Magic and the Modern Girl (40 page)

Authors: Mindy Klasky

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Occult & Supernatural, #Humor, #Topic, #Relationships

David was enjoying this. “I thought you
liked
being a librarian?”

“I do!” My nerves made me sound as if I was arguing. A log on the fire spat as it settled lower, sending up a little geyser of sparks. I tried again. “I do. But I’ve pretty much done what I can do at the Peabridge. It’s time to try something else.”

“Something else?” He stretched, as if he were disinterested, and then he settled back on the couch, closer yet. His arm trailed along the back of my sofa cushion. “There aren’t too many jobs out here in the country.”

“I could run a school.”

“A school?” He actually laughed out loud. I felt his fingertips on my shoulder, inching along to trace the neckline of my blouse.

“A school for witches,” I said defiantly. “A training ground for women like me. Like Gran and Clara. Witches who don’t want to work the Coven way.”

“The Coven way,” he repeated, and I felt the pulse of his fingertips against the hollow of my throat.

The magic flared between us just before he kissed me. I’d felt it building, gathering, coalescing even as my body responded to his touch. But I think that both of us were surprised when it snapped along the witch-warder bond like an electric shock. Like an electric shock—startling and brilliant, but without the pain.

“I’m sure you can work out something,” he whispered against the corner of my mouth. “Some sort of school.”

“With you,” I said, pulling him closer. My fingers tingled where they met his flesh. “With your help.”

And then he was pulling me to my feet. He was settling his palm against the flat of my back. He was steering me toward the stairs with an urgency that made me want to laugh. He was answering the way that I had wanted him to answer, that I had
yearned
for him to answer, during my long, nighttime drive.

But I stopped at the foot of the steps.

I wanted to go with him. I wanted to return to his bed. I wanted to erase the past three months of doubt and regret.

But I was still afraid. I was still afraid that I would wake up alone in that perfectly orderly bedroom. That I would come downstairs to find David silent and withdrawn. That I would find Warder-David in his place, grim and protective.

“Jane,” he whispered, and he swept aside my hair to kiss the back of my neck.

The shock went through us again, the electric power, the promise of our magic. This time, though, he did not pull away. He folded his arms around me, pulled me back until I could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

My pulse raced to match his. Power pounded through my body, carried by every cojoined heartbeat. Our bond was a physical thing, enfolding us like golden robes. My power was melded to his; my strength was meshed with his. We were two astral beings, each drawing on the power of the ancients, separate, but inalterably together.

This was the man who had seen me—who had seen to the magical core of me and beyond—in Ariel’s magic circle on the White House lawn. This was the man who had stepped toward me, who had locked his gaze to mine, who had raised his arms to protect me, to join with me, against all the power arrayed against us.

His warder’s magic beat around us, through us, his strong and driving energy mixing with the swirling force of my own witchy powers, giving, taking, until I could no longer be sure which magic was mine, which was his.

This was why I could never have stayed with Will. This feeling, this force. Will could love me, always. He could honor me. He could respect me. But he could never share this feeling, this magical awareness, this perfect, golden perception of all the world around me, within me. No matter what he did, Will would never share this witchy part of me.

But David could. He did. He felt it, too.

I heard his breath catch in his throat. I forced myself to pull away from him just a little, just enough that I could turn to face him. I made myself look into his eyes, recognize the expression there. The love. The chance that he was taking with me, the vulnerability that he had never shown to another person, to another witch.

“David—” I started to say, and his name wove into our power.

“Jane,” he said, closing the conversation, wrapping it back around us, binding us together more completely, more honestly, than I’d ever been bound to any man—Will, or the Coven Eunuch, or the Imaginary Boyfriend, or all the other missteps I’d taken to arrive here, now.

Now I knew that, despite his playful seduction in front of the fireplace, David proposed more than a magic-charged romp. He was offering more than a warder’s required service. He was making a broader statement, announcing a deeper plan. We’d reached a new place, a different place, a place far scarier than any I had seen with him in two long years of attraction and respect, of flirtation and regret.

I turned away, suddenly overwhelmed by the gravity of it all. David was changing the rules. David was breaking down walls. My warder, who had always done what was right. My warder, who had always pulled back, always pulled away, even when I had not wanted him to do so. My warder, who had always been gone in the morning.

Terrified to accept what he was offering, I let myself be distracted by Spot, who was shifting noisily in his plaid bed. I scanned the kitchen through the doorway, glancing at the back door, looking for an escape, for a separation I was not at all sure I wanted.

I spied a brown paper bag that I had missed on the kitchen counter. A knife sat beside it, serrated edge barely visible in the dim light. “What’s that?” I asked.

David answered with a kiss that left me clutching at his arms for balance, a physical answer to an emotional question that I had not even known I still wanted to, needed to, ask.

Sheets of magic tumbled around us, so completely intertwining our powers that I could no longer say where my witchy abilities ended, where his warder’s tricks began. The bond between us expanded in my consciousness, the rope that had pulled him to me across time and space, the tie that had forged between us when I first stumbled on the magical books in my basement.

This was what I needed. This was the rapport I craved. This was the balance, the nature, the meaning—this was the most that witchcraft and love combined could be.

“Sesame bagels,” he whispered against my throat, turning me back toward the stairs. “For breakfast.”

MAGIC AND THE MODERN GIRL

A Red Dress Ink novel

ISBN: 978-1-4268-2256-8

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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