A Spoonful of Magic

by Irene Radford

  G threw out his arm to keep the boys from following Belle. He’d had enough of their dogged parade behind Belle. BJ, in particular. The boy had been Jason’s friend since preschool, and though his parents now lived in a new home closer to town, he was still a fixture in this house. Bret Junior was six months older than Jason and a year ahead in school. He’d been so much a part of the family G hadn’t thought about him as a potential “date” for Belle or Shara.

  Not that either girl was old enough to even consider dating yet.

  “Belle, be polite and offer some refreshment to your guests,” Daffy reprimanded her.

  “Um, we have an appointment with an X-ray machine at the urgent care clinic,” Ted stammered. He stood and offered a towel to Tiffany.

  She hastily dried her feet and took her father’s hand. “Thanks, Ms. Deschants. My feet feel a lot better, and I promise to use the balm and the salve every day.” She ducked her head as they made their escape from a potentially embarrassing situation.

  “Do I have to invite the boys in?” Belle asked on a whine. “They followed me home. I didn’t ask them.”

  Daffy looked to G for confirmation. He shrugged, relaxing his stance now that the Tylers had fled.

  He’d known Ted for years. An honest man. But not right for his Daffy.

  The boys had a glassy-eyed look similar to the muggers after G enthralled them. He’d had to learn that skill. Belle seemed to have it born into her.

  Damn. Belle had manifested her talent. Who’d have guessed that the class klutz and geek would become a siren? Come to think of it, she’d only stumbled twice today and dropped her chess set once. He’d wondered at the time if she did it deliberately to manipulate the boys into picking it up for her.

  As I watched the boys standing still and moving only their eyes to follow Belle, I remembered something. I’d been reading in some of the books Gayla and I stocked at Magical Brews. Coyote Blood Moon had written one on using ritual magic as a form of hypnosis. Made sense to me. More sense than magic actually working. A lot of people in town did parlor tricks, though none quite so magnificently as G’s juggling. Something in the water. So I stepped between Belle and the boys, breaking their line of sight.

  Of course, they didn’t shake themselves free of the spell. Of course, they merely looked around me, or over the top of my head. Mike might be only in his mid-teens, but he already topped me by two inches.

  G narrowed his eyes and shifted his gaze between the boys and his daughter. The fingers of his left hand twitched, and he started to reach for his pen/wand. Then he looked at me as if trying to read my mind for clues.

  La, la, la, la, I sang to myself, not letting thoughts leak. Not going to let that happen. I didn’t know if he could read my mind or not. I was not about to let him.

  Standoff. No one moved except Belle who munched on a cookie with studied and determined bites and working her tongue to loosen crumbs lodged in her braces. Her glasses slid down her nose as she kept her gaze on the plate of cookies in front of her.

  “Belle?”

  “Yssmmam,” she mumbled around a giant bite of cookie.

  “Daffy, what is happening?” G asked. He put his taller and broader body between the boys and Belle.

  I knew something he didn’t. Our daughter had started her first period a week ago. She’d entered puberty, and I had this awful feeling her magical talent had manifested.

  My lungs needed emptying of pent-up air. So I released it, and took a deep breath. Somewhat fortified, I spun and grabbed the hair sticks from Belle’s untidy bun.

  “Hey!” she slapped her hand where mine had just been. Dark tresses tumbled about her shoulders. I watched the air around her blur, like a magical glamour sliding off.

  The boys sighed and blinked, then blinked again. BJ shook his head, his eyes cleared. “Um . . . hey, Ms. Deschants, um, I see Belle got home safe and sound. Tell her if she needs a ride again, I’d be happy to drive her.”

  G growled something that resembled, “I’ll drive my daughter,” but included a bunch of other impolite words. Two of them I actually knew.

  “Great chess tournament, Belle,” Mike said, clearer and brighter than he’d been a moment ago.

  “Nice finesse with your bishop at the end of the third match,” Bill added.

