Dead Man's Quill
Author: Jordan Castillo Price
Date: 2019-08-08 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Romance; Paranormal; Humour; Mystery; Contemporary
Description: It's all fun and games until someone loses a hand.Dixon has been dying to introduce Yuri to Uncle Fonzo, the Hand of his family, and now he'll finally get that chance. All they need to do is meet him at a traveling carnival with an unused piece of Spellcraft. Easy peasy, right?Not even a little. And even worse, they might encounter a clown.Uncle Fonzo has left a trail of magical destruction in his wake, but he claims he's been helping people. Spellcrafters are a slippery bunch, and it's hard to say if he's stretching the truth or telling an outright lie. One thing's for sure, he's between a ro
Publisher: JCP Books LLC

Contents

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

Guide

1. Contents

2. Start of Content

DEAD MAN’S QUILL

The ABCs of Spellcraft 4

Jordan Castillo Price

Find more titles at
www.JCPbooks.com

Dead Man’s quill. ©2019 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 978-1-944779-08-5

Electronic Version 1.0

1

DIXON

“Dixon Penn…. Is that any way to greet your favorite uncle?”

It takes a heck of a lot to render me speechless. But after all this time? The sound of my uncle’s voice left me too baffled to form a coherent thought. I was in our hotel room at the spa, in the midst of picking up a pineapple parfait when I’d answered the phone, and the dessert was now face-down between my feet. I was so stunned, I had no memory of how it even got there. Yuri squinted at me from the bathroom sink where he’d returned to washing out his socks, completely unaware than my world was tilting on its axis…or, at least, just beginning to suspect.

“Listen,” Uncle Fonzo told me. “I know it’s been a while—”

“It’s been a year,” I managed.

“I know, kiddo. And I feel pretty lousy about falling off the radar. So, why don’t you come see me—and you can read me the riot act in person?”

After a year of searching—of wondering and worrying—it hardly seemed real that it would be as simple as that. Even so, my heart was racing with the anticipation of finally bringing my uncle home. “Okay. Yeah. Definitely. Just tell me where you are.”

“I’ll do you one better and tell you where I’m going to be. I’ve hooked up with the Big Fun Traveling Carnival, and we’re heading for a three-day stint in Mount Valley. It’s just a day’s drive from Pinyin Bay.”

I mapped it on my phone—a day’s drive from Spring Falls, too. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“That’s my boy! Oh…and one more thing. Before you head out, I’ll need to you swing by Rufus Clahd’s office and grab me a fresh Seen.”

***

Given how Yuri felt about clowns, no doubt he would’ve preferred to drive away from the carnival, not toward it. And I was too hopped up to be my normal, soothing self.

I also had a sneaking suspicion Yuri was none too thrilled to meet my uncle, either…judging by the way he accidentally knocked the hotel room door off its hinges on the way out.

Good thing I’d paraphrased the conversation about meeting Uncle Fonzo at the carnival, and left out the part where we were supposed to bring him a fresh Seen. Hoping Yuri could offer a few civil niceties to my uncle was one thing. Expecting him to turn over something as intimate as a Seen was another.

We reached the Big Fun Traveling Carnival at dusk, when the sky was streaked the color of strawberry jam and the lights on the midway came to life with only the occasional burned-out bulb interrupting the pattern. A teenage girl chewing a huge mouthful of gum took our admission, and listlessly upsold the all-you-can-ride wristband around the gum wad. “No thanks,” I told her. “We’re not actually here to ride the rides.”

“Food-and-game tickets are a fun-filled bargain at thirteen tickets for ten dollars,” she said with zero inflection, parroting a script she’d been forced to memorize. “And be sure to check out our deep-fried frozen cotton candy.”

I paused for a moment to try and imagine how a frozen anything would survive a dunk in the deep-fryer, but only for a moment. “Actually, I’m looking for someone on the crew.” I flashed the photo of my Uncle Fonzo. “Maybe you can point me in the right direction.”

The girl gave a few juicy mastications, then shrugged. “I just started today, and I’ve been in the ticket booth the whole time. Sorry.”

I thanked her and bought a strip of food tickets even though my stomach was in knots. No sense in starving to death when tents full of shaved ice, candy apples and funnel cake were just a ping-pong ball’s throw away—even when everything cost three or six tickets, and no matter how you sliced it, you’d never use up ticket number thirteen without buying two more strips.

We asked around, or at least we tried. Safety regulations didn’t allow the ride operators to talk while their rides were running. The game barkers were too busy calling out patter. Eventually, a guy on the cleaning crew seemed eager to talk to us—but only for the purposes of selling some “bargain” tickets he’d clearly pilfered…which I bought, since Yuri was looking kind of hungry.

Eventually, we finally found someone who recognized my uncle—the lady stuck stirring the kettle corn, a hot and thankless task. “Oh, I met him. Friendly guy. But I think it’s been a day or two since—”

She went back to her stirring, mid-sentence, and twice as hard.

A day or two since what? I was about to ask, but Yuri nudged me and drew my attention toward a towering figure all in black. He was a homely middle-aged man, rawboned and angular, with permanently etched frown lines and a home haircut—the lovechild of Abraham Lincoln and Frankenstein. As he strode through the carnival, a pall of discomfort spread around him like ink furling away from the tip of a quill plunged in water. Even the customers went silent and shrank away.

Once he’d turned the corner of the plywood haunted house, Kettle Corn Lady loud-whispered, “That’s Reverend Fun. You don’t want to end up on his you-know-what list.”

Reverend Fun? If ever there was a walking oxymoron…. “And here I thought the Big Fun Traveling Carnival was named that way because it was enjoyable. Is he actually a holy man?”

“Not that anyone here can tell. I heard it was a vanity mail-order license he’s using to get a tax break.”

Hmm…Reverend Penn might have an interesting ring to it. But my family wasn’t keen on organized religion, so I shelved that idea without much serious thought.

The kettle corn was starting to singe, so we thanked the sweaty lady and left her to her stirring. We asked around for a few more hours, but unfortunately, no one else knew any more than she did. If I’d been discouraged by not knowing where Uncle Fonzo was all this time, after a couple fruitless hours trying to talk to the carnies, I was on tenterhooks wondering if this trip would turn out to be a big, fat dead-end.

The midway held all the usual carnival games. Water gun races. Goldfish bowls. Duck pond. But it was the balloon pop where Yuri froze in his tracks, then did a double-take. Maybe they didn’t have balloon pop games in Russia. But before I could ask, I saw that he wasn’t focused on the game, but rather the prizes. The assortment was just as kitschy as game itself. Fake nose with glasses, paddleball, potato gun, itching powder. I was about to inform Yuri that the X-ray specs didn’t really work when he shoved some tickets into the host’s hand and said, “Darts.”

The stoned guy behind the counter handed over three darts with a vague half-grin on his squinty-eyed face. “Reveal a star and win yourself a prize.”

“Where is star?”

“Hey, man, that’s not how the game—ulp!”

Yuri dragged him forward by the shirt and said, “Where…is…star?”

The guy nodded toward the board and said, “That red balloon up in the corner is a good bet.”

Before I could mention that I would occasionally win a complimentary well drink playing darts at Bar None, Yuri had fired the three darts in rapid succession—Pop! Pop! Pop!—annihilating every red ballon on that side of the board. Not only one, but two of them had been hiding stars.

“Two stars,” the stoner declared as he flapped his hand at a tier of awkward-looking stuffed animals. The cartoon knockoffs were so bad they were almost cute, though I doubted Yuri would be eager to wake up to the cross-eyed gaze of a pale blue Porky Pig. “Pick a prize!”

Yuri squinted, then jabbed a finger at the tier below it—the one-star stuff that was so cheap it was nothing more than a consolation prize, and a lousy one at that. “Give me the paint.”

The stoner swayed on his feet, staring in the direction Yuri was pointing as if he was trying to see the hidden picture in a Magic Eye painting. After an awkward pause, he said, “But, like, you can have one of the good prizes.”

Yuri dropped his voice low and dangerous, and repeated, “Give me the paint.”

“Chill, dude—you want the Pretty Princess Glitter Face Paint so bad? You got it!” He turned to the display and pulled off a glitzy pink card with a minuscule children’s paint set attached. I personally wouldn’t get that stuff anywhere near my face, since it was clearly so cheap, the sparkle was probably all floor-sweepings from a glass-grinding factory. But I guess kids have pretty resilient skin. The stoner also threw in the next prize over, a pink glow stick bracelet, to sweeten the pot and make sure Yuri was well and truly satisfied…and didn’t come back an hour later with buyer’s remorse.

Yuri snatched the toys and crammed them into his pocket. For reasons unknown, the stoner was compelled to try and sustain the conversation. “So. Who’s the lucky little lady?”

Yuri gave him a look that could wilt a Sequoia. “I am.”

Well…at least, one of us had found something he was looking for.

The longer we picked through the carnival without spotting Uncle Fonzo, the more nervous I grew. It had been so long since I’d seen him, being without him had become my new normal.

Eventually, my growling stomach got the best of me, and we paused for a break, perched at a sticky-topped picnic table. I picked at my deep-fried cotton candy (the middle had not only thawed, but melted to a sugary syrup, leaving a hollow shell of fried batter that looked unappetizingly like a cow flop) while Yuri inhaled a fried dough, then tried out his new paints on the wrapper. I was just about to ask him whether he thought the word “tenterhooks” had its origin in the carnival when he looked up from his painting and went very still. He squinted into the visual cacophony of the midway and said, “What is that?”

2

YURI

American carnivals were nothing like the ones I’d been to as a young man outside St. Petersburg. There were no snowball fights...in fact, no snow at all. No straw effigies burning in the square. No blini, though the fried dough was not bad.

And no expectation that I would return home, as was the tradition, with a fiancée.

Even better, I determined there were no puppet shows at this traveling carnival, and the only clowns in sight were merely images printed on the popcorn boxes. Even those images were cartoonish enough to not strike me as particularly disturbing.

While many of the amusements had a Russian equivalent, those that did not were easy enough to figure out, even though the prizes were more garish, the rides were more thrilling, and every food option was deep-fried. But the huge water tank painted with the words Dunk the Skunk?

I could think of no counterpart for that.

But while I scanned the amusement with mild curiosity, Dixon froze in his tracks.

Which could only mean one thing.

I looked closer and saw that inside the tank, a man wearing a skunk costume perched, shivering and damp, on a thin wooden ledge. Beside him, a barker called out, “No one likes a stinker! Five balls for three tickets—can’t beat that with a stick! Come on now, little missy,” he called out to a teenage girl in earbuds, “you know you want a shot!”

The girl seemed unimpressed once she saw there was no prize other than the satisfaction of seeing a man suffer hypothermia. But the game made quite the impression on me. Because behind the animal nose and ears, the wet hair and the miserable expression, was none other than the Hand of Dixon’s family, Fonzo Penn.

I thought he’d be taller.

It is rare indeed for Dixon to be at a loss for words. I marched up past the Barker and peered into the tank—or at least, I tried. The Barker, an elderly man with massive dentures and a well-worn wooden cane, poked me in the knee and said, “Now now, Sonny, you know what happens when you spook a skunk.” He gestured with his cane and said, “No crossing the red line. No exceptions.”

If push came to shove, he could probably do some damage with that cane. I backed up a few paces until I crossed the red strip of tape stretched across the asphalt. I stared. Dixon stared. And eventually the barker made a “gimme” motion with his hand and said, “Three tickets. Are you slow?” He held up three fingers, and slowly articulated, “One…two…three.”

I tore three tickets off our strip and shoved them into his arthritic hand.

The skunk in the tank had been staring at his own knees, but at the pause in the barker’s patter, his curiosity got the best of him. When he looked up and locked eyes with his nephew, both of them went wide-eyed and stunned—and while Fonzo’s features were a generation older (not to mention half-covered with a felt skunk nose) no one could possibly miss the family resemblance.

The barker handed me a baseball. It felt too light, but what did I know? He jabbed his cane toward the center of the target and said, “Here ya go, ball number one. Hit the bullseye and dunk the skunk!”

The girl in the earbuds might not have found the prize particularly appealing…but I did.

Unfortunately, my first pitch bounced harmlessly off the edge of the target.

“So close—but no cigar!” The barker jammed another ball into my hands.

I hefted the ball. Definitely too light for its size. But while I took its measure, I glanced up and noticed that Fonzo was making a signal of some kind with his far hand, where the barker couldn’t see it, but Dixon could. Not sign language, exactly. Numbers. Directions.

“Come on, now, Jumbo,” the barker told me, “I don’t have all day. Take your shot.”

I pitched the second ball. It bounced off the other side of the target.

“Big, strong guy like you,” the old man said. “I’m sure you can do better.” He gave me another ball. Dixon gestured to his uncle. Fonzo gestured back. They both nodded.

Something was settled, then. Good.

I took aim at the target…and threw hard.

The ball went wide, hit the side of the tank, and dropped to the pavement.

“And a miss! Two more tries—better make ’em count.”

As the barker gave me my fourth ball, I glanced up at Fonzo. He was watching me intently now. I met his gaze, narrowed my eyes, and threw.

The lightweight ball arced over the top.

Obviously, the game was rigged—but it couldn’t have been entirely impossible to hit the mark. The most successful ploys at parting people from their money needed to offer at least some margin of hope, however slim. Otherwise no one would play.

“Put your back into it!” The barker handed me the final ball.

I squinted at the target—really got the feel for it—but as I wound up my throw, Dixon tugged at my sleeve, then wordlessly held out a hand.

Dixon claimed he was more of an athletic supporter than an athlete, but if he wanted a shot, who was I to deny him? As satisfying as it would be to send his uncle plunging into a tank of water, I couldn’t possibly resist that big-eyed look. Our fingers brushed when I handed him the ball. He held it for an extra moment, allowing the touch to linger…then without even bothering to aim, turned and flung a wild pitch at the target.

It hit, dead center, with a hollow smack.

I’m not sure who was more surprised. The barker? Me? Dixon himself?

Or Fonzo Penn…as he was dumped unceremoniously into the water.

3

DIXON

Our meeting was set for ten o’clock at the northwest corner of the grounds. I killed time waiting for the carnival to wind down by watching Yuri eat fried dough and trying to imagine how on earth Uncle Fonzo had ended up in this predicament. I have a pretty active imagination. And I couldn’t think of a single darn thing.

The rendezvous point was well-chosen. Dark. Secluded. And not particularly comfortable. No one would have any reason to find us lingering out back behind the maintenance truck unless they were in dire need of toilet paper, or maybe some of that vomit-soaker-upper.

Ten o’clock came…and ten o’clock went. And as it did, it dawned on me that my uncle could have sent me to the spot where I was waiting so he could slip out the other side of the carnival before I was any the wiser. And never mind that it would’ve been totally illogical, since he was the one who’d asked me to come in the first place. Hopefully he wasn’t ticked off about the baseball. I couldn’t really explain what had come over me back there at the Skunk Dunk myself, and anyone who’s talked to me for more than five minutes would surely know that any success I might have in throwing a ball was purely coincidental. But just as I was about to ask Yuri to split up and do a sweep of the grounds, I heard the thready sound of whistling in the dark.

Not just any song, but the one my uncle had sung when he tucked me into bed—a nonsense ditty about trolls stealing your toes unless you allow your eyes to close—that never failed to catapult me straight into dreamland. In the dim glow of the distant carnival lights, my eyes played tricks on me. For just a moment, as he rounded the maintenance truck, Uncle Fonzo looked like he did when I was still a kid who tucked his blankets tight around his feet so as not to make it any easier for the underbed trolls to have their way with me. But then he smiled, and I saw the pronounced lines around his mouth. And sagging jowls. And receding widow’s peaks. And it was obvious the years had changed him. Just like they’d changed all of us.

“Dixon, my boy. Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” He opened his arms. “Come and give your ol’ Uncle Fonzo a hug.”

I flung my arms around him. His sweater smelled like chlorine, and words tumbled out of me, too eager to form real sentences. “I…you…we…I’m so sorry for dunking you.”

Yuri made a scoffing sound. “You are apologizing to him?”

Uncle Fonzo gave me an extra-hard squeeze. “A lucky shot! Remember, I know full well how quickly you can run away from a baseball.” Once the hug was all hugged out, he landed a few good claps on my back. He wore thin leather gloves, like Yuri, like lots of old-school Spellcrafters, so the claps were more of a muted thwack. He then pushed me to arms’ length, gave my shoulders a squeeze, and said, “It’s been too long.”

