The Conjuring Glass (21 page)

Zoe snatched it from her hand and pushed it into the top hinge from the bottom. She shoved the door shut, and when the latch tongue clicked in place, the door began to cool almost at once. The orange glow of flames licking between the top of the door and the frame winked out.

Zoe did not relax with the closing of the strange door, but snatched the black wand from the ground and retreated a few steps. “He can still come through.”

“No, he can’t,” Penny said, and when Zoe turned to regard her, she pulled his key from her pocket. “He needs this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” Penny said.

“Very well done, young ladies,” said a voice from the trees. “I would indeed need that key to come back through. Luckily for me, I’m already here.”

Penny and Zoe turned in unison to the sound of Tovar’s voice, both raising their wands. They fired identical spells at the red magician, but before either could reach him, giant black wings spread from his shoulders, pushing his cloak out behind him. He crouched and leapt, his wings pumping the air, and shot straight up through the trees.

Their spells passed below his feet, blasting leaves from the hanging willow limbs.

“Where’d he go?” Zoe spun in a circle, searching.

“I don’t know!” Penny searched the sky above them, saw a dark shape pass across the moon, then lost track of it.

They both screamed when something crashed through the green canopy over their heads. A moment later, one of Tovar’s boots landed in the dirt between them.

They both stared at it.

Tovar dropped from the night sky screaming, and Penny saw his feet, bootless bird’s talons, clenching and unclenching on empty air before one of them grabbed the back of Zoe’s shirt and the other snatched the wand from her hand.

Zoe shrieked as Tovar rocketed upward through the overhead boughs, then dropped her, and before Penny could even think to raise her wand to help, Tovar, The Birdman, plummeted downward again. He caught Zoe a bare moment before she would have crashed to the ground, pinning her against him, a human shield, and pointed his recovered wand at Penny.

Penny did not lower hers. If she did Tovar would capture her too, and any chance they had to escape him would be gone.

“You have been a lot of trouble, you little red monster! It’s a familial trait, like your father’s red hair, and those pretty green eyes.” Tovar’s face broke into a wide, handsome smile of good humor, but Penny knew that face was a lie, an illusion.

“
You don’t know anything about my father
!
Let her go
,” she shouted, taking a step forward, holding her wand steady. She did not attack though, as much as she wanted to. She was afraid she’d hit Zoe.

Tovar broke into gales of artless, honest laughter, the laughter of a man with some inside joke he’s bursting to share. “I know much. Much more than you, anyway. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met a person so ignorant of their own history and heritage.”

“I don’t believe you!” She did though. She couldn’t help but believe him.

Tovar shrugged, a grotesque gesture that sent his wings fluttering.

“Your belief or disbelief matters not a bit. But if you require proof, you could always ask the woman you called mother when you meet her in the next life.”

He winked at her, and Penny found herself wanting nothing more than to blast that smile off his face.

“The woman who called herself Diana Sinclair was not who she claimed to be. I’m not altogether sure
she
knew who she was anymore.”

The smile faded from his face, and he fixed her with his cold green eyes. Not his real eyes, only part of the mask he wore, but his real eyes would be just as cold.

“However, you’ll have all the answers you could hope for on the other side. I’ll not return empty-handed.”

He twitched his wand upward, and Penny felt her own try to leap from her hand. She tightened her grip on it, using both hands to keep it from flying away. The force pulling it strengthened for a moment as Tovar pulled his wand upward, then disappeared as he relented.

Penny sent a blast of air at him, throwing his cloak out behind him like a black flag, catching his unfurled wings and throwing him off balance before he could tuck them back at his sides.

Tovar laughed. “Is that all you’ve got, little one?” He gave his wand a minute wave, a tight little circle.

The world seemed to twist in Penny’s vision, and a wave of nausea crashed down on her. Her knees came unhinged, and the pain that shot up her legs as they hit the hard, stony earth seemed unimportant in the face of the terror and confusion that suddenly held her. The earth itself tried to buck her off, and she fell face first to the ground, digging her fingers into the dirt as the world twisted, rolled, and tried to send her tumbling in all directions at once. All sense of balance, of up and down deserted her. Earth and sky swapped places, and she felt gravity itself rejecting her.

The sound of Tovar’s laughter pierced her terror like a needle, and a sudden, growing anger gave her a fraction of her focus back. She turned her face up, fighting a renewed nausea, and saw Tovar tracing complex patterns in the air before him. He finished with a sharp downward slash of his wand, and a bright purple line appeared in front of him.

It crackled, buzzed, glowed brighter, and opened like a vertical mouth in the air. Through it, Tovar and Zoe’s shapes were dim, almost not there at all.

Penny pushed herself up with trembling hands, could not quite gain her feet, and so knelt before the stretching, widening crack in reality, balancing herself on one hand and raising her wand with the other.

“Run, Penny,” Zoe cried, struggling fruitlessly against the arm pinning her to Tovar’s chest.

Tovar turned his attention back to Penny.

“They’ll want you alive, I suppose, but I don’t think they’ll care if you’re damaged,” and with a snarl, he brandished his wand at her.

Without thinking, Penny forced her wand up, and parried his spell with one of her own.

The shield shimmered between them for only a few seconds before her concentration broke and she spilled back to the dirt, but it was long enough. Penny saw his spell fly toward her, shining and opalescent in the firelight. It struck her shield, bowing it in as if determined to break through, then rebounded back on him.

The spell hit Tovar in the face, snapping his head back, knocking the wand from his raised hand, and she saw smoke rise from the singed and reddening skin of his hand.

His face, the false face of Tovar The Red, sizzled and burned away, and the dark, slick feathers and snapping beak of his true face appeared.

