Magickeepers: The Eternal Hourglass
Read Magickeepers: The Eternal Hourglass Online
Authors: Erica Kirov
Copyright © 2009 by Erica Kirov
Cover and internal design © 2009 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover illustration © Eric Fortune
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kirov, Erica.
Magickeepers: the eternal hourglass / by Erica Kirov.
p. cm.
Summary: Living in Las Vegas with his unsuccessful father, Nick Rostov learns on his thirteenth birthday that he is descended from a powerful line of Russian Magickeepers on his dead mother's side, and that the equally powerful but evil Shadowkeepers will stop at nothing to get an ancient relic that his grandfather gave him.
[1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Magicians—Fiction. 3. Good and evil—Fiction. 4. Family— Fiction. 5. Russia—History—Fiction. 6. Las Vegas (Nev.)—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Eternal hourglass.
PZ7.K6382Mag 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008047718
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
LB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my father, for instilling in me a pride in my Russian heritage.
To my mother, for teaching me to live in the moment.
And to my children, Alexa, Nicholas, Isabella, and Jack,
for teaching me what it means to love.
A huge thank you, as always, to my agent, Jay Poynor, who was enchanted by the book idea, and who has never failed to support me in my writing endeavors.
To Lyron Bennett, my editor at Jabberwocky, who drove the writing of this book—his notes, his questions…I met my match as a writer. I appreciate all the inspiration and ideas he offered. The book—and I as a writer—gained infinitely from his insights.
To Irina Polyakova, who translated phrases into Russian for me and was more than generous with her knowledge of linguistics and Russian culture. I very much appreciate her patience with me.
To Writer's Cramp—Pam, Jon, and Melody—for Tuesdays and the power of conference calls, friendship, dedication, and…sushi.
To my young friends—the “gang” at New Hope—Miranda, Lauren, Allison, Maggie, Josh, and most especially Jacob, who always makes me feel like a special author.
To my nieces and nephews, whom I adore: Tyler, Zachary, and Tori and Cassidy (Twins #1); and Pannos and his sisters, Sofia and Evanthia (Twins #2).
And finally, to my own family. Most especially, for this book, to my children, who have so wonderfully understood deadlines, and helped me name tigers and polar bears and envision a world in which magic exists. Because in the end, family is magic.
The power of thought—the magic of the mind!
—Lord Byron
The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
My brain is the key that sets my mind free.
—Harry Houdini
1. A Less-Than-Stellar Birthday Report Card
6. Revelations and Advertisements
11. Grandpa's Triumphant Return
13. A Great Deal on a Dancing Bear!
14. Who Sneaks into a Library During the Summer?
16. Sometimes All You Need Is a Little Push
17. An Imperial History Lesson
18. Some Questions Are Better Left Unanswered
25. Fire, Water, Wind, and Sand
Princess Theatre, Montreal, Canada, 1926
T
HE MYSTERIOUS MAN IN THE BLACK WOOL CLOAK SAT in the front row of the Princess Theatre, precisely in the center seat. He set his top hat on his knees, and his rough beard straggled down, like a bird's nest after a storm. The man waited for the finale of the show, speaking to no one, not even his companion. Instead, he stared intently with pale, magnetic eyes as the most famous magician in the world, Harry Houdini, announced his next trick from the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen, introducing my original invention, the Water Torture Cell.”
As the audience hushed, Houdini, short and muscular with a head of dark hair and wearing a simple black bathing suit, was draped in chains by his wife, Bess. A policeman from the audience was brought onstage wearing a dapper uniform,
badge gleaming under the spotlights. Holding up his own handcuffs, the policeman pulled Houdini's arms behind his back and clapped the cuffs on tightly, checking them several times before nodding. The chains wrapped around Houdini's body were heavy and clinked and rattled with every move he made. Finally, two huge padlocks were attached to the chains and locked dramatically with shining brass keys.
Slowly, the magician was lifted—upside down—and suspended over the glass torture chamber filled to the top with ice-cold water. Bess signaled, and Houdini was lowered until his head almost touched the beckoning water.
Bess told the crowd, “Take one last breath with the master, Houdini, and see how long you can hold it.”
