The Association by A. K. Caggiano

Author:A. K. Caggiano [Caggiano, A. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

The election was just two and a half weeks away, and Ivy was walking from mailbox to mailbox stuffing a list of candidates and voting information into each one. Her mind was reeling with the conversations she’d been having with Safiya and the plans they’d come up with and ditched over the last few days while organizing the clubhouse, overseeing street lamp repair, and one incredibly monotonous budget session.

There must be a truth serum, Ivy had insisted, in their world of magic potions and creepy creatures, but Safiya told her while something like that existed, it was terribly difficult to make and not particularly reliable. Not to mention something the magistratus and the Sylvan Society frowned upon. What about just searching for the orb, dowsing like Hunter had done in the forest for the cockatrice? Well, didn’t she think Safiya had tried that already? The gist of her search had told her it was, indeed, somewhere in Avalon Estates, but she could get no more specifics. A fragment of the netherlight wasn’t supposed to be easy to find, after all.

“You said he’s buried here, right?” Ivy finally had asked.

“In the cemetery, yes.”

“Well, why don’t we just go ask Rufus’s ghost who killed him?”

Safiya had stared at Ivy for a long time until she finally broke down into nearly uncontrollable laughter. “Ask his ghost?” She was crying and had to take off her glasses to wipe her eyes. “Oh, geez, thank you, I needed that.”

“I’m serious.” Ivy said through grit teeth.

Safiya had straightened back up, holding her stomach. “Stop it! Ghosts aren’t real! I mean, they’re a little real, but not like real real. Can you imagine how easy solving, like, everything would be if that were the case?”

Ivy blushed a little at the memory, folding up another paper and slipping it through a slot on the wall of mailboxes at one of the blocks of condos. They had finally come up with some semblance of a plan after Safiya had gotten a hold of herself.

“Listen,” Ivy had said, “I really don’t think it’s Hunter. He wasn’t at the dinner, so he couldn’t have poisoned me, and I just…I don’t think so. But I do know that whatever is in that box in his house is important. I need to find a way to get into it.”

A jinx was a weird thing, Safiya told her, as if everything going on wasn’t its own fun brand of weird already. They were like personalized, mini curses, but meant for minor inconveniences and inanimate objects. In this case, it was both. But they weren’t particularly complex, and they were breakable if you could figure out what you were dealing with. And Safiya happened to be a pretty good jinx breaker, if she did say so herself, which she did. “It was a necessity growing up,” she admitted without wanting to elaborate.

Safiya gave Ivy a tiny bag, a sachet she’d called it, and told her to place it so that it touched the box.

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