Magic Spark

by Sara Dobie Bauer

  “It should ring through.” She nodded to the plastic phone on the table by Zoe’s bed, which made Liam realize he had no idea where his phone was or Zoe’s. Probably still in their burning car.

  “Thank you.”

  Even though he was expecting it, he still jumped when the phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Liam?” It was the owner of the Bistro, Max. He sounded just this side of hysterical.

  “Yeah. Is everyone okay down there?”

  Max let out a long, loud breath. “It’s a damn mess. Horrible. We closed the restaurant, of course. Then, once things calmed down a bit, I saw your burnt-up car and called the hospital, and they said Zoe was there.”

  “She’s in a coma. Her side took the brunt of it. Do they know what happened?”

  “They’re saying something about the trolley.”

  Liam remembered driving slowly down Broad in the midst of Charleston rush hour and playing some stupid country music to annoy Zoe. He remembered seeing the trolley in front of them, then—

  “I think there was an explosion,” Liam said. “I think I saw a flash of red.”

  Max let out another loud sigh. “Let’s not worry about that right now. You worry about Zoe. What’s the doctor say?”

  “She’s in a coma. They don’t know anything—don’t know if she’ll wake up today or a year from now or never.”

  “She’ll wake up, Liam. She’s got you to come home to.”

  His eyes burned a bit at that.

  “Do you need anything?” Max asked.

  He paused. “I need Zoe back.”

  Cyan sat on the cold stone of Grandmother Plainacher’s grave in the Church of St. Agnes cemetery. Usually, she talked to her grandmother, asked her about their family, about the Craft, but she had nothing to say that night, no questions. She reached into her wallet and pulled out the folded, hand-drawn picture of her destined true love. She stared at him for a while and then stood.

  It was easy to walk right into Charleston Memorial Hospital undeterred. The first floor was in chaos, patients still pouring in from the accident on Broad Street—the accident Cyan knew was no accident at all. There had been a witch present, and he had done something awful.

  The more she thought back to the bloody scene on Broad, the more she wondered if she’d just imagined Liam. Maybe Sybil’s paintings had wormed into her brain. Maybe every man in need of saving would look like Cyan’s “Dof,” her invisible man. Except if what she thought she saw amidst the flames was true, he wasn’t invisible. He was real, and he was early.

  It would take some work to find Liam and Zoe since she didn’t have last names. It would take even more work to look him in the face. She walked up to administration where a harried nurse shifted papers, eyes wide and afraid. “Excuse me,” Cyan said. “I’m looking for my friends, Liam and Zoe.”

  “Last name?” the nurse barked.

  “Uh—”

  A soft hand fell on Cyan’s shoulder. “Did you say you’re a friend of Mr. Cody’s?”

  Liam Cody. Sure. Cyan nodded, and the female doctor smiled.

  “Good. He needs a friend right now. I’ll take you up.”

  Cyan followed closely behind, surrounded by the sounds of groaning and the hurried movements of doctors trying to save lives. She didn’t even know if Mr. Cody was Liam, but she followed nonetheless. What choice did she have?

  After a quick elevator ride, the doctor walked down the quiet hallway of the ICU. When she stopped in front of one room, Cyan recognized the beautiful woman in bed with a tube down her throat and Liam’s black tuxedo coat.

  “Thank you,” she whispered to the helpful doctor, who nodded and went back to work.

  It was hard to hide the sound of combat boots, so Liam turned when she entered the room. He had a bandage on his head, and the collar of his white dress shirt was open and stained red. He tilted his head and stood, staring at her.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said, his mouth turning up on the edges.

  Cyan played with one of her blonde braids. “You sure about that?”

  He nodded. “My hero. I don’t remember your name.”

  “Cyan.”

  He reached his hand out to her. She moved to shake, but they both paused when they saw dried blood on her palms.

  “I’m sorry.” She crossed her arms under her leather jacket.

  “There’s a bathroom.” He pointed to the door in the corner of the room.

