Magic and the Modern Girl (22 page)

“Okay,” I said. “I have something that might work.”

Majom and Nuri settled beside their witches as if they’d worked magic together for all of their lives. Neko came and stood beside me, a surprisingly comforting presence, offering up the possibility of my using my own magic in the not-so-distant future. I sensed David hovering close behind us, felt his presence like a physical thing.

Gran and Clara skated through the preparation, the deep breaths, the offering up of their good astral intentions. Still wondering if I could harness a weather charm to meet my kitchen needs, I said, “Okay. Here are the words. As you say them, lean into your familiars.” I saw Gran start to shift her weight. “It’s not just a physical thing, it’s mental. Like you’re pushing against a revolving door with your powers. The door moves, but it holds you up, as well.”

Gran and Clara looked skeptical, but they nodded their willingness to try. I recited the spell for them from memory.

“Feel the winter, slowing heartbeat,

Sense the icy surface cold.

Dream of summer, think of new heat

Sunshine breaking through so gold.”

As they repeated the magical incantation, I stared at the cake. I knew they had failed, though, even before they stepped away from their familiars. There had been no flash of darkness. Nevertheless, Neko poked the center of the cheesecake with a tentative finger.

“Nope,” he said. “Still hard as a rock.”

“That should have worked!” I was angry. Spellcraft had always come easy to me. I wasn’t used to failure, used to utter ordinariness. I didn’t know if the mistake had been mine or theirs; I didn’t even know how to find out what had gone wrong.

“Maybe if we tried the microwave, dear?” Gran was always ready with a practical answer.

“No,” Clara said, and her tone was sharp. I’d never seen her so driven, so possessed. She grasped Majom’s hand, and she took a step closer to me. “We’ll do this by magic. Think about the words, Jane. Make sure you had them right.”

I started to protest out of habit—I didn’t like Clara being the boss of me in anything. But she was right. Something had kept the spell from working, and the words were the most obvious flaw. I ran them over in my mind again.

“Bold!” I said, when I got to the end of the chant. “Sunshine breaking through so bold!”

Clara nodded tightly. “Let’s try it again.”

This time, she and Gran chanted together, without prompting. They didn’t need me. I was dead weight. But when they got to the last word—when they got to
bold
—there was the familiar flash of darkness.

A flash of darkness and something more. A twist of wicked jealousy. A searing mental itch, reminding me that I should feel the power, that I should have the strength. I hadn’t realized how much hope I had pinned on a silly thawing spell.

I opened my eyes to find David staring at me. Silent. Inscrutable.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

As he spoke, the few drops of power that I had gleaned from Ariel twisted sluggishly inside my mind. I caught my breath against the sensation, remembering how recently I had still been able to work magic, how recently I had been overwhelmed by sparky energy. Weeks ago, only. In David’s study.

“Nothing,” he said again, and neither of us believed him. But before I could figure out the right thing to say, Neko began dissecting the cheesecake, with a speed and an accuracy that would have made Martha Stewart proud.

I regretted the cheesecake three days later, convinced that I had gained a dozen pounds as I spent the entire workday fretting about what to wear for my date with Will. I needed something that said intellectual and fun, brainy and just a little bit willing to step outside the schoolgirl role.

I barely had time to be afraid of the message Neko had left on my kitchen counter some time during the day:

Everyone is coming over for dinner and a quick tour of the basement. No need for you to change plans. Leave money for takeout, and everything should be fine.

Funny, how even the most innocuous little note could sound like a threat. I dropped two twenties on the table and offered up a prayer to the joint pantheon of dating and witchcraft gods. The money should at least be enough to move the quartet of my budding witches and familiars toward their instructional goal, especially with—er, make that, even with—Neko standing by to help. I contemplated adding another twenty to the bribe but decided that wouldn’t guarantee my arcane progress. And Neko certainly wasn’t going to return any change at the night’s end. I knew my familiar well enough to be certain of that.

