Last but Not Lease #5
Summary:Location, Location, Location!
Yuri knew his idyllic beachfront cabin wouldn’t last forever—but he wasn’t expecting to come home to an eviction notice. And with Uncle Fonzo back in town, Dixon’s attic apartment is getting crowded.
Unfortunately, real estate in Pinyin Bay is surprisingly scarce. Good thing there’s an up-and-coming crowdsourced experience called Hunting Party that really moves the needle on the traditional rental acquisition model.
Okay, it really is as obnoxious as it sounds. But rentals are so few and far between, Dixon and Yuri are willing to give it a shot.
Pitted against a group of apartment hunters, the guys must compete with the other hopefuls to land a new place. It’s clearly all just a cheesy sales ploy, and the apartments they view are real dumps.
And yet…they’re also oddly appealing.
Since all the rentals are in the falling-down neighborhood known as Scrivener Village, it stands to reason Spellcraft is involved. But when exposing the magic could leave Dixon and Yuri without a roof over their heads, can they really afford to be so picky?
The ABCs of Spellcraft is a series filled with bad jokes and good magic, where MM Romance meets Paranormal Cozy. A perky hero, a brooding love interest, and delightfully twisty-turny stories that never end up quite where you’d expect. The books are best read in order, so be sure to start at the beginning with Quill Me Now.
Don't Rock the Boardwalk #6
Summary:Sounds like the start of a bad joke, but Dixon and Yuri are most definitely not laughing. Because this particular mime needs a Crafting deactivated—one that’s been helping an outsider buy up Pinyin Beach.
And it originated at his family’s shop.
While undoing Spellcraft is Dixon’s specialty, Yuri thinks they should determine who ordered the Spell first. It’s too awkward to ask Dixon’s parents. And the mime isn’t talking.
Going undercover on the South Dock Boardwalk to find out for themselves might not be the most direct way to tackle the problem, but it’s definitely the most enlightening. From whispered secrets to secret societies, the guys find out more about the underpinnings of Pinyin Bay than they ever imagined.
Hopefully, they can figure out what it all means before it’s bye bye, Boardwalk.
And it originated at his family’s shop.
While undoing Spellcraft is Dixon’s specialty, Yuri thinks they should determine who ordered the Spell first. It’s too awkward to ask Dixon’s parents. And the mime isn’t talking.
Going undercover on the South Dock Boardwalk to find out for themselves might not be the most direct way to tackle the problem, but it’s definitely the most enlightening. From whispered secrets to secret societies, the guys find out more about the underpinnings of Pinyin Bay than they ever imagined.
Hopefully, they can figure out what it all means before it’s bye bye, Boardwalk.
What the Frack? #7
Summary:It’s all fun and games until something blows up.
Thanks to the recent explosion in Pinyin Bay, most of its residents got out while the getting was good. Not Dixon Penn. He grew up there, and from the power plant to the strip malls, the city is full of fond memories. But if the mysterious corporation that bought up the shoreline doesn’t stop drilling, memories may soon be all that remain.
Yuri Volnikov is finally fitting in. He crossed an ocean to find a loving home with Dixon. Now, that home is threatened. And he won’t give it up without a fight.
The drilling has attracted plenty of attention. While a harebrained reporter covers the scene, a traveling geologist shows up who might shed some light on the situation. He’ll need all the light he can get, since he can hardly see three feet in front of his own face.
Whoever is digging up the shore, they’re using Spellcraft to exploit every possible loophole so no one can put a stop to their operations. Can Dixon and Yuri defuse the Craftings before Pinyin Bay goes up in smoke?
Original Review April 2020:
Who knew home-hunting could be so . . . magical? Dixon and Yuri are back!!!! I love these two, they are such a mismatched pair on paper but the minute they're together you just know that not only are they perfectly matched, there really is no one else for either. Dixon's peppy-ness and Yuri's stoic-ness should make them run for the hills in opposite directions but they calm each other, balance each other, makes the other stronger. I guess what I'm saying is Jordan Castillo Price knows how to make them work and work they do!
So, in Last but Not Lease, Yuri has lost his home and Dixon's place is cramped, sardines-in-a-pea-pod cramped, so the logical thing is to go home-hunting. But as you can imagine, this pair always seems to find themselves in an intriguing, controlled chaos(and if you don't know what I mean then you haven't been reading the series and need to go back to the beginning-trust me you'll love it!). So I'm not going to give anything away because the magical craziness of this duo is something you need to experience yourself to fully appreciate them and their predicaments.
The best way for me to explain the meshing of humor, magic, mystery, and chemistry is Lucy & Ethel meets Samantha & Darren Stevens meets Nick & Nora Charles. Brilliant characters, great world building, and amazing storytelling make for an all around reading gem that just keeps getting better and better. This is a series that is best read in order as each entry has a little something that is part of a bigger picture as well as following along with Dixon and Yuri as their relationship grows.
The ABCs of Spellcraft was one of my favorite series last year and their new adventures seem to be well on the way to being a fave of 2020 too.
So, in Last but Not Lease, Yuri has lost his home and Dixon's place is cramped, sardines-in-a-pea-pod cramped, so the logical thing is to go home-hunting. But as you can imagine, this pair always seems to find themselves in an intriguing, controlled chaos(and if you don't know what I mean then you haven't been reading the series and need to go back to the beginning-trust me you'll love it!). So I'm not going to give anything away because the magical craziness of this duo is something you need to experience yourself to fully appreciate them and their predicaments.
The best way for me to explain the meshing of humor, magic, mystery, and chemistry is Lucy & Ethel meets Samantha & Darren Stevens meets Nick & Nora Charles. Brilliant characters, great world building, and amazing storytelling make for an all around reading gem that just keeps getting better and better. This is a series that is best read in order as each entry has a little something that is part of a bigger picture as well as following along with Dixon and Yuri as their relationship grows.
The ABCs of Spellcraft was one of my favorite series last year and their new adventures seem to be well on the way to being a fave of 2020 too.
Don't Rock the Boardwalk #6
Original Review June 2020:
This isn't the first time the guys have gone in undercover to discover the "faulty" or misused crafting but there was something about doing so in their own backyard that made Don't Rock the Boardwalk that much more interesting. I hesitate to say "more fun" because the whole series has been fun from the beginning but it does seem to have that something extra special and again for me that was being right their in Pinyin Bay and having come from the Penn family shop.
The whole series has had the perfect blend of romance and humor to label it romantic comedy, for me however it does seem odd to use that genre tag with an equal blend of paranormal and mystery but Jordan Castillo Price makes it work. Don't Rock the Boardwalk is no different. Dixon as a tour guide and Yuri as a street artist is absolutely divine. Let's face it, if you've been reading Dixon and Yuri's adventures you know by now that Dixon has the gift of gab so the tour guide disguise is pure genius, even if some of his facts are of his own creation or embellishment and when Yuri finds himself on the tour one day, I'll just say it may not have been Who's On First? but their timing was as spot on as many classic comedy routines are.
As for Dixon and Yuri on a personal level, they just continue to grow both in their individual crafts and their love for each other. I don't want to say they tackle this case different than others but as they do take on roles that don't work together I think they are apart more in Boardwalk than any other entry in the series. Which in one way is a bit of a disappointment because I love seeing them interact but on the other hand I think it shows just how much they've grown to be able to work apart and still get the job done and still find time for that Dixon/Yuri magic that ABCs of Spellcraft is known for.
If you are wondering about reading order, well The ABCs of Spellcraft needs to be experienced as written. There's a certain level of completion to each novella but there is an overall arc to boys' journey. So far Jordan Castillo Price has two story arcs in the series, #1-4 and #'s 5 & 6 and the upcoming 7: What the Frack?. Trust me, if you enjoy magic, mystery, romance, humor, and heat then Spellcraft is definitely a series for you.
What the Frack? #7
The whole series has had the perfect blend of romance and humor to label it romantic comedy, for me however it does seem odd to use that genre tag with an equal blend of paranormal and mystery but Jordan Castillo Price makes it work. Don't Rock the Boardwalk is no different. Dixon as a tour guide and Yuri as a street artist is absolutely divine. Let's face it, if you've been reading Dixon and Yuri's adventures you know by now that Dixon has the gift of gab so the tour guide disguise is pure genius, even if some of his facts are of his own creation or embellishment and when Yuri finds himself on the tour one day, I'll just say it may not have been Who's On First? but their timing was as spot on as many classic comedy routines are.
As for Dixon and Yuri on a personal level, they just continue to grow both in their individual crafts and their love for each other. I don't want to say they tackle this case different than others but as they do take on roles that don't work together I think they are apart more in Boardwalk than any other entry in the series. Which in one way is a bit of a disappointment because I love seeing them interact but on the other hand I think it shows just how much they've grown to be able to work apart and still get the job done and still find time for that Dixon/Yuri magic that ABCs of Spellcraft is known for.
