Magic and the Modern Girl (3 page)

I washed away my discomfort with yet another swallow of mojito. “I better run downstairs to get the runes now. If I wait till Sunday morning, I know that I’ll forget them.”

Melissa held out her hand for my glass, silently offering a refill. I thought about taking the freshened glass down to the basement, but then I pictured sweet, sticky cocktail spilling over my witchcraft treasures. Better to brave the secret stash alone. Grinning, I handed over my glass and said, “‘I drink the air before me, and return or ere your pulse twice beat.’”

She faked a yawn. “
Tempest
,” she said, continuing our long-standing game of trading Shakespeare quotations. “Ariel. Hey! Have you seen the posters around town for that production?”

“Of
The Tempest?
”

“Yeah. They’re putting it on at Duke Ellington.”

“The high school?”

“It’s part of some outreach program. They’re updating the language and performing it in street clothes, making it ‘accessible.’” She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers.

“Sounds horrible.”

“But they’ve got a picture of the guy playing Prospero on the poster. He’s really cute. Looks a lot like David.” I didn’t say anything as I tried to reconcile the notion of my warder and the magician Prospero, not even trying to apply the adjective
cute
to David’s sometimes-severe demeanor. “David Montrose?” she said, as if I knew a dozen Davids we might be talking about.

“I knew who you meant.”

“I let them put up a poster at the bakery,” Melissa said, refusing to take offense at my dry tone. “Anything I can do to help preserve the arts,” she added piously.

“Even if preserving them destroys them? I hate that modern update stuff.”

“You’re just feeling superior because you’ve got the entire play memorized.”

I stuck my tongue out and quoted Prospero himself, “‘Now does my project gather to a head.’ Maybe I just feel superior because I’m right.”

“Or because you’re stubborn! Drink some more.” Melissa toasted me with her full glass and recited part of a line from later in the play. “‘If all the wine in my bottle will recover him…’” She laughed.

It was wonderful to have a friend who didn’t mind that I was a total, utter geek. I hurried downstairs to get my runes, before I forgot them again.

If I’d expected the basement to look different now that Neko was gone, I was sorely disappointed. I’d been consistently shocked that a man as fashion-conscious as my familiar had so few personal possessions. Of course, he
did
have a seemingly limitless supply of black T-shirts. And black trousers made out of leather, denim, linen and a couple of other fabrics that I couldn’t name. And an omnipresent pair of sleek shoes, vaguely European in their leather perfection.

But that was it. And now, even those meager possessions were gone.

I sighed and shook my head. Melissa was wrong. I wasn’t going to miss my housemate at all. I was going to revel in his absence.

I turned to the mahogany bookshelves that lined the walls. Clearly visible dust had settled over the nearest books. So, I wasn’t going to win any
Good Housekeeping
Seals of Approval for my housework. Who really cared?

When I had first classified my newfound books, I had sequestered all of the other witchy paraphernalia to one set of shelves. I had collected all of my crystals there, and delicate glass jars containing ingredients for potions. I had carefully laid out the wand that David made me use when I read from some of the oldest texts, the rowan pointer that made the words come into focus in a way that had more to do with magic and less to do with my itchy contact lenses or my often-smudged eyeglasses.

And there, on the bottom shelf, were the bags of runes. The jade ones that I had promised Clara, but other sets, as well—one carved out of wood, another cast in sturdy clay. The jade runes were held in a silk bag, its delicate embroidery hinting at some Chinese ancestry.

I found the bag exactly where I’d left it months before. The brilliant red stitches were a bit dulled with dust but that would be easy enough to brush away. Clara would never know the difference.

I clutched the sack. I expected to feel the runes shift inside. I expected to hear the jade squares click against each other, a familiar clacking sound like oversized mahjong tiles. I expected to see the faintest hard-lined bulges against the delicate silk fabric.

But something was wrong.

The bag was heavy in my hand, shapeless and sodden, like a sack of flour on the bottom shelf in the supermarket. Catching my lower lip between my teeth, I pulled open the laces that cinched the bag shut.

