Chapter 4: Magic Users Are Sneaky People

Addison’s muffled voice came through his office door. I had a lot of work to do, but instead I loitered outside listening. I was supposed to be in his greenhouse transplanting jacca flowers.

Jaccas are like tiny, colorful daisies that grow on a vine. They’re another magical plant, good for charms and luck spells. I was surprised he let me work with them unsupervised, but he probably figured I’d get into the least amount of trouble with them. I know he just wanted me out of the way.

Earlier I’d watched him go into his office while on my way to refill the watering can. I knew I should get back to work, but I had a few minutes to spare.

Everything sounded like gibberish. He’d arranged it that way, so I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was saying in there. A sound camouflaging spell, probably. Obviously, I wasn’t meant to hear it.

The door swung open without warning. I tumbled into his office face first, landing at his feet.

“Coralie!” Addison shouted.

I peered up at him, my cheek pressed to the gritty floor. It badly needed to be swept. “Are you disappointed in me?”

“Not as much as I would be, if you’d been able to hear our conversation,” he said.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

He sighed. “Look. Rufus was very angry that you were in here, so I tried to make peace with him by leaving you out of this one. I didn’t exclude you to make you feel bad.”

“I didn’t hear him calling.”

“I called him,” Addison said.

“Oh.” I sat on my heels. “Does Rufus hate people like me?”

Addison smirked sideways at me. “People like you? Teenage girls who eavesdrop?”

“You know what I mean. People who can’t do magic.” I stood up and flicked the dust off my clothes.

Addison brushed my hair out of my eyes. “You need a haircut. It’s hanging in your face.”

I usually wore it short but hadn’t gone for a cut in months. Now it flopped shaggily over my forehead. “You didn’t answer my question.”

He exhaled through his nose. “It’s complicated.”

It was a deliberately vague answer. “What’s complicated about it?”

“Coralie, I doubt he hates you personally, and you shouldn’t worry about what he thinks of you anyway. I don’t know how he feels about the rest of non-magic-users, but for what it’s worth, your name didn’t even come up during our chat.”

“What did you guys talk about, anyway?” I asked.

Addison gave a short laugh. “Nice try, but you wouldn’t understand it all anyways. It was mostly technical magic jargon. You would’ve found it insufferably boring.”

“Can you tell me anything at all, or are you going to make me die of curiosity?”

“I can tell you this: I need to transfer ownership to Rufus before it can be returned to him. Right now, it thinks it belongs to Roanna, the woman he used to be married to. It’s tricky business. I’ve done it before, but the pendant is a powerful artifact that was created by a group of people. It might not like being moved to someone else.”

“What’s it made of, anyway?”

A shadow crossed his face. “I’d rather you not know.”

“Wait, did he say why he needed it back?”

He clicked his tongue. “Apparently, it was supposed to go to him in the divorce, since she owes him money. You should have heard him carrying on about what a conniving shrew she was, a shrieking harpy who tried to take him for all he was worth. Gods, it makes me glad I stayed single.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a bit let down that it wasn’t a more exciting backstory.

The next morning, I dozed in bed with a paperback of horror short stories fanned over my face. I’d read them all a hundred times. When I was younger I’d to get bad dreams from them, but I hadn’t had a nightmare from them in two years. I figured I outgrew it.

Addison didn’t approve of my taste in reading. He would’ve preferred me to read about history, or astronomy, or botany, rather than stories of undead people rising from their graves to eat the townspeople.

I jolted awake. The book slid off my face and thumped to the floor. For the second time that week, I dreamed about rising black water.

I grabbed my dream dictionary off the shelf. It was dog-eared and had smeary pencil marks all over it from the previous owner. I’d pocketed it out of a bargain bin at a book fair downtown when the bookseller was staring at some lady’s butt.

I thumbed through the pages under the W section. The entry for water was three pages long. At the bottom of the third page, it said that dreaming about black-colored water either meant that I was experiencing an emotional emptiness in my life or that I was in mourning about something.

Next I searched under F for floods, but it was more stuff about emotions.

“Neither of those makes any sense,” I said out loud.

“What doesn’t make any sense?” Addison popped his head in the doorway.

I almost jumped out of my skin. He was stealthy as a cat.

“Just this stupid dream dictionary that didn’t answer any of my questions.”

He leaned against the door frame, inspecting a hangnail. “Oh, is that the one you stole?”

My eyes widened. “I never stole a book in my life.”

“You know, it gives you the wrong definitions if you didn’t buy the book legitimately.”

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I paused for a moment. Addison gave me a lot of obviously phony magic facts but I couldn’t always tell if he was fibbing or not. “No way, that can’t be true.”

“How would you know?” he asked. “Did you become an expert overnight?”

