by Sara Hanover
Like that wasn’t creepy. I shoved the paper back in its envelope before saying to her, “Why are you spouting all witchy woman and Shakespearean?”
She blinked a few times. “I’m not. Am I?”
“Then what was that you just said?”
“What was what?”
“That bit about good and ill and destiny.”
“I didn’t. Did I?”
“You most certainly did.” I fingered the envelope. Without the professor, I needed a mentor on how to handle the new me, but he’d always despised the Society and I tended to think he had valid reasons. My experience so far had been mixed. I didn’t know whether I should show up or not, and Evelyn’s little speech didn’t help my indecision. “You don’t remember?”
Evelyn shook her head. I considered her a moment, before adding, “You’ve done that a couple of times.”
“Said something I don’t remember?”
“More like intoned. Predicted.” I considered what she’d intoned lately. It couldn’t be, and yet it was. “And, come to think of it, you’ve mostly been right.”
“Well, thank sugar for that. I’d hate to go around saying something stupid.”
I grinned at her. “Oh, I didn’t say they didn’t sound stupid. Just . . . correct.” And she had been, and because of what I’d been exposed to over the last year, I crossed my arms and asked, just in case, “Any witches in your family?”
“Witches? No, for heavens’ sakes. Maybe a horse thief or two and a prohibition runner.” She punched me lightly in the shoulder again. “Now who’s being stupid?” The movement flashed her watch in front of her eyes, and she straightened. “I’ve got to fly. Don’t forget, you promised me.”
“Be here by nine.”
“All righty!” she fled, the kitchen side door banging in her wake, Scout chasing after her until the door shut in his face. He sat down, a disappointed look on his doggy muzzle.
“I’ll take you for a walk in a bit.”
His tail thumped. Sidestepping him, I went to the front door, then out the kitchen door, and then through the mudroom to the backyard but found no sign of its delivery. I should have asked Evelyn where exactly she found the invitation, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. It would have poofed into existence wherever it was most likely to be picked up quickly. It felt substantial enough, but I was a little surprised that it stayed intact under Evelyn’s touch. I tapped the envelope. “You forgot to include the time.”
If the Society thought I was going to get all fancied up and then sit for hours hoping to be collected before I wilted, they had another think coming. The envelope grew warm between my fingers and I eyed it suspiciously before opening it enough to peer inside.
8:00 pm appeared below the original missive. Magic, ain’t it wonderful. I let the envelope snap shut. I’d be ready by eight, but not a minute sooner, and I still didn’t intend to sit around all night waiting to be picked up. I didn’t even have to sleep on that idea.
Mom had chores lined up for me, filling my day, so when bedtime rolled around, I collapsed. We’re a team, the two of us, and although University was on break for her, and community college for me, her dissertation had her pretty well tied in knots, so I worked at keeping the house Aunt April rented us in as good a shape as I could. It’s really old (for that matter, so is she) but it’s not a Victorian, just a framework almost Craftsman style two-story. It needs a daily cleanup, cooking, laundry, dog care, the usual. Also the unusual, but I tried to keep most of that as unobtrusive as possible. Sure, Mom’s paper touched on reality and magic, but I had no intention of letting her know how steeped in it I’d become. It was enough she knew about Dad and my friends and the stone in my hand, but most of the rest of it I’d kept quiet. Or I hoped I had. I didn’t want her to worry. Even when the wicked elf Devian had taken her, he’d kept her under a glamour so she really didn’t know what was happening. Getting her released from his hold had been an ordeal. Luckily, the professor and Carter had blasted Devian back through his elven portal and didn’t think he’d be able to reappear again for a decade or so. Equally hopefully, he’d learned a lesson not to mess with us.
Sometime after midnight, a tap-tap-tapping came at my bedroom window. I struggled out from under my comforter and my Labrador, whose body was thrown over my legs as though he expected a high wind to come blasting through and I needed an anchor. His watchdog instincts had gone to sleep with him, his pink tongue hanging out with a bit of dog drool as I staggered to the window and wrestled it up.
A lady harpy sat on the sill, the detached window screen in her arms as if she held a harp. I say lady because, although all harpies are female, this one usually dressed in battle armor and tonight she sat wrapped in a stylish silk dress, matching heels dangling from her feet. Harpies are shapeshifters, and in their battle mode they are winged and wicked. She could also manifest entirely as an owl, a hunter of the night. But it was a good-looking woman who faced me now. Goldie handed me the screen as she swung inside my room. I pried one eye open enough to peer at my clock.
“A little early, aren’t you?”
“Early morning rain expected, and I didn’t want to ruin my dress. You’ve got room on your couch.” With that, she marched past and through my door, headed for the downstairs sofa. I propped the screen against the wall, wrestled the window shut again—old houses, what can I say, with enough paint on the frame that I was lucky the window could be moved at all—and I went back to bed.
