“Don’t make me zap you, Salem,” Gramps said.
“I just call ‘em how I see ‘em.” Salem paused and smirked. “You old dog, you.” Something seemed to catch his attention over Gramps’s shoulder. He was looking at the chest on the table, and its contents next to it. “Oh my! Is that—”
Before he could finish, Gramps nodded and said, “It is.”
“How long has it been since we’ve used this?”
“Far too long, I reckon. I doubt it’s still useful; the potency of the magic alone would’ve depleted after all these years.”
Gramps was holding something in his hand. Maria saw it was a vial, the glass crystalline and coming to a sharp point on each end. Inside of the glass swirled a deep purple liquid. It was radiant, as if the sun were inside of Salem’s Ice Cream and lighting its surface. Maria found herself entranced by it.
“What is that?” she asked breathlessly. “I’ve never seen something so beautiful.”
Raucous laughter again floated in from the dining room, but as Maria stared at the vial, the sound seemed like a distant echo to her.
Gramps closed his hand with a snap.
Whatever spell had come over Maria vanished, and she came back to the present like being jolted awake from a terrible nightmare, covered in sweat, chest rising and falling rapidly.
“Ah, yes. It can have that effect on a person,” Gramps said. “That’s why it’s better off in this chest where it can’t harm anyone.”
Still, Maria found herself bewitched by the small vial.
“What is it?” she asked again.
Gramps wasn’t going to answer her; she wouldn’t have found out if Salem hadn’t been there with them.
“A communication liquid. Earthlings might call it a ‘magic potion,’ but we Oricerans think that sounds a bit…schlocky. ‘Communication liquid’ is much more…professional.” Salem smiled.
He went to the table and started rooting through the contents of the chest that hadn’t been revealed. Maria was both surprised and unsurprised to see his arm disappear nearly to the shoulder when he reached in, despite the chest being no bigger than two feet deep…at least to the naked eye.
Magic, Maria thought. I’ll never get it.
“Ah, there it is!” Salem shouted.
“Hey now,” Gramps said, “get out of there. That stuff is precious to me.”
Salem held a necklace by the chain. The pendant was a small, sharp-featured rock, like a crystal, and was filled nearly to the brim with the purple liquid. Maria found she wasn’t drawn to it like she had been to the larger vial. “Still full, at that!” he said. “Who would’ve thought?”
Gramps sighed. “I guess that kind of old magic doesn’t carry an expiration date.”
“Apparently not,” Salem said.
He dug into the chest again and pulled out a couple more small crystal necklaces. These were empty. Maria was confused.
“Should we test it out?” she asked.
Gramps shook his head. “No need. We can get along quite well without it. We have so far.”
Salem crossed his arms. “Now you can’t honestly believe that. If we’d had these on in Ashbourne, we could have saved ourselves a lot of bruises.”
Gramps didn’t answer, but Maria could tell by his expression that he knew Salem was right.
Finally, the curiosity took hold of her, and she had to ask. “How does it work?”
“The simple answer is ‘magic,’ Maria,” Salem replied, holding up an empty vial to the overhead fluorescents. The glass caught the light and cast a wonderful array of gleams across the back room. Maria was reminded of a disco ball. “But there is a difficult answer…a more scientific one. I know humans need to know the answers to everything in order to be satisfied. The way I see it, there’s some subjects among this wonderful thing called life that are unexplainable. We gotta accept that. So here’s the first step to accepting.”
“You mean you’re not going to tell me?” Maria asked.
Salem grinned and shook his head. Closing one eye, he peered at Maria through the crystal.
Gramps snagged it out of his hand and put it back in the chest. “What he really means is that he doesn’t know the difficult answer.”
“Neither do you, you old wizard,” Salem said.
“You’re right. I do not. I’d like to keep it that way, too. I have seen the consequences of fiddling with such magic, and don’t intend to subject my granddaughter to them.”
“Eh, I think she can handle herself just fine,” Salem argued as he rooted through the chest again. “She did ride a dragon a couple miles into the sky.”
“Don’t forget the Arachnid I beat,” Maria added.
Salem nodded, looked at Gramps, and crossed his arms. “Yeah, and the Arachnid.”
“The Cave of Delusion, too. The Trials of Antenele.” Maria started listing off all of the crazy stuff that had happened to her in such a short span of time, and counting them one by one on her fingers. She quickly ran out of fingers.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Gramps said, waving his arms. “I’m a terrible guardian—”
“Don’t say that, Ig,” Salem replied. “What happened to Maria was inevitable. Seems that kind of stuff has a way of falling upon the Apples, huh?”
“You’re right,” Gramps said again.
“Of course I am,” Salem replied, grinning. “I’m always right…for the most part. Just don’t tell that to Agnes. She’ll rupture an important organ laughing so hard.”
Maria snorted.
“I’m serious,” Salem said. “According to her, I’m never right.”
All three of them laughed, and for that moment, all the uncertain things hanging in the balance, the weight of the worlds on Maria’s shoulders, the Arachnids, the Rogue Dragon—all of that—was gone. In that moment, it was just friends and family, hanging out at an ice cream shop near the end of summer. Just some people enjoying one another’s company.
But as quickly as that moment came, it disappeared.
“Ig, that magic could help us when we go back to Oriceran,” Salem pointed out.
Gramps looked apprehensively at his friend, then back to the chest and the vial within.
“We’ll need a form of communication in case we get split up again.
