Magic Ain't a Game

by P. D. Workman

  Reg saw Jessup through the peephole, and another shape behind her. She opened the door, hearing Jessup laughing over some joke.

  It wasn’t Jessup and Sarah, but Jessup and Francesca. Francesca, a white Haitian transplant, had entered Reg’s life when Francesca had lost her cat, Nicole. They had ended up fighting an immortal, a powerful being known as the Witch Doctor. It had taken all of them to eventually overcome him in battle, and one of the results was that Francesca became responsible for nine more black cats that she and Reg had needed to find homes for. Reg loved Francesca’s lilting Creole accent and was glad that she had decided to join them as well.

  “Oh, this is going to be a fun night,” Reg said, smiling. She displayed her outfit to them. “What do you think? Will this do?”

  “Sure,” Jessup agreed, “I told you anything would be fine. All of the stuff you usually wear is dressy enough.”

  “I just wanted to be sure that—” Reg cut herself off, looking at Francesca.

  Francesca was staring at Reg’s door, all humor gone from her face.

  “What is it?” Jessup asked.

  “What is this?” Francesca demanded. It sounded like ‘What ees thees?’

  Reg looked at Francesca and looked at the door.

  “What is what?” Jessup asked, her head tilted to the side. She obviously couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “That mark,” Francesca said.

  Reg turned her head to look more closely at the door. There was an initial carved into it. Not quite. It wasn’t an initial, but a rune, like the ones she had seen when she had visited the dwarfs. And it wasn’t carved into the door. She wasn’t sure what it had been made with, but it glowed around the edges. Somebody must have taken the time to pick up glowing paint from Michael’s.

  “I don’t know where that came from. Some vandal? Is it a gang sign?” Reg looked at Jessup for her analysis. It wasn’t like any gang tag that Reg had ever seen, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. Gangs adopted all different kinds of symbols.

  “What are you talking about?” Jessup moved closer to the door, her face just inches from the mark.

  “You can’t see that?”

  Jessup shook her head and stepped back again. “Can you?”

  Reg nodded. “But I don’t know how it got there. The only person who has been here…” She trailed off, deciding that she really didn’t want to talk about Sabat and the news he had brought.

  “This is an official seal,” Francesca said, her nose wrinkling as she studied it. “Who left it?”

  Reg didn’t answer.

  “What does it look like?” Jessup asked.

  Francesca traced the lines with her fingertip for Jessup. The policewoman thought about it for a minute.

  “Hmm. That looks sort of like the seal for Magical Investigations.”

  Both women looked at Reg, expecting further explanation. Reg shrugged, spreading her arms wide.

  “If we stand around here looking at the door all night, we’re never going to get to the party. Let’s go!”

  Francesca and Jessup looked at each other, then agreed. They led the way back to Jessup’s car.

  “Is Sarah going to come?” Reg asked, looking at the big house as they walked around it. She could sense that Sarah was still at home.

  “I think she’ll probably show up later,” Jessup said. “She didn’t want a ride, but I don’t see her passing it up. She’s wanted to go to all of the celebrations lately.”

  “Ever since she was revived, she’s been… acting like a twenty-year-old,” Reg said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “I don’t know where she gets all of the energy. It’s not even just the physical effort I’m talking about. With all of her new friends and dates and every event on the community calendar, I don’t even know how she keeps them all straight.”

  “It is not natural,” Francesca agreed.

  A fact that they all knew. Her emerald amulet slowed Sarah’s aging, and a spell had reversed many of the years she had already put on. Reg knew that Sarah was an old woman, far older than she looked, but it was pretty hard to wrap her mind around the fact when she was gallivanting all over town.

  Gallivanting. Reg felt sixty herself.

  “What else do you think is going to happen at this equinox celebration?” Reg asked once they were on their way.

  “Don’t think that I’m going to forget that seal on your door,” Jessup said in a flat, even tone.