If you are wondering about reading order, well The ABCs of Spellcraft needs to be experienced as written. There's a certain level of completion to each novella but there is an overall arc to boys' journey. So far Jordan Castillo Price has two story arcs in the series, #1-4 and #'s 5 & 6 and the upcoming 7: What the Frack?. Trust me, if you enjoy magic, mystery, romance, humor, and heat then Spellcraft is definitely a series for you.
What the Frack? #7
Original Review August 2020:
I want to start by saying there has yet to be a cover in The ABCs of Spellcraft series that isn't brilliant and that Dixon and Yuri don't look Yummy in but there is something about What the Frack? that has that little something extra. Is it the hardhats to give the men that hard-at-work look? Is it Dixon in flannel and bibs to give him a rugged edge? Is it Yuri with the sledgehammer in his hand teetering between work and rest? Or is it that slight tip-of-the-hat that gives them a gentlemen yet blue collar look? I don't think I can narrow in on any one thing, it really captures the characters and gives you an inkling into what their latest "case" will entail. Then of course there is the colors, the purplish, bluish, aquaish blend that draws your attention and an almost graphic novel artistry that tells you no matter how much drama they face, Jordan Castillo Price hasn't lost the comedic slice that help get Dixon and Yuri in AND out of trouble.
And who says a cover is just a cover?😉
So let's get to What the Frack? This is the finale of the second story arc in ABCs of Spellcraft, Dixon and Yuri continue to grow and strengthen their relationship. We get to see some of the ins and outs of Pinyin Bay, and though it may not be New York City, Atlanta, or Chicago in the hustle and bustle part of activity, it's no sleepy little burg either. So as the title suggests, the guys are faced with mining in Pinyin Bay and knowing the way these two get themselves into trouble it won't be welcomed by everyone.
What could go wrong? More like what won't go wrong?😉😉
I don't want to give anything away so I'll end it there and just add that if you are already a reader of JCP's newest series then you know it'll be brilliant, if you have yet to experience The ABCs of Spellcraft, now is the perfect time as the second story arc is finished and we await a new set of adventures for our lads. This is a series that must be read in order but you won't regret it. The blending of magic, mystery, romance, mayhem, and humor is enough to tick all my sub-genre boxes making What the Frack? and The ABCs of Spellcraft as a whole a perfect choice no matter what kind of mood I'm in.
RATING:
And who says a cover is just a cover?😉
So let's get to What the Frack? This is the finale of the second story arc in ABCs of Spellcraft, Dixon and Yuri continue to grow and strengthen their relationship. We get to see some of the ins and outs of Pinyin Bay, and though it may not be New York City, Atlanta, or Chicago in the hustle and bustle part of activity, it's no sleepy little burg either. So as the title suggests, the guys are faced with mining in Pinyin Bay and knowing the way these two get themselves into trouble it won't be welcomed by everyone.
What could go wrong? More like what won't go wrong?😉😉
I don't want to give anything away so I'll end it there and just add that if you are already a reader of JCP's newest series then you know it'll be brilliant, if you have yet to experience The ABCs of Spellcraft, now is the perfect time as the second story arc is finished and we await a new set of adventures for our lads. This is a series that must be read in order but you won't regret it. The blending of magic, mystery, romance, mayhem, and humor is enough to tick all my sub-genre boxes making What the Frack? and The ABCs of Spellcraft as a whole a perfect choice no matter what kind of mood I'm in.
RATING:
Don't Rock the Boardwalk #6
1
DIXON
Practical Penn is not a fancy shop. It’s situated between a take-and-bake pizza place and a dollar store. The floors are linoleum (worn), the walls are paneling (fake wood), and the acoustic drop ceiling tiles are vaguely discolored. But Practical Penn is more than just a store in some seventies strip mall, it’s my family’s livelihood. And for that reason, it’s the best shop ever.
Unfortunately, businesses come with regulations.
While I did still have an office in the shop, it was just an out-of-the-way little closet of a room. To save on our liability insurance, my mother had taken me off books several years ago while I was trying out every youth hostel in Europe. That move turned out to be to everyone’s advantage. Because not being officially employed there meant I didn’t have to go to the annual Spellcraft rules and regulations training that was required of every Scrivener in a small-to-midsized shop. With me unofficially manning the helm at the store, Practical Penn could stay open while every other shop in the city had to shut its doors.
Win-win.
Technically, I didn’t need Yuri to come along and keep me company. Chances were, I’d just be sitting around all afternoon watching adorable chipmunk videos on my phone. But he insisted that if Rufus Clahd was the only one I had for backup, some intrepid robber would clean us out for sure. And so, he came along, parked himself at my cousin Sabina’s desk, and shot apprehensive looks at Rufus’s door when he thought no one was watching.
Poor Yuri. I think Rufus freaked him out because he’d never met another Seer before. And Seers tend to be… unusual. Whether it’s because they possess a talent that’s basically a genetic mutation, or because every Scrivener they meet treats them like the next Messiah? Hard to say.
As long as you don’t mess with his things, Rufus can be fairly easygoing. But though he’s got a normal-sized ego, he’s also got extremely large hair. My cousin and I have speculated over the years as to whether or not it’s a white-guy perm. She thinks it must be, whereas I’m not so sure. While some days it looks more tightly coiled than others, I think the discrepancy could be due to a change in shampoo, or humidity… or maybe the occasional trim.
I hadn’t yet determined what Yuri thought of the hair, but I’d wager he had an opinion. It was Yuri’s desire to keep an eye on everything that landed him front and center when the mime walked in.
I often ponder what Yuri’s nightmares must be like— no doubt, they’re in Russian. Yuri’s got a thing about clowns. And while a mime isn’t technically a clown… I guess it’s close enough. He stood up so fast, the office chair spun out behind him and crashed into the wood paneling with a giant clatter. It made enough noise to wake our Seer from his current nap. Rufus’s door cracked open just as I made it over to Yuri’s side to catch him in case he fainted. He’d probably squash me. But, heck, I was used to him squashing me. I might even kind of like it.
The mime walked up to the service counter and started swatting at a bug on the Formica surface. We keep the place well-fumigated, but I supposed it was possible that some of the feeder crickets had escaped their stinky little tank. The office was now home to a variety of nocturnal creatures— apparently, toads get really loud around one a.m. And crickets were a lot less icky to handle than mealworms. Still, those little suckers could really hop. I picked up an empty coffee mug and a pizza menu, and came over to rehome the poor cricket, who’d probably enjoy getting squashed a heck of a lot less than I did. But when I got up to the counter, there was no cricket. And the mime was still swatting away… at nothing. I picked up the edge of a phone directory to see if the little escape artist got away.
“Mime is ringing service bell,” Yuri supplied, from a safe distance away, with an accent gone thick.
Oh. Right. The mime brightened and nodded vigorously.
I could’ve sworn he was swatting a bug.
You wouldn’t think a little greasepaint would make all that big a difference, but I couldn’t really get a bead on the man behind the makeup. Was he older or younger than me? Dark or fair? And, most importantly, was he better-looking? Between the whiteface and the eyeliner, it was really hard to say. The only thing I knew for sure was that his drawn-on eyebrows made him look perpetually startled.
He gestured at the counter. I looked at it. Back in the day, when smoking was in vogue, a lit cigarette had fallen from an ashtray and left a nicotine-yellow burn on the surface. The mime shook his head and gestured for me to stop looking at the burn mark and pay attention to him instead.
He pinched his fingers together on both hands and raised them in an arc. “You’re typing,” I ventured. “You’re reading the newspaper. You’re folding laundry.”
At the sound of all my excited guesses, Rufus Clahd ambled out of his office. Practical Penn’s official Seer was my parents’ age, and he still dressed like it was 1979. He’d been working here for years… if you counted napping in his office as working. He joined in the guessing game, sounding half-asleep. “You’re eating corn on the cob. With lots of butter. And a sprinkle of Himalayan sea salt.”
Yuri snapped, “He is opening briefcase.”
The mime touched the tip of his nose, winked, and pointed at Yuri.
Yuri shuddered.
Rufus squinted at the mime. “You sure it’s not corn?”
The mime pointed at Yuri again.
“I’m really pretty good at charades,” I said. It wasn’t my fault this mime was so ambiguous.
Once the “briefcase” was open and all three of us Spellcrafters were watching, the mime pulled something out of the case. Except the thing wasn’t imaginary, like the purported briefcase. And it was really obvious he’d just pulled it out of his pocket.
And… it looked a heck of a lot like Spellcraft.
He placed it importantly on the counter and indicated it with both hands, then started making frantic little looping motions.
“You’re cranking a pepper grinder?” I guessed. “No? Crocheting an afghan. Wait, I know— you’re playing Yahtzee.”
Rufus shook his head. “No way, man, he’s definitely waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, just after sundown, throwing white-hot sparks against the night sky.”
Huh. I’d really never figured Rufus was that imaginative. Then again, it made a lot of sense, given that the weird watercolor blobs he painted (the ones that never looked like anything to anybody) still managed to fix the Spellcraft mojo onto the paper.
Unfortunately, judging by the frustrated huff that came out of the mime, Rufus was also wrong.
