Magic and the Modern Girl (16 page)

“This strange gauzy dress. It flowed when she moved, sort of floated all around her. It was woven from different colors, red and orange and yellow.”

I knew that dress. I’d seen it in my basement. I’d made it with the last of my magic. I forced myself to ask, “And she walked on stage?”

“She just stood up in the audience and walked down the aisle, like she was part of the show. She climbed onto the stage and looked out at all of us. About half the audience thought that she was part of the production, that she was supposed to be some sort of dream scene or something.”

“And the other half?” I asked, a queasy feeling turning my belly.

“The other half thought something was wrong. The guy playing Prospero pretty much confirmed it. I mean, he tried to ad-lib and everything, to pretend like he was summoning servants to clear a ghost. He actually did a decent job—at least with all the modern talk, he didn’t have to make up lines in iambic pentameter. But the stagehands who came out weren’t anything like island servants.”

“What did they do?” I tried to picture what she was describing, tried to imagine the entire production stalled by this strange woman. By my anima.

“Only one guy came out at first. He tried to walk her off the stage, but she refused to move. It was creepy. She didn’t say anything, just stood there, like a statue.”

Didn’t say anything. Like a statue.

Or like an anima.

“So what happened next?”

“The entire crew came out on stage. They were all wearing black, and a few of them had headsets. They gathered around her like she was some sort of wild animal.”

Wild animal…That wasn’t too far from the truth. “And then?” I asked.

“She held up a sign.”

“A sign?”

“A poster. Like something we might have made in school for a pep rally. I didn’t see where she’d been hiding it, it was like she just produced it out of nowhere. She held it up above her head so everyone could see. It said ‘Empower The Arts.’”

Empower The Arts. The slogan that had been on the play’s promotional poster. The slogan that I’d thought of when I created Ariel. The slogan that had apparently taken the last of my magic and twisted it into something I could no longer recognize, something that was utterly foreign to me, something that had been stolen from me.

“Empower The Arts,” I echoed.

“She held up her sign, and she pivoted around, making sure that everyone in the audience saw it. People started clapping—it was like she was Norma Rae or something. And then the stage crew got serious. They closed in around her, trying to herd her into the wings. Before they could make her move, though, she just jumped off the front of the stage. Jumped off and ran away.”

“Did she take her sign with her?”

“That was the strange thing. That’s why I’m here.” Melissa looked at me with eyes that were half-afraid. “The sign totally disappeared, Jane. It was like she’d never been there. Like she was totally a figment of our imagination. Everyone was talking. They thought it must be some theatrical trick. But I was pretty sure it was something else. Something you needed to know about.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “What happened next?”

“The stage manager came out. She said that they’d start the show over from the top, that it would take them fifteen minutes or so to reset the shipwreck, and there was coffee in the lobby for anyone who wanted it. I told Rob that I had to leave, and I came over here as fast as I could.”

“Without Rob?”

“Your witchcraft stuff is strange enough to
me
, and I’ve known about it for two years. I couldn’t figure out a way to tell him what was really going on.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that I knew a reporter, someone who was going to be thrilled to get the scoop. Rob was still going to come with me, but he couldn’t because he had to do the whole glad-hand thing with the rest of the Arts Council people, after the play.” She shook her head and sneezed again.

“Bless you,” I said automatically. “Melissa—” Even as my mind was racing, even as I was trying to process everything that she’d said, I felt terrible that I’d ruined her date.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, reading my mind with the ease of years of friendship. “I mean, there’ll be other dates. Another one tomorrow, as a matter of fact.”

“You go, girl!” I said, climbing to my feet.

“What are you going to do?”

“Put on clothes. I’ve got to get over to the high school. I have to see if it was actually Ariel.”

“Do you really think it was?” Now she sounded doubtful.

“A tall, black-haired woman who makes an albino look tan, wearing a gauze silk dress? Naw. Couldn’t have anything in common with my anima.”

