The Conjuring Glass (9 page)

“Was that real enough?” Penny asked, smiling.

The Principles of Magic.

Ability.

One must have a degree of natural ability to feel, channel, and control magical energy. No amount of study, theory, or practice will help a person without natural talent to use magic.

Intention.

Clear intention is vital in channeling magical energy for a specific task. Without clear intention of what you expect channeled energy to do, anything could happen. Most accidents and unintended effects happen because the user’s intentions were not clear. Know what you want to do before you try to do it.

Focus.

Without proper focus to propel channeled energy, the intended magic will be weak, or may not work at all. Concentrate on your goal.

Imagination.

Imagination is the key to developing new kinds of magic, and expanding uses for known magic.

This book will only open for one with the ability to use magic. Keep it safe, for it holds the secrets and lessons of those who came before you. Study the secrets of The Phoenix Girls, practice their lessons, and when you are ready, the book will give you more.

Learn and grow, and when the time comes that you have learned all the book has to teach, you will become the teachers.

You are The Phoenix Girls.

Penny practiced while Zoe read the principles of magic written out on the first page of the old book again, first picking up and moving a fist-sized rock with the wand, then making it fly in circles over their heads around the hollow.

“It’s like a school textbook.” Zoe said, setting the book down and glaring at it, as though it were being intentionally boring.

Distracted, Penny turned to Zoe and lost control of the flying rock, sending it shooting through the upper boughs and startling birds into flight.

“Yeah, but not at first. I think it changed for us because that’s how we’re used to learning.”

“How would it know that? It’s a book!” Zoe turned away from the open book, arms crossed stubbornly over her chest—but snatched it up a few seconds later, unable to resist the temptation to reread it.

Penny pointed the wand at the inside of the fire pit, her pale face flushing as she concentrated. The wand tip flashed, and a bright spark shot into the center of the stone ring, erupting into tall, bright flames. Without proper fuel to sustain the fire, it guttered and died in only a few seconds. “Just know what you want to do, then point, and concentrate.”

Zoe turned to the second page and scanned it. “I want to try something.”

Penny handed the wand over and stood back.

“Throw something at me,” Zoe said.

Penny thought she knew what Zoe was going to try, but hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“Yep. If it doesn’t work, I’ll jump out of the way. Just make it something small.”

Penny pried a small stone from the dirt. She still didn’t think it was a good idea, but threw it anyway, aiming to the right of Zoe instead of at her.

Zoe whipped the wand up, pointing it straight out in front of her, her eyes narrowed in concentration. A foot away from her, the stone stopped abruptly and bounced back toward Penny, landing at her feet.

Zoe gave a little shout of triumph. “It worked! Here, you try it.”

She ran forward and pressed the wand into Penny’s hand, then ran to the creek’s edge, plucking a small rock from the water.

“Ready?”

“No,” Penny said, but raised the wand anyway.

Zoe grinned, made a show of winding for a pitch, and threw it.

Penny tried to concentrate on making a shield to block it, but her brain froze as she saw it whizzing toward her, and all that happened was that the wand gave a feeble little
hoot
. She jumped out of the way at the last second, and the rock just missed hitting her.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” Zoe said, running forward.

“It’s okay,” Penny said, though her heart was beating hard at the near miss. “Maybe we should practice that one with something softer next time.”

They took turns with the wand for the next three hours. While their efforts yielded unpredictable, often nearly disastrous results, they at least had a handle on the few spells—if spells are what they really were—that the book had to offer.

There were no ‘eyes of newts’ or ‘bat wings’ involved, no magic words or incantations. Penny didn’t think these were spells, only crude manifestations of will. Potions and fancy words would come later, if at all, she guessed.

Why guess when we can check
?

“Zoe, come here,” Penny said, taking a seat on a boulder by the dead fire pit and picking up the book again. It had closed itself while they practiced, and Penny didn’t need to try the cover to know it wouldn’t open.

Zoe, who had been using the wand like a leaf blower, sending the cover of dead and rotting leaves off the ground of the hollow and under the curtain of low
‐
hanging willow limbs, turned to Penny. When her concentration broke, the wind blowing from the wand tip died.

“What?” she asked, trotting to Penny’s side.

“Let’s see if there’s anything new.”

Zoe brightened at the suggestion, and tapped the Phoenix coin inlaid in the leather cover. The book’s cover sprang open, and Penny thumbed the first few pages over to the first blank page.

Zoe tapped it without hesitation, and her grin widened. She pressed the wand into Penny’s waiting hand and Penny tapped the page.

Print spread across the page, not the weird pictures and runes, but neat and crisp handwritten English. She tapped the next page, and more text appeared across the top of the page. Beneath the text several illustrations appeared. They looked to Penny like pictures in an instruction manual. She flipped the page and tapped the next.

“Nothing on this one,” she said, a little disappointed, and passed the wand back to Zoe so she could read the second new page.

Zoe tapped it with the wand tip and read, taking several long moments to digest it. Her anticipatory grin wilted, became a frown. Finally, she groaned and handed the book back to Penny.

Penny scanned the first new page, skimming over what appeared to be a few more spells, and an illustration of a cup like the one they found with the book. Finding nothing there to frown about, she moved to the second page.

She read it three times, very slowly, before looking up from the page with a sinking feeling of disappointment.

“Magic circle,” she said. “We have to make a magic circle before it’ll show us more.”

Scanning back to the illustration of the cup, rereading the instructions below it, she saw that the book told them how to make the magic circle. It sounded easy, and everything they needed was here, except for one thing.

The one thing they needed to move forward in their learning, neither girl knew how to find.

The book said there must be at least three to start the magic circle, and they were only two.

