A Hiss-tory of Magic: A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 1 (3 page)

I
was
afraid I was going to die. Marshmallow and Aunt Astrid were obviously both worried that they wouldn’t be able to pull the magic off, but still, they had a quiet determination that came from knowing why they would have to try in the first place. I didn’t have that, and I still had to do a big spell—my first big spell since witnessing the one that took both my parents away from me.

When Marshmallow started to pull the other dimension—or some magic from the other dimension—in over this one, I felt like a little kid again, watching the monster come out from under my bed and feeling helpless as my mom tried to keep it at bay by waving her quartz-crystal wand. She’d drawn a protective circle on my bedroom floor and told me not to leave it. My dad had run into the room—

I forced myself to focus, telling myself,
That was then and this is now
. No evil beings were exploding out of a portal—we were just making a phenomenal effort to tweak people’s minds.

Besides, Aunt Astrid was the one who had to do the magical heavy lifting, moving us into the Brew-Ha-Ha of the future just enough that we wouldn’t leave a trace in it in the present but not enough to cause some temporal paradox that would collapse every dimension in on itself.

That wasn’t as comforting a thought as I’d wanted it to be. First of all, a big spell was a big spell. Second of all, I wondered if we could really end the world by casting it. Bea would know the risks better because she reads about quantum physics. Aunt Astrid was just convinced that it was worth the risk.

Anyway, Marshmallow began to let the other worlds into our default one.

The sensation of that happening felt a little bit like standing under a waterfall as the numbingly cold water beats down on the top of your head. I forced myself to open my eyes against that flux and to move forward.

Aunt Astrid and I began to walk to the back entrance of the Brew-Ha-Ha. Bea caught sight of us, cloaked in magic. Jake turned toward us, and my breath caught, but he looked right through us and returned his attention to Bea, to my relief. Blake was in the police car, speaking into the two-way radio. He didn’t take any notice of us either.

I gritted my teeth against the waves of magic as Aunt Astrid began to fold time in on itself. I saw a corpse in the kitchen with the same height and buff build that Ted had. As we took the next step, the body faded into a chalk outline, and in another step, it had become clean, new tiling. I began to feel dizzy.

Aunt Astrid led the way out of the kitchen and behind the bar, which was badly burnt but still standing. Behind the bar was a trapdoor. Aunt Astrid pulled it open just enough to squeeze through and make her way down to the stairs below. The trapdoor remained open at an angle that would have been physically impossible to maintain if it weren’t frozen in time.

As I was about to follow, something on the ground caught my eye. It was a pendant on a chain, glinting silver against the soot and char. Because of the time manipulation, it flickered in and out of existence, but something about that necklace burned against the magic.

It could only do that if it were magic itself.

I took my phone out of my pocket and snapped a few pictures of the pendant. I don’t know how physics and technology work when they’re mixed with magic. Maybe Bea’s developed some grand unifying theory, but I just do what I hope works out well in the end.

“Cath?” Aunt Astrid called.

I snatched the necklace from the ground, pocketed it, and then followed Aunt Astrid downstairs into the cellar.

The magic faded as we reached the bottom of the stairs. I leaned on the railing and waited for my nausea to pass.

“Marshmallow should keep the spell going on above us.” Aunt Astrid’s voice sounded frail in the pitch darkness. “I built this basement to stand up against a nuclear war. Fire wouldn’t have touched it.”

With a click, a flashlight flickered to life, the silver beam of light illuminating the room. It was a bunker—gray, concrete, and bare except for a shelf of dusty canned goods. I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days. That’s what magic burnout does to a person, and we were only halfway done.

“What was so important that we had to do this?” I groaned miserably.

Aunt Astrid beckoned and handed me the flashlight. “Hold this for a moment.”

I shone it at the corner she was approaching.

“I needed to keep something here that was very important,” Aunt Astrid told me as she opened one of the fuse boxes. “It’s a spell book that we’ve kept in our family for generations. You know the spell that we’re casting now? It’s a cantrip compared to the weakest spell in that book.”

