Broken Spells Read online

  Mara headed toward the back of the shop to get the cash register tray, but Bruce waved her off. “You don’t need to open the shop today. The outstanding repair jobs have been finished, and the auction house is stopping by tomorrow to clear out the shelves. There’s nothing left for you to do.”

  “You mean, I’m fired? That’s it?”

  Bruce chuckled. “Of course you’re not fired. But I guess you are without a job, unless you want to work for me in the bicycle shop. I’m taking over the whole space now. You could run the retail shop out here if you want. Anyway, the old man left you a check through the end of January and told you to take whatever inventory you wanted.”

  “Jeez, I guess Mom was right. We don’t have a clue about what might be.” Looking stunned, Mara returned to the coat tree and grabbed her jacket. She scanned the little shop, took in the old radios on the shelves, the neon signs behind the counter, the trinkets in the display case and the billiards light fixture hanging over the old brass register. She couldn’t believe it was going away.

  While she absorbed her last look of the place, Bruce must have run back to the office, because now he stood in front of her holding an envelope with her name scrawled on it in Mr. Mason’s messy penmanship. “Is there something you want to keep? He said you could take whatever you wanted,” he said.

  “The Philco 90.” She pointed to a wooden cathedral radio on the shelf behind the counter. “Ping taught me metaphysics with it.”

  Bruce retrieved the radio and brought it to her. “He taught you what?”

  “Nothing. It has sentimental value.”

  Handing it to her, he said, “It’s lighter than it looks.”

  “There is no internal mechanism. It’s just a wooden case.” She wrapped an arm around the radio and balanced it on a hip. “Thanks for everything, Bruce. It has been wonderful being work-neighbors with you.”

  “What about the job in the bike shop? You interested? You’re great with customer service, and I could use the help,” he said. “I plan to have the new shop open in time for spring.”

  “Let me get back to you on that.”

  Bruce held the door open, and she left Mason Fix-It for the last time, in a daze.

  CHAPTER 3

  The blended aromas of coffee and baked treats pulled Mara out of her funk as she navigated past the round tables in the front of Ping’s Bakery and approached the glass counter and display case, behind which stood a gray-haired lady, wearing a name tag that read Roberta. The lady handed a credit card and a cake box to a man standing in front of the counter. After the customer left, she turned her attention to Mara.

  “How may I help you?” Roberta asked.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Ping. Is he in the back?”

  “Yes. Would you like me to get him?”

  “That won’t be necessary. He doesn’t mind if I visit with him in the kitchen while he’s working.”

  Mara, still carrying the old radio case, rounded the end of the counter and used a hip to push through the swinging doors. In the back, Sam sat at a small table next to the office door, rummaging through his book bag while, across the kitchen, Ping lingered over an industrial-size mixer, its large silver bowl rotating in one direction while a massive beater spun in the opposite, churning a brown lumpy batter that gave off a cloying smell.

  Ping smiled and said, “Fruitcakes, for Christmas.” He flipped a switch, and the machine stopped. “Now it needs to set for a few minutes. Then it goes into the pans.” He pointed to a row of a dozen rectangular bread pans lined up on the counter.

  “Do people eat fruitcake anymore?” Mara asked. She sat the radio case on the counter next to the bread pans.

  “This batch is for a business down the street that’s giving them as gifts to their customers,” he said. “I’m not sure if they’ll get eaten, but the recipe is tasty.” He led her to the table where Sam sat and pointed to a plate of slices. “Try it. Those are from the test batch I baked yesterday.”

  “Not without coffee. Do you want some?” she asked. Ping nodded and took a seat while she filled two paper cups at the row of three coffee urns on the opposite end of the counter from the empty pans.

  When she handed the cup to Ping, he said, “You’ve got that drawn, stressed look about you. What’s the matter?”

  She glared at her brother, who said, “What?”

  “You’ve been running your mouth again.”

  “I haven’t said a word. I’ve been busy looking for my last assignment for Mrs. Zimmerman, which I can’t remember doing. Seems like the last time I went to her house was months ago.”

  “It’s true. We’ve hardly spoken since the boy walked in,” Ping said. “Is something troubling you?”

  “What isn’t troubling me? My mother is on the verge of disowning me for losing the body she gave me. Mr. Mason got tired of my disappearing act and closed the gadget shop, and I feel completely out of place because the house I grew up in was burned down by a dragon. Also Sam’s right—time is all screwed up from bouncing in and out of realms for the past few months, or maybe it’s just been a week. I can’t tell. I’m untethered to my life.”

  “Beyond commiserating, I’m not sure how much I can help with your first three issues. However, in terms of how much time transpired during our recent trip to other realms, we were gone a week, and we’ve been back for three days.”

  “I know that,” Mara said. “It just doesn’t feel like it. I have at least a month of memories from that week.”

  “Perhaps you should have returned us to this realm a month after our departure. It might have made the transition less disorienting,” Ping said. “Why did you return us to this moment in time?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about when we were returning, I just concentrated on where. Besides, if we’d returned a month after we left, Mom would have disowned me.”

