A Hiss-tory of Magic: A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 1 (8 page)

J
ake
and I were silent as he drove me to the hospital. I kept reaching out to Treacle in my mind, but something kept blocking me—until suddenly, the blockage wasn’t there anymore.

“Is it safe to talk now? I thought there was magic—bad magic, from somebody else.”
Treacle spoke in my mind, but I couldn’t see anything from him but pitch blackness.

Contrary to popular belief, cats can’t see in complete darkness. Their eyes just function much better than most human eyes do at low light levels.

“Treacle,”
I murmured.
“What happened?”

“I’m not hurt.”

“But where are you?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t smell familiar.”

I felt a steel grid through Treacle’s whiskers and smelled dye and fabric
that had been used to cover the grid.

Treacle asked,
“Why couldn’t I talk to you? Was it because of magic burnout? You seem fine now. More than fine!”

“No,”
I told Treacle.
“Not magic burnout. Something else.”

Jake cleared his throat as he drove. “Funny thing. Treacle and Peanut Butter interfered with the crime scene today.”

“I keep telling Treacle not to go wandering off!” I whispered, hating the tremor of terror and regret in my voice. Then I bit my tongue. “I mean, I do what I can. Locking the cat flap door and all that.”

Jake gave me a doubtful look. “They helped us to find evidence.”

“Really?”

Jake nodded his head toward the dashboard, where I saw some fully developed photographs of the inside of Aunt Astrid’s bunker. I picked up one of a shoeprint. Through Peanut Butter’s eyes, Blake had some nice shoes, too.

“I think these animals really do know what’s going on sometimes,” Jake said.

I told Jake, “That’s more than me these past two days.”

A
fter the hospital
workers rolled Astrid out of the emergency room, Bea slept sitting on a plastic chair by her mother’s hospital bed. That would make it easier for Bea to use her talent.

I warned her about magic burnout, but she turned her despairing eyes to me and asked, “What use is my power if I can’t save my own mother?”

I sat down on the armchair in the corner and didn’t argue.

When she couldn’t heal Astrid any more, Bea said, “I can’t believe I didn’t check for the book!”

“It was gone before you came in.” That wasn’t exactly reassuring.

“There were supposed to be protection spells in the Greenstone house. What happened?”

I said grimly, “The Order. They have magic.”

“Min did this? Or Detective Samberg?”

“I don’t know. Still, it’s the Order that broke down the protection spells. Aunt Astrid’s magic burnout was worse than mine. She and Marshmallow would both have been numb to the spells disintegrating.” I massaged the sides of my head. “Something keeps stopping me from getting in touch with Treacle. It’s either Min or Blake. They were meeting with each other while Aunt Astrid was being attacked. That much I do know.”

Peanut Butter had bolted out of his hiding place in the alleyway the moment Min and Blake walked away. He’d gone to alert Marshmallow that Treacle had been captured.

“We need to know more about this Order,” I said. “How many members could come to Wonder Falls? Is our town secretly being invaded by a secret society run by frat boys?”

Bea sat up. “What can we do? Look them up on their website? Run ‘The Order’ through a search engine? Ask Blake Samberg and trust he isn’t lying?”

At that moment, someone knocked on the door of the hospital room.

I opened the door to find Blake waiting outside, holding a pet carrier hidden badly by his coat. Inside the carrier, Treacle put his paws against the grid of bars and meowed.

“I’ve made a mistake,” were the first words out of Blake’s mouth.

“No, I have,” I said, taking Treacle from him. “Come in. Shut the door behind you.”

I set the cat carrier down at the foot of the hospital bed.

Blake came into the room. I gently shut the door, turned, and slapped Blake across the face.

I was seething. “Confidant
and
informant, did you say? It was a huge mistake to trust you!”

Blake rubbed his jaw and flinched.

Bea stood up, trying to calm us both down. “I did not,” she said, “just witness my cousin and soul sister assault a law enforcer!”

“As if he’s to be trusted!” I was answering Bea, but my eyes were on Blake. That time, he lost our staring contest. “You’re as crooked as they come, Blake Samberg.”

