Illusory

"What do we need?" I asked, and he lay the open spell book on the table between us, turning it so that the text was right-side up to me. He said nothing, merely watching my face as I read, and when I looked up, he was smiling. "What?" I asked, feeling my cheeks warm for the umpteenth time in the past day.

"You're confused," he said, his smile unchanging. "It's cute."

I glared. "Are you making fun of me?"

"No," he answered, laughter to his voice. "I'm trying to pay you a compliment."

"Liar," I mumbled, turning my attention to the book spread open before me. "I don't know what half of this means."

"Only half?" he said, that same lilt of laughter altering his words, and I raised my eyes to his face in another glare. "I figured it'd be at least three-quarters. It is in Latin, after all."

"Why are you being such a jerk?" I asked, my face flushing with anger instead of embarrassment.

"I like seeing you flustered." He leaned his elbow against the gray marble counter top, resting his chin upon his waiting hand. I'd leaned over the counter to read, and his change of position brought our faces much closer than I would've liked. My blush burned a bit hotter. "It's entertaining, and it's really not hard to do."

"Jerk," I muttered, pulling the book toward me so that I could stop being so close to him.

"You know, for such a flirt, you sure do get embarrassed easily around me," he commented. I pretended I couldn't hear him, keeping my eyes stubbornly focused on the page, and he asked, "Why is that?"

"I don't get embarrassed easily around you," I said defensively, peeking at him through a few strands of brown hair that had fallen into my face. I was pretending he couldn't see me, but he locked eyes with me and ruined my delusions. "You just pick the times when I'm actually trying to do things to flirt with me, and it puts me in that flustered mood that you love so much."

He chuckled, giving me that lopsided grin of his. "I know. Isn't it great?"

I shook my head but turned my attention back to the matter at hand. "So, what is all of this?"

"Basically," he began, pulling the book from my fingers and turning it so that the words were legible to him, "we need to light three green candles, use them to set fire to a picture of what we've lost, then chant the spell six times." He paused and looked up at me with a bored sigh. "Really, though, we don't need to do most of that. The candles and that nonsense is all for show, mostly for girls who want to pretend they're witches."

"But I thought this book was written by a rich old guy," I said, frowning in puzzlement. "Why would he write spells for girls who are pretending to be witches?"

"I said mostly for girls pretending to be witches," he said, glancing at the page after the current spell and quickly flipping it back again. "Old men like flashy things, too."

"All right," I said, nodding, though I was still a bit confused. "So, what do we really have to do?"

"Get a map of the city and a bit of salt, create the most vivid mental image of the lost object that we can muster, and speak the spell," he said simply, almost boredly, and flipped forward a couple more pages before turning back to the locator spell.

I sighed, already resigned to my imminent fate. "I'm in charge of finding the map, aren't I?"

He smiled, and I glared. "Correct."

"And you get to cast the spell and do all the fun stuff, as usual."

"Of course."

Another sigh slipped through my lips, and I mumbled, "Okay."

-?-

After a few minutes of digging, I found a map of the city in the small den at the back of the first floor. I returned with it to the kitchen and spread it open on the counter beside the book, which Van still sat pondering.

"There are quite a few simple spells in here," he remarked as I tried — and inevitably failed — to smooth the many creases on the map. "Most of them are filled with the 'candles and chanting' nonsense, but it's not hard to wade through all of that useless trash to find the real method underneath."

"Does the original locator spell mention the map and stuff, or did you just know that?" I asked, stubbornly continuing my attempts to smooth the lines in the map.

He cocked an eyebrow at my repeated failure. "It mentions it. If I'd known it, I wouldn't have needed to find a book about it, now, would I?"

"But isn't this spell just like all of the other ones you do?" I threw my torso across the map, hoping to smash the creases out of it with my body weight. "A word or two of Latin with a little extra because of the map?"

I glanced up at him, and his expression immediately became guarded. He dropped his gaze to the book. "Essentially."

"So why didn't you know it?" I paused at my work, carefully taking in his defensiveness. "It's just Latin, right? You know Latin. And the map thing is kind of obvious."

He turned from the counter and went to an overhead cupboard, jerking the door open and grabbing a glass. "Spells use very particular words of Latin," he told me tightly as he filled the glass with water from the tap. "Several different words can have close to the same meaning, but all of them do different things when used for magical purposes. You can't just pick a word and try a spell." His glass full, he put his back to the sink and leaned against the counter. He gazed at me coolly now, no longer outright displaying his defensiveness. "And you can't just grab a map and a pinch of salt because you think it's obvious."

I bit my lip, hard, trying to stave off the angry outburst that was welling up inside me. He was calling me stupid when he couldn't even remember which word belonged to an obvious spell, a spell that I, in all of my stupidity, could have figured out with little trouble if I spoke a bit of Latin. This was not happening.

I pushed myself off of the counter, spinning to fully face Van where he stood by the sink. "So, what you're saying is, you couldn't remember the one itty-bitty Latin word required for a simple spell, a spell that every magician should know, which happened to be in a book of simple spells that every magician should own...and it's not supposed to be obvious?"

He sighed and took a sip of his water. "What I'm saying is, you have no idea what you're talking about. I may have forgotten a spell, but you never even knew it. You're not a magician; you'd know that you can't play with magic if you were."

"I'd be a magician if you'd just teach me," I snapped, crossing my arms rigidly. "I thought that's what we agreed to when I became your assistant."

"I never said that I would turn you into a magician," he said as he turned from me to dump the remaining half a glass of water down the drain. "I just said I would teach you some magic."

"And all you've taught me is how to style my hair with a spell and how to change my hair color and how to do a ton of other useless things to my appearance," I said, showing him my painted red nails for emphasis. "I wanted you to teach me real magic, magic that could actually do some good in the world or...or something," I stammered, weakly breaking off.

