Magic and the Modern Girl Read online

“Come on, Jane. The class will focus on inner balance. Peace. All the tools you need to live in harmony with your fellow man.”

  “My fellow man is moving out.” I gestured toward the basement and Neko’s now former lair. “I’m not living with anyone. In harmony or otherwise.”

  “Rock-paper-scissors,” Melissa said.

  Melissa and I had cast rock-paper-scissors over disputed matters for years, ever since we were little girls. I’m pretty sure that I won half the time, but it seemed like she always got the upper hand when it mattered. Not that there was any way to cheat. Unless…No, if there’d been a way to harness my witchy powers to win at the childish game, I would have figured that out long ago.

  “Melissa—”

  “Am I going to have to Friendship Test this?”

  Wow. She was really serious. A Friendship Test was the ultimate power play in our relationship. We could Friendship Test the last bite of chocolate cheesecake—the person who called the test got to spear the final perfect morsel (although even then, we usually ended up splitting dessert). We could Friendship Test an evening, dragging each other out in a rainstorm or on a slippery winter night.

  But we didn’t call Friendship Test lightly, Melissa and I. She really wanted me to go to yoga class. She must be certain that it would be good for me. Or good for her. Or good for both of us together.

  No reason to make her waste a Friendship Test. I sighed and held out my palms, curling my right fingers into a fist. “One,” we said together, and I couldn’t help but let a smile twist my lips. “Two. Three.”

  I cast paper.

  At the precise same instant, Melissa cast scissors.

  I shrugged in resignation. At least I owned a heating pad. I’d certainly need it after the class. “When’s the torture?”

  Melissa beamed. “A week from Sunday.”

  “Great,” I said, without the slightest hint of enthusiasm.

  Melissa filled two glasses, taking the time to set a whole-leaf mint garnish on the edge of mine. “To animal yoga!” she exclaimed, raising her glass high.

  “To animal yoga,” I echoed. At least the mojitos were perfect—icy and crisp, the lime balancing the sweetness of the rum. I swallowed again and felt a little of the tension ease from my shoulders. I complemented the mojito therapy with another Lemon Pillow. Then, I glanced at the calendar on my wall. “Wait! I can’t make it! I have mother-daughter brunch!”

  “That’s this Sunday, isn’t it?”

  Why did I share so much of my life with my best friend? It was ridiculous that she should know my schedule better than I did. But she was right. I had brunch with my mother and grandmother the first Sunday of every month—we’d started the get-togethers almost two years before, as my grandmother attempted to build ties between her “two favorite girls,” as she described Clara and me. I loved my grandmother without question—she had raised me, after all, taking in a scared and lonely four-year-old whose parents had died in a tragic car crash.

  Except that my parents hadn’t died. They’d just split up. And neither of them had wanted the responsibility of caring for the daughter they’d brought into the world. My mother had scampered off to a series of New Age havens, seeking spiritual purity without looking back at me.

  Until two years ago, when she had finally decided that she was ready to come back into my life. Our relationship was rocky at best—even if she carried the same witchy blood that pumped in my veins. She and my grandmother both.

  In fact, Clara—I still wasn’t used to calling her Mother—had always had an affinity for crystals and stones; that’s probably what had drawn her to her previous home in Sedona. And she loved the coded magic of runes, the secret messages that were revealed when the symbols were cast.

  “Oh,” I said to Melissa, and there was a tangled skein of recognition in the single word. “You’re right.”

  Melissa laughed at my depressed tone. “Come on,” she said. “You’ll have a great time with them. Wasn’t Clara going to cast your star chart?”

  I grimaced. Both my mother and grandmother possessed limited witchcraft skills; their powers had been substantially magnified in me, for reasons that weren’t at all clear to any of us. Clara, though, had an annoying tendency to embrace anything that sparkled with New Age hocus-pocus and she had taken to star charts with an astonishing vehemence. “That reminds me,” I said. “I told her I would give her my set of jade runes. She managed to mislay her Tyr and Nyd.”

  Melissa eyed me over the edge of her own glass. “Tyr and Nyd?”

