Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Why would I go after a gypsy queen?” Peter asked. “That’s like saying I get my magic tips from the guy at the duck-shooting booth at the carnival. You’re completely irrelevant.”

  “Prove it,” Jackson said.

  “How did she do it?” Peter asked.

  Jackson turned to look at Becca, who paused, then opened her hand again. She’d lost most of the copper, but there was enough dust there for him to put together the cast. He nodded.

  “Simply enough,” he said. “But even if I told you the ingredients, the method is one that takes a lot more knowledge than I’m in any mood to give you. She used truth.”

  “Truth,” Peter said. “That’s not crystal magic.”

  It was when you were using citrine, but it was exactly how Jackson said it was - you had to understand the underlying magic to get there.

  It was at this moment that Becca shocked herself.

  She’d invented magic.

  No one had taught her how to do what she’d just done.

  She was Makkai. She realized she was standing taller than she had been a second ago.

  “It is,” Jackson said, “but that’s all I’m going to tell you about it. You owe us an answer.”

  “I owe you nothing,” Peter said. “I didn’t agree to a trade, and I find I’m still interested in seeing how things turn out.”

  “You do owe it to us,” Jackson said. “Because we are the balance to the demons.”

  Becca didn’t know what that meant. And for a moment she wasn’t sure Peter did, either, but then his face went stiff.

  “You aren’t invoking that.”

  “I am,” Jackson said. “It is a matter of our life or death and it applies.”

  “I don’t have to help you,” Peter said. “I’m not bound by that.”

  Becca felt like the conversation had gone above her head, and she didn’t like it.

  “You don’t, you’re right,” Jackson said. “But if you deny me, and deny me when it would cost you nothing to help me, I’m within my rights to mark your door. And I will. I will find every one of your doors and mark them.”

  Peter swallowed. He actually looked nervous. Becca held perfectly still, feeling as if Jackson was casting a particularly delicate spell and if she moved, she would break it.

  “All right,” Peter said. “All right, fine. Whatever. It’s just interesting is all. I’ve never seen one like this, and I wanted to see how far it could go.”

  “What?” Jackson asked. “Who is it?”

  “His name is Handel,” Peter said.

  “Where do I find him?” Jackson asked. At this, Peter grinned. He actually grinned.

  “See, that’s what’s interesting. He died. Blew himself up into tiny little bits of Handel about twelve years ago.”

  “Twelve,” Jackson said. Peter nodded.

  “Before your last queen died,” he said.

  “Who else was involved?” Jackson asked.

  “No one,” Peter said, his smile widening. “No one at all.”

  “How do you know?” Jackson asked.

  “The description you gave Carter. Very detailed, by the way. I recognized him immediately.”

  “It couldn’t be anyone else?” Jackson asked.

  “Nope,” Peter said.

  “Why?” Becca asked. “Why would he be trying to kill gypsy queens?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I don’t care. All I know is that this is the first time I’ve ever heard of a mage’s magic outliving him for this long, and I…” he shrugged, clearly delighted and on the verge of giggles. “I don’t even know if there’s a way to fight it.”

  Jackson looked away.

  “Look,” Peter said. “I’m sorry about your wife. I really am. I’d love to spend the rest of her life getting her to tell me what she knows. It’s always a loss when an exquisite witch like that dies.”

  “She isn’t going to die,” Jackson said. “We’re going to stop it.”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I’m the best mage I know. And I know a lot. And I’ve never heard of a way to break magic after the caster died. I suggest you don’t replace Bella after the spell gets her. It’s for the best.”

  Jackson shook his head and motioned to Becca.

  “It’s time to go,” he said. “We have what we came for.”

  She looked over her shoulder as she followed Jackson out of the room, chilled by the way Peter’s eyes followed her.

  Carter had been telling the truth.

  They went back to the camp, where everyone was still up. Becca went to sit by the fire, not sure what about the whole thing to process first, while Jackson, Bella, and Dawn disappeared into their trailer. She was not a part of this conversation. Jackson hadn’t talked to her all the way back.

  When she looked up, she realized that everyone was watching her. Grant was leaning against a trailer at the far side of the ring, looking aloof and embarrassed, but even he wanted to know what had happened.

  “Look,” she said. “If they wanted you to know already, they’d have told you.”

  “That bad?” Robbie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Becca answered.

  “Is it one of us?” Billy asked.

  “Is one of us a mage?” Becca asked. “We know a mage cast the spell. That was never a part of the question.”

  “So we don’t know anything we didn’t know before,” Quinn said. Becca hugged her arms around her chest, feeling left out to dry.

  “They’ll tell you when they’re ready to tell you,” she said. “Maybe it’s just time to go to bed.”

  “She’s right,” Bella said, stepping out from behind a trailer. “She brings news, and news is good, because it has information that we need. But it also brings new unexpected complications, which the Makkai have long learned is only unexpected because we fail to learn from the last time. Everyone to bed. There will be no music or dancing tonight. We will have a plan laid out in the morning.”

