Magic and the Modern Girl (31 page)

I shook my head. After a few deep breaths, I managed to say, “It’s working. My magic is building. She has it all, within her. It’s locked up, so that I can’t get at it.”

David pulled me to my feet. “They’ll be back in a minute. Let’s get out of the spotlight.” He marched me down the endless steps, holding me upright when my knees decided to imitate Jell-O. Only when we were on the ground level, halfenrobed in shadows beside the Reflecting Pool, did he let us stop. “I don’t understand,” he said. “The night that you created her, you said that everything worked exactly as we planned.”

I stared into the darkness, toward the accusing finger of the Washington Monument. George Washington. The man who could not tell a lie. “About that spell,” I said, unable to meet his eyes.

“What happened, Jane?” His words were frozen.

How could I tell him? How could I admit that he had distracted me? That I had been thinking of his arms, of his chest, of his bed, of that entire glorious, mistaken afternoon, when all the time I should have been focused on creating my anima? How could I admit that I had let a stupid promotional
poster
sway my concentration?

“My God, Jane, are you all right?”

I whirled at the new voice, recognizing it even before I found the speaker. Will.

He skidded to a stop beside us. “What’s going on? I grabbed a cab when I got your message. The driver had on WTOP. They said there was some sort of disturbance at the memorial.” He glanced up the stairs. “Some sort of riot?”

David stepped forward before I could speak. “It’s over now. Everything is under control.”

Will ignored him. “Jane, are you all right?” he repeated.

“I’m fine.”

David put a hand on my arm. “I said, it’s over now.”

I slipped away from his touch, crossing my arms over my chest. Will looked from me to my warder. “It’s David, right?”

“That’s right.” I could hear the abrupt authority in his voice, the animalistic boundary that he was drawing. I didn’t want to be part of that argument, though. I didn’t want to be his possession.

“Well, thanks for making sure that Jane was safe.” Will planted his feet more firmly. In a different age, he would have been summoning his second and setting a place for dueling pistols at dawn. He turned to me and offered a soothing hand. “Let’s get out of here. Are you ready for dinner?”

“Dinner?” David sounded like an adult laughing at a child’s knock-knock joke.

“We had plans.” Will managed to swallow some of his defensiveness.

“Jane doesn’t like to eat dinner this late.” David was tossing down his own gauntlet.

“She didn’t have any problem accepting my invitation this afternoon,” Will said.

“Where are you going?” David asked, eyes narrowing. It sounded as if he thought that Will was lying, that he was making up our late-night dinner plans.

“If you really have to know, Paparazzi. In Georgetown,” Will said. That was news to me, and I winced, but only because David and I had once shared a midnight meal there. “A little alfredo for two.”

My warder apparently had not forgotten. He raised a provoking eyebrow. “She prefers baked ravioli. For dinner.”

“But sesame bagels for breakfast.”

I couldn’t believe it. David was actually knocked silent; Will had deflated him with one simple line. A line that made me blush as David absorbed its full import, but one line all the same.

My warder turned to me stiffly. “We have to finish this conversation. Tomorrow. Phone me after you wake up.”

He strode into the darkness. Before I could even look at Will, my familiar came loping out of the shadows. “Neko,” I said, cutting off whatever was going to pass as a smart comment from him. “Go after David. Tell him everything you learned.”

“But—”

“Now,” I said. “Go.”

For once, he listened to me.

I was shaking by the time I turned to Will.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was ugly. That was possessive and stupid and…rude.”

“It was,” I agreed. I could see his face fall in the darkness, read the disappointment in his expression. I said, “David can have that effect on people.”

“Really?” Will said. I knew that he was asking about more than my warder’s behavior. I knew that he was asking about me. I knew that he was asking if I forgave him, if I was willing to have dinner with him, if I was willing to do more.

My heart was still pounding. I looked up at the floodlit stairs, realized that people were wandering up and down, as if it were any other night at the tourist spot.

Ariel must have gotten away, slipped from the crowd. She was out there, somewhere, burgeoning with power that was rightly mine. I needed to find her, needed to tame her, needed to control her like the anima she was supposed to be.