The crowd inhaled as one. Houdini filled his lungs with air—
one last breath
—and was lowered into the water, first his head, neck, then body, and finally his feet, before Bess fastened the top. The chamber was not big enough for Houdini to turn around in. A thick curtain was drawn. An hourglass was overturned.
“He must emerge before this sand runs out,” Bess announced to the crowd. “Or he will drown.”
Not one whisper could be heard in the theater. Patrons in fur coats and fancy theater dress leaned forward, women in plumage and jewels knotted their hands together anxiously. The man in the cloak heard people exhaling around him as
they gasped for breath. He watched the sands trickling, as if he were somehow counting each grain. Now, as the sands ran down inside the hourglass, members of the audience murmured. Someone near the man in the cloak whispered, “It's impossible to hold your breath that long. They must free him.”
“It's been two minutes!” Bess exclaimed from the stage, panic in her voice. “He cannot survive.”
Bess parted the curtain, revealing Houdini struggling wildly with his shackles. Frantically, she closed the curtain and ran for the safety ax, ready to smash the glass and free her beloved husband from the throes of death. She raised the ax as the audience gasped in horror.
The man in the cloak saw those around him frozen at the edge of their seats as if statues. Seconds passed. The curtain rose.
The Water Torture Cell was empty.
At that moment, a dripping wet and smiling Houdini was revealed, standing atop the torture cell, arms raised above his head in triumph.
The crowd in the Princess Theatre rose to their feet as if they were one, stamping and clapping their approval, whistles and shouts of “Bravo!” ringing through the theater. But not the man in the cloak with the icy eyes. He stared, not at Houdini, but at the hourglass that had sifted the
sparkling sand. He could see the lettering etched along its gold-rimmed top.
His companion leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, “Is that it, Master?”
The man in the cloak nodded, his eyes narrow with fury. “Yes.”
“Now what?”
“We must do whatever it takes.”
Eight days later, Harry Houdini, revered showman, the most famous magician ever to have lived, was dead.
A LESS-THAN-STELLARBIRTHDAY REPORT CARD
N
ICK ROSTOV STARED DOWN AT HIS END-OF-YEAR REPORT card.
One F. Two Cs. One B-minus. And an A. In Health.
He tried to imagine how he would explain to his dad that his lone A was for the class that taught where babies came from; that he knew what a fallopian tube was, but square roots eluded him.
If he thought his report card was bad, lunch was a disaster. When he walked into the cafeteria, an overwhelming stench overpowered him—way worse than Tuna-Surprise Tuesdays and Mystery-Meat Mondays. The usual lady in the hairnet had been replaced by a creepy guy with long, wiry hair and strange eyes, and whatever the guy was serving didn’t look good—and smelled worse. The smell was so gross that Nick
didn’t eat and instead fished from his backpack a pulverized snack-size bag of potato chips, which had been crushed into smithereens by his math book. This meant he actually ate potato chip
dust
, and his stomach growled all afternoon.
When the final bell rang, he grabbed his skateboard from his locker and waved good-bye to a couple of kids in the hall. Once he was off school property, Nick rode his board down the hot Nevada sidewalk in the general direction of the hotel where he lived in a suite with his dad.
He’d attended two schools in the last three years. Every time his dad was fired or changed jobs, they moved. Nick bent his knees and jumped a curb on his skateboard.
Living in hotels with his dad meant whenever Nick made a friend at the hotel pool, the kid was on vacation. He figured over the last three or four years, he’d made a hundred friends, and not one of them lived in Las Vegas. He once had a friend from Belize. He didn’t even know where Belize was.
Nick rode his skateboard into a big parking lot by the high school, the wheels making a steady
whish-whish
noise. He didn’t want to go home—not with that report card. Not that his dad would say much, but he always had a sad look on his face. Bad report cards only made it sadder.
Nick didn’t know how long he rode his skateboard, hopping curbs, jumping over banged-up trash cans lying on their sides. The last two cars left the high school's parking lot, two
teachers with bulging briefcases, grinning from ear to ear. Even teachers were happy when school let out for summer.
