Funny Tragic Crazy Magic (Tragic Magic Book 1)

by Sheena Boekweg

  It was like dinner with my dad all over again, I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t say anything.

  “There aren’t any girls here,” Joe said.

  I hit him. Joe looked over at me as if I was an idiot. Oh, that’s right…

  “Only us chickens.” I said, turning back to Ash.

  “Muppets. Good one.” Ash said smiling. He looked over at Joe, and he was smiling too. Only when their eyes met, they both looked away.

  “Yeah, we know, it’s awkward,” I said. “Get over it.”

  They both looked over at me, but I fought back a blush and kept going, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. We just have a lot of questions.”

  “Well, I guess if you know Muppets movies well enough to quote from, then you can’t be that bad.” He smiled, and I felt a lot more comfortable. “Alright, gentlemen, proceed,” he said, taking a long draw out of a bottle. It was beer, which is strange. Runes don’t usually drink or have tattoos. Or live in trailers.

  Joe didn’t say anything, so again it was up to me. “How dangerous are the Grandmothers?”

  They both looked at me, and I wondered if what I said was dangerous to Joe. “I mean…The stories my mom used to tell me, are they true?”

  “Depends on what side you are on. I doubt they would hurt a girl.” Ash settled in his chair and looked down at the bottle. “They are dangerous enough. When they have to, a Grandmother can kill a person in less than a second. I saw it back in my early twenties, this horrible woman with brown hair drew a rune on the underside of my friend Jacob’s neck, and he…” Ash opened up his closed hands like his hands exploded. “And he just exploded.”

  Fury filled Ash’s eyes, yet still he smiled. A hard smile filled his entire face.

  “Did he do something… did he deserve it?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Ash said, looking away. He didn’t elaborate on what his friend had done. His words felt flat. “The Grandmothers are dangerous enough, but they aren’t invincible. A well placed bullet and an absence of a healer, and a Grandmother can die, same as anyone.”

  “Of course it’s not as elegant or as guaranteed of a kill as a killing rune. Those runes are like a nuke, compared to a pocketknife. So yes, Grandmothers are dangerous. They aren’t monsters. They follow the law. That’s why they were given the killing runes in the first place.”

  “What law? We don’t know what you are talking about.” I asked.

  “You obviously lack some training…”

  “And whose fault is that?” Joe mumbled.

  Ash continued as if he didn’t hear Joe. “In the 1770’s, Runes and Instincts were in the middle of the ‘second great worldwide conflict.’ Witches and Mages alike were using the killing runes, and it was like hell on earth. That was when the Grandmothers and Grandfathers formed. They were just alliances, really. The strongest Witches and Mages of their era killed every Witch or Mage who wouldn’t surrender the killing runes and allow their memories wiped of it.” His voice sounded bitter, yet still he smiled as he spoke. “Finally only eight people in the entire world knew of them. The Grandmothers and Grandfathers. It went on like that for a while, and then the Grandmothers were given sole use of the runes after the Grandfathers misused them in the 1930’s.”

  Joe looked at me; there was that glint of joy in his eyes that he only gets when he learns something he’s hungered for.

  Ash continued, “The idea was that since women are less inclined toward war, they would keep the peace. And there has been that. But now there is a growing sentiment that the Grandmothers have too much power…”

  Ash stopped talking and looked at me warily.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not exactly a big fan of the Grandmothers; you’re not offending me.”

  “I wasn’t worried about offending you, girlie,” he said with Joe’s smile. “I just want to make sure you won’t go running to the Grandmothers, and get me killed.”

  I held out my hand, he took it reluctantly, and I wrapped our hands in the binding rune. “I promise that not one word of what you say will get to the Grandmothers.”

  Ash leaned back in his chair and looked at me as if he was deciding if I should be trusted or destroyed. Joe retook my hand.

  Ash looked at his son warily for a second. Then I could see as he took the features of Joe’s face in, he smiled again. There was no question how happy he was to be a dad.

