Wizards (19 page)

"They’re a bunch of highly repressed men who hop out into worlds where they can do whatever they want. It must be pretty intoxicating."

"Well, I'm glad you're not repressed, Jake."

"I've been extremely frustrated lately," I couldn't resist pointing out.

"We're going to end that problem in the next few minutes," Jenny said. She kissed me and I got the impression I wasn't the only one in the relationship who'd been feeling frustrated.

"Meep, meep, meep!" [Hey, not in front of the dragon!]

Chapter Ten
: Wizard's Lost

I
t had been just under four weeks since King Petre 12th of Salice announced the betrothal of his daughter, and only one day less since I fled the kingdom vowing never to return. I had kept that promise as far as seeing Princess Esmeralda was concerned, but I was starting to get nervous. For a start, I knew Jenny was determined I find a way out of the marriage that didn't embarrass Esmeralda. Unfortunately, Jenny wasn't letting me in on how I was supposed to come up with that particular miracle.

We bought coffee at Kate's Coffee Shop, which was a few hundred yards off the college campus. Jenny picked up the Evening Chronicle from the rack as I put our two lattes and blueberry muffins down on the table. Thinking back on it, letting her read the paper was a mistake. Every time she reads the local rag it causes trouble. This time was to prove to be no exception.

"Mr. Griffith rang today to say he had some work," I volunteered. "I should earn enough to pay you back for my phone."

Jenny grunted noncommittally. I lost my phone in the college grounds a couple of weeks ago and Jenny lent me the money to buy a new one. If it hadn't been for Mr. Griffith and Jenny I wouldn't have bothered.

"How's your course going?" Normally I don't try and force the conversation. However, I was getting nervous that Jenny was going to say something about Esmeralda, and so I was trying to steer the conversation away from anything remotely connected with Salice.

"Oh no! You are going to have to do something about this, Jake."

"I'm not going to see Esmeralda."

"What about Esmeralda? I was talking about this story in the paper."

"Oh."

"But now that you mention it, we'll have to go back to Salice soon. Perhaps we could visit her this weekend?"

"You were saying about something in the paper?" What had I done? Why did I blurt out about Esmeralda without checking what Jenny was talking about? I cursed my own stupidity at some length and nearly missed Jenny's next words.

"Look at this headline. Can girls be wizards, Jake?"

"Huh? Wha—?" I took the paper out of Jenny's hands and read the story that dominated the front page.

Bronwyn Mathews Vanishes

‘Eleven year old Bronwyn Mathews vanished from her back garden yesterday afternoon. The garden has high fences and there are no signs the fence has been breached. The police are baffled and have asked for anyone who thinks they might have seen her to come forward.’

There was a picture of a rather pretty child and a photograph of the garden. The fence looked like something surrounding a military base, complete with barbed wire running along the top.

"I don't see what you're getting at."

"Look at the photograph of the garden."

I duly looked again.

"There on the patio," Jenny said when she realized I was still baffled. Drawn in chalk on the paving slabs was a hopscotch court.

"Just a coincidence."

"Turn to page two where there's more detail."

Bronwyn has vanished before, but never for so long. 'We put up the fences when she was ten to stop her wandering off,' her father Brian Mathews told our reporter. 'Bronwyn has a way of disappearing on us that started when she was eight. We thought she had grown out of it. She's very young for her age and is always us telling fantastic stories of places she imagines she's been. Her mother and I are frantic with worry."

"Can she be a wizard, or are they always men?"

I sighed. Without a doubt, Jenny was going to get me involved in this whether I wanted or not.

"Wizards can be female, or so the Master claimed. Female wizards usually stay in the background and keep to themselves as they rarely want to take over anything."

"You have to help her, Jake."

"If she's a wizard, she can take care of herself."

"Or be killed, or injured. That could have easily happened to you. You told me so yourself."

"The chances of two wizards being born in one small town in Wales must be astronomical. It's probably a coincidence."

"You help find missing people, Jake. Bronwyn's a missing person. Why can't you find her?"

I sighed even louder, but Jenny frowned at me.

"I only find people when their relatives ask me to look for them. I haven't had a call from this Mr. and Mrs. Mathews, have I?"

My mobile began to ring and Jenny gave me a superior look.

"This is a new mobile. The police don't even have the number," I said casually. I took my time getting the phone out of my pocket in the hope it would stop ringing before I could answer it. The damned thing kept on ringing regardless of my wishes.

"Yes."

"Jake Morrissey?"

"Yes."

"This is Sergeant Brandon Jones. We got your phone number from your mother. I wonder if we I can ask you to come down to the station."

"I'm in Kate's Coffee Shop and I'm busy."

"Wait there, we'll send a car."

The line went dead. Jenny looked at me expectantly.

"The police are sending a car."

"I knew it," Jenny said with a smirk on her face.

The police don't like me and I have to say the feeling is mutual. When the car arrived, the two constables didn't want to take Jenny with us, until I mentioned her full name. It was not that many months ago she'd been kidnapped by a sadistic serial killer. I helped him gain a close and intimate acquaintanceship with a concrete pillar, which ended his life and helped uncover another four murders.

The police never believed Jenny's story of what happened to her, mainly because it was a pack of lies. But then, it would be difficult to explain how the man ended up crushed three inches into solid concrete. I did it to him and I certainly can't explain how I did it. I was very angry with him.