  “I don’t want to talk about that. Don’t wreck the evening by insisting on discussing problems. I want to enjoy myself.”

  Francesca nodded. “There will be plenty of time to worry later,” she agreed. “Ostara is a time for peace and balance, not a time to worry about life’s troubles. Everybody has troubles. But not for Ostara.”

  “Ostara,” Reg repeated. “That’s like Easter? Is that where the word Easter comes from? I know it’s like Christmas; the Christians adopted a bunch of pagan traditions…”

  “Actually, many of the Easter traditions come from Jewish Pesach, not paganism,” Francesca advised. “Hard-boiled eggs, for instance, are traditional for Pesach.”

  “Oh.” Reg nodded and looked out her window. She didn’t want to delve deeply into the traditions and where they had all originated. If she wanted a lecture, she could call Corvin and ask him about it. She was sure that he could put her to sleep if she were having insomnia when he got into professorial mode.

  Over the phone, anyway. If he were there in person, there were too many other distractions.

  Chapter Six

  Reg looked around at the hundreds of people crowding the community center hall and yard. It was a good thing that Florida had such pleasant weather. If they’d had such a celebration outdoors in the north, where she had grown up, nobody would have been able to stay outside without freezing their fingers and toes. But the nice weather in Black Sands allowed them to spread out and to accommodate far more people.

  She recognized many of the faces, people she knew from around the neighborhood, even if she didn’t know them all by name. And there were people she didn’t recognize as well. Mothers with young children, out-of-town guests who were identifiable by their clothing, a number of warlocks in robes that she didn’t think she had met before. She wondered if they were from Corvin’s coven or another. Maybe local, maybe from halfway around the world, there to enjoy the Spring Games.

  Reg saw Letticia putting out cookies in the kitchen service window and headed toward her. She remembered the last time she’d had one of Letticia’s chocolate chip cookies. They were worth going out of her way for. And she was starting to get used to Letticia. She wasn’t just an old crone, the witch who led Sarah’s coven. She looked severe and definitely didn’t mind sharing her opinions with anyone who asked, but Reg had learned that she had a softer, more human side too. She had helped Reg and had shown compassion and sympathy for Reg and for Sarah when she had been dying. It had been a challenging time, and Letticia had tried to make it easier for her, not harder, and had been an unexpected ally during Corvin’s tribunal hearing.

  Letticia saw Reg coming and nodded at her. “Miss Rawlins.”

  “You don’t need to call me that. Call me Reg,” Reg insisted, her face burning. Letticia was much older and more senior than Reg was; it was embarrassing to be treated like an equal or superior. Reg was barely an initiate in the magical world.

  “Have a blessed Ostara,” Letticia invoked, reaching out with her tray of cookies so that Reg could reach past the others in the throng to grab one.

  “Are these ones your cookies?” Reg asked, grabbing one.

  “Some of them.” Letticia nodded. “That one is.”

  Reg bit into it. It tasted like it had just come out of the oven. It was the perfect taste and texture. Reg looked past Letticia to the oven in the kitchen, trying to see whether she was cooking them right there.

  “This is fabulous. Thank you.”

  Letticia nodded. “How are you doing?” she inquired, as
Reg made her way over to the wall, where she was closer to Letticia, in order to talk to her and away from the pressing, noisy crowds.

  “I’m good.”

  “You’ve been through quite a bit during the last few months. You’re well? And your cat?”

  “Yes, we’re both fine. Fully recovered, I think. There don’t seem to be any long-lasting effects.”

  “Excellent. And how did things go in the Everglades?”

  “Oh.” Reg looked around. It wasn’t really the kind of thing she was prepared to discuss in public. “Well… we all survived. So that’s a plus. Things didn’t go quite the way we had hoped.”

  “The Everglades is a very ancient place. It is a long time since I have been deep into the park.” Letticia’s home was on the fringes of the Everglades. Reg didn’t know if it were actually within park boundaries or not. “There are things… best left undisturbed.”

