Title:
Catching A Sorcerer
Author: Sara Walker
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Audience: Young Adult
Formats: Paperback and E-book
Publisher: Sara Walker
Cover by: Melody Simmons
Pages: 198
ISBN-10: 1491049804
ISBN-13: 978-1491049808
ASIN: B00CTLG5A2
Date Published: May 2013
Blurb –
After a sorcerer kills her mother, fifteen year old Melantha is asked to
help catch him. She wants nothing to do with it, but then she learns one of her
classmates is the son of the sorcerer. With her spell-turner powers not yet
developed, the mission will be dangerous, but it will be downright deadly if
the sorcerer figures out who she is and decides she will follow in her mother's
footsteps.
Excerpt –
Sunday night and I was learning to
turn a summoning spell. Though I'd spent most of my life being home schooled, I
had a feeling this was not a normal family activity for other fifteen year old
girls.
"Gran, when I told you I wanted
a cell phone, this wasn't what I had in mind," I said.
Gran picked through a handful of
wheatberries, looking for just the right one to add to her pot. We stood at
opposites sides of the round table with a copper pot in front of each of us and
a host of ingredients filling the table between.
"Cell phones don't work for
members of the magical community," she said.
"What community? It's just you
and me."
Dumping ingredients into a pot had
nothing on the convenience of electronic communication. Kids at school were
constantly using theirs to call each other, text, watch videos. But not me. I
wasn't allowed to have one. I had to learn the "old ways."
Gran sighed, and I knew by the way
her lips were pursed that she didn't intend to elaborate. She'd been trying to
get me to learn spells every night for weeks now. I'd finally caved in hopes
she would back off, but that plan hadn't worked out quite like I'd hoped.
"I have to go to the library
tonight," I said. I dumped a handful of crispy dried lavender flowers—for
devotion so the line of communication would stay clear— into my pot.
In another time we might have been
called witches. But now that term was considered derogatory. We were
spell-turners. Well, Gran was. I wouldn't be a full spell-turner until I turned
sixteen and came into my full powers. In all my fifteen years, in all the time
I'd spent in Halifax and my current residence in Ottawa, I'd never met another
turner, not another magical creature of any kind, until the day my mother died.
If there was a magical community out
there, I wouldn't know it.
I hadn't been out of the apartment
except to go to school in six weeks. I needed to get away, to hang with some
friends— even just for a little while.
"We have books here," Gran
replied in a stern tone. This was an old argument.
She was right— we had books here.
Every wall of the living room was filled to the ceiling with shelves, every
shelf filled with books. All had belonged to my mother.
Without coming right out to say so,
Gran was subtly reminding me of the reason I was confined to the apartment. My
mother had been killed by a black-spell sorcerer— that is, a sorcerer who
chooses to use death to fortify his spells. For some reason Gran thought he
would come after me. But I wasn't a full turner yet. I had only partial powers.
Until my sixteenth birthday, every spell I turned would dissipate the moment it
came together. "Learning powers," Gran called them. "Just enough
juice to see what you're doing, but not so much as to harm yourself or anyone
else."
She seemed convinced I had these
learning powers, but for some reason my spells never seemed to turn out right
no matter how carefully I followed her instructions. And that was bad news.
Even though they didn't want me to know, I'd heard my mother and Gran fighting
about me. Gran thought I was either a late blooming white turner or a null— a
turner's daughter born without powers. My mother refused to believe I was a
null. So Gran was on a mission to prove one way or another I had learning
powers or I was deliberately faking not having them out of extreme laziness.
"Your mother was a good white
turner," Gran said. "She loved turning spells with me when she was
your age. Couldn't get enough of it."
Her mention of my mother hit me
square in the gut.
"Didn't she like to do anything
else? Anything normal?"
Gran pinched her lips together
again. She didn't like to speak about my mother beyond her gifted spelling
abilities.
I directed the conversation back to
the topic at hand.
