The Portal 00 - Legacy of the Witch

away.
    Later, when the rifle-toting security officer at the airport
crooked his finger at me, calling me closer, I thought I should have listened to
that part. “I need to see what’s inside this bag,” he said. He had eyes like
black marbles, a moustache that covered his lips. He didn’t look like an honest
man to me.
    “It’s only my personal things,” I said.
    “All the same.” He opened my case while I stood there, helpless
to argue. Then his eyes fell upon the box and lit with greed. “What is
this?”
    “A family heirloom. It was my grandmother’s.”
    He picked up the precious box, and I lunged for him, reaching
out, but his arm—the one holding his rifle—shot out, and the cold metal barrel
pressed across my chest.
    “Open it,” he said.
    I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I can’t. I’ve tried
and tried, but there’s just no way. It feels empty, though.”
    He held the box up near his ear and shook it. “No, there’s
something. Light, but still…. I’m going to have to confiscate this.”
    “But it’s mine!”
    “You’ll get it back,” he said. “Once I’ve cleared it with the
Department of Antiquities. People are constantly smuggling treasures from our
ancient sites, selling them on the black market.” He set the box down. My gaze
remained pinned to it as I searched my brain for a solution.
    Pulling a pad and pen from his uniform pocket, he handed them
to me. “Write down the address of the place where you are going in the U.S. I
will see to it that this is shipped to you once it has been cleared.”
    I obediently jotted the address, and then a symbol, one my
grandmother had taught me, because I wasn’t entirely powerless. It was a minor
hex of sorts—for along with the history of the witches, a few of their skills
had been handed down through the generations of my family. It was part of our
legacy, and my grandmother had taught me all the bits and pieces of magic that
had come down to her with the tales. So I drew the sign that would ensure he
would know no peace until he returned the box to my hands.
    I eyed the box, and while my head was down, muttered in a
whisper, “I bind you now, oh box, to me, by the power of three times three,
return return return to me.”
    “What was that?”
    “I was praying,” I said, straightening and handing him the
paper. “That you would take mercy on an innocent orphan girl and not steal from
her the last thing her dead grandmother gave to her.”
    His eyes held mine for a long moment.
    “I promise you will regret it if you don’t,” I added, letting
my fury show in my face.
    His marble eyes narrowed angrily. “It will be shipped to you
when it clears the Department of Antiquities. Now go, before you miss your
flight.”
    I kept on staring. He thrust out an arm. “Go!” he shouted.
    I knew I would be arrested if I stayed, so I went, feeling I
had failed my grandmother utterly.
    I didn’t see the box again for ten years.

Chapter Two
    1992, Cortland, NY
    I wasn’t much for television. At twenty-four, I was
more concerned with finishing my final semester of university and doing
freelance editing for a small publishing house on the side. It kept my writing
skills honed, and it paid decently. And since I intended to be a successful
author one day, it was nice to be working in what I considered my field.
    Thoughts of Babylonian witches and curses and such rarely
entered my busy brain anymore. And though the memory of that treasure chest
haunted me, I’d pretty much written off the story—the mission—that had been
given to me along with it. My grandmother had been only a few breaths away from
her last, and heavily medicated. The stories she’d been telling and retelling to
me, the ones her own mother had told to her and that went all the way back to
the roots of our family tree, had probably seemed real to her, just as they had
to me in my childhood. But it was easy to confuse a story that old, that much a
part of the family, for something true, especially in a dying, morphine-muddled
mind. And easy for a child of four—or one of thirteen—to get swept up in the
delusion.
    So I tried not to think too much about how I’d lost the box or
how I’d failed to keep my vow to my dying grandmother, and I told myself it
didn’t matter so much.
    Until I saw the box again.
    As I said, I wasn’t much for television, but I shared a house
with seven other students, so the thing was always on. And as I walked through
the living