  Joe looked away first.

  “So…” Ash said, and then he cleared his throat. “Earlier this year, the Grandfathers decided to, um…take those Grandmothers down a notch. They didn’t have the killing runes anymore, but they found an Instinct whose talent was death. Poor kid. When he was ten, a dog was chasing him… Anyway, the Grandfathers tried using him as a tool to show the Grandmothers they didn’t have the monopoly on killing with magic. They were going to have him kill a bird or something, no big deal, just enough to gain back a measure of pride the Grandfathers had given up. Somehow, things went wrong, things got loud, and there was pushing, and fighting… Michael, that’s the kid, ended up killing the first position Rune Grandmother, her husband and their only kid, this five year-old innocent girl who tagged along for the ride.”

  I sat back in my seat. Joe looked over at me.

  “I think it broke our whole world’s heart,” Ash said. “This was almost a year ago, and since then, the awkward semi-friendly rivalry has turned deadly. Most Mages went into hiding, like I am, keeping low to the ground until this all blows over. But every day, I hear more names gone missing.”

  “Did you…” I had to start over because my voice went weak, “Do you know what that Grandmother’s name was?”

  “Yeah, Alvarez,” he said. “Javier was a good friend of mine; his wife… umm her first name…was”

  “Theresa.” I said without any emotion. Joe squeezed my hand. I barely noticed.

  “That’s right.” Ash looked at me with suspicion.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  My mom was a Grandmother. My parents didn’t die in a car accident. The lie stung, mostly because I had believed it. An Instinct, a tool of the Grandfathers, killed my mother, and my father and my little sister. These same Grandfathers were the ones I’d put all my trust in to protect Joe. I… I didn’t know what to do.

  “It’s not all black and white, is it?” I asked. “It’s not good and evil,” I laughed once without any emotion. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Only a child thinks it is,” Ash said with a smile.

  “She wasn’t an only child,” I said.

  “What, who are you talking about?”

  “The five year-old innocent,” I said. “Phoebe. She’s my little sister.”

  That shut the man up. I had so many emotions boiling through my head, that I just grabbed onto my anger like it was a floatation device keeping me above the swirling miasma that threatened to pull me under into a dark despair that would never let me go.

  I didn’t know who I could trust now. I feared the Grandmothers, hated them for what they did to me: turning me into a spy on my best friend. And now I found out my mother was one of them. My mother was a Grandmother. Giara was second in power, which meant my mother was the strongest Rune Witch in the entire world. Why didn’t she tell me? Was it because I didn’t ask? Oh, she could have taught me everything. And…

  No wonder they took my mother’s notebook. It had the killing runes in it. If I had that notebook, if I had all those runes, I would have access to the strongest collection of runes in Witch history.

  If I took it, I would be… I’d be a Grandmother. If I took that notebook, it would be my responsibility to kill my best friend.

  I put my head in my hands and looked down at the ground. What guy in his right mind bought a zebra print rug?

  I didn’t say anything for a while, and the silence became awkward.

  Joe started on Ash, “Did you know?”

  “What,” Ash asked, “that your girlfriend here is the daughter of a Grandmother? No, or else I would ne
ver let you in.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  Even tossed as I was within an avalanche of emotion, that offhand comment had the power to hurt me.

  “Did you know I existed?” Joe continued. “Did you know my mom was pregnant?”

  Ash ran his fingers through his hair. “Dude,” he started and then corrected himself, “Joe. I loved your mom. I think there are people in this world who can only find love once, and I’m one of them. Maggie was everything to me, I… I would have never have given her up if it wasn’t my only option.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Screw that,” Joe said.

