What the Frack?
Author: Jordan Castillo Price
Date: 2020-06-30 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Paranormal; Mystery; Fantasy; Romance; Humour; Contemporary
Description: It's all fun and games until something blows up.Thanks to the recent explosion in Pinyin Bay, most of its residents got out while the getting was good. Not Dixon Penn. He grew up there, and from the power plant to the strip malls, the city is full of fond memories. But if the mysterious corporation that bought up the shoreline doesn't stop drilling, memories may soon be all that remain.Yuri Volnikov is finally fitting in. He crossed an ocean to find a loving home with Dixon. Now, that home is threatened. And he won't give it up without a fight.The drilling has attracted plenty of attention. Wh
Publisher: JCP Books LLC

Contents

1. Book Info
2. 1 DIXON
3. 2 YURI
4. 3
5. 4 DIXON
6. 5
7. 6 YURI
8. 7 DIXON
9. 8 YURI
10. 9 DIXON
11. 10
12. 11 YURI
13. 12 DIXON
14. 13 YURI
15. 14 DIXON
16. The ABCs of Spellcraft Series
17. About this Story
18. About the Author

Guide

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. Start of Content

WHAT THE FRACK?

The ABCs of Spellcraft 7

Jordan Castillo Price

Find more titles at
www.JCPbooks.com

What the Frack? ©2020 Jordan Castillo Price. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN 978-1-944779-15-3

Electronic Version 1.0

1

DIXON

At the cusp of summer, Pinyin Bay should have been packed to the gills with people. Once the north end of the beach blew up, however, it was practically a ghost town. The snowbirds who summered here fled back to Florida. Year-round residents with relatives nearby decided it was a great time to visit family. And a lot of folks just loaded their valuables into their cars, picked a direction, and drove.

It was the day after the explosion shook the Boardwalk. Up in the attic Yuri and I called home, I was batting some pesky cobwebs off the ceiling joists—with our cockatoo, Meringue, supervising loudly from above—when my mom texted, COME DOWNSTAIRS. I’ve shown her how to release the caps-lock I don’t know how many times. Clearly, her phone was defective.

My father drops by all the time, but Mom says she’s not big on “visiting” anybody but the bakery. I peeked out the louvered window and saw Dad parked out front in the Monte Carlo, with Mom standing on the sidewalk, glaring at her phone. On my way, I texted back, before she climbed any more stairs than she needed to and started her day on a less-than-chipper note.

I greeted her with a hug and a kiss and another big hug. She’s especially fun to hug because she’s so squishy, though I no longer came right out and said so like I did when I was little. “Did you want to see some photos of our latest project?” I asked. “That lighting fixture we found out behind the store looks pretty spiffy in our reading nook. Not that we do any reading there—the folding chair isn’t exactly the type you’d want to sit in. But there’s nothing to perch on nearby and Meringue hasn’t pooped on it.” Yet. Though now that there was a convenient light fixture right above it….

Mom looked me up and down, then spoke as if we were having an entirely different conversation. “You know we have plenty of room, for you and Yuri both.”

“The car looks pretty full to me. Great packing job, by the way.”

“Not in the car. In the motel. Your father Crafted for them when they had that huge bedbug scare a few years back—apparently some folks can’t tell a carpet beetle from a bedbug—and they upgraded us to a suite free of charge.”

“That’s awfully generous of you guys—”

“A suite.”

“—but Yuri and I have talked about it, and we think it’s important to stay.” After all, drilling was currently banned in Pinyin Bay, so how dangerous could it be?

“Those out-of-own people are working hard to get the drilling ban lifted.” Mom said the word people as if it meant something offensive. “They have lawyers. Fancy lawyers.”

All the more reason to stay and make sure the city council of Pinyin Bay didn’t cave in to the pressure, what with Mayor Dunce being the first one to skip town. But Yuri, as a freelance Seer, had way more latitude than the Seers affiliated with specific shops, so if any Seens needed painting on the spot, he could paint them. And if we discovered any Spellcraft to be undone, I was the best guy for the job. Plus, Sabina had an irrational aversion to motel rooms. We didn’t want her to get lonely while Uncle Fonzo was off on a romantic getaway with his current lady friend.

“It’ll be fine,” I told my mother. “We’re not even that close to the shore. In fact, we only lost one windowpane to the last blowup.”

“I don’t like it, Dixon. You know who shut their doors? Pack in the Day. And they’ll work through anything. Even dumpster fires.”

The shipping shop at the end of the strip mall Practical Penn called home was nothing if not persistent. “They probably needed to recoup all the business they lost when their stingy owner used all those torn-up magazines as packing material.” Girly magazines. And not the kind that gave advice on lipstick and dieting, either.

Mom was not to be deterred. “What if there’s another explosion?”

“Nobody’s drilling.”

“Maybe not right this very minute. But mark my words. You don’t just haul in all that heavy equipment for decoration. At some point, the drilling will start up again. And when you least expect it—kaboom!”

Mom has always had a good, strong pair of lungs, and at this point in the conversation, both Yuri and Sabina came outside to see what the enthusiastic chatter was all about. “Did something else blow up?” my cousin asked. “Why didn’t we hear it?”

My mother attempted to recruit Sabina. “Nothing’s blown up…yet. You kids need to get out of here while you can.”

“I’m not willing to drop everything and go live in a room where the bathroom drains are full of stranger-hair! Besides, we’re at least a mile from the beach.”

“And if your cousin decided to run toward the explosion? You wouldn’t just follow—you’d race him there. The two of you have always been more dangerous together than apart.”

Yuri settled a hand on my shoulder. “I will keep an eye on them.”

My mother looked only slightly mollified as Dad rolled down the window and called over, “Come on, Florica, we’d better check in before they give away our room!”

“It’s a suite,” Mom muttered, then subjected each one of us in turn to her trademark head-grab and forehead kiss. She climbed back in the car, Dad gave a jaunty honk, and the two of them drove off.

Once Yuri was done blushing, he said, “Your parents are right to be cautious. The only reason no one was killed in that explosion was that the cabins were empty. Now all the heavy machinery is so close to the Boardwalk, people are mistaking it for a new carnival ride. We should stay clear of the shore until all of those machines are—”

A van with a satellite mounted up top squealed around the corner. “Hey!” I said. “Is that Bayside News?”

As the news van hurtled down the street, Sabina and I both ran toward the pickup truck.

“C’mon, Yuri.” I popped open the locks and climbed in. “Whatever’s going on, we won’t want to miss it!”

Yuri paused.

“Hurry up!” Sabina punched me in the arm so hard I nearly dropped my keys. “We’re gonna lose ’em!”

And with a resigned shake of his head, Yuri shoved me over to the middle of the bench and got behind the wheel.

Yuri can be the textbook definition of stoic when he wants to be, and despite Sabina exclaiming at him all the way to the beach, he took no creative license with the speed limit. Good thing. As we took the final turn that headed toward the beach, we saw a halfhearted demonstration that was well attended…by Pinyin Bay’s “finest.”

The demonstration took place in the scrubby area between the Boardwalk and the dunes, in a crunchy asphalt lot where Streets and Sanitation stored its leftover road salt. The lot was also the only way onto this particular stretch of shoreline, one where the earthmovers and cranes and augers hulked on the beach. The area was crisscrossed with sawhorses and bright yellow caution tape, though given how many people were milling around behind the tape, it was no big challenge to simply walk around it.

Now the cops were all standing around the sawhorses, sweating in their navy blue polyester, eyeing both the activists and the construction crew. They looked like they were daydreaming about leaving town. All but one, who was standing over a guy picking torn up paper out of the grass.

“Oh no,” Sabina said. “It’s Officer Hotti.”

I gave the cop a more interested once-over. “I guess he’s pretty cute, if you go for the stalwart superhero type.”

“No, that’s his real name—Hotti! Remember the bachelorette party I crashed a few weeks ago?”

“The one with the chocolate fountain? How can I forget?”

“When he showed up to warn us to keep the noise down, we mistook him for a stripper and started stuffing dollar bills down his shirt.” Sabina glared in his general direction as he tore a citation off his pad and handed it to the paper-picker. “Served him right for parading around with the boombox. Anyway, he’s got zero sense of humor, and he’s a total stickler for the rules, and he absolutely lives to write tickets. Whatever you do, don’t land on his radar.”

Yuri eased the truck around to the other end of the lot, giving Officer Hotti a wide berth, and slipped into a spot on the other side of the news van. We spilled out of the truck. A few parking spots away, a tall, good-looking Handless man in a very official lab coat and a hardhat was passing out protest signs from the back of a van marked Nature World. He wore glasses—so, of course, he must be very smart.

“That guy looks important,” Sabina said.

Yuri scanned the crowd. “Agreed. And the reporters think so too—they are heading right for him.”

“Perfect!” I said. “Let’s listen in.”

We slipped into the crowd, and someone shoved a sign into my hand that read Kill the Drill. A rhyming slogan? I was warming up to the activists already. But despite the catchy rhyme, I passed the sign on to the next guy so I could edge my way closer to the reporter.

The Pinyin Bay Journal was a local institution primarily known for its fastidious reporting of high school basketball games—and the Pinyin East Pelicans hadn’t made state playoffs in over forty years. Still, Pinyin Bay was proud of its one and only newspaper, even if its main function was to line bird cages and help insomniacs fall asleep.

Pinyin Bay isn’t large enough to have its own TV station, but thanks to the internet, the PBJ recently decided to add live video coverage to its strange mishmash of online offerings and social media. Tiffany Tennant was the face of the Journal’s new spot, “Pinyin Minute”—a show that has not yet clocked in at less than a minute, even once, in the months it had been airing. If folks were being generous, they’d claim that Tiffany had a knack for asking the questions everyone else was wondering about. Otherwise, they’d say, “That woman sure ain’t the sharpest rock in the box.” I’m no journalist, but it seemed to me that the reporter was chosen primarily for her looks. Then again, she had very expensive shoes—and you don’t usually see a reporter’s shoes—so it was possible her wealthy parents had something to do with her big journalistic opportunity.

While Tiffany primped her hair and the lab-coated nature guy looked impatient, the cameraman framed the shot of a big drilling machine behind them. The cameraman counted down, and Tiffany brightened just as he got to number one. “In the aftermath of an alarming boom, while some residents flee, others have gathered here on the dunes of Pinyin Bay to protest the drilling some surmise is the cause of the explosion. I’m reporting live with traveling geologist Dr. Skip Stone. Dr. Stone, what can you tell us about the blast?”

“It’s not surmised that the drilling is the cause of the explosion. It’s…pretty clear.”

“What’s not clear is the reason for the drilling, as no representatives of the new property owners have stepped forward. Why would anyone drill into the shores of Pinyin Bay?”

“In all likelihood, Tiffany, they’re fracking.”

Tiffany did a startled double-take, and whispered, “Language, please! This is live.”

The geologist refrained from rolling his eyes. “Fracking is a process that fractures the bedrock so natural resources can be extracted. It’s very controversial.”

Tiffany looked like she didn’t quite believe him, but the cameraman was making a go-ahead motion for her to continue, so she blithely carried on. “How is it that drilling could cause an explosion?”

“Any number of ways. There could be a pyrophoric mineral that ignites from contact with the air. There could be an inflammable gas that was exposed by the drilling.”

“Don’t you mean flammable?” Tiffany asked.

“Er…no. The term is inflammable.”

“But wouldn’t inflammable be the opposite of flammable? And what are your qualifications, anyway?”

“I hold the Arena Rock Award for ground-breaking advancements in my field.”

“And how do we know that’s a real thing? You seem awfully young to be a doctor.”

Maybe Tiffany really did ask the key questions everyone was wondering. As the scientist rattled off a list of degrees he held and then explained the vocabulary in greater detail—an explanation that went in one ear and out the other—I scanned the horizon, spooked by the thought of flammably inflammable pockets of gas lurking around below us, just waiting for a wayward spark. But the earthmovers were at rest.

For now.

“This has been Tiffany Tennant reporting for Pinyin Bay Journal Online. And if you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to like, share—and visit our sponsor, Happy Jack’s, home of Pinyin Bay’s hottest griddle.”

“They’re closed,” someone called out. “Left town yesterday.”

Undeterred, Tiffany and the cameraman headed off to get a few more shots of the protesting crowd. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to see if the scientist might know more about who was blowing up the beach. “Excuse me, Dr. Stone? I was wondering if you could tell me more about who’s drilling?”

He swung around and regarded me with hands on hips, looking more like an actor playing a scientist at the box office than an actual, real-life person. “Who? More like a what. The Loveland Development Corp is just a bunch of nameless, faceless bureaucrats. You can’t reason with them. I’ve tried. The minute one backs down, another one steps up to take their place.”

I’ve never been one to take no for an answer...not until I’ve done a lot of pestering. “Then what can we do?”

“We need to convince the mayor to hold an emergency land use hearing and permanently revoke their drilling permit.”

Sabina was incensed. “Well? What’s Dunce waiting for—the whole darn city to blow up?”

The geologist shook his head sadly. “Apparently there was an unprecedented loophole in their current permit. The mayor can’t stop them until he finds out what they’re drilling for. They can keep on drilling until they locate something.”

If only we had a dollar for every unprecedented loophole we encountered. Yuri stroked his chin thoughtfully. “What is it they are searching for?”

Dr. Stone said, “That’s what I’m hoping to figure out before anyone gets hurt.”

I got up on my tiptoes, hitched myself up even higher on Yuri’s shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Loophole?”

He nodded grimly. “Volshebstvo.”

And if we didn’t do something about it, who would? “Now what, Yuri? We can’t know for sure that the Crafting is in Pinyin Bay.”

Even if it was, the Loveland Corporation had bought so many properties, the sheer number of places they might have stashed a small slip of paper was beyond daunting. And while Yuri and I prided ourselves on spotting Craftings in the wild, that didn’t mean we could do it from a mile away.

It was overwhelming. Maybe Mom had been right, and the smart thing to do was pack everyone up and head out of town until the dust settled.

I was about to float the idea past Yuri—just in case he wanted to get out while the getting was good and he was only sticking around to humor me. But when I turned to ask him, the strangest expression crossed his face. Something vulnerable, between hurt and dismay. Just a flicker, and then his trademark don’t-mess-with-me, tough-guy frown slammed back home.

I followed his gaze and saw some debris from the previous day’s explosion poking out from the municipal salt pile. Rocks. Bricks. Planks of wood. I was about to reassure him that the chance of getting hit by flying rebar at this point was pretty slim, when he marched up to the salt pile, grabbed hold of something, and hauled it out.

A hunk of…plywood?

It was roughly the size of a card table, with three smooth sides and one jagged edge where it had broken away from a stud. I caught another flash of that pained expression, and when I did, I realized what we were seeing. I caught up with Yuri, snapped off a tiny, frayed bit from the broken edge, and held it to my nose.

Cedar.

I thought back to the cabin where we’d spent so many idyllic (if crowded) nights falling asleep in each other’s arms to the gentle murmur of the water lapping the shore. Maybe we’d always known our time there wouldn’t last forever…but we must’ve presumed the cabin itself would at least make it through another summer.

“We’ll figure this out,” I said. “Somehow.”

If there’s one thing I know about Yuri, it’s that he’d much rather do something than feel his feelings, so he was all over the chance to take action. “The volshebstvo is powerful, no question, but it is also lazy. Its power diminishes over distance. The corporate headquarters may be elsewhere. But if there is a Crafting which will allow them to keep drilling, it will be hidden somewhere in Pinyin Bay. And you and I will find it.”

2

YURI

We left Sabina at the protest to see what else she could dig up on the geologist. That was the reason we gave her, at least. I knew Dixon. And the probability was high that we’d wind up somewhere inflammable by the end of the day. Or maybe the word was flammable. I didn’t really see the difference. English is notoriously confusing.

I flung the cedar panel into the back of the truck, then climbed behind the wheel. Dixon was waiting for me in the cab. “I’ve been thinking, Yuri. Loveland might be a nameless, faceless corporation, but they’re still made up of people. And we just so happen to know the one who’s been doing their dirty work in Pinyin Bay.” How could I forget? In Spring Falls, I’d spent an hour massaging the man while doing my best not to make physical contact. “Though I’m not so sure how to search him for the loophole Crafting now that he knows we’re onto him.”

“Quint will see us. He is eager for another massage.” Of all the men whose naked bodies I’d ever touched, his was the most repulsive—though not because of his looks. Everything about the man disgusted me, so it would feel particularly satisfying to thwart him.

We headed to the Pinyin Inn, which was locked up tight…but my crowbar made short work of the back door. Inside, the atmosphere was dark and stale, and utterly quiet. We trod carefully anyway, in case Quint was still lurking around. But a check of the first floor revealed nothing. “His car’s not here.” Dixon opened the coffee maker and prodded the grounds. “And the coffee maker is stone cold, so he hasn’t used it this morning. I think we might be too late.”

I was angry. Searching the old hotel for a piece of Spellcraft was bad enough. Searching the whole city would be impossible.

When there is no one upon which to take out my anger, I do my best to swallow it down. Anger makes a good crucible. One which hardens the heart to disappointment and loss.

But Dixon did not cope with such things by hardening himself. Instead, he fostered resilience. “Well, you never know. Maybe he bought his coffee this morning at the cafe. We’d better check around and make sure he’s really gone. There are how many rooms here?”

“Two dozen, at least.”

“Then, we’d better get started!” Dixon dashed halfway up the staircase, then turned and gestured eagerly for me to follow. “Come on, Yuri — who knows what kind of oddball stuff we might find?”

I had little desire to paw through the leavings of whatever derelicts once lived at Pinyin Inn. Their belongings were doubtless of little value to begin with, and they would have removed anything worthwhile when they were evicted. Still, we could hardly squander the opportunity to be sure Quint was well and truly gone.

We headed up to the second floor. The carpeting was not simply dingy and worn. It was threadbare, with a trail worn through the center that went all the way down to the floorboards. The windows on either end of the hall were thick with grime, and what little light pushed through was stained sepia. I am not a sentimental man. But the sight of this squalid hotel brought back the memory of my life before Dixon in such a vivid and tactile way, I could not help but relive that feeling of coming to this foreign land and feeling so utterly alone.

