No Quest For The Wicked

“Thank you for the pep talk,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m not trying to cheer you up. That would be pointless. I’m just glad you’re finally being honest with me—and with yourself.” I hesitated, then asked, “Do you also really believe it will come back?”

He worried his lower lip in his teeth for a while, then whispered, “No.” His shoulders sagged in defeat.

I stepped forward and pulled him against me in a big hug. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

After holding me for a couple of minutes, he said, “So, now that we’ve dealt with my issues, are you ready to talk about what’s going on with you?”

“Well, since I’m not throwing things, that’s not an immediate crisis, and we have work to do.”

He placed his hands on either side of my face, kissed me, and said, “Fine, but at some point, you’re going to have to stop avoiding the discussion. I won’t forget.” Then the two of us headed into the manuscript room.

He pulled a stack of paper toward himself, lifted off the top half, and handed it to me. “I labeled it as I was transcribing. Look for the word ‘spell’ in the margins and pull those pages.” I shuffled quickly through the pages, handing the “spell” pages to him as soon as I had a handful. From there, he turned the rest of his stack over to me while he read more carefully through the spells, sorting the pages into piles. After he’d gone through the whole stack, he picked up one of his piles. “These are the ones the doorman used and a few others that fall into the same era that seem like they might also be used for attack or defense.”

“Is there anything in those spells that might give us a clue what this is about? Are they related to the Eye?”

“No, they’re actually after Merlin’s time, probably from one of his immediate successors. At the most, maybe two generations later. But they are all from the same era and I think they can be traced back to the same wizard. I’m not sure what that tells us, but there’s probably some old grimoire out there from that time period, and the doorman could have read that. Now, let’s go get your grandmother and get back to the others.”

When we reached Merlin’s office, he was standing at the conference table with someone I assumed, based on the beads, scarves, and scent of incense, was from Prophets and Lost. “Ah, there you are,” he greeted us as we crossed the threshold. “I just heard from Mr. Gwaltney. They haven’t found the brooch or Ms. Perkins yet. I trust your search was successful?”

Owen held up the stack of spells and opened his mouth to say something, but whatever he was about to say came out as “Ouch!” when Granny’s cane jerked and rapped him across the shin so hard that the sound of it made me hop on one foot for a second.

She looked up at him with an expression of fake innocence. “Oh, dearie me. I’m so sorry. My muscles must still be twitching from all the excitement earlier. I can’t seem to control myself.”

The P & L person finished adding colored pushpins to a map of the city lying on the conference table. “There, those are our latest findings,” she said. “Red is confirmed sightings. Blue is where we’ve picked up an aura that could mean something. Green is potential visions of the future.” The pins spread over most of the Upper East Side, with a few blue and green pins trickling down to Midtown.

“Thank you,” Merlin said. The woman nodded as she picked up her notebook and left, her scarves wafting behind her.

As soon as she was gone and the doors had closed, I whirled on Granny. “What was that for?” I demanded.

“Loose lips sink ships,” she snapped.

I groaned inwardly and was about to tell her that just because someone dresses funny, it doesn’t mean they’re suspicious when Merlin said, “She is right about that, though I suspect she could have conveyed the same warning without resorting to physical violence.”

I gestured to the doors where the P&L lady had exited. “You think she’s the mole?”

“We’ve narrowed it down to that department.”

“But why stop me from saying anything when you just said everything that was going on?” Owen asked as he straightened from rubbing his sore shin.

Granny grinned. “That’s because we’re setting a mole trap!”

Chapter Nine

“A mole trap?” I repeated dumbly, shocked to learn that my grandmother was involved in espionage. Not that I should have been at all surprised. She always did keep close tabs on everything my family and everyone else in my hometown did.