“It’s all right.” Jenny spoke to me with the same soothing tone she used to console her patients. It only made me angrier. “We’ll find a different way.”
“Are we sure Annette got the name right?” I snapped. Casting a spell with the wrong name was like fishing without a hook.
Annette tapped her phone and handed it over, clearly humoring me. An old obituary filled the screen. There was no picture. I zoomed in and squinted at the short, generic text.
“Her maiden name wasWentworth,” I said.
“But she changed it,” said Annette. “Her legal name—”
“Don’t get me started on the rules and caveats and exceptions surrounding True Names. A name isn’t inscribed into your bones by some clerk at the county courthouse. If she thinks of herself as Wentworth, that’s her name. It’s who she is.” Before they could argue, I read the spell again, finishing with, “Margaret Wentworth.”
Power pulsed through the house, through my body, and into the candle. The smoke bent away sharply, like it was caught in an unfelt breeze.
I slumped in my chair, not bothering to hide my relief. “The smoke will lead us to her.”
“Good work.” Jenny picked up the coffee mug and candle.
Annette handed me my cane.
I should have thought to verify the name before I cast the spell. A stupid mistake, but it didn’t matter now. My magic had worked.
I closed the book and ran my fingers over the worn dust jacket with the drawing of Stuart Little paddling his birch bark canoe through the reeds.
I was still a magician.
I was still Temple Finn.
• • •
I sat in the front of Annette’s red 1972 BMW. The candle and coffee mug were in a plastic cup holder clipped to my door. Jenny was squeezed into the back.
Annette started the engine.
The car wasn’t alive, but it responded like a living thing, purring in response to its owner’s love. Maybe it should have been alive. It wouldn’t take much, given how deeply Annette loved it. But both Annette and Jenny had been clear that I wasn’t to enchant their belongings without asking.
“Where to?” asked Annette.
The smoke traced a line forward and to the right.
“East.” As we drove, I watched Salem pass by through my open window.
So much had changed. I remembered coming this way when I was young to watch anti-sub patrols take off from Winter Island in the early days of World War II. There was so much more traffic now. Cars had multiplied and spread like rabbits overpopulating their habitat.
I’d seen so much, both magical and mundane. In many ways, the mundane was just as magical: the first helicopter; television; the atomic bomb; Apollo 11 landing on the moon; the internet. It was exciting and overwhelming and often infuriating, watching history spiral through the same conflicts and mistakes as each generation forgot the lessons of the past. But though they were as clumsy as a blindfolded minotaur in an antiques shop, still they moved forward.
“Turn left,” said Jenny. She’d twisted in her seat to watch the smoke.
“Sorry, yes.” I checked the candle. The smoke was darker now. “We’re close.”
The candle died in front of a bed-and-breakfast on Hardy Street, a red-painted building called the Maule House. An American flag hung on one side of the door, and a large pentagram dominated the other.
Jenny spotted the black van at the back of a small parking lot that had been a public playground seventy years prior. I remembered bringing a date there and sitting on the swings, talking and watching the stars.
Annette parked near the front, away from the van. She double-checked her weapons after getting out. I double-checked my cane and fanny pack.
A flicker of spectral movement caught my eye as we started walking. “She knows we’re here.”
“You mean the van?” asked Jenny. “Do you think she recognizes me?”