  Reg nodded slowly. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “But, young people have to try everything once,” Letticia said dryly. “That’s what you young folks say, isn’t it? ‘I’ll try anything once.’ Not really the best motto to live by.”

  “Yeah. I don’t… I don’t say that.”

  Reg looked around, needing a distraction from the topic of conversation. As Francesca had said, it was a time to celebrate and enjoy themselves, not a time to worry about all of the rules and consequences.

  Or something like that.

  “Will you be going to the Spring Games?” she asked Letticia.

  “Yes, of course. I think you will find that most of the practitioners around here will go. It’s only natural to want to see what other people are doing. Figure out they can tweak their own practices, improve their powers. Everyone always wants to stretch and to reach new heights.”

  “Sarah said there are protesters.”

  Letticia looked more sour than usual at this. “There are protesters for everything. It doesn’t mean anything. There will always be detractors. To everything.”

  Reg nodded. “I guess so. I’m glad you’re going to be there.”

  Letticia smiled thinly. “Why is that?”

  “Uh…” Reg cast around for an answer, trying to put it into words. “Just that… I want there to be people I know there. I want to know that it’s okay to go watch them; I’m not breaking any rules by attending. It’s just new… I guess I want some reassurance.”

  “And I’m sure your girlfriends have already told you everything you need to know,” Letticia dismissed. She looked across the room and Reg saw she was focusing on Jessup and Francesca.

  “Yes, they’re always very helpful,” Reg acknowledged. “But Officer Jessup is… she doesn’t have much in the way of powers and Francesca isn’t from around here, so her traditions might be different.”

  “Good points.” Letticia nodded. “But Marta was raised in a practicing home. She knows her way around the magical laws and traditions surrounding Black Sands.”

  Reg reached across a platter of cookies to get herself a drink of punch. The chocolate chip cookies were so sweet, she needed something to cut all of the sugar.

  “How does that happen? Someone like Marta,” Reg substituted in Jessup’s first name. They were friends, but Reg had a hard time calling her by her first name. “Where her family were practitioners but she ends up without any powers? Or with only very weak powers. Is it just… genetics? Like some kids end up with brown hair and some of them with blond hair? Or is it choice? Or because she didn’t practice every day like learning an instrument?”

  “You only need to look at your own life to answer most of those questions,” Letticia pointed out. “Did you practice your spells regularly?”

  Reg laughed.

  “No. I didn’t even know that I had any… special abilities. I tried to not do things that would attract people’s attention. When kids spend more time talking to the air than to the people in their family or at school… they think there’s something wrong with you. You get visits with a therapist or get smacked around until you start behaving. I didn’t even know what was the matter with me. Why I was so different.”

  “So, no one needed to teach you how to do what you do.”

  “No. But I keep finding out other things that I can do, other abilities I have or things I need to be careful of. If I had grown up with others who were… like me… then I would know more about that kind of stuff, right?”

  Although, from what Reg had learned about her possible parentage, either one of them might have chosen to kill her instead of nurturing her as was expected in most human homes. It was to Reg’s advantage that she had grown up in foster care, even if she hadn’t known anything about her abilities because of it. She wouldn’t have survived if she hadn’t been removed from her mother’s care.

  “Even those raised in practicing homes still find that there are things they don’t know about themselves. That is why we have a lifetime to keep learning and events like the Games to expand our horizons.”

  Reg nodded and sipped some more of the punch. It was too sweet to completely cut the sugar of the cookie. Milk would have been better. And she suspected that the punch—at least the cup she had taken—was not child safe. But it was giving Reg a pleasant buzz. Making her more relaxed. She could forget about what’s-his-name and just have a nice equinox celebration like Jessup had promised.

  “Davyn is helping me with my firecasting,” she told Letticia. “I have to do practice exercises for that.”

