That Touch of Magic (3 page)

Peach’s eyes locked on me in alarm. “Oh. God. Stace! Are you okay? Do you need a drink? Happy Larry’s opens at noon.”

“I’m fine.” I forced a laugh that sounded hollow even to my own ears.

Liv pushed up from the table, looking wretched. “I really have to go. Brenda will be here soon and we’ll go back to my place, okay?”

“No, guys, really. I think I just want to be alone,” I said, but no one was listening.

“Okay,” Peach said to Liv. “I’ll stay here with you until Liv’s ready, and we’ll all go.”

“You’re not going anywhere in that goddamned dress,” Eleanor said, amping up the Brooklyn in her accent.

Peach turned on her. “Can’t you see we’re in crisis here?”

Eleanor narrowed her eyes. For a seamstress, she was pretty scary. “You wanna be in crisis? Try going somewhere in that dress.”

“Really,” I said. “Guys, I’m fine. It was ten years ago. Stop making such a big deal out of it.”

Liv looked at me, nibbling her lip, and Peach crossed her arms over her middle. They glanced at each other doubtfully, and I managed to get up from the table all by myself, which I thought was pretty impressive.

“I have a load of work to do,” I said, stepping around Peach’s huge dress. “And I’m tired. I think I might nap.”

I kissed Peach on the cheek. “Thanks for coming so fast.”

I patted Eleanor on the shoulder. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

I reached out and squeezed Liv’s hand, pressing the money from Deidre Troudt into her palm. It was a hell of a tip, but I didn’t care. I just needed to get out of there, fast. I didn’t have time to do the math on two cups of coffee and personal bodyguard services. “I’ll call you later.”

They might have responded to me; I don’t know. As I walked out of Crazy Cousin Betty’s, I couldn’t hear anything but a big, crashing wave.

Chapter 2

I drove home on autopilot, finding my way to my trusty Winnebago on the dusty outskirts of town without realizing I had done it until I was pulling the rickety screen door away from the rickety regular door. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and it had been free; my aunt Ruthie had given it to me before she ran off to South America with husband number four.

“I think you might need a place to get away from your mother sometimes,” she’d said, stuffing the keys and the papers at me with one hand while the other lifted a frozen margarita. I was only twenty at the time, but even then I knew how right she was. The ’Bago didn’t drive; Ruthie had blown a gasket on it while driving it around town for her fourth bachelorette party. I’d had it towed to the four-acre lot I’d purchased with the intent of building a real house someday. The thing was, someday never came, because I never wanted a real house. The permanency of a real house gave me the twitches, whereas the ’Bago always felt comfortably temporary, even after nine years of sitting in the same spot.

I crawled inside, lay down flat on the bed, and stared at my ceiling. Ceilings in general are boring things to stare at, but try staring at the ceiling in a Winnebago for three hours. It’ll make you want to stick a fork in your eye, just for the variety. Of course, if I closed my eyes, all I saw was Leo’s expression of mixed shock and elation when he first saw me, and I felt all over again that wonderful, terrifying happiness quickening in my chest, only to be beaten to death by the
How stupid are you?
two-by-four.

“Arrrrgh!”
I yelled finally, grabbing a pillow and pressing it over my face before tossing it aside and sitting up. This was no way to spend my time. I had to do something, distract myself, think about something else for a while.

I stuffed my feet into my work boots and headed outside into sunlight that was a little too bright for my taste. I mentally cursed it and squinted, trudging my way down the path through the woods to my sanctuary.

It was just an old garden shed, but it was one of the few things in the world I loved. It had been on Millie Banning’s grandmother’s farm outside of town, and when we were kids, she, Liv, Peach, and I used to have sleepovers in that old shed. It was pretty big, even for a shed, and we pretended it was our apartment and that we lived there together while we each pursued our dreams. Liv wanted to be a television journalist, tracking down bad guys and getting them to confess on tape; Peach wanted to be a fashion model; Millie wanted to be an astrophysicist; and I wanted to be independently wealthy. The three of them would run around, pursuing their dreams, and I would laze on the sofa (a big piece of foam we’d covered with sleeping bags) and eat Doritos while watching Liv pretend to interview someone while hunched inside the huge fake television we’d made out of the box her mom’s new oven had come in.