“No,” I admitted. “But half the stuff in this book probably is just made up.”

Addison shrugged. “Perhaps. I’m going downstairs to start that artifact transferring project. There’s doughnuts on the kitchen table for you. Get ’em before they're gone; I’ve already had two.”

Suddenly, he winced and rubbed his chest.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Just heartburn from the doughnuts,” he said. “It’s worth it.”

I made a face at him. “You may be thin but your diet is terrible. You should know better, at your age.”

“My age?” he laughed. “You’d think I was ninety years old!”

I’d eaten three jelly doughnuts before he sauntered by again and nabbed a sugar-glazed one right out of my hand.

“Those things are gonna give you a heart attack,” I scolded.

“No doughnut is going to be the death of me,” he said. “I need you to shelve some books in the library today. You know where I’ll be.”

He meant in his office performing the complicated spell to force the artifact to acknowledge its soon-to-be-new owner, Rufus. Unfortunately, he’d probably do everything with the door shut so I couldn’t watch if I wandered away from my shelving duties.

I wasn’t sure how much energy this type of magic took, or how tired he’d be when he was done. The pendant had a spooky aura about it. It might drain Addison and then he’d have to sleep for hours after.

Rustling noises startled me out of my thoughts. Clyde, our gray-furred neyse, had his pointy nose buried in the greasy bag of doughnuts.

Neyse are clever, cat-like creatures with tufted ears and long, fluffy, venomous barbed tails. They’re commonly kept as pets and have the barbs and venom sac removed, but there are plenty of them living wild all over most of Ransara, mostly in trees or attics. Clyde ran into our house one rainy night, curled up on the sitting room sofa, and never left.

“Hey, get out of there,” I scolded.

Crumbs dotted his pointy snout. He raced off to enjoy his stolen treat.

“Those things are gonna kill you, too!” I yelled after him.

By mid-morning, I’d already shelved two cartons of books. Like the magical artifacts, Addison only had me work with ones I could handle safely.

Spell books gave sparking, burning shocks to non-magic-users. It was like wearing wool socks in the winter and then touching something metal after you’ve scuffed across the carpet, times a hundred. Some burned worse than others. I had the scars to prove it.

Although the books I was putting away had to do with magic, they were benign. Mostly they were practical guides about personal finance for magic users or laws about setting up a home experimental laboratory.

My thoughts drifted to Rufus and what his house looked like. Was it a homey, hodgepodge collection of knickknacks of places he’d visited, like ours?

I thought of the woven rug from Cirreket in our sitting room, the colors of a fiery sunset, the azure blue vase made by a potter in the Jhotu Islands that Addison had gotten before he adopted me, the giant tundra yak horns hanging over the fireplace we’d gotten on our trip to Vordmarre. Did he have anything like that?

I pictured Clyde stretched out across the sofa, waiting for his belly to be rubbed. Clyde, who curled up behind my knees as I slept and eventually took over my pillow, who draped himself over the back of Addison’s brown plaid armchair and didn’t let him get any work done.

Rufus was probably the type of person who didn’t allow pets on the furniture. He probably didn’t even let them inside the house. I bet he didn’t even have any pets at all.

A few hours later, I finished with the books and went to see what Addison wanted for lunch. The door was open slightly. Odd. I expected it to be locked.

“Addison?” No answer. I pushed the door all the way open. It squeaked loudly in the silence. “Hey, Addison?”

He was slumped face-first over his cluttered desk. The spell must have wiped him out. The pendant was inside a charred metal box among piles of papers and books next to him. The box’s lid was blackened and twisted, with wisps of smoke still rising from it. It stank like burnt matches and silver polish. The pendant looked okay.

“Hey, wake up,” I said, poking him gently. “Let’s eat lunch.”

Addison didn’t stir. His skin was gray and clammy.

Creeping willies began to roll around inside my belly. “C’mon, Addison. Wake up.”

His head lolled when I shook him. My stomach dropped to the bottom of my feet, just like the time I rode a rickety wooden roller coaster at a fair, except this wasn’t a fun ride with ice cream afterward.

“Addison?” I said with urgency. “C’mon, get up.”

But he didn’t wake up. His body was a dead weight in the plaid armchair. My throat tightened.

Stay calm. Don’t freak out.

“Oh, gods,” I said, looking around the room in the grip of panic, as if the desk or the burnt box or something else was going to tell me what happened. The doughnuts in my belly started to crawl around, like they were going to splatter all over the floor.

Get help. Get someone who’ll know what to do.

Tears blurred my eyes. I was sweating but cold at the same time. Then I started hyperventilating and raced outside to the busy street.

“Somebody help me!” I shrieked.

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