Until, that is, a hand slipped into mine.… And squeezed. “You okay, Yuri?”

“Fine.”

Dixon squeezed again. “Let’s check these rooms and get out of here.”

Many of the doors stood open, and most of the rooms were thoroughly stripped. Peeling wallpaper, stained mattresses, and in one room, a collection of glass jars filled with what appeared to be urine. We made quick work of checking each room, closet and bathroom. If Quint had been using one of them, he had removed all traces of his stay. And the likelihood that he had ensconced himself on the third floor was slim, since it would have involved climbing so many stairs. But it would be lax to leave any stone unturned.

We checked the first room at the top of the stairs, which was crammed with outdated newspapers and thick with dust. I said, “The farther up we go, the less likely it is we will find anything. Even the long-term residents didn’t want to drag themselves all the way up here.”

“It does feel awfully deserted,” Dixon agreed. “Just a quick check, and we can—” Something plinked against the baseboard. Dixon crouched down and picked it up. “Huh. An airplane bottle of vodka. Empty, unfortunately.”

As he held it up to the light and considered it, a clink sounded from a distant hallway. He cut his eyes to me. I made a series of gestures, motioning for him to take the right-hand branch of the hallway while I took the left. He tried, but failed, to suppress an eager grin. He often claims I look like I am starring in my own action film. Silly. But I wanted to ensure Quint did not know we were onto him.

I took the hallway I’d presumed the noise came from, but after a careful check, found the rooms not only empty, but long disused. I rejoined Dixon back where we’d first heard the sound. I was about to suggest the possibility of rodents when Dixon flashed three more tiny vodka bottles, each clamped between two fingers of his right hand, one beside the other. He waved them all in greeting. “I guess coffee wasn’t cutting it anymore,” he whispered. “He’s been up here on the third floor recently. These are fresh—the little dregs of booze haven’t had a chance to evaporate. But if he was in any of the rooms I checked, he’s a lot better at hide-and-seek than I’ve ever been. If he was up here before, he’s not anymore.” He smiled at his own rhyme. “I think Quint’s given us the slip.”

I was about to agree when another clink sounded in the distance.

“That came from the stairwell,” I whispered. “He is somewhere downstairs. There are two sets of stairs, front and back. If we each take one, we can trap him between us.”

Dixon brightened. “Brilliant! Now, send me toward my staircase with another sexy strategic gesture…one where you make a vee with your fingers and point toward your eyes first.”

It was easier to comply than to waste time telling Dixon to stop playing games. Besides, I was counting on him to keep up the morale for both of us.

We split up, went downstairs, made another sweep of the second floor, then met in the middle. It was empty. But I did find a tiny, empty vodka bottle at the foot of my staircase that might not have been there before. Dixon took it from me and sniffed. “Maybe Quint is drinking his way down?”

But as he said so, a distant clink sounded—that of a small bottle hitting the floor. This time from above us.

I said, “Quint knows this place better than we do, and there are just too many hallways and rooms where he can hide.”

“So…we need to corner him somewhere he can’t slip away. Do you know of anyplace like that?”

I was about to say it was a fool’s errand—too many hallways, to many exits—when I recalled the room I’d nearly stayed in back when I first arrived in Pinyin Bay. Luckily, I noticed the doorknob had been installed backwards, so it locked from the hallway, not the room. The owner resented the fact that I was not willing to sleep there, and put me in a room that reeked of cigar smoke and old cheese instead.

I made my way up the hallway, checking each door, until I found the backwards lock. “But with so many rooms, how can we get him to hide in this one?”

Dixon thought for a moment, then brightened. “Do you still have that fancy vodka in the truck?”

I slipped outside and retrieved it from under the seat—wishing I could avail myself of a few stout shots, but knowing I might be called upon to think on my feet. I brushed some lint off the bottle and gave it a regretful shake. It had not come cheap. But how much would I really enjoy a good vodka if I had no home in which to drink it?

I rejoined Dixon in the room with the backwards doorknob, where he was futzing around on the dresser with a pile of random objects. “Just in time,” he said brightly. “Set that puppy down right here.”

“Is that a…propeller?”

“The blade of a ceiling fan.”

The long wooden slat stretched across the dresser top, balanced like a see-saw over a sideways coffee mug. Dixon held down one end, while the other, angled higher, had a billiard ball precariously balanced inside an old sock scrunched over the end of the blade.

“Whatever it is you think you’re doing—”

“—will be totally awesome when the mousetrap is sprung! You probably didn’t have that game in Russia, so I’d better fill you in. The vodka holds down one side of this tippy fan blade. And when Quint picks it up, the other side drops. Then, the pool ball rolls to the floor, banks off that wall, and smacks the door hard enough to shut it behind him. Bada-bing, bada-boom, we’ve got our guy.”

He found a drinking glass in the bathroom, set it to one side of the contraption, and admired his handiwork. It was a ludicrous plan…but at the very least, it would make enough noise to alert us to Quint’s presence.

“How do you intend to lure him to this particular room?”

“Good question! Let’s see…how about a sign? Free vodka!”

There was no chance this ridiculous plan would work.

And yet, how could I resist helping Dixon?

“No, not free vodka. Quint thinks too highly of himself. Anything that strikes him as discount or bargain would only make him leery. Instead of free…use the word exclusive.”

Dixon’s eyes shone with delight as he walked up to me, snagged me by both lapels, and bumped up against me. “You’ve gotta admit, Yuri. You. Me. Even when we’re not Crafting, we make a phenomenal team.”

We took note of the room number, then went down to the office to pull paper from an old copy machine and dig up a marker. Even with such a clumsy instrument compared to his cockatoo quill, Dixon was nimble with the pen when he wrote, Exclusive Vodka Tasting - Room 221. Not only did the lettering look elegant, but the frame he drew around the border elevated the announcement even further. He worked rapidly, with quick strokes. But his hand was so sure, he dashed out the sign as quickly as if he was just jotting down a shopping list.

Dixon held up the finished product for inspection. “Too bad I don’t have a fineliner to add a little fancy-work.”

“It is perfect,” I said simply, and he quelled a tiny smile as he turned to the photocopy machine to run off a stack of copies.

We hung a sign on the landing of every stairwell and all around the lobby. “Where else?” Dixon asked. “If Quint is three sheets to the wind already, he might not see the first one—or ten—he comes across. Front door, back door, the intersection of every hallway….”

We distributed the signs throughout the building. Even a very drunk man would not be able to miss them. I watched Dixon hang the final poster, and as I did, I felt a pang. Not pity, exactly. More like sympathy. Because he gave his heart so freely, it left him vulnerable to such disappointment. And there was no way his plan would work.

Once the paper was stuck firm, he turned an assessing look in my direction. In a deliberately bad imitation of my accent, he said, “Yuri, what is this face?”

I could have told him it was nothing, but he knew me all too well. So instead of pretending a confidence which I did not feel, I pulled him into a kiss. He could make of that what he wished. Given his baffling optimism, his interpretation would be much less of a killjoy than anything I could say.

He looped an arm around my neck and cradled the back of my head in his palm, smoothing his thumb over the shadow of stubble left on my scalp by the clippers. It never failed to surprise me—how intimate Dixon could be with the most unlikely of gestures. How confident. And tender.

But just as he pressed his mouth to mine and parted my lips with his tongue, something hit the floor above us. A sharp, percussive sound. Like that of a billiard ball dropping to the floor…and then rolling across it. And then a door slamming.

Dixon teetered back and mouthed the words, It worked! Though he was so beside himself with excitement that no sound came out.

The English language is full of nuance, and many words apply to only a very limited number of situations. Take, for instance, the word cockamamie. If ever there was a fitting time to use it, it was in regard to this vodka scheme. And yet, apparently, even the most cockamamie schemes had some chance of succeeding. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go see what Quint has to say for himself.”

We headed upstairs. The door to room 221 was now closed. I approached cautiously. Dixon, behind me, was vibrating with anticipation. I paused beside the door and listened so hard I could practically hear my own heartbeat. Eventually, I made out the sound of the glass clinking against the dresser, and then the hollow noise of the billiard ball rolling a few more inches.

Somehow, Dixon’s plan had actually succeeded.

I rapped sharply on the door. “It is Yuri,” I called out. “I am coming in.”

I gave the lock a twist and flung the door wide, ready to tackle the obnoxious businessman as he tried to flee. But not only was the man in the room seated in the faded armchair with a full glass of vodka in his hand…but he was most definitely not Quint.

Dixon spilled into the room behind me. “Ladin Silver? What’re you doing here?”

3

The portly Scrivener took a gulp of my good vodka, squinting at us the whole while, until he finally recognized us from the Hunting Party. “Ah, if it isn’t the Penn boy and his grown man friend!” His nose was red and he was slurring his words, but only a bit. He struck me as a man who was no stranger to vodka. “The two of you were pretty good sports—hic—about losing that primo love nest over the popcorn shop to me. But now I’m wishing I hadn’t—hic—jumped the gun in signing that lease.”

“Why?” Dixon asked. “What happened?”

“When those big construction machines on the shore blew up the beach—hic—the explosion tipped over a kettle corn machine in the shop downstairs. Butter-flavored cooking oil went—hic—everywhere...and then it caught fire!”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes! And it found—hic—every last sack of unpopped kernels. Talk about a blowout! There was so much popcorn—hic—it shattered the windows and shorted out the—hic—electricity.” Ladin splashed more of my good vodka into the glass and filled it to the rim. He downed half of it in one gulp, smacked his lips, and declared, “The signs were right! This is the most exclusive booze I’ve ever tasted!”

While it galled me to watch him slug it down like that, at least the gulp quelled his hiccups…for the moment.

He declared, “The fire marshall says the building is uninhabitable until further notice, which leaves me with nowhere to go.”

“What about your lady friend?” Dixon asked.

“She didn’t take too kindly to the idea of serving me flapjacks in the bathtub. Can’t imagine why. I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.”

I said, “So you have been at Pinyin Inn since the explosion?”

“I have. Figured since this old place was vacant, I might as well make use of it till I got back on my feet.”

“And you are the only one here?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Just me.” While I met Dixon’s eyes and gave my head a shake, Ladin sighed wistfully and added, “If only I hadn’t allowed myself to be seduced by a kitchen bathtub.”

Maybe I should have been relieved the volshebstvo had moved him to sign that unfortunate lease before I did, but mostly I was annoyed to hear that Quint had gotten away. I snatched the half-empty bottled from the fan blade and turned toward the door. “Come on, Dixon. There is nothing more to learn here.”

“Are you gonna be okay?” Dixon asked Ladin, but the Scrivener waved him off and settled onto a creaky old mattress to sleep off my good vodka.

We climbed into the truck, and I glared at my half-empty bottle for a moment, then tucked it under the seat where it belonged. It was silly of me to entertain hope, even for a moment, over such a ridiculous plan. Now, with no chance of forcing some answers out of Quint, I was out of ideas.

I could suggest we join Dixon’s parents in their motel suite. We could tell Sabina we were going for ice cream. She might be suspicious of the fact that Meringue was with us…I supposed Dixon could concoct something about “bring your bird for a free cone day,” a story which would hold together long enough to strap her down with a seatbelt and drive off.

As I considered how best to frame my suggestion, I realized Dixon had not said a word for several seconds. When he felt me watching him, he turned to me and said, “I can’t imagine it was easy for Quint to live at Pinyin Inn, what with his fancy, big-city businessman ways. Maybe he’s found someplace else to crash—after all, I wouldn’t put it past an enterprising homeowner to make a few bucks renting out their empty place while they fled for unexploding pastures. It would take forever for us to check out all the recently vacated properties, and that’s if we could even figure out which ones were up for grabs. But if he’s got any gold body paint left, maybe we’ll find him on the Boardwalk.”

It was as good a plan as any.

We headed over to the Boardwalk and found it alarmingly empty. Not a tourist in sight. And the few performers who’d shown up were clustered around the single concession stand that remained open, stuffing cotton candy in their mouths while keeping a watchful eye on the large equipment visible beyond the tree line.

Unfortunately, the living statue was not among them. And no one had seen Quint since the explosion.

Dixon was not daunted. In fact, he was already moving on to his next idea. “Maybe while we’re here I should make a wish on the Wishing Bell. The wishes still work, don’t they? Or did the Re-crafting I did when we were looking for the vote nullify whatever it was that helped regular wishes come true? Or true-ish. Because Bell wishes were never anything as good as Spellcraft, but they did kinda-sorta work. I’d make extra sure to pat the bell—”

“Keep your eyes peeled for Loveland’s Crafting. There will be no bell if the fracking starts again.”

Dixon snerked. “You said fracking.”

But before he lost his battle to quell a bout of adolescent laughter, a woman stepped neatly out from behind the Wishing Bell and pulled him into the shadows—the tour guide from the Barge of the Bay historical boat tour.

“Charlotte?” Dixon said. “I can’t help you run a tour today. I’m trying to figure out how to stop a nasty corporation from drilling up our shoreline.”

“I don’t need an assistant—the Barge of the Bay won’t launch if there’s no one here to take the tour! But something’s going on. Something big.”

“I know! I saw Tiffany Tennant just this morning.”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Tiffany should stick to her puff pieces about baking contests and makeup techniques. She asks all the wrong questions.”

As much as I was leery of this woman’s nervous energy, I had to admit…the reporter did ask ridiculous things.

“What are the right questions?” I asked.

Charlotte looked me up and down, then asked Dixon, “Can we trust this guy?”

“I’d trust Yuri with my life—and my family’s cherished monkey bread recipe (contains no actual monkeys).”

“Well, if you vouch for him, I’ll take a chance….” She narrowed her eyes. I held her gaze. “But if anything gets out that shouldn’t, we’ll all know where the leak is.”

Dixon said, “Yuri is most definitely not leaky. In fact, he goes whole days without speaking to anyone. You can trust him one hundred percent.”

“Then, it’s settled. But I’m not saying one more word out here in the open.” Charlotte cocked her head toward the parking lot. “Let’s go somewhere private.”

As we walked toward an old hatchback at the far end of the lot, Dixon tried to convey his excitement over whatever Charlotte might reveal with a meaningful wide-eyed look. As if I couldn’t already tell he was beside himself with gleeful anticipation. Anything that smacked of intrigue practically sent him into orbit.

The woman’s car was filled with stuff. Not as though she had neglected to clean it out—more like she’d been clearing out her office, only to find Pack in the Day had closed its doors and there was nowhere to dispose of her papers and records. She opened the back door, reached in among the boxes, and pulled out a roll of foil. She tore off a sheet and handed it to Dixon. He creased it into an inverted vee and placed it on his head.

Charlotte returned the roll to the pile, then pulled out a baseball cap with a shiny foil lining and put it on.

“What about Yuri?” Dixon asked.

“He doesn’t need any shielding. No hair to pick up the signal.”

I was already lost. But apparently, Dixon knew what was going on. “Listen,” he told her, “there’s some kind of loophole that’s going to let the outsiders keep digging up Pinyin Bay. I need to Un…derstand what’s going on. For my own peace of mind.”

If the Handless woman noticed he’d very nearly blurted out a Spellcraft secret—the fact that spells could be Uncrafted—she didn’t show it. She said, “You need to understand what’s going on? I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on. There are secrets buried beneath Pinyin Bay.”

I had to ask. “What secrets?”

“You’d never believe me.”

“Try us,” Dixon said. When she was not convinced, he added, “My mother always says the best way to cheer yourself up is to make someone else feel worse.” Charlotte looked confused. “Which means that sharing your problems is always helpful! You know we make a good team, so do yourself a favor and confide in me.”

One thing I can say about Dixon. For all that he’s a formidable Scrivener with dubious morals and no sense of self-preservation, he always manages to come off as utterly harmless.

“All right.” Charlotte nodded and took a deep breath. “Here goes. Something’s buried under Pinyin Bay, and it’s been there for generations. My grandmother knew what it was—she even wrote a book about it. I’m sure you’ve got a copy of I’ve Been in Pinyin.”

“We sure do!” Dixon exclaimed. “Your grandmother wrote it?”

“That glorified doorstop? No way! Meemaw wrote a history of Pinyin Bay all right, but hers wasn’t some whitewashed pabulum about bricks and fire hydrants. Meemaw’s history cut straight to the heart of all the suspicious goings-on in Pinyin Bay that’ve been happening ever since the city became a city—things that just don’t add up. Local taxes, for example. Did you know certain combinations of obscure deductions will earn you enough tax credits that the government ends up owing you money—and wealthy business owners aren’t even taking advantage of them?”

But I would wager Pinyin Bay’s Spellcrafters were. I cut my eyes to Dixon, and he gave me a smile and a shrug.

“And then there are the local noise ordinances. They’re so convoluted that if your dog is barky, you could end up in a stockade. It’s not one of those weird rules from the 1800’s that never got taken off the books, either. It was passed thirty years ago!”

Dixon smiled wider and tried to look innocent. He failed.

“There are all kinds of absurd laws on the books. Did you know it’s technically illegal in Pinyin Bay to whistle after midnight?”

And no doubt there was a nearby Scrivener no longer annoyed by someone’s late-night serenade.

Spellcraft was not well suited to many things. It was notoriously unreliable around machinery, and it was not powerful enough to alter the mechanics of the natural world in any fundamental way.

But the law?

The volshebstvo loved nothing more than to take a complicated set of legalities and scramble them to the point of chaos.

Charlotte said, “I think it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.”

Dixon laughed nervously. “Really? Because so often, a bunch of things that appear to have a common denominator are actually entirely unrelated. Take, for instance, the fact that the Pinyin Bay Annual Picnic was closed after someone stole all the grills from the park—”

Charlotte frowned. “But that’s exactly why the picnic was canceled. I make it my business to keep an eye on local news. I was at that city council meeting, and I remember specifically what Mayor Dunce said: This is why we can’t have nice things. I hope that grill thief is happy!”

“—and I’m sure that the special tax credits and touchy noise ordinance laws have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”

If I didn’t suspect it was all related to Spellcraft before, I certainly knew it was now.

