Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus Beginnings Page 4

  After a lengthy discussion of spell types, casting techniques, and the subtleties of Enkinim, Madam Barrington sat back in her chair, considering.

  “Well,” she finally said, “it is clear this spell is quite advanced. I have never heard of such vague yet effective parameters. That is not to mention the strength of the casting, to remain active for so long. I have also never heard of an Annabelle Witherspoon in any wizard circle, but then she would have been before my time here in America.”

  Lily’s ears perked at that. The Madam had never offered, nor had Lily ever asked, anything about her past. Now, no longer under the stern woman’s direct tutelage, and more sure of her own abilities, she felt bold enough to ask a personal question.

  “If I may, Ms. B, weren’t you born here?” Her mentor had the faintest of British accents, and it had always made her wonder.

  Madam Barrington gave her a level look, as if considering whether to answer such a forward inquiry. After a moment she looked away, gazing out into the garden.

  “I was born and raised in Aylesbury, England,” she said in a quiet voice. “But that was many, many years ago.”

  There was a heavy silence, which Lily dared not break. But then Madam Barrington seemed to snap back to the present and continued as if nothing had happened.

  “No matter her skill, I would guess Miss Witherspoon came to a bad end after she left Mr. Jackson. If she were as unbalanced as you imply, it would only have been a matter of time before her reckless behavior caught up with her. That, added to her family’s disgrace, might have caused enough scandal to get her in the local histories. The only dependable way of dispelling the curse is to find her original notes, if she even kept them. If you find those, the methodology we discussed could unmake the casting. Without them, you run the risk of unpleasant side effects, backfires, and mutations. Unless, of course, you use a blood-binding. But that would be a foolish risk for little gain. No, thorough research is your ally here. I am sure that will pose no problem for you, dear; you did, after all, learn from the best.”

  Mentor and student shared a private smile. Lily remembered blissful hours lost in the exciting—to her—world of library research. Finding the right book among the sea of volumes at her own library, not to mention libraries and bookstores across the nation, was just as exciting as reading the actual material she sought. There had to be a local library or historical society that carried records on Annabelle Witherspoon. Finding it would be a challenge she was eager to begin.

  She thanked her mentor, and, after one more cup of tea, escorted Sebastian through the house and out the front door. Once again, she had to keep a tight grip on his arm, not to drag him forward, but to keep him from bolting for the car at full speed. It would have been an intolerably rude gesture, despite the sardonic smile it surely would have elicited from Madam Barrington.

  * * *

  They relocated to Lily’s apartment—and its accompanying high-speed Internet connection—since Sebastian wasn’t allowed on campus at the McCain Library, and since his own apartment was a den of discarded pizza boxes and smelly socks. The last time Lily had dared enter, she’d nearly fainted from the overwhelming smell as well as a nearly insane need to scrub the place to within an inch of its life.

  Sebastian insisted on sticking around for this research portion of the project, claiming he needed to “supervise” its progress. Lily knew it was his excuse to gain access to the cake-dome in her kitchen—always full of home-made goodies she baked to accompany her tea—and the sinfully comfortable sofa in her living room.

  Her cat did not object to the intrusion. This was probably because it assured him vigorous pettings while Lily was absorbed at her computer. Much to her cat’s annoyance, her desk was one of the few “no cat” zones in the house, the other being the kitchen counters, since Lily disliked finding cat hairs in her food.

  For reasons she didn’t quite understand, it irked her that her feline companion, who turned up his whiskered nose at every other stranger, had taken to Sebastian so readily. Right now, he was sitting contentedly on Sebastian’s stomach as her “colleague” lay sprawled across her couch, munching on a cheese scone. With white-tipped paws tucked daintily underneath his fluffy gray body, he eyed her lazily across the room as though he, too, were supervising her. White chest markings extended up to frost his nose, and a curious circle of white around one eye made it look like he wore a monocle. As a kitten, these markings had earned him his name, Sir Edgar Allan Kipling, after two of Lily’s favorite poets. Now, they made him look particularly scholarly as he observed her with bright yellow eyes.

  Lily snorted at the sight and turned back to her desk. The first thing she checked for information about Annabelle was her personal archive. Not her library—that was a collection of mundane books neatly organized on bookshelves all over the house. Because keeping genuine occult books in an insecure location was unsafe—more for the books than for the mundanes who stumbled across them—Lily had a much better solution than worrying about cumbersome protective wards. When Madam Barrington had first apprenticed her, she’d given Lily a wondrous gift: an eduba. While the word meant simply “library” to the ancient Sumerians, for wizards it described their personal archives of knowledge, their grimoires, so to speak. Yet unlike what mundanes considered to be a book of magic, edubas were full of much more than simply spells. They contained centuries of history, research, and personal notes as they were passed on, usually from parent to child or teacher to student within powerful wizard families.

  Of course, all that information had been beyond her reach when she’d first started learning magic. Unlike mundane books, you couldn’t just “flip” to the desired page in an eduba. Their knowledge was magically archived, and the information desired had to be called to the physical volume to be read. If you didn’t know what to summon, obviously you could not summon it. Madam Barrington had slowly taught her how to access the basic information she needed—spell charts, reference notes, dimmu diagrams, and the like—but she knew there was much more hidden away that she would be discovering for years to come.

