Witch's Bell Book One (53 page)

She looked up from the mud pile she had
created. There was a spade leaning next to an overturned table, the
exact same patio table that I often liked to have my breakfast at,
and it was clogged with dirt.

I made a point of raising an eyebrow and
looking up and down my grandmother. She had dug a hole, a fairly
hefty, deep one considering how old she was. She had filled it with
water and mud, and she was now dancing around in it like a woman
trying to crush grapes. Except there were no grapes, just dirt, and
it had covered her pants and top completely. She even had it
splashed across her face, and a couple of clumps dangling from her
purple-rinse curls.

She grinned at me. A very cheeky, somewhat
disassociated grin. “Good morning,” she chimed.

It was very much the afternoon. I ground my
teeth. Sometimes I didn't know if she put it on. If she only said
highly unsettling things and dug holes in the yard so she could
irritate me.

“It's the afternoon,” I conceded as I
cleared my throat, “a fact you are well aware of. And something
else you are well aware of is that you can't bloody well do magic
in the yard,” I dropped my voice low, very low at that point, and I
had no doubt that Mary could still hear me; everything else might
be going, but her hearing was fine. Exceptional even. If I ever
tried to have a secret conversation with someone on the phone and
she was at the other end of the house, I swear she could always
pick up on what I had been saying.

“Magic?” My grandmother's lips wobbled open
as if she were surprised at the mere mention of the word.

“I'm not a trainee witch any more, Grandma,
I know a weather spell when I see one. Now do you want to cover it
up, come inside, wash, and help me prepare some dinner?”

For a moment my grandmother narrowed her
eyes, and it was a move that reminded me so much of how she had
been when I was a child. Strong, impossibly powerful. My role
model. A figure that had taken up so much authority in my life. She
had been the one I would always turn to if I had a problem with
magic, and she would be the one to track me down if I ever did
something wrong. Well now our roles had changed. She was the kid
outside playing in the mud, and I was the one trying to tell her it
just wasn't done.

“A weather spell, ay? Are you sure?”

I was about to turn away, head back inside
to grab a towel and mop in preparation for my muddy grandmother to
track her way to the bathroom, but I paused. I glanced back
carefully. “Yes, that's right, a weather spell.” Was she
challenging me?

“Let me see.” She brought a hand up and
started counting off on her fingers. “All you have seen is a spade,
a hole, mud, and a miraculously well-preserved grandmother dancing
around in it. And you have concluded from this scant evidence that
I am engaged in a weather spell?”

She really was challenging me. Though it
happened less and less these days, occasionally the old bat would
grow lucid enough to remember her training. “Yes,” I kept my arms
crossed. I knew what to do when I was questioned. Hold your ground,
snarl if you had too, but look as deadly as you can. And my years
of growing up with my grandmother had taught me just how one can
narrow their eyes in the right way, stiffen their jaw, and pull
their lips to the side to give off a definite feeling of
concentrated rage and anger.

“Well you are wrong, young girl,” my
grandmother finally pulled herself up and out of the hole, showing
a grace that she simply should not have considering her age.
Bringing up a completely mud-covered hand, she patted at her curls,
raising an eyebrow at me as I still stood there with my arms
crossed firmly in front of my chest. “This is a garden spell,” she
trilled.

Even though I tried to control myself, I
couldn't help but falter. My eyebrows descended in a twitch. “No it
isn't,” I tried petulantly.

This only caused her to laugh, and it wasn't
entirely pleasant; it reminded me acutely of just how much of an
authority my grandmother had once been. “I beg to differ. And if
you feel like challenging me, take that spade, go over to my lovely
little mud pit, dig down, and see what I was dancing over.”

Damn. She had a point.

I wasn't about to go over, pluck up the
spade, and actually bother to dig around in that ridiculous mud pit
though. I would take my grandmother's word for it.

“There is still a lot you must learn about
magic.” As my grandmother passed me, she flicked her curls again,
and headed unashamedly to the patio, splashing mud everywhere as
she did.

