Ordinary Magic (6 page)

“I’m not going to tell you again,” Jeremy said, doing a pretty good Dad impression.

Barbarian Mike held up his hands. “Whoa, babe! Everybody, let’s calm down. Now, we need an ord. We’ll pay double, triple, anything you want, but we need your ord. Jobs are racking up. If we don’t get an ord pretty soon we’ll be losing business to the competition.”

“My sister is not for sale,” Olivia hissed.

“Are you even the owners?” the woman asked.

“The owners?” Gil repeated.

“The legal owners of that.” She pointed at me. “The ones authorized to accept or refuse an offer of purchase. Don’t you even know the regulations?”

“That would be Mom and Dad,” Jeremy said. Olivia shot him a savage look. “It’s true.”

“It is true,” Gil said before Olivia could start sputtering furiously. “But you would be wasting your time. They’ll give you the exact same answer. Abby is not for sale. No ord is. According to ‘regulations,’ buying and selling children is illegal.”

The woman shook her head, muttering something about amateurs. “Look, pretty boy, we’re not leaving until—”

“We would prefer to make a formal offer to the legal
owners,” Barbarian Mike interrupted. “Just to keep everything simple. We can wait here while you go get them.” He smiled at me. “It will give us a chance to get to know Abby better.”

Gil put a hand on my shoulder, his fingers digging in so hard it hurt. “No thank you. Abby can get our parents. We’ll stay here with you.” He shoved me toward the door.

Dad was in his workshop, needle flashing as he frowned over a complicated section of embroidery on a special order. “Hello, brown-eyed girl,” he said without looking up. “What’s up?”

“They want to make a formal offer,” I finished after explaining what had been going on.

Dad set his needle down and pulled on his mustache. He has one of those dashing pirate-type mustaches, and occasionally he still swings in on chandeliers and sweeps Mom off her feet. “Whose turn is it?”

“It’s Mom’s, but they’re not very nice—well, one of them isn’t—and you know how Mom gets when people are mean. They’re insisting that they have to tell you their offer.”

“You want to stay here while I get rid of them?” he asked.

“No way,” I said. “This is my favorite part.”

“Come on, then,” he said, putting his arm around me. “Why are they here again?”

“They need an artifact to fulfill a prophecy and stop an evil king.”

“They need a new story. That one’s getting old.”

Barbarian Mike’s voice carried all the way down the hall. It held an indulgent “let me explain it to you again” tone. The
kind that makes you want to do the exact opposite of whatever someone tells you to do. “Look, I get that you’re attached to the girl, but she’s not your sister anymore. She’s an ord, and ords are dangerous if you don’t handle them right.”

Olivia started to tell him exactly what he could handle and how he could handle it when Dad charged into the living room. “What’s your offer?” The guy was huge.

“Ten—”

“No thank you. Good-bye,” Dad said.

“—thousand. Ten
thousand
,” Barbarian Mike said.

“No thank you. Good-bye.”

“Twelve thousand. Fifteen.”

“Good-bye,” Dad said. My brothers and sister were grinning.

“What do you want? We’ll pay anything.”

“I want you to leave.”

The woman threw up her hands. “You people are unbelievable. I’m going to take this up with the Guild. They told us there’d be an ord. That’s our ord, we get dibs.”

“Dibs?” For the first time ever, Dad sounded dangerous.

“Yeah, dibs,” Barbarian Mike said. He looked at us. “You guys have an ord, how can you not know this? It’s basic procedure, man. Okay, so when an ord is discovered, if the town’s Guild doesn’t want it, they send out a call.” He pointed at me. “That’s our ord. Name your price, dude.”

“Ellen,” Dad called. “Get the police, would you? We have trespassers.”

The next moment Mom was there, her wet hair leaving damp blotches on her robe. She sized up the situation and took
hold of me so tight I had finger marks on my arm for two days after. “You’re trying to buy my child. My daughter will be very interested to learn this.” When they glanced at Olivia, Mom added, “My oldest daughter. Who works for the king.”