But for now, I needed time away from the chaos. I needed a human companion and a night without witchcraft and worry, without spells and deception. I slipped my hand into Will’s. “I’ll share alfredo with you any time,” I said. I managed not to look back at the memorial steps as we walked away. And for the rest of the night, I managed not to think about Neko and Ariel. And David. I didn’t think about David at all. Not even when the couple next to us shared an order of baked ravioli.

16

S
eptember ended, and Mabon, the Autumn Equinox, passed without any change in the magical environment. Ariel, the Artistic Avenger, the anima that was holding all of my power hostage, had apparently gone underground.

I heard about her often enough.
The Washington Post
set up Avenger’s Watch, running a hotline by phone and a blog on their Web site. People sent in their sightings—dozens each week. I knew that some of them could not possibly be true. Ariel would not cut her hair, would not—could not—even bleach it. She was bound to wear her gauzy dress, no matter how cool the autumn air became. She was not going to take a trip to Rio, to the Bahamas, to Australia, to perfect a tan, no matter where the rumormongers placed her on the globe.

I knew that she wasn’t a real, human woman. She was bound by the way that I had created her; her body was set, even if her mind had somehow gotten away from me. Those surface features could never change.

Still, she remained perfectly elusive. She’d apparently lost her taste for dance concerts. She modified her tactics, leaving giant signs sprawled across places no real person could access. Empower The Arts was splayed across the reading room of the Library of Congress, the letters shaped out of books that had been pulled from the shelves, stacked on the floor. The slogan found its way onto the columns at the World War II Memorial, in bold, black letters that took some poor custodian days to scrub away. It was stenciled onto the doors of the National Archives.

Ariel had a taste for vandalism that frightened me. But she certainly had a way of making her message heard.

I was booting up my computer on the Tuesday after Columbus Day when my phone rang. A quick glance at caller ID said it was Will, calling from his cell.

“Hey there,” I said. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” The busy life of an architect was catching up with my boyfriend—let me say that again, my
boyfriend
. He was finding it difficult to juggle nights at my place, days at his office, and the huge Harrison project that was swooping toward deadline—the housing plans for his dot-com billionaire with a colonial mansion fixation. I’d left him in my bed, curtains drawn, pillow over his head, groaning that he was going to take a personal day.

“I’m heading back to my place. At least it’ll be quiet there.”

Oh. That didn’t sound good. “What’s going on?”

“David phoned. Apparently, he thinks that you’re screening your calls, because he called three times back-to-back. I picked up the fourth time.”

I winced. David and I had been seeing each other twice a week, working with Gran and Clara on building up their powers. The witchcraft instruction was going only slightly better than our verbal correspondence. We nodded hello and actually verbalized goodbye. Otherwise, we spoke only to Gran, Clara and the familiars, pretending that we were too busy, too driven, to have anything else to say.

Even Neko had given up making snarky comments, trying to reconcile us by way of his wit. There was a certain grim determination about every training session. The mood was made darker by the fact that I still had not succeeded in teaching Gran or Clara anything substantial. Sure, they could thaw a cheesecake. They could even, on a good day, summon their familiars, silently, from across the room.

But manipulate crystals? Brew a potion with any truly useful qualities whatsoever? Empower even the smallest charm?

They could not harness their magic, and I was absolutely unable to find a key to unlock that barrier.

I was just about ready to call a stop to the charade altogether. So what if the Artistic Avenger kept up her campaign? So what if she successfully lobbied Congress to increase funding for the arts? She wasn’t doing any harm on the magical front.

And I was more and more certain that I was willing to let the magical bit of me slip away. What good had it done me, in the past two years, anyway? It had gotten me romantically involved with two real losers. It had dragged me into a snake pit of female jealousy that made high school look like fun. It had burdened me with a familiar who thought it was a game to pick apart every single thing I wore, ate or touched. It had left me with a brooding, possessive warder who apparently thought that I was more a thing for him to own than a person for him to respect.