Inside, where I should have seen bright, green squares, I found nothing but dust. A sickly dust, like heavy, dried moss. I shifted the bag in my hands, wondering if my lousy housekeeping had somehow buried the runes in dirt. But there were no runes inside the bag.

My heart started pounding, and I reached for the next item on the shelf, the leather bag that held my wooden runes. I knew that there was something wrong before I opened the sack, before I found the sawdust that clumped in the bottom of the container. My clay runes were in a burlap sack. When I tugged it open, though, I found nothing but grit.

My runes, all of them. Destroyed.

I glanced toward the stairs, fighting the impulse to call for Melissa’s help. After all, what could she do? She’d never worked a lick of magic in her life.

Struggling against a rising snake of panic in my gut, I wrestled my box of crystals off another shelf. The wooden container was familiar to my fingertips; I had handled it every single day for months, when I’d worked regularly with David and Neko to hone my powers. I slid the hasp from its lock, threw back its lid to reveal the treasured crystals inside.

Amethyst. Spiritual uplifting.

Obsidian. Grounding.

Kunzite. Emotional balance.

Onyx. Changing bad habits.

All ruined. All faded, shrouded in gray webs, in dull destruction that seemed to have eaten the stones from within.

I bit back a cry and reached for the nearest book.
On the Healing of the Sick.
I tore open its cover, only to find my hand covered with red-brown dust, the detritus of dry, cracked leather. The parchment pages themselves remained unharmed, but the words danced and wavered as I flipped through the volume. As soon as I flipped the pages, the ink faded away, drifting to nothingness in the time it took for me to catch my breath.

I stormed across the room, reaching for a volume at random on another shelf.
The Role of Familiars in American Witchcraft.
Cloth binding. Faded as if it had been left for weeks in the heat of summer sun. And when I opened the covers, the rag-cotton pages blurred, then were bare.

I started to reach for another volume, and then a chilly finger stroked the nape of my neck. If I opened another book, I would destroy it, as well. If I so much as touched a cover, I might wipe away forever the words of wisdom contained inside.

My witchcraft resources were crumbling around me, and I didn’t have the first idea of what I could do to stop the destruction.

2

D
avid!
I thought my summons without voicing my warder’s name out loud.
Neko!
Even as I reached out with my powers, calling the men toward me, I realized how strange it felt to be using my magic. How long
had
it been since I’d worked a spell? Hurrying back upstairs, I wondered if this magic stuff was like training for a marathon. Was I going to be achy and sore tomorrow because I was overexerting myself right now?

I couldn’t worry about that—I needed to get to the heart of whatever was happening in my basement.
David!
I mentally shouted again.
Neko! Now!

As I walked into the kitchen, Melissa must have read something on my face. She set down her glass and stared at me. “What?” she asked, and her eyes drifted toward the silk sack in my hand. “You decided not to give Clara the runes?”

“They aren’t there.”

“What?”

“They’re ruined. Crumbled to dust. I don’t know what happened.”

“What do you mean, crumbled? They’re made out of jade, right? Out of hard stone?”

The cottage’s front door opened before I could answer her. “We’re in here,” I called out, trying desperately to sound nonchalant. Hoping that I
could
be nonchalant. Hoping that I was worrying for no good reason, that nothing was truly wrong, that there were dozens of benign explanations for how magical translucent stone could crumble away to useless green dust.

David Montrose swept into my kitchen. I could still remember the first time that I’d seen him, appearing on my doorstep like
Jane Eyre
’s Edward Rochester in the dark of a stormy night. He’d been furious with me then, enraged that I had released Neko from his form as a statue. Now, I recognized the power that had frightened me that night, the strength—both physical and astral—that coursed through his body, down his arms, into his fine-fingered hands. But I wasn’t afraid of him. He was my ally. My friend.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and we might have been picking up a conversation after a separation of a few minutes, not several weeks. Months, I thought, with a curious flip of my belly. It had been at least three months since I’d seen David. Um. Four. Could it really be five? Where did time go?

