The Secret Sorcerer: The Magi Series, #2

By Nicole Demery

A handsome stranger. An unlikely murder. A secret inheritance that will unravel this witch's world.

 

My plan was simple and…mostly ordinary. Finish my PhD. Teach Celtic mythology in a tiny college town. Stop hearing the thoughts and feelings of every person I happen meet. 

As a wayward seer just coming into her powers, I couldn't avoid the last one. 
But the first two were just within my reach when sorcerer-particle physicist Jonathan Lynch appeared one chilly winter morning along two other shocks: 

The death of my grandmother, the most powerful seer in a generation;
And the mysterious box she protected.

Suddenly I was tangled in a secret that had been unraveling for years, and my unruly talents and complicated inheritance were at the heart of it all. 

Ordinary life would have to wait. 
The extraordinary was coming for me after all. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicole French
• Release date: Apr 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781950663231

Book preview

1

From the dream journal of Cassandra Whelan

Last night I dreamed of my father’s death. I was in Gran’s living room, and my mother was yelling at me.

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Cassandra! Pick up the towel, and do it right. I don’t want to have to ask you again.

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I turned over the back of the couch toward Sybil, a red-haired flame against burnished cedar cabinets and the gray slate counters of the kitchen.

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How could you even know that? I demanded. You can’t See that sort of thing. You told me so yourself.

---

Sibyl scowled as she poured hot water over a cup of ginkgo leaves, then set a plate over the top to let them steep. You might be thirteen now, missy, but it doesn’t mean you know everything. I didn’t have to See what you were doing. It was more than obvious that you’d rather watch the surf than do your chores.

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Now it was my turn to scowl, although this time it was at the pile of laundry I still had to fold. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I did this. It was never to her liking. No matter that she never seemed to do it herself.

---

If you had just let me go surfing this morning like I wanted, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, I sneered, though I was already refolding the towel.

---

And what am I, your chauffeur? Between swim team and school, I spend half my life carting you up and down the 101. I have to do it on the weekends too so you can frolic with the sharks? God knows I’d have never had children if I’d known they would turn me into a bus driver.

---

It was a variation of the same argument we had constantly for the last year. Seemingly overnight, my life had changed completely. Dad had received his orders. It was Baghdad this time. A very long way from Pendleton.

---

A week before he deployed, he drove us up to Oregon to live with Gran. It had been Dad’s idea, strangely enough. I could still remember them fighting.

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I don’t want the two of you on base alone, he’d insisted as he shoved one more pair of socks into his ruck. "Cassie needs family, Sib. Unless you want her around mine."

---

I didn’t need to be psychic to see my mother’s face at that proposal. She and Grandma Charlotte didn’t exactly get along.

---

But Manzanita wasn’t exactly Pendleton. It was fifty degrees most of the year instead of seventy-five. The average age of this town’s five hundred or so residents hovered around sixty. At thirteen, I desperately craved independence and privacy—and because my two roommates were psychic witches, I was having none of the above.

---

But at least I still had the ocean.

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"Who cares! I snapped as I tossed a folded towel onto the sofa It’s not like you do anything anyway."

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Cassandra!

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Well, you don’t, I shot back as I grabbed another one and hastily. If he were here, Dad would take me surfing. He’d probably go with me.

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Cassandra, do you have any idea how spoiled you sound right now? Your father is off fighting a war, and you can’t even deal with folding a couple of towels.

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"That’s because there’s no point. They’re just going to get used and rumpled all over again. We should just hang them up."

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Cassandra, I swear. I’m in absolutely no mood for this right now. If you don’t shut that mouth of yours, I’ll—

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You’ll what? I sneered. Practice a little voodoo on me? Make me think I’m a frog? Yeah, I’ve been listening to those threats for years. You don’t have the guts or the talent.

---

Silence suddenly yawned between us. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, and I didn’t have to look to know my mother’s glare was especially fiery. When I finally did have the guts to look at her, she had crossed the room to the other side of the couch, having abandoned her tea to crouch down to look at me eye to eye.

---

She reached out a hand, and I flinched, same as if she had threatened to hit me. For the last few years, but especially since moving to Oregon, the change had started. And if the awkwardness of sudden adolescence weren’t bad enough, amidst all of that, suddenly I was randomly subjected to a cavalcade of emotions, senses, and visions with simple contact.

