The ABCs of Spellcraft Collection Volume 2
Author: Jordan Castillo Price
Date: 2020-06-26 00:00:00+00:00
Description: Pinyin Bay is in peril! Dixon Penn has done his share of traveling and is ready to settle down in the city where he grew up. Yuri Volnikov has finally found a place he can call home. But their idyllic life together is threatened when a mysterious buyer starts scooping up properties in Pinyin Bay…and not with the intention of sprucing things up. To add insult to injury, the buyer is using Spellcraft to get what they want. Pinyin Bay might not be a thriving metropolis, but from the ramshackle tenements of Scrivener Village to the crumbling splendor of Shirque Mansion, the city is rich with Spell
Publisher: JCP Books

Contents

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

Guide

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. Start of Content

BROWNIE POINTS

The ABCs of Spellcraft 9

Jordan Castillo Price

Find more titles at
www.JCPbooks.com

Brownie Points. ©2021 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 978-1-944779-21-4

1.1

Don’t miss Yuri meeting Dixon’s parents for the first time in the bonus story All that Glitters.

Sign up for Jordan Castillo Price’s newsletter at http://bit.ly/jcpglitters and download free.

1

Dixon

My mother always says, show me a person who doesn’t like free stuff, and I’ll show you a big, fat liar. Me, personally? I love a good freebie. Absolutely adore them. And so the annual Shop the Bay trade show was my favorite event of the year.

Shop the Bay was not a public event. It was only open to retail stores looking for wholesale goods. But Practical Penn was a retail store…technically. Maybe my office in the back of the shop was more of a repository for loud amphibians, and maybe the last work Yuri did was change a lightbulb no one else could reach, but Yuri and I were Practical Penn employees.

Technically.

And that was good enough for me.

The Bayside Convention Center stretched out before us like a glimmering sea of possibility. While it’s true that the giveaways were all printed with some random business logo, most of the time you could scrape it off…or at least put a sticker over it. There were key fobs. There were water bottles. There were squishy little foam balls that purportedly provide some sort of stress relief. But best of all…there were pens.

You might think that a guy who’s trained his whole life to wield a specialized writing implement—a magical hand-cut quill—would turn his nose up at a cheap, disposable pen. But I love making marks on paper, whether or not those marks harness the power of Spellcraft. And it’s always fun to put a new pen through its paces and really see what it can do. I’d managed to gather up every pen in sight, from felt tip to ballpoint.

Yuri, meanwhile, appeared to be in the market for things like emery boards and back-scratchers and dinky little magnetic calendars with dates so small you could barely see them. Yuri has the predilections of someone at least two and a half times his age. Whether this was the result of growing up in Russia or his natural bent of personality, I couldn’t say. I just knew it was adorable.

We’d drifted apart—me to a table with pens that had multicolored ink, Yuri to a podiatrist’s booth. It was getting late. My pockets bristled with so many pens that my pants gave off a plasticky brreeeet with every step I took, and we’d still need to figure out what to do for dinner. Yes, there was some take-and-bake pizza left in the fridge. But after a couple of days, those slices are more like a doorstop than a dinner. Speaking of which….

“Say, Yuri.” I sidled up to him so I didn’t have to shout over the crowd and pitched my voice flirtily. “Is that a doorstop in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

He blinked. “It is promotional doorstop.”

Such a cutie.

I was about to nudge Yuri toward the parking lot when he suddenly stiffened. Not in a doorstop kind of way, either. More like a predator with something vulnerable and tasty in its sights. I tried to follow his gaze as best I could, but saw nothing but the backs of a bunch of heads. I went up on tiptoe and still saw nothing. I was about to give up and ask, when the crowd parted and it hit me: the alluring smell of chocolate.

I don’t have a major sweet tooth—not like Yuri—but the smell was so enticing, so good, I half-expected it to turn into a cartoon hand beckoning us forward. We weren’t the only ones to notice. While Shop the Bay was thinning out and some of the vendors were even starting to pack up for the day, the crowd around Bruno’s Brownies was more of a mob scene.

But crowds have a way of making room for Yuri. Often punctuated by the sort of “oof” sound you’d make when an elbow connected with your ribs.

As we elbowed our way toward the front, I found a big brute of guy hacking a sheet of brownies into cubes and dealing them onto tiny paper plates. He wore an apron embroidered with the name Bruno—a normal-sized apron, I presume, but on his burly frame it looked more like a front-facing thong. Not only did he have the physique of a grizzly prepping for hibernation, but he was just as hirsute. I come from a long line of hairy guys—though I’m told I’m more of an otter than a bear cub—and even I was impressed by Bruno’s follicles. Chest hair bulged from the neck of his shirt. His forearm hair was more of a pelt. His beard was thick enough to merit its own hairnet. But despite all his fur, the thing that struck me the most about Bruno was his eyes. Small and sweet, blinking as though he’d just woken up from a long winter’s nap…and completely overwhelmed by the bloodthirsty mob demanding his treats.

“One per customer,” the frazzled baker entreated, though if anyone heeded his pleas, it was only because they were shoved out of the way before they could help themselves to seconds.

As fast as Bruno could put those brownie samples out, they disappeared. And when a voice over the loudspeakers announced that Shop the Bay would be closing in ten minutes, the mob grew even more frantic.

At his side, a tiny woman whose name tag read Bernadette was doling out the paper plates as fast as he could fill them. Her chef coat was two sizes too big, and her blondish hair was in a sloppy ponytail on top of her head, though maybe it had started the day more contained and just ended up looking messy. Despite the fact that she came off like a kid playing dress-up, she had the cheerful confidence of an adult as she worked the crowd. “Bruno’s brownies are made only from the finest ingredients, from fair-trade chocolate, to organic flour, to locally sourced cream, butter and honey. Your customers will really taste the difference!”

Maybe so…if you could manage to get your hands on one.

The brownies were going alarmingly fast, and the people within reach of Yuri’s elbows were falling like bowling pins. But when a girl of about seven or eight popped up in front of him, Yuri somehow stayed his elbow mid-jab. The kid was clearly into the color pink. Little pink T-shirt. Little pink baseball cap. Little pink jeans with a glitzy silver belt. And a little pink tongue that poked out at Yuri as she snatched up the last brownie and darted away, blowing raspberries. “Better luck next time, Chubby!”

“You’re better off without the brownies, if you ask me,” declared a desperate voice from over my shoulder. “Sweets are terrible for your blood sugar and your teeth.”

I turned and found a tall beanpole of a guy watching the crowd cruise past his stall. His shop was Herb’s Herbs and Veggies, according to the big, pumpkin-shaped sign. Why was it that only the second H was silent? Unless Yuri was pronouncing the word…but he’d picked up a lot of his pronunciation from British TV. Anyway, Herb still had plenty of samples to give away—but no takers. And now that he’d caught my eye, he seemed really invested in engaging my attention.

Herb was a middle-aged guy with a long, wispy ponytail and a tie-dyed shirt. But he wasn’t one of those relaxed hippies you see sprawled in the corner of a coffee shop nursing a single soy latte. He was the sort who’d earnestly thrust a clipboard in your face to get you to sign a petition for some cause or another.

And in this case, the cause was produce.

“Most people know tomatoes are actually a fruit,” he informed me, “but did you know their classification as a vegetable was for taxation purposes? As if something as glorious as a plant can be governed!”

“Er…can’t say that I did.”

“Did you know that in the seventeenth century, carrots were originally purple, but were bred to be orange?”

“Oh. How about that?”

“And did you know the apples you buy in the supermarket can be as much as a year old?”

Don’t get me wrong—I love it when someone’s passionate about advocating for their cause. I’ve just never found vegetables particularly appealing unless they were covered in a bright orange blanket of cheese.

“Fascinating…” I started edging away. “But, wow, would you look at the time?”

The thing about tall people is that they take really big strides on their long, gangly legs, and before I could blend back into the brownie hubbub, Herb was shoving a little paper cup into my hand. A cup filled with something that looked suspiciously like wood chips.

“Herb’s herbs and veggies are grown right here in Pinyin Bay, not shipped from halfway across the world. I use a special, year-round hydroponic growing system I developed myself. And they’re preserved using time-tested, all-natural methods like brine and fermentation and sunshine. Don’t settle for anything less!”

“Indeed I won’t,” I assured him brightly, then dodged around a chubby guy with brownie residue clinging to the corners of his mouth, and finally made my getaway.

The mob was only just starting to thin, but Yuri’s shaved head is easy to spot. I checked in with him to see if the brownie folks had put out more product while I was being waylaid by Herb but, unfortunately, Bruno and his bubbly assistant were packing up shop with no more brownie samples to be had. It looked like we were out of luck—at least until I noticed a smug-looking guy threading through the crowd in the opposite direction, holding not one tiny paper plate aloft, but two.

No fair!

Instinctively, I called out, “Say, is that the Pinyin Bay Perch?” When Two-Brownie Guy paused to look, I made a grab. Thanks to my otter-like reflexes, I came away with half of his ill-gotten gains…and left a cup of dried veggie chips in its place.

The brownie was halfway to my mouth when I turned back and saw Yuri gazing forlornly at the now-empty brownie table. As good as the goodie might smell (and it smelled really good) I could hardly keep it for myself. Shielding my prize with my body, I sidled up to Yuri, jostled him playfully with my shoulder, and said, “Gee, what a shame we didn’t find this booth sooner. And now the samples are all gone.” I waggled my eyebrows at him and whipped out the brownie cube with a flourish. “All except…this one!”

It was a big one, too.

Yuri’s expression transformed from disappointment to glee—well, as close to glee as Yuri gets, but by now I can read him pretty darn well. He snatched the brownie from my hand as if it might disappear, and shoved it in his mouth. But just as he was about to bite down, he said, “Should we split it?” That’s what I understood through the brownie and the sexy Russian accent, anyhow.

I patted Yuri on his bulging bicep. That handsome hunk of man-meat has had a hard life. He’s guarded and suspicious and even a tad bit pessimistic, and I think that’s what makes it especially satisfying to see him really enjoy himself. Even outside the bedroom. “You eat the whole thing, Yuri. I’m sure it can’t be any sweeter than watching you enjoy it.”

That declaration brought a blush to Yuri’s cheeks…but he wasn’t too embarrassed to scarf down the entire brownie in two bites.

Satisfied, I turned to the table. There was nothing left but a few crumbs, a scattering of paper plates…and a business card.

Bruno’s Brownerie

Bruno Baer, Proprietor

Wholesale Orders Only

I tucked the card into my pocket, wheels turning. “My parents’ shop might not be in food service, but the strip mall is zoned for restaurants—Practical Penn even shares an entire wall with the pizza place—so technically, we should be able to place a wholesale order. How many brownies do you suppose that would entail? A gross? Isn’t that a funny unit of measurement, considering that those brownies are anything but gross? I wonder how it came to be that the word for ‘twelve dozen’ and ‘completely disgusting’ is the same—probably a major case of buyer’s remorse was at the root of it. And how confusing is it for you when English words have two entirely different meanings?”

“Everything about your language is confusing,” Yuri said, though the words weren’t as harsh as they might have been, given that they were thick with brownie. His cheeks went an even brighter red.

I could count the number of times I’ve made Yuri blush on one hand and still have enough fingers leftover for tiddlywinks, so I really did my best not to stare, so as not to make him feel too self-conscious. And yet, the sight of him looking all flushed sent my thoughts spiraling down a much more lascivious route. I gave his massive arm another firm pat, then went up on tiptoe and purred in his ear, “Homophones might be confusing, but I know a vocabulary that the two of us speak loud and clear.” I took Yuri’s face in both hands (with the intent of adding the word “naked” to avoid any potential ambiguity) when I realized his cheeks were unnaturally hot to the touch.

And even as I watched, the blush resolved itself into two clusters of bright red spots.

2

Yuri

My main objective was to get home—as soon as possible. If something was seriously wrong, I had no desire to flaunt my weakness in public for all to see. We retreated to the truck. Cheeks burning, I struggled to make my way out of the expo parking lot without flattening another attendee.

“Have you had measles?” Dixon asked eagerly from the passenger seat. “Mumps? Rubella? Whooping cough?”

“These are the sicknesses of children.”

“How about the heartbreak of psoriasis?”

“It is nothing. I just need to wash my face.” I said this with more conviction than I actually felt.

Dixon consulted his phone.

I said, “Those medical websites give you nightmares.”

Too late. He had already found one. “Nope, not psoriasis—yikes, these photos are really graphic…ooh, I know, maybe it’s shingles! And how about that, yet another word with multiple meanings. Though according to this medical blog, as diseases go, it’s pretty darned painful. I’m guessing it’s preferable to keep your shingles up on the roof where they belong.”

Dixon had called out the names of a half dozen more potential ailments, from vitiligo to leprosy, by the time we pulled up in front of the house. It was cool outside, early Spring with a nip in the air, but still, my cheeks were blazing. Even I could not be sure if this was entirely caused by some mysterious malady, or my embarrassment over catching it.

I cut the engine, stormed out of the truck and headed for the stairwell to our attic flat. Dixon trotted along behind me with one eye on his phone. “Have you traveled to the Congo recently? I suppose I would have noticed. How about Wyoming?”

I had been by his side for more than a year now, never farther than the corner store, and we both knew it. Still, Dixon could not help but give voice to every stray thought which crossed his mind. Picking up speed, I strode up the stairs, through the flat, and into the bathroom—where I closed the door behind me. Firmly.

Dixon was still talking. “It says here that people with certain genetic predispositions are especially susceptible to tree man syndrome…though there’s no actual tree bark involved, but warts. Is there a history of anything like that in the Volnikov family?”

Ignoring him, I turned on the shaving light and peered into the mirror. My cheeks were just as red as they felt. But not in a rosy, healthful sort of way. Instead, they were livid and blotchy.

“Of course, there’s always the chance that you were subjected to a strange chemical of some sort. Maybe it’s something to do with your paint set. Have you tinkered with any new pigments lately? Manufacturers are always cutting corners and you never know what they’ll grind up next. Say, did you know that purple dye was originally made from ground up snails? And insects can carry all kinds of strange parasites.”

I ran the water, hoping to drown out Dixon’s “helpful” trivia. I did splash my face, first with warm water, then with cool. But neither did any good.

“And, of course, we can’t rule out hypnotic influence. Because if a well-placed command can make a person cluck like a chicken, who’s to say it can’t make them blush like a baboon’s, bu-uh…well, I kind of doubt it was hypnosis, but still, you never know. I’d be happy to try my hand at re-hypnotizing you, though I can’t promise I won’t make a few sexy suggestions—”

The doorknob jiggled, and the lock was flimsy at best. Because the bathroom walls were a do-it-yourself job, the door was not quite square and plumb, and tended to stick shut at certain inopportune moments, and pop open at others. Dixon and I had become proficient in pretending we saw nothing embarrassing in those moments. But right now, I had no desire to endure his unwanted assistance. Not until I had some idea what was going on, myself.

Luckily, there was a promotional doorstop in my pocket. Little did I realize when I picked it up it would come in handy so soon. I jammed it under the door and turned back to the mirror. My skin felt tight, as if I’d fallen asleep in the sun—or come too close to the charcoal grill. It was a disturbing sensation. A combination of sensitivity, itchiness…even pain.

Through the door, Dixon said, “Maybe we should ask Uncle Fonzo’s lady friend.”

Last summer, Dixon’s uncle nearly lost a hand to a particularly insidious curse. Obviously, he could never disclose to a Handless what had actually happened. But Fonzo had a way of landing on his feet. He’d somehow wound up with a doctor credulous enough to believe his patched-together explanation of how he’d broken his finger—possibly because he couched his story in a ridiculous amount of flattery and flirtation. Not only did he heal well enough to hold his quill again, but he’d ended up on extremely friendly terms with Dr. Glenda Slaughter.

It galled me to ask anyone for favors. Even Dixon’s family…despite the fact that he insisted none of them were keeping score. But Fonzo Penn had nearly lost a limb to his own poor judgment, and since I’d played a part in breaking the curse, I couldn’t help but think he owed me.

Not that I was keeping score either.

Not exactly.

But I would concede to have him call his “lady friend” and see what she had to say.

Dixon happily relayed the request, while I lingered where I was until I heard the downstairs doorbell ring—not the doorbell itself, but our cockatoo’s echo of the sound. Meringue has very sharp hearing, and she insists on repeating every bell, buzzer or chime.

When I finally tried to emerge from the bathroom, Dixon was standing directly outside the door with a long purple scarf in his hands. “Just in case you wanted to wrap up. I thought you might be feeling a tad bit self-conscious. Not that you have any reason to be. A sudden and startling medical condition is nothing to be ashamed of—”

“I’m fine,” I snapped, and squeezed past while he made no effort whatsoever to make room for me. Once I muscled by, he followed me step for step, as if the friction of my passing had created an electromagnetic pull that dragged him along behind.

I made my way downstairs to the sound of Dixon listing all the reasons a person might have to be legitimately embarrassed, from belching in public to “butt-dialing,” and stepped into the living room of Fonzo Penn and his daughter, Sabina.

If these two shared a philosophy about their home decor, it could be summarized as, Still good! All of their furniture had been in the family as long as I’d been alive. Many of the pieces had seen prior owners—usually several. And all of them were either faded, sagging, or missing important parts such as tops, bottoms or legs. A Spellcrafter and his money are not easily parted, and so they made do. Sheets were thrown over the worn upholstery, tables were leveled with discarded magazines, and the spring-laden “davenport” was approached with the caution it deserved.

Currently, the davenport was occupied by Sabina, sprawled there in ripped jeans, tattered T-shirt and worn combat boots, with her body expertly fitted around the most obtrusive lumps and jabs as she scrolled around her phone. A few weeks ago, she’d dyed the tips of her bleach-blonde hair acid green, but the color had faded to a gentle pastel and the black roots were coming in.

Fonzo was dressed in a shirt that still had most of its buttons. His dark hair was slicked back from his high widow’s peak. He reeked of aftershave that was nearly pleasant, and his salt-and-pepper stubble was already coming back in. And standing in the circle of his arms was the inimitable Dr. Slaughter.

While Fonzo did enjoy a certain status as the Hand of the Penn family, this status carried no weight whatsoever among the Handless. No one quite understood how he’d managed to get so lucky as to land himself an emergency room doctor—especially one like Glenda. She was a dozen years younger than him, fit and attractive, and she earned more money than the entire Penn family combined.

It would be highly illegal, not to mention unethical, for Fonzo to have ensnared her with a bit of Spellcraft. Not that I would put it past him. But I did know for a fact that when the two of them met, he was unable to hold a pen.

Glenda had long, wavy hair, ash blonde, with a tendency toward corkscrew curls—which she ironed flat more often than not. But she was fresh from the hospital tonight in her navy scrubs and sensible shoes, and springy blonde tendrils had worked themselves free from her polka dot scrunchie.

Someone had apparently filled the doctor in on my “condition,” as her gaze went immediately to me. She made a pouty face and said, “Who’s got a boo-boo?”

Did I mention her most loyal patients were children?

I have never been comfortable in the face of sympathy. Already, the urge to retreat upstairs was overwhelming. But Dixon had planted himself firmly in the doorway behind me, and Glenda was descending on me with great purpose. “Don’t worry, this isn’t gonna hurt. I promise, I’ll only look with my eyes.”

“I am not worried,” I said, affronted.

Glenda pulled a red lollipop from her pocket and waved it under my nose. “Then have a seat. And once we’re done, someone gets a cherry sucker!”

I rolled my eyes as Sabina moved her feet to make room for me beside her. With seemingly the whole room waiting for me to assume the position, I sat. Once Glenda took my temperature and my pulse, she slipped on a pair of glasses with magnifying lenses that made her eyes look comically large, then pulled out a penlight.

It was uncomfortable to endure all the scrutiny. Both from Glenda, with her bright light and cartoonish eyes, and from the Penn family with their unabashed curiosity. One may gain much support from being part of such a close-knit clan…but it comes with a cost: privacy.

I forced myself not to squirm.

“That’s definitely quite an owie,” she said.

