Magic and the Modern Girl (11 page)

“W
hat’s up, girlfriend?”

I pushed my hair back behind my right ear for the thousandth time. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re more nervous than a cat,” Neko said, arching one eyebrow. “And believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“Why shouldn’t I be nervous?” I countered, catching myself chewing at my lip. “This is the biggest working I’ve undertaken in months.”

But not the only magic I had done, a part of my mind nagged. No, I had used my powers only the day before. I could still feel the little twist in my belly, the spark that told me my magic had worked. The spark that—supposedly—reminded me that there would be no lasting impact from my indiscretion with David. For the thousandth time, I panicked that I had misperformed my contraceptive spell, that I was misreading the magical record in my body. But no. I was enough of a witch that I could tell it had worked. I was safe from that worry, at least.

Even if I had to keep racking my brain, trying to figure out how I was going to act natural, act normal, when my warder walked through my front door.

Matters weren’t helped any when Neko sniffed the air, his nose twitching with all the delicacy of a calico scenting rotten salmon. I was suddenly horrified by the thought that he knew what had happened between David and me. I had showered—twice—since then. And I was wearing completely different clothes. But my familiar had strange abilities when it came to knowing that I’d made a fool out of myself.

There was a knock at the front door, and Neko nodded. “There,” he said. “I knew he was out there.”

So, that was all that he had sensed. David’s arrival. Nothing more secret. More embarrassing. Neko waited for me to wave a purposely languorous hand, freeing him to answer the door as I descended to my basement lair. I sneaked in a half-dozen deep breaths before my partners in magical crime joined me in front of all my books.

Neko was quivering with excitement, each muscle stretched taut beneath his revealing black T-shirt. He was wearing the leather pants he’d sported when I first awakened him from his statue form, over two years before. His feet looked small and neat in his European-styled shoes, and I might have described his walk as delicate, if I hadn’t known the power that lurked just beneath his flesh. He could mirror my own magic back to me, magnify my spells into things of true arcane spectacle. Without Neko, I was a powerful witch. With him—if David was to be believed—I was almost unstoppable.

And David was someone to believe.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs, as if awaiting formal permission to enter my witchy domain. He was wearing charcoal-colored slacks, as neat as if he’d just retrieved them from his tailor. A flawless cotton shirt blazed white against the gloom of the staircase, crisp without the stiffness of starch. I glanced at his face, fearing what I might see there, but his features were smooth. Implacable.

We might have been presidents of our very own Fortune 500 companies, meeting to collude on prices in the most illegal antitrust scheme in the history of capitalism. We might have been spies sent to assassinate each other for shadowy government agencies that claimed to keep peace in the world. We might have been strangers meeting in the hallway of some luxury hotel.

“Good evening,” he said.

Or we might have been awkward former lovers, trying to figure out how we could continue working together.

Strike that.
I
might have been an awkward former lover. David seemed utterly unaffected by what had happened.

Neko looked at me, and I realized that my familiar truly was going to figure out what was going on if I didn’t pull myself together and start acting normally. “Hi!” I said, and I realized that my voice was a dozen shades too bright. I cleared my throat and said, “Thank you for coming.”

Ouch. Wrong word choice.

David didn’t react, though. Instead, he glanced at the rows of books behind me. “Have you thought about the ritual? About what you’re going to do?”

Fine. If he was going to act as if nothing had happened, I could be every bit as blasé.

I nodded, with the aplomb I harnessed every day as a reference librarian. Hardening my voice, I made myself sound like the trained professional I knew I could be. “Yes.” There. I almost kept my voice from quaking. “I’m going to create an anima.”

Neko sucked in his breath, and I took a perverse pleasure in knowing that I’d surprised him. I smiled sweetly and found the strength to go on. “I’ll vivify it tonight and then task it to straighten things up around here. It can use its powers, its focus of
my
powers, to work through the crystals and the books, to get everything back in order. Each task it completes will build my reservoir of power.”