* * *
• • •
The sounds of voices drifted up the stairs to greet me as I came down for breakfast, and I could hear Goldie and Mom laughing over something or other. A pang hit me that the two-men-in-one our professor manifested as wasn’t there to partake. I’d spent months trying to help him reconcile his soul with the rejuvenated body of his younger self, but we hadn’t been able to succeed for quite a while. Brian had been all left-coast surfer dude, laid back and very naïve because he’d been born at the age of twenty and had a lot to learn about the world. The professor now—crusty and knowledgeable and altogether magical—well, he was supposed to have morphed soul AND body into Brian but hadn’t, his phoenix ritual going wrong. Not entirely wrong because his personality resided inside Brian, so the poor guy had two people wrestling for control of his body. The professor usually won. We’d managed to get it right, finally, or I hoped we had. He’d disappeared when we’d attacked Devian to get Aunt April and my mother freed as hostages and knocked that evil elf deep into his own realm. With any luck, Devian wouldn’t get his shit together for a decade or two. If he were smart, he wouldn’t bother us then either, but no one could accuse Devian of being able to let bygones be bygones. Had Evie somehow been warning me against Devian?
All of which went in a full circle to my missing Brian/the professor at the breakfast table with the rest of us. I sat down with a sigh, putting the envelope next to my place, and both women swung around to face me.
My mother said brightly, “Goldie here has been telling me more about that stone in your hand.”
Wonderful. The rules of magic seem to be on a need-to-know basis, and nobody seemed to think I needed to know much in case that made me dangerous. “Anything interesting?” I responded as I took two pieces of bacon, some lukewarm toast already spread with melted butter, and poured myself a glass of orange juice.
“Many think it thrives on chaos, but there are other opinions on it.” Goldie passed me the spare teacup and saucer as she answered, and my mother filled it with coffee as it was passed along to me.
Mom kept her gaze on my face as I ate my bacon and swallowed before saying, “Oh?” I feared to say anything less or more in case I might be in trouble later, so I dropped my sight away from her blazing blue eyes to concentrate on cream and sugar in my coffee.
“Indeed,” Goldie continued. “You know, of course, that the stone tends to absorb magical relics—that curs
ed ring of Professor Brandard’s and the book on the Dark Arts, as well as the benevolent shards of the Eye of Nimora—” She smoothly ignored the gulp and near splutter from my mother’s direction, and added, “Which seems to support the theories I’ve heard that the stone is not one of chaos but balance.”
“Balance?”
“It purportedly acts like a fulcrum in the powers of magic.” Goldie smiled at me as if totally unaware of the chaos she was currently bringing to my life. “You took physics in high school? You know what a fulcrum does?”
I put my teacup down. “ ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. Archimedes.’ I got an A in the class.”
“Good quote.”
“So . . . this thing . . .” and I rubbed the thumb of my right hand over my left palm. “Seeks balance?”
“That’s a theory I’m inclined to believe. It’s not sent you down any paths of evil, has it?”
“Maybe a little reckless now and then, but no.”
My mother coughed.
Goldie smiled. “Still so much to discover in this world!” She pushed back from the kitchen table. “I’ll leave you two to finish your breakfast in peace while I go talk with the neighborhood guardians and see if there is anything afoot.”
That gave me a hope that something else besides myself had seen that apparition watching the house the night before last. I wanted to go with her, but chances were the spies she hoped to contact might not show if I were there, so I stayed in my chair and studied my breakfast plate.
The kitchen door had banged solidly back into place before my mother said, “Neighborhood guardians?”
I shrugged. “No idea. Maybe crows? An owl or two?”
“Seriously, Tessa?”
“I really don’t know.”
“I’m finding out new things every day.”
“Welcome to my world.”
She stared at me wordlessly while I stared back.
Finally, Mom said, “There’s a chance that thing could go evil?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, the professor and Steptoe were a little astonished when it embedded in me, but they didn’t wave a cross in my face or anything.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not! I think, but I’m not sure, that they don’t want to suggest anything to me in case that brings on the problem they’re worried about. Anyway, I’ve had this for what—six months?—and I’m still on an even keel.” I shoved the envelope back and forth a bit. “Or I thought I was. The Society wants to see me in two days.”
“Mandatory? I know the professor held nothing but scorn for them.”
“The feeling is mutual, near as I can tell, but I don’t think I have an option here. I really need training.”
“Should I worry?”
I looked at my mother, examining her face which is not at all like mine except that I have blue eyes, too. Her dark blonde hair looks to have strands of silver here and there, and her eyes had laugh (and maybe some crying, too) wrinkles at the corners, and she had one crease across her throat that may develop into some serious stuff as she gets older. So, yeah, she looks a little worn but still pretty, if stern and worried, and I can see why my father fell in love with her. I love her, too, but then she’s my mom. I wasn’t about to tell her that my trip today was vital and for information that might bring back my father. I didn’t want to offer hope I couldn’t deliver.
“If I told you no, you would anyway.”
“True.” She finished her cup of coffee. “I wish the professor was here for advice.”
“No, you don’t. Not about this anyway. He had nothing but spite for them and he’d be spitting nails now and telling me not to go. Threatening them for requesting my presence. Trouble we don’t need.”
“Right again. Okay. I’ve got a meeting at the university, a short planning committee to prepare for the new semester. Can you start the dishes before you go wherever with Goldie?”