  Cyan hid behind that door, scrubbing her hands, and stared into her own gray eyes in the mirror to make sure she wasn’t wearing blood anywhere else. When she stepped back into the gauze-smelling hospital room, Liam hadn’t moved from where he stood.

  Cyan stayed near the door. “I didn’t mean to impose. I just wanted to see if she was all right.”

  Liam glanced back at the bed. “She’s not. I mean, she’s not yet. She will be.”

  Cyan gestured to his bandage. “Your head.”

  “My hairline will never be the same. And the dry-cleaning bill is going to be a nightmare.”

  He said it all with such a deadpan expression, Cyan almost didn’t realize he was joking. When she did, she snorted and covered her face. He chuckled once, quickly, and that moment of levity was enough to convince Cyan: this was the man from her aunt’s visions.

  Her eyes brushed over his short, dark brown hair. Beyond a few cuts near his eye and across his forehead, he had the flawless complexion of Sybil’s paintings. He looked like a man who never had to shave—or perhaps shaved every morning, with a deadly sharp straight razor, so smooth was his skin. He had big, bright eyes, maybe green or hazel; she couldn’t tell in the dim, hospital room lights. Cyan hadn’t expected him to be so big, possibly because Sybil had never painted much more than Liam’s face. She felt like an elf next to him.

  She looked at the floor. “I’m sorry, I’m staring at you.”

  “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “You work on Broad Street.”

  “Yeah. My aunt owns Sea Books.”

  “I’m the manager at Broad Street Bistro.”

  “Oh.” He’d been a block away from her, but for how long? “You’re not from here. You talk funny.”

  He feigned offense. “I talk funny? Where do you crazy southerners get off saying I talk funny?” He sighed. “I grew up in Ireland. Most days, I think the accent’s gone.”

  “It’s not,” she said. “Have you been here long?”

  “America or Charleston?”

  “Charleston.”

  “Only about three weeks.”

  It was a strange relief to know he hadn’t been a block away from her for months, years. “Are you and Zoe married?”

  Apparently, that was the exact wrong thing to say. The tall, strong man in a destroyed suit covered his face. His shoulders shook with sudden, silent sobs. Cyan rarely touched people and never comforted, yet what had she told her mother just earlier that day? What would she do when she met her Dof?

  Keep him safe.

  Cyan got closer and put her small hands on his arms. There wasn’t an electric shock, no nod from the great beyond of their fated meeting. The suit fabric felt cold against her palms, but she could feel him shaking—his whole body, shaking.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He hugged her, and despite his size, he felt small in her arms. Cyan had never hugged a man before, except her father, but she didn’t need to be guided into an embrace. Liam clung to her, so she clung back. Her face pressed against his chest, and he smelled like smoke and the remnants of men’s cologne.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again and felt his hand at the base of her neck, his fingers in her hair as he held her tighter, tighter. She looked to the broken body on the bed and said, “She’ll wake up. She’ll wake up.”

  She kept saying it until he was too exhausted to stand and she led him to his chair by Zoe’s bed. Cyan sat on the floor in the corner and watched the clock tick.

  Liam woke with a pain that extended up
the side of his neck and directly into his temple. He reached his hand up to poke at the pain only to have his finger encounter a thick, white bandage, which was when he noticed the beeping sounds, the smell of antiseptic, and remembered where he was.

  His eyes popped open to early morning light, tilting its way pathetically through the thick, hospital blinds. He sat in a thinly cushioned chair, legs extended in front of him. Zoe hadn’t moved an inch in her pale, white hospital bed—which her skin was beginning to mimic in the places where it wasn’t a shade of purple, yellow, or dark brown. Bruises. She had bruises everywhere he could see, and the tube down her throat looked like some sadistic pacifier between her lips.

  He rubbed his eyes and then heard a noise from the floor beneath the window: a sort of sighing moan. His eyes darted down.