---

It might not work. It was erratic and only happened every so often. But enough that the touch of a finger could be as hard as a slap.

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You wouldn’t, I whispered.

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Wouldn’t I?

---

The finger edged closer.

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I’ll tell Gran, I said, like I was threatening to tattle on a classmate, not my own mother. She said not to.

---

Penny is not your mother, Sibyl snapped. "She is not the one who has to teach your impossible little brain some respect."

---

This is Gran’s house, not yours, I said, though my bravado was draining as her hand crept closer. "You don’t make the rules. She does. You’re just her daughter, same as I am to you. Except you’re a terrible mother. And a terrible seer.

You’re nothing, you’re pathetic, you’re—"

---

My mother gasped, sharp and pained. Suddenly her eyes rolled back into her head, and her thin, stark form began to shake. Her hand latched around my wrist with the jab of a snake bite. And a vision lanced through my mind, quick and electric as lightning.

---

The beach was gone. The dark walls of the old cabin disappeared. I was standing on a street where the light was yellowy, the air was filled with dust, and people were running between buildings while gunfire peppered overhead.

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Behind me a tank roared.

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Whelan! a man’s voice shouted. Move!

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The street disappeared. I was back in the house, keeled over the couch while my mother stood, milk white and shaking in the middle of the room.

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"What was that?" I demanded.

---

But her eyes were still white where the pupils should have been. Behind me, the French doors leading to the kale yard banged open.

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Sybil! Gran shouted as she ran in, her red skirt billowing around her like a blood-soaked bandage.

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What’s happening? I shouted. Gran, what’s going on?

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Quick! she cried, beckoning me to join her on the other side of the couch. Then she gathered us to her, slipping one hand around my neck and her other around Sybil’s waist.

My Sight smashed open. Back on the dusty street, just in time for the road in front of me to blow open. Chaos erupted. And then my body did too.

---

Aieeeeeeeee! a voice keened on the wind.

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Sybil, I thought in a voice that wasn’t mine. A deep voice. A familiar voice. Sibyl, I’m sorry.

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Daddy.

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Pain shot through my body.

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And then blackness dropped, and I was no more.

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The room returned, and we were all shaking then. I collapsed to the ground, desperate to feel the uneven wood under my fingers and knees. Something solid. Something real.

---

That was the first time I learned how death felt. It wouldn’t be the last.

---

As my Sight disappeared and the world returned to normal, that strange wail still filled the room. I looked up to find my mother rocking in Gran’s embrace, tears streaking her pale white face.

---

Jimmy, she whispered in between siren-like sobs. Oh, my Jimmy!

---

Dad? I croaked, tears already starting to fall as the realization of what I’d Seen found purchase. Was it Daddy?

---

It was Gran who answered, not my shrieking mother.

He’s gone, she told me in her matter-of-fact way. Gone to the next world. You’ll see him again there. Come, girl. We’ll find comfort together.

---

She beckoned me close again, and despite what I’d seen, I didn’t hesitate. Something touch is the only thing that heals. Even if it brings pain right along with it.

---

But as I allowed my grandmother to encircle us once more, pressing my cheek to my mother’s to weld our grief together, the truth both of them forgot to hide flew through our touch with the fluidity of the tears on our cheeks.

Sibyl burned Jimmy’s death into all of our minds, the memory I’d just lived flashing like a strobe. It was then that I understood just how much my mother loved my father, and how he grounded her, tied her to the earth in a way she could never do herself.

---

But it was also then I discovered her secret.

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Sybil had known.

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She had been waiting for years for this to happen.

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She had known my father was going to die, and she hadn’t done a thing to stop it.

2

Arrival

I dreamed that one had died in a strange place

Near no accustomed hand

W.B. Yeats, A Dream of Death

L adies and gentlemen, we’d like to welcome you to Portland International Airport. The approximate time is four-thirty p.m.

I woke with a start when my seat mate nudged my shoulder. His thoughts were dull and groggy, clouded by sleep, just as mine were as he wondered whether his wife would be on time to pick him up. I edged away toward the window and worked to hold myself as far from him as possible while the rest of the passengers rose in their seats, eager to disembark after six and a half hours in the air.

Under any other circumstances, I would have driven home. Rented some tiny compact that would barely make it over the passes, dropped it off in Portland, and forced myself to endure the last ninety-minute bus ride to the coast at some god awful hour just to avoid the masses.

