Page 38 of The Fantastic Fluke

It was the first time someone called Fluke my familiar and I didn’t have the slightest urge to correct them. That warmed me all over, despite the rest of the crap going on. Finally, I shrugged and nodded. “He kind of was.”

Mal nodded decisively and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Still, for some reason I sat down and hugged Fluke for a while. I didn’t miss my father. I didn’t miss our lack of a relationship. He’d been more a demanding boss than a father, and no one missed that when it went away. Plus, well, it hadn’t gone away.

“I miss Mom,” I finally whispered to Fluke. “I’m kind of a shitty son, and I forgot how much I missed her.” Losing Dad hadn’t hurt me the way losing a father hurt most people. Mostly, it had brought the loss of Mom back to the forefront of my mind, opened that old wound I’d thought long closed.

Fluke’s response was to burrow into me, shoving his whole body at me and licking my face until I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Slacking off out here?” Beez asked, lugging a box into the living room. Then she really looked at me, dropped the box in the middle of the floor, and came over to sit next to me, leaning against the entertainment center. “Am I being shitty? Not sensitive enough? I know I’m like that sometimes.”

“Nope. You’re fine. It’s not—it’s not about him. I don’t even think I’d be this bothered if I lost him and that was it. But first him dying and then finding Fluke and”—I barely stopped myself from adding Gideon, even though Beez didn’t know about him— “and finally having someone around all the time, it’s reminded me of Mom.” I leaned on her shoulder, still holding Fluke against my chest. He leaned over and licked her cheek too, and she giggled and pulled away.

“Silly fox, I’m wearing makeup; don’t lick that.” As though just to prove a point, he leaned in and licked her again. Then he spent a minute looking like he wanted to scrape his tongue against something to get the taste off. He glanced over at the edge of the table, then back at me, tongue still hanging out, like maybe I wouldn’t notice if he did it. It almost made me laugh, because hell, I didn’t care. It wasn’t my table, and I suspected the estate people were going to wash everything anyway.

Mal came out of the kitchen with a box, and gave us both an affected, melodramatic glare. “I see how it is. You ask me to come here so I can do the work and you can snuggle. On the skinny uncomfortable looking carpet.”

“Making you do all my work is always my end goal, babycakes,” Beez told them with a grin.

“Was he some kind of monk?” Mal asked, coming over to sit on the coffee table, which was quite a bit sturdier than it looked. Fluke braced himself and watched them with concern for a moment, apparently convinced the table was going to collapse. “I mean, this place is deeply asceticistic.”

Beez gave a snort. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about the guy.”

“But the bookstore is so homey,” they pointed out.

It was true. The bookstore was all warm colors and wood shelves, and that old burgundy couch. “He was good at what he did. He didn’t decorate the store the way he liked it, he did it to fit a style and attract customers.”

“Oh!” Beez said, loudly and too close to my ear. I cringed back, but she was so distracted that she didn’t notice. “He had some kind of shrine in his closet. It’s super weird, you have to see.”

A shrine? That did not sound like my father.

Sure enough, though, in the back of his closet, past the enormous racks of bland, colorless suits, was something that resembled a shrine. Or maybe one of those crime walls from TV. There was a map on the wall, pins and pictures tacked to it. A picture of my mother, pinned to my house, the date of her death under it, as well as my name, which was crossed out emphatically.

Halfway across town was a picture of a beautiful couple at a formal event, the word “Adler” written beneath.

It was the third one that stopped me cold, though, heart pounding and a cold sweat breaking out across the back of my neck. A picture of my mother with a woman who looked vaguely familiar—maybe someone I’d met when I was very young. The caption was what caught my attention: Meredith Johnson. A date in nineteen-ninety-eight was listed under it.

“Whoa, is that a copy ofInfinite Power?” Mal asked, kneeling to look at a shelf beneath the map. “It is. And—um, oh wow. Your dad may not have cared much about keeping books, but the ones he did keep are worth a freaking fortune. I think this is a first edition.”

They pulled out one book after another, all old, all expensive, and many I didn’t even recognize. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I watched them stack the books.

Dad was never interested in magic that didn’t relate to his own social gifts. He’d never kept up on the latest studies or techniques—didn’t even carry the biggest modern magic magazines in the shop.

One of the last books off the shelf was the most concerning of all. It was handwritten, in that cramped, near-unreadable scrawl I’d been seeing every day for the last two decades. A journal in Dad’s own handwriting.

“Back up a little,” I told them, and pulled out my phone to take pictures of the wall. Every detail captured, I took down the pictures and tucked them into my pocket, and tore the map off the wall, crumpling it up to stuff in the kitchen trash can.

“Sage?” Beez asked, and if the look on her face was anything like the look on mine, we were both terrified. “Honey, what does this mean? Who were those other people?”

“Have either of you heard ofAll Debts Are Paid?” Mal asked, looking at one of the slim, older volumes from Dad’s hidden library.

At face value, it was a silly question. “All Debts Are Paid”was the first rule of magic.

All energy came from somewhere and was finite. If a medical mage used the energy in a person’s body to heal their illness, they could only use the amount of potential energy that person had. It was why people were always told to gain a little weight before medical treatments if possible. If someone used up all the energy from a source, the source ceased to exist. The stream slowed to a trickle, the fire went out, the person died. It was why magics that directly affected people were so strictly regulated.

It was a statement, a law, and a universal fact of existence. A student complained about a failed test, an insomniac about exhaustion, or a spendthrift about their empty bank account, their friends and family told them “all debts are paid.”

It was a common saying, and frankly, it always seemed rude to me. Telling an insomniac they were suffering because of their inability to sleep was cruel at best. It wasn’t like they didn’t know; they just wanted their grievance to be heard.

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