Yuri matched it with a huff of his own, though he made no move to come any closer, as if mimeness might be catching. “He is drawing— from right to left and bottom to top. He wishes you to Uncraft spell.”
The mime made a really big deal out of gesturing toward Yuri. Yuri backed up another few steps, until the wood paneling creaked against his back.
Rufus and I both leaned in to get a better look.
I might not have figured out the pantomime for “Uncrafting a spell,” but the Spellcraft itself? That, I recognized right away… even though I really wished I hadn’t. Not because of the Seen— it wouldn’t be the first Rufus Clahd creation I’d unmade— but because of the Scrivening.
The mime waved his hands in a flurry of inexplicable gestures. Rufus scratched his chin and said, “You went for a swim, but the water was colder than you thought, so instead you focused on your Tai Chi.”
While even the mime looked befuddled over that guess, Yuri said from across the room, “He is disturbed by Crafting and hopes we can help him.”
Either Yuri had a better view from where he was standing way over there, pantomime was a flourishing art in Russia (which gave him an unfair advantage), or learning a second language had just made him pretty darn perceptive. The mime hopped up and down in excitement and gave Yuri an eager thumbs-up.
I took a better look at the Crafting. The Seen, predictably, was a messy blue-gray blob that could have been anything— but the Scrivening was pretty darn specific. Go-getters get their goal. I was big on rhyming, and Uncle Fonzo liked to Craft fortune-cookie type sayings. The alliteration, though?
It couldn’t have come from anyone but my father.
No one likes to be the source of a bum Crafting, so naturally, I considered claiming it must’ve come from some other shop. But before I could, Rufus said, “Oh, I remember that one.”
“Really?” I said. “Because it’s awfully, uh… abstract.”
“Nope. That’s Pinyin Bay. See the dip over here? That’s where the power plant sits. And the flat side over here is where they shored up the coastline, so the inmates at the county detention center couldn’t swim away anymore. And the tiny flecks of black inside the water— those are leeches.”
Well… now that he pointed out all those details, I supposed I could see it.
Yuri said to the mime, “I read article that said South Dock Boardwalk is threatened by developers. Is that where you have come from?”
The mime nodded with great purpose.
“The South Dock Boardwalk can’t be sold off,” I declared. “It’s a Pinyin Bay institution!”
Rufus agreed. “That’s where everyone loses their virginity on a full moon under the pier to the sound of off-key buskers yodeling in the distance.”
“Um… not everyone,” I said. “But it’s bad enough some out-of-state corporation bought up the rental cabins on Pinyin Beach. Are they gunning for the Boardwalk, too?”
The mime made an exaggerated frown and nodded.
Yuri said, “If same buyer also has Morticia Shirque’s estate as well as the cabins, when they take the Boardwalk, this entire coastline of the bay will be theirs.”
That couldn’t be. “All of Pinyin Beach?” Even as I said it, landmark after landmark cropped up in my mind’s eye as if I was cruising past on Old Bay Road. The trailer park. Pinyin Inn. The cabins. The Shirque Mansion. From the power plant on one side of the bay to the crumbling bluffs that separated Pinyin Bay city limits from the road to Strangeberg on the other, the only property that hadn’t recently changed hands was the Boardwalk.
The mime knuckled away a fake tear.
I snagged the Crafting by the corner and pulled it across the counter to get a better look at it, but as I did, Yuri caught me by the back of the collar and dragged me into my office. Since I hardly ever used it, tanks filled with toads and lizards and whatever else ate all those escaping crickets took up a lot of the meager real estate. But Yuri crowding me into a gap between my desk and a coatrack was something I could hardly complain about— even though I was pretty sure no kissing would be involved. Not this time, anyhow.
“You would Craft for mime?”
Obviously, Yuri was none too keen on the situation. Even if I didn’t know he had a thing about clowns, he’d been dropping articles left and right ever since the guy gestured his way across the threshold. “Listen, Yuri. Pinyin Beach means a lot to me. But even if it didn’t, that’s not just a Practical Penn Crafting out there… it’s my dad’s.”
Yuri understood. He answered with the sort of slow-blink he reserved for those moments when a long-suffering sigh simply wasn’t enough.
I patted him on the chest. And then added a few more pats for good measure. And then trailed a fingertip along his neck tattoo in a way that made him shiver. “Think about it this way, Yuri. Pinyin Bay is riddled with Spellcrafters. The mime could’ve brought this Crafting to any one of them. But, as luck would have it, we were the only shop open. It’s as if it was meant to be.”
“Nothing is ever a coincidence with the volshebstvo.” Yuri pulled me against him roughly, smoothed my hair back, and paused to cup my face in his palm. Gazing down into my eyes with exquisite tenderness, he said, “You are always taking on problems that are not yours to solve— so, how could I expect you to leave this Crafting to the wind? I know you must do it… but I do not have to like it. Especially when Uncrafting involves no Seen, and can only be done by you, and you alone.”
I brushed a kiss across his frowny lips. “I just knew I could count on your support! Now, let’s get back to the mime before any more Spellcraft shops open up and he can start comparison-shopping.”
We headed back out to the lobby, where Rufus was regaling the mime with a rambling tale about… well, frankly, it’s just as hard to follow Rufus’s stories as it is to figure out which end of his Seens is up. But whatever the narrative might be, it involved a trashcan, a used harmonica and some shaving cream. Just as Rufus wrapped it up by saying, “… and then all of us broke into a half-hearted rendition of Auld Lang Syne!” my cousin shouldered her way through the front door with a teetering stack of pizza boxes in her hands from the take-and-bake joint next door.
“Who holds a meeting in this day and age and doesn’t supply any donuts?” she demanded with all the vehemence with which she demands… well, everything. “I swear I could hardly hear the presenter over the groaning of all the empty Scrivener stomachs.”
Sabina had dressed “professionally” for the mandatory meeting— which was to say, she didn’t have any holes in her black jeans, her Doc Martens were polished, and her bra straps weren’t showing. Fortunately, Spellcraft is one of those professions that doesn’t require you to dress to the same standards as a banker or a politician or a high school principal.
I, myself, might be fond of sharp tailored suits and natty bowties, but Sabina balked at the notion of wearing anything even remotely conservative. My cousin has crammed herself into a pair of pantyhose exactly once in all her twenty-five years. And by the time she was done clawing them off again ten minutes later, everyone up and down the street knew exactly what she thought of them.
Yuri relieved her of the pizza boxes and steered them into the break room, where three toaster ovens we’d found at various garage sales and thrift stores awaited. And with no stack of boxes blocking his view, the mime did an exaggerated double-take at my cousin.
Sabina looked equally as startled— and knowing that she can be just a teensy bit acerbic if you rub her the wrong way, I quickly attempted to steer the mime’s attention back to the matter of the Uncrafting. I slid a contract from a pile of legalese, slapped it down in front of him, and said, “I’d be happy to see to the matter at hand. All I’ll need is your signature on the dotted line and five hundred dollars. We take all the major credit cards, but there’s a five percent discount if you pay cash.”
The mime pretended to be pulling down his pants.
Even if I were single, trading sexual favors for Spellcraft was a line I was simply not willing to cross. “I’ll have you know this is a respectable family business.”
Yuri said, “He is showing you his pockets are empty.”
“Oh. Fine. Well, there may be some wiggle-room.” We didn’t need a Seen painted, after all. “It’s a real stretch, but I can go down to $ 399.”
The mime repeated the gesture.
“Looks like he’s frying up some bacon and eggs,” Rufus observed. Was that a euphemism? Hard to say.
“$ 299?” I tried. No dice. “$ 250, and that’s really the best I can do.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that if I didn’t want my dad’s Crafting to fall into the hands of another Spellcraft shop, I’d have to settle for twenty bucks. I’m usually a lot better at negotiation, but frankly, it’s unsettling when the other party is constantly pretending to disrobe.
The mime handed over a crumpled bill, then pretended to sign the contract with his fingertip.
Sabina rolled her eyes and handed him an actual pen. He brightened and plucked a tiny paper flower from his sleeve, then offered it to her in return with a grand, courtly bow. Until Yuri swatted it out of his hand, anyhow. “Stop dawdling and sign. There is much work to do.”
The mime made a big deal of signing with a flourish. Spellcrafters always get a big kick out of what passes for a flourish among the Handless. But as I spun the contract around to face me, it wasn’t to critique his penmanship, but to figure out what in the heck I should call him. Because it hardly seemed fitting to keep referring to my new customer as “the mime.”
His signature was a vague squiggle.
“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to be working together, I need to know what to call you.”
The mime smiled, spread his arms wide as if to say get a load of this, then bent his knees and straightened them again.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Sabina demanded.
The smile went a bit pained. He repeated the motion.
“You’re jumping rope,” I said. “Are you a boxer? Is your name Muhammed Ali? Ooh, I know, it’s Rocky.”
The mime shook his head and did it again.
“A bunny hop,” I guessed. “A pogo stick.”
Rufus nodded sagely. “That’s exactly how the slow-motion dismount of a gymnast from a pommel horse would look. He’s trying to tell you his name is Trigger.”
