by A. L. Tyler
Finally pulling out the warranty card, I stood up and looked at the circle again.
“I never used candles when I did it with Charlie.”
She gave a rueful smile. “Yeah, well, Charlie isn’t exactly teaching you witch magic. He’s a warlock’s aid.”
I considered that for a minute. “You think I might have more luck using candles?”
She extinguished the last pillar with a quick blow, and then stood up