Blake held his hands up as if he were under arrest. “Not usually. Only this time.”

My jaw dropped. “Oh,” I said sarcastically, “that makes it all better, then!”

“I thought I’d cracked the case. I thought that it was only about me.” He glanced over at Bea. “Can I say anything more specific with her around?”

“You’d better,” I said to him. “Because it’s her mother who was getting assaulted while you had your showdown with Min.”

Blake groaned. “I thought he wasn’t going to say anything!”

Bea and I glanced at each other.

My outrage faltered as I remembered that he didn’t know Treacle was my magically mind-linked pet cat—or, apparently, that I had any magic at all. I mustered up my outrage again and said, “Min Park didn’t say anything about this club except that he was in it. I just figured some things out. So, tell us about the Order. No, wait, first tell us how you knew this was my cat.”

Bea squatted to slide the latch open and let Treacle out of the carrier.

Blake answered, “Cats are the one thing Jake and I can talk about without fighting. He mentioned that if I saw a black cat with a star-shaped scar on its forehead, then he was probably yours.”

“Right.” I sat down on the edge of the hospital bed and gestured to an armchair in the corner. “Now, tell us about the Order.”

Blake took his long coat off the carrier. From one pocket, he drew a palm-sized, leather-bound journal with a pyramid embossed on the cover.

“This is what they give to the legacy members of the Order. My father was a member, and he wanted me to join because he’d made some good friends there. He paid my dues at first. We host charity fundraisers, help entrepreneurs, give each other a leg up on the job network—that sort of thing. Country clubs. A few parties.”

I said, “You did strike me as a party person.”

“Never.” He traced the triangle on the cover with his fingertips. “The pattern on this pyramid shows where in the hierarchy my father was. Until you get pretty high up, you usually only know who’s immediately above you.”

Bea asked, “How does the Order decide on hierarchy?”

“The higher-ups pick and choose who’s going to be directly beneath them. If you progress in something called the Mysteries, then you get…”

“Higher up?” I offered.

Blake corrected me. “Deeper in. Attending solemn rituals in robes, drawing circles on the ground in chalk, dribbly candles, and saying the same thing as everybody else in the room at the same time in a language that nobody really speaks anymore.”

Bea smiled. “The Mysteries! You figured out how to do magic!”

Blake’s eyes flashed with resentment. “Mrs. Williams, there is no such thing. My father got too deep into it. I’m a man of science and reasoning.”

I believed his last sentence. “So you don’t mind if we keep that book?”

“Borrow it. I’d rather not forget how much it messed my dad up.” He tossed the journal to me, and I caught it. Bea, with her magic burnout, edged her chair away. The Order journal wasn’t like the Greenstone spell book, where every page and especially the cover had some seal that had to be unlocked for the magic to flow. Somebody had been careless in making it. The pulp of the pages twisted the physical world into the other worlds.

Blake continued, “I wanted out. After my father passed away, I quit paying my dues. The members would come to where I used to live and say something about legacy—how it means that you can never leave the Order. I filed complaints against them, even restraining orders, and finally I changed my name and moved here,” he concluded, “where I thought that I could leave all that behind me.”

“So,” I said, “when you recognized the necklace—”

“I thought it was a warning from them. Min made clear that it wasn’t just me who was from the Order. I met up with him in secret—I admit to that. I told Min to tell the rest of them that I was ready to barge into their chapter with guns blazing.” Blake laughed. “Min’s left the Order, too! They let him, though, because he wasn’t a legacy. He didn’t need any of their help to become a success, obviously.”

I stifled a sigh of relief but still had to play it cool. “You said that you cracked the case.”

From his other jacket pocket, Blake drew the chain and pyramid pendant. “Min gave me the Order’s membership amulet you found. It isn’t his. The pattern shows somebody too high ranking.”

Bea suggested, “Could there be DNA on it still?”

“It’s been passed around too much,” Blake pointed out. “And Cath did say that she picked it up after the fire.”

“Is it all my fault you can’t catch them, then?” I demanded. “For tampering with evidence? What about the way you withheld crucial information pertaining to the case—and not for anybody else’s sake but yours?”

