Authors: Tim Pratt
Trey scratched his nose. “I think it’s a garage door opener. But Grace doesn’t have a garage.”
“Trey. A garage door opener? So, basically, this is a key?”
He grinned. We hurried downstairs to the kitchen and faced the locked door. I pointed the opener and pushed the button.
Nothing. “Well, crap.” I tossed the opener on the counter.
“I thought for sure this was it.” Trey picked up the opener. “Maybe it doesn’t have batteries…”
“Magic things need batteries now?”
“What do I know? Maybe.” He slid open the cover to the battery compartment, then said, “What the hell…” Trey took out a piece of paper someone had folded and crumpled and shoved into the place where the batteries should have been. He opened it up, read it, then muttered something between a laugh and a moan. “Read this.”
The handwriting was spidery and shaky.
trey
make sure my dauter gets this. key to everthing. give when give keys to house also batteries dont forget dont forget dont forget
“ ‘Don’t forget,’ ” I said. “I get the idea that message was meant as much for Grace himself as it was for you.”
“Didn’t work, though. He forgot. I knew he was bad at the end. He told me everything was taken care of, that you’d have all the information you needed. I wonder if he thought he’d given me this note already?” Trey pulled open one of the many junk drawers and sorted through the mess of old batteries inside until he found a nine volt, then installed it in the garage door opener. He offered it to me. “I don’t think this will work for me, so the honor is yours.”
I took the opener, pointed it at the door, and pushed the button.
Every cabinet door in the room flew open, and every drawer shot out to the end of its track with a clatter of shifting contents, and slams reverberated through the house as all the doors in the Grace house swung wide simultaneously, smacking into walls in the process.
The padlock fell off the locked door with a clatter, and the door itself opened soundlessly.
“Hold on.” I went into the living room and grabbed the sword of healing, because better safe, and took a moment to shut and lock the front door, too, because ditto. When I got back, I took Trey’s hand, and we walked through the now unlocked door into the corridor. The same doors I’d seen in my visions were there on either side, minus the pages torn from
The Book of Grace
and the handwritten labels. The door at the end, leading into the study, was standing open.
“I remember sitting in there, getting chewed out by Mr. Grace,” Trey said.
“I remember it, too.” We stopped in the doorway to the study, looking at the desk with its cracked glass top, and at the lumpy cup, and the folded letter resting on top. I went inside, fluttering in my guts, trembling in my heart, and Trey followed.
“That candle,” he said. “That flame, it’s so…so…”
I looked at him curiously, then at the candle. It was weird, sure—a little, stubby white thing, burning without consuming the wick, but a flame that didn’t eat its fuel wasn’t all that exciting as far as magics went. “It’s so…what?”
Trey just stood there, staring at the flame, like a switched-off robot. I waved my hands in front of his face, and he didn’t react at all. “Trey?”
“Yes.” His voice was a robotic monotone. I looked into his eyes. His pupils were dilated hugely, like he was tripping on acid.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you acting so weird?”
No answer. I looked at the candle, then picked it up. Trey’s head moved, following the progress of the candle. I moved it slowly back and forth, and his gaze tracked the motion.
Oh shit. The candle was a trap, too—anyone other than the rightful heir, presumably, who made it this far and saw the flame would get captivated, moth-to-a-flame style. I blew on the flame and it winked out just like an ordinary candle, sending up a tendril of sweet-smelling smoke. Trey blinked and shook his head. “Uh. Did I…were you saying something?”
“Magic candle. Stole your brain. Bad shit.” I put the candle down, then thought better of it, and dropped it in my pocket. Captivating eternal flames could be useful.
Trey grunted. “Thanks for blowing that out. I really wish your dad would stop messing with my mind.”
“Me too.” I picked up the letter that covered the cup. It was just a folded sheet of paper, but it was nice paper, the kind made with pressed flowers, for writing fancy thank-you notes and stuff on. I unfolded it, and read:
If you seek power, take up this cup, and drink
Pretty straightforward. I looked into the lumpy chalice—a holy grail sculpted by a kindergartner—and wrinkled my nose. “Trey, what does this stuff look like to you?”
He peered in. “Ah. Let’s say wine.”
