Magic and the Modern Girl (35 page)

Reflexively, I stretched for the bond between David and me, the magical one. I had tested the connection obsessively since power started to trickle back into my storehouse. I knew precisely how much weight I needed to place on the link, how much I needed to apply to pull him toward me. I could measure out my energy precisely, count it like a miser’s coins. I could control it, without sparks and confusion, without whipsaw unpredictability.

Will shifted in the front row, and I backed off from the bond, as if the touch had burned me. David didn’t move.

Judge Anderson was finally intoning the wedding vows. Gran and Uncle George repeated their lines carefully, proudly. At the judge’s instruction, the couple exchanged rings. They kissed.

They were married.

After twenty-five years of dating, after whatever tempests had brewed in their respective teapots, after decades of saying that there was no need for change, for formality, Gran and Uncle George were one couple, united in the eyes of the law.

Kit pressed a button and Andrea Bocelli’s voice rang out, filling the auditorium with Fauré’s “Chanson D’Amour.”

Gran and Uncle George led the way down the aisle. I followed, taking Mr. Potter’s arm and reminding myself to walk slowly, to ignore all the eyes that had to be drawn to the silver lamé bow across my ass.

When we passed David’s chair, he was gone.

The guests gathered in the upstairs reference room, eager to congratulate Gran and Uncle George, to compliment Judge Anderson on a job well done. Melissa swiftly took on the job of cake-cutter, and Will volunteered to open a bottle or six of champagne. Everyone chatted and laughed, and I knew that the simple ceremony had been better than anything Gran had hoped for.

Still, I sought her out after a few minutes, to make sure that she wasn’t too wistful about the party that hadn’t been.

Uncle George was clapping his hand on Mr. Potter’s shoulder, regaling a group of opera friends with a story about some ancient production. Gran had taken the opportunity to snag a chair, slipping off her sensible black pumps.

“It was beautiful, Gran.” I sat beside her, using my years of Peabridge costume expertise to shift the lamé bow toward the side.

“Thank you, dear. It’s wonderful to be surrounded by friends. I’m just so sorry that Neko couldn’t be here.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” I said.

She sighed, and then she looked around the room. “There, dear. Why don’t you bring David a nice slice of cake, and a glass of champagne? He looks so lonely standing by himself.”

Our warder was, indeed, lurking by himself, staking out a corner by my not-so-beloved coffee bar. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want to be the one to bring him into the crowd. I was still more than a little unnerved by how easily I had reached out to him, by how routinely I had touched the connection between us during the service. I tried to tell myself that it was the memories, it was the calendar. It was the power of Samhain that had set my nerves a-jangle.

“Some cake?” Will said, appearing from nowhere, balancing three plates. He settled one in front of me and one in front of Gran, taking the third for himself. Gran looked pointedly at mine before glancing toward David, but I managed not to understand her instruction. I was spared a direct command by Mr. Potter’s jovial voice as he stepped to the center of the room.

“Ladies!” he exclaimed. “Gentlemen! Friends!” It took a moment for the mutter of side conversations to die down. “Now is the time for the best man to give his toast!”

“Hear, hear!” some hearty soul called. I smiled. Gran’s friends were formal in a quaint, old-fashioned way that I had loved ever since I was a little girl. Before Mr. Potter could begin his speech, I snuck a bite of wedding cake. The buttercream was flawless—rich, smooth vanilla, the perfect complement to the delicate cake beneath. Neko would have been in heaven.

“It’s the custom,” Mr. Potter said, “for the best man to tell about his longtime friendship with the groom. I’m supposed to tell an amusing little anecdote about a time we shared, a time before the groom met the bride, a time before the happy wedding at hand.” He paused dramatically. “Well, no one here has known George that long! After twenty-five years of George and Sarah dating, any story I might tell would be so old and so outdated that you would boo me out of this fine room.”

On cue, someone booed, and the rest of the crowd laughed. I snared another bite of cake.