Tovar screeched, the cry of a wounded monster bird, and lunged for the doorway he’d drawn, dragging Zoe behind him.

Zoe punched, clawed, kicked, but could not break his hold.

“No,” Penny said, clawing the ground to drag herself forward, still held in the clammy grip of vertigo and nausea.

The sound of a low growl, something with a throat full of rage, drew her attention, making her skin prickle with a fresh wave of fear.

Then she saw him, crouched in his hole on the other side of the creek. His red fur bushed up, his snout wrinkled up to show snarling rows of sharp little teeth.

“Let go of her you dirty crow,” Ronan growled, and leapt across the water. He rebounded off the trunk of the tree at the water’s edge and flew at Tovar, scrambling up the smoldering black cape, sinking his teeth into the back of the monster’s neck.

Screeching in fresh pain, Tovar released Zoe and clawed at Ronan, catching him by his bushed out hackles, and threw him.

Before Penny’s chin hit the ground and she lost consciousness, she saw Zoe shove Tovar toward that glowing fissure he’d drawn between them.

Tovar The Red, The Birdman, tumbled through it, his screams fading like the scream of something falling down a long well.

The glowing lines closed into a single vertical line again, then burned out, and he was gone.

Penny fainted.

Unanswered Questions

Penny awoke to a tug on her arm, and the pressure of sharp teeth pinching her flesh. She didn’t want to wake up. She was comfortable, the residual pain from the spells that had hit her was fading, and the world was no longer spinning out of control, swapping earth and sky, trying to buck her off.

“Nuh-huh,” she mumbled, pushing against the furry muzzle that closed on her arm.

The teeth let go of her arm, but continued tugging on the sleeve of her robe.

“Come on, Little Red. You have to go.” The voice, muffled slightly by a mouthful of cloth, was familiar and welcome. She wanted to ask Ronan where he’d been, she hadn’t seen him for weeks, but the desire to sleep was stronger. She’d ask him later.

“Penny, wake up!”

She felt hands on her shoulders, lifting her from the ground, supporting her in an uncomfortable sitting position—and the last scraps of a happy dream, one where her father came to help her get rid of The Birdman, slid away. Penny opened her eyes.

She saw Zoe, still holding her shoulders, Tovar’s black wand stuck in the waistband of her jeans. Her pale, frightened face relaxed a bit. Sitting next to her, Ronan barked in excitement and leapt into Penny’s lap, bathing her cheek with wet licks.

The last of her lingering confusion departed. Penny remembered where they were, and what had happened.

They had done it, faced Tovar, not The Red, but The Birdman, and won.

Penny pulled Ronan close with one arm, dragged Zoe down, and hugged her with the other.

“We did it,” she said, as much to herself as the others.

“Yeah,” Zoe said. She sounded almost as shocked as Penny felt.

“You did well, young ladies,” Ronan said. “Very well, but it’s time for you to go now, before Susan finds you missing.”

Zoe broke from Penny’s arms and pulled her to her feet.

Ronan scrambled off her lap and ran up the steep path, waiting for them at the top. “Get that mirror. We need to get you two back home. Hurry, there’s no time to waste.”

Zoe dashed back to the closed door, stooping to pick up the mirror they’d taken from Tovar’s lair.

Penny expected the vertigo and nausea to return when she moved, but it did not. She ran up the hill to Ronan’s side, and a few moments later Zoe came up behind them.

While Zoe made her way down the trail, Penny knelt beside Ronan.

“Where have you been? We really missed you…and who was that? How did he know so much about me?”

Ronan moved closer to her, his furry snout only a few inches away from her face.

“I cannot say, but you shouldn’t dwell on anything that trickster told you. His kind are liars and thieves.” He was silent for a moment, peeking down the dark trail toward Zoe, who stood waiting. “Yet...he was familiar with this place…you’ve seen how well he disguised himself. He’s been here before.”

“But why?” Penny reached out, hesitated, and put a hand on Ronan’s shoulders. She had to resist the urge to pet him like a dog.

She somehow knew that would irritate him. “Why would he come here? Why was he trying to kidnap us?”

“To sell as slaves,” Ronan said without hesitation. “Where he comes from, human children bring a high price.”

“He was going to sell us?” Zoe, tired of waiting alone in the dark, had joined them again. Her normally dark skin was pale in the moonlight.

“Children can be trained…conditioned to forget freedom.” Ronan looked away from them, then slipped from beneath Penny’s hand and started down the trail again. “We have to go now.”

They ran to catch up, Penny replaying Ronan’s words in her head. She did not entirely trust his answer.

I cannot say
did not necessarily mean
I don’t know
.

As they ran, the aches of the night’s work began to settle into Penny’s bones and muscles again, and the questions continued to gnaw at her.

How did he know so much about her?

How did he know about her mother?

How did he know about her father?

They arrived to find the house still deserted, the phone ringing.

For the second time that night, Penny rushed to pick it up. “Susan?”

Susan’s voice blared from the speaker, not angry, but excited, and Penny had to hold the phone away from her ear.

“No. We were upstairs…what?” She turned to Zoe and pointed at the television. “Yeah, we’re turning it on.”

Zoe seemed frozen in place, but a nudge from Ronan got her moving. She knelt in front of the TV and turned it on. Canned laughter filled the living room.

“Find the news.”

Zoe flipped through channels until she found the local station, broadcasting live.

“Yeah, okay.” Penny hung up and turned toward Zoe and Ronan, who lay curled up in front of the television. “She’ll be home soon.”

Penny recognized the scene on the screen in front of them. It was the park, bathed by the light of dancing flames and the red strobes of fire engine lights. The giant effigy of The Birdman was wreathed in flames and tilting crazily as the House of Mirrors fell in on itself.

The camera panned on the perky, smiling face of a local reporter.