  They turned in sync, as if managed by the same puppet master and marched back the way they’d come.

  “What was that about?” Belle asked.

  I handed the hair sticks back to her. She wound the mass of her hair into a wad and started to stab the knot with a stick. I held up my hand to halt her actions.

  “I believe it is time you and your father had a long talk about your heritage.” I sighed. I couldn’t deny it any longer, I’d married a warlock, or wizard, or whatever, and he’d passed his talents to our children.

  “I know about magic. This is Eugene, after all. Half the people in town have some magic. Dad already told us about it.”

  I remembered that. Three years ago, when Jason was twelve and beginning to mature. I’d eavesdropped as best I could, but G kept getting up and checking the doors, so I missed big chunks of his lecture about the existence of magic and the need to never admit it to outsiders and to tell him as soon as “things” started happening. He also warned them to watch each other for changes in personality. Insanity was not unusual until they got used to their powers.

  Part of what I missed was just how powerful he was and that a Guild of registered magicians existed. But I had seen his hands shaking to the point where he had to stuff them in his pockets. That alarmed me. Fastidious G risked marring the line of his trousers to hide shaking hands.

  It happened as he mentioned the personality change.

  “We’ve talked. But only that magic exists. Now it’s time to talk about training and control,” G replied. He slouched into an uncharacteristic posture reminiscent of the fearful stuffing of his hands in his pockets. He looked almost as if he had to have the first sex talk with his daughter. I’d already done that one; the day after I kicked G out, I had to explain the pictures to the girls. Jason, thankfully, already knew.

  Which one of my kids would be next to manifest?

  Oh, wait. Shara had already listened to magical evidence that wanted to be found. And she’d found it.

  Which left Jason. Three years older than Belle, he should have been first. He should have started three years ago when G had the first talk with the kids. I sighed again.

  “G, you’d better stay to dinner and talk to each of them in turn. Or all three together. Then you get to advise me on how to deal with them.”

  “I always look forward to your dinners, Daffy. What are you cooking tonight? It smells like Spanish flank steak. Done about six?” He gestured to Belle to follow him.

  I hated to tell him that his home office was now my sewing and craft room. The kids had gleefully helped me move every scrap of paper, file cabinet, and desktop computer to the basement. They had prevented me from carrying it all out to the compost pile and setting it afire.

  I could still do that.

  Six

  “I KNEW IT!” Shara exclaimed. She jumped up from her seat on the end of the curved bench around the kitchen table to G’s left.

  G winced at the steam-whistle pitch of her voice. He shifted uncomfortably in his straight-backed chair. So did Belle on his right.

  Belle reached for her hair sticks, fingering the dangling charms rather than the ivory shafts. That told him a lot about her wand of choice.

  Jason, across from G, in the middle between his sisters, stared at his bare feet, his hand paused in midair reaching for a bag of chips.

  Daffy had gone back to the shop to clean up after the small grease fire. She should be here, listening and learning so she could help the children. But she needed to clean, to control the world around her with a bottle of bleach before and after she
turned her own magic loose on baked goods.

  He needed to think about that. Would she ever be more than a casual kitchen witch? He knew she had power. A lot of it. He’d sensed it the first time they met. But she’d suppressed it. Her father had instilled a deep fear of magic in her at a very young age.

  “I win my chess matches with logic. I don’t cheat with magic,” Belle insisted.

  “Chess and math are a natural part of your mind, Belle. Your magical talent seems to be something along the line of being a pied piper.” Better than giving her the real name for her talent, siren. That word had sexual connotations he did not want to explore with her yet.

  “Pie piper,” Shara giggled. “Mom’s teaching you to bake pies and pipe icing. Though all you pipe are strict geometrical designs. No graceful swoops and swirls or even rosebuds.”

  “Geometric is graceful and elegant.” Belle gave her sister a quelling look that in a couple of years would discourage the most ardent of suitors.

