Flicker (28 page)

“Dammit!” Filo shouted
, dashing toward the stair.

For a moment, after he pushed the apartment door op
en, Filo wasn’t entirely sure
what was happening. Stacks of
books had toppled
lay like a ruined city. Drifts of paper covered the floor, and several bottles and jars had fallen from the table and broken, their contents mingling in a puddle on the floor.

And there was Lee, in the middle of it all. When she saw him, she jabbed her hand toward the other side of the room, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly.

A
broomstick, the one he kept in the other room but never used,
was
sweeping up a storm, all by itself. It scraped the floorboards, tipping over book towers and anything else that got in its way.

Filo unleashed a few of his choicest swear
words
. He moved his hand in a wide arc, catching the enchantment with the tips of his fingers and tearing it loose. The broom froze, then clattered to the floor.

“I found the spell in that book you gave me,” Lee said apologetically. “I thought it would be good practice, and it was so dirty in here
…
”

Filo turned around, surveying the damage. It would take hours to pick everything up. The most urgent thing was that he clean up the spilled potions.

He went to grab a handful of rags from the other room, saying nothing to Lee
. When he returned, he shoved them
into her hands and directed her toward the puddle.

“Start sopping that up,” he instructed. “Don’t get it on your hands, don’t cut yourself on the glass, and whatever you do, don’t touch your eyes.”

“Okay.” Lee knelt beside the shimmering puddle. She dropped
a
rag on top of it and poked at it nervously, like she thought it would grow arms and grab her. He sighed and shooed her out of the way, mopping up the mess himself.

“I’m sorry
,” Lee said meekly.

Filo didn’t say anything. Lee started shuffling stray papers into a pile.

“This is probably a really bad time to ask you something like this,” she said, after a moment, “but I want you to tell me about messenger spells.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Flying a little close to the sun, aren’t you, Icarus?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “And I really don’t advise it. You’ll just end up hurting yourself.”

“How could you know what I—”

“It’s your
mom
, isn’t it?” Filo ask
ed abruptly. “You want to
find her.”

Lee stared at him, shock
plain
in her eyes.

“Nasser and Jason were the same way,” he explained. “Actually, they were worse. They were sick over the whole thi
ng.
All they wanted
was
to
go back to their old lives. But after a while, they learned to move past what had happened, and live in
this
life, instead of in a memory of the other one. You ought to take a lesson from them.”

“But that’s different,” Lee insisted. “Their mother
died.
Mine—”

“Spent seven
years thinking
rabid dogs had ripped you apart
,” Filo said coldly. “For all we know, she could be dead herself by now. But it doesn’t matter. Even if she’s alive, you won’t find her with a messenger spell.”

“Why not?”

“Because they only work over short distances. The farthest I’ve ever sent one is
fifteen
miles. Any farther, and the magic wears off. Maybe a more experienced Seer could send it farther, but I can’t. You can’t contact her, Lee. Not that way.”

“What if I still want to learn the spell?” she a
sked suddenly
.
Her eyes were bright with tears, but she blinked them back, swallowing.
“Even if I can’t use it the way I want to, I should still learn it, right?”

“No.” Before she could ask anything
, he continued, “You’ll
blow yourself up if you keep at this like you’ve been. Spells go wrong all the time.”

“But
I won’t need to pull the enchantment
off, just
get it started.”

“
Y
ou started learning magic
yesterday
.
Crawl before you can walk.
”

“I need to learn somehow,” Lee persisted. “
Is it such a hard spell?”

“Not really. I use it all the time.”

“So what gives?”

“Isn’t it obvious? It takes skill to screw up a cleaning spell. Imagine what you could do with a higher-level spell. It would be a pretty impressive disaster.”

“But isn’t it
just like the animatio
n spell you showed me yesterday?
”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Filo replied. “You’re not just animating a plane to fly around the room. You’re bewitching it to carry a message to a particular person or place. You have be totally specific in your intentions, or the magic will fizzle out, or end up in the wrong place. You can’t leave any room for extrapolation on the spell’s part.”

“A spell can extrapolate?”

“Can and will.”

She paused before speaking again. “Do you really use it every day?”

“Just about. It makes communication a lot easier. Instead of hunting someone down on fo
ot, you write down what
you need to say and send it off
.”

“How do make s
ure it gets to the right person
?”

“You put their energy into your mind and will the spell to seek it out,” Filo said. “That way, you don’t need a specific destination, just a pe
rson.
It’s easier if you know them, but sometimes you can do it with just a name.”

Filo picked up the sopping cloths and carried them into the kitchen. He dropped them into the sink and turned on the faucet, then rinsed his hands.

When
he returned, Lee
grabbed a sheet of paper, folded it, and held it out to him. “Will you animate this?”

“You’re trying to get a feel for my energy, aren’t you?”

