The Glass Magician

Ceony turned her gaze to the door Emery had disappeared behind nearly an hour ago. He had been involved with law enforcement on a deeper level for years, Ceony knew, but she still wished she could hear the discussion. Emery had seemed rather adamant that she wait out here. Was he trying to protect her, or did he simply not trust her?

She had been as useful as a sack of weevil-eaten flour when the buggy went over the riverbank. Had she been alone, she would be dead in the water, floating alongside the driver, whose name she didn’t even know.

The driver. The crash blurred in her memory, but she remembered his gruesome death clearly. A simple swipe of another’s hand, and he had died. An Excision spell; Ceony had no other explanation for it.

The door opened. Ceony perked up, but only the detective emerged, holding an unmarked, yellow folder full of papers. From a glance, she could tell the folder had a “no-eyes” lock on it—it would only open when given a specific command, though that command did not necessarily need to come from a magician. Emery had taught her about that spell just last week.

The detective glanced around, set one paper on an unoccupied desk, and then crossed the room toward Ceony. He pulled up a chair and sat across from her, their knees just two feet apart. He held an expensive pen with a tiny Smelting seal on its end—a seal that would light up when the pen was about to run out of ink. Ceony had used similar pens during her schooling at Tagis Praff.

He set a ledger printed with the seal of Criminal Affairs on his lap.

Criminal Affairs, though strictly a branch of the Magicians’ Cabinet, worked closely with all of England’s law enforcement both domestically and abroad. A few magicians even worked with detective agencies that weren’t associated with Criminal Affairs. Ceony assumed involvement with the Magicians’ Cabinet got overly political, so she couldn’t blame them.

Ceony took a long look at the detective before her, his coffee-stained shirt and what looked like a Smelted gun in a holster over his shoulder. Smelters often operated alongside law enforcement; had Ceony become a Smelter like she’d originally planned, she might have been here under a different capacity.

The detective frowned. “Do you need a blanket, Miss Twill?”

Ceony shook her head, though her wet waistband had begun to itch. “I’m fine, thank you.”

“I’m sorry to make you repeat yourself,” the detective apologized, “but could you recount your story once more? Give me as many details as you can remember.”

Chewing on her bottom lip, Ceony nodded. She recounted the accident as best she could, trying to keep her voice smooth, though that proved difficult when she spoke of the driver’s fate. She couldn’t recount more than the beginning and the end of the story—once the buggy hit the water, her mind had just stopped working.

Useless.

The detective asked her a few more questions, then thanked her and stood, returning his chair to the desk he had borrowed it from. A few moments later, he disappeared back into the closed room where Mg. Cantrell and Emery were still talking.

The front door to the police station opened, and in walked Mg. Aviosky, a very exhausted-looking Delilah, and Mg. Hughes, a Siper—rubber magician—whom Ceony had formally met after Emery’s brush with death three months ago. Mg. Hughes sat on the Magicians’ Cabinet for Criminal Affairs, and Ceony knew from the third chamber of Emery’s heart that he was the one who’d involved Emery in hunting Excisioners in the first place.

Ceony stood and set Fennel and the rest of her soaked belongings down on her chair.

Mg. Aviosky reached her first and seized her shoulders, taking a moment to look her up and down. “You have a knack for getting into danger, Miss Twill,” she said with a click of her tongue, followed by a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness you’re well.” Her face paled. “Magician Thane?”

“He’s fine, just a bump on his head,” Ceony said. She hadn’t noticed the injury—and the dried blood coming down from Emery’s hairline—until they had reached the police station.

She was completely and utterly useless.

“He’s talking with Magician Cantrell,” she finished, gesturing to the closed door across the room. She had met Mg. Cantrell—a Smelter—only briefly. She had seemed far more interested in Emery’s account of the accident than in Ceony’s.

Delilah pushed forward and gave Ceony a tight hug, but spared her the double kiss. “Oh, Ceony, I’m so sorry. How dreadful this must be.”

“I’m all right,” Ceony said, though she felt less than confident in her answer. She felt tired, frightened, worried, relieved, anxious—did “all right” fit with any of those?

“You’ve filed your reports?” Mg. Hughes asked. He sounded gruffer than Ceony remembered, but that could have been due to the late hour.

She nodded.

Mg. Hughes frowned and rubbed his trimmed white beard with his thumb and forefinger. “A knack for danger is something of an understatement. This is the third incident you’ve been involved in this week.”