Jaci Dawn

The following day was crisp and clear. The five companions made good mileage, stopping to eat here and there, and napping only once during the day. The herd of elk kept circling around behind them and around them. The snow had melted, but the ground was soft, and the greens still tender. The only birds they saw were varied thrushes, dark-eyed juncos, and northern flickers. A flock of geese too far away to see glided over, honking as they flew in a southerly direction. Canadas, Ella told them.
They rested a third time as dusk set in, hiding in the hollow of a fallen tree, punky and rotten, with a large, blackened conk growing out of the side of it. They did not talk as much as before, each of them wrapped up in his or her own thoughts about the night before and what lay ahead of them. The mice rode in the hoodies while Dylan and Madison maneuvered through the thinning under growth toward the imagined goal: Deke’s family’s hunting cabin.
The night was clear, but no full moon. A deer made a bed nearby: they knew it was a deer by the different musk scent and the sounds it gave off. Dylan made no mention of his mother, but they all secretly hoped it was her.
Dylan was on watch when he smelled danger. He thumped once. Not far away, he heard the deer rise from its bed and snort softly. Then it bounded off: thump! Thump! Thump! He imagined it jumping, large tail flashing black and white: Danger! Danger! Danger!
Aric and Madison joined him by the opening into the hollow. The smell of wet dog wafted on the air, and a pheromone sense of weariness. They could hear the large foot pads of something clumy working its way in their direction. Occasionally, there was a whuff as the animal sniffed the air. Eventually, a voice drifted their way.
“Let’s just find a place, OK, Kyle?”
“I’m looking.” Kyle sounded peeved.
Aric squeaked into the night air, “Kyle! Buddy! Gran! Billie! Dish! Over here!! Over here!”
“Shush,” Madison whispered, “It could be a decoy!”
“Did you hear that, Kyle? Was that Aric?”
“Gran the Man! Here, dog!” Dylan yelled.
“Dylan! Dylan the Villan! Follow that voice, Kyle!”
Dylan and Aric shouted into the darkness as if they were calling a pet dog. “Here! Over here!”
A large black shape shuffled out of the woods, round black eyes and long snout sniffing the air. “I smell rabbits and mousies. Is that my friend, Aric Peabody?”
“KYLE!” Aric bounced out of the hollow log and hopped across the space between them, doing little paw bumps as he want. “You guys are safe!”
Kyle sat down. “Are all of you safe?”
Billie was the first to scramble off and run toward the hollow log. Ella had just poked her nose out at the excitement. “Ellaaaa!”
“Billeeeeeee” Ella jumped from her perch and ran into her best friend’s hug. They danced in a circle, hugging and exclaiming, and hugging, again. They forgot, for a short moment, what they were, and why, as old friends hugged and slapped paws, and laughed with relief.
The deer brought them to their senses. She stood in a shaft of moonlight, her ears cocked curiously at them, steam rising from her nostrils when she exhaled. She eyed them, and stamped one slender hoof onto the ground. Everyone fell silent and turned to face her. She did not speak, but turned eastward, and slowly walked past, her long, white tail switching furiously.
Dylan hopped after her, “Mom?”
The deer paused, and looked over her shoulder briefly before continuing on her walk away. Dylan looked over at his friends, his eyes brimming with tears. He hopped slowly back. “I thought it could be her,” he whispered.
“And I think it is her,” Ella said, reaching out to pat his paw. “I think she wants us to follow her, but quietly. C’mon, let’s go.”
Dylan was reluctant, but the mice were already on board with anything Ella said, and soon the odd assembly of creatures was moving silently through the moon-lit forest, following the slender doe. The doe did not act surprised or nervous, but walked at a pace they could all keep up with.
She traveled in a fairly straight line, along a well-used deer trail that sometimes narrowed enough that Kyle’s riders had to hold on for all they were worth, lest they be scraped off and left behind. An owl hooted here and there, frightening Madison until Ella whispered in her ear that it was probably Horace, and Horace was a friend.
They came upon a meadow where the elk were bedded down, and the deer crossed out into the open, leading her small parade past the big bulls, cows, calves, and small bulls. Just beyond the dozing elk, she flipped her tail upward with a flash of white, and it was as if the flag had dropped at the car races: the elk lumbered to their feet, grunting and squealing, and they took off at a trot the way the caravan had just come. The doe watched them, and it seemed as if a smile played on her face.
That was magic, Ella thought, if nothing else is! The deer, the elk, the moonlight!
They crossed the meadow, and onto a path. The path led to the back of a cabin, from which warm light glowed. The smell of wood fire was in the air here. The doe led them around the side of the cabin, and to the front. Mr. Nagasaki sat on the steps of the porch, smoking a pipe. He waited until the doe was before him before standing up and bowing deeply. The doe bowed back.
“I suggest you come into the cabin single file,” Mr. Nagasaki said to the animals. “Piggy-back is not advised.” Then he turned and walked into the cabin, leaving the door open.
They all scrambled down to the ground, then looked at the doe, but she made no move to enter the cabin. At last, it was Ella who stepped over the threshold first. She was no more than three paces in when she felt the world change rapidly around her, and she was suddenly herself.
Kyle refused to come in until he saw that both Dylan and Maddy changed into themselves, fully clothed. He peered into the cabin and said, “You promise, Mr. Nagasaki?”
The doe butted him from behind, and he was forced to enter. He felt himself shrink and change, but he kept his eyes closed tight until someone touched his shoulder.
“It’s OK, Kyle. You have clothes on. Pajammas, to be exact, but they are clothes.” Ella stifled a giggle.