Yuri crossed his arms and said, “And whose fault is that?”

Undaunted, Uncle Fonzo craned his neck to peer up at Yuri through the darkness, and said, “You brought a friend. A boyfriend?”

“Grown man friend,” I said. “His name is Yuri.”

“Guess where the two of us met,” Yuri said.

“Well, the Pinyin Bay Pride Parade isn’t for another couple of months. Did the gin mill on Stump Street take my advice and put together a disco-themed Thursday?”

“Precious Greetings.” He sounded kind of hostile—even for Yuri. “We met at Precious Greetings.”

My uncle’s smile turned pained…then dropped away completely. He looked from Yuri to me. “Oh, Dixon…what were you doing in that awful place?”

Before I could figure out where to begin, Yuri said, “He was doing what you could not. He stopped Emery Flint from trapping any more Spellcrafters in his web.”

“Flint is gone?”

“Neutralized, more like it,” I said eagerly. “Last I heard, Precious Greetings was being renovated into a build-your-own yogurt bar. And the old full-time Scrivener, Dolores Tran, put out the word that Flint tried to bilk her into signing a bum contract—so nobody in the circuit is likely to Scribe for him again.”

“If they can help it,” my uncle added.

“Spellcraft compulsion is gone.” Yuri’s accent had gone thicker and he’d dropped his article, so he was obviously feeling nowhere near as calm, cool and collected as he made out. “You can stop hiding now.”

Uncle Fonzo took it all in stride. “Hiding? Is that what you think? Well, who can blame you? It’s not as if you know me.”

Yuri didn’t disagree—but his thin smile spoke volumes.

“I wasn’t hiding. I was making sure the rest of the family didn’t suffer from the fallout of my mistake. Dixon is resilient—always lands on his feet—but he’s got nothing Flint would want. My daughter, though? I couldn’t just sit by and let that predator scoop her up. Look, everything’s under control, I’ve just got a score to settle here before I wrap everything up. Can’t Craft something for nothing, it upsets the natural order. And this surly old carny owes me a whole lot of somethings. I bought out the last Dunk Skunk so I could take his place, tag along and keep an eye on things. I know where Fun is keeping my money. I’ve got a plan. All I need is a Seen—you did bring me a Seen, Dixon, right?”

“Actually…I didn’t.”

Uncle Fonzo’s smile shifted into a wince.

“Dixon did not bring Seen,” Yuri announced. “He brought Seer.”

“He…? You…?” Uncle Fonzo slapped his knee. “Well, how about that? Snagged yourself a Seer—not that I’m surprised, handsome young buck like you. Quite the catch. Florica must be so proud.”

She was over the moon—practically orbiting Venus—but I knew flattery when I heard it, and I had the sneaking suspicion there was more to the story he was avoiding. “Mom’s tickled pink—but let’s stick to the topic at hand. Why do you care so much about your payday? I get that you need some kind of compensation, but there’s something funny about this carnival—funny-weird, not funny-ha-ha. Why not pocket a prize from the midway, call it even, and come back to Pinyin Bay?”

Uncle Fonzo’s shoulders slumped. “I’d love to—more than anything. Especially hearing that Flint’s been taken care of. But the truth is, now I’ve got a debt to settle, and the clock’s ticking. I can’t come home empty-handed. And, for your own protection, that’s as much as you need to know. So, about that Seen….”

“I never agreed to paint for you,” Yuri said. “You need money, Fun has money, we take it, we leave. You don’t need Seen.”

“Sure, in an ideal world, that’s exactly what we would do. But there’s rumors flying left and right that his stash is protected.”

“How so?” I asked.

Uncle Fonzo lowered his voice dramatically. “No one knows. But carnies are hard to impress—they’ve seen it all, and then some—and if they’re all too spooked to even think about robbing Reverend Fun, I’m not about to find out the hard way exactly what his protections…entail. Erm…Dixon?”

“Yes?”

“You’re standing on my foot.”

Of course I wasn’t…oh. “Oops. Sorry.”

My uncle fixed me with a very serious look. “If there’s anything you want to say to me, kiddo, I’m all ears.”

“I dunno. Welcome back?”

Abruptly, Yuri said, “I will get crowbar from truck,” and strode off. Because he needed a crowbar? Or because he wanted to give me some time alone with my uncle?

“Listen,” Uncle Fonzo said. “I get that you might be a little ticked off.”

“Me? No way! I’m totally jazzed to see you.”

“I know I’ve been MIA, but like I was saying, I had to keep contact to a minimum, in case whatever Spellcraft Flint used on me got its hooks into any of you. The way it all went down, I thought the best course of action would be to regroup and deal with Precious Greetings myself before anyone else got hurt. And I want you to know that even though I wasn’t with you guys, I thought of you all each and every day. It was a strategic retreat, that’s all.”

A strategy that somehow involved finding another quill…but before I could ask about that, Yuri slipped from the shadows with a crowbar in his hand and said, “Now we go get money.”

4

The days of carnivals coming to town in brightly painted caravans were long gone…if all that pageantry had ever happened anywhere besides the silver screen to begin with. The Big Fun Traveling Carnival made its way across the country in a series of dilapidated campers, a graffiti-covered eighteen-wheeler, and a pair of repurposed school buses. One of those buses was the private sanctum of Reverend Fun himself. It bore little resemblance to the vehicle that transported groups of eager children to and from the local establishments of learning. The (once) cheese-colored exterior had been painted dull black, and the banks of windows along the sides were bolted over with thin sheets of corrugated aluminum, which left it looking like a charter bus to Hell…or maybe a thrash-metal concert. The only thing that differentiated it from a post-apocalyptic prison van was the black-painted calliope welded to the back.

“I can’t say I recommend taking the short way in,” Uncle Fonzo said as he cut his eyes from the bus door to Yuri’s crowbar. “If there’s an alarm system, that’s where it’ll be rigged.”

Yuri tapped the crowbar against his palm as he weighed his options. He had on his leather gloves, so the iron tool made a satisfying thwack with each strike. After several good thwacks, he nodded and said, “We go through metal window.”

There’s never a convenient stepladder around when you need one, so my uncle and I got down on hands and knees to form a pyramid base for Yuri to stand on. Uncle Fonzo made an “oof” sound as Yuri stepped onto his back, then muttered, “I still think it would’ve made more sense for you or me to climb up top.”

“But Yuri’s the one with all the upper-body strength. And besides, it’s just like my days on the cheerleading squad.” Which most definitely qualified as a sport—and was also the best way to ogle the football team running around in their skin-tight leggings.

While Yuri grumbled in Russian as he tried to wedge in the crowbar, my uncle told me, “Still…a Scrivener needs to be serious about protecting his greatest asset—his hands.”

He was totally right. I’d need to start thinking about it myself. Lots of Spellcrafters wore gloves, including Yuri. But I’d never developed the knack for having gloves on all the time. They felt sweaty, and the stunted sense of touch was annoying.

As I pondered, yet again, whether a stylish pair of gloves, maybe in a cute paisley, would make me change my mind, Yuri’s crowbar hit home. With a shriek of stripping bolts, the corrugated metal peeled up like the top of a sardine can. Unfortunately, he’d underestimated exactly how wide his shoulders were. He tried every which way, but couldn’t manage to wedge himself through the window. Uttering a few choice Russian expletives, he climbed down and said, “I will wait here.”

He knelt in the dirt, wove his fingers together and gave my uncle an alley-oop. He was none too keen on me following, but he must’ve known there’d be no stopping me. As Uncle Fonzo wriggled his butt through the peeled-up window, Yuri pressed something into my hand. Something small. And glittery. And vibrating with Spellcraft.

He brushed his lips against my ear and said, “I would not paint for him…but for you? Always.”

That elusive whisper of magic shivered through my body and coalesced in my right hand. But it would have to wait until I had some idea what I might need to Scribe.

With Yuri pushing and Uncle Fonzo pulling, I was up and into the big black bus in no time…despite the fact that it was so full, we could hardly cram ourselves in. The seats had been removed, and the big bus was filled, floor to ceiling, with balloons.

I can hardly think of anything more harmless than a balloon—but apparently I’d never imagined I’d have to wedge myself into a confined space so full of them I couldn’t even turn around. The latex creaked alarmingly as it rubbed against itself. My hair follicles tingled with static. And I experienced the disconcerting sensation of being pressed into from every conceivable angle.

“Dixon?” My uncle’s voice echoed oddly around the latex, as the membranes all reverberated with the sound of his voice like several thousand ginormous eardrums. “Whatever you do…don’t pop anything.”

Cautiously, I squeezed a hand into the balloon avalanche and eased open a springy crevasse to walk in. I became profoundly aware of anything on my person that might be even remotely sharp, from my tie tack to my cufflinks. “Any idea where your money is?” I asked.

“If it were me, I’d stash it at the point farthest from the door.”

A logical notion—though I wasn’t sure logic necessarily prevailed with someone who guarded his hoard with a bumper crop of inflated rubber. “Good thing I’m not allergic to latex.” D’oh…probably something I didn’t need to announce to my uncle. “Maybe we can let the air out of some gradually and free up a little elbow room.”

I picked apart the knot on the nearest balloon and deflated it with a squee-ee-ee, but it was such a delicate and time-consuming task, we’d be at it all night if we ever hoped to make any headway. I said, “As much as I love hearing a balloon sing the song of its people, this’ll take forever. And the squeak it makes is just as loud as a pop—so we might as well start stomping.”

My uncle put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Hold up there, kiddo. Human Behavior 101—people don’t do things for no good reason. If the Reverend took the time to blow up all these balloons, they serve some kind of purpose.”

“A carny alarm system?” I guessed. “And something to keep us in place while security shows up.”

“Security consists of a couple of unenthused rent-a-cops and a retired lunch lady named Bernice. Keep your eyes on the prize and we’ll be just fine.”

Eyes on the prize. Easier said than done wallowing in balloons. “If I were a stack of money, where would I be?” My mom kept her secret stash inside a fake lettuce in the crisper drawer—because everyone knows lettuce is for rabbits, or maybe garnish, if you’re being fancy. But unless the converted bus was tricked out with a kitchenette, we were probably looking for a safe. Most non-professional burglars would be foiled by a safe. But, lucky for me, I just so happened to have a fresh Seen and a quill.

“We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” I decided. “You take the back end of the bus, I’ll take the front.” Despite the gentle illumination of the exit signs over the doors, within moments I was disoriented, but I did my best to press forward. Good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic. Step by step, inch by inch, I squeezed my body through. All around me, the balloons marked my progress with a symphony of squeaks.

I banked off the sides of the bus a few times, but eventually I found the driver’s seat. And built into the back of it was a secure panel with an urgent-looking sign that proclaimed in bold, red letters, Authorized Persons Only.

How nonspecific. Undoubtedly, at some point in my life, I’d been authorized by someone to do something. With that settled, I went about prying the panel open with my trusty knockoff Swiss army knife. Most of the blades had snapped off years ago. But the toothpick was surprisingly sturdy.

It was like trying to unseal a can of house paint that’s been moldering in the basement for years, but eventually, my persistence paid off. I plucked open the door in triumph, fully expecting to find stacks of greenbacks. Or diamonds. Or even gold doubloons. So I was puzzled to find, instead….

A stapler.

Not one of those hand-held staplers you’d use to organize your personal magazine clippings or receipts, but the big, hulking, automatic kind you’d find in a hardcore office environment. It was lying on its back. Odd. I cocked my head to get a better look, and noticed, stranger still, that a thin line of filament connected it to the metal door I was holding open.

And also, that a tiny lever had sprung out to keep the door open.

Ca-chunk.

It wasn’t so much that the staple hurt—it bounced off my lapel—but it sure was startling. I backed away quickly as the staples picked up steam. Ca-chunk-ca-chunk-ca-chunk. And before I knew it, I had plenty of room to flail around—as the balloons all around me detonated.

Once I got over my startlement, it was kind of festive, actually, since the balloons were all filled with glitter. When they popped, they gave off a sparkly spray.

As the balloons around me let loose, other balloons sank down to take their place as airborne glitter rained down. And within moments, the sparkly surface had lowered to eye-level. Loud? From where I stood, yes. But the joke was on Reverend Fun, because the bus was so trussed up so tight, it would effectively muffle all that popping. I scrambled around and found Uncle Fonzo looking at me, alarmed, from the opposite end of the bus. The balloons kept on popping, and soon the surface level reached my shoulders, then my chest. Across the length of the bus, more of my uncle was revealed as the balloons around him gently rolled away to fill the void. He’d found a hatch just like the one I’d pried open. But before I could warn him about the staples, he pulled his little door open.

There was no stapler inside his.

Instead, it was hooked up to the massive calliope.

The steam-powered instrument wheezed to life. It was like a giant’s pan-pipes on steroids, blasting out a cheerful carnival tune with enough decibels to shake the whole bus, and the parking lot all around it, too. If the security staff didn’t hear the balloons popping, they’d sure as heck hear that calliope playing…all the way from Poughkeepsie.

The entirety of the bus was tricked out with hatches and doors, I realized—and any of them could be hiding the money. If it was even there at all. As the balloons around me continued to burst, dousing me with glitter, I felt a telltale tingle in my hand and decided that enough was enough. Spellcraft wasn’t guaranteed to work instantaneously. But when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Actually, that probably wasn’t exactly the expression I was looking for.

Anyhoo.

I whipped out Yuri’s Seen…and did a double-take. He’d used the glitter face-paint he’d won on the midway, and his abstract design was a bunch of circles that could easily represent balloons—glittery balloons. Trying to figure out which came first—the chicken or the glitter-filled egg—was enough to make my head hurt, so I set those considerations aside and focused instead on Scribing my way out of there.

I slipped my quill from my pocket and opened my ink with my teeth, hoping I didn’t end up wearing it. Juggling quill, ink and Seen was a challenge—but if you’re gonna juggle, what better place to do it than in a bus full of glittery balloons?

Since Uncle Fonzo wouldn’t leave without his payout, show me the money came to mind, but I quelled the impulse to Scribe something that specific. If Reverend Fun had made a bank deposit, I could end up wasting my Spellcraft on a deposit slip or a few nickels that slipped behind the seat cushion. I discarded my initial idea and did my best to clear my mind. As the balloons popped glitter and the calliope blasted, what came to me would need to be good enough.

Fair is fair.

Carnival. Fair. Get it?

It was hasty calligraphy, no doubt, scrawled on my knee while my ink splattered the popping balloons. But I felt that old Spellcraftian tingle anyhow. Or…did I? Because my left hand was tingling now, too.

That was different.

“I’ve got it,” Uncle Fonzo hollered over the off-kilter music, and I saw him, covered in glitter, pulling a gigantic plushy walrus from the guts of the calliope. “Let’s get out of here!”

He high-tailed it to the window and tossed the walrus to Yuri. I waded toward our exit through balloons that were just thigh-high now. The stapler was still ca-chunking, but the staples were overshooting the balloons, and soon the strip ran out. I thought I was home free, but then the tingling morphed into an itch. I realized it wasn’t just glitter filling the balloons—but itching powder. Panic flooded me. I might’ve been raised in the Craft, but I was still relatively new to Scrivening. What if I’d botched the job by Crafting for fairness instead of money?

And what if it wasn’t Yuri outside the bus waiting for us…but Reverend Fun?

This couldn’t be happening—I was way too pretty for prison. But as I scrambled to follow my uncle—terrified of what I’d find once I looked out that window—my elbow jostled a switch on the wall.

Overhead, a dome light blazed to life, revealing the balloonish wreckage in all its colorful, glittery glory.

I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sudden onslaught of light, and realized there was something stuck inside the dome. Something small and papery.

Something the exact same size as all the other wonky bits of Spellcraft we’d been trailing.

Something with a single, ragged word Scribed on it.

Remunerate.

5

YURI

Outside, on the outskirts of the fairgrounds, the festive blinking carnival lights had long since been extinguished. But when the thunderous music started playing, a distant searchlight blazed to life. It swept the grounds around the black bus, and though I tried to avoid looking directly at it, my eyes were dazzled by the glare.

The corrugated sheet metal covering the window pried open and an ugly stuffed animal dropped out, followed by Fonzo Penn. A few balloons drifted out behind him. To his credit, he didn’t immediately dash off into the night with his prize, but instead planted himself beside the bus and waited for Dixon.

