Catching A Sorcerer
Sara Walker
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Audience: Young Adult
Formats: Paperback and E-book
Publisher: Sara Walker
Cover by: Melody Simmons
Pages: 198
ISBN-10: 1491049804
ISBN-13: 978-1491049808
ASIN: B00CTLG5A2
Date Published: May 2013
Blurb
After
a sorcerer kills her mother, fifteen year old Melantha is asked to
help catch him. She wants nothing to do with it, but then she learns
one of her classmates is the son of the sorcerer. With her
spell-turner powers not yet developed, the mission will be dangerous,
but it will be downright deadly if the sorcerer figures out who she
is and decides she will follow in her mother's footsteps.
Book Links
Excerpt
Sunday night and I was learning to turn a summoning spell. Though I'd
spent most of my life being home schooled, I had a feeling this was
not a normal family activity for other fifteen year old girls.
"Gran, when I told you I wanted a cell phone, this wasn't what I
had in mind," I said.
Gran picked through a handful of wheatberries, looking for just the
right one to add to her pot. We stood at opposites sides of the round
table with a copper pot in front of each of us and a host of
ingredients filling the table between.
"Cell phones don't work for members of the magical community,"
she said.
"What community? It's just you and me."
Dumping ingredients into a pot had nothing on the convenience of
electronic communication. Kids at school were constantly using theirs
to call each other, text, watch videos. But not me. I wasn't allowed
to have one. I had to learn the "old ways."
Gran sighed, and I knew by the way her lips were pursed that she
didn't intend to elaborate. She'd been trying to get me to learn
spells every night for weeks now. I'd finally caved in hopes she
would back off, but that plan hadn't worked out quite like I'd hoped.
"I have to go to the library tonight," I said. I dumped a
handful of crispy dried lavender flowers—for devotion so the line
of communication would stay clear— into my pot.
In another time we might have been called witches. But now that term
was considered derogatory. We were spell-turners. Well, Gran was. I
wouldn't be a full spell-turner until I turned sixteen and came into
my full powers. In all my fifteen years, in all the time I'd spent in
Halifax and my current residence in Ottawa, I'd never met another
turner, not another magical creature of any kind, until the day my
mother died.
If there was a magical community out there, I wouldn't know it.
I hadn't been out of the apartment except to go to school in six
weeks. I needed to get away, to hang with some friends— even just
for a little while.
"We have books here," Gran replied in a stern tone. This
was an old argument.
She was right— we had books here. Every wall of the living room was
filled to the ceiling with shelves, every shelf filled with books.
All had belonged to my mother.
Without coming right out to say so, Gran was subtly reminding me of
the reason I was confined to the apartment. My mother had been killed
by a black-spell sorcerer— that is, a sorcerer who chooses to use
death to fortify his spells. For some reason Gran thought he would
come after me. But I wasn't a full turner yet. I had only partial
powers. Until my sixteenth birthday, every spell I turned would
dissipate the moment it came together. "Learning powers,"
Gran called them. "Just enough juice to see what you're doing,
but not so much as to harm yourself or anyone else."
She seemed convinced I had these learning powers, but for some reason
my
spells never seemed to turn out right no matter how carefully I
followed her instructions. And that was bad news. Even though they
didn't want me to know, I'd heard my mother and Gran fighting about
me. Gran thought I was either a late blooming white turner or a null—
a turner's daughter born without powers. My mother refused to believe
I was a null. So Gran was on a mission to prove one way or another I
had learning powers or I was deliberately faking not having them out
of extreme laziness.
"Your mother was a good white turner," Gran said. "She
loved turning spells with me when she was your age. Couldn't get
enough of it."
Her mention of my mother hit me square in the gut.
"Didn't she like to do anything else? Anything normal?"
Gran pinched her lips together again. She didn't like to speak about
my mother beyond her gifted spelling abilities.
I directed the conversation back to the topic at hand.
"I really need the books at the library," I said. I
followed her actions and, using a wooden spoon, swirled in two cups
of diluted bay leaf extract for strength. I turned the spell
clockwise, same as she did. We were on opposite sides of the small
round kitchen table, so I had to think for a minute which way to turn
my spoon.
"Why?" Gran asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes.
Everything was suspicious to Gran.
I barely kept myself from rolling my eyes. "I have homework."
"What homework?"
"What do you mean? I go to high school now. I get homework."
I used to be home-schooled. Right up until 52 days ago when I lost my
mother. Then Gran had to take over as my teacher. She used to be able
to teach my lessons for the few months of the year when I went to
live with her in Halifax, but now that I was in grade ten, my studies
had advanced to the point where she didn't understand anything in my
textbooks. So she marched me down to the nearest high school. She
would have signed me up right then, but they were closed for winter
holidays. Imagine that.
"The new semester starts tomorrow, February second, according to
the
literature I received from the school," she pointed out.
Crap. "I'm catching up from last semester," I said,
carefully examining a handful of calendula. I felt more than saw Gran
carefully examining me.
"Who's the boy?" she asked.
"There's no boy," I answered quickly. Too quickly. Double
crap.
"I might not know much about quadriplegic equations or—"
"Quadratic equations," I corrected.
"Or, what goes into a good Theseus statement, but—"
"Thesis statement. Theseus killed the Minotaur."
"But," she said again with emphasis, ignoring my
corrections, "I know my granddaughter."
This time I did roll my eyes. "Whatever."
His name was Rory Macdonald. But I wasn't about to tell Gran that. I
met him in the principal's office on the morning of my first day. It
was his first day, too. A drunk driver had killed his parents and now
he was living with his aunt. I met him again later in the day at the
guidance counsellor's office. A special grief counsellor had been
brought in to meet with us. Neither of us wanted to meet with her,
but nobody asked us. His aunt was almost as controlling as my Gran.