“I understand your skepticism,” Charlotte said. “But believe me. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Everything is connected. Meemaw’s book is proof—written proof. And when the Historical Society encouraged history buffs around town to put together a local history, she figured it was her big opportunity to shed some light on all the suspicious stuff that’s been going on. It was a fascinating read—at least according to Meemaw—but as the book rolled off the printing press, in came Mildred Merriweather Block with her boring, whitewashed history. At the eleventh hour, production was called to a halt, and I’ve Been in Pinyin was printed instead.”

“This is all…interesting,” I said. “But what does it have to do with the fracking?”

“Fracking,” Dixon murmured with a snort.

“The title of Meemaw’s book is Buried Secrets of Pinyin Bay.”

“Buried secrets is a common expression in English,” I said.

“True—but Meemaw didn’t have a metaphorical bone in her body. And once you see the scope of what’s going on, it’ll be obvious why Loveland wants to dig up the shoreline.”

Dixon clapped his hands together. “Well, I’m sold. Let’s see the book.”

“That’s the thing,” Charlotte said wistfully. “All those copies that rolled off the press were remaindered…which means that they tore off the covers and destroyed the rest.”

Dixon said, “But don’t you have the computer files?”

“This was all pre-computer. I’ve checked around, and even the printer’s plates are long gone. Only a single copy of Buried Secrets wasn’t destroyed—a galley proof—but Meemaw gave it away. Apparently, she had a best friend that no one knew about until her will was read. Her life’s work passed on to this elderly woman, who was even older than her! I’ve tried getting in touch to plead my case for the book, but no matter what I do, I just can’t seem to pin this woman down.”

I did not need to see the volshebstvo bending reality to know it was in play.

“I’ll bet I can get your book back,” Dixon said. “Old ladies find me incredibly charming.”

I was not so sure Charlotte believed him, but she seemed desperate to retrieve her grandmother’s book. She mashed down her cap, squashed the foil more closely around Dixon’s head, and made a few bizarre hand gestures beside my ears, as if she was batting away flies. Once her precautions were in place, she leaned in, fixed us each with a meaningful look, and whispered, “The old woman’s name…is Morticia Shirque.”

4

DIXON

I could barely contain my excitement as we headed over to the hospital where the head of Pinyin Bay’s Spellcraft circuit was convalescing after an unfortunate black mold incident. “We’ll sneak into the staff areas and steal face masks and scrubs,” I told Yuri. “They’re not exactly the most flattering of garments, but they’re roomy enough that we can probably find something to fit even you. If not, I can put you on a gurney, cover you with a sheet, and act like I’m headed for the morgue. And if anyone questions me, I’ll just say it’s my first day. Acting incompetent is a great way to gain people’s trust—”

“Or you could just ask to see Morticia.”

“I dunno, Yuri. As plans go, that seems way too simple to actually work.”

Yuri gave me the side-eye.

“All right. Fine. We’ll try it your way.” I supposed we could always sneak back in and do it my way if Yuri’s idea didn’t pan out.

As hospitals went, Bayside Mercy was not particularly impressive—though they did straighten out Uncle Fonzo’s cursed hand without asking too many questions, so maybe their borderline incompetence wasn’t all bad. The nurse at the front desk was working hard when we approached…or at least, she appeared to be. But then we got up close and saw she was doing a word search. Once she circled her word, she glanced up, bored, and said, “Can I help you?”

“We’re here to see Morticia Shirque,” I said. My mind was racing with various reasons we could give for the visit. We could say we were personal injury attorneys. Or out-of-town mold specialists. Or Jehovah’s Witnesses. But before I could decide, the nurse took a better look at me and said, “Oh, are you one of her great-grandkids?”

“Yes,” Yuri said quickly. “He is. And I…was adopted.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed about you, but I could totally tell the short one was part of the family. He looks just like all the others. But you all need to communicate better amongst yourselves. Ms. Shirque was released last night.”

“I don’t suppose she left a forwarding address,” I said.

The nurse frowned. “Why don’t you just ask your cousins?”

Before I could stammer out some patchy story about family rivalry, a long-buried feud, and a monkey bread recipe gone awry, a set of doors whooshed open and my actual cousin stepped out from the urgent care wing—followed by the tall, handsome geologist, who was now hobbling along with one foot encased in a gigantic orthopedic foot brace.

I hurried over and asked, “What happened?”

Dr. Stone gave a heavy sigh. “Twisted my leg. It was my own fault, really. I was so wrapped up in the protest, so pleased with the amount of public support we’d garnered, that I didn’t look where I was going and found myself knee-deep in a gopher hole.”

Sabina has been leery of gophers ever since we were kids. I was pretty sure they weren’t the ones pooping in her sandbox and the more likely culprit was the neighbor’s cat, but she was never quite convinced. “Someone oughta do something about those gophers. Now Skip is stuck in this dumb boot. At least the city council hasn’t lifted that drilling ban…yet.”

“That’s a real shame about the gopher hole,” I said. “And it’s your driving foot.”

“I’m fortunate to have such a caring nursemaid.”

Sabina’s cheeks went pink.

I can count the number of times my cousin has blushed on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to play tiddlywinks—so, the pink cheeks were a serious red flag. I took in the way they were standing, her with an arm linked through his, snuggling close, gazing up at him with limpid eyes.

Interesting development.

Usually Sabina couldn’t go anywhere without tripping over a potential suitor. Ever since I could remember, I had to dress nice, practice my pickup lines and keep plenty of product in my hair. But Sabina could charm a guy by just standing there. (Like, seriously, she’s met at least four boyfriends waiting at a crosswalk for the traffic light to change.)

This fancy geologist was a few layers above the typical Penn family social strata, so Sabina might need a little help to land him. And since my cousin has played wingperson to me many a time, steering all the gay guys my way, I was eager to return the favor. “Where are you staying, Dr. Stone? Hopefully not Pinyin Inn. Their vodka tastings really leave something to be desired. And besides that, they’re closed.”

“I’ve been putting the field cot in my van to good use.”

“But you’re all dirty,” I said. “You should stay at our place. The water pressure’s phenomenal, and our washing machine hardly ever shrinks anything. Sabina’s on a daiquiri kick lately, so there’s plenty of ice for your ankle. Never underestimate the healing power of a great night’s sleep in a homey home. Why do you think hospitals discharge people so quickly these days?”

Dr. Stone’s brow furrowed. “Their insurance runs out?”

“Besides that. It’s the power of positive attention. Totally a thing—look it up!” Hopefully, he wouldn’t. Or if he did, the search engine would lead him to something at least remotely plausible.

“I would hate to insert myself where I’d be unwelcome.”

“Nonsense.” If insertion occurred, I’m sure it would be entirely consensual. “My Uncle Fonzo’s out of town, so we’ve got plenty of room.”

“Sabina is good nurse,” Yuri added.

His agreement totally fanned my flames. “Absolutely! She’s the best darn amateur nurse in Pinyin Bay. She’s kind, and nurturing, and conscientious.”

Sabina was pretty much none of those things—in fact, most people described her as fierce, opinionated, and disarmingly prickly—but she’d kissed an awful lot of toads lately, and maybe this one had princely potential. As I sang her praises, a rousing soundtrack began to play behind me. Maybe it just turned out to be the crabby receptionist’s ringtone—but even so. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone give such a persuasive argument.

Apparently, Dr. Stone agreed. “Very well. Miss Penn, I shall be forever in your debt.”

While my cousin and her new geologist friend hobbled off, Yuri and I headed back to the truck. “Now what?” I asked.

“We do not know where Morticia Shirque is…but her great-grandson probably does.”

“If we steal those scrubs and pretend to be doctors, we can look up Morticia’s discharge records and find out where she went. I know the nurse literally just spoke to us, but maybe if I put on an accent—”

“We can see Vano’s apartment from here. Literally.” Yuri pointed toward Scrivener Village. “And his lights are on.”

I groaned. “Vano is the last person I want to go crying to for help.”

“Do you want to find out what that book can tell us or not?”

I supposed that with the fate of Pinyin Bay at stake, I could suck it up and go ask my old frienemy for help.

But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

5

Vano Shirque has never done anything deliberately mean to me. In fact, I doubt he has any idea that his mere presence is so infuriating…which makes him even more insufferable.

See, Vano has this way of always coming up smelling like roses with no effort whatsoever on his part. In high school he was a trendsetter, even among the Handless. Our junior year, he had this one particular T-shirt that became the envy of Pinyin High. It was a dark burgundy knit with an incredible drape, and a somewhat disturbing Rorschach blot design front and center. Plenty of kids took their fashion cues from Vano—from the slouchy knit cap to the cheap necklace wrapped around his wrist to form a bracelet—but no one could figure out where this particular garment had originated. I knew this for a fact. Sabina and I hit every darn store in a twenty-mile radius trying to find one like it.

Turned out all our searching was in vain, because there wasn’t another shirt like it to be had. He’d spilled India ink on himself and didn’t care enough to throw the stained garment away.

I should have felt some small satisfaction over the fact that he was the one who’d ended up living in an apartment made of old doors, not us—especially since our attic was not only spacious, but upstairs from my family and incredibly cheap. And yet, it still stuck in my craw that he’d beaten me to the punch in signing that darn lease. Probably because while I’d been racing frantically toward the paperwork, he’d accidentally leaned into the table and a perfect signature just fell out of his Scribing hand.

Still, if anyone knew where Morticia Shirque might be, it was her beloved Vano.

Scrivener Village was just as deserted as the rest of Pinyin Bay. We can be a stubborn people, but without any Handless around, there was no one to Scribe for. If Vano was planning on joining in the great exodus, he hadn’t gotten around to it just yet. Must’ve found some interesting lint in his bellybutton that required closer examination.

We trooped up the dingy stairs and I rapped on his door. It swung open slightly, and the heady scent of baking wafted out. I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance—but no, this was the right apartment—followed by the elation that Morticia had been so easy to find. And here I was all tied up in knots about seeing Vano. Just goes to show how productive it can be to face your fears. Or your annoyances, as the case may be.

“Hello?” Yuri called through the semi-open door while I was patting myself on the back.

“It’s open, c’mon in.” Not Morticia. Vano.

Without the glamour of Spellcraft glitzing up the place, the empty apartment had been a real eyesore. Now, though, with Vano’s stuff moved in, it looked like a magazine spread on boho chic. Each individual thing had obviously been rescued from the thrift store or the trash heap, and obnoxious seventies furniture brushed elbows with battered antiques. But together, it looked whimsically harmonious and breezily charming.

I rolled my eyes.

Vano was seated at the dining room table, which had a crocheted tablecloth that looked like a spider’s web, and four mismatched chairs, each painted a different shade of turquoise. The table was covered from one end to the other in perfect little rectangles of shortbread. He piped a stunning dark chocolate flourish onto the piece he was holding, set it down, and then deigned to look up to see who he’d randomly invited into his apartment. “Oh, hey,” he murmured casually, not as if he’d been expecting us, but like nothing particularly surprised him.

“Vano.” I said his name coldly. Which I’m sure he didn’t notice. “Can I see Morticia?”

“You could. If you were in Arizona.”

“Arizona!”

“One of my uncles lives out there, so she went to visit. Said the dry air would clear out her lungs.”

“If Morticia’s in Arizona, then who baked all these cookies?”

“I did. For the Scrivener Village block party.”

Where the heck had Vano learned to bake while I could barely make myself a piece of toast? (Like, seriously, they should warn you that flames will shoot out the top of the toaster if you let too many crumbs build up inside.)

He picked up another naked shortbread and piped on a perfect chocolate flourish. “The party got canceled, though, what with the explosion and all. So, help yourself. I’ve got plenty. Prob’ly end up feeding half of ’em to the seagulls.”

I was about to tell him in no uncertain terms what he could do with his attractive and no doubt very buttery baked goods, though the sound of shortbread crunching between Yuri’s molars distracted me from whatever point I’d hoped to make.

Vano added a few decorative dots to the flourish, which made it even better.

“Chocolate is really bad for birds,” I informed him.

Vano set down the piping bag with a shrug, folded his arms and tipped back in his chair. “I guess that makes it easier for me. But since a lot of these are already decorated, if you wanna hang out and help me eat it, it’ll be a lot easier than packing it up for the freezer….”

Yuri jammed another cookie into his mouth. They sounded delicious. Darn it all.

“Maybe you can help me,” I forced myself to say. Because while I hated the thought of owing Vano any favors, it was preferable to sitting around stress-eating his perfect shortbread. Plus, he was a fellow Scrivener, so he knew full well how Spellcraft worked. “A loophole is keeping Mayor Dunce from putting an end to the drilling for good. There’s a history of Pinyin Bay your grandmother owned that could help us close that loophole.”

“The mold cleanup service dropped off a bunch of Nana’s books. I think the one you’re looking for was somewhere in the stack.”

He oozed up out of his seat and led us deeper into the apartment. When we got to the room cobbled together from dozens of discarded doors, my heart sank. The “stack” of books was practically a library, jumbled up on the floor in waist-high, teetering piles. Vano considered one of the swaying towers of hardcovers. “If I remember right, there’s a local history somewhere around…here.”

One second, he was all listless ennui, and the next, he’d struck like a cobra to snatch a single book from the center of a pile. The stack wobbled momentarily, then settled. It was like a magician whisking a tablecloth out from under a three-course meal.

He held the book out to me. “Here ya go.”

I was excited…but only until I recognized the title: I’ve Been in Pinyin by Mildred Merriweather Block.

Yuri swallowed his mouthful of shortbread and said, “This is not the one we are looking for. There is another history. A secret history. One of a kind. And Morticia had the only copy.”

Vano whipped out his phone and said, “I’ll ask her.”

As plans went, that seemed awfully…simple.

He shot his great-grandmother a text. Which was kind of crazy, considering that while my parents were several generations younger than Morticia, my mother insists on yelling into her cell phone as if it can’t hear her, and my father sends inscrutable texts via autocorrect.

I angled myself to watch—Yuri did, too—as the three little reply-dots danced across the screen. And danced. And danced. But by the time I questioned whether or not Morticia Shirque was any better on her phone than my parents, a lengthy reply appeared.

I know exactly which book you’re looking for, though I haven’t thought about it in years. The Handless woman who wrote it was a friend of mine. A little too fond of conspiracy theories, maybe, but she shook a good martini. There’s a secret attic over the secret study.

“Two levels of secrecy?” I gasped. Out loud. Then was annoyed with myself for letting on that I was impressed.

Look in the old steamer trunk and you’ll find the key to your quandary. And don’t forget to take your vitamins.

“Is that code for something?” Yuri asked as we followed Vano back into the kitchen.

“No, Nana’s just overprotective.” He grabbed a container of chewable kiddie vitamins off the shelf, the kind shaped like cartoon dinosaurs, and crunched through a stegosaurus and a triceratops. He held up the vitamins and rattled them in offering, but Yuri and I both declined.

Was it adorable how close the two of them were? Of course. But I wasn’t about to let Vano lull me into a false sense of security. “How will we get into the mansion? I’m sure Loveland changed the locks.”

Vano was, of course, unconcerned. “I know lots of ways in and out of that old place. I can’t imagine they’ve found them all.”

I said, “There’s no need for you to come along. Just tell us about all the various obscure entrances. And the location of the secret room and its secret attic. And describe the trunk—”

“Dixon,” Yuri said, in the tone of voice that hinted I was not being entirely reasonable in trying to leave Vano behind.

“I’d better come along,” Vano said. “When Nana sold, she went on this minimalism kick and left most of her stuff behind. And when I was making cookies, I realized something that meant a lot to me was still in the mansion: my favorite wooden spoon. I know, it probably seems dumb to be sentimental about a spoon….”

Yuri cut his eyes to me. The look had remember your lucky spatula written all over it.

I quelled a sigh. “I suppose we could take a look…if you hand over what’s left of that chocolate piping bag.”

6

YURI

We were worried that someone from Loveland might be monitoring the Shirque Mansion, but that worry was unfounded. Even from the carriage house at the end of the drive, we could tell it was entirely abandoned.

“What architectural style is this?” Dixon asked through a mouthful of melted chocolate.

“That depends. Which part are you talking about?”

I took in the building’s façade. It was complicated, with elaborately trimmed gables, fantastical posts and spindles, and even a turret. Definitely Victorian…until we walked around the side, and instead of shingle, we found beam and stucco.

Vano said, “The four faces of the building are Queen Anne, Tudor, Arts and Crafts, and Federalist.” He pointed at the back of the carriage house, which looked more like a Grecian tomb, complete with caryatid columns shaped like scantily clad women. “The more avant-garde stuff is on the outbuildings. Most people don’t know this, but my great-great-grandfather, Phineas Shirque, failed his Quilling Ceremony…and so he decided to become an architect. In fact, he designed a lot of the buildings that make up Scrivener Village.”

Why was I not surprised?

“The way Nana tells the story, her dad might not have been a Scrivener, but he still had a Spellcrafter’s insight into the way people think. Back then, people sold their services by showing illustrated catalogs of various house designs. But Phineas knew that if customers had something physical, something tangible, to see, they’d part with more of their hard-earned cash. And so he built this mansion to be a showroom where he could really put his skills on display.”

Dixon craned his neck to look at a waterspout shaped like a gargoyle. “This whole big place, and it was just you and your great-grandmother living here?”

“Ever since mom went to ‘find herself’ in India and was trampled by an elephant, and my dad took a header into the Ganges.” Vano said this as casually as if they’d simply gone to the store and failed to return. Then again, they wouldn’t be the first Scriveners who’d met with a baffling demise. Particularly if they were sloppy in their Crafting.

I convinced Dixon to leave the chocolate behind—he’d probably be up half the night as it was—and we approached the back of the building. Its doorway was flanked by a symmetrical line of tall classical columns. The wear and tear caused by the progression of time was much worse here. Unlike the Victorian front, which had been painted in a half-dozen bold colors, the Federalist back was entirely whitewashed. Once. But the old white paint was now peeling, and green with mildew where the tall trees cast perpetual shade. Freshly boarded windows were stark against a building that had been moldering for years. And a brand new lock shone from the door.

