CHAPTER THREE
Staci awoke the next morning to the smell of cooked bacon and coffee. All things considered, she had had much ruder awakenings. She felt well rested, despite having had a very odd dream during the night. She could only remember bits and pieces of it; her rolling a large stone up a hill, or trying to keep it from rolling down? There was a lot of thunder and lightning, and she had heard what sounded like a lot of scratching noises rising up all around her. Weird.
After a quick shower and a change of clothing she ran downstairs to find her mom had actually made a full breakfast for both of them without ruining anything. Pancakes, bacon (a little more on the burnt side of crisp, but still edible!), and coffee, and orange sections on the side. “Hey sweetie!” Mom greeted her, handing her a plate with the butter melting on top of the pancakes. “Remember when I used to make you mouse-head-pancakes?” she added wistfully. “You used to eat them until I thought you were going to pop.”
“Yeah, I loved those. You started making them after our first trip to Disney when I was little.” Staci looked at the pile of food before her. “You really did great on this, Mom. I just hope I can finish it all.” Her mother beamed at the compliment. Staci had been trying to encourage her mother at every opportunity that she could; there were a lot of missteps on both of their parts, and sometimes her mother would break down and cry from frustration. But it had been a long time since that had happened, and it looked like her mother had learned to cope with the little setbacks much better. Before, the burnt bacon would have been enough to set off a crying jag, and statements about not being good enough, a horrible mother, and a general failure. Staci had recently had her own bout of not feeling good enough for anyone; it was the one good thing to come from that experience, that she could help her mother with her own feelings.
“At least my tips are getting a lot better.” Mom nodded at the jar, which was noticeably fuller than it used to be. How much of that was due to Mom not drinking her tips away? Some, but not all of it. There’s a good pile of money in there.
Staci eyed the jar with a nod of approval. “Things getting better at the bar?”
“More guys coming in from the lumber mill.” Mom filled her own plate and took it to the table and sat down. “You know, when they started talking about the mill going all sustainable products everyone thought that was the start of layoffs. But it isn’t. The guys were all talking about it last night. They said that the bay is full of old sunk logs that are all old-growth wood. There’s work for divers bringing them up. And they’re milling out every single scrap, because that wood is so valuable, so instead of being less work, because they have to be so precise, there’s more.”
Staci blinked. Not at the idea of there being more work because of what the new owners were doing at the mill (and wouldn’t that new owner be Morrigan? Wasn’t she the only Blackthorne left alive on this side of the Portal?) but because her mother had actually listened to what the guys at the bar were saying and remembered it. “Wow,” she said. “That sounds like something everybody can get behind.”
“Mhmm. So, what adventures do you have planned? Another day at the bookstore?” her mother asked as she was clearing away the plates; Staci had demolished the breakfast, even having seconds. She would need her energy for today.
“Nope, heading out to play in the forest again with Seth and Wanda; more LARPing and hiking,” Staci responded, as she slipped her jacket on and secured her leather knapsack. “I probably won’t be back until late; we’ll probably stop and get some lunch or dinner in town.”
“Well, I can’t complain that you’re a couch-potato, that’s for sure. You’re in better shape than I am! Maybe you ought to make a fitness video or something.” Her mother giggled at that. “Move over, Buns of Steel, right? You’re so cute, you’d make a million dollars!”
Staci rolled her eyes a little. “Too many people doing those for free on YouTube, no way I could compete.” She checked to make sure that she had everything: phone with its attached charm, backpack, and all of the books that she needed to return to Tim. “All right, I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you later!” She pecked her mother on the cheek before starting for the door.
“Okay, sweetie. I’ll be working tonight, so I’ll see you in the morning. Be safe!”