Hard to say what was happening in there over the earth-shaking racket of the great pipe-organ in back blasting out its creepy circus tune. As the searchlight swept away from us, I stole a glance at the fairgrounds. A single, tall figure strode toward us, backlit and menacing. And it was holding something that looked suspiciously like an elephant rifle.

I was just about ready to pry off the entire side of the bus and retrieve Dixon myself when he slid feet-first from the window and dropped awkwardly to the ground. He hastily looped an arm through mine and hollered over the music, “Let’s go!”

The three of us zig-zagged through the parked vans, but everywhere we turned, the tall, dark figure was not only right behind us, but gaining ground. He lurched along like an animated scarecrow, closing in, silhouetted against the lazy strobe of the searchlight.

Hastily, we ducked around a corner and found a small mob running toward us—only to realize, when we all staggered to a stop, it was nothing but a stack of funhouse mirrors from a disassembled attraction leaning against the side of a truck.

We dodged the mirrors, careened around the skunk tank, then found ourselves at the edge of the parking lot. It had a dark, weedy, deserted feel with all the other customers long gone. Only one truck remained.

Ours.

With Reverend Fun and his great big gun behind us, we broke into an all-out run. Dixon let go of me, and instinctively, the three of us fanned apart, weaving as we ran. We might be easy targets out in the open with nothing to hide behind. But hopefully he couldn’t reload fast enough to get us all.

We were far enough from the black bus that the music had faded into the distance. Still audible. But quiet enough to hear the meaty thump made by the Reverend’s gun.

“Oof!” Dixon went down, rolled in the dust, then sprang back up with a wad of material in his hand. “T-shirt cannon!”

I was relieved—mostly—until a shirt smacked me between the shoulders. I staggered, but kept on running.

Another thump and a shirt arched over Fonzo’s head…and finally, we were at the truck. We scrambled in. Another T-shirt bounced off the rear window and dropped into the truck bed as, with a gritty spin of the balding tires, we left the Big Fun Traveling Carnival receding in the taillights.

Fonzo craned his neck to look back on the latest snare he’d managed to slip. With a whoop of triumph, he turned his attention to Dixon—who was wedged between us, scratching furiously at the backs of his hands. “Whoo—wasn’t that something?” Fonzo cried. “Were my eyes dazzled back there, kiddo, or did I actually see you Scribe?”

“It wasn’t the balloon-glitter. It was me.”

“No thanks to you,” I muttered. In English.

“I knew you had it in you,” Fonzo said. “Tell me all about it. Who decided to do another Quilling? Whose pen did you use? It wasn’t Johnny’s turkey feather, was it? Your old man’ll never live that one down.”

“There was no Quilling Ceremony. Turns out I’m such a sparkly Spellcrafter, a bird went out of its way to Quill me on its own.” Dixon pulled a Crafting from his pocket. I’d just painted the thing, so the volshebstvo still resonated, but it was weak now, mostly spent. He tore it up and released it through the passenger window before the magic could sour. It doesn’t pay to be greedy where Spellcraft is concerned.

Fonzo itched at his neck. “Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How many Spellcrafters throughout history had a feather dropped on their heads before one of them picked it up and Crafted with it?”

Probably a few. The real game-changer was the first one who’d penned his magic on a Seen. I had no desire to hold a philosophical discussion with Dixon’s uncle, though, so while they enthused about Dixon’s newfound Scribing ability, I held my tongue and simply drove.

My objective was to put as many miles as I could, as fast as I could, between us and the carnival. I didn’t think Fun would get the law involved, but you never know. And even though we weren’t carrying any Spellcraft, I wouldn’t trust a superstitious policeman to not “accidentally” snap Dixon’s delicate cockatoo quill in half. I focused on the road. But the road was not enough to distract me from the light banter shared by nephew and uncle.

Fonzo spun tales about how many people he’d “helped.” Dixon regaled him with the story of the demise of Precious Greetings. They filled the cab with enthusiastic chatter…but neither of them voiced what was really going on. When, finally, we decided we’d taken enough turns to throw an angry carnival owner off our trail—and when their itching became too great—we found a 24-hour gym, where Fonzo talked the sleepy attendant into letting us “try out” the facilities. While Dixon and Fonzo hit the showers to scrub away the itching powder, I soothed myself with bench-presses.

Even that did little to curb my annoyance.

The Penns emerged from the locker room, pink-cheeked and steamy, in matching Big Fun T-shirts. “…and so I told Mom, ‘Maybe the Oreo cake didn’t rise, but how many people can say they’ve met a paramedic and a fireman on the same day?’ Oh, hey Yuri.” Dixon came over to where I stood, looked me up and down, then melted up against me. He slung his arms over my shoulders, pulled my forehead to his, and whispered playfully, “The veins in your neck are all bulge-y! You know what that does to me.”

My impulse was to shrug him off. Because he was shamelessly flirting with me in public? Or because he did it in front of his uncle? It wasn’t easy, but I stayed right where I was and let Dixon have his flirty moment. And I made myself enjoy the fact that Fonzo couldn’t help but see it.

The hot shower must have been soothing, because as soon as we hit the road again, the two of them nodded off. It was disturbing, to say the least. They were more like one another than I was my own parents, from the pattern of their facial hair to the way they both smirked ever so slightly in their sleep.

They even breathed in tandem.

There was no question of Dixon’s paternity. His father had proudly regaled me with the story of the month-long honeymoon in Schenectady that resulted in a bouncing baby boy nine months later. So, it wasn’t the physical resemblance that bothered me, but how easy it would be for Dixon to someday disappear, as Fonzo had done to Sabina, and leave me with nothing but an occasional jaunty postcard.

I drove until sunup, then pulled into a roadside diner to quell my hunger pangs and spur myself onto the last leg of the journey with an infusion of caffeine.

We ordered our food and the inane chatter resumed. I sipped my coffee, fuming. The food came. Both of them hacked up their pancakes in the same haphazard way. Each shoved a forkful of syrup-soaked flapjack into his mouth at the very same time. It was all too much. When they were both chewing—to the same rhythm—I heard myself say, “Why don’t we talk about what’s really going on?”

Even the bewildered, chipmunk-cheeked looks of confusion were identical. “Wrr?” Dixon said through a mouthful of breakfast.

I looked Fonzo in the eye and said, “What was the real reason you didn’t just walk away from Reverend Fun?”

He swallowed once, twice, then gave me a grin that I would have found perfectly charming…on his nephew. “Come on, now, everyone knows it’s lousy luck to let someone bilk you out of what’s rightfully yours. Fun owed me big—we had an agreement. And now, thanks to you boys, everything’s copacetic.”

“Very logical. Too bad you are lying.”

Dixon nearly choked on his milkshake. Fonzo was the picture of affronted innocence. The Penns don’t handle directness very well. That’s what makes it such a good weapon.

I said, “Money is everywhere. What Spellcrafters value more than any amount of cash is their freedom. Yet you attached yourself to the carnival without even knowing that Dixon could Craft you out of your predicament. What have you conveniently neglected to tell us?”

Fonzo heaved a sigh of resignation. “You got me there. I would have loved nothing more than to ditch that old miser, Fun. Unfortunately, money wasn’t the only thing I was short on, but time. The clock’s ticking.” He patted the stuffed walrus. “And if I don’t get this wad of cash back to Pinyin Bay by midnight, I can never show my face there again.”

“Sure you can,” Dixon exclaimed. He pitched his voice to an urgent whisper and added, “No one knows you leaked our secrets to the Handless…no one but us. Emery Flint is under house arrest for tax evasion. And with all that money, you can pay off the second mortgage, we’ll send our nasty tenant packing, and everything can go back to the way it was before!”

A fine fantasy. Too bad there was more to the story than a debt. “But it’s not that simple,” I said. “Isn’t that right?”

“Everything’s under control. Just as soon as I get this curse lifted—”

At the mention of the word “curse,” the volshebstvo tingled across my scalp.

“A curse?” Dixon squeaked, then looked around to make sure the truckers in the corner weren’t listening in. He hunched into the table and hissed, “Uncle Fonzo!”

“Listen, boys, it sounds wa-a-ay worse than it is. All I need to do is make the final installment on my payment plan and I’m in the clear. And anyway, as curses go, it’s not even that big a deal. In fact, I’ve found a good stopgap solution, so it’s honestly nothing to get all worked up about. ”

The trail of strange Craftings we’d been following was beginning to make a lot more sense. “Let me guess,” I said. “Your solution is to Craft only a single word.”

“Brawn and brains!” Fonzo exclaimed to Dixon. “Not to mention the fact that he’s a Seer. No wonder you picked him. Yep, it’s true—for the time being, I’m operating under some pretty harsh restrictions. I can only Craft with new words I’ve never Scribed before, otherwise a piece of the nib crumbles off.” In all Fonzo’s years of Scribing, I’d imagine the total vocabulary added up to a good number of words. “Even so, I’ve managed to help small business owners far and wide be more profitable than ever before…thanks to this handy thesaurus.” With a wag of his heavy eyebrows, he flashed us the cover of a tattered book from the inner pocket of his coat. “Pretty darn clever, if I do say so myself!”

We regarded the book. Then, with a wince, Dixon drew something from his own coat pocket and slid it onto the table: a piece of Spellcraft that bore a single, ragged word.

Remunerate.

Fonzo’s eyes went wide, and at first I thought he was horrified by the sight of what he’d wrought. But then he broke into a wide smile of delight. “And you took back the Crafting! What a gratifying turn of fortune! Reverend Fun weaseled out of his end of the bargain—he didn’t deserve to keep on reaping the benefit of my magic.”

I have learned to only trust a dictionary as a starting point. English is a tricky language, and the same word can have shades of meaning in direct opposition to one another. And that’s not even taking into account the possibility of saying something in a sarcastic tone. I pulled up the word remuneration on my dictionary app and read, “Requital for a loss.”

Fonzo blinked. “Pretty sure it’s the same thing as payment.”

“To remunerate is to make up for,” I read. “To compensate.”

“Like I said, guys. Payment. Commerce. Tit for tat. The exchange of goods and services makes the world go ’round—that’s why so many different words for it exist, and they’re all saying the same exact thing.”

Truly spoken like one who has never had to master a foreign tongue and wade through all the various shades of meaning. Not only did the word have the potential to signify something damaged that needed to be paid for, but thanks to the lack of a full sentence to support the intended meaning, it could have applied to anyone.

It was we who were in possession of that particular piece of Spellcraft. Were we the ones to be remunerated? Or would we now do the remunerating?

One thing was for certain…no doubt we’d find plenty of damage to rectify.

We finished our food, and I went outside to warm up the truck while Dixon and his uncle used the facilities. I was joined shortly by Dixon, who climbed in, fastened his seatbelt, and gave me an expectant look like he was ready to hit the road. “Shouldn’t I wait for your uncle?” I asked.

Dixon smacked himself in the forehead. “Wow. I must’ve slept funny. Totally slipped my mind. Good thing you said something—that would’ve been awkward!”

He unbuckled himself and shifted toward the center of the seat while Fonzo strolled out to the passenger door and heaved himself in. As I put the truck in gear, I double-checked Dixon from the corner of my eye for any telltale signs of wayward Spellcraft at work. But there was nothing magical to be found…just the cheerful enigma that was Dixon.

6

DIXON

On one hand, it was a relief to find out there was a logical reason behind Uncle Fonzo’s weird string of Craftings. But on the other…a curse?

Shudder.

Obviously, I wanted to know every last detail about this curse, but my uncle dozed off the second we hit the road. He’s always claimed he was capable of falling asleep standing up, and that might not have been an exaggeration.

Yuri was understandably concerned about the whole curse business. I could tell by the way the steering wheel creaked beneath his leather gloves. “Look at it this way,” I told him. “We found my uncle. We’ve got enough money to lift whatever curse might be on him. And that Reverend Fun guy really didn’t deserve to keep the profit he’d tried to bilk from Uncle Fonzo, so it’s all fair and square.”

With a grunt, Yuri spun the wheel and careened off onto a side road, where he pulled over amid a sorry little stand of trees. “Then the Crafting has done its job, and we get rid of it. Here. Now.”

“But what if it brings us additional remuneration?” I asked. “After all, Reverend Fun kind of owes me for that itching powder discomfort.” Yuri gave me a Very Stern Look. I sighed. “Okay, fine. If you insist, we’ll ditch the Spellcraft.”

Uncle Fonzo had clearly been through some stuff, so we left him snoring in the truck…though when Yuri pocketed the keys, I knew better than to suggest leaving them behind in case my uncle woke up and wanted to listen to the radio. With the crowbar in hand, we headed off into the trees.

I know Yuri doesn’t mean for it look like a seductive striptease when he takes off his jacket—it’s just the slow deliberation of someone who’s packed in tightly and doesn’t want to convert the outfit to tear-away sleeves. Still…it never gets old. He stripped down to his clingy undershirt, handed me his shirt and jacket for safekeeping, and then began hacking at the hard earth. His labor was a symphony of muscle. Bulging biceps. Pulsing pecs. All of it adorned with Russian tattoos and glistening with the faintest sheen of sweat.

Once the hole was finished, Yuri dropped the crowbar, looked at me, and snapped, “Stop fanning yourself with the cursed Crafting!”

Whoops. I handed over the paper. Yuri dropped it in the hole, kicked the rocky pile of dirt on top, and gave it a few solid stomps. Then he shoved a huge fallen log over it for good measure.

He pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his perspiring face, then gestured for his shirt. Instead of handing it over, I held it up for him with an inviting shake. Yuri isn’t used to anyone doing nice things for him…but he’s getting better at letting me try. He slid one arm into its sleeve, then the other—and he didn’t even remark that it would’ve been quicker for him to simply put it on himself. I swung around the front and nudged his hands away before he could button it up himself. I worked my way up, brushing my knuckles against every defined swell of his musculature. Eventually, I came to the point on his formidable neck where even the most valiant of buttons wouldn’t manage to stay unpopped for long. I smoothed the fabric over his broad shoulders…then I took his collar in both hands and pulled him in for a kiss.

His lips held the tantalizing whisper of salt. I slicked it away with my tongue. He sighed against my mouth—part resignation, part desire. Tongue played against tongue. Our kisses grew more fervent, until finally I had to come up for air with a gasp. Yuri’s brows were still drawn together in a fierce scowl, but we’d spent enough time together that I knew the difference between his angry scowls and his thoughtful ones. (Plus, I think there may be some truth to the old saw, “Stop making that face or it’ll freeze that way.”)

“It’s okay if you’re angry,” he told me.

Clearly, he was projecting. I caressed his scruffy jaw and said, “Everything’s fine.” Having Uncle Fonzo along changed the dynamic more than I thought it might, but I was confident everything would eventually work out. I cupped his damp face in my hands and said, “And it makes no sense for you to be jealous of my family.”

“I’m not—” he began to protest.

“Shh.” I pressed the fingertip of my Scribing hand to his lips, and the Spellcraft tingled between us. “There’s no reason for you to feel threatened. You’re family now, too.”

People think Spellcrafters play fast and loose with the definition of “family,” but that’s only when we’re claiming exemptions on our income taxes or trying to get into a restricted VIP area. Otherwise, it’s more of an elite club where only the most desirable of candidates makes the cut. Yuri’s a perceptive guy, and despite the fact that we’d grown up on entirely different continents, hundreds…thousands of miles—hundreds of thousands?—I should probably look at a map one of these days. Anyway, however far apart it might have been, Yuri fit in with the Penns like he was born into the clan.

Though, thankfully, he wasn’t. With all the naked hijinks the two of us got up to, that would’ve been creepy.

With the unfortunate Spellcraft good and buried, we piled back into the truck and set a course for Pinyin Bay. Eventually, I nodded off again, though thankfully I managed not to drool on anyone. Sometimes I’m not sure exactly when Yuri sleeps. A micro-nap on the side of the road? Or the capacity to sleep one brain hemisphere at a time, like a shark who can’t stop swimming? Either way, when I woke, it was nighttime again and we were practically home.

My jostling woke up Uncle Fonzo, who snorfled awake, took a bleary look at the highway signs, and said, “Up there—hang a right and go around Pinyin Bay to the opposite side of the water.”

“But our exit is the next one up,” I said. “This one would take us to Strangeberg.”

“And not a minute too soon. My payment’s due at midnight. And the Stranges have one heck of a long driveway.”

