Smoke and Mirrors: The Trueheart

By Helene Opocensky

How could Corbin possibly do what he was supposed to do? After Corbin's mother died, Maxim Moritz Grobian took him, penniless orphan that he was, under his wing and taught him the magic that was their heritage. Corbin owed Max everything, and now Max had given him a mission. Corbin was to bring Max's estranged daughter to New York. Lorelei was

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helene Opocensky
• Release date: Oct 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734873214

Book preview

They had him cornered. There were three of them, two guys and a pretty, dark-haired girl. Corbin figured they were about his own age—sixteen, maybe a little older. He looked at the girl again—well, maybe a little younger. It didn't really matter. What mattered was that they had him cornered, and he had to do something about it.

Oh, just leave him be, Karl Heinz, the pretty girl said, twisting her mouth into a moue of disgust. Corbin couldn't tell if the disgust was meant for him or the Karl Heinz she referred to. She had the brightest blue eyes he had ever seen.

The blond boy, Karl Heinz apparently, looked over his shoulder at her. Take it easy, Magdalene. I'm not going to hurt him. He's new and I just want him to show respect.

Corbin snorted. Somebody always wanted him to show respect, to know his place in the scheme of things. Somebody had also wanted him to know his place at his old school, the Institute, as well, when he first went there. That was four years ago in Queens, New York, when he was twelve. He was sixteen now and had learned a lot since then. If this Karl Heinz guy thought he was going to be intimidated by him, he had another thing coming. The Institute was a school established as a detention facility for boys who had gotten into serious trouble. Those boys were all convicted criminals and were dangerous. Their threats meant something. This guy was just a normal bully, one who relied on his size and the fact that his friends were standing behind him to intimidate.

Corbin wasn't the least bit intimidated.

The other boy, the one with bronzy-brown hair, put his hand on the girl's shoulder. It'll be alright, Maggie. We just want to talk to him.

Corbin felt the anger churning even more inside him. He scowled at the brown-haired boy who claimed he only wanted to talk. If he just wanted to talk, why didn't he talk? He hadn't said a word to him. Instead he had stood there looking stupid while his big imbecile of a buddy shoved Corbin up against the wall.

Corbin reacted in the only logical way he could. He shoved him back and took off running. Karl Heinz ran after him and the brown-haired boy, who had been standing behind Karl Heinz gawking, ran after both of them. The girl, seeing them all bolt away, chased after them yelling, Rolf, wait! What are you doing?

They chased him down the street. This town was a lot different from New York. Corbin had never run on cobblestones before and it was rough going. His footing was uneven and he stumbled as he veered into a side street.

Bad move! The street was a dead end and he was cornered again.

The blond boy grinned while the other two hung back. The brown-haired boy, who Corbin figured was Rolf, was brushing off the girl's—Magdalene's or Maggie's—hand with which she was angrily gripping his shoulder.

Corbin faced them all belligerently. You want to talk to me? he spat out. Well, I got news for you guys. I don't want to talk to you.

I'm not interested in conversation anymore either, said the blond boy as he continued his advance, pinning Corbin in the corner. He had only one way to escape—up.

Up was an option.

Corbin laughed at them all. He stretched out his arms and rose on his toes. His arms pulled in the shadows from the surrounding buildings, enveloping him in darkness as it solidified around him, covering his arms, head and body. He momentarily dimmed and hovered, a large and ominous shadow, spreading black and threatening within the boundaries of the dead-end street. The shadow dwindled down in size again, and Corbin stretched out his wings. With one loud caw he took flight. Transformed into a large black crow, on black powerful wings he rose high over his tormentors.

He watched their startled faces as he circled over their heads. He could hear the girl laughing. I guess he showed you, Karl. He showed you both. He knows how to turn! So much for the both of you!

Corbin circled once more and then flew off. He liked the girl. Well, that was nothing new—he always liked the girls, and this one . . . this one seemed very special. She was nothing like the girls he hung out with at home, his Friday-night girls. That's what he and the guys at school called them—his classmates at the Institute, the very same ones who had initially attempted to bully him. They stopped that as soon as they found out who he was, the protégé of the school's founder Maxim Moritz Grobian, but that wasn't going to happen here. Here no one cared about Max Grobian, regardless of all his money, and Friday night was just another night of the week.

