Small Magics (12 page)

With a heroic tug, the pig squeezed through the hole, leaving clumps of brown fur on the wire. Chad swore. Pol ran to the fence door and struggled with the piece of wire hooked through the lock to keep it shut.

The pig cleared the path from the soccer field and ran onto the old wooden staircase. The stairs led down, and back to River Street. On the left rose a huge yellow apartment building, and on the right sat a row of old storage sheds, covered in grey waves of fibrocement roof. The top of the stairway was just about level with the storage sheds.

The pig looked left, looked right, backed up a couple of steps, and leaped onto the roofs, its hoofs clacking on fibrocement.

Pol finally worked the door open and they filed out onto the path. The pig backed away from them. It had reached the edge of the roof, and it had nowhere to go.

Chad measured the distance between the stairs and the sheds with his gaze.

"You're too heavy," Marky said. 'The roof will break. Let me…"

Chad was too heavy, but she wasn't. Alena took a running start and jumped. The fibro cracked under her but held. Step by step she began to advance. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Chad, Marky, and Pol run down the staircase, trailing her.

Step. Another step.

The pig gathered itself into a tight clump. Long red scratches scoured its sides, where the fence had torn off the skin when it tried to escape the soccer field.

"It's okay," she told it. "It's alright. It will be okay." Her feet really hurt from all the barefoot running. A stray thought zinged through her brain: this can't really be happening, can it? She pushed it aside, bent down, and grabbed the pig.

It didn't struggle. It just looked at her with huge dark eyes and she was struck by an oddly sad expression in their depths…

With a thunderous crack, the roof collapsed under her feet.

Alena plunged into darkness, pig pressed securely to her chest. Her damaged feet hit something hard. Suddenly there wasn't enough air. She choked, coughed, and realized she'd landed in a pile of coal stored for the winter.

Outside something crashed and then the door was torn from its hinges. Bright light stabbed into the shed. Chad appeared in the light. He held a switchblade in his hand. "You did good," he said. "Real good."

She rose to her feet shakily, clutching the beast.

"Give me the pig," he said.

Her voice came out dull. "No."

"Give me the damn pig," he snarled.

Something inside her broke, like a glass rod being snapped in two. Magic flooded her, roaring through her veins. Behind Chad, Marky backed away and she knew her eyes had ignited with pale green glow.

"No," she growled. The magic swelled inside her and broke loose.

The shed exploded. Chunks of coal pelted the walls, going right through the soft wood. She took a step forward. Chad lunged at her and fell back, knocked aside like a twig.

That was her talent. She didn't have anything elegant, like her father's ability to precisely pinpoint a location miles away and establish that first tenuous connection which would allow the building of a water communication line. Nor was her magic complex like her mother's ability to reconstruct images with her mind with perfect recall.

No, her power was simple and brutal, like her grandfather's. Alena took another trembling step. Pol pulled out a knife and stabbed at her, trying to penetrate the invisible cocoon of magic. She let the magic tear the knife from his hand. The blade streaked past her and bit into the nearest shed, sinking to the hilt. The magic brushed against Pol, and he went flying across the asphalt.

Such a simple magic, really. If she didn't want an object within six feet of herself, it moved out of her way.

Streaks of silver shot in a continuous tornado of magic around her, bright footprints of her power.

Chad had doubled around her and barred her way up the staircase. "Alena..."

"Move," she said.

He held on for another second, his hands white-knuckled on the rails, and then he moved aside. Limping and shuddering, she climbed up the stairway, up the steep path to the gate of her home's wooden fence. As if in a dream, she opened the door, crossed the path between the rows of rose bushes, and came up three stairs to the porch.

Her own reflection stared at her from the glass of the kitchen window.  Orange clay covered her left side. Everything else was black with coal dust. Her hair flared from her head in a tangled filthy mess. Her eyes blazed with green. Even the pig she still held seemed to know better than to offer any resistance. It just sat in her arms, filthy with a mix of clay, coal, and its own blood.

She looked down at her legs. Her stockings were in tatters. Long scrapes marked her bare feet.

By this evening everyone in the neighborhood would know what happened.

Alena sniffled, reached into her pocket, pulled out a key, and let herself in.