  “I’ve been giving it some thought, and it might be prudent for you to concentrate on all the elements of Reality as you engage the Chronicle. Think about Time, Space, Consciousness and Consequence. When, where, in what form, and to what end are you crossing into another realm. That might help you get what you want out of the experience.”

  “In what form? What do you mean by that?” Mara asked.

  “The element of Consciousness defines the composition of things in Reality. If my hypothesis is correct, besides controlling which realm you visit and at what point in time, you should have the ability to reshape your being when you cross from this realm to another. For example, you could arrive in the destination realm as a grizzly bear, if you wished, or a man or a fruit fly.”

  Sam straightened. “Cool. The next time we go somewhere, I want to go as a griffin. Can you do that, sis?”

  Mara rolled her eyes at him. “Don’t you have to get to your lessons?”

  He glanced at his phone and jumped from his seat. “Shoot! You’re right.”

  They watched him clatter through the swinging doors, running while slinging his book bag onto his shoulder.

  Mara turned to Ping and asked, “How do you come up with this stuff?”

  “It is a reasonable assessment based on observations of your interactions with the Chronicle. Your limited knowledge of metaphysical principles is stunting the application of your abilities. Some of that is my fault. I can teach metaphysical theory as well as the next academician, but applying those principles to real world situations is more challenging.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I would encourage you to seek opportunities to experiment with your abilities, always keeping in mind the elements of Reality. Also, don’t forget about the elements of Perception—Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. While they are not the exclusive domain of progenitors, you still have—or can develop—the ability to work with them.”

  “Haven’t I made a big enough mess of my life already?”

  “You will one day think of your abilities as a potential solution to the problems you face, not the cause.”

  “How can you be
so sure?”

  “At some point in the future, you send your niece back in time to help us deal with the aforementioned dragon, so I must assume you fully embrace your abilities.”

  “And burned down the house. That worked out just great.”

  “Notwithstanding the house, it did work out,” Ping said. “But you didn’t stop by to talk about metaphysics or even your lost home. Are you upset about Mr. Mason closing the fix-it shop?”

  “It’s not that. I’m disappointed about it, but I knew he’d close it eventually. He’s been talking about retiring the whole time I’ve worked there,” she said.

  “You mentioned your mother.”

  “Yes, we told her about my synthetic body this morning, and she didn’t take it well.”

  “I hope you didn’t do the hand thing.”

  Mara looked sheepish. “She fainted.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Physically she’s fine. It was a bone-headed thing to do, but she couldn’t believe I was synthetic without seeing proof. The thing is, I never imagined how hurt she would be, how much pain it would cause her. As much of a free spirit as she is, I think I have hit the limit of her open-mindedness. She will never—deep down inside—accept that this synthetic body is the daughter she raised. Oh, she’ll deny it, and she’ll play the role of mother, but she’ll never get over it.”

  “Perhaps she needs time to adjust to the idea.”

  “No, I know my mother. She’s open to just about anything, except in those rare cases when she isn’t. And when she’s closed her mind to something, there’s no opening it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. There’s still the possibility she’ll come around. A mother’s love isn’t something that just goes away, and you are her daughter, even in your synthetic body.”

  “I’ve been thinking there might be another possibility, a solution with a metaphysical twist.”

  “If my theory is correct, and you could learn to better control the Chronicle, you could use it to turn your synthetic body into a biological one. That may take time and practice. Is that what you mean?”

  “Wouldn’t that just be me rearranging my pixels to fool myself and my mother into thinking my body was biological?”

  “For all intents and purposes, you would be biological. Remember, you have the ability to shape Reality.”

  “It can’t be something I whip up metaphysically. That would not be acceptable. It has to be biologically connected to Mom, a body that could not exist except for its connection to her.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “I think there’s someone who can help me do this.” Mara stood and slipped her hand into her jeans pocket. She removed the bejeweled copper medallion.

  “The Chronicle?” Ping asked. “What are planning?

  She held out the disk on her palm, and it levitated. Spinning and gyrating, the lines of the Chronicle blurred, its blue crystals emitting a blue light that melted the copper into a blue molten orb.

  “Mara. Please explain,” Ping said.

  “Show me creation,” she said. The spinning blue light exploded into a translucent globe of lines and nodes that filled the bakery’s kitchen. She glanced at Ping, a sheen of blue light reflected from her eyes. “I will get my body back.”

  “Your body is dead. Even if you find who took it, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “I know.” She looked away, into the center of the giant map of Reality.

  “Take me with you.”

  “Sorry, not this trip.” She reached out and grabbed one of the nodes. The blue sphere collapsed and disappeared, taking Mara with it.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mara felt less panic as she plunged through the streaks of dark and light between realms, at least until she wondered if she had grabbed the correct node. She’d acted intuitively, not using an object from her destination to draw a node to her as she had in the past.

  Jeez, I could end up anywhere.

  The blue sphere burst open, and daylight flooded through its transparent walls; then it collapsed into the copper medallion which fell to the ground with a metallic clatter. Mara bent to pick it up and realized she stood on worn gravelly asphalt.

