Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  That’s all right, she replied, sinking to her belly and curling her tail around her. It’s not so bad out here.

  “Negative. There’s nowhere to hide you topside.”

  For an overgrown lizard, Georgie had become remarkably adept at facial mimicry, and her brow ridge rose in emphasis of her bemused thoughts. Hide from what? Are the cows dangerous? You don’t seem concerned about them…

  “I’m not,” said Toula, moving closer to Georgie’s snout. “There aren’t any dragons in this realm, honey. If someone saw you, they might try to hurt you. Understand?”

  So…I go home?

  “Not if all hell’s breaking loose in Faerie,” said Toula, frowning at the trailer park. “I could shrink you temporarily, get you through the doors, but the Council’s going to have a cow if they find out we’ve got a dragon down there.”

  Georgie cut her eyes to the herd but kept the question to herself. Idioms didn’t always work in direct translation.

  Toula thought for a moment, stomping her damp slippers to keep warm, then paused and considered Georgie with an odd expression on her face. “This will feel weird,” she told the dragon, “but it shouldn’t hurt, and it’ll let us keep you safe. Can you trust me?”

  Suddenly uncertain, Georgie turned her head to Joey, who nodded reassurance and stepped clear. “I’m right here, sweetie,” he soothed. “Nothing bad’s going to happen.”

  “Just keep your fingers crossed for me, okay?” Toula quietly replied.

  Before either Joey or Georgie had time to reconsider, a streamer of blue light flew from Toula’s fingertips—active magic, bright against the muted colors of the background. It expanded like a bubble, surrounded Georgie in a split-second, and flared so strongly that even Joey, who couldn’t detect magic if his life depended on it, squinted as the energy release echoed on the mundane side of the visible spectrum.

  When I opened my eyes and blinked away the after-image, Georgie had vanished. In her place, lying stunned on her stomach in the crushed weeds, was a pale girl with long black hair—and, awkwardly enough, not a stitch of clothing.

  The girl sucked in a breath, raised her head in confusion, then caught sight of her hand and telepathically screamed.

  “Holy shit,” Joey muttered as he yanked off his coat, then ran to her and threw it over her as she curled in on herself. “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay, I’m right here,” he said, talking over the scream echoing in our heads. “You’re safe, it’s okay—”

  NOT OKAY! NOT OKAY!

  “Come here, I’ve got you.” With that, he wrapped the edges of his coat underneath her and scooped her into his arms as if she weighed nothing. “It’s over, Georgie, just breathe, I’m not going to let anyone hurt you,” he murmured, holding the bundle against his chest as she hyperventilated. “It’s over, just calm down.”

  As he tried to pacify her, Toula came up beside him and snapped her fingers next to his shoulder. “Georgie. Hey, Georgie, look at me.”

  The girl’s head popped free of the coat, and she turned her wet face to Toula’s.

  “It’s temporary,” Toula insisted. “We’ve got to hide you, and this is the best way to do it. This is not the end of the world.”

  What did you do to me? she demanded in a mental shout—loud, but better than the screaming had been.

  “Transformation spell,” said Toula, keeping her voice low and no-nonsense. “Glamour wasn’t going to cut it, not with the physical constraints below. You’re still you, just…compressed.”

  Georgie held up her hand and glared at Toula. Compressed? This isn’t compressed! This is…is…

  “A temporary human form.”

  Where are my claws? she shouted, then clumsily patted her face. My teeth…my nose…everything’s wrong, it’s all squishy, and…and I think it’s leaking…

  “You cried a little,” said Joey as he shifted her on his hip. “It’s nothing to worry about. Happens to the best of us.”

  She looked around, torn between panic and anger, and finally focused on him. You’re too big, she thought plaintively. You’re not supposed to be this big.

  “Just let me be the big one for a change, all right?” he said, studying her expression. “We’re a team, Georgie—it’s my turn to take care of you.”