“Not blood and water and ashes?”
Trey leaned forward and sniffed. “There’s definitely a whiff of vinegar. I’m going to go with bad wine. If that’ll make you feel better.”
“This better not be poison.”
“If it is, that’s what the magical sword of healing is for.”
Moment of truth. Power for the taking—but I’d better be sure I wanted to take it.
I thought of that vision of myself, white-haired and demented. Was that the inevitable end of this path? Would this magic corrupt me, as it had my father, as it had my eldest sister? Being able to teleport everywhere was nice, and if magic let me do that sort of thing, I saw the appeal. Having power to alter reality to suit my whim—assuming I was able to pay the cost—would certainly create space and time in my life to do things I really cared about, like making art and making out and traveling and looking at beautiful things and interesting ugly things. Keeping the Firstborn from cutting off my pinkies in order to motivate me to see things her way would also be a plus. On the whole, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.
“I’m going to do it, Trey.”
“I figured that’s what we were here for. You need anything from me?”
“Here.” I put the sword in his hands. “The sword is yours now. It belongs to you. If I start convulsing or turning into a giant bat creature or melting into electric slime or something, I want you to stab me back to health. All right?”
“Yes ma’am.”
I picked up the cup in both hands, put it to my lips, and drank. The concoction did taste a little like corked wine, and a little like liver—and a little like cardamom, for some reason. I swallowed, almost convulsively, mostly to get the taste out of my mouth.
Ever take a big shot of liquor on an empty stomach, and feel it go to your head almost instantly? This was like that. The walls around me seemed to recede, like a trick camera effect in a Hitchcock movie, and a dull white-noise roar filled my ears. The cup fell from my hands—my fingers were no longer cooperating—and it seemed I was falling, too, though my body didn’t move. I was falling
inward
. Dark clouds swirled all around me. Or maybe not clouds. Maybe a cloud of ink, spreading out in water, like I was adrift in a distant sea.
Everything went dark. Then it brightened, and I was somewhere else.
Things weren’t black and white, like when I’d visited the past. They weren’t garishly supersaturated, like the future. At the same time, I knew I hadn’t moved in space, to another real place. I had a feeling this was a more
internal
sort of world than others I’d visited. I just wasn’t sure if it was
my
interior.
I stood in a round stone room, a castle tower, with arched windows. I could sense that I was very high up, even before an immense black bird flapped by outside the window. Everything seemed oddly soft at the edges, as if my surroundings only solidified when I turned my head to look at them directly—in my peripheral vision, things were hazy, conditional.
“Bekah.”
I turned, and my father was there, looking younger than I’d ever seen him, his face creased in a smile. “You’ve grown up so much. Turned into a fine woman.”
Wow. More visions of the dead, but this time, the dead wanted to have a conversation. I wasn’t sure I was ready to chat with the shade of Archibald Grace, but I was here, so I had to do it anyway. “Uh. Thanks. What is this place?”
“The inside of the cup, more or less,” he said. “A frozen moment in time, where we can talk, and do our necessary business. Look, see?” He pointed at the window. I looked, and the same bird flapped by again. Some kind of temporal loop. Oh boy.
“Are you a ghost?”
My father shrugged. “I am a scrap of personality, and an abundance of raw power, infused in the liquid you drank. My power is inextricably linked with my self, my identity—my power
is
me. That’s just how it is.”
I frowned. “So, what? Now you’ll be living in the back of my head? That’s kind of creepy.”
“It’s worse than that, I’m afraid. I’m a survivor, Bekah. I always have been. I used my own life too hard, scraped holes in my soul, emptied myself out. I chose death because I couldn’t bear losing myself. My mind. My memories. But…there are ways to renew oneself.”
“What are you saying?” But I had an idea of what he was saying, and I didn’t like what I was hearing.
He stepped closer to me. “I’m saying I prepared for this eventuality. Some people call it ‘the thing on the doorstep trick,’ and it’s an old technique—the ancient wizard takes over his apprentice’s life.” He reached out, as if to touch my face, and I flinched away. “I can slip into your mind, and take your body and your soul—so fresh, so whole, so vital—for my own. I can live again. I—”
“Screw that,” I said.
