Page 14
Er, pardon? Sera was instantly suspicious. Nothing good could possibly come of anybody who not only knew her name but also, apparently, saw fit to react to undead farmyard animals with a sigh .
“Jesus, you really did reanimate a dead chicken,” said the unknown man, managing to sound fascinated and disapproving all at once.
Fear clutched Sera by the throat. This wasn’t someone she’d once met at the pub or talked to on a train. He knew about magic. He knew what she’d done fifteen years ago.
Swallowing, she drew herself up to her full height and instantly transformed into the prickliest version of herself. “How do you know about that?”
“Who doesn’t know about that? I know it’s been a decade or so, but you can’t really have forgotten that everyone once knew everything about you.”
“So you’re from the Guild, then.” Sera bit the words out. “Albert couldn’t be bothered to come himself?”
“Albert?” His eyebrows twitched together. “Albert Grey?”
“Didn’t he send you?”
“As I try to have as little to do with the Great and Powerful Wizard as possible,” the stranger replied in a clipped, icy voice, apparently unimpressed with both her tone and her question, “I can’t imagine why he’d send me anywhere.”
“The Wizard?” Sera was momentarily distracted. “…of Oz?”
“Who else?”
Sera collapsed into helpless laughter.
The stranger stared at her for a bemused moment before turning away to check on something in the car. “I’m still here,” Sera heard him say, at which point she realised that between the darkness and the whole Roo-Roo debacle, she hadn’t noticed that there was a young girl in the back of the car.
From the little Sera could see of her through the glass of the closed window, the girl seemed to be contentedly watching a tablet, one hand twirling a lock of her blond hair while the other held what looked like an assortment of leaves.
“So Albert didn’t send you?” Sera was beginning to feel like the emotional hullabaloo of the day had taken a greater toll on her than she’d thought and she had, perhaps, overreacted a smidge. “You’re not here because of him?”
“I’m an academic, not an errand boy.”
“You could be both.”
The man gave her a look.
“Oh, quit looking so fed up,” Sera said. “You’d want to be absolutely sure, too, if you were me.”
He sighed again. “What have you done this time?”
Sera was by no means planning to tell this stranger anything, no matter what he’d said about wanting as little to do with Albert as possible, but even if she had been so inclined, she was otherwise preoccupied with an unexpected and overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
It was that sigh, and the Scottish-ish accent, and those exact words said in that exact tone of resignation—
Reluctantly, she pulled on that thread. Visiting her past wasn’t exactly a pleasant stroll down memory lane.
It was a lane of teeth, crooked and sharp, and the pleasant stroll was more of a panicked scramble to find what she needed without slicing herself open on the sharpest edges.
It was inevitable, then, that some things, normal things, things that were perfectly fine , were overlooked, and it was there, between the sound of Albert’s impatient voice and the smell of spellbooks, that Sera found him.
Luke Larsen.
She must have said it out loud because he looked surprised. “You remember my name.”
Before Sera could reply, the bright, slightly translucent figure of a teenage girl ran past her, skidded to a halt at a desk that materialised out of thin air, ducked past the legs of the slightly translucent boy standing beside the desk, and concealed herself under the desk.
The boy, who’d had his head bent over a hefty book in his hands, snapped the book shut and sighed. “What have you done this time?”
“ Someone drank half a bottle of Chancellor Bennet’s favourite brandy,” the girl whispered, smothering a giggle. “Well, two someones, really, but only one of those someones confessed.”
As abruptly as they’d appeared, the girl, boy, and desk faded away. Sera scowled at the spot where they’d been.
“What was that?” Luke demanded.
Sera scowled some more. “The house does that sometimes. It’s a side effect of my old magic. It throws up echoes. Memories. Ghosts. Whatever you want to call them.”
He looked past her at the crooked, starlit inn, reassessing it.
She searched his face for the young, quiet apprentice she’d just seen and was somewhat annoyed to discover that Luke in his thirties was even nicer to look at than his younger self.
And, considering the exact words she’d used to describe him to Francesca at the time were “gah, he’s so hot,” that was saying something.
He’d grown into himself. He was less lanky than he’d been, his shoulders broader than she remembered and his forearms lightly muscled.
His jaw, which had once had the softness of youth, had settled into sharp lines.
His blond hair was shorter, too, and a lot less boyish, ruthlessly pushed back from his brow.
