Stonecast

Seven

Alexandra

Despite all the time I spent trying to decipher the finer points of Spellmasonry, peace and quiet had reigned on the home front until last night. So it was with an angry and fearful heart the next morning that I set upon the dark and personal task of attempting my own arcane warding of the entrance to the guild hall.

If Alexander Belarus had protected the Belarus Building for several hundred years with the power of his wards, surely I could do a single room.

Or so I thought.

The alchemy of how to construct the safety measure was where I had the problem. If I already had prowess in any of this, I’m sure it would be as easy as following a recipe. Most recipes, however, didn’t require you to imbue carved-stone markers with the power to grant or deny entrance to a space.

How the hell was I supposed to do that? I couldn’t rightly “teach” stone how to read minds to determine intent or make judgment calls about anyone who tried to enter. And after several hours of tinkering, I settled instead on something that seemed an easier solution—enchanting the stone to activate and open by the invocation of simply speaking a password to allow safe entrance.

My stomach growled as I sat there satisfied with my work, and I set off upstairs in search of food, grabbing a quick sandwich before heading back down to the basement.

I nearly dropped my plate and soda when I saw a figure standing at the slid-back bookcase that hid the stone door, but, thankfully, it was only Rory, who was putting her key to the building back into her enormous dance bag.

She turned at the sound of my plate knocking against my water bottle, catching the surprise on my face.

“Sorry,” Rory said. “I let myself in.” She pushed against the stone door. “It’s locked.”

“After last night, I decided I needed to try my hand at upping security.”

Rory looked around, her eyes looking low to the floor. She pulled a long, tall water bottle from her dance bag and brandished it like a club. “Am I about to be ambushed by an army of Bricksleys?”

“No,” I said. “He’s actually inside there. I left him putting away a bunch of the alchemy supplies I was mixing. Our supply of Kimiya is running lower than ever down here, thanks to our thief. There’s more up at the Belarus Building, so I’ll probably head up later to grab it, but even that’s dwindling. If we don’t figure out how to make it soon, I may have to back off our experiments.”

Rory relaxed and turned back to the door. “Can you magic it open for us?”

I held up my sandwich and water bottle. “Sorry. Hands full here. You try.”

She looked at me like I had two heads. “Be serious.”

“I am being serious,” I said. “You don’t have to be all fancy magic pants to do it. It’s like my laptop: password-protected. At least, I think it is. You’re my first guinea pig.”

Rory seemed wary, then glanced back at the door, striking a pose like a wizard readying for battle. “So what’s the password?”

“I’ll give you three guesses.”

Rory thought for a moment, then, in her best Hermione Granger voice, said, “Wingardium Leviosa!”

Nothing happened. Rory looked to me, but I only shrugged at her.

She paced back and forth for a moment, then said, “A hint, please.”

“Well,” I said, thinking, “it has to be something all three of us could use, so consider Marshall in this, too.”

Her eyes went wide, and she spun toward the door, shouting, “Friendship is magic!”

Again, nothing happened. Rory sighed.

“It’s something Marshall always calls us,” I offered. “Think Lord of the Rings.”

The disappointment swept away from Rory’s face as she did her best Gandalf—which wasn’t very good at all. “Mellon.”

The door clicked and opened into the room.

“Clever,” Rory said, going in. “Now we just have to make sure we’re not attacked by anyone speaking Elvish.”

I shook my head as I marched to the table at the center of the room where I had been working. Bricksley had made short work of the mess I had left there, and I put my food down on the recently cleared space, attacking my sandwich.

I was three bites in before something hit me, and I pulled out my phone, checking the time.

“You’re early,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of hours.”

“Well, my dance card literally opened up for the day,” Rory said. “One of the things that the Manhattan Conservatory of Dance frowns on is dizziness and vomiting in class.”

“Rory!” I said, my mouth full of food, almost choking as I said her name. I swallowed. “You okay?”

She nodded, taking a long sip from her bottle of water.

“I will be,” she said. “I guess I was a little more concussed than I thought. Our morning study was all textbook, history and such, which left me with a headache, but our late-morning session was practical. I got into maybe my tenth or eleventh fouette before I fell over and threw up.” She laid her dance bag by the table and sat down across from me, grabbing up one of the books she had been going through yesterday. “I’ll try not to blow buckets of bile on any of your books.”

“No,” I said, taking the book from her. “No researching for you. Absolutely not.”

Rory reached for the book but missed by a mile.

“I’m not going to vomit,” she said, looking a little paler than I liked to see her. “Probably not, anyway.”

I shook my head. “Rory, you must have hit your head last night harder than we thought,” I said. “You need to see the doctor.”

Rory leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest. “That’s where I spent the rest of my afternoon,” she said, but nothing more.

“And . . . ?”

She sighed, running her fingers through her Cookie Monster blue hair. “She yelled at me for not coming in sooner,” she said. “But not just because of the concussion. Under these clothes, my body is a rainbow of colors, going a bit heavy on the black-and-blue side.”

“That’s not from the dancer side of your life,” I said, pained on her behalf.

“Dancers get injured, too,” she said. “Do you know the shelf life of a dancer? It’s almost as bad as that of a figure skater!”

“You need to take it easy,” I said. “Go home and rest some more. I won’t have you falling apart on my account.”

“Lexi—”

I stood, pulling her up out of her chair. Her legs wobbled underneath her and gave out, but I caught her as she fell forward. It was an awkward grab, her forehead slamming into my chin, but when she looked up at me, the fight was gone from her eyes.

“Fine,” she said. “But who’s going to protect you if that guy comes back around here?”

I smiled. “Not this girl,” I said, tapping her on her forehead. I scooped up her dance bag.

“At least let me sit here and do some puzzle solving in your great-great-grandfather’s books,” she insisted. “I feel so useless.”

“Pretty sure you’re supposed to cut back on the gymnastics both physical and mental,” I said, walking her out of the guild hall. “And given the type of arcane stuff you might stumble across in Alexander’s books, that’s even more reason for you to steer clear for now. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

I led Rory all the way up and out to the front door, even hailing a cab and sliding her into it. She smiled up at me as I handed her the dance bag, but there was worry in her eyes.

“At least call Marshall,” she said. “That would make me feel better about leaving you here all alone.”

“Will do,” I said, and, without another word, I shut the cab door, sending her on her way as the taxi pulled away from the curb.

I could have hugged her for her concern, worrying about me when she was the one who could barely keep her feet under her, but as I headed back into the building, I had no intention of calling Marshall.

Seeing Rory like that was more than I could stand. My body shook with the thought of my best friend since childhood coming to harm in my home over secrets that had been put upon my family generations ago. If she thought I was going to call Marshall in to watch over me and put him in harm’s way, too . . .

Such fragile creatures.

Stanis’s words came to me. In his gargoyle hands, the lives of human enemies would be in danger. What scared me more was that in my hands, the lives of my human friends were, too.

If I was going to keep them safe and out of harm’s way, I needed to step up my research, and that meant doing it on my own. For that, I needed full access to everything at my great-great-grandfather’s disposal.

I needed to be back in his library.