  A woman slept, curled in a little ball against the wall. She used her black leather coat as a pillow, and her long, thick, braided hair fell over her cheeks and cascaded down her neck. Her name was Cyan, he remembered, although now, looking at her in the morning light, he knew her as something else, too: Blondie. It was what some of the boys at the Bistro called her, and she’d almost knocked Liam over the day before. Her good looks were legend at the restaurant, although she didn’t much resemble the cartoon character or the 80s rock star. Her look was too wild for the comic book girl, and she was too small to be Debbie Harry. He remembered the color of her eyes: a shade of blue that had all the color washed away, to more of a deep, dark gray. She smelled like spice and smoke but not cigarettes. He remembered all that, but he couldn’t remember falling asleep or apparently giving Cyan no other option than to sleep on the floor like an unwelcome housecat.

  Liam stood and kissed Zoe on the forehead but pulled back quickly when he found her skin cold. He wanted to pick her up and hold her to his chest, warm her, but all the beeping machines and IVs made that impossible.

  He leaned down next to Cyan, put his hand on her shoulder, and said her name.

  She startled and looked up at him.

  “Hey,” he said. “You didn’t have to stay.”

  “Oh, I…” She pushed herself up on one elbow. A heavy, black and white amulet hung around her neck. “I was tired.” She sat up and stayed on the floor, legs curled beneath her. “What time is it?”

  He sat on the floor, too. “I have no idea.”

  He watched her search around in her jean pockets, then jacket, before pulling out a black cell phone. “Oh, shit, I have like sixty messages from my family.” She stood suddenly, as did Liam, who then almost fell over. With lightning speed, Cyan’s hand reached out and held him by the forearm. Her grip was like iron. “You okay?”

  “Will be, once the room stops spinning.”

  She expelled an irritated gasp and dragged him back to the chair by Zoe’s bed. “You have a head injury. Where the fuck is the nurse?” Meanwhile, she pounded away at her cell phone, one hand still on his arm.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You need to go home. In the sunlight, you look like an extra in a slasher flick.”

  He chuckled weakly. “I don’t want to leave her alone.”

  “You said you work at the Bistro. Can someone from there sit with her while you go home and wash up? And when did you eat last?”

  He looked up to find her studying his face, her full lips set in a thin line. “I don’t know.”

  She glanced away from him and toward Zoe, motionless on the bed. “You shouldn’t eat hospital food. I mean, no one should eat hospital food. Maybe…” Cyan seemed to be wrestling with something. “Maybe I can bring you something to eat.”

  Her hand was still wrapped around his wrist, and he suspected she didn’t even notice. “You’ve done enough. You don’t even know me.”

  Her laugh sounded frantic. He thought it would have been a pretty thing if not for the panic in her eyes.

  “You don’t know me, Cyan. Do you?”

  She pulled her hand away from him. “Why would you ask something like that?” She took a breath in through her nose. “That sounded a lot angrier than I meant it to.”

  “Well, you did just wake up on a floor. Gives new meaning to wrong side of the bed.”

  “You need to go home, Liam.” She tapped some more on her cell phone, not looking at him.

  He looked at Zoe. “I’ll call someone from work.”

  “I need to go.”

  He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “Yeah, of course.”

  Cyan didn’t move to leave. She didn’t move at all. When he looked up, she stared at him, top teeth nibbling her bottom lip.

  “What?” he asked.

  She reached out and ran her fingers through his hair, then her whole hand over the top of his head. She pulled back as though she’d been zapped. “Jesus, I’m sorry. That was weird.”

  “No, it felt good actually. My head aches.”

  She stared at him again until he felt like he was being studied, a man-sized bug under an invisible microscope.

  “Do you have any… I mean…” She tugged on her braids, and her eyes darted around the room. “There’s got to be paper around here.”

  There was a little pad with the name of some drug at the bottom in purple letters. Cyan scrawled something across the paper’s surface, violently, as if she was actually angry at the paper and then handed the pad to Liam.

  “That’s my number,” she said. “You don’t have to use it, but if you need anything.”

  He stood and held the paper in his hand. The top of her head came up to his chin. “Thank you. For everything.”

  “Go home, Liam.”

  He nodded as Cyan said a quick goodbye. He turned to watch her long hair dance across her back as she walked, or more like ran, back into the hospital hallway. She seemed to be in quite a rush to get away from him.

