Chapter 16 - Coven Headquarters

Rall’s ninja campaign started later that morning. I had to give him minus ten points for not being in full costume, and another minus ten for using the ludicrously unstealthy technique of knocking on my door at six in the morning.

On the other hand, he did earn extra points in the mysterious category.

Even after he gave me the message, I still couldn’t understand what he was after.

I rubbed my eyes. “Huh?”

He repeated, “I thought that Olivia might want to know that her mother’s home now, safe and sound.”

By that time the squirrels that ran my brain were mostly up and moving on their wheels (even if they were still staggering around a bit). Despite that, everything was still coming up blank.

Did he think that their relationship had suddenly improved enough that Olivia might actually worry about her mother?

I glanced at the bed.

Olivia had stolen my pillow, crammed it over her face, and rolled away from the door. She didn’t look worried.

I turned back to Rall. “I’ll be sure to tell her.”

“Soon?”

My head bobbed in a sleepy nod. “Yes, yes. Of course.”

I meant it. I didn’t see why I should be the only one awake.

Rall waved goodbye and walked away. I shut the door, stumbled over to the bed, stole my pillow back from Olivia, and flopped down on the mattress. Thank god, the blankets were still warm.

“Your mother’s home.” I grumbled loudly to make sure Olivia could hear me.

“You think I care?” she grumbled back, less loudly.

I cuddled into the pocket of my body heat. “Not at this hour. It’s hard to care about much before breakfast.”

A few seconds passed.

“What time is it?” Olivia asked.

I thought about reminding her that she had her own stupid phone, but there was enough compassion left in my sleepy heart that I decided to spare her from the agony of purposefully shining a light in her eyes when, by all rights, they should’ve been closed.

I wished someone had spared me.

“It’s five fifty-eight or something,” I said. “Almost six.”

I felt Olivia sit up in bed. That did not bode well.

“And mother’s home?” She wasn’t grumbling anymore. Her voice was clear.

That really didn’t bode well.

“That’s what your father said,” I grumbled.

Olivia flung off the blankets, exposing my back to a line of cold, and stood up. “Get up, Emerra. It’s time to leave.”

“Now?” I groaned.

“Now. I’ll get Jacky. You start getting dressed. Dress warm. We’re going to be walking.”

The shock was enough to get me to sit up. “Are you serious? Why?”

“Because my mother’s home.”

She left me alone in the room, still blinking at the empty doorway.

Ten minutes later, we were walking down the frozen sidewalk on a dismal February morning while Olivia explained the situation to Big Jacky.

“Something happened last night at one of the coven buildings, and mother would never leave unless everything was taken care of. If she’s home, that means that the building is empty.”

“I’ll accept the fact that you know more about your mother than I do,” Jacky said, “but what does that have to do with what we’re doing?”

“If the building’s empty, that means we have two hours to look around before the first workers start showing up around eight.”

“Olivia, are you convinced the events of last night have something to do with Kirby?”

“This is Craftborough! Nothing ever happens here. A witch blows up their workshop every once in a while—that’s all!”

I silently marveled at how some people’s “nothing” could deviate so far from the dictionary definition, but I guess that’s what overexposure to witchcraft will do to you.

She continued, “If two suspicious things are happening at the same time, they have to be related.”

“Probably,” Jacky said.

When Olivia and I glanced at him, Jacky clarified.

“I believe you meant to say that they were ‘probably’ related. The statement was an assumption. It should be framed as one.”

Olivia’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m wrong?”

“I don’t know—which is often the case when you’re dealing with assumptions.”

There are few things in the world more satisfying than watching Jacky annoy Olivia. Since he’s her master, she can’t talk back, and having to resist the urge brought a lovely vermilion shade to her cheeks.

“It sounds like a pretty good assumption to me,” I assured her, “but why did we have to walk?”

“It’s only thirteen minutes away,” Olivia said.

“And if we’d driven, it would have been less than five minutes away. More time to snoop.”

I thought that was pretty good logic coming from a bunch of sleep-deprived squirrels.

Olivia said, “No one drives in Craftborough unless it’s to the grocery store.”

“You’re appealing to tradition?” I said.

That offended me and my squirrels. There’s only so much hypocrisy a person can stand, and I liked to reserve most of it for myself.

Olivia gave me a hard look. “No one drives in Craftborough, meaning cars stand out here. Especially unfamiliar cars sitting alone in an empty parking lot.”

Oh.

In the morning silence, our footsteps created an odd, arrhythmic beat that followed us down the empty street.

“Olivia,” I said, “what was that phrase you used yesterday?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

‘As blind as a witch?’” I said it quietly, probing her mood, hoping it wouldn’t upset her too much.

To my surprise, Olivia smiled. “It was something Kirby used to say to me.”

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“Kirby?”

That was more surprising than the smile. Kirby wasn’t supposed to be an initiate; Olivia shouldn’t have been talking to him about her magic or her lack of talent.