“Got it.” I finished my breakfast and listened to her gather up her tote bag and laptop before leaving, and wondered if anything Evelyn said might come true this time.
Scout snuffled around the backyard, chasing off a few birds and marking his territory to warn off the raccoons and possums near the trash cans. It wouldn’t work, and he would be unhappy if they stopped coming around because chasing them off seemed to be one of his great joys. He bounded through the grass, golden Lab-half something else. Our yard was no longer green and lush, and I didn’t miss the need to have to mow and hack back shrubbery. Winter does have some advantages. I saw no sign whatsoever of Goldie. That early morning rain she’d predicted began to fall, first as an ice-cold mist and then a steady drizzle. The pup and I ducked our heads and hurried back into the house, more from the cold than the wet.
I found Goldie sitting at our breakfast table, sipping a mug of hot tea; she pointed helpfully at the nearby kettle on the stove. “Should still be piping hot.”
Scout plopped his butt down near his food bowl, put a paw into its empty interior, and looked up at me hopefully. He watched with soulful eyes while I fixed my own mug and left it to steep on the counter before heading to the small bucket we used as a kibble bin. Goldie watched as I poured his scoops in and the pup did his celebratory dance, which consisted of hopping around in a joyful circle three times before diving in.
“Are you taking him with us this morning?”
I sat down with my mug and dosed it with sugar. “I don’t think so. Should I?”
She shrugged, powerful shoulders moving under her silk dress. “Perhaps not today. You and I will be very busy and not able to tend to him. But someday. He needs a forest run. He was bred for it. And the retriever part, too—he would love splashing through the rivers.” She paused and tapped a nail on her mug. “I wouldn’t let the Society get a close look at him, though.”
“You think?” I had been buttering a day-old biscuit to go with my tea before considering Scout as he ate as if he’d never, ever, in his months of lifetime, been fed before. Carter had certainly evaluated him closely; the dog was a gift from him, a reject from the police department when a basket of orphaned pups had been left for the canine unit. Scout hadn’t fit well into the training program. After months, my birthday had come up, and so he’d brought Scout over to see if the dog would take to me. And the two of us had bonded. I’d never been quite certain why the dog hadn’t fit in, but I had an idea that he had been very selective over whether or not he’d obey commands. He and I had a few similar talks lately. Mostly though, he respected my discipline, and I tried to respect those times when he had a different agenda in mind. Unless it was eating. Heavens knew Scout would eat himself into a food coma if I let him.
She gave an indifferent wave of her drink. “It might be wise. The Society might try to take him from you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I finished my second breakfast, funneling biscuit crumbs to Scout’s eager red tongue and waiting for our guests to show up. I bolted upstairs to brush my teeth and run a comb through my hair to be ready.
They showed up within minutes of each other, Evelyn first as she came in the kitchen door and footsteps after that, as Hiram approached. The house always moaned and groaned under the hefty weight of the Iron Dwarf—but it was relatively quiet this morning and I realized that Hiram had done that thing, lightening his body, to prevent undue strain on the building’s structure. I was certainly used to the wood and iron and stone of the house awakening to him but not so much to Evelyn, I realized. That told me at least two important things: one, he hadn’t explained his background to her yet; and two, he knew she’d come in the house just ahead of him even though from the expression on his face he hadn’t expected her at all.
I eyed Evelyn up and down, and she caught on to what I was doing, looking to see if she’d changed clothes from yesterday or was doing th
e infamous walk of shame. She slapped my elbow lightly as she passed me, saying “I do declare.”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “Just checking.”
Ever the gentleman in spite of his surprise, Hiram held a chair for her to sit, even though we were all at home in our kitchen.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Evie told him. “Tessa said I could come along, and I thought it would be nice to meet your family.”
“Why wait?” Hiram forced a smile. “This is my stepmother, Goldie Germanigold.”
Evelyn’s jaw dropped, and she swiveled about. “Goldie! I didn’t know you were part of Hiram’s family.”
The two of them had only met briefly during a heavy rainstorm on a country highway, but the meeting had been rather unforgettable since we were all fleeing Silverbranch Academy for one reason or another.
Goldie reached out and squeezed her wrist. “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, right?”
“No kidding!” Evie leaned back in her chair, hoping perhaps to also lean back against Hiram, but he’d moved quietly away and stared at me.
The look was stern enough that the thought went through my mind that Iron Dwarves didn’t need mining tools; they could just stare at a rock hard enough and it would chip away. I tried to fend it off with a weak smile but wished I had my bracers on or my shield up instead.
Goldie sensed the tension. Even Scout sat in the corner, his ears in a downward droop. In fact, the only person in the room who didn’t seemed to be keyed in was Evelyn.
Evie smiled. “I thought,” she said brightly, “that today would be a terrific day to meet everyone.”
Hiram’s hands flexed. “Actually, a better time would be when we can host you properly, with a grand luncheon or dinner, and I could gather the clan in, because my aunts and uncles and brothers and cousins are a hard-working group, most of them out on crews and such. It would be a near empty house today. There will be no one for you to meet, and I would hate to disappoint you and my family.”
