“My uncle is not a super complicated man,” Moira told them as she flipped the lights of his office on. They stared around in awe at the custom bookshelves and fancy rugs. She walked past it all without batting an eyelash and tapped on one of the sliding wooden panels beneath the bookshelves. There was a little metal keyhole on one side. “This is the only thing he ever locked in here, aside from the desk drawer where he keeps his dark liquor away from Aunt Angie.”
“Do you have the key?” Jeremy asked.
“No, but,” Moira looked around the office. She spotted a heavy paperweight on the desk. It was shaped like an elephant and made of solid marble. After weighing it in her hand a few times, she crouched by the wooden panel and smashed it over the keyhole. The wood buckled and splintered under the blow. After a few more hits aimed to destroy all the wood around the latch, she could push the panel out of the way.
They peered inside. A lone storage tub sat in the compartment. Jeremy could make out stacks of books and papers through the cloudy plastic. Moira dragged it out. She popped off the lid, and the smell of old, musty paper wafted up. They all reached at the same time to grab something. Their hands knocked together, and they snapped at each other. Jeremy batted both of them away and took one of the leather-bound books out. He flipped to the first page and scanned through it.
“Jackpot.” He grinned, “This is probably your great-grandfather’s journal or something. First page talks about his coming of age, when he learned about magic.”
Moira pawed through the rest of the tub. There were letters bound together by string. A couple of ancient-looking tomes. Some more leather-bound journals. She flipped one of the larger tomes open.
“This looks like a family tree, but like it’s got a note beside each person about their ‘gift.’ Do you remember my aunt mentioning something about getting a gift at the coming-of-age ceremony?” Moira looked at Jeremy. He nodded. She looked at the page, “I had an inkling that maybe my ability to turn into a dragon was my gift, but most of these are a lot less exciting than that. Stuff like ‘aptitude for time magic’ and ‘aptitude for fire magic.’ Oh, someone was fireproof! That’s pretty cool. And it’s not just my family.” She flipped through the pages, “I recognize some of these other families. They are like… all the guys my dad used to sit around and puff cigars with or were on his polo team and stuff.”
Caleb made a face at her, “Polo team?”
“Shut up.”
“Some of these letters look like they might be between families.” Jeremy said, “This one is from Dorothy Hughes. So it looks like your family wasn’t the only one in on this. Maybe they are just the ones responsible for the sacrifice?”
“Dunno.” Moira slammed the book shut, “We’ll have to read through everything to find out.”
“Okay.” Jeremy agreed, “We should make two piles as we read. One for stuff we want to take with us. Do you think there would be anything anywhere else?”
Moira glanced around the room. Her eyes landed on the desk, where a sleek gray laptop rested. She leaped to her feet. “He didn’t have his laptop with him the night of the banquet! Knowing Uncle Howard, he kept all his records by hand and still wrote letters, but I could check his e-mails and files. Maybe he has a hard drive somewhere, too.”
She started searching through the desk drawers but came up empty-handed. She collected the laptop into her arms and swept out of the room, saying she wanted to check around for her Aunt’s laptop, too.
Jeremy pored over the books in the office. It was like something out of a movie set. The desk was a massive, solid wooden piece, and the desk chair was probably custom-made to fit Uncle Howard’s ass. Bookshelves lined every wall. Everything was neat, organized, and dusted. Jeremy parked himself in one of the velvet-upholstered high-backed armchairs by the fireplace. There was a low coffee table over which he spread the journal and letters. He even switched on the fireplace. It crackled peacefully beside him.
“The one percent truly lives in a different world.” Caleb held one of the heavy, floor-to-ceiling drapes back with two fingers as he looked out the window. The view included the river and the columns of smoke rising from the city. A haze obscured the horizon and made the sun appear a dark, angry red.
“Will you come help me look through this stuff?” Jeremy called over his shoulder. He thumbed through an ancient book, one of the oldest from the bin. The binding was still in good shape but creaked ominously when Jeremy opened it. The paper did not feel like paper. It was vellum or something along those lines. But the words printed inside were still clear, untouched by age.
He wondered if there might be a spell to preserve the book so well. It would not surprise him, given the contents. The rest of the paperwork appeared to be personal accounts and correspondences, but this seemed like an instruction manual. Various symbols were drawn out, with writing beside them. The content appeared to increase in complexity toward the back of the book. Some of the symbols were the same runes that Jeremy saw. Unfortunately, the writing was not in a language he recognized. He put the book into the ‘take along’ pile.
Caleb ignored the other high-back chair and plopped down on the soft rug. He picked up a letter, squinted at it, then dropped it on the table. “Why don’t we just take everything?”
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“We are already carrying too much stuff,” Jeremy said.
Oh, listen to this…” Caleb cleared his throat, “He’s getting advice from someone. And they say, ‘Your issue is that you do not spend enough time in meditation. You must balance the acts of practice and cultivate the experience gained in equal measure, or else the payoff of your original efforts will be wasted.’ Does that sound useful?”
“Very useful.” Jeremy gestured to the stack of papers beside the ancient book, “Put that in the take-along pile.”
“You are putting everything in the take-along pile.” Caleb pointed out. Jeremy grumbled and looked toward the 'leave behind' pile. It contained two letters and one journal, which did not have any information about the use of magic. He looked at the other pile, which had grown into three stacks of letters, several journals, and the old book.