I narrowed my eyes. “Is that your clinical assessment?”

“Things like this are usually diet-related. Think about anything you’ve eaten lately that’s out of the ordinary.”

I had grazed through many samples at Shop the Bay. But so had Dixon. Everything but the brownie. But I refused to believe I’d suddenly developed an allergy to such things. Allergies were afflictions of the weak. Perhaps the brownies were tainted. “Are you gonna prescribe a salve?” Dixon asked. “Or maybe a lotion? A balm? Ooh, I know, how about an unguent?”

Glenda said, “When you’ve known as many pharmaceutical reps as I have, you wouldn’t be so quick to dash off a prescription. So many unwanted side effects! You’re better off going with a natural approach.” My doubt must have shown in my expression, because she added, “Not only is my remedy safer—it’s a lot cheaper, too.”

“Cheap is good,” Fonzo said.

Glenda grabbed a purse from the sideboard and started rummaging through it. “In fact, I’ve got what you need right here. Lucky for you I was too busy sewing back in a severed tongue to eat lunch!” With a flourish, she pulled out….

A carton of plain yogurt.

“That’s it?” I said. “Eat yogurt?”

“No, silly. Put it on your rash.”

“You’re joking.”

“I can help you apply it,” Dixon said flirtatiously. “Maybe it’ll even be fun.”

Glenda said, “Yogurt has natural anti-yeast properties. It’s packed with probiotics.”

Did we have any proof that Glenda was an actual doctor? Maybe she was just some middle-aged woman Fonzo picked up at the pancake house who happened to be wearing scrubs. The quickest thing to do would be to agree with her, then go to the pharmacy, buy all the various creams and lotions, and bathe in them until something made the redness go away.

Glenda shoved the yogurt into my hand.

“And the candy?” I prompted.

“Actually, you’ll need to lay off the sweets until your rash calms down. There’s nothing candida likes more than sugar, and it wouldn’t hurt you to lose a few pounds. Besides, I’m sure you’re plenty sweet as it is! Don’t worry—I’ve got something even better for you than a sucker.” She dug a small green marker from her pocket—a marker clearly made for a child—then handed it to me with a big smile. “For being such a fantastic patient!”

Patient? I felt anything but.

Glenda did not notice. “And don’t worry if you make an oopsie. It washes right out. Plus, it smells like green apple—though I wouldn’t suck on it if I were you. It’s non-toxic…but even so, I’m told these things don’t taste nearly as good as they smell.”

While Fonzo lured Glenda into the kitchen with promises of vegetarian take-and-bake pizza, Dixon and Sabina whispered together at the opposite end of the davenport. I presumed they were making fun of me—or perhaps scheming to part me from my green marker—so I was surprised to find the two of them looking uncharacteristically serious.

Sabina craned her neck to ensure her father and Glenda were out of earshot, then crooked a finger in my direction. “C’mere, Yuri, lemme get a closer look.”

She put her phone in flashlight mode and held it up to my face. Once I was through seeing spots, I noted that both she and her cousin seemed alarmingly concerned. “What is it?” I asked.

Dixon double-checked that Glenda would not overhear him, lowered his voice dramatically, and said, “There’s a glimmer and a shimmer where there shouldn’t be, Yuri. It’s not yeasties causing your rash—it’s Spellcraft!”

3

Dixon

We hurried upstairs to our apartment—Yuri, Sabina and I—to try and figure out what to do. If Yuri’s rosy-cheeked affliction was a result of Spellcraft, you’d think we would be uniquely qualified to Craft it away. But Spellcraft has a funny way of manifesting in the human body, and results can be unpredictable at best. Legally speaking, Spellcraft shops will get in a lot of trouble for dispensing anything that even remotely smacks of medical treatment. And clinically speaking, Spellcraft cures have proven to be about as effective as a placebo.

Those of us in the Craft don’t take much stock in the evaluations of the Handless, though, so it’s not uncommon for us to Craft our own home remedies. But in this instance? With a malady caused by Spellcraft to begin with? Anything we Crafted would be just as likely to “set” the spell as to cure it. Our only hope was to sniff out the original spell and Uncraft it.

“We’ll need to retrace our steps,” I said.

Sabina asked, “Where’s the yogurt?”

I pulled out a sheet of paper to start a list, and wrote Our Steps across the top with only a moderate amount of flourishing. “Okay. What’s the last thing we did before the flushing started?”

Yuri was too distracted to answer, with Sabina circling him like a persistent gnat while he shielded the yogurt from her as best he could. “Come on, Yuri,” she taunted. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Yuri?” I prompted. “Our steps?”

Sabina made a fruitless grab at the yogurt—which also contained no fruit, being as it was plain. And who the heck eats plain yogurt straight from the carton, anyway?

Sabina dodged around Yuri and made another grab, but came away empty-handed. She might be quick, but Yuri had a much longer reach. “Sabinochka….”

“What, are you afraid of a little yogurt?”

She just wanted to see Yuri with yogurt on his face (and we all knew it) so I took pity on him and did my best to bring us all back to the topic at hand. “Working backward, the last place we came into contact with when the spots showed up was the parking lot. So, think back. It was a little congested getting out of the lot. Did you make any Russian gestures you shouldn’t have at an out-of-town Spellcrafter?”

Yuri held the yogurt aloft like a burly, shaven-headed Statue of Liberty and said, “It wasn’t the parking lot—it was the brownie.”

He seemed awfully sure about that—and, thinking it all through, it did make a certain amount of sense, since he’d had a brownie, I hadn’t, he broke out, and I didn’t. So much for my list. But who says you can’t have a list of one? I wrote the word brownie nice and big, and underlined it with an ornate swoop.

“Lots of people ate those brownies,” I said. “But Dr. Slaughter didn’t mention her ER experiencing a big rash of rashes. Then again, Spellcrafters seem more sensitive to Craft-related things than Handless…and any other Scriveners who might’ve been at the expo aren’t very likely to consult a Handless doctor.”

As I puzzled things through, Yuri set the yogurt on the highest kitchen shelf. Out of Sabina’s reach…but not Meringue’s. The cockatoo fluttered down from the attic beams to pick at the foil top of the yogurt. But since she doesn’t have fingers or hands, she’s not what you’d call coordinated, and pretty soon the yogurt was face-down on the card table. Yuri gave an exasperated sniff, grabbed a sponge, and started cleaning it up with a great deal of excess force. Sabina watched wistfully as the yogurt went down the drain, muttering, “You could have at least given it a try.”

But I was still looking at my list, and making an effort to sort out what it might mean. “So, was someone tinkering with the brownies to make them taste better? They were awfully popular.”

Yuri gave the sponge a final wring, then nudged Meringue off the dish drainer and onto his finger while the bird chuckled to herself. He said, “Why would they go through the trouble and expense? Would it not be much cheaper to use good quality ingredients?”

True. Craftings didn’t come cheap. I stroked my chin thoughtfully. “Maybe they wanted an extra boost for the expo.”

“Or…” Sabina said dramatically, “maybe it was sabotage.”

As soon as my cousin uttered the word sabotage, I knew exactly who was to blame!

***

Bright and early the next morning, the three of us set off on a reconnaissance mission to Herb’s Herbs and Veggies. Technically, I should have been working on a Recrafting project, but as a freelancer, it was my prerogative to put off the boring jobs and focus on the fun tasks. At least until my clients started threatening to stop payment on their checks. And technically, Sabina was supposed to be at work too, minding the shop at Practical Penn. But those were the perks of working in a family business—no one was particularly surprised at a random and vaguely explained absence.

“You’re looking awfully eager,” my cousin said as we piled into the truck. “There must be a disguise involved.”

Another thing about family. They tend know you awfully darn well. “I can’t just go in bare-faced. Back at the expo, I talked to Herb for a pretty long stretch—or maybe he talked to me—whichever was the case, he’d recognize me in a heartbeat.” I plucked my latest disguise from my pocket and gave it a good shake.

“Is that a wig?” Sabina asked.

“Even better.” I looped the elastic around my ears and pulled it into place. “It’s a prosthetic beard.”

Sabina frowned. “Looks more like a merkin.”

“What is merkin?” Yuri asked.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll have you know, Sabina, that this fine example of facial hair augmentation had nothing but enthusiastic five-star online reviews.” Maybe they were worded like they’d been generated by a bot with a tenuous grasp on the language, but they were glowing, nonetheless.

My cousin gave the beard the hairy eyeball. “If you wanted a full beard, all you had to do was skip shaving for a few days.”

“We don’t have a few days.” I gesticulated toward Yuri. “Just look at how red he is.”

“Should’ve put that yogurt on it,” Sabina said, while Yuri ignored both of us, or at least pretended to. But that only made it easier for Sabina to scrutinize him. “Wow, you’re more flushed than the toilet at a laxative factory.”

When she tried to prod his affliction, Yuri broke down and batted her finger away. “Leave it alone.”

Not only were Yuri’s cheeks bright and livid, but they were starting to swell. I didn’t suppose he’d take kindly to being told he looked adorable with chipmunk cheeks, though I’ll admit, it was very tempting.

“Stop staring,” Yuri said testily.

I dutifully aimed my gaze at the road ahead…though my peripheral vision is surprisingly well-developed, and Yuri’s cheeks were vivid enough to monitor even while pretending to keep my attention front and center for the remainder of the drive.

Not only was the Herb’s Herbs booth situated just across the aisle from Bruno’s Brownies back at the expo, but their shops were right next door to one another. In fact, you could sprint from one place to the other without even getting winded. I said, “No wonder Herb wants to sabotage his neighbor. Who would buy his dusty old kale chips when they could get chocolate chip brownies instead?”

Yuri was too busy scrutinizing his cheeks in the rearview to remark on my astute observation. Over the course of our short drive, his condition had become exponentially worse.

He did allow Sabina to touch it—gently, with the backs of her fingers. “Wow, you’re burning up. I’ll bet that means we’re getting close to the Crafting!”

I said, “Maybe we can use Yuri’s cheeks as a Geiger counter.”

Yuri reached across Sabina and made a gesture. “Give me the beard.”

I smoothed it down possessively. “But Herb will recognize me without it.”

“What difference does that make? Give. It. To. Me.”

There was no arguing with Yuri when he had his mind set on something—not to mention the fact that I was putty in his hands when he got all commanding—so I dutifully unlooped my ears and handed over my disguise. Which, now that I saw it on Yuri, did make me wonder if it was actually designed to be worn on the face.

We piled out of the truck and approached the store. Herb’s Herbs and Veggies was a small clapboard storefront tacked onto a flat, industrial cinderblock building. For a store that sold the food group people only ate out of duty and shame, it was doing pretty brisk business. The shop was filled with herbs and spices, chips and chutneys, pickles and preserves. Several customers roamed the store looking puzzled and somewhat lost, and the till was unmanned. A door to the back gaped open behind the counter, and it was helpfully marked Grow Room - Staff Only. There was a bunch of clamor and commotion going on behind it. “Just a second,” Herb called out frantically. “Be right out…just as soon as I—”

He was cut off by a crash and a clatter.

What luck! I’ve always found that the best way to shoehorn your way into a restricted area is to be helpful—even if it means getting shooed out the door five minutes later when it’s discovered you have no skills whatsoever. With the confidence of someone who knew exactly what he was doing, I pushed through the staff-only door and said, “How can I…help?”

The door let into a massive room thick with greenery and buzzing with fluorescent lights…but hands down, the most fascinating thing about the place was that it was raining inside. That seemed like a pretty cool trick—until I deduced that the downpour was not intentional. A skeleton of clear tubing surrounded us, and that tubing was filled with plants suspended in water. Said water was currently spraying in a dozen different directions, turning the grow room into something more like a car wash. Herb was there—tall and lanky in his tie-dyed shirt—trying to stop the biggest leaks. Not very successfully at that. Water jetted out from between his fingers, and every time he grabbed a leak, another popped up somewhere else.

“By the potting bench,” Herb called out. “Grab the duct tape.”

If anyone knows his way around a roll of duct tape, it’s Yuri. His truck is practically made of the stuff. He grabbed that tape in no time flat and yanked out a strip as long as his arm with a loud, tape-y squall. And, as always, he attempted to tear the tape off the roll cleanly by nicking the edge with his teeth. The way duct tape tears, so perfectly perpendicular, is such a profoundly satisfying thing that a person can’t help but do it with great enthusiasm. Even Yuri (who, as a rule, is cautious about showing his enthusiastic side).

Unfortunately, in addition to being flexible, durable, and satisfying to tear, duct tape can also be pretty darned sticky. So when Yuri bit into the tape, the sticky side grabbed onto the prosthetic beard. Before Yuri even realized his face had been denuded, Herb had grabbed the tape from his grasp and wound it around the leaky seam.

On the plus side, the beard really seemed to help plug the gap…even if it was somewhat startling.

“Where’d that merkin come from?” Herb demanded.

I didn’t bother to correct him, so as not to draw attention to Yuri’s already-inflamed cheeks. “Never mind that. What happened to your sprinkler?”

“This is no sprinkler! My hydroponic system is going haywire.”

The world can be incredibly random—and no doubt there were dozens of potential sources of malfunction besides Spellcraft. But despite the fact that I couldn’t see the telltale magical shimmer through all the water spraying left and right, I had a gut feeling that the impromptu shower and Yuri’s rash were somehow related.

Giving the trapped beard a wide berth, Sabina and I taped up Herb’s pipes just as fast as Yuri could rip off tape strips. Within a few minutes, we’d contained the pluming plumbing to a few stubborn drips.

Herb swabbed his face with a bandanna and gave me the once-over. “Do I know you?”

“Dixon Penn. We met back at the expo. What’s going on?”

“No idea! My system’s been water-tight since I installed it a year ago. And now this?”

“When it rains, it pours,” I couldn’t help but observe. “Who’s to say what caused it? I’m sure it could be any number of perfectly logical things. But right now, you’ve got a lot of eager customers in the shop.”

“Those aren’t customers, they’re here for a pickup. A really important pickup. Parties for Smarties—have you heard of it? Awesome charity. They encourage the poorest kids in Pinyin Bay to stay in school by sponsoring all their big events. I’ve committed major guacamole to the big springtime dance. Major guacamole. And I need to load it up right now!” As he said this, a new jet of water sprang from yet another leak. Followed by another. And another.

What luck! “Why don’t you let us handle the grow room situation while you handle your donation?”

Herb gave me a vigorous (if soggy) handshake. “I can’t thank you enough. I’ll be back just as soon as I take care of the guac.”

“No problem!” I said brightly.

“And don’t mind the pollinators,” he said as an afterthought. “The bee-door is shut right now, but a few of them always manage to get left behind.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a bee-door.”

“It’s my own invention!”

“Huh. Learn something new every day.”

“Just make sure you don’t swat the little workers. You wouldn’t want to send them into attack mode.”

“Attack…mode?”

“Thanks again!” Herb said, and sloshed out the door.

“What the heck?” Sabina cried. “This place is full of bees!”

I looked up and saw that above all the spraying water jets, the air was abuzz with honeybees. The water sounds must have camouflaged their buzzing! They didn’t seem to mind the spray. In fact, several of them had paused to sip from water droplets. While they didn’t seem aggressive...there sure were a lot of them. “Hi, little bees,” I crooned. “Don’t worry, we’re not here to swat you. Just holding down the fort till your bee-dad gets back.”

“Bee-dad?” Sabina repeated.

I shrugged. “Anyway, if you guys keep your stingers away from me, I promise to keep my hands to myself. Win-win.”

If Yuri was apprehensive about the grow room before, he was positively dismayed now. But we couldn’t just walk away without getting to the bottom of the situation. Not with his current cheekish condition. He was nipping off tape strips as fast as he could manage and wrapping up leaks as quick as they could sprout, but there were just too many seams involved. At every corner and bend there was a joint with leakage potential, and it would take every last roll of duct tape in Pinyin Bay to seal it all up.

“What would rupture a hydroponic system?” I wondered. “We’re not on a fault line…are we?”

Sabina slapped her hand over a particularly powerful spray. “Not that I know of. And there haven’t been any new explosions lately, either. Maybe a really big truck hit a pothole nearby and shook the street.”

Unlikely. The streets outside Scrivener Village were in pretty good repair.

Yuri unreeled the last strip of tape from the roll and plugged another leak, but by the time he did, his first repair had already split open. He glared at the spurting water, planted his hands on his hips, and said, “Patching holes is no use. We must turn off water at the source.”

4

Yuri

We split up, and each of us went a separate direction—right, left, and dead ahead—in search of a shutoff valve. Sabina was grumbling and Dixon was chatting with the bees, but I kept quiet and focused all my effort on finding Spellcraft. While it certainly might be some other “perfectly logical thing” at fault, I knew in my gut it was volshebstvo. Perhaps it was counter-sabotage from the baker. Or perhaps Herb’s own Crafting had backfired on him. Either way, the whole thing smacked of Spellcraft.

But how could I find it? The telltale bending of light by which I recognized a Crafting would be impossible to see among the jets of water.

I have tried to use my other senses to understand Spellcraft. Back in Russia, when I first learned of my ability, I took nothing my mentor said as fact, certain that she was manipulating me. No one helps another without the motive of somehow serving themselves. (Which was why this whole “charity” motivation of Herb’s was suspect.) Never did I think Ulyana was training me from the simple desire to see me flourish. She wanted something. To believe otherwise would be foolish.

She once told me, “A Scrivener experiences the volshebstvo through touch, through words, through language. But a Seer will grasp Spellcraft only through the image in his mind. This is an advantage. You could bring forth your ideas without having to fully understand them yourself. All that matters is that you can envision the Seen.”

Of course, I liked nothing better than to prove her wrong, and catch her in her manipulation. But Ulyana was far more cunning than I. It would be possible to paint a scene blindfolded, I decided, and spent most of an afternoon attempting to do this by way of proving her wrong. The resulting mess was a useless waste of pigment. But worst of all was her smile of satisfaction at seeing me fail.

“A Seer is nothing more than his eyes. And you are a Seer. Never forget.”

Was this so different from a Scrivener?

I have never met a blind Scrivener, but Dixon’s people are nothing if not resourceful. I would not be surprised to discover a Spellcrafter who was able to poke braille messages into Seens with the sharpened tip of his quill.

But the problem with being resourceful is that you often entertain far too many ideas at once, and Dixon was eager to abandon our search already. He dodged a spray of water, shook out his hair, and said, “I think this is a bust. Herb is no saboteur. He’s a charitable guy.”

I said, “People do what they do for reasons of their own. You cannot assume he is above sabotage just because he is free with his guacamole. The hearts of men are complicated.”

Dixon gave me a knowing look. “Indeed, they are.”

I shrugged off his look and did my best to penetrate the jets of water with my gaze. But just as the magic bends light, so does water. The whole grow room shimmered with reflection and refraction and made it impossible for me to make sense of things. I was tempted to give up and say it was no use…but then the thought occurred to me: while I sensed Spellcraft with my eyes, could the same be said for the bees?

The subtle signals of magic were impossible for me to see, but the pattern of the flying insects was not, once I attuned myself to their rhythms. Up towards the ceiling, they buzzed around the room in a seeming jumble…until I realized they were flying in concentric circles, one within another.

In the center of that circle was a post supporting the ceiling. And attached to the very top of the post was a tiny piece of paper. I could not see the light bending around it from where I stood…but I was certain it would be thrumming with volshebstvo.

“There,” I called out, pointing. Dixon mouthed the word “oh!” while Sabina’s eyes went wide. It took a bit of doing, but Dixon boosted Sabina onto my shoulders, I stood on tiptoe, and she gingerly plucked the Crafting from its seat.

“What’s it say?” Dixon asked her eagerly.

“I’m not gonna read it with a faceful of bees! Put me down first!”

I crouched down so Sabina could dismount, though now I was certain I felt the tickle of bee’s legs against my shorn scalp, and could barely restrain myself from brushing away the sensation for fear of sending them into “attack mode.”

As Dixon helped Sabina off my shoulders, he said, “We’d better find a dry spot to read it.”