“What does it mean?” Big Jacky asked.

Olivia’s eyes rose to the blanket of gray clouds that was hiding the first hints of the sunrise. They glowed around the edges.

She said, “Sometimes people can be so set in their ways, or…or how they think—”

“Mental habits,” I said.

Olivia latched onto the phrase. “Yes! Mental habits. We can have such deep mental habits that it changes how we see things. Or maybe we can’t see things because we’re living too much in our head.”

Jacky said, “Surely you can’t live—”

I interrupted him: “She means that we pay more attention to our own thoughts than the world around us.”

“Ah. I see.” Jacky paused. “And Kirby would accuse you of this?”

“It wasn’t just me!” Olivia said.

I smiled when I heard her indignation.

She went on, “It’s a problem for a lot of people.”

“Especially witches?” Jacky asked.

Olivia nodded. “It became this joke between the two of us. Whenever we missed something obvious, we were as blind as a witch.”

Kirby knew a lot of people from Saufgrove. Even if he wasn’t an initiate, he probably knew they called themselves witches. He could’ve easily coined the phrase without Olivia ever telling him about her lack of talent.

But she hadn’t told me either. Was that because she didn’t want people to know?

The way Rall had talked made it sound like her condition would be obvious to most magicians, and I doubted they’d be rude enough to press her for details. Maybe she was used to people simply knowing.

Or maybe she preferred not to talk about it.

With wisdom foreign to my essential nature, I decided to keep quiet.

We arrived at coven headquarters. Olivia had been right about it being empty. All the windows were dark, and the parking lot was barren. Two antique style lanterns kept the front doors well lit, but Olivia took us around to the side of the building.

As we turned the corner, I whispered, “Are we breaking in?”

“There’s no ward,” Olivia said.

“There was no ward around Kirby’s shop either. Does it only count as breaking in if there’s a ward?”

Olivia turned to glare at me.

I threw my hands up in a shrug. “How would I know the rules for living in Witch Central?”

She turned and kept walking. “I only want to look around. It’s not like I’m going to trash the place. We’ll figure out what happened last night, decide if it might have something to do with Kirby’s kidnapping, and get out of there. Since there’s no ward, we can get in and out without anyone knowing we were here.”

“Would a ward stop Jacky?”

Olivia stopped so suddenly, I almost walked into her. She said in a voice of pure wonder, “I don’t know.”

We both turned to look at Jack Noctis.

“What?” he said.

“Can you get through wards?” Olivia asked.

“I haven’t been stopped by one yet.”

“So that’s a yes?” I said.

Big Jacky turned his skull toward me. Even without a facial expression, he managed to radiate disapproval at my sloppy thinking. “I haven’t walked through all the wards in the world, Emerra.”

“Right. Forget about the wards. Are you willing to help us get through this door?”

It’d be tricky to avoid the “breaking” part of “breaking in” if Jacky was in the mood to display his scruples.

“Yes,” he said.

I blinked. “I don’t have to talk you into it?”

“That’s why we broke in yesterday—to get certainty. Now we have good reason to believe there’s a crime behind all this and a man’s life is in danger—”

“What do you mean?” Olivia snapped. It was hard to tell in the dim light, but I thought she looked pale.

Jacky was silent for a moment. “Olivia, Nolan Kirby is alive, but I can’t say how long that may remain true. Until we understand why he was taken, and why he hasn’t been killed, we must accept the idea that he could be in danger.”

Olivia’s gloved hands curled into fists, and a dusting of purple light specks glowed against her black cape.

I’d only seen something like that when she was working her magic.

“Olivia,” I whispered, “are you doing something?”

“What?” Her head whipped around. “No.” The purple dust settled and disappeared. “Come on.”

She led us to a nondescript entry tucked in the middle of the side wall. Jacky took a hand from each of us and escorted us through the locked door.

Once we were through, we stood in the hall and looked around.

“What are we supposed to be looking for?” I asked.

If the answer was “darkness,” I had us covered.

“You, look for magic,” Olivia said. “Jacky and I will keep our eyes open for any other clues.” She held up her hand, and a steady blue light shone from her palm.

I nodded to her handy (Ha! Handy!) magical flashlight. “Won’t someone be able to sense that?”

“Only if they were here. It doesn’t leave traces.”

“Do we need to worry about cameras?” I asked.

“No.” She started down the hall.

“Wait. You’re telling me, there are no cameras…at all?”

“They wouldn’t waste the money. Who’d be stupid enough to break into the headquarters for the coven.”

“You mean besides us?”

“We don’t count.”

A faint sense of unease filled me, pouring up from my toes to my head. I looked at Jacky.

“I suppose that’s the blindness of witches,” he said.

Considering it was Jack Noctis talking, he showed an impressive amount of restraint by failing to specify whether he was thinking of Olivia or the rest of the coven.