  But she shook her head, and her eyes welled once again. I don’t like this, nothing’s right, put me back the way I was. She paused, realized she was crying once more, then slapped the tears away. Please, Joey, you’ve got to make her change me back. Please…

  Her first sob escaped, and Georgie buried her head against his shoulder as she wept. Joey turned to Toula, who crossed her arms and looked embarrassed. “She’ll adjust before long, I bet,” she said. “And it’s only until we figure something better out…oh, come on, honey,” she begged, smoothing Georgie’s hair, “please don’t cry. I’m sorry, I really am, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  I stood outside their little huddle, momentarily forgotten and coming to terms with the notion that the massive dragon I’d just ridden had been reduced to a child of about ten.

  “How long is this going to last?” Joey asked.

  Toula looked up from her ineffective attempts at comfort and shrugged. “Assuming a constant magical field, either until someone breaks it or she crosses back into Faerie. A gate would take care of it pretty quickly. I mean,” she hastily added, “that’s my best guess. I’ve never worked a transformation this involved, and, uh”—she paused to look at Georgie’s streaming eyes—“it appears to be incomplete.”

  “What do you—oh,” said Joey as Toula moved her orb closer to Georgie’s face. “Can you fix that?”

  “Maybe, but I’m not doing anything else to her right now.” Catching my confusion, she explained, “Her eyes are still red. Can’t exactly pass her off as albino,” she mused, “not with hair that dark, but maybe no one will notice.”

  Georgie’s tears began to slow as Joey rubbed her back. After a moment, they dwindled to pathetic sniffles, and I chanced joining the others. “She, uh…why is she so young?” I asked.

  “The spell considers relative age,” said Toula.

  “Physical growth is fast for dragons, but she’s still a kid,” Joey added as Georgie started to hiccup. “Here, hon,” he told her, hoisting her head over his shoulder, “take slow breaths, they’ll stop—”

  His instructions ended in another hiccup and a jet of fire that narrowly missed his ear and scorched a patch of dead grass. “Shit!” Toula yelped, then magically smothered the blaze while Joey and Georgie looked on in shock. “I told you it was incomplete,” she muttered when the fire died away. “Godzilla’s back around dark magic—we’re going to have to be careful.”

  Joey and Georgie stared at each other in silence until she hiccupped again, taking pains to keep her mouth closed. A little plume of smoke drifted from her nostrils, and her lip started to shake.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked, pulling her head back against his shoulder.

  She closed her eyes and let him rock her. No, but it makes me hungry. The fire…it’s burning inside again, and I have to feed it…

  Carefully, he shifted her weight and pressed one hand against her abdomen. “She’s warm to the touch,” he told us, sounding dazed. “Like she swallowed a space heater. Remember how hungry she got in the Gray Lands?”

  As if on cue, Georgie’s stomach growled. Can I have a cow now?

  “I’ll see about getting you a few burgers,” said Toula, raising her light as the grand magus approached through the field. “Once we’re inside. And, uh…how about letting me do the talking, guys?”

  Grand Magus Harrison was an institution. His predecessor, Grand Magus Callahan, had been old-blood Arcanum, a wizard of wizards stretching back a thousand years. I never met Callahan—he had a heart attack in 1969, almost thirty years before I came around—but his official portrait looked much like what the average mundane would expect from a top wizard: long white hair tied loosely behind him, a longer white beard fall
ing over his ceremonial velvet robe, half-moon glasses at the end of a crooked nose, and piercing blue eyes beneath bushy brows that seem to follow the viewer around the room. In other words, Callahan looked like he came straight from central casting.

  But because he died without a named heir, the next year in Arcanum politics was little more than a drawn-out Council meeting to discuss and dismiss potential candidates. A number of names were put forth—not a few of them belonging to magi of the Inner Council—but the eventual winner was the dark horse, a thirty-five-year-old Tennessean without a drop of old Arcanum blood in him. There were plenty of raised eyebrows when he took the helm. Greg Harrison was young, the first wizard in his family, and—the real scandal to certain wizards—black, but he was unequaled in terms of talent, respected by those who’d worked with him, and a Harvard man who’d gone to school on scholarship. He might keep his hair short and eschew the beard and robe, but Harrison was undoubtedly grand magus material.

