Chapter Sixteen

Piper walked around the kitchen, stooping often to pick up papers, manuscript, sandwich, plate, and various utensils spread and smeared across the kitchen floor. The sandwich she threw in the trash, the plate and utensils were tossed in the sink. The papers and manuscript she placed on the table.

Wiping her hot salty tears away, Piper sat at the battered kitchen table and began reordering the yellow pads of manuscript paper, making sure all of them were there, with all the pages still attached, in good shape, and in proper order. She couldn't help reading the last section over again, the fight. As best she could tell, nearly everything Aelvarim had said to her was from the manuscript.

Though his actions had been different. In the manuscript the characters hadn't kissed at all. Nor had the woman character chased the male around with an ordinary kitchen utensil. And the male character never specifically told the woman he wanted to marry her, just that he wanted her to be his.

Reading it now, it seemed more of a threat than an endearment. As if he wanted to possess and control the woman, not marry her. His pleadings somehow twisted in this new light into arrogant commands, his pretty words vicious threats, and his tactics coercive. Piper could only assume that either she or Aelvarim had misinterpreted the manuscript. Or both.

Piper carefully stacked the yellow pads, with the first pages on top and the last on the bottom. She stared at the thin, faint, scrawling script, willing the manuscript and her dead grandmother to help her in some way. Nothing occurred to her. She pushed the stack away from her, sighing. Regretting her own confused and hasty actions and words to Aelvarim, she looked up at the back door, wondering how far he'd run when he left so hastily.

Next to it a black hole gaped in the wall.

Her chair fell backwards, landing with an echoing thud on the kitchen floor. Piper barely caught herself before she fell with it. A hole in the wall? A rift here in Grandma's house? Already?

Fear and fascination drew her unwillingly but inexorably toward the gaping black rip in the wall. As she cautiously approached she noticed pieces of ripped, faded wallpaper hanging down into the hole.

It wasn't a rift. Someone, or something, had punched a hole in the wall.

Still she gingerly extended one finger hesitantly to probe the tattered edges of the wallpaper. The paper gave under her fingertip, and she didn't disappear. It was just a hole punched into the wall. She picked a hanging shred of faded wallpaper, fluttering near the top of the hole, and pulled. A roughly triangular fragment ripped away from the wall.

Piper could see where the drywall ended, in an almost-straight horizontal cut. She'd thought the whole house had been built in the days of plaster. Had this wall at some point been rebuilt using drywall instead?

Pulling away other bits of wallpaper revealed a nearly square hole in the drywall, a handspan in height, encompassing the entire width between two wall studs. Someone had cut a hole into the wall, and then wallpapered over it to cover it up.

Why cut a hole in the wall, and then paper it up? The only reason Piper could think of was to hide important items. A clue? Probably not. After all, how had Grandma found the time after she'd been stricken, but before she went to the hospital. This hole had to predate Grandma's illness. Unless Grandma had anticipated problems and prepared for them. That would be like the Grandmother Dickerson Piper remembered.

Piper could almost see something lurking in the dark shadowy recesses of the hole, a gleam of metal. Hesitantly, she reached inside.

Her fingers touched the familiar cold metal loops of an egg whip. Laughing at herself, she boldly reached in, grasping the egg whip by the jointure of the loops and the handle, to pull it out. The backs of her fingers brushed against something cardboard, leaning up against the outside wall of the hole, as she pulled the egg whip out. Something else in the hole? She threw the egg whip on the floor and carefully put her hand in the hole again. Piper easily found the cardboard, grasped it, and pulled it out.

It was a legal-size pad of yellow paper, with a faint scrawling script covering it. Numbered on the upper right hand binding and on the back, with page numbers at the bottom of each page. The numbers taking up where the others left off. It could only be the end of the manuscript.

She rushed to sit at the table and began reading.

This writing was fainter still than all the others, and so scribbled and scrawled that is was difficult to make out, as if written hastily by someone that wasn't at all sure of what they were writing. Piper read slowly and carefully. Here would be the clues she needed.

This portion of the manuscript clearly defined all the characters that had been so nebulous before. It identified the vague male figure from Fairy, who had so harassed the heroine in the previous installments, as a wizard. The heroine was a young widow, still mourning her recently dead husband. The reason she could never love the wizard was because she would always love her deceased husband, the real true love of her life.

The wizard couldn't, and wouldn't, accept this. He didn't appear to be all that sane on any count. He threatened now not to kill himself or the heroine, but to throw a spell over her. He said he would bind her soul to him, to Fairy, away from her dead husband's, even if it threatened the very worlds of Fairy and Human.

The heroine stalled for time, knowing she didn't have the necessary power and knowledge to combat his spells. She escaped his wrath by pleading with him, and was given three days in which to reconcile herself to her fate. She retreated to her home, preparing what simple protective spells she could to aid herself.

She called upon her sister for assistance. The sister was apparently, unknowingly, a very strong but untried sorceress. The two of them also went to a friendly young elf for help. While not as powerful a mage as the wizard, the elf had in his favor his youth, honor, and a raw genius for magic.

While spying on the woman, the wizard found out about the three conspiring against him. Before they could mass their powers against him, he bound the sister and the elf hand and foot with his spells. Leaving the woman to face him alone.

Attempting to fend off his spells, the woman couldn't concentrate well enough to launch an attack of her own against him. She barely managed to keep up her own defenses. The elf and the sister combined forces to break the wizard's bindings. This distracted him enough that the woman was able to bring up her strongest defensive spell, a mirror spell, while he re-bound the sister and the elf.