“This is no way in,” I said.

“Not here,” Vano agreed. He led us around the corner and pointed to an overgrown hatch set low to the ground. “But it looks like they missed the old coal chute.”

Dixon blanched. “That doesn’t look like it leads anywhere good. In fact, it might not lead anywhere at all.”

“Ask me how many times I found a raccoon rooting around in the pantry thanks to this door. It’s a hop, skip and a jump to the kitchen from here.”

“I dunno,” Dixon said. “It looks awfully small.”

Vano shrugged. “They were really big raccoons.” He pried open the old coal chute and peered inside. “All clear! Let’s go.”

Fortunately, I am not claustrophobic. One by one, the three of us squeezed down the coal chute and into the basement. By the light of our phones, we picked our way through a warren of old washtubs and coal bins and even an old distiller until we came, finally, upon a set of stairs which led up to the kitchen.

Vano switched on a small light over the range, which was newer than the building itself, but still very old. “Power’s still on. But I suppose we shouldn’t light the place up too much, just in case anyone’s watching.”

While I was not afraid of the dark, the old mansion would have undoubtedly been eerie enough even with every light ablaze. “Where is attic?” I demanded.

But Vano was not easy to intimidate. “First things first. I go no farther without my favorite spoon in hand.” He turned to the cabinets and began pulling out drawers. The sound of utensils clacking together filled the quiet room. Dixon and I stood by. Watching. Me with my arms crossed. Dixon rocking back and forth expectantly on his heels. But seconds went by. And minutes….

Until finally Dixon and I could bear it no longer, and then all three of us were searching for the spoon.

The drawers were a baffling array of shapes and sizes. Some shallow, some deep. Some tall, some wide. And every one of them had a different knob. Dixon’s uncle has a “junk drawer” in his kitchen, one which is full of twist ties, odd bits of whatnot, old batteries and loose change. But every one of these drawers could be called a junk drawer. And they’d been accumulating that junk for well over a century.

By the time midnight came, we had been stabbed by myriad dull butter knives, found no fewer than thirty-eight wooden spoons, and still no luck. I slammed shut a drawer with a knob shaped like an acorn, turned to Vano, and said, “I am sure you have heard I am a Seer.”

He gave me a cryptic almost-smile. “A new Seer is big news among the Scriveners of Pinyin Bay.”

“Then let us find this spoon and be done here.”

Dixon did not seem pleased I would offer a Seen to anyone other than him—but neither was he eager to continue searching.

“That’s the thing about this old place.” Vano took in the monstrosity of the mansion with a casual sweep of his hand. “Spellcraft goes wonky inside these walls. As far as we can figure, it’s the fault of old Phineas. Whatever was in him that tanked his Quilling Ceremony must be woven into the fabric of this building. Crafting to find my spoon would be an exercise in futility.”

When I shifted my vision and scanned the kitchen by the single small light, did the building feel different than a normal place? Impervious to the volshebstvo somehow? More quiet, or stable, or still? I could not say. It was difficult enough to see the subtle distortion of Spellcraft. Impossible to discern the total lack of it.

Dixon frowned in thought. “My mother always says, re-check the first place you looked. You probably weren’t paying enough attention the first time around.”

Vano considered Florica’s advice. Then, he hauled open a deep, narrow drawer, thrust his arm in all the way to the back, and pulled out another half dozen wooden spoons. He tossed all but one on a growing spoon pile, but held up the final spoon to the tiny light. His expression turned poignant, but only for a moment. And then his unflappable demeanor returned. “Very cool. Now we can go grab that book.”

We tested the flashlights that had been unearthed in the spoon search, found three of them which were still working, and followed Vano deeper into the mansion. The light beams bounced off hallways that changed every few meters, from paneling to wainscoting to wallpaper. The house he had grown up in was not unlike his current home. But while the apartment was crafted from stray bits due to necessity and thrift, the mansion was done for show—and in a time when everything was showy. The effect was both disturbing and captivating, as though with every few steps we took, we were shifting in and out of different realities.

There was a grand ballroom in the center of the house. As Vano’s flashlight beam flitted across the far wall, I realized we were not alone. I recoiled with such force, I nearly flattened Dixon.

Good thing he is resilient. “They’re just statues, Yuri.”

“The mansion is full of ’em,” Vano added.

Wonderful.

In addition to the still, pale figures lurking in every alcove, there was a fireplace on each of the ballroom’s four walls, with a different mantle on each. Brick. Marble. Fieldstone. Wood. The wooden mantle was intricately carved with botanical designs. Vano strode over to it, took hold of a wooden pine cone, and gave it a twist. With a click, a single brick on the face of the mantle swung open. Dixon made a sound of annoyance—impressed despite himself.

“Oh, the mice were at it again.” Vano flicked out a bit of insulation and fluff. He was surprisingly blasé for a Scrivener about thrusting his hand into a bed of rodents. But then his brow furrowed as he continued to grope.

“What’s wrong?” Dixon asked.

“I could’ve sworn this was where Nana kept the key.”

I was running out of patience. “The key to what?”

“The secret door.”

I said, “Stop playing games. We have wasted enough precious time on coal chutes and spoons.”

Vano was as unfazed by my tone as he was by the threat of a mouse bite. “It must be in one of the other secret compartments.” He pulled out his phone and began texting. “Hopefully Nana’s still awake.”

“Why don’t we just check them all?” Dixon suggested.

“Secret compartments were my great-great-granddad’s specialty—they were a big hit back when Spellcraft could land you in the clink. Most of the hidden nooks and crannies in Scrivener Village were his doing. You know Scriveners—they’re notoriously cheap, and they wouldn’t part with their hard-earned money without good reason. Phineas had to demo his designs somewhere.” Vano lifted a portrait of a dour-looking Scrivener with an impressive set of mutton chop sideburns and flashed a secret wall safe behind it. Then he twisted the top off a decorative finial to show us a pile of dominoes inside. “There are so many hidey holes in this house—heck, in this room alone—it would be faster to just wait for Nana’s text.” He shrugged. “At least she’s an early riser.”

“My cousin’s got a Crafting that might help. I’ll see if she can swing it by.” Dixon called Sabina, but got no answer. “Maybe she’s already…in bed.”

I supposed she could do worse than the traveling geologist. Too bad we could not simply recreate the Spellcraft Fonzo had made her, Persistence opens all doors. But even if the mansion did not actively thwart Spellcraft, despite the fact that Dixon was a Scrivener and I a Seer, we could not simply copy the image and words. Spellcraft comes from the heart. True, there are only so many words in a language and not every Scribing would be entirely unique. But knowingly copying a painting or a phrase was the surest way to lose your grasp on the volshebstvo.

“Where is the door?” I said. “I do not need a Crafting to force it open.”

“Actually….” Dixon caught me by the arm. “It really is late. And no one’s drilling anytime soon. So why don’t we get a little shut-eye and tackle this problem fresh?”

“Fine. But first thing in the morning, we get through that door. One way or another.” I turned to leave. But as I did, I realized there was no obvious way out, unless I planned to crawl back up the coal chute.

“There’s a couple dozen bedrooms,” Vano said. “Stay wherever you like. But I’d avoid the woodland room if I were you. Unless you’re into taxidermy.”

Great.

Wallpaper changed styles so often I lost count as we made our way upstairs to the bedrooms. Some rooms were locked. Others disused, with furniture covered in sheets. Still others had been so neglected over time that the elements had encroached, crumbling the plaster ceilings and staining the walls with damp. But eventually we found a room far away from the taxidermy—a room that was not only still intact, but had seen use sometime in the current century. It would do…once I dragged the disturbing statues out into the hall.

Though it was hard to see by the light of the flashlights, clearly the decorating was overwrought, with fringes and tassels and an overabundance of silk moire. We were covered in coal dust. And even though the place would likely be razed to the ground by developers with all the furnishings still inside, we took care to wash up in the adjoining bathroom. We shed our soiled clothing before climbing into the musty bed. Both of us were too exhausted to be aroused, though our bodies had grown accustomed to one another these past few months. When we nestled together, even this strange bed could be made to feel somehow comfortable.

I woke the next morning with Dixon’s head pillowed on my biceps and his knee wedged between my legs. When he saw my eyes open, he traced the tattoo on my collarbone with his fingertip, and despite the body heat we’d built up beneath the covers, I shivered.

I captured his hand and brought his knuckles to my lips, kissed them, then said, “What is the real reason you discouraged me from breaking down the door?”

“Who says I’ve got an ulterior…motive?”

Dixon’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. I followed his gaze, and saw the entire ceiling was painted with cherubs. In trompe l’oeil fashion, it was made to appear as though the ceiling was open to the sky with a dozen grinning creatures leering down at us…which they had been doing all night long, and me none the wiser.

I hiked the covers up to our necks.

Unperturbed, Dixon rolled to face me and slid an arm across my chest. “I suppose I always figured Vano had it all. Status. Looks. Talent. He got to live in a turret, for crying out loud! Everything came so easily to him—to his whole family—while the Penns had to scrape and struggle for even the most modest success. Worst of all, though, he made me feel…inadequate. Like no matter how hard I tried, he could outdo me by just standing around. But hearing about his parents? Knowing now that his grandfather failed a Quilling Ceremony, like me? And then seeing how the inside of the mansion is nowhere near as cushy as I always figured it would be? I never thought I’d say this…but I kind of feel sorry for him.”

“It does a man no good to have things handed to him. If you did not know what it was to strive for something, would you have ever found your quill? You are clever and persistent—qualities you might not have had, if there was no need to work. But this hatred? It does not sit well on you. You are too soft.”

“Well…not entirely.” Dixon butted his groin into my thigh. “You know how I am first thing in the morning.”

“Not that.” I pulled him even closer and nestled his head into the crook of my shoulder. I spoke low, words that he felt in the vibration of our bare chests touching as much as he heard them. “Your heart is soft, nothing like mine, and the shard of hate is uncomfortable for you to carry.”

We stayed that way, curled together, for a long, thoughtful moment. And then he said, “For someone with such an impossibly petrified heart, you’ve got a lot of insight when it comes to love.”

I felt my cheeks grow warm. But luckily he could not see it with his face pressed into my neck.

“You are more than adequate,” I said, and felt Dixon smile against my shoulder.

Eventually, with a reluctant sigh, he rolled away. “Vano’s probably heard from Morticia by now, and we should deal with that secret door before Loveland blows up anything else…though I’m guessing the mansion will be even more spectacularly weird in the cold light of day. Plus, now we can get a better look at the funky statuary!”

7

DIXON

The word mansion dredges up all kinds of notions: excessive, baroque, larger than life. And yes, the house where Vano had grown up was all of these things…while being completely devoid of any sort of cohesion. I’ve never tried hallucinogens, but if I had, I’d imagine the experience would be a lot like walking the halls of the Shirque Mansion, albeit with less dust, fewer cobwebs, and more giggling.

My folks have a rec room in their basement. The ceiling is low, the paneling is drab, and every now and then, a truly bizarre insect will crawl out from a crack in the building’s foundation. But since living space was at a premium in our house—especially back when I was a teenager who required extensive amounts of privacy to browse online pictures of naked men—we made good use of all available square footage. There also wasn’t much disposable income in the Penn household, so we tended to make do with what we had.

This was how the rec room floor came to be covered in carpet samples.

“Can you believe they were just throwing these things away?” my father asked. Rhetorically, I presumed.

Mom looked like she certainly could believe it—and not only that, but if she had her druthers, she’d make him put those carpet squares right back where he found them. But since she only went downstairs to look for Halloween decorations (she got a real kick out of scaring the neighbor kids with her gruesome lawn tableaus) she let him keep his lucky find.

As Scriveners, we have a certain bent toward making things aesthetically pleasing whenever we can. And so, Dad laid out the carpet squares in the best pattern he could come up with. It was part checkerboard, part mandala. A kaleidoscope of carpet. But what he didn’t consider was that while he’d managed to create a design with great visual appeal, thanks to the difference in pile and weave, the texture he’d ended up with was disconcertingly inconsistent. You could hardly walk across the floor without tripping.

And it turned out the construction adhesive he’d glued it all down with was literally impossible to pry off.

The Shirque Mansion was a lot like the rec room carpet. On steroids. Times a million. Plus statues. And it looked even more cringeworthy now that we could properly see it.

We found Vano in the kitchen crunching through a bowl of cereal with a cup of tepid instant coffee at his side. He shoved the cereal box in our direction without looking up. We ate it dry. The nuggets were soft and the marshmallows were kind of rubbery—and it definitely could have used some melted chocolate—but it settled my growling tummy.

“Nana should be up soon.” Vano sighed. “Then we can grab your book and get out.”

How had I failed to notice that his disaffected boredom was a thin veneer masking his sadness? Maybe it took the presence of so much actual veneer to clue me in. Seeing someone down in the dumps—even Vano Shirque—invariably made me up my game. “Once we do find that book, maybe we can help you liberate a few souvenirs. After all, it’s not like Loveland will appreciate all the beautiful antiques and artwork in this mansion.” Frankly, I doubted they’d even notice anything was gone…which made me realize I’d probably just made things worse by opening my big mouth.

Vano sighed again. “Nana always hated the artwork. Especially the statues. See, her dad decided if he couldn’t Scribe, he would sculpt. Whenever he wasn’t working on the mansion, he was making these sculptures, and now the whole place is full of ’em. All the local art dealers said they were a waste of good plaster. Nana says she couldn’t get rid of those darn things even if she paid someone to take them off her hands. She actually tried, but no one wants ’em. They’re too amateur. Too strange. And the proportions are all wrong. The heads are way too big for their bodies.”

Yuri shuddered.

“I’m sure you’d find a taker online,” I said.

“Nope. Not even there.”

Clearly, they hadn’t put forth enough effort, because for every yin there’s a yang, and no doubt there was someone out there who’d think those statues were the bee’s knees. But…not me.

And most definitely, not Yuri.

Vano went on. “Even the trash collectors wouldn’t haul them away. It got to the point where Nana started pitching them down the dumbwaiter shaft…at least until they backed up so badly the dumbwaiter stopped working.” He turned to the wall and opened a door set into the cabinetry to show us a plaster arm sticking up from the shaft. It looked like it was waving. “It’s not the statues I miss. It’s Nana.”

Have I mentioned how flustered I get around other people’s sadness?

“Listen, Vano. It’s true that you live in an apartment made of old doors, and it’s a real shame that you’re not sleeping in a turret anymore. Plus, for all we know, you’ve grown accustomed to living under the blank white gaze of a bunch of misshapen plaster statues and their absence has resulted in a vague, yet discernible, feeling of nostalgia. But Morticia pulled through the whole black mold crisis—possibly because it wasn’t weird enough to actually kill her—so you’ve still got your Nana, and that’s what counts. When she comes back to Pinyin Bay, she shouldn’t set foot in that moldy apartment ever again. Have her move in with you.”

Morticia’s ears must have been burning, because just as I finished my rousing speech of encouragement, Vano’s phone dinged. Did it get under my skin that I could actually relate to Vano missing his family? Maybe a little. But spending as much time with him as I had lately, I’d become a lot better at picking up on his subtle cues. It might only be a quirk at the corner of his mouth and a subtle twinkle in his eye, but he lit up when his great-grandmother texted. And I could hardly take issue with a guy who was as attached to his family as I was.

That’s what I told myself, anyhow, when it turned out the key had been tucked under the doormat all along.

A bajillion hidey-holes at their disposal, and that’s where they hid the key? Not to mention the fact that no one puts a doormat in front of a secret door if they want it to remain a secret—and if it hadn’t been so dark last night, I would’ve totally noticed how suspicious it looked.

Unfortunately, the secret study behind the poorly concealed secret door looked nothing like the mad-scientist haven of my imagination: filled with grand bookcases brimming with leather-bound volumes, and flanked by forbidding wing chairs where bespectacled men with weird mustaches could retire with their snuffboxes.

No, it was just a plain old office. Utilitarian shelving. A battered metal desk. A single orthopedic shoe. The shelves were full of books, all right, but not the fancy tomes of my imagination. Instead, there were manuals and instructions, blueprints and plans. The most interesting part of the collection was the leisure reading—midcentury adventure magazines with lurid covers, the kind that featured lantern-jawed heroes fending off various monsters from busty damsels in distress. But wood pulp makes for fragile paper, and when I picked one up to take home with me, it crumbled.

Vano poked through a few storage closets before he figured out which door had a staircase behind it. “Nana was never too keen on either of us exploring the attic. Nothing up there but bats.”

Beside me, Yuri stiffened.

“Look at it this way,” I told him. “At least you don’t have any hair for them to get tangled up in.”

Apparently, that reassurance didn’t help.

But Vano wasn’t particularly concerned. A thick sheet of cobweb hung in the doorway like a lacy curtain. He grabbed a rolled-up blueprint and used it to clear the way ahead, then trooped upstairs. I followed with Yuri close behind. Also armed with a blueprint, I noted. Since Yuri didn’t play baseball growing up, I wasn’t so sure how effectively he could use it as a bat against the bat…and I wondered how he made sense of the word “bat” having multiple meanings. Before I could ask, though, we emerged into the attic…and all vocabulary-based questions fled my mind. Because the whole attic was covered in stalagmites. Or was that stalactites? Tighty-toppy, mighty-moppy? No, that wasn’t a real mnemonic.

Or was it?

If not, maybe it should be.

The three of us stared up at the massive icicle-shapes dripping down from above. Some were smaller, maybe a foot long, while others were easily as tall as Yuri, making the whole attic feel like the inside of a piranha’s mouth…one with particularly challenging dentition. Vano gave a prod to one long, pointy tooth. “I don’t think there’s any risk of them falling.”

I wasn’t so sure. Not after hearing about his mother’s final vacation.

I said, “I’ll be the first to admit, I could’ve paid better attention in Earth Science…though I basically only took it because I heard it was an easy A. But how come your attic looks like a cave?”

Yuri scratched one of the stalag-ma-tites with his thumbnail. “This is not rock. It’s plaster.”

We all peered harder at the ceiling.