  Letticia nodded. “Because you are not strong enough?” she asked with a dry smile. She knew that was not the case. Reg had been lighting fires without even knowing she was the one responsible for it. And when she had used her fire in the Dwarf kingdom to help to unmake Calliopia’s blade, she had been so strong she had been worried about blowing up the entire mountain.

  “No…” Reg laughed and looked down at her punch. “Because… I don’t know how to control it really well.”

  “And that is another thing that we learn from our families. Not everyone has the same strengths and talents, and sometimes innate talent can be more dangerous than not having any magical power at all. It needs to be refined and controlled. You can definitely practice your talents and build up levels of spell craft. But sometimes what is important is to be able to tamp those powers down when they are not appropriate.”

  “Well… growing up in non-practicing families definitely helped me with that. I suppressed a lot of things.”

  Her mind turned back to Julian. He had guessed she had powers. With everything that her foster parents and social workers and therapists had done to try to make Reg act more normal, he had still seen something in her. She was curious about what it was and whether other people had known it at the time.

  Chapter Seven

  Time to stop being a wallflower,” Jessup told Reg, drawing her out of her corner. Reg had eaten several cookies and she wasn’t sure how many cups of punch she had drunk. She’d smiled and talked to some of the community members that she knew, but she knew that Jessup was right, and she was just wasting her time standing by the wall eating cookies. It was a celebration. She was supposed to be joyous. She was supposed to be doing things.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Just as long as you don’t expect me to do the thing where they stand an egg on its end.”

  “That’s just a myth,” Jessup scoffed. “You can do that any time of year as long as you are patient enough. How about some egg decorating?”

  “I can do that,” Reg agreed. “I’m really good with the stickers. Not so good at the dye.”

  “We’ll show you some tricks. You’ll be decorating like a pro in no time.”

  Reg allowed Jessup to lead her to a room that was a little quieter. There were several different stations around the room with different kinds of dyes or decorations. Reg picked up an egg at the nearest one. But it was much lighter than she expected and flew out of her hand. She tried to grab it out of the air and ended up crushing it in her hand. She looked down at the bits
of eggshell in dismay and looked at Jessup.

  “I thought… this one was empty!”

  Jessup started to laugh. Not polite little giggles, but a loud, hearty laugh that went on and on. Reg held her hands up to her face as if she could hide the fire she felt there.

  “Hey…” she protested.

  “It’s blown,” Jessup told her, between chuckles.

  “Blown?” Reg dropped the eggshells of the exploded egg into a nearby garbage can and brushed off her palms.

  “For kids, we usually do hard-boiled eggs, and that’s probably what you were expecting, right?”

  Reg nodded. “Yeah. Right.”

  “But when you’re more experienced or want to try some of these other techniques, then a lot of times we use blown eggs. Hollow shells.”

  “But how do you get chickens to lay hollow eggs? And how do you know which ones are hollow and which ones are… eggy?”

  Jessup wiped at her eyes, still giggling a little in between answering Reg.

  “The chickens don’t lay hollow eggs. They wouldn’t be able to. They’d get crushed in the… egg canal.” She picked up one of the eggs from the basket Reg had taken one from. She held it out for Reg to see. “You see the hole?”

  “Yes.”

  “They drain or blow the egg out of the hole.”

  “But wouldn’t that be really hard? How do you do that?” Reg had a hard enough time peeling eggs for an egg salad sandwich. She couldn’t imagine trying to blow one out.

  “Raw eggs,” Jessup said. “It’s not hard. I mean, you can still mess it up and end up breaking it, but once you’ve had a little practice, it isn’t that bad. Why don’t you grab one? Carefully this time. We’ll take a look around and see how you would like to make yours.”

  Reg picked up a hollow egg from the basket. The witch behind the table smiled at her, hundreds of wrinkles and lines shifting and getting deeper, yet making her look lighter and younger. The egg had practically no weight at all. Reg followed Jessup gingerly, feeling like she was going to bump into someone and crush the second egg before she got a chance to do anything with it.