  Cyan texted everyone—Sybil, her mom and dad—and told them to meet at Sea Books… after she told them, obviously, that she was alive. Still, as she left the hospital, she knew she was in for it. After the massive accident on Broad Street and then silence from Cyan, she was certain her family had spent the entire night calling the police and then, the hospital, looking for her dead body. Good thing conjuring spells didn’t affect her, protected from magical detection by Grandmother Plainacher’s black agate necklace, or who knew what spells her mother would have done to try and summon her back to them?

  The morning was dreadfully cold and damp as she passed still-flowering gardens that hid the huge plantation homes set back from the road. Above her, the sky was the color of a murky pond; a storm approached. She almost tripped over crooked sidewalks as she thought back to the hospital scene and touching Liam’s hair.

  What the hell was that about?

  Cyan hadn’t planned to caress the man’s head, it just sort of happened. One second, she was staring down at the face she’d been staring at all her life—through pictures. The next second, her hand just moved, fingers running through soft hair. Still, no glow of magic light, but touching him had indeed made something glow inside her. She wanted to touch him more, a sensation she’d never had before, so focused was she on learning the Craft and preparing for the War.

  Now, as she walked, she thought more about the way he made her feel: warm, nervous, and sort of dizzy. Liam was better looking in person than in Sybil’s paintings, maybe because of the way he moved, the way his eyes crinkled, the way…

  Cyan shook her head when she turned onto Broad Street, annoyed at her own distraction. Up ahead, the street was blocked. A palm tree had fallen over in the chaos. Remnants of burnt cars—Liam’s included—still remained, although crews looked to be working hard to at least sweep up the rubble. Cops were everywhere, trying to figure out how this happened. Cyan knew, but she wasn’t going to the authorities. She was going to her family.

  As soon as she stepped into Sea Books, the room erupted in high-pitched, female shouting, mostly from Rue, who even used Cyan’s real first name—that of a woman burned in 415 AD for witchcraft. What
kind of name legacy was that anyway?

  “Where have you been, Hypatia?”

  She brushed past her mother and hoped someone had made tea. “Mother, I hate that name.”

  “Well, it’s yours, and I’m about one more smart ass comment away from setting up a stake for you in the middle of Broad!”

  “Rue.” The sound of Cyan’s father’s voice soothed the whole room—even Sybil, who stood in the corner, wringing her red hair. “Why don’t we all just calm down now? Cyan is safe.” Drake Burroughs guided his beautiful, hysterical wife to an overstuffed, paisley chair in the corner and stood in front of Cyan. He was a giant of a man with dark blue eyes and perpetual five o’clock shadow. “Why don’t you tell us where you’ve been, honey?”

  “Sybil, you might want to sit down.”

  Her aunt did as instructed, pulling up another ugly chair from the recesses of bookshelves.

  “I was on Broad last night. When it happened.”

  Rue exhaled loudly and put her hand to her forehead. “I knew it.”

  “Mother, I’m fine.” She looked up at Drake. “But Daddy, before the accident, I saw someone. I saw a witch.”

  Drake put his massive hands on his hips. “You’re sayin’ a witch caused the accident.”

  “Yes. I tried to…” She shook her head. “I shouted, but it was too late. I saw a red light, and the trolley went flying through the air.”

  “That’s a damn strong witch,” he said.

  “Yeah. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Dorcha,” her father whispered.

  Rue sprung to her feet. “Here? Now? But Cyan still doesn’t have any powers. How can she fight back without any powers?”

  “Yes, Mother, I know, but maybe they’ll start manifesting now that he’s made an appearance. Maybe me seeing him last night will push things along.”

  Drake put one of his hands on Cyan’s shoulder. “Do you feel any different?”

  She thought of Liam. “Well. There’s something else. The trolley caused a lot of damage, but one of the cars was practically crushed. The driver got out, but his girlfriend was trapped, so we worked together to get her free.” She paused. “It was dark, and there was fire. I wasn’t sure.”