Magicae Terra Episode One

by K. McKinley

a gift.

  He headed for the door, then stopped when he realized I wasn’t following him. I had just thought of something, something I should have thought of before. If I could possibly die, and I was disappearing, what would my parents think? What about the rest of my family? I was close to them, so me just vanishing would be noticed. I know they would look for me, but that could end up bad for them. I looked at the man and then walked over to the hotel’s phone.

  “What are you doing? We have to leave.”

  “Yeah I know, I get it. Urgency is needed. If I’m going to disappear and start some new life, or maybe even die, I have to tell my parents something. That way they don’t go looking for me and get caught in some evil warlock plot.” I picked up the phone and called my mom’s cell; she answered after three rings.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Mom. It’s me, Amelia.”

  “Amelia! How are you enjoying New York? Did you finally remember which class you shared with Laura?”

  “No, I didn’t, but she doesn’t remember either. She thought I was someone else when I showed up.”

  “Oh, well at least you got to visit New York. Are you going to go see a Broadway show? I think you should see that Wicked show—you love the Wizard of Oz.”

  “I can’t.” I paused, then continued, “Mom, something’s happened. I can’t explain it but I have to… disappear for a little while.”

  “Disappear? Are you okay? Amelia, what’s going on?”

  “I’m fine, Mom, but I saw something I shouldn’t have.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I’m going into some kind of protective custody. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to contact you again, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m okay and not to worry about me.”

  “Amelia, what’s the word?”

  “What?”

  “The word! The word I told you to ask for if someone came to pick you up from daycare and it wasn’t me. What’s the safety word? This way I’ll know if you’re being forced, that there’s not a gun to your head.”

  “Mom.”

  “Amelia.”

  “Snuffleupagus.”

  “Oh, Amelia, my baby. Promise me you’ll be safe.”

  “I promise, Momma. Tell everyone I love them.”

  “I will. I love you, my baby girl.”

  “I love you, too, Momma.”

  I hung up the phone and hid my face so he wouldn’t see me cry. It took me a minute and then I turned back to him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Let’s do this. Where are we going?”

  “Hawaii.”

  I nodded and grabbed my bag, following him out of the hotel room and down to the waiting taxi. The flight was long and if I hadn’t brought the book it would have been even longer since the man wasn’t very talkative. I still hadn’t bothered to ask his name; keeping him nameless meant that I could still think this wasn’t real, that I was still imagining everything.

  Since we left New York at noon and traveled backward in time, we arrived in Hawaii at three, which evidently left more than enough time for us to make our way to a place called Spitting Cave with a stop-off for supplies.

  We were at your standard camping and general supply store and I was trying to think of anything other than dying. Nervous, I asked him, “So, what exactly do we take on a trip through the Barrier? What exactly is the Barrier? And once we make it through, what then?”

  The man was impatient, walking through the store, pulling things off shelves and putting them in his shopping cart. “Think of it like a hiking trip—you take water, nonperishable food, sleeping bags, things like that.” He hesitated before continuing; he studied me and then shook his head and went back to picking out food to bring. “The Barrier is a wall that was created a long time ago around a large continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a barrier to hide magic, made of magic. If we make it through, then I’ll help you find a job and start a new life.”

  “You keep saying if we make it through and if we survive. If it’s just a wall then what’s the big deal?”

  “The Barrier is magical; it’s not a physical wall. It’s magic set up to keep people from trespassing. So we’ll have to make our way through layers of spells that were created to do anything possible to stop us from succeeding. We will be attacked in every way imaginable: physically, psychologically, emotionally. It will try to destroy us on every level of our existence.”

  I paused in the middle of an aisle of MRE’s and cured trail bologna, for the first time getting a glimmer of what I was about to do. “That sounds horrible. How is that better than a warlock?” I was starting to get hysterical and might have said “warlock” a bit too loud, because men farther down the aisle gave me a weird look. I didn’t care, though, because I was coming to the realization that I might really die. Before it was almost a game, now I was picking out a sleeping bag for a trip I might not survive. All the things I’d been trying not to think about were flooding through my head.