My familiar…He’d managed to turn my entire life upside down when he’d come to live with me. That had been the one part of my plan that I had worried about the most—how Gran and Clara would explain their familiars. Seeing the magical companions in the flesh only heightened my concern—what would Gran say to Uncle George about Nuri? How would Clara explain to neighbors that she had a new, hyperactive little boy living with her?

I needn’t have worried. Gran had shrugged with her typical aplomb. “I’ll just say that she’s a friend of yours, dear. I’ll tell George that she needed a place to stay while she gets her own life in order. She’ll stay in your bedroom, after all. I hardly think he’ll mind.”

I started to protest, to explain that Nuri would create absolute chaos. But then I thought about the shy awkward woman, about her relative quiet compared to Neko. Nuri would be much easier for Uncle George to become used to than Neko had been for me. And we’d worry about the long-term effect of my grandmother having a live-in familiar down the road.

As for Clara, she’d laughed when I laid out the problem. “I’ll just tell people that he’s my grandson. Once we’re back in Sedona, I’ll explain that he was the reason I came out here to D.C. in the first place.”

I looked down at my belly, the belly that had never swelled for Majom or any other child, and then I swallowed away a tart reply. When Clara got back to Sedona…. That’s where her mind was, already.

I shook my head and read Neko’s note one more time, realizing that I didn’t have any more time to debate the matter of that night’s training session. Gran, Clara and the familiars were going to come over, and there was nothing I could do to protect my house. Or my witchcraft collection. Or my sanity.

Except cancel my date with Will Becker. And I wasn’t going to do that.

Sighing, I ducked into my bedroom, intent on digging out some date-perfect outfit. If I couldn’t be the witch I wanted to be, at least I had a fighting chance at being a decent girlfriend. Lecture attendee. Casual acquaintance. Whatever.

Neko had been hard at work in my bedroom, as well. A pair of black cropped pants were laid out on the bed; he must have excavated them from the very back of my closet. A silk T-shirt lay across them, folded as perfectly as the day that I’d brought it home from the store. Its color was halfway between blue and green; I’d been captivated by the shade when I first found it. Strappy sandals waited on the floor, perfect for both the lecture and the walking tour to follow.

I might get angry with my familiar. I might take exception to his exploiting me out of food and drink. I might rage about his treating the cottage like Grand Central Station, coming and going as he pleased. I might worry that he was going to lead Majom and Nuri down paths of arcane naughtiness.

But I’d be a fool to argue with Neko’s fashion sense. I switched my hoop skirts for the new outfit in record time.

As promised, Will was waiting for me by the garden gate. “I tried to get a parking space in front of the library, but the closest thing I could find was a couple of blocks away,” he said.

“No one can ever find parking in Georgetown,” I answered with a shrug. No one without magical acumen, I thought, but I had no desire to make the clarification. David somehow never had a problem locating a space directly in front of the Peabridge. If I really was serious about leaving my witchy life behind, I might as well start practicing now. It wasn’t such a hardship to walk to the car.

We made our way around the corner, chatting easily about the Federalist town house across the street from the library. Will said that it had been written up in a recent issue of
Home Architecture
, but he’d been inside and thought that the magazine had missed the chance to highlight better examples of colonial splendor, elsewhere in town.

“Here we go,” Will said, stopping beside a green VW Beetle. The car was plastered with the word Borrowedcar.com. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I don’t actually own a car, I just use BC when I need one.”

I’d heard about the communal car rental service. They paid for cars, insurance and gas; people rented them by the hour. I liked the idea of sparing the environment, of sharing a common vehicle. After all, it wasn’t everyone who had the money or desire to own a Lexus. I was just a little put off by the thought that Will was investing—literally—in our evening together. I tried to put the thought out of my mind, tried to assure myself that I didn’t need to be eight dollars an hour worth of entertaining.

“Makes sense to me,” I said, before the pause could become too awkward. “I don’t have a car, either, but I usually borrow my grandmother’s if I need to drive anywhere.” Gran. Was she a conversational gambit worth eight bucks? I could surely come up with some amusing story about something she’d made me promise, something about borrowing her car. If I couldn’t think of something real, I could surely make something up.

