by S T G Hill
Ellie spoke quickly, breathlessly, racing through the story as her excitement mounted.
“Anyway, the foster family I was with then didn’t care, so long as I didn’t have any visible bruises when the CPS agent came around to check up on them. So I was on my own. My school was putting on a production of Hamlet, and there’s a bunch of scenes where he goes crazy and I remember watching them in dress rehearsal and the guy they got playing Hamlet breaks a bunch of bottles. The drama teacher got them all on special order from some movie supply place.”
Ellie took a breath and continued, “They’re made out of sugar. No, I don’t know how. But you can break them over anything and the shards won’t cut you. You can slam one off someone and it shatters really cool but it doesn’t hurt. I knew that, but Charlotte didn’t. I got one of these bottles and that day after school Charlotte came at me just like I knew she would. So I told her to stay back, that I was crazy. She just laughed at me. She stopped that when I took that sugar bottle out of my backpack and then whacked it against the side of my head. She screamed when it shattered and ran away without looking back, shouting about how she didn’t do it to me, I did it to myself, blah-blah-blah. She steered clear of me after that.”
Ellie finished in a pant, her heart machine-gunning in her chest and her hands all shaky.
They both continued to look at her, slow realization dawning first across Arabella’s face.
“We make Simon believe that you’re crazy,” Arabella said.
“And dangerous,” Ellie added, unable to keep her grin from spreading across her cheeks. It made her lips ache. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d grinned like that.
Then it hit Thorn like that lightning he channeled. “So dangerous that it’s taking everything we have to hold you back! So that Simon has to come to us!”
“I knew you’d figure it out,” Ellie said.
“This could work,” Thorn looked at Arabella, “This could actually work.”
“If we’re careful about it,” she said.
The front door opened up and Peter rushed inside, breathless, his backpack hanging off one shoulder and his keyring jangling in his other hand as he closed the door behind him.
Everyone turned and looked at him. When he saw that, he froze with his keys halfway into his pocket.
“I wanted to get home to check in on…” he started, his cheeks flushing a deep red.
“Hey,” Ellie said, that grin still on her face.
“Hi,” Peter hooked one strap from his backpack onto the set of hooks beside the door, “What’s going on? What did I miss?”
Ellie clapped her hands together, “Oh, not much. We just came up with a plan to get my magic back.”
“Great!” Peter said. Then he looked, really looked, at Arabella and Thorn. He saw them with the eyes of a cop. Saw their mixed excitement and apprehension. “But it’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
Peter’s budding apprehension dampened some of Ellie’s excitement, “No, it’s not so bad. It’ll be fine!”
“I want in,” Peter said.
“Absolutely not!” Arabella started
“That’s the worst idea I’ve heard yet,” Thorn said with a shake of his head.
Chapter 41
“So let me get this straight,” Grant spoke from in front of the gas range, where he tended to an enormous pot of bubbling pasta sauce.
An equally large vessel that could only rightfully be called a cauldron boiled away beside it, laden with enough spaghetti to feed a small army.
Or a small cadre of sorcerers and their willing hosts.
He wore a large, sauce-spattered apron with the words: I know what I’m doing, I’m Italian! emblazoned across it.
Grant interrupted himself to taste the sauce from the end of a wooden spoon and then took a pinch of salt from a bowl on the counter and sprinkled it into the saucepan. He stirred as he spoke.
“You guys are going to pretend that Ellie—Ellie, the missing girl I should by all rights bring back to the precinct—that she’s some powerful wizard so that you can steal some bits of horn from another powerful wizard to… defeat yet another, even more powerful wizard? Do I have that straight?”
The kitchen was generously sized, with an eat-in table, but even it felt cramped with six people jammed into the space.
Arabella stood closest to Grant, leaning against the counter while she watched him cook. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Thank you so much for sheltering us; I promise we won’t impose on you much longer.”
Peter sat beside Ellie at one side of the table. Thorn sat at the end, and Matilda leaned against the doorframe behind Thorn and rested her hands on his shoulders.
“It’s no problem,” Grant said, “Didn’t surprise me one bit. No, not one bit. Not when you told me about this Belt guy. Always hated Panopsys. Just trying to do the right thing. I only wish it didn’t involve so much danger to the kiddos.”
“Dad, I want to go with them,” Peter said.
“Why?” Matilda said, “So you can be even more useless in a fight than Ellie?”
Peter’s face darkened, “I won’t be useless.”
Grant, sauce-flecked spoon lifted, turned partially away from his cooking, “That’s right. You won’t be useless because you’re not going. I know you want to help these folks out, Peter, but they also serve who only stand and wait. You know?”
“I don’t,” Peter said.
Ellie was touched. And part of her wanted Peter to tag along with them, but even she recognized that at best he’d contribute nothing and at worst become a liability.
“You should stay,” Ellie said, putting her hand over his knuckles.
The angry flush to Peter’s face changed to a blush centered in his cheeks.
“I promise we’ll come back as soon as it’s all done, though,” Ellie told him. She hoped she could keep that promise.
