Chapter 23 #2
But Talula, lost in her magic, couldn’t hear him. She dropped her books gently through the window and watched them land on her desk. She broke off her concentration. The window disappeared, leaving behind a barely visible cerulean film on the counter.
The café door opened as Dahlia made her second entrance. Talula tried to waft away the leftover magical miasma from the counter. Simon’s face had frozen between utter shock and his go-to scowl.
“Town hall approaches!” Dahlia sang out. “It’s time to arm ourselves with colorful graphs and snappy bullet points.”
Talula was still dizzy from emergency experimental sorcery. “What?”
“Unless you already have a presentation, of course.” Dahlia rearranged her binders on the coffee table. “Can I see it? Want me to jazz it up?”
“Oh.” Talula chewed on her lip. “My mom’s handling that. This kind of thing has come up before, and she knows how to make it go away.”
“Is your mom going to blackmail somebody?” Dahlia paused. “If so, no judgment.”
“No, definitely not!” Flummoxed, Talula stuttered. “She’s just very convincing. You’ve met her, you get it!”
“I do. But I love it when you get flustered,” Dahlia teased.
Talula groaned.
“But seriously, do you need any help? Does your mom know how to make different songs play on each slide? Or upload a GIF? Because I do. GIFs are my bitches.”
“I’ll let you know.” Talula breathed an internal sigh of relief.
“Well, if I’m not needed—”
“You’re always needed!” Talula blurted out.
Dahlia ran her hands along her body, suddenly sultry. “For more than just eye candy?”
Talula’s neurons did a complicated pinball thing in her brain.
“You’re”—Talula swallowed, eyes following Dahlia’s curves—“excellent eye candy.”
“Talula.” A wicked smile stretched across Dahlia’s face. “You’re blushing.”
Dahlia, you’re killing me.
The wicked smile lingered as Dahlia’s gaze found hers, but whatever she saw in Talula’s eyes (fear, obviously fear) had it slowly morphing into a friendly smile. “I’ve actually got some more stuff to do for tonight. I’ll leave the binders here just in case.”
“Thank you,” Talula squeaked. Then Dahlia was gone.
The door had barely shut when Simon erupted. “What was that?”
“I don’t know! Is she flirting? Is she just being a super complimentary friend? I can’t tell!” Talula let her top half collapse onto the counter, her forehead landing with a thump.
“Focus, you besotted mongoose! How did you make your books disappear?”
“Oh. That.” Talula peeked up. “I conjured in reverse.”
“What does that mean?” Simon sputtered. “How do you know you haven’t lost everything forever in the pickle dimension?”
“Because I saw where it went.” Talula straightened up, took a quick, calm breath, and conjured. The cookbook tumbled into existence in a smear of blue magic. “See? I just sent everything home.”
“Do it again.” Simon pointed his nose at a napkin dispenser on the counter. “That. Send that somewhere.”
Talula focused. A faint blue blur fizzed beneath the dispenser; as if through a trapdoor, it sunk into nothing and disappeared. Half a blink later, it clunked back into existence right next to Simon’s paw. He yelped, jumping about a foot into the air.
Talula tried not to grin. “Sorry—cut that a little close.”
Simon shook out his fur testily. “Tell me what you do when you conjure. Exactly. Step by step.”
Talula explained how she used Kiki’s marginalia to make doors in her mind, then reversed the process.
“Whatever you’re doing is not conjuring.” Simon paced anxiously. “To conjure, you have to know precisely where the item is before you can conjure it. Or have a deep emotional connection to it. But you’re able to peek into spaces you’ve never been and move objects in and out of these ‘doors.’ ”
The hair on the back of Talula’s neck prickled. “So what am I doing?”
Simon’s nails clacked worriedly over the wooden floor. “It looks like you’re creating temporary miniature portals.”
“Is that bad?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why do I sense a ‘but’?”
Simon’s ears went flat against his head, his eyes wide with worry. “But I’ve been doing magic for millennia, and I don’t know how you’re doing what you’re doing.”
They stood in stunned silence. Tentatively, Talula summoned an apple from the Voltlette. She examined it, watching the cerulean shimmer of magic dissipate into air. She thought back to a few weeks ago, when Sara had tried getting Talula to grab a peach blossom through the Volta—
Talula nearly dropped the apple. “The Volta.”
Simon cocked his furry head. “What about it?”
“I’m making doors, right? Maybe that’s because of the Volta.” Talula squatted down to meet Simon at eye level. “How many sorcerer’s kids have grown up next to a powerful magical portal?”
“Hmm…” Simon squinted, as if he were peering at some invisible, complex magical math equation. “There have been rare cases when a child reared near a highly concentrated magical source presents their abilities differently than others of their same species. It’s worth looking into.”
Relief flooded Talula. She sat down hard in one of the café’s armchairs. “It would explain a lot, don’t you think? Maybe even why it’s been hard for me to learn magic the traditional way.”
“It’s not that simple.” Simon scowled. “The Volta is a highly volatile and dangerous magical phenomenon. If your theory is correct, you may be at severe risk for…for, I don’t know! Spontaneous sorcery combustion?”
Talula heard the wisdom in Simon’s voice—the Volta was an ancient force maintained only by a tangle of sorcery, ley lines, and very, very good luck.
Trusting the Volta was like trusting a tsunami.
But Talula’s next words felt truer than salt on her tongue or rain on her face. “The Volta would never hurt me.”
Simon made a deeply pained noise. He spent the rest of the afternoon calling Talula eighteen different kinds of foolish, but Talula paid him no mind.