Sabina was running out of patience. “How long have you guys been at this?”
“Too long,” Yuri said.
Dang it, I had to get something right. It was a matter of principle now. “You’re looking for something on a low bookshelf. You’re doing squats at the gym. Wait a minute— I know! You’re crouching.” The mime shook his head emphatically… but if he wasn’t willing to speak up for himself, it was his problem, not mine. “That settles it. Crouch it is.”
DIXON
Practical Penn is not a fancy shop. It’s situated between a take-and-bake pizza place and a dollar store. The floors are linoleum (worn), the walls are paneling (fake wood), and the acoustic drop ceiling tiles are vaguely discolored. But Practical Penn is more than just a store in some seventies strip mall, it’s my family’s livelihood. And for that reason, it’s the best shop ever.
Unfortunately, businesses come with regulations.
While I did still have an office in the shop, it was just an out-of-the-way little closet of a room. To save on our liability insurance, my mother had taken me off books several years ago while I was trying out every youth hostel in Europe. That move turned out to be to everyone’s advantage. Because not being officially employed there meant I didn’t have to go to the annual Spellcraft rules and regulations training that was required of every Scrivener in a small-to-midsized shop. With me unofficially manning the helm at the store, Practical Penn could stay open while every other shop in the city had to shut its doors.
Win-win.
Technically, I didn’t need Yuri to come along and keep me company. Chances were, I’d just be sitting around all afternoon watching adorable chipmunk videos on my phone. But he insisted that if Rufus Clahd was the only one I had for backup, some intrepid robber would clean us out for sure. And so, he came along, parked himself at my cousin Sabina’s desk, and shot apprehensive looks at Rufus’s door when he thought no one was watching.
Poor Yuri. I think Rufus freaked him out because he’d never met another Seer before. And Seers tend to be… unusual. Whether it’s because they possess a talent that’s basically a genetic mutation, or because every Scrivener they meet treats them like the next Messiah? Hard to say.
As long as you don’t mess with his things, Rufus can be fairly easygoing. But though he’s got a normal-sized ego, he’s also got extremely large hair. My cousin and I have speculated over the years as to whether or not it’s a white-guy perm. She thinks it must be, whereas I’m not so sure. While some days it looks more tightly coiled than others, I think the discrepancy could be due to a change in shampoo, or humidity… or maybe the occasional trim.
I hadn’t yet determined what Yuri thought of the hair, but I’d wager he had an opinion. It was Yuri’s desire to keep an eye on everything that landed him front and center when the mime walked in.
I often ponder what Yuri’s nightmares must be like— no doubt, they’re in Russian. Yuri’s got a thing about clowns. And while a mime isn’t technically a clown… I guess it’s close enough. He stood up so fast, the office chair spun out behind him and crashed into the wood paneling with a giant clatter. It made enough noise to wake our Seer from his current nap. Rufus’s door cracked open just as I made it over to Yuri’s side to catch him in case he fainted. He’d probably squash me. But, heck, I was used to him squashing me. I might even kind of like it.
The mime walked up to the service counter and started swatting at a bug on the Formica surface. We keep the place well-fumigated, but I supposed it was possible that some of the feeder crickets had escaped their stinky little tank. The office was now home to a variety of nocturnal creatures— apparently, toads get really loud around one a.m. And crickets were a lot less icky to handle than mealworms. Still, those little suckers could really hop. I picked up an empty coffee mug and a pizza menu, and came over to rehome the poor cricket, who’d probably enjoy getting squashed a heck of a lot less than I did. But when I got up to the counter, there was no cricket. And the mime was still swatting away… at nothing. I picked up the edge of a phone directory to see if the little escape artist got away.
“Mime is ringing service bell,” Yuri supplied, from a safe distance away, with an accent gone thick.
Oh. Right. The mime brightened and nodded vigorously.
I could’ve sworn he was swatting a bug.
You wouldn’t think a little greasepaint would make all that big a difference, but I couldn’t really get a bead on the man behind the makeup. Was he older or younger than me? Dark or fair? And, most importantly, was he better-looking? Between the whiteface and the eyeliner, it was really hard to say. The only thing I knew for sure was that his drawn-on eyebrows made him look perpetually startled.
He gestured at the counter. I looked at it. Back in the day, when smoking was in vogue, a lit cigarette had fallen from an ashtray and left a nicotine-yellow burn on the surface. The mime shook his head and gestured for me to stop looking at the burn mark and pay attention to him instead.
He pinched his fingers together on both hands and raised them in an arc. “You’re typing,” I ventured. “You’re reading the newspaper. You’re folding laundry.”
At the sound of all my excited guesses, Rufus Clahd ambled out of his office. Practical Penn’s official Seer was my parents’ age, and he still dressed like it was 1979. He’d been working here for years… if you counted napping in his office as working. He joined in the guessing game, sounding half-asleep. “You’re eating corn on the cob. With lots of butter. And a sprinkle of Himalayan sea salt.”
Yuri snapped, “He is opening briefcase.”
The mime touched the tip of his nose, winked, and pointed at Yuri.
Yuri shuddered.
Rufus squinted at the mime. “You sure it’s not corn?”
The mime pointed at Yuri again.
“I’m really pretty good at charades,” I said. It wasn’t my fault this mime was so ambiguous.
Once the “briefcase” was open and all three of us Spellcrafters were watching, the mime pulled something out of the case. Except the thing wasn’t imaginary, like the purported briefcase. And it was really obvious he’d just pulled it out of his pocket.
And… it looked a heck of a lot like Spellcraft.
He placed it importantly on the counter and indicated it with both hands, then started making frantic little looping motions.
“You’re cranking a pepper grinder?” I guessed. “No? Crocheting an afghan. Wait, I know— you’re playing Yahtzee.”
Rufus shook his head. “No way, man, he’s definitely waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, just after sundown, throwing white-hot sparks against the night sky.”
Huh. I’d really never figured Rufus was that imaginative. Then again, it made a lot of sense, given that the weird watercolor blobs he painted (the ones that never looked like anything to anybody) still managed to fix the Spellcraft mojo onto the paper.
Unfortunately, judging by the frustrated huff that came out of the mime, Rufus was also wrong.
Yuri matched it with a huff of his own, though he made no move to come any closer, as if mimeness might be catching. “He is drawing— from right to left and bottom to top. He wishes you to Uncraft spell.”
The mime made a really big deal out of gesturing toward Yuri. Yuri backed up another few steps, until the wood paneling creaked against his back.
Rufus and I both leaned in to get a better look.
I might not have figured out the pantomime for “Uncrafting a spell,” but the Spellcraft itself? That, I recognized right away… even though I really wished I hadn’t. Not because of the Seen— it wouldn’t be the first Rufus Clahd creation I’d unmade— but because of the Scrivening.
The mime waved his hands in a flurry of inexplicable gestures. Rufus scratched his chin and said, “You went for a swim, but the water was colder than you thought, so instead you focused on your Tai Chi.”
While even the mime looked befuddled over that guess, Yuri said from across the room, “He is disturbed by Crafting and hopes we can help him.”
Either Yuri had a better view from where he was standing way over there, pantomime was a flourishing art in Russia (which gave him an unfair advantage), or learning a second language had just made him pretty darn perceptive. The mime hopped up and down in excitement and gave Yuri an eager thumbs-up.
I took a better look at the Crafting. The Seen, predictably, was a messy blue-gray blob that could have been anything— but the Scrivening was pretty darn specific. Go-getters get their goal. I was big on rhyming, and Uncle Fonzo liked to Craft fortune-cookie type sayings. The alliteration, though?
It couldn’t have come from anyone but my father.
No one likes to be the source of a bum Crafting, so naturally, I considered claiming it must’ve come from some other shop. But before I could, Rufus said, “Oh, I remember that one.”
“Really?” I said. “Because it’s awfully, uh… abstract.”
“Nope. That’s Pinyin Bay. See the dip over here? That’s where the power plant sits. And the flat side over here is where they shored up the coastline, so the inmates at the county detention center couldn’t swim away anymore. And the tiny flecks of black inside the water— those are leeches.”
Well… now that he pointed out all those details, I supposed I could see it.
Yuri said to the mime, “I read article that said South Dock Boardwalk is threatened by developers. Is that where you have come from?”
The mime nodded with great purpose.
“The South Dock Boardwalk can’t be sold off,” I declared. “It’s a Pinyin Bay institution!”
Rufus agreed. “That’s where everyone loses their virginity on a full moon under the pier to the sound of off-key buskers yodeling in the distance.”
“Um… not everyone,” I said. “But it’s bad enough some out-of-state corporation bought up the rental cabins on Pinyin Beach. Are they gunning for the Boardwalk, too?”
The mime made an exaggerated frown and nodded.
Yuri said, “If same buyer also has Morticia Shirque’s estate as well as the cabins, when they take the Boardwalk, this entire coastline of the bay will be theirs.”