  There was muttering at this, but everyone went along with it, to Becca’s relief. Bella gave her a small nod as she went by, but didn’t say anything else.

  She’d find out in the morning, like everyone else.

  “A gypsy curse is a stubborn thing. We aren’t the type to hold grudges often - content people don’t - but when a Makkai holds a grudge, he may hold it for the rest of his life, and that’s a lot of power to put into a curse. We have stories of men and women scorching fields and making whole seas inhospitable to life, because of a curse they felt was justified by the situation.

  “Breaking a gypsy curse is no small task, and it often requires knowing the exact details of the circumstance that justified it, as well as the cast itself, because even normally beneficial crystals can bring down a terrible curse by the right Makkai.

  “Not all curses are so. Many dark curses simply require the right application of positive energy through truth or life crystals, and others require no magic at all, simply a change in circumstance or a reconfiguration of something involved in the grudge and the curse.

  “Regardless, there is no such thing as an unbreakable curse. The world is such a place that there is no permanent thing in it, much less a bit of woven magic aimed at something specific. Fools point to things like the Bermuda triangle or the Devil’s Sea, but fools such as these are wont to believe anything. The natural world holds more curiosities and mysteries than any human magic can control, and while we may marvel at it, the idea that we may cause such things is fallacy and hubris.

  “Every curse can be broken; it is a matter of will, talent, and knowledge to make it so.

  “There was once a Makkai named Theresa who, as a child, stumbled across a cache of small, tidy things that glimmered in the sun: buttons, coins, bits of metal and stone. She was young and amused by such things, and so she took them with her, putting them under her mattress in her wagon and taking them out at night to sit next to the campfire and muse over them.

  “She was a lovely, friendl
y child, and everyone smiled when they saw her, and time passed as it should for such a child, in happiness and curiosity. Her family traveled and she grew older, and as more time passed, she took the small things out less and less to look at them, but they comforted her to know that they were there when she slept, the small things she had worn smooth with her young hands over so many years.

  “Now, Theresa was a frail young woman, always falling sick with this or that, or stumbling and bruising her knees and elbows in falls. Her hair got caught in trees more than anyone else she knew, and the first time she tried to kiss a young man, she tipped over and got a fat lip smashing into a wall, instead. At her ceremony of majority, a horse kicked her and broke three of her ribs.

  “Clumsy girl, the people said, smiling and shaking their heads, but her mother had begun suspect that there was more to it than that. Theresa was a graceful young woman at dance, and she worked with her hands in her spare time with great dexterity and attention to detail.

  “’How can you be so careful when you do your needlework and your sewing, and simply forget that there are steps coming out of the wagon?’ her mother asked her, one day. ‘Are you simply that absentminded?’

  “’I don’t know,’ Theresa said. ‘I was just about to step down, and then I forgot that I hadn’t, and I fell.’

  “Theresa’s mother shook her head as she bandaged the girl’s arm for the second time that week, then Theresa laughed and waved and went to go see what was for sale in the market in the little town where they were staying.

  “It was this very day that Theresa’s mother was cleaning in the wagon and found the stash of small things under Theresa’s mattress. Many of the things she recognized, having seen Theresa play with them for so many years, but some of them she hadn’t seen before, including a ring with a small, ruby stone on it.

  “That evening, she held it out.

  “’What is this?”

  “’Just one of my fancies,’ Theresa told her. ‘It’s nothing.’

  “’Where did you get it?’ the older woman asked. Theresa shook her head

  “’I don’t remember, anymore.’

  “Theresa’s mother sighed and set the ring in her lap to look at it. It was nothing much to look at: there Theresa was right. But the stone had caught her attention and stayed with her as she thought.

  “And so she showed it to her husband, who was greatly alarmed.

  “’That is a precious ruby,’ he told her. ‘They don’t make them any more because they are so dangerous. Where did you find it?’

  “’Under Theresa’s mattress,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve been bothered by it all day.’

  “’That’s because you have good instincts,’ her husband said, setting it on a wheel of the wagon and stepping back to look at it. ‘Once you have it, you will never forget it. If someone takes it or you lose it, you will miss it forever.’

  “Theresa’s mother laughed at this.

  “’Theresa has no interest in it at all. She says it’s nothing, and she was completely unconcerned when I kept it.’

  “And this made her father smile.

  “’That’s because she is a Makkai, and a wise one at that. She knows that such things hold no special value and she has rejected it. But where did she get it?’

  “’She doesn’t know,’ her mother said. ‘I have long wondered if there is some outside cause for how often she injures herself, and this makes me wonder all the more.’

  “And her husband nodded in agreement.

  “’I would advise that we leave it alongside the road as we went, but for the fact that it might not break a curse, if she does have one, and then we would never get it back to try again.’

  “’I would burn it in a fire for the same reason,’ her mother said, ‘but hesitate for just the same reasons as you.’

  “And so they put it away to think about it, and as they thought about it, they both forgot that it was there, and time passed again.