She wrenched back a panel of switches and wires—a false display. I held my breath as she reached into the back of the fake fuse box.

She drew her hand back and exhaled sharply. “It’s gone. Someone’s taken it.”

“Who would do that?” I asked, but I knew the answer to that. “Somebody who wants to do magic more powerful than we’re doing.”

“Somebody,” Aunt Astrid added, “who knows that we kept it. Somebody who knows that we’re witches.”

I gulped. What could have given us away? We’d all been so careful, and Wonder Falls was such a safe town.

“Turn the light onto the floor.”

I jumped back, startled, when I saw faint footprints leading from the stairs to the fuse box.

“Those are new,” Aunt Astrid said.

“They don’t belong to us,” I observed. “The size of the shoe is too big.”

I took note of the outsoles’ imprints, too. They looked smooth, as though they belonged to formal shoes, not patterned like hiking boots or sneakers.

“Maybe…” My mind spun. “Maybe it was just an eccentric collector. Maybe they’ll leave us alone now that they have what they want. It was a family heirloom, sure, but not one that we ever used, so—”

Aunt Astrid muttered a word, and a blast of magic shot out of the fake fuse box. It gave the air a fresh tang, like ozone or Freon.

“Protecting that book is a duty that I take very seriously,” Aunt Astrid said as she reached into the fuse box once more. She drew out an old, leather-bound tome. “The thief stole a fake copy. I had this one hidden in a pocket dimension, guarded by the Maid of the Mist.” She turned to me and said harshly, “We’re all in great danger, Cath. Whoever found this set this whole place on fire, and now Ted is dead. Just remember that.”

We made our way back outside to Bea’s car, with Aunt Astrid tightly knotting time behind us. We wouldn’t want investigators to walk onto the scene, disappear for days, and then reappear, insisting that no time at all had passed for them. We only wanted any evidence that we’d been there moved away somewhere safe.

When all that was done, Marshmallow flicked her ears and tucked the other dimension away, back where it belonged. Aunt Astrid and I raised a sort of magic wall that would prevent magic from coming through even though the wall itself was magic—it’s easier to do if you don’t think about it too much. I don’t usually think about “How?” except when I repeat what Bea’s figured out about how it works, but that day I was thinking about “Why?” and “Should we or should we not?”

So I didn’t pull the spell off easily. Most magic walls that we cast are actually walls of spells—for example, to make a nonwitch afraid to go near a place for some unexplainable reason. Those walls take a long time to grow, but they tend to stay up for a while. We needed that sort of power in crunch time, which even Aunt Astrid—who had worked with time magic all her life—had difficulty with.

With a final burst of power, I felt the wall align.

Aunt Astrid clapped her hands and looked from Marshmallow to me. “Well done, team!”

I had to lean against Bea’s car to keep myself from fainting.

Bea walked briskly over to meet us. “I convinced Jake to take his partner on their beat and interrogate us after.”

She still looked visibly shaken by what she’d seen. That much was no act. I gave her a hug. She looked as though she needed it.

As she hugged me back, she sniffled and said, “I want to go home. You can catch me up on whatever you just did when we’re there.”

“Just don’t forget to lock your car doors from now on,” Aunt Astrid told her as she got into the driver’s seat. “This neighborhood isn’t as safe as it used to be.”

B
ea’s house
looked more like a library than a home. In every room except the kitchen and bathroom, she had bookshelves instead of walls. The shelves reached the ceiling and had side-rolling ladders mounted on them.

In the kitchen was a trolley—a trolley!—full of books, and they weren’t even all cookbooks. I rolled them into the living room.

“I read over those when I have a midnight snack!” Bea objected when she saw me.

“What, all of them at the same time?” I furrowed my brow. “That’s impossible. Besides, it’s a fire hazard. I’m kind of concerned about that now, you know.”

At that, Bea smiled sadly and laid out a serving platter of cold smoked salmon with avocado sauce and toasted crumpets. “When were you going to tell us about that spell book, Mom?”

“It’s in my will,” Aunt Astrid answered from the sofa, where she sat reading. “If anything happened to me, then it would go to you and Cath—technically. You’d be advised not to move it. You’re both talented and intuitive enough that you would’ve been able to figure out the rest.”