  As I’d been raised with a healthy respect for (and maybe a touch of fear of) the grand magus, I found it disconcerting to be standing outside with him in the middle of the night, trying to give him a coherent reason for our presence in the Arcanum’s pasture while ignoring his bathrobe and old Reeboks. Once Toula ceded the floor, I stumbled, I shivered, and I tried to keep his attention off the sniveling bundle in Joey’s arms with all of the grace and suaveness of any scared, disoriented teenager. To his credit, the grand magus heard us out, but then he folded his arms and said, “We’re not going to get anything accomplished tonight. I suppose y’all had better come in out of the cold, and we’ll see what’s to be done in the morning.”

  By then, however, I’d woken and processed enough to protest. “Coileán could be dead by morning. And Val—”

  “Mr. Carver,” he replied, quietly cutting me off, “I know this is upsetting, but I’m not about to invade Faerie, especially not at this time of night. Let’s not be foolish, hmm?”

  Toula’s hand clamped on my shoulder, silencing my rebuttal before I could get myself in trouble. “We’ll deal with this after breakfast,” she murmured, squeezing me for good measure. “Come on, it’s freezing out here.”

  She remained at my side for the walk back into the trailer park—despite his age and arthritis, the grand magus apparently saw nothing to be gained by using a gate as a shortcut—and I felt her take my hand as we passed the first decoy trailer in the circle. I couldn’t put a name on my jumble of emotions at that moment, but fear and dread were among them, and the sick feeling in my gut was only partially out of concern for my brother. Toula had seen firsthand why I’d been willing to put the silo behind me. Out of habit, I glanced to the left and right as we passed the trailers, checking the usual hiding spots for my old classmates—Russell Mulligan, Milo Brown, Morgan Kramer, Dan Solomon, Leo Rossi, and Terrance Anders, sons and grandsons of Council magi who’d made “Whack a Dud” their longtime favorite game. Though I hoped they’d been sent to reform school while I’d been away, I doubted they’d ever get more than a slap on the wrist and a stern talking-to, with their connections. No one on the Council had seemed to give a damn about my health, in any case, and I’d been a walking poster child for CPS intervention.

  But my tormenters were either gone or asleep, and we entered the silo without molestation, earning only curious looks from the pair of night watchmen as the grand magus waved us inside. When we’d descended a level to the guest rooms, the grand magus pointed down the hallway and said, “Toula, I believe number five is ready. Would you please get Mr. Bolin and his, uh…friend…situated?” he asked, taking a careful look at the face peeping out from Joey’s coat. Toula nodded and led them away, and he escorted me to the room across the hall. “I think,” he said, unlocking the door with a touch, “that any family reunions should be saved for daylight. Don’t you?”

  As I was by turns strung-out and weary that night, the last thing I wanted at that moment was a reunion with my parents. “No rush,” I muttered, brushing past him toward the neat bed. “They don’t need to know I’m back.”

  “Well…actually, they do.” He closed the door behind him and stood in the entryway as I dropped my jacket onto a floral-print easy chair. “The official line is that they shipped you off to boarding school last year. If we don’t want to raise any eyebrows—”

  “Home on fall break?”

  “Maybe. Let me deal with it in a few hours.” He started to leave, but then he hesitated, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “And in the meantime, I’m going to have to ask you not to wander from this floor.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to read the unspoken in his expression. “No unattended faerie lords. Got it,” I replied, kicking off my shoes.

  “Beyond that. As you might imagine, your, uh…your friends are still living here,” he said, emphasizing the euphemism with a raised eyebrow. “Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but I’d rather not test that hypothesis on top of everything else.” The grand magus paused, then added, “I hope you won’t be offended if I don’t address you properly, but—”

  I waved it off. “Keep the peace, let Dad save face, I get it.”

  “Did Coileán ever tell you what Titania did to him?”

  “He did. Never knew about my aunt. That…explains a lot.”

  The grand magus nodded slowly. “You’re a smart kid, Mr. Carver. Always have been. So I’m not going to stand here and lie to you that he loves you and wants you back.”

  “I kind of figured that out.”

  “Yeah. Wish things were different.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled.