His eyebrows raised, and he faced me with the empty glass still in his hand. "So you want to become some kind of superhero. Is that it?"

I averted my gaze, berating myself for having set that one up so easily. "I don't want to be a superhero," I said after a moment, looking him in the eye determinedly. "I just want to help somehow."

He looked me over for a long moment, his eyes sliding down my frame and carefully searching my face, lingering on me, probing me, until I had to lower my eyes again. "All right," he said, just when I began to feel a face-exploding blush coming on. "Let me do this one spell, and we'll see what you can do to help when we find the book." He left his post by the sink, then, and returned to the open spell book. "Will you hand me the salt shaker, please?" he asked as he resumed his skimming of the page.

I did as he asked, taking the clear glass container from its little nook in the corner where two counters adjoined and placing it beside the book. I nearly dropped it on the way, suddenly giddy with the excitement of promised magic. "What does it all say?" I asked, peering over his shoulder at the foreign words sprawled across the clean white of the pages. "Can you read it all?" It was a silly question, I knew, but I just couldn't help it.

"Of course I can," he answered, giving me a little half smile. "You know that."

"Yeah," I said with a sheepish laugh.

He moved past me to stand before the map, picking up the salt shaker and beginning to twist the lid off as he walked. "What you have to do for this spell," he began suddenly, dropping the silver cap onto the counter with a light ting, and I perked my ears up in preparation for a lesson, "is picture clearly the item you're searching for, focus on it with every fiber of your being, then speak the spell as you drop a pinch of the salt onto the center of the map, careful to keep that mental image from slipping from your mind." His eyes slid to me, a sly smile curving his lips. "But I'm sure you already knew that. It is a bit obvious, after all." I smiled, but didn't dare speak, and he turned his attention to the salt shaker as he poured a bit of salt onto his palm.

"Expiscor," he whispered, and sprinkled the salt near the map's center. It only sat there for a moment, just boring old grains of salt on a map; but it soon began to glow a ghostly white, rolling slowly toward the left edge of the map. It gradually picked up speed, rolling faster and faster until it hit the spell book, leaped on to its pages, and rolled on across. "Oh, well," Van murmured, watching as the salt continued its journey off of the book, off of the counter, and across the floor at the speed of a race horse, "it seems we did something wrong."

"We?" I said, arching an eyebrow at the escaping salt. "All I did was get the map and the salt shaker. This has nothing to do with me."

"Do we have a map of the country somewhere?" he asked as if I hadn't even spoken, moving his eyes from the still-moving salt particles to my face.

"Probably. Would you like me to find it for you?" I asked, though I already knew the answer. I was already halfway across the kitchen by the time he mumbled a distracted "Sure."

I walked quickly out of the kitchen, across the plush white carpet of the living room, and up the stairs. Van's study was immediately across the hall from the steps, the door still hanging open from when I'd gone in search of the first map, and I slipped silently inside. There was really no reason for stealth — Van had told me not to go in here hundreds of times, but he'd said nothing the dozens of times I'd ventured inside to fetch something for him — but it just felt like such a secretive space, a deep, dark space that you should creep into and not make yourself known. Besides, I liked to play ninja. Was the roll across the lightly carpeted floor really necessary to get behind the desk? Of course not. But was it fun? Oh, yeah.

I crouched behind the desk, pulling open a heavy oak drawer and beginning to rummage around inside. A manila folder, another manila folder, three more manila folders, a few loose documents, more manila folders…I pushed the drawer back into place and moved to the one above it, which proved to be much more fruitful. Beneath a thick leather journal that I hadn't bothered moving during my first run through, I found another map, folded tightly into a perfect square. I pulled it out from its hiding place and unfolded it just enough to determine that it was a full map of the country, then shoved the drawer shut and stood. I eyed the many creases that had already been revealed on the map's surface, my nose wrinkling in disgust. Fixing this one was going to take forever.

"Did you find it?" I heard Van call from the kitchen, and I rushed to the top of the stairs.

"Yeah," I yelled back, quickly descending the steps. "It's wrinkled all to hell, though."

"Maps tend to do that," he responded, just as I entered the kitchen. He looked at me. "The salt ran away."

"To where?" I asked, puzzled, as I spread the map of the country out on top of the one of the city. I didn't put nearly as much effort into flattening this one, though. I knew a lost cause when I saw one. "Where would salt want to go?"

"To wherever the book is, I assume," he answered with a shrug. "Salt doesn't really have a mind of its own." He poured another sprinkle of salt onto his palm, stared at the map much harder than he had before, then let the white crystals spill onto the middle of the maze of squiggly lines. "Expiscor." Instantly, they took on that ghostly magical glow and darted to the left side of the map, stopping suddenly in a neat little pile over the state of Washington, where it immediately lost its light.

"Merriclaw, Washington," he murmured after scraping the salt aside. He turned to me with that lopsided grin of his and an air of accomplishment. "Looks like we'll be doing a little traveling this time around."

"Can we teleport?" I asked excitedly, figuring there would be a spell for that. Really, there seemed to be a spell for everything, and what could be more useful than a teleportation spell?

His smile fell, and he went to work carefully guiding the salt off of the counter and onto his waiting palm. "No," he answered almost sadly. "That spell is in one of the missing books, and it's likely too advanced to be found in my mother's library, extensive though it may be."

I pouted. "Does that mean we're gonna have to drive there?"

"No," he said again, now dumping the salt back into the open shaker. I made a face, but he didn't notice it, focused as he was on screwing the top back onto the container. "It means we're going to be boarding an airplane in a few hours."