Julie L. Kramer - Motorcycles and Magic

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I t's one thing to know that your mom left you. It's another to know that she left you a motorcycle and a curse.

I stared at the letter in my hands, trying to understand what I was reading. Mom hadn't been home for a few days, but I had figured that it was just another bout of her wanderlust, or a bounty that had gone sour and then she had needed to rest for a while. It wasnt like her not to contact me if something bad had happened, but we all had our off days, and I wouldnt have judged her if she had forgotten to call me; we would have laughed about it later and I would have chided her about remembering the important things, but then we would have moved on like nothing had happened. The letter in my hands told me that that wasn't the case at all.

I'm sorry. I can't explain, but I need to go away for a while, and I need you to not follow me. The bills are paid. Stay safe and I'll be back as soon as I can.

There was no signature, nor any kind of identifying marks, but it wasn't hard to figure out who it was from; Mom and I lived here alone, so it couldnt have been from anyone else, but that didnt make it any easier to figure out why she hadnt wanted to stay, nor why she had decided not to tell me before she left. Still, the fact that she hadn't signed it was enough of a problem. She never did that; she always signed her letters to me, even the notes that she left taped to the fridge or the bathroom counter. Her handwriting looked hurried, like she had been in too big of a hurry to write it that she had forgotten to sign it at the bottom, which wasn't like her. Her signature was one of the most distinctive things about her, and she was very proud of it. She had always taught me that signing in cursive, with my full name, was the only way to make a good impression: Renegade Emberley Moseley, with my huge R that dwindled into far smaller letters with each time and started tilting in about the middle of the word if I didnt have a line to write on. I knew her signature almost as well as I knew my own, because she had always drilled it into my head how important it was. For her to not sign such an important missive was strange, and it worried me. My hands had started to shake as I was staring at the note, my nose and eyes burning as tears loomed. I was not going to cry, not because I didnt want to, but because Mom wouldnt want me to. She had never tried to tell me that there was anything wrong with crying; she was a better mother than that, but that didnt mean that I hadnt learned from her. I couldnt remember the last time that I had seen her cry, and besides, it wouldnt help me anyway.

My knees were locked in place, but I carefully folded the note and shoved it into my pocket, trying not to think about it any more than I had to. I wanted to check the house for anything that she might have left behind, other than the obvious. If she had put enough thought into this that she had paid the bills for presumably months in advance, then it was unlikely that she hadnt thought to take at least some basic necessities with her, which meant that anything she had left behind could be almost as important as what she had taken with her. Or at least that was what I told myself. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I figured that I would know it when I saw it. Of course, that was easier said than done, and eventually I gave up and sprawled on the couch. It felt like giving up, but it was more like a tactical retreat.

Magic is easier to sense when you're familiar with it, the same way that you can recognize the footsteps or the perfume of someone that you spend a lot of time with. That's why I could sense the sudden spike of Moms magic, enough to tear me from my funk. I flung my legs over the edge of the couch and padded through the house, using my own magic to track hers. When I was a kid, it had always been a game that Mom and I played, one that helped me to gain better control of my magic. We would hide throughout the house and leave messages for one another, messages that would appear at another time or another place. For me, the extent of my abilities was when I had made them pop up in the kitchen when I was hiding in the attic or something like that; it was like a magical version of playing hide and go seek, with a little bit of message-in-a-bottle flair thrown in. As I had gotten older it had been much easier, and I had often used the magical messages rather than my cell phone, if it was dead or there was no signal. All it took was a piece of paper, a pen, and a little bit of concentration. I could feel that same tiny spark of magic throughout the house now, in several different places, which meant that Mom hadn't just left one note for me. That, too, was strange, because Mom was a simple woman; she didnt mess around like that. If there was something that she wanted to say, then she would write it all down in one place, no matter how big the piece of paper was or how tiny her handwriting had to be in order to fit on it. So why hadnt she done that this time?

The bike in the garage is yours. I love you, and I know that you'll take good care of it. It was always meant to be yours, when you graduated, but this time I won't be around to give it to you.

I swallowed hard, doing the math in my head for that. The fact that Mom didn't think she would be here for my graduation suggested that she was going to be gone for a long time. If not forever. And I couldn't let that happen.

I found another note in the attic, hidden in a pile of boxes. I coughed once, my eyes watering from all the dust that was moving around kicked up. Being up here killed my allergies, so I rarely came up here. Mom didnt either; she always said that there was nothing up here but the past, and she wasn't exactly eager to go back to that. Whenever she said that, she always looked a little wistful, and it made me think that she wasn't telling me everything that had happened when I was younger. I knew that my father wasn't exactly a great man, but she had never told me much about him. I never knew why she didn't want to share, but I thought she must have her own reasons. Unfortunately, right now it looked like her reasons were taking her away from me, and if that meant playing a magical game of hide and seek for yet another note, then so be it. Fine.

I found the next one in one of the old boxes, tied to a strange looking bracelet. It looked like it was made of both leather and silver, twisting together with a glittering black stone in the center. There was a spark of magic as I touched it, just enough to be painful, and I sucked on the tips of my fingers as I glared balefully at it, contemplating whether or not it was worth it to pick it up. Clearly Mom had intended for me to have it, or it was a serious coincidence that it happened to be stuck right there where the third note was. If she had meant for me to have it, then I would have appreciated it if she hadn't spelled it so that it tried to bite me when I picked it up, although I supposed I should be glad that she hadn't spelled it to literally bite me; she was a powerful witch and even if she wasn't the most skilled at spells like that, since she had more experience with battle spells because of her job, but she was still capable of doing some serious damage if she wanted to. I had no idea why she wouldn't want me to have the bracelet, and why she would have made the note appear so close to it if she hadn't wanted me to have it. Either that, or I was just reading way too much into this whole situation. I thought that might be a little more likely than Mom making such a huge mistake, so I carefully reached out again. I fully expected that it was going to shock me again, so when it didn't, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was a spark of magic that I recognized as Mom's, as if it were trying to recognize me, before everything went quiet again. I couldn't say that I blamed it for trying to make sure that I was the right person for the note, if that was what was happening. Honestly, that was the only reason that I could think of for it to be acting like this, not to mention the only reason for Mom to be leaving messages everywhere for me. She had left the one non-magical note in a place where I could very easily find it, and the rest I'd had to hunt for. But if I had to hunt for them, then that meant someone else had to as well. Now that I thought about it, that might have been the same thing that had happened with the bracelet and it's change of mind when it had shocked me the first time but not the second. The extra layer of protection had been put in place to make absolutely sure that the person who was reading the notes she had left for me was actually the person who was supposed to be reading it. It made sense, but that was just something else that scared me about this whole situation. The fact that Mom had made sure to put an extra layer of protection on something as simple as a note to me meant there was more going on here than met the eye. I was swearing under my breath about the fact that she had decided not to let me in on any of whatever this situation was, because that would have been too easy. Part of me hoped that this whole situation was some sort of game, that I only had to find the last note and she would come swooping back in to give me a hug and praise on a job well done, but the longer I searched, the less I believed that.