“Since we have magic, we should create a bag of holding." Caleb mused, "Maybe there is something in all this for that. In the meantime, I wonder if this guy has a car parked somewhere that we could take.” Caleb pushed to his feet, “I’m going to go check on Moira.”
Jeremy put down the letter he was reading and rubbed his eyes. Caleb had a point. He was unwilling to leave much of the paperwork behind because it was all from a tub full of information relevant to magic. But he wanted to at least skim through most of it to be aware of the contents. Not only was he paranoid they might be destroyed, but each new bit of information provided a greater context he had not even imagined before. It was too satisfying to finally get some answers for him not to want to read through everything.
Besides, there was no rush to get out of the penthouse. The fridge was stocked, and this side of the city seemed tame. He rolled to his feet as well.
Moira had spread out in the living room. All the blankets and pillows were dragged off the couch and piled into a nest beside the coffee table. Both laptops sat on the table, surrounded by an open bag of chips, a notebook, and a few empty soda cans. The TV on the wall opposite the couch was turned to the news. Jeremy wondered if any channels broadcasted anything besides the news anymore. They were showing imagery of the nuclear blast. It looked like something out of an old film, except in high definition. But it happened only a couple of hours ago.
Moira and Caleb stood in the kitchen on either side of a glowing red toaster. Moira had a cup of something steaming in her hand. Caleb stared as a single-serve coffee maker dripped into a second mug.
“They actually did it.” Jeremy joined them. “They actually dropped the nuke on Gate 0.”
Moira watched Jeremy search through the cabinets. “Yep. If you want coffee, the mugs are in that corner cabinet. And apparently, the radiation is pretty successful at stopping goblins that keep coming through the gate from getting very far.”
“Well, at least it wasn’t for nothing.” Jeremy selected a black mug with an unfamiliar logo and then went to peruse through the K-cup flavors.
“Caleb said you were finding good information in the paperwork.”
Jeremy picked out a regular medium-roast. “Yeah. Especially in the letters. Caleb found one just now that said not only do you have to practice spells to increase your power, but you also have to meditate. What was the word they used?”
“Cultivate.” Caleb offered. He grabbed his mug as the coffee finished brewing and popped the used pod out. Then he stepped aside to let Jeremy use it. The toaster put out a little electric hum and a whole lot of heat from where it sat on the counter, toasting a bagel.
“Cultivate.” Jeremy said, “So I guess you have to practice spells, which is pretty intuitive, but you also have to internalize what you practiced somehow?”
If creating a runic system to make spellcasting simpler and more streamlined was possible, maybe Jeremy could also figure out a way to make this process less hand-wavy. Meditation was tough for him on a regular basis. He tried a few times throughout his life and always gave up. Using it towards a goal like increasing magical abilities, might make it easier. Or not. He would have to give it a try. He exhausted his magical resources earlier while practicing the simple elemental spells as they walked. Now seemed like a good time to internalize that practice.
He looked around the kitchen as his coffee brewed. “Where would the plastic bags be?”
The toaster popped, startling them all. Moira, who was standing next to it and had been staring at it in anticipation the entire time, sloshed hot coffee all over her hand. She set the mug down and stuck her hand in the sink to pour cold water on it.
“They should be in that cabinet.” She tapped the cabinet below the counter to the left of the sink with her socked foot. Jeremy pulled out the box of gallon-sized bags. Caleb eyed them.
“Moira said her uncle has like three cars, so we have our pick of the lot if we want to take one," he said.
“That’s fine, but I want to carry this one book with me even if we put everything else in a tub in the trunk.” He went back into the office, zipped the old book into a plastic bag, then brought it back to the living room so he could tuck it into the duffle with his clothes.
Moira bent over a jar of jam, struggling to untwist the metal lid. Caleb watched her over the rim of her coffee mug. He opened his mouth and closed it a few times. She glared at him and held the jar out.
“Open this for me.”
“Aren’t you a literal dragon?” Caleb quipped. Her face turned ugly, and he hastily set down his coffee mug, “Okay, okay. Let me see if I can get it…there. You loosened it, right?”
He handed the open jar back to her, and she huffed. Jeremy went back into the kitchen to grab his coffee. There were a couple of coffee creamer flavors in the fridge. He heard a click by the front door as he stood there contemplating them. He glanced over and saw that the deadbolt was twisted to the unlocked position.
“Moira?” He asked, “Does anyone else have a key to this place?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Moira came over and followed his line of sight toward the door, “Why?”
“Because I’m certain I locked it behind us,” Jeremy said. Caleb joined them. They all jumped as the clock of the regular lock echoed through the foyer. This time, Caleb was the one to slosh coffee all over his hand. He hissed and licked it off. Jeremy slid his knife out of its holster and held it ready behind the refrigerator door.
The front door swung open. Three men in suits strode through the door, the man in the middle obviously in charge. While the other two wore plain black suits, he wore tweed like some Scottish noble on a hunt in the hinterlands. His slicked-back red hair and a dusting of freckles across his face completed the look.
“Moira.” He greeted, unsurprised and as comfortable as if entering his penthouse. If he had a key to get in, he might be familiar enough with the place to walk in like he owned the place. His eyes flicked between the three of them, then landed back on Moira, “I’m glad to see you are safe.”
Moira crossed her arms and sneered, “I wish I could say the same to you.”