Page 81 of Crossroads Magic
“I saw nothing that would spoil it,” Trevalyan said. “But time is the only measure that will tell you if it worked.” He patted my arm once more. “Have confidence in your work. It helps.”
“Fake it till you make it?”
Trevalyan laughed. “If you must, yes. Here.” He held out a small leather drawstring pouch. The leather string was long, and looped. “Scrape the ashes into this, and put it around Ghaliya’s neck.”
?
I drank the coffee in the flask. When Hirom tapped and asked about dinner, I told him to put out supplies and let everyone make their own sandwiches. He went away without comment.
While I was sipping coffee, I listened to my book. I didn’t want to read anything written by my mother right now.Harold the Hobgoblin’sadventures were exactly the distraction I needed. Only, listening to the narrator talk of magic and hexes and spells, fairies and goblins, had lost its charm. I kept wondering if anything the author wrote was actually true.
For sure, I knew that vampires did not erupt into a column of flames if they were exposed to sunlight. I had seen Broch standing in full sunlight, and all the sunlight did was irritate his eyes.
Hunters didn’t hunt vampires anymore. Vampires workedwithhunters to find other creatures. And dryads were the royalty of the world. At least, the world I was starting to know.
I grew increasingly restless as Harold’s adventures continued. They felt like comic-book tales to me. Finally, I put my phone down and took out my earbuds. All was quiet in Ghaliya’s room. Was that why I couldn’t settle into the book? I wanted to hear if she was ill again, and the earbuds would prevent that?
But my restlessness continued to grow, even without the earbuds. I got up and walked the length of the sitting room and back.
Something on the wall.
It wasn’t the direct and distinct tugging I’d experienced before. Instead, it was as though a section of the wall was radiating coldness. I could only detect the coldness by passing it and feeling the change against my side from a mild warmth to a bone-deep chill.
I squeezed between the wing chair and the little cupboard that served as an end table for the sofa and held my palm in front of the wall, not quite touching it. The chill was unmistakable.
I pulled open the picture frame hiding the two little drawers, and slid open the top drawer.
As I had the first time I’d opened the drawer, I wrinkled my nose at the collection of junk in it. Rusty nail clippers, a few chess pieces, screws, nails, checkers pieces, a screwdriver handle missing the bit at the end that would fit into a screw head. Cash register receipts so old the print had faded and was invisible. A tiny plastic bag holding clear half-domed pieces of plastic mounted on a strip of waxed paper, that I finally figured out were stoppers to stick on furniture and walls to stop doors from slamming directly against them and dinging the paint or furniture finish.
Pieces of string. A few old wooden beads, mostly scratched and useless. A miniature Rubik’s Cube.
I stirred the contents without hope. What was making me cold when I got near it? My fingers were chilled, so I was close. But I had no idea what I was actually looking for. I only had the coldness to guide me. And nothing I touched was anything but room temperature and inert.
I opened the bottom drawer and let my hand hover over it. Yes, something in this drawer, for arctic chill bathed my palm.
The drawer was filled with the same miscellany as the first. Old pens, stubs of pencils, pennies and nickels and dimes. Paper clips. Folded and crumpled Post Its, with dust, hair and grit attached to the formerly sticky strip. A half-used tear-off notepad. A hockey puck.
I paused as the notepad uncovered the hockey puck, recalling how surprised I had been by Ghaliya’s interest in hockey. Had my mother also been a fan? I couldn’t recall her ever watching hockey on our tiny TV, when I was a child.
Perhaps my father hadn’t liked it.
I tried to shut down the thought as soon as it popped into my head. But Juda’s evaluation of my father had opened up a whole wing of my life that I had thought safely dealt-with and closed. He’d made me question how well I had known my father, all over again.
I had re-examined my relationship with him when he had abruptly left Haigton Crossing and my mother, with no note or word to say why or where he was going. As far as I knew, he could be living anywhere in the world…or he could be dead. Neither of us had heard from him since he had disappeared, the same year they had moved here. That had been the year Nanna had died and left my mother this inn.
The police—well, I suppose it would have been the same Sheriff’s office who had dealt with my mother’s death—they had looked into my father’s disappearance and found no suggestion of foul play or suspicious circumstances.
My father had simply gone away.
His departure had made me wonder how well I had known him. What did it take for a man to walk away without a word to their wife, their daughter, and start another life?
Had he hated hockey and refused to let my mother watch it? Or had they simply come to an agreement that hockey wouldn’t be aired in their household? Perhaps all sports were considered timewasters, for we had never watched football, basketball or baseball, either.
I went to pick the hockey puck up and snatched my hand back as the chill turned into a hard, biting coldness as my fingertips got close to the puck.
That was it. Whatever it was.
You know what it is, I told myself. At least, I was almost certain that I had found the missing summoning token.
