The Witches Three Cozy Mysteries 4-6

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

When we came in through the back door in 1928 Brianna headed straight up the stairs to the library to set up the spell circle, but Sophie and I stayed behind in the kitchen, looking at the very old-fashioned phone on the wall near the butler's pantry.

"I know how to use a rotatory dial," Sophie said. "I even get that you hold that bit to your ear and talk into that bit megaphone bit there. But you know what I forgot?"

"That we don't have his number?" I said. "He named his club after you. There must be a directory around here somewhere."

"Would an illegal club be in the directory?" Sophie asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I see your point," I said. "A shame we can't just walk over. Would Brianna notice we sneaked off?"

"You know she would," Sophie said. "And she's right to be cautious."

"I guess," I agreed. I remembered every magical fight I'd already been in. I'd not yet faced anyone who was actually a witch, but what I'd nearly done on more than one occasion made me shiver just in the remembering. "Right, so what can we do from here?"

"A letter," Sophie said, catching at my sleeve. I followed her into the parlor where she went through the drawers of an incidental table until she found a fountain pen, a stack of stationary and an envelope.

"We don't have his address either," I pointed out.

"We don't need it," she said. "Think about it, we never see them because of that protective time spell thing, but this place is full of students. Most just normal young ladies, but a few witches like us, right?"

"Maybe," I said. "Were there always witches? I would think they'd be rare."

"Well, even if there weren't, someone around knows about their existence. Miss Zenobia herself must be around at least some of the time, right? She's the teacher."

"So what are you thinking?" I asked.

"We just leave this envelope out with his name on the front and a little note. 'Please deliver' or something like that. Once we walk out of the room, it becomes a thing that they can see too, right?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "It's certainly worth a try. If that doesn't work, there's always running next door and getting Coco to help. But I'd rather leave her out of it."

"No, we want her out of harm's way as much as possible," Sophie agreed. I knew we were both picturing the newspaper photo of her house, half reduced to rubble by something blowing out from the charm school. Did she still live there in the 60s? She'd be a middle-aged woman, but it wasn't inconceivable.

"What are you saying to him?" I asked as Sophie wrote in her elegant script. Even bent over from a standing position her writing was perfectly formed.

"To gather everything he knows, photos if possible, and bring it here to the school," she said, talking and writing at the same time.

"And how will we know he did it?" I asked.

"Stuff gets forwarded to us through time all the time," Sophie said. "Like our invite to the New Year's Eve party. The students or perhaps Miss Zenobia herself in 1928 just put it in a cubby, and when Mr. Trevor lays out the morning papers, he also sets out that mail. It has dates."

"And he has all of this in his office?" I asked. "Why don't we just take everything and read through it all now? Some of it might be important."

"We could ask him," Sophie said. "I'm not sure it would make much sense with no context."

"But some of it could be useful," I said.

"Maybe," Sophie said. "I just keep thinking of what Brianna said. Light touch with this time travel stuff. Maybe when you understand your power better, we'll know what's safe to meddle with."

"Maybe," I said. Brianna's warnings were why I had never done even the most basic research, like whether Coco really did still live in her childhood home in the 60s. Or what happened to Edward after 1928.

Brianna's warnings didn't come with a terribly specific idea of what would happen, just a general sense that it was better not to know. No, the real reason I hadn't looked was because I was afraid. I couldn't think of a single fate that wouldn't upset me to read about it. That he died young, perhaps even because of something I had done with my magic? That he remained a bachelor for all of his days, pining for a certain witch who never appeared again in 1928? That he grew old and died surrounded by generations of loving family he had with someone else?

Yeah, there were no happy endings for me in this one. But I was very sure the moment I gave in and started looking stuff up, that would be the ending for me. My part in the story would stop with that act.

Sophie left the envelope and the note on the incidental table in plain view of anyone heading towards the front door, then went upstairs to join Brianna in the library.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Yes," Brianna said. "This is going to be exhausting."