His eyes, on the other hand, were just as she remembered: glacier blue and maddeningly difficult to read.
“Do you still work at the castle?” Sera asked.
“When I’m not working from home.” He was still studying the inn.
“Eighty percent of my job is reading old books and documents, so it goes a lot faster when the entirety of the Guild’s library is right around me.
On the other hand, there are fewer distractions at home.
” He shrugged. “The professor I work for isn’t fussy about where I am as long as the job gets done. ”
Sera couldn’t quite resist fifteen years of curiosity. “What’s the castle like these days?”
Luke seemed to think he’d already said more than he’d planned to because his jaw tightened and he ignored the question. He nodded in the direction of the house instead. “I didn’t know you still lived here. It used to be an inn, didn’t it? Your great-aunt used to run it? The one you—”
“Brought back to life with a forbidden spell that cost me pretty much all my magic? Yep, that’s the one.
It’s still an inn. We both run it now.” Rearranging Roo-Roo in her arms, she gave him a wary look.
“Why were you surprised that I remembered your name? I know you were a few years older and we weren’t exactly friends or anything, but we both spent so much time in the library that—”
He gave her a politely puzzled look. “We weren’t exactly friends, as you put it, because I was working, you were doing whatever the Wizard of Oz wanted on that particular day, and it was generally understood that you were too important to be bothered by anyone whose name wasn’t Grey.”
“I would never have said that!”
“You didn’t have to.” Luke shrugged like he didn’t care either way. “Besides, you were gone about six months after I started working in the library. I only remember you because you were you .”
It didn’t sound like a compliment. “Because I was me,” she echoed. “Right. Of course.”
She wasn’t sure why she’d expected anything else. She might remember Luke as the apprentice she’d had a big schoolgirl crush on, the one she’d looked for excuses to talk to, but all Luke remembered was the mythology the Guild had spun around her from the moment she’d crossed their threshold.
Pulling herself together, she said, “If the Guild didn’t send you, what are you doing here?”
The silence lasted only an instant, but it was unbearably loud.
Oh. Oh. She’d been so prepared for the worst that she hadn’t even considered the most obvious answer. “The spell brought you here.”
“I always thought the stories were exaggerated.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t believe any spell could call to somebody, beckon them from miles away, but yours did.”
She softened just the tiniest bit. “Well, you’re in luck. We have exactly two empty rooms.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It’s fine. It’s not that long a drive back to Edinburgh.” He looked over his shoulder at the girl in the car and reconsidered. “I’ll find a hotel.”
“Good idea,” said Sera agreeably. “If only there was something of a hotel-esque persuasion close by.”
“I don’t need—”
“Maybe the spell didn’t bring you here because you need something,” she replied. “Maybe it brought you here because she does.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. They both looked at the child in the car, who now had her head propped against the window like she was getting tired.
Sera shifted the undead rooster to her shoulder, freeing her hands, and decided to proceed like the matter was settled. (As far as she was concerned, it was.)
“We’re doing dinner at the moment,” she said, nodding back at the house. “There’s plenty, but if you’re not up for some extremely eccentric company right now, I’ll bring something upstairs for you. There are two rooms going, but one of them has twin beds if you’d rather stay with your daughter.”
“She’s my sister. Posy.” He hesitated. “She’s like us.”
“Magical?”
He nodded.
Sera had a lot of questions, but now wasn’t the time to ask them. “If you follow the lane a bit farther uphill, you’ll see the front of the inn. I’ll meet you there.”
“Wait.” The muscle in his jaw twitched again. “You should know Posy doesn’t understand she has to hide her magic. She could give all of us away.”
“How old is she?”
“Nine. And no, before you ask, I can’t just tell her to hide her magic or tell her it’s really, really not safe if other people find out what we can do.
I have told her. Every witch she’s ever met has told her.
I don’t really know how to explain it except to say she knows it, but she doesn’t get it. ”
He sounded tired, like it wasn’t the first, second, or even hundredth time he’d had to explain his sister.
Justify her. Sera’s wrath kindled and she was suddenly, utterly furious for both of them.
“Just to be clear,” she said gently, “I don’t care.
And I mean that in the kindest possible way.
If Posy gives us away, well, we’ll cross that bridge if we ever get to it. ”
“That’s it?”
Table of Contents
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- Page 14 (Reading here)
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