I never expressed to any of them how much I loved that shed. Sometimes I would go visit Millie just so we could sit together in the doorway of the shed, drinking Diet Cokes and singing bad duets. We were too old to pretend by then, but I still would. I’d pretend that Millie and I were sisters, and that I had also been raised by someone who baked cookies and showed up for school plays and high school graduations.

And then last year happened. Magic came to town in the form of a badass conjurer named Davina Granville, who had set her sights on taking Liv’s power. Millie, easily the most fragile out of the four of us, had stupidly let Davina use her to get to Liv, all in an attempt to steal my brother from Peach. Just thinking about it made me furious, even now. Millie had loved Nick for all those years, but had never said a thing, and then when Peach and Nick got together, instead of turning to us and letting us help her, she lost her shit and gave herself over to the most dangerous person who’d ever stepped foot in Nodaway. In the end, Liv had survived, but Millie had not. Our foursome was cut down to three, and I still hadn’t forgiven Millie for letting that happen.

Anyway, when the bank sold off Millie’s property, I bought the shed from the new owners. I didn’t have any particular plans for it at the time, but then the county library downsized and I got laid off and it turned out to be damn near perfect for my new career making magical potions. I wasn’t sure if Millie would be happy about me finally having a direction in life, or sad that I was profiting from the very thing that killed her. I liked to believe she was happy for me, and if she wasn’t, then it was her own stupid fault. If she hadn’t gotten herself killed she could yell at me.

I continued down the wooded path, the sunshine a little more bearable now that I was shaded partially by the trees. I followed the bend in the path to the small clearing where I’d placed the shed. The trees were full with summer leaves, dappling the sunlight into the open space, making it feel more magical than anything I’d ever accomplished with potions. This was the magic of hope, of potential, of dreams. The regular world was no place for that kind of nonsense, but here, in this one space, I could believe in that kind of magic again.

I went around to the side of the shed and yanked the generator cord one, two, three times … and it finally took. I’d need to get a new one before winter hit, but that wasn’t today’s problem, so I wasn’t going to worry about it.

I took my keys out of my pocket, popped open the padlock, and stepped inside, feeling peace wash over me as I did. The floor was packed dirt, which gave it a wonderful, earthy smell; clear Christmas string lights lined the doorway and the windows, as well as the ceiling and some of the shelves. I’d painted the wooden walls a bright yellow; the shelves, cloud white. My workbench, which lined the back wall, I’d painted a periwinkle blue. Holding up either side of the workbench were a series of shallow drawers, each with a ceramic drawer pull on it, all of them bright, cheerful, and mismatched. Mason jars in varied sizes lined the shelves, all containing the magical herbs I’d collected over the last year. I’d printed out pretty, swirly labels for the jars in cheerful pastels, and tied ribbons around the mouths of the jars to color-code them by intention. Most ribbons were blue, indicating perception magic, but a few were in dangerous red, indicating some of the rarer and more interesting samples I’d gotten my hands on and set aside for the days to come when I’d be able to do more hard-core stuff. It was my haven, my happy place, and my secret shame. If anyone knew I had gone all Martha Stewart out here, I’d never be able to hold my head up in town again.

I sat on one of the pair of leather-cushioned, twirly bar stools I’d appropriated from Happy Larry’s, started up my little MacBook, and got to work.

*   *   *

I don’t know how long I’d been working in my garden shed, but by the time I looked up from my workbench, the sun was close to setting and with a sudden
whap!
of consciousness, I realized I was starving. It was like that sometimes. They say you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing when you lose time like that, when the world spins quickly around you and you stay in one space. If that’s true, then I’m supposed to be making magical potions, I guess. Or maybe it was just how much I loved the shed. Either way, happy was happy, and I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. It wasn’t going to last, I knew. Even in that flash of reconnection to the world at large, I could feel the reality of Leo’s return like a punch to the gut.