  “The runes that stand for war and loss. I almost accused her of throwing them out on purpose. You know how she is about accepting grim reality.” Conforming to the expectations of the real world was not my mother’s strongest suit. “Anyway, I told her I’d give her my set, so that she can do complete castings. It’s not like I use them much, anyway.”

  “When was the last time you used them at all?”

  Melissa just sounded curious, but I felt a flash of guilt. My answer was defensive. “They’re just some stupid jade runes.”

  “Hey, don’t get upset.” She sipped from her mojito, reminding me to take a therapeutic swallow of my own. “I know that you’ve been busy. It’s just that I don’t even remember the last time I saw David around here.”

  David. David Montrose. My warder. He was my astral bodyguard, the man appointed to protect me in my witchy workings. Over the past two years, we’d had our ups (a couple of shared kisses) and our downs (his hidden past with a witch who had challenged me before the Coven).

  “Did you guys have another fight or something?” Melissa asked, widening her eyes with mock innocence. She’d always liked David, and she thought that I should appreciate his guidance more than I did.

  “No.” Blessed mojito lubricated my thoughts. “Not a fight. Just a sort of…drifting. I haven’t found time for witchcraft stuff for a while, with Evelyn on the warpath about the James River presentation, and mentoring the reference intern, and—”

  “And a hundred and one other excuses.” Melissa’s tone brooked no protest. “You shouldn’t cut him out of your life like that.”

  “I’m not cutting him out!” I heard the shrill note behind my words and eyed a third Lemon Pillow as a way to sweeten my tone. “Well, not exactly.”

  I could still remember the compassion in his eyes, when he’d seen what a wreck I’d made of my dating life the year before. David’s sympathy unnerved me. Not that I liked his supercilious instruction any better.

  I washed away my discomfort with yet another swallow of mojito. “I better run downstairs to get the runes now. If I wait till Sunday morning, I know that I’ll forget them.”

  Melissa held out her hand for my glass, silently offering a refill. I thought about taking the freshened glass down to the basement, but then I pictured sweet, sticky cocktail spilling over my witchcraft treasures. Better to brave the secret stash alone. Grinning, I handed over my glass and said, “‘I drink the air before me, and return or ere your pulse twice beat.’”

  She faked a yawn. “Tempest,” she said, continuing our long-standing game of trading Shakespeare quotations. “Ariel. Hey! Have you seen the posters around town for that production?”

  “Of The Tempest?”

  “Yeah. They’re putting it on at Duke Ellington.”

  “The high school?”

  “It’s part of some outreach program. They’re updating the language and performing it in street clothes, making it ‘accessible.’” She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers.

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “But they’ve got a picture of the guy playing Prospero on the poster. He’s really cute. Looks a lot like David.” I didn’t say anything as I tried to reconcile the notion of my warder and the magician Prospero, not even trying to apply the adjective cute to David’s sometimes-severe demeanor. “David Montrose?” she said, as if I knew a dozen Davids we might be talking about.

  “I knew who you meant.”

&nbs
p; “I let them put up a poster at the bakery,” Melissa said, refusing to take offense at my dry tone. “Anything I can do to help preserve the arts,” she added piously.

  “Even if preserving them destroys them? I hate that modern update stuff.”

  “You’re just feeling superior because you’ve got the entire play memorized.”

  I stuck my tongue out and quoted Prospero himself, “‘Now does my project gather to a head.’ Maybe I just feel superior because I’m right.”

  “Or because you’re stubborn! Drink some more.” Melissa toasted me with her full glass and recited part of a line from later in the play. “‘If all the wine in my bottle will recover him…’” She laughed.

  It was wonderful to have a friend who didn’t mind that I was a total, utter geek. I hurried downstairs to get my runes, before I forgot them again.

  If I’d expected the basement to look different now that Neko was gone, I was sorely disappointed. I’d been consistently shocked that a man as fashion-conscious as my familiar had so few personal possessions. Of course, he did have a seemingly limitless supply of black T-shirts. And black trousers made out of leather, denim, linen and a couple of other fabrics that I couldn’t name. And an omnipresent pair of sleek shoes, vaguely European in their leather perfection.