The adventurers stiffened at that. Barbarian Mike looked around at all of us and then at his companion. His face was friendly, with a slightly doofy smile, but I have been around Mom and Dad long enough to know when a grown-up is saying something without saying something. His friend looked at me. Really looked—up and down and all over—when neither of them had more than glanced in my direction before. But it wasn’t a personal kind of look; it was more the look you’d give a carpet you wanted to buy. It was a “you are nothing” kind of look. There wasn’t anything mean about it, which made it worse.

Then she turned back to Barbarian Mike and shrugged. And Barbarian Mike smiled at us and said if that was their decision he’d have to live with it, and shook everybody’s hand, and left. His friend didn’t do any of that except for the leaving part, which we were fine with.

Gil waited a minute and then slipped on an invisibility spell and followed after them. He was back within twenty minutes to confirm that the adventurers were out of town, heading north. That didn’t stop Mom from giving the cops a heads-up, or Olivia from burying an extra row of ward stones along the protection circle that surrounded our house.

The rest of the summer was pretty quiet—no more offers, no more adventurers. Lots of long, sunny mornings sitting in the window seat in Dad’s shop, lots of Gil muttering to himself at the kitchen table and jumping out at us when we least expected it, shouting, “Which do you like better—‘furious’ or ‘infuriated’?”

The morning we left, it was rush-rush-rush and busy-busy-busy from the first second. Wake. Shower. Dress. (“Pants, Abby,” Mom called, a warning finger pointed at me.) Jeremy was in the middle of his annual “returning to school” panic attack, fretting over not having enough potion bottles and where had he packed his grimoire and why had he sent it on ahead instead of saving it to study on the flight? (Which was surprising because Jeremy usually has his spell book welded to his hands.) Olivia whipped up waffles for breakfast.

It was as if I were a normal kid—a magic kid, that is, going to a magic school. And it’s not like I was truly saying good-bye;
my family has a way of getting in each other’s business, no matter the odds or the distance, which is why I didn’t cry that much. Olivia—eyes fierce, voice breaking—grabbed me close until she was finally able to hiss, “I swear, Abby, if we don’t hear from you every week, I’ll drag you back home by your hair. I am so not kidding.”

“Come on, O. It’s not like we’re never going to see her again,” Gil said, sweeping me up in a big spinning hug. “Speaking of, Abs, can I have your half of the bedroom?” Olivia smacked him. “Ow! What? It’s not like I’m trying to get rid of her memory. It’s about prioritizing my work space. I need a study.”

“You want to share your study with Olivia?” I asked.

“Oh no. I plan to buy her out.”

“I’m not selling.” Olivia sniffed, swiping at her eyes.

“And it’s not your house,” Dad reminded us.

“You can have my room if I can have a cut,” I said.

“What? Abby? I mean, I’d expect this from Olivia because she has a black, withered pit where her heart should be, but you?” Gil put a hand on his chest and did his best to look shocked. “My baby sister. Whom I convinced Mom and Dad to keep, purely out of the goodness of my heart. They wanted to get rid of you because you were funny looking.”

“That’s not funny,” Olivia said.

Gil ignored her. “You know, because of all the freckles. They wanted to call you Spot and donate you to the local animal shelter, but I said no. I said, let us not judge a child purely on the number of freckles—”

I threw my arms around Gil and hugged him quiet.

Dad shook out one of his oldest carpets on the front lawn, the green-and-gold one with knotted fringe that he wove back in college. It was just your straightforward, no-frills flying carpet, but it was the biggest one, which was important because we were doing a favor for Alexa.

We climbed on, Mom putting me right between her and Dad, with Jeremy behind us, so they could both get to me quickly. The carpet had spells to keep everyone’s balance, and there was a shield to prevent people from falling off. For extra insurance, Dad called up the rug fibers, twisting them into a rope around my waist. If I moved too much one way or another, it tightened up like a snake and jerked me back into my seat.

Dad murmured something, and the carpet lifted up. There’s always a moment of freefall with magic carpets when your body goes up but your stomach stays down. It’s my favorite part. The carpet picked up speed and my head started spinning as we kept going up and up and up and then—everything was perfect. The wind was rushing all around, lifting us up until we were light as frosting and twice as weightless. The sky stretched out all around us, blue and cloudless. I could see part of one moon peeking out in front of us.

