Copper Girl (4 page)

“Silver,” I deduced. “Your home is silver.” I looked at him, and asked very seriously, “Am I supposed to live in copper?”

Micah chuckled at my ignorance. “A copper abode would enhance your power, but any metal would do. Silver would do nicely.”

I ignored that innuendo. “Micah, your home is beautiful.”

“It is--” He opened his mouth to say more, then cocked his head to the side. “I regret to tell you, I am needed below. When may I see you again?”

“I came to tell you that I shouldn’t see you again,” I said. “It’s just too dangerous. At least, that was what I decided this morning.”

“And now?” he asked, hopefully.

“I…” I looked at him, this silver elf who had just thrust himself into my life, and uttered the very words I knew could be deadly. “Now, I don’t think I mind the danger.” Micah smiled, seeming content with that answer for now, and walked me back to the thin spot between worlds. We said a quick goodbye, since he had to respond to his mysterious summons, but when he turned to leave, I called for him to wait.

“Shouldn’t you give me a token?” I dropped my eyes. “I mean, you have two from me. Shouldn’t I have something from you?” I scuffed the pine-needle carpet with my toe. It was a foolish request, for many reasons. Not only was someone like Micah not likely to want to see an undereducated wretch like me again, I was seriously risking my life just by talking to him. Really, this couldn’t go on.

Instead of telling me to go back where I came from, Micah pulled a chain over his head, and then stepped closer as he arranged it around my neck. On the chain was a pendant shaped like a silver oak leaf, along with a silver-capped acorn carved from amber.

“The oaks are my allies, and I take their leaf as my symbol,” he murmured, fastening the clasp behind my neck. “Wear it, my Sara, and be guaranteed safe passage throughout my lands.”

“Micah, it’s too much!”

“It’s not.” He closed my fingers over the pendant. “Nothing is too much, my Sara.”

“Should our tokens be of metal, since we are?”

“Traditionally, yes.”

Hmm. He only had fabric from me. I dug in my pocket and retrieved a few pennies. “It’s all the copper I have,” I apologized.

“I will treasure them,” he murmured. Micah slid the coins inside his tunic, close to his heart. “Just as I treasure you.” He kissed me then, softly, sweetly, almost respectfully. “And, I will see you again.”

Yes. Yes, he would.

I stepped out of the Other world just as easily as I would have stepped from one room to the next. When I was a child, I’d thought walking from one reality to the next was amazingly cool, fodder for endless stories and Hollywood blockbusters. Now, it just made my hands shake and my stomach turn, the fear of discovery having replaced my childhood wonder.

I climbed back into my car and sat heavily behind the wheel, tracing the edges of Micah’s token while I stared at the twisted pine trees.
If the trees are the same, why are the worlds different?
I squinted, trying to catch a glimpse of Micah or the Whispering Dell, but I only saw the fence separating the parking lot from the abandoned industrial park next door. I leaned to the side and saw the edge of a concrete building that, impossibly, occupied the same valley as Micah’s silver castle.

Vaguely, I recall learning (from Max, not from any Mundane instructor) that the things we humans create only exist in our world, and the same holds true for beings of the Otherworld. Good thing, too, or there would be a lot of cities with awkwardly placed municipal buildings and sacred fountains. Despite this, the bones of the worlds are the same. This means that natural things, like trees, can exist in both places, but things like buildings can’t. But humans and animals and elves are natural, and we only occupy one at a time, so the tree theory never did fully make sense to me
. Then, I remembered that the Museum of Human Triumph exists simultaneously in both worlds, and my head drooped forward to rest on the steering wheel. I had no idea how magic worked, why trees could exist in whichever world they please, while buildings and people are confined to one at a time. I was certain, however, what my punishment would be if I were caught with an elfin artifact.

I missed Dad. I missed Max. They would know the answers.

They would know what to do.

The telltale hum of an approaching drone roused me. Missing Dad and Max wasn’t going to get me any answers, so I tucked Micah’s token inside my shirt and started the car. As the silver oak leaf warmed against my skin, I sped out of the parking lot, not caring if the drone slapped me with a fine for speeding or reckless disregard. Unlike my aimless morning drive, I knew where I was going, though my destination would probably lead to even more questions. I made a left out of the lot and headed toward the only magical place I had clearance to enter - my mother’s house, the Raven Compound.

She’d been granted the estate in the hasty, unasked-for divorce, along with a generous government stipend that paid for the daily maintenance of the place, not to mention my and Sadie’s living expenses. The estate itself was huge, boasting eleven bedrooms, fourteen baths, and not one, but two ballrooms. The house proper sat upon several acres of land, nestled between groves of oak and ash trees.
It was, as you (and the government) could well imagine, the ideal place for a clan of Elemental magicians to work spells unobserved
.

After Dad went missing during the third year of the wars, the government had wasted no time in declaring him an enemy of the state and divorcing him from my mother. You see, under the new regime political criminals couldn’t enter into any contracts, of which marriage was definitely included; really, this was just another way to make us miserable. Mom hadn’t wanted the divorce, and Dad had only been unaccounted for a few months when it happened, but then, she hadn’t even known about any divorce proceedings until the papers were delivered.
By armed Peacekeepers, mind you
. Being that her husband was missing, magic had been declared illegal and she had three small children to care for, Mom had had other things on her mind instead of her newly-single status. However, she had put up enough of a fuss that we got to keep the house in exchange for turning over all our magical implements, spellbooks included. And once the house had been outfitted with cameras and listening devices, the checks had started rolling in.

Yeah. As if we were going to invite our Elemental buddies over for a magic party.

