Tall meadow grass swept against the bare skin below the hem of my shorts. Grasshoppers popped and fluttered among the greens, thudding against me like lazy buckshot. The reverberating thrum of frogs and toads rode the breeze as it circled around me, plucking at my shirt.
I shut my eyes. Concentrated. Focused. A steady, systematic breathing passed through my nostrils. The colors behind my eyelids shifted to dark indigo, coagulating from shade to tar.
There was a pulling in my chest. A splitting, like I was a cell during mitosis.
There’s two of me. There has to be.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Babbit. His gray hair was pulled back into a much shorter ponytail than usual. He’d lopped it off himself, though a couple of beaded braids were still intact. The dark mirrored frames that hid his eyes were mesmerizing pools.
He grinned, clasping his hands behind his back. “A good Diabolique should be fast and flawless. Indistinguishable. And—”
Babbit shimmered out of existence. Just disappeared. Only to reappear about four feet away and left of where he had been standing.
“—there should only be one of you at a time.”
My jaw dropped.
“What?” he asked.
I barely found words. “Yours talked.”
Babbit snickered, nodding. “A perfect mimic should be able to do all the things you do, Quinn. Takes a lot of mastery, but you’ll be able to do it too.”
I shook my head, clearing the daze. “Wow. Just wow. That was really something, Babbit. At no point did I think that last one was a fake.”
Babbit gave a snort. “And how about this one?”
“Huh?”
Just as the old man once again shimmered into oblivion, replaced by empty air and a view of the marsh, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I quickly spun around to face yet another Babbit, grinning inches from my face.
“Are you kidding me?” I laughed, stumbling backwards. “Is this the real you?”
“You’ll never know,” Babbit said sharply. He aimed his index finger right at me. “And that’s exactly how the spell should work.”
I nodded, fighting my eyes from rolling. “All right, all right. I get it.”
“Do you?” Babbit asked, more seriously. “You’re still thinking of a Diabolique like a carbon copy, a facsimile. I can tell that much just from the way you’re gritting your teeth.”
“I’m still doing that, huh?”
Babbit nodded. “Yep. Look, Quinn, Diabolique is—it’s complicated.”
“It’s French,” I replied. “All the French ones are.”
“But,” Babbit went on, raising a finger and shifting his weight on his trusty rake. “It’s easy to master. It’s a two-tiered spell. You’re not just copying yourself, you’re cloaking your true self. You’re not just a matador waving a red cape—you’re the matador, and then you’re the cape. One then the other. Never both.”
Was I that transparent? Or not transparent—apparently that was my problem.
“I don’t know how else to think about it,” I admitted. “I don’t want the real me to disappear. And that’s what it feels like. Like I’m dying or something. Fading away.”
Babbit gave a shake of his head, flicking the beads about his shoulders. I could tell he was trying to think of a way to rephrase his teachings. But that was the problem with metaphysiks—the meta part. If you could describe it with words and numbers, well … it would just be physics.
He opened his mouth to speak, sealed his lips, and grinned. “How about some lunch?”
“I could do lunch,” I agreed. “Lunch is a concept I get.”
Inside the maintenance shed, Babbit pulled a pair of brown paper bags from the top shelf of a beat-up fridge that resembled a big turquoise Twinkie. Albeit a dented Twinkie. He had told me it was from one of the lodge’s condo-style rooms. Some rowdy frat boys had upended it like a car during a riot. Still ran fine, but wasn’t much to look at.
As promised, I’d packed us the finest lunch I could pilfer and finagle out of the boys in Spellbound’s kitchen: an apple, some carrot sticks, and a cheddar sandwich.
Babbit hunched over a coffee table, admiring the spread. “Looks good.”
“Best I could do,” I offered with a laugh. I had connections—didn’t say they were great ones. I sat against a workbench, sparing no time tearing into my sandwich.
After a few bites, Babbit took a swallow of his cold coffee, clearing his mouth of the dry bread. “So what’s new with you?”
It was kind of an unexpected question coming from Babbit. He was a great friend, but he usually didn’t waste time on small talk. “With me? Nothing.”
“You’ve been a bit scarce lately,” he said. “Just thought maybe you were getting into trouble.” Babbit shot me a wink.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well. You know me … Trouble is my middle name.”
Babbit’s stony face sobered. “You seem a little distracted.”
I sighed. “And?”
“Well,” the old mage shrugged. “More than usual.”
“Ah.”
