Magic and the Modern Girl (26 page)

I hurriedly led the way into the kitchen.

A bottle of red wine stood on the counter—Fish Eye Merlot. The corkscrew was laid out neatly beside it, flanked by two spotless glasses. Paper cocktail napkins fanned out in a neat array. A plain white bowl sat nearby, filled to the brim with bright orange goldfish crackers.

A note curled from beneath the bowl, and I recognized Neko’s scrawl from across the kitchen. “Sorry,” the page said. “This is for your own good.” I grabbed at the paper and crumpled it into a tight ball, before Will could see my “assistant’s” confession. Admonition. Whatever.

“Care to do the honors?” I asked, passing the bottle and corkscrew to Will. He took them reflexively, and I shoved an emergency handful of Pepperidge Farm’s most popular snack food into my mouth. As Will pulled the cork and poured, I busied myself toting napkins and crackers to the table. The glug of wine seemed loud in the room.

Will passed me a glass. “You’ve got a whole fish theme going here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said weakly. “It’s sort of a favorite with me.”

Will raised his glass, touching his rim to mine. We both sipped mechanically.

I remembered my opening line. “Will, I have—”

Unfortunately, Will chose that precise moment to fill the silence himself. “It sounded like—”

We both stopped, waiting for the other to go on. Will popped a few goldfish into his mouth, but I shook my head firmly. “Please,” I said. “You go first.”

He chewed and swallowed. “I was just going to say that your assistant said this was urgent. I told him at first that I couldn’t make it, but he said you really needed to see me.”

“Oh! I’m sorry. I mean, if there’s someplace else you need to be….”

He shook his head and gulped some wine. He
was
as nervous as I was. And I had to admit that I found his discomfort really cute. “No,” he went on, endearing himself more to me with every syllable. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have anything else planned. It’s just that things got so weird after that lecture…. I thought that you might need some space. Some distance.”

“I know I acted really strange.” I looked around my own kitchen, hoping for some wild distraction. It was too bad that my powers were on the fritz. I could have done with one hell of a spell-working session right then. I could have erased Will’s memory altogether, taken us back to a time before Ariel, before he’d seen me running around the United States Capitol like a madwoman.

Not enough powers for that, though. No memory spells. Nothing but the truth.

I took a deep breath and recited the sentence that I’d crafted so carefully at work, just that afternoon, “Will, I have something to tell you. It’s serious.”

Like a star performer, he recited his line perfectly. “I’m listening.”

A little bit surprised at how easily this was going, I went on to my next line. “I’m a witch.”

He stared at me. “That’s not funny.”

I couldn’t keep from saying, “What?” He’d dropped a line. He was supposed to say, “A witch. Like you’ve got magical powers and everything?”

Instead, he put down his wineglass and pushed his chair back from the table. “Come on, Jane. That’s not funny. You have your assistant call me. You have all of this laid out, wine and food, like you’re looking forward to seeing me. You make me sit down, and you start in on this totally serious conversation, and then you turn it into a joke?”

“It’s not a joke!” I was stung. This had all been going so perfectly. Where had my carefully constructed conversation gone astray?

“Yeah, right. You’re a witch. Worked any spells lately?”

“As a matter of fact, my spell-working isn’t going so well right now. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s what this is all about. I was trying to get my powers back, and I made that woman, um, the Artistic Avenger, to help me out.”

“Made that woman…Are you nuts? Or do you just think that I’m some kind of idiot?” There was anger in his voice, but something else. Something that I recognized. Something that I’d felt myself, more than once.

Before I could identify what I heard, though, I had to respond, “Of course not!”

“Do I really look that gullible to you? Is this some sort of game? Some scam that you work on people who come to do legitimate research at the Peabridge?” He blinked, and I could read shock behind the lenses of his eyeglasses. Shock, and defensiveness, and that something else, that all-too-familiar emotion that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“It’s not like that!” I let a little of my own self-protectiveness transform into anger. “I really
am
a witch!”

“I suppose you’ve got a broomstick, then? A black cat?”