"I'm sure you're up for it," I said.

"No, it's going to be exhausting for the two of you," she clarified. "I know what to do to pull the spells apart, and I'll keep a mental catalog until we're done and I can write it all down. But in the meantime, I'm going to need power. So much power, a constant supply. That's where you two come in."

"It sounds like a little tweak to what we usually do," Sophie said. "We flow power through each other all the time. This is just hitting pause at the moment where you are the focal point."

"Yes, exactly," Brianna said. "But I will actually be draining you, both of you. We should have a signal, if it all gets to be too much."

"I think collapsing on the floor is a pretty good signal," Sophie said. "We've got this Bree."

"Just be careful with the brainstorming thoughts," I said.

"I will," she promised. "I'll need all my focus on what I'm doing."

We sat together in a circle on the floor, pretty much in the same spot where we'd removed the brain fog from our own minds in 2019. I controlled my breath, shifted my awareness, then expanded it until I could feel Sophie and Brianna on either side of me. Their magic was like a pulsing glow, warm and familiar.

Sophie's hands began to dance, and I saw her catching and pulling little threads of light, gathering them up and feeding them into Brianna, then attracting more with her graceful movements.

My own methods were a lot more blunt, but I slowed my motions down, careful not to burn Brianna with power.

I could see the clockworks of her own power around her as she began to speak arcane words, her wand summoning the first of many spells from the walls of the house to the center of our circle where she poked at it, never ceasing her chanting, until the tight knotwork of the spell unraveled and the threads broke away, the light within them dying as they drifted off to the far corners of the library.

As we worked, I tried to see if I could tell what the spells were. Some I could see were time spells from the way they pulled the threads of magic into elaborate braids that just made sense to my eyes. But most were more like the brain fog spell, just angry squiggles of power that had no order to my eyes, no story I could tell.

We worked for hours. Occasionally I would sense Sophie's energy beginning to flag, and I would catch up a ball of magical light and pass it to her. I don't know if she was aware, but each time her back would straighten, and her hands would become more fully expressive as they teased the threads into dancing through her fingers.

But even I couldn't keep it up forever. I was narrowing my focus to just gathering the energy and feeding it to Brianna. I wasn't trying to watch the spells as she dismantled them anymore. I certainly wasn't paying attention to the world outside of the three of us.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when Brianna untangled one last particularly brutal knot of magic, and there was no spell to pull into our circle after it.

We all opened our eyes. "Is that it? Did we get everything?" I asked, but Brianna just held up a finger to ask for silence.

Sophie and I watched her scribble away inside her notebook, filling page after page at a furious pace. She even had to switch pens at one point as the first ran dry.

By the time she was done, it was well past midnight, but her eyes were bright with energy. Maybe we'd given her too much. There'd be no sleep for her now.

"Did we get it all?" Sophie asked her. Brianna tipped her head then gave a qualified nod.

"Everything else around us felt like older magic," Brianna said. "I didn't want to risk damaging the spells Miss Zenobia wove into the house itself. We need that protection, all of us over all of the decades of the school." Then she launched herself to her feet, putting out a hand to help each of us get our own weary legs under us.

"Now what?" Sophie asked, but Brianna just pulled us along, out of the library to the door of Miss Zenobia's office. She dropped our hands as she looked around. By square footage, it should have been a rather spacious office. But long decades of acquiring magical objects had crowded it full of more things than I could even name. I did recognize a few things we had managed to destroy in the present, releasing spells I wasn't anxious to tangle with at the moment. I hugged my arms close to my sides and stayed in the doorway.

"Ah!" Brianna cried, running around the desk and standing on tiptoe to reach something on the top of the shelf behind the desk chair.

The box she set on the desktop was very, very familiar. The last time I had been in this office with that box was the night I had seen the ghostly form of Miss Zenobia Weekes. The night I had found out I was a witch.

"Should you be touching that?" Sophie asked. She, like me, had opted to stay close to the door.