Definitely so. Wetting down a Crafting can be a very effective way of setting the spell. We found a corner that was mostly shielded by the climbing leaves of an overgrown cucumber plant. I shielded Sabina with my body, and she drew out the Crafting and read.

“Leaks are sprouting everywhere. I guess we know what’s up with the hydroponics.”

“It’s a good start.” Dixon tilted his head for a better look. “Maybe we can backtrack starting with the Crafting. Do you recognize the penmanship?”

Before Sabina could decide one way or another, a new leak shot out from among the cucumbers, dousing all of us with water. She tucked the Crafting underneath her jacket and sprinted for the door.

Dixon and I were right behind her. He said, “This is a huge deal, Yuri! Herb and Bruno are both the victims of sabotage! But who’d want to run both of them out of business?” Any number of people, no doubt. Never underestimate a man’s potential for greed. “Once we can track down the Scrivener, I’m sure they’ll spill the beans. So long as we manage to convince them we’re not cutting into their territory, anyhow.”

In Russia, a Scrivener would deny his own Crafting until his dying breath. But in America, where Spellcraft was legal (though not entirely ethical)? Bragging rights would certainly be claimed, at least if the Crafting were successful. And I had yet to meet an American Scrivener who could resist telling a tale…and then embellishing it for dramatic effect.

Once away from the water, we crowded around the paper and had a look.

The Seen was painted in transparent watercolors. Quick strokes, layered in an interesting way. Mostly greens. Abstract foliage. I would recognize the style, had I seen it before, but I had not. Unlike Scriveners—who were more like a large, extended family—Seers were aberrations. Wild cards who kept to themselves. And aside from Rufus Clahd, the Seer at the family Spellcraft shop, I was acquainted with no others in the city like me.

Sabina turned the paper this way and that. “Do you recognize the writing? Seems to me I’ve seen that letter-R before. And maybe the S. Then again, there’s only so many ways to make an S.”

“It’s old-school penmanship,” Dixon decided.

I tried to understand how he determined such a thing. Scribing was generally done longhand and it all looked traditional to me. But as I saw technique within paint strokes, he saw nuance in handwriting.

“Maybe my parents would recognize it,” Dixon said.

“Or my dad,” said Sabina, “with all his connections.”

Fonzo was the Hand of the Penn family. Even after all this time under Fonzo’s roof, I was still unclear what the Hand must actually do. Evasiveness was Fonzo’s default setting, and his explanation of his duties took vagueness to an entirely new level. Perhaps the title of Hand was mostly tradition. After all, his family managed without him for a year while he floundered around trying to rid himself of a curse. Or perhaps the family had simply succeeded in covering for his neglect. Either way, Fonzo was the point person for the Penn family in the local circuit. He would be the most acquainted with Pinyin Bay’s Spellcrafters. Especially the elder generations.

“Can you Uncraft it?” Sabina asked Dixon.

“It looks a little damp. I’d better not try until it’s totally dry—hey, that rhymes!”

If we could not fix the Spellcraft, we would need a mundane solution. I found Herb in the loading dock hefting the last cartons of guacamole into the back of a delivery van. “Where is water valve?” I asked.

“We can’t turn off the water! My poor seedlings won’t stand a chance!”

“It’s up to you,” I said, shrugging. “But you can hardly fix the seams while water is spraying through them.”

Herb’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “It’s just that my most stubborn crops finally took root—and they were doing so well!” He headed toward a side door and motioned for me to follow. It opened into the far end of the grow room. Water jetted in a dozen directions, like our shower head did when it was clogged with lime.

The plants did not seem bothered by the situation. They hung from their hydroponic tubes and vats, leafy and vigorous and green. Water beaded on the leaves, which created their own rivulets. The effect was like walking through a rainforest during a monsoon—if that rainforest was made up of parsley, broccoli and kale.

We pushed through the greenery as carefully as possible, until finally we reached the far side of the grow room.

“Zucchini,” Herb told me, pointing to an intimidating wall of massive, vining plants. “They’re the opposite of fussy. Very prolific. Fast-growing, too. In fact, you’ve got to be careful not to let them get away from you. Left to their own devices, they’ll get as big as a baseball…bat.”

He had been parting the wet greenery as he spoke, but on the last word, he froze in shock. I pushed aside a cluster of leaves and followed his gaze. On the concrete floor lay a zucchini so monstrous it looked more like a prop from a horror movie…and it had wedged itself so firmly into the space below the hydroponic tubing it might take a chainsaw to get it out.

Good thing there were two of us. It took me pushing and Herb pulling to finally free the absurd vegetable. And once we did, we saw that it had grown on top of the main water inlet, where over time, the weight of it had pushed the valve past its normal setting.

Herb turned the valve down a notch, and within moments, the jetting water spray slowed to a manageable drip. “If that don’t beat all! Have you ever seen anything like it?”

I refrained from telling him about the greenhouse full of explosive tomatoes I’d encountered in Taco Town. It was bad for business to let the Handless know how common it was for Spellcraft to go berserk.

“I’ll tell you what,” Herb said. “Zucchini are sneaky little buggers. Who knows how long that would’ve gone unnoticed if you hadn’t come along?” He thrust the zucchini into my arms. I staggered a bit under its weight. “You take it. It’s the least I can do.”

Nobody I knew would have the faintest idea how to cook such a vegetable, and the only one under our roof likely to eat it was Meringue. Even she could be surprisingly finicky. “You don’t need to thank me.”

“No problem at all. In fact…I insist.”

5

Dixon

While Yuri kept Herb busy, Sabina and I headed for the restroom at the back of the store. It was a unisex affair, just a single small room with pictures of veggies on the wall. The images were vintage scientific illustrations showing the cross sections of corn, peppers and eggplant. While I’ve never encountered a Seen that was quite so realistic, I checked for the sparkle of Spellcraft and the presence of Scribings anyway. Luckily, the pictures were nothing more than pictures.

Too many instances of Spellcraft in close proximity can lead to unexpected results. That’s why we had so many Scriveners working at Practical Penn—to keep everything separate. But once we assured ourselves we were in a Spellcraft-free zone, Sabina pulled out the soggy Crafting and gave it a blast of warm air from the hand dryer while I puzzled through the best way to Uncraft it.

Leaks are sprouting everywhere. Ample room to turn it into a couplet, plus lots of good potential rhymes. But what? I could claim the sabotage was unfair…but was it really? For all I knew, it was retaliation for making the brownies radioactive. It gave us a scare—and that was the truth—but the actual timeline of Spellcraft can be a little slippery. I didn’t want to encourage things to go from startling to horrific.

Scriveners need to be really careful about any word with a double meaning. We’ve all been told the cautionary tale of the Scrivener who tried to Craft himself some extra luck at the craps table and keeled over dead. Now that I’ve had more direct Crafting experience myself, I’m pretty sure the story had been purely fabrication. Spellcraft would never mess up the word die…not if craps was also an option. Still, the story was impossible to forget. “I wonder if I could stop the leaks by saying it was all the system could bear,” I told Sabina. “But homonyms are so tricky. What if that line made all the crops stop bearing?”

Sabina gave me a look. “You’re missing the obvious issue.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t want a grizzly bear to shamble through the door!”

She had a point. And while any bear meandering through the place should wander off once we tore up the Uncrafted spell, it wasn’t wise to push our luck.

“Maybe I could add something about glare…though that’s got more than one meaning, too.”

“Leaks are sprouting everywhere.” Sabina considered the Crafting. “Why don’t you just add a few letters to change the word are to aren’t?”

“Not the most elegant solution,” I said loftily. “But I suppose it would work.” I might be crazy about my cousin…but I didn’t want her to start elbowing in on my Uncrafting specialty.

I checked the paper. Totally dry. Spellcraft was always done on the best paper available, and the thick cotton rag was able to withstand a lot of abuse. In this case, though, the watercolor Seen was looking kind of spotty. There were no telltale sparkles that I could see, and it was quite possible the Spellcraft had done its work and was already long gone. If that were the case, I supposed it couldn’t hurt to add those extra few letters. And as a bonus, if it failed, I could always blame Sabina.

I flipped down the plastic changing table, set my messenger bag on top (doing my best not to think about any traces of baby poop it might come into contact with) and pulled out my pen and ink. Despite the fact that I was working on a changing table—and despite the fact that the paper in my hand might be little more now than a fancy piece of calligraphy—I did my best to center myself and focus on the work. Two letters and a stroke of punctuation. Such a small change, but one that would totally reverse the meaning.

I took a deep breath, inked my quill, and set pen to paper. There was space enough between the words to add letters. Not pretty letters, by any stretch of the imagination. But legible enough to re-route the Spellcraft, if there was any left in the Crafting to divert.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether it’s that old tingle I feel in my inking hand, or just nerves. Especially when I’m so excited! But once I changed are to aren’t, I held my breath and listened. Unfortunately, judging by the distant hiss of water and the gurgle of the drains, the grow room was still functioning as an impromptu sprinkler system.

I was just about to remark that we’d given it our best shot, pack it all in, and start calling around for a plumber, when my arm gave a jolt as if I’d just whacked my funny bone. I re-read the Crafting and the follow-up line sprang into my head, fully formed and perfect. I dipped my quill again…and I Scribed.

Leaks aren’t sprouting everywhere

In fact, things are in good repair

Sabina and I both shivered as the Spellcraft raised goosebumps on our goosebumps. The distant hiss of water went silent, and a moment later, the drain stopped its gurgling.

“Quick,” I told my cousin. “Set the spell.” With a decisive nod, she tore the Crafting in half. I was about to suggest flushing it to a watery grave, but Sabina tucked away the two halves of the spent spell in her jacket. “Good thinking, Sabina. We can track down the handwriting.”

“I thought we might want to shove it in someone’s face later when we make our big accusation. But that works too.”

We packed up and emerged from the restroom just as Yuri stepped through the grow room door carrying something that looked like a cross between a pool noodle and a mutant pickle. “What do you intend to do with that?” I said.

Sabina didn’t miss a beat. “Gross! I don’t want to hear about your sex life.”

“Sex life? I was worried he’d try to cook it up for dinner!”

My cousin has lots of opinions…and apparently, her opinionated worldview extended to this particular vegetable. “Zucchinis are good for one thing, and one thing only: leaving on other people’s doorsteps.”

That must not have been a popular pastime in Russia. Yuri gave her the side-eye and hauled the ginormous veggie toward the truck, where he pitched it unceremoniously into the pickup bed. The truck listed a bit to one side. “We will figure out how to get rid of it later. Right now, we need to check the bakery for Spellcraft.”

I’d thought Yuri’s cheeks looked painful before, but they were even redder and spottier now, and twice as swollen. Yuri’s got an iron-clad constitution. One time he did come down with a case of the stomach flu—which was really weird, since we’d had dinner at my folks’ house, and no one else there was affected—but other than that, nothing can lay him low.

We hurried over to the bakery, where we spread out to find the best way in. I tried the office, and found the door open—what luck! Bruno’s assistant Bernadette was there, sorting through a teetering pile of orders. She spared me a quick glance and said, “If you’re here for the job fair, you’ve come on the wrong day. We’re not taking any applications until tomorrow.”

Uncle Fonzo always says that anyone who takes “no” for an answer deserves exactly what they get. I wouldn’t say that philosophy is entirely bulletproof, as it’s earned my uncle his fair share of angry tirades. Luckily, he’s charming enough that most folks don’t stay mad at him for long.

I did my best to channel his charming demeanor…which may or may not have involved me shamelessly batting my eyelashes. “Are you sure we can’t just get a head start on that job application? After all, don’t you want your new hire to be a real go-getter?”

She handed us a card with the job fair particulars. “We just need good bakers. That’s all.”

My feet were already backing away from the brownie shop in strategic retreat, because no way would I be able to pass myself off as a baker without a thorough crash-course in the subject. The last time I tried to bake anything from scratch, we ended up having to replace the toaster oven.

I bid Bernadette my best charming goodbye, then caught up with Yuri and Sabina in the truck. “If there’s any chance of getting a foot in the door, we’ll need to disguise that foot as a baker.”

Sabina went puzzled. “Just the foot, or…?”

I rolled my eyes. “The whole body. Maybe my mother can give us a few pointers. Enough nomenclature to skate through a job interview.”

“Your mother is a very busy woman,” said Yuri.

Sabina shifted uneasily. “If she wasn’t before, she will be now that I skipped work.”

Yuri said, “We know a talented baker who never seems to be busy. And he lives not five minutes from here.” He cut his eyes to the railroad tracks that separated the cut-rate shopping district from Scrivener Village, and I bit back a groan. Or I gave it my best shot, anyhow…though a sound of annoyance might have slipped out.

“Okay,” Sabina declared, “I give up. Who in the heck are you two talking about?”

Someone who was strikingly good-looking and effortlessly cool.

Someone who had impeccable penmanship with gorgeous flourishes.

And someone who—darn it all—made shortbread that literally melted in your mouth.

My age-old nemesis…. “Vano Shirque.”

6

“Vano Shirque?” my cousin repeated. “The time in high school when you spent every last cent of your birthday money on hair goop trying to imitate some other kid’s hair, and it turned out he’d just slept on it funny…that Vano Shirque?”

I crossed my arms and muttered, “Why, do you know someone else by that name?”

“Don’t be so sensitive, Dixon, no one blamed you for trying. His hair did look pretty cool.”

Understatement of the year. Vano Shirque was the poster child for luck. Usually. Except for the time his father drowned in the Ganges and his mother was trampled by an elephant. Other than that, he’s led a phenomenally charmed life.

As much as it would pain me to ask Vano for a favor, he truly was the least busy guy we knew. Plus, the fact that he was so good at everything he put his hand to would hopefully work to our advantage. Even if it did gall me.

We headed over to Scrivener Village, where half the streets were blocked off for construction and we nearly lost a tire to a missing manhole cover, but luckily, we found a parking spot around the block from Vano’s apartment. It had very nearly been my apartment, but Vano was quicker on the draw and got to the lease before I did. And while I’d never aspired to live in a place where all the walls were created from surplus doors, maybe I would’ve considered it—had I realized such an apartment actually existed.

“We don’t even know that Vano’s home,” I complained…though I made no move to text him.

We rounded the corner, and Yuri pointed to Vano’s second-story window, where the silhouettes of two figures were faintly visible behind the curtain—one tall and Vano-like, and the other much shorter and vaguely stooped. Vano’s great-grandmother was the head of the Pinyin Bay Spellcraft circuit, and if anyone could identify the Scrivener of the leaky Crafting, she could. So I supposed it was in my best interest to plaster an ingratiating smile on my face and ask them for help….

Though I didn’t have to like it.

There seemed to be some kind of commotion going on in front of the building, though it wouldn’t be Scrivener Village if a commotion wasn’t going on somewhere. This particular commotion consisted of a woman having conniptions at Vano’s front door.

At first I took her for your typical middle-aged businesswoman, given the fact that she was wearing a suit. But when I got a better look at her, I realized her suit was a little too clingy, her fingernails were press-on, and her designer bag screamed “knockoff.” She jingled with jewelry, from the glittering stacks of bracelets on each wrist to the oversized earrings that swung like giant pendulums. And though her hair was a brassy blonde, her complexion was the same coffee-with-cream as everyone else who’s had a magical quill fall from the sky.

Sabina saw her at the same time as I did and ducked behind the nearest Volkswagen. She hissed, “What on earth is Venus Monger doing here?”

I said, “Presumably she lives in the neighborhood.” After all, most Pinyin Bay Scriveners did. I crouched down by Sabina, and Yuri did his best to follow suit…though we definitely should have picked a bigger car if we’d hoped to keep Yuri out of sight. “So, why are we hiding?”

Sabina said, “Because she’s always got some cockamamie money-making scheme in the works. Remember when my dad bought that timeshare in Des Moines?”

“How could I forget? Dullest vacation ever.”

“Well, who do you think talked him into it? One look at her plunging neckline and he was putty in her hands.” That made a lot of sense. Uncle Fonzo did have a real weakness for the ladies. “If Venus gets a load of us, we’ll be the ones to get stuck listening to whatever crazy sales pitch is on her agenda!”

My cousin takes particular umbrage to a pushy salesperson, and before I knew it, she was halfway down the nearest alley in her bid to get away. Yuri caught me by the arm and tugged me along behind her. Did I mention he has a really impressive stride? And I can’t say I was too disappointed we’d need to come up with a plan B after all—one that didn’t involve begging favors from Vano Shirque.

Sabina looped around to the rear of the building and pulled out a slender metal nail file. Everyone knows how annoying a hangnail can be, but even so, it was an odd time for a manicure. I was about to say as much when my cousin stepped up to the back door, thrust the nail file into the lock, gave it a jiggle, and popped open the door.

“Impressive,” Yuri said.

Sabina shrugged modestly. “Persistence really does open all doors. But in the absence of a handy Crafting, a little lock-picking knowledge doesn’t hurt, either.”

As we trooped upstairs, I said, “This is a terrible idea. Vano’s obviously busy visiting with his Nana—”

“His Nana?” Sabina chortled.

“—and no one wants to annoy the head of their circuit by being a buttinski.”

Apparently, no one was moved by my totally valid argument. Yuri, I could excuse. His rash was making him do desperate things. Plus, he didn’t grow up in the Craft, so he must not have understood how important it was to avoid pestering Morticia Shirque. As for my cousin, though? I’ll bet she was just hoping for another opportunity to show off her B&E skills.

Sabina was in the lead. She marched up to Vano’s door—the front door to his apartment, which more-or-less worked, unlike the other doors, which were repurposed as various structural elements—and brandished her impromptu lock-pick. But before she could jam it in the lock, the door swung open, and there was Vano, in all his carelessly tousled glory.

Hold on. Tousled…or frazzled?

“You’re not Venus Monger,” he said to Sabina.

“Well, duh!” My cousin loves nothing better than landing a well-deserved duh. “But you should definitely let us in, just in case Venus manages to slip into the building behind us.”

With a hasty glance up and down the hallway, Vano ushered the three of us inside. Immediately, I sought out his great-grandmother, brimming with apologies, since I’m told courtesy goes a long way with Morticia. But in the front window where I’d seen her standing with Vano, instead I found a coat rack and a broom with an old afghan thrown over the top. “It’s a decoy,” Vano said. “While that pushy woman was yelling up at the front window, I was planning to slip out the back.”

“Why are you hiding from her?” I asked. “Did she try to sell you a timeshare?”

“She’s trying to take me out on a date.”

Yikes. Venus might be bodacious, but she was old enough to be Vano’s mother. And then some.

Vano ran a hand through his hair. It looked even more fetchingly disheveled. Of course. “Ever since Nana got out of the hospital, the vultures have been circling.”

“That’s awfully morbid,” I said. “I thought your Nana made a full recovery.”

“She did! They’re not circling her, they’re circling me. Because if Nana decides to retire after her health scare….”

Sabina looked up in surprise from a wall-door she’d been prodding at with her nail file. “Then you’ll be the Head.”

But that was crazy-talk. The head of circuit is a venerable position, and Vano was my age! “How is that possible? There’s no one between Nana and you? Aunts, uncles, grandparents?”

“A few cousins down by St. Louis. But even though they’re older, they don’t live in Pinyin Bay, so the responsibility would fall to me.”

I vaguely remembered a residency requirement among all the various rules and regulations. The path of Scrivener succession is convoluted…and boring. Waaay boring. Oh, they tried to drill it all into my head in Scrivener lessons, but obviously I paid more attention to penciling flourishes onto my desk than the mechanics of position and rank within the Spellcraft community. Morticia Shirque had been the head of our circuit approximately forever—in fact, she presided over my grandparents’ Quilling Ceremonies—so I’d never pictured one of my contemporaries taking her place.

Yuri edged into the room, giving the coat rack and broom a wide berth. He’s not a fan of anything person-shaped that isn’t actually a person. “If your grandmother is not here, then where is she?”

“She finally won her mansion back from the Loveland Corporation. The red tape was brutal and they dragged out the case for months. But in the end, it was no match for the quill.”

Yuri cast a look at a patchwork of shutters that made up the lounge’s wainscoting. “Then why are you here, and not back in the mansion?”

