Allie Beckstrom 09 - Magic for a Price Read online

  Oddly, he seemed pretty happy with the way things had turned out, and was currently coordinating his efforts toward the safety and crackdown on illegal spells with Sam Arch, the Authority’s Ward of the region.

  It wasn’t just the Hounds who were working closely with the Authority. It was the police now too. Being a little less of a secret organization was benefiting everyone.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Thank you both for the ride. Have a lovely time on the river.”

  “We will,” Nola said. “See you Saturday for the movie.”

  I opened the car door and walked out into the sunny day. Autumn may be around the corner, but it hadn’t browned the backs of leaves or put a chill in the air yet.

  There were probably twenty or so people in the park. I made my way along the concrete path, and finally found a bench a little out of the way, covered in an equal spattering of shade and sunlight.

  I had brought something with me. Something that I hadn’t been brave enough to open before now.

  My box.

  ALLISON ANGEL’S BOX OF DREAMS.

  Hayden had helped me spring the lock. The box had been sitting unopened in my apartment for months now, on my dresser where I’d left it.

  I didn’t know why it worried me, but I had a huge case of the butterflies thinking about what might be in it.

  I took a deep breath, let it out, then opened the lid.

  The lid hinged back smoothly, as if it had last been used yesterday, instead of almost twenty years ago. I exhaled, like I’d been holding my breath for years. Suddenly, the trees didn’t seem so close and crowded, and the park took on an even more spacious and sunny feeling.

  Inside the box were papers. Letters, photos, little origami cranes. I smiled, remembering some of these things—the origami in particular—but most of it was unfamiliar. I picked up the photo on the top.

  A woman and child were smiling in the picture, both holding dandelion fluffs in their hands. The child—a girl—was probably only one year old, wearing a pink dress and striped tights. That must be me. The woman had dark hair, soft eyes, and a smile that set a cascade of memories rushing through my mind.

  My mother.

  She was so pretty, so young. Maybe about my age. We were in a park I think, even though I would have been too little to remember that day. I smiled. We both looked really happy.

  I realized I didn’t have any photos of my mother. Why hadn’t I thought about that before?

  Beneath the photo was an envelope. It was my dad’s monogrammed stationery, and written in his handwriting across the front: “Allison, open first.”

  I turned the envelope, opened it, and pulled out the letter.

  My dearest Allison,

  I do not know when you will read this letter. At the time of writing, you have just turned twenty-one, are in college, hating me, and dating my assistant, Eli Collins.

  Twenty-one. Already. Yet I find myself pacing the nights with regret.

  I have had an entire lifetime to tell you the truth, and could not bring myself to do it. Better that you hate me for the things you know I have done, rather than for the secrets I have held from you.

  Let me begin thusly: I have made enemies, very powerful enemies who are part of an organization called the Authority. They are strong magic users who are seeking to destroy Portland and magic. It may sound strange, but they are not afraid of stepping through death to see that their goals are achieved.

  They see me as a threat to their plans of dominance. Rightly so. For it is my intention to remove them from power and see that magic falls into the right hands.

  That, though, isn’t the secret I’ve been avoiding all these years.

  When you were five years old we took you for a drive, your mother and I. The brakes on the car failed. That is what the police report said. But I remember, just before blacking out, seeing another car pass us. Seeing magic users in that car casting dark spells. An Authority member named Bartholomew Wray was among them.

  We hit the side of a warehouse in St. Johns at fifty miles an hour. I woke to the pain, the blood. Your mother, beside me, was silent. She wasn’t moving. Wasn’t breathing. She never did again.

  They killed her. Trying to kill me, they had killed her.

  I believe Sedra was behind it, though I have no proof. Or perhaps it was not Sedra, but something darker that holds her.

  You were barely breathing, broken bones, and so very bloody. I carried you out of the wreckage. I am ashamed to say I panicked and ran down the streets looking for help. Looking for someone who could save you.

  There is a woman in St. Johns. Her name is Rossitto. She and I have a deal, a secret between us I have never betrayed. St. Johns holds its own magic. That is the secret. The magic is different from all the magic in the city, perhaps in the world, because it is not broken into light and dark. It is pure. Other than a few crystals, I have not yet been able to study it thoroughly. I had planned to lay the network lines into St. Johns. But that day, my plans changed.

  She found me, on my knees, with you nearly dead in my arms. She took us to her home and made a deal. I would never lay lines for magic to be accessed in St. Johns. I would keep the Authority away from her and the secret magic she guarded. In return, she would heal you.

  Magic for a price. It is always the way of things. I gave her my promise.

  The price of pulling your soul from the brink of death was my soul. Most of it, in any case. A trade-off I was more than willing to do then. One that I hope you will appreciate one day.

  A part of me died so that you could live.

  To hold you to life, she gave you a small piece of the magic from St. Johns.

  And you breathed, and cried, and lived.

  I have raised you on my own for all of these years. Up until you were thirteen, I created memories of your mother for you because I could not bear to tell you she had died. That I had let her die, and only barely saved you.

