The entrepreneur enigma, p.2
The Entrepreneur Enigma, page 2
And neither of us knew why she had kept it.
Although I was working on some theories.
Chapter
Two
I stood alone for a moment, looking around my nook. The long, heavy wooden table was covered, as always, in stacks of books and scrolls. The current mix was half books about the history, biology, and sociology of dragons and half research into magical astronomy.
The first was for Houdini, of course. As much as we knew for a fact he had been born a dragon, he had just been hatched when Agatha had transformed him into a dog, and no one had been able to work out yet which sort of dragon he was, let alone who his family might be.
If Agatha herself had ever known, she hadn't told anyone before her untimely end. Not even Houdini.
But the second bunch of books was my really desperate bit of wishful researching. The month before, Steph and I had gotten close to getting our hands on a book that might have explained a little about my own hereditary branch of magic, the forbidden magic of chaos. But before we'd been able to so much as glance at the cover, the man who had brought it to us had decided instead to set it and himself on fire.
I didn't like revisiting that memory. The smell, the sound, all of it had been pure horror.
All I knew about the text was that it had been tucked away inside of a book about binary systems of stars. And as much as Steph kept assuring me the two had nothing in common besides the connections an insane wizard had once made, it was all I had to go on. Maybe astronomy had something to teach me about myself.
A month of reading had yet to turn up anything, except for the sure knowledge that the math involved in really understanding these things was beyond me. Which explained the sudden appearance of calculus books at the end of the table. The bookshop had known before I had that I would soon give in to the inevitable impulse to understand something new, as daunting as that educational process was doomed to be.
Whatever Mercutio had thought of those titles—if he'd even perused them—he hadn't given any hint of it. But I should probably be a little more careful about putting things away when I wasn't using them.
I was still caught in that reverie when I heard the words, "I was starting to think he'd never leave."
"He was here for barely five minutes," I said as I put Houdini down on the ground.
"What? I didn't say anything," Houdini grumbled at me as he climbed into his favorite chair at the head of the table.
Those words hadn't been his voice inside my head? I really must be tired.
Especially when I turned to see who had spoken them.
It was Steph, doing his usual appearing out of nowhere trick. He was wearing the shimmering, jewel-toned cloak of the Wizard's that aided in this magic, but even as I started to rush towards him, he had taken it off and was folding it over the back of one of the chairs. That cloak was the only touch of color he ever wore. The rest of his outfit was pure Hamlet, black boots and pants under a black tunic he wore untucked and unbelted, loose around his hips.
But the tall mass of dark curls on his head was nothing like that Danish prince. Those were all his own. And as I kissed him hello, I indulged myself in burying my hands in it. The curls always felt so cool and soft against my fingers. Even on a hot, sticky August night like the one pressing against the window behind us. And even in the perfect cool, dry interior of the bookshop.
"I thought you said you didn't mind my brother," I said to him after that quick kiss had become three longer kisses.
"Did I say that?" Steph asked.
"You did," Houdini said. "You also insisted that it was best if I didn't speak when he was here. And that you would tell me the moment you were sure it was no longer necessary."
"I know it's a hardship for you," Steph said, giving Houdini's head a quick scratch. "I promise I'm not being overly cautious. Mercutio may not currently be working as a ritual magician, but he had many close friendships with people who are. And no one is more likely to abuse a dragonet than a ritual magician gone rogue."
"So you've said," Houdini said, almost a pout. But not quite. He didn't take it lightly, everything we all did to keep him safe.
"You've still been asking about him?" I asked.
"As much as I can," Steph said. "Not that I don't trust him. But… well, I don't trust him. I mean, I want to."
"I know," I said, and sunk into the chair at Houdini's right hand with a sigh. "I feel the same way. But he just showed up out of nowhere, and nothing he says quite feels like the whole truth. I don't know what to make of him."
"He said he came to find you as soon as he knew you existed, right?" Steph said as he slid into the chair next to mine.
"Yeah, I guess that part felt true," I admitted. I watched as he picked up the books on the table one by one, scanning the covers without saying a word.
Then he got to the calculus book and turned to me with one eyebrow raised high.
"I know, grasping at straws," I said, folding my arms on the tabletop and burying my face into them. It would be nice to nap. My body was tired. But I knew my mind was never going to allow it.
There were still a few hours to go before dawn. I didn't see myself sleeping before then. Not even a little.
"Actually, I'm just surprised you didn't jump on that sooner," Steph said. "Higher-level math is something I've only dipped my toe into. Definitely not for me. But with the way your mind works, I think you might find it quite rewarding."
"With chaos magic?" I asked, perking up enough to lift my head.
"Well, theoretical magic, anyway," he said. "Chaos magic isn't all you can do, you know."
"Yeah," I said glumly. I fidgeted with the silver bracelet on my wrist. Before Steph and the Wizard had given it to me, I had been a constant danger to myself and others. So many things had just spontaneously caught on fire. Now the charm inside that bracelet kept the chaos inside me from growing too big for me to control.
But without it, I was just as useless with magic as I'd ever been.