“I do!” I said desperately. “Not a broomstick, no, that’s ridiculous. But I’ve got a black cat. You spoke to him! He told you he was my assistant. Neko.”

Will clambered to his feet. He glanced around my kitchen, his eyes wild. I could see his gaze focusing on the corners of the room, on the shiny black front of the stove. “I suppose this is where I should say, ‘Where are the hidden cameras?’ because I’m starting to feel like a fool.”

I shook my head, misery rising like a lump in the back of my throat. This entire conversation had gone so much better when I had been allowed to write all the lines. “It’s not like that!”

“What’s it like, then?”

And that’s when I recognized the emotion. That’s when I knew precisely how Will felt. I knew, because I’d felt that way myself, before.

Embarrassed.

Will thought that I’d been mocking him. Like I’d been leading him on. Like I’d lured him here to make him feel bad, to feel like an idiot, all for my own cruel pleasure.

And I couldn’t think of my lines, I couldn’t think of my words, I couldn’t think of anything I could say to make it better. To make him understand. To make him know that I hadn’t tried to hurt him, that I wasn’t trying to make a fool out of him in any way, shape or form.

Tears pricking at the back of my eyes, I shrugged and walked away.

I crossed the living room. I opened the door to the basement. I palmed on the light.

I held my breath as I walked down the stairs, hoping—fearing—that I’d hear his footsteps behind me. I waited, desperate for the sound of him crossing the living room, as well.

And then I heard him.

I heard him on the stairs. I felt him brush behind me. I saw him walk into the center of my basement.

I crossed to the far side of the bookstand, so that I could watch him as he took in everything in the room. Like any good intellectual, he noticed the shelves first, the volumes and volumes of leather-clad books. But then his gaze was pulled to the intricate box that stored my crystals, the wooden container of handcrafted layers, carefully hinged and folded.

Of course. He was an architect. The construction drew him.

He studied everything—the small wrought-iron cauldron on the bottom shelf, the bags of dried herbs beside it. He started to read the titles on the books, swallowing audibly as he processed some of the phrasing, some of the archaic words.

“I can’t believe these are real,” he said, and I could barely make out his whisper above the pounding of my heart. I could hear his surprise, though. Surprise, and something else. He
wanted
it to be real. He wanted to believe.

“They are.”

“But you could just collect this stuff, right? You wouldn’t have to work any real magic with it. You could be one of those fans, like the people who have every
StarWars
doll ever made.”

I had to prove myself to him. However sparse my powers might be, I had to show him the truth.

I glanced at the crystals that Ariel had cleansed for me. I couldn’t imagine scraping together enough energy to use their stony strength, to work their intensive brand of magic.

Of course, the runes were a lost cause, as well. Their bags still sagged in shapeless masses; I hadn’t bothered to replace them, since I still wasn’t able to muster my powers into anything resembling full witch status. I was afraid to take a book down, terrified that I would open it to reveal blank parchment, empty pages that would make my magic seem even more a sham. Or worse yet, pages where the ink drained away before our very anxious eyes.

I was on my own. Without my familiar, without my warder, without any of the familiar tools of my trade, I was on my own.

And yet, I could feel the faintest curl of magic, deep inside myself. It was the core of my remaining power, the precious drops hoarded from Ariel’s mind-speech. It flickered, faint, nearly invisible to my astral sight.

If I used it all, trying to convince Will that I was a witch, would anything magic remain to me? Would I turn myself into an ordinary woman, trying to prove that I was something more? Did it matter?

I had to prove that I was not lying.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I raised my left arm in front of me, cupping my hand at waist level. I took three deep breaths, trying to calm myself, trying to center myself, as I offered up my mind and my voice and my heart.

I closed my eyes and I whispered a spell inside my mind, one of the simplest I had ever read. I would have mastered it as a child, if I’d started down this witchcraft path in the normal way, like an ordinary magical girl with an ordinary magical life.

Dark shies;

Light vies.

Clear eyes,

Fire rise.