They needed to find someone like them, someone who had a talent for magic.

They needed another friend.

Questions.

The girls had a hundred of them.

Penny and Zoe sat across from each other on the ground next to the dead fire pit, a reluctant Ronan resting on his haunches between them.

He turned his face from one to the other, then back again, and they fired questions without pause, determined to get them all out.

“This feels like an ambush,” he’d said, and he had been right.

“How long have you been here?” Penny asked.

“How long have The Phoenix Girls been here?” Zoe fired her question a second later, before Ronan had a chance to even consider Penny’s.

“Why doesn’t everyone know about this place?” Penny asked, crossing her arms and leaning closer to Ronan with an inquisitorial eyebrow arched.

For the past few days Penny and Zoe had spent every possible minute at Aurora Hollow, and whenever Ronan came out to watch them practice, the questions began. At first they were hesitant, almost shy. But the more Ronan didn’t answer, the bolder they became, until finally Ronan emerged from the solitude of his cave one morning to find them simply standing on the other side of the creek, waiting for him. The wand and book were still locked in their chest.

“Why are we the only ones who can see you?” Zoe asked.

“Enough questions,” Ronan growled, apparently pushed to the edge of his patience. “You two should be practicing.”

Penny rolled her eyes skyward.

“Why should we be practicing?” Zoe countered, ignoring the renewed growls rumbling up from Ronan’s throat. “Why is it so important to you anyway?”

Ronan’s feeble attempt at intimidation ceased and he turned to face Zoe again.

So did Penny. That was a question, she thought, feeling a little stupid, which should have occurred to her.

“Yeah,” Penny said, catching the thread of Zoe’s new enquiry. “Why is it so important?”

Ronan shook his head in frustration. “This is precisely why some animals eat their young.”

Zoe giggled.

Penny rolled her eyes again.

“Can you at least answer one of our questions today?” Penny asked, despising the whining tone of her question but unable to help it. “Then we’ll practice.”

Ronan considered them again in turn, then mimicked Penny by lifting his snout to the sky and rolling his eyes. “If you insist … I will answer
two
of your questions today.”

Penny and Zoe sat up straighter, irritation turned into anticipation. They both leaned in a little closer to Ronan.

Penny’s excitement grew stronger as seconds passed with Ronan only staring into the distance, silent and still.

Then he turned to Zoe.

“Pick me up.”

Zoe seemed startled by the request. They were still a little intimidated by him, such a strange and unlikely creature roaming around boring old Dogwood, but after only a moment’s hesitation, she rose to her feet then bent to pick him up. She wrapped her arms around his middle gingerly, as if afraid he’d turn on her and bite, and when she rose again he lay in the cradle of her arms like a pet.

He looked down at Penny. “Anybody can see me if I want them to, but humans have an unfortunate tendency to shoot at things that walk on four legs.”

Ronan closed his eyes, and for a second Penny thought he was going to take a nap right there in Zoe’s arms. His outline blurred, his body became translucent, and he fell through Zoe’s arms and drifted downward toward the ground like smoke. Then he was solid again and falling toward the ground. He landed gracefully on all fours and sprang into the air again, scrambling up the side of the big tree and stopping on his usual high perch.

“I am proficient at escaping your kind, but it’s easier just to avoid their notice.”

Zoe was still staring into her empty arms in surprise. “That was seriously cool!”

“The reason you can see me even when they can’t is because you are different. You may find you see a lot of things the others don’t.”

“How did you do that?” Penny nearly shouted.

Ronan ignored this latest question.

“The reason only you two know about this place is because the others who came here before you knew how important it was that it be kept secret. People like you are gifted, but they can still die at the hands of a mob.”

Penny had no reply for that. The morning’s light mood had departed. She met Zoe’s eyes and saw the new, serious mood had taken her too.

“If other people learn about Aurora Hollow and The Phoenix Girls, eventually the wrong people will. You would no longer be safe. This place would no longer be safe, and too much depends on …”

Here his speech broke off. He seemed to have thought better of the direction he was leading them.

“What?” Penny and Zoe asked in unison.

Ronan shook his head, and a glimmer of his normal good humor seemed to have returned. “I’ve answered two questions, just as promised. Now get back to work before I change my mind about eating you.”

The Red Magician

Dogwood School

There was only one school in Dogwood, the one at the end of downtown beside the riverside park, where Main Street turned sharply to the left before winding its way toward the coast. Penny’s house was less than a mile from the school, so she rode the new bike Susan bought her instead of taking the bus.

The old school building housed kindergarten through high school, every student in Dogwood, which was still fewer than Penny’s grade alone back in the city.

The school bus passed her as she neared town, and she saw Rooster’s stupid, round face pressed against a window. He made a rude hand gesture and ran his tongue out at her. A few others sitting around him had turned to face her as well, flashing grins that made Penny even more nervous about her first day at her new school. She recognized a few of the faces from the park, the day she’d met Zoe.

She slowed and turned into the school parking lot a few minutes later, suddenly feeling only half her already diminutive size. All those new faces, many of them turning to regard her, the stranger in their town, were a little frightening.

Ignoring the strange, gawking stares, Penny searched for one of two things, the bike rack, or Zoe. She found them both at once as Zoe coasted past an emptying bus, ignoring the pointing fingers and laughter as she passed Rooster and his friends. Her bike looked very poor parked between a new mountain bike and a ten-speed. The owner of the mountain bike, a girl about their age Penny thought, regarded Zoe’s antique-looking bike with distaste before clicking the lock on her chained wheel and walking away.

“Zoe,” Penny called as she coasted in behind her and slid off the seat, which even adjusted down all the way was a little too high for her.