“I’m saying that was a mistake! You don’t have to forgive me, but just to start making it up to you, I thought you should be the first one to know what the next course of action is, and it won’t be a DNA test.” Blake stood up. “They—the Order—do have a website directory, and the Wonder Falls police force does have an IT team. We can cross-reference what I know about these patterns, what they signify, and narrow down who it might be. They might not categorize every member, but…”

I finished, “It’s worth a try.”

“The only problem is…” He heaved a sigh. “I’ll have to tell Jake. And Chief Talbot, of course.”

Bea and I started talking at the same time.

“Just do it.”

“He doesn’t bite!”

“Good luck.”

Blake shrugged on his coat. “I just thought you deserved to know what this was all about.”

I saw him out the door. “Thank you,” I told him, “for trusting me with this after I slapped you. I really hope it turns out all right for you.”

“I hope your Aunt Astrid gets well soon.” Then Blake left.

Inside, Treacle batted at the journal with his paw.

“The Order stirs up trouble in more than the magical way,” Bea remarked. “That could be all they need to get caught.”

“But they have magic,” I said. “They have
our
magic, and it’s powerful!” I picked up the journal. “This has a blocking or privacy spell on it. That’s why I couldn’t get to Treacle when the carrier was covered. It’s definitely effective, but whoever wrote the spell didn’t put any safety catches on it so that it would only apply to somebody trying to read the journal. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

“We can’t get the Greenstone spell book back until we know which member of the Order came into Wonder Falls, killed Ted, and attacked my mom.” Bea sighed. “You know this is the hardest thing for me to say, but we have to let them do their jobs—Blake and Jake and Talbot. Everyone.”

“They can’t do it properly if we don’t tell them everything. They could be running out of time and not even know it!”

“Mom would know what to do.” Bea brushed away a few stray wisps of hair from her mother’s forehead. “I wish she’d wake up.”

With that, Bea and I lapsed back into the gloomy silence we’d shared before Blake came in.

J
ake urged
Bea away from the hospital bedside, using the fact that he had a gun license and was in a better position to protect Aunt Astrid in case any agents of the Order tried to attack again.

“You think they’d attack again?” I asked him. They had what they wanted, the spell book.

Jake answered, “She might have seen something. The attacker wouldn’t want to be identified.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“Fine,” Bea said, to my surprise.

Jake nodded. “Blake will drive you. He should be right outside.”

I gave Bea a confused look.

She mouthed, “They have the book. They won’t bother Aunt Astrid.”

As we walked out, I whispered, “How can you be so sure?”

Seeing Blake, Bea adopted a more normal tone of voice. “They’re in over their heads, drunk with power. Isn’t that right, Blake? About the Order? They wouldn’t hound Aunt Astrid like they did you since they don’t know her personally.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Blake murmured.

So Blake drove Bea, Treacle, and me home. Marshmallow and Peanut Butter were already in the car. He said it would be safer if Bea and I were in the same place, and he’d stake out the house in case any members of the Order tried to attack us, just in case they were targeting everyone connected to the Brew-Ha-Ha.

The entire case had turned him and Jake into real partners again. Jake and Blake. The safety of innocent civilians was more important than arguing over attitudes.

“What makes our caution so important is that even I don’t understand the motive,” Blake said. “A couple of officers followed the gang violence that made up Ted Lanier’s history and came to a dead end. Darren Castellan, Darla’s ex-husband, has a solid alibi, and Jake says that the marriage had run its course for him—he wasn’t jealous. So Ted’s death had to have something to do with the Order. Why set one person on fire and leave another concussed?”

I played along. “You did say that Ted had a concussion. Maybe when Bea brought Peanut Butter home, she’d interrupted the arsonist.”

“And nothing was burgled?”

I lied. “No, nothing.”

Bea supplied, “It makes no sense.”

“Well, Bea, Blake did describe them as basically a mob. Maybe they like to cause destruction, and they believe it’s not that bad because they’re all doing it together and laughing about it afterward.” I reasoned, “They’ll still go about it in different ways because they’re different people.”