Bea munched on a crumpet thoughtfully. “Could the lawyer have caught on that this heirloom spell book was so valuable?”

Peanut Butter hopped up onto the sofa where Marshmallow sat curled up. They sniffed each other’s noses and rubbed their heads together.

Aunt Astrid replied, “I only said that it was a book, that it was part of my collection. If it was a spell book of ultimate power, people would expect me to say so.”

“My mother,” Bea said, flourishing her hand, “master of the triple bluff.”

“However, existence of the book got out. Why act on that information only now, though?” I wondered. “This is such a tiny, quiet town. What changed?”

Bea hummed, getting into bookworm mode. “I can only think of two things. First, somebody who was close to us, who could catch every moment that we slipped—who’d catch enough of those moments to wonder if there wasn’t more going on—”

“You think Ted did this?” I asked with disbelief.

“Well,” Bea said, “that’s only one of my thoughts. How nice was the author who wrote the fake book, the one that actually got stolen? Did she write spells that simply wouldn’t work, or did she write spells that made sure that whoever tried them wouldn’t get a chance to steal the real one? Try to conjure up a magic fireball, and it could backfire and…”

“There would have been a book beside the body,” I said.

“And ‘whoever thought up the fake spell book’ was very nice—a downright tree-hugging hippie, as a matter of fact,” Aunt Astrid said, pointing at herself. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, girls. I’ve only bought us time.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” I told her. “The only one doing anything wrong here is this power-hungry thief, arsonist, and murderer who’s meddling in things that not even we completely understand.”

Astrid sighed. “I will blame myself if it turns out to be Ted himself—an accomplice might have double-crossed him and made away with the book. Ted didn’t like to talk about his family or what was going on in his life, and in the decade he’s been with us—I never pried!” Aunt Astrid heaved the spell book back into her bag and joined us at the dining table. Bea poured her mother a lemonade, and Astrid gulped it down.

On the sofa, Peanut Butter and Treacle curled up beside Marshmallow. Treacle could always find a way into the house. Marshmallow also seemed to have been exhausted by the spell.

“It couldn’t have been Ted,” Aunt Astrid said decisively. “He wasn’t interested in magic—not at all. He’d always refuse my astrology readings.”

“The other thing I’m thinking,” Bea said, “is that it’s a newcomer. Maybe a tourist pretending to have come to see the falls.”

“Or…” A thought occurred to me, and I spoke it slowly. “A new detective in town, taking the perfect position to try to turn the tables and pin the blame on us?” I remembered the necklace I’d found and took it out of my pocket. “Could this have been a clue? I found it while we were walking through, and I thought it was magical.”

Bea peered at it. “Weird, but not magical—not anymore, at least.”

“We were covered in magic,” Aunt Astrid pointed out. “Maybe you imagined that part.”

“It wasn’t there when I swept the place up yesterday,” I said. “It was charred. This definitely wasn’t Ted’s.”

“Maybe a locator spell—” Bea began, and Aunt Astrid and I interrupted her with synchronized groans of misery. “All right! All right. Not yet. Not like that’s any of our talents, anyway.”

Aunt Astrid told her, “There are no locator spells in the Greenstone spell book although there are other spells I’m aware of.”

“But,” I added, “if there were a locator spell in that book… If two out of three of us weren’t recovering from magic burnout right now, would we be able to cast a locator spell? What about spells in this book that would help witches so their powers weren’t limited to one or two talents?”

Aunt Astrid said, “That would mean that even nonwitches wouldn’t be limited. They would have magic as well. The words, the ingredients, the gestures—all were designed to create an intersection between this world and the worlds beyond, no matter what. So, yes, it also means that witches could work outside their talents. You see how important it is to keep this spell book out of the wrong hands.”

I sent the clearest pictures of the necklace from my phone to Bea’s, and I deleted the rest.

Bea leaned back in her seat. “So, then… All we can do is guess until we know more.”

“No,” I said. “We need to figure out what’s going on. We can’t just wait around—not with so much at stake!”