I pushed him away and focused on the work.

I glanced at the Erlenmeyer flask full of steaming amber liquid over the Bunsen burner and checked my watch. Three hours and forty-five minutes; it was almost done. I had no real hopes of success. Most of my work had been perception magic, beginner stuff. Creating something physical with potions was varsity-level shit even for the most highly trained conjurers. For a rogue conjurer like myself, who didn’t have any official training, it was both stupid and improbable. Which, of course, was exactly why I was trying it.

Truthfully, according to the strictest of conjurer’s codes, I wasn’t supposed to be doing even the low-level perception magic unsupervised, let alone attempting physical magic. That was the kind of thing people went to special schools in Europe or Japan to learn, apprenticing for years before they could even try it under supervision, but the Internet was a beautiful, if dangerous, thing. I’d found the formula on a website last winter, and had downloaded it out immediately, which was a good thing, since the entire website where I’d found it had disappeared by the time I went back to it again after dinner.

The formula hadn’t worked yet, but I wasn’t giving up. The magical community was only about 1 percent of the population at large, but where there was power, there were people watching. The people watching this particular power took the form of two shadowy magical agencies, and I had no desire to get their attention. So even if I managed to create physical magic, I couldn’t tell anyone.
I
would know, though, and that would be enough.

I could tell Leo,
a sinister thought broke in.
He’d be happy for me, and he’d never tell anyone else.

I shrugged the thought away and pulled out an Edison vial, named for its likeness to a tiny lightbulb and made of super-thin glass that flattened just enough on the bottom to give it stability. I glanced at the screen on my MacBook and read the instructions out loud.

“Wait until a single bubble has emerged from amber liquid and surfaced at the top, remove from heat source and allow to cool for ninety seconds.”

I watched the liquid carefully, waiting for the single bubble to form at the bottom and then move slowly to the surface. This part always went just fine, so when the bubble disappeared on the surface of the solution, I wasn’t nervous. I removed the vial from the burner with my tongs and carefully set it on the workbench, then hit my timer and looked back at the glowing screen on my computer.

This
is where I got nervous, the part where it always went wrong in the past: the transfer from flask to bulb. Sometimes the potion turned black when I moved it, which was bad, or it was too hot and it cracked the Edison vial, or it was too cool and turned to honey-colored sludge. Every time, I made a note in my notebook to figure out where it had gone wrong, and tried something different the next time.

Conjurers are kind of an odd group. They’re not naturally magical; their magic comes from potions and centuries of secrecy. But in the age of the Internet, where information wants to roam free, it’s hard to have power like that and not show it off. To prevent the magical agencies from catching her sharing rogue formulas on the ’Net, a conjurer would usually put in one or two wrong details; if you followed the directions exactly as written, you’d never get it to work, and that was the loophole they would try to use to get out of trouble if it found them.

I’d made it as far as I had by uncovering one obviously wrong step in this formula—she called for purified rather than distilled water when making the base, which is a rookie goof and any conjurer with half a brain would catch it—but I couldn’t be sure how many more errors were in the formula, not until I’d tried everything. I knew there was something at this point that wasn’t right, but who the hell knew what? And there was always the possibility that the formula was right, and I was just too green to be able to pull it off.

I looked at my remaining instructions.

Pick up flask and swirl 2x counterclockwise.
I’d already tried one and three swirls, both counterclockwise and clockwise, and two counterclockwise was definitely the ticket.

The timer dinged, and I picked up the flask and swirled it two times, watching as the now-blue liquid cleared the steam from the sides.

I glanced again at the instructions.

Remain calm. Breathe twice.
I always found this part stupid. What my emotional state had to do with conjuring was beyond me, and it always sounded like old wives’ tales. Still, when a formula reminded me of this—and they all did—I followed the instructions as laid out. The ingredients were expensive, and humoring superstition was free. But of course, tonight, as soon as I read the words
Remain calm,
I saw Leo’s face in my head again, and my heart skipped a painful beat.