It was nothing like home here. At home, Friday nights were special. Friday night was when he went out with his classmates to scout out the resident talent. There was a place near the school where the local teens hung out. It wasn't much of a place, just an abandoned apartment building, but it was a good place anyway, and it was sanctioned by the school. Well, maybe sanctioned was overstating it. It was more that the Institute boys weren't prohibited from going there. It wasn't against the rules.

Despite the fact that the Instidudes (that's what they called each other) were basically felons, they always followed school rules. They knew better than to disobey. They knew how lucky they were that the judge who sentenced them sent them to the Institute instead of to jail. At least the ones who decided to stay at the Institute once their sentences were up realized how lucky they were. They were the only ones who had the freedom to go out on Friday nights to scope out the girls, and those girls were ready and willing to be scoped out by them. They liked the Instidudes, who were so different from the neighborhood boys. They had an aura about them, a disreputable past, a sense of danger, and the girls flocked to them like flies to fries left unattended.

Those girls were all nice in Corbin's estimation. They were all a little wild, all hot in their individual ways, all eager to—Corbin momentarily paused the flapping of his wings and drifted on the air current remembering exactly what the Friday night girls were eager to do. He started to plummet slightly. The air current had changed, and he had to start flapping again. He had to forget the Friday-night girls. He'd never see them again. That was New York. That was the United States. Those days were done. He was in Europe now, in Czechoslovakia to be exact, or to be even more precise, in Hexenheim. Corbin had looked up its meaning. Hexenheim was a German word that meant witch's homeland, a sanctuary for magical people. He was here because Max Grobian had exiled him here.

Corbin stopped flapping his wings and drifted momentarily on the air current again. Down below he spotted a small isolated valley nestled amongst rocky crags. A roaring iridescent ribbon of silver splashed between the peaks and cascaded into a clear shimmering pool of water. A trio of trees stood stark and barren next to the pool, their naked branches scratching the afternoon sky with long gnarled fingers.

Corbin circled down and landed in one of the trees and then hopped off it. Spreading his wings to catch the air, he descended and landed on the ground as a sixteen-year-old boy. He was proud of himself. That was something new he had just learned: how to turn when he was almost still in flight. No one had taught him how to do that; he had taught himself. Not even Max could turn as quickly as he could. The next step was to figure out how to do the reverse. That is, jump up into the air and turn into a bird at the point where it had just risen into flight. That would be great! Then if someone were chasing him, someone like that a-hole Karl Heinz, Corbin would be able to turn on the run and leave him behind. He would've loved to have seen his stupid face then. Ha!

Corbin chuckled to himself as he inspected where he had landed. A blanket of heavy clouds cast a brooding gloominess over the stark late-February bareness. The trees, tall and long-limbed, stretched into the sky as if they owned it. The stream ripped through jagged rocks and fell, roaring furiously, into a crystal icy pool. Despite the gloomy atmosphere, Corbin liked it. It matched his mood. What a great place, he thought. Best of all, it was completely isolated. It was wholly surrounded by high rocky peaks, not exactly mountains, but they were high and jagged enough to thwart anyone from just hiking up them. It would take rope and tackle for someone to scale them and reach this valley.

Well, it would take rope and tackle if that someone couldn't fly, but Corbin could fly, and he claimed the valley as his. Lobo's Lair. Yeah, that was what he would call it. That was a great name. This was going to be his special place. Someplace only he knew about, someplace only he could go to. Corbin sat down and stretched out with his arms crossed underneath his head. Maybe now that he had this place, maybe Hexenheim would be all right, even if the kids were jerks. Actually it was a good thing the kids were jerks, Corbin pretended. It made his mission, the real reason Max had sent him here, so much easier.