Then I kicked my dead father between the legs and jumped out the window.
I plummeted through freezing fog, but before I had time to reconsider my rash decision to leap from a window to escape my dead father’s body-stealing ghost, I landed with a hard thump on the stone floor of the tower room. I groaned and got to my feet, and saw Archibald Grace sitting against the curved wall some distance away, cupping his hands between his legs.
“I admire the swift lateral thinking,” he said, with a gratifying amount of pained squeak in his voice. “I’m not often surprised, but I didn’t expect that. If you’d let me finish, I was going to say, ‘I
can
live again, but I don’t think I want to.’”
“You might have led with that part, old man, instead of going into all the soul-sucking details.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but since jumping out a window hadn’t gotten me very far, my options were limited.
“My aching testicles and I take your point.” He winced before musing aloud, “Why should my entirely imaginary body hurt so badly from
another
entirely imaginary body kicking it? This spell is more potent than I realized.” He looked up, as if remembering I was there. “If I have a flaw, Rebekah, it’s that I’m too good at what I do.”
“As far as your flaws go, that wouldn’t even make my top five. But let’s get back to the topic at hand: you brought me here to steal my body, and now, what? You don’t like what you see? Are you flipped out at the idea of being a woman?”
He shook his head. “I set this soul trap and laid out this poisoned chalice when I was in a particularly dark place. You’re young, so I don’t think you can truly comprehend the terror I felt at the prospect of losing myself. It wasn’t even death I feared, or not just death—I’m not sure I could truly conceive of my own death, because I had always
been
, and believed on some level that I always would
be
. But I realized too late the deleterious effects of putting my soul aside for safekeeping. The loss of memory is the loss of identity, Rebekah. If you can’t remember who you are, you are at risk of becoming someone else. In one of my darkest, most vicious, and most reptilian moments, I saw a possible path back to wholeness, and I set that plan in motion. If it makes you feel better, I didn’t even remember you were the daughter I’d decided to make my heir—when I poisoned the chalice, my mind was scrambled, and I expected the Firstborn to take up the cup. If she had…I would have probably gone through with the ‘thing on the doorstep trick.’ I accept a large part of the responsibility for the creature my eldest daughter became—though her mother’s influence should not entirely be discounted—but the fact is, the world would be better off without her.”
“Some could say the same of you, Pops,” I said. Maybe we had an equally low opinion of the Firstborn, but that didn’t make him into someone I was willing to trust. “So you would have taken over the Firstborn’s body and, what? Gone into retirement? Painted landscapes?”
“I don’t know what I would have done, honestly, and it’s a moot point now—”
“Yeah. The thing is, I saw a vision of the future, one where the Firstborn got the vessel away from me, and took on your power, and she
still
killed me. Shot me with a crossbow while I was trying to learn magic, actually. Except, I guess it must have been
you
who did the shooting in that vision, huh?”
A shadow of doubt crossed his face, and he shook his head. “That…I have no explanation for that. The future is a shifting thing, but—”
“The Firstborn did the same trick you did, Grace. She put her soul away in a stone. You wanted to take over a fresh new form you could wear down all over again, but her soul’s moth-eaten and raggedy, too. Just like yours, in kind if not degree. So in at least one possible future, you were still enough of a crazy asshole to murder me before I could turn into a threat.”
“I…did not realize she’d put her soul aside. Or I didn’t remember, which amounts to the same thing. I’m so sorry, Rebekah. For all the trouble that comes along with having me for a father—”
I held up a hand, cutting him off. “You are
not
my father. My father’s name is Robert Lull. He teaches medieval history at a little college in Illinois. Likes to quote the dirty bits of
The Decameron
when he’s had too much wine. Taught me how to ride a bike and, coincidentally, how to kick a boy in the balls if he tried to do something I didn’t want him to do.
He
is my father. You’re the sperm donor who left me on a doorstep.”