  “Well.” He cleared his throat and rubbed the hole in the elbow of his bathrobe. “With all of that in mind, I believe it goes without saying that no one is to know what’s happened until we sort something out.”

  “I don’t even know what’s happened. Val said he’ll send word, but—”

  “But you’re in the dark for now,” he finished, and sighed. “I suppose I’ve dealt with worse. Get some sleep, son, and we’ll talk about it over breakfast.”

  He let himself out, but almost immediately rapped and opened the door again. “One last thing,” he said quietly. “Just checking, but the girl with you…”

  “Georgie,” I offered.

  He gave me a knowing look, then cocked his head toward the room across the hall. “I seem to remember hearing something about Mr. Bolin raising a dragon by that name. Strange world, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mm. And I’m not suggesting there’s anything odd about the little lady, but should you need it, there’s a fire extinguisher down the hall to your left.” The grand magus pushed his glasses down his nose. “Don’t y’all burn down my silo, now.”

  With that, the door latched, and I was alone. I stretched out on top of the comforter and stared at the off-white ceiling, not bothering to turn off the lamps.

  Sleep wasn’t coming, and it was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  If I’d never seen the inside of the silo again, it would have been too soon. There weren’t enough rose-colored glasses in the universe to give me the warm fuzzies about my childhood in that hellhole. If someone had deigned to teach me about magic and the workings of the three realms, then I might have looked upon the experience as at least useful, but the night classes my peers took were barred to me, the unfortunate dud. What little I learned of magic came to me piecemeal, often due to my own investigation—but then, as the Arcanum saw it, there was no sense in wasting their time and mine with a proper education when I’d never be a wizard.

  In general, magical talent is inherited like height or hair color or shoe size: if you look at a pair of wizards, you can make a decent guess as to how their children will turn out. That said, there are freaks on both ends of the spectrum, gifted wizards like my sister who wow the world from day one, and an underclass of witches and duds who quietly go away. I’m sure it’s tough to be a witch, able to do a
little with magic but never strong enough to pass muster, but for someone growing up in an Arcanum installation, being a dud is hell. There’s no known cause for the condition, and to my dismay, I learned there was no cure. Every so often, for no good reason, wizard parents will simply have a child who can’t cast the most basic of spells. And while a few witches may linger on the fringes of the Arcanum, maybe through marriage or out of pity, there’s just no place in a magical organization for a person who can’t use magic at all. As soon as they’re old enough, duds go out on their own, and most never look back. Of course, if most duds have classmates like mine, then I understand the impulse to put as much ground between themselves and the silo as possible.

  There’s no official test for a dud, and the Arcanum hesitates to make any formal classification until age twenty, when it considers a wizard to have come of age. Though rare, late bloomers happen—one of the Council magi when I was growing up was thought to be a dud until he was ten, when he fell off his bike, broke his leg, and blasted a hole through a nearby tree in response to the pain. But anyone who knew me knew I was a hopeless case—which, combined with Helen’s fame as the heir apparent to the grand magus, made me a target. Kids whose mothers and fathers and grandparents were on the Council suddenly found an upstart in their midst in my sister, and because kids are fundamentally assholes, they took it out on me. Their parents were fundamentally assholes, too, which is why I was excluded from classes in magic, even the classes that didn’t require proficiency with a wand. But I had a computer and a better handle on technical infrastructure than most of the Arcanum luddites combined, and so I tried to educate myself.

  For any success I had in that regard, the Arcanum can blame my father. Dad worked in the Archives, cataloguing newly acquired works, preserving older books and scrolls, and providing research assistance to the Council when asked. As he had led the push for digitization, he also oversaw that massive project and its team of junior archivists. But while Dad and his people taught themselves about scanning and database construction, they didn’t bother so much with security. Consequently, by the time I was twelve, I’d figured out how to work my way into the system—it was too easy to be called hacking—and help myself to some heavy reading. The Arcanum may not have seen any point in educating a dud in the ways of magic, but I decided that there was no reason why I couldn’t at least learn the history. If there’s one thing at which the Arcanum excels, it’s documenting its own past, and I found dozens of books to read, covering topics as broad as the Great War and as specific as the day-to-day jottings of individual grand magi.