Page 25 of Starlight Witch

“Don’t scare me that!” I exclaimed. But his silly grin and twinkling eyes cut through my irritation. “Oh, come here. You silly thing.”

Fancypants glided over and settled on the picnic table next to me. He looked delighted with himself, and I stroked him between the eyes. He purred, and then was aloft again, flying over toward the treeline.

“Don’t go too far,” I said. “I don’t want to have to come find you.”

As he flew off, I returned to my father’s diary. I thumbed through several more entries focused on his daily life, then came to a short entry that stopped me cold.

I had hoped things would calm down, but I can see now that there is going to be no peace for me. And that means there will be no peace for my wife and my child. They caught me in the parking lot tonight, after I stowed the groceries in the backseat. I looked up to find two of them there, and they reminded me that I signed a contract with them. If I can’t make this work, I’m in serious trouble. I was so sure that I had a handle on this, and that nothing would interfere. I thought my powers were strong enough, but everything’s falling apart. It’s beginning to look like there’s only one way out to save Catharine and Elf, but I have a few more things to try first. Then, we’ll see.

“Magic. My father got in trouble over something magical, but it also has something to do with money—that much I know,” I whispered. I tried to think back to our circumstances when I was four or five years old. Were we poor? Did we have enough money to pay the bills? That wasn’t something children usually thought about. I didn’t remember being hungry, and we stayed in the house after my father died. But if the contract had been with him exclusively, would they have come after my mother?

Once again, it seemed there were so many pieces to the puzzle, and I didn’t have the framework in which to place them. When you were dealing with scattered pieces, knowing where to begin was like trying to find the end of the thread in a tangle of yarn.

I flipped through the rest of the journal but only saw a few more pages. The next three entries were brief, and they were all equations that I didn’t understand. I had no clue what my father had been trying to calculate, but at the end of each one there was a bright red checkmark. The diary ended abruptly with the last entry.

It’s not going to work. I’ve done my best but I can’t figure out the formula. I was so sure, absolutely positive that I could do this. And now, what’s going to happen? I’ve made promises to a lot of powerful people and creatures along the way, and they expect results.

I don’t know what’s going to happen—I’m so tired. I’ve been working 24/7. But something in my formula is off, and the magic isn’t holding true. It’s too volatile and I don’t dare loose it into the wild. I’m not the genius I thought I was, and I suppose that might be a good thing, considering everything involved.

I thought I could play the villain for money, but when it comes down to the end, I can’t. I know that my days are numbered, and I know my baby girl is going to grow up without me. I pray and hope that Catharine won’t flake out on her.

I’ve kept my wife in the dark, and I can’t leave her holding the baggage that I’ve incurred, either financial or emotional. I can only see one option… One chance to make things right. But I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. I have no one to blame but myself and my greed. I’m hiding this diary, and hopefully, when everything’s blown over, the right person will find it. With luck, Catharine will find the letter that I left her.

I set all my affairs in order, and I’ve locked up my daughter’s trust in an ironclad contract. No one can take it away from her, regardless of the situation. So at least I’ve done that part right. I’m going to make one last-ditch effort, but I don’t hold much hope with it. There’s still one thing I haven’t tried, but I have to find Yanak. He’s my only hope now, in a world where little hope exists. As Percival said, “When all lights are dim, when shadow covers the road, one candle can save a life.” And Yanak is my candle.

If you find this, my candle vanished in the wind. If I succeed, I will burn this journal and everything connected to it. I wish I could see the way forward.

The journal ended there, the pages after it blank. I flipped through, looking for anything that might be hidden toward the back, but the pages were all empty. I shut the diary. What the hell had my father gotten himself into, and what kind of magic was he working with? It had to be dark magic, given what he had written.

My trust fund had come through with no problem. As he said, it had been sewn up so tightly that my mother couldn’t touch it. As far as I could tell he had been after what must have seemed a great deal of money, and it involved some sort of secret room, and magical experiments. It had also involved putting his clients at risk. But how?

I thought for another moment. Accountants usually dealt with people who had a great deal of money. So he must have had clients who were wealthy. Somebody wanted that wealth, perhaps? And then there was the Port Townsend Witches’ Guild. Did that mean that they were corrupt? Or had he only thought they were? The one certainty was that the diary had raised more questions for me than it answered.

I stared at the outside of the book, running my fingers along the smooth leather binding. I needed to know more. At least I had one name to go on: Yanak. When we were in Port Townsend for Thanksgiving, I would do my best to track him down.

In fact, I could start looking now, online. It had been twenty-eight years since my father died, but witches lived longer than humans, so even if he was an old man at the time, whoever this Yanak was might still be alive, if he was a witch.

I looked up to see Fancypants flying along the shore, giggling as he flew. He was having the time of his life, and I didn’t want to interrupt him. Instead, I faced the bay. The wind whipped the waves into swells, and the clouds were socking in. We were due for rain any minute.

Finally, I stood and, talking the journal under my arm, I called for Fancypants. “We need to head home. It’s going to storm soon and I don’t want to get caught out in the rain.”

He landed on the picnic table. “All right. Thank you for bringing me. I needed that.” He paused, then asked, “Are you all right?”

I nodded, not knowing what else to say. “Yes, I’m fine. Come on, race you to the car.”

As I sprinted toward the car with Fancypants flying alongside, my mind was turning in a hundred different directions. Now, more than ever, I wanted to know about my father and what he’d been involved in.

All the way to the car, a voice deep inside me whispered: Are you sure you want to dig up the past? Are you sure you shouldn’t leave the dead to the dead? Old bones can bring up old wounds. But even as I listened to the warnings, I knew that I’d ignore them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

That night at dinner Grams told me about the inspection. “Everything’s good to go. A few minor things need repair, but there’s nothing major. The owner and I came to an agreement, so the deal is on. May and I had a full afternoon of shopping after that.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I know, dear. What about you? How was your jaunt to the park?”

“Cold, but informative.” I told Grams what I had read in my father’s diary. “Do you remember him ever saying anything about financial worries?”

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