Grace sighed. “I am a monster, Rebekah. I mean that unironically. I was a giant, you know. But monsters can love, too. I tried to protect you from the perils of the magical life, to let you grow up normal, whatever that means. Except I knew it was in your blood—I knew the magic would tell eventually. Since I’d given you no preparation for that kind of life, I thought I could redeem my neglect by giving you a few useful things after my death. But…I was falling apart by then. I planned badly. I took half measures. I thought I’d done things I hadn’t, and forgot I’d done things I did. From here I can see I made a mess of things.”
“Magical hindsight is twenty-twenty, huh?” I shook my head. “But the magic never did tell, did it? I was just a person, and it was fine, until I came here. Well, not to this weird pocket-dimension. To the house in Meat Camp.”
Now it was his turn to shake his head. “You do have your own magic. You’ve been using it for weeks.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve found some magical stuff, but it’s the stuff, not me: the cup, the broom, the house—”
“Ah. Yes. The house. It responds to your wishes, doesn’t it?”
“Sure, because I’m your heir—”
“No, Rebekah.” His patronizing smile made me want to kick him in the balls again. “I never made the house into a citadel of supernatural self-defense. The only spell I cast on the house itself was to lock the door to the room where you found the chalice, so the wrong people wouldn’t stumble upon it. Everything else, the objects flinging themselves at your enemies, the house leading you to things you needed…they are an expression of your personal magic.”
I blinked. “Wait. You’re saying I’m…telekinetic?”
“Mmm.” He considered for a moment. “That’s part of it, yes. You’re a bit old to exhibit poltergeist behavior—it happens more often in girls just entering puberty—but you’re a Grace by blood, and we’ve never been typical. There’s more to your power than just moving objects by the power of thought. You seem capable of exciting a sort of low-level sentience in the objects around you. The house
does
know things, or at least has witnessed things, and you were able to tap into that knowledge, and ask the house to provide you things you needed. Quite remarkable, really. Not a skill I ever developed, myself, and I come from a time when all the objects of the world were literally believed to contain spirits, of one sort or another.”
“So I’m a wizard whether I like it or not.”
“I always preferred ‘sorcerer’—wizard makes me think of pointy hats and black velvet robes—but as you like it.”
Right, because
sorcerer
is way less ridiculous.
“You don’t have to use the power,” Grace said. “But it’s hard to have power and not use it. Now that you’ve sipped from the chalice, you can have the power of my remaining life force—stripped of my personality, of course; you don’t have to worry about that—or…I can just let the power dissipate. Allow it to disappear to the same place where flames go when you snuff them, or where the magnetic field goes when you turn off an electromagnet.”
“If the power is gone, do you think the Firstborn will just shrug and move on with her life? Give up her vendetta?”
“That does not sound like my eldest daughter, no. I think she will rage at the waste, much as you would if someone used the contents of the Louvre as firewood.”
“Right. So that doesn’t really help me. What happens if I
do
take on your power?”
“Honestly? It will be a bit like putting a jet engine in a minivan.”
“No one’s ever called me a minivan before. I appreciate that.”
“In this metaphor the minivan is your own natural magical ability. I am—I was—a creature made as much from magic as from flesh. If not more so. You won’t have the knowledge to do everything I can do—I can’t give you that without leaving my mind lodged in yours like a splinter of bone in a salmon fillet. But you will be able to work your own magics more easily, and will learn new skills more quickly, and you’ll be resistant to the attacks of others. It is also likely to have some second-order effects I can’t entirely predict. It would be, essentially, like injecting a magical drug into your system.”
“So it’s like doing steroids. More muscle without all the effort of earning it.”
He shrugged, but also nodded his acknowledgment of the analogy.
Go, me
. “Something like that. The side effects should be less objectionable, though. No pimples on your back, anyway.”
“A minivan with a jet engine would just tear itself apart, you know. Or flip over and crash and explode.”
“You’d have to drive very carefully.”
Ha. Dead old Dad had quite the gift for understatement. He was a creature of magic, from the moment of his mysterious creation, but I’d spent a vastly shorter life as nothing but a person. The prospect of becoming
more
was frankly terrifying. But I guess what it comes down to is, there are different kinds of people in the world. Some people, if they stepped outside and saw a glowing portal hovering in their yard—a shimmering doorway that led to another world where the sky is the color of emeralds and crystal palaces shimmer in the distance—they would go right back inside the house and lock the door and pray for the freaky thing to go away. Other people would grab a couple of power bars and a bottle of water and a baseball bat for self-defense and step on through, because the regret of wondering what might have been would tear them to pieces eventually if they did anything else.