  Ash sighed. He glanced at me as again he was weighing whether he could trust me. I faced the ground again. Finally he spoke. “I don’t know what life was like for you, growing up like you did. I bet everything I own that Maggie is a great mother. I didn’t grow up with a great mother, or a great father. Back when I was your age, I didn’t tell my family that I was dating a normal. I tried to keep things quiet. I didn’t mean to fall in love with Maggie, but I did, and when I knew I could never let her go… when things got too big for me to keep a secret, I made a mistake. I brought her to meet my family. I thought… It didn’t matter what I thought… it was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. No one was good enough for my family, but a normal… I think my dad took it as an insult to our family name, and he lost it. My dad almost killed her, and my mom looked the other way, as she always did when my dad came after me. I… tried to fight back, but you don’t know my dad… He would have killed her. If we ran he would have hunted us down, and he would have killed her.

  “So I did what I could to make him stop hitting her,” he continued. “I promised him I’d leave her alone. I gave my word. My dad healed her. I wiped her memories of everything related to magic, and I walked away. I don’t know what she remembered. When you wipe away memories, you can’t wipe away the underlying feelings, so she must have known something horrible happened to her, but then not known what it was that actually happened. And it was my fault. I should have known better than to bring her anywhere near…”

  “She must have been pregnant with you when my dad beat her,” he said. His voice cold and empty, his fury sharp like a knife.

  “After that, I was done with them. I left my parent’s house without graduating High School. I got a job in South America, Chile of all places, in a coal mine, running so far down into the darkness, I thought nothing would catch me. But my guilt, my memories… they found me. I tried to come back, just to see how she was. But every time I got close, my family stopped me… So I kept running. Changing jobs. Changing countries.” He laughed once without any emotion. “Changing my name. I met my friend, Jacob, when I was twenty-one, and we did things I’m not proud of, trying to cover my guilt with more guilt. Then the Grandmothers--your mom, Larissa--killed Jacob and were going to kill me, but Robert, one of the Grandfathers, caught up in time and argued on my behalf. He… gave me direction. A purpose.”

  Ash took a long drink of his beer and then put the empty bottle down on the floor. “I didn’t know if Maggie was even alive. I didn’t know… if she hated me, or if she even remembered I ever loved her, remembered I ever existed. I absolutely did not know she was… pregnant.” He looked up at Joe. “But I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that she was. That I had left something of myself with her.” Ash smiled. “That means my family wasn’t following her as close as I thought, not if they didn’t know about you. How is she, how is she doing?”

  Joe looked up, his head shaking subtly again and again. He stood without looking his father in the eye, and then pulling me behind him with the hand he was still holding, he walked out of Ashford Zabriskie’s trailer of a house without looking back.

  We drove back through Greenville and parked behind an old building in a crumbling parking lot. We sat there in the parking lot for more than an hour, both of us crying and pretending we weren’t. It was difficult, this change in perception, difficult for both of us. We grieved for what could have been, for the lost opportunities, for being lied to and believing the lie. I grieved with fear that the Grandmothers could kill Joe in a second. All of it. It was quite a lot to take in.

  “What a fun road trip,” I said as Joe started the car.

  We didn’t speak much for the first hour. Joe blasted his music, and I didn’t mind it. I didn’t really want to think either. For the last few hours, we filled up on gas, looked out the window, and talked about remarkably rube things. Both of us were avoiding any mention of our new information as we ate fast food we picked up along the way.

  Behold the healing power of a McDonald’s french-fry.

  When we got home, Ash’s bright yellow sports car was parked in Joe’s driveway. We went to my house in silence instead, and watched infomercials about fancy knives. When it got late, I went with Joe back to his house and the yellow sports car wasn’t in the driveway anymore.

  Inside Ms. P. was whistling, and a bouquet of pink and blue daisies arranged in a glass vase sat on the kitchen counter. Joe walked past his mother and the flowers without looking at either one. He stopped for a second, turned to give her a quick hug, and then slammed his bedroom door behind him.

  Ms. P. turned and watched his path as if she had something she wanted to tell him. But then smiling, her cheeks pink with a blush, she turned to face me still standing by the front door, my fingers brushing against the doorknob.