When our quick walk-through of the main rooms revealed nothing, my unease grew until my nerves were fairly quivering with indignation, like some psychotic chihuahua. If Ellis Oliversen only went home after everything was taken care of, why did Olivia think there’d be anything left to find? And if only idiots like us were dumb enough to break into coven headquarters, that meant we were making a lot of assumptions about the relative intelligence of Kirby’s kidnapper.

One glance at Olivia’s tight, strained expression was all it took for me to decide to keep my concerns to myself. If someone had kidnapped one of my friends, there’d probably be no end to the stupid chances I’d take if I thought it might get them back.

We stopped outside the largest office on the fifth floor. The name plate said “Ellis Oliversen.” There was no title. Presumably, if you’d gotten that far, you knew who she was.

“Jacky,” Olivia whispered.

Jacky took our hands again and led us through the door.

The office on the other side was spacious. Art hung on the walls between the bookshelves, a tasteful rug covered most of the dark wood floor, and three windows, arrayed along the wall behind the desk, looked out over the park in front of the town buildings. The sun was well up by that time, but it was still tucked behind the clouds. The diffused light made the snow glow yellow and blue.

Most of the room was the kind of clean that I’d come to associate with Ellis Oliversen. It felt sterile and aloof. If you saw something, it was because you’d been allowed to see it.

Which is probably why the open folder and scattered pile of papers laying on her desk stood out so much.

Olivia honed in on them. Jacky trailed after her while I peered around the room, checking for magic, before joining them.

“It’s a list,” Olivia said.

“Is it important?” Jacky asked.

Olivia picked up a piece of paper and held it close so she could read it by the light of her hand. “It must be. Mother doesn’t leave things out, so this has to be about last night.”

I was close enough now that I could read over her shoulder.

“Do you recognize any names?” Jacky asked.

“Yes,” Olivia said.

The whole list seemed to be nothing but names. I flipped through the three pages still on the desk to confirm it. It looked as if someone had printed out a list from a program that was never intended to create printed lists, and they hadn’t bothered to fix the formatting. The names were spread over the page with unnecessarily wide gaps. Beside each name was a small check mark written in pencil.

The name Oliversen kept popping up, commanding my attention.

“Is this your family tree or something?” I asked.

“These are the most famous witches in the history of the coven,” Olivia said.

My brow crinkled. “You mean the mistresses?”

Olivia put down the paper she was holding and spread out the others. “The mistresses are on here, but it isn’t just them. She pointed to a name near the top of a page. “River Bishop served under Mistress Grace Oliversen.”

Grace was the last in a long line of middle names.

My voice rose in surprise. “You know the name of a witch that was alive a hundred and fifty years ago?”

Olivia shushed me. In a whisper she added, “I said ‘famous,’ Emerra. Do you need me to define it for you?”

“So your mother gets an emergency call at three in the morning and rushes over to coven headquarters to review a list of famous witches?”

“It’s unlikely to be merely a list of famous witches,” Jacky said while gazing at the names.

Olivia and I stared at him.

When Jacky finally felt the combined weight of our eyes, he raised his skull, moving it this way and that so his empty eye-sockets could take in both of us.

He straightened up and said, “I’ve been forced to look over many lists that included nothing but the names of famous magicians. None of them were a list of famous magicians.”

“Um, Jacky…” My voice trailed off.

How does one explain the concept of “nonsense” to death?

He continued, “They were all lists delineating a specific group that happened to be composed of famous magicians.”

I decided to start with the concept of “poppycock” and work my way up to “balderdash.”

“For example,” Jacky said, “the last list I read included all of the attendees invited to the Torr’s annual world conference.”

There was a second of silence, followed by the furious sound of paper rustling as Olivia and I bent over the desk.

“We have to find out where this list came from,” she said.

We both froze when we heard the footsteps in the hall. My eyes flew to the door in time to see the knob twitch when someone inserted a key.

I grabbed onto Jacky’s sleeve so he’d look at me. I spoke rapidly, under my breath: “Go back to Olivia’s house.”

Jacky said, “But—”

“Go back there right now, and if anyone asks, tell them that you’ve been in your room the whole time.”

Jacky’s skull dipped once, then he disappeared. I was left holding nothing but air.

“What are you doing?” Olivia hissed. Her eyes were wide. “We can’t get out of here without him!”

I grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the desk, toward one of the bookshelves. “Whether he’s here or not, we can’t get out of this room without being seen, but if he’s at home, at least someone in our group can pretend to be respectable. Now try to look casual!”

By the time the lights clicked on, I was leaning against the bookshelf, my arms crossed and a manic grin plastered on my face. Olivia was bent over the books with her finger extended so it’d be obvious to anyone who happened to glance her way that she’d been interrupted while perusing the literature.

When I saw who it was, I forced a laugh. “Oh! Hey! Good morning, Officer Ansel. Fancy meeting you here!”