Heir To Magic

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Heir To Magic - book excerpt

Chapter 1

I remember thinking that my life was perfect. Well, as perfect as it could be, anyway. My parents were very loving and supportive. Foster parents, I should say. Jill and Tony. They’re great. My real parents were dead, so that part wasn’t so perfect. My big sister was super-awesome. She’s a foster, like me. Not to say she didn’t have her issues—what foster kid doesn’t? But Nora was pretty great, too. That’s what I mean by as perfect as it could be.

Some people think I’m an optimist. Believe me, I’m not. I’m really just practical, and to me, it makes more sense to focus on what I have than on what I don’t have. You can’t build anything with what you don’t have. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my sixteen years, it’s that life doesn’t give you anything but opportunities, and it’s on us whether we can see them and how we use them. If we miss them or make bad choices? Well, life can be a real bitch.

I didn’t know why I was feeling so introspective. Jill had just brought me something that she’d been holding onto for a while. It was just a wooden box. More like a small chest, I guess. About two feet long, a foot wide, and maybe a foot tall. It was my mother’s. I didn’t know Jill had it, but she said I was old enough now that I should be the one to take care of it. It was my inheritance.

I remembered my parents, but it had been such a long time. What was inside the box? What would I find out? Would it change anything? I could imagine all kinds of things about them. I couldn’t ask the box any questions. It wouldn’t hug me or smile at me. I did remember those things about my parents. No, the box could only tell me something of the people who had been my parents. Maybe.

Whatever it held, it would have to be enough. There wasn’t anything else. And once I knew what was inside, there wouldn’t be any more answers.

“Aren’t you going to look inside, Mira?”

I looked up at Nora as she leaned against the door frame, then back to the box in my lap.

“Nosy!” I teased her, looking back up.

We didn’t look much like sisters. Oh, we were about the same height, not terribly tall, and we both wore our hair past our shoulders. Other than that, we were very different. She had crazy, curly red hair, which she hated, and freckles on her pale skin. My looks and light brown skin clearly showed my Latina heritage. She’d just turned eighteen, so she was two years older than me and ready to graduate from high school. I’d already started teasing her about graduation; how could anyone hope to look nice in those horrible robes? I planned to take plenty of pictures to save as blackmail material for the future.

She shrugged and looked away. “Maybe. But if you want to look at it alone, Mira, I understand.”

“No,” I shook my head. “I’m just…I don’t know. I really don’t know anything about my real mom.” I glanced at her quickly. “That sounded horrible! Jill has been a real mom to me.”

Nora nodded. “It’s okay, I know what you mean.”

I turned back to the chest in my lap. It wasn’t very heavy, but it was a bit bulky to open on my lap, so I put it on the bed next to me. The top was slightly rounded, but not too much. It was made out of a dark wood, and the corners had been reinforced with metal. The whole thing wasn’t terribly decorative, but it was definitely sturdy. There was a clasp with a lock holding it shut.

“It looks like it takes a key,” I said.

“Let me take a look,” Nora said, approaching. She smiled at me. “You have a bobby-pin?”

I laughed as I retrieved one from my dresser. “Here you go. But I don’t think it’s as easy as they show in the movies.”

Nora tried for several minutes to open the latch before she gave up.

“Sorry,” she shrugged. “I guess it is harder than in the movies.”

“That’s frustrating,” I frowned. “How am I supposed to open it?” I gave the latch an irritated shove, and it popped open. “Woohoo!”

“How did you do that?” Nora gave me a bewildered look.

“It was probably just stuck, and between the two of us, we worked it loose,” I shrugged. “Let’s see what’s inside!”

I lifted the lid. The contents weren’t really organized. There were some clothing items; they looked like scarves or something. There were letters, photos, some rolled-up papers tied with ribbons, and a big jumble of odds and ends. It was going to take a bit to sort through it all.

“I bet when you read the letters, you’ll find out about your mom,” Nora said.

Something blue and shiny caught my eye at the bottom of the chest. I pulled it out. “Wow! Look at this!”

It was a silver necklace with a stone pendant. The stone was more oval than teardrop-shaped, but it was wider at the bottom and tapered toward the top. It was about an inch and a half long and a half-inch wide. It seemed to catch the light and the colors changed. It was attached to the chain by silver wire that was woven into an intricate, net-like pattern that held it snugly in place.

“I think that’s black opal,” Nora sounded impressed.

“It’s not just black. It’s got all these other colors, blue and red and green.”

“Black opal just means it has a dark base instead of something lighter. But look at the colors in the light. Definitely opal. Maybe a black fire opal. Score!” She grinned at me.

I laughed and hung it around my neck.

“It looks beautiful,” she said.

I picked up a stack of photos from the chest.