  The tome itself was larger than a novel but smaller than a textbook. Bound with blood-red leather, its embossed surface was covered in golden filigree tracing exotic patterns that looked faintly Persian. When opened, its thick, creamy pages appeared blank. Only when a wizard who knew the book and its secrets actively called upon its knowledge did text appear on the pages. The glory of an eduba was that it had an unlimited capacity to store knowledge, if you knew the right magic to properly archive and organize it all. In addition to showing her how to retrieve certain parts, Madam Barrington had taught Lily how to create her own entries, thus making the eduba her journal, notebook, and reference book all in one. Though her teacher refused to discuss it, Lily imagined this eduba had been passed down through Madam Barrington’s family for generations and she, with no children of her own, had passed it on to Lily.

  After a thorough search, however, Lily found no mention of Annabelle or even the Witherspoons in general. Possibly, the Witherspoons simply hadn’t been well known. However, her eduba was suspiciously lacking in any wizard genealogies more recent than a thousand years ago—the fault of her mentor’s meddling, she assumed—so it was hard to know for sure. Accepting the dead end, Lily turned to that greatest of archives, the Internet. Two hours and five scones later—four and a half of those consumed by Sebastian, the remaining half thoroughly licked by Sir Kipling—she found what she was looking for.

  “So,” Lily explained, having moved to the floor, where she sat drinking a cup of Twinings Assam tea, “there’s a small, local history museum in Eufaula that has an exhibit on the Witherspoon family. It might be nothing, but if any of Annabelle’s personal possessions survived, they may be at this museum.”

  “Excellent,” Sebastian said around a mouthful of muffin. He, too, drank a cup of tea—he wasn’t a complete heathen, after all, though he put entirely too much sugar in it to be strictly proper. “So, when do we lea
ve?”

  “Leave?” Lily asked.

  “To go to the museum?”

  “They’re closed, Sebastian, and it’s a three-hour drive.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Tomorrow then?”

  Lily rolled her eyes. “Unlike some people I know, I have a job. With a schedule. The museum is open from ten to four, Monday through Saturday. We’ll go on Saturday.”

  “But that’s so far away!” Sebastian exclaimed, sitting up abruptly. Sir Kipling, startled out of his catnap by the sudden change from horizontal to vertical, leapt off of Sebastian and took refuge underneath Lily’s desk, looking affronted.

  “What am I going to do until then?” Sebastian asked plaintively.

  Lily didn’t bother replying to this obviously asinine question, just raised an eyebrow. The “Really?” of her expression was insultingly overt.

  “Never mind,” he grumbled, and got up from the couch to collect his things. “You have no sympathy for the trials I go through, the terrible boredom.”

  Lily’s expression did not soften. “You’ll be fine. If you die, I’ll bring flowers to your funeral…or maybe muffins. Now, meet me here at nine a.m., sharp, on Saturday. And we’re taking my car this time. Last time, I had to ride the whole way sitting on a layer of trash and pizza boxes. And don’t get me started on the smell. You should post a biohazard sign on your car door, so people will know what they’re getting into when you offer them a ride.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You think you’re so funny,” Sebastian said as he dug his keys out from between the cushions of her sofa, then headed for the door. “See you then.”

  “Make sure you bring money for gas!” Lily called after him as he disappeared out her front door.

  * * *

  The museum was housed in the Shorter Mansion, an imposing house built in 1884, whose purchase in 1965 sparked the formation of the Eufaula Heritage Association and helped launch the preservation movement in Eufaula. At least, that’s what the brochure handed out at the front door said.

  Sebastian was inclined to rush through the exhibits just to find the one featuring the Witherspoons. Lily, however, made him follow the guided tour through each room, taking delight in both his suffering and in the stories of local lore their tour guide shared.

  When they finally reached the Witherspoon room, they held back and let the gaggle of tourists pull ahead, giving them peace and quiet to examine the exhibit. It consisted of a series of panels outlining the history and exploits of the family, along with blown-up pictures of its members. There was also a glass display case containing personal items such as a pipe, heirloom jewelry, an engraved pistol, and…

  “A diary!” Lily exclaimed in a stage whisper as she caught sight of it. They both crowded around the glass case, bending down to peer at the bottom shelf where the item’s label declared its owner:

  Personal diary of Annabelle Witherspoon, last direct descendant of the Witherspoon family.

  “Yes!” Sebastian yelled, straightening and punching the air triumphantly.

  Startled, Lily shushed him. “Not so loud. Do you want to get us thrown out?”

  “Oh, stop being so uptight,” he said, grinning. “You’d think you had a pinecone shoved up your—”

  “I’ll thank you not to finish that sentence,” Lily interrupted him. She sniffed and turned away to read the information on the wall, taking a few quick notes on a writing pad she drew from her sizable carpetbag.