That couldn’t be. “All of Pinyin Beach?” Even as I said it, landmark after landmark cropped up in my mind’s eye as if I was cruising past on Old Bay Road. The trailer park. Pinyin Inn. The cabins. The Shirque Mansion. From the power plant on one side of the bay to the crumbling bluffs that separated Pinyin Bay city limits from the road to Strangeberg on the other, the only property that hadn’t recently changed hands was the Boardwalk.
The mime knuckled away a fake tear.
I snagged the Crafting by the corner and pulled it across the counter to get a better look at it, but as I did, Yuri caught me by the back of the collar and dragged me into my office. Since I hardly ever used it, tanks filled with toads and lizards and whatever else ate all those escaping crickets took up a lot of the meager real estate. But Yuri crowding me into a gap between my desk and a coatrack was something I could hardly complain about— even though I was pretty sure no kissing would be involved. Not this time, anyhow.
“You would Craft for mime?”
Obviously, Yuri was none too keen on the situation. Even if I didn’t know he had a thing about clowns, he’d been dropping articles left and right ever since the guy gestured his way across the threshold. “Listen, Yuri. Pinyin Beach means a lot to me. But even if it didn’t, that’s not just a Practical Penn Crafting out there… it’s my dad’s.”
Yuri understood. He answered with the sort of slow-blink he reserved for those moments when a long-suffering sigh simply wasn’t enough.
I patted him on the chest. And then added a few more pats for good measure. And then trailed a fingertip along his neck tattoo in a way that made him shiver. “Think about it this way, Yuri. Pinyin Bay is riddled with Spellcrafters. The mime could’ve brought this Crafting to any one of them. But, as luck would have it, we were the only shop open. It’s as if it was meant to be.”
“Nothing is ever a coincidence with the volshebstvo.” Yuri pulled me against him roughly, smoothed my hair back, and paused to cup my face in his palm. Gazing down into my eyes with exquisite tenderness, he said, “You are always taking on problems that are not yours to solve— so, how could I expect you to leave this Crafting to the wind? I know you must do it… but I do not have to like it. Especially when Uncrafting involves no Seen, and can only be done by you, and you alone.”
I brushed a kiss across his frowny lips. “I just knew I could count on your support! Now, let’s get back to the mime before any more Spellcraft shops open up and he can start comparison-shopping.”
We headed back out to the lobby, where Rufus was regaling the mime with a rambling tale about… well, frankly, it’s just as hard to follow Rufus’s stories as it is to figure out which end of his Seens is up. But whatever the narrative might be, it involved a trashcan, a used harmonica and some shaving cream. Just as Rufus wrapped it up by saying, “… and then all of us broke into a half-hearted rendition of Auld Lang Syne!” my cousin shouldered her way through the front door with a teetering stack of pizza boxes in her hands from the take-and-bake joint next door.
“Who holds a meeting in this day and age and doesn’t supply any donuts?” she demanded with all the vehemence with which she demands… well, everything. “I swear I could hardly hear the presenter over the groaning of all the empty Scrivener stomachs.”
Sabina had dressed “professionally” for the mandatory meeting— which was to say, she didn’t have any holes in her black jeans, her Doc Martens were polished, and her bra straps weren’t showing. Fortunately, Spellcraft is one of those professions that doesn’t require you to dress to the same standards as a banker or a politician or a high school principal.
I, myself, might be fond of sharp tailored suits and natty bowties, but Sabina balked at the notion of wearing anything even remotely conservative. My cousin has crammed herself into a pair of pantyhose exactly once in all her twenty-five years. And by the time she was done clawing them off again ten minutes later, everyone up and down the street knew exactly what she thought of them.
Yuri relieved her of the pizza boxes and steered them into the break room, where three toaster ovens we’d found at various garage sales and thrift stores awaited. And with no stack of boxes blocking his view, the mime did an exaggerated double-take at my cousin.
Sabina looked equally as startled— and knowing that she can be just a teensy bit acerbic if you rub her the wrong way, I quickly attempted to steer the mime’s attention back to the matter of the Uncrafting. I slid a contract from a pile of legalese, slapped it down in front of him, and said, “I’d be happy to see to the matter at hand. All I’ll need is your signature on the dotted line and five hundred dollars. We take all the major credit cards, but there’s a five percent discount if you pay cash.”
The mime pretended to be pulling down his pants.
Even if I were single, trading sexual favors for Spellcraft was a line I was simply not willing to cross. “I’ll have you know this is a respectable family business.”
Yuri said, “He is showing you his pockets are empty.”
“Oh. Fine. Well, there may be some wiggle-room.” We didn’t need a Seen painted, after all. “It’s a real stretch, but I can go down to $ 399.”
The mime repeated the gesture.
“Looks like he’s frying up some bacon and eggs,” Rufus observed. Was that a euphemism? Hard to say.
“$ 299?” I tried. No dice. “$ 250, and that’s really the best I can do.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that if I didn’t want my dad’s Crafting to fall into the hands of another Spellcraft shop, I’d have to settle for twenty bucks. I’m usually a lot better at negotiation, but frankly, it’s unsettling when the other party is constantly pretending to disrobe.
The mime handed over a crumpled bill, then pretended to sign the contract with his fingertip.
Sabina rolled her eyes and handed him an actual pen. He brightened and plucked a tiny paper flower from his sleeve, then offered it to her in return with a grand, courtly bow. Until Yuri swatted it out of his hand, anyhow. “Stop dawdling and sign. There is much work to do.”
The mime made a big deal of signing with a flourish. Spellcrafters always get a big kick out of what passes for a flourish among the Handless. But as I spun the contract around to face me, it wasn’t to critique his penmanship, but to figure out what in the heck I should call him. Because it hardly seemed fitting to keep referring to my new customer as “the mime.”
His signature was a vague squiggle.
“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to be working together, I need to know what to call you.”
The mime smiled, spread his arms wide as if to say get a load of this, then bent his knees and straightened them again.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Sabina demanded.
The smile went a bit pained. He repeated the motion.
“You’re jumping rope,” I said. “Are you a boxer? Is your name Muhammed Ali? Ooh, I know, it’s Rocky.”
The mime shook his head and did it again.
“A bunny hop,” I guessed. “A pogo stick.”
Rufus nodded sagely. “That’s exactly how the slow-motion dismount of a gymnast from a pommel horse would look. He’s trying to tell you his name is Trigger.”
Sabina was running out of patience. “How long have you guys been at this?”
“Too long,” Yuri said.
Dang it, I had to get something right. It was a matter of principle now. “You’re looking for something on a low bookshelf. You’re doing squats at the gym. Wait a minute— I know! You’re crouching.” The mime shook his head emphatically… but if he wasn’t willing to speak up for himself, it was his problem, not mine. “That settles it. Crouch it is.”
What the Frack? #7
1
DIXON
At the cusp of summer, Pinyin Bay should have been packed to the gills with people. Once the north end of the beach blew up, however, it was practically a ghost town. The snowbirds who summered here fled back to Florida. Year-round residents with relatives nearby decided it was a great time to visit family. And a lot of folks just loaded their valuables into their cars, picked a direction, and drove.
It was the day after the explosion shook the Boardwalk. Up in the attic Yuri and I called home, I was batting some pesky cobwebs off the ceiling joists— with our cockatoo, Meringue, supervising loudly from above— when my mom texted, COME DOWNSTAIRS. I’ve shown her how to release the caps-lock I don’t know how many times. Clearly, her phone was defective.
My father drops by all the time, but Mom says she’s not big on “visiting” anybody but the bakery. I peeked out the louvered window and saw Dad parked out front in the Monte Carlo, with Mom standing on the sidewalk, glaring at her phone. On my way, I texted back, before she climbed any more stairs than she needed to and started her day on a less-than-chipper note.
I greeted her with a hug and a kiss and another big hug. She’s especially fun to hug because she’s so squishy, though I no longer came right out and said so like I did when I was little. “Did you want to see some photos of our latest project?” I asked. “That lighting fixture we found out behind the store looks pretty spiffy in our reading nook. Not that we do any reading there— the folding chair isn’t exactly the type you’d want to sit in. But there’s nothing to perch on nearby and Meringue hasn’t pooped on it.” Yet. Though now that there was a convenient light fixture right above it….
Mom looked me up and down, then spoke as if we were having an entirely different conversation. “You know we have plenty of room, for you and Yuri both.”
“The car looks pretty full to me. Great packing job, by the way.”
“Not in the car. In the motel. Your father Crafted for them when they had that huge bedbug scare a few years back— apparently some folks can’t tell a carpet beetle from a bedbug— and they upgraded us to a suite free of charge.”
“That’s awfully generous of you guys—”
“A suite.”
“— but Yuri and I have talked about it, and we think it’s important to stay.” After all, drilling was currently banned in Pinyin Bay, so how dangerous could it be?
“Those out-of-own people are working hard to get the drilling ban lifted.” Mom said the word people as if it meant something offensive. “They have lawyers. Fancy lawyers.”