Staci took a leisurely route through town on her way to the spot in the woods where she would meet the others. She had the time; Wanda hated getting up early, and Tim had to attend to things at the bookstore before he would be free to come out and help train them. Even getting there early, Staci would be able to keep herself occupied: first setting up a few wards to alert her if anyone was getting close, and then working on magic. Practicing magic produced a thrill in her that she hadn’t even thought was possible, when she first moved to Silence. It was primordial: something that was old and impossibly powerful, but able to be manipulated. Used for purpose. Immediately after the attack on the Blackthorne mansion, Staci had thought that she wouldn’t want anything to do with magic ever again. But, instead, she had thrown herself completely into studying it, and it had helped her cope. She loved using magic; that was part of why she had messed up during their last training day. She understood the need to practice mundane skills, even rely on them, since her magical energy stores could be drained, leaving her unable to cast even a simple cantrip, but magic was just more fascinating.
Deep inside of herself, she felt a burning urge to use magic more and more. Who wouldn’t? To shape the world with your thoughts? To control the very elements and fibers of existence? It was addicting, and helped to mask the ache she experienced whenever she thought about Dylan.
It’s always coming back to him, isn’t it? Ugh. She shook her head as she pedaled along, trying to will the image of her erstwhile, elven pseudo-boyfriend away. Then she shook her head again that that was even a thing.
Staci decided to take a detour down towards the cannery and lumber mill to see for herself what her mother had mentioned. Plus . . . the route would take her past David’s house. The thought of him made her smile. He would be at work right about now, without a doubt; serving all of the fishermen that had already brought in a good haul, or people from the industrial area getting off of swing shifts.
There were a lot of guys going into the cannery; the alley that had been mostly deserted at this hour before had activity in it. Mom was right; there had been all these rumors about the cannery going bust, that the fishermen would never be able to follow the new “zero bycatch rule” and still make enough to keep food on the table and fuel in the boat. That was why Jake and Riley’s parents had both bailed. They’d been sure that their cannery and mill jobs would be done, so they’d headed up to Vermont where relatives were living. Even sold the houses that had been in their families for generations.
And yet . . . whoever the owner was, he’d (or she! It could be Morrigan!) managed to make it work, almost as if there was magic propelling everything. It turned out there were lots of fancy East Coast markets who’d pay top dollar for “certified zero-bycatch” sardines, and sardines were getting trendy instead of being a bar snack or a poor-man’s lunch. So the cannery was doing well! Smaller cans than before, new brand, meant more work. Jake and Riley could still be here, if only their folks had had faith. . . .
But faith had been in very short supply in Silence, the town that was dying by inches . . . and anyway, Staci had gotten the very strong feeling that neither of the two had been even remotely comfortable with magic that was real, magic that could kill people, magic that wasn’t safely contained in a book or on a screen. Their brush with it had been more than enough for the pair of them. Still, she missed them loads, and still kept up with them via texts and Facebook when she could. Sometimes Seth would do a special campaign and have them do telepresence through a laptop; it wasn’t exactly the same, but it was still better than nothing.
You would think that the simple fact we can even do that now would prove to them that everything is better now.
“Maybe they’ll come back one day, if they see how things are changing,” she wondered aloud to herself. She’d have to remember to take some pictures of the town, especially the cannery; show that things were bouncing back. Something they could show their parents. She wouldn’t mention the magic stuff; that would just be for her, Seth, Wanda, and Tim from now on.
Just as she had thought, Staci was the first person to arrive at their spot on the cliff, or rather, below it. Staci had stopped using Makeout Hill to practice magic, for a number of reasons. One, it reminded her of too much; the Blackthornes, Dylan, Sean even. Two, now that there was actual cell reception in the town, people didn’t just use the spot to rarely get a signal, but for its actual namesake. Watching couples getting it on there would have been bad enough; having some unlucky couple drive up at the wrong time and catch a real display of magic would have been far worse.
Instead, they had decided on a spot that didn’t give Staci any memories to speak of, and had the advantage of being very secluded—the Blackthornes’ private beach. There was road access only to the top of the cliff over the beach. But because you had to climb down a cliff—even if there was a staircase cut into the side of it—no one around here bothered to use it. At least not for swimming. Probably it had been used during Prohibition to land booze, but there were easier ways to traffic drugs in and out of this area.