“The Strange family cursed you?” That couldn’t be. The Stranges and the Penns were all in the same Spellcraft circuit. We were invited to all the same quilling ceremonies. On a clear night, we could see their patio lights across the bay. Heck, I’d even gone to summer camp with the Strange twins. It seemed impossible that they would have cursed someone—especially one of our own.

Especially Uncle Fonzo.

Everyone loves Uncle Fonzo.

“There must be some mistake,” I said. “The Penns go way back with the Stranges. I’m sure this is all just a big misunderstanding.”

“Dixon—” my uncle said.

“I’ll even talk to them for you. They’re important so-and-sos these days, but I’ll bet Violet Strange will see me.”

“Dixon, hold on.”

“We actually dated for a week—nothing to be jealous about, Yuri, we were only twelve, and I was more curious than enamored. Sure, we did make out that one time, but there was hardly any tongue involved. Once I tell her Uncle Fonzo’s side of the story—”

“Dixon!” my uncle snapped, and I lost track of the point I’d been about to make. “There is no misunderstanding. I’m cursed—and it was the Stranges who cursed me.”

“I don’t get it,” I admitted. “What reason would they possibly have to curse you?”

My uncle let out a gusty sigh. “Before you jump to any conclusions, keep in mind that if everything had gone to plan, this whole rigmarole would be entirely unnecessary. Emery Flint pulled me into a poker game I never had any chance of winning.”

“But you’ve got such a good poker face!”

“Didn’t matter—the game was rigged, in more ways than one. A marked deck, and a line of Spellcraft inked on one of his cards. Normally, I have enough sense to walk away when Lady Luck is giving me the cold shoulder. But not that night. The more I lost, the more I bet.”

Magic draws Magic. Disturbing how versatile that three-word bit of Spellcraft had been.

Uncle Fonzo went on. “Pretty soon, the only thing of value I had left was my quill. If I’d been in my right mind, I never would have upped the ante. But I wasn’t thinking straight—I actually thought it was lucky that he’d let me throw it in the pot at all, since the Handless think our quills are just any old feather. I didn’t realize he knew all about Spellcraft, and that my quill had been his target all along.”

I gave my uncle’s hand an encouraging squeeze. He looked weary. And when he went on, his tone was uncharacteristically serious. “Losing my quill was bad enough. Once he had that, the blackmail began. Flint forced me to supply him with Seens. He was convinced it was possible to teach him to Craft. The Handless always think we’re hiding something.” Probably because we usually are. “And he spent every spare moment forcing lessons out of me. It was only when one of our lessons blew up hard enough to knock him out that I was able to shake the hold he had on me and get away. But he’d had my quill on him at the time, and somehow it ended up in the hospital with him. I tried to charm it out of the nurses on staff—I just about had one of ’em convinced to give me his personal belongings—when Flint woke up. All I could do was get out of there before he saw me and sucked me back under his thrall.”

I’d felt the compulsion of Mr. Flint’s Spellcraft, but lucky for me he’d never seen me as a real Spellcrafter and given me any direct orders. Even Yuri had been unable to resist his commands—and Yuri’s strong enough to open the pickled egg jar at Bar None…and dauntless enough to eat one.

“But you found another quill eventually,” I said. “Did you run across a helpful bird, like I did?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Uncle Fonzo turned to face the passenger door. It was dark in the little subdivision of Strangeberg, where streetlights are few and far between. The light of the persistent Check Oil warning lamp illuminated his reflection in the window…where he looked even more weary than before. “But the quill’s prior owner didn’t need it anymore.”

I said, “I’ve heard of Spellcrafters swearing off Crafting, but I always figured they were just trying to sell autobiographies.”

“Not exactly…” my uncle sighed.

Before he could find more words to explain, Yuri said, “Whoever this Crafter was, they didn’t need it because they were dead. He is Crafting with a dead man’s quill.”

I laughed. Yuri’s sense of humor can be pretty peculiar…but my laughter died abruptly when neither of them joined in. Scandalized (and, believe me, it takes a lot to scandalize me) I gasped, “Uncle Fonzo!”

“It’s not like he was using it!” my uncle declared. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“But…grave robbing?”

“Mausoleum robbing, if we’re being technical. That’s why I picked the Stranges—they’ve got that big ol’ marble monstrosity out back where they keep their stiffs…er, their dearly departed family members.”

Yuri said, “More efficient than digging around in a cemetery.”

“Exactly! And far less likely to get caught. I would’ve returned it once I got my own quill back and no one would be any the wiser, if not for the curse.” Uncle Fonzo shook his head ruefully. “Who curses things anymore in this day and age?”

Apparently, the Strange family did.

While there was nothing particularly strange about the tidy subdivision of Strangeberg—other than the name, and the fact that their recyclables were on a bi-weekly pickup schedule—the manor at the top of the hill that overlooked the place was another story. The sprawling building had been a mental asylum back when the Model T was all the rage and women weren’t allowed to vote. Later, in the Reagan era, the residents were turned onto the street and the asylum became a boarding house for the awkward single men involved in the fledgling computer programming industry…one that eventually relocated to the West Coast, which let the Strange family acquire the place for pennies on the dollar.

A cunning bit of Spellcraft was probably involved, too, though none of us other practitioners would have dreamed of remarking about it to the Handless.

Strange Manor, as it was re-christened, not only featured a hedge maze, an exercise yard, and a shallow pond full of bloated, slow-moving goldfish…but an honest-to-goodness cemetery out back. The graveyard housed several generations of residents unfortunate enough to die in the old asylum’s dubious care—and it contained a mausoleum in which the Stranges’ late family members now rested as well.

One of whom was now missing a quill.

It was a bright, waxing moon that night, nearly full, and it illuminated Strange Manor in all its semi-dilapidated, asylum-esque glory. The cobblestone drive was doing a number on the truck’s suspension, and the three of us bounced along in the cab, too jostled to attempt to speak. And even if we could, what was there to say? Uncle Fonzo was in a real pickle, but thankfully, once we paid the final installment, all of that would be water under the bridge. Or maybe more like sour green juice swirling down the drain, if one were to extend the pickle metaphor. Or maybe—

Yuri’s hand fell on my knee and I snapped into the present.

“We will handle this,” he said firmly.

Some people have boyfriends who buy them cute trinkets or laugh at their jokes. Some people have men who serenade them badly, though it’s mostly off-key on purpose. Some people receive near-constant declarations of undying love. But at that particular moment, I wouldn’t have traded Yuri for any other man in the world.

We approached the front door with some trepidation, but Yuri gave me enough strength to pass along to my uncle. “You can do it, Uncle Fonzo. I have faith in you.”

“Right.” He squared his shoulders and pressed the doorbell. “And we made it with plenty of time to spare.”

He plastered on his winningest smile as, with an ominous creak, the door swung open.

7

Violet Strange and her twin sister Pansy were identical, right down to the tiny, pale scar each girl bore high on her left cheekbone. Back when we were kids, I’m not sure if their parents purposely dressed them alike. Since everyone wore an Ink-a-Dink Calligraphy Camp T-shirt the summer we met, the wardrobe was no help in telling them apart.

If you observed the two of them for any length of time, though, it couldn’t have been more obvious who was who.

While Violet drifted unobtrusively to the back row and never raised her hand, Pansy volunteered to clean the dry-erase board after lessons and made herself the teacher’s pet. While Violet spent her free time down by the pond trying to coax frogs out of the water, Pansy nearly fainted at the sight of a tadpole. And when Violet announced, quietly and firmly, that I should be her boyfriend (because my penmanship was, by and far, the most ornate) no one scoffed louder than Pansy.

That was a long time ago, and neither one of us was still a pre-pubescent Scribbler. But despite the fact that we’d both developed secondary sex characteristics, we still looked enough like our younger selves. Violet’s mannerisms were the same—the way she brushed her thumb over the pads of her fingers as if to double-check that they were still safe and sound. The way she took a half-step back to get a broader view of the situation. The delicate furrow in her brow.

But the way the iris of one of her mahogany brown eyes was now a startling purple? That was new.

“Dixon,” she said blandly. “I hadn’t realized you’d be here.”

If my uncle hadn’t run afoul of Reverend Fun and needed to call in for reinforcements, no doubt I wouldn’t be. Lucky thing he’d needed my help. “Great to see you,” I said. “In person, I mean. I sent you a friendvitation on Friendlike a few years back—maybe you’re not much for social media.”

I’d seen recent pictures of Violet—the ones that weren’t set to friends-only, anyhow—so it wasn’t really a shock to see her all grown up. Aside from that odd eye, anyhow. It was like the brown-eyed guy in Brussels I’d dated who wore colored contacts. I’d thought his eyes were pale blue until one contact fell out after a vigorous shag and he popped up out of the sheets looking like a disconcertingly preppie Marilyn Manson.

Violet must’ve been pretty good at Photoshop these days. Either that or the purple eye was a fairly recent occurrence.

As I congratulated myself for being tactful enough not to mention it, she stepped aside. “Come in,” she said, stilted and formal. “We’ve been expecting you. Well, your uncle, anyhow. But leave the hired muscle outside.”

“Yuri’s not my bodyguard.” I waggled my eyebrows. “And I get all the muscle I can handle for free!”

Violet looked puzzled—until she realized what I’d meant, and an adorable blush colored her pale cheeks. I hadn’t dated many women, back while I was still figuring myself out, but the ones I eventually came out to were never particularly surprised. Violet didn’t seem too shocked, once she figured out the score. She simply stole another glance at Yuri, then gave a quick nod and said, “Right this way.”

Strange Manor had been redecorated since its days as an asylum, but here and there you’d glimpse something—like the sturdy hardware on every door—that served as a pervasive reminder of the building’s origins. Violet led us into a dining room that would’ve been cramped for a few dozen convalescing patients, but was outrageously large for a family of three. Even the twelve-seated dining table was dwarfed in the cavernous space. Massive family portraits were hung throughout the room in an attempt to break up the vast expanses of wall. I couldn’t tell Violet’s portrait from Pansy’s, since the subject of each painting had two brown eyes.

As I tried to deduce which twin portrait was which, a towering grandfather clock at the far end of the hall let out a startling clong, followed by ten more. “I hate that thing,” Violet said. And then, “Have you eaten?”

At eleven o’clock at night? It was awfully late for dinner, but Uncle Fonzo and I had slept right through mealtime while Yuri drove. And even if we hadn’t, it’s not like me to turn down free grub. The table was set for four—the Strange Family and Uncle Fonzo—so, Violet grabbed a couple of plates from the sideboard for Yuri and me before she buzzed an intercom and announced, “We’ve got company.”

The Strange twins’ mother hadn’t aged quite as gracefully as her children. Dahlia Strange was the Hand of the family. While I found her tall and stately when I was young, now she just seemed a little too thin, and as brittle as her smile.

Violet’s twin, Pansy, was still her sister’s spitting image—or vice versa (though, thankfully, neither of them actually spat.) Both her eyes were brown, and even if the twins didn’t quite match anymore, I’d still be able to tell the two of them apart. Pansy didn’t simply walk into a room—she sashayed. And when her brown eyes fell on me, a smile crept across her face that was equal parts pleased…and predatory. “Well, who have we here? If it isn’t Little Dix.”

“People don’t call me that.”

“I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“Really. They don’t.”

“How long has it been, fifteen years? No, even more than that.”

“And if they did, it would be ironically.”

Pansy tittered. “It’s only a name. You always were such a sensitive boy.” We took our places at the table. She sat directly across from me. “Such a shame to hear about your quilling ceremony.”

My knee-jerk impulse was to inform her in no uncertain terms that the botched ceremony’d had zero to do with my Spellcrafting ability—but under the table, Yuri kicked the side of one foot just as Uncle Fonzo kicked the other. I couldn’t rise to my own defense without letting on that my uncle had been duped by the Handless. So, I did the next best thing and tried to change the subject.

“Oh, you know what they say about ceremonies—they make a serum out of moan and knee. Not that knees moan, but people take a lot of creative license where idioms are concerned. Anyway, there’s more to life than Spellcrafting. Scuba diving, for instance.”

“Scuba diving,” Pansy repeated blandly.

“Sure. I’m told I look absolutely fetching in a wetsuit.” Which was a bald-faced lie, since the closest I usually got to the water was checking out guys on the beach. But before I could dig my hole any deeper, Violet appeared, pushing a rolling cart full of covered platters—just like you see in the movies, where dinner is served by butlers in tuxedos and white gloves. I’d been ruing my decision to accompany my uncle to Strange Manor, what with the whole “Little Dix” thing, but maybe my discomfort would turn out to be worth it after all.

The family’s Hand, Dahlia, indicated the rolling cart with a gesture that was meant to be gracious, but mostly came off as stilted. She flashed her brittle smile. “I’d been hoping you’d come to settle your business in person tonight,” she told my uncle. “In fact, I’ve spent all day slaving in the kitchen to make you my signature dish.”

Oh boy—what would it be? Mac and cheese with chopped baloney? Baloney roll-ups? Baked bean surprise? (The surprise was baloney.) Actually, though, it smelled more like fish. Maybe it was tuna casserole. I could go for a nice tuna casserole with frozen peas, cream of mushroom soup, and big, squishy egg noodles. Hopefully Dahlia knew enough to top it off with crushed potato chips, preferably ranch-flavored….

The twins set a covered plate in front of everyone. It was Violet who served Yuri and me. I tried to catch her eye—either one—to nod my thanks, but she didn’t meet my gaze. Maybe she was put out because using the good china meant more domes to wash later. I was practically bubbling over with anticipation waiting for the countdown reveal, but the Strange family apparently had no sense of drama. When Dahlia lifted her dome, everyone else just followed suit.

I’d been so sure there’d be a nice big scoop of tuna casserole under mine, I hardly knew what to make of the grayish-whitish lump on my plate.

Dahlia bared her teeth in the semblance of a smile. “Pinyin eel,” she announced. “Quite the delicacy.”

Was this some kind of joke? Eels weren’t food—they were overblown sea-worms.

Pansy shaved a sliver of eel off her lump with the precision of a surgeon. “Maybe you’ve seen them in the bay,” she said. “Scuba diving.”

I gave a noncommittal head-bobble, since I was too busy trying to keep from throwing up in my mouth to actually answer.

Her mother said, “Most people think Pinyin Bay is just a moderately-priced resort area. A harmless diversion. A lark. But there are depths to the bay that are completely underestimated by outsiders.”

I was fairly sure we were no longer talking about tourism. What the actual subtext might be, though, I had no idea. I was far too distracted by the lima beans on my plate.

Lima beans.

I just…couldn’t.

“Try the dandelion greens,” Pansy suggested. “I made them myself.”

Surely this was some kind of farce, and the Stranges were in possession of a truly strange sense of humor. Any minute now, they’d haul out a tuna casserole while we all shared a good laugh. Except that everyone at the table was actually tucking in. Especially Yuri—in fact, I’d never seen him attack a plate with such gusto. Either he didn’t know what eel meant in English, or he hadn’t actually stopped anywhere for dinner on the way home.

“Or don’t try the greens,” Violet said. “And go hungry.”

I forced down a few mouthfuls. Maybe if they’d told me it was spinach, I would have managed more than that—because my mom’s bread-bowl spinach dip was a mainstay of our annual Cyber Monday feast, and I always consumed so much of the green stuff, it was a wonder I didn’t turn into Popeye. But as it was, I could only choke down enough of the greens to keep my stomach from announcing my ravenous hunger to everyone at the dinner table with a loud, empty gurgle.

My uncle was making good progress on his plate. But my uncle also had a stunted sense of taste, thanks to an irate customer, years ago, who’d broken his nose with a stiff whack of her purse. Uncle Fonzo always claimed he was glad all the damage was on the inside, so as not to detract from his dashing good looks. But now I suspected that having a compromised nose came with other, less obvious benefits—such as being able to swallow lima beans.

And eel.

Yuri cleaned his entire plate, right down to the very last bite, then looked at my mostly-untouched food and said, “Are you going to eat that?”

I shook my head queasily, attempting to convey that he didn’t have to fall on the sword on my account. Yuri must’ve taken it as a plea for help, because he immediately picked up my plate and shoveled the yucky excuse for food onto his, then proceeded to wolf it all down.

As Yuri chased a final lima bean around his dish, my uncle plucked the cloth napkin off his lap, dabbed his mouth with the corner, and declared, “It’s very civil of you all to treat us to a meal, all things considered. I wish we’d broken bread under less trying circumstances. I’d like you to know that I had the utmost respect for Hawthorn Strange.”

“You knew grandpa?” Violet asked.

