Your Magic or Mine? (22 page)

So, what to do?

She had to keep her head on straight, not fly off the handle as she usually did, according to her brother. If she was arguing with Clay, she’d attack to force his reasons out. Not a good approach to Forscher, as closed as he was. He’d lock himself deeper in his cave, and they’d get nowhere. Better to remain calm. Be ready for any outcome.

What did she want that outcome to be? Truth be told, she did want a loving mate and children. She expected it. Having a family was part of being a practitioner. She’d never thought about it much until her sister and brother had both found their mates in the course of a year. If she let it, the idea consumed her thoughts. Daria’s pregnancy must have stirred up her own hormones, her own latent desires. Why else the panic she’d experienced at the news?

She wasn’t against having a mate, only this particular one. She didn’t even understand his magic. When he’d displayed his equations and proofs, it was like looking at gibberish. She knew chemical and molecular formulas and diagrams, but his math was
way
out of her league. She knew he understood it, down to each little sigma and plus-or-minus sign.

How
he manipulated his mathematical illusions was another question. Were they true illusions, the same kind she used when she created the figure of a panther around her? Complicated illusions could take a long time to build. Ones that performed like computer spreadsheets—change one variable and see the effect ripple through it—were far beyond her expertise.

She’d never seen her father cast a spell like that with his auditing and accounting techniques. Furthermore, her mother understood what her father did, even if she couldn’t cast his spells. Daria understood Bent, and Clay understood Francie. Shouldn’t she expect the same?

What did her inability to understand mean for her being with Forscher? Soul mates were supposed to be helpmates, too—able to offer support and encouragement. How could she when she couldn’t offer even an intelligent comment about what he did? On the flip side, how could he help her when he seemed almost frightened of her magic?

They hadn’t discussed the emotional side of the situation, either. Oh, she’d experienced practically every emotion possible in the course of their discussion—especially before, during, and after that kiss. But what was he feeling? The kiss had certainly affected him physically. Emotionally? He’d reverted to the intellectual, emotionless man he’d been from the start. She could almost see him build the walls to shut in his feelings—and shut her out.

Yet she had always been about feelings, emotions, passions, as much as she’d been about the intellectual pursuit of her profession. To deal with him, she’d have to keep her emotions out of the equation—oh, how she was coming to hate that word—and talk in his terms. Be logical, practical, composed like he was, or he’d never hear a word she said. Keep her head on straight and, most importantly if he was going to reject her, guard her heart against the imperative’s efforts.

What on earth could have caused him to be that way? He came from a soul-mate family. He had the same sort of parental example she did. Soul mates always loved each other, and that love always encompassed their families. How could he not want to be a part of it?

That brought her back to the basic problems. How could two such different people possibly be mates, but how could she convince an invisible, magic power that it was making a mistake? If she did, would another soul mate appear? Who knew?

He, on the other hand, was implacable, completely against having a soul mate, her or anybody else. Worse, he didn’t appear to be someone who easily changed his mind.

Where did all her thinking leave her? If they were mates, she was damned if he rejected her, and damned if she did the rejecting.

Either way, she’d never have what her brother and sister had—a mate who loved her as much as she loved him and the possibility of children.

She almost wept at the thought, and her center vibrated in sympathy. Then it hummed—a distinctly encouraging feeling. She put her hand on the spot, and a pleasant, soothing tranquility settled over her.

In her floating state, she began to wonder what her children with Forscher would have looked like, how the combinations of hair and eye colors would have worked out. She fell asleep mentally constructing a possible family tree like biologist Gregor Mendel had done for common pea plants.

Marcus refused to let himself think about his—or their—predicament even after he returned home and retrieved Samson from the boarding kennel. The hound was definitely unhappy about being left with strangers instead of his usual stay with George and Evelyn. Too bad. He knew he’d have to face his friends soon enough, but not right this instant. Not yet.

Evelyn, however, smashed his resolve to atoms when she called and ordered him to dinner on Wednesday, no excuses accepted.

So, he went, luxuriated in her hug, drank some of George’s superb scotch, and discussed the debate, which they had watched on the Webcast.

“How did the evaluations go?” George asked over Evelyn’s delicious pot roast. “I’m always leery of those on-the-spot forms.”

“Ed e-mailed me today with the quantitative results. If you leave out the extremes, ninety-two percent of the respondents want more discussion. A few said they had actually tried the formula, and one reported trouble with the ‘ingredient measurements.’“

“That’s been one of the problems from the beginning,” Evelyn said. “Did anything new come out of the comments?”

He wasn’t going to worry them with the four rabid replies, of course, so he simply said, “Nothing that I could see.”

“All the information’s really out there already,” George said, “what with the articles and reports and the Webcast. If we practitioners act like we usually do, we’ll hash and rehash the issues until some real research is done on how to apply calibration to magical power. After that, we’ll talk some more.”

“We caught a glimpse of your family and the Morgans in the audience,” Evelyn put in. “Your mother looks as beautiful as ever. How are they?”

“They’re fine. Yesterday they left for Europe—a little vacation, a conference for Judith, meetings with colleagues for Stefan.”

“What about Gloriana?” George asked, his tone innocent and his eyes full of glee.

“She’s fine.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

George chuckled. “What about her being your soul mate?”

“George, I told you not to tease the man,” Evelyn scolded.

“I’m not teasing, honey. I really want to understand.”

Marcus looked from one to the other. Evelyn and George had been his friends and mentors for years and had helped him in immeasurable ways. They had stood behind him in ways his parents never had. He owed them some explanation—but not the complete one.