All the more reason to stay and make sure the city council of Pinyin Bay didn’t cave in to the pressure, what with Mayor Dunce being the first one to skip town. But Yuri, as a freelance Seer, had way more latitude than the Seers affiliated with specific shops, so if any Seens needed painting on the spot, he could paint them. And if we discovered any Spellcraft to be undone, I was the best guy for the job. Plus, Sabina had an irrational aversion to motel rooms. We didn’t want her to get lonely while Uncle Fonzo was off on a romantic getaway with his current lady friend.
“It’ll be fine,” I told my mother. “We’re not even that close to the shore. In fact, we only lost one windowpane to the last blowup.”
“I don’t like it, Dixon. You know who shut their doors? Pack in the Day. And they’ll work through anything. Even dumpster fires.”
The shipping shop at the end of the strip mall Practical Penn called home was nothing if not persistent. “They probably needed to recoup all the business they lost when their stingy owner used all those torn-up magazines as packing material.” Girly magazines. And not the kind that gave advice on lipstick and dieting, either.
Mom was not to be deterred. “What if there’s another explosion?”
“Nobody’s drilling.”
“Maybe not right this very minute. But mark my words. You don’t just haul in all that heavy equipment for decoration. At some point, the drilling will start up again. And when you least expect it— kaboom!”
Mom has always had a good, strong pair of lungs, and at this point in the conversation, both Yuri and Sabina came outside to see what the enthusiastic chatter was all about. “Did something else blow up?” my cousin asked. “Why didn’t we hear it?”
My mother attempted to recruit Sabina. “Nothing’s blown up… yet. You kids need to get out of here while you can.”
“I’m not willing to drop everything and go live in a room where the bathroom drains are full of stranger-hair! Besides, we’re at least a mile from the beach.”
“And if your cousin decided to run toward the explosion? You wouldn’t just follow— you’d race him there. The two of you have always been more dangerous together than apart.”
Yuri settled a hand on my shoulder. “I will keep an eye on them.”
My mother looked only slightly mollified as Dad rolled down the window and called over, “Come on, Florica, we’d better check in before they give away our room!”
“It’s a suite,” Mom muttered, then subjected each one of us in turn to her trademark head-grab and forehead kiss. She climbed back in the car, Dad gave a jaunty honk, and the two of them drove off.
Once Yuri was done blushing, he said, “Your parents are right to be cautious. The only reason no one was killed in that explosion was that the cabins were empty. Now all the heavy machinery is so close to the Boardwalk, people are mistaking it for a new carnival ride. We should stay clear of the shore until all of those machines are—”
A van with a satellite mounted up top squealed around the corner. “Hey!” I said. “Is that Bayside News?”
As the news van hurtled down the street, Sabina and I both ran toward the pickup truck.
“C’mon, Yuri.” I popped open the locks and climbed in. “Whatever’s going on, we won’t want to miss it!”
Yuri paused.
“Hurry up!” Sabina punched me in the arm so hard I nearly dropped my keys. “We’re gonna lose ’em!”
And with a resigned shake of his head, Yuri shoved me over to the middle of the bench and got behind the wheel.
Yuri can be the textbook definition of stoic when he wants to be, and despite Sabina exclaiming at him all the way to the beach, he took no creative license with the speed limit. Good thing. As we took the final turn that headed toward the beach, we saw a halfhearted demonstration that was well attended… by Pinyin Bay’s “finest.”
The demonstration took place in the scrubby area between the Boardwalk and the dunes, in a crunchy asphalt lot where Streets and Sanitation stored its leftover road salt. The lot was also the only way onto this particular stretch of shoreline, one where the earthmovers and cranes and augers hulked on the beach. The area was crisscrossed with sawhorses and bright yellow caution tape, though given how many people were milling around behind the tape, it was no big challenge to simply walk around it.
Now the cops were all standing around the sawhorses, sweating in their navy blue polyester, eyeing both the activists and the construction crew. They looked like they were daydreaming about leaving town. All but one, who was standing over a guy picking torn up paper out of the grass.
“Oh no,” Sabina said. “It’s Officer Hotti.”
I gave the cop a more interested once-over. “I guess he’s pretty cute, if you go for the stalwart superhero type.”
“No, that’s his real name— Hotti! Remember the bachelorette party I crashed a few weeks ago?”
“The one with the chocolate fountain? How can I forget?”
“When he showed up to warn us to keep the noise down, we mistook him for a stripper and started stuffing dollar bills down his shirt.” Sabina glared in his general direction as he tore a citation off his pad and handed it to the paper-picker. “Served him right for parading around with the boombox. Anyway, he’s got zero sense of humor, and he’s a total stickler for the rules, and he absolutely lives to write tickets. Whatever you do, don’t land on his radar.”
Yuri eased the truck around to the other end of the lot, giving Officer Hotti a wide berth, and slipped into a spot on the other side of the news van. We spilled out of the truck. A few parking spots away, a tall, good-looking Handless man in a very official lab coat and a hardhat was passing out protest signs from the back of a van marked Nature World. He wore glasses— so, of course, he must be very smart.
“That guy looks important,” Sabina said.
Yuri scanned the crowd. “Agreed. And the reporters think so too— they are heading right for him.”
“Perfect!” I said. “Let’s listen in.”
We slipped into the crowd, and someone shoved a sign into my hand that read Kill the Drill. A rhyming slogan? I was warming up to the activists already. But despite the catchy rhyme, I passed the sign on to the next guy so I could edge my way closer to the reporter.
The Pinyin Bay Journal was a local institution primarily known for its fastidious reporting of high school basketball games— and the Pinyin East Pelicans hadn’t made state playoffs in over forty years. Still, Pinyin Bay was proud of its one and only newspaper, even if its main function was to line bird cages and help insomniacs fall asleep.
Pinyin Bay isn’t large enough to have its own TV station, but thanks to the internet, the PBJ recently decided to add live video coverage to its strange mishmash of online offerings and social media. Tiffany Tennant was the face of the Journal’s new spot, “Pinyin Minute”— a show that has not yet clocked in at less than a minute, even once, in the months it had been airing. If folks were being generous, they’d claim that Tiffany had a knack for asking the questions everyone else was wondering about. Otherwise, they’d say, “That woman sure ain’t the sharpest rock in the box.” I’m no journalist, but it seemed to me that the reporter was chosen primarily for her looks. Then again, she had very expensive shoes— and you don’t usually see a reporter’s shoes— so it was possible her wealthy parents had something to do with her big journalistic opportunity.
While Tiffany primped her hair and the lab-coated nature guy looked impatient, the cameraman framed the shot of a big drilling machine behind them. The cameraman counted down, and Tiffany brightened just as he got to number one. “In the aftermath of an alarming boom, while some residents flee, others have gathered here on the dunes of Pinyin Bay to protest the drilling some surmise is the cause of the explosion. I’m reporting live with traveling geologist Dr. Skip Stone. Dr. Stone, what can you tell us about the blast?”
“It’s not surmised that the drilling is the cause of the explosion. It’s… pretty clear.”
“What’s not clear is the reason for the drilling, as no representatives of the new property owners have stepped forward. Why would anyone drill into the shores of Pinyin Bay?”
“In all likelihood, Tiffany, they’re fracking.”
Tiffany did a startled double-take, and whispered, “Language, please! This is live.”
The geologist refrained from rolling his eyes. “Fracking is a process that fractures the bedrock so natural resources can be extracted. It’s very controversial.”
Tiffany looked like she didn’t quite believe him, but the cameraman was making a go-ahead motion for her to continue, so she blithely carried on. “How is it that drilling could cause an explosion?”
“Any number of ways. There could be a pyrophoric mineral that ignites from contact with the air. There could be an inflammable gas that was exposed by the drilling.”
“Don’t you mean flammable?” Tiffany asked.
“Er… no. The term is inflammable.”
“But wouldn’t inflammable be the opposite of flammable? And what are your qualifications, anyway?”
“I hold the Arena Rock Award for ground-breaking advancements in my field.”
“And how do we know that’s a real thing? You seem awfully young to be a doctor.”
Maybe Tiffany really did ask the key questions everyone was wondering. As the scientist rattled off a list of degrees he held and then explained the vocabulary in greater detail— an explanation that went in one ear and out the other— I scanned the horizon, spooked by the thought of flammably inflammable pockets of gas lurking around below us, just waiting for a wayward spark. But the earthmovers were at rest.
For now.
“This has been Tiffany Tennant reporting for Pinyin Bay Journal Online. And if you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to like, share— and visit our sponsor, Happy Jack’s, home of Pinyin Bay’s hottest griddle.”
“They’re closed,” someone called out. “Left town yesterday.”
Undeterred, Tiffany and the cameraman headed off to get a few more shots of the protesting crowd. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to see if the scientist might know more about who was blowing up the beach. “Excuse me, Dr. Stone? I was wondering if you could tell me more about who’s drilling?”
He swung around and regarded me with hands on hips, looking more like an actor playing a scientist at the box office than an actual, real-life person. “Who? More like a what. The Loveland Development Corp is just a bunch of nameless, faceless bureaucrats. You can’t reason with them. I’ve tried. The minute one backs down, another one steps up to take their place.”