I said, “Maybe Phineas was working on some kind of avant-garde ceiling finish.”

“This used to be his studio,” Vano said. He wove through the dripping forms and hopped up onto a scaffolding to get a better look. “Maybe he was just storing all his plaster in this overhead loft. I can see daylight through the roof up above, so it must’ve been getting rained on for years. And when the boxes broke open, we ended up with…this.”

The fact that the plaster formations were essentially natural somehow made them even weirder.

Vano hopped back down and unveiled the nearest sheet-covered form. The plaster-covered canvas crackled. When the dust settled, we saw it was no steamer trunk underneath, but a stack of wooden statue pedestals. Wind whistled through the holes in the ceiling, and the plaster danglies creaked alarmingly overhead. And as much as Vano was the closest thing I had to a nemesis, if I were to see him impaled by a plaster icicle, I knew I’d be scarred for life. “Maybe we should figure out an alternative way to access the chest. A lasso…or maybe a lariat.”

“It’s fine. See?” Vano gave a stalag-ma-tite a leisurely prod. “The bats are long gone. And the plaster icicles aren’t going anywhere.”

Good thing. He was moving slower than a sloth on valium right underneath them.

Yuri poked at one of the dangling plaster shards. It did seem pretty firm. And since there were no faces on the things (at least, I hope there weren’t), Yuri wasn’t particularly spooked by them. He waded impatiently into the fray and began dragging tarps and sheets off anything even remotely trunk-sized. Unfortunately, there were lots of things in the defunct workroom fitting that description.

When I got too antsy just standing by, I inched over toward the nearest object and pulled off a tarp. The fabric was surprisingly heavy with plaster drips and part of it was welded to the floor, but a good tug revealed…a Christmas tree. A really old Christmas tree, in sparkly silverish aluminum. I was about to ask Vano if his family had ever celebrated Christmas or if it was just for show when I noticed that Yuri now had a book in his hand. But before I could ask if he’d found what we were hoping he’d find, my question was cut off by the sound of an engine chugging to life outside.

A very loud engine.

Very nearby.

Not just any engine, but the sort that ran heavy equipment. But that couldn’t be! What about the moratorium? Before I could express my outrage, there was a huge boom. Not an explosion. More like a crash…even bigger than the time Uncle Fonzo dropped his bowling ball on the floor and very nearly collapsed his own bedroom. I spun around to face one of the garret windows to see what was going on, and through a stand of scraggly trees, saw the claw of a massive digger coming down.

Loveland wasn’t drilling. They were digging.

Evidently, Spellcraft wasn’t the only thing that knew how to exploit a loophole.

I watched in horror as the giant claw swung down. It hit the rocky soil with a thud so massive it knocked my teeth together—and I wasn’t the only one who felt it. The ceiling creaked as dozens of humongous plaster icicles were disturbed. Some big, and some bigger still—each of them creaking with its own pitch, which made the noise sound like a cross between a freakish harmony and a wail.

And then the stabby plaster came raining down.

Smaller hunks at first. Pieces with less plaster to anchor them to the ceiling. Yuri and Vano both looked up, startled. Vano eased away as a pointy icicle crashed into the spot where he’d been standing a nanosecond before. Yuri lunged toward the exit, but as he did, a wooden beam came down right in front of him. I might have veered around it and kept going, but not Yuri. He froze with the book clutched against his chest.

And a gigantic plaster hazard creaking directly above his head.

Through the window, the motor roared as the digger geared up for another strike.

I would have called out directions—if there’d been anywhere for me to steer him that wasn’t a path of certain doom. Outside, the claw came down. Inside…so did a dozen more plaster shards.

But in a move so fast it was nearly a blur, Vano Shirque whirled a heavy, plaster-saturated tarp overhead, shielding both him and Yuri from a freakish demise. The plaster raining down was brittle, and when the extra-big stalactite hit the tarp, it shattered in a spray of harmless flakes and a cloud of white dust.

I held open the door as Yuri and Vano skittered out, shedding the tarp behind them, and the three of us barreled down the stairs, nearly tripping over each other on our way through the secret door. Yuri closed it behind us just as another boom sounded, and a crack fired through the silvered glass of a nearby mirror like lightning.

“Don’t touch it,” I cried as I hauled Yuri away from the crackling surface.

“Bad luck,” Vano said…and as he agreed with me, I realized just how similar the two of us truly were. Something welled up inside me. Kinship? No, that was a bit extreme.

But tolerance? Definitely.

Would I have come to the same conclusion if he hadn’t just saved Yuri from getting plastered to death?

I suppose I’d never know.

8

YURI

Only an idiot would continue to dig in an area where their drills had caused an explosion. But as Dixon’s mother would say, if people had ink for brains, most of them couldn’t write their own name before the pen gave out.

We piled into the truck and I kicked up gravel in my hurry to get as far away from the digging as possible. We were all so covered in plaster dust, we looked like a bunch of donuts dusted with powdered sugar. As did the book we’d found in the attic, which rested in Dixon’s lap. “I hate to ask,” I said, “but did I get the right book, or not?”

Dixon drew a deep breath…and blew.

Once all the coughing subsided, he said, “I can’t open it.”

Vano took a closer look. “Is that Spellcraft on the cover?”

Of course it was. I knew as much without even taking my eyes off the road. “Protect this book from prying eyes,” Dixon read. “But I don’t understand. Why write a book if you won’t let anyone read it? And how is it prying if I just want to know what’s been written?”

Good questions. But if the book had any answers, we could not read them. The pages were stuck firmly shut.

Dixon took the pocket square from his jacket and carefully cleaned off the Crafting. “Pull over, Yuri, I’ve got an idea.”

Dixon’s cockatoo quill was a delicate thing. He drew it from its protective case while I opened the ink and held it ready. Scriveners train for years before Crafting their own spells. Uncrafting was even more of a specialty, a skill that most of them never mastered. Dixon, however, had figured out his first Uncrafting only moments after receiving his beloved quill.

One can learn much with the proper motivation.

Even Vano was intrigued as Dixon took a deep breath, centered himself…and began to Scribe.

Protect this book from prying eyes…

But show it off when needs arise

Dixon finished the phrase. I could not tell if I felt the volshebstvo tugging at the small hairs on the backs of my hands or if it was just the plaster dust mixed with my sweat drying into a tightening crust. We all watched the book. Not that we expected it to fly open of its own accord, defying all laws of nature. But it certainly seemed as though something should happen.

Vano observed, “You didn’t dot the ‘i’ in ‘arise.’”

While it seemed that Dixon had been less prickly around Vano—though it was hard to tell if it was just because we were all fleeing a catastrophe in the making—he definitely bristled at the slight to his calligraphy.

“Just planning out my final flourish,” he said loftily. He dipped his quill once more and topped the letter-i with something that started as a simple dot. But, like a seed, this dot was only the beginning. An elaborate stroke sprouted from it, whirling and looping to frame the Scrivening, weaving in and around the letters. It was bold and confident. And, yes, it was excessive. But even though it was clear Dixon was showing off, the flourish was so stunning, he had every right to be proud….

Until the pen nib hit the crease where the spine folded open. It skittered clumsily, spattering ink. I was merely surprised. The Scriveners—who had spent entire lives learning to ink—each let out a startled gasp of dismay. But as the pen staggered across the surface, the quill caught on something: a hole so small, none of us had seen it. But the cockatoo quill was so slender, so fine, it slipped right in.

With a click, the cover opened.

“It wasn’t the pages that were stuck,” Vano said. “It was the spine.”

The title page was simple. Buried Secrets of Pinyin Bay. And the author: Meemaw Jones.

“And here I thought it was Charlotte’s cutesy grandma-name.” Dixon put away his quill and traced the name with his fingertip. “Let’s just hope that if anyone’s dirty laundry is hung out in here, it doesn’t belong to anyone we care about.”

Vano said, “This thing is nearly half a century old, and even if there’s a compromising story inside, whoever needs to feel embarrassed about it is long gone…unless there’s anything in there about Nana. And I can guarantee, she’s old enough not to give a rat’s keister.”

“Well then. Let’s see what we can see.” Dixon dusted his hands together briskly and turned the page. “Table of contents: The dubious origins of Coral Beach. That seems like a promising start. How the Dunces bought their way to power. Not quite as relevant, but sounds pretty juicy. Pesticides and fluoride linked to tourism decline. O…kay.”

As Dixon listed the chapters, his enthusiasm quickly waned, until finally he fell silent. Vano and I followed his ink-stained finger as it trailed down the page. With each entry in the list, scenarios grew less promising, more unlikely, and even more paranoid. Accusations of foul play. Strange phenomena with perfectly logical explanations. And then, to top it all off….

“A town founded on alien artifacts. Great—now we’re descended from little green men.” Dixon thunked his head against the seatback in exasperation as the book slid from his lap. “I’m so sorry I dragged you both into this. My friend Charlotte is a little eccentric, but she’s got a bird’s eye view of Pinyin Bay from her tour boat, and she’s a smart lady. I really did think this book of hers would pan out.”

Vano retrieved the book and turned to the last section Dixon mentioned. He cleared his throat and read. “While a great many prestidigitators found fame and fortune causing things large and small to disappear, those vanishing acts of yore were but an illusion. Sleight of hand. There is a history, however, of an entirely different sort of disappearance in Pinyin Bay: one which can only be explained by alien abduction.”

I could think of a great number of ways people might disappear that were much more plausible—mainly that they were now food for eels at the bottom of the bay. But the author clearly had a knack for zeroing in on the most convoluted explanation possible.

“In 1894, the founder of Central Plains Paper and Sundries Corporation disappeared without a trace from the wagon train between Kansas City and Pinyin Bay, leaving his brand new, state-of-the-art paper factory untouched. The property sat unused for several years.” Vano looked up from the book. “Didn’t it eventually become the massive Spellcraft shop that put the Strange family on the map during the Great Depression?”

Dixon sat up straight again. “I’ve heard of that place. The one that burned to the ground, despite being surrounded by fire hydrants. Faulty wiring.” His tone clearly implied faulty Spellcraft.

Vano consulted the next passage. “During the second World War, GI Arbor Silver mysteriously vanished between basic training and his assigned battalion.”

Silver…yet another familiar Spellcraft family. If Arbor was anything like Ladin, no doubt he decided going to war was far more effort than he was willing to expend, and used his quill to make himself disappear.

“But the greatest mystery of all was the disappearance of an entire cell block from the Bay County Prison, when twenty white-collar criminals, including bootleggers, counterfeiters and forgers, vanished from the prison yard without a trace.” Vano glanced up. “I know all about that one. My grandpa was doing five years at the time for forging Englebert Humperdinck autographs.”

“Five years seems awfully excessive,” Dixon said.

Vano shrugged. “My grandmother was so sick of him she slipped a Crafting to the judge to make sure he didn’t get out anytime soon. I’m not sure why they bothered getting married to begin with—maybe for a tax break—but I guess it was a real pain back then to get a divorce. Anyway, after four years, Grandma changed her mind. She hid his quill in a homemade Thanksgiving card among five other turkey feathers, and by the end of the week, he’d Scribed his way out of there. A seagull stole a guard’s lunch, he left a gate open he shouldn’t have, and everyone in the cellblock went for a little swim.”

Dixon nodded. “Whoever built that jail put it way too close to the bay.”

“And ten days later, Grandpa died of pneumonia. It was December, after all. Anyhow…too bad about the lack of aliens. That would’ve been pretty cool.” We pulled up in front of Vano’s apartment. He climbed out, gave us a lazy salute with his wooden spoon, then headed back to the room of doors where he seemed curiously at ease—which made a lot more sense now that I saw how he’d grown up.

Dixon watched him go. I would have expected Dixon to be relieved to get rid of his rival, but he must have made his peace, as he had no parting complaints.

A sound like thunder boomed in the distance, but the sun was high. It was not the weather we heard, but the heavy machinery along the bay. Dixon sagged in his seat, dejected. “What a waste of time. We spent all night looking for Buried Secrets, but it’s useless. Now what?”

But before the words were even out of his mouth, a familiar van rounded the corner, hurtling toward the shore. A traveling geologist’s van…with Dixon’s cousin at the wheel.

9

DIXON

Yuri gunned the engine and we charged after Dr. Stone and Sabina. Normally, Yuri is a cautious driver. Even though he’s got a green card, he’s not a hundred percent sure he won’t get himself deported for failing to heed the posted speed limit. And I’m fine with that. While I love letters and words as much as any Scrivener, I’d never want some disgruntled cop to throw the book at me.

Sabina was not nearly as careful.

She raced toward the beach like they were giving away free hot dogs—and she was starving. And they were made of gold. Edible gold? On baking shows, they sometimes decorate fancy pastries with gold leaf, so it must be edible. Still, ingesting copious amounts of metal, even gold, hardly seemed healthy for the digestive tract. But I’ll bet if you found the right buyer, that golden hot dog could feed you for a year—or a few months, at least, depending on where you shopped….

“Dixon?” Yuri said.

Oh. We’d stopped. I hardly recognized the municipal lot with the heavy equipment all around. “Where are the hot dogs?”

“What hot dogs?”

“Never mind—there’s two sets of footprints heading up the sand dune. Let’s go!”

Judging by the tracks in the sand, Sabina was half-helping, half-dragging Dr. Stone and his orthopedic boot. But the sand was soft and tricky to navigate, and we caught up with the two of them at the top of the dune. Normally, other than the cries of the seagulls, there’s not much to hear. But the air was thick with the revving of huge engines. “What’s going on?” I called over the cacophony.

Sabina yelled back, “Tiffany Tennant is gearing up for another Pinyin Minute.”

Dr. Stone said, “It’s crucial we convince them to stop digging!”

I caught the geologist by his free arm, and together, Sabina and I managed to haul him to the top of the dune—but it was no mean feat.

Turned out we weren’t the only ones that had difficulty navigating the sand. Once we reached the top, we saw that on one end of the dune, caution tape was looped all around like streamers at a particularly low-rent birthday party. That side of the dune butted up against the boardwalk, and The Fence was in sight just below. On the other side, a bulldozer struggled, nose-down, in the valley between the dune and the salt pile like a turtle flipped on its back. Its tank treads spun uselessly, spraying sand, while the construction workers from all the other big machines stood around looking perplexed.

Tiffany Tennant and her cameraman had planted themselves on high ground, with the panorama of heavy equipment spread out in the background. She brightened when she saw Dr. Stone was in tow, and motioned for us all to join her. “I wanted to interview someone on the construction crew, but they claim it would be a safety hazard.” Behind her, the bulldozer flailed, and a guy in a hardhat looped more yellow caution tape around anything that would hold it. “I’d love your professional opinion of whether this was sabotage or something else.”

Something like…Spellcraft? Yuri, Sabina and I all clammed up, but the Handless didn’t seem to notice. Gingerly, Dr. Stone went down on one knee to scoop up a handful of sand while Tiffany motioned for her cameraman to make sure he got some good footage.

“Sand is notoriously hazardous for heavy machinery,” the geologist announced knowledgeably. “The grains unconsolidated and unstable, which results in a lack of traction.”

Tiffany was unconvinced—despite the fact that the bulldozer was throwing up a shower of sand in its struggle to right itself. “How can that be, when sand is spread on streets for traction in icy conditions?”

“That’s different, of course, when you’re providing friction on ice.”

“And what is this so-called sand made of, anyhow?”

The geologist seemed confused, but he answered as best he could. “Sand is primarily silica. Some organic sediment. Of course, in this region, the bedrock is full of schist….”

“Doctor Stone!” Tiffany gasped. Yuri flashed me his phone. Apparently schist is not a swear word, but a type of rock. Huh. You learn something new every day.

Skip straightened up, brushed off his hands, and took in the machinery fiasco with a sweep of his arm. “Surely, in your extensive journalism career, you’ve covered all kinds of accidents. What is sabotage but the addition of the human animal to an already fragile system?”

Sabina tugged my sleeve and motioned for us to duck behind a nearby port-a-potty. It wasn’t big enough to hide the three of us—not with Yuri—but it did put us out of earshot. “Extensive journalism career?” she complained. “Gimme a break!”

“Maybe he was being sarcastic,” I suggested.

“Skip doesn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body. In fact, he’s painfully sincere. Do you think he’s into her?”

Frankly, I doubted he could even see her through those thick lenses of his.

Yuri leaned out past the edge of the blue plastic outhouse and scrutinized the two of them as they spoke. “He does seem very focused on Tiffany. But he is doing an interview. So maybe this is to be expected.”

“Why do you ask?” I poked my head around the side and had a look for myself. Hard to tell if he was ogling her, what with the glasses. “Didn’t you two seal the deal yet?”

“Hardly! Once he organized my dad’s magazine collection, he spent the rest of the night re-reading the Wikipedia geology page, then nodded off on the davenport.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” I said. “If he saves us all from getting blown up, there’s a better chance you’ll have a future together.” Yuri gave me the side-eye. “What? If Dr. Stone develops a sentimental attachment to Pinyin Bay, he could make it his base of operations.” Plus, it was a lot easier to date someone who wasn’t blown up.

Yuri crossed his arms. If it weren’t for all the revving engines and the flailing bulldozer, I’m sure we would have heard threads snapping. “If he is more interested in the reporter than in you, then it does not matter how educated he might be. He is an idiot.”

“You always say the sweetest things,” my cousin grumbled, and reached up on tiptoe to give him a peck on the jaw.

“There you are!” Dr. Stone said, and all three of us jumped apart. But before I could fabricate a likely topic of conversation that was anything other than What’s the deal with you and my cousin? he shoved his phone into Sabina’s hand and said, “Would you mind snapping some pictures of Miss Tenant and me for my blog?”

“Uh…sure.” Her face fell as he turned around and clomped away in his big plastic boot.

“Look at it this way,” I told her. “You can insist he gives you credit as the photographer.”

Once Sabina was out of earshot, Yuri said to me, “Is Wikipedia not the site you would visit if you knew nothing about a subject and needed a quick education? What reason would a geologist have to study it?”

“I dunno. Maybe he needed to double-check something. After all, these rocks all look pretty much the same.”