“Indeed, I did. A truly stand-up guy—even if he had the penmanship of a doctor and his flourishes were atrocious. As the Hand of the family, he always did the Stranges proud. He was the first to bring a bottle of top-shelf whiskey to a card game, and the last to whine about it when the booze ran out. I was proud to call him a friend. And I had every intention of returning his quill, just as soon as I was done with it.”

Dahlia arched a penciled eyebrow. “I hope this song and dance isn’t just some attempt to get us to lower the bounty.”

“Of course not.” Uncle Fonzo hefted the lumpy walrus that hadn’t left his side and gave it a pat. “Just hoping that once this is all squared away, we can let bygones be bygones, preserve our families’ alliance, and put the whole affair to rest once and for all.” He stole a look at the grandfather clock that had been overseeing dinner from the foot of the table like a judgmentally dyspeptic relative. Twelve clongs would ensue shortly, and my uncle wanted to make sure he fulfilled his contract to the letter of the law.

We Spellcrafters are well aware precisely how much power words can hold.

“It’s all there.” Uncle Fonzo thrust his hand into a seam in the animal’s belly and came up with a neat bundle of twenties. He riffled it meaningfully, basking in the sweet smell of currency, then quickly dealt out twenty-five bundles from the dwindling walrus and shoved them across the table toward Dahlia. There were even a few bundles left over—but not many. “I’ll entreat you to lay a hand on the payment,” he told her. “Before the clock strikes midnight.”

“Oh, there’s no need for that.” It seemed as if Dahlia was about to tease Fonzo for being such a stickler for the rules…until I realized there was something malignant lurking in her smile. “Midnight has come and gone.”

We all did a double take at the clock, which hadn’t yet begun clonging.

“Don’t trust that old thing,” Dahlia purred. “It’s deplorably slow. One day it will stop running altogether. At least then it will be right twice a day.”

At my side, Yuri went rigid while Uncle Fonzo threw down the deflated walrus. “This isn’t fair!”

“Come now,” Dahlia said. “You can hardly take the moral high ground when you robbed my father’s grave. Your installment is overdue. Now you owe interest.”

“This wasn’t what we agreed.”

“Perhaps not—but Strange curse, Strange rules.”

Uncle Fonzo squeezed the few bundles of currency that remained. He wanted to keep them—but it was more important to have the curse lifted. He slid the walrus puddle across the table. “Fine.”

Dahlia peered in and gave the remaining bundles a quick scan. “That will do…for tonight.”

“What? That’s an outrage. What we have here would easily cover 8% interest.”

“Do I look like Pinyin Savings and Loan? My rate isn’t 8%, it’s a hundred—so I’d recommend you come up with the rest before your final installment doubles again tomorrow at midnight.”

The initial impression I had of the Strange family having no sense of drama?

Untrue.

There was more than enough drama here to last us all a lifetime.

8

YURI

We retreated to the truck. Fonzo muttered angrily, while Dixon was uncharacteristically silent.

“I should’ve known the Stranges would pull something like this,” Fonzo declared. “Dahlia always was a nasty piece of work.”

It was tempting to mention that she’d have nothing to hold over his head if he hadn’t stolen her dead father’s quill, but the Strange woman reminded me so much of my old mentor in St. Petersburg that my sympathies were, surprisingly enough, with Fonzo.

“Lottery tickets,” Fonzo decided. “Between the business loans outstanding on Practical Penn and the second mortgage on my house, it’s the only way. But not a single big win—that would take too much time to pay out, more time than we have. A bunch of scattered winning scratch-offs throughout the city, though, a few hundred bucks at a crack....”

Dixon shook his head wearily. “Don’t rig the lottery, they’ll throw the book at you—that’s Spellcraft 101.”

Only if you get caught. I met Fonzo’s eyes. He was thinking the same thing. But before he could try to coerce Dixon and me into Crafting him a small windfall, I said, “I have dealt with plenty of people like the Hand of the Strange family. Even if we came up with the money, she would simply keep raising the bar. The only way to get out from their blackmail is to ensure they have nothing to hold over your head.”

Dixon swallowed nervously. “What are you saying?”

“We must steal curse.”

Before Dixon could protest that it was too dangerous, Fonzo agreed. “He’s right. It’s the only way.”

“Is it?” Dixon looked to each of us earnestly, one, then the other. “Because usually, when a situation is all screwed up, the more you try to finagle your way through the minefield, the deeper of a pit you dig for yourself. Uh…that metaphor doesn’t really hold up, but you get the gist. We steal the curse, and maybe that activates another curse, and suddenly it’s an infinite loop of itching powder balloons all the way down. But what if you just set aside the dead man’s quill, walk away and get a fresh start?”

Although Dixon was raised in the Craft, somehow he’d also managed to pick up an unhealthy sense of trust. In himself. In others. In the notion that good luck existed and the world was somehow fair, and that pluck and perseverance would ultimately be rewarded. And who had filled his head with such ridiculous ideas? His family. And even though Fonzo Penn was as slippery as an eel and twice as tough, I suspected he, too, carried within him that insidious seed of hope—so, I was surprised when he merely sighed and shook his head.

“Dixon, there is no starting over for me.” He tugged at the index finger of the glove on his right hand. “Not until the curse is lifted.”

It was late, and it was dark. But even by the moonlight that filtered through a canopy of trees, the true measure of the Strange curse was revealed when Fonzo exposed his Scribing hand.

And what I saw? Something that would surely haunt my dreams for the rest of my days.

At first, I thought he was merely holding the cursed quill inside his glove for safe-keeping. He’d lost one magic quill already, after all, and he couldn’t be eager to lose another. But then I saw the black quill was not merely flattened against Fonzo’s hand…but instead, it had merged with his very flesh.

The feather covered him from the tip of his forefinger, across the entire length of his palm, and beyond—several centimeters past his wrist, up into his forearm. It looked like a stark, ugly tattoo. But unlike body art, this cursed black feather was in motion, writhing beneath the man’s skin like a parasite. The mere sight of it made my vision tunnel…and then a smell arose from the cursed quill. The stench of death. I felt so light-headed, I might have even blacked out, if not for Dixon’s fingers digging into my knee hard enough to bruise. A high-pitched whine escaped his throat: the only sound I could hear over the panicked pounding of my own heart.

“Yeah…” Fonzo nodded ruefully. “It ain’t pretty.”

Pretty? If that thing were on me, I’d be sorely tempted to saw off my own arm. I had no great love of Fonzo Penn, and would like nothing more than to leave him to his own devices. But even I was not cold-hearted enough to walk away now.

“So,” he said, “now you boys know what we’re up against. Come hell or high water, I have to break the curse.”

Indeed he did—and failure was not an option.

I turned the key, gunned the engine and peeled away. The cobblestone drive felt twice as jarring coming back down—then again, we were probably going twice as fast. So fast that I had to slam on the brakes when a figure stepped into the driveway and motioned for me to stop. The truck skidded on its balding tires and arced in a perfect circle, coming to rest an arm’s length away from one of the twins.

“Violet,” Dixon gasped. Given their history, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he could tell one from another just by glancing at them—but I was impressed. I needed to watch them interact to know one from another. Pansy was the one who took pleasure in goading Dixon, and Violet was harboring an old grudge. We piled out of the truck and approached her.

The moonlight painted Violet in cool tones of indigo and slate, and lit her single violet iris an unnatural shade of purple. Her expression was cold and stern. She planted her hands on her hips and said, “Don’t bother trying to steal the curse. Dahlia has been up to something in the crypt and she’s been really secretive about the whole thing. I’m sure it’s a trap, and if you break in, you’ll be walking right into it.”

“You call your mother by her first name?” Dixon asked.

Violet acknowledged the question only with a roll of her eyes, then said to Fonzo, “When you stole the quill, you left grubby footprints all over my Great Uncle Rowan’s sarcophagus. Don’t think she’ll let you get away with the same thing twice.”

He scratched his chin. “So you’re saying, bring a step-stool next time?”

“What I’m saying is, you need to back off and wait for a better opening.”

“Is this some kind of reverse psychology?” Dixon asked.

“Not at all. I adored my grandfather, and frankly, I think your uncle got what he deserved. At least…I did.” She turned to Fonzo. “But those things you said about Grandpa…they really rang true. And if the two of you were as close as you say, I don’t think he would have signed off on all this. He’d take your money, sure—we all know you don’t get something for nothing—but he wouldn’t ruin you. If you keep messing with Dahlia, though, that’s exactly what will happen. Give it some time. Let me work on my mother. And whatever you do, stay away from the mausoleum. It’s just not worth the risk.”

Dixon and I climbed into the truck. Dixon slammed his door, leaving Fonzo outside. It was tempting to play innocent and pull away without the man, but I did him the favor of waiting until he’d rapped on the window and been let in. We drove to my cabin in silence. As we pulled up alongside it, Fonzo said, “I’m sure Violet means well, but she wasn’t on the receiving end of that little love note. Besides, it’s not like my curse can get any cursier.”

I didn’t care for his logic. Things can always get worse. But exhaustion had finally sunk its claws into me. My traitorous body would no longer allow me to remain conscious, and I was out before my head hit the pillow.

9

DIXON

Normally, I can sleep through pretty much anything—but I’d dozed off and on all the way from Spring Falls to Pinyin Bay, and in the still of the night, I woke to my phone chiming with an incoming Friendlike alert. I reached across Yuri’s broad chest and grabbed it off the built-in nightstand.

Violet Strange has accepted your friendvitation.

Huh! I must’ve made a pretty good impression forcing down those dandelion greens. I gave the action a thumbs-up. The number 2 appeared beside the thumb icon as Violet did the same.

And here I thought she’d been kinda chilly at dinner, and unduly ominous when she met us by the crypt. She probably just needed time to process me coming out to her. Of course, if she’d accepted my friendvitation years ago, my gayness wouldn’t have been any big revelation. But better late than never.

If Friendlike had existed back when I was in high school, it’s possible Violet would’ve been one of the first people to know when I kissed Braden Harvey in the Haunted House at Pinyin Beach Park. I’d never found that attraction particularly scary, since the skeletons were clearly spring-loaded and the ghosts were pretty tattered. But my heart nearly hammered out of my chest when I realized Braden’s mouth was actually pressing against mine. It was a few more years before my cousin Sabina seemed old enough to regale with the sordid details, once I’d blurted out my big announcement to my family at the dinner table. But Violet was my age. And if she’d been the first person I’d told…I’d like to think she might’ve understood.

Now, though, I wasn’t so sure exactly how much of our old history she wanted to dredge up. Our fateful kissing experiment at Ink-a-Dink Calligraphy Camp was pretty adorable in retrospect. A few days after she’d deemed me her boyfriend, she slipped me a note asking me to meet her alone by the pier—with a little Y/N for my reply. Of course I circled Y. The thought of doing something clandestine was a thrill. And it would still be a few years until Braden Harvey demonstrated exactly how thrilling it could actually be.

I’d thought I was a pretty good kisser. If not experienced, then at least enthusiastic. But the next day, I couldn’t find her at breakfast, or sing-along, or the advanced letterform workshop. In fact, I didn’t see her until her mom came to pick her up and she made a dash for the station wagon. And until my first (and hopefully only) eel dinner, that was the last I’d seen of Violet Strange.

I’d always figured she was just embarrassed we’d swapped spit. Kids will fart proudly at the drop of a hat, but they find certain other natural urges profoundly shameful. Did any of this matter anymore? Was it too late to bring it up now? Heck, did she even remember? Before I could figure out how to broach the subject, the little pulsing dot icon told me Violet was typing, so I waited to see what she had to say.

Meet me alone by the bier - Y/N

Hooray—that was quick! Not only did she remember our note—but she was cool about it. And her sense of humor was adorably punny.

Best gal-pal ever.

I messaged back—Y. As I hit send, Yuri rolled onto his side. It was a really narrow bed for two grown men, but we’d adapted. Normally, I’d roll right along with him and nestle my rump up against his business. But not now. There was no time to be the little spoon—not when I had to go meet Violet and break that curse.

As I extricated myself from the bed with the skill of an expert Twister champion, I knew full well Yuri would insist on going with me, were I to wake him. But Violet’s message had said to come alone. And I wasn’t about to give her any reasons to change her mind about helping us.

Normally, I’d worry about waking up Yuri by starting the truck. Its engine isn’t exactly subtle. But luck was on my side, since my uncle had bedded down in the shower stall, which was the only free floor space in the dinky cabin. The fiberglass walls reverberated with the sounds of his snoring, and amplified them into a drone loud enough to cover the sound of the pickup truck, and then some.

The moon had set. The water of Pinyin Bay was still and dark. As I drove off and looped around the shoreline toward Strangeberg, I was the only one on the road. I hadn’t realized exactly how much noise people make, even when they’re not talking, until I took the trip alone. The creak of Yuri’s leather driving gloves on the steering wheel. His occasional annoyed huff. My uncle’s nose whistle. All of that was absent, which left me alone with my thoughts, and the churning anticipation of being the one to break Uncle Fonzo’s curse once and for all.

The Strange Family mausoleum was a low marble building surrounded by columns and covered in ivy. Like so much cemetery architecture, it was designed to look Grecian—if something from ancient Greece had been miniaturized, teleported across the ocean, and dropped into the graveyard behind a Midwestern mental asylum. I parked a respectful distance away, not wanting to roll over anyone’s grave, and hurried up the path to meet Violet.

The gate to the mausoleum stood open. In the archway, a figure stood, backlit by the dim orange light of a single guttering candle. I was breathless by the time I reached her. “I got your message,” I said. “That was some serious wordplay!”

“You always did have a soft spot for things like that.” She stepped aside and motioned for me to come in.

I’d never been inside a mausoleum before—my grandparents were buried in the perfectly normal cemetery out by the interstate—so I guess I expected something spooky.

The Strange family crypt didn’t disappoint.

The candle cast ominous shadows, and when Violet stepped aside to let me in, another figure stood beside her, arms stretched wide. She’d hired some muscle of her own! I curled up to protect my vital organs, then realized her thug hadn’t moved. Because he was no thug at all, but a marble likeness of Hawthorn Strange.

In all fairness, though, Hawthorn really had looked like he’d been a brawler, back in his day. What a relief to learn I wouldn’t need to dodge any punches.

Statue-Hawthorn held a tiny slip of marble paper was in one hand. A marble likeness of his quill in the other.

Funny to think it had once been a regular old Spellcrafting quill before the family’d cursed it.

The statue was poised in front of a vault, set high in the wall, with Hawthorn Strange engraved in elaborate lettering on a bronze plate. There were a few scratches where my uncle had pried the door open, and off to one side was the smaller crypt he’d stood on top of to do it.

I was eager to get down to business and break the curse. Unfortunately, Violet was more interested in catching up on old times. “It was such a shame about your quilling ceremony. Your uncle invited us, you know.”

He’d invited every Spellcrafter within a hundred miles, and even a few from out of town. I knew. Every last wide-eyed face was etched into the memory of my greatest failure…one which no longer stung that much, seeing as how I did turn out to be a Scrivener after all. I was just about to say as much, when Violet surprised me by pulling me into a hug. “It must have been horrible.”

“Not my greatest moment.” I patted her on the back and disengaged. Not that I have anything against hugging, I was just eager to put the curse to bed. “But it all worked out in the end. So, the curse….”

“So horrible. Pansy and I always thought it was paranoid of Mother to place the curse—as if there were vagabond Spellcrafters roaming the moors in search of an unattended quill. We had no idea we’d be violated by a Scrivener from our own circuit.”

“Violation is a pretty strong word.”

My gal-pal eased up closer and dropped her voice low, and a little sultry. “And we had no idea it would be Fonzo Penn…or that he needed that quill for you.”

I shuddered and thanked my lucky starts Uncle Fonzo hadn’t pressed that gnarly black quill into my Scribing hand. Seeing the thing melded into him was bad enough. I couldn’t fathom how nasty it would feel to be stuck to it myself. No, Uncle Fonzo had just wanted his own quill back, and was hoping to Spellcraft it out of Emery Flint without involving any of the rest of us.

Not that I was at liberty to tell her that.

Violet moved closer still and patted my chest with the flat of her palm. “Your uncle should have asked instead. The Penns and the Stranges weren’t particularly close, it’s true, but I would’ve argued on your behalf.” Her pat turned into more of a caress. “Given our history.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think Violet was coming on to me. Which was pretty strange, given everything I told her last night when I introduced her to Yuri. I took her by the wrist and gently settled her hand at a more comfortable distance, down at her side. “That was a long time ago. And like I always say, all’s well that ends well.”