  A brief shaft of light from the setting sun caught her profile. The stark outline reminded him of a bust of Nefertiti. But with glasses perched on the end of her nose while she looked over the top. An Egyptian goddess in the making. Gorgeous. She wouldn’t need magic to attract attention. She had beauty beyond belief. Her thick glasses and braces were but a temporary mask.

  The clumsiness, on the other hand, might present problems. She hadn’t started walking until well after her first birthday because she kept falling down. She tripped over everything and dropped whatever she carried. With her beauty, she’d have boys picking up after her willingly. As they had this afternoon.

  Then the light shifted again, and he saw her real silhouette: too long of a nose, asymmetrical eyes, mouth and teeth too big. She’d grow into most of that but . . . that brief moment told him that the magic was the mask, not her impediments.

  “Is . . . is that why all the cool kids are following me around? Because the hair sticks give me the illusion of something they crave?”

  “I’m afraid so.” The ache in her voice felt like a knife wound to his heart. He’d do anything to protect his girls; his son, too. Which could be a problem already. He needed a report from Marseilles. His bosses were amazingly reluctant to part with information. He’d deal with them later. When he had more protections in place here.

  “What does this mean? What are we to do about this . . . this magical talent we seem to have inherited from you?” Jason asked accusingly, still staring at his feet.

  Not just my talent. You inherited your mother’s as well. And that scares me shitless.

  “It means you must learn to control your talents so that they only work when you want them to. In the way that you want them to. Which means you must practice.” He called up a document on his laptop that he’d created years ago, hoping to delay this conversation, but knowing it would have to come someday. “Is the printer hooked up to wireless?”

  Shara rolled her eyes. “Of course.” She jumped up from her place on the bench of the breakfast nook and dashed into Daffy’s office on the old sun porch. “Okay, you can hit print now,” she called back to them. She flitted around the kitchen and the office, too excited to contain her energy. That was something she’d have to learn to control before her magic worked right.

  Seconds later he heard the printer chatter to itself and spit out the first of several sheets. “I’ve drawn up some basic lessons in general magic, because until today I didn’t know how your talents would manifest. You have to understand that these lessons, your talent, anything about magic does not leave this house. You speak of it to no one except me and maybe your mother. If she has any talent, she has suppressed it, so she won’t understand a lot of what you tell her.” He speared each of them with the same gaze he used to subdue criminals into obedience.

  They each nodded, eyes wide with wonder but not enthrallment. Good. They understood in their hearts and their heads. It wasn’t imposed on them.

  “You each need to spend some time every day practicing these lessons but also honing your individual talents, understanding your strengths, overcoming your weaknesses. And thinking through magical problems with logic. Otherwise, it will twist your mind inside out and sideways.”

  “All I can do is leap to the ceiling and land as lightly as a feather, without noise.” Jason still hadn’t looked his father in the eye.

  “Leaping to the ceiling is merely the easiest thing for you to do. What you are actually doing is levitating your entire body. Pushing against the Earth, defying gravity. If you can do it to yourself, you can do it to anything else.” G drew a deep breath and concentrated on the open laptop in front of him.

  It had been a long time since he’d done this. Though it had been a useful skill to lift jail cell keys and bring them to his hand when that sorcerer in El Salvador had conned the local policia into arresting G for littering.

  “I’m a full wizard,” he explained. “Which means I have a variety of skills. Three primary, but a number of others I’ve learned. Most witches or warlocks have only one.”

  “Like?” Belle prodded him.

  “My primaries are Water—I can make it rain, or stop raining, I can melt snow, and I can swim long distances because water gives me strength and won’t drown me. Then there is Mind Magic—sort of like hypnosis. I use that a lot in gaining cooperation from rogue magicians and criminals. They want to confess every crime, every lie, every cheat on their spelling tests at the age of eight. Kind of boring, but useful.”