"I really need the books at the
library," I said. I followed her actions and, using a wooden spoon, swirled
in two cups of diluted bay leaf extract for strength. I turned the spell
clockwise, same as she did. We were on opposite sides of the small round
kitchen table, so I had to think for a minute which way to turn my spoon.
"Why?" Gran asked
suspiciously, narrowing her eyes. Everything was suspicious to Gran.
I barely kept myself from rolling my
eyes. "I have homework."
"What homework?"
"What do you mean? I go to high
school now. I get homework." I used to be home-schooled. Right up until 52
days ago when I lost my mother. Then Gran had to take over as my teacher. She
used to be able to teach my lessons for the few months of the year when I went
to live with her in Halifax, but now that I was in grade ten, my studies had
advanced to the point where she didn't understand anything in my textbooks. So
she marched me down to the nearest high school. She would have signed me up
right then, but they were closed for winter holidays. Imagine that.
"The new semester starts
tomorrow, February second, according to the literature I received from the
school," she pointed out.
Crap. "I'm catching up from
last semester," I said, carefully examining a handful of calendula. I felt
more than saw Gran carefully examining me.
"Who's the boy?" she
asked.
"There's no boy," I answered
quickly. Too quickly. Double crap.
"I
might not know much about quadriplegic equations or—"
"Quadratic equations," I
corrected.
"Or, what goes into a good
Theseus statement, but—"
"Thesis statement. Theseus
killed the Minotaur."
"But," she said again with
emphasis, ignoring my corrections, "I know my granddaughter."
This time I did roll my eyes.
"Whatever."
His name was Rory Macdonald. But I
wasn't about to tell Gran that. I met him in the principal's office on the
morning of my first day. It was his first day, too. A drunk driver had killed
his parents and now he was living with his aunt. I met him again later in the
day at the guidance counsellor's office. A special grief counsellor had been
brought in to meet with us. Neither of us wanted to meet with her, but nobody
asked us. His aunt was almost as controlling as my Gran.
We didn't have plans for tonight, so
I didn't have to worry about calling him to cancel. He'd mentioned he'd found
this place, where he liked to go on Sunday nights to play bass guitar for a
band. I'd only hoped to stop in and hear him play.
"You may invite him to come
here," Gran said, ignoring my denials. She released three drops of cedar
oil, for dedication, into the liquid swirls in her pot. "But you won't be
going out."
I bit back a scream. It used to be
my mother and Gran had no trouble keeping friends out of my life, what with
shipping me off to Halifax twice a year and homeschooling me. I never got to go
to birthday parties, Halloween parties, camping trips or any other fun thing
that normal girls did.
"Friendship is dangerous,"
Gran would say. My mother would agree. She would even agree when they were
having that big fight that lasted for weeks.
I tried a new angle. "I need to
use the computers at the library."
"What do you need those
confounded contraptions for?" she asked. Her tone was one of surprise,
even though this wasn't the first time we'd talked about my needing a computer
for schoolwork. She just didn't get the concept of computers. Ever.
I listed the reasons on my fingers.
"Research, report presentation, statistical analysis—"
"Hmph. In my day we had to do
all of that by hand." She peered down her nose at the runny swirls in my
pot. While mine was little more than a pathetic soup stock, hers had taken on
shimmering hues of purple and green. I didn't have to see her face to know she
was disappointed.
Still, I pressed my case.
"Look, it's not a big deal. I can take care of myself."
"Hmph." She tapped the
wooden spoon on the pot rim.
"Please? Can I go for an hour?"
Oh, man. That sounded so desperate.
"No," she said simply,
placing her spoon on the table next to her pot. She carried the empty vials to
the sink and turned on the hot water.
"Gran—" I cried.
"I cannot permit it, Melantha.
If you do not go outside this apartment with me, then you do not go outside
this apartment at all."
I rolled my eyes and groaned.
"You are completely impossible!"
If my words stung even the
slightest, she didn't show it. She carried on with washing the dishes.
"I'm sorry, Melantha. But I promised your mother."
"Promised her what? Promised
you would keep me a prisoner and never talk about her?"
