Chapter 10
2079 Words
Chapter 10
When I got to the library, I found Sophie already there with Brianna, waiting for me. Brianna had managed to clear enough space on one end of her massive table to accommodate a tray of tea and sandwiches. I must have just missed Mr. Trevor, as curls of steam were still rising up from the pile of sandwiches, and I could smell the roasted chicken from the night before making an encore appearance.
"Anything good?" Sophie asked as I slid into a chair unencumbered with stacks of Brianna's books. Brianna poured a cup of tea for me, but my attempts to reach for a sandwich were hampered by a small ball of fur lunging into my lap.
"Hey, Duke," I said, scratching around the white cat's over-sized ears. He purred loudly, closing his mismatched eyes in pleasure.
"Here," Brianna said, putting a plate with a couple of sandwiches in easy reach.
"Thanks," I said. "I did find a few things, but I'm not sure how helpful they are." I pulled the printouts out of my bag and explained about the marriage announcement and then the news story. Brianna examined the blurry newspaper photo then handed it to Sophie, who shifted the sleeping Ziggy from one shoulder to another before taking it.
"It doesn't tell us much," she said. "Something happened, and it looks like magic, but is it anything to do with our mothers or the time portal? It could be something else entirely."
"It gives us a date," I said. "But whether that date connects to anything else, who knows?"
"Data points are always good," Brianna said. "I'll add it to the timeline." She got up from the table, Jones trotting beside her as she brushed past the back of my chair. I saw something new in her little space: an old chalkboard, as big as a section of classroom chalkboard but on its own rolling frame. I couldn't quite see what was on it in the dim, mostly downward-directed light of the library, but when she wrote down the date from the newspaper, I could tell it was indeed a timeline.
"I'm going to make it a separate line," she decided, drawing another horizontal line across the board a few inches above the one that was already there.
"Separate timelines," I groaned. "That's always when time travel gets complicated, doesn't it?"
"It might not be separate," Brianna said. "In fact, I don't think it is. But that's just an intuition. I don't want to write it down as known fact when it isn't one, quite."
"Sure," Sophie said, then caught my eye and gave me a shrug and a smile. Neither of us was ever going to understand this stuff the way Brianna did. But if she thought such distinctions had a purpose, who were we to argue?
"I do wonder about the marriage announcement, though," I said. "Is this Olgesen my real father? Is he the one who died the day I was born, or was that someone else?"
"Maybe we can look into that more later," Sophie said. Brianna was still looking at the board as if hoping a pattern would emerge from the mostly blank space. Sophie went on, "you could get DNA testing done to find out, if you exhume the body. It could be this Olgesen guy was just wearing a shirt that said Clarke on it."
"Or it could be he stayed in the 60s when my mother jumped forward in time," I said. "If that's actually even what happened."
"I think that's the most likely explanation," Brianna said as she went back to her chair to take a sip of tea.
"Did you have a more fruitful day than me?" I asked.
Brianna sighed. "That depends on what you mean by fruitful. I might have uncovered too much information."
"What do you mean?" Sophie asked.
"I wanted to figure out what spells might have been done, starting with basic cloaking and warding spells," she said, pulling her little notebook out of her pocket. "I started by listing everything I thought I saw going on when we looked around in 1928. But I found way too many things that matched my observations. I think there might have been dozens of spells all layered and intertwined and covering each other up. Most of them wouldn't even have served any real purpose."
"Maybe the complexity was the purpose," I said. "They're trying to confuse you."
"Do they even know who I am?" Brianna said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"They know you. Evanora saw you with her own eyes, and they all were watching you on New Year's Eve. I think it's a safe bet they know your powers. Up until now I didn't think they were even really aware of Sophie or I. I mean, I would guess they knew you weren't alone, but did they know about our powers?"
"I assumed they did," I said.
"Why?" Sophie asked.
"They took all of our memories, right?" I said. "It seems like it would've been easier to just take mine if that was all that mattered to them."
"Can they see us here?" Sophie asked. "Can they be watching us now? Are they somewhere in the present world?"
We all looked around the gloomy corners of the library, as if we were going to see the shadowy forms of spies there. Something about the intensity of our mood set off the kittens, who all went charging away from us at once as if in response to a starter's pistol only they could hear.
"Ow," I protested, a row of red welts rising up from the skin of my forearm from where Duke had used it as a launch pad.
"If they could be here, there'd be no need for the time-delayed magic they've been using in 1928, would there?" Sophie asked.
"Well, if confusion is part of their plan," Brianna said with a shrug. "At any rate, I also spoke with Sephora in Boston. The coven that raised me is not so modern, but she can stop in and visit them in person for us. I loaded her up with questions about my mother, your mothers, and Miss Zenobia. I actually wrote up that timeline in the first place because it helped Sephora and I focus on the important bits."
"And what did they say?" I asked.
"I'll know tomorrow," Brianna said.
"Great. Waiting is my favorite," I said glumly.
"What about you, Sophie?" Brianna asked. "Did you find anything?"