Life would be simpler without witchcraft. Life would be sane. Life would be normal. Life would be the perfect slice of pie I’d been feasting on with Will for nearly a month, minus the drag of failed training sessions. I was so, so tempted.

I sighed and said, “What did he want?”

“He said to call him. As soon as possible.”

Great. I still hadn’t really told Will about David—at least not about sleeping with him. As far as Will knew, David was just my overprotective, overbearing warder. I kept telling myself that Will didn’t need to know anything else. After all, I was never going to end up in bed with David again. Not a chance of that.

David was just a Number—a guy I’d slept with in the past—and Will and I weren’t sharing Numbers. I had no interest in the women he’d slept with before me; there was no reason to count them up. (Okay. I had a little interest. A lot of interest. But I cared more about keeping my own list secret, than about learning the specifics of Will’s.)

“I’ll get back to him,” I said, trying to sound brisk and businesslike. And I would—when I was good and ready. I relished the opportunity to pay him back for all of
my
phone calls that he had ignored. Besides, I really resented his triple-calling. As
if
I would be the sort of person to screen my calls. Oh. That’s right. He actually knew me pretty well.

I glared at the red “message-waiting” light on my desk phone. Now, I was virtually certain that at least one call from David had triggered the signal. Well, that was fine. I could ignore him at work as well as I could ignore him at home. I glanced at the drawer where I kept my purse locked away. It was a good thing that Evelyn insisted that we keep the library a cell-free zone. David couldn’t reach me there, either. I’d talk to him when I was good and ready. And his hounding me at home made me that much more inclined to wait another day or two.

I softened my voice and said to Will, “I’m sorry that he bothered you.”

“I’m not,” Will said, and I could hear his grin over the phone line. “He sounded really surprised when I picked up the phone.”

There was that gorilla behavior again. Why didn’t they just agree to a cage match and be done with it? I rolled my eyes and grunted, “You Tarzan. Me Jane.” Will responded by roaring like a lion. I started hooting like a chimpanzee, because I’d always had a soft spot for Cheeta.

I looked up to find Evelyn standing over my desk. “Whoops! I’ve gotta run.” I hung up the phone and hastily spread a professional smile across my face.

My boss tried to erase her startled expression, but she wasn’t quite fast enough. Not for the first time, I wondered what she really thought of me. I knew that she despaired of my ever gaining the level of professionalism that she hoped for. She pursed her lips and said, “Jane, I have a special project for you.”

Oh, goody. “Sure. What do you want me to do?”

“The fire marshal came by yesterday. He’s concerned about the papers on top of the bookshelves, down in the basement. If the sprinklers ever came on, they couldn’t flow freely with everything stacked up there.”

If I recalled, Evelyn was the one who had decided to use the bookshelves as auxiliary file space. She’d argued that there was never enough storage in a special collection like ours. “Did you want me to move them?” I asked, trying to cut to the chase.

“I think you should read through them. See if there’s anything worth keeping. They should be duplicates of our vendor records from the eighties. That’ll give you a good idea of the management issues the library has faced over time.”

Great. Paper records of purchases made decades ago. And Evelyn wondered why we ran out of space. “I’ll get right on it.”

So, this was the glory of management. Kit got to spend her day working with patrons, answering questions, and I ended up with dust-reddened eyes, with vision blurred by peering at endless invoices. I would have loved the chance to brew a cup of coffee or two, even the old-fashioned coffees I used to make, with time-consuming foamed milk and patron-confusing choices like macchiatos and cappuccinos. How nostalgic I could become for the words
con panna
.

If I was going to waste an afternoon sorting meaningless material, I’d rather be doing it in my own basement, at home. Maybe I could find the courage to open my books, try to read from them before the writing faded away, attempt to force my way back to magic or destroy every last volume trying. At least then I’d know where I stood. Then, I’d know that the books would never trouble me again.

Once again, I was going to meet with Gran and Clara after work. I was going to try—once again—to lead them through a bout of spellcasting. Try—once again—to figure out a way to bolster their powers. Try—once again—to shape our little witchy community into something that could support me, that could feed my powers back to me. My frustration made a headache pound to life behind my eyes.