The Blackthornes had used the beach for parties, but the Blackthornes had had a million servants to schlep stuff around, and magic to make it, if they didn’t even want to bother schlepping it. Whereas, if you were schlepping the stuff yourself, and were a normal teenager, or even a jock, you’d be too tired by the time you got to the beach to pop a beer. So much easier to swim off the docks, now that the weather was normal and Silence was actually warm and sunny during the day. Mostly. This was still Maine. It got in the 50s even in the summer, especially at night.
This, of course, meant that Staci and Company were toting their own practice gear down to the beach, and she really didn’t want to think about how awful this stretch of sand would be once it turned cold . . . but that was for the future, and right now, this was a pretty good spot.
She left her bike chained to a tree at the top of the cliff, picked up her pack, and started down the stairs. Down below there wasn’t a sign that anyone used the beach for anything. Not even litter. Well, that was because part of their warm-up was to police the place for anything that washed in on the tide. So that no one had to lug tons of practice weapons up and down the stairs, Tim would use a borrowed boat to bring that stuff in when he got here.
Her first chore was to set up a couple of alarm spells; just enough to let her know if anyone was getting too close, to where they could see what was going on. The last thing any of them wanted was for someone to roll up on them right in the middle of a spell, or a cop asking questions about why they had bows and arrows, knives, and other implements. Or, frankly, why the local bookstore owner was in a secluded spot with three teens.
She touched her phone charm and went to work. Staci knew that it was a stupid habit, and knew that she was being sentimental about it; it was something Dylan had given her. But, it had also helped to save her life, and to discover magic. Even Tim said that things that meant a lot to people could be powerful for them; like totems that could store magical energy. That’s how she justified keeping the charm. Her fingers took a moment to warm up as she started weaving complex designs in the air; it was a little cool with the breeze, and her hands felt slightly stiff. As magic started to trickle into her limbs, all feelings of being tired or her hands being not quite warm enough vanished.
The great thing about this being a secluded beach was that nothing ever really changed here. So instead of needing to create some kind of illusion or put up something like a barrier, all she needed to do was to set up a kind of “magical screen” across the front of the cove that replayed a moment in time. And that time was an hour before she got here. She didn’t even need to allow for anything but about a five second loop of waves washing up on the shore. Simple, easy to do, and required the minimum of magical “juice.” She could keep the screen going even if she wasn’t concentrating on it; there was a small piece of quartz in her jacket pocket that would turn to ash when the spell ran out, consumed as part of the spell. It was very handy, to say the least.
Now that her set-up was done, it was time for her to get to work. It was a good thing I ate a large breakfast; this is going to burn up a lot of energy. Never mind what Tim will have me practice. Staci started with a basic shield incantation; it would set up a barrier that would stop basic spells and small objects that were thrown at her, diverting them around her. It couldn’t take much abuse; only one or two shots, and it was gone. But it wasn’t supposed to be her only line of defense; it was the base that she needed in order to build the rest. Now something a little fancier. The next layer was a reflection spell; any spell launched at it would rebound along the same path, hopefully back to whoever had cast it. But Staci had been experimenting with a twist on the spell. It now had a minor illusion spell attached to it; whatever spell that was launched at her, if it had a visual component, would simply disappear. The idea was that if something got reflected, her opponent wouldn’t be able to see their own spell coming back to smack them in the face. The illusion spell made the shield a little more unstable, but Staci figured that it was worth it if it took someone off-guard. She could see the trickle of magical energy flowing from herself to the shield, and willed it to be dampened until it was almost not even there. She could strengthen the connection—and thus the spell—at will, but this way it wouldn’t be so obvious as to what she was doing if another caster was watching.
So much for set-up. She sighed, letting out a breath she had been holding. “Time for the offense.”