When the wizard launched his next attack, it was mirrored back on himself. Without any defenses – he didn't expect to need them against her – he was incinerated by his own spell.

Piper flipped the page, to find cardboard.

The end? No wrap-up, no denouement? This was one story where Piper wanted to see the "And they all lived happily ever after" part. Especially since it wasn't really done yet. At least it wasn't finished yet for her. It would be nice to know now that it all turned out all right in the end. No such assurance there.

But clues, yes, she finally had the puzzle pieces all in place. It was so obvious now. Why hadn't Grandma made it obvious in the other manuscript.

Because it was Larkingtower. And Larkingtower, with his spell-casting ability, might be able to ferret it out and destroy or obliterate the manuscript. Or perhaps he'd cast a spell that wouldn't let Grandma put it down so plainly on paper, and she'd only managed to get the truth buried and coded in this way on the one yellow pad with the very faint, extremely scrawled, laborious handwriting.

Larkingtower was the only one of the three males in Fairy close enough to the juncture with Grandma's house having enough knowledge of spells to be able to do that. Larkingtower hated and despised women, while simultaneously hiding a passion for them. Serious insanity, that. And the gaps were supposed to show up first in those places between the two worlds that were least connected. Larkingtower obviously had more contact with the Human world, and Grandma, than the other two. How could Malraux cast a spell on someone in the Human world if he'd never been to the Human world?

Which made Piper's earlier suspicions about Malraux seem ridiculous. Luckily, she'd only shared them with Aelvarim. She felt incredibly guilty about suspecting Aelvarim. Worse, she'd confronted him about it. Accused him to his face of murdering an innocent old woman he cherished. Remorse and shame over her conduct burned through Piper.

How had they missed the obvious clues pointing to Larkingtower? The exploding spell in the garage. Only Larkingtower could have done that. Grandma didn't have the knowledge, Malraux never entered the Human world, and Aelvarim admitted he didn't have that kind of spell-casting power. Larkingtower had tried to convince them it was only paint. How could paint break and char a broom?

Had he needed the broom and the pot holder for his spell? Something, or several somethings, that were personal items belonging to his victim to complete his odious spell. What else had he used, that Piper was even now ignorant of? And what was his spell?

Piper flipped back through the last pages. A binding spell – in the manuscript the wizard threatened to use a spell to bind the woman's soul to him and to Fairy. Had Larkingtower bound Grandma Dickerson's soul to him and to Fairy? Was that what was causing the two worlds to pull apart? From what Piper could recall of spells, a natural recoil against an abnormal binding might in fact be the cause of the rifts.

Unable to remember any particular binding spells Piper hurried to the parlor, and pulled Grandma's spell books from the shelves. There weren't any spells that purported to bind souls, but there were several petty binding spells. One that supposedly made regular glue into a superglue, but after a moment's distraction on that spell, Piper returned to searching through the spell books for spells to bind souls.

Few counterspells were listed. Most seemed to involve the destruction of something particular to the binding, generally through burning it to ashes. Unfortunately, Piper didn't know of any burnable thing that might particularly pertain to this binding. And in any case, there was more involved in even the simplest of binding counterspells than just the burning of an object.

Returning to the kitchen, Piper reread the final section of the manuscript, looking for clues to counteract a binding spell. The part where the sister and elf unbound themselves to fight the wizard was terribly uninstructive.

Larkingtower would know. Piper wondered momentarily about the advisability of just walking up to his door and asking. With both worlds about to destroy themselves, could things really get any worse?

Would Aelvarim know?

There was only one way to find out. Piper dreaded confronting Aelvarim, after some of the things she'd said and done. Could he forgive her for flinging the contents of the utensils drawer at him?

How had he missed all the clues that they'd run across? He'd been spending his time looking for clues and not seeing any.

Of course, he hadn't wanted to believe that it had to be one of his friends and mentors. Aelvarim had naturally shied away from the thought that the people he knew, and admired, and were so precious to him, had committed so heinous an act. Piper couldn't blame him for that.

After all, her only excuse for not figuring things out earlier was stupidity. She'd at least had the advantage of being an outsider looking at the whole situation from a different angle. She should have seen, she should have noticed, she should have known.

Method, motive, opportunity, all pointed to Larkingtower.

Knowing she had to find Aelvarim and let him read the final installment of Grandma's manuscript, and that delaying was only making things worse, Piper picked up the last yellow legal pad and clutched it to her.

She took a moment to try to find the words to say to Aelvarim. "I'm sorry" seemed inadequate, but she didn't have time for a long-winded explanation. Maybe she could just give him the pages to read. After they'd figured a way to defeat Larkingtower, released Grandma, and saved their worlds, he'd forgive her.

Barring that, she could always try kissing him again. He seemed to like that. It couldn't hurt.

Pushing her chair back, Piper resolutely stood up. She was tired and worn, physically and emotionally from her fight with Aelvarim. Anticipating a long night's work, Piper walked to the counter and uncorked Malraux's mead. She took a swallow and recorked the jug, waiting for the sweet thick mead to work.

With the jug in one hand and the final section of the manuscript in the other, Piper approached the back door.

"I need to get to Aelvarim, in the world of Fairy, as quickly as possible."

Keeping her concentration on her goal, Piper stepped outside into the dark.

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