Page 56 of That Ain’t Witchcraft

And it wasn’t like James deserved to come into his mother’s private study and find me sitting at her desk, wiping away what few traces of her presence might remain. It was that thought alone that kept me on my feet, while the wardrobe rocked and shuddered and finally shifted a few inches to the side, revealing a slice of James’ pale, pointed face.

His eyes widened as he saw the sunlit room behind me. “What in the …”

“I found the other half of the attic,” I said, reaching up with my good arm, weak as it currently was, to help him keep on pushing. The wardrobe was heavy, the kind of furniture built to pass down through generations like some sort of cursed idol or unholy artifact. James’ grandkids might be living on a space station in orbit around Sirius IV, but they’d have this wardrobe with them, taking up half their available space, looming disapprovingly.

“I see that.” The opening was finally large enough for him to squeeze through. I stepped to the side. He didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy staring at his surroundings, turning in a slow, mesmerized circle.

Finally, in a hushed tone, he said, “Mom used to say she was going to get some writing done while I went out to play, and promise to be downstairs by lunch. Only one day, she wasn’t. I was seven. I searched the whole house for her, and I was getting really scared when there was a bang and she came down the stairs. She told me she’d been in the bathroom and hadn’t heard me calling. But she wasn’t in the bathroom, was she?”

“Nope,” I said. “Surprise.”

“How … ?”

“She was a sorcerer. There are lots of tricks to make things boring. Too boring to investigate, even for a smart guy like you.” That also explained his father’s willingness to abandon an entire floor of his otherwise perfect home. Yes, he was punishing James, but that didn’t mean giving the spiders a stronghold from which to attack the lower floors. A minor distraction charm, however, especially one that was intended to eventually let James find what she had hidden …

He was turning in a slow circle, eyes wide, drinking in every dust-covered inch. He bit his lower lip, cast a glance in my direction, and started for the bookshelf.

“Her diaries,” he said, grabbing the first volume. He opened it to a random page, and blinked. “It’s blank.” He flipped frantically through the book before grabbing another, and another, finally turning to me and saying despondently, “They’re all blank.”

I heaved a sigh of relief. “Finally,” I said. “Something I can help with.”

Fifteen

“Some skills are essential, no matter what your future holds. Never assume that knowledge is useless.”

–Jane Harrington-Price

In the private attic office of a dead sorcerer, playing intrepid detective

“IT’S A FORM OF invisible ink,” I said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the office floor across from James, an open book between us. It was a relief to be seated. I wasn’t sure I would be able to stand up again, but hey, one thing at a time. “All kinds of magic-users use it to keep their notes from being discovered by people who might want to hurt them.”

It’s a testimony to Grandpa Thomas’ love for his magically-deficient wife that most of his notes—at least the ones written after his arrival in Buckley—had been taken in ordinary, ever-visible ink. But there had been a note, tucked at the back of one of his books, that mentioned more information might be found by someone who looked the right way.

I like to think he’d suspected his genes would assert themselves somewhere down the line, winning out over bubbly blondness to produce, well, me. A descendant who’d have fire in their fingers and would need a way to learn what that meant. Not that he could leave much in the way of useful instruction—very few sorcerers are self-taught, because very few “spells” have clear, coherent steps that take well to being written down—but at least he could reassure that potential grandchild or great-grandchild or whatever that they weren’t losing their minds or starting fires the normal way, with matches and lighter fluid, and then forgetting about it. No sleep pyromania here! Just a good clean dose of Jean Grey syndrome.

James looked at me dubiously. “Invisible ink,” he echoed. “Are you going to suggest we get a hair dryer to make the words appear?”

“Okay, one, that’s lemon juice, two, you’re making fun of me, and three, this is way more like one of those fantasy novels where the writing only appears by moonlight than some kid’s science project. I want you to put your hands above the page. About six inches up. You don’t want to freeze the book.”

The dubious look intensified. “Freeze the book.”

“Look, I make fire, not ice, so I am very safety-first. I had to do this part with a bucket of sand in easy reach.” Not a fire extinguisher: that would have been too difficult to explain to my parents, and too potentially destructive for the books. Any time something started to smolder, I’d just thrown fistfuls of sand over it until the smoldering stopped. Low-tech but effective, that’s the family motto.

James sighed. “All right. You found the room, we’ll do things your way.” He squared his shoulders and extended his arms, palms down.

He clearly resented my continued presence, and I couldn’t blame him, because this room … this was a piece of his mother he had never seen before. I couldn’t imagine what that felt like. I didn’t want to imagine what that felt like. I knew I was lucky to have both my parents. I was even luckier to have two parents who genuinely loved me and wanted what was best for me, even if we didn’t always agree about what that was. James …

He’d lost the one person who should have been there to love and understand him from the beginning, and then he’d lost the one person who had volunteered to try filling the gap, until he was left with only a father who viewed him as a burden and an embarrassment. Any questions I might have had about how accurate that view of the situation was had died when we’d climbed the stairs to the second floor. The charms around the hidden door might have contributed to Mr. Smith’s neglect of the cleaning, but they wouldn’t have caused him to mistreat his only son.

“What do I do?” asked James.

I snapped out of my introspection. “Focus on your hands. Try to call the cold without allowing it to happen. You want to touch the potential, not the actuality.”

The temperature in the attic dropped several degrees. I wrinkled my nose.

“Dial it back, Iceman,” I said. “The idea, not the real thing. Think about what the magic feels like when it answers you. Think about the way it hums.”

I’ve never had the kind of training James needed—or that I needed, quite frankly. Magic-users are rare. Sorcerers, being wholly hereditary, recessive, and hunted by assholes like the Covenant of St. George for centuries, are even rarer. There’s no way to advertise for a teacher, and the people who’d answer an advert like that are usually not the sort of folks it’s a good idea to trust. But I’ve had access to my grandfather’s books, and for a little while at Lowryland, I had Colin, who may have been syphoning off my powers and using them to fuel a malicious luck-theft spell that would eventually have gotten a lot of people killed, but who also knew what the hell he was doing.