There were only a few other people flying when we took off, but as we got closer to Thorten, the airspace started filling up.

Since Mom and Dad were already planning to stop in Thorten on their way to Rothermere to drop Jeremy off at school, Alexa asked if they would mind picking up a few
students who lived nearby and giving them a ride into the city. Alexa arranged to meet us and accompany us the rest of the way. “They’re actually not that far from Rothermere themselves—we’ve got a girl coming from Glendale, and a boy in Teaneck. But I’d feel better if we escorted them ourselves.” Mom raised an eyebrow at this until Alexa admitted, “I’m not sure I trust the parents to get them to Rothermere. You’d be surprised how lazy some people get once they find out they have an ord.” Then she grinned. “Not every kid’s lucky enough to have parents as amazing as you guys.”

Dad smiled and shook his head. “Please. Go on.”

Alexa was waiting for us in the clear stretches of meadow outside of town, shielding her eyes from the sun as she watched us land. She gave us each a brusque kiss on the cheek. Jeremy pulled me in for a rare hug and made me promise to let him know about the curriculum. Then Alexa guided me and Dad back on the carpet while Mom and Jeremy headed off toward campus. He had to get checked in and make sure his stuff was all set.

Below us, the place was packed—move-in day in a school town is always crazy. Stores were open, hawking crystals or dried herbs or extra-long bedsheets or anything people might have forgotten. There were so many carpets, taking off and landing, it was a struggle just to get through; we didn’t even try getting close to campus, and lines of students checking in wound all the way back through the streets. Even from a distance I could hear the massive doors of Thorten’s front entrance groan happily as they swung open to admit a new student.

Alexa had arranged for us to meet the other new students at the Whittleby home. Their only kid, Peter, was going to be in my class. The Whittleby house was on the edge of town, small and white and square, with decorative blue tiles around the windows and tiger lilies purring along the fence. It was a nice place if you didn’t look too close: if you didn’t notice the chips in the tiles, or that the paint was faded and flaking, like no one was keeping up the maintenance spells.

There was a girl waiting by the Whittlebys’ gate, hugging a faded leather satchel, her cheeks pink from the sun. Surprise slapped Alexa in the face, and she jogged over. “When did they drop you off? I didn’t know it was going to be this early.”

The girl’s response was too quiet to catch. She was a tiny apple dumpling of a girl—soft and round and dimpled—with buttercup curls and a slump to her shoulders. There were deep, dark shadows under her eyes, and her fingers were bone white as they gripped her bag. She seemed to be trying to fold in on herself and disappear.

“Why didn’t you go in? Aren’t the Whittlebys here?” Alexa asked.

The girl shook her head and didn’t meet Alexa’s eyes. “No—I mean, yes—I mean, I didn’t check. I didn’t want to bother them.”

Alexa got that look on her face like she did when she thought we were being difficult for no reason, but she didn’t get a chance to say anything else because Ms. Whittleby came out then in a blur of questions and welcomes, dragging her son behind her.

Ms. Whittleby was what my mom would call a “striking beauty”—very fair with thickly lashed eyes and lots of long dark curls
piled on top of her head—but the most noticeable feature was the bruise on her forehead and a scrape on her cheek.

That was what had me gaping at her. I mean, the bruise, yes, but also what it meant. Ms. Whittleby was a
grown-up
. And if her bruises were visible, it meant she was an ord. A grownup ord!

I wanted to hug her, which wouldn’t have been appropriate because Alexa was already angrily demanding to know what had happened to her face even as Dad was asking if Ms. Whittleby was all right.

“Oh, this? It’s nothing. I’m fine,” Ms. Whittleby assured us, with a glance at Peter. He was glaring at the ground. “We’ve had adventurers stopping by to make offers for Peter ever since he was … confirmed. Usually we tell them no and they go on their way. We got a pair yesterday that was a little more difficult than most. Apparently Barbarian Mike and Trixie didn’t want to hear no.”