The Untangled Cassie Black

by Tammie Painter

  Given what Morelli had told me, this wasn’t a surprise — the portal dead end, not the Burning Wand affair. The Mauvais may be a jerk, but he wasn’t stupid enough to allow himself to be tracked as easily as a wayward husband.

  "How have you had the time to do all this, Runa?" Fiona asked, setting down her bite-sized ham-and-egg tart. "You must be exhausted."

  "This stuff is basically what’s flowing in my veins now." Dr. D lifted her mug of tea, not the fine porcelain that had come with the tea things, but her own mug that featured a scene of Daffy Duck dressed as Duck Dodgers and standing next to his spaceship. "I can’t take all the credit, though. I’ve looked over a few things, but it’s been Banna who’s gone over the majority of the scans. She volunteered to help out after seeing my frustration with the Starlings. I’ve read the reports she’s generated, but neither of us has found a single suspicious thing."

  "So it has to be an illegal portal," said Busby. He then nibbled on a strawberry tartlet after first offering it to Fiona.

  "Illegal portal?" I asked, curious to hear their version of what Morelli had told me.

  "Think of it like a burner phone," Runa said. "Something you use specifically because it can’t be tracked. Meant to serve its purpose then get tossed aside."

  "But obviously even those can be traced on some level," said Fiona, as I selected a cranberry-studded, orange-scented scone. "It goes against all laws of physics for it not to have caused some ripple that can be detected. Even a slight disturbance should alert a sensitive surveillance gnome. Have Percival, Petunia, and, oh I can’t recall all their names, but you know who I mean. Have they been trying?"

  "Yes, they’ve been monitoring the area Tobey came through, but so far haven’t caught wind of anything."

  "But just because Tobey came through there, doesn’t mean that’s where the Mauvais is."

  "Don’t remind me," complained Runa. "Even if we do figure out where he’s gone, there’ll be a whole separate issue of where he went afterwards. I mean, surely he wouldn’t just stick around. He’d want to get as far from the portal entry as possible, wouldn’t he?"

  "True. We need to think of areas he would feel safest in. Maybe focusing on the portal is a waste of time. We should be looking into your old records, Busby."

  "Do you think I haven’t been doing that very thing since arriving to the Tower? Every night I’m in bed and unable to sleep, I go over what I remember, begging my mind to see what I’ve missed. I haven’t come up with anything we don’t already know, but if I was going to divulge anything I might have discovered, I wouldn’t do it in front of Cassie. Sorry, but I’d be in no end of trouble with HQ if I got you involved."

  "Involved? Mr. T, I’m so involved I’m coated in involvement and will probably need an industrial solvent to clean off that involvement."

  "You’re dead, Busby," said Fiona. "They can’t exactly reprimand you."

  Apparently, I now had Fiona on my side. Perhaps with Mr. Tenpenny dazzled by the pink dress, this could work to my advantage.

  Mr. Tenpenny took a long sip of tea, then toyed with a triangle of salmon and cream cheese on rye before taking a decisive bite. I guess the pink dress wasn’t a miracle worker, after all.

  "There are proper channels we must go through. We—"

  Just then Bugs Bunny called out, "What’s up, Doc?" The startling alarm that was as loud as someone trying to speak in a noisy restaurant sent my tea sloshing out of my cup as I flinched. Even Mr. T and Fiona tensed at the sound. But not Runa. Without batting an eye, she set her cup down, switched off the alarm, and stood up.

  "I need to check on Tobey."

  "We’ll join you," said Fiona, and Mr. T looked appreciative for her I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer statement.

  As we made our way from the office and through the ward, I could hear my parents singing their same tune. This time as a duet, but while my dad was humming, my mom was replacing whatever lyrics were in the lullaby with a single word: white. Over and over in melodic harmony. I wondered if maybe the Mauvais had previously been holed up somewhere snowy. Norway? Alaska? Antarctica? I shivered just thinking of having to travel to the tundra to track down Devin Kilbride.

  When I glanced over, Fiona had a curious expression on her face, like she was trying to remember something, but simply couldn’t grasp it from the air of memory. She gave up and fixed her attention on Mr. T.

  "You were saying?" she asked Busby as we reached Tobey’s curtained cubicle. He was conscious, but the doctor who’d last examined him still advised he not exert himself. Tobey did look good. Well, as good as someone can look in a hospital bed. He appeared in full health and had tried to greet us, but Fiona’s question cut him off. "Channels?" she prodded.

  "I was saying, there are proper channels we must go through. We know where Kilbride once lived and we know where he once operated from. I’m arguing that we start there, but I keep meeting resistance. It’s ridiculous. We found him once using these very methods."

  Mr. Tenpenny abruptly stopped speaking. He and Fiona both glanced at me from across the bed. I knew what the glance was about. My parents had been the ones to find the Mauvais’s lair. They’d gone there to bring him in. They had warrants, not even magically forged ones. They’d gone through proper channels, but the Mauvais was one step ahead of those channels. He zapped them, sucked out nearly all their power and the majority of their comprehension of the world at large, then tucked them away in a nice quiet place for a couple dozen years. And that’s where doing things by the books gets you.