Babbit winced at another cold swallow of bitter break room coffee. “So? What’s so distracting?”
I had an annoying juvenile quality that, when talking to an elder, I had to sum up all my problems into a one-word answer. “Friends.”
“Friends?”
“Yeah.”
Babbit squinted at the ground. “Acquisition of? Or loss?”
“Little of both, actually.”
“Hm,” he snorted. Babbit set down his mug and scratched a rune into the dirt with his rake. I didn’t recognize they symbol, nor could I tell that it affected anything around us. “You want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Suit yourself.”
I chewed on my lip for a second. “Can I ask you something though?”
“Of course.”
“If you were, say, a pyromagus … could you cast a water spell?”
Babbit’s sandwich froze inches from his lips then dropped like dead weight back to the crinkly wax paper that rested in the old man’s lap. He glared at me angrily and didn’t stop. The corners of his eyes twitched, and I wondered if he was casting some kind of lie detector spell from the way he seemed to be reading something behind my eyes. Was he mad? Mad at me, or the question?
“First of all,” Babbit began when my brain-scan was complete. “A magus can’t ‘cast spells’ in the traditional sense. They can manipulate their element—rock, wood, fire, whichever—but spells and incantions, those are the privilege of mages, Quinn—and no one else.
“Second, to answer your question. No. Absolutely not.”
It took me a second to remember what my question was. “Oh. All right.”
Babbit continued, “I hate to make this comparison, but—a magus is sort-of a specialized mage. Born to affect one thing. If you were to change that, it would be … unnatural, to say the least.”
Unnatural? I knew Babbit was old and kind of magist, but the way he was speaking to me was like a preacher delivering a fear-driven sermon.
“Okay, okay,” I said, taking an unwanted bite of my sandwich just to cork my mouth.
“Quinn?”
“Hmm?”
Babbit narrowed his eyes. “Why do you ask?”
My heart sank into the cold pit of my stomach as I worked the day-old bread down my esophagus and tried to force some saliva back into my mouth. Anything but the truth here, Quinn. “No reason. You’re the guy with all the answers. I just think up questions. Wacky, hypothetical questions.”
Babbit’s eyes grew even narrower from above the lip of his thermos. I prayed that would be enough to satiate the old dragon. Babbit mulled it over, swishing the stale coffee around his mouth. He turned away from me chewing the inside of his cheek.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Then hypothetically, if you locked a pyromagus in a box filled with water, there is one thing he could do.”
“Which is?”
“Drown.”
I coughed, choking up ragged chunks of sandwich. “Croa, Babbit. What’s wrong with you?”
Babbit shrugged. “You asked.”
Feeling my most snarky, I came back with, “Is that what happened to Houdini?”
The old mage clenched his teeth. “That filthy rat.”
“Easy, Cagney,” I told him. “Now what do you have against Houdini? He was a mage, wasn’t he?”
Babbit shook his head furiously, I had to pull my head away to avoid the whip of his last beaded braid. “No. No. If Houdini was a mage, then I’m a bobcat. That con artist sullied the good name of mages for years.
“Houdini was as inept as the day is long. His whole schtick was that he’d ‘cracked the metaphysikal code’—that he’d discovered the secret to harnessing meta. He made metaphysiks into a farce. A gimmick! All that controversy for a bunch of parlor tricks.”
Babbit finished by spitting into the sandy floor. “I’m glad that phoney bought it with that last stunt. Cracking the metaphysikal code—preposterous!”
I shivered. Hey, Babbit, guess what Emma’s going to school for?
At least I’d learned enough to avoid letting that little gem spill out. There was no way Babbit would help me with my little quest—whatever was left of it anyway—if he knew what sending Emma to a fancy alchemy school might mean for the future of metaphysiks. Truthfully, I didn’t think a lot could be done. Maybe I was as black-and-white as Tristan said, but you’re either meta or you’re not. There wasn’t any switching sides at that point.
“You have any luck with that stone?” Babbit lobbed. “The alchemy rock?”
I froze. He had to know, had to have read something in my aura. No way was that a coincidence. I sighed cautiously. “No.”
“Sore subject?” Babbit asked.
“You could say that.”
Babbit cracked into a carrot stick. “Did you try the library like I said?”
“Yeah,” I said, scowling. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
Babbit sensed the sting in my tone. “What?”
“Well, they aren’t exactly alchemist-friendly up there,” I answered.
“You’re a mage,” Babbit reminded me.