“See?” Grant started, “These people can handle themselves, Peter. Best we can do is make sure they don’t go out on full stomachs, and—Ouch! Damn!”
Grant jerked away from the stove, wincing and holding up his free hand. He’d brushed the side of his hand against the hot element. It went red, blisters rising on the burned flesh.
He put down his spoon and went over to the sink, running the burn beneath a stream of cool water from the tap. “Serves me right for not paying attention. See how quick things can go south?”
“Let me see that,” Arabella said.
Grant frowned, but took his hand out of the water. Arabella cradled it in both of hers, examining the burn.
“Best thing for a burn,” Grant said, “Slather it with some butter after the cold wash.”
This earned him a smile from her, “I have something better.”
Then she cupped her palm against the burn. Grant winced, but then his pained expression dropped, turning to open-mouthed wonder.
A soft glow emanated from between Arabella’s fingers, and when she took her hand away the burn had gone. “Now you can save your butter for your bread.”
Grant held his hand up and flexed it, touching the formerly red, blistered flesh.
“We could have also made supper,” Arabella said, “It would be no trouble at all.”
Grant picked up the wooden spoon and admonished her with it, “You may be all magical and all that, but I don’t think some spell could replace my family recipe. Not in a million years.”
Peter leaned closer to Ellie, “When he gets nervous about some big case or whatever, he cooks. Couple years ago he helped bring down a big gang and a week before the sting he did up so many preserves that we’ll never need to buy jelly again.”
Ellie smiled. Then she noticed that she hadn’t taken her hand off his, and that he hadn’t tried yet to remove it.
She really, really hoped that their own sting operation went well.
Thorn sighed. He’d wanted to get the whole thing over and done with right away. Get in touch with Simon, pull the grift, get the horn fragments.
&n
bsp; But even in the magical world some things didn’t happen quickly.
It had been a couple hours ago, in the late afternoon after Peter got back but before Grant could get away from the precinct that they’d sent the message.
The five of them stood in the courtyard garden that Peter’s row of brownstones and the row behind it backed in on.
“You sure no one can see? My dad calls looking out your window at the neighbors the original reality TV,” Peter glanced around at all the windows that looked down into the courtyard.
“Matilda?” Arabella nodded.
Matilda took a step back from the group. She raised both hands over her head. Then she snapped her fingers with her right hand.
Instantly, all the shutters, all the curtains and the drapes and the blinds, they all came down, drew closed, and otherwise obscured the windows peering down into the courtyard.
Then Matilda snapped the fingers of her left hand. The sound of the traffic on the streets around them dulled, and if Ellie squinted she could see a slight, shimming bubble that surrounded their small group and the planters full of tulips that took up the space beside the walk that cut through the area.
“I think anyone nosy or curious enough to try looking out will find that they just can’t seem to get their curtains and blinds open. And anyone who passes by won’t see anything at all,” Arabella said.
“Nothing but an empty garden,” Matilda said.
“Now,” Arabella said to Thorn, “Get in touch with Simon.”
“Why can’t we just go to him?” Ellie asked. “Use a spell to find him?”
“Locator spells do exist, but as with so much of magic, a prepared sorcerer can easily obscure themselves,” Arabella said, “No, sorcerers like Simon don’t like to be found. You only see him if he wants you to.”
Thorn held his hands out in front of his face, cupped slightly but with some space between his fingers. After a few moments, a glowing orb flickered to life in that gap between his palms.
He frowned and closed his eyes, his lips moving but making no sound. Then he released the orb like someone letting go of a bird, which wasn’t, as Ellie saw, far from the truth.
The orb floated up above their heads and then shot away into the sky.
“What was that?” Ellie said. There was still just so much she didn’t know or understand about magic.
Sure, there were a couple months’ worth of classes at Sourcewell, but they barely scratched the surface.
“Think of it like magical email,” Thorn said, “It doesn’t find him exactly, but he’ll still get it.”
“And we couldn’t just send him a real email or call him because…?” Ellie said.
Arabella shook her head, “Non-magical technology is too easily compromised. There’s no way Belt doesn’t have Panopsys listening in on every single method of communication there is.”
Then they waited. And they waited some more.
“How long did it take you to hear back from this guy the first time?” Peter asked.
Ellie had insisted on filling him in, and now he knew about what happened to her after Belt attacked the Williamson brownstone, as well as her rescue from the Council headquarters in London.
“Pretty quick,” Thorn said. He managed to hide his frustration pretty well, but Ellie recognized that characteristic grinding of his teeth and the way his jaw muscles worked.
“Give it time,” Arabella told them.
And so they had, which brought them all the way to sitting around the Pitarelli table, heaping plates of spaghetti with generous dollops of the secret family pasta sauce recipe.
Ellie’s mouth watered at the smell, and she realized this was the first good meal she’d had in weeks.
Thorn just pushed his around his plate, the tines of his fork squealing against the glass. “What will we do if he doesn’t return the message? What if he gets back to us and he says he doesn’t have what we need?”