Vano shook his head sadly. “It’s Nana’s idea. She’s under the weird impression that I need a ‘bachelor pad.’”

Outside, Venus called up, “Not up for zip-lining? How about glow-in-the-dark putt putt? I hear it’s very romantic!”

Vano sighed. “Unfortunately, living here means everyone in Scrivener Village can track my comings and goings.” He peeked out through the window blinds and winced. “Including Venus.”

“I’ve got an idea,” I said, hoping to make it sound like I’d be doing him a favor, and not the other way around. “We’ll make a huddle around you, smuggle you out, and help you escape to your Nana’s mansion. And once we’re there…you can invite us into that crazy kitchen full of wooden spoons and teach us how to make brownies. Won’t that be fun?”

“I suppose I’ll be harder to spot if I hide behind Yuri. Let’s go.”

I’ll say one thing for Vano—he was a pretty good sport about riding in the bed of the truck. We threw a tarp over him (just in case any sharp-eyed, eligible Scrivener ladies were out and about) then made for the supermarket in the Handless part of town. There, we grabbed some baking supplies—and a yogurt. Because Yuri was looking beyond miserable, though I’d never be so insensitive as to mention it. Whether he believed that I was actually craving a plain, sour yogurt was anyone’s guess.

As reluctant as I’d been to enlist Vano’s help, he knew exactly what to buy for our baking lesson without needing to consult a recipe. It seemed awfully suspicious, though, that brownies contained no brownie mix whatsoever.

The last time we’d seen Shirque Mansion, it had been locked up tight…but not anymore. Ask me if I’m a traditional guy and I’ll deny it up and down. I prefer to think of myself as a trendsetter and a go-getter. But pulling up the fancy circular drive and seeing the windows no longer boarded up and the big padlocks all gone? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved the weird old mansion hadn’t been lost after all.

After his sojourn in the back of the truck, Vano was, of course, no worse for wear. But he did seem unduly impressed by the zucchini. “That’s a real beauty—and so early in the season. Too bad the state fair is so far off. It’ll be mush by the time judging rolls around.”

Yuri did not share his enthusiasm. “You want the squash? Take it.”

Vano was delighted…or as delighted as he tends to get, which looks more like a fetchingly mysterious half-smile than a full-blown expression of joy.

Yuri hefted the monster zucchini and we headed for the mansion. Morticia wasn’t home, but Vano had a key (much to Sabina’s disappointment). The inside was a lot more open and expansive without the boards on the windows, though it was still a weird mishmash of styles. Shirque Mansion was a showcase home—in the literal sense. Morticia’s father had been a builder who used his own house to demonstrate all the cutting-edge styles and finishes he offered. And while the Shirques no longer needed to live in a life-sized catalog, it would take a lot of money to re-fit Shirque Mansion as a single, cohesive house.

Money they didn’t really seem to have.

Furniture was dusty, wallpaper was peeling and carpets were faded. Other than the electricity and phone lines, things hadn’t been updated in nearly a century. And even the electricity looked somewhat dubious in spots. But as long as the oven worked, we’d be in business.

Vano parked the zucchini in the corner, cleared clutter from the kitchen table, and set up each of us with measuring cups, spoons, and a mixing bowl. As he demonstrated how to weigh the flour, he said, “In some ways, baking is a lot like Spellcraft. Something between an art and a science. The ingredients are like words—you need to choose the right ones and treat them with respect. But there’s room for creativity too.”

He pulled something off a dusty spice rack, gave it a sniff, and added a pinch of it to his bowl.

“And then there’s the part where you give over to the process and take your hands off the batter. Too much beating makes the flour go tough. And you can’t close the oven door without letting go of the pan.”

Yuri pressed a damp kitchen towel to his cheek. “But the stakes are a lot higher with Spellcraft.”

“True,” Vano agreed. “Maybe Spellcraft is more like baking without a recipe—with a bunch of un-labeled ingredients, in an oven with a broken thermometer.” He considered the metaphor. “Frankly, it’s a real wonder Spellcraft works at all.”

Vano was a patient instructor—which was no surprise, since he was as unflappable as the wings of a taxidermy seagull. (To be fair, no one at the nature center told me they weren’t supposed to move. And once they wired them back on, you could hardly tell the difference.) I had no idea baking was so particular. It’s not enough to fill the measuring cup—you need to level it off, and sometimes you “pack” it, sometimes you don’t. Teaspoons and tablespoons? Apparently not synonymous. Stir, but don’t overstir. And bottled vanilla tastes nowhere as good as it smells.

Despite learning the technique in his second language, Yuri seemed the most competent. Not a surprise. He’s the only one who can make toast without setting off the smoke alarms. But I did my very best to pay attention—to mind my big T’s and my little t’s—and by the time I reached the end of my recipe, I was happy to find my batter looked just like everyone else’s.

Everyone but Sabina, who had some kind of chunky, watery, marbled effect going on, despite the fact that Vano did everything in his power to assist, right down to helping her stir the bowl.

Once everything was mixed, we popped our pans into the oven. The range at Uncle Fonzo’s house has a window in the door. It’s small and grimy and nearly impossible to see through, but it’s a window nonetheless. The range in Shirque Mansion was a big, fancy cast iron affair that belonged on the set of a historical movie where every character had a slightly different British accent. It was easily large enough to hold all four pans—but it had no window.

Vano noticed me hovering around the oven door. “Don’t open it, you’ll just let in cold air. You can tell when they’re close to done by the way they smell.”

Maybe. With his brownies. But he didn’t account for the other three pans alongside his. I doubted his wisdom. At least I did, until the weird old kitchen filled with the enticing smell of chocolate. Chocolate, and…pizza?

Vano glanced at the dusty spice rack. Two of the jars had smudges of shine on them where they’d been recently handled. His—the cinnamon. And the other….

He plucked it from the rack and said, “Who added oregano?”

Sabina looked annoyed. “I thought it was mint.” Yuri gave her an exasperated look, to which she said, “What? You know how much I love mint-chocolate-chip anything.”

“You never know,” I told her. “Maybe it’ll be an awesome flavor combo!”

Before my cousin could call me out on my bald-faced lie, we were interrupted by the crunch of tires on the gravel drive as the head of our circuit pulled up to the mansion in her slightly rusted Rolls Royce.

What luck! If anyone would be able to identify the handwriting on the Crafting we found at Herb’s, it was Vano’s great-grandmother. And then we could really get to the bottom of things!

7

Yuri

Morticia Shirque was the picture of a storybook witch. Her hair was long and steely gray, and she wore it in a single thick braid. Her frame was bony, her nose was hooked, and she even had a mole on her protruding chin that could double for a wart. But unlike a storybook witch, she couldn’t just wave a wand and make spells happen. She would need a quill for that, just like any other Scrivener.

Morticia hobbled into the kitchen squinting nearsightedly. “Vano? Is that you?”

“Who else would it be, Nana?”

“Someone with very strange taste in pizza toppings. Pineapple is one thing. But chocolate is simply a bridge too far.”

“It’s not pizza, Nana, it’s brownies. Uh…hopefully.” Vano went and met her with a kiss on the cheek, which was apparently enough to confirm his identity to his squinting great-grandmother. None of the other Scriveners in Pinyin Bay would ever dream of being so familiar with the head of their circuit. Meanwhile, I glanced out the window at her car to see if any pieces of mowed-down pedestrians were clinging to the grille. How she’d managed to get home in one piece was anybody’s guess.

“Excuse me, Ms. Shirque,” Dixon said bravely, “but we’ve got a Crafting here we were hoping you could identify.”

Sabina produced the torn Crafting we’d found in the hydroponics room. Morticia took it from her and squinted at it very hard. And after a long, tense moment, she handed it back and said, “It does appear to be a Crafting.”

“Erm…yes,” Dixon said as tactfully as possible, “we know. Any telling who it was that Scribed it?”

“Not without my glasses. Haven’t seen the darn things all week.”

I checked the car yet again for body parts.

“I’m great at finding glasses,” Sabina declared. “Where should we look?”

Morticia shrugged. “If I had any idea, I would have found them myself!”

And so, we looked. We searched the parlor. We searched the drawing room. We searched the conservatory. Under the unseeing eyes of a half dozen misshapen plaster statues, we combed every room that was still in use. We were just about to climb the turret when Dixon said, “That’s funny—funny-weird, I mean, not funny-ha-ha.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Smells like barbecue.”

Of course it did.

We rushed back to the kitchen only to find tendrils of smoke creeping from the oven. “Don’t open that,” Vano called out, but he was too late. Sabina was quick on her feet, and once she’s in motion, she’s impossible to stop. She heaved open the oven door and thick black smoke billowed out, filling the kitchen in a choking cloud which smelled vaguely of oregano.

As the rest of us fanned the smoke in no particular direction with any available paper—newspapers, magazines, the Crafting—Morticia shuffled in behind us. “Someone open a window before the smoke detector goes off!”

“Since when do we have smoke detectors?” Vano asked.

Morticia gave a sniff of annoyance. “The Loveland Corporation filled the place with the wretched things. I’m sure I’ve yet to find them all.”

I glanced up at the ceiling where a tiny red light blinked amid the smoke.

Vano turned to the nearest window and tugged. “It’s sticking.”

I shouldered him out of the way to do it myself, but it was no use. The sash was painted shut. I felt something creak and pulled harder, though I suspected the thing that had shifted was my own sinew and bone, not the window. And when a sheen of sweat broke out on my face, it prickled like liquid flame.

Succumbing to a rash was bad enough.

Having it happen because the volshebstvo was working against me felt like a betrayal.

There was a ceiling fan overhead, an elaborate Victorian thing with blades of filigreed metal. Vano flipped it on. Grudgingly, it squealed and squawked into motion. Unfortunately, the smoke did not dissipate. It simply compressed toward the floor.

And then smoke detector began to bleat. It was a shrill, ugly sound that made me feel twice as disorientated as the smoke alone. You would think that with a bird who knew how to imitate the sound uncannily well, I would be accustomed to the noise. But the offer of a peanut won’t shut up a real smoke alarm.

“Knock that wretched thing down!” Morticia ordered.

Sabina perked up immediately. “I’m as great at beating down pinatas as I am at finding glasses! I just need a long enough stick.”

That would be a challenge. Even in the kitchen, the ceilings were high. As the alarm shrieked, we searched desperately for something that would reach—a broom, a cane, a baseball bat, anything—but there was nothing in that kitchen longer than a wooden spoon. Nothing except….

“The zucchini!” Sabina cried.

Before anyone could stop her, she grabbed the ridiculous vegetable, scampered up a chair and onto the kitchen table. “I got your back,” Dixon called out as he lunged for the light switch. “Ceiling fan stopping in three…two…one!”

Sabina hoisted the zucchini—it was as tall as her and weighed nearly as much—and gave it an awkward swing…just as it became clear that Dixon had not shut the fan down, but turned up the speed instead.

A series of wet thumps joined the cacophony of squeaking and shrilling as the fan blades chewed through the zucchini. Everyone reflexively crouched and shielded their heads (everyone but Morticia, who couldn’t see what was going on). Gobs of zucchini flew in all directions. It was a wonder any of us were spared, but most of us did remain unscathed. All but Sabina, who took a big chunk to the forehead, and toppled backwards off the table.

Luckily Vano was there to break her fall.

By the time they scrambled to their feet, it became clear that the fan blades had done more than just chop the zucchini. The filigreed openings, together with centrifugal force, had acted as a massive peeler. And as we all watched in bewilderment, a thick ribbon of zucchini spun from a chunk caught in the blade, wider and wider, whirling around the room like a giant weed whacker. On the ceiling. Made of zucchini.

Soon the vegetable strip reached the diameter of the room, and as it did, it began knocking things off shelves. Spice jars. Cookbooks. Wooden spoons. Dozens of small objects rained down from the shelves.

And among them, coming to rest in the center of the kitchen table atop an elaborately embroidered dish towel, were Morticia Shirque’s lost glasses.

Soon the smoke settled out—it was apparently quite heavy—and Dixon managed to knock down the smoke alarm by straddling my shoulders and whacking at it with a wooden spoon.

Sabina had a red mark on her forehead that would likely bruise, and was picking streamers of zucchini from her hair.

I expected Vano to bemoan the loss of his zucchini, but he hardly seemed to notice it had been demolished.

He was too busy gazing at Sabina.

I supposed she could do worse. Though if anything came to pass between them, her cousin would be less than thrilled.

Morticia had been cleaning her glasses elaborately on the hem of her blouse while the commotion raged around her. Once she finally slid them on, she looked around her kitchen and said, “Dixon Penn? What are you doing here? And what’s wrong with your grown man friend’s face?”

Luckily, Dixon does not know the meaning of the word exasperation. (And given the effect his rambling had when it outlasted a stranger’s patience, he truly should.) “That rash is exactly why we’re here! Yuri ran afoul of a Crafting, so we’re trying to track down a Scrivener and were hoping you’d recognize the writing.”

Sabina handed the two halves of the Spellcraft—luckily no worse for wear—to the head of the circuit.

“It’s been Recrafted,” Morticia remarked.

“Oh, right!” said Dixon. “That would be me. You’ll notice that not only is the rhyme quite inspired, but the meter is spot on. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the Recrafted version is much more elegant than—”

“Dixon,” I murmured.

“Anyhoo. It’s the author of the original Spell I was hoping to nail down.”

Morticia gave Dixon a shrewd glance. I wondered what she saw when she looked at him? The Scrivener whose Quilling Ceremony had failed, or the Scrivener who’d redeemed himself? Either way, I had no great trust of canny old women. “This might be familiar,” she said, “but I’ll need something to compare it to before I give you a definitive answer. Vano, fetch me the Register of the Hands.”

Gooseflesh prickled along my arms. Not due to the volshebstvo—I was accustomed now to its comings and goings—but the thought of witnessing a Scrivener’s secrets. Things were different here than they were in Russia. This was a phrase that was continually proving itself to me, again and again. Russian Spellcrafters guarded their secrets with their lives. In comparison, American Spellcrafters were merely coy. And once they knew me as a Seer, they laid open their secrets to me as if I had always been one of their very own.

In Russia, I was told only as much as I needed to know to create a usable Seen. And so, in Russia, I could not say if there was a Hand in every Scrivener family. But in Pinyin Bay, this was how things were done…though Fonzo was never clear as to what being the Hand might entail.

I expected Morticia to unveil something secret—something sacred. But instead she cleared zucchini peels from the kitchen table with her forearm, then Vano dug an old notebook from a drawer and tossed it onto the clean spot. There was a coffee ring on the cover.

“The ends of the strokes have a slight hook to them that you don’t see very often,” the old woman said as she paged through the notebook. I was too far away to see what secrets it so casually contained, but I did notice that Dixon had gone silent and was doing his best to read over her shoulder without being too obvious…though anyone who knew him would know that the moment he falls silent is the one in which you must keep your eye on him.

Sabina, meanwhile, could care no less about the book. She was more concerned about the brownies. “Sabinochka,” I chided, “you’re not thinking of eating those.”

“You never know. The middles might still be good.”

Earlier, when we were mixing our brownies, we had each chosen a different pan (as there were no two alike) but had used the same ingredients. Even so, the things she now pulled gingerly from the oven could not have been more different.

I recognized my pan immediately. My brownies looked good—not too burnt—until I realized they had not risen. They were half the height of everyone else’s. When I pried my attempt out of the pan, it came out in a shallow square which was so hard you could have used it to pave a walkway.

Sabina’s brownies were burnt black around the edges, and yet they still wobbled with raw egg in the center. The oregano had risen to the top and floated on the soupy center like algae off the shoreline of Pinyin Bay.

Vano’s brownies? They looked like…brownies.

And surprisingly enough, so did Dixon’s.

Dancing from foot to foot, Dixon clapped his hands together. “I’ve never baked anything from scratch! Ever! Who’d have thought it was so easy?”

Sabina narrowed her eyes. “This makes no sense. You can’t even toast a frozen waffle without smoking out the whole house.”

“Then clearly the problem was the toaster,” Dixon replied. He snatched up a fork and plunged it into his steaming pan of brownies. “You’re just jealous because yours have a swimming pool in the middle. Whereas mine are…” he scooped out a steaming forkful and shoved it into his mouth. Immediately his eyes started to water. I believe he was attempting to say the word “delicious” through all the spluttering and retching that followed. But even his relentless optimism could not possibly make anyone believe him.

Morticia grabbed a small crumb from the pan, placed it in her mouth, and winced. “You’ve mixed up the sugar and the salt.”

While Morticia got Dixon a glass of water, Vano lopped his own brownies into warm squares and doled them out onto mismatched china plates. Dixon wanted to refuse to try them, I could tell—but he also needed to get the taste of salt out of his mouth. He took a resentful bite, then another, and I followed suit. The texture was good, soft and chewy, but the taste was unusual. Not just chocolate, but something else, too, aside from the pinch of cinnamon. The more I ate, the more appealing it became. A hint of burnt sugar. Evidently, as Sabina’s brownies burned, they had imparted a subtle, smoky flavor to Vano’s—as if that had been his intention all along.

No wonder it took a valiant effort for Dixon to swallow them…though he did manage.

In the end, had we learned anything about baking under the tutelage of Vano Shirque? Only the lesson of not getting distracted while something is in the oven—a lesson that would no doubt be forgotten soon enough.

Once nothing remained of Vano’s brownies but a few moist crumbs, his great-grandmother turned her attention back to the stained notebook and began flipping through in earnest. It was beginning to look like yet another dead end as she paged through to the very back of the book. But just as I resigned myself to a life of itchiness and yogurt, she let out a triumphant crow.

“Aha! I knew I recognized those hooks! The Scrivener who penned this Spell…is Ladin Silver.”

8

Dixon

We left Vano and his Nana at Shirque Mansion and headed back to Scrivener Village to try to track down our man.

Ladin Silver is a regular fixture of the Pinyin Bay circuit. Not only was he the guy who wooed Sabina’s mother away from Uncle Fonzo, but his photo graced the wall of every restaurant in town with an oversized gimmick entree—you know the type, eat the whole thing and it’s free? Ladin was the champion of them all. He was the only person who’d managed to eat the three-pound Bamtastic Beefburger in one sitting without throwing up. Baskets of hot wings, stacks of pancakes, and entire schools of deep-fried perch, Ladin had powered through them all…and then called for the dessert menu. Rumor was he’d Crafted himself a little something to keep his competitive edge. But if you’ve ever taken in the full expanse of him at close range, you’d know that eating came so naturally to him that such a Crafting would be totally unnecessary.

The thing about Ladin Silver is that he tends to show up (uninvited) whenever you’d like to avoid him—but when you do need to see him, he’s nowhere to be found.

Ladin lived in a three-story brick walk-up with storefronts on the ground floor and a bank of unmarked doorbells beside the entryway. The popcorn shop that was once below his place was no more, lost to a catastrophic blowout of epic proportions back when explosions were commonplace in Pinyin Bay. I did miss the shop, though only for nostalgic reasons, since the popcorn had always been pretty bad. And despite the fact that it had been many months since popcorn rained down like chewy, scorched, fake-buttery snow, seagulls still circled the building, hoping another explosion might occur.

In the old popcorn shop’s place was a new, trendy-looking boutique of locally-sourced items. The shop was closed for the day, so I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the plate glass window while Yuri tried all the doorbells. Candles and wind chimes, coasters and paperweights. And beside the quaint, antiquey cash register was a bunch of skin care items displayed in a cardboard honeycomb display, topped with a hand-lettered sign that read, Bee Balm. Did that mean the bees were local, or just the balm-maker? Or would that be balmist? Most importantly, would bee balm soothe poor Yuri’s inflamed cheeks? I turned to ask, and let out a startled yelp as I nearly pitched headfirst into Venus Monger.

“What the heck?” my cousin said. “Don’t sneak up on a person like that!”

“You don’t want to shop there,” Venus told us importantly, then leaned in and whispered, “it’s owned by Handless.”

So were the majority of stores in Pinyin Bay. I saw no reason to feel weird about spending my money in Handless establishments. After all, they were the ones who paid me to Uncraft their wonky spells.