I’ve never been one to take no for an answer... not until I’ve done a lot of pestering. “Then what can we do?”
“We need to convince the mayor to hold an emergency land use hearing and permanently revoke their drilling permit.”
Sabina was incensed. “Well? What’s Dunce waiting for— the whole darn city to blow up?”
The geologist shook his head sadly. “Apparently there was an unprecedented loophole in their current permit. The mayor can’t stop them until he finds out what they’re drilling for. They can keep on drilling until they locate something.”
If only we had a dollar for every unprecedented loophole we encountered. Yuri stroked his chin thoughtfully. “What is it they are searching for?”
Dr. Stone said, “That’s what I’m hoping to figure out before anyone gets hurt.”
I got up on my tiptoes, hitched myself up even higher on Yuri’s shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Loophole?”
He nodded grimly. “Volshebstvo.”
And if we didn’t do something about it, who would? “Now what, Yuri? We can’t know for sure that the Crafting is in Pinyin Bay.”
Even if it was, the Loveland Corporation had bought so many properties, the sheer number of places they might have stashed a small slip of paper was beyond daunting. And while Yuri and I prided ourselves on spotting Craftings in the wild, that didn’t mean we could do it from a mile away.
It was overwhelming. Maybe Mom had been right, and the smart thing to do was pack everyone up and head out of town until the dust settled.
I was about to float the idea past Yuri— just in case he wanted to get out while the getting was good and he was only sticking around to humor me. But when I turned to ask him, the strangest expression crossed his face. Something vulnerable, between hurt and dismay. Just a flicker, and then his trademark don’t-mess-with-me, tough-guy frown slammed back home.
I followed his gaze and saw some debris from the previous day’s explosion poking out from the municipal salt pile. Rocks. Bricks. Planks of wood. I was about to reassure him that the chance of getting hit by flying rebar at this point was pretty slim, when he marched up to the salt pile, grabbed hold of something, and hauled it out.
A hunk of… plywood?
It was roughly the size of a card table, with three smooth sides and one jagged edge where it had broken away from a stud. I caught another flash of that pained expression, and when I did, I realized what we were seeing. I caught up with Yuri, snapped off a tiny, frayed bit from the broken edge, and held it to my nose.
Cedar.
I thought back to the cabin where we’d spent so many idyllic (if crowded) nights falling asleep in each other’s arms to the gentle murmur of the water lapping the shore. Maybe we’d always known our time there wouldn’t last forever… but we must’ve presumed the cabin itself would at least make it through another summer.
“We’ll figure this out,” I said. “Somehow.”
If there’s one thing I know about Yuri, it’s that he’d much rather do something than feel his feelings, so he was all over the chance to take action. “The volshebstvo is powerful, no question, but it is also lazy. Its power diminishes over distance. The corporate headquarters may be elsewhere. But if there is a Crafting which will allow them to keep drilling, it will be hidden somewhere in Pinyin Bay. And you and I will find it.”
DIXON
At the cusp of summer, Pinyin Bay should have been packed to the gills with people. Once the north end of the beach blew up, however, it was practically a ghost town. The snowbirds who summered here fled back to Florida. Year-round residents with relatives nearby decided it was a great time to visit family. And a lot of folks just loaded their valuables into their cars, picked a direction, and drove.
It was the day after the explosion shook the Boardwalk. Up in the attic Yuri and I called home, I was batting some pesky cobwebs off the ceiling joists— with our cockatoo, Meringue, supervising loudly from above— when my mom texted, COME DOWNSTAIRS. I’ve shown her how to release the caps-lock I don’t know how many times. Clearly, her phone was defective.
My father drops by all the time, but Mom says she’s not big on “visiting” anybody but the bakery. I peeked out the louvered window and saw Dad parked out front in the Monte Carlo, with Mom standing on the sidewalk, glaring at her phone. On my way, I texted back, before she climbed any more stairs than she needed to and started her day on a less-than-chipper note.
I greeted her with a hug and a kiss and another big hug. She’s especially fun to hug because she’s so squishy, though I no longer came right out and said so like I did when I was little. “Did you want to see some photos of our latest project?” I asked. “That lighting fixture we found out behind the store looks pretty spiffy in our reading nook. Not that we do any reading there— the folding chair isn’t exactly the type you’d want to sit in. But there’s nothing to perch on nearby and Meringue hasn’t pooped on it.” Yet. Though now that there was a convenient light fixture right above it….
Mom looked me up and down, then spoke as if we were having an entirely different conversation. “You know we have plenty of room, for you and Yuri both.”
“The car looks pretty full to me. Great packing job, by the way.”
“Not in the car. In the motel. Your father Crafted for them when they had that huge bedbug scare a few years back— apparently some folks can’t tell a carpet beetle from a bedbug— and they upgraded us to a suite free of charge.”
“That’s awfully generous of you guys—”
“A suite.”
“— but Yuri and I have talked about it, and we think it’s important to stay.” After all, drilling was currently banned in Pinyin Bay, so how dangerous could it be?
“Those out-of-own people are working hard to get the drilling ban lifted.” Mom said the word people as if it meant something offensive. “They have lawyers. Fancy lawyers.”
All the more reason to stay and make sure the city council of Pinyin Bay didn’t cave in to the pressure, what with Mayor Dunce being the first one to skip town. But Yuri, as a freelance Seer, had way more latitude than the Seers affiliated with specific shops, so if any Seens needed painting on the spot, he could paint them. And if we discovered any Spellcraft to be undone, I was the best guy for the job. Plus, Sabina had an irrational aversion to motel rooms. We didn’t want her to get lonely while Uncle Fonzo was off on a romantic getaway with his current lady friend.
“It’ll be fine,” I told my mother. “We’re not even that close to the shore. In fact, we only lost one windowpane to the last blowup.”
“I don’t like it, Dixon. You know who shut their doors? Pack in the Day. And they’ll work through anything. Even dumpster fires.”
The shipping shop at the end of the strip mall Practical Penn called home was nothing if not persistent. “They probably needed to recoup all the business they lost when their stingy owner used all those torn-up magazines as packing material.” Girly magazines. And not the kind that gave advice on lipstick and dieting, either.
Mom was not to be deterred. “What if there’s another explosion?”
“Nobody’s drilling.”
“Maybe not right this very minute. But mark my words. You don’t just haul in all that heavy equipment for decoration. At some point, the drilling will start up again. And when you least expect it— kaboom!”
Mom has always had a good, strong pair of lungs, and at this point in the conversation, both Yuri and Sabina came outside to see what the enthusiastic chatter was all about. “Did something else blow up?” my cousin asked. “Why didn’t we hear it?”
My mother attempted to recruit Sabina. “Nothing’s blown up… yet. You kids need to get out of here while you can.”
“I’m not willing to drop everything and go live in a room where the bathroom drains are full of stranger-hair! Besides, we’re at least a mile from the beach.”
“And if your cousin decided to run toward the explosion? You wouldn’t just follow— you’d race him there. The two of you have always been more dangerous together than apart.”
Yuri settled a hand on my shoulder. “I will keep an eye on them.”
My mother looked only slightly mollified as Dad rolled down the window and called over, “Come on, Florica, we’d better check in before they give away our room!”
“It’s a suite,” Mom muttered, then subjected each one of us in turn to her trademark head-grab and forehead kiss. She climbed back in the car, Dad gave a jaunty honk, and the two of them drove off.
Once Yuri was done blushing, he said, “Your parents are right to be cautious. The only reason no one was killed in that explosion was that the cabins were empty. Now all the heavy machinery is so close to the Boardwalk, people are mistaking it for a new carnival ride. We should stay clear of the shore until all of those machines are—”
A van with a satellite mounted up top squealed around the corner. “Hey!” I said. “Is that Bayside News?”
As the news van hurtled down the street, Sabina and I both ran toward the pickup truck.
“C’mon, Yuri.” I popped open the locks and climbed in. “Whatever’s going on, we won’t want to miss it!”
Yuri paused.
“Hurry up!” Sabina punched me in the arm so hard I nearly dropped my keys. “We’re gonna lose ’em!”
And with a resigned shake of his head, Yuri shoved me over to the middle of the bench and got behind the wheel.
Yuri can be the textbook definition of stoic when he wants to be, and despite Sabina exclaiming at him all the way to the beach, he took no creative license with the speed limit. Good thing. As we took the final turn that headed toward the beach, we saw a halfhearted demonstration that was well attended… by Pinyin Bay’s “finest.”
The demonstration took place in the scrubby area between the Boardwalk and the dunes, in a crunchy asphalt lot where Streets and Sanitation stored its leftover road salt. The lot was also the only way onto this particular stretch of shoreline, one where the earthmovers and cranes and augers hulked on the beach. The area was crisscrossed with sawhorses and bright yellow caution tape, though given how many people were milling around behind the tape, it was no big challenge to simply walk around it.