  But that was it. And now, even those meager possessions were gone.

  I sighed and shook my head. Melissa was wrong. I wasn’t going to miss my housemate at all. I was going to revel in his absence.

  I turned to the mahogany bookshelves that lined the walls. Clearly visible dust had settled over the nearest books. So, I wasn’t going to win any Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval for my housework. Who really cared?

  When I had first classified my newfound books, I had sequestered all of the other witchy paraphernalia to one set of shelves. I had collected all of my crystals there, and delicate glass jars containing ingredients for potions. I had carefully laid out the wand that David made me use when I read from some of the oldest texts, the rowan pointer that made the words come into focus in a way that had more to do with magic and less to do with my itchy contact lenses or my often-smudged eyeglasses.

  And there, on the bottom shelf, were the bags of runes. The jade ones that I had promised Clara, but other sets, as well—one carved out of wood, another cast in sturdy clay. The jade runes were held in a silk bag, its delicate embroidery hinting at some Chinese ancestry.

  I found the bag exactly where I’d left it months before. The brilliant red stitches were a bit dulled with dust but that would be easy enough to brush away. Clara would never know the difference.

  I clutched the sack. I expected to feel the runes shift inside. I expected to hear the jade squares click against each other, a familiar clacking sound like oversized mahjong tiles. I expected to see the faintest hard-lined bulges against the delicate silk fabric.

  But something was wrong.

  The bag was heavy in my hand, shapeless and sodden, like a sack of flour on the bottom shelf in the supermarket. Catching my lower lip between my teeth, I pulled open the laces that cinched the bag shut.

  Inside, where I should have seen bright, green squares, I found nothing but dust. A sickly dust, like heavy, dried moss. I shifted the bag in my hands, wondering if my lousy housekeeping had somehow buried the runes in dirt. But there were no runes inside the bag.

  My heart started pounding, and I reached for the next item on the shelf, the leather bag that held my wooden runes. I knew that there was something wrong before I opened the sack, before I found the sawdust that clumped in the bottom of the container. My clay runes were in a burlap sack. When I tugged it open, though, I found nothing but grit.

  My runes, all of them. Destroyed.

  I glanced toward the stairs, fighting the impulse to call for Melissa’s help. After all, what could she do? She’d never worked a lick of magic in her life.

  Struggling against a rising snake of panic in my gut, I wrestled my box of crystals off another shelf. The wooden container was familiar to my fingertips; I had handled it every single day for months, when I’d worked regularly with David and Neko to hone my powers. I slid the hasp from its lock, threw back its lid to reveal the treasured crystals inside.

  Amethyst. Spiritual uplifting.

  Obsidian. Grounding.

  Kunzite. Emotional balance.

  Onyx. Changing bad habits.

  All ruined. All faded, shrouded in gray webs, in dull destruction that seemed to have eaten the stones from within.

  I bit back a cry and reached for the nearest book. On the Healing of the Sick. I tore open its cover, only to find my hand covered with red-brown dust, the detritus of dry, cracked leather. The parchment pages themselves remained unharmed, but the words danced and wavered as I flipped through the volume. As soon as I flipped the pages, the ink faded away, drifting to nothingness in the time it took for me to catch my breath.

  I stormed across the room, reaching for a volume at random on another shelf. The Role of Familiars in American Witchcraft. Cloth binding. Faded as if it had been left for weeks in the heat of summer sun. And when I opened the covers, the rag-cotton pages blurred, then were bare.

  I started to reach for another volume, and then a chilly finger stroked the nape of my neck. If I opened another book, I would destroy it, as well. If I so much as touched a cover, I might wipe away forever the words of wisdom contained inside.

  My witchcraft resources were crumbling around me, and I didn’t have the first idea of what I could do to stop the destruction.