“Besides,” Venus went on, “you wouldn’t get the personalized service there that you get when you buy direct from the manufacturer.”

“Uh-oh,” Sabina said. “Here comes the sales pitch.”

“Anything you could find here, I could recreate at half the cost.”

Yuri, naturally, was skeptical. “A Scrivener should be crafting Spells, not pot-holders.”

Venus was undeterred. “No need to get all flustered and flushed.”

“I am not flustered.”

“All good Scriveners have a healthy amount of hustle. And diversifying is the best way to protect yourself from a fluctuating market. What is it you’re looking for? Pens? Note cards? Macrame?”

My initial impulse was to give her a polite brush-off, but once I thought about it, I realized it would be silly of me to pass up the opportunity to help Yuri. “I was just curious about the skin care items inside the—”

“Say no more!” Venus swung a massive handbag off her shoulder, snapped it open, and thrust her arm inside—which disappeared up to the elbow. After a hearty rummage, she came up with a small, unlabeled jar with something semi-liquid sloshing around inside. “You’ve heard of the health benefits touted of various natural ingredients—goji berries, coconut oil, apple cider vinegar. I’ve combined all these plus a proprietary herbal blend into a miracle product I call Monger’s Medicament Balsam and Tonic.”

Great name. And I’m not gonna lie…I’ve always been a sucker for anything proprietary. “What does it do?”

“The question you should be asking is: what doesn’t it do?”

“Well, okay, what doesn’t it—?”

“Monger’s Tonic is a toxin-clearing, wellness-promoting, colon-cleansing, gluten-free, organic-adjacent alternative to any product for the home or body you can imagine. And it can be yours for a mere $99.99. Plus tax.”

“That’s awfully steep,” Sabina said.

I nodded toward the storefront window. “The bee balm in the display is only ten dollars.”

Venus narrowed her eyes. “But I can personally guarantee that Monger’s Tonic is bee-free.” That did seem like a pretty important feature. “Plus, instead of waiting till morning for the shop to open back up, you can get it right now.”

“I don’t have a hundred bucks.” I patted down my pockets. “How about five?”

Venus didn’t seem thrilled about my offer…but she did grudgingly accept my crumpled five. And, bonus, since I was now out of money, she informed us that since she was not actually a medical professional, she could make no medicinal claims on her tonic, and wasted no time in moving along to find her next mark. Er…customer.

“This was no use,” Yuri said, giving a Very Stern Look to Venus’s departing back. “Ladin Silver is not here. Unless we can figure out some way to track him down—”

“Guys?” my cousin said. She cocked her head at a nearby telephone pole that was plastered with so many layers of notices and flyers it ruffled in the breeze. “Check out this note.”

My breath caught. “Wow—someone’s selling a trampoline?”

“No, not that one.” She pointed to an unobtrusive slip of paper pinned to the top of the stack. “Look at the handwriting—it’s got those little hooks Morticia pointed out. It must be Ladin’s.”

Yuri and I joined my cousin at the telephone pole and read.

Meat is scarce

At least I know

The cabbage is

In season

“What the heck is that supposed to be?” Sabina scowled. “Some kind of haiku?”

I ran through it in my head. “Wrong number of syllables,” I said. “Though if I added five more at the end….”

“It is awkward,” Yuri said decisively. “Even for English.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looked like a Crafting. But it hadn’t been penned on a Seen, just a scrap of plain paper. Despite the fact that I’m always being reminded to “look before I leap,” I was leery about touching the note, because something about it was clearly not right. “Maybe there’s a Seen on the back.” I pulled a faded business card off the telephone pole and used it to lift the edge of the paper. The flip side was blank.

I stared at the words and defocused my eyes, searching for the telltale Spellcraft sparkle, but all I got for my effort was a bunch of blurry words.

“I don’t sense the volshebstvo,” Yuri said.

“Maybe it’s half a Crafting,” Sabina suggested. “Just the words. Some kind of cloak-and-dagger handoff between the Scrivener and the Seer where the two of them never actually meet.”

“Impossible,” Yuri said. “You cannot Scribe without a Seen.”

Sabina warmed to her idea. “But you can’t just stick a Seen to a telephone pole in Scrivener Village—it’s too valuable. It would be gone before the paint even dried. A Scribing, though? Those things are a dime a dozen around here and no one would think twice. Especially one about cabbage.”

Yuri didn’t budge. In fact, I suspected he enjoyed the casual squabbles he shared with Sabina. “No one would waste their time Crafting about a cabbage. This saying is probably slang for something else—like every other word in your language. But the fact remains: you cannot Craft a blank page. The Seen always comes first.”

They kept right on arguing, but word first echoed through my mind: first-first-first…. Hopefully that didn’t mean my brainpan was as empty as my Handless teachers always said it was. And, honestly, that really wasn’t fair of them. I might have the attention span of a flea, but I retained things just fine. In fact, who was it that had just demonstrated his knowledge of haikus? That would be me. Although I’d need to split up the lines a bit differently…not that they made any particular sense in their current configuration….

Not unless you looked at each line individually, and made note of the word that came first.

Meat is scarce

At least I know

The cabbage is

In season

Meat. At. The. In.

“Aha!” I exclaimed so loudly (and abruptly) that both Sabina and Yuri immediately stopped bickering. “I know exactly where to find Ladin Silver!”

9

Pinyin Inn sits at the edge of town halfway between the Bay County Prison and the wolverine fence. It was one of the many properties that Loveland Corporation had acquired in their bid to excavate the underbelly of Pinyin Bay—and like Shirque Mansion, it had fallen into foreclosure once it was realized there was nothing to find under the city but a heap of disturbing, amateurish sculpture.

Unlike Shirque Mansion, Pinyin Inn had no one interested in reclaiming it. And so it sat forlornly on the western shore of the Bay, abandoned by all….

Or so we thought—until we rounded the drive and saw several cars half-hidden in the surrounding undergrowth. There’d been some effort to make the cars look as abandoned as the hotel, but it was only a cursory attempt at best. A station wagon had a tarp thrown over the hood. A couple of stray branches had been strewn on the windshield of a dented sedan. And if I squinted just right, deep in the shadows of the utility shed, I could make out the unmistakable headlights of an old Buick….

“Sabina, isn’t that your dad’s car?”

She rolled her eyes. “I thought he was being awfully cagey about his plans tonight. Let’s go see what these crusty old Scriveners are up to.”

I’ve always loved a good clandestine meeting. How exciting!

At first the building looked dark, but when we got up close, I could make out the faintest slivers of light creeping out around the edges of the drawn curtains. The front door was plastered with all sorts of foreboding signs: Private Property - Keep Out. Which only made the whole thing that much more intriguing.

I tried the door. The doorknob didn’t budge. Sabina brightened. No doubt it had been a while since so many lock-picking opportunities presented themselves to her in a single day. But as she jimmied a credit card into the crack of the doorframe, a tiny window slid open right beside her head and startled her so badly she not only jumped, but punctuated the hop with a noise like a squeak toy.

A pair of beady eyes regarded us from the other side of the door. “What’s the password?” the owner of the eyes demanded gruffly.

This night just kept getting better and better! “I’m great at passwords. I’ll just need a couple of hints. Is it bigger than a bread box? And do people even use bread boxes nowadays? Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actual bread box in the wild—”

“No hints,” the doorkeeper said. “Either you know the word, or you don’t.”

Sabina could not let that statement go unchallenged. “Really? Maybe we’re here to make sure you know the password. You tell us.”

Unfortunately, the guy didn’t fall for it. He made to slide the tiny window shut—but before he did, Yuri stuck his finger in there. He ended up getting his knuckle cracked, but he did keep us from being shut out entirely.

“Fine,” I called through the gap, “I don’t need a hint. I’ll just make an educated guess. Hotel. No? How about door? Still no? Okay, is it doorknob?”

Sabina wasn’t about to guess when she could argue instead. “You have to let us in. My father’s in there—so, obviously, he’d vouch for us.”

An exasperated sigh, slightly tinged with whiskey, wafted through the gap. “Look, kids, I don’t make the rules. You need to say the password or you can’t come in. So do us all a favor, take your finger, and go on home….”

Just through that door, tales were being told and secrets were being secreted, and here we were, mere moments away from a rare glimpse into the clandestine underpinnings of Pinyin Bay’s Scrivener community. All that stood in our way was a single word. But with more than a million distinct words in the English language, I couldn’t imagine how we’d ever—

“Spellcraft,” Yuri said. “The password is Spellcraft.”

“Fine,” the doorman groaned. Home free! Or so I thought, until he said, “And your contribution to the potluck?”

Uh-oh.

If ever there was a perfect time to whip out a giant zucchini! Unfortunately, the incorrigible courgette was now nothing but a bunch of zucchini streamers festooning the kitchen of Shirque Mansion. In theory, I kept a granola bar in my messenger bag to ward off any potential low blood sugar moments, but in practice, whenever I reached for it, I came up with nothing but a wrapper and a vague memory of a pronounced craving for a granola bar. I delved into my bag anyhow to buy myself a moment to think…and, lo and behold, came up with a carton of warm yogurt which, technically, was food.

What luck! I brandished the yogurt triumphantly and said, “Here’s our contribution!”

The eyes squinted. “Yogurt? That’s it?”

“Of course not.” I dove back in my bag and came up with the snake oil Venus sold me…which hopefully did not contain any actual snake. “Once you mix in this proprietary herbal blend, it’s an unparalleled dressing and dip. Now let us in.”

With much rolling of eyes and another whiskey-tinged sigh, the old Scrivener opened the door.

The Pinyin Inn harkened back to times when a hamburger cost a nickel and people rented rooms by the week. The original decor must have been interesting once, but now it bore little resemblance to its original glory. The place had been revamped several decades ago—think country cottage chic, with whitewashed wood, stenciled borders, and lots and lots of gingham—and no one had given it so much as a coat of paint ever since. The whitewash was so yellowed and the gingham so faded, their origin looked more 1880’s than 1980’s, and the fact that the place was now lit solely by candlelight only deepened that impression. But we Scriveners learn to make do with what we have. Given the laughter coming from the old dining room, everyone was having a grand old time despite the lack of electricity and the cringeworthy decor.

I could hardly wait to see what top-secret undertakings were transpiring. A long-lost rite? An obscure ritual? I rounded the corner eagerly, and found a half-dozen Scriveners seated around a table. Candles flickered. Cigars smoldered. And in the center of it all?

A pile of plastic chips, which rattled as Ladin Silver threw in a handful, declaring, “I’ll see your bet and raise you ten.”

At my side, Yuri made a sound of annoyance. “All this secrecy…for a card game?”

The poker players all looked up, Uncle Fonzo among them—and he seemed particularly glad to see us. “Well, would you look who’s here! You all remember my daughter, and my nephew, and his grown man friend—”

“No stalling, Fonzo,” Ladin told him. “Either see the bet, or fold.”

With a groan of resignation, Uncle Fonzo laid down his cards. “Fine, fine. It would be unsportsmanlike to clean you all out before we’ve even gotten started.”

The other poker players all chuckled. I knew each of them to some degree. They were ubiquitous fixtures at any Pinyin Bay Quilling Ceremony, the type of paunchy, middle-aged guys who’d hand you a thin envelope with a couple of bucks inside, tell a few questionable jokes, and then try to be surreptitious about spiking the punch bowl.

It was like any other poker game you might imagine, save for one thing. Each player had a piece of Spellcraft stuck to his person. Oh, and the one guy now sniffing curiously at Venus’s goji berry concoction. But mostly it was the visible Spellcraft.

The sentiments were all pretty much what you’d expect. This hand is a winner. Or, The cards are with me. Or, Luck is my lady tonight. Crafting for luck is big business, so it wasn’t the presence of the Spellcraft that surprised me, just the fact that everyone had his lucky poker spell on full display…though I wouldn’t be surprised if they also had a few backup spells tucked away for safe keeping.

As the Scrivener who’d answered the door raked in a hefty pile of plastic chips, Uncle Fonzo shook off the loss of the hand with cheerful brusqueness. He parked his stogie in an ash tray, stood and brushed cracker crumbs from his lap, and said, “Whatever it was that led you to track me down must’ve been pretty important, so I suppose I can tear myself away from the game.”

With zero attempt at tact, Sabina blurted out, “We weren’t looking for you, Dad. We have a question for Ladin Silver!”

Now everyone was curious—but accusing another Scrivener of sabotage was serious business—and I’d like to think I was more tactful than my cousin. “Maybe we should ask Ladin in private,” I suggested.

“Nonsense,” he declared, larger than life as always. “We’re all among friends here. I’ve known this group for ages and I’d trust them with anything.”

“Really,” I said, “this is a delicate matter.”

That insistence only made Ladin more determined to make me air his dirty laundry in front of the whole group. He dug in his heels and said, “I’m not shady like your uncle, all secretive and sly.”

“I’m nothing of the sort!” Uncle Fonzo protested.

Ladin went on. “Anything you need to say, you can say in front of my pals.”

I would have tried once more to lure Ladin away from the table, but Yuri’d had just about enough of our American attempts at politeness. He shoved the leaky Spellcraft under Ladin’s nose and said, “We know this is your Crafting—and don’t try to deny it. Your writing was verified by the head of your circuit!”

A forceful Yuri is truly a sight to behold. Ladin backed up as far as his chair would allow—but only to get the Crafting into the sweet spot of his bifocals. “Sure! I remember that one. The veggie man was what you’d call a skeptic, but I guess I showed him. How’s he doing?”

“How would you expect?” Yuri said dangerously.

For some reason, Ladin wasn’t the least bit intimidated. “Hopefully a lot better, now that I fixed his leaks.”

Sabina read the Crafting aloud with great indignation. “Leaks are sprouting everywhere. You call that a fix?”

“Absolutely.” Ladin gestured to the potluck spread on the sideboard. “I needed some potatoes for my famous spuds au gratin, my credit card was declined, and Herb was complaining that his leaks wouldn’t sprout—so I struck a bargain and paid with a Crafting. If that’s not a win-win, I don’t know what is.”

A groan worked its way from the back of Yuri’s throat. “It is a misspelling.”

I read through the Crafting again. “Everything looks kosher to me.”

Yuri shook his head. “The very first word: leaks. It should have been L-E-E-K-S. Like the vegetable.”

“Are you sure, Yuri? I’ve most certainly never eaten anything called a leek.” Then again, vegetables weren’t exactly my greatest area of expertise.

The Scrivener who’d answered the door said, “I’ve eaten leeks before. My lady-friend puts them in her potato soup.”

“Your lady-friend knows how to cook?” Ladin Silver asked with a predatory gleam in his eye.

“Forget I said anything!” The doorman went back to his cards.

Fine, so an obscure vegetable known as a leek might actually exist, and some hearty soul might be so brave as to eat it—on purpose, even. But a Scrivener misspelling a Crafting? Unheard of! Growing up, we had spelling drilled into our impressionable Scrivener heads just as forcefully as vocabulary and cursive. Handless kids at public school got away with the occasional quiz, but once they dispersed to piano lessons or soccer practice, budding Scriveners were shuttled off to another hour of Spellcraft training—not to mention the weekend workshops and summer camps. Homonyms and homophones were topics of many a lesson. I should know—Cuthbert Rath called me a homonym for most of seventh grade.

Not that he was wrong.

There was even a handy rhyme we were taught as a cautionary tale against using homonyms: When two words are spelled the same, it’s time to use a different name. By name, obviously, they meant word. Though that didn’t rhyme. Although, if the first line were reworked to end with absurd…. At any rate, it was ludicrous to think any Scrivener would be careless enough to actually misspell something as critical as a—

Sabina elbowed me and pointed to the Crafting protruding from Ladin’s breast pocket.

Grate luck is at my fingertips!

Eesh. Maybe the whole leek theory did hold water after all.

Yuri was not entirely convinced. “How did the farmer fail to see your mistake?”

“Mistake is an awfully strong word,” Ladin said. “Do you think Spellcraft knows the difference between an A and an E?” Actually, Spellcraft was infamous for exploiting mistakes like that. Everyone knew the volshi-boogaloo loved nothing more than a loophole. But Ladin wasn’t looking for an actual answer to his question. “The intent is what really matters. And as for the farmer—he was such a skeptic, he made a big point of not even looking at the Crafting. I guess I showed him!”

Boy, I’ll say.

I would have loved to stick around and absorb the private conversation among the Scriveners—though I suspected most of it revolved around old-man topics like cigars and liniments, and maybe off-track betting—but it was time to head home and do our best to prepare for tomorrow’s job fair. Yuri’s cheeks were looking really painful. And as for Venus’s miracle tonic, judging by the guy scraping the last dregs from the bottom of the jar with a stale tortilla chip, the concoction must’ve made a pretty good salsa.

“Say, Uncle Fonzo, before we go, would you mind calling Dr. Slaughter and asking if there’s any other home remedy we can try?”

His stack of poker chips was pretty diminished, and I think he was grateful for the opportunity to sit out a hand. “I’d been meaning to check in with her anyway. Things have really been heating up for us in the romance department, if you know what I mean.”

“Dad!” Sabina cried. “Ew!”

Ignoring her, Uncle Fonzo pulled out his phone. He set it to speaker—presumably to prove that he was not shady—and dialed.

She picked up in a single ring. “Fonzo…I thought you were at poker night.”

“I am! Say hi to the boys, Glenda!”

“Um…hi. Listen, Fonzo, take me off speaker for a second, would you? I need to tell you something.”

“I’ve known these guys since the dark ages. Anything you need to say, you can say in front of them.”

“But, Fonzo—”

“I have no secrets from my friends.”

“I’d really rather not.”

“No, I insist!”

“Well…if that’s how you want it.” After an especially awkward pause, Dr. Slaughter cleared her throat and announced, “I’m late.”

Late for what? If she knew Uncle Fonzo was on a boys’ night out, it wasn’t as if she’d expect to meet up with him. I was about to ask when Sabina sucked in a huge gasp—seriously, a major whoop, like she’d just given up on a breath-holding contest—and she’d gone white as a sheet.

I said, “I get the sneaking suspicion I’m missing something.”

My cousin snagged me by the elbow and hauled me toward the door. “I’ll tell you later. Let’s get out of here.”

10

Yuri

Back at our flat, Sabina informed us what women mean by the word “late” when spoken in a particular tone of voice—and the period involved had nothing at all to do with the end of a sentence. She declared she had no desire to be stuck with babysitting duty, then stomped downstairs in her combat boots to slam her bedroom door, play her music far too loud, and probably scream into a pillow.

Dixon shook his head. “I’m having a doozy of a time wrapping my head around this, Yuri. Uncle Fonzo is way too old to be a new dad.”

“Apparently not.”

Once Fonzo absorbed what was going on, I had no doubt he would be thrilled. American Spellcrafters adore their children—and while they were loath to use the word “blessing,” if ever I heard a Scrivener utter such a loaded word, it would be in regard to the promise of new life.

The thought of a wailing newborn just beneath my floorboards should have left me apprehensive. I had no patience for babies. They were helpless and demanding. They gave off all sorts of objectionable noises and smells. And they turned every adult in their vicinity into a babbling, cooing simpleton.

And so...why was it eagerness which I felt stirring in my belly?

I had no desire to be a father myself. I was reared with no good example of how to parent—my mother was cold, and my father lashed out with both words and fists. But there was no doubt in my mind that when I opened my heart to Dixon, I gained not only a vozljublennyj, but a family. This family had so much love, there was easily enough to spare for another child. In fact, no doubt the baby’s arrival would only cause that love to multiply.

I paused beside Dixon as he rummaged through our refrigerator (which was actually two mini refrigerators stacked on top of each other) and said, “Will it make any difference that the mother is Handless?”

“Not in the least.” Dixon pulled out a container, sniffed it, and put it back. “As far as the circuit is concerned, the more, the merrier. Any child of a Scrivener is considered a full-fledged Spellcrafter—and their partner, too.”