  He walked over to where I was standing and stood over me, blocking me from view. “Believe me when I say the Barrier is the lesser of two evils. Julius is a sadistic man with lots of power and he gets off on torture. If he got a hold of you it would be months, maybe even years, before you would be dead, and by that time you would be just a shell of the person you are now.”

  This was just getting better and better. He stepped away from me and went back to picking out supplies. I just continued to stand there, my feet frozen again. Stupid things just couldn’t get use to facing death.

  We left the store and headed out to Spitting Cave, the taxi dropped us off and we started walking out. “So what are we doing here? Do we go into the cave and get transported there? Is there a doorway or something? What do we do?” I was getting tired of having to force him to give me information. It would be nice for once if he just told me what was going to happen instead of dragging me where he wanted me.

  “I didn’t want you here, so I am not dragging you where I want you.”

  Crap, I did it again. This was getting ridiculous.

  “Yes, it is.”

  I sighed and just shut my mouth, which was a good thing since the trail was getting steep and slippery. I could see the ocean spreading out in front of us and then all of a sudden we were at the end. There was nowhere else to go. I looked around, trying to find a cave, but all I saw was the ocean and the occasional spray of water as it splashed up. Then he started climbing down. Down a cliff that led to nothing but crashing waves. The last few times I’d asked questions I didn’t like the answers I got, so I decided not to ask this time.

  We stopped about a quarter of the way down on a small ledge and he started making sure his pack was on securely and then reached to make sure mine was too. Still no answer as to what we were going to do. He turned back to the ocean and looked down. “When I say, we’ll need to jump.”

  “Jump! What the hell! I'm not jumping! Are you crazy?” That was the final straw; I looked down as the water rushed into a previously hidden cave and was then spit back out. I shook my head violently. “There isn’t enough tea in China to get me to jump off this cliff!” I started backing up; I was just going to have to take my chances with Julius, the evil warlock.

  “That’s really a shame, Ms. Bennett. Well, for you, not for me. Now I get to have a new plaything.”

  I turned and looked up the cliff to where a thin, pasty man was staring down at us. He had slicked-back black hair and a pencil-thin mustache and was wearing a dated tuxedo. He was the very picture of sleazy magician. I turned back to the man to see if he thought this was as funny as I did. He did not.

  “Julius, what are you doing here?”

  I turned back and took another look. So this was the evilest warlock on this side of the Barrier. At first glance, he was not impressive. He had filed his teeth down to points, uber creepy but not really scary. It was his eyes that finally did it for me. There was
something wrong when you looked into them—they were missing something. Sanity.

  “I’m here to make sure you both jump. I can’t have someone ruining my well-thought-out plans again, now can I?”

  Well-thought-out plans? Who was this guy kidding? It was an insurance con that even the slowest college student could have come up with. Completely unimpressed.

  “Be quiet, Ms. Bennett. The men are talking. Now, you two need to either jump or let’s be on our way. I have a plane on standby waiting for your decision. I have some experiments that I’ve been dying to try out for a while now. I’m not sure what use Ms. Bennett will be, but at the very least she could provide some entertainment for my men.”

  The man was leering at me; who leers nowadays? Was he some reject from a silent movie? And telling me to be quiet because the men were speaking? I didn’t care who this man was supposed to be, nobody told me to be quiet so men could talk. Without thinking, I raised my hands and repeated the gesture that I had done just a few hours earlier and once again white lightning shot out of my fingers. To my surprise, it disintegrated Julius. Shocked, I was silent for a moment and then I turned around. “So does this mean we can go home? Is he dead now?”

  The man was staring at me, assessing me. I was still unable to read his thoughts; whatever they were, they didn’t seem to paint me in a negative light, which was an improvement.

  “That was just a construct he sent here—it wasn’t really him.”

  I groaned. There was no winning today.