Yuri watched with narrowed eyes as Dr. Stone posed for his photo beside Tiffany Tenant in his orthopedic boot. “And how did he step in hole? A geologist should be more aware of the ground.”

Okay. Here’s the thing about Yuri. While he’s never made me wear a tinfoil hat, he does tend to regard everyone with a healthy amount of suspicion. And while he’d deny it up and down, when push comes to shove, he’s endearingly protective of my cousin. She needs protection like Pinyin Bay needs another explosion, but it doesn’t matter. As far as Yuri’s concerned, Sabina is the kid sister he never had.

He’d shown admirable restraint with her last couple of unfortunate romantic liaisons. But a guy who didn’t appreciate Sabina’s obvious charms?

Yuri was having none of it.

“Notice how eager he was to convince us that a nameless, faceless corporation was behind all the digging. How would he know?”

“Geology records? Look, I know you mean well, Yuri. But maybe it’s healthy for Sabina to actually put forth some effort into catching someone’s eye for a change. After all, look at what you and I overcame to be together. And it’s only made us stronger.”

I hadn’t convinced Yuri, it was obvious, but when Sabina rejoined us, we tabled the discussion. She hates it when we talk about her, unless there’s praise involved, in which case she gives us full permission to have at it. She planted herself beside us and looked daggers in the general direction of the reporter. “I get it,” she said. “Being on camera is a lot more glamorous than working in some stuffy old Spellcraft shop. How can I compete with someone so famous?”

I patted my cousin on the shoulder. “She’s only internet-famous.”

“Still. I really like this guy. He’s brilliant. He’s ambitious. And he’s incredibly passionate…about geology, anyhow. But I’m dying to tap into that passionate side myself.”

Yuri caught my eye over the top of Sabina’s head. “Then we must win him over.”

“Uh…we?” I said. I could tell Yuri was up to something. I just wasn’t sure what.

“It is obvious Spellcraft is at the root of this whole situation. We find the Crafting and stop the digging, and not only will this Dr. Stone see how resourceful Sabina is, but he will have no more reason to talk to the silly reporter.”

Yuri had very nearly put air-quotes around the word doctor, but Sabina didn’t notice, as she wasn’t as well-versed in his particular flavor of sarcasm as I was. Obviously, Yuri just wanted to expose the guy as a phony. I watched as my cousin’s potential love interest gesticulated at the camera with a small rock in his hand as he explained something science-y to the viewers of Pinyin Minute, and as he waved the thing just a little too emphatically, doubt crept in. Was he really a traveling geologist…or, like us, did he merely claim to be whatever it took to insinuate himself? After all, the flashy Nature World van, the lab coat…the glasses. Would a real geologist really need to try so hard to look like a science geek?

Even if the guy did turn out to be a fake scientist, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to meet the problem head-on and expose him in a big, dramatic reveal. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when Yuri is all bold and decisive. But Sabina’s feelings were involved, so I thought the situation called for a bit more tact. “Are you really sure the two of you would be compatible? I mean, yeah, he’s tall…and of course, he’s handsome. And I’m sure scientists make more money than Spellcrafters—”

“Dixon,” Yuri warned.

“But you’re not particularly interested in geology. And if he hasn’t noticed your obvious charms, even after spending all this time together, maybe his libido is on the fritz. And I’m sure a fritzy libido would get old pretty darn fast.”

Sabina’s brow furrowed. No doubt wriggling past this guy’s resistance might seem like a fun challenge now, but the thought of having to work so hard for his affection each and every time she wanted some lovin’ was not so appealing. But then the interview wrapped up and Dr. Stone realized Sabina was no longer at his side. He scanned the dune with the construction workers and protestors milling around, until finally his gaze fell on Sabina. He brightened, then clomped over in his ungainly plastic boot—handsome and tall, and weirdly adorkable—and I knew my attempt at subtly diverting Sabina’s interest was all for naught.

As they clip-clopped over to a picnic table together, Yuri’s piercing gaze followed. “Whatever it is you’re thinking—” I said.

“We ask him questions only a true geologist would know, entrap him in a ludicrous response, and expose him for the fraud he is.”

Well, then. I had to admit, as plans went…Yuri’s idea was pretty darn solid.

10

We joined Sabina and her geologist—if that’s what he truly was—where they rested in the shade of an off-duty auger. The massive drilling machine was sinister even in repose. But hopefully it could protect us from any flying debris that might come at us if the giant claw machines hit anything that was fixing to blow up. Meanwhile, on the other side of the dune, a couple of dump trucks were being chained up to the capsized bulldozer to try and drag it out of the ditch.

“Good thing you’re both here,” I said enthusiastically over the sound of all the massive revving engines. I’m pretty sure they bought it. “Because Yuri and I need an argument settled. A geology argument.” That was really all I had, but since the science quiz was Yuri’s idea, I figured he could take it from there.

Everyone looked to him expectantly. There was a momentary deer-in-headlights pause. Should I claim it was possible something had been lost in translation? Throwing around random Russian vocabulary had suited us well in the past. But before I could convey all of this to Yuri with a meaningful wag of my eyebrows, he snatched up a random rock from the sand, slammed it onto the picnic table, and said, “What kind of mineral is this?”

Dr. Stone held it up and squinted at it through his thick lenses. “It’s granite. A common igneous rock. The grains are coarse. You can see flecks of quartz, and a hint of feldspar in the pinkish vein.”

Yuri was not impressed. The confidence of the answer only made him more eager to prove it was all made up. He grabbed another nearby rock—the most boring gray rock I’d ever seen—smacked it down even harder, and demanded, “What about this?”

“Limestone. Typical of the lakes in this area, formed from the calcium carbonate in the sediment of the bay.” When Yuri glared hard at the guy, daring him to flinch, Dr. Stone merely added, “If you’re lucky, you’ll find a fossil inside.”

I was starting to think Dr. Stone might be an actual doctor after all—then again, Sabina had seen him browsing Wikipedia, so it was also possible he just had a really good memory. Yuri was positive there was something hinky going on, and wouldn’t take an answer for an answer. He kicked angrily at the dune until he dislodged a small, blackish chunk, which he brandished in triumph right in Dr. Stone’s face. “And this?”

Dr. Stone plucked it from Yuri’s grasp. “It’s a charcoal briquette that never caught fire. Likely from someone’s picnic. See the edge, where it’s dusted with gray? That’s ash. And it even still smells a bit like lighter fluid….”

Before Yuri could tell him to shove that darn hunk of charcoal where the sun didn’t shine, I said, “Those big, pointy things hanging down from the tops of caves—what are they called?”

The answer to that was clearly advanced geological knowledge. After all, I’d been puzzling over this question, off and on, since we escaped from Phineas Shirque’s plastery attic, and I was still confused. But Skip answered without hesitation. “You’re referring to stalactites. Fascinating things. Spleotherms are the most common type—what you’d find in limestone caves. But what most people don’t know is that other things can mimic the spleotherm, such as the common icicle. And, of course, there’s the so-called soda-straw formation that occurs on cement, which forms a calthemite—”

“But I’m sure it would be totally impossible for a stalactite to form out of plaster.”

“Not at all. Plaster contains gypsum and lime. Prime candidates for calcite formation….”

While Dr. Stone continued to ramble on about minerals, I got a text—a text from Yuri, who was still standing right next to me. I love it when he texts me. In fact, his messages give me shivers all over, because I never fail to hear them in his sexy accent.

He will not slip up. We must try another way. Find Spellcraft.

Genius! If we found the construction loophole on Dr. Stone, we could just skip the part where we exposed his bogus credentials and go right to discrediting him for digging up the beach while he pretended to be on our side.

Was it possible to get him to turn out his pockets without making myself sound like a complete weirdo? Maybe Sabina would back me up if I told him it was a lucky Pinyin Bay tradition. But before I could launch into my suggestion, Yuri whipped out a piping bag full of chocolate and splooted it all over the front of the geologist’s shirt.

“Oops,” Yuri said blandly.

“What the heck?” Sabina cried.

“Sorry.”

Yuri really needed to work on his delivery.

The geologist was completely unruffled. “That’s quite all right. Accidents happen. Why, I’ve been dropping things left and right trying to get acclimated to my new glasses.”

It seemed he didn’t notice anything suspicious about the piping bag. What luck! Unfortunately, when he stripped down to his undershirt, shook out the chocolate-covered garment and set it aside, it was clear there was nothing Spellcrafty stowed away in the pockets.

The piping bag was not entirely empty…and Yuri now had his eye on our target’s pants. But before he could christen them with chocolate, Tiffany Tenant leapt out from between the massive yellow earthmovers and got between the two of them. “Dr. Stone, there you are! I was hoping to do some fact-checking with you for the Pinyin Minute blog post.”

It sounded perfectly reasonable. But something in the way she delivered the request pinged my alarms. Her voice was always a little too cutesy, but now she was practically simpering. And her eyelashes were fluttering so hard, she looked like she’d just come through a cloud of plaster dust.

If Tiffany planned to swoop in on Dr. Stone, that should come as a relief, so as to spare Sabina the chagrin of accidentally sleeping with the enemy. But I knew my cousin—and she’s not one to back down from a challenge. If anything, knowing Tiffany was gunning for the same guy would only make Sabina double down on her efforts.

Tiffany slotted herself into the picnic table at the purported doctor’s side, sandwiching him between her and Sabina. “There were a few things we didn’t cover in our interview that my readers might be curious about.” She pulled out a pocket notebook with a pink rhinestone cover and an adorable little matching pen. “How is it again you can tell whether a cave is natural or man-made?”

“It’s the tool marks, of course….”

While Dr. Stone treated Tiffany to a lecture on Spelunking 101, Yuri stood up from the table and gestured with his eyes for me to follow. Once we were out of earshot, he said, “That reporter will have many questions. We should take this opportunity to search van.”

Brilliant!

Unfortunately, Sabina had locked the doors behind her. Would she think it was weird if I asked for the car key? Or I could just have her cough up that piece of Spellcraft Uncle Fonzo had made her—though if she thought I was trespassing somewhere, she’d insist on coming along. As I considered my options, Yuri strode over to his truck and tore off the wire coat hanger he used as a radio antenna. He bent it into a hook, shoved down past the weatherstripping on the van’s window, and popped the lock in fifteen seconds flat.

Wowsa. Gotta love a man with skills!

I took a furtive look around to make sure our little B&E had gone unnoticed. At the top of the dune, the construction workers nearby were all busy on their phones, my cousin and the reporter were both focused on Dr. Stone, and he couldn’t see two feet in front of his own face.

“Good work,” I told Yuri. “Now let’s see what we can find.”

There’d be something incriminating. I was sure of it. Yuri and I squeezed inside the back of the van. We had plenty of practice navigating small spaces together, thanks to the bathroom in his old cabin. Though we weren’t naked here. And since we were in a hurry, I couldn’t rub up against him quite as much as I might like.

I assessed the van’s contents. There was the field cot Dr. Stone had mentioned. A laptop. Boxes of equipment with long, scientific names, all helpfully labeled. Even a small bin of various rocks. No helpful receipts from costume shops, or bulleted lists labeled How I Will Scam a Small Town. Nothing at all that marked him as an impostor.

How disappointing.

There was a pegboard partition that separated the cargo area from the driver seat. Not only was it hung with a variety of small tools—hammers and chisels and all kinds of electronic gauges and sensors—but the blank spots in between were filled in with a few framed certificates and photos. There was a picture of him with an older mom-type lady and a golden retriever. A framed certificate for the Arena Rock Award. And an old shot of him as a gawky teenager holding a science club trophy. If Skip Stone was conning us, it was a really long con. All signs pointed to him being exactly who he said he was…though I’m sure the science club photo could have been Photoshopped, and maybe that trophy had actually been for something else, like bowling.

Beside me, Yuri was scrutinizing the award. “It’s real,” I told him. “Not just some bogus thing he put together on the computer. You can tell by the paper the certificate is printed on and the quality of the engraved border. And that signature is real ink, not just printed. See there? The stroke had a wet edge that’s really hard to mimic with printing. What’s the award situation like in Russia? I’ll bet there aren’t quite as many to go around as there are over here. My mom always says that if the Handless could give their kids a prize for falling off a log, the world would be covered in lumber….”

Tiny hooks pinged to the floor of the van as Yuri grabbed the frame off the pegboard.

“It’s real,” I insisted. “I’m sure of it.”

“Maybe so. But there is more here than just an award.” Picture frames aren’t exactly rocket science—or geology, for that matter—but there was no apparent way to slide off the backing. At least, not until Yuri bent the frame with his bare hands and pried off one of the sides.

So butch!

He tugged out the paper and turned it over. And on the back? Spellcraft sparkled to my inner eye like a burst of glittery confetti.

Unobserved

And well-preserved

A creature of routine

Expertise

Shall never cease

But labor sight unseen

I didn’t recognize the calligraphy, so the Crafting must not be from my circuit. I read it once. Twice. Grudgingly admired the rhyme and meter. But once I read it yet again, I had to admit, “I have no idea what this is supposed to do.”

“It is obvious,” Yuri said—and I’m glad it was obvious to one of us. “Look at Seen. It is cave. This Crafting gives him access to the excavations ‘sight unseen.’ It allows him to infiltrate Pinyin Bay in a professional capacity with no one being the wiser to his presence.” Yuri fixed me with a meaningful look. “You know what you must do.”

I wasn’t so sure. I could hardly Uncraft something I didn’t completely understand. But I couldn’t just let this guy continue to run rampant, and so I did my best to dissect the Scrivening’s meaning.

Unobserved and routine must mean Skip could dig up Pinyin Beach without anyone even noticing he was doing it. Ditto for sight unseen. Well-preserved must be the reason he looked so young and non-threatening. And after the little “name-this-rock” session, his expertise was definitely not in question.

Usually, when I Uncraft something, I need to sneak words and letters in and around the existing Crafting. But this? The certificate was nice and big. There was enough space for me to simply append to the narrative. I scanned the rhyme scheme—not my usual—and that old familiar tingle prickled through my Scribing hand when I added….

But then his stay

In Pinyin Bay

Made justice intervene

Justice was entirely subjective, and as I finished the sentence with a big flourish that would stop a future Scrivener from changing the story by adding yet another paragraph, I worried that maybe I should have been more specific. But if there’s anyone who’s cultivated a healthy distrust of fairness, it’s Yuri. When he gave a satisfied nod, I decided our problem was now in the Spellcraft’s hands.

Yuri bent the frame back together and hung up our altered Crafting. Since it was face-down, it should have plenty of time to do its work.

Satisfied, the two of us slipped out of the van…only to find one of the construction guys off in the distance pointing us out to a very interested Officer Hotti.

11

YURI

Justice should have intervened with Skip, not us. After all, it was his name on the certificate.

I should not be so surprised the volshebstvo would take any opportunity to be capricious.

In a small town like Pinyin Bay, bribes were given in the form of compliments and baked goods. This Officer Hotti, however, had the air of a man who would not accept so much as a stale brownie without writing himself a citation. Hotti was trim and fit, but maybe we could outrun him, lose him in the maze of machinery and equipment. We were not far from the beach that was my home all winter long, and I knew the nearby woods well enough. We could evade him.

But Dixon was connected to an officially recognized Spellcraft shop. If they searched the van—if they gave Skip a reason to notice his Spellcraft had been altered—all blame would be placed squarely on Dixon’s shoulders.

And so, instead of heading directly for the woods—for safety—I veered toward the picnic area and said, “We can’t leave without Skip and Sabina.”

“Good thinking—the last thing my cousin needs is to get caught with that dubious Crafting she carries around. I doubt it would unlock the jail cell she’d find herself in once the cops took it away. So, what are we going to tell them? There’s a geology emergency on the other side of the dune? Or a hot dog eating contest? Ooh, wait I know—we say a rabid wolverine has been spotted in the parking lot! That’ll flush ’em off the opposite side of the dune.”

Dixon is capable of generating a baffling amount of ideas. I know, since I am so often on the receiving end. But I am a slow and deliberate thinker, and by the time we hurried over to the picnic table where Sabina was just helping Skip get up, I could think of no plausible reason to persuade them to head away from the van.

Then again, there is more than one way to persuade.

I jabbed my finger in the direction I wished them to head, and commanded, “Go. Now.”

Strangely enough, they did. I was not surprised about Sabina. Ever since they were children, wherever Dixon might lead, Sabina was eager to follow. Whether Skip trusted us or simply wanted to keep an eye on us, I did not know.

Though perhaps he should have been keeping an eye on the ground.

His big plastic boot came down on a pointed rock at the edge of the dune. If it had been his other foot in a regular shoe, he would have twisted his good ankle. But the orthopedic cast was too rigid for that, and the stone acted as a fulcrum, just like Dixon’s vodka trap back at Pinyin Inn. It was a fifty-fifty chance of Skip falling toward or away from the edge.

He fell toward it.

And Sabina’s arm was looped through his.

Together, they tipped through a stretch of bright yellow caution tape, which parted for them like the finish line of a marathon and fluttered to either side in the wind. It was not a particularly terrifying fall. Not a bluff, but a slope, and a sandy one at that. At worst, there should be nothing more harmful than a few bruises to show for it.

Except that when I crested the top of the bluff with Dixon and looked down, I saw they were still rolling…straight for the curve of tall wooden fencing at the edge of the boardwalk.

Add some cuts and splinters to that assessment. But at least the fence would stop their fall.

Or so I thought.

Skip Stone burst through the old lumber like a cannonball, and Sabina tumbled through right after him.

Dixon clutched my arm frantically. “Yuri! You know what’s behind that wolverine fence?”

Indeed, I did. “A tunnel.”

We hurried after them, sliding most of the way.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Dixon declared. “The entrance is sealed off by a very sturdy…gate.”

We skidded to a stop at the broken wooden fence and peered through the gap. I remembered the tunnel well. It had been blocked off by not only the tall fence, but a stout metal gate…a gate which was now hanging cockeyed. The gate itself was perfectly intact, but the stone around it had crumbled like shortbread.

Sabina and Skip were nowhere to be seen.