The family had just sat down for dinner. They saw her and froze. She looked at them, from the slack-jawed Aunt Ksenia, to the stunned face of her father, to her mother, petrified in mid-move, a pot of mashed potatoes in one hand and a big wooden spoon in the other, and hobbled past them, to her room.

They watched her go. Nobody said a thing.

Inside, she locked the door, crossed the room to her bathroom, got inside, and slid to the floor. Her magic died. Tears swelled in her eyes.

She released the pig and it backed away from her.

"This was my favorite blouse," she told it and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. "This mess will never wash out. And I don't even know why they were chasing you."

Alena crawled up onto her knees, picked up the pig, and maneuvered it into the tub. "And you got all scratched up. Look, you're bleeding everywhere. We need to wash that or it might get infected."

She turned on the water and began to gently rinse the clay and coal dust from the pig's sides.

"None of this would've happened, if that damn idiot hadn't stood me up. That stupid sonovabitch. Do you know how awful that felt? I felt this small." She held up two fingers with barely any space between them before picking up the soap and building it into lather on the pig's back. "And it's not like Dennis even was a decent boyfriend. He didn't even noticed I was a girl. It's not like I wanted him to be all over me all the time or shower me with flowers. Just some small acknowledgment that I was pretty or at least female would've been nice.  So what do I get? I get Chad Thurman who stares at my chest and tries to slaughter small animals.  How is that fair?"

She rinsed the pig off and examined the scrapes running down the pig's sides.   Not too bad.  The little beast gotten off with mostly scratches.

"You're one lucky pig.  All of your battle scars are shallow." She sniffled, blinking back the tears that kept wanting to break through her defenses into a full blown deluge. "After I'm done, we'll put some nice poultice on your hide to keep you healthy. And you know, I perfectly understand that you can't understand a word I'm saying.  I never thought I'd end up in my bathroom looking like this pouring my problems onto a pig."

She paused and stared at it helplessly. "It's just that I have nobody to talk to. And if I don't talk, I think I'll fall apart to pieces. And I don't want to do that, because then my family will pity me."

Alena reached for the towel. "Let me tell you about Chad. You should at least know who you ran away from. It all started with a sleigh…"

Fifteen minutes later, the pig's wounds were treated with cinnamon-smelling poultice and Alena had ran out of words, she set the pig on the bathroom floor and began to strip her own clothes off. "I think we'll have keep you in protective custody," she said, climbing into the tub. "Until Chad gives up on his pig-killing dreams. I can probably guilt Father into building some kind of sty."

She picked up the shower head and turned on the water. "So I--"

The pig jerked. Its brown hide boiled, expanded, twisted, like a rapidly inflated balloon, paled, and snapped into a nude man. For a brief moment they stared at each other in total shock. Alena caught a flash of wide shoulders, young face, and dark intense eyes beneath brown eyebrows. The man raised his hand, uttered an incantation, and vanished.

That was too much. Alena dropped the shower head. Her knees buckled. She sat into the bathtub and collapsed into tears.

* * *

Someone knocked on the door. Alena put her head deeper into her pillow.

Mother swung open the door and brought it a tray. "It's been three days," she said. "I understand you don't want to come down for the family meals, but you have to eat something besides a sandwich a day."

A sandwich a day had been great, Alena thought. That way she didn't have to field questions from Boris and her sister.

Mother put the tray down and said next to her on the bed. "Would you like to talk about it?"

Alena shook her head.

Mother pursed her lips. "This isn't what your father and I had in mind. Had we known it would turn out this way, I would've never let you out of the house. If it helps, the story hasn't made the rounds. Everybody is talking about how Thurmans are in a heap of trouble. They've managed to offend one of the patrician families, very powerful. Not sure how in the world they would even have come into contact with them -- must've been through their bank. Rumor has it, Thurmans have to pay out an enormous sum to avoid a feud. They're liquidating their investments to raise cash."

Alena looked up. "So the date was completely for nothing?"

"It appears so."

It figured. Maybe she was cursed.

The doorbell rang.

"I'll be right back." Mother pushed the tray toward her. "Eat. Please."