  “Theresa’s bad luck had dulled somewhat, but she was now engaged to be married and they were preparing for the ceremony when her dress caught fire and she fell, twisting her ankle as she tried to put out the flames. It was at this moment that her mother remembered the ruby and set about to determine once and for all the correct way to dispose of it.

  “She sat that night at the side of the fire as it burned down to embers and blocked all of the magic around the ruby, then measured for any activity inside of her pattern.

  “She was shocked to find how potent a magic the ring had in it. She couldn’t be sure if it was the crystal alone, or if there was something else acting on it, but she knew that sleeping above the stone for as many years as she had could not have left Theresa untouched. She wondered at the other things that Theresa had kept with the ring for all that time: could they have absorbed some of the magic as well?

  “And so she went in and stole away with several buttons and a coin and isolated those as well, measuring them and getting a weaker but still present result.

  “Without hesitation, she went in and took everything out from under Theresa’s mattress and lay it out before the embers of the fire, staring at it for a long time.

  “The magic from the ring had infected buttons and coins and rocks. It might be in the mattress itself or even the wagon. Doubtless Theresa carried some of it with her. The question was: had it latched onto her in a way that Theresa’s mother needed to disconnect the magic separately before she destroyed the ring, or was simply putting it away going to be enough to prevent it from having any future impact?

  “She still didn’t know, but she wasn’t willing to keep the ring with them, now, since Theresa had burned her dress and the backs of her legs. There was no way to be sure that something worse wouldn’t happen next time, and so Theresa’s mother took the ring and the rest of the baubles and went deep into the woods, marking her way with personal crystals until she came to an uprooted tree, where she dug a hole in the wet, loose soil and buried the bag she carried. She marked her way back again, to be sure that she would be able to find it again, and then she went to bed, relieved that the ring was finally gone, but troubled that the ring bore a curse that perhaps was still on Theresa.

  “Theresa was successfully married, despite the damage to her dress, and the family celebrated for three days. On the evening of the third day, Theresa’s mother was sitting with the groom’s mother and mentioned the ring.

  “’What did you do?’ the other woman asked. Theresa’s mother told her, and the woman nodded.

  “’That was wise,’ she said. ‘But if it’s a curse as well, you should at least try to break it.’

  “’That’s my problem,’ Theresa’s mother said. ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

  “’Where did she get it in the first place?’ the mother-in-law asked. Theresa’s mother shook her head.

  “’She doesn’t remember.’

  “’How long ago was it?’ the other woman asked.

  “’She’s had these things since she was very young,’ Theresa’s mother said, and the other woman nodded.

  “’Sometimes old curses are the easiest to break, because the one who set them is no longer invested in keeping them, but with a ring such as the one you told me about, it may be that the previous owner still misses it and still curses Theresa for taking it.’

  “Theresa’s mother was disappointed, but the other woman took her hand.

  “’You put the ring away some days ago, did you not?’

  “’Yes,’ Theresa’s mother said and the woman nodded.

  “’Then there is still something we can do, while the marriage is fresh.’

  “Theresa’s mother did not know what to expect, but she and her husband followed the woman to get the rest of the family, and then out into a wide, open field under nothing but the moon.

  “’You are a new woman,’ the mother-in-law said, reaching into a bag and taking out a beautiful ruby pendant on a chain that she wove through Theresa’s hair and fastened so tha
t it lay on her forehead. ‘All the old is gone and the new replaces it.’

  “’I am who I am,’ Theresa said, concerned at what the woman was implying.

  “’Of course you are, but the magic that was in you before is no longer a part of you now,’ the woman said. ‘Before you had a small, jealous stone and you were a child. Now you have a proud, beautiful stone and you are a woman.’

  “Theresa put her fingers to the ruby on her forehead. The groom’s mother handed Theresa’s mother a selection of crystals, and Theresa’s mother gave her a quick nod, seeing the purpose of them. She was binding her daughter to her new husband, so tightly, it appeared, that all of their previous magics would be squeezed out. She worked quickly, mirroring the groom’s mother’s side of the pattern, and then they stood back. There was a flash of light, and a series of tiny white sparks fell from Theresa’s back to the ground. When they looked later, they could find nothing there, but Theresa’s mother knew what had happened. The magic that had attached itself to her daughter fell away, and she was a free woman.

  “The two mothers embraced and went back to the camp arm in arm to continue their celebrations, and while no woman goes through life without some share of accidents and injuries, never again would anyone think of Theresa as uncoordinated or unlucky. Even without knowing the curse, where it came from, or who cast it, her mother found a way to break it. Such is the way of curses, and such is the love of family, old and new.”

  Jackson didn’t usually tell stories in the morning, but he did that morning as they sat and ate a cold breakfast. Everyone was hoping that something would happen and they would be on the road before Colin would have time to set up a hot breakfast, but it had taken hours after sunrise for Jackson to appear, alone, and tell the story of the curse.

  Becca could tell from the faces around the dead fire that no one was pleased at the story he had chosen, but he finally finished and stood.

  “We have a plan,” he said.

  Everyone started asking questions, and he held up a hand.