“We didn’t have much opportunity to see each other in Boston and only talked for a few minutes. We both think it’s possible, only not probable. We’re extremely different, nothing like soul mates are supposed to be.”

“The only difference you have to worry about is that you’re a man and she’s a woman,” George stated. “Everything else is window-dressing.”

“You know how I feel about the entire soul-mate business—” Marcus began.

“Yes, I do. Must I remind you again that you are not your father. Gloriana is certainly not your mother, and you have no reason to believe you or she will act like them.”

Marcus opened his mouth to protest that reasoning, and shut it again without uttering a word. George simply didn’t understand the situation. He hadn’t lived it.

“George, don’t badger Marcus,” Evelyn said. “Finding your soul mate can be difficult and confusing.”

“So, what are you going to do about it—try to deny the imperative?” George said mildly, his tone clearly meant to assuage his wife.

“We’re not sure yet. We both have reservations about the choice of the imperative.”

“Oh, Marcus, you can’t reject your mate. Terrible things will happen.” Evelyn’s face was creased in worry lines.

“What? What will happen? What,
exactly?”

“If one mate rejects the other, they both suffer. As long as the rejecter lives, the other will never find a replacement. I’ve only heard of one instance of rejection between practitioners. The one rejected, a woman, committed suicide after ten years of loneliness and imperative pain. The man who rejected her actually married a non-practitioner, and that marriage failed in a very short time, as you would expect.”

“Is that fact or anecdote?” Marcus asked.

“I had it on good authority,” Evelyn answered, “but I’m not absolutely certain.”

“From everything I’m hearing about our ‘ancient force,’ it ranks right up there with the most horrendous torturers of all time,” Marcus said.

“That’s only if you resist,” George responded.

“What about free will?”

“The reality of the practitioner world contains the imperative,” George stated. “We can change it no more than we can change any other reality. To use a math example, you’ll always find the roots of a quadratic equation with the formula: ‘As long as
a
doesn’t equal zero, then
ax
²
plus
bx
plus
c
will
always
equal zero.’ Nothing you say or do will change that reality. For the soul-mate reality, the same applies. If you’d relax and enjoy it, you’ll be fine. The imperative doesn’t make a mistake.”

“Let’s change the subject,” Evelyn interjected before Marcus could respond to George. “Tell me about the dinner at the HeatherRidge.”

At home that evening, Marcus worked through the practitioner database looking for imperative information. The next day he went over to the Austin HeatherRidge to use their library. He wasn’t very successful in either endeavor and could only hope Morgan had been able to find more than anecdote and legend in her searching.

They had to find evidence that the—what did Morgan call it? Oh, yes—the SMI could and did make mistakes. Then they had to discover how to make it change its mind.

For the rest of the week, his center didn’t itch or hurt, and he was able to keep the memory of that kiss at bay by overloading himself with tasks, problems, and duties. His dreams, however, betrayed him. Every morning he woke, arms—and other body parts—aching, with an enormous sense of wanting to hold and be held. Telling himself he needed uninterrupted time to work and hoping also for relief from the imperative’s pressure, he flew to Denver on Friday night.

Gloriana sat there in the Denver HeatherRidge ballroom on Saturday night willing herself not to scream. It had not been a good day. First a rainstorm in Austin made the plane late and a wreck on the Denver freeway delayed her even more. She’d rushed into the private dining room as everyone was sitting down to eat.

Dinner was pleasant, or at least the food and conversation were. Forscher was there, of course, looking as perfect as ever. By contrast she felt disheveled and slightly unprepared. Damn, why did she always feel off-kilter with him around? Well, duh, because of the SMI, of course.

He walked with her into the ballroom and in a low voice the others couldn’t hear, said, “Meet in my room after we look over the evaluations? I’m in 1080.”

“Fine. I’m in 1081.” She breathed easier when they were sitting on the stage with Ed in between them. Her center was quiet, thank goodness.

She might still scream after all. Mike Brubaker was speaking for the FOM and boring everybody to death with high-level math terms and complicated explanations of power calibration. It was not a way to win friends and supporters. At least Pritchart had injected humor and sarcasm into his three minutes.

Gloriana looked out over the audience. She liked the setup, however. Ed had followed Forscher’s suggestion of dividing the room into thirds. He had organized it with the middle much larger than the two sides, and it certainly made a difference. The people declaring themselves FOM or THA filled their sections, but did not appear as imposing as when there was only one division. In fact, some neutrals had dragged chairs to the center to avoid sitting with one of the factions. Most looked bored. She shared their sentiments.

Finally, Brubaker sat down after Ed called time twice.

To the front strode Gordon Walcott, Horner’s second in command. Tall and very thin, his stiff carriage and his haughty expression proclaimed his arrogance, confidence, and superiority. He took the microphone from the usher and stood for a long moment looking down his sharp nose at the audience before speaking.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we at the THA are here to warn you. We warn you of the pernicious, malicious, destructive danger that will be foisted upon the practitioner community by this wicked heresy of a so-called

magic formula for casting spells. Pritchart, Brubaker, and their cohorts would have you believe that, to cast properly, you must follow an overly complex, elaborate, incomprehensible set of symbols. They would have you follow their path, which will only lead to confusion, difficulty, and chaos. They would have you teach your children to cast their way—the only way, according to Pritchart. The THA is here to tell you that you do not have to follow them, you do not have to believe them, and you can find support and guidance against the insidious threat with us.”