t raising her hand. She looked right at me and said, “I’m waking up.”

  “What?” I asked, confused and hopeful.

  Aunt Astrid said, as if repeating, but she was not repeating, “Sometimes, the future that I see is fixed.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” declared a voice from my other side. I turned to see Darla Castellan as she’d appeared in high school. More quietly, she suggested, “Senior moment yesterday, maybe?” Darla swung her arm as if to strike me, and she was holding a shoe with a strangely shaped heel. Kitten heel, they call it. I ducked, and the shoe flew past me.

  “Aunt Astrid!” I shouted, concerned. It should have been me to take that hit. If only I hadn’t been somewhere else…

  But where Aunt Astrid had been sitting, Ted Lanier now sat, pressing star-shaped cookie cutters into a piece of rolled-out dough. Bea took the seat on his other side.

  Bea added, gloomily, “We’re at stake. As witches have a historical tendency to be. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

  At the final “ha,” Ted burst into flames. In an instant, the face I’d known in life became the charred remains that I’d caught sight of.

  At that, I stood up. “I’m done with this.” I turned to leave and entered a ballroom instead of a classroom. Everything was made out of glossy marble. It was difficult to walk in the ball gown that I was wearing.

  Min Park stood in the middle of it all, looking perfect in a white tuxedo. “Do you dance?” he asked, extending his hand in invitation towards me.

  Music filled the room—only it wasn’t music. It sounded like several people intoning the same thing at the same time in a language so old that nobody should speak it anymore.

  “I don’t know what this dance is called,” I told Min.

  He put one hand on my waist and held one of my hands with the other. “Trial by water,” Min answered me. “One, two, three. One, two, three. Repeating history.”

  “No,” I laughed as we danced. “I’m pretty sure that this is called a…” Waltz was the word, but I’d forgotten it in the dream. “A waterfall?” I looked down at our feet to make sure that I wasn’t stepping on his and he wasn’t stepping on mine.

  The foot maneuvers looked strange. He seemed to be stepping where I had just stepped. It didn’t make sense. His shoes were nice, though.

  I looked up to see that my dance partner was Blake, not Min.

  “We were all under orders,” he said to me. “Dress code. Bloodline legacy. What to say, how to think—it’s a cult that takes over your life.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I asked him, “What’s this dance called again?”

  Blake stepped back and moved my hand in a circle, signaling me to spin around. I did so, and Reuben Connors in his fireman gear pulled me to his chest and answered, “Trial by fire.”

  I shouted in surprise and struggled to push him away.

  I woke up struggling against the quilt.

  The Social Network

  As Bea filled
the food and water dishes for all three cats, I made pancakes and eyed the morning sky suspiciously from the kitchen window. The sun shone bright over the neighbors walking their dogs, the shingles of the suburban houses, and the police cars as they drove by on their ways to Aunt Astrid’s home.

  When the pancakes stacked higher than the distance between Bea’s elbow and her wrist, she forced me to stop.

  “What are they waiting for?” I wondered aloud. “They have what they wanted, our spellbook. Why aren’t they using it?” I ate my pancakes over the countertop by the sink so that I could keep giving the sky a suspicious look.

  Bea, at the table, spooned maple sugar over her pancakes and bacon. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve read that book from cover to cover—only once, but—” Bea didn’t need to be so modest. She had a great memory for everything that she read. “I can only guess that every one of those spells comes at too high a cost for them. It isn’t just a spellbook. It’s almost a how-to manual on different human sacrifices!”

  “Between Ted and Aunt Astrid, the Order obviously isn’t squeamish about hurting other people.” I remembered what Treacle had told me the night before. “Treacle did some investigating, too. He smelled something in Aunt Astrid’s nuclear bunker. Forensics probably wouldn’t think to look for it, and I wouldn’t even recognize it with my human nose.”

  Treacle and Peanut Butter sniffed each other’s noses. Treacle, tail up and on a mission, stalked out the door.

  The doorbell rang. I gave a start, made a grab for something in the kitchen that I could use as a weapon, and bolted after Treacle.

  “Cath, calm down!” Bea called after me.

  Through the door, I could hear Jake’s laughter and a voice that sounded like Blake’s except that it was happy. I recognized it as Blake’s for certain when he said, “Okay, bye, kitty!”