There was an old piece of busted concrete pillar that had somehow found its way onto the beach; it made a good target. Since it was man made, it would stand up a little bit better to some of the stuff that she could throw at it than say a rock or a tree stump would; magic had an affinity for natural substances, which is why she wore a lot of leather and non-synthetic fabrics when she was practicing magic. She willed energy to collect in her hands, building up and coming from what felt like the center of her chest. She imagined what she wanted to happen, started mouthing the words . . . and then looked at the pillar. Her right hand shot forward while her fingers did an odd, twisting sort of contortion. There was a very audible thwack and a puff of dust that came from the pillar. It was a simple kinetic spell; like punching someone, without being right next to them and actually touching them. It was good for interrupting someone while they were casting, or to make someone sit down hard if you put a lot of energy into it. She repeated the spell a dozen times, varying it a little each time; once with a visual component so that it looked like a bolt of energy, once with a spell rider that would make the place that it struck itch like crazy if it landed on a person. Her head swam with calculations, chants, incantations, glyphs and symbols; underneath it all, however, was raw power. Willing what she wanted to have happen was just as important as knowing all of the mechanics of how to do it. Sometimes when she dreamed it was in the permutations for a spell; occasionally she would wake up half afraid that she had somehow cast it in her sleep and blown the house up.
Next came something a little flashier. “Seth’s favorite: fireball.” This spell took substantially more power, and the result was equally impressive. A literal ball of flame shot towards the pillar, erupting into a cloud of flame and smoke like a small gas explosion when it impacted. Nothing fancy for that spell. Something you want to be on fire? Congratulations, it is now probably on fire and hopefully not bothering you anymore. A lot of the elemental attacks were variations on the same theme; create a big hunk of something with magic, then use magic to basically throw it at whatever you wanted. She still hadn’t gotten used to electricity; the magic got very “slippery” for her, and part of the magic would get away from her. The very first time she had tried ball lightning, she had shocked herself bad enough that when she came to, she could smell ozone and burnt hair.
Tim had told her to study up on spells that were both offensive and defensive, and the first one that had come up had been something to create a “tempest”—basically a dust-devil sort of thing, but a lot more powerful. She decided to go ahead and try it. This one you had to “anchor” to the place or thing you wanted to attack. The idea was, at the worst, your opponent would get a lot of dust and sand and debris in his face. And at best, he’d be knocked around and too busy trying to stay on his feet, and get scoured or cut up by the debris in the wind.
Staci poured magic into her arms, tracing a complex circular glyph in the air; her fingers and arms left after-image trails of magic as she moved, the trails sparking and disappearing as quickly as they had appeared. Finally, she offloaded the magic into her target; a patch of sand at the base of the pillar. Damnit! Not again! The spell started off just as she had wanted; a small cyclone, no more than a couple of inches high, swirling in the beach sand. Then the spell unraveled; the energy that she had put into the spell tore it apart, and the cyclone dug into the ground for a half-second before exploding, showering Staci and the immediate area in sand. And since she had her eyes open at the time, the sand flew into her eyes.
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Shit ow!” She dashed for the water and waded out knee-deep, opening her scalded-feeling eyes wide and splashing water in them to try to get the sand out. The salt water hurt, but it was better than the sand. That was the fifth time that had happened, and the worst. She still hadn’t figured out what she was doing wrong; she would have to ask Tim when he got here. Finally, she got all of the grit out of her eyes. Then she realized what the scene would have looked like to an outsider; first the sound of the sand exploding, followed by a teenage girl cursing and appearing seemingly out of thin air in the middle of the surf. Her magical screen was still up, and she had run straight through it.
Good job, bonehead. It was a lucky thing that there wasn’t anyone out on the water just then. Staci slogged through the knee-high water to get back to the shore; she felt the electric tingle on her skin that told her that she had passed through the magical screen again. Her boots were waterproof, but the salt water had splashed up high enough to soak into her pants. Clicking her tongue, she started to brush off the last remaining bits of sand from her clothing. I probably have time to get a spell going to help dry off, at least a little bit.