It wasn’t easy to see by dim, flickering candlelight, but Violet’s brow definitely furrowed. “In what way has this ended even remotely well?”

“Wrong idiom,” I said, with a growing sense of unease. The Stranges were angry enough about the quill. I couldn’t afford to have Violet think I’d been leading her on. “It’s not over till the fat lady sings? A stitch in time saves nine? Wait, I know—curses and promises are made to be broken!”

“That’s not an expression.”

“It isn’t?” I hadn’t realized I’d been backpedaling till I butted up (literally) against Statue-Hawthorn. His marble arms hovered like they were about to wrap the two of us in a stony embrace. “If not, it should be.” I flailed for a change of subject. “Say, if you don’t mind my asking, what happened to your eye?”

Although it was too dark to get a good look at her one purple iris, she tipped her head aside as if it embarrassed her. “A misguided attempt to differentiate myself from my sister. And you, of all people, know how capricious Spellcraft can be.” Violet draped herself against my chest, and there was no doubt left in my mind that when she’d asked me to meet her, it hadn’t been to deal with any curse. “Don’t worry, Dixon. You might have failed your quilling ceremony, but I won’t hold it against you.”

How was it that she hadn’t heard of my new Uncrafting venture? I definitely needed more aggressive marketing. But before I could ask if she knew anything about running Friendlike ads, she’d dragged me down by the front of my shirt and pressed her mouth against mine.

Wrong. On so many levels. Not just because said mouth had recently been chewing up lima beans—and eel—and not just because it was a woman’s mouth. But because I couldn’t imagine anyone’s lips pressing into mine but Yuri’s.

I eluded Violet like a dog on bath day, ducked under Hawthorn’s Scribing hand, and slipped around the sarcophagus that still bore the faint outline of my uncle’s wingtip shoe tread.

“Cold feet?” she asked flirtatiously. “I’m sure you’ve had ample opportunities to practice your kissing since then.”

“Look, even if I wasn’t 100% gay, like I said, I’m head over heels for Yuri. Him and me—it’s not just a fling. It’s the real deal. So don’t take it personally, Vi, but I really can’t be anything more than friends.”

“You…? Oh.” She seemed surprised. Not that I blamed her. I could see where she’d take me for the type of guy who liked to play the field. Before Yuri came along, I had a serious case of shiny object syndrome, and the men I dated were quick to tarnish. I was always wondering if I’d find a sexier smile, a more exotic accent, or a naughtier repertoire of bedroom tricks just around the corner.

These days, it didn’t even occur to me to check.

“Wait!” Violet lunged at me, but I dodged her again—though I had to push off the low sarcophagus this time to do it. I’d expected the marble to be solid under my hands. But instead of supporting my weight, it fell in with a click as a hinge mechanism engaged. Violet made a grab to stop me from taking a header, but all she managed to do was pull off one of my shoes. And as I tumbled down the chute just as precipitously as my uncle had dropped into the tank at Dunk the Skunk, it occurred to me that the reason Violet was so shocked about Yuri was that it wasn’t Violet who’d tried to kiss me just now—it was Pansy.

10

YURI

A foul odor intruded into my dreams. It roused me, and good thing. Sleep was a luxury I simply could not afford. Early morning light filled the cabin. Dixon was off doing whatever Dixon did, and Fonzo was perched at the narrow table folded down from the wall, poised over a Seen I’d painted. Scriveners shape magic into spells to release into the world, but it’s the Seer who fixes the magic onto the page for them to work with. I might not be able to see it, flat on the table, from the angle at which I lay. But I felt the Seen pulsing with volshebstvo.

I sat bolt upright and flung myself out of bed. Fonzo had removed his glove, and his right hand was black and twisted. The feather had merged with it even more fully, and instead of a fingernail, his index finger terminated with the crumbling nib of a quill. One that dripped stinking black ichor like ink.

I snatched away my Seen before he could foul it with his cursed Scrivening, and snapped, “This is not yours to Scribe.”

I tore it in two. Such a waste. But I had a point to prove.

Fonzo threw up his hands in desperation and reeking black fluid spattered the table. “Desperate times call for desperate measures. We need to dredge up that money and appease the Stranges, and it can’t wait another night. Not only will Dahlia double the price again.” He massaged his wrist gingerly. “But it’s getting worse.”

I lowered my voice, so as not to be overheard—and, frankly, I seem more threatening when I speak deliberate and low. “Do you think I care about your discomfort? If not for your nephew, I’d happily leave you to your own devices. It was your greed that got you into this situation to begin with.”

Fonzo leveled me a shrewd look. “Greed? Show me a man who doesn’t strive for more—for his family, for himself—and I’ll show you a man who doesn’t deserve to be successful. If anyone should understand, it’s an immigrant like you.”

That might be true, had I come to America looking for a better future, and not simply to escape my past. I elbowed past Fonzo and checked the bathroom, but Dixon wasn’t there. What a relief. I’d never met a man so enamored of his own family. I’d be stupid to give him any reason to reconsider my honorary position in it.

I forced myself to look at the cursed quill. Its tattered shape pulsed against Fonzo’s palm, and the veins on the back of his right hand ran dark with ink. It seemed even more malignant in the cold light of day than it had the night before. “If Crafting is your best bet at getting out of this mess, fine. But not with your tainted Scribing. Dixon might not have your experience. But even so…he’s talented, and he’s clever. If anyone should Craft my Seens, it’s him.”

No one gets to be the Hand of a family by letting others order them around, but I glared at Fonzo until he relented. “Fine. But only because I have just as much confidence in Dixon as you obviously do.” He crammed his hand—and the dead man’s quill—into his glove, looked around expectantly, and said, “So, where is he?”

How would I know? I was asleep. “Didn’t he tell you where he was going?”

“He was gone when I woke up.”

“How long ago was that?”

“An hour?”

Or more. That Seen had been well-hidden in a pair of socks at the bottom of my suitcase.

“Maybe he went out for a walk,” Fonzo suggested. “This cabin’s smaller than a wiener in an ice water bath. There’s hardly enough room to change your mind.”

There was plenty of room when it was just Dixon and me, but I wasted no time arguing. I knew Dixon—and he’d never walk far, especially at this hour, unless we ran out of gas on the way to an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. I picked up my phone and called him, half-expecting to hear the jaunty trill of the ridiculous ringtone he’d selected for me just outside. I heard nothing but the waves lapping against the shore and the sound of Fonzo’s annoying nose-whistle.

No answer. Dixon might be ignoring me. Or, possibly, his phone was dead. But when I threw open the door and found my truck was gone, I knew it could only mean one thing: that brave, gullible man had gone back to Strange Manor without us.

Unbelievable.

I brandished my phone as Fonzo hurried out behind me. The Spellcrafter is nothing if not observant, and he’d grabbed me by the arm before I could call up my contacts. “Yuri? Don’t do it.”

“How do you know what I—?”

“You’re going to call Sabina to come get us.” Observant…and accurate. “Please. I’m begging you. Leave her out of this.”

“So, that’s how it is? Fine for Dixon to be tangled up in your mess, but not your daughter. He’s only your nephew, so he’s fair game.”

“Is that what you think?” Fonzo made to scrub at his bristly face in frustration, then remembered the quill burrowed into his Scribing hand and thought better of it. “You couldn’t possibly be more wrong. The reason I don’t protect Dixon is that I don’t need to. Even before he was quilled, it was obvious he was the best and brightest of us all. He’s clever and creative and stunningly dauntless. Sabina is the apple of my eye, but she’s still so young. Not worldly like Dixon. The Strange family? They’d eat her for breakfast. So, please….” He clasped my wrist with his left hand. “Don’t throw my little girl to the wolves.”

What he said was not wrong—but I feared that one day, Dixon’s relentless confidence would be his downfall.

“I’ll try my brother,” he said. But Dixon’s father had no great love of cell phones, and while Fonzo wasted precious time trying to get hold of him, I felt like I would burst out of my own skin. I’d thought watching Dixon plunge into a black bus full of balloons was horrific, but that was nothing compared to the thought of him marching into a repurposed mental institution that a set of identical twins called home. “Johnny?” Fonzo hollered. “Is that you? Dang it, no one thinks those fake messages that sound like you’re answering are funny anymore!”

The urge to punch something (and keep on punching until I’d pummeled it into the ground) seethed through my veins like Spellcraft. I paced back and forth, back and forth on the shore, glaring across Pinyin Bay at Strange Manor, just visible beyond a springtime canopy of budding trees.

“I’ll call a cab,” Fonzo declared. “They won’t know we’re too broke to pony up the fare until we get there….”

A cab was unlikely to make it to us in time since the campground’s signs were covered for the season, and online maps led people down a road that no longer existed.

I squinted across the water. It felt as though my heart should be able reach across the bay and grab Dixon away from whatever had drawn him into its clutches, but instead it just pounded desperately against my ribcage. It was a straight line between me and Strange Manor. Yet the road around the bay was so convoluted, once a vehicle found us, it would take far too long to get there. I tasted frustration as a bitter tang at the back of my throat—or maybe it was adrenaline. Either way, I was just about to go against Fonzo’s wishes and call Sabina when my gaze fell, instead, on a tarp-covered mound by the boat launch…and I realized there was another way.

I tore off the tarp. Three battered rowboats were piled face-down on the gravel. I grabbed the top boat and heaved it toward the water, but I’d overestimated its weight. It was aluminum, and only half as heavy as I’d thought—and I’d flung it so far into the water, we’d need to wade in up to our waists to get to it. Immediately, a current grabbed on and pulled it down the shore.

The second boat might have fared better, were the interior not covered in slugs, which pattered out of the hull like softly falling rain. I pitched the thing in a startled arc, and it landed nose-down in the spongy silt of the bay with its aft protruding like a stunted monolith.

One boat remained. I braced myself for more slugs—and was nearly toppled by a muskrat running between my ankles. It slid into the cold water and was gone. The creature had nearly given me a heart attack…but at least it had eaten most of the slugs. I set the boat (carefully, this time) on the ramp, then turned to see if Fonzo had enjoyed himself watching me do all the work…and was surprised to find him waddling toward me with a heavy outboard motor in his hands. A nearby shed, which had been firmly padlocked all winter, stood open.

At least he’d made himself useful.

Together, we mounted the motor. “I picked the one with the most gas sloshing around the tank,” he said.

That might not even matter. Unless the fuel was treated, it could be unusable after the freeze and thaw. I grabbed a pair of oars, flicked off a stubborn slug, and clambered into the boat as Fonzo gave me a hand up. He liked the sound of his own voice just as much as Dixon did, but I was much less keen to hear him ramble. “Now, the thing about engines is to treat ’em like you would a lady….” He embarked on a running commentary while I fit the oars into place and began to row.

Because doing something, effective or not, was better than doing nothing.

I’m in good condition. Even so, above the urgency and the growing sense of dread, I felt the exertion in my thighs, my arms, my shoulders and back. And especially in my hands, which were naked and exposed since my gloves were still in the truck. I considered asking Fonzo for his, but thought better of thrusting my hand into a glove that had touched the dead man’s quill.

“It’s a good head start,” Fonzo was saying, “but it’s not as if anyone can row all the way across Pinyin Bay without the rest of the high school rowing team pitching in. You might want to save your strength.” The engine clicked as he tinkered with the starter. “I’ve almost got it.”

My shirt protested. I doubled down and rowed even harder.

“C’mon, c’mon….” Fonzo jiggled the starter. The engine coughed, then went silent. “It must be flooded.”

I dug the oars into the water and pulled for all I was worth. Seams split. Buttons popped. But the boat hardly moved at all.

I’ve never given much thought to the currents in the bay. Not until they were working against me. For every stroke that brought me a meter closer to my goal, the current swept me back half that distance. Each time I took a breath, I found myself closer to our starting point. I leaned into it and rowed faster, as if I could outpace the bay itself.

The engine chugged twice, then fell silent. “Almost got it.”

My muscles burned. The palms of my hands were on fire. I doubled down again.

A few more hollow clicks. “I think the spark plug’s had it.”

My energy flagged. Despite what Dixon thinks, it takes more than pluck and courage to prevail. And if I was attempting something physically impossible, no amount of grit would make any difference.

But.

If I’ve learned anything in my time with that exasperating man, it’s that you can’t tell the difference between impossible and merely difficult until you try.

I pulled even harder.

The boat leaped forward with a lurch. The current circled through the bay, and suddenly it was working with us, not against. Perhaps I could’ve eased up and allowed it to carry us to shore—especially when the engine finally caught. But instead I leaned into it and kept on rowing.

There were no boat launches on the edge of Strangeberg, just a rocky coastline. The old rowboat screeched to a halt as submerged stones scraped aluminum and the propeller jammed. I jumped out and sent the boat spinning, and Fonzo tipped over the side, jumped to his feet, and sloshed up onto the shore beside me.

Lucky for us Strange Manor was such an eyesore. Even through the trees, we managed to keep our bearing and hurry, ever upward, to the top of the hill. Undergrowth lashed our faces and we were covered in welts by the time we discovered a road, but Fonzo tugged me away from it. “Not the front door,” he said between gasps of air. “Around back, where the curse is. The graveyard.”

I ignored the gooseflesh competing for attention among all the welts and forged on.

A dreary dawn was warming the horizon as we stumbled out into the Strange family plot. The approaching sunrise didn’t lighten the scene so much as draw attention to the eerie mist that clung to ground. With only the Strange women to look after the place, the grounds were now dilapidated, fuzzed over with moss and choked with weeds. The only spot that had been cared for (and not very well, at that) was the mausoleum.

From which could be heard the thready keen of a woman sobbing.

The koza—the sign of the horns—would offer as much protection as a cheap umbrella in a typhoon. Intellectually, I knew that—still, my right hand curled into the protective gesture anyway. But as superstitious as the Penns might be, their sense of danger was horribly askew. Fonzo was already outpacing me to the clearly-haunted crypt.

And so, I forced myself to follow.

His foolhardy lunge into danger wasn’t the only thing that was just like Dixon—but his propensity for drama. He didn’t slip into the tomb and try to assess the situation. No, that would be too sensible. Instead, he flung the gates wide and declared, “Aha!”

But instead of a group of frightful mages summoning a wailing spirit, inside there was nothing but a single, crying girl kneeling at the foot of a marble statue. She looked up sharply at the two of us, then hiccupped and began crying even harder.

“Violet?” Fonzo asked.

She shook her head, and between sobs, snuffled, “I’m Pansy.”

“Where’s Dixon? Is he with your sister?”

Apparently, this was the wrong question. The girl cried even harder.

I shouldered Fonzo aside—hysterics would do us no good—and said, “What have you done?”

But before I could shake the girl to her senses, Fonzo got between us, put an arm around her and said, “Don’t worry, you’re not in this alone. Just tell us what happened and we’ll figure it all out.”

“I thought he was luring Violet away from me. Again. I was wrong—and now it’s too late.” She sobbed and pointed with a trembling, pale hand at one of the stone sepulchers. “Mother suspected the thief would come back and try to steal the curse to break it himself, stepping in the same spot he did when he took the quill. So she moved Uncle Rowan and rigged his casket with a trap door. And now Dixon is stuck under the mausoleum.”

Fonzo assessed the sarcophagus. “So what do we need to get him out? A rope? A ladder?”

His sensible demeanor rubbed off on Pansy and she began to calm down. “None of that will do him any good unless we get the trap door open. And now that it’s been triggered, it’s locked shut. Dixon is stuck down there unless he can find the failsafe.”

“Everything’s fine—we’ve got plenty of time to figure this out.”

“Until the tide comes in,” Pansy said. “But he won’t panic in the water, will he? Not if he’s an experienced scuba diver.”

Right.

Fonzo crouched beside the sarcophagus, cupped his hands and yelled, “Find—the—failsafe!”

“He can’t hear you,” Pansy said. “The stone is too thick.” She buried her face in her hands. “This is all my fault!”

It most certainly was, but before I could agree, Fonzo said, “C’mon, now, there’s no time for wallowing. Let’s focus on the solution. What’s the quickest way to get him a message?”