"Just this," she said, and lifted a massive tome onto the table, where it landed with an echoing thud.
"What is that?" I asked as Brianna immediately started turning the pages.
"It's definitely full of magic," Sophie said. "Can't you feel it?"
I blinked into the world of threads, and the light coming from the book was blinding. I blinked back into the library.
"Definitely," I said. "But it's not out of time. The threads were connected to everything around us."
"It looks like a journal," Brianna said, pointing to headings on top of blocks of text. "See, these look like dates."
"Look like?" I asked, leaning forward. Then I saw what she meant. It did have the format of someone writing the day of the week followed by a month, day, and year. Only I couldn't read a bit of it. "What language is that?"
"What alphabet is that?" Sophie countered.
"It's some sort of code, I think," Brianna said. "But it's not the same code throughout the book. It keeps changing."
"How can you tell?" I asked.
"I'm scanning for patterns. Things like the year should be consistent, right? But if this is indeed a date, the symbols for the year is different each time. And I don't see a pattern to the change."
"So if you were going to decode it-" I started.
"I'd need to decode every section separately," Brianna said. "With all of the work that that implies."
My brain started to throb with a fatigue headache, just thinking about it, but Brianna sounded eager to dive into a particularly thorny problem.
"That's going to take time," Sophie said. "And it might not lead to anything. We don't even know what this is. It could just be some student's angsty journal from a totally different time period."
"Not with this kind of power," Brianna said, holding her hands spread before it as if warming them before a fire. "This has to be Miss Zenobia's work."
"So potentially important, but still maybe not," Sophie said. "Miss Zenobia lived for centuries. She probably filled a dozen tomes of that size before she even came to America."
"Can we carbon date it or something?" I asked.
"Maybe," Brianna said, and I could hear the gears in her mind spinning up to full speed.
"Hold on," Sophie said, putting her hands over the pages of the book as if that would stop Brianna. "Maybe that's not what we focus on first."
"What do we focus on first?" Brianna asked.
"The coven," I said, and Sophie nodded.
"You want to go looking for Evanora and the others?" Brianna asked, touching the little watch amulet she was still wearing around her neck.
"Not yet," I said. "But we need to learn more about them."
"How?" Brianna asked.
"I'm thinking two things," I said, leaning forward. "The first is just mundane, but might help. We get photos of all of them. Maybe someone in your circle of witches might recognize them. Maybe we already have their faces on the walls here, among all the class photos. Faces might give us names, and names could give us a sense of who they are and what they can do."
"How are we going to get photos?" Brianna asked, and I could see she was still nervous about physically hunting down a bunch of witches of unknown power.
"Otto," Sophie said, and now it was my turn to nod.
"He already knows them," I said. "Before New Year's Eve, they were letting him see them around, watching him. If he doesn't have photos of them already, it'll be simple for him to get them."
"Assuming they're still being visible like that," Brianna said.
"Assuming," I said with a shrug.
"It can't hurt to check," Sophie said.
"But that means going back to 1928," Brianna said.
"Yes, but we don't have to leave the school to contact him. And we don't have to hang around until he gets back to us. We can do just as before, only staying as long as we have to and then getting back home before those witches even know we're there," I said.
"Okay, so what's the second thing?" she asked.
"You told me once that few witches are generalists. Most focus on a particular kind of magic, right?" I asked.
"I'm about as close as it comes to a generalist," Brianna said. "But that's a matter of study, not practice. My actual magic tends to be verbal and short-range impact, or infused in objects."
"Okay," I said slowly, not entirely sure I grasped what she was saying. Energy bolts and amulets, I guessed. "But my magic is related to time, and Sophie does that wind thing when she dances."
"I'm working on Brianna's verbal and short-range impact stuff too," Sophie said, tapping the wand nestled against her forearm.
"I'm not following you," Brianna said. "What do you want to do?"
"Look at the spells," I said. "You said they were all intertwined and layered and meant to confuse you. It all looked like a blast of power to me too. It was overwhelming. But what if we tuned out the big picture and just started picking those spells apart?"
"Most of them were random distractors, I'm sure," Brianna said.
"But even that might tell us something," I said.
"We'll observe their details when we dismantle them," Sophie said. "Catalog them. Look for patterns."
"Oh," Brianna said. "That might help. Even minor spells meant to be a distraction could tell us a thing or two about the witch. What she thinks is minor, how she manifests it. Yes, this could be very interesting."
"So we're agreed, then?" Sophie said, and she and I both got to her feet to join Brianna, who had never sat back down after consulting the chalkboard.
"Yes," Brianna said. "It's back to 1928. But promise me we're not leaving the school grounds."
"Not until we know what we're facing," I agreed.
"We need more intel before we go looking for a fight," Sophie said. Brianna looked at us both, chewing her lip in a worried sort of way. I could see a conflict starting to form between us. Sophie and I were going to be ready for a fight long before Brianna was done gathering intel.
That might become a problem later, but not yet. In this moment, we all agreed what needed to be done next.
We went back to 1928.
- Writer