  "Even so," Fiona said, as Runa flipped through Tobey’s charts, "we can’t just go barging in with guns blasting like an action movie."

  "Magic guns," Tobey muttered and I bit my lip, trying not to laugh.

  "Fiona, a word," Mr. T said crisply. He and Fiona stepped out into the hall where I could hear words like "immature" and "needs trained" and "vulnerable" and "not ready."

  "I think they’re talking about you," Tobey said. He leaned toward me and whispered, "Let me help you. I feel like this is my fault. If I hadn’t followed you from the V & A, maybe you could have gotten in and saved Alastair. Then he could have helped you with the watch or whatever."

  I didn’t respond. Instead, I grabbed two more of Daisy’s chocolates and went over to stare out the window.

  "It’s me, Cassie. I swear it."

  "I believe you, but I— I just don’t know. I mean, one: I don’t work well with others. And two: he’s already shown he can use you."

  "Then let me do something in the background. I’m not feeble, you know. Granddad and Runa insist I keep resting, but…" He pointed to the floor. I looked to where he was pointing and saw the tips of a pair of maroon-red Doc Martins poking out. Unlike my scuffed and battered pair, which had been purchased on Half-Price Wednesday from the thrift store, his sported that brand-new sheen. "I’ve been going out and walking up and down the hallway while they’re away and I feel totally fine."

  "Walks? You think strolls along the corridor are training exercises for being whacked with Mauvais magic? He had you in a Binding Spell, he knocked you out to get you here. I can’t trust that you’d be able to take another hit like that."

  "Or is it that you just don’t trust me?"

  "Well, the Mauvais did impersonate you really well," I said, cringing at the idea that I had kissed my own cousin. Who had actually been the Mauvais. Double cringe.

  "Then we set up a code word. You can ask for it every time you see me and if I don’t know it, you’ll know it’s not me."

  This wasn’t entirely true. The Mauvais could get into Tobey’s head with a Confounding Charm or BrainSweeping Charm, but the idea of an ally was strangely appealing. Especially one who had been wherever the Mauvais might currently be.

  "I need to think about it. Busby would kill me if you got hurt."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  He turned away from me. I wanted
to tell him I’d already lost Alastair because of the Mauvais, and I’d already essentially lost my parents. I’d lost so much because of one vile person. I was tired of losing and I wouldn’t take the risk.

  But I wasn’t the sort of person who made those kinds of speeches. You know, emotional, showing vulnerability. Instead, I snagged another chocolate and left him to sulk.

  16 - A GOOD MORNING

  I SPENT THE next day feeling lost and a little pointless. Olivia and Rafi were still busy appeasing the magic communities around the world. I sat in on a few of these calls just to hear the reactions. That was a bad idea. I can’t blame them and I tried not to take it personally, but nearly every community demanded HQ give the Mauvais what he wanted: me. Olivia tried to explain the consequences of me falling into his hands, how it would be far worse for everyone if that happened, and that all Magics must stay alert and report anything odd to HQ immediately.

  After the third call, to the Toronto community — and yes, even those polite Canadians were willing to toss me to the wolves — I left Olivia and Rafi to it and climbed up to my room. I flopped on the bed and spent half an hour blindly flipping through the black-and-white pages of my Portland history book. Realizing I wasn’t registering a damn thing, I let out a growl of irritation, slapped the book shut, and tossed it aside.

  In the hospital ward, Runa was running herself ragged between trying to sort out my parents, hurriedly having me fill another batch of capsules, and racking her brain over the portal problem. Since I knew I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near my parents without Rafi nearby, I asked if I could help with the portal searches.

  "Nice try," she said. "But if you find out where he’s gone, you’ll go after him, and then it’ll be my head on a platter."

  Fiona and Busby said pretty much the same thing: I couldn’t help them go through Mr. Tenpenny’s notes because I might do something rash. As if I’d ever do such a thing.

  Frustrated and bored, I decided the only thing useful I could do would be to work with Nigel. Once I’d perused my messages that dinged through after stepping outside the White Tower, I guided Nigel along more of the twists and turns and highlights of royal history in the Tower of London.

  Oh, and since you’re probably curious, Lola’s message was of Pablo dressed as the Easter Bunny, with the caption: I’m hoppin’ happy to have seen you. Mr. Wood’s message had said much the same thing about being glad to see I was okay. Although he hadn’t donned rabbit ears in the selfie that accompanied his message. Instead, he was holding up a string of crocheted hearts in various shades of pink.

  Neither photo did anything to ease my homesickness.

  * * *

  As sometimes happens in the White Tower (to me, anyway), the following day I was woken by someone pounding on my door. After shoving aside the books on magical theory I’d been studying when I fell asleep, I groggily answered the knocking, not once giving a second thought to whether or not it might be Banna. Luckily, since I’d left the curtains halfway open, it wasn’t. Well, luckily might be stretching the term to its thinnest usage because instead of a diminutive Irish witch, it was a stout American doctor.