Wordlessly, I offered him the silk bag.

His dark eyebrows nearly met as his lips pursed into a frown. Silver glinted at his temples—more silver than I remembered. All of a sudden, I wondered what he’d been doing in his spare time, without needing to ride herd on me and my sometimes wayward witchcraft. There was a hardness to his eyes, a wariness, that made me think that he hadn’t spent the time catching up on back seasons of
American Idol
.

Before I could ask him what was new, though, before I could say anything to direct his study of the green dust in the bag, the cottage door flew open again.

“Let me guess, girlfriend. You just couldn’t stand the thought of an evening without—Oh.”

If I hadn’t been so worried about the destruction of my witchy paraphernalia, I might have laughed at my familiar. Neko stopped just inside the door to my kitchen. With perfect timing, he absorbed the presence of my warder, immediately twitching to an alert status that made me wonder if all the rest of his existence—the late-night party hound, the fashion guru, the man-man lover extraordinaire—were all some elaborate acting gig, all artfully created to misdirect the world from his true purpose as a channel of magic power.

Neko’s nostrils flared as he edged into the kitchen, and his gaze remained glued to the silk bag. I could almost see the hair rise on the back of his neck, and a low growl hummed deep in his throat. He moved like a ballet dancer, stepping sideways with a dangerous caution, and when he reached a single finger toward the sack, he glanced first at David’s face, then at mine, as if seeking approval. Permission.

I nodded. “Go ahead. Either one of you. Both.”

Poor Melissa was leaning against the counter, and I could see that Neko’s intensity frightened her. Hell, Neko’s intensity frightened
me
, and that was before I let myself wonder what David was thinking.

My warder nodded slowly and loosened the ties on the bag. He peered inside like a chemist examining unexpected results in an experimental test tube. As his thin lips twisted into a frown, I forced myself to say, “There’s more.” My voice came out thin and broken, and I cleared my throat, wishing that I could toss back another mojito or two before continuing. “There’s more,” I repeated, and this time my words were too loud, but I brazened through. “My other runes, and my crystals. My books.”

David passed the sack to Neko, who quivered daintily. I half expected him to hiss as he accepted the green dust, to offer up one of those terrifying feline sounds of disapproval, displaying fangs like a snake as he stretched his lips into a snarl. Instead, he weighed the evidence of destruction in his palm, shaking his head and setting it on the table with a moue of distaste.

“What?” I asked, and this time some of my fear came out as anger. “What is it? Is the Coven back? Are they ruining my collection because I wouldn’t share it with them?”

David shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “Nothing quite that simple.”

Simple! I wanted to shout. There was nothing simple about this! Someone had bespelled my cottage, my collection. Someone was attacking me, and I didn’t have the first idea who. Or why. Or how. I didn’t know anything at all.

“What, then?” I asked. “If it isn’t the Coven, what is it?” I heard the panic rising in my voice. I’d had a difficult enough time holding my own against my fellow witches last year. If David had the nerve to say now that that confrontation had been
simple
…. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the fortitude to face whatever he said next.

But David didn’t answer. My faithful warder didn’t give me a simple response, easy words that would still the pounding of my heart, that would make the metallic taste fade away at the back of my throat.

Instead, he shook his head and sat down at my kitchen table. The scrape of the metal-legged chair against my linoleum floor echoed the irritation in my brain. What was it? What was he not telling me? This must be something truly terrible, if he had to sit to tell me the news. I searched for a sign on his face, for any hint of meaning, but I could read nothing there. His smooth features formed a mask, like the blue cotton a surgeon hides behind before he tells exhausted, anxious loved ones that the worst has happened in the operating room.

That was it. David was going to say that my magic was killing me. He was going to tell me that I must stop practicing, that I had to give up all the arcane goods in my basement. He was going to explain that the collection was dangerous to me, that there was nothing to do but cut it out, destroy it, make one final brave effort to save my tragically shortened life.

“Do you have another glass?” he asked, looking meaningfully at the pitcher by Melissa’s hand.