The next morning, Elijah and Monica got up early and fixed eggs and grits before heading out to Emerald Outback, the hiking trail park on Beech Mountain. They left at dawn, not wanting to drive unfamiliar mountain roads in the dark, and parked at the trailhead about forty minutes later. Though Casey’s house was closer to Beech Mountain than to Boone as the crow flew, it took longer to get there because there was no direct road going up the east side of the mountain; they had to circle halfway around the mountain to get to a good road leading to the park entrance.

Elijah had printed out a map of the park a couple of days earlier, and they’d studied it during breakfast, picking out which trails they wanted to walk. They wanted to get plenty of walking in before it got too hot, although it wouldn’t get as hot on the mountain as it would at the lower elevation of Casey’s house.

Their conversation during the drive over was a little strained after the argument the night before, though Monica did say, early in the drive, “I’m proud of you for doing the right thing, giving the book back. I wish you hadn’t made that promise to Casey, but if you did, I guess you had to give it back instead of destroying it.”

Elijah mumbled a noncommittal “Thank you,” and procrastinated once again on confronting Monica about her disturbing desire to see a book burn.

They walked about four miles on several different trails over the course of the morning. They stopped several times to take photos, especially at the scenic overlooks, but gradually tapered off taking photos as the day went on. Then they paused to let Monica take a photo of a spider’s web, and she realized she didn’t have her phone.

“I must not have zipped up my fanny pack tight last time I used the camera,” she said, dismayed. Elijah immediately thought of the finding spell, but pushed the thought away. Even though he had that spell pretty much memorized, Monica would rather buy a new phone than use magic to find her old one.

“Let’s retrace our steps and keep an eye out for it,” he suggested. So they did. They walked back along the trail, Elijah looking on the left and Monica on the right, got to the point where the trail branched off from another one, and retraced their steps along that one until they got to the point where Monica last remembered taking a photo. They asked the people they passed, or who passed them, if they’d found a lost cellphone. None had.

So they returned the way they’d been going earlier, and got to the photogenic spiderweb without ever spotting the phone or meeting anyone who’d found it. “Let’s finish up this trail,” Elijah suggested, “and head back to the visitor’s center to see if someone’s taken it to the lost and found.”

“We should probably give it some more time,” Monica said hesitantly. “If someone’s found it, they’ll probably finish whatever walking they were planning on doing before dropping it at the visitor’s center. If they’re honest enough to turn it in.”

So they finished the trail they were on and walked another trail loop before heading back to their car and driving to the visitors’ center. The woman on duty at the visitor’s center checked the lost and found, but didn’t find a phone.

“What kind of phone is it?” she asked. “If someone turns it in later, I can call you.”

After some brief discussion, they decided to give her Casey’s landline number, as Elijah would be better able to pick it up if it was turned in after Monica went home. They talked about going out and walking some more, but it was starting to get warm, and they decided to head back after using the restrooms.

As Elijah entered the men’s room, he thought again of the finding spell. Its range was supposed to be over a mile, so it should cover the entire park from here. And if he cast it before he left the restroom, Monica wouldn’t know. He thought about it as he used the toilet and washed his hands, and as no else came in the men’s room in that time, he finally decided to try it.

He now knew where the phone was. It had been concealed by some leaf litter, about four hundred feet from the head of the trail they’d been on when they noticed it was missing. The problem now was how to find an excuse to go back and look for it again when they’d already looked twice and decided to give up on it. He was still thinking about what to say and how when he exited the restroom.

By the time Monica emerged from the ladies’ room, he had thought of nothing better than the obvious solution, and said “Do you want to go back and search the trail again?”

“Maybe?” she said doubtfully. “If we couldn’t find it, probably somebody has already picked it up, either to steal it or to turn in to the lost and found. And I’m getting tired, and it’ll be getting hot soon. Let’s head back to the house.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll call the visitor’s center and ask about it over the next few days.”

So they headed back to the house, and Elijah prayed that the phone wouldn’t get rained on, or stolen, before he could return and retrieve it.

---

After they returned, they took turns taking showers in the hall bathroom, and after eating a light lunch, they sat in Elijah’s office for a while, chatting. Elijah told her more about the cataloguing work he was doing, showing her the process of cataloguing a book – figuring out how to classify it, making a catalogue entry, making a label, and shelving it. “The last bit’s complicated because I’m still figuring out which subjects are going to go where,” he said. “And the house is so stuffed with books, there’s not a lot of room to temporarily stage books for reshelving.”

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s hardly a surface that doesn’t have books stacked on it. Even part of the dining table and kitchen counter. Is that safe? Aren’t you worried books might get food spilled on them?”

“I’ve been gradually relocating books from the kitchen to other parts of the house,” he said. “And Casey is picking out some books he doesn’t care to keep so we can sell them. We’ve already sold a few of the more valuable ones on eBay, and once we have a few boxes full, he’s going to drive to Asheville and sell them to a used bookstore.”