“Scriveners are so clannish. I am surprised they would not prefer to limit themselves to other Scriveners.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with making sure there’s fresh DNA in the bloodline. You wouldn’t want to start getting inbred, and a kid with one formerly-Handless parent is no more likely to fail a Quilling Ceremony than a full-blooded Scrivener.” Dixon’s expression clouded. His own failed Quilling Ceremony was still a painful memory. But then he glanced up at Meringue, dozing in the rafters with her head tucked under her snow white wing, and he immediately brightened. Because if his official Quilling Ceremony had succeeded, he would not have ended up at Precious Greetings that fateful day—and the two of us might never have met.

“Just picture it, Yuri. Can you imagine how much fun a baby will be? Those chubby little legs? Those itty-bitty toes? Those inky-dinky little toenails??”

“What if its mother does not wish to move in and raise the child with Fonzo?”

“Of course she will! You know how charming Uncle Fonzo can be! Plus, she’s got her medical career to think of, so she’ll want all the extra help she can get. We Scriveners work much more flexible hours.” As evidenced by the fact that Sabina wandered away from the office whenever the impulse took her.

Dixon hugged himself in anticipation. “A new baby! I can’t wait to teach him how to talk. Him…or her. Or, ooh, I know—what if Dr. Slaughter has one of each? Maybe she learned a special way to make that happen in medical school.”

“While she was learning about birth control?”

“And when do I get to start calling her Auntie Slaughter? Maybe the baby can have her surname as its first name. Slaughter Penn—how about that? Hip, trendy, unisex—and, bonus, if the baby ever decides to be a pro wrestler….”

Dixon turned on an overhead light to get my reaction to his name suggestion. At the sight of me, the wistful joy in his expression turned to concern as he pressed the backs of his cool fingers to my face. “Maybe I shouldn’t have surrendered that yogurt to the pot luck after all. Your rash is getting worse.”

I stepped into our bathroom and carefully unbuttoned my shirt, dreading what I would see in the mirror. My cheeks were as red as the crimson paint pan in my small metal paintbox, but that was hardly a surprise. The skin felt hot and angry, as though I was enduring an unending moment of humiliation. And it was no longer just my cheeks looking red, and blotchy, and swollen—but my neck, too.

As I scrutinized my reflection, Dixon slipped into the bathroom behind me…holding a bowl.

“That had better not be the concoction from that Monger woman,” I said.

“Come on, Yuri, I’m an incurable optimist, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Plus, those Scriveners at the poker game finished every last drop.”

“We have no yogurt. If you have found anything in our refrigerator that seems like yogurt, it can only be some milk we have forgotten about.”

Dixon bathed my reflection in a tolerant smile. “Don’t worry, I know how you felt about putting yogurt on your face. So I did a little web search, and found that oatmeal might be soothing.”

“How is oatmeal any better than yogurt?”

“Well, for one thing, we already had some in the fridge. Good thing you made that triple-batch this morning.”

“If this is a magical affliction, it’s a waste of time to pursue a mundane cure.”

Dixon fluttered his dark eyelashes—a move which never fails to melt my resolve, though I do my best not to show it. He pitched his voice low, just the slightest bit sultry, and said, “If I’m going to waste a little time with someone…there’s no one I’d rather do it with than you.”

He eased my shirt down to my elbows and lay a stroke of chilled oatmeal across my bare shoulder…then warmed it quickly with his tongue. A shiver coursed through me that had nothing to do with the volshebstvo.

Dixon is creative to the point of being fanciful…which, I have found, is one of the very reasons I adore him.

Half an hour later, after nearly braining ourselves in the shower—oatmeal is surprisingly slippery—we dried off and settled into our bed. I rolled to face the door, not because I did not want Dixon to see me, but because he loves to spoon against my back. The gentle rasp of his stubble buffed my shoulder blade and his contented sigh played down my spine. And there, in the dark, in the safety of our room, on the very cusp of sleep, I found a bit of wayward courage. I could have let it pass, but I chose, instead, to speak.

“It is clear that neither of us has any chance of being hired as a baker based on our skills, but I know you, and I know you do not take no for an answer. I also know you are not only persistent, but charming.”

Into my back, Dixon murmured, “You’re just saying that because I do naked things to you.” He sounded like he was smiling.

I squeezed his hand to my chest. “I’m saying that because it is true. Even if I did not love you—” Against my back, Dixon tensed. Only briefly. More of a quiver. But thankfully, he did not make a big deal of what I’d inadvertently admitted. “—even then, I would be amazed at your ability to win people over and get what you want.”

With another happy sigh, Dixon mashed himself into my back more firmly and settled into the deep breaths of sleep.

Love is a complicated thing. I have always thought love made a man weak, or at the very least, uncomfortably vulnerable. But maybe, I now suspected, that uneasiness was a fair price to pay.

11

Dixon

You really don’t appreciate how early bakers get up until you have to pry yourself out of bed well before sunup. It was the next morning, technically—though it felt more like the middle of the night—and even Meringue couldn’t be bothered to stir and mimic the alarm clock. It was tempting to duck under the sheets and pretend I’d hit the snooze button (and not the off-switch)…until I found Yuri’s face in the dark, and pressed my fingers to his disturbingly hot cheek.

Apparently the oatmeal hadn’t been much help.

There was some debate about whether we should include Sabina. Of the three of us, she was by far the worst baker. I thought she might make us look better by comparison, while Yuri was concerned that her badness would paint us all in a negative light. But since she proved impossible to pry out of bed, we ended up heading over to Bruno’s without her.

There’s a mirror beside my uncle’s front door—a promotional thing from the seventies bearing the logo of a long-gone shoelace factory—but its placement is perfect for double-checking your hair on the way out.

Unfortunately, it gave Yuri second thoughts about leaving the house at all.

The red spots on his cheeks were livid. They were so raised now, they actually looked shiny. They looked pretty painful, too, poor guy….

“This plan will never work,” Yuri said. “No one will hire me to touch food looking like this.”

I gave his biceps a squeeze—but gently, in case the rash had spread. “It has to work. There’s no telling how bad your condition will get, let alone how long it will take to get better.” If ever. Because magical afflictions didn’t exactly follow the usual laws of nature. “Too bad I lost that prosthetic beard yesterday to the duct tape. I don’t think the costume shop opens again until ten. Darn it, I knew I should’ve sprung for the three-pack…. Wait, I know.” I snatched a scarf from beside the door, a slinky, silky boho thing that belonged to Sabina, and wrapped it around his head.

“Dixon—”

“Don’t worry, you can totally pull it off. Just pretend you’re European. Er, wait, you are European.”

“I am Russian.”

“There you go—perfect!”

We headed over to Bruno’s Brownerie, where the owner’s assistant, Bernadette, met us at the staff door looking pint-sized and adorable. “Cute scarf!” she told Yuri. “But with health regulations being what they are, anyone with facial hair longer than a quarter inch is required to wear a beard guard.”

Normally, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in something called a beard guard—but we’d left the house in such a hurry, I hadn’t had a chance to shave. And Sabina’s comment yesterday about the proliferation of my one-day beard was no exaggeration.

While I might have felt reticent, Yuri couldn’t get that thing on fast enough. It was a gauzy, meshy fabric, fine enough to see through, but it did obscure his condition. If you didn’t know to look for it, you’d never realize his cheeks were covered in angry spots. Once our beards were girded, we filled out our name tags, stuck them on and headed in.

At the next branch in the hallway, Bruno was watching applicants file in with a look of gentle bewilderment on his broad, friendly face, directing the stream of hopefuls into a workroom large enough to hold us all. As I passed him, I couldn’t help but notice a door behind him labeled in extremely stern lettering: Staff Only.

“What’s in there?” I asked. “I’ll bet it’s super interesting!”

His tiny, bright button-like eyes lit up. “It sure is. No other brownerie has anything like it—”

“Never you mind,” Bernadette said briskly, herding us along. “We don’t let just anyone in on our trade secrets. Land one of the job vacancies and then you’ll get the grand tour.”

The workroom she hustled us into held three rows of long stainless steel tables manned (or womaned) with about a dozen job applicants. I’d been hoping we wouldn’t have so much competition, and that the appalling hour would weed out some hopeful bakers. Unfortunately, the other potential candidates were early birds. Not only had they arrived well before us, but they looked disturbingly awake.

The best way to scope out our rivals, I reasoned, was to be friendly. Actually, that’s my go-to approach for pretty much everything. But in this case, it really did seem like the best course of action. Ingratiating myself to the top dog should make me seem like a good team player—never mind that I know nothing about teams, since Spellcraft is more of a relay race than a football game. The current group of hopefuls had turned to check us out as we walked in, but they fell back into the dynamic they’d established just as soon as they looked us over.

A woman named Joan was the first to resume speaking. She was maybe my mom’s age—but unlike my mom, she’d let her hair go natural salt-and-pepper, wrapped in a tight bun at the top of her head. She wore a folksy, embroidered smock that screamed artsy-fartsy (or perhaps artisan-fartisan, if you want to be technical, since baking is more artisanal than artistic). And while I had no preconceptions of what a baker might look like, she did strike me as the sort of person who’d have a sourdough starter bubbling away in a dark corner of her kitchen.

“I would never use hard winter wheat in a croissant,” Joan was saying loftily. “In fact, in the Basque region, soft winter wheat is the norm. Of course, in Slovakia, they prefer red wheat to white….”

My only experience with flour was that while “whole” wheat flour might sound impressive, it was not welcome in my mother’s home—I found that out the hard way. Though on the bright side, it did get me out of grocery shopping duty. Anyhow, this woman was dauntingly knowledgeable, and I clearly had no hope of out-baking her. But I could absolutely schmooze her.

Maybe we could forge a connection by talking about Europe, I figured—since Yuri was European-ish and I was very well-traveled. I sidled up to Joan’s table and said, “Wow, Joan, you really know your European wheat. Have you been to Slovakia?”

“Several times.” She proceeded to tell me a bunch of dull facts about Slovakia which I immediately forgot.

Yuri, meanwhile, scoped out the adjacent table, which just happened to be vacant, and leaned into it with his arms planted wide so as to discourage anyone from cozying up to him. Not that his ridiculously butch stance would work on me. In fact, it might just have the opposite effect—if it weren’t for the silly beard guard. Then again, I’d been forced to wear one too, so I couldn’t exactly throw stones. Maybe later I could get Yuri to strike that same pose without the guard….

I was contemplating whether or not the card table in our kitchenette would bear the full weight of Yuri’s assertive leaning when one final hopeful joined us in the baking room—and that person was none other than Venus Monger.

Yuri’s forbidding territorial stance was all for naught. Venus strode up to his work table, jingling with bangles and baubles, and plunked her massive purse down right beside him with the force of a knockoff wrecking ball. Yuri moved, grudgingly, and conveyed his annoyance at being displaced with a short but expressive sigh—so expressive that it made Venus finally look at the person she’d been elbowing in on. “Oh, aren’t you the Seer—er…?” Only once the question was out of her mouth did she notice she was in the company of a bunch of Handless—all of whom were now way more curious about Yuri than they’d been a mere five seconds before. “Sea urchin, uh, trainer. Yes. That’s right. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Whip those spiny little critters into shape?”

Yuri answered with an even more eloquent sigh. But before he could come up with any sort of plausible response—either to play along or totally deny the urchin-wrangler thing—Bernadette brandished a tiny air horn, pushed the button…and nearly sent the entire room into cardiac arrest.

Once our ears were done ringing, she said, “Okay, gang, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk brownies. Bruno’s Brownerie has done incredibly well in a very short time, and the reason for that is quality, consistency, and attention to detail….”

Somehow, I’d ended up front and center of the crowd, so I politely nodded along with Bernadette as she went on about what she was looking for in a job candidate. But it was early. Really early. And she was, frankly, pretty boring. Not only that, but I was way more interested in figuring out why Venus Monger might be there. Venus was the poster child for entrepreneurial endeavors. So why would she even dream of putting in an application to work for someone else?

I pondered that for a good few moments before I realized Bernadette was still talking. “…so if you do your best to align yourself with Bruno’s standards, you stand the best chance of donning the apron. Now, for the first part of the job fair, we’re going to see how well you listen.” Fantastic! I’m a great listener. “I’ll take you through the supplies and tell you where everything is, then give you a simple recipe to convert. Step right this way and we’ll get started.”

Logically (and logistically) I should have been the first person to follow Bernadette out the door. But before I knew it, I was being shoved aside as Venus Monger hustled and bustled her way to the front of the line. “Don’t worry,” Joan told me. “All the rushing in the world won’t make her any better of a baker. Knowledge and precision are the keystone habits of a competent baker.”

Precision was no problem—I was able to cant my writing at any given angle so accurately you’d swear I kept a protractor up my sleeve. But knowledge? Hopefully I’d get away with faking it.

Our group of a dozen hopefuls crowded into a big pantry full of very industrial-looking bins of ingredients. Bernadette pointed out where everything was, assuring us that it was all fresh, organic, and local. Except for the fair-trade cocoa, which apparently didn’t grow in Pinyin Bay. Maybe that problem could be solved with Spellcraft…but before I got too lost in my fantasies of starting my own magical chocolate plantation, Yuri elbowed some bakers out of the way and eased up beside me. This was probably for the best, as I had no idea where to go about recruiting Oompa Loompas to help me run the operation. Yuri cocked his head toward Venus, then whispered through the beard net, “That woman is up to no good.”

That was really assuming the worst…but at the very least, she must have an ulterior motive.

“Venus would do anything for right price,” he said decisively. “She must be the one behind the sabotage, and she is here to cover her tracks.”

The Scriveners in the Pinyin Bay circuit were basically a large, often estranged, and somewhat dysfunctional family. While I hate to think ill of any one of them…I did have to admit that Yuri’s notion made an awful lot of sense. If someone hired Venus to make Bruno’s Brownies look bad at the big expo, it was in her best interest to clean up the evidence. And like my mom always says, the only one interested in your own best interest is you…and, naturally, your mother. But since I’d never met Venus’s parents, I could only presume she was acting on her own behalf.

“I hope you’ve all been paying close attention,” Bernadette announced—and I realized I’d missed pretty much everything she’d said up to that point. “Because I only have three positions available.”

And given Joan’s extensive knowledge of baking, she was sure to land one of them! Which meant it was imperative we knock Venus out of the competition to make sure both Yuri and I were hired. Bernadette herded us back into the workroom and said, “Before I have you all start baking, first I’ll need to make sure you can convert a recipe.” She handed out recipe cards, papers and pencils. “Let’s say you’re making a double batch of this basic butterscotch blondie. Jot down exactly how you’d go about it.”

The original recipe was hand-written—clearly penned by someone who hadn’t been subject to daily calligraphy drills, at that. Obviously, I’d improve on the penmanship. But the numbers were a bit concerning, once I realized that some of the measurements were in fractions, like the 1/2 cup of butter (and, wow, that’s a lot of butter) or the .5 tablespoons of salt. How was it that both of those figures doubled to become the number 1? As I pondered how decimals and fractions could both exist in the same universe, Yuri cleared his throat and asked, “Beside the baking powder—is this teaspoons or tablespoons?”

Oh no, he’d exposed himself for the rank amateur he was—even after getting a lesson from Vano. But instead of showing him the door, Bernadette smiled broadly and said, “Very good! If something is ambiguous or confusing, always ask for clarification. That’s a teaspoon.”

Now that she mentioned it, the letter I’d taken for a sloppily inked capital-T next to the baking powder was a lowercase with a particularly short stem.

Bernadette kept her eye on Yuri, and when he finished his conversion, she took a look at his paper and said, “Very good. You’ve made it to the next round.”

12

Yuri was in—which meant we were halfway there! Or a quarter of the way, given that there was apparently more to come. Though maybe it would be best expressed as a decimal….

Bernadette collected the rest of the converted recipes and paged through them, giving each one only a cursory glance. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to mess up a simple conversion. For instance, the double of .5 is not .10. Whoever this belongs to? You’d better brush up on your math if you ever hope to work for Bruno’s.” She held up the sheet in question and a shame-faced hopeful sheepishly left the room.

“Here’s one that took the conversion one step further, and doubled two tablespoons to a quarter cup. Joan? Great work.”

Joan accepted her victory with a curt nod, as if she hadn’t expected anything less.

After a few more flips, Bernadette paused, then lingered. “Now this is some beautiful writing.” Ooh! Handless notice that about me all the time! All. The. Time. I could hardly wait to be ushered through to the next phase. I was schooling my features into what I hoped would be enthused (but gracious) acceptance when Bernadette said, “Venus? Congratulations.”

Good thing for the beard guard, otherwise my jaw might’ve hit the floor. As I scrambled to hide my dismay, Bernadette paged through the remaining conversions. “We’ve got one more semi-final spot.” Just one?? “And so the last candidate will be…Dixon.” She gave the paper another long look—no doubt to reassure me that my cursive was on par with Venus Monger’s—then said, “But you definitely need to tone down the loop-de-loops. Legibility always takes precedence over flair.”

My writing was supremely legible, thank you very much. But while the criticism stung, at least I was in.

Once all the other potential candidates filed out the door, I asked Bernadette, “So, when do we start?”

“Not so fast! There’s four of you, and only three positions open—and I’ll need to see your baking skills in action.”

Uh-oh. Unless those skills involved the creation of brownies that could double as salt-licks, I was in big trouble.

With only four of us left in the room, Bernadette was able to spread us apart so we each had our own table—which really put a crimp in my plan to copy off Joan. Passing out recipe cards, Bernadette told us, “This is our most requested brownie, the Nut’n Honey, made with heirloom black walnuts grown in the nearby township of Success, and honey harvested right here. If you haven’t worked with raw honey, just warm it gently in a hot water bath if you need to dissolve any crystals.”

What luck! There’d be no chance of me mixing up my salt with my sugar if we were baking with honey instead.

I headed for the pantry to gather my ingredients. Venus (being obnoxiously pushy) didn’t care who she had to plow down to get in and out of that pantry as soon as possible. Joan was clearly in the zone, scooping out her dry ingredients so fast I swore she’d sprouted extra arms. I followed behind, realizing I had no idea what the labeling on any of the bins actually meant, since I’d been thinking about Oompa Loompas at the time…but I did my best to just grab from the same bins Joan had been rooting around in, figuring I’d sort it all out back at my workstation.

My handwriting might have been too fancy for Bernadette’s liking, but I’d just have to show her that I knew how to measure. Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the table, I realized I had no clue what all the various white powders might be. I’d just have to use the process of elimination. Cocoa was brown. Butter was buttery. Honey was liquid. Eggs were round. Salt was granular. Baking soda, baking powder and flour, though? They all looked the same. Even if I was able to copy Joan move for move, I had no idea which scoop of dusty white powder was which.

I was still puzzling over my ingredients by the time the other three bakers were stirring up their batter, so clearly a decision would need to be made. If I didn’t know which was which, I’d just have to put in equal amounts of everything. That way, at least one of them would be right.

And then there was the raw honey, which was actually pretty intimidating. It was chunky and cloudy, with bits of wax inside. If anything like that ever turned up in my mother’s pantry, she’d heave it into the trash for sure—and that’s really saying something, as she considers expiration dates to be nothing more than suggestions. But, surprisingly enough, I was familiar with the concept of the warm water bath. When I was a kid, I used the technique to melt down my crayon stubs into multicolored mega-crayons to play Scrivener with my cousin. The color-changing line was a pretty creative representation of Spellcraft, if I do say so myself.

But despite what Vano had claimed during our baking lesson at Shirque Mansion, I was beginning to wonder if there really was a place for creativity in baking. With all the math and chemistry involved, the process felt much more like a science than an art.

So, I dutifully bathed my honey, creamed my butter, chopped my nuts, cracked my eggs, measured my dry ingredients, and stirred. And lo and behold, when I sifted in the cocoa powder, (sifted, mind you) my brownie batter actually smelled like brownies!

I was feeling pretty optimistic—but when I snuck a little taste for myself, I was in for a surprise. A big, nasty surprise. Because while my batter may have smelled like brownies, it tasted more like aluminum foil. Pretty sure that wasn’t the flavor profile I was supposed to be going for.