I strode into my bedroom, palming on the light and tearing open my closet door. What did one wear for anima-hunting on a Friday night in Georgetown? I settled on a pair of jeans and a green blouse. I carried my tennis shoes into the living room and tugged them on as Melissa watched. “Aren’t you going to call David?” she asked.

I’d been hoping to avoid that. Still, Melissa was right. I’d be an idiot not to bring my warder into the hunt. I reached for him with my mind reflexively.

Nothing.

The bond between us shimmered with the faintest reflection of memory, taunting me with the fact that it had been there, that I
had
relied on it. But there was nothing now. I sighed and picked up the phone. And cursed when I got his outgoing message. “David, Ariel was here in Georgetown. At the high school. I’m going to try to find her. Call me on my cell when you get this.”

I didn’t even bother trying to reach Neko, certain that he’d be at some unbearably fashionable nightspot, surrounded by music too loud to hear his phone ring, by activity too vigorous for him to feel the vibration in his pocket.

In the end, Melissa and I shouldn’t have bothered. We got over to the school while the play was still going on; we had a chance to rattle a bunch of locked doors, to peer into night-dark classrooms. We decided to comb the nearby streets before the crowd let out, but our gesture was meaningless. Ariel could have been anywhere, hiding in any shadow, lurking behind any tree or car or house. My efforts to think a command to her were utterly unsuccessful.

After an hour, we headed back to Cake Walk. Melissa turned on the working light below the cabinets on the back counter, but she purposely left off the overhead so that we wouldn’t be disturbed by late-night patrons with the munchies. She excavated a platter from beneath the serving counter, peeling back tin foil to reveal an almond-and-chocolate confection. “Lust After Dark?” she asked.

I giggled, letting off some of the pressure that had gathered while we searched unsuccessfully for my magical creation. Almond Lust was one of Melissa’s signature creations. The addition of chocolate had been my idea, long ago, and the new name always made me laugh. I sighed in appreciation as Melissa poured a tall glass of milk to accompany the toothsome sweet.

We sat in companionable silence for a while, before Melissa asked, “Notice anything different?” She waved a hand toward the wall.

There was the spotless sink. A clean dishrag. A wall-mounted telephone. A little white board for writing down emergency messages. A calendar.

Melissa’s dating calendar.

Melissa’s dating calendar with each day for the past week shining through with unadulterated white squares. Not a single red
X
for a week—no First Dates.

“Melissa?” I asked. “Are you feeling all right?”

“What?” She grinned.

“Did you lose your red pen?”

She laughed again. An open and friendly laugh. An honestly cheerful, not sulking at all, enjoying-herself-like-an-ordinary-person open and friendly laugh that was so contagious I almost forgot the misery of my missing anima. “I decided I was being a bit obsessive.”

Obsessive? Melissa? The woman who had counted off her First Dates for the past dozen years? My best friend, who had alternated her evenings out with all the precision of a professional stocking the dairy shelves at the most exclusive grocery store on the eastern seaboard?

“Do you think?” I asked, not bothering to disguise my mocking tone.

“I was just marking off the disasters in red to give myself the feeling that I was doing
something
. That I was trying to make myself happy.”

“And now?”

She blushed. She blushed the color of the red ink that used to reconfirm her spinster status on a painfully regular basis. “And now, I really
have
done something to make myself happy. Asking Rob out was the best thing I ever could have done. We flirted all week long. He helped me close up on Wednesday.” She blushed even deeper. “He stuck around for…dinner. By the time we got to tonight, it was like we’d been dating forever.”

“Where’d you eat tonight?”

“Don Lobos.”

The little Mexican restaurant was one of our favorites. More to keep her talking happily than because I had any real interest, I said, “What did you have?”

“We shared the garlic shrimp, and then I had—”

Okay. Worried about Ariel or not, I had to call her on that one. “
You
ate the garlic shrimp? You? The queen of appropriate First Date foods?” Ariel be damned, there were some announcements so earthshaking that they needed to be given their full, unstinted due.

“We
both
ate the garlic. Besides, I don’t think First Date foods apply when you’ve been talking to a guy every day for a year.”