The conversation drifted to what their mutual friends from Mars Hill were up to these days. After a while, they decided to watch a movie before Elijah would start fixing supper. The movie was near over when Casey poked his head into the office.

“Don’t want to interrupt,” he said after Elijah had paused the movie, “but I’m fixing to head out. I’m gonna go eat at a restaurant tonight, let you two have your romantic dinner by yourselves.”

“Oh,” Elijah said, resolving to make sure Monica’s mom never found out about them being left ‘unchaperoned’. Not that anything was going to happen. “Have a good dinner.”

“And a safe drive,” Monica added. Casey left and they finished the movie.

Elijah cooked borscht, which his mom had learned to make from her Ukrainian roommate in college and had taught him in turn, and which Monica had enjoyed a lot when she came over to dinner at his family’s house the previous summer. Monica helped out with chopping vegetables and setting the table, chatting with him as they worked.

Once they had the dishes on the table, they lit a couple of candles Elijah had found in a box half full of 1980s mystery paperbacks and turned off the overhead lights, sat down, and asked the blessing. During supper, conversation turned to their nebulous wedding plans. They’d been planning to get married once Monica finished undergrad and Elijah finished grad school, and then look for jobs together in the same city. Currently, they were both set to graduate in about a year, and Monica pointed out that they needed to get serious about booking a venue and working on invitation lists before too much longer.

“Yeah,” Elijah said. “I guess I’ve got about nine or ten relatives I’m close enough to to invite, not counting Mom and Dad. And a couple of those live far enough away they probably won’t come. I know you’ve got a lot more.” Monica’s parents and grandparents all had at least two siblings, some of them a lot more, and she had more aunts, uncles, and cousins than Elijah could keep track of. He’d gone to her family reunion last year and couldn’t believe how many people there were. “Plus friends, well, probably not more than three that I might expect to actually come. Would you mind if I invited Casey?”

Monica pursed her lips. “I’m not sure he’s a good influence. It sounds like he’s been encouraging you to use that spellbook. I’d feel better if you didn’t stay in contact with him after this job is over.”

“We’re living in the same house and sharing meals,” Elijah protested, evading the issue of magic. “It would be super awkward if we were as distant and formal as a normal manager-employee relationship. Besides, we both love books.” And are fascinated by magic, he didn’t say and tried not to think. “So it’s natural for us to become friends, or as close to friends as an employer and employee can be.”

“Of course it makes sense for you to be friendly with him while you have to work with him,” Monica said. “I’m just not sure it’s a good idea to keep talking to him after that.”

Elijah let it drop. He would have liked to stay friends with Casey, if they could manage it when they probably wouldn’t be living close together after he graduated. He didn’t have that many friends; he’d long since lost contact with most of his high school friends, and already, after only a year of grad school, he’d only kept in close contact with a couple of his undergrad friends besides Monica. But if Casey and Monica couldn’t get along, he’d have to pick Monica.

As they started cleaning up after supper – Elijah had offered to do it by himself, and Monica had insisted on helping – they talked about maybe watching another movie.

“Let’s watch it on my laptop, sitting on the sofa,” she said. “Watching it on the big monitor in your office was nice, but sitting in two office chairs meant we couldn’t snuggle.”

“All right,” he said.

So they reviewed their options, and after copying Little Women from Casey’s network drive to Monica’s laptop, they set it on the coffee table (after moving four volumes of The Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw out of the way) and snuggled on the sofa (after moving two Spanish novels and a biography of P.T. Barnum out of the way). Elijah felt warm and content. The tension after their fight the evening before had gradually faded over the course of the day, and he was pretty hopeful that things would be back to normal by the time Monica had to go home. It was a pity about not being able to do magic anymore, but again, if he had to choose between magic and his best friend, she would have to come first.

The disaster happened an hour later when Monica said she had to use the restroom and paused the movie. Elijah reached over and turned on the lamp on the side table, so she could find her way, and she got up and headed toward the hall bathroom. Elijah closed his eyes to rest them for a few moments. Then, after a couple of minutes, he decided she was taking long enough he might as well read a little. There was a poetry collection or two in one of those stacks of books on the coffee table, wasn’t there? One or two short poems would be just right to fill in the time until Monica got back.

He looked at the stacks of books on either side of the laptop and froze. At the top of the stack nearest to his hand was A First Spellbook for Beginners. He gingerly reached over and picked it up, turning to the first page of the introduction, then flipping ahead a few dozen pages. It was the same book he’d given to Casey, with the introduction and first four chapters in English – wait, four? – then the rest in that unknown language.

Unfortunately, he’d barely begun to read the first paragraph of the fourth chapter when Monica returned from the restroom.

“I can’t believe you!” she burst out. “You lied to me! You told me you’d given it back to Casey and he’d put it in the safe, and now I find you sneaking a glance of it whenever I’m out of your sight!”