Instead, I had gone through my version of the seventh circle—otherwise known as a cramped seat on a packed, cross-country flight. The red eye departure time from Boston left me exhausted to begin with, but the constant nudging forced me to keep my mind reciting Yeats to steel against the barrage of sensations until the cocktail of melatonin and valerian kicked in and I passed out.

Resisting the urge to stretch in my seat lest I bump someone, I contented myself with drifted back into the dream I hadn’t had in years, though at one point it plagued me nightly.

My father’s death.

My mother’s betrayal.

Ten days after that fateful afternoon, two men in dress blues, with shiny black boots and their hair cut high and tight, sat down with my mother on Gran’s old Victorian couch. I’m sorry, ma’am, they said, over and over again as they recounted Jimmy’s death exactly as I’d seen it. They still couldn’t tell us exactly where he was, or why he was there, but we knew anyway, thanks to Sibyl’s vision.

Two days later we were on a plane for Dover AFB, the only other time I’d endured air travel until today. I had a window seat next to my mother, where I spent the entire flight with my forehead pressed firmly against the cold plexiglass window, watching the ice crystals spread slowly across the exterior of the plane and avoiding Sibyl’s touch at all cost. Along with the families of the eleven other men in his squad, we met the casket, covered with an American flag as they unloaded it from the cargo plane onto the tarmac. Sybil and I gathered with Jimmy’s sister and parents to watch solemnly as his body was carried through Arlington cemetery on a horse-drawn carriage and lowered into the icy ground to take his place under a gleaming white cross.

When the chaplain finished the service and everyone touched the steel-covered coffin, Grandma Charlotte turned and glared at us.

"This is your fault, she said, pointing a chubby finger through the tears streaking down her grief-lined face. If you hadn’t put that boy under your spell and gotten pregnant with this one, my Jimmy would have never joined up. You killed him, you hussy, you and your daughter!"

Her words blazed off the freshly laid snow, but no one replied. Sybil just stared at the coffin until it was fully lowered. Until everyone was gone, and it was just the two of us left.

The following day she put me on an airplane back to Portland, alone. More and more visions were coming by that point, and I needed my mother there to help me manage them. But she needed to stay with him more, she said. I didn’t protest, just steeled myself against the barrage of people and marched numbly down the gangway. By the time I reached my seat, I knew the other truth that would keep us apart: I didn’t want her anymore either.   

Cass! Cassandra!

I almost felt my best friend’s gravelly voice before I heard it for real.

Almost.

As soon as I stepped out of the terminal, Reina flew at me with a bear hug that rocked me off my feet despite the fact that she was just a hair over five feet tall. One of the few people whose thoughts never bothered me, her positive sympathy and good emanated from her body like a halo, and I was happy to be wrapped in its warm embrace. People probably thought we were reuniting lovers, not best friends.

Reina chuckled. I mean, no offense, Cass, but you’re really not my type.

I grinned as a face flowed through her touch. Still stuck on that redhead from cardio?

Reina huffed as she stepped back. I can’t get solid read on her. Her thoughts are all over the place. I swear she notices me. But she notices, well, everyone.

Reina West was a fellow seer I had met when we were both nervous undergraduates at Reed. Standing in the same line at orientation, she had identified me within ten feet, and unlike most fey, she had no issue with my irregularities. After all, as a Guatemalan adoptee who hadn’t learned English until she was ten, she understood what it meant to be different.

Within an hour, I knew she would be the best friend I’d ever had—even if her internal dialogue was often still in Itza’ or Spanish, not English. We convinced the housing director to place us together and lived together for another four years until I left for Boston and she started medical school. Because her parents were plain, Reina often spent vacations with Gran and me on the coast since that first meeting in the quad, if only to learn from Gran what she couldn’t learn at home. Ten years later, we were more like sisters than friends.

Maybe she doesn’t know what she likes, I said as we started for the exit. Not everyone has to. You don’t. Men, women. You never cared.

Reina shook her head, her long brown hair swimming around her waist. "I suppose. But sometimes I think that’s a byproduct of knowing what people are like on the inside. The outside matters a lot less."

I think the inside is what counts for most people in the end.

We walked toward the exit, and Reina stepped in front of me with more purpose than her short, squat