  “Did you two have a good day?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The next day was Monday, and Joe didn’t show up for school. At first, I thought that was a good thing, that we both needed space to make sense of the world. Thankfully, I ran into Meg about ten minutes before first period so I wouldn’t be alone. She held her math book in front of her chest.

  “How was your date?” she asked, her face worried.

  “Awful,” I said.

  “No.” She had a smile when she said it, like she had expected it to fail.

  I looked at her quizzically.

  “Sorry,” she said hurriedly, “It’s just that… Ryan called me.”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday,” she said. “He had a question about History, and we started talking… um… I don’t know how to say this, but… Is it okay with you if I like him?”

  “Ryan?” I asked.

  “You’re my best friend, and I don’t…” she said.

  I interrupted. “I don’t care if you like Ryan.”

  “You sure?”

  “Meg,” I said. “I want you to be happy, and I don’t like Ryan like that at all. And he didn’t like me, either; he just liked the runes.”

  “Do you think…”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Could you give me…” She looked around to make sure no one was listening, “some runes too? Like, could you, maybe, make me taller?”

  I smiled. “Absolutely.”

  We made our way to the girls bathroom, and after checking the stalls for company and locking the door with stay, I opened my bag and brought out my notebook. I added a little bit of height, and for fun, a bit of length to her eyelashes.

  When she looked at herself in the mirror, it was like seeing a different person. Not just because of the slight physical changes, but because of the way she held herself, the way she smiled at herself so confidently in the mirror. I haven’t seen her that free, that happy, since we were kids.

  “You know you’re beautiful, right?” I asked. “You don’t need the runes to make Ryan like you, right?”

  She shrugged. “I just think they’d help me to be more confident.”

  She went on to describe everything she didn’t like about herself, the mole next to her left ear, how pale her eyelashes were, her slight figure. And I, as her friend, went about changing everything she didn’t like. I thought it was a kindness, that it’d be a fun project. When we were finished, she was beaut
iful, but she didn’t look like Meg at all. She looked more like a Barbie, like some image she was supposed to look like, that we were all supposed to look like. We stood together staring at the false perfection facing back at us in the mirror.

  “That’s not me,” Meg said, after a moment.

  I wiped away the runelight until the entire transformation spell was gone. At first it was jarring, like all I could see were Meg’s supposed imperfections. I never noticed them before she pointed them out. But then she smiled, and she was just Meg, my best friend. A person truly beautiful, inside and out.

  “There I am,” she said with tears in her eyes.

  I looked at myself and realized that I was just the runes, that the image of me wasn’t real. I wiped away my own runelight, grateful that the dress I chose to wear had so much give in the waist, and pulled my hair up into a ponytail.

  “Well, here I am too,” I said.

  The bell rang, and we walked together down the halls of the school, our arms linked together, her pulling my posture down as I kept in step with my tiny, perfect friend.

  People didn’t look at me as much, but I didn’t care. I was happy, and I was real. That beats pretty any day.

  We ran into Ryan sooner than I expected. He didn’t face me, but he smiled at Meg. She stopped to talk with him, and I left them behind, knowing that my presence would just stand in their way. I stood behind a locker at the end of the hall and watched them. Meg smiled up at Ryan and touched his arm. The bell rang, and they didn’t seem to notice; Ryan’s eyes never left Meg. I smiled and then walked to class.

  A few hours into school, I started noticing weird things. There was a substitute in my math class, and he seemed to know my name before looking at the roles. As I tried to concentrate on the variables in front of me, he kept glancing in my direction, as if he was waiting for me to cough a cloud of runelight. When I walked to my car after the final bell rang, I felt that burning feeling on the back of my neck I only got when an Instinct watched me. I turned around but I didn’t see anyone out of the ordinary. I scanned the parking lot. I barely noticed a man standing up on the roof of my school. He wore a red baseball cap, and he ducked when I saw him.