Mr. Potter continued. “When George first told me that he was going to propose to Sarah, we had a good, long laugh. We joked about wedding registries, and how George and Sarah could finally afford to get a decent set of pots and pans. But when we stopped joking, George told me that he knew they didn’t need any gifts. They didn’t need any markers from friends. They had all the worldly riches they could ever use.”

I looked at Gran. Her eyes were clear, and she held her head high. She obviously knew what Mr. Potter was about to say, and she was excited by it. She reached out and squeezed my hand.

Mr. Potter looked toward me, as well. “In fact, George and Sarah wanted to
give
gifts, rather than to receive. Your invitations all said, ‘No presents, please.’ What they didn’t say is that Sarah and George are the ones distributing presents tonight.”

Mr. Potter gestured, and Gran climbed to her feet after sliding her shoes back on, twitching her deep-green jacket into place with a single efficient tug. Mr. Potter held out his other hand, and Uncle George took it; the three of them stood in the center of the reference room, holding the perfect attention of every single guest.

Mr. Potter cleared his throat, and then he said, “George and Sarah decided to take my advice. They decided to donate to a favorite charity, a different charity than the one that most of us know so well, to the Concert Opera. In honor of their wedding, George and Sarah have made a very generous donation to Human Rights Watch.”

There was a rush of pleased surprise from the assembled guests. I wondered how many people in the crowd were familiar with the watchdog group, how many realized that Gran and Uncle George were supporting gay rights. Listening to the hubbub, I twitched my lips into a smile. Neko would have been snarkily amused.

Mr. Potter raised his glass. “To Sarah and George,” he said. “Long may their generosity guide us all! Cheers!”

“Cheers!” sang the crowd, and glasses clinked against glasses.

A swirl of well-wishers came between Gran and me. I turned to Will, caught him laughing at the surprise on a couple of guests’ faces. “Did you know about this?”

“Rob mentioned it earlier. He helped them find a lawyer to draw up the appropriate papers.” Will leaned in and kissed my cheek. He knew that I was worried about Neko. He whispered, “I’m going to get us more champagne.” I nodded and watched him cross the room. I shuddered involuntarily, suddenly chilled without him standing right beside me.

When I turned back toward Gran, Clara had approached. “What a wonderful gesture!”

“It was just something that we wanted to do, dear,” Gran said.

Realizing that the three of us were alone for a moment, I couldn’t keep from asking, “But why the change? Why not something to do with opera?”

Gran looked around at all the guests. She dropped her voice enough that Clara and I both had to take a step closer. “I had to do it. For Neko.” She cleared her throat, and then she shrugged. “Besides, do you remember that night, two years ago?” I narrowed my eyes. Two years ago, my powers had just awoken. Two years ago, I had just been learning what it meant to be a witch. Gran helped to narrow her meaning. “You had spent those days down in the basement, organizing your collection, after that horrid man lied to you. And we finally lured you up to the kitchen with fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.”

Oh. That night. “I remember.”

“Do you remember the secret that I told you then?”

Of course I did. Gran hated opera. She had gone along with Concert Opera for years because Uncle George loved it, because it was important to him. I nodded.

“Well, I told him.”

“You what?” My voice was louder than I meant it to be. My exclamation attracted a little attention. Majom came dashing across the room from where he had been studiously pushing buttons on the terminal for our online catalog. Nuri sailed behind him, as if the familiar had accepted the responsibility to watch over her colleague for the night.

“What?” Majom asked, launching himself against Clara’s hip. Gran clicked her tongue, patting him on the head in a hopeless attempt to get him to settle down.

“It was time,” she said to Clara and me.

“I would say so, Mother.”

“But why? Why now?”

“I couldn’t get
married
with that sort of secret between us. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be fair to George.” She could date the man for twenty-five years, but marriage changed everything. It was sweet, in an old-fashioned way.

“But what did he say?” I was fascinated, awed.

“He said I should have told him twenty-five years before. And he said that his hearing’s going, so he’s not able to appreciate the performances the way he used to. We’ve decided to keep working on the board, to continue socializing with all our friends, but I think we’ll probably miss a few performances next year. And, with any luck, a few more after that!”

I shook my head. All those years. All those lies. A facade maintained in the name of love, torn down almost overnight.