Now the cops were all standing around the sawhorses, sweating in their navy blue polyester, eyeing both the activists and the construction crew. They looked like they were daydreaming about leaving town. All but one, who was standing over a guy picking torn up paper out of the grass.
“Oh no,” Sabina said. “It’s Officer Hotti.”
I gave the cop a more interested once-over. “I guess he’s pretty cute, if you go for the stalwart superhero type.”
“No, that’s his real name— Hotti! Remember the bachelorette party I crashed a few weeks ago?”
“The one with the chocolate fountain? How can I forget?”
“When he showed up to warn us to keep the noise down, we mistook him for a stripper and started stuffing dollar bills down his shirt.” Sabina glared in his general direction as he tore a citation off his pad and handed it to the paper-picker. “Served him right for parading around with the boombox. Anyway, he’s got zero sense of humor, and he’s a total stickler for the rules, and he absolutely lives to write tickets. Whatever you do, don’t land on his radar.”
Yuri eased the truck around to the other end of the lot, giving Officer Hotti a wide berth, and slipped into a spot on the other side of the news van. We spilled out of the truck. A few parking spots away, a tall, good-looking Handless man in a very official lab coat and a hardhat was passing out protest signs from the back of a van marked Nature World. He wore glasses— so, of course, he must be very smart.
“That guy looks important,” Sabina said.
Yuri scanned the crowd. “Agreed. And the reporters think so too— they are heading right for him.”
“Perfect!” I said. “Let’s listen in.”
We slipped into the crowd, and someone shoved a sign into my hand that read Kill the Drill. A rhyming slogan? I was warming up to the activists already. But despite the catchy rhyme, I passed the sign on to the next guy so I could edge my way closer to the reporter.
The Pinyin Bay Journal was a local institution primarily known for its fastidious reporting of high school basketball games— and the Pinyin East Pelicans hadn’t made state playoffs in over forty years. Still, Pinyin Bay was proud of its one and only newspaper, even if its main function was to line bird cages and help insomniacs fall asleep.
Pinyin Bay isn’t large enough to have its own TV station, but thanks to the internet, the PBJ recently decided to add live video coverage to its strange mishmash of online offerings and social media. Tiffany Tennant was the face of the Journal’s new spot, “Pinyin Minute”— a show that has not yet clocked in at less than a minute, even once, in the months it had been airing. If folks were being generous, they’d claim that Tiffany had a knack for asking the questions everyone else was wondering about. Otherwise, they’d say, “That woman sure ain’t the sharpest rock in the box.” I’m no journalist, but it seemed to me that the reporter was chosen primarily for her looks. Then again, she had very expensive shoes— and you don’t usually see a reporter’s shoes— so it was possible her wealthy parents had something to do with her big journalistic opportunity.
While Tiffany primped her hair and the lab-coated nature guy looked impatient, the cameraman framed the shot of a big drilling machine behind them. The cameraman counted down, and Tiffany brightened just as he got to number one. “In the aftermath of an alarming boom, while some residents flee, others have gathered here on the dunes of Pinyin Bay to protest the drilling some surmise is the cause of the explosion. I’m reporting live with traveling geologist Dr. Skip Stone. Dr. Stone, what can you tell us about the blast?”
“It’s not surmised that the drilling is the cause of the explosion. It’s… pretty clear.”
“What’s not clear is the reason for the drilling, as no representatives of the new property owners have stepped forward. Why would anyone drill into the shores of Pinyin Bay?”
“In all likelihood, Tiffany, they’re fracking.”
Tiffany did a startled double-take, and whispered, “Language, please! This is live.”
The geologist refrained from rolling his eyes. “Fracking is a process that fractures the bedrock so natural resources can be extracted. It’s very controversial.”
Tiffany looked like she didn’t quite believe him, but the cameraman was making a go-ahead motion for her to continue, so she blithely carried on. “How is it that drilling could cause an explosion?”
“Any number of ways. There could be a pyrophoric mineral that ignites from contact with the air. There could be an inflammable gas that was exposed by the drilling.”
“Don’t you mean flammable?” Tiffany asked.
“Er… no. The term is inflammable.”
“But wouldn’t inflammable be the opposite of flammable? And what are your qualifications, anyway?”
“I hold the Arena Rock Award for ground-breaking advancements in my field.”
“And how do we know that’s a real thing? You seem awfully young to be a doctor.”
Maybe Tiffany really did ask the key questions everyone was wondering. As the scientist rattled off a list of degrees he held and then explained the vocabulary in greater detail— an explanation that went in one ear and out the other— I scanned the horizon, spooked by the thought of flammably inflammable pockets of gas lurking around below us, just waiting for a wayward spark. But the earthmovers were at rest.
For now.
“This has been Tiffany Tennant reporting for Pinyin Bay Journal Online. And if you enjoyed this post, don’t forget to like, share— and visit our sponsor, Happy Jack’s, home of Pinyin Bay’s hottest griddle.”
“They’re closed,” someone called out. “Left town yesterday.”
Undeterred, Tiffany and the cameraman headed off to get a few more shots of the protesting crowd. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to see if the scientist might know more about who was blowing up the beach. “Excuse me, Dr. Stone? I was wondering if you could tell me more about who’s drilling?”
He swung around and regarded me with hands on hips, looking more like an actor playing a scientist at the box office than an actual, real-life person. “Who? More like a what. The Loveland Development Corp is just a bunch of nameless, faceless bureaucrats. You can’t reason with them. I’ve tried. The minute one backs down, another one steps up to take their place.”
I’ve never been one to take no for an answer... not until I’ve done a lot of pestering. “Then what can we do?”
“We need to convince the mayor to hold an emergency land use hearing and permanently revoke their drilling permit.”
Sabina was incensed. “Well? What’s Dunce waiting for— the whole darn city to blow up?”
The geologist shook his head sadly. “Apparently there was an unprecedented loophole in their current permit. The mayor can’t stop them until he finds out what they’re drilling for. They can keep on drilling until they locate something.”
If only we had a dollar for every unprecedented loophole we encountered. Yuri stroked his chin thoughtfully. “What is it they are searching for?”
Dr. Stone said, “That’s what I’m hoping to figure out before anyone gets hurt.”
I got up on my tiptoes, hitched myself up even higher on Yuri’s shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Loophole?”
He nodded grimly. “Volshebstvo.”
And if we didn’t do something about it, who would? “Now what, Yuri? We can’t know for sure that the Crafting is in Pinyin Bay.”
Even if it was, the Loveland Corporation had bought so many properties, the sheer number of places they might have stashed a small slip of paper was beyond daunting. And while Yuri and I prided ourselves on spotting Craftings in the wild, that didn’t mean we could do it from a mile away.
It was overwhelming. Maybe Mom had been right, and the smart thing to do was pack everyone up and head out of town until the dust settled.
I was about to float the idea past Yuri— just in case he wanted to get out while the getting was good and he was only sticking around to humor me. But when I turned to ask him, the strangest expression crossed his face. Something vulnerable, between hurt and dismay. Just a flicker, and then his trademark don’t-mess-with-me, tough-guy frown slammed back home.
I followed his gaze and saw some debris from the previous day’s explosion poking out from the municipal salt pile. Rocks. Bricks. Planks of wood. I was about to reassure him that the chance of getting hit by flying rebar at this point was pretty slim, when he marched up to the salt pile, grabbed hold of something, and hauled it out.
A hunk of… plywood?
It was roughly the size of a card table, with three smooth sides and one jagged edge where it had broken away from a stud. I caught another flash of that pained expression, and when I did, I realized what we were seeing. I caught up with Yuri, snapped off a tiny, frayed bit from the broken edge, and held it to my nose.
Cedar.
I thought back to the cabin where we’d spent so many idyllic (if crowded) nights falling asleep in each other’s arms to the gentle murmur of the water lapping the shore. Maybe we’d always known our time there wouldn’t last forever… but we must’ve presumed the cabin itself would at least make it through another summer.
“We’ll figure this out,” I said. “Somehow.”
If there’s one thing I know about Yuri, it’s that he’d much rather do something than feel his feelings, so he was all over the chance to take action. “The volshebstvo is powerful, no question, but it is also lazy. Its power diminishes over distance. The corporate headquarters may be elsewhere. But if there is a Crafting which will allow them to keep drilling, it will be hidden somewhere in Pinyin Bay. And you and I will find it.”
Author Bio:
Author and artist Jordan Castillo Price is the owner of JCP Books LLC. Her paranormal thrillers are colored by her time in the midwest, from inner city Chicago, to small town Wisconsin, to liberal Madison.
Jordan is best known as the author of the PsyCop series, an unfolding tale of paranormal mystery and suspense starring Victor Bayne, a gay medium who's plagued by ghostly visitations. Also check out her new series, Mnevermind, where memories are made...one client at a time.
With her education in fine arts and practical experience as a graphic designer, Jordan set out to create high quality ebooks with lavish cover art, quality editing and gripping content. The result is JCP Books, offering stories you'll want to read again and again.
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EMAILS: jordan@psycop.com
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Last but Not Least #5
Series
The Complete Collection Volume 2
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