  “And the third?” Shara asked, handing him the first set of collated sheets of paper.

  He passed the pages to Jason. The boy frowned deeply at the first command. “I know how to breathe and to control my breathing. It’s basic to any athletic endeavor.”

  G let that pass.

  “What’s your third power?” Shara urged, bouncing from foot to foot.

  “My third primary power is channeling the flow of electricity. Magic is a lot like electricity in needing a conduit, positive and negative, leaping a gap to mate one spark with receptive fuel. I have to stay away from electrical appliances or I short them out.”

  “So that’s why Mom won’t let you in the kitchen,” Belle snorted.

  “One of many reasons. She does like to control her kitchen and doesn’t like any interference. One of the talents I learned, however, is levitation.”

  What would impress his children? He looked around and spotted the food processor on the counter. He pointed his pen at the wall socket and channeled his thoughts through the receptive wand. First, he had to remove electricity from the equation. The pen telescoped out and bobbled almost of its own volition. It knew what he wanted, sometimes before he knew what he wanted. The unique bond between a wizard and his wand grew over time.

  His concentration wavered as he wondered how Jason would find a wand that allowed him to levitate himself. Was it unique to the stage at the theater, or would any wooden floor do?

  Back to the food processor. The plug wiggled in the wall socket. With a pop it bounced, severing the electrical connection. Ah, now the appliance was his. Another wiggle of the pen, and the processor slid to the edge of the counter.

  “No, Dad. Mom will kill you,” Belle cautioned.

  He let the side of his mouth quirk toward a smile as he pulled the processor toward him and let it hang in the air a moment before lowering it to the floor.

  He released the breath he’d been holding and felt his arms go limp and a headache pound behind his eyes.

  Another deep breath in and out, another. Feeling returned to his hands. He had enough strength to retract his wand into a pen again.

  Water. He needed water to drown the headache.

  As casually as he could, he rose and sauntered over to the food processor, and lifted it back into place, but he didn’t plug it in. Not yet. The electrical power was too close in frequency to his own power. If he tou
ched the socket, he’d blow the circuitry in the whole house. He’d only done that once. When he was seventeen and wanted to impress Coyote Blood Moon, his best friend and fellow wizard. His grandfather, Gabe, had laughed (the house had needed bringing up to code for a long time) before taking the cost of rewiring out of his college fund. Money G had to replace by working as a clerk at the grocery store for five summers.

  Three glasses of water later, he plugged in the food processor and returned to his chair by the table.

  Belle hopped up and began searching for hidden wires and levers.

  “Can I do that?” Jason asked, gape-mouthed.

  “With practice. It is not my primary talent, so I have to work hard at it. And because I have to work hard, I need to replenish my body afterward. Water is important. Drink lots of it, even when you aren’t working. Food is also important. Not just empty calories, though right now about six of your Mom’s cookies sound very good. Keep up your protein and fresh vegetables. Fruit is better than candy. But if nothing else is available, a bar of dark chocolate will do.”

  Shara put a plate full of cookies in front of him. “Sorry—there’s only five. That’s the last of that batch,” she said meekly. “Mom said she’d bake more tomorrow. And I don’t like dark chocolate.”

  “Thank you, sweetie. I’ll survive on five cookies.” He reached an arm around her and held her close for a few moments. “You’ll learn to like dark chocolate better than milk chocolate the first time you desperately need to restore.”

  “Wouldn’t the milk protein in milk chocolate work better?” Jason asked.

  “Negligible,” G dismissed his argument. “The antioxidants in dark chocolate are better than the minimal amounts of milk in lighter blends.”

  “What else do we need?” Belle asked. She worked her way down the first page of lessons and flipped to the second. Jason lingered in the middle of his first page, needing to absorb and question each one.

  “Sleep.” G answered Belle’s question. “Make sure you get enough, even if you have to skip a TV program or time with your friends. You’ll find your natural life rhythms soon enough.”