She nodded guiltlessly. “Can you blame me?”

“Not really.”

Filo had done a lot for Lee. He’d been a grouch about it,
sure,
bu
t it wasn’t like he
owe
d
her anything. Still
…

He took the airplane from Lee, balancing it on his upturned palm.

He focused far more energy than necessary into animating it, enough for Lee’s senses—still almost as dull as a normal’s—to pick it up. The excess energy dissipated into the air as the plane rose from his hand.

“Do you have it?” he asked.

“I think so…”
She wore a mystified expression.

“Good,” he said darkly.
“Because I won’t be showing
you again.”
 

* * *

Of all the strange things Lee had experienced so far, sensing Filo’s energy was quite possibly the strangest. Two days had passed since he showed it to her, and even now, as she sat alone in the apartment where Filo had left her yet again, she couldn’t put it from her mind.

Filo’s energy was like a rush of wind, powerful enough to make her pause, and yet so subtle that there was no breeze. It was a pressure in the air, neither hot nor cold.

The oddest part
was the impression left in her body and mind:
blue.

It wasn’t so much a thought or image as it was a feeling, a cloud in her mind that refused to take a single shape. It was a hazy
impression
of dark, flickering blue, reminding her of the candles in the apartment that burned blue at the wick. Feeling blue was like tasting green or hearing pink. It was impossible and strange. But it
had
happened, and Lee knew that she would never forget how it felt.

Lee tore a page from her sketchbook and grabbed a pencil.
Pretty impressive disaster, right?
she wrote, then folded the plane.

She
pushed the window open, holding the plane in both hands. She closed her eyes, pouring her magic over the plane as if she were watering a plant. The memory of Filo’s energy gave direction to the spell.
Blue.

At first, the energy tickled her hands like feathers brushing over her skin. As she held onto the energy, however, the tickling sensat
ion became sharp needle pricks that made her wince.
She held
onto
the energy for as long as she could bear it, then released the spell. There was a soft rush of energy
and heat—
and when she opened her eyes, the plane was gone.
 

* * *

Lee sat by the window after the plane disappeared,
sketching to pass the time while she waited
. She didn’t expect Filo to reply immediately.
Even after the plane found him, she
doubted that answering her was a top priority.

So she was surprised when the plane returned to her just fifteen minutes later. Two words were scrawled beneath her message:

Beginner’s luck.

Chapter
Ten:

Out of Sight

Lee spent the next morning in the shop, shadowing Filo as he shelved items and organized records
,
until he finally set her to work.
Filo seemed to have a peculiar knowledge of almost everything in the shop, like the scattered items were already catalogued in his mind. It just took him a while to unearth everything.

She boxed up some of the less expensive art
ifacts and wiped down the
windows
and counters
. Lee had been
dying to do some cleaning
around the shop
—the mess was driving her crazy—and this was far more interesting than any h
ousework she’d ever done
. She enjoyed getting a closer look at the shop as she sifted through items and cleaned them off
: dust-covered amulets of iron and bronze; knives with smooth bone handles, their blades wrapped in frayed silk; a deck of hand-painted tarot cards that felt warm in Lee’s hands, lying atop an ancient velvet cushion inside a carved jade box.

As she polished a large snow globe that contained a tiny, exquisitely detailed castle
of
gleaming ice, Lee asked,
“Where do
Neman
and
Morgan
go all day?”

“Beats me.
”
Filo
was
pawing
through a cardboard box, looking
for a
particular
horseshoe. “I usually don’t see them in the daytime
anymore
.”

“But they live here, don’t they?”
Lee shook the snow globe, and gasped as little storm clouds gathered inside the glass dome. A miniature blizzard swept around t
he castle; cold radiated from the globe
, and Lee heard a distant whistling wind. When the blizzard cleared,
miniature
figures emerged
onto the balconies, and a group of knights riding tiny
steel-gray
horses galloped up to the castle gate.

“
The shop belongs to them, but they live all over th
e place,
” Filo said,
“
wherever they want
. The apartment is more for the benefit of apprentices.”
He looked up suddenly, noticing the snow globe in her hands. “And be careful with that! It’s a perfect replica of the Winter Palace in Otherworld, and it’s expensive.”

The front door opened
as Lee gently placed the snow globe on a shelf
, and a scrawny girl stepped inside
, no older than nineteen
. Twigs were tangled in her white-blonde hair. She wore a frayed sweater over
a gray dress and scuffed boots.

“Welcome to Flicker,”
Filo
said, wiping his hands on his jeans
as he straightened
. “Can I help you?”

Silent, the girl glanced around the shop. Lee froze when she saw the girl’s eyes: They were completely white, wi
th neither pupils nor irises.

“Can I help you?” Filo repeated, unfazed. Lee supposed he was used to this sort of thing.

The girl rasped something in Old Faerie, her voice rough as sandpaper.