Before I could say anything, Majom perked up. He cast his eyes toward the ceiling and stood up straight, dropping the fork that he was using to spear the remnants of my slice of wedding cake. Nuri followed his gaze by reflex, and then she also jumped to her feet.

It took me a moment longer to hear the noise. It sounded like a train, barreling down on the library. No, not a train. A plane. A dozen planes. Flying lower than any planes had any right to fly.

“Those are fighting planes!” Clara said. “Scrambling fighters—we used to hear them at the Sedona airshow every year.”

The other guests had heard them now. Chairs were pushed back. Plates and glasses were dropped on tables. Everyone hurried to the doors, dashed into the garden, looked up into the moonlit sky.

I turned around in the midst of the chaos, wondering what was happening. Adrenaline fired my blood. Reflexively, I reached my powers toward David, skating toward his protection. As I triggered the bond between us, I felt another touch, another astral tug.

Faint.

Distant.

So vague that I had to sit to concentrate. I closed my eyes, ducked my head into my hands, trying, trying to find that contact once again.

And there it was. So far away that I could barely feel it.

Neko.

Jane. We’re at the White House. Come now.

18

B
efore I had fully registered the faint words, David stood before me. “Let’s go.”

Clearly, his warder’s knowledge had brought him into the link; he had heard Neko’s message. But had he heard the faint tinge of desperation? The outright fear? Did he know what we were traveling to meet?

Clara spoke up first. “What? Where are you going?”

David was looking over his shoulder. The reference room had emptied out; all of the wedding guests had run outside to see if there were still fighter planes in the sky. I said, “We found Neko.”

“Where?” asked Gran. Understandably, she looked around the library, as if she expected my mischievous familiar to be hiding behind a table.

“He’s at the White House. And he needs us.”

The words sounded absurd, like the summons of a comic book hero. And yet, they made perfect sense. Ariel had been playing all around the nation’s capital; she had acted out her mission on the steps of Congress, on the thresholds of federal landmarks. Stepping up to the president’s own home wasn’t really much of a change for her.

“Are you ready?” David asked. “I can take all of us there.”

Clearly, he wasn’t talking about driving. However impressive, his Lexus wasn’t going to cut through traffic at this hour. Between Halloween revelers in Georgetown and Secret Service officers responding to whatever had summoned the jets, it would take hours to get across town.

I looked around the room. I had to tell Will what was happening. I had to let him know where I was going.

“There isn’t time,” David said.

“But—”

“There isn’t time.” I knew that tone. I knew the iron behind those words. I’d seen David carve out ultimatums before, mandate my training, my safety. There would be no arguing the point.

Will would have to understand.

David was already orchestrating everything, taking it out of my control. “Sarah, put your arms around Majom’s shoulders. Good. Nuri, hold on to Clara. I’ll take you first.”

He put both his hands on Clara’s right arm, pulling her close as if they were going to practice some somber ballroom dance. Nuri flew into the embrace, and then all three blinked out of sight.

“Clara!” Gran exclaimed, and Majom scrambled out of her grasp, pouncing on the spot that his witch had occupied only moments before. I seized the boy just as David flashed back into sight, mere inches from where he had started.

“Sarah, now,” he said, reaching out to clutch Majom’s hand at the same time that he settled his right palm on Gran’s shoulder. I started to speak, but they were gone before I could finish drawing a breath.

Just—gone. Not a shimmer of air, not a glint of light. One moment, they were standing in front of me, and the next I was staring at empty space.

Magic shouldn’t be that easy, I thought. There should be a visible transition, like the old transporter on
Star Trek
, shining with dancing lights as people came and went. I didn’t understand. I’d never truly appreciated what my warder was capable of doing.

David reappeared. Silently, he held out his hand to me.

“I—” I started to say. But I didn’t know how I intended to end that sentence. I didn’t know if I meant to protest. I didn’t know if I meant to thank him. I didn’t know if I meant to say that we were back to where we had stood a year ago, on Samhain, as our future rode on my ability to master powers I wasn’t sure I had.