I slumped into a chair with my arms
crossed. This was hopeless. Gran was super stubborn. I needed a new approach.
Temporarily abandoning my potion, I
snagged the tea towel on the way to the sink. Unexpected helpfulness always put
Gran in a good mood. I hoped it would be good enough to let me out.
She cleared her throat. "Your
potion is incomplete."
"My potion is nothing but water
with twigs and leaves in it." I noticed she didn't tell me not to dry the
dishes. Nor did she tell me to start over and make the potion again. We'd been
down that road before. It always resulted in the same thing: failure. Whatever
it took to make a potion, I didn't have it. My mother and Gran had been
convinced my spells would come together the closer I got to my sixteenth
birthday, but so far they always amounted to nothing.
"Did you project your light
into it?" she asked in that snippy tone that said she already knew the
answer.
"Yes." I hated it when she
said "light" instead of "magic".
"And?" Gran prompted.
"And what? Nothing
happened." I shrugged. I felt my power, my magic. It flowed through me,
the same as blood and oxygen flowed through me. It was there. I could feel it
the entire time we put together these spells. But magic also dredged up too
many memories of my mother. And there wasn't much light there when I thought
about how she died. It was more like a choking sensation. I hated that feeling.
"You're not trying hard
enough," Gran said. That was what she always said. I didn't answer. There
was no point. She'd already made up her mind.
Maybe the truth was, I could have
tried harder, but turning spells just felt wrong. If my mother had been killed
by bullets, would I still be expected to attend target practice?
"I don't understand what's so
bad about having friends," I said, plucking a soapy plate from the drain
board.
She shut off the water. "You
know the reason. They can be used against you. And you against them. It's
better for everyone if you just don't have them to begin with."
Yeah, I'd heard that part before. It
was stupid. For some reason my mother and Gran thought I would be kidnapped and
held for ransom. I couldn't understand why. We didn't have anything of value.
It wasn't like we were millionaires.
So who were they protecting me from?
"As for going out alone,"
Gran continued as she washed a pot, "there are many kinds of evil out
there. You are not safe on your own."
"But I won't be on my own. I'll
be with friends!"
"Together you'll be on your
own."
"But that makes no sense at
all!"
An eerie wind howled outside the
windows. If the weather was getting worse, I was sure to lose this argument. I
crossed the apartment to the living room windows and used the tea towel to
clear away the condensation on the cold glass. Snowflakes swirled under the
streetlights below. Even the weather wanted to keep me inside.
There was a sharp knock at the door.
I met Gran's gaze. She appeared as surprised as I was, but where I welcomed any
and every visitor, I knew she would send away whoever was on the other side of
that door. By the expression on her face, she suspected I'd invited a friend
over without permission. I hadn't, but knowing Gran, that wouldn't make a
difference.
I dove for the door, but Gran beat
me to it. She leaned cautiously up to the peephole.
"Open up, Alberta. I'm here to
speak to the girl." It was a man's voice— muffled, old and tired. The
voice of someone older than Gran, someone ancient.
The girl? I hoped for his sake, he
wasn't referring to me. There was something familiar about the voice, something
that sent a nervous sense of foreboding all the way down to my toes. This was
one visitor I didn't want to see.
About the Author – A
former bookkeeper, Sara always preferred books over numbers, and finally put
aside her calculator to write stories and work part-time in a library. She
is the founder of UrbanFantasyLand.net, a website established in 2008 that specializes in
promoting urban fantasy and speculative fiction. Her articles and fiction have
been published in anthologies and online.
Author
Links – Website
/ Blog / Facebook / Goodreads /
Amazon
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A voracious reader, J. A. Jance knew she wanted to be a writer from the moment she read her first Wizard of Oz book in second grade. Always drawn to mysteries, from Nancy Drew right through John D. McDonald's Travis Magee series, it was only natural that when she tried her hand at writing her first book, it would be a mystery as well.
J. A. Jance went on to become the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, three interrelated thrillers featuring the Walker family, and Edge of Evil. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