  I am sorry, Allison, for that deceit the most. The false memories of your mother and your life with her. I don’t know if she would have wanted it that way. I do know she loved you very much. I hope one day I will be able to tell you these things.

  I hope one day to apologize for the changes I have made in your memories, and the memories I have taken away from you. Magic should not make you lose your memories, but I regret that in my hope to give you a happier, if false, childhood it has changed the price you pay when you use magic. Perhaps one day I will find a way to heal magic and make it whole again so that you will no longer lose your memories.

  Perhaps one day I will be able to tell you all these things. You deserve that. You deserve to hear this from me, and not from a letter hidden away with your childhood memories. Your real memories.

  I hope you will find forgiveness for the things I have done and the choices I have, regrettably, made.

  Lovingly,

  Dad

  After all these years, he finally explained…everything. Why did it make me so sad?

  “Sitting on a park bench alone, Allie girl?” Mama Rossitto said.

  I looked up away from the letter. I hadn’t heard her approach, too lost in the reality of this letter. These truths.

  “Is this true?” I asked, holding the letter out to her. “Is any of this true?”

  She studied my face for a moment. I realized I had been crying, and wiped at my cheeks.

  Then she took the letter. After reading the first bit, she sighed and sat on the bench next to me.

  “The accident,” she said after she read the entire thing, “is true. He was so afraid to lose you, his sweet baby daughter. And so broken with your poor mama’s death.” She shook her head. “He was a good man once. Before her death. Before his soul snapped in half so you could live.”

  “Why me?” I asked, both miserable with the knowledge, and on some levels, not surprised. I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, buried deep in my memories, I had known my mother was dead. I had seen it in my father’s eyes, heard it
in his voice for a long, long time. “Why didn’t you try to save my mother instead? Give her the magic.”

  “St. Johns chooses its own. All the people here are called by its magic. They may not know it, but still, they come. They are nurtured by it, and in return nurture it. The guardian of the magic here is chosen by the magic. Touched, changed, healed by it.”

  “Are you its guardian?”

  “Yes. But not forever, Allie girl.” She gave me a knowing smile. “Not forever.”

  She shoved the letter back at me with a grunt. “Is this all in that box of yours? One sad letter?”

  I looked down at the box of memories on my lap. “No, there’s a lot more.” I started digging. “Pictures of my mother.” I handed her the first one. “Finger paintings, origami, a drawing of something that looks like a turkey.” I shook my head.

  My dad had packed these things away. Little bits of my life he had tried to keep safe for me. Little bits of my life that were mine again.

  “I think these little cassette tapes are video, right? There’s dozens of them.” I read the label of one: ALLISON YEARS ONE THROUGH THREE. It was in a softer, more fluid handwriting. My mother’s.

  She had recorded memories, stories of me? Of my life?

  Only the first few of the tapes were in her handwriting. Then there were others, in my father’s handwriting. ALLISON YEARS SIX AND SEVEN. ALLISON YEAR EIGHT. ALLISON YEAR NINE. He had taken over where Mom had left off.

  It was all so much—more than I’d ever thought he’d cared about me, more of my life than I’d ever expected to get back. And I’d barely scratched the top of the pile of stuff. I could see a few thumb drives, which might be full of photos, or who knew what else? It would take me a lot of time to go through everything.

  And it made me really happy to have it all.

  “Good. You’re smiling now. Too nice a day for all those tears.” Mama pushed up onto her feet. “You come by again soon. I feed you dinner.” She patted me gruffly on the shoulder, then stumped off toward the street.

  I sat and looked through a few more things: a key that said it fit a safety deposit box, my birth certificate.

  “Allie?”

  I glanced up. Eli Collins stood in the shadows near the trees.

  “Eli?” How long had he been standing there?

  “I just wanted to tell you it was a pleasure working for your father. I know he’s dead now. Truly at rest.”

  “We dated?” I blurted out, holding up the letter.

  He nodded, the light not quite reaching his glasses. “We did. For two years, actually, while you were in college.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled a little ruefully. “Because we liked each other?”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t use magic to make me like you?”

  He laughed. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him laugh. It was a joyful outburst, and I found myself smiling too.

  “No,” he said. “I have never used magic to make a girl like me. We had…something. And we were both happy for a while. But I came here to tell you something about…about our past.”

  I braced myself. For the life of me, I didn’t know what he could say that would shock me now.

  “Your father once told me that he was very sorry for the choices he had made. For the things he had done to you. Especially for his years of influence on your mind causing heavy use of magic to take your memories away. He also told me that if magic could be healed, dark and light joined, it might make it so that you didn’t lose your memories any longer.”

  “I read the letter,” I said.

  “Good. There’s one more thing he told me. He said he knew you were strong enough.”

  “What, to survive what he did to me?”

  “No. To question him. He counted on that. And he counted on you being strong enough to trust him one day.”

  I was quiet for a moment or two. “I guess he was right about that,” I finally said.

  “Yes. Well. He was brilliant,” Collins said. “And, Allie, please don’t look for me. You won’t be able to find me.”