  Wait, did that make Runa a witch doctor?

  "Don’t just stand there grinning like a moron," Dr. D said. "Get dressed. I think I’ve found a way for your parents’ magic to stick."

  I gestured her in and spoke from the bathroom as I got dressed.

  "Are they better? Talking?"

  "No, not talking, but they do seem more aware of their surroundings, which in my books is a huge improvement. If I can get more magic into them, who knows. I don’t like to get my hopes up, but we may be rounding a corner."

  "A bend."

  "What?"

  "You turn a corner. You round a bend."

  "Oh, Merlin have mercy. Are you really going to lecture me on semantics?"

  I stepped out from the bathroom and shrugged as if to say, I just might.

  Breakfast popped into existence on my table, but Runa was already rushing me out the door before the scent of sausage ever had a chance to reach my nostrils. As I closed the door behind me, I noticed Winston arriving at my open window. Well, at least the food wouldn’t go to waste.

  "Are you sure it’s okay for me to visit? Won’t I suck their strength away?"

  "I don’t think so, not with this new technique. Besides, it will be a good test of how sticky the magic I’ve given them is."

  Runa Dunwiddle normally speaks gruffly, sardonically, and in short sentences that are so sharp they leave you at risk of needing a tourniquet. So to hear her speaking with a hint of enthusiasm over my parents’ health, had even me, a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, hopeful that we truly had rounded a bendy corner.

  In their hospital room, Simon and Chloe Starling were sitting in cushioned dining chairs at a small, circular table.

  And I’ll just note here, those chairs looked far more comfortable than the back-breaking ones in my room. Just in case anyone wants to relay that to the White Tower’s customer service department.

  My parents weren’t talking, they weren’t humming their usual tune, they didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, but they were both eating triangles of toast on their own. And, when eating twice-cooked bread is seen as a leap forward and a sign that you’re on the mend, you really were in bad shape.

  "How— I mean, what changed?" I whispered to Runa. Even though she’d told me I wouldn’t absorb their new magic, I didn’t want to get too close. Plus, they had the fragile appearance of a newborn deer or dwarf rabbit who would be easily frightened by any sudden movement. And, okay, if we’re going to get all analytical, I suppose I was afraid they’d recognize me and reject me. What was I to them, anyway? Just another forgotten memory.

  "I stopped treating them like they were Magics. I should have seen it all along. Instead of trying to restore their power so they could heal themselves, I treated them like Norms and used magic in a healing capacity."

  "And now I’m out of a job," said Rafi’s dancing voice from behind us.

  "You’re not out of a job, you elvish twat." There’s the Runa I’ve come to know. "We’ll still need you to be a conduit when they’re stronger."

  "So who’s healing them?"

  "I’ve had Chester come back in."

  "You had Chester come in?" Rafi asked tartly.

  "Fine," Runa conceded. "It was Chester’s idea."

  "Chester has ideas?" They both gave me that look that makes it very clear you’ve said something inappropriate. "Sorry, he just doesn’t seem like an Idea Man, more of a Sure-I’ll-Do-That Guy." Several moments of silence followed. "Don’t I have a lesson to get to, or portal to find?"

  "You’ll not be hunting down any portals," Runa asserted. "We’re still looking for traces."

  "I thought you said you already tried that."

  "We tried one way. Then Fiona’s comment reminded me that you can find illegal portals by analyzing what locations had signature disturbances. That night was a busy one for portal usage, but we can pick out which of those disturbances were from registered portals, eliminate them, and continue from there. All that’s to say, Banna and I are working on it, not you. Got it?"

  "Got it," I said gloomily.

  "Come on, smooth talker," Rafi said, linking his arm with mine. "If I remember correctly, you have a lesson with me. How about a little sparring to start the day."

  "If you can handle it. Sure."

  I gave one last glance at my parents. From where I stood, I wasn’t certain, but it looked like my mom had eaten all but the crusts of two triangles of toast. She had placed the leftovers on the table where they stood out against the dark, laminated surface. The way she had set them down had formed a W and I wondered if it stood for Winston. Or perhaps an upside-down mountain. Or maybe my mind was grasping for meaning and there was nothing more to it than some hard, discarded bread.

  * * *

/>   Even though it meant climbing to the rooftop recreation area, sparring with Rafi was just what I needed. Well, that and some scones, which he called up before we began when my growling belly told him I’d missed breakfast.

  I don’t know if it was simply the fact that I enjoyed practicing with Rafi, or if I was on a high from seeing my parents on the road to recovery, but over the course of that long practice session, my movements felt smooth, my defensive charms snapped readily into action, and my attack spells hit their mark every time. Without nearly killing my opponent, I even managed to block a Binding Spell and to stop Rafi’s Vacuum Hex — the spell Banna had used on me during my last test.