As I drove past the wrought-iron gates of the Compound, I nodded at the ravens standing guard along the weathered metal. On account of their presence, and our surname, we called the family home the Raven Compound, in honor of the birds who’d always seemed to flock to their namesake. Sometimes they were so still you could mistake them for statues, but the statues all had shiny glass eyes of green or blue. The living birds’ eyes were black as a moonless night.

The leader of these silent sentries was the copper raven that sat alone atop the gable over the main entrance. Most probably thought he was nothing more than a weathervane, but Dad had always called him our watcher, an agent of The Raven; he was the one who made sure nothing bad got past our gate. When I was a kid, he’d gleamed as if we’d polished him daily, though to my knowledge no one ever had. Once Dad left for the wars, the patina slowly set in; I remember Max saying that the raven missed Dad. Once the Peacekeepers came to serve Mom with the divorce papers, the green had taken over, engulfing him like so much kudzu.

I watched this raven, our so-called guardian as I parked; even though he was well and truly blanketed by the thick, mottled patina, I still felt like he marked every move I made, for all the good it ever did us. I wanted to yell and scream at the metal bird, throw things at him, tell him that he’d failed in the worst way possible. He was no watcher, no guardian. Through his inattention, we’d lost both Dad and Max.

Shakily, I turned off the car. First, I was taking trips to the Otherworld and making dates with elves, now I was getting into fights with the decorations. Hoping I still had some time left before I totally lost my mind, I got out of the car. My feet crunched on the raked gravel driveway and, after a quick wave at the passing drone, I strode purposefully toward the door.

The foyer of the Raven Compound was ridiculously, over-the-top, ostentatious. It was circular, the curved walls clad in gold-flecked marble and gilded plaster. The ceiling was a full three stories high, held aloft by eight pillars half as wide as I was tall. An enormous crystal chandelier, dripping with multicolored glass baubles, took up the top third of the room. Portraits and statues of significant ancestors had once encircled the foyer, but they had all been confiscated as evidence during the war trials. In an effort to brighten things up in their absence, Mom had placed some potted hydrangeas around the pillars. It was nice.

“Mom?”

After a moment, I called out again, a bit less softly, but Mom was nowhere in sight or earshot; the estate was so large you could easily go for several days without seeing another living soul. Once we had been allowed to move back in after Max’s arrest, and it was just Mom, Sadie, and me, the three of us regularly went a week or more before all of us were in the same room. Now that Sadie and I had moved out, me to my tiny apartment and Sadie to the university dorm, Mom was all alone with her memories and a vegetable garden.
She doesn’t even like vegetables
.

I sighed, unsurprised by Mom’s lack of response, crossed the foyer, and entered the front parlor. It was my favorite room at the Compound, since it was the only one left unscathed during the war trials; the government, true to their “beneficent” nature, had deemed that nothing in it was spelled, so they had let us have one whole room of family memories.
Mom re fuses to set foot in the parlor, since she’s convinced that the Peacekeepers laid a trap in it and they’re just waiting for her to slip up
.

Hidden listening devices or no, the parlor was a nice room, if a bit outdated. Flocked red velvet covered the walls, and it was crammed full of dark wood furniture and tarnished silver bric-a-brac. A behemoth of a china cabinet graced the far wall, stuffed full of childhood drawings and lopsided plaster ashtrays, along with what was left of the eggshell-thin heirloom plates that Mom’s ancestors had carried over from Ireland, and a set of crystal handed down by Dad’s mother. The deal was that whichever girl married first would get her pick of the plates or glassware, with the other set going to the other, later-married sister. Since I’m a realist, I’d never had my heart set on either.

Despite the many familiar items, the aspect of the parlor I liked best was something intangible: its smell. The parlor held that distinctive odor of all rooms magic had been worked in: musk and brimstone, a touch of rot, sweet incense, and sour, bitter herbs. I breathed deeply of the smells of my youth, since they had been sanitized out of the rest of the house.

A few deep breaths later, I flopped down on the mustard-yellow divan and looked at the tiny framed photograph resting on the end table. It was of me, Max, and Sadie. We were out back under the big oak tree, which was where Max taught us spells. Max would tell us a story, or give us bitter herbs to chew, then he would have Sadie and me stare upward and squint until we could see the fairies frolicking in high branches. When I got older, I had assumed the fairies were one of Max’s illusions, but after meeting Micah I was not so sure.

Ironically, with all the effort the government had expended on removing every iota of magic from the Raven Compound, they had left the stately oak intact. When we moved back in after Dad had been declared dead, we’d expected to find it little more than a pile of sawdust, but there it was, welcoming us back to our home. Max had laughed and said that this oversight was further evidence of how clueless the Peacekeepers really were; normally, we ignored Max’s rants, but he’d had a point. The oak tree had been the hub of magical activities for hundreds of years, which was one of the reasons the Raven Compound had been built nearby. You didn’t need to be an Elemental to feel the tinge of magic covering its bark, hear it rustle in its leaves, and yet the Peacekeepers hadn’t given it a second look. They were so busy hauling off badly composed portraits of long-dead Corbeaus that they had left behind a veritable fountain of power.

The first day we moved back, we had tried to have a picnic in front of the oak, just like old times. That hadn’t turned out to be the best idea, since before long Mom was weeping for the loss of Dad, Sadie was terrified that a Peacekeeper would leap down from the branches and get her, and Max was yelling at them both to keep it together. Me, I had just concentrated on my sandwich, and hoped it was all just one long, terrible nightmare.

That had been the last time the four of us had visited the oak; sometimes, I wondered if the tree missed us, or if he was glad not to have three rambunctious children snapping off his twigs and leaves. My hand strayed to the pendant Micah had given me that morning, and I traced the edge of the oak leaf, felt the amber acorn warm in my hand. Was it a sign that Micah was allied with the oaks, just as the Corbeau children had been?