David’s eyes narrowed, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. I remembered kissing his throat, and a sudden breathlessness crushed my heart like a ton of featherbeds.
Concentrate
, I told myself.
This is important.

“Have you reviewed the spell?” he asked, and he might have been inquiring if I’d had a chance to check the weather forecast, for all the emotion he loaded into the question.

“Three times,” I said. “At least, my memory of it. I studied it in depth last winter.” And I really had. At the time, I’d still been smarting from my encounter with the Coven. I’d contemplated creating an anima, a creature to do my own arcane bidding, just to prove that I was not magically alone. I’d memorized the spell, but I had not worked it before the laptop crashed. Before the laptop crashed, and my interest in my witchy abilities had faded.

I had winged things often enough when I’d worked with David and Neko, but I couldn’t take that risk this time. I could sense the truth: we were approaching a true transition. Either I saved my powers now, or I lost them forever. The anima working was the strongest spell I knew by heart, the most elaborate working I could accomplish without benefit of the spell books that would fade away at my touch.

I glanced at Neko, wondering how he felt about tonight’s magic. Last year, when I had done battle with the Coven, Neko’s independence was on the line. David had warned me numerous times that I needed to perfect my skills as a witch or the Coven would reject me and take Neko away. Take all of my accoutrements away.

I sighed. As a librarian and a scholar of Elizabethan literature, I understood the meaning of irony. Alanis Morissette and her song aside, I knew it would be ironic if I’d fought the Coven, gained my witchy independence, only to lose Neko and my arcane collection now, through lack of use.

David nodded, accepting my determination as if I’d always been a star pupil. Yeah, sure. “All right, then. Shall we get started?”

And that was it. No great debate. No long discussion. No back and forth about whether I had chosen the correct ritual, the proper symbols, the perfect expression of my magical intentions. Momentarily speechless, I nodded.

David reached inside the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small silver flask. It was the sort of vessel that might hold holy water, if he’d belonged to a different esoteric school. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Rainwater, collected under a full moon.”

Of course. “So you knew, all along, what I was going to try?”

He shrugged. “I knew that you’d likely be calling on the elements for whatever you work. I can take it back, if it bothers you. If you have your own that you want to use.”

“No!” My voice still sounded too shrill to me. I glanced at Neko, only to find that he was staring at me curiously.

Well, everyone knew what curiosity had done to the cat. I made a silent vow that he would learn the full meaning of that adage if he tried to question me directly.

I reached out for the flask, automatically twisting my fingers to avoid touching David’s. That motion made my wrist bend at a strange angle; he rotated his own grasp on the flask to keep it from falling. Like an awkward fool dancing sideways to pass someone in a narrow hallway, I contorted my own fingers, only to end up grasping his with full force.

I sucked in my breath, as if I expected an electric charge to pass between us, but there was nothing. No residual glimmer of magic. No lingering sparkle of my contraceptive spell. No hint that anything had happened the afternoon before.

My belly twisted and, for just a moment, I thought I might be ill.

“Ready?” David asked, and his voice was calm and smooth, the steady baritone that had always anchored my magical workings.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, beyond caring if Neko suspected anything. “Ready,” I said.

I set the flask of water on the high bookstand that occupied the center of the basement. A burlap sack sat in the center of the mahogany surface, the same sack that I had explored a week and a half before, with Melissa obliviously drinking mojitos in my kitchen. I tried not to think about the clay runes that I had enjoyed using, the smooth tiles that had clicked in my fingers as I shuffled through their smooth, glazed surfaces.

Dust, now. Nothing but dust.

I shook my head. “Let’s go,” I said to David.

He eyed me for a long moment, and I wondered what he was thinking. Was he questioning my witchy ability? Was he wondering about our little diversion the day before? Was he doubting my dedication to my arcane arts?

I’d never know.