The tunnel was man-made, a shaft which led into the sandstone bedrock beneath the dunes. Not toward the natural shoreline cavern beneath the Wishing Bell, but somewhere inland. Dixon took two flashlights from Shirque Mansion out of the messenger bag he carries, and together, we peered deeper into the tunnel.

The passage inside sloped downward. The angle was not terribly steep, and yet, no Sabina.

“Hello?” Dixon called. “Anybody there?”

“Hello?” At the sound of Sabina’s voice, my heart did a painful flip of relief. I was unaccustomed to worry.

I did not care for it.

“What the heck happened?” she called out from a distance. In a different sort of tunnel, it might have echoed. But the sandstone was porous, which stunted the sound. Our flashlight beams played over the walls and floors, and something that appeared to be a shadow against the far wall resolved itself into a meter-wide crevasse.

Evidently, the worry was not through with me yet.

“You fell in a hole,” Dixon called to her. “A hole inside a hole. But don’t worry. We’re on it. Or should that be, in it?”

We crept over to the edge of the fissure and shone our lights down. Sabina peered up at us, squinting into the flashlight beams. “Hey, Dixon—I finally beat you to The Fence!”

Skip was beside her crawling around on his hands and knees. “My glasses…I can’t find my glasses.”

He was so pathetic, I might have felt sorry for him—if it were not for the whole reason he was in Pinyin Bay to begin with. Sabina said, “Toss me a light. He’s blind as a billiard ball without his glasses.”

Dutifully, Dixon lobbed her the plastic flashlight. Its beam flashed wildly over the walls of the crevasse as it fell, but Sabina caught it neatly…though in taking a step back to do so, something gave off a distinctive crunch.

Sabina aimed the light toward her feet. “Skip? I think I found them.”

It served him right. He should never have come here. But I could not enjoy reveling in his downfall until Sabina was safe and sound.

Rescuing Sabina was no problem. Skip gave her a boost, and I grabbed the collar of her jacket and hauled her up the rest of the way. But Skip?

“We need rope,” I decided.

“No problem,” Skip said. “There’s some in my van.”

Dixon leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Emember-ray the ake-in-bray.”

“What??”

“We can’t go back to the parking lot until Officer Hotti is gone.”

True. But the policeman had not seen Sabina with us. While Dixon and I could not retrieve the rope, she certainly could. And better yet, it would give me the chance to confront this Skip person about his real reason for being here without Sabina feeling the need to jump in and defend him.

Skip called up, “The rope is in the cabinet under the centrifuge. And there’s a pair of old glasses in the glovebox—bring those, too.”

“You go,” I told Sabina. “We will keep him company.”

“Great idea! I’ll be right back.” Sabina did not even think to question me. The assessment Dixon’s mother had about her being a follower and not a leader was no exaggeration.

Once she climbed out of the tunnel and scampered up the sand dune, I turned back to Skip. “Your time of hiding in plain sight is over. Pinyin Bay will no longer accept you at your word.”

“About what? The drilling? It seems pretty self-evident that you shouldn’t keep drilling something if it might blow up.”

“That is true…if your actual intent was to stop the drilling, and not enable it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” When I shone my flashlight beam in the man’s face, he squinted back helplessly. He was a good actor. If I did not know better, I would believe he truly was the harmless, myopic scientist he pretended to be.

Footfalls sounded behind us, and Sabina’s shadow played along the cavern wall. She must have forgotten something and came back for it. “Stall your cousin,” I told Dixon. “I must make him confess before she gets here.”

“I’m on it!” Dixon hurried away to head off Sabina while I turned back to Skip.

“There is no use denying it,” I told Skip. “We found your Spellcraft.”

“Spellcraft? You must be joking! I’m a man of science. I wouldn’t truck with Spellcraft any more than I’d consult with an astrologer or a Magic 8-Ball. Any evidence that Spellcraft does more than part gullible people from their money is purely anecdotal. If it were up to me, every Spellcraft customer should sign a waiver of informed consent that what they were purchasing was nothing more than an elaborate placebo.”

“You’d be surprised how many people feel that way.” It was a woman’s voice—but not Sabina’s. I swung around to find Tiffany Tennant was there, with Dixon at her side looking wide-eyed and panicked. His reaction seemed out of proportion to her presence. After all, what would she do but ask a bunch of ridiculous questions?

But then I saw she was aiming a gun at him.

Not a regular gun—a nail gun from one of the construction workers.

I narrowed my eyes. Tiffany gave me a sweet smile with a brittle edge.

“Who is that?” Skip called up. “What’s going on?”

Tiffany spotted the crevasse with evident delight. She edged over, still holding the nail gun on Dixon, and assessed the depth of the fissure. “That’s convenient! Then again, everything about this digging expedition has been convenient…at least until those stubborn Boardwalk people refused to sell and things started blowing up.”

My heart sank as I realized that while our enemy had indeed been hiding in plain sight…that enemy was not Skip.

Tiffany gestured toward the crevasse with the nail gun. “Go on, baldy, hop down there and join Dr. Stone. I only need the Scrivener. Not his bodyguard.”

“Yuri’s not my bodyguard,” Dixon protested. “He’s my significant other. And he might look all big and scary and tattooed and musclebound, but looks can be deceiving. He’s totally harmless. Unless you’re a fly. In which case he’s really accurate with a rolled-up Pinyin Bay Journal.”

Tiffany looked me up and down. “I’ll buy that there might be some hanky-panky going on between you…but if this guy is harmless, then I’m Barbara Walters. In the hole, Mr. Yuri. Now.”

Over the years, I have been threatened by many people. And any one of them was more menacing than Tiffany. I puffed myself up to loom over the girl and said, “I refuse. And the nail gun might sting…if I felt it at all.”

If I expected to intimidate her, I was in for a big disappointment. Instead of aiming at me, she grabbed Dixon by the wrist, gave his arm a solid yank, then pressed the gun directly into the palm of his hand.

His right hand.

His Scribing hand.

“Hands,” she said conversationally. “Surprisingly delicate, what with all the nerves and muscles and teeny-tiny bones.”

“Those would be the metacarpals,” Skip called out.

Tiffany ignored him and said, “So whether you’re his bodyguard or his boy-toy, I’m thinking you don’t want to see what happens if I empty a whole strip of nails into his palm.”

“Don’t listen to her, Yuri,” Dixon said. “She’s bluffing.”

Tiffany said, “Am I? This excavation has dragged on way too long already and my trust fund is nearly tapped out. If you know what’s good for you, Yuri, you’ll put your cell phone on the ground and go join the good doctor.”

I fumed so hard it was a wonder the inflammable gasses around us did not ignite. But even a single, well-placed nail could cost Dixon not only his livelihood, but his vocation. The drop to the floor of the chasm was jarring. A shock jolted my bones and my teeth rattled together. But I cared little for myself with Dixon at the hands of that woman.

“Now the other phone,” she said, and we tossed up Skip’s phone as well. She considered us for a moment, then added, “I’ll take the flashlight, too. I might need a backup, and it’s not as if there’s anything interesting down there for you to look at.”

I shot her a look of such hatred I thought she must surely combust. But she simply smiled in return, then grabbed Dixon and headed deeper into the old mine.

12

DIXON

“I’m not sure how much of Dr. Stone’s diatribe you overheard,” I told Tiffany, “but Spellcraft is just as much of a science as it is an art. We Spellcrafters can’t scribble down just any old thing and have it come true. A very specific set of conditions is required for the Crafting to take shape—and even then, the effects tend to be subtle and gradual, not striking and sudden.”

My dad had a similar spiel, and he trotted it out whenever a customer had “dissatisfaction” written all over them. Managing expectations, he called it.

“Don’t worry, Dixon, I’m fully aware of the way Spellcraft works. You’d be surprised at the low opinion most Spellcrafters have of the Handless.”

Not once had I met any non-Spellcrafter who knew how we referred to them amongst ourselves. As I was reeling from the fact that Tiffany Tennant was a much better investigative journalist than anyone ever imagined, she herded me into a big chamber that was shored up with old lumber. One side was open to the elements where her diggers had scooped out the sand dune to expose the old mine, and sunlight shone through the scoop, with sandstone particles dancing in the shaft of light. Rumbling engines were still audible, but they sounded far enough away that even if I called for help, it was doubtful anyone would hear me.

Tiffany watched me take it all in. “The quartz mines beneath Pinyin Bay were active throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but digging stopped when an explosion took out most of the mining equipment in the adjacent quarry. So-called experts claimed the blowup was caused by inflammable gases. But, was it?”

“I…have absolutely no idea.”

“At that point, the mine was nearly tapped out, and digging was no longer worth the risk. So they said. And yet, mere days before the big explosion, someone snapped this picture.”

She jammed a sheet of paper under my nose, one that looked like it’d been torn from a textbook. There was a photo printed on it, slightly grainy, black-and-white—and really tough to discern. “What’s this supposed to be?”

“You’ve heard of sarcophagi found in ancient Egyptian tombs? Preserved bodies in Pompeii? That’s what you’re looking at now. Only this discovery will turn everything science thinks it knows on its ear…and who will be right there when the news breaks? Me, that’s who.”

She waved the picture emphatically. “I’ve had this photograph analyzed by leading experts. You’re looking at the origins of an ancient civilization. And that origin is not terrestrial in nature.”

I cut my eyes to the wrinkled page. “And where did you find this photo?”

“Packing material from a Christmas ornament I bought on Etsy—and it came from Pinyin Bay.”

And I could guess exactly where it had shipped from. Pack in the Day must have moved on from girly magazines and onto…what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. “May I?”

She handed me the photo, too proud of what she thought she’d discovered to resist showing it off.

Now that I knew the random jumble in the picture was actually the arms and legs of body stacked upon body in some bizarre mass burial, it was difficult to see anything else. But I made myself take stock of the whole page. When I did, I saw that I recognized the font, the kerning, the overall layout…and especially, the title in the footer. Buried Secrets of Pinyin Bay by Meemaw Jones.

Tiffany must have read admiration into my silence. “No more small-town internet spot for me,” she preened. “This is my ticket to the big time.”

Maybe. If by “big time” she was talking about utter humiliation and a professional demise.

Whatever was going on in that old photograph, I had no idea. But knowledge of its origins cast everything in a whole new—distinctly skeptical—light. The single page might’ve seemed somewhat more plausible out of context without all the other zany conspiracy theories, though, and I hated to think what Tiffany would do with that nail gun when she realized she’d emptied her trust fund based on the ravings of a delusional wannabe historian. “Sounds like you’ve got things all figured out,” I said nervously.

“Not everything.” Tiffany ran her fingers along the stony wall. “I’ve matched certain distinctive tool marks from the photo to this locale.”

“Then why keep digging and risk blowing everyone up?”

“Do you hear any digging right now? Of course not. The equipment flailing around up there is just a ruse to keep the authorities busy while I strategize my next move. And that’s where you come in.”

“I’m not much of a strategist. In fact, I think the term ‘winging it’ was coined specifically for me.”

“I don’t care about your planning skills. I need you to Spellcraft.”

You know I’m scared when it’s tempting to admit I failed my Quilling Ceremony, if only to get out of Scribing. But while stating as much might make me seem like a less viable candidate for whatever she had planned, I couldn’t expose such an integral secret to a Handless. “We’re not exactly hurting for Spellcrafters in Pinyin Bay. In fact, you can hardly walk down Main Street without tripping over a Scrivener. And, frankly, I’m not even all that experienced. I only started Spellcrafting earlier this year. I took a gap year after college…and somehow that gap just got wider and wider—”

“Fact: you come from a long line of Spellcrafters. Fact: Spellcrafters train their whole lives to do what they do. And, fact: you, Dixon Penn, are the go-to Scrivener when someone in Pinyin Bay needs a Crafting altered.”

“Well, I uh…really? Where’d you hear that?”

“I have my sources.”

That’s the problem with trying to flim-flam an investigative journalist—they come equipped with all kinds of facts. But hopefully, my fellow Scriveners were vague when it came to the finer details of the Craft. “Okay, Tiffany, I’ll look at your Spellcraft. But I make no guarantees that I can change it.”

Tiffany cocked her head toward an old wooden crate marked Coral Beach Quartz Company and motioned with the nail gun toward the ground. “Kneel. Keep your hands clasped behind your back. And if you try anything funny, just remember: I’ve got a whole strip of nails.”

She pulled her little pink notebook from her jacket and placed it on the crate in front of me. “Open it to the third page.”

“But you told me to keep my hands behind my—”

“Just do it!”

She didn’t have to be so testy. Carefully, I eased open the notebook. Page three was nearly as sparkly as the glittery cover…but for entirely different reasons. In the background, a pale watercolor skyline was painted. Once I blinked away the sparkles, I could make out the Ferris wheel, the power plant, and roofline of Shirque Mansion. The Scrivening read:

Pinyin Bay has

No way

To stop me

“So, you see the problem,” Tiffany said. “The Crafting created a loophole that allowed me to dig despite the clear and obvious danger of explosion. And yet, that same loophole is also stopping me from actually finding anything, because if I found something, they could order me to permanently stop. Good thing there’s plenty of room to add more words.”

“How…fortunate…for us.” I reached into my bag and pulled out the chisel-tipped marker I’d used to advertise Ladin Silver’s vodka tasting.

Tiffany gave me a long-suffering look. “With your quill.” Boy. All those dumb little questions she was continually asking really added up. “Unless you’d like me to nail that marker to your hand.”

And this is why the Handless shouldn’t know our secrets. It was tempting to tell Tiffany that I didn’t carry my quill around with me…but if she upended my bag and found a long cockatoo feather in a fancy protective case, I could hardly convince her it was just the quirky souvenir of an avid bird enthusiast.

I couldn’t hide my quill—but maybe I could sabotage my own ink. As I dug through my bag, I said, “Uh oh, something’s wet in here. I think I spilled my ink.”

“Let’s hope not.” Tiffany hefted the nail gun. “I’m sure this thing can easily open up a vein.”

“False alarm…heh. My water bottle must’ve been sweating.”

And that wasn’t the only thing all a-sweat. It was really hard to figure out how to re-craft the spell to my advantage while appearing to be helping the reporter.

The most elegant solution would be to add some letters to Pinyin Bay has no way to stop me so that instead it read, Pinyin Bay has another way to stop me—and then hoping that the cavalry would charge in before Tiffany realized what I was up to and ventilated my Scrivening hand. Unfortunately, the spacing between the words was way too tight for four more letters, even with my superfine quill.

“Just need to warm up,” I said, doing my best to buy time. I pulled out some scratch paper and penned a delicate line of loops. It was way too simple to be called a flourish—more like a precursor to cursive I’d learned, back when I was still too young to use a toilet without a special potty seat to stop me from falling in.

I could watch someone loop-de-loop for ages—but the Handless get bored with such things pretty quick. Tiffany was vigilant, but only for a few moments. And eventually she began sighing and yawning and rolling kinks out of her neck. And when she inhaled at the cusp of a long and hearty yawn, I dipped my quill.

As her eyelids fluttered shut, I swung my hand toward her Crafting with my arm suddenly ablaze with tingles. Lightning fast, I added a cascade of words to the far end of each line.

Pinyin Bay has / great beaches

No way / would I want anything

To stop me / from enjoying them

Yuri always says the voshibbyshibby has a will of its own. I couldn’t tell if I was still basking in the Spellcraft sparkles, or Tiffany’s startled reaction to my Uncrafting just kicked up a bunch of dust. At least not until we were both seized by a racking fit of sneezes that caused the nail gun to leap from Tiffany’s hand and begin spraying nails everywhere in a startling burst of ca-chunks.

13

YURI

Of all men for me to be trapped with alone in the dark…did it have to be the one I had falsely accused of exploiting Pinyin Bay?

Long after Dixon’s nervous babbling faded into the distance, we sat quietly, the geologist and me. I supposed I would need to apologize, though such words are always awkward on my tongue. But before I could figure out what to say, Skip filled the silence. “Well, I suppose I really stepped in it this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those things Tiffany said about your partner Dixon being a Spellcrafter? Now I realize what a nincompoop I’ve been. He and his cousin welcomed me into your home, dropped everything to help me in my time of need—me, a total stranger—and here I go, spouting off and debunking their livelihood. Sabina told me her family was in the stationery business. I had no idea it was a euphemism for Spellcraft.”

Skip’s regret easily eclipsed mine. What a relief.

“It does no good to sit here feeling sorry for yourself,” I told him. “We must get out of here and help Dixon before that woman nails him to the wall.”

Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. I tried to give the man a “leg up” as he had done with Sabina, but only ended up getting kicked in the head with a big plastic boot. Luckily, my skull is very hard. And Skip did his best to boost me, but it was no use. He was an academic, not an athlete.

“It’s no use,” he said. “We’ll never get out of here.”

I glared in the direction of his voice, considering whether I should have given him more of a fling than a boost, when he slumped to one side and revealed a thin sliver of light in the stone wall. “Turn around,” I said. “What is that?”

Thankfully, his vision was not so poor as to stop him from seeing the single thread of light in the darkness. I could make him out faintly now by the meager illumination. He pressed his ear to the wall and knocked. “There’s a thin spot, right here. In fact, it feels like this wall was formed by a cave in. Now, if only I had my excavation gear—”

I leveled a solid kick to the wall, and though it jarred my very bones, I felt something give—something other than my foot. A pebble fell from the wall, and though it let in only the faintest bit of light, to our sensitized eyes, it was enough.

With a shriek of Velcro, Skip tore off his orthopedic boot and beat it against the thin spot. I took off one of my own shoes and followed suit. Once a bigger chunk came free, another soon followed, and within minutes we widened the hole large enough for Skip to squeeze through. He crawled across a set of metal tracks on the floor and declared, “It’s an old mine shaft! What luck!”

I was not so sure I believed in luck, but I had no desire to return to a discussion about the validity of Spellcraft. He found a rusted prybar and hammer in a jumble of discarded tools, and together, we widened the hole enough for me to squeeze into the shaft as well.

A few holes in the ceiling let in daylight…enough for me to see a massive handcart just a few meters away. One end of the shaft was lost to collapse, but the other burrowed deep into the dune. It curved away into the darkness, and there was no reason for us to think it led anywhere useful…until we heard a burst of sneezing. Followed by a burst of nailing.