We didn't have plans for tonight, so I didn't have to worry about
calling him to cancel. He'd mentioned he'd found this place, where he
liked to go on Sunday nights to play bass guitar for a band. I'd only
hoped to stop in and hear him play.
"You may invite him to come here," Gran said, ignoring my
denials. She
released three drops of cedar oil, for dedication, into
the liquid swirls in her pot. "But you won't be going out."
I bit back a scream. It used to be my mother and Gran had no trouble
keeping friends out of my life, what with shipping me off to Halifax
twice a year and homeschooling me. I never got to go to birthday
parties, Halloween parties, camping trips or any other fun thing that
normal girls did.
"Friendship is dangerous," Gran would say. My mother would
agree. She would even agree when they were having that big fight that
lasted for weeks.
I tried a new angle. "I need to use the computers at the
library."
"What do you need those confounded contraptions for?" she
asked. Her tone was one of surprise, even though this wasn't the
first time we'd talked about my needing a computer for schoolwork.
She just didn't get the concept of computers. Ever.
I listed the reasons on my fingers. "Research, report
presentation, statistical
analysis—"
"Hmph. In my day we had to do all of that by hand." She
peered down her nose at the runny swirls in my pot. While mine was
little more than a pathetic soup stock, hers had taken on shimmering
hues of purple and green. I didn't have to see her face to know she
was disappointed.
Still, I pressed my case. "Look, it's not a big deal. I can take
care of myself."
"Hmph." She tapped the wooden spoon on the pot rim.
"Please? Can I go for an hour?" Oh, man. That sounded so
desperate.
"No," she said simply, placing her spoon on the table next
to her pot. She carried the empty vials to the sink and turned on the
hot water.
"Gran—" I cried.
"I cannot permit it, Melantha. If you do not go outside this
apartment with me, then you do not go outside this apartment at all."
I rolled my eyes and groaned. "You are completely impossible!"
If my words stung even the slightest, she didn't show it. She carried
on with washing the dishes. "I'm sorry, Melantha. But I promised
your mother."
"Promised her what? Promised you would keep me a prisoner and
never talk about her?"
I slumped into a chair with my arms crossed. This was hopeless. Gran
was super stubborn. I needed a new approach.
Temporarily abandoning my potion, I snagged the tea towel on the way
to the
sink. Unexpected helpfulness always put Gran in a good mood. I
hoped it would be good enough to let me out.
She cleared her throat. "Your potion is incomplete."
"My potion is nothing but water with twigs and leaves in it."
I noticed she didn't tell me not to dry the dishes. Nor did she tell
me to start over and make the potion again. We'd been down that road
before. It always resulted in the same thing: failure. Whatever it
took to make a potion, I didn't have it. My mother and Gran had been
convinced my spells would come together the closer I got to my
sixteenth birthday, but so far they always amounted to nothing.
"Did you project your light into it?" she asked in that
snippy tone that said she already knew the answer.
"Yes." I hated it when she said "light" instead
of "magic".
"And?" Gran prompted.
"And what? Nothing happened." I shrugged. I felt my power,
my magic. It flowed through me, the same as blood and oxygen flowed
through me. It was there. I could feel it the entire time we put
together these spells. But magic also dredged up too many memories of
my mother. And there wasn't much light there when I thought about how
she died. It was more like a choking sensation. I hated that feeling.
"You're not trying hard enough," Gran said. That was what
she always said. I didn't answer. There was no point. She'd already
made up her mind.
Maybe the truth was, I could have tried harder, but turning spells
just felt wrong. If my mother had been killed by bullets, would I
still be expected to attend target practice?
"I don't understand what's so bad about having friends," I
said, plucking a soapy plate from the drain board.
She shut off the water. "You know the reason. They can be used
against you.
And you against them. It's better for everyone if you
just don't have them to begin with."
Yeah, I'd heard that part before. It was stupid. For some reason my
mother and Gran thought I would be kidnapped and held for ransom. I
couldn't understand why. We didn't have anything of value. It wasn't
like we were millionaires.
So who were they protecting me from?
"As for going out alone," Gran continued as she washed a
pot, "there are many kinds of evil out there. You are not safe
on your own."
"But I won't be on my own. I'll be with friends!"
"Together you'll be on your own."
"But that makes no sense at all!"
An eerie wind howled outside the windows. If the weather was getting
worse, I was sure to lose this argument. I crossed the apartment to
the living room windows and used the tea towel to clear away the
condensation on the cold glass. Snowflakes swirled under the
streetlights below. Even the weather wanted to keep me inside.
There was a sharp knock at the door. I met Gran's gaze. She appeared
as surprised as I was, but where I welcomed any and every visitor, I
knew she would send away whoever was on the other side of that door.
By the expression on her face, she suspected I'd invited a friend
over without permission. I hadn't, but
knowing Gran, that wouldn't
make a difference.
I dove for the door, but Gran beat me to it. She leaned cautiously up
to the
peephole.
"Open up, Alberta. I'm here to speak to the girl." It was a
man's voice— muffled, old and tired. The voice of someone older
than Gran, someone ancient.
The girl? I hoped for his sake, he wasn't referring to me. There was
something familiar about the voice, something that sent a nervous
sense of foreboding all the way down to my toes. This was one visitor
I didn't want to see.
A former
bookkeeper, Sara always preferred books over numbers, and finally put
aside her calculator to write stories and work part-time in a
library. She is the founder of
UrbanFantasyLand.net,
a website established in 2008 that specializes in promoting urban
fantasy and speculative fiction. Her articles and fiction have been
published in anthologies and online.
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