Corbin shivered from the February coldness and stood up to gather dry wood for a fire. He pulled his wand out of his sleeve and thought about what he needed to do. Did he know a spell that would work for this? He didn't know the right word for gather but he knew the power word for stockpile, and he also knew the power word for wood. If he put the words together, maybe that would work. He gathered his intent, focusing on what he wanted to accomplish, then pushed that intent through his wand while intoning the magical words. Normally, he no longer needed to say a spell out loud anymore. He prided himself on that. But when he was doing something new, it was always better to verbalize the spell instead of just thinking it. He shrugged his shoulders. It didn't really matter—no one was there to hear.

Corbin watched the odd scraps of wood slide in from wherever they came from and pile themselves neatly before him. It was late afternoon and the wind had picked up; he could feel its bite through his jacket. He conjured a fire next and settled himself comfortably near it. He folded his arms again and watched the fire dance its chaotic dance as bright sparks exploded into the late afternoon sky.

He closed his eyes. How did he come to this? How did he wind up in magic town, alienated from everything he cared about, on a secret mission for a man he owed everything to?

Six years earlier, a crow watched with one eye intently fixed on the dark-haired ten-year-old boy sitting in the window of the tenement building. The crow had been watching him all day. He didn't understand what he was watching, but he knew he didn't like it. He preened his feathers, more out of frustration than out of need. All he could do now was watch as the boy, tears streaming down his cheeks, stared vacantly at the street below where the wind picked up a discarded paper bag, swirled it haphazardly, and dropped it into the gutter. It lay there among the other discarded flotsam of urban life.

The boy, however, did not see the crow. Nor did he notice the wind, the trash, or even the teenage boys gathered by the streetlight laughing. In the bedroom, his mother was stretched out on her bed with a sheet over her face. In the kitchen, the social worker and his neighbor, Alma Lopez, talked, deciding his fate. He knew he had grandparents who lived in Queens. His grandfather owned an insurance agency that sold insurance to the entire local Latino community. Aunt Graciela, his mother's older sister, was a juvenile court judge. She lived over the border in Greenwich, Connecticut. Corbin could hear Señora Lopez tell the social worker all about them.

He didn't want to go to live with his grandparents, the Lobos. He had never met them. He never heard from them. They wouldn't want him, and he didn't want them, not at all. He definitely did not want to live in Connecticut with Graciela and her husband Nicolas Murray, a high-powered, prominent Manhattan attorney. They would take him in. He was sure of that. His mother had told him that Graciela was on commissions for the protection of children. He knew that the great child advocate would never allow her nephew in foster care. She cared too much for her reputation. That's what his mother would have said.

Corbin had met his aunt only a couple of times. Once, when he was about six, she had visited them. He liked her right off the bat. She took him and his mother to the zoo and bought them all ice cream. He loved that day and kept asking his mother when she would come back. After saying, Oh, I don't know, maybe a thousand times, she finally said, Honey, I don't think she's coming back. I don't know why she came in the first place. Sometimes people do things for silly reasons. Remember when Manuel first moved here, and you told him that that red bike was yours even though you knew it wasn't? Corbin nodded, coloring slightly. He clearly remembered even though two years had gone by and Manny and he were friends now, but when Manny first moved into the apartment downstairs, no boys Corbin's age lived in their building. He had wanted Manny to like him, so to impress him, he told him that the bike was his. Cool, was all Manny had said. His mom had heard him lie and asked him later what he was going to do when Manny wanted to ride the bike. Was he going to steal it? He had shaken his head no. He hadn't thought that far ahead. Remember, she told him as she had told him hundreds of times before, everything you do has consequences. You always have to think about the consequences. He understood, and later on, he nervously confessed his big lie to Manny, who only shrugged and said, No problem, man.

But, he said to his mother, I was little then.