Turns out, I’m the kind of girl who has a hard time turning her back on what might be.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t hesitate, when the moment of truth came. I said, “You watched over me when I was little, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Seeing you grow up, unpoisoned by my influence, was one of the final pleasures of my life, Rebekah.”
I nodded. He’d been some kind of monster, once, and he’d been further corrupted by the unchecked use of his power and the choice to give up his soul…but even so, he’d retained a core of something I recognized as humanity. If I knew what I was getting into, and recognized the dangers, surely I could do a better job of holding on to my own soul. “Okay. I’ll take the power.”
He got to his feet and approached me. Archibald Grace opened his arms, and after a moment’s hesitation, I stepped into his embrace. There was a chance this was still a trick to suck my mind out of my body so he could move into my skull like a hermit crab into a new shell, but I was in a magical tower dreamscape scenario with no apparent escape anyway, so what the hell.
He closed his arms around me, and I put mine around him, too. He seemed to get taller, somehow—not like a giant; more like your dad when you’re little, and he’s the biggest person in your life—and I rested my head against his chest, and listened to his imaginary heart beat in my imaginary ears.
My father kissed the top of my head, and then turned to smoke in my arms.
I lifted my head and blinked. I was in the study, on the ground, my head in Trey’s lap, and his face was looking down at me with immense concern and compassion.
I could see a silver thread leading from the top of his head, curling in the air, and then trailing down to my fingertips. In an instant, I knew what that thread was—there was a whole new alphabet of formerly unseen reality, and I’d learned to read it in a moment. The thread shimmered and pulsed, and I frowned, twisted my hand, and snapped the thread. It dissolved and vanished.
Trey gasped, eyes widening, and began to shiver like he’d been doused with ice water. “I—Bekah, what—”
“You’re free,” I said. “No more magical indentured servitude. So you’d better start kissing me of your own free will.”
He leaned down to oblige, his shivers subsiding as his lips touched mine. After a lovely but too brief interval, he pulled back and stared down at me. “So. I guess you took on your inheritance, then?”
I didn’t
feel
all that different—maybe a little adrenaline-energetic. But as I sat up, looking around the room, I saw it was the
world
that had changed around me. There were new shadows and new sources of illumination. The smoking jacket on the back of the chair seemed to shimmer, and I knew it was magical. I rose and walked around the desk, picked up the jacket, and slipped it on. Though it should have been too big for me, made for my father, it fit me perfectly, adjusting itself in subtle ways to fit my shape. I knew it would protect me from cold, and from fire, and from bullets, and to some extent from hostile magic, and even from the vacuum of space, for a little while—it was a wizard’s cloak, of sorts.
I knew about those magical properties the same way I knew the jacket was red, or that one of the buttons was falling off, or that the inner lining was silky and smooth: it was obvious from mere observation.
Apparently wizard-vision was one of those second-order effects.
I slid my hands into the pockets and my fingers touched something cold and rectangular and metallic: a Zippo lighter, maybe the very same one Grace had used to light the candle that captivated Trey and stole his brain.
“So…how does this work?” Trey said. “Do you have Mr. Grace’s memories, or…”
I shook my head. “Just his power.” I decided not to go into the whole thing about how I’d had a conversation with my dead father, at least not now. “Come on, I want to look around.”
Trey trailed after me as I left the study and went back into the house proper, looking around with my new vision. There was magic everywhere, nestled in unexpected places—not just the mug and the spoon on the counter, but also a Winnie the Pooh cookie jar (it would keep anything inside it fresh forever) and a dark gray marble mortar and pestle (it would reduce anything ground inside it to a fine paste or sand, even diamonds) and one of the paring knives in the knife block (anyone who held it would gain perfect pitch and a singing voice capable of projecting to the back of pretty much any auditorium imaginable…of course they’d be holding a knife while they did it, which limited the theatrical possibilities—I guess Sweeney Todd would have been a good fit).