“Yeah, that almost made it worse. Like I was a traitor to my kind or something,” I explained. “I thought the librarian was going to put a spear through me.”
Babbit snorted a laugh. “Vivian can be a little … intense.”
Vivian. My nemesis had a name. “You know her?”
Babbit scowled, creasing the leathery skin of his forehead with furrows and cracks. “I’m no stranger to Willow Bay, Quinn. Especially the library.”
“So you sent me to the front of the Magism 101 class with my hand up knowing my question was about alchemy?” I returned fire.
“Oh, magism,” Babbit huffed, waving his hand. “It’s an old-fashioned town with old-fashioned values, Quinn. Nothing wrong with a little pride in your own kind, son.”
I frowned at the taste on my tongue. The air had become rather bitter. Pride? In your kind? Who was I talking to here? I wondered if Babbit knew about the island at the edge of town. If he knew what happened there. Babbit was the guy with all the answers. But did I really want to ask this particular question?
“So you didn’t find any answers there I take it?” Babbit asked.
“Not especially. Not about the stone, anyway,” I told him. “There was a little something about the solistone in one of the books, but not much. It hinted to look, um, elsewhere.”
Babbit nodded. “Classic alchemy literature. Very cryptic. Everything is cross-referenced with everything else. Keeps folk searching.”
“Mmm.”
“So what did the book say about it?” Babbit pressed.
Something wasn’t sitting right. Mr. Pride-in-his-kind barely let me say two words about alchemy last time we talked and now he was pumping me for information? What was Babbit’s deal?
“Next to nothing,” I answered him. “It said a solistone is formed by the same process that makes coal.”
“Coal?” Babbit echoed.
“Yeah, exactly,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Some help that is, right?”
To my surprise, Babbit shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. Coal is made from peat. It’s compressed or … or something.”
I nodded along, not really following. That was the double-edge of Babbit being your answer guy. He had to have an answer for everything—whether he knew what he was talking about or not. I chewed on, thinking of where I could go with this without pushing Babbit for an answer he didn’t have.
“What’s peat?”
Babbit shook his head a little, trying to jar the words from the old shelves of his memory. “Peat, I don’t know—it’s peat. Like, uh, uh … moss. Plant matter.”
Plant matter. The words stung me in the back like a wasp, forcing me upright out of my slouch, solid as a statue. I could feel my eyes waxing wide. Babbit must have noticed too, because he suddenly grew concerned.
“What is it?” he asked.
I didn’t answer him right away. My gears were too busy turning.
When I read that entry in the Encyclopedia Alchemica, I didn’t have much frame of reference. Coal-forming processes weren’t exactly my strong suit. Still weren’t. But coal was a rock. A rock, according to Babbit, that was made from plants.
And didn’t I know somebody now who knew a little something about both those things?
In a flash, I was on my feet, the wax paper drifted lazily from my lap to the ground. I snatched it up along with what was left of my lunch and tossed it into the garbage can. Just because I had an epiphany didn’t mean I had to eschew my manners.
I brushed a few crumbs off my shirt and headed for the door. There wasn’t much left of my lunch break—no time to waste. Especially since I still had to locate a certain double powerful magus who liked Star Wars.
“Whoa, what’s the rush?” Babbit asked.
I’d completely forgot about him. So much for manners.
The old mage rose slowly with the aid of his rake and dusted crumbs and dirt from his coveralls with a short grunt. He looked more feeble just then, and I wondered if maybe he was putting on a show to keep me around, a classic grandpa maneuver.
“I have to go,” I answered. “I have to find somebody.”
“That’s awful cryptic,” Babbit said with a scowl.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him—not really. But I didn’t have time to explain. Epiphanies didn’t happen everyday, especially to me. “I just remembered something—something I have to take care of before my break’s over.”
“What about the lesson?” Babbit pushed. I’d have to be a robot not to register the hurt in his voice. “We didn’t get to Nightcaster yet.”
I considered staying, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to focus. I knew I wouldn’t stop thinking about the solistone—or Emma—long enough to concentrate on spellcasting.
“Sorry, Babbit. Look, I learned a lot today,” I told the old mage on my way out. “Tomorrow maybe? I really have to take care of this.”
“Uh-huh,” was all he let me depart with. That, a pair of crossed arms, and that scowl.
I didn’t even have to check the schedule to find him. As luck would have it, Tristan was pulling weeds from the gardens that surrounded the main lodge as I raced up.