Brianna ignored that question, but she did seem to change her mind about lifting the latch to open the lid. "This was the focal point of the real spells," she said.

"Wait, are you saying everything was a lie?" I asked.

"What? No!" Brianna said. "I told you, Miss Zenobia's spells have a very different feel to them than anything this coven whipped together. And what Miss Zenobia did, to send a piece of herself into the future to speak to us on that night, that was very advanced magic. No one in that coven is remotely at that level. And it had a cost. Years of her life, remember?"

"You're sure?" I said.

"Absolutely," she said.

"But Miss Zenobia cast that spell just last year before she died, right?" Sophie said. "So right now, that box is empty. Right?"

We all looked at it, but none of us wanted to test that theory.

I blinked to shift my awareness to the world of threads.

The box was there on the desktop, between Brianna and me. It was like a black hole of power, glowing darkly as it pulled light in to collapse on itself, the threads around it all warping to give it a wide berth.

I opened my eyes. "It's an object out of time," I said. "Like Mina Fox's crystal ball. I thought that happened because it was ineptly made?"

"I thought so too," Brianna said. "Brute power. Maybe what you're seeing is just the form of the box now, in 1928. Decades before Miss Zenobia puts it to another use."

"There must have been a reason she chose it," Sophie said. "Some property that suited her spell."

"And it was the focal point of the coven's spells too?" I asked.

"Yes," Brianna said. "When the box opened at the appointed hour to release that sequestered piece of Miss Zenobia so she could speak with us for those few minutes, it also triggered the memory-erasing spell. Somehow, the coven knows what this box is and that we'll all be close to it at the same moment."

"But how did Miss Zenobia never see their magic contaminating it?" I asked.

"Because we just removed it all?" Sophie suggested.

I threw up my hands. "If we removed it all, then how did we lose our memories?"

"I dismantled that spell as well," Brianna said. "It was the last, toughest one."

"So we never lost our memories at all? Only we did?" I said.

"We remember that happening," Brianna said. "It doesn't mean it did."

"Huh?" Sophie said.

"Memories are weird," Brianna said. "Every time you access a memory, you risk altering it."

"Maybe it's too late at night to discuss memory magic," Sophie said, rubbing at her temples. "Or too early in the morning."

"I wasn't talking about magic," Brianna said. "That's science. It's very interesting actually-“

Sophie put up a hand to halt the flow of what was certainly going to be far too much information. "Too late. Too early. Too tired."

"We should get back to our own time," Brianna agreed.

"Do we take the box with us? Or do we not because we didn't before? Or does it even matter?" I asked tiredly.

"Leave it," Brianna said, but then took out her wand. "I'll ward it first, just to be on the safe side. It'll just take a moment."

Sophie and I left her to it, making our way one slow step at a time down the stairs.

"She's going to be up all night, isn't she?" Sophie said. "And I'm dead on my feet."

"We maybe gave her too much and didn't keep enough for ourselves," I said.

"Says you," Sophie softly scoffed. "I felt you giving me extra. Don't you ever run out?"

"The world seems to hold a lot of power I can access with a touch," I said. "It's kind of scary."

We heard the sound of Brianna coming out of Miss Zenobia's office, her feet running down the corridor to the stairs, and we paused outside of the parlor to see the letter and note we'd left there now gone.

"I guess your plan worked," I said.

What did the students of this era think of us, though? How far into the future did the school exist, anyway?

The thought made a shiver run up my spine. The time bridge hadn't existed forever. It had begun at some date, and it would have to end at some date. It wasn't always going to exist. Somehow knowing that didn't feel like knowing that someday our sun was going to go supernova or whatever. It felt a lot more immediate than that.

Like it was all going to come to an end soon. I was never going to live long enough to see the Earth's sun go cold and dark, but in that moment I was sure I was going to see that time bridge collapse. I could feel it in my bones.

It was not a comfortable feeling.