Chapter 1

The exploding teapot was the first sign trouble was brewing.

Gentleman sorcerer John Wellington Wells had just intoned the first verse of his incantation: "Appear, appear, appear!" As if in response, the teapot on the stand in front of him erupted with a sudden fwoosh, an outpouring of gray smoke, a burst of fire-bright orange light, and the sharp crack-tinkle of shattering ceramic. There was also a loud THUD and a curse from behind the billowing smoke.

"What the hell was that?" demanded Lyle Applegate, dropping out of character and abandoning the sorcerer's roguish British accent in favor of his natural Texan twang.

I was out of my fourth-row aisle seat and mounting the stage before he had finished the sentence. The smoke was already dissipating as I stepped around the stand, extending a hand to help my lead actor to his feet. "A very good question," I said. "I gather you did not trigger the flash mechanism."

"I didn't touch it, Ms. McKenna," he said, eyeing the stand and shaking his head. "Hey, that's weird." I followed his glance. The teapot's fragments lay in a tidy ring around the edge of the small, nearly chest-high table, which was unmarked save for a dirty black stain in its center.

"Indeed," I said. "Remarkably neat, considering. It looked as if all three charges went off at once."

By now, the rest of the cast had crowded onto center stage. "I know!" said Peter Morgenthaler, a member of the chorus and Lyle's understudy. At two inches under six feet, he and Lyle were of similar size and build, though Peter presently wore his own short, dark hair while Lyle's yellow-blond buzz cut was concealed by a thick salt-and-pepper wig. "It must have been the ghost!"

"Ghost?" I said mildly.

"You don't know the story?" piped up Yvette Qin, who was playing Aline, our ingénue. Unlike Lyle's, her accent was genuine, a by-product of mixed Irish and Chinese parentage by way of Hong Kong.

I arched an eyebrow at her. "Professor Sauvé's notebooks fail to mention hauntings, and no spectral being has introduced itself to me in the past eleven weeks. Perhaps mere artists-in-residence are beneath its notice."

"He, not it," Lyle put in. "Roderick Riley, class of '25 or '26. I forget which. A fire broke out during a rehearsal of The Tempest, and somehow he didn't get out with everyone else. It took out nearly half the theater. They rebuilt the next summer, and he's supposed to have been here ever since."

Yvette bobbed her head. "It would fit. He was playing Prospero back then, so of course he'd turn up for The Sorcerer."

The beginning of a laugh slipped out before I could restrain myself. "Hardly likely," I said. "Shattering crockery implies a poltergeist, not a frustrated thespian. Assuming the event was of ghostly origin to begin with, which I doubt." A quick glance around the stage revealed no sign of a supernatural presence--and it was a rare ghost, in my experience, who possessed the skill to hide from a Sidhe.

Mortal readers (she wrote, contemplating the published version of this account) may wonder how a genuine Sidhe came to be an artist-in-residence at a small Pacific Northwest liberal arts college. That tale is best left for another time; suffice to say that much as mortal youths once ran off to join the circus, this particular Sidhe ran off to join Actors' Equity.

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