"You have more general knowledge of every branch of magic still being taught in the world than any wizard I know," Steph said. He caught my hand in his and ducked his face down until our eyes met and he knew I was listening to him. "I've known a lot of wizards, Tabitha. Almost all of them currently living, actually. No one knows more than they do in their chosen fields of study. But their knowledge is by design very narrow. There are so many uses for a wider base of knowledge. I'm not sure you've thought enough about what you can do with what you know. You're still too focused on what you can't do."
I swallowed hard. Self-confidence still wasn't something I had a ton of. Not after years of acing the written tests but failing the practicals over and over again all through my academic years.
It had helped that, since coming to the Square, I had found a community where no one cared who could do how much or how little magic. We all just lived our lives knowing everyone else was doing their best. Academic life had been nothing like that.
And it had helped even more that I had met Audrey, my best friend and most loyal cheerleader. She did all the magic between us, but the spells she wove were the ones I designed for her. They worked like gangbusters, but she was always the first to hand all the credit to me. She just waved the wand and spoke the rhymes, she said.
Which I knew wasn't true. Not only could I not do those spells myself, I knew even if I handed them off to a different witch, the results wouldn't be as good. It wasn't Audrey's fault that her teachers in ritual magic had never found a way to explain the knowledge in a way that clicked with her.
I could. And I could write spells that really maximized her growing skills. But it was almost embarrassing, how quick she was to throw all the praise my way.
But these words from Steph were different than that. I mean, he was definitely my number two cheerleader, no question about that.
But he was also my coach. And what he was saying now was something I had literally never thought of before.
I had tried so many paths while still attending the magical academies, and every one had dead-ended on me. My last hope had been apprenticing in a library. Well, not just any library. It had been an opportunity to work at the All-Planes Athenaeum.
But my out-of-control power had put an end to that by setting fire to one of the wizards who had been evaluating my fitness for the position.
Since then, working at my uncles' bookshop had been all I had been hoping for. Hence my panic at what was going to happen tomorrow.
But Steph, in his usual gentle way, was reminding me I had other gifts. There were other paths. I hadn't tried everything yet. Not even remotely.
I put my arms around him and hugged him tight.
"Oh, thank you," Houdini said to Steph with palpable relief.
"For what?" I asked. I didn't want to stop hugging Steph, but I turned my head on his shoulder enough to look at Houdini, his snout resting on the edge of the table as he peered at both of us with his dark brown eyes.
"You've been this tense mess for days," Houdini said. "That charm on your bracelet has been throbbing like a telltale heart that's about to explode. I've been bracing for flames."
I looked down at the bracelet, resting as cooly and calmly as ever on my wrist. "That's not true," I told him.
"It's absolutely true," Houdini said with a sniff. "It's not my fault you can't sense things the way I do."
"What about you?" I asked, lifting my head to look at Steph. "What have you been sensing?"
"Nothing from your bracelet," he said. But then he touched my hair. "This has been extra interesting the last few days, though."
I put my hands on my hair and flattened it down under my palms. I hadn't noticed anything different about it at all. But I had been pretty distracted.
"Your uncles aren't going to throw you out," Steph said.
"I know that," I said, still trying to flatten my hair down. It was a little extra full, as if I'd spent the whole day outside in the heat rather than in the cool interior of the bookshop.
"And even if they did, there's plenty of room in the Tower," Steph went on. "Not only would you be welcome, I'm afraid the Wizard would insist on you staying close. With us, if need be. Although I'm sure Audrey would fight us for the right to take you in."
"I know I'm nervous, and I know it's irrational, okay?" I said, forcing my hands to drop back into my lap. But then I reached up again to adjust the frame of my glasses just a little. That gesture was one my uncle had taught me. He insisted it was calming. I still did it, even though I didn't find it as effective as he apparently did.
"Is your brother being here helping or hurting?" Steph asked, his tone carefully neutral.
"He's trying to help," I said. "The fact that he wants to try kind of does help. Honestly, I'm feeling better now than I was an hour ago."
"Ask her if she intends to sleep at all tonight," Houdini said. I glanced over to see his head had disappeared from view. He was curled up on the padded seat of his chair, apparently accepting that our bed was not where we were heading any time soon.
"I'm not going to ask that," Steph said to me with a conspiratorial smile. "But I do have something else to ask. I meant to be here sooner, but I got caught up with an experiment with the Wizard. I missed dinner entirely. Are you up for ordering a pizza?"
"Absolutely," I said. "But I'm warning you now, I'm going to want pineapple on it."
"Well, I was going to insist if you didn't," Steph said. "Nothing better than a little citrus to take the edge off all the grease, right?"
"Right," I said, even as I pulled out my phone.
Houdini made a sound in the back of my mind like a long-tortured sigh. But he wasn't fooling anyone. When the pizza came, he'd be begging for bits of sausage as vociferously as any real dog.
But I was already ordering extra sausage on the app. Extra extra, so I could scrape some off onto a plate of his own.
A dragon needed a little dignity, after all.