“Hey!” I shouted, a little more friendly this time. The excited look on my face probably seemed a little weird to Tristan.
He sort of grimaced and looked back to his project. “Hi.”
Instead of going right into my list of questions, I watched him plucking the prickly-leaved plants. Though the weeds were giving him zero resistance—they seemed to merely pop away from the earth—it seemed to pain him each time he had to pluck one. I wondered if maybe he could feel it, as if each weed and wildflower was like a hair on his leg.
“Do you have a second?” I asked.
“Hopefully,” he said dryly.
“Yeah, hilarious,” I told him. “I mean it. I have a question.”
“All right,” he said, pushing some dark curls out of his eyes as he looked up at me. “Shoot.”
“Do you want to take a walk?”
He shook his head. “No.”
My breath came out in a groan. “Look, this question I have, it’s … powerful.”
Tristan’s eyebrow went up. “Powerful?”
I nodded. “Doubly.” To emphasize my meaning I nodded down the wall of the the lodge to an open window. Slayt’s open window.
Tristan looked irritated as his eyes came back to my face. “I guess I could use a break.”
“Perfect.”
Tristan rose stiffly from the garden and we dipped around the side of the building. A lap around the lodge was all that stood between me and some answers.
Hopefully.
When we were out of the wake of Slayt’s window, Tristan fixed me with a flat glare. “So I guess we’re super best friends now, huh?”
I scowled at him. “What?”
Tristan shrugged. “You go from never saying a word to me to interrogating me on a daily basis. I’m honored.”
I frowned. You could say it was a hair on the sheepish side as frowns go. “It’s not—sorry. I’ve just been working on this thing all summer and I think you might be able to help me.”
“Your wish is my command,” Tristan returned snidely.
“And your secret’s still safe,” I shot back. “So don’t push it.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have said anything,” Tristan muttered, crossing his arms. “Okay, what is it?”
“I need to know about coal.”
Tristan tugged off his faded black ball cap, and tried to rub a smear of dirt from the Pink Floyd prism patch on the front. “Coal?”
Am I saying it wrong or something? “Yes. Coal. C-O-A-L.”
“What about it?”
I cleared my throat. “Someone told me it’s made out of plants—is that true?”
Tristan swept his eyes back and forth, pursing his lips in thought. “More or less, yeah.”
“And coal is a rock, right?”
“Yeah,” Tristan replied. “Sort of.”
“Okay, so … plant, rock, rock, plant,” I said, balancing my words in each hand before cupping them together. “See where I’m going with this?”
His mouth crimped and he looked confused. “Are you calling me coal?”
I shook my head. “No, but … do you know anything about how coal is formed?”
Tristan shrugged. “Kind of. Just grade school stuff. A bunch of plants and vegetation decay and compress—”
“Yes! Compress!” I said, recognizing Babbit’s word. “That’s like pressure, right?”
“Sure,” Tristan said. “Compressed plant matter under pressure and then it fossilizes.”
“Fossilizes?” I said, picking the sour word from his sentence and squeezing it like a grape. My chest clenched around my lungs, spilling air and crushing hope. “As in millions of years fossilizes?”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’s why coal is a fossil fuel—ring a bell?”
I almost threw up right then and there. That was it. The end of my quest. Everything else was irrelevant, wasn’t it? Every answer, every clue. I needed time. A lot of time. More than I could ever get. Mage or not, I was still human at the end of the day. A million dollars or a million years, it made no difference. Either way, Emma wasn’t getting her solistone by the end of summer.
Or was she?
“Okay, but, you’re part geomagus—” I talked through my thought process.
“Gee, thanks,” Tristan hissed. “So I’m a mutt now?”
“No. Well, yeah. Kind of … but if you’re half-geo, half-bota, this sort of thing might be right up your alley.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Speeding up the process.”
Tristan shook his head. “What process? What’s all this about, man?”
“Fossilization,” I said, grabbing his shoulders. “You … your ability. Do you think you could fossilize something?”
Tristan looked down at his high-tops, sighing. Just like that, I heard how crazy I sounded. It was a stupid question, I knew it. And though I was famous for asking stupid questions, this one was certifiably insane. I let go of Tristan’s shoulders, giving him an apologetic look and stepping back out of his bubble.
I had my answer then. Maybe I could save some face and not wait for the answer.
“You can’t speed up fossilization, Quinn,” Tristan answered coldly. So much for saving face.
