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“So, hey,” said Alex, “I think I maybe . . . broke the library. Just a little.”
Justin looked up from behind his desk. “You what?”
Alex tugged on a strand of hair and tilted her head to the side. “Only a little.”
“Alex, tell me that’s a joke.”
Alex brightened. “Would you believe me if I said it was?”
He sighed, pressed his face to his palm and shook his head. “Probably not, no.”
“Yeah,” Alex agreed morosely, “I’m not really a library-jokes kind of girl, am I?”
“Most of your jokes usually involve people falling down,” Justin agreed. “Or getting hit in the face.”
“Or, or!” Alex reminded him, bouncing on her toes, “falling down because they got hit in the face!” Then she laughed. It was a scary sound.
“That, too.” Justin rubbed his face again, this time in recollection.
“Aw, come on,” Alex sidled up to his desk, “you thought it was funny too.”
“Alex, I had to wear a brace on my face for three weeks! I swelled up and turned purple and green and yellow! My nickname in the school yearbook was Pumpernickel Face!”
“Ohh, yeah,” she remembered, and giggled again. “I forgot about that part. Man, school days, huh?” She hopped up onto his desk and crossed her legs. “Now you’re a teacher.”
“Professor,” Justin corrected. Alex ignored him.
“Hey, do you think that’s why I like spending time with you so much more, lately? Cause I’m like, conditioned to piss you off? Because you’re a teacher now, and that’s what I do.”
“Professor,” he corrected again. Then he took hold of her knee, gingerly swinging her legs around so they were not pointing directly at him. “And frankly, Alex, you were conditioned to piss me off since birth.”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “Must just be fate.” Then she looked at him with such open, friendly affection it threw Justin completely off his stride. It took him almost a whole minute before he remembered why she’d come into his office in the first place.
Then, “ . . . so, what happened to the library?”
***
The Russos stood together in the WizTech library. Justin looked around.
“I don’t see anything—”
“Avast!” a burly, foul-smelling man in filthy clothes and a battered tricorn hat leaped around the corner, brandishing a sword. Justin yelped, and pushed Alex behind him. The pirate advanced, waving the sword. Justin yelped again, and ducked behind Alex.
“Prepare to suffer the wrath of Short Jim Sterling and his fearsome blade,” warned the pirate.
“Short who what?” Alex frowned. “God, you’re worse than that drip in the blue dress.”
“The drip in the—Alex, is somebody else in the library with us?” Justin, still careful to keep his sister between himself and the naked sword, carefully craned his neck to look around the room.
“Well, there was. That’s, um, kind of why I came to find you. They just kept showing up.”
“Who did?”
“How should I know?! I’ve never seen any of them before in my life! There was this one girl in a blue dress who kept yawning and moaning on about her boyfriend until I told her to shut up and go find him, if he meant that much to her. And there was some guy with some beans, or something? I told him to take them outside to eat, cause the ventilation system in here is not what it could be, if yanno-what-I-mean. And I guess there were some mice, but they might have been here before I did the spell. I’m pretty sure Max used to stash snacks here when . . .” she stopped abruptly, and looked away. “When he was still a student.”
Justin swallowed, and looked away too.
Because yeah. Being Headmaster at WizTech, having his little sister with full powers flitting through to tease and torment him at will, and generally enjoying almost exactly the life he’d never realized he always wanted . . . it was always going to feel a little wrong, without Max as a part of it.
The reflection was absorbing enough that he forgot about the stocky little pirate in front of them—forgot, until the man, annoyed at being so disregarded, made a lunge for both of them.
“Hey!” Alex yelped, and Justin shoved her out of the way just in time to avoid ending up as shish kebab on the little guy’s cutlass. “Hey, I like that, some nerve!” she added, glaring up from where she’d sprawled into a stack of unshelved books. “Look, buddy, I dunno how they do things in Neverland or Fee Fie Fo-dom or wherever the hell it is you’re from, but here if you’re gonna stab somebody with a big old sword, you give ‘em some warning, first.”
“Alex, you never give—”
“Well, he doesn’t know that, now, does he?” Alex glared at her brother.
“Look, Mr. Sterling—where are you from, exactly?” Justin wanted to know. With Alex shoved safely out of the way, he had taken the precautionary measure of leaping to balance on the third level up of a nearby set of bookshelves. He was fully prepared to climb higher, if it looked like the pirate meant to pursue him.
“I was on a voyage,” declared the man, twirling his sword and turning round to study Alex, struggling to rise from the pile of books. “’Twas the journey of a lifetime, a quest for treasure the like of which no mortal eyes have seen. Then suddenly a great void opened in the clouds, directly above my ship, and compelled me to enter. I thought ‘twas some sea-siren trickery, and sure enough, here is she who lured me off course.”
“Whoa, hey, no!” Alex protested, holding up a palm as she continued to struggle back to her feet (the books kept sliding out from where she braced her hands on them, so it was tricky going). “I am nobody’s siren! I mean, I can be a little shrill sometimes, I’ll give you that, but—”
“No, Alex, a sea siren is a magical creature that lures sailors off course,” Justin corrected.”They’re generally very beautiful, and impossible to resist.”
“Really?” Alex paused in her bookish struggles. She appeared flattered. “Well, okay then.”
“Precisely,” agreed the pirate, which was when both Alex and Justin noticed he was still stalking toward Alex, sword uplifted.