“He will,” Arabella said.
“And here I thought you didn’t have any ability in prognostication,” Matilda said between slurping mouthfuls of spaghetti.
The sun set while supper wound down, the gradual darkening of the sky mirroring the mood in the Pitarelli brownstone.
Even Arabella grew tense, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when she told Grant that she would take care of the dishes.
She touched the sink and it came to life, the sponge and the bottle of dish soap that sat beside the tap moving with lives of their own.
They all watched as the dishes washed themselves, making neat piles of sparkling cookware on the counter beside the sink.
The magical version of sitting in the laundromat watching your clothes splash around in sudsy water, Ellie figured.
“Hey, what’s that?” Peter said.
They all heard it. A gentle if insistent tapping.
“We get mice in the basement every now and then,” Grant said.
“It’s not mice,” Thorn nodded towards the kitchen window. They all looked.
A paper airplane, a paper clip on its nose to give it some weight, tapped against the pane of glass like a curious bird.
“It’s gotta be him! Simon, I mean,” Thorn said.
“Should we let it in?” Grant asked, making his way towards the window.
Before he could reach it, Thorn made a flicking motion with one finger. The latch that held the window closed unlocked, and the window itself slid upwards in its frame.
As soon as enough of a gap appeared, the airplane wafted its way inside. It flew straight at the table.
When it reached Thorn, it unfolded itself and landed with a gentle waver in front of him.
Everyone in the room held their breath while Thorn grabbed the message with shaky fingers.
He looked up at them, and Ellie couldn’t read his expression.
“He says he has what we want, but that he won’t bring it until he verifies that we have what he wants, which we figured would happen. He understands our position and wants to know when and where he can verify the… uh… the merchandise.”
“Me,” Ellie muttered.
“So we’re on,” Matilda said.
“You know what to tell him,” Arabella directed at Thorn.
Chapter 42
Ellie had the idea for where they could meet.
Their group arrived at Belvedere Castle in Central Park about a half hour before Simon was supposed to get there.
Unlike their confrontation with Farazon Shaffir outside the Imperial War Museum in London, they actually had the time to set things up just the way they wanted.
Thorn and Matilda set about disguising the area, conjuring up fake warning and worksite signs to keep the public out of the space.
Also unlike in London, they had a cop with the NYPD on their side.
Grant had been reluctant, but he wanted as few people hurt as possible. So he pulled a few strings with some guys he knew in Manhattan precincts to both keep the police away from the castle, and for those cops to keep as many civilians away as possible.
“No nosy nils,” Matilda said. And for good measure they also set up more of those bubbles like the one Matilda used in the garden, to hide them completely from sight.
“Are you sure about this,” Arabella took Ellie over to a wall, where they looked down at one of the large, open fields that the castle overlooked.
Ellie wasn’t, but she smiled and said, “Yeah. I think I’ve got it all down. What other choice do we have?”
“There’s always a choice,” Arabella said.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that there’s always a good choice,” Ellie added, “But we’re here now. May as well get it over with.”
Arabella sensed that Ellie needed some time by herself, so she went away to go check on the others.
Ellie leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky. It was a nice day. Blue as far as the eye could see.
With everything that had happened over the last few weeks, Ellie had barely registered th
e passage of time.
Which was kind of funny, now that she thought about it. So many incredible things had happened, were happening, would happen.
It seemed like enough to make the world stand still and watch. But apparently even magic couldn’t do that.
The many trees of the park, the lungs of Manhattan, had begun to change color with fall.
Ellie realized that her birthday had happened and that she hadn’t even thought of it on the day of.
But is it really my birthday? I mean, I touched the Gem in Belt’s office and appeared back in Brooklyn six months later. Am I six months older? It doesn’t feel like it.
For that matter, she wasn’t even certain about what had happened to her over those months. Had the Gem hidden her from the world, kept her some place for that time?
Or had she simply popped out of time and then slipped back in?
But time travel was one of the things that Darius Belt said that magic couldn’t do. And he seemed to know what he was talking about.
Ellie resolved to remember to ask the Gem itself these questions, as soon as they got the unicorn horn from Simon and figured out how to use it so that she and the Gem could communicate clearly once again.
“Ellie? You ready?” Thorn said.
Ellie turned away from the park to face him. Arabella stood not far away. She and Thorn had changed once more into their colored trench coats, the combat uniform of the Resistance.
Matilda wasn’t with them, but Ellie knew where she would be. Over in the turret, where she had a clear view of everything.
“Yep. Just do it. Make sure it looks real,” Ellie said.
Then she held out her arms, hands balled into fists. Thorn nodded, both to himself and to her.
A pair of manacles clasped around Ellie’s wrist, the summoned steel cold against her skin. A heavy chain joined them.
Arabella led her over to a section they had cleared of tables and benches. These had been piled close by, right where they were needed.
Then Arabella put her hands on Ellie’s shoulders, her forearms glowing so bright that Ellie squinted against the glare.
This needed to look real so that Simon wouldn’t take one glance and take off.