  2

  David! I thought my summons without voicing my warder’s name out loud. Neko! Even as I reached out with my powers, calling the men toward me, I realized how strange it felt to be using my magic. How long had it been since I’d worked a spell? Hurrying back upstairs, I wondered if this magic stuff was like training for a marathon. Was I going to be achy and sore tomorrow because I was overexerting myself right now?

  I couldn’t worry about that—I needed to get to the heart of whatever was happening in my basement. David! I mentally shouted again. Neko! Now!

  As I walked into the kitchen, Melissa must have read something on my face. She set down her glass and stared at me. “What?” she asked, and her eyes drifted toward the silk sack in my hand. “You decided not to give Clara the runes?”

  “They aren’t there.”

  “What?”

  “They’re ruined. Crumbled to dust. I don’t know what happened.”

  “What do you mean, crumbled? They’re made out of jade, right? Out of hard stone?”

  The cottage’s front door opened before I could answer her. “We’re in here,” I called out, trying desperately to sound nonchalant. Hoping that I could be nonchalant. Hoping that I was worrying for no good reason, that nothing was truly wrong, that there were dozens of benign explanations for how magical translucent stone could crumble away to useless green dust.

  David Montrose swept into my kitchen. I could still remember the first time that I’d seen him, appearing on my doorstep like Jane Eyre’s Edward Rochester in the dark of a stormy night. He’d been furious with me then, enraged that I had released Neko from his form as a statue. Now, I recognized the power that had frightened me that night, the strength—both physical and astral—that coursed through his body, down his arms, into his fine-fingered hands. But I wasn’t afraid of him. He was my ally. My friend.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, and we might have been picking up a conversation after a separation of a few minutes, not several weeks. Months, I thought, with a curious flip of my belly. It had been at least three months since I’d seen David. Um. Four. Could it really be five? Where did time go?

  Wordlessly, I offered him the silk bag.

  His dark eyebrows nearly met as his lips pursed into a frown. Silver glinted at his temples—more silver than I remembered. All of a sudden, I wondered what he’d been doing in his spare time, without needing to ride herd on me and my sometimes wayward witchcraft. There was
a hardness to his eyes, a wariness, that made me think that he hadn’t spent the time catching up on back seasons of American Idol.

  Before I could ask him what was new, though, before I could say anything to direct his study of the green dust in the bag, the cottage door flew open again.

  “Let me guess, girlfriend. You just couldn’t stand the thought of an evening without—Oh.”

  If I hadn’t been so worried about the destruction of my witchy paraphernalia, I might have laughed at my familiar. Neko stopped just inside the door to my kitchen. With perfect timing, he absorbed the presence of my warder, immediately twitching to an alert status that made me wonder if all the rest of his existence—the late-night party hound, the fashion guru, the man-man lover extraordinaire—were all some elaborate acting gig, all artfully created to misdirect the world from his true purpose as a channel of magic power.

  Neko’s nostrils flared as he edged into the kitchen, and his gaze remained glued to the silk bag. I could almost see the hair rise on the back of his neck, and a low growl hummed deep in his throat. He moved like a ballet dancer, stepping sideways with a dangerous caution, and when he reached a single finger toward the sack, he glanced first at David’s face, then at mine, as if seeking approval. Permission.

  I nodded. “Go ahead. Either one of you. Both.”

  Poor Melissa was leaning against the counter, and I could see that Neko’s intensity frightened her. Hell, Neko’s intensity frightened me, and that was before I let myself wonder what David was thinking.

  My warder nodded slowly and loosened the ties on the bag. He peered inside like a chemist examining unexpected results in an experimental test tube. As his thin lips twisted into a frown, I forced myself to say, “There’s more.” My voice came out thin and broken, and I cleared my throat, wishing that I could toss back another mojito or two before continuing. “There’s more,” I repeated, and this time my words were too loud, but I brazened through. “My other runes, and my crystals. My books.”

  David passed the sack to Neko, who quivered daintily. I half expected him to hiss as he accepted the green dust, to offer up one of those terrifying feline sounds of disapproval, displaying fangs like a snake as he stretched his lips into a snarl. Instead, he weighed the evidence of destruction in his palm, shaking his head and setting it on the table with a moue of distaste.