Staci had just begun to trace the lines for the spell when she came up short. Something was wrong; not with her magic, or with her. But she felt it all the same. It took her a moment to pinpoint it; then she recognized the feeling, remembered it. This feels like that first time on Makeout Hill, when I had the Red Caps following me.
Someone—or something—was watching her.
She didn’t immediately move to cast a spell, or even look around suddenly. Tim had taught her that letting on that you knew you were being watched or followed wasn’t the wisest strategy, most times. Instead, she went back brushing off the sand, pretending to get it out of her hair as she scanned with her eyes. Whoever it is, they have to be in the forest. I would’ve seen them, otherwise, and there’s still my alarm spells—
What sounded like a fire alarm from the New York City apartment building she used to live in went off inside of Staci’s head. Tim had taught her that spells were highly personal; you put something of yourself into them every time you cast. If you were creating your own spells, it was the same thing. Nothing in the world sounded like those fire alarms from her childhood; they had been old, ’70s era fire alarms, outmoded and endlessly repaired instead of replaced. She would recognize the sound anywhere. Hearing them now meant only one thing; her alarm spells had been triggered. She started readying new defensive spells, and already had in mind a particularly nasty attack spell that would suspend someone in mid-air; if she did it right, it basically killed gravity in a small sphere. And will probably make whoever is caught in it blow chunks.
At the same time a familiar voice hailed her from the top of the cliff. “Hey!” She swiveled her head to look up, and there were Seth and Wanda, backpacks on their backs, standing at the edge of the staircase down. “Already starting without us?”
Wanda was snickering. “You’re supposed to take your pants off when you go swimming, Stace!”
She dropped her hands to her sides, then glanced quickly to the forest behind them. Whatever had been there was surely gone now. But there had been something . . . hadn’t there been? She had felt so sure, and Tim told her to trust her gut, but now she was having doubts. All alone at the beach, and you’re freaking yourself out. Some great warrior mage badass you are, Staci.
The sound of an outboard motor puttering at low speed made her look towards the ocean, and there was Tim, in the borrowed green dinghy, heading in. It was the sort of old metal boat you could run right up onto the beach, and that was what he did, pulling the motor up after he killed it, on its swivel out of the water and letting momentum and waves carry him in. Staci trotted over to help him pull it all the way up past the waterline. It hardly mattered now, with her pant legs soaked.
As Tim was gathering up the equipment in the front of the boat, he noticed that something was off with Staci. “Are you okay?”
“My cyclone spell had a catastrophic system failure, and my alarm spells went off.” She knew better than to lie to Tim at this point. “I don’t know if the alarms went off because there was something in the woods, watching, if it was because the cyclone interacted with them somehow, or because I FUBARed and Wanda and Seth set them off.”
Tim paused for a moment, as if weighing her words, and then nodded. “We’ll work on that spell. There are a couple of mnemonic tricks I can help you with that might fix it. As much as I like to drill that this is a certain kind of science that we’re doing, there’s still a lot of individual interpretation. Doesn’t hurt to have the hard and fast stuff down pat, though.” Staci mentally breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t sure that she really had seen something or not; being too gung ho about it might make her come off as easily spooked or just nervy. She had moved past that; Tim trusted her, now, more than he ever had before. She wasn’t just the little elven-blood girl who had ruined his town. She was his apprentice. He had done a lot in those early days to discourage her from training under him, hoping that, if he was hard enough on her, she’d give up, quit, and forget all about this magic business. But she had persevered . . . and earned his respect.
She treasured that, and wasn’t about to throw it away because she got a little spooked on a beach. But she also didn’t want to screw things up because she “didn’t bother to tell him something,” either. It was a balancing act. But then, everything in magic seemed to be a balancing act.
“All right,” Tim said. “Stay alert and focused, because there might have been someone up there watching. Probably a kid, possibly a low-level Fae creature, but you never know. Now let’s get training.”