Without a spoken word, he ducked down. It took me a moment to figure out why he made the graceful motion, but when he stood, he clutched a silver dagger. I glanced at his ankle, unable to make out any sort of hidden sheath. Not for the first time, I wondered what other secrets my warder kept from me.

So. David was going to treat this working as high ritual. He was moving beyond the ordinary spellcraft that he and I had practiced so many times here, in the comfort of my basement. He was elevating this magic to the limits of my witchy ability, making sure that we had the utmost astral protection.

My throat was suddenly too dry for me to swallow. I had known this spell was important. I had understood that a lot rode on what we were doing. I had believed that my future as a witch would be determined by my ability to create an anima.

But I had not truly grasped the seriousness of my endeavor.

Or the danger. David rarely used his warder’s powers this blatantly. I had to assume that he sensed some very real threat to what we were doing.

Or else, he was being his usual, paranoid, controlling self.

Before I could decide if that last thought made me feel more or less safe, David inclined his head over the dagger and muttered a few words, too softly for me to hear. At the same time, Neko glided to my side.

I felt my familiar magically as much as physically. He was like a highly polished bronze mirror, reflecting my own power back at me with a deep, steady glow. Neko might be a fashion king, and he might chide me far more than was fair about the makeup that I should or should not wear, but when arcane push came to magical shove, I could not imagine having a better resource at my side. I’d missed his astral companionship as we’d squabbled over milk and ice cream.

David nodded when he saw that we were poised for spell-work, and then he extended his arms in front of him, holding the dagger steady before his eyes. “May Hecate watch over our working here and keep us safe from evil.”

Neko and I responded as if we had rehearsed. “May Hecate keep us safe.”

David walked a quarter circle, continuing to hold the silver blade high, like a dowsing rod searching for magical potential. I knew from past work in this basement chamber that he was facing due north. He bowed slightly, like a courtier acknowledging the presence of another haughty lord. “May the Lady of the North, the Lady of Water, watch over us during this working.”

Once before, I had called upon the compass coordinates, the ancient elements, for protection. As my body folded into an automatic bow of respect, I remembered that other circle of power that David had trod with me, the night that I had rejected membership in the Washington Coven. The words rose to my lips without conscious recollection. “Lady of Water! We ask that you protect our workings and bless them in the name of our mother Hecate.”

If David was proud of me for remembering the incantation, he gave no sign. I shoved down a nibble of annoyance. We had more important things to attend to than his pig-headed refusal to acknowledge my accomplishments. Or his stubborn determination to accept that we
had
slept together whatever his warder’s code of ethics might demand. Oops. I’d promised myself not to go there.

As if to pull my mind back to the matter at hand, David strode another arc of the circle, planting his feet at due west. “May the Lord of Earth watch over us during this working.”

“Lord of Earth,” I replied, “we ask that you protect our workings and bless them in the name of our mother Hecate.”

South came next, with the Lady of Air, and then east, with the Lord of Fire. When David strode back to the northern start of the circle, a faint glow shimmered in the air, a silver curtain that separated us from ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties. I swallowed hard, sensing the tremendous power my warder had raised, even as my paranoid hindbrain whispered, “And things that go bump in the night.”

Enough with childhood fears. I had woman’s work to do. Witching work.

As Neko and David drew closer to the bookstand, I lifted the bag of clay dust. It felt heavier in my hands now than it had when I’d first picked it up, as if the destroyed runes could sense how I was planning to use them. Taking a deep breath to slow my pounding heart, I pulled the rope ties loose at the neck of the burlap sack.

I started to shove my hand into the bag, but then I thought of the clay dust settling under my fingernails. I wasn’t the most fastidious of women, by any means, but I imagined those grains of clay, once they were animated, and my belly flipped at the thought of living flesh underneath my nails. Grateful that—for once—I’d thought of consequences, I tilted a generous pile of the dust into my open palm.

“Earth,” I intoned. “For earth doth make us all.”