The car pulled into my driveway. Bea carried Marshmallow in the cage into my house, with Treacle and Peanut Butter following.

Blake stopped me at the door. “I can’t shake the feeling that you’re holding out on me, Cath. After today, I swear I have no secrets from you.”

“I don’t have secrets, either. I never did! I have privates.” That sounded really bad, didn’t it? I blamed Blake’s cheekbones and the composition of the rest of his face for distracting me. A hint of a smile appeared on his face; he wanted to laugh. Wearily, I added, “You know what I mean. Secrets. The day’s not over until I’ve had some sleep. Then we’ll talk. Yeah?” Without waiting for a reply, I patted his arm and walked past him.

Treacle walked me up to my room.
“In the cellar below the place where the fire happened, I smelled something.”

I wanted to theorize and think some more until everything fell into place, but I was too exhausted. I fell into bed without changing my clothes.

I
dreamed
that Aunt Astrid and the Maid of the Mist were one person, and I felt silly for not realizing that they were. Her braids cascaded in a loud hiss of flowing water that sounded like rain. From the balcony of the Parks’ grocery store, I watched a meteor shaped like the pyramid pendant of the Order tumble from the sky and crash into the estuary of the three waterfalls.

Blake stood at a chalkboard like a teacher and said, “But you see, it isn’t possible for this to happen.”

From my school desk, I raised my hand so I could take my turn to talk. “It did happen. My Aunt Astrid is in the hospital now because of it. You said the Order did this.”

Blake shook his head and looked around. “Does anybody else know the correct answer? The Maid of the Mist.”

Aunt Astrid, in the seat beside me, wasn’t raising her hand. She looked right at me and said, “I’m waking up.”

“What?” I asked, confused and hopeful.

As if repeating herself even though she was not, Aunt Astrid said, “Sometimes, the future that I see is fixed.”

“I refuse to believe that,” declared a voice from my other side. I turned to see Darla Castellan as she’d appeared in high school. More quietly, she suggested, “Senior moment yesterday, maybe?” Darla swung her arm as if to strike me, holding a shoe with a strangely shaped heel—a kitten heel, they call it. I ducked, and the shoe flew past me.

“Aunt Astrid!” I shouted. I should have taken that hit. If only I hadn’t been somewhere else…

But where Aunt Astrid had been sitting, Ted Lanier sat, pressing star-shaped cookie cutters into a piece of rolled-out dough.

Bea took the seat on his other side. She gloomily added, “We’re at stake. As witches have a historical tendency to be. Ha. Ha. Ha.”

At her final “ha,” Ted burst into flames. In an instant, the friendly face I’d known in life became the charred remains I’d caught sight of.

At that, I stood up. “I’m done with this.” I turned to leave and entered a ballroom instead of a classroom. Everything was made of glossy marble. Walking was difficult in the ball gown I was wearing.

Min Park stood in the middle of the room, looking perfect in a white tuxedo. “Do you dance?” he asked, extending his hand toward me.

Music filled the room—but it wasn’t music. It sounded like several people intoning the same thing at the same time in a language so old that nobody should speak it anymore.

“I don’t know what this dance is called,” I told Min.

He put one hand on my waist and held one of my hands with the other. “Trial by water,” Min answered. “One, two, three. One, two, three. Repeating history.”

“No.” I laughed as we danced. “I’m pretty sure that this is called a…”
Waltz
was the word, but I forgot it in the dream. “A waterfall?” I looked down at our feet to make sure I wasn’t stepping on his and he wasn’t stepping on mine.

Our foot maneuvers looked strange. He seemed to be stepping where I had just stepped. It didn’t make sense. His shoes were nice, though.

I looked up to see that my dance partner was Blake, not Min.

“We were all under orders,” he said to me. “Dress code. Bloodline legacy. What to say, how to think—it’s a cult that takes over your life.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I asked him, “What’s this dance called again?”

Blake stepped back and moved my hand in a circle, signaling me to spin around. I did so, and Reuben Connors in his fireman gear pulled me to his chest and answered, “Trial by fire.”

I shouted in surprise and struggled to push him away.

I woke up struggling against the quilt.