  “You!”

  Mara looked up to see her counterpart standing next to a car with an open hood, an angry expression on her face. They stood in the alley behind Mason’s Fix-It Shop—in Prado’s former realm, the birthplace of the Aphotis, and the world where people put the souls of their dead in lightbulbs.

  “Which one are you? The one with the lizard fetish or the one who killed my brother?” the other Mara asked. She raised her right hand, palm up, and a glowing cinder spun in the air above it, quickly growing into a ball of hot lava.

  Mara raised her hands in surrender. “Don’t start with the fireworks again. We’ll be here all day.” The burning mass pixelated and broke apart, sending a cascade of translucent red and orange cubes tumbling down the other Mara’s arm.

  She batted them away in frustration and glared at Mara. “Get lost. I’ve got a rush job to do, and I don’t have time for your nonsense,” she said.

  “I need your help with something.”

  “No way. I’m done with you—all of you. You show up here, asking for favors, and the result is nothing but death and destruction. Now, GET OUT OF HERE.” Her face reddened.

  “Look. I’m not leaving until you listen to what I have to say.”

  Her counterpart sagged, the fight seeping from her, like air from a punctured tire. Leaning against the front of the car, she slid down to sit on its bumper while wiping some clear goo from her hands with a rag she pulled from her back pocket. Without looking up, she said, “I will fight you if I have to.”

  “I’m not here to fight,” Mara said. “What happened to Sam? You said someone killed him?”

  “I said you did. How did you know his name was Sam?”

  “I have one of my own—a brother named Sam, that is.”

  The other Mara looked up, the anger melting away. “What’s he like?”

  Mara shrugged. “He’s a little brother. Always tagging along, blurting out the wrong things at the wrong time, making a game out of life. But he’s a good kid, who would do anything to help me if I were in trouble. Why did you say I murdered him?”

  “I gather from the pixel thing that you’re not the lizard girl—the one who had me create the customized geckos for her mother a while back.”

  “No. That’s another Mara. She’s dead.”

  “You came back to this realm after the last time we talked, about six months ago. Didn’t you?”

  “I did come to this realm after we met, but I’m not sure about the timing. From my perspective, it was less than a week ago. Either time progresses differently in each realm or my travels through the Chronicle have been more haphazard than I realized earlier.”

  Something moved behind the other Mara’s head, slithered up like a snake from beneath the hood of the car. Mara’s eyes widened, and she pointed. “Ah, something’s crawling out of the car.”

  The other Mara turned. Casually she swatted the serpentine thing, and a tiny arc of electricity jumped when her hand touched it. If it was painful, she didn’t show it. “Just a loose tendril from the transmission. I’ll get back to it after you leave.”

  Mara approached the open hood and looked inside. Instead of an engine, the vehicle had entrails—thick wet tubes packed tightly together like intestines, into which she watched the quivering tendril disappear. A network of thinner translucent pipes wound through the mass, pumping brown liquid in spurts, like blood vessels, to various organs that she had no hope of identifying.

  I forgot about the biomechanics of this realm.

  She grimaced and looked away. “Jeez, that looks nasty.”

  “It’s not so bad. I’ll have it running in less than two hours, assuming its liver isn’t failing. It can take a day to grow one of those.”

  Mara wasn’t sure she had the stomach for gadget repair in this realm. G
rowing queasy, she needed to think about something else. “How did you know I had returned on an earlier trip? I stopped by the shop, but you weren’t here.”

  “You had a luminaire. You placed it at the luminarium—the funeral home—down the street.”

  “It was the soul of Juaquin Prado, the guy I told you about.”

  She looked doubtful. “The darkling wraith.”

  Mara nodded. “He possessed the body of my friend and turned into the Aphotis. How did you know I went to the luminarium?”

  “Because they have security cameras. That’s why the zealot luminaries think I’m responsible for killing the Aphotis and destroying their religious beliefs. The Coven of the Unbound came here looking for me but found Sam instead. They killed him, all because you couldn’t keep your nose out of my world.”

  Mara gasped. “Is that true?”

  “I would not joke about losing my brother.”

  “What do they want with you?”

  “Revenge, I suppose. Retribution for undermining their faith. The most radical segment of luminaries broke away from their caste and created the Coven. There are rumors they practice magic and plan to restore their religion and force it on the rest of us.”

  “Oh, my God! They didn’t release the Aphotis, did they?”

  “They tried, but, when they smashed the luminaire that contained him, his spirit clung to the broken pieces and could not free itself. They blamed that on me as well, accusing me of casting a spell on him. You did that—cast the spell, didn’t you?”

  “It wasn’t a spell. It was more like a chemistry experiment from a dream realm.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “You’ve got a lot of those.”

  “I know.” Mara decided she had caused enough damage. It was a stupid idea anyway. “I’ll let you get back to your repairs. I’m sorry for the interruption. And I’m sorry about what happened to Sam and to you. It was not my intention to hurt you or your family. I’ll go, and I promise never to return.”