Alena looked at the tray. French fries and a piece of baked chicken. At least it wasn't a pork chop. She wouldn't touch another piece of pork even if she was starving to death.

Mother reappeared in the doorway. "Come." Her voice left no room for negotiation.

Alena sighed and got up. What now?

She followed Mother downstairs to the foyer. The outside door was open. She saw her father on the porch, wearing a plaintive expression she'd never seen before. Her mother pushed her lightly, propelling her out the door into the sunlight.

"Here she is," she heard Father say and then he brushed past her into the house and shut the door.

Alena blinked against the sunshine and raised her hand to her eyes.

Wide shoulders, dark eyes, and brown hair.

"You!"

He nodded. "Yes."

Heat rushed to her cheeks and she knew she blushed.

He was about twenty and taller than her by half a foot. Even with the loose green t-shirt it was plain that he was muscular, but his wide shoulders and powerful chest slimmed down to narrow hips and long legs that looked very nice in blue jeans and boots. He stood with a natural poise, light on his feet, and somehow elegant, despite his slightly disheveled hair. His skin was tan, and his face made her blush harder. His eyes were very dark, like bitter chocolate, and smart. He wasn't strictly handsome, but he was definitely attractive and very masculine.

And he had seen her naked. After she chased him half across Old Town, clutched him to her breasts and carried him around for good fifteen minutes, and then told him her life story.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," Alena echoed, wishing she could fall through the porch and vanish.

He dragged his hand through his hair. "This is really more awkward than I thought it would be."

He would get no arguments from her.

He pushed his hand through his hair again. Something gleamed on his hand -- a ring. Her shocked brain took three whole seconds to digest the significance of the crest on it. A patrician. Oh God. He belonged to one of the magical heavy-weight families.

"My name is Duncan. Would you like to go on a date with me?" he asked.

Alena recoiled. He felt sorry for her. "I don't need charity."

Duncan took a small step back. "I see. I understand, considering the circumstances. Well, if you do feel charitable, I've left my number with your father…"

"I meant that I don't need you to go on a date with me out of pity," she said and almost fainted from her own bravery.

"Pity?"

"Yes. I told you everything. You probably think I'm some sort of hysterical dimwit to be laughed at. Actually, it's taking all of my willpower to stand here and speak to you and not run away screaming."

"It's taken pretty much all of my willpower to ask you on a date," Duncan said. "I mean, I was a pig. There might be a worse way to be introduced to a beautiful girl, but I can't think of any. If anything, I'm the laughing stock here. I'm a Class II pyro."

Alena blinked. A Class II pyromage. He could incinerate entire city blocks in a matter of moments.

"I have been properly educated. And I've managed to blunder right into a trap set by three punks whom I should be able to take down blindfolded with one hand tied behind my back. It's good the academy is out for the summer, or my desk would be filled with pig ears." He growled low under his breath.

"How did you…?"

"A friend of mine had been chased by a pack of wild dogs into a warehouse in this area," he said. "And then when his family came to get him, they were ambushed. A rabid dog is classified as an imminent danger illusion. It's illegal. I came down to see if any traces of the illusion remained, followed the residual magic to its source, and walked right into a trap. In my defense, it was a very good trap, a military grade short-range transmutation mine. I don't know where the hell Chad and his hangers-on got it, but it's illegal for a civilian to own one. More, while it's not unlawful to defend a family's territory, setting traps and summoning imminent threat illusions is carrying it way too far. Chad knew what he was doing would land him in hot water, and once they discovered me, he told the smaller guy…"

"Marky," Alena supplied.

"Marky, to slit my throat."

She crossed her arms. "He's lost his mind."

"He knew the mine magic would wear off eventually and he hadn't a prayer of taking me on when I was human. It was a lot easier to eliminate me while I was a pig. Lucky for me, neither Marky nor his pal had the balls to do it. Apparently Chad decided to kill me himself, but I decided not to go meekly to the slaughter. And you know the rest. Once the mine's effect wore off, I ported back home and came back with cavalry. The thing about military mines -- when they go off, they leave a magic trail that even an idiot could follow. We have Thurmans by the throat. That dumb stunt will cost them their financial security, and if they play very nicely, we might condescend not to bring charges."