She laughed. I know and you're my big boy now. But sometimes, a lot of times, grownups say silly things too. Your Aunt Graciela is like that. Will she be back? Well, I don't know, maybe she'll be back. I know one thing, though, if she comes back, it'll be because she wants something. She'll make it sound all noble and everything. She's sneaky that way. When we were kids, she always got what she wanted. She was so smart, and she charmed everybody. She could never do anything wrong. In school they all expected me to be like her. It was tough being the little sister of the wonderful Graciela. Corbin's mother frowned, remembering the past. She bent and kissed Corbin on the forehead. "Listen, Cory, don't count on anything. I doubt she'll come back. She knows she won't get what she wants from me. That's how she is. But don't worry, mijo. We don't need her. We don't need anybody. It's you and me forever. That you can count on!"

Corbin snorted and wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. His mother had been wrong on all counts. Graciela did come back again. Six months earlier, Corbin had come home from school and heard his mother arguing with someone in the kitchen. He heard his mother say, "What do you know about me or Corbin, for that matter? You think you can come here and tell me about my son just because you're a big important judge? Well, you're not going to judge me! Don't you dare judge me! Corbin and I are just fine. We don't need you."

They stopped shouting when Corbin opened the door. Graciela picked up her handbag. Very well, Corazon, for now. It's not what I meant, and you know it, but you better understand that I'll be watching. You haven't heard the last of this or of me. She walked out but in the hallway turned and said, No nephew of mine is going to be at risk.

Corbin's mother shouted out after her sister, I don't want your stinkin' money, Gracie! Corbin is not at risk. I take good care of him. I'm a good mother! She grabbed the door and slammed it hard, barricading herself and Corbin from anything else Graciela had to say. Money isn't everything, she mumbled.

She ran to Corbin, grabbed him, and held him tight. You want to stay with me! she said. She pushed him away and held him at arm's length, looking into his eyes. You do, don't you? After a short pause, she added with an edge to her voice. Or do you want to go with Graciela and live in a big house in Connecticut? She got more time than me. There's two of them. She got a husband who can do guy stuff with you. Maybe she's right. Maybe I'm not thinking about what's best for you.

Corbin shook his head and buried himself in her arms. You're best for me, Mom. It's you and me—forever, he said, echoing what she had always told him. She hugged him closely and he hugged her back. Nobody was going to separate him from his mother. It was the two of them forever.

But it wasn't forever. She was gone now, lying in the bedroom with a sheet over her face, and he was alone staring out the window at an old bag. His mom had deserted him.

In a way he didn't blame her. She hadn't been happy. He heard her cry every night. He tried to make her happy—tried really hard. He did well in school to make her proud. He tried to cheer her up by telling her stories about what had happened during the day, and sometimes it seemed to help. They would go to the park and she would play ball with him; they would both laugh because she was so bad at it. And sometimes she would tell him stories, stories about growing up, stories about the man who was his father.

Eleven years earlier when she was sixteen, she and a friend took the train out to Long Island. They wound up at one of the marinas. They walked along the docks looking at all the big boats, admiring how beautiful they were and imagining what it would be like to have so much money that you could own a boat and sail away to wherever you wanted to go. They were two hot young girls and they waived at and flirted with all the guys they saw, hoping one of them would offer to take them up into his boat.

One of them did, laughing as he led them onboard. He had an air about him that was mysterious and a little dangerous. Dressed all in black with his long black hair tied back, he was as handsome as a storybook prince. His dark gray eyes bordered just on blue, and he had the most entrancing smile. Corazon fell for him immediately, and he seemed to like her too. For three months she would sneak out of the house every night and meet him where he was waiting for her.

She never knew anyone like him. He always had lots of money. Whatever she wanted he would get for her. He would take her to nice restaurants and bars, and when anyone asked for identification, he would whisper something. After a pause and a hint of confusion, they would be let in, no more questions asked. Everywhere they went, he was treated with respect. It was as good as dating a rock star, except he wasn't hounded by groupies. He was hers alone. She was so proud to be his lady, and she loved him very much. It hurt, she loved him so much.