“What about your Five Conversational Topics?” For years, Melissa had prepared for potentially awkward dates, queuing up discussions to drop into any uncomfortably long pauses.

“I forgot to pull them together.”

“You
forgot?
” My world was spinning out of order. Mountains were crashing into oceans. The sun was hurtling into the abyss. Every truth that I had ever known had just been dashed to smithereens on Cake Walk’s tiled floor. I barely managed to repeat, “You forgot to set five Conversational Topics?”

“I guess I didn’t need them. I mean, I’ve known Rob forever. We could talk about real things—his work at the firm, the Arts Council, my work at the bakery.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “You. The queen of Conversational Topics. Going cold turkey.”

Melissa shrugged, and the motion seemed to trigger another sneeze.

“Not again!” she said. “I must be coming down with a cold.” She turned to her stainless steel sink and soaped up her hands with the thoroughness of a surgeon going in for some lifesaving procedure. As she scrubbed beneath her fingernails, she blushed a spectacular shade of crimson.

“What?” I asked, like any prying best friend.

“Nothing.”

“What!” I repeated.

“It’s just that Rob had a cold. He said that he was almost over it, but…” Melissa giggled.

My cool as a cucumber best friend giggled. Like a schoolgirl. Like a schoolgirl with a wicked crush.

“You really like this guy, huh?” I couldn’t help but grin, myself, even as a corner of my mind still tried to figure out the best way to lay a snare for my wayward anima. What had drawn Ariel to the theater? Was it her namesake play? Or the actor who looked like David? What
had
I planted in whatever passed for her psyche, when I thought about
The Tempest
, about the Empower The Arts campaign at the precise moment that I summoned her to life?

Melissa just looked down at her hand towel, suddenly bashful.

I felt a rush of warmth for her. Even if this didn’t turn out to be the real thing, it beat her usual stream of dating disasters. “Well, let me see if I can do anything to help you with the cold.”

“Like what?”

“Like a little magical potion.” I glanced around the bakery and bit my lip, trying to remember my herbal spell books. “Have you got any white water lily?”

“Sure,” Melissa said airily. “I keep it right here in the fridge. Behind the snakeweed and the lotus pods.” She laughed at my grimace. “I run a bakery, Jane, not a greenhouse. Of course I don’t have any white water lily.”

“Look, I’m just trying to help you,” I said. “If you don’t have any water lily, then we can probably work something with ginger.”

“Ginger, I’ve got. But I can make ginger tea on my own.”

“Do you know the right words to say over it, to make it really work?”

“Um, with that tone in your voice, I’m guessing the answer is no.”

“Get the ginger.”

Melissa cast me a doubting glance, but she turned back to her cavernous refrigerator and excavated a gnarled root of ginger. It branched a half-dozen times, almost breaking itself into walnut-sized nodules. “Will this do?”

“Perfect,” I said.

“What comes next? ‘Get with child a mandrake root’?”

“That depends,” I answered with a wicked grin. “Do you want to get rid of the cold that Rob gave you? Or do you want to snare him by having his baby?” I saw the nervous glance that Melissa cast on the ginger, and I laughed. “Come on,” I said. “I don’t even know any baby-making spells.”

“You don’t know nothin’ about spellin’ no babies?” But there was a nervous quality to her laugh. She handed over the root.

I hefted it in my hand, as if I were trying to estimate how much it would cost me, checking out at a magical grocery store. Closing my left fingers loosely around the ginger, I raised my right hand to touch my forehead, my throat and my heart. I exhaled each time, centering myself for my working. I shut my eyes and tried to remember the herbal spell book that I had studied, one of the first volumes in my collection that I had thoroughly committed to memory. After all, with a best friend like Melissa, with her herbal garden just outside her back door, I would have been a fool not to focus on such nearby riches.

Still holding the image of the spell book in my mind, I took one more deep breath and started chanting in a low voice, keeping the words between Melissa, the ginger root and I.

“Wild ginger, fire and earth—”

Nothing. I felt a gaping hole of nothing. There should have been a tingle gathering in my fingertips, a frisson of energy threatening to spark and spill over into the knobby root.