Eight dollars an hour. That wasn’t
so
much, was it?

Will held the door for me like a perfect gentleman, and then we made our way across town. I fought to come up with more topics that were BC-worthy, and settled for the tried and true—asking questions about Will, rather than talking about myself.

That technique worked surprisingly well, as Will told me about his colleague, Moira Prentiss, who was delivering the night’s lecture. In fact, Will was full of details about the trip that Moira had recently taken to Greece, which led to a discussion about summer vacations, which led to my sad confession that I had not traveled anywhere interesting for years.

When we arrived at the lecture hall, Will proved to have the expert eye of an urban driver; he spotted a parking space before I had even started to look for one. Parallel parking like a man born behind the wheel, he grinned up at the red stone building of the Smithsonian castle. It was the oldest part of the museum complex, hulking over the Mall like a misplaced bit of English history. I’d been to another lecture there, when Melissa had dragged me to an all-day seminar about the secrets of French baguettes. As we descended stairs to the underground lecture hall, I felt a little thrill of expectation. I enjoyed giving my own presentations at the Peabridge, but it was much more fun to sit back and let someone else do the work.

Moira Prentiss rose to the occasion. She had obviously prepared her speech well in advance. She mixed slides with entertaining stories, interspersing images from the Greek isles with shots of the nation’s capital. I began to look at buildings that I saw every single day with new eyes. The Capitol suddenly looked like a museum of architectural form; the Jefferson Memorial was a perfect temple to both rational thought and a founding father.

The rest of the room obviously appreciated the lecture as much as I did; applause echoed against the celadon walls when Moira finished. Soon enough, we were trooping out into the twilight, heading down the National Mall toward the self-same Capitol that Moira had featured in her speech. “That’s the thing about a good lecturer,” I said. “They make you realize things you’ve known all along.”

Will agreed. “She was great!”

I laughed at his enthusiasm. On another date, I might have been jealous. With another man, I might have questioned his complimenting another woman—an attractive, educated, well-spoken woman—while he was out with me. At another time, I might have questioned my own worthiness, wondered at my own ability to entertain, to be witty, to be enough.

Especially with the eight dollars an hour for the car factored in.

But with Will, I didn’t worry about any of those things. After all, he had suggested that I join him for the lecture. He could have gone with anyone from his office, any one of his friends, but he had chosen me.

As we walked with the group, Will reached over and took my hand. His fingers folding around mine felt right. Easy. There wasn’t any awkward fumbling; I didn’t need to worry about my palms sweating.

I glanced at him quickly, and he smiled, squeezing my hand lightly. Even as my belly swooped, I squeezed back. This asking-guys-out-on-dates thing was great. I should have done it a long time ago.

Moira stopped the group so that we could look across the Mall at the National Gallery of Art. I could feel Will beside me, a new expectation shimmering from the long line of his arm against mine. Moira pointed out the dome atop the museum and said, “There weren’t many classical Greek buildings built on a round floor plan. We don’t have extensive records of Greek domes—those seem to be more from the Roman era. But the Temple of Aphrodite at Knidos definitely had a round base—it might be the inspiration for just this sort of architectural detail.”

A few people asked questions, and then we continued down the Mall. The Capitol loomed above us, brightly lit in the twilight. A trio of police cars crouched against the plaza at the base of the building, their lights flashing blue and red. Will stepped closer to me, the heat from his body making me feel safe, protected.

Moira pursed her lips as we waited for a traffic light to change. “I’m not sure what’s going on over there. Maybe we should just stay put.”

But as I squinted across the street, I realized that I would not be able to stay where we were.

A marble terrace stretched in front of the building. Centered on the plaza, surrounded by a gathering crowd, was a woman. A tall woman. A painfully pale woman. A woman with long black hair as dark as the shadows beyond the Capitol complex. A woman clad in some sort of a filmy gown, a frothy mixture of crimson and magenta and gold.