She was sixteen and he was—she didn't know how old. Actually, she didn't know much about him at all. He told her that his name was Corbin but did not tell her much else. He wouldn't talk much about himself, and she didn't care. He told her he loved her, and that was all she needed to hear. Finally, one day, he did tell her about where he came from. It was very far away, he told her, a secret place, a magical place and, he said, he had to go back there. She asked him if he would take her with him, and he laughed and kissed her. He told her he couldn't, but he promised her that he would come back. She needed to be patient. It would take awhile but he would come back to her.

A month after he left, she found out she was pregnant. She had her baby—and a huge fight with her father. She left school. She left her family. Eventually she got a part-time job at Dunkin' Donuts, then another part-time job at McDonald's plus some houses to clean. And she waited every night for her mystery man to return, but he never did.

Corbin wondered about the man who was his father, the dark man, the mystery man. He hoped he would come back. When he came back, Corbin knew exactly how he would greet him. He would kick him where it hurt and punch him out for leaving them, for hurting his mother. She left her family for him. She quit school. She worked three jobs to support them, and she cried every night because her mystery man didn't come back to her like he had promised he would. He left her alone with a broken heart, and a son he didn't even know existed because he didn't care about either one of them. Well, Corbin didn't care either. He swore solemnly that he would never be like his mother, that he would never hurt like her. He swore that he would never love anyone, ever. Love was a bad thing. His mother suffered from it like it was some kind of a disease. She faded from it, wasting away until she came home coughing and wheezing with a fever.

Despite that, she went to work.

You should go to the emergency room, he had told her, but she said that she couldn't because none of her jobs offered health insurance, and she wouldn't sign up with the state because she would have to name Corbin's father. She just couldn't do that. Corbin told her to at least stay home until she felt better. But she said they needed the money and would drag herself out of bed and to work. Finally, this morning, she didn't get up at all, and never would again.

Now Corbin sat alone at the window. He heard the social worker on the phone. He has an aunt. It's Judge Lobo! Can you believe it? Corbin pressed his forehead against the window, once again wiping tears from his face. The teenagers were gone, but he saw a large black bird on the fire escape outside. It cocked its head sideways looking at him as he looked out.

Corbin sighed. To be a bird, how wonderful would that be, to just go away, anywhere, anytime he wanted! He wouldn't have to worry about the social worker, the grandparents he never met, or his snooty Aunt Graciela.

Corbin opened the window. Beat it, he shouted at the bird, envying it its freedom. The bird just eyed him with one eye and hopped down to the landing, spotted something, and began pecking at it while still keeping one eye on Corbin.

As Corbin stared at the bird, he felt that eye piercing into him. The more he looked at the bird, the more he felt connected to it. In his head he imagined that his eye looked just like the bird's eye. It seemed to him as if he could look into the bird's brain. He felt what it was like to be a bird, to have a beak, feathers, and funny feet splayed against the floor. He looked down at the floor. His feet no longer wore shoes but were thin with long toes ending in strange claw-like nails. He shook his arms. They rustled with feathers. Corbin found himself standing next to the bird on the landing. He and the bird were now mirror images of each other, two black crows.

The transformation stunned him, and yet he felt unsurprised. Maybe that had to do with the influence of the strange crow's eye boring into his, or maybe it had to do with the nature of the bird he had become. Whatever it was, he felt free now, free to do whatever he pleased, free to go wherever he wanted.

With a loud caw, Corbin stretched his new wings and flew off the landing. What else was there to do? His realistic crow mind told his confused transformed boy self.

The black bird followed behind him. Soon it overtook him and led him away—away from the tenement, away from Graciela, away to a future Corbin never imagined was possible.

Corbin followed the crow away from the life he had led with his mother. They flew for hours, rhythmically flapping black wings as the terrain changed below them from urban cityscape, to suburban houses with green lawns, and finally to wide-open countryside where they landed in a tree housing five crows. The crows were a family: two parents and three younger crows that helped the parents with the nestlings who squawked for food with wide-open beaks.

The tree stood in a horse farm probably in Connecticut somewhere. It was a good choice for the crows. The tree was tall and food was easy to find, and soon Corbin, like the other young crows, dutifully carried worms, bugs and sundry other things to the nest. Such became his life. Oh well, at least he didn't have to