“Quickly,” I told Skip. “The handcart.”

He swung around to squint at a random wall. “Where?”

I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him onto the cart, then hurried around the other side, kicking debris off the tracks. The propulsion was a two-person lever. No doubt it would be stiff with age, if it even moved at all. But when I pushed down on my end of the lever, the opposite end smacked upward, catching Skip by the jaw. He somersaulted off the back of the handcart. The momentum launched me forward and sent me hurtling down the tunnel into darkness.

14

DIXON

On my eighth birthday—which would’ve made Sabina barely six—an overabundance of balloons and an unseasonably warm Spring saw us gearing up for the water balloon war of the decade. We were filling up at the garden hose. The nozzle was busted and leaky, but Uncle Fonzo had helpfully shown me how to pause the flow of water by simply stepping on the hose.

What I hadn’t realized was how much pressure would build up in the amount of time it took my cousin and me to argue about whether the next balloon we filled should be red or blue. When I took my foot off the hose, the nozzle shot up out of my hand like a bottle rocket.

Good thing Sabina’s front tooth was already somewhat loose.

Anyway, that’s what popped into my head as the nail gun leapt from Tiffany’s hand and my life flashed before my eyes. Nails shot everywhere—Pew! Pew! Pew! And while the sandstone ceiling was able to absorb them, the century-old wooden walls were not. Most bounced off and dropped to the stony floor. But one ricocheted and sank into a knotted rope high above Tiffany’s head.

A knot that appeared to be holding shut a really thick wooden hatch in the wall.

Like the surrounding wood, the knot was old—but unlike the wood, the rope fibers had grown brittle and more fragile with age. The rope was as thick as my wrist, but at the impact of the nail, a single twist of fibers popped free with a dusty twang. Followed by another…and another….

Until finally, the massive hatch behind Tiffany was held up by only a single strand of ancient rope. It quivered menacingly as she edged one way, then the other, scrambling for an escape route. And just when it seemed that she was in the clear, a mighty squeal of metal on metal filled the chamber, and the opposite wall burst open in a spray of sandstone crumbs and old lumber.

Explosion?

No—even better!

It was Yuri, soaring through the air on one of those old-timey prospector’s see-saw carts. And neither one was particularly aerodynamic—though luckily, I was there to break Yuri’s fall.

Once I was through seeing stars, I realized the old crate I’d been Scribing on was now flattened, and Tiffany’s little pink journal was totally black with spilled ink. Wow. Talk about an indelible way of setting the Spellcraft. Lucky for us it happened after I Uncrafted the magic.

And then the final, quivering rope fiber snapped, and the big wooden hatch behind Tiffany dropped open like a drawbridge, flattening her…but also revealing a tangle of bone-white petrified bodies.

First thought? Death cooties. Second thought? Yuri won’t be able to sleep for the rest of the year…possibly the rest of his life. But as I inserted myself like a human shield between him and the nightmarish remains, I realized the pale bodies looked strangely familiar.

Especially the big, misshapen heads.

If that wasn’t evidence enough that I was looking at Phineas Shirque’s cast-off statuary, the broken dumbwaiter car would have tipped me off for sure.

Everything in Pinyin Bay is connected. The beach gave way to the Boardwalk. The Fence surrounded the hole. And the hole led to a mine shaft that burrowed below Shirque Mansion.

Maybe everything is connected everywhere, if you’re creative enough to find the connections. And maybe those six infamous degrees of separation are the channels through which the Spellcraft flows.

Unlike Pinyin Bay, in which the landmarks are all physically connected through mysterious tunnels that burrow through the bedrock like the maze of a giant ant farm, Spellcraft connections were esoteric, not limited by time or space, or even plausibility. They’d brought Yuri and me together across an ocean, after all, from hundreds of miles away. Wait, no. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands.

Yuri would know. But he’d tell me in furlongs or liters or hectares, which made even less sense than the circuitous route of Spellcraft.

I made a mental note to look it up later.

The big wooden hatch had knocked Tiffany out cold, but Yuri disarmed the nail gun anyhow, just to be safe. We were retrieving our phones from her pockets when my cousin called out, “Dixon? Can you hear me?”

“Over here!”

Her head poked through a portion of the ceiling that was partially collapsed. She was so backlit, it looked like she was calling down from heaven. “You need to get out of there—Skip says it’s not safe.”

Another head silhouette joined hers. “Where is Tiffany Tennant?” Not Skip’s voice. Not at all. “What’s going on down there?”

With an eye-roll in her voice, Sabina said, “Officer Hotti saw me hustling over here and insisted on tagging along. In fact, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Tiffany just had a little run-in with this trap door,” I explained—and how I managed to sound completely guilty of something even though I was telling the unvarnished truth was beyond me!

“Everything is fine.” Yuri sounded even guiltier than me.

Officer Hotti swung through the gap and made his way down the pile of rubble with the footing of a mountain goat and the speed of a cheetah, which left no time for me to make it look like I was doing anything other than going through Tiffany’s handbag.

“I’ll need you to put your hands where I can see them,” the cop told me. While he’d looked pretty striking from a distance, he was even more intimidating in person. Almost as tall as Yuri, with an even deeper frown and a bulletproof vest.

“Wow! Talk about stern! Those bridesmaids must’ve been pretty tipsy to mistake you for a stripper, whether you were carrying a boombox or not. Not that you’re not attractive enough to be a stripper. Heck, I’ll bet you could pose for one of those local fundraising calendars. You know the ones—shirtless guys and their dogs? Though I guess you’d need a dog for that. Have you got a dog? If not, maybe you could rent one, though I’m not exactly sure where one would go about renting a dog. But if you can settle for a leopard gecko, my parents are looking to unload one cheap—”

“Sir?” Officer Hotti snapped, and whatever train of thought was running rampant in my head screeched to a precarious halt.

“Forget about my cousin,” Sabina cried. “He’s obviously not at fault. It couldn’t possibly be more clear that this woman was attacked by a door. And everyone knows there’s only one possible reason that might happen.” Before I could say nail gun run amok, she answered her own question—very forcefully, at that. “Spellcraft!”

Now she had the cop’s attention.

When he turned to her, I frantically gestured “time out” behind his back. But other than dodgeball, which gave her a gym-sanctioned opportunity to nail the mean kids with a red rubber ball, Sabina was not much into sports. She said, “This was no freak accident. Tiffany Tennant was carrying around a dangerous piece of Spellcraft. I’ll bet it’s even illegal!”

Where was Sabina getting all this? Yuri was gesticulating now too, something Russian that looked like he was threatening to cut her throat, while I time-outed so hard I nearly jammed my own finger. When Officer Hotti turned back around to see why my hand-flapping was fanning the back of his neck, I quickly flailed into an innocent hands-up while Yuri succumbed to the sudden urge to scratch his jaw. The cop gave us each a very stern look, then said, “Don’t move. And remember—the evidence will speak for itself. If you’ve got nothing to hide, then there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

I was considering whether or not I should entrust my quill to Sabina while I got sent to the big house, when Officer Hotti plucked something out of Tiffany’s unconscious grasp and said, “What’s this?” He held up a sheet of stiff watercolor paper that was the perfect size to hold a bit of Spellcraft, and read, “Persistence opens all doors.”

“No wonder that door fell on her,” Sabina declared. “What with that extra super illegal piece of Spellcraft she was walking around with right in her hand. Arrest her.”

Officer Hotti leveled a look at Sabina while I practically squirmed out of my skin. And just as I decided that while Sabina’s heart was in the right place, she couldn’t act herself out of a paper bag, he reached for the little radio thingie on his shoulder and said, “Obviously, I can’t arrest an unconscious woman. I’ll call some paramedics to revive her first.”

I decided not to mention the little pink notebook—after all, there might be more Spellcraft in there that needed undoing. Besides, I didn’t want to take the spotlight off the one that would land Tiffany in jail. Even if it wasn’t technically hers.

Once the paramedics carted the reporter away—thankfully, with the intimidating Officer Hotti in tow—Sabina, Yuri and I could all breathe a sigh of relief…at least until I realized we were missing someone. “What happened to Skip?”

“He’s waiting for us in the crack. He told me all about what Tiffany did and insisted I go help you guys and come back for him later.”

“Skip turned out to be a pretty good guy after all,” I said.

Sabina gave me the side-eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Oops. She hadn’t been privy to our suspicions. I exchanged a glance with Yuri, then said, “Well…er…just that you never can tell with traveling geologists.”

Sabina let it slide. “When I got to the science van, I realized I didn’t have the first clue what a centrifuge looked like. And when I tried to look it up, I found out I’d fallen on my phone and smashed the screen. How the heck did people survive before Google, anyway?”

Yuri said, “It is fortunate it took you as long as it did. Otherwise, you would be stuck back there with Skip. Or worse, Tiffany could have made an example of you.”

Still…. “Too bad you sacrificed your Crafting to get us out of hot water.”

Sabina shrugged. “Officer Hotti was distracted by you rambling about dogs, and I had to do something before you ran out of steam. You were on a pretty good roll, but I figured even you would need to come up for air at some point.”

“But it was your favorite.” And while Craftings were easy enough to come by when everyone in your social circle is a Scrivener, each instance of Spellcraft has got to be unique. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a craft, but an industry.

Good thing. Nobody in my circuit would last more than five minutes on an assembly line.

“I’ll survive,” my cousin said. “And at least now I can stop worrying about getting caught.”

***

It turned out that Skip could see a heck of a lot better with his old prescription than he could with the glasses that met their demise beneath the heel of Sabina’s combat boot. And that observation made me re-think the Crafting on the back of his Arena Rock Award. Since he didn’t even believe in Spellcraft, he clearly hadn’t commissioned the piece. We figured one of his rivals had been trying to keep him from rising up any farther in the traveling geology ranks.

Whatever the Crafting’s intent, as was so often the case, the Spellcraft had a mind of its own. Laboring “sight unseen” not only left Skip working away in obscurity—it rendered him practically blind. I’d done him a huge favor by Uncrafting it. But given his hardcore, science-driven disbelief in Spellcraft, my chances of collecting any financial recompense were slim.

A good deed is its own reward. Now, there’s something no one in my family would ever say. But I will admit, my loved ones and I all benefited from Skip’s restored vision. He spotted a squashed blueprint in Yuri’s truck—the one we’d used to clear the cobweb-covered way to Phineas Shirque’s attic. With those plans, he determined that the explosions rocking Pinyin Bay were not due to some random naturally-occurring flammably inflammable substance, but a series of long-forgotten septic tanks.

Even so, when Mayor Dunce rolled back into town and ordered Tiffany’s construction crew to fill in the collapsing tunnels beneath the sand dunes, we thought it best not to second-guess him.

Skip’s restored vision had another unexpected consequence: now that he’d had a good look at Sabina, he no longer saw her as just a helpful friend. His libido hadn’t been on the fritz after all. He just hadn’t realized how cute my cousin was! And yet, the next day, he packed up his Nature World van, gave Sabina a stilted hug, slipped off his orthopedic boot, and drove gingerly off into the sunset toward his next geological adventure.

We stood on the sidewalk in a loose cluster—Sabina, Yuri and me. My cousin and I waved goodbye. Yuri glared at the van’s receding taillights. Even though it turned out Skip wasn’t the secret mastermind behind the Loveland Corporation after all, Yuri never took a shine to him. So, I was surprised when he asked Sabina, “Why was he so eager to leave?”

“Oh, that was my doing. I told him my dad was on his way home with a sawed-off shotgun.”

“As if Uncle Fonzo would know which end was which!” I chortled.

Yuri was puzzled. “I thought you were interested in Skip.”

“I was…but ever since he started wearing that old prescription, he’s been staring at my chest. Never trust a guy who’s fixated on your boobs—unless you’re trying to pickpocket him, in which case, have at it.”

That sounded a lot more like my family.

“Did you ever figure out why he spent so much time on Wikipedia?” I asked.

“Apparently, one of his favorite hobbies was to fact-check other people’s entries. I guess he found it soothing.”

Yuri seemed grudgingly satisfied by that explanation. “And what about all the properties Loveland bought?”

“According to Pinyin Minute,” I said, “the financing is all in default and the bank will be unloading them cheap.”

“Tiffany Tennant is still reporting?” Sabina asked.

“Not at all. Remember my friend Charlotte, the one with all the conspiracy theories? She took over Tiffany’s job. I’m guessing the local news is about to get a lot more interesting.”

“That reminds me….” Yuri went to his truck and pulled out a familiar book. The cover no longer stuck together. “I am curious to see what other secrets are buried in Pinyin Bay…even if they are all elaborate ruses meant to throw the Handless off the scent of the local Spellcrafters.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You think the whackadoo was deliberate? How do you know the author wasn’t just as paranoid as her granddaughter?”

“I took a better look at the history. Not only was Meemaw Jones old friends with Morticia Shirque, but her husband was the illustrator of this book. And his original paintings were more than just pretty pictures.”

“How about that?” Sabina remarked—it really takes a lot to impress her sometimes. “You never know where you’re gonna run into a Seer.” And with that, she headed to the backyard to watch the fireflies.

I carried Buried Secrets upstairs (very gingerly, I might add) while Yuri retrieved the cedar panel from the back of his truck—the hunk of wood sent airborne by the most recent explosion—and brought it up to our bedroom. Only one side of the panel was splintery. Yuri hid that part behind our mattress when he bolted it to the wall. It made for a handsome headboard, but even better, it filled the bedroom we shared with the comforting scent of cedar.

We got Meringue settled in her cage with a blanket over the top to encourage her to stop singing the Banana Splits theme song and finally get some sleep. Once the attic was all quiet, it was almost like being in the cabin again. Except the mattress was cushier. And there were no wayward drafts whistling through the crack beneath the door. And Yuri didn’t bonk his elbows on the walls when he stripped me down and had his Russian way with me.

Afterward, I stroked our new headboard as we lay together in a tangle of limbs, feeling sentimental about the fact that our tiny love shack was no more…but only a little. Because while we’d made some great memories in the cabin, the attic apartment was truly ours—Yuri’s and mine.

Yuri captured my hand and brought it to his lips, brushed a kiss across my knuckles, then said, “You are very quiet. What are you thinking?”

“Oh, just the normal sorts of stuff you’d think after a studly tattooed guy well and truly rocked your world.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, I’m relieved none of my other childhood memories will be exploding anytime soon. And I’m thrilled it’s safe enough for my parents to come back once they’re done enjoying their suite. And…” dare I say it? “After all that we’ve seen together and all that we’ve done, I’ve never been more sure that…Yahtzee blah you-blue.”

No doubt I’d really mangled the sentiment. The urge to fill the silence with something—anything—was strong, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Yuri’s expression? Unreadable.

But only for a moment.

And then his gaze went soft as he gathered my hand in his…and warmed my ink-stained knuckles with a kiss.

This concludes the current story arc, but Dixon and Yuri will be back with more adventures. If you enjoyed the ebook, check out the audiobook with Nick Hudson, who brings all the characters to life.

THE ABCS OF SPELLCRAFT SERIES

1. Quill Me Now

1.5 All that Glitters

2. Trouble in Taco Town

3. Something Stinks at the Spa

4. Dead Man’s Quill

5. Last But Not Lease

6. Don’t Rock the Boardwalk

7. What the Frack?

The ABCs of Spellcraft Collection Volume 1 (Finding Fonzo, stories 1-4) in paperback and audio available now.

Volume 2 (Peril of Pinyin Bay, stories 5-7) coming soon!

ABOUT THIS STORY

The day I wrote the passage about the history of Pinyin Bay’s mines being shut down, I went for a walk around an old quarry with a friend who’s lived here in Sheboygan, WI all her life. The quarry is filled with water and is now an inland lake with a beach and small water park on one side (it’s more of a floaty obstacle course.) Sheboygan is nowhere near as colorful as Pinyin Bay, and even so, my friend told me this story: there are train tracks at the bottom of the quarry. They were digging and hit a natural spring and the quarry filled up, and all the equipment and train cars are still down there at the bottom.

It struck me as a very Pinyin-esque tale!

I’ll have to go to the beach when the weather warms up. While I’m right near Lake Michigan, it’s usually too cold for swimming until August or so.

Originally, I’d made Phineas Shirque’s statues out of marble. But then I realized that the cost, the weight, and the availability would have made marble an unlikely material for him to use.

I have a lot of experience with plaster. I did a moldmaking class in art school where I learned how to make really complex, multi-part molds for ceramic pouring. I actually remember a few tips from working with plaster. Weigh the plaster and water. Pour in the powder and let it sit there for a while—otherwise you’ll just end up with a bunch of lumps. And then mix with your hand.

I ended up with contact dermatitis and eventually switched to fiber art. But my plaster molds turned out really well.

The idea of an “alien” discovery was inspired by the Cardiff Giant, a hoax perpetrated in 1869 by a guy who would be right at home with Phineas Shirque or Fonzo Penn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant

George Hull had a human statue carved from 10-foot block of gypsum, buried it on the farm of a guy he was in cahoots with, and a year later, the “petrified giant” was discovered by workmen digging a well.

When the hoax was uncovered, P.T. Barnum tried to buy the giant. When Hull refused, Barnum simply created a few of his own and toured them as the “real” Cardiff Giant. I’ve seen one of Barnum’s copy giants at the Circus World historical site in Baraboo, WI, and I’ve been eager to work it into a Spellcraft story for quite some time.

This story completes the Peril of Pinyin Bay arc of the Spellcraft series, but be sure to keep your eyes peeled for more Dixon and Yuri adventures in the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jordan Castillo Price has never lived in a house with secret doors or passageways, but she does own some creepy ceramic heads she made many moons ago. She does not have the patience to bake cookies. Eating them is another story.

Connect with Jordan:

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Jordan-Castillo-Price-257078438055

Twitter - https://twitter.com/jordancprice

Bookbub - https://www.bookbub.com/profile/jordan-castillo-price

Blog - http://jordancastilloprice.com

And explore her other stories at http://jcpbooks.com