  “Look for you? You’re standing right there.”

  He smiled again. “No,” he said. “I’m not.” Then the image of him, the Illusion of him that had seemed so real I was sure I could smell his cologne, winked out of existence.

  Sweet hells. Magic.

  Without thinking, I cast a small Sight spell. Magic flickered into the spell I drew, and I caught my breath. I saw the dusty remnant of the spell Collins had cast, draped across the dry grass at the base of the tree. He was nowhere to be seen.

  But that wasn’t what had surprised me. Magic felt easy again. It didn’t hurt, not one bit, to cast it now. Whatever healing Cody had done included my ability to cast magic too.

  Oh, that was good. So very good.

  Then I felt a familiar, and very real, presence.

  Zayvion was walking across the park toward me, his thumbs tucked in his belt loops, relaxed in the sunlight, smiling.

  I folded the papers back up and tucked them in the box. I stood up and walked toward Zayvion, my soul, my love.

  There would be time enough for the past later. Time enough to explore what I could do with magic later. Right now, I just wanted today, with a promise of an awful lot of tomorrows with him.

  Epilogue

  It was the morning of my twenty-sixth birthday, and all I wanted was a decent cup of coffee, a hot breakfast, and some time away from the gargoyle who had been given a dozen squeaky toys by Shame and was chewing on them. All of them. At once.

  It sounded like an entire flock of rubber ducks were screaming out their death quacks.

  I’d asked Zay if he wanted to go out today to do something to celebrate, and had received vague promises in return. Something about him needing to help Shame and Terric with important Authority-related stuff.

  He’d gotten up before dawn, given me a kiss, which I’d been too sleepy to return properly, and left.

  Not that I expected him to remember it was my birthday. Things had been busy the last few months.

  Reappointing the Voices of the Authority was just the beginning of restructuring the Authority. There was a lot of information that needed to be exchanged about how magic had changed worldwide. It meant establishing contacts throughout the various systems and agencies so the Authority could now operate as a semihidden organization.

  But Sam Arch and the Overseer had finally chosen who should be the head of Portland’s Authority.

  They’d given that position to Shame and Terric. Said that they thought the head of the Authority might best be handled by two people, Soul Complements, with a lot of experience dealing with a town that sat on five wells of magic.

  Terric was shocked, but as is his way, took the appointment with gravity and grace.

  To say Shame was reluctant to take the position was a massive understatement.

  To say he threw a bloody fit was more like it. He’d argued against it for three weeks, brought up his lengthy past history of irresponsibility and slackerdom as proof of his incompetence.

  Zay had finally taken him out for a drink and a long talk.

  The next day, Shame had agreed to the position.

  I hadn’t yet gotten Zay to tell me what he’d said to Shame.

  But there were plenty of things I’d probably never understand. Like why I had dated Eli Collins in college.

  Use magic, it uses you back. That was still true, though the magic was much gentler now and the price to pay was also more moderate. No one knew if that was a temporary state of things or not.

  I guess we’d just have to keep living to find out.

  I shoved the pillow off my head and got out of bed. “Stone! For the love of God. Stop torturing those ducks.”

  There was a pause in the noise from the living room. Then one long, sad squeal that ended with a pop.

  Oh, sweet hells. He was killing them.

  Fine. Let him have his rubber minions. I wanted a sho
wer, clothes, then a big cup of coffee at Get Mugged. Because it was my birthday and I planned on doing anything I wanted to do today.

  By the time I got out of the shower, dressed, and had put on my shoes, Stone had stacked his toys across the windowsill in the living room. Even the slightly saggy duck with the missing head.

  At least he wasn’t eating them anymore.

  “See you later, Stoney,” I said. “Be a good boy, okay?”

  He whuffled at me and trotted over so I could pet his head.

  “You are such a goofus,” I said, rubbing behind his ears. “Don’t get seen, okay?”

  Sure, people had gotten memories back, and the Authority was a little more out in the open than before. But Stone was still the only gargoyle in the city. The fewer people who knew about him, the better.

  It didn’t take me long to make my way to Get Mugged. Even though it was September, the sky was mostly clear, patched together by clouds that sent the sun dipping into and out of shadows. No rain yet. That was nice.

  I just kind of wished Zay was here. That maybe he would have had time to spend with me on my birthday.

  Maybe Grant would take a couple of minutes and sit at my table. We hadn’t had a chance to gossip for weeks.

  Just before I opened the door to the coffee shop, I realized something was not right.

  It was too quiet, though I saw Grant, and only Grant, standing behind the counter. He smiled and waved me in.

  I put my hand on the blood blade I still carried at my side and cautiously opened the door.

  The snap of a canceled spell filled the room with the sweet scent of lilac.

  “Happy Birthday!”

  The entire place was filled with people. No, not just people. My friends. All the Hounds, all the members of the Authority, Maeve and Victor, Nola, Stotts, Violet and my little brother, and Terric and Shame.

  It was back-to-belly crowded, but I stepped right in. And for the first time, I realized I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of claustrophobia.

  All the world seemed a lot more open to me now.