I narrowed my eyes at her, stopped short of
shaking my fist, and headed over to the spade to at least cover up
the hole. Even though I was damn sure that no one could see into
the yard, I didn't like the idea of somebody accidentally catching
a glimpse of a deep mud pit. Who knew what they would think.

After I had filled it in, and had grumbled
at every splash I had gotten over my stockings and skirt, I finally
went in to find my grandmother helping herself to a sandwich from
the fridge. She was still covered in mud of course, as was the rest
of the kitchen now.

“You have a lot to learn about the
subtleties of spells and enchantments,” she shoved the massive
sandwich in her mouth and took a hearty bite.

I crumpled up my nose as I watched her eat,
noticing every single time her muddy fingers tracked across the
bread, lettuce, and cheese.

“Influence magic is very, very context
sensitive,” my grandmother brought up her hand and waggled a finger
my way. “The difference of one single ingredient can change the
nature of a spell.”

I knew all of this, I really did. But I was
still kind of right here. Regardless of what kind of spell my
grandmother had been casting, she shouldn’t have been doing it
outside in the yard where everybody could see ... Okay nobody
could see, but it was still outside, and that was too visible for
me.

“Couldn't you have done it in the bath?” I
flopped a hand behind me, indicating one of our many bathrooms.
“And when exactly are you going to clean yourself up?”

She shrugged her shoulders and took another
enormous bite of her sandwich. For an old lady, she still had a
ravenous appetite. She could, and previously had, eaten us
completely out of house and home.

“A bath? How am I going to make anything
grow if I'm standing on enamel and ceramic? You need to be
connected to the ground.” Mary latched her hands onto her muddy
pants, placing her sandwich down for a second, and pulled them up
as she danced on the kitchen floor, splashing dirt everywhere. “You
should know that. It's in the details,” she brought up a finger and
pointed it at me again, “every single little detail. If you want to
learn how to influence the world through magic, you must be ever
sensitive to everything around you. Gather facts, my dear witch,
and you will gather power.”

I nodded my head, even though what I really
wanted to do was roll my eyes. I had to keep reminding myself that
while my once powerful grandmother was now heading full force
towards dementia, I still owed her respect. Because underneath she
was still the same woman, just at a different stage of life.

“Anyhow, enough lessons, they do so tire me.
How was your day at work, my dear?” She grabbed up her sandwich and
went back to cramming it in her mouth.

I brought up a hand and tucked my hair
behind my ears as I tried to do a quick mental calculation of how
much time it would take me to clean the kitchen of all this blasted
mud and dirt. “Fine, I guess,” I said distractedly.

“It can't be that fine; you sound as if you
have been forced to endure the trials of Hercules himself. Has
anyone been making you fight water monsters? Have you had to steal
magical apples from the gods?”

I smiled pleasantly, if you call pleasant
thin-lipped, stiff, and entirely unhappy. “Just the same old
business.”

Though I was technically a witch, and I
wasn't a particularly bad one, it didn't pay all the bills.
Especially when you lived in an enormous house that was crying out
for repairs and had to keep on buying hundreds of dollars of
groceries a week to keep your grandmother fed.

One of these days, if it were ever possible,
I would love to live off my magic alone, but I doubted it would
ever arise. There wasn't that much call for witches these days, not
because people didn't like magic, but because they didn't know
about it. It was particularly hard to make a living off something
that was entirely secret, that you couldn't advertise, and that you
couldn't tell anyone about unless they already knew it existed.

It hadn’t been like this
hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, or so I had been told. When
magic had been more widely practiced, accepted, and known about,
many witches had lived off their trade alone. Then the dark ages
had come along, or something like that, witch hunts and whatnot, I
wasn't really that up on the history, all I could tell you was that
in the 21
^st
century it was practically impossible to get along only
being a witch.