Baking was definitely not an art. With art, you could pass anything off as a success if you knew how to justify your process. But even without running it through the oven, I could tell that no amount of fancy verbal footwork would ever convince someone that this batch of brownies was edible.

While I’m not averse to bending the rules, I’ve never been a fan of cheating. But even through the beard net, I could see that Yuri’s cheeks were livid with swollen, hot splotches of Spellcraft-induced rashiness. I may not like it, but for Yuri, I’d do what I had to do to get in that bakery and put an end to his misery. And no way would I manage that with my current brownie batter, though lucky for me, Venus’s batter was directly behind me—right within arm’s reach.

Though I could hardly grab it right out from under her nose. Not without a good distraction.

I checked my ingredients, pinpointed the white mystery powder that was closest to the edge of my table, feigned a massive yawn, and elbowed it over the side. The container hit the floor with a plasticky clatter, spraying white powder that was possibly flour, or baking soda, or talcum. Everyone turned to look...and then turned back before I’d even had a chance to grab my brownie pan.

Dang it!

“Butterfingers!” I said, hoping to make a bigger spectacle out of the spill. “Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Especially on shag carpeting. Not that I have shag carpeting in my kitchen. Or anywhere in my apartment, for that matter. But my dad has a few shag carpet squares in the basement. Those are the ones you always trip over….”

Talking was proving to be an inadequate distraction, since the only one paying me any heed was Yuri. And he was giving me his patented I-know-you’re-up-to-something squint. If he was the only one looking at me, I realized, I could give him a message.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just come out and say it. I’ve found out the hard way that even when someone looks completely tuned out, they’ll snap back to attention the moment you slip and reveal something you’d meant to keep secret. Maybe I could signal Yuri in Russian. Too bad the only Russian words I knew were naughty, and not appropriate to the situation at all.

Stumped, I glanced down at the spilled powdery stuff on the floor…and realized I wouldn’t need to speak my secret message after all. I waved at Yuri, crouched low, and scribbled DISTRACT THEM with my fingertip in the powder. His brow furrowed—but I recognized the look as a thinking-furrow rather than a confusion-furrow—and I quickly dashed away the message with the side of my hand before anyone else could see.

I waggled my eyebrows at Yuri expectantly.

He scowled harder.

I added a particularly pleading puppy-dog look.

He gave a subtle head shake (with a silent sigh), then pointed at a window on the far wall and called out, “Erm..look. Pinyin Bay Perch.”

This time, everyone did look—and when they didn’t immediately see a guy in a fish costume, they kept right on looking! Heck, they even went over to the window! I made the switch with time to spare. Did I feel bad for swapping my tinfoil brownies for Venus’s undoubtedly better (or at the very least normal) brownies? Only somewhat. Yes, it would mean I’d finagled my way into a job that should technically go to her. But it wasn’t as if I was planning on keeping my bakery job once we got Yuri’s rash under control. Besides, Venus had a dozen other streams of income to fall back on in the meantime.

“No mascots that I can see,” Venus called back, “but it looks like someone’s having a major meltdown on the street. And I think it’s Dixon’s cousin!”

13

Dixon

Yuri and I flocked to the window, and sure enough, the old Buick was parked just down the street, and Sabina and Uncle Fonzo were squaring off in the middle of the road beside it. I couldn’t tell what they were squabbling about with each of them yelling over the other, but since they were both pretty opinionated, it wouldn’t be the first time they butted heads.

“I’m sure it’ll work itself out,” I told Joan, who looked particularly concerned. “After all, they haven’t killed each other yet!”

It would have been so much easier if Venus hadn’t called attention to our family ties and I could just pretend I didn’t know the people shouting on the street. Luckily, Bernadette swept back into the room before I had to fabricate any excuses for my family members. “All right, everyone, the proof is in the pudding—or, in this case, the brownies.” She put a little colored wooden pick in each pan to mark whose was whose. At least the sludge in Venus’s pan didn’t dissolve the toothpick! “Let’s pop our batter into the ovens and see what we get.”

“Hold on,” Joan said as Bernadette tried to collect her pan. “My batter seems to be bubbling and I’m a little concerned—”

Bernadette would have none of it. She snatched the pan from Joan with a firm yank. “I gave you all more than enough time to mix up a simple batter. If you had time to look out the window, you had time to double check your measurements.”

Yowsa. For someone who looked like a little kid playing dress-up, Bernadette could be quite the drill sergeant. I never realized brownie baking was such serious business.

She tucked the brownies into the oven and set a timer. Within moments, the bake room filled with the enticing aroma of chocolate. And aluminum. But mostly chocolate. Bernadette said, “Let’s take a break while we’re waiting for this batch to bake.” Great rhyme! Though my enthusiasm for it dimmed somewhat when she glanced at the spillage on the floor. “But first, I’ll show you where we keep the brooms.”

I’ve always been good at sweeping, aside from that weird line of dust you get at the end that you keep chasing around with the dustpan—the one that doesn’t get any smaller no matter how hard you sweep. I can usually get away with scattering whatever refuses to be swept up, but I’d never seen a floor so clean. All around the edges, where a normal floor would have at least a few crumbs or cobwebs, was nothing but gleaming linoleum.

No baking ingredient was gonna get the better of me!

As I skootched around on the floor chasing the stubborn line, I took the opportunity to search for errant Spellcraft, but came up empty-handed. And I also kept one eye on the oven in case smoke started pouring out the door. But by the time I was so bored with sweeping I could barely manage even one more stroke, we were still smoke-free.

“Dixon!” Yuri called from the doorway. “Come outside and talk some sense into your family before they ruin our chances of getting hired.”

“I’m sure they’ll listen to you, seeing as how decisive and commanding you are. Actually, scratch that—” It was the perfect excuse to stop sweeping. “I’ll come out and help you smooth things over.” But just as I edged the final bit of flour under a nearby worktable, something glinted in the dust. Interesting. I blew gently on the dust, and something shimmered iridescent in the light. Not Spellcraft—but a single translucent insect wing.

How strange. A few deceased houseflies or ladybugs can usually be found on the windowsills of my mom’s kitchen. I was surprised, though, to find bug parts in Bruno’s scrupulously clean workroom.

Before I could puzzle too hard over the insect wing, Yuri hauled me outside, where Sabina and Uncle Fonzo were still going at it. Sabina was particularly riled up, and her angry voice really carried. “I’m just saying, you’d be fine at Glenda’s. All of you. In fact, I’ll bet it would be a lot easier to baby-proof than our place.”

“Nonsense!” my uncle said. “I raised you in that house, I’ll remind you—and look how you turned out!”

“I’ve got a big scar on my knee from the time I fell through a rotten step in the basement!”

“And you learned a valuable lesson about snooping around in your old man’s toolbox, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t give a baboon’s butt about your toolbox—I was looking for my Frisbee!”

I leaned into Yuri and said, “Why did they come here to have this argument?”

He shook his head. “They both claimed we would take their side, so when we didn’t answer our phones, they brought the argument to us.”

Meanwhile, my uncle said, “Glenda’s got one of those sterile condos that looks like a model home. How would a kid pick up any life lessons in an environment like that?”

Since time was running out on our break, I took it upon myself to try and bump their discussion into a more productive direction. “Where would Dr. Slaughter want to raise a baby?”

With great enthusiasm, my uncle said, “Glenda is an agreeable lady—she’ll love that old house just as much as I do.”

Sabina snapped, “You just want the tax write-off!”

“Everyone loves a tax write-off,” Uncle Fonzo allowed.

Sabina was not appeased. “And you want to use me as an indentured babysitter!”

Ah…now we were getting to the heart of the matter.

My cousin has never been too keen on babies. When Aunt Rose gave her a baby doll for her fifth birthday, the next day it turned up in the oven, melted to a misshapen lump. Aunt Rose claimed Sabina was just looking for a quiet place for her dolly to sleep. But my cousin later told me that she didn’t like the way it was looking at her.

Which was probably one of the many reasons she and Yuri got along so well.

“I’ll move out,” Sabina said. “That’s what I’ll do.”

My cousin lives paycheck to paycheck—and that’s without spending any money on meals. Or clothes. Or anything, really, but the occasional zucchini to leave on an enemy’s doorstep. Pinyin Bay real estate didn’t come cheap…which meant she’d be angling to move back into the attic by the time the baby was due.

I loved my cousin. But I shared the attic with Yuri now. Just him. (Okay, and technically Meringue. But she fell asleep the minute you threw a sheet over her cage.) That space was our alone-time haven—and that’s how I wanted it to stay.

I eased myself between my cousin and Uncle Fonzo and said, “Look, there’s still plenty of time before the baby gets here. Weeks? Months? A year? Can’t say I paid too much attention to the pregnancy section in Health class. Anyway, point being, no one needs to make any rash decisions right this second.”

Sabina boffed me in the arm—ow. “Whose side are you on?”

“There are no sides, and there’s absolutely no reason we can’t all come out ahead. I adore babies—and I’m confident I would make a fabulous babysitter. Plus, I work from home, so you know I’m always available—”

“As Dixon said,” Yuri interrupted. “No decisions must be made right now.”

I knew that tone—one of his many leery tones, this one intended to stop me from biting off more than I can chew—but before I could tease him about being spooked by a harmless little baby, I saw his hot, painful-looking rash had spread well beyond the beard guard, and was now creeping up his temples!

“You’re absolutely right,” I told Yuri. “We’ll have plenty of time to plan for the baby. Right now, let’s get back inside and find that Spellcraft.”

Poor Yuri. He was putting up a brave front—but that was his go-to reaction to pretty much everything. Behind the gruff, tough exterior, my big, brawny bruiser of a man was hurting. Not only that, he was scared.

No more messing around. Yuri was my number one priority. And I might not be known for my focus, but darn it all, I would not stand idly by and watch my grown man friend suffer. So help me, I would ferret out whatever Spellcraft was responsible for Yuri’s condition if it was the last thing I did. Which was a weird expression, come to think of it, since of course I’d want to Uncraft the spell once I ferreted the thing out. And also, I’ve never been a fan of ferrets—they’re just a little too sinuous for my taste. Maybe I’d be better at ottering….

“Well?” Bernadette called from the doorway, “Are you coming inside, or what?”

“Oh. Right. Absolutely.”

I sent my family on their way, then marched back into the brownerie with a full head of steam, intending to search that place up and down, leaving no crumb unturned, just as soon as I was hired.

Bernadette gathered us all in the workroom. The first thing to hit me was the heavenly smell of the Nut’n Honey brownie, which I remembered from the job fair. Unfortunately, it was followed by a whiff of something weird and metallic—kind of like an aftertaste, but in my nose instead of my mouth.

And it smelled an awful lot like my batter had tasted. But wa-a-ay stronger.

Especially when Bernadette swung open the oven door, and a blast of metal-brownie-scented air hit the room.

All of the pans had gone into the oven looking like brownie batter—and three of those pans still looked like brownies. But one particular pan had morphed into a science experiment gone berserk. It was like one of those baking soda volcanoes collided with the expanding aerosol foam my dad used for sealing gaps around the basement windows. Whereas all the other brownies were flat-ish rectangles, the brownies I’d mixed up were exuberantly 3-D. They’d puffed up so high, they engulfed the shelf above them, and when Bernadette tried to liberate the pan from the oven, the entire top rack pulled out right along with it.

With a yank, Bernadette freed the crazy brownie-mountain from the hot metal. The top skin of the brownie stayed behind. But losing that top layer released a blast of steam—which smelled like a hot metal skillet roasting a bunch of ball bearings—as the monstrous brownie deflated like a yoga ball on a thumbtack.

It was bad enough I’d cut off one of Venus Monger’s potential streams of income. But I’d also made her look completely inept—and for that, I felt truly guilty. Spellcrafters might play fast and loose with things like income taxes and local ordinances…but we did have our pride. I’d have to make it up to her somehow. Not with something as extravagant as buying a timeshare in Des Moines, obviously, but I could acquire some of her outrageously priced snake oil without too much haggling.

I felt so terrible about what I’d done that I actually winced when Bernadette pulled out the identifying toothpick, gave it a look, and said, “Anyone can have a bad day, but it’s pretty clear this person has a lot of work to do before they should set foot again in a professional kitchen. Better luck next time, Joan.”

Joan?

At that moment, I realized I hadn’t been the only one playing brownie batter switcheroo. If Joan’s toothpick ended up in my science experiment, Venus must’ve swapped the pans when the rest of us were watching my family argue out the window!

That really didn’t seem fair. If the Penns were going to provide a useful distraction, it should have been for my benefit.

Poor Joan was horrified. “I don’t understand,” she stammered out. “There’s been some mistake.”

Bernadette dropped the flaccid brownie skin into the sink with a metallic hiss. “That’s a major understatement.”

“If the bins were mislabeled—”

Bernadette wasn’t having it. “If that were the case, explain the fact that no one else had an issue. Mistakes happen. But you need to take ownership for them, not try to explain them away. Thank you for your time, Joan, but unfortunately, your services will not be required.”

In Scribing, vocabulary is everything. It’s usually a great feeling to come up with the perfect word. But at the sight of Joan’s face as she left the room, the term crestfallen sprang to mind…and pinpointing that specific word felt decidedly un-great. Once Yuri was cured, I’d have to make it up to her.

Presuming that curing this magical affliction was even possible….

Bernadette startled me out of my doldrums with a brisk clap of her hands. “Well, that settles it. Welcome to Bruno’s Brownerie, everybody!”

“Aren’t you even going to taste my brownies?” Venus asked.

“No need,” Bernadette waved at the thing smoldering in the sink, “since one of them was clearly inedible. There’s just enough time for the grand tour, gang, so step lively and follow me.”

14

Yuri

I was unsure how Dixon managed to switch pans with Joan during the few seconds in which I distracted the room, though there was no doubt in my mind it was precisely what he had done. Dixon is a man of many talents…but cookery is not one of them.

In his shoes, I would have played it safe and tried to knock Venus out of the competition. Not only had she been standing closer to him than Joan, but the results would be more believable, since Joan was clearly the superior baker.

But Dixon does nothing by half-measures. This unabashed confidence never fails to amaze me. Sabina is much the same, always sure of herself and her opinions. Both raised by a loving family with encouragement and praise, not threats and indifference. This new child of Fonzo’s would be nurtured just as the two cousins had been. Perhaps to an even greater degree, with Dixon’s unflagging support. Sabinochka might grumble, but I suspected she, too, would ferociously champion her new sibling just as she did everyone she loved.

I had never thought myself fond of children. These stirrings of anticipation I now felt were most definitely unexpected.

Also unexpected was the level of secrecy with which these bakers guarded their secrets. Bernadette handed out some contracts and said, “I’ll just need the three of you to sign our standard non-disclosure agreement, and we’ll be on our way.”

Dixon, naturally, was eager for a chance to show off his signature. He was not the only one eager to sign. Venus dashed off her name boldly, then held out the pen to me. I thought she was being helpful, until she said, “If you’re in the market for a quality writing implement, look no farther.”

I do not normally carry a pen, but the child’s marker given to me by Fonzo’s lady friend was still in my pocket. Though when I attempted to use it, the ink proved to be transparent, more like that of a highlighter pen. Water-soluble, too, like paint. Where the contract had picked up a bit of moisture from the work table, the ink immediately spread out into a yellowish cloud. And the green apple scent cut right through the smell of metallic brownies which permeated the room.

Dixon came to my rescue by pressing one of his many mundane pens into my hand. “Yuri lives with a Scri—uh, scriptwriting pen enthusiast.” Bernadette did not seem to notice the near slip. “He’d hardly want for something to write with!”

Dixon was, indeed, a pen enthusiast. The pen he handed me overwrote the spreading green blob with ease.

Once we all signed, Bernadette collected the contracts, then happily ushered us all into the hallway, headed for the staff-only door which had previously been blocked by Bruno. She led us into a room that was stacked floor to ceiling with large cloth sacks, which she presented with a sweep of her hand. “Our first crucial ingredient is our flour. This is a proprietary blend milled especially for Bruno’s, to ensure both quality and consistency.”

“Question,” Dixon said. “Do the wheat plants have flowers on them? And if so, is it not confusing that a plant would produce both flowers and flour?”

“The flowers are very tiny. I’ve never heard of anyone confusing them with flour.”

I should have known something was amiss when Dixon did not immediately launch into a running commentary about the quirkiness of language. By the time I saw him scrutinizing one of the giant cloth sacks, it was too late. Bernadette noticed him just as I did. “Wait! You don’t wanna pull that—”

A white cloud enveloped us.

“…string.”

I slapped my hand over the corner of the sack that was now gaping open, and within a few minutes, the dust began to settle. It was only because of the beard guard acting as a filter that I did not choke on the airborne flour. Bernadette waved away the cloud, coughing. “That’s how you open the bags!”

“Sorry,” Dixon said meekly as she found a clamp to re-close the sack. “It was like having a hangnail. But made of thread. On a flour sack.”

“I can see we’ll need some ground rules,” Bernadette said. “Rule number one—don’t touch anything unless I say so!”

“Got it.” Dixon said. “No touchee.” But when Bernadette turned toward the next door, he gestured to his eyes with the vee of his fingers and then pointed at the room, reminding me to watch for Spellcraft. I swept the room with a glance, but the only atmospheric shifting I could see was the settling clouds of flour.

Though as I walked through to the next room, that flour seemed to drift into a shape like an arrow, guiding me forward. At least, I thought it did…until the motion of my passing made it disperse.

Bernadette led us onward. “Be especially sure to keep your hands to yourself now. We’re passing through the egg room.”

If ever there was an accident waiting to happen….

Hundreds of eggs—white, brown and pale sea-glass blue—were stacked two meters high in narrow wooden pallets. Bernadette was much more confident than I that we would make it through the egg room unscathed. She turned to the group and said, “At Bruno’s, we contract with three local poultry farms, and we visit them all regularly to make sure our hens are being treated right. Happy chickens lay happy eggs.”

Dixon was, unsurprisingly, impressed. “Hey! That egg is the very same color as my favorite shirt!”

Despite “rule number one,” he impulsively reached out to grab the egg. With visions of an entire wall of eggs crashing down on our heads, I was quick to grab him. So quick that the green marker launched itself out of my pocket…and rolled directly under Venus’s feet. She stepped down on the bright plastic barrel and rolled forward an inch, flinging her arms out to catch her balance. Bangles rang together. Bracelets jingled. I shielded Dixon with my body and steeled myself to be covered in yolk. But mere inches from the egg wall, Venus righted herself with a final jangling swoop of her arms.

The only casualty was a single round bracelet, which flew from her wrist, rolled toward the next door, circled a few times, then settled to a halt at Bernadette’s feet. She picked it up and handed it to Venus. “Rule number two: no dangling jewelry. It’s a safety risk.”

“I never knew baking was so serious,” Venus said with a sigh, while I retrieved my marker. It gave me an opportunity to scan the room’s lower half for Spellcraft, but in that respect, I came up empty-handed.

Bernadette gave us all a hard look. “Absolutely no fooling around in this next room. With all the heavy equipment, things could turn dangerous.”

I glanced at Dixon—he looked far too eager—and surreptitiously took hold of the back of his shirt, just in case I needed to restrain him.

When the next door opened, the smell of chocolate enveloped us. Not sweet like candy, but dark and rich, bitter and complex, like coffee or wine or freshly turned soil. The room was dominated by a large metal machine with a conveyor belt on one end and a hopper on the other. Bernadette turned on a power switch and the conveyor belt chugged to life. “While we can’t grow the cocoa here in Pinyin Bay—totally wrong climate—we can grind and roast our own nibs. This gives us the freshest possible ingredient, which we can even tailor to our various recipes. These dials control how quickly the nibs make their way through the roaster. A fan cools them to the optimal grinding temperature, and then they’re precision ground to our exact specifications.”

Bernadette was clearly very proud of this machine, and she grew more and more emphatic as the explanation went on. “Bruno invented this system himself. It’s really a marvel of modern culinary engineering! I’ll let you see it in action—but the settings are very precisely calibrated. It’s absolutely crucial you don’t touch anything.”