Bea added gloomily, “We’re at stake… as witches have a historical tendency to be. Ha ha.”

“It will be a witch hunt at best,” Aunt Astrid agreed. “At worst… Well, that worst won’t happen, not as long as they don’t have the book. I’m taking this home with me to personally ensure its safety!”

“We just have to wait until we know more,” Bea said. “Do you really want to go home, Mom? Are you sure?”

Aunt Astrid nodded. “The Maid of the Mist is more powerful than the three of us combined, but she wouldn’t be able to move the dimension pocket. There are generations of protection spells in the old Greenstone house. That’s the second-best option.”

“Cath,” Bea said, turning to me, “you know, we’ve got a guest room. You’re welcome to stay overnight, and Treacle is, too.”

I was just about to protest that the situation wasn’t that bad when Treacle spoke into my mind.

“Well,” I said instead, “Marshmallow says she’s not going anywhere, and Treacle isn’t leaving Marshmallow.”

“And you don’t want to go back to your place alone,” Bea finished warmly.

It wasn’t until she said it that I realized it was true, never mind what was going on with the cats. I’d inherited my house from my parents. I hardly ever think about what happened there because it was decades ago, but after the big spell that day, going back there would remind me of the monster under my bed.

Most kids have imaginary friends or monsters. In a family line of witches, those imaginary beings usually turn out to be real, which can be pretty disconcerting.

So Bea drove Aunt Astrid back to her place, and I stayed in the guest bedroom.

Bea spent the afternoon making calls and drafting letters to the insurance company, and Treacle kept watch over the sleeping Marshmallow. Peanut Butter pawed at the bottom of the guest room’s door until I let him in, and we talked. Yes, I had magic burnout, but I’d guess it’s sort of like waiting tables when you feel as though you’re about to come down with the flu or feeling as if you’ve pulled an all-nighter.

Peanut Butter was so insecure that he really needed a chat, so I exerted the effort to do so even though I would be completely drained of magic for the whole next day.

Our talk was mostly just me reassuring Peanut Butter that Jake didn’t dislike him and that Bea and Jake weren’t going to split up and abandon Peanut Butter in a cardboard box on the side of the road. I told Peanut Butter that the stereotypes humans have about cats being proud and independent just didn’t fit him.

Neither Treacle nor I told Peanut Butter about the fire, Ted’s death, or the big magical spell.

I did show Peanut Butter the pendant, though. He said it reminded him of the four-sided dice that Jake’s nephew and his friends played with.

I remembered those. Min Park, who was Mrs. Park’s son, had been a great fan of those fantasy-adventure tabletop roleplaying games when we were back at school. Once Bea’s brain ate up all the guidebooks, she became the most annoying player, a total stickler for the rules. She was better at running the game and telling the players what was what than she was at playing. When we tried certain actions, we rolled dice—six-sided, ten-sided, twenty-sided dice—to determine whether the characters we played would succeed or not. The four-sided dice were more painful to step on than Lego bricks.

Of course, those medieval fantasy games had magic, and I might have let it slip once that how we played out magic usage according to the guidebooks wasn’t how magic “really” worked. Min Park was a good friend, but I think he dismissed that comment as my taking a fictional entertainment medium too seriously.

I realized then that I hadn’t made a lot of friends since Min had left. I hadn’t noticed because my family lived nearby, and I wasn’t as much of a social butterfly as Bea. Maybe animal communication had spoiled me because, to me, nothing is clearer than a pure thought, a pure emotion, a memory, or a mix of the three just dropped into your mind. I wondered if I could try something new more often—meet new people or meet familiar people in new ways.

All right, maybe I didn’t mull over all of that at the time. If I did, it would have been pushed to the back of my mind, considering the much bigger concern about who knew the Greenstone legacy, which we’d tried to keep so private.

When evening fell, Bea fried up some ground turkey and potato wedges. Jake called to say he would be working overtime that night. I gave Marshmallow some of the turkey just to get her to eat something. After taking the afternoon off to rest, I was feeling better, but Marshmallow still felt terrible.