No Quest For The Wicked

Granny stepped forward. “Don’t worry, I know a thing or two about plants. Gardening is what I mostly use my magic for, anyway.” She faced the vines, shaking her cane at them, and said firmly, “Now, you don’t belong here. There’s no sunlight, no good soil, no water. How do you expect to thrive? This isn’t natural at all.” The leaves on the vines started turning yellow and wilting and Granny nodded sadly. “Yes, that’s what’ll happen to you if you stay here. But isn’t there somewhere better for you? I think you should go there now.” Her voice turned to iron at the end, making that last statement into a command.

The vines receded, shrinking back into the ground as though they’d never been there. “No wonder your lawn always looks so nice,” I said to Granny while Sam unlocked the door.

“Don’t tell the garden club,” Granny said with an impish grin. “I don’t want to have to give back all my Yard of the Month plaques.”

We’d just made it to the doorway when a group of men approached from the depths of the garage. “Looks like they weren’t just counting on Mother Nature to keep us out,” I warned, pushing Granny inside ahead of me. The men mouthed spells and sent them in our direction, but they had no effect on Owen or me, so we were still able to get through the door. Owen hit the elevator button while Sam sealed the door and put an extra spell on it. When the elevator arrived, Owen leaned in, hit a floor button, and let the doors close while he gestured us toward the stairs.

“Maybe they’ll be waiting to ambush the elevator instead,” he said as he led the way up. I’d worried about Granny’s ability to climb the stairs, but she was practically running, confirming my mom’s suspicion that she carried that cane as a weapon, not as a walking aid.

We reached the top of the stairs only to nearly run into a great wall of fire hanging in the air less than a foot away from the staircase, blocking us from entering the museum. I felt its warmth on my skin, so I knew it wasn’t illusion. It was probably magical, since it was hanging in midair, didn’t create any smoke, and hadn’t set off the museum’s fire alarm, but it would still probably hurt us. We had no choice but to remain in the relative safety of the stairwell. Then footsteps on the stairs behind us told me that the men in the garage had made it past Sam’s spells. We were trapped.

Chapter Ten

“We’ve got puritans,” I warned. “They’re coming up the stairs!”

Granny whirled, pointed her cane at the stairs, and shouted, “Get on with you!” Vines sprouted from the floor and raced down the stairs and up the walls. Unlike the vines that had blocked the entrance, these had long, sharp thorns, and soon they formed a wall between us and our pursuers. “I know more about plants than you people will ever learn,” Granny boasted. “And that’s the oldest magic there is.”

That still left the fire blocking the stairwell from above, as well as the puritans who must have cast the spell from within the museum. “Looks like we’re trapped between a fire and a pointy place,” I wisecracked, trying to keep my spirits up. It didn’t work.

“The fire will burn out pretty soon,” Owen said. “They’re using elemental magic. It’s very inefficient, so it’s a huge power drain. They’ll have to choose between maintaining the wall of flame and using other magic.”

“Why don’t we force them to use other magic?” I asked.

Instead of answering me directly, he called Rod on his cell phone. “We’re in the stairwell coming up from the parking garage, and we’re under attack,” he said. “We could use some help. I’d like to hit them from both sides.” Then he leaned his head against the wall and groaned. “And you don’t have the spells that would help you fight these guys. Wait, I have an idea.” He reached his hand out to Granny, and she handed him the pages. “Look out for a message. I’m sending the most likely ones to you now.”

He lay the pages on the steps, then took pictures of them using his phone and sent them to Rod. “I should have thought of that earlier,” he muttered as he worked.

“I think the fact that you didn’t proves you aren’t quite as modern and technologically corrupt as they think you are,” I said.

“Yeah, but when you don’t have magic, you’d better be technologically corrupt. I need to get used to it.”

“I don’t mean to alarm you kids,” Granny said, “but we’ve got more problems.” We turned to see water rising up the stairs. It had made it past Granny’s wall of vines and was flooding the next step.