The journey to the police station took place in an unhealthy silence. I asked no questions and nothing was volunteered. We were taken to an interrogation room on the second floor and nobody offered us tea and biscuits when we arrived.

"Jenny Owens," a man in his forties said as he stood up, "you don't remember me, but I met you a couple of times when you were a child. It was your father who rang me and suggested I ask Jake Morrissey to help with the search." He turned to me. "I'm Brian Mathews and you must be Jake."

We shook hands. Sergeant Jones turned up at the door and sent off the two constables who brought us to the police station.

"Jake," Sergeant Jones said curtly.

"Sergeant," I replied, equally curtly.

"Mr. Mathews has asked we bring you in on the search. You know my views on the matter."

"Peter Owens is convinced Jake can help."

"Jake didn't help with your escape from your attacker, did he Miss Owens?"

"Of course not, Sergeant," Jenny replied sweetly. "But Jake is very good at finding people, isn't he?"

The sergeant frowned and didn't answer Jenny's question.

"Peter said I should bring something of Bronwyn's with me." I was offered a small cloth purse. "She normally takes this with her."

"In this particular case I'd like to see your back garden, if that's all right with you?"

"My car is in the parking lot, we can go right now."

The driveway to the house had a police constable on guard and there were a number of photographers hanging around. Flashguns erupted as we drove into the drive. Brian told us a female police officer was keeping his wife company while they waited for news.

"There's a gate at the side of the house we normally keep locked. It's been open since the police started investigating Bronwyn's disappearance."

"We'll find it," I said casually. "We won't be coming into the house, but we will start looking for your daughter as soon as we've looked in the garden. I'm sure she'll turn up safe and sound."

We shook hands again and Jenny and I wandered around the side of the house to the gate. It was an impressive solid oak monstrosity. Barbed wire coiled along the fence and above the gate, making escape impossible.

"If I lived here, I'd want to get out the first chance I got," I whispered to Jenny. "Are you sure bringing her back to this place is a good thing?"

"Let’s find her first and we can ask her, Jake. What are you going to do?"

"If she used a stone to hop out into the multiverse, the court might still be open. I'm going to try hopping out on it."

"Then I can't come too?" Jenny sounded disappointed.

"Probably not safe, not until I've checked where it goes. Once I've got there, I'll return and take you with me."

Jenny nodded. I was keen to get her involved in this search. Perhaps if she saw how tedious this work could get, she wouldn't be so keen for me to take on the next job.

I looked around to see no one was looking and then hopped and skipped across the court. With no destination in mind and no stone thrown, I should have stayed on Earth unless Bronwyn had hopped before me.

Soft stone and rubble crumbled below my feet and a wave of intense heat blasted at me. I almost slipped as I tottered backwards. Down the slope and not all that far away, molten lava rumbled past. The noise, the heat and the smell of sulfur were overwhelming.

Staggering backwards, I found myself in a small lee of land. Blocked from the radiant heat of the liquid rock my face still hurt from my short exposure. At the bottom of the slope, a flat black slab of rock was marked out with a hurriedly drawn hopscotch court. That was a relief, because I'd been worried Bronwyn fell to a horrible fiery death.

I certainly wasn't going to bring Jenny to this hellhole. I hastily hopped and skipped across the new court to another world.

And found myself in a flat stone desert. I spun around and looked out across the virtually featureless terrain. It was almost as hot in the desert as it had been at the lava. This Bronwyn girl certainly showed a talent for finding places I would never want to go. I looked down at the ground in the hope of finding some kind of tracks. To my surprise, there were cart tracks on the stone below my feet. Footprints remained in the dusting of sand over the rocks. Assuming the local sun set in the west, the tracks went North West.

I hopped back to the patio and started to shiver. Compared with the two places I'd just been, Wales was very cold.

"Coming?" I asked and Jenny took my hand. A second later, we were standing in the desert.

"God, it's hot!"

"Not as hot as the place Bronwyn hopped from to here. That had running lava flows."

"How will we find her? She could have wandered off anywhere." Jenny looked around the desert. If someone collapsed here they would probably be covered in sand in a short time. A hot breeze blew across the open plain and my lips were already feeling parched.

"There are cart tracks over here and enough footprints to give us the direction the carts were going."

Jenny peered down at the marks in the dust.

"How can you be sure?"

"Welsh shepherd blood flows through my veins," I said grinning at her.

"I thought that only worked for finding the nearest pub."

"That too. Welsh shepherds are nothing if not practical."

"Do we start walking?"

"Only if you want to. Otherwise we could do this." I grabbed Jenny's hand and hopped us to the horizon in the direction of the tracks. Jenny staggered from me on arrival as the ground had a slope. I'm used to landing from a hop and remained standing at the spot I appeared.

"Next time, warn me if you're going to do that. Where did we come from?"

I pointed back across the featureless landscape. This was not particularly helpful as one bit of the desert looked exactly like the rest.

"And where did the cart track go?"

I pointed confidently in the other direction. The sun was sinking in the direction I pointed and Jenny put her hand onto her brow to try to see.

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I can see three covered wagons. It looks as though the ground rises fairly steeply over there. They're nearly at the horizon." To me, the wagons were easy to see. Each was pulled by a single horse and three people walked besides them.

"I can't see a thing," Jenny complained. "Either your eyesight would put an eagle to shame or you're cheating and using magic."