I tightened my grip on Dixon’s shirt.

Tendrils of heat were now rising from the body of the roasting machine. Bernadette took a large scoop of “nibs” from a nearby vat and spread them on the conveyor belt. Immediately, Dixon strained toward the machine, but I held him firm.

“Hey! What’re you doing, Yuri?”

“It is for your own good.”

“But the machine—”

The ponderous chug of the roaster changed in pitch as, suddenly, the internal gears sped up. The mouth of the machine glowed red, and the smell of roasting chocolate filled the room.

And then a thin wisp of smoke rose from the machine.

“Is it supposed to do that?” Venus asked.

Bernadette scrambled over to the controls. “Something’s wrong!”

Over the sound of the motor, Dixon called, “It’s the middle dial! You hit it with your pinkie while you were enthusing about your machine.”

For once, Dixon’s interference would have averted a crisis instead of creating it. And my preventing him from meddling had only made matters worse. It was such a convoluted turn of events, I knew in my gut it could not be coincidence. And so it was no surprise that when smoldering cocoa nibs blasted out of the machine, they all shimmered with the telltale distortion of the volshebstvo.

Two inventors, both specializing in food, set up shop directly next door to one another? No doubt there was a rivalry. Where there was rivalry, there was sabotage. And in Pinyin Bay, where there was sabotage, there was Spellcraft.

Perhaps we should not have been so fast to clear the hydroponic farmer of wrongdoing.

Nibs shot in every direction. They were small—but they were hot, pinging off our exposed skin like tiny coals. Good thing I had a beard guard—I could focus on shielding my shaved head from the assault without worrying about my face.

Bernadette lunged for the controls and shut the roaster off—but not before she endured a spray of hot nibs. “Eep! My eye!”

“I’ve got you,” Dixon called out as he yanked a bottled water from his messenger bag. In one quick motion, he cracked the top, and sent a stream of water arcing toward Bernadette.

She took it square in the face.

Beside her, the slowing roaster began to hiss.

The whole debacle smelled disturbingly good.

Dixon put an arm around a soggy Bernadette and said, “Let’s get you to an eye-wash station.” Then he caught my eye over the top of her head and mouthed the words, Find the Spellcraft!

15

Bernadette might be occupied…but I could hardly search the place with Venus Monger watching me. “You should go help them,” I said firmly. Americans tend to listen to me when I use this tone.

But Venus was the most persistent Spellcrafter I had ever met—and that’s saying a lot, considering I live with a man for whom pestering is practically an art form. “Oh no, Seer. You’re not getting rid of me that easily. You guys are obviously running some kind of racket. And whatever it is, I want in.”

“There is no racket.”

“The heck there isn’t! If you’re an avid baker, then I’m the Mayor of Pinyin Bay. A single Seen is more lucrative than a whole day slaving over a hot oven—and you don’t need to get up at the crack of dawn to do it. I wasn’t born yesterday—something’s definitely up!”

I did not know how long Dixon and Bernadette would be gone. While I had no good reason to trust Venus, she was a Scrivener, and it would be valuable to have a Scrivener’s help. Also, I realized, I did not need to trust her. I just needed to strike the correct bargain. “I am looking for a Crafting. If you help me find it, I will pay you.”

“Ten thousand dollars,” she said, without missing a beat.

While I knew she was just starting her bargaining from a high position, I did not have time—nor the patience—to talk her down to the five dollars in my pocket. “I would not pay you with money.”

She gave me a long, skeptical look, then shrugged. “I don’t generally prefer my men quite so lunky, but I suppose you’ll do. Though you’d have to lose the beard guard.”

“That’s not what I meant! I am offering you a Seen.”

Her avaricious eyes lit up. “Ah! Now you’re talking! I’m definitely in. Where do we start?”

“Search the room,” I said, and began slinging around hundred-pound sacks of cocoa nibs to ensure there was nothing lurking between them.

Venus did nothing to earn her Seen. Or so I thought. While she appeared to be simply staring at the floor, it turned out she was scoping out the situation. “Before you wear yourself out throwing chocolate around, come take a look at this.”

The floor was set with square tiles on the diagonal. The hot cocoa nibs had settled into the cracks between the squares, but only a few of them. Enough to form the distinct impression of an arrow—one which did not drift away as easily as the flour. An arrow pointing at a door on the far wall. A door marked Apiary.

“What does apiary mean?” I asked.

Venus shook her head. “It always comes down to the monkeys….”

It made no sense to house monkeys at a bakery. I plugged the word into my phone’s dictionary. “That cannot be the definition—”

Venus paid no attention to me. She was already opening the door…from which we heard the gentle hum of a distant, droning buzz.

I took a step back and said, “An apiary is not for apes…but for bees.”

Movement.

The far wall was made entirely of glass, behind which thousands of insects undulated in a brownish ripple of motion. When Bernadette had said the honey was harvested “right here,” I presumed she meant Pinyin Bay. Not the brownerie itself.

I am not afraid of a bee. While I do not wish to be stung, I could certainly handle the pain. It was the sight of so many, moving together with a single intelligence, dipping in and out of sticky, moist cells in the honeycomb…depositing their larvae….

“It is no use,” I said. “We will never find the Crafting in here—”

“There it is!” Venus pointed triumphantly to a small, framed bit of calligraphy tacked to the glass.

I certainly would have noticed it without her help…once I had a moment to get my bearings.

I swallowed down my insect-induced nausea and forced myself to approach the undulating wall of bugs. The Crafting was on the bee-side of the pane.

Of course it was.

And a dozen bees had wriggled their way between the Crafting and the glass, thwarting my attempt to read it. “Can you hazard a guess as to what these words say?” I asked.

“I don’t have to guess!” Venus declared. “I wrote them.”

I had never met a woman with such gall. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Bernadette commissioned me, of course. It’s bad business to give away your Spellcraft for free.”

“So she is sabotaging Bruno?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. She’s crazy about Bruno, but the man has zero business acumen, so she had to take matters into her own hands. There’s no sabotage, just a standard business-enhancement Crafting. That’s all.”

At the top of the hive was a clear plastic pipe, almost like a chimney—the same piping used in the hydroponic warehouse. It exited through the wall facing the other business. It must lead to the bee-door Herb had told us about in his grow room.

As I tracked the path of the bees, I realized Herb and Bruno were not in competition with one another at all. They were in a collaborative relationship—the ultimate win-win—with one of them utilizing the bees and the other reaping the honey.

But if this was not sabotage…. “Why would anyone hide a harmless piece of Spellcraft within a living wall of bees?”

“The hives are flourishing,” Venus read—or recalled. “Where else would it go?”

I would not put it past this woman to stretch the truth, so I forced myself closer to the glass to try to read what I could for myself. But when I neared the glass, the rash on my face flared to life, hot and angry as the sting of a thousand bees. I grunted in pain and tore off my beard guard.

Venus saw my cheeks and let out a startled gasp. “Yikes—what are you so allergic to? I’ve never seen such a terrible case of…hives.”

Our eyes went to the Crafting.

Behind the shimmy and shake of the industrious bees, the Crafting itself glimmered with magic. The words were just as Venus had claimed—The hives are flourishing. And the Seen? A cluster of reddish blobs—which could have been painted by none other than Practical Penn’s inscrutable Seer, Rufus Clahd.

Indignantly, Venus said, “I thought it was a bunch of bee hives. Obviously, that’s what I asked him to paint. Not an allergic reaction.”

“Tell that to the volshebstvo!”

“I can’t have people saying my work needs Uncrafting. It would be terrible for business!”

“I care nothing for your business.” My cheeks were blowing up like a pair of fleshy balloons. “We must fix this thing now!”

“Fine,” she said petulantly. “I’m willing to add the word bee. But you’d have to be an idiot to stick your hand in there.”

Where was a giant zucchini when you needed one?

That thought reminded me of the hydroponic grow house next door—and Herb’s admonition not to swat his bees…the ones who had lingered behind after he shut the bee-door.

My cheeks had swelled to such ridiculous proportion I could hardly see to pull up Herb’s business on my phone and call him. After three rings which seemed like an eternity, he answered. “Herb’s Herbs and Veggies, where freshness is always in season!”

“It is Yuri,” I said bluntly.

“Yuri! How’s that zucchini treating you?”

The words that followed were nearly painful to grit out. Because until I met Dixon, I would consider them the words of a fool. “I need…a favor.”

“Of course. Can’t rave enough about how you and your grown man friend saved my skin by finding the problem with my irrigation system. Anything I can do.”

“Open the bee-door.”

“The bee-door?”

“It is urgent.” Must I say it? “Please.”

“It’s a little early yet for bees—but if it means that much to you—”

Herb rambled about the bees’ schedule, but I had crammed the phone back in my pocket to press the palms of both hands against my blazing cheeks as if I could squash them back into place. It was not just painful. It was pain and pressure and itching and heat—all of it underscored with the growing tingle of volshebstvo.

My eyes were squeezed shut tight when Venus said, “Would you look at that? All the bees are high-tailing it out through that clear plastic tube.”

Not all. Some, I saw, were still tending to their larvae. But the majority of them seemed eager to go visit the flowering plants next door…enough of them that I could yank open the glass panel—the earthen floral smell of honey was dizzying—and steal the Crafting from the hive.

I thrust the sticky thing at Venus. “Quickly. Add the word.”

“Obviously, I can’t do it here. I don’t have my quill on me.”

“You carry a handbag big enough to kidnap someone and you do not have your quill?” Without waiting for her to answer, I snatched back the Crafting, hoping I could summon Dixon before I was utterly incapacitated by the hives. I thrust my hand, sticky with honey, into my pocket to retrieve my phone, though I worried how many precious minutes it would take Dixon to retrace his steps through the brownerie to reach me. When I pulled out my phone, something else was also stuck to my honeyed hand….

The green marker.

Obviously, it was possible to Uncraft a Scrivening. But never had I realized it was possible to re-envision a Seen. Normally, I would take time to consider what I was about to do, and probably talk myself out of it. I am naturally averse to things that have never been tried, especially when the stakes are so high. I would rather allow someone else to experience the inevitable failure. But at that moment, the volshebstvo was thrumming through my left arm in an impulse too fierce to deny.

The green marker was not dark enough to obliterate Rufus Clahd’s work, but it was stuck fast to my hand—and these things happen for a reason. I smacked the small picture frame against my knee to expose the Crafting and the thin glass shattered. As I shook away the fragments, I tore off the marker cap with my teeth. The scent of green apple welled up, cutting through the cloying scent of honey—mixing and mingling into a tempting aroma much better than either one alone.

As the scents combined, I understood. I did not need the ink to cover the original Seen. I only needed to enhance it.

I would like to say I directed my own hand, but this would be a lie. Seens do not come from me. They come through me. As I brought marker to paper, ink flowed through the barrel just as surely as my paints would flow through a brush. The ink was not only transparent, but water-based, and the friction of the felt with the wetness of the ink began pulling at the pigments laid by the brush of Rufus Clahd.

The intent of the Scrivener was already there—bee hives—and the volshebstvo on the page was eager to resolve the friction between Scrivening and Seen. Marker and paint mingled, green over red, its opposite on the color wheel. And together, the two made brown—many shades, from the color of the wooden frame to the deep golden hue of honey.

Though I was doing little more than scribbling over the Crafting with a marker, it was hard work to control the Spellcraft. Sweat sprang to my brow, and a meandering bee paused on my temple to sip at my perspiration. But it did not sting.

Unlike most men, the wild creatures of the earth respect the volshebstvo.

I dug boldly into the Crafting. Magic drained from my arm as the colors shifted, and the Spellcraft reimagined itself. It was much different from creating a Seen from scratch, where the control rested solely with me. More like coming upon a strange pan of unbaked brownies, trying to determine what might be missing, and mixing in that ingredient before the pan went in the oven.

Or perhaps it was more like pulling the pan out just before the brownies have set and remixing the molten batter.

At any rate, the relief, when it came, was immediate and profound. I might have dropped the Crafting, but it was stuck with honey to my right hand.

The pain and itching subsided in moments as the Spellcraft settled into its intended purpose, and my face cooled to the temperature of the skin around it.

The bee drank his fill and buzzed away.

I always suspected I was especially sensitive to the energy of the volshebstvo. How else had it called to me from across the ocean? No wonder it had no problem nagging at me to come and set it right from the other side of the city.

By the time Dixon returned with Bernadette, we had the glass swept up and the Crafting back in place. Venus might not have a quill in her handbag, but she did carry an assortment of small picture frames. (I did not ask why.)

Bernadette was disheveled and her hair was damp. Her cheeks were pink, but this was from the eye wash station, not the volshebstvo, judging by the twin tracks of mascara trailing down her face. “I see you found our honey room,” she said with a weak smile. “Though I’m not sure why the bees are gone so early. I hope they haven’t escaped!”

I reassured her that they went through the proper tube, and she sagged with relief. “It seems like everything that could’ve gone wrong today, did. Spectacularly. And it might sound hokey, but I think everything that happens, happens for a reason. I’m sorry to say I’ve changed my mind about expanding Bruno’s Brownerie, so I won’t be taking on any new staff. But as a reward for coming out so bright and early, I’ve got a 10%-off coupon for each of you.”

You would have to buy a lot of brownies for that ten percent to be worth your while…but they were very good brownies, and surely we should not leave empty-handed. Though from this moment forward I did plan to avoid the signature Nut’n Honey brownie. Just to be safe.

Dixon asked, “Can we at least take home the brownies we made?”

“Sure,” Bernadette said wearily. “They’re all yours.”

“What a relief. I’m starving!” Venus grabbed her pan and was already halfway out the door. Time is money, and she was not the sort to waste valuable earning potential exchanging pleasantries if there was nothing for her to sell.

We collected our warm brownies and headed toward the door, with Dixon calling out a promise to return the pans just as soon as we were done with them. Making our way through the brownerie, as soon as Bernadette was out of earshot, he lowered his voice and said, “Your rash is, like, a thousand times better. Whatever you did—it must’ve worked!”

What I had done—Reseeing a Seen—was completely out of my realm of experience. I was not sure whether I felt excited, or terrified. I would need to mull it over before we talked it through, so for now, I changed the subject by saying, “I would be surprised if my brownies are even edible…and I’m guessing yours were the ones that blew up bigger than my cheeks.”

Dixon winced. “Unfortunately. But I didn’t mean to knock Joan out of the running. I was aiming for Venus—darn it, I should’ve known she’d be cutthroat enough to swap with Joan.” This said with absolutely no acknowledgement that he’d used the same tactic himself. “Maybe it’s a moot point, since it turned out there was no job to be had anyway.”

I nodded toward the pan in his grasp. “So who made those?”

Dixon pulled out the colored toothpick and waved it at me. “While Bernadette was in the eye-wash, I swapped toothpicks with Venus, so these must be Joan’s. Unless Venus switched them first, and this is a quadruple-switcheroo. In which case, I suppose she really has outsmarted us all.” Dixon popped the toothpick in his mouth and sucked off the crumbs…and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head with delight. “Nope, these are definitely Joan’s. D’you suppose I should track her down and give back her brownies? Not that I know where she lives.” He hugged the warm tray possessively to his chest. “And when you think about it, she’s totally skilled enough to whip up a batch of perfect, glorious, gooey, sweet, chocolatey, oven-fresh brownies anytime the mood strikes her….”

We stepped outside and I squinted against the early-morning sun. Once my eyes adjusted, I noticed two people chatting under the awning at Herb’s Herbs—Herb, and Joan. Herb’s thin chest was puffed out proudly against his tie-dyed shirt as he expounded about something, probably dull things about vegetables. Joan tittered at whatever he said and tucked a lock of graying hair behind her ear. I said, “It appears Joan’s morning was not entirely wasted.”

Dixon peeked out from behind me, shielding his brownies with my body. “Wow. Those two foodies go together like chocolate and, uh…pretty much anything. I can’t even imagine how factual their discussions will be.”

Satisfied that Joan would not wish to be interrupted over a job which did not exist and pan of brownies she could easily recreate, we climbed into the truck. The smell of fresh brownies filled the cab, though if I tried, I could still detect the lingering scent of green apples.

Dixon pressed the backs of his fingers to my cheek and said, “So I guess everything’s back to normal.” I expected him to then tuck into the brownies, but instead he set them on the dash with a wistful sigh. “But just think, Yuri. Nine-ish months from now, you’ll no longer be the most recent member of the Penn family!”

We were on the brink of some interesting times…and I found I was not entirely dreading them. I captured his hand and pressed a kiss to his fingers, and his wistful smile turned slightly naughty as he clambered across the bench to take my face in both hands and kiss my mouth, slow and deep.

When we ran out of air, he gave my face an extra squeeze and said, “I hadn’t realized how much I missed being able to smush your adorable cheeks!”

I caught his hands in mine and cleared my throat uneasily. “Tell me something, Dixon.” Certain things would be difficult for me to hear, but if anyone could soften the blow…. “Am I…lunky?”

“Not at all, Yuri.” Dixon’s smile turned naughtier still, hinting all the many ways in which he would like to grab hold of my not-so-thin places. “In fact, I’d say the more accurate word is hunky.”

The English language is a confusing thing. Words sounded the same but were written differently. Or they were spelled the same, but had different meanings entirely. The change of a single letter changed everything. Even the very same word might mean the opposite, depending on how it is spoken. And in the hands of a Scrivener, words were literally magic.

I may not know what this hunky specifically meant without double-checking the definition. But seeing the smile sparkling in Dixon’s dark eyes…I most definitely understood in every way that mattered.

About the Author

Jordan Castillo Price has no quarrel with zucchini, and would be thrilled if her neighbors were to leave some on her doorstep.

But she wouldn’t say no to a gooey, fresh brownie.

About this Story

I’m a pretty good baker nowadays, though that hasn’t always been the case. I remember making a chocolate cake when I was 14 or 15 and inviting all my new high school friends over to share it. I beat and beat that batter so it was smooth as silk, and couldn’t wait to cut into a moist, velvety cake. (Anyone who knows their baking can probably anticipate what I found.)

Holy cinderblock, Batman. That cake might’ve looked good, but it was not exactly palatable. All that beating overmixed the gluten in the flour and I ended up with something dense, dry, and all-around gross. So while I have never been as shoddy in the kitchen as Dixon or Sabina, I can still feel for them.

And I will admit…baking fails can be pretty funny.

The humor in The ABCs of Spellcraft has been compared to I Love Lucy, which feels so fitting. It’s silly and character-driven and way over the top. To me, the most iconic I Love Lucy scene is from the episode Job Switching where Lucy and Ethel take a job in a chocolate factory and end up working the connveyor belt where, naturally, hijinks ensue. The studio audience is laughing so hard they’re practically weeping. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one peed their pants.

I took the original brownie factory setting from my memories of that scene—of two people blundering through, getting in way over their heads, and persevering despite it being clear that they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of coming up roses.

But Dixon and Yuri, of course, always do.

The more time I spend in Pinyin Bay, the more I feel like I get to know the key players of the Spellcraft community. Ladin Silver in all his grand ineptitude is always a joy to write. I’m really tickled with how Venus Monger came out, too—all Spellcrafters tend to have a lot of hustle, but she takes it to the nth degree. In media, women characters are so often relegated to a pretty narrow range or roles. It’s important to me to make sure the women of Pinyin Bay are every bit as memorable as the men.

Brownie Points begins the third ABCs of Spellcraft story arc that delves deeper into the relationships within the Penn family and the presence of Spellcraft in Pinyin Bay.

The ABCs of Spellcraft Series

1. Quill Me Now

1.5 All that Glitters

2. Trouble in Taco Town

3. Something Stinks at the Spa

4. Dead Man’s Quill

5. Last But Not Lease

6. Don’t Rock the Boardwalk

7. What the Frack?

8. Present Tense

9. Brownie Points

10. Forging Ahead - coming soon

11. Mayor May Not - coming soon

The ABCs of Spellcraft Collections

Volume 1 (stories 1-4) in paperback and audio

Volume 2 (stories 5-7) in paperback and audio

Volume 3 (stories 8-11) coming soon