I sent him a text—Find the failsafe. Its arrival dinged a few feet away from us, where Dixon had dropped his phone. I tried to pocket my own phone, and found it had stuck to my palm. Evidently, our rowing endeavor had made a casualty of more than just my ruined shirt. I now saw the skin on my palms hung in shreds, weeping with blood-tinged fluid. I carefully peeled off the phone and eased it into my pocket, then retrieved Dixon’s with my fingertips and did the same…and did my best to ignore the fact that it now felt as though I was holding my hands in a bonfire.

Fonzo pulled out a pocket knife and wiggled it into the seam of the sarcophagus. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

While I resented his optimism, maybe he was on to something. Will was a useless abstraction, but where there was a mechanism, there was a way to force it open. I staggered out into the early gray dawn and spotted my truck parked haphazardly where Dixon had left it at the side of the path. My gloves sat on the dash, though I was none too keen to pull them on. I grit my teeth and forced myself to work my hands inside while I tried not to think about pulling them back out again. Best not get ahead of myself. Once gloved, I grabbed my crowbar from the back and headed in.

Fonzo was fishing around the hinge with his small, thin blade—completely ineffectively. I shoved him out of the way and drove my crowbar in. The stone lid was rigged like a see-saw. If the front half of the sepulcher dipped down, then the back half should pry up. I jammed the crowbar in again. Shards of granite sprayed as if I was a sculptor, not a painter. I tried not to think about my hands. I tried not to think about the fact that I was desecrating a grave. And I tried not to think about what would happen to Dixon if the tide came in before I got to him. He was no more a scuba diver than I was a motivational speaker.

“Don’t worry,” Pansy said. “It should be a while before the tide seeps into the hollow. It’s mostly blocked by a valve that the excavators installed.”

“All this to safeguard an old quill?” Fonzo asked.

“You’re the Hand of your family. You more than anyone should know how important it is to protect what’s yours.”

If he didn’t, I certainly did. The palms of my hands were screaming, but I kept on pounding at the stone. It made a sound like a hammer on concrete, the percussion of metal on mineral. Regular. Predictable. Until something gave, the sound changed, and a chunk of stone fell away. I had a momentary flash of the lid falling in and crushing Dixon beneath it. Luckily, though, the shard that broke away was not even the size of my hand. But it did create a very small opening for him to hear us.

“Dixon,” I called, and my voice was ragged with exertion. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine! This big pile of twigs broke my fall. I’ve been trying to make a fire by rubbing them together, but I can’t quite get the hang of it. It’s darker than a black cat in a sealed box.”

Telling him to find the failsafe would do no good if he couldn’t see. If I tossed down his phone, in all likelihood, all I would accomplish was destroying the thing. Besides, it wouldn’t fit through the tiny hole. But I had a better idea. I shoved the crowbar into the hole and leaned on it, really leaned on it, and pried the gap open another fraction of a centimeter. “In my pocket,” I gasped to Fonzo, straining with exertion with every word. “Pass it to Dixon.”

Fonzo hurried around the sepulcher, thrust his hand into my pocket, and pulled out a condom. With a shrug, he slipped it through the hole.

“Not…that.” The crowbar was starting to slip. “Glow stick.”

They say there is only so much pain a man can bear. If that is true, I have never found the threshold—but not for lack of trying. The pain in my hands was already excruciating. Now it redoubled with every moment I held open that gap. But Fonzo wanted Dixon out of that pit just as much as I did, and while his harebrained schemes so often went wrong, he was not a stupid man. He plucked the glow stick out of my pocket and bent it with a snap. It lit with a wan pink light—much dimmer than I’d hoped. But it would have to do. He shoved it through the gap, and finally, I could let go of the crowbar.

11

DIXON

The water was up to my knees by the time they started prying the trap sarcophagus open. I couldn’t really see much by the light of the tiny opening, just enough to know that I’d fallen a good dozen feet, and I’d definitely have a few choice bruises to show for my adventure. Something dropped on my head and I grabbed it. A condom? My sex drive is pretty healthy, so I’m generally up for anything, anytime, anywhere…but, frankly, I drew the line at getting my jollies in a mausoleum.

And then everything went pink.

Grunting and clattering ensued up above as I blinked away afterimages from my dark-sensitized eyes. After a few blinks, I discovered the glow bracelet from the balloon pop floating by my knees. I plucked it from the water and had a look around.

Those twigs that had broken my fall? Not twigs at all. Unless some of them just so happened to look like femurs. And ribs. And skulls.

“Find the failsafe,” Pansy called faintly.

She didn’t need to tell me twice. “Got it!” I looked around. Bones and bones and bones. “Uh…what’s it look like?”

“There are two levers in the floor,” she said. I found them protruding from the bones. “The left lever unlocks the trap door. The right one will flood the chamber. So be sure to pull the right one.”

“I thought you said the left one would get me out.”

Pansy warbled a scream of frustration. “Stop confusing me!”

If there’s anything a Scrivener is good at, it’s telling right from left. And Scribing, obviously, but only with the right hand. The frigid water crept up my thighs, half submerging both levers. Despite growing up near the shores of Pinyin Bay, I was always more of a sunbather than a swimmer. Good thing I’d be out of there soon. I knew for a fact Yuri kept a clothesline in his truck—weird insistence on hand-washing his clothes, don’t ask—and once the trap door was open, he could hoist me out of there, no problem. “Just to be clear, which lever do I—?”

“Left!” Pansy hollered. “Pull the left one.”

She didn’t need to be all huffy about it. I squared myself up to the levers, and I pulled. It was a big, solid thing connected to some major machinery, and I really had to put my back into it. Initially, it seemed like it might not even budge. But I’m nothing if not persistent. Sometimes you need to shove something in the opposite direction to break the seal—case in point, the pickled egg jar at Bar None. So I braced myself and gave the lever a good, solid shove. That seemed to do the trick. In fact, it moved really well in that direction.

There was a distant click.

Followed by a muffled roar.

And then the realization that if I happened to be facing Pansy, her left was my right, her pull was my push…and that harmless little lie I told about scuba diving?

It was coming back to bite me square in the butt.

12

YURI

The marble floor rumbled beneath our feet—and the trap door held fast. “Oh no,” Pansy said. “He pulled the wrong lever! Now he’ll drown—and it’s all my fault!”

The pain in my hands? Gone. I hefted the crowbar and began pounding at the sarcophagus for all I was worth. In between clangs, I overheard Fonzo and Pansy yelling over the noise. “How much longer does he have?” Fonzo called out.

“Ten minutes? Maybe five.”

Fonzo caught my arm mid-swing. “Then we’ve gotta work smarter, not harder. It’s obvious you’d dig to China if that’s what it took, but you’ve been whacking away at that thing with only a little chip to show for it. We need to Craft.”

Good thing Fonzo wasn’t the only Scrivener there. I told Pansy, “You can redeem yourself and Scribe him out.”

She stood on tiptoe to peer out a decorative window at the bay. “My quill is back in my room, and the water level’s too high. We’re running out of time. By the time I got to the quill, it would be too late.”

I’d thought there couldn’t be anything more terrible than Crafting with that cursed black quill…but the thought of something happening to Dixon was infinitely worse. However, as I resigned myself to letting Fonzo touch one of my Seens with his revolting pen, my hands cramped so fiercely the crowbar clattered to the floor.

I might be willing to paint…but I wasn’t so sure I could hold the brush.

Unaware of my struggle, Fonzo was already flipping through his pocket thesaurus. “Which sounds better—manumit or disembarrass?”

I swatted the book from his hands. “If we do this together, we do it right. Bad enough you’ll be using that cursed quill. I will not have you write something ambiguous and cryptic. You Scribe for real.” I glanced toward the chipped sarcophagus. “Dixon’s life depends on it.”

He wanted to bargain with me out of sheer habit, I could tell. But we were out of time. “Fine. Give me a Seen.”

“I don’t just carry them around with me.”

“Could’ve sworn I saw one just recently—oh, wait, somebody tore it up.”

I should’ve known that gesture was too good to be true by how satisfying it felt. I’d need to make another Seen.

A Seer can’t paint wearing gloves—they’re a barrier to the flow of the magic. Too bad I hadn’t realized I’d need to Craft before I forced them on. It had only been a few minutes. Unfortunately, that was long enough for the wreck of my palms to turn gummy and thick.

I grit my teeth, braced myself, and pulled.

The human hand is rich with nerve endings. I often suspect that flowing the volshebstvo through them makes them even more acute. A ragged scream tore from my throat as the glove stripped away what little flesh remained on my palm, punctuated by Pansy’s horrified yelp. Fonzo just let out a low whistle.

Pain muddled my thoughts. Pain…and fear. Not just the fear of losing Dixon—but the dread of it being my failure that condemned him to a watery death.

Fonzo tore a blank page from the back of his thesaurus and slapped it down on the sarcophagus lid. I expected him to tell me I was no good. Worthless. Weak.

But instead?

“You got this, kiddo.” He gave me a few solid whacks on the back. “You got this.”

You’re family now, too.

Maybe I wasn’t quite ready to fully accept that. But I was willing to entertain the possibility.

I fumbled the cheap paints from my pocket and opened them with my teeth. Glitter paint spattered from the tiny plastic pot and the brush dropped to the floor and rolled away. I couldn’t let it stop me—there was no time to let it stop me. I scooped out what was left with my finger, called in the volshebstvo, and forced it onto the page.

I’m not sure I could even call it a painting, this haphazard swipe of glitter and blood. But it pulsed so strongly with Spellcraft that the air all around it wavered to my sight.

Scriveners don’t visualize the magic exactly as I do, but they know it when they see it. Pansy gasped and backed away a few steps. Fonzo nodded grimly, then pulled off his own glove.

Black foulness drooled from the tip of the cursed quill—from the tip of Fonzo’s index finger—as the dark feather writhed beneath his skin.

Pansy shrieked and flattened herself against the wall, too terrified to even faint.

Fonzo took no notice. He was Crafting even before the leaking nib touched the Seen. Spellcraft originated not on the page, but in the mind. As he touched pen to paper, images of all the cursed Craftings we’d found flashed before my mind’s eye. For a terrible moment I thought Fonzo would make another spell just as bad as those, attempting to Scribe words he’d never before written. But then he took a deep breath, gave a preemptive wince, and wrote…a word I’m sure he’d Scribed before. More than once.

Dixon

It is powerful magic to Craft by name. Illegal here, too—though Scriveners followed their own code, and they had no compunctions about naming their own when they Scribed. Fonzo bit back a groan as he finished the word, and something crumbled off the tip of the quill…or maybe his fingernail. Or both. Black ichor spattered.

He caught his breath, then Scribed again.

is

Another chunk dropped off. Fonzo’s breathing went ragged and Pansy tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a moan.

I’d formed plenty of opinions about Fonzo Penn. Con man. Charlatan. Thief. But seeing him Scribe, a bigger picture emerged. Yes, he truly was all those things. But he was also the Hand of his family. And his power was great. Even with the quill fighting against him, Fonzo was strong enough to ink one more word.

free

Now complete, the Crafting pulsed with magic, even as Fonzo’s forefinger made a sick crunching sound of joints grinding and bones shifting. An agonized whine escaped him, and he staggered back into the statue that had been presiding over the goings-on. All three of us—Fonzo, Pansy and I—caught our breath. Yes, Fonzo was strong. But what if Dahlia Strange and her curse were stronger? And in the moment of harrowing stillness where I very nearly surrendered to despair, we heard a small click.

Hawthorn Strange’s right arm dropped as if to stab himself in the thigh with his stupid marble quill. In the distance, gears ground, then engaged. And with a gritty sigh, the top of the tomb tilted open.

We all dashed toward the opening—Pansy in tears, Fonzo cradling his blackened hand, and me running on pure adrenaline. There was no sarcophagus inside, but instead, a dark shaft with the sound of water lapping at its stony sides. How high was the water level? Too dark—no way to tell. I thought of the parasites that would surely work their way into my flayed palms if I dove in to retrieve Dixon, but only briefly. Before I could plunge in, though, a rosy will-o-the-wisp in the shape of a smile bobbed to the black surface.

Dixon broke the water and his smile broadened, pink as the sunrise, with the glowstick clamped in his teeth.

“You can swim?” Fonzo demanded—evidently shocked.

“Who needs to swim when you can float on a big rubber…balloon. Yep. That’s what I’m floating on. Totally a balloon.”

How he managed to say all that around a pink glow stick was beyond me.

Pansy gave him a hand up, and good thing. I was in no shape to haul Dixon out of the shaft, and neither was Fonzo. Dixon left the inflated condom floating on the dark water and climbed out, soaking wet, and bathed us all in his pink Cheshire Cat smile.

13

DIXON

“I knew you were no scuba diver,” Pansy said shakily. “You couldn’t even hold a kiss for ten seconds without breathing into my mouth. And it tasted like Bubble Yum.”

I spat out the glowstick. “Bubblicious…and I’m more talented than you realize. I’ve had lots of time to hone my skills. Not kissing skills, obviously. A person might get somewhat better with practice, but I think that talent is mostly innate. We’re not kids anymore, though. We’re grown men—well, not you, Pansy—anyhow, we’re all adults. And we’re all Spellcrafters. So let’s get this curse lifted, once and for all.”

Pansy wrung her hands. “But I don’t know how.”

“Between the four of us, we’ll figure it out.” We had to. I risked a glance at my uncle’s mangled hand and immediately wished I hadn’t. “Now, show us the curse.”

Carefully avoiding the trapped sarcophagus, Pansy dragged a series of decorative square urns against the wall, forming a set of steps, and climbed up to the fancy metal plaque bearing the name of her grandfather, Hawthorn Strange—the plaque dinged with scratches where Uncle Fonzo had pried it open. She pressed the letter H. The plaque clicked and the vault hinged open.

As secret activations went, not exactly rocket science. Then again, none of us had thought to try it.

Pansy steeled herself and looked down at us. “Are you sure you want to do this?” She sounded scared.

Yuri glanced at my uncle’s hand, blanched, and said, “It is the only way.”

Pansy probably knew that herself. But hard things are that much easier to accomplish when someone’s got your back.

She pressed the letter S. More distant mechanical sounds, and suddenly the wall became a massive Pez dispenser—one that dispensed big black coffins filled with the remains of deceased Spellcrafters instead of candies. The coffin of Hawthorn Strange tilted out, then down, angled like the world’s most gruesome recliner. And with an ominous click, the lid swung open.

I must’ve expected it to be another Reverend Fun type situation. Something that felt super scary when we were all caught up in the hubbub…something that turned out to be nothing more sinister than a burst of itching powder and a T-shirt cannon. But no. We were looking at a real dead body. And an even realer curse.

The Crafting unfurled from the coffin lid like a macabre party banner in a grim, gray scroll. Usually, Spellcraft sparkles to my inner eye. I’m not sure if it’s possible for something to negative-sparkle, pulsing with black flashes of light instead of white, but it sure as heck felt like that’s what was happening.

Scribing is as individual as Scriveners themselves. We pen our own words in our own styles. But there’s a certain phrase each and every Scrivener will write at least once, at their quilling ceremony: I choose the quill and the quill chooses me.

On first glance, that’s what I thought was inked on the cursed banner which, in all fairness, was really hard to read.

It was the most inharmonious calligraphy I’d ever seen, and given those whackadoodle things my uncle’d been spreading around, that’s saying a lot. The letters were big and thick, each one different from the one next door. It would’ve made a spiffy punk rock album cover. But Spellcraft? The magic wasn’t just directed through those letters, it was distorted.

And then I realized the lettering wasn’t the only thing that was distorted, but the Scrivening.

THou choSE tHe quiLL aNd

ThE qUiLL CuRseS tHeE

One time, at calligraphy camp, when we were singing this charming (but lengthy) madrigal called the Scrivener and the Cuckoo’s Quill, I realized I’d been standing on an anthill for the better part of the song. Maybe if I wasn’t a prepubescent boy with legs as smooth as a pantyhose model’s, I would’ve felt them coming before they breeched my underwear. Let’s just say the phrase “ants in your pants” had its origin in a very uncomfortable reality.

That’s what it felt like to look at the curse.

If I was disturbed by the profaned Spellcrafting, Yuri was downright horrified. But Uncle Fonzo simply shook his head.

“And now you understand,” he said. “Some knots are just too tight to untangle. And the only thing left to do is cut them off.”

I took that statement to be metaphorical—until it registered that it wasn’t a knot he was talking about.

Yuri might turn green when he encounters a hair in his food, but he’s disturbingly blasé over the sight of blood. “I will do the job,” he said calmly. “There’s a hacksaw in the truck.”