And when I dared to look, I could see faint blue flames glowing inside my cupped palm.

I couldn’t use them for anything. A moonlit night would provide more light. A soft breath would provide more warmth. As a symbol of my witchcraft, they were pretty sorry, utterly failing to leap high against my basement shadows, to crackle with the core of my supposedly awesome power and strength.

But they were real. They were there. They were a physical manifestation of my power, perhaps the last that I would ever show, if I couldn’t track down Ariel, couldn’t work things out with Gran and Nuri, Clara and Majom. If I couldn’t find out what had gone wrong and why.

Will looked from my palm to my face. His own features were slack with surprise, and he took a step back, as if he were afraid of me. “It’s not a trick, is it?” he whispered.

I shook my head. “Not a trick.”

“But this is incredible! Who else knows?”

The blue light flickered as I thought of everyone who knew I was a witch. “Some of my family. Other witches, their attendants.” Two ex-boyfriends, I thought, but I didn’t say. “A handful of others.”

“Handful?” he said, nodding toward my own cupped fingers. That’s when I knew everything was going to be all right. That’s when I knew that he was laughing, that he was accepting, that he was understanding everything I was telling him. He reached toward the blue fire dancing on my palm, and he repeated, “Handful?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said, and I shrugged, letting the magical power dissipate. The fire had consumed all the droplets of power that had lurked deep in my thoughts. I felt the vaguest sense of possibility, of potential, but I had absolutely no magic left to call on. Nothing.

In the end, some might have called the working frivolous. But I had needed to do it. I had needed to make my point.

“You’re amazing,” Will said.

I flushed. “You must say that to all the girls.”

“No, seriously! I can’t imagine what it must be like! To have magical powers! To figure out who you can trust and who you can’t, with a secret like that!”

Yeah, I thought about saying. I haven’t always made such good choices there. Instead, I said, “It just seemed like something I needed to do.”

I didn’t bother to tell him that I was empty now. That I might not work another spell ever again. I didn’t want him to feel any sense of guilt.

He swallowed, and his eyes were wide. His glasses made him look vulnerable, like an orphaned schoolboy struggling to be accepted as a man. “Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For trusting me. For trusting me enough to tell me. To share the truth with me.”

I tried to think of the right answer. I tried to remember my next line. I tried to discover the perfect thing to say, the flawless response.

I remembered that writing conversations in advance was an absolute waste of time.

I shrugged and said, “I thought that this was something you should know. Something you needed to know, if we were going to spend any more time together. That is, if you still want to see me. If you’re not put off by all of this….”

I waved a hand around the room, taking in all the strangeness, all the differentness, all the arcane substance that had been my life for the past two years. I couldn’t figure out what else I could say, what else I could do.

But Will knew.

He’d known since he’d asked me out for dinner. He’d known since we’d walked through Georgetown’s quiet nighttime streets. He’d known since that horrible car ride home, since the silence that Ariel had shoved between us, a silence all the more terrible because we had both wanted to move beyond it, both wanted to share our words, our thoughts. More.

He closed the distance between us. He pulled me close to his shirt, crushing my lacy bodice against his plain broadcloth shirt. He ran his fingers through my hair, nestled his hands against my scalp, pulling me close for a kiss.

I laughed against his lips, tasting Neko’s well-placed merlot, and my amusement raised a chuckle from him, like a funny question, asked and answered. We had meant to have that conversation the night of our first date, the night that David had waited for me like an overactive chaperone. We had moved toward it again in the days of left messages, the fumbling conversation where I asked him out. We had planned on arriving here the night that we saw Ariel, the night that she ruined everything at the Capitol.

His fingers traveled down; I felt them scrabble at the back of my neck, where an ordinary woman wearing ordinary clothes would have sported a zipper. He fumbled a little lower, then to the side, obviously perplexed by my costume.

I caught his hand and guided it to the line of perfect, miniature silk-covered buttons. “You have got to be kidding,” he breathed, and his rueful frustration forced a full-fledged laugh from my lungs.