The doe entered last, turning into Mrs. Woodhouse, dressed in her painting clothes. She sighed and hugged Dylan, then Maddy.
The rest of the group felt too awed to speak, and too cowed, after their initial meeting with the deer. Mr. Nagasaki had a fire in the fireplace, and everything seemed too homey to be real. The smell of snicker doodle cookies hung on the air, and a heavy aroma of stew.
He smiled at the group and pointed toward the kitchen, “There is hearty vegetable soup in the kitchen. Please refresh yourselves, and then we will talk.”
Mrs. Woodhouse sank into a comfortable chair. “Good evening, Richard.”
“Natalie. Are you not hungry?”
“I will let the kids eat first. They’re teenagers, and their stomach comes first.” She smiled briefly.
The teens filed through the kitchen, filling soup bowls with a barley-vegetable soup, and grabbing cookies from the cooky jar as they passed, They all filed back into the main room, sitting on the floor or on the sofa, or taking up a wooden chair at the dining table by the window. Ella found herself sitting next to Dish. He looked more tired than ever, with circles under his pale eyes. His dark hair hung into his eyes. She leaned over and laid her head on his shoulder for a moment.
“I missed you.”
He tried to smile through a spoonful of stew. “Show you thay.”
Ella smiled.
They went back for seconds, and some went back for thirds. The cookies disappeared. Mrs. Woodhouse even got a bowl of stew before it, too, disappeared. Sated, finally, and the dishes stacked in the sink, everyone gathered around the two adults. Ella asked the first question on everyone’s mind:
“Why are we back to ourselves now? Wouldn’t the use of magic alert someone to where we are?”
“Elemental magic,” Mr. Nagasaki said. “This is my hunting cabin you are in. Everything here is elemental magic.”
“The elk were also elemental magic at work. They covered your tracks so the hunters could not smell you or track you. Real elk, but they obeyed commands.” Mrs. Woodhouse smiled mysteriously.
“So – where are our parents?”
“Who is doing this?”
“What is the talisman?”
“Who stole it in the first place?”
“What do we do now?”
Mr. Nagasaki waited patiently until Ella called out, “Guys, wait. Let them tell us, OK?”
“Thank you, Ella Peabody. First, please call me Richard. That is my given name, when I am not Kitsune.”
“And please call me Natalie, not ‘Mrs. Woodhouse’. That sounds so old.”
“We needed to make certain you were all safe, but we were not immediately certain who – or, rather, what – you all were. There are others, but they are in different locations. We could not risk bringing everyone under the same roof.”
Natalie nodded. “The attack blind-sided the wizarding community. We did not know anything had been stolen, or why this sudden crack down. Only Richard, here, had a strong enough cover to go undetected as a wizard or magician, and he alone was able to discover why we were attacked, and in most cases, illegally arrested and impounded.”
“Yes,” Richard nodded, before adding, “Does anyone want a cup of hot tea? I have made myself some, and wish to pour a cup before I settle down to tell you what I know.”
Ella raised her hand, but everyone else declined. She followed the ex-librarian into the kitchen, where he poured the tea into delicate cups and offered her cream and sugar. She took the sugar and they came back to the rest of the group.
Richard smiled as she settled down. “I went to the emergency meeting where many of us protested the arrests of our neighbors. We were given flyers, propaganda, and a man from the Capitol came to speak to us: Fred Gist, the governor’s press secretary. It was what he did not say that intrigued me.” He took a sip of tea.
“He did not say that the raids were conducted almost simultaneously, starting at 0700. He did not say that many students were missing from the schools, from K-12. He did not say the word ‘wizard’, but he used the words ‘witches’ and ‘sorcerors’. He alluded to a ‘family heirloom’ that could only have been ‘taken by black magic’. He did not mention burglary, alarms, theft, or motive. He did not mention whose family heirloom was missing, but intimated it was someone very high in the governor’s office.”
“So, by all that stuff missing, you figured out the plot?” Gran shook his head.
“Sure, that’s how you figure it out in a book,” Dylan replied. “It’s always what’s missing that’s the real clue.”
“Like these?” Gran held out the five wands from the Peabody house.
Natalie raised her eyebrows, “Everyone knows about those, Gran. Frank pulls them out at every party and tries to trick the newest guest into guessing which one – if any – is actually a real wand.”
Richard sipped his tea, listening. Ella sipped hers, too. “I see what you inferred,” she said. “He was making it sound as if the wizarding community was involved in practicing Dark Arts, and that it was by force the Dark Arts that this heirloom disappeared. But what he really meant was that anyone with access to some magic skill was suspect. But that’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not true!” Aric glowered at his sister.
“I believe your sister has more to add,” Richard said calmly. “Ella? Go on.”
“Dylan reads a lot of true crime and mystery stuff, so he should be on board with this: any good burglar can steal something, and they don’t have to use magic to do it. They just know coding and disable alarms, or they case the place and know all the security code, all of that James Bond stuff.”
“But he did not mention a burglary!” Dish looked excited. “That’s how Mr. Nagasaki knew it was a magic talisman!”
“Or totem, or whatever,” Madison said.
“Riiiight,” Billie leaned forward. “Because it would have had a non-removal spell on it, and someone had to know how to get around that spell in order to take it.”
“But we still don’t know who got robbed, or what it is.”
Richard raised a hand, “You learn quickly, but I have not finished my account. Fred is a good friend of mine. He used to come to the library at least once a week. A very avid reader. Yet, when I approached him after the news conference, he was extremely distracted and agitated. He did not have time for an old friend, and he looked frightened. I asked how the governor was, and he merely shook his head. ‘No comment’, as if I was a news reporter.”
“The governor…”