“No!” he protested. “It wasn’t there before we started the movie, I would have noticed. And I did give it to Casey, and he did say he’d put it in the safe… You can ask him. I don’t… I guess it must have teleported back to me, out of the safe.”

“Even if that’s true,” she said, “which I doubt, you shouldn’t have picked it up and looked at it. You should have left it alone, told me about it, and gotten Casey to do something with it when he got home.”

And what if it teleported right back to me from wherever Casey put it, even in a safe deposit box in Raleigh? he thought. “I was startled,” he said. “I wanted to check if it was the same book –”

“That’s such a terrible excuse. I’ve had enough of this… I’d leave right now and spend the night in a hotel if it weren’t already too dark to drive on these roads. Good night.”

He followed her to her bedroom door, trying to protest his innocence. Later on, he felt guilty about obtruding himself on her attention when she clearly didn’t want to talk, but he was too torn up with panic and fear to think straight. When she glared at him for a moment before slamming the door in his face, he realized he was still holding the spellbook. He went to Casey’s office and left it on his desk with a note before going to his own bed, where he tossed and turned for an hour or two before turning the lamp back on and reaching for the novel he’d been reading on his bedside table.

What came to his hand instead was A First Spellbook for Beginners. He glanced over and saw that the novel he’d been reading was there on the table; this must have been on top of it. This really proved his guess that the book was teleporting to him; he might theoretically have failed to notice the book sitting on top of that stack in the living room before they started the movie, and Casey might have left it there after trying to get it to re-imprint on him sometime in the last day, but Casey wasn’t home and Monica wouldn’t touch the book. He put the spellbook aside and picked up the novel, but couldn’t concentrate on it. His fear that he’d irreparably damaged his relationship with Monica was constantly intruding.

Finally, he reflected morosely that if he was going to lose his best friend over using magic, he might as well do what he was suspected of, and satiate his curiosity about what was in chapter four.

This chapter turned out to be primarily devoted to meta magic, specifically to a technique that would let him modify other spells so as to change their targets. He could take a self-directed spell and turn it to an other-directed spell, or potentially vice versa, if it made sense to do so. He wondered if casting the spell for finding lost things on himself would let him find his way home if he were lost, or if it would just unhelpfully tell him “You are here.”

There was also a new flesh magic spell and an information magic spell. The first would allow him to reshape his body, moving fat or muscle from one part of his body to another. The second was similar to the first information magic spell he’d learned, allowing him to find a vaguely remembered passage in a book, but this one would work on a whole library, and he didn’t have to know the exact book he was looking for or have read it before. It could just be something he’d heard about.

The third assignment at the end of the chapter said to apply the new target-changing technique to at least three of the spells he had learned earlier. He immediately thought of Casey’s earlier request to let him know when he could cast those flesh magic spells on other people and not just himself, and moments later, he heard the front door open. Casey was home.

It might not be too late to patch things up with Monica. Especially if he could get Casey to vouch for him in the morning, to confirm that he’d put the book in the safe and it had teleported to the stack of books in the living room while Casey was at the restaurant or wherever he’d gone afterward. He’d better talk with Casey tonight, though, and let him know what had happened so he wouldn’t be on the back foot when Elijah asked him to confirm his story tomorrow for Monica.

Elijah got up and went to open his bedroom door. Casey was coming down the hall toward his own bedroom.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “Hope I didn’t disturb you coming in?”

“No, I was already awake. Reading. Um, something weird happened earlier –”

“Magic? Something you didn’t do?”

“The spellbook got out of the safe on its own.” He told how he’d found the spellbook sitting on top of a stack of books on the coffee table, and the fight with Monica that had ensued, and how he’d put it on Casey’s desk and found it on his bedside table when he gave up on sleeping.

Casey looked thoughtful. “Then I guess our plan of you leaving it with me and hoping it’ll eventually imprint on me instead won’t work. Unless maybe you just keep refusing to touch it and it eventually gives up on teleporting back to you?”

“Uh, yeah, I should probably do that. I’m just worried about Monica thinking I was ignoring her when she asked me to give it back to you. Or seeing it by my place at the breakfast table and thinking I brought it there to read… I was hoping you could talk to her in the morning and confirm that you put the book in the safe?”

“Oh, sure. I’m sorry about what happened. I can put it in the safe again tonight, if you want?”

“Uh, yeah… I don’t expect it to do any good, but it can’t hurt.”

Elijah thought about telling Casey about the new meta magic in chapter four, but decided it could wait until morning. Or better yet, after Monica went home. It wasn’t urgent, he told himself; it would probably be weeks, at least, before the book decided he wasn’t going to read it again and stopped following him around, and might allow Casey to imprint on it.

After Elijah gave Casey the book, they said goodnight and Elijah returned to his bed.