  “Looks like Annabelle died just a few years after Francis jilted her. It says here she was found in her small apartment, having been dead for several days. It doesn’t list a cause of death,” Lily finished, looking up at Sebastian. “How sad…she must have isolated herself, or else alienated everyone around her, for no one to notice she was missing.”

  “I wonder what killed her,” Sebastian mused.

  Lily gave a shrug. “A spell gone wrong most likely, or else a broken heart. But we’ll never really know. It seems that, after her death, her belongings were given to a distant cousin who must have kept them in an attic somewhere for decades. One of the cousin’s descendants rediscovered them recently and bequeathed them to this museum.”

  They both stood for a moment, staring at the glass case and contemplating Annabelle’s last days.

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Sebastian finally said. “Let’s go ask to see the diary.”

  * * *

  “No, I’m sorry, but it’s quite out of the question,” the museum curator, Mr. Hensley, said, shaking his head.

  “Not even if we come in after hours?” Lily pleaded. She shied away from confrontation in social situations, but this was work, so she was all business. “As little as thirty minutes would be sufficient. I’m a certified archivist. I know how to handle fragile documents.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Singer, but that diary is on display for an exhibit and can’t be moved until the exhibit ends and it goes back to storage. Even then you’ll need a signed consent form from the Heritage Association.”

  Before Lily could come up with another objection, Sebastian sidled into the conversation, putting on his most winning smile. “Look, old chap, surely there wouldn’t be any harm in giving us a quick peek right after closing before you lock up the building. It would only take a moment, and we could make it worth your while.” He wiggled his eyebrows meaningfully.

  Embarrassed, Lily resisted the temptation to hide her face in her hands as Mr. Hensley gave Sebastian a severely disapproving look. Sebastian, on the other hand, seemed impervious to the curator’s glare. The look rolled off him like water off a duck’s back, and his smile didn’t falter.

  Attempting to salvage the situation, Lily cut in. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hensley. What my colleague was trying to say is we have a very important, time-sensitive project going on at the moment, and that diary is essential to our research. If there is no way to view it while on display, then when will the exhibit be rotated out?”

  “Oh, sometime in the fall, I expect.” Mr. Hensley deadpanned.

  “Why you—” began Sebastian heatedly.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hensley,” Lily said loudly, talking over her friend as she drew him away. “Have a nice day!”

  Once they were safely outside and headed to her car, Sebastian vented his feelings, wild arm gesticulations accompanying his heated exclamations. “What an unhelpful, stuck-up, self-righteous, obnoxious, unhelpful, little prig!”

  “You said unhelpful twice,” Lily pointed out absently.

  “Because he was! There’s no reason at all why he can’t let us look at it. It’s not like it’s the United States Constitution or anything.”

  Lily sighed. “He was just following the rules, I’m sure.”

  “Uh-huh, sound familiar?” Sebastian said, crossing his arms.

  “Oh, hush.” Lily ignored the rest of his mutterings as they got into the car and closed the doors. But for some reason, she was reluctant to put the key in and start their drive back to Atlanta, empty-handed.

  “So…what do we do now?” she said into the silence. “Can’t we just wait until the fall?”

  “No,” Sebastian said, slouched low in his seat, arms crossed. “The owner gave me a time limit. After that, the deal’s off, and he’ll find a ‘real’ professional. So, no magic books for you, and no money for me.”

  They relapsed into silence.

  “You know…” Sebastian said after a while, “there is something we could do.”

  “Is it legal?” Lily asked suspiciously. She recognized that tone of voice. Sebastian adopted it right before he suggested something wild and dangerous that usually got them into trouble.

  “Weeell, depends on how you look at it. We wouldn’t be hurting anything, if that’s what you mean.”

  Lily glared. “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean exactly what I say. Is it legal?”

  “No,” Sebastian admitted, and there was a pregnant pause.

  The seconds stretched into a minute as Lily glared, and Sebastian maintained a careful
ly casual expression.

  “Alright, fine,” she finally said. “What is it?”

  “We could sneak in after dark and steal it,” Sebastian suggested, studying his nails.

  “No! I will not commit a robbery.”

  “We’d give it back when we were done! How else do you suggest we get ahold of it? Would you rather sit there for hours reading and risk getting caught?”

  “No, of course…wait a minute…” Lily’s eyes lost focus as she considered a sudden idea. “If I could physically hold the book for about fifteen minutes, I could make a copy.”

  “Really?” Sebastian was intrigued.

  “Yes. It’s a relatively straightforward spell, it just requires extended concentration for the duration of the process. I use it sometimes to make copies of fragile documents that can’t be safely handled without risking damage.”

  “So, what’s the holdup then?” Sebastian asked, excited once more. “We sneak in, you do your little bit of hocus pocus, and voila! We have a copy of the book. No harm done. Nobody will even know we were there.”

  “No, no. This is insane,” she insisted. “Forget I suggested it. Breaking in is illegal, too. I’m an upstanding citizen. I will not break the law!”

  * * *

  “I can’t believe I’m breaking the law,” Lily whispered, still agonizing over the moral quandary even as she crouched in the shadows of a dumpster behind the Shorter Mansion, Sebastian at her side.