“Wait, hang on there!” Alex warned, then screamed and rolled to the side as the cutlass came slicing down.
“Alex!” Justin tumbled from his shelf and landed wrong. A white bolt of pain shot up his ankle, and he howled. Alex, who had drawn that howl from Justin on more than one occasion, peeked out from behind a shelf in concern.
“Justin?” she called. “Justin, are you—hey, ow, buddy, leggo!”
Justin peered out from behind his own shelf to see Alex twisting ferociously in the grip of the pirate.
“Alex,” he called, “Alex, how did you call them all here?”
“I don’t know, how should I know, for crying out freakin’ loud, Justin, can’t you just assume by now that however I did whatever I’ve done, I don’t really actually know? OW, cut that out!”
This last edict was issued to the pirate, who had pressed the edge of his sword to the underside of her jaw.
“You, boy,” he called to the stacks, “come out here where I can see you. If you are consort to this siren, I will have no tricks from you.”
Consort? Justin was bright red when he limped out from behind the bookshelf.
“I’m not her consort,” he insisted. “I’m her brother, and I am actually in an on-again-off-again relationship with an older woman.”
“You were seeing a vampire,” Alex corrected, “until she dumped your ass for correcting her grammar. Again. And I can’t say I blame her. That shit’s annoying, Justin!”
The pirate looked from Alex to Justin, then back to Alex again. Confusion clouded his face. He leaned toward Justin in an almost confidential fashion.
“Truly? You’re not her consort?”
“No!”
The pirate shrugged. “You act it.”
This drew sputters of protest from both Russos, and the pirate shrugged again. “Well,” he said, “’tis of no matter. Slaying the siren should break her spell over me, and over you too, boy, if you are in any manner enslaved by her. Then I am free to return to my ship.”
“No!” Justin said. “No, it doesn’t work that way, not here! If you kill her, it won’t . . . I mean, it’s not like that. Don’t kill her. You really, really don’t need to do that.”
The pirate raised an eyebrow, and snugged the cutlass tighter. Alex squirmed, and tried to draw her foot up high enough to drag her wand from her boot, but the angle was all wrong. She couldn’t manage it without getting cut into the bargain.
Justin swallowed.
“Alex,” he said, “think. Fast. What were you doing when they all appeared?”
Alex squeezed her eyes shut.
“I moved a book. I found a lump of green something—I think an old piece of cheese? I said ‘ew, sick’ and moved it. Then they came.”
“You touched the cheese?”
“Or dead mouse or an old sock or whatever it was. It was really done being whatever it was supposed to be. Like, really done.”
“Okay,” Justin nodded, “okay . . . I don’t know.” He started to look a little desperate. “Alex, if I don’t know what you did, I can’t reverse it! I can’t fix—”
The pirate’s sword pressed closer. A bright line of scarlet traced a dribbly path down Alex’s neck. Alex screamed.
In the next heartbeat Justin had his wand out, pointed it at the pirate and spoke a hard, twisty word into the air. The pirate vanished in a puff of black soot. His cutlass clattered to the ground, and Alex would have followed it if Justin hadn’t been there to wrap his arm around her, hold her up and put her at arm’s length to study her.
“Are you okay?” he said roughly.
She nodded, touched her throat, and flinched.
“Mostly. What . . . you figured it out? You sent him back?” She looked around.
“No,” Justin said hoarsely, “I didn’t.” He sank to the floor and put his head in his hands. “I killed him.”
“You what?” Alex took a step back. Justin shook his head.
“I killed him,” he repeated. “That’s what that spell was. It was the only one I could think of. It was the only one I wanted to think of, once I saw . . .” he stopped. Swallowed. “Oh, God. I think I’m going to be sick.”
Alex leaped back to avoid getting her shoes spattered. When Justin did not, in fact, throw up, she inched in closer again; sank to the floor in a puddle of wizard robes, and sidled up close to him.
“How do you know how to kill a person with a spell?” she asked. “Is that what you get to know when you’re a professor?”
He shook his head.
“No. It’s what I made it my own business to know, after . . . everything.”
Alex waited, head tipped to the side. Justin looked down at his wand as he continued to speak.
“After Gorog, after . . . everything, I realized that if anything else like that was going to happen—and I mean, it’s us, of course it was going to happen again—then . . . I wanted to be ready.”
“Ready to kill somebody?” Alex clarified. She didn’t sound horrified—but then, she was Alex, so that was unsurprising. She only sounded curious.
“If I had to, yeah. If it came to that. If you—or Max, or Mom, or Dad or anyone, really—needed me to. I wanted to be ready.” He fidgeted with his wand. “Except, you’re never really ready to—to do something like that.”
Alex didn’t personally agree with him, there (she could think of seven people on the spot she was ready to do that to) but she took this to mean that Justin had done something impossibly difficult for him, and, as he so often did, he’d done it to help her. She rested her head on his shoulder, and looked up at the ceiling of the WizTech library.
“I’m glad you knew how,” she said softly.
“So am I,” he replied. It wasn’t a lie.
There was another long pause, which Alex broke.
“We’re gonna be fine, right?” she said. “With all of this, I mean. The powers and family left behind, and me trying to do alphabetical order and screwing it up with old cheese and cutthroat pirates . . . we’re gonna be okay, aren’t we?”
Justin nodded, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“Yeah,” he said, “I think we’re going to be okay.”
Much to his surprise, that wasn’t a lie, either.
They were going to be just fine.