“What’s all this?” Nora was running her fingers along some carvings on the underside of the lid. “Why all the decoration on the inside? The outside looks pretty plain.”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “But it looks like these carvings are all over the inside.”

“Girls!” Jill’s voice sounded from down the hall. “Dinner’s ready!”

“Coming!” Nora called back.

“Come on!” I said to her. “I want to show Jill the pendant!”

As I stood, the cuff of my shirt caught on the chest and pulled it off the bed to the floor, spilling the contents.

“Oh, no!” Nora knelt by the chest. “Did it break?”

The boards at the bottom of the chest looked like they had come loose.

“No,” she said. “It’s a false bottom! There’s something else in here.”

We pulled out the loose boards. Underneath them were two recessed apertures holding a few knob-like objects. Two of the smaller ones, maybe an inch and a half in diameter at the most, were wrapped in cloth. Another was round and flat, and more like two and a half inches in diameter. I grabbed that last one and tried to pick it up, but it was evidently a lot heavier than it looked and it barely moved when I tried to lift it.

That was kind of weird, but I switched to one of the smaller ones. It came easily, but it wasn’t just a knob. As I pulled, there was more below that kept coming from out of the hole; somehow it was embedded downward through the bottom of the box. It ended up being more than a foot and a half long, and the whole thing was wrapped in a cloth. That didn’t make any sense. There were only a couple of inches of box under the surface of the hidden area.

I unwrapped the cloth to see what was inside. It was a knife in a hard sheath with metal caps.

“Awesome!” Nora exclaimed.

“But how could it come out of the box like that?” I asked her. “There’s not that much box under there.”

“Maybe this is like one of those boxes magicians use for tricks?” she suggested. “You know, like when they pull a coat rack out of a small bag, but there’s really a secret compartment you can’t see.”

I wasn’t going to argue with her, but I was right there and there was no way it was something like that. I could see the size of the whole box. I pulled out the other small knob and it turned out to be a knife, just like the first one.

“I bet Jill didn’t know these were in here!” Nora said.

“Probably not,” I told her. This whole thing was just too weird. I didn’t want to think about it right now. “Let’s check this out some more after dinner. Right now, I’m starving!”

“Me too!”

We wasted no time piling spaghetti and meat sauce onto our plates. Jill was a really good cook.

“This cheesy garlic-bread is the best,” I said as I dabbed it in the sauce.

Nora nodded her agreement with a full mouth.

“Mom,” I said between bites. “Was there a key to that box?”

“Oh! I’m sorry!” Jill got up from the table. “I’ll get it for you.”

“I think it can wait until after you’re done eating,” I laughed.

“Better to do it now before I forget again.”

After a moment, Jill returned with a key. “Here you go!” She handed it to me before sitting back down. It was a simple key that looked the right size for the small lock, and had a blue ribbon tied in a short loop.

“Thanks!”

After dinner, we went to my room and gave the daggers a closer inspection. They looked like duplicates of one another, except for the color on part of the handle. The blades were about ten inches long. The covers for the blades—I think they’re called sheaths—were covered with some kind of fancy metalwork. The swirling designs continued into the handle, but they were inlaid to make the grip totally smooth. The black or white part of the handle design seemed to wrap around the grip. And then there was the round, flattish knob on the end. The blades themselves were polished and seemed to reflect the light in the room brightly.

“These look really sharp,” Nora commented. “I bet I could shave my legs with one of these!”

“As if anyone would notice,” I teased her. “What little body hair you have is practically invisible.”

She grinned at me. “Don’t be jealous!”

We decided to take the knives to an antique store the next day after school to see what we could find out about them. Were they heirlooms? Would they tell me something about my mother or my family? Online, we found an antique store that might be helpful, and we decided to go right from school the next day.

Nora’s scooter was an old Vespa she’d found on Craigslist. We used that to get to and from school. I’d have to figure something else out for next year after she’d graduated.

I hid the knives in my backpack. I didn’t know what my teachers would say if they found out I had them with me in school.

As we left the house that morning, I saw something move in the corner of my eye and turned to look. No one was there. I started to look away when I noticed that there was some kind of shadow hanging in the air about twenty yards from the front gate. Nora accelerated at that point, and when I tried to look back over my shoulder, I couldn’t see anything.

The whole day seemed strange, and I kept feeling like I was being watched. Plus, I kept seeing odd lights, and sometimes when I felt like I was being watched, I could see some kind of shadow. Or, almost see a shadow. I was glad when the school day was over.

We went straight to the antique store right after our last class. The guy in the store couldn’t tell us anything about the knives.

“But you know what?” he said. “I may know someone. She has a strange little place that is part antique store, part herbalist shop, and I don’t know what else. She’s a bit odd, but something about this filigree reminds me of things I’ve seen in her shop. Maybe she can help you.”