Pansy bit back a sob and said, “You’ve gotta believe me—I didn’t know it would end like this.”

“Hold on a sec,” I told everybody while I inserted myself between Yuri and the exit. “Maybe it doesn’t.”

My uncle shook his head with a sad smile. “Dixon…some dark clouds simply don’t make it through the storm with their silver lining intact.”

“But you won’t know until you really look. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Spellcraft is that there’s always another way—it’s just a matter of exploiting the loopholes.”

“Not this one,” Pansy said. “It was inked by my whole family, switching off one letter at a time, with each of us binding the curse to the Seen. Even if you thought of the right phrasing to Uncraft it, three Scriveners penned the curse—and thirty times three would need to reverse it. That’s every Spellcrafter in our circuit, and then some. And most of them wouldn’t touch a curse with a ten-foot quill.”

“Wait a minute,” Fonzo said. “How can that be? Dahlia promised to lift the curse.”

Pansy shook her head. “It was a lie. She was just stringing you along until all your blood turned to ink.”

Oh dang. I had no idea that was even a thing.

Neither did Yuri. He was galvanized into action. In an attempt to move me aside, he tried to grab me by the shoulders, then flinched away in pain. His hands were all red and sticky, and his fingers were curled into claws. “I am not able to hold the saw. You need to do it, Dixon. It must be you.”

My head swam and I swallowed back the urge to revisit my dandelion greens. There had to be another way—there was always another way. Maybe we could steal back the walrus and pay a bunch of Scriveners to do the curse-breaking. I took another look at Uncle Fonzo’s right hand. Even in the guttering candle light, I caught a glimpse of black veins creeping up his forearm. Finding eighty-some willing Scriveners outside my own family would take time. Time we didn’t have.

Was it possible to Scribe without a hand? After all, my uncle’s real quill still functioned even though the nib had been hacked off and jammed into the body of a fountain pen…a topic I still hadn’t quite figured out how to broach.

And which…I realized…might actually be the viable loophole I was hoping for.

“Forget about the saw,” I told Yuri. “Uncle Fonzo, read those words aloud.”

“Dixon, there’s no time—”

“Do it!” I insisted. “But read it in first person.”

“Fine. I chose the quill and the quill cursed me. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

I nodded along with the words as my inspiration took hold. “You chose the quill.”

“It’s my fault—everything’s my fault. You think I don’t know that? I’m sorry. More sorry than you’ll ever know. And I’d take back every last decision if I could, but I can’t.”

At my uncle’s admission of guilt, something inside me clicked. Yuri hadn’t been projecting after all. From the baseball to the foot-stomp to the attempt to leave him at the diner…all this time, I’d truly had been angry with Uncle Fonzo for leaving. I was only able to see it now that he’d apologized.

Now that I was able to forgive him.

“Maybe you can’t take it back,” I said gently. “But you can make another decision. You chose the quill—a Scrivener can only have one quill—and now you can choose another.”

“There’s no way I can manage a new quilling ceremony.” He flailed his right hand in a spray of bleeding ink. “Not with this thing under my skin.”

“You don’t have to. Emery Flint didn’t end up with your original quill. I did.”

I could tell him about the state of its condition later.

“Choose it,” I said. “Choose your real quill. Just like it chose you, all those years ago.”

Emotions played across my uncle’s face. Shock. Disbelief. And a grim determination. I’m especially good at figuring out loopholes—that’s why I’m such a good Uncrafter—but I’d inherited that knack from him.

He stomped up to the open casket and peered down at the corpse. The old patriarch of the Strange family had never been a handsome man, and aside from the fact that his nose had collapsed, he didn’t look much different to me dead than he had when he was alive. “Hawthorn,” Uncle Fonzo announced, “I don’t need your quill anymore. I’ve got one of my own.”

I swallowed audibly. Pansy sniffled.

Uncle Fonzo looked expectant, then puzzled…and, finally, alarmed…as nothing at all happened.

“Don’t just say the words,” I prompted. “You’ve gotta choose it in your mind, and in your heart.”

Because that’s where Spellcraft really got its focus. Not from words on a page.

He nodded, then gathered his courage yet again and said, loud and clear, “I choose my own quill.”

When the change in the air came, it was so subtle at first, it felt like wishful thinking. But that’s the thing about Spellcraft. Once you really spot it in action, you know what to look for. The air in the crypt flexed as dark un-sparkles swarmed at the corners of my vision. Subtly at first, then stronger. Until the whole structure was reverberating with that single note of cursed Spellcraft. Struck. Sustained. And finally…released.

The gray scroll fluttered as if caught by a breeze that none of us could feel, and the malignant lettering pulsed with power. At first I thought it was just the paper trembling that gave the illusion of movement. But soon I couldn’t deny that the letterforms themselves were shifting, breaking down into ugly black strokes that crawled across the page like leeches, until they finally reached the bottom, taken by gravity, where they shriveled, died, and fell away. Ash rained on the corpse of Hawthorn Strange. I half expected him to start moving around, too. But thankfully, he just laid there with his squashed nose and allowed the curse’s ashes to rain on down.

As the last bit of ink fell from the page, Uncle Fonzo lunged forward, cursed hand outstretched, as if he wanted to catch the ash like snowflakes on a mitten. It wasn’t my uncle calling the shots, though, it was the black quill. It dragged him right up to the casket, and for a moment I thought it was yet another elaborate trap, one that would suck him in and pull him into the vault, never to be seen again. But instead it was the horrible cursed feather that was suctioned away. It pulled from his flesh and veins with an appalling, wet sound like you’d hear at the bottom of an overlarge slushy, and it flowed from his body like gravity-defying blood. The blackness was mesmerizing in its intricacy and terrible, dark grace. It spun through the air like a girl changing dance partners. My uncle might’ve led her on a few spins across the dance floor. But thankfully, she was willing to leave the ball with her original partner.

The blackness coalesced in the right hand of Hawthorn Strange and formed itself into the shape of a vulture’s plume. And before it could get any funny ideas about taking a spin with anyone else, Pansy jabbed at the secret buttons on the foot of the casket, the lid ground shut, and the corpse of her grandfather slid back into the wall, taking his quill along with him just as the sun edged over the horizon.

Coral-colored light pinked the mausoleum through the open door, enough to see that Yuri looked like he’d spent the night with his palms pressed against a hot stove. Pansy’s eyes were most definitely both the same dark brown. And while my uncle’s hand had seen better days, at least it was still attached to the end of his arm. He wasn’t relieved, though. He was angry. He turned to Pansy and said, “All that graft I’ve been giving your mother this past year—she obviously hasn’t used it to spruce up the Manor. I hope she’s put it in some good investments. She made me a promise she had no intention of fulfilling, and now she owes me. With interest.”

Pansy shook her head helplessly. “She spent that money having Great-Uncle Rowan’s sarcophagus dug out so no one could use it to get to Grandfather again. All but the cash you brought with you last night.”

As the four of us limped through the mausoleum door, soaked and stunned, bruised and beaten, Yuri slipped an arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the truck…then recoiled with a startled gasp.

A slip of paper that was stuck to my back peeled off when he jerked his hand away, and dropped to the ground with a moist pat. Even though it was wet, I still recognized it as the Crafting we’d taken such great care to bury, all to no avail. The watercolor Seen had mostly rinsed away, maybe while I stood in rapidly rising water, desperately trying to tie off the blown-up condom (and that slippery lube coating was definitely no help). Or maybe the whole Crafting had lost its integrity and begun to fade once the black quill returned to its rightful owner.

But the single word, Remunerate, was still legible.

Uncle Fonzo thrust his arms out wide as if he was protecting the rest of us from a papery grenade. But I’d been developing a pretty good feel for Spellcraft, so I suspected the detonation had already occurred, and what we were dealing with now was only the aftermath.

“Of all the words in the language you could have picked,” I said to him, “the one you chose was a real doozy. Requital for a loss. Make up for. Compensate. Reverend Fun was forced to pay you for your services whether he wanted to or not, while you paid dearly for…uh…borrowing Hawthorn Strange’s quill. But where does all this titting and tatting end? Dahlia Strange will eventually get what she deserves—miserable people like that usually do—and once your hand heals, you’ll Scribe another day. I think it’s time to cut your losses and move on.”

My uncle is a proud man. Stubborn, too. But even he could see when it was best to put down his cards and walk away from the table, like he sorely wished he’d done a year ago when this whole train wreck began with Emery Flint. He made up his mind, nodded once…and the ragged black word faded from sight.

We left Pansy to make her way back to the manor while we piled into the truck. I hardly ever drove it—I’m told I ride the brakes—but given the fact that I was the only one with two functioning hands, Yuri let me take the wheel without comment. As I turned out of the cemetery gates, I caught one last look at Pansy in the rearview mirror, picking her way through the thorny brambles that passed for landscaping at Strange Manor. She’d really had me fooled. I thought I was so clever, being able to tell the twins apart by their body language alone. But who better to imitate Violet than her twin sister?

“Hold on.” I tapped the brakes.

“You see what I mean?” Yuri muttered.

I ignored him. “If that was Pansy…then how’d she know about the bubble gum?”

14

In light of the bubblegum revelation, I realized it was never my girlfriend Violet who’d invited me to the clandestine meeting on the pier all those years ago, but her sister, Pansy. Not because they were in cahoots, either. If Pansy had always been jealous enough to drive us apart, she must’ve been the one to slip me the note, then let Violet think I was two-timing her.

No wonder Violet thought I was such a heel.

Over the next few days, I debated whether or not to exonerate myself and let Violet know I hadn’t intentionally cheated on her that fateful night at Ink-a-Dink Calligraphy Camp, despite whatever Pansy might’ve told her. But in the end, I decided that it was more important to protect the twins’ relationship than to clear my own name. I had an awesome family—including Yuri. Pansy and Violet only had each other, and it would be quite the irony to mess that up by trying to prove I was a nice guy.

And I was most definitely a nice guy. Would I be spending so much time peeling Yuri’s hard-boiled eggs for him if I wasn’t?

Yuri refused to seek medical attention for his hands—of course he did—but according to the internet, we were just dealing with some really bad blisters. (Pro tip: don’t search for blisters online unless you’ve got a really stunted gag reflex.) Since nothing appeared to be infected, it was just a matter of keeping everything clean and dry while we waited for his hands to heal.

By contrast, Uncle Fonzo was happy enough to see the doctor—probably because she’s disproportionately chesty and he’s always been into that kind of physique. Fortunately, Dr. Butcher was a reasonably competent medical professional, too.

My uncle claimed to have hurt his forefinger rescuing a trapped bag of chips from a vending machine, and that’s how it ended up lacerated, bruised and broken. Dr. Butcher didn’t question his story. The Handless can be kind of oblivious that way.

Yuri’s main problem these days was boredom. In his little lakeside cabin, he paced in the sliver of floorspace beside his bed, which was clearly unsatisfying. With his long strides, he could only go two steps before he had to turn and go back again. “No push-ups,” he grumbled. “No pull-ups. No weights. If I can’t exercise, I will grow soft.”

Hardly. He must’ve gone up two shirt sizes rowing across the bay. I didn’t mention it—I’ve learned to be strategic in my compliments with Yuri, since too much affirmation only makes him leery. Distraction, though? I was pretty good at that. I snagged him by his waistband before he could do another two-step pace and pulled him down onto the bolted-down bed. His hands were wrapped loosely in gauze, partly for their protection, and partly to keep them from oozing on everything. It might be awkward trying to figure out how to avoid them, but luckily there was a lot more of Yuri to love besides his hands.

I wriggled out of my clothes in no time flat, but I couldn’t pull Yuri’s sleeves over his mummy hands. That was fine by me. I settled for unbuttoning his shirt and rucking up the ribbed undershirt to get to that broad, tattooed chest beneath it. It felt naughty for only one of us to be totally naked—and I’ve never been averse to a little naughtiness.

If Yuri’s push-up muscles did end up a smidge atrophied and he had trouble assuming his normal bedroom position in the future, there was no doubt in my mind that we’d figure something out. I’m always happy to do whatever heavy lifting is required of me in the sack. Judging by the way his mesmerizing stomach muscles rippled as I straddled him and rode him like a mechanical bull, he was getting a pretty solid workout, too. Even flat on his back.

The cedar smell of the tiny cabin was soon seasoned with that particular olfactory tang of man-on-man lovin’, and it was trippy to press Yuri into the mattress and make him submit to my kisses once we were through. Sure, we both knew he could stand up and brush me off like a crumb…but it gave him a good excuse to let me linger at his mouth even after the fireworks were done exploding.

I wouldn’t dream of interrupting a good roll in the hay to check my phone, but with Yuri on his back and the phone on the nightstand, it was right in Yuri’s line of sight when a Friendlike notification pinged. He tried to glance over with just his eyes—as if I wouldn’t notice. Now I was curious. So, I made a mental note to pick up later where we left off—at which point all our bottle rockets and roman candles would be restocked, anyhow, so it was probably for the best—and I pulled the phone into bed.

We read together, with Yuri snugged up to my back, reading over my shoulder. The notification was from Violet—a group selfie with her, Pansy and a male set of identical twins. Given the dark-haired, dark-eyed, five-o’clock-shadow looks of the guys, they were Spellcrafters, too. Not from our circuit, though. I would’ve remembered them from Calligraphy Camp.

Yuri moved to take the phone from me and thumb through the post, but only succeeded in boffing it with his gauze. I waved him off and flicked open Friendlike myself.

More photos of the four of them. Laughing. Eating. Horsing around. They looked so happy.

They looked like they were in love. Or if not love, at least serious like.

There was one particular selfie on the teacup ride that brought a lump to my throat. One of the guys was gazing adoringly at Violet, and the other at Pansy. The Strange twins had sunglasses on, and I could no longer really say which twin was which. But it was more than obvious that those guys totally knew.

Scrolling through the comments, I could see the twin-sets had been courting each other online for quite a while, but had only just met in person. I also realized the teacup ride was not the type of scuffed, dented attraction you’d find at the Big Fun Traveling Carnival, but a fancy teacup ride at WonderWorld Paris.

Yuri reached around me and boffed the phone again with his swaddled hand. He clucked his tongue, then said, “Scroll down farther. There. The harpy mother has something to say.”

That, she did. All in caps, too.

COME HOME IMMEDIATELY AND DON’T EITHER OF YOU DARE SPEND ANOTHER DIME

Blocking her would be easy enough, but either Violet enjoyed the fact that her mother was fuming, or she was having such a good time she simply didn’t care. My uncle might’ve paid off Dahlia Strange for nothing, but at least she wouldn’t be able to fund another creepy renovation project with his final installment.

“You are not angry about the money?” Yuri asked.

“How could I begrudge the twins a little vacation? I’m sure they deserve it after living in that asylum with Dahlia for so long.”

Money comes and money goes, and, hokey as it may sound, it clearly can’t buy happiness. I had my quill now. And, more importantly, I had my family, too—my whole family, including Uncle Fonzo…and including Yuri.

Which made me the luckiest guy ever.

THE ABCS OF SPELLCRAFT SERIES

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

ABOUT THIS STORY

I’VE NEVER EATEN eel, but a family member has a story about the time she was putting up some Russian ballet dancers, so the dancers cooked her a special dinner as a thank-you. And they served eel.

I know my friends in the UK and Europe probably eat it all the time, but I have no idea where you’d even buy eel around here. Maybe a dedicated fish market, or an Asian specialty store. I know I’ve never seen it at the supermarket. Then again, I have no great love of seafood, so I’ve never really looked.

Anyway, according to what I’ve read online, it’s basically just delicate fish.

My palate isn’t much like Dixon’s, but I’m with him on this one anyway. Ick.

Yuri was pretty excited about the eel, but he was definitely none too thrilled about tracking down Fonzo after all this time. Obviously, I was fully aware how he felt about the whole thing going in. But I didn’t realize how satisfying it would be to write the mausoleum scene where they finally have to work together. A big part of Yuri’s internal struggle is coming to terms with caring for someone else rather than just protecting himself, and making nice with Fonzo was a big step in that direction.

Getting Uncle Fonzo squared away completes the first big arc of Dixon and Yuri’s story, but never fear, there will be more Spellcraft adventures on the horizon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE has has a soft spot for carnivals and amusement parks, though her tomfoolery did once knock an old ride off its tracks and cause the entire attraction to back up and shut down.

The wails of the other children trapped in the dark funhouse were particularly satisfying.

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