Chapter
Three
Steph hung around until nearly dawn, but couldn't go with me to wait at the portal for my uncles to return. His master, the Wizard, needed him at the Tower, which probably meant another trip across the globe.
Having zipped to Europe and back with him a couple of times the month before, I didn't know how he could stand doing it so often. It was exhausting, worse than jet lag, and I had not even been the one exerting any magical power to do it. I had just been along for the ride.
So it was just Houdini and me walking through the hedge maze in the gray early morning. The heat wasn't too bad that early in the day, but the humidity from the day before lingered still, coating the grass underfoot and the leaves of the hedges all around us in a kind of moisture that lacked all the charms of dew or even frost. It was just… gross.
When we reached the portal that stood in the open space at the heart of the maze, I realized we weren't the only ones waiting for the scheduled arrival of the magic streams that conveyed witches around the world. There were two young people sitting on crates of mail, yawning hugely and not quite chatting with each other. I recognized the boy from the last time I had traveled through this portal and he had been doing the same job, but the girl beside him only gave me the vague sense of someone I had seen around the Square now and again. They both gave me and Houdini a tired nod, then went back to their whispered conversation.
"Do you think your uncle will remember me?" Houdini asked me. He sounded terribly anxious. I looked down at him sitting on the wet grass beside me. His big brown eyes were gazing up at me, his ears flat back against his skull in that way that always made me want to pick him up and cuddle his worries away.
But I resisted the temptation. "Carlo? I didn't know you'd ever even met," I said. "I mean, he knows I am your legal guardian now that Agatha has passed. He's not going to be surprised to see you."
"We met a few times," Houdini said. But I could hear hedging in his voice. Even though it was only in my mind, that voice.
"And?" I prompted, not quite smiling. I had a feeling I already knew where this was going.
"I might have been… unmannerly," he said, dropping his eyes and hanging his head just a little.
"Like Titus Bloom levels of unmannerly?" I asked. Titus Bloom owned the Bitter Brew Coffeeshop, the Square's chief competitor to the Loose Leaves Teashop, once Agatha's but now her grandniece Audrey's. When I had first met Houdini, back when I thought he was just the dog he appeared to be, he had nursed a particular grudge against Titus Bloom. He would growl at the mere sight of him passing by the teashop doors, a growl that would erupt into a barrage of barking that always felt like a lot, coming from that little body.
Not that he'd been entirely wrong to be suspicious. Titus Bloom had indeed been trying to acquire the teashop real estate from Agatha. But the real thing that had set Houdini off had been a strange smell he couldn't place but instinctively distrusted. It turned out in the end what he was smelling was actually emanating from Titus' wife Nell, who had been making ill-advised bargains with a certain otherworldly entity.
That entity had killed Agatha, at Nell's behest. But Titus had been blameless in all of it.
Well, if you considered someone who really ought to have been at least a smidge suspicious of what his wife was up to blameless.
I had stopped blaming him myself. But I wouldn't exactly call us friends.
But Houdini made a snorting noise, both a little doggy one and a more disdainful one in the voice that spoke inside my mind. "Not remotely. But still. Do you think he remembers?"
"If he does, we can explain you were a littler guy then. You've learned a lot since then. I see no reason why he wouldn't agree to a fresh start," I said. But after a moment's thought, I felt compelled to add, "Unless there was biting involved?"
"No, never!" Houdini said with a snort of offense. "Only I worry that he won't let you stay because it means I have to stay too."
Those ears were plastered back against his skull again, his mournful eyes bigger than ever, and I gave up trying to preserve his dignity. He allowed me to scoop him up and cuddle him close, even burying his little head under my chin to press his nose close to my neck.
"We're going to be just fine," I promised him.
"I wouldn't mind so much, living in the Tower," he murmured. "If we have to. But I know you'd very much prefer the bookshop."
I didn't answer, just stroked his back until his chihuahua trembling settled back down.
Then the pinkening sky just visible between the curved arched pillars of stone that defined the area of the portal began to glow with magical energy. That glow brightened, then began to swirl like a vortex. The two young people waiting on the crates hopped down to the ground and picked up the first of the packages, ready to toss them inside the portal the moment it was properly open.
The heart of that glowing vortex elongated like a cat's eye, then opened up with a rush of colors like the world's most intense rainbow. Then two shapes emerged, both men of average height but heavy set, their rounded bellies not quite covered by their faded sweater vests.
Sweater vests, despite the heat of August, which I was sure was no less intense in the city in the south of France they were leaving behind than it was here in Minneapolis. But it brought a smile to my face all the same. My uncles. They absolutely hadn't changed.
"Ah, Tabitha!" my uncle Carlo said, adjusting the frames of his square steel glasses as if to be sure it really was me standing there waiting for him. Frank, behind him, gave me a tired nod of hello, but then turned back to the portal to catch the first of what turned out to be nearly a dozen suitcases.
They had left home with only two over-stuffed bags apiece.
"Successful trips acquiring things for the bookshop?" I asked as I set Houdini down so I could help move the suitcases out of the way so the two young people on mail duty wouldn't trip over them as they tossed package after package into that rainbow-filled cat's eye.