I felt like an idiot. A Grade-A moron. I shut my eyes and nodded solemnly. “I know.”
“But I could probably mimic the process,” he went on, mostly to himself. “Transfigurative decay, relative compression? Yeah, probably.”
“Really?” I said, practically sobbing. “Seriously?”
Tristan juggled his head between his shoulder blades. “Yeah. Most likely. It would take awhile. Not a million years, but awhile.”
“What’s awhile?”
“Week, give or take,” he estimated. “After I perfected the process, of course.”
A grin split my face. I clapped my hands together. Pressing my palms against each other, I could almost feel a solistone growing between them. The thought of it made me shiver.
I was Luke Skywalker. Clad all in black, strolling up to Jabba’s palace at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, ready to rescue Princess Leia. This is where the montage would start. Cue up that Bonnie Tyler song from Footloose, man. This was it!
“Well, then,” I said grandly. “Let’s do it.”
“Do what?” Tristan replied. “Make coal?”
It was a bit anticlimactic. Completely deflated my moment.
I searched my lungs for a voice like a kid searching for pocket change. Or me searching for pocket change. “Well, no. Not coal. A stone, or a gem—thing.”
“A gem thing?”
I rubbed my eyes, biting back the words. “It’s an alchemy stone. This book said it was formed by the same process in which coal is formed—and you said that’s fossilization.
“And you said you could do fossilization—”
“Mimic,” Tristan corrected.
“Whatever,” I said. “Can you do it or not?”
“Well, a stone is a stone,” he muttered. “But an alchemy stone? That’s a tall order.”
A long hiss of air escaped my lips. “What would you need?”
“For starters?” Tristan said, shaking his head. “A base material.”
“A base material?” I echoed. “What do you mean?”
“You know, a base material. Like coal starts with peat,” Tristan went on. “This stone might share the same process with coal, but I’m sure it doesn’t start with the same stuff.”
“So what does it start with?”
Tristan shrugged incredulously. “How should I know? This is your thing, remember?”
I did remember. “Croatoan.”
“You know who might know? That Emma chick,” Tristan suggested. “You said this is an alchemy thing, right?”
I sighed. “Yeah. Maybe.”
But even if Emma did know—and that was a big if—she was the one person I couldn’t ask. It was like asking somebody’s shirt size right before their birthday. Talk about a spoiler.
This was the detective part. Covert. Under the radar. A real hero would just show up one day with the solistone, slap it on the table in front of Emma, possibly wearing a trench coat, drenched in rain, and say something smooth. Real smooth.
You look like you could use one of these.
Probably skip the trench coat.
“You know her, don’t you?” Tristan said, shattering everything. “Emma, I mean. You guys are, like, friends, aren’t you?”
“We’re—”
I stopped. I found myself taking offense to that. Just friends? I suppose to everyone else—no. Reality check. That’s what we were. Just friends.
And after our little field trip to Willow Bay I wasn’t even sure we were that.
Which is exactly why I needed the solistone. Almost as bad as Emma needed it.
Tristan squinted, craning his neck as if to see the words before they escaped my mouth.
“We can’t ask Emma,” I said ominously. “Can you just trust me on this?”
Tristan shrugged. “Of course. I met you, what, yesterday?”
Sarcasm. Tristan was funny now. Perfect. “Please, Tristan.”
I poured every ounce of what I was feeling into those words. My voice barely sounded like my own. I doubted Tristan was empathic—like, real empathic—but I saw his face change, a subtle wash of his features.
He got it.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Secret project.”
“So you’ll help me with this?”
He nodded. “Whatever this is … yeah, I think I can help. Provided the geomag thing is still just between us …”
I grinned, putting up my hands to show I had nothing up my sleeve. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re just, you know … singularly powerful?”
Tristan shook his head. “Heh. Yeah, sure.” He tried to wipe the grin from his face to little avail. “I should probably get back to work.”
“Yeah, ditto,” I said, suddenly becoming aware of the light blue work shirt I was wearing.
Tristan strode away, patting the many pockets of his vest until he found one containing a cigarette. Before he put it in his mouth, he pointed at me with it.
“Remember, base material,” he said. “Bring me that and I’ll do my thing if I can.”
“Got it,” I said with an affirmative nod.
And with that, Tristan was back around the building, presumably back to work plucking plants as sensitive as eyelashes from the ground.
A base material.
Okay, so I didn’t have all the answers on this little quest of mine. Questions were still in the majority—but I was closer. Closer than I had been all summer.