“You should open your heart to the
possibilities of magic. It can be practiced at every single moment
in the day. A true witch understands the power of context and
influence,” my grandmother reminded me for about the thousandth
time.

I knew that lesson, but it wasn't one I
required repeating today. What I really needed was for my
grandmother to clean up this mess, have a bath, and maybe, just
once, not trash the house while I was out at work.

“I don't suppose we had any requests today?”
I asked as I walked over to the kitchen table, frowning at the
dirty dishes.

How they had un-cleaned themselves, taken
themselves out of the cupboard, and stacked themselves back on the
table, I didn't know, and I didn't want to ask. Probably some
ridiculous spell my grandmother had attempted.

“Unfortunately not, my dear, but my new
herbs arrive tomorrow, and I'm very excited about it. I imagine the
love potions I'll be able to make from these, and the special
healing tonics, will be quite fantastic.”

I listened to my grandmother with half an
ear as I stacked the dishes and took them over to the dishwasher,
making sure to frown their way, as if that would help.

“You have signed your custom papers this
time, right?” I turned over my shoulder to face her.

“Of course I have.”

I nodded my head. At least one thing was
going right. Because I really didn't need a knock on the door from
the police ready to drag my grandmother away for importing God
knows what into the country. She did so love her herbs, and I
understood how important they were to magic, but in modern times a
lot of the substances she wanted for her spells were ... to
put it mildly ... absolutely freaking illegal. We’re not just
talking dried lizards that could bring in various bacteria and
viruses, we’re talking freaking narcotics. The kind of thing that
would get you in a great deal of trouble, and the kind of thing I
really didn't need to deal with on top of all of the other hassles
that were already assailing my life.

Last time my grandmother had tried to import
her latest bunch of new herbs, I'd spent almost two hours down at
the customs office, trying to get them to understand that she was
old, and she didn't really understand it was illegal to import
sleeping pills en masse from South America.

To my grandmother, they contained a
substance that was absolutely necessary for various nocturnal
enchantments; to the police it looked like she was trying to set up
her own illegal pharmacy.

Pressing my fingers into my brow, I soon
finished stacking the dishwasher. Loading in the soap and turning
it on, I patted it several times as if in warning. I really didn't
need the dishes to unstack themselves and wind up on the table
again.

“Patting it won't do any good, but a chain
would,” my grandmother commented. “I think there's a lock somewhere
out in the shed, and you remember that old ship’s anchor we dredged
up one day from the bay? You could put it on top, I'm sure it would
get the impression then,” Mary pointed through the window towards
the shed.

Chaining up a dishwasher, locking it up, and
popping a ship’s anchor on top to weigh it down so it didn't
unstack itself was not something that ordinary people had to deal
with.

Well welcome to the extraordinary. Yes, it's
full of magic, but I can't exactly claim it's full of fun.

“I'm going upstairs to have a shower. Please
do me a favor and hop in the downstairs bath?”

Granny appeared to consider my words for a
moment, then she clearly got distracted as she watched a flock of
birds fly past the window above the kitchen sink. “My oh my,
they're practicing weather magic. Rain is on the way,” she brought
up a hand and waved at them.

Birds practicing weather magic. If we
weren’t both witches, such a statement would lead me to conclude
that my grandmother's slip into dementia had turned into a
landslide. But I understood, I understood perfectly.

We looked at the world in a different way.
Magic made you do that. If you practiced it, it completely changed
your perspective. It wasn't just witches and wizards that could do
potions, spells, and enchantments; anybody and anything that
followed the correct steps practiced magic as well.

The squirrel that hoarded nuts, dug them
into the ground, and left them there for the winter, practiced a
type of growth magic. The butterfly that flapped its wings over the
Amazon, was practicing a kind of chaos magic. The giant blue whale
that swum through the ocean, breaching to the surface only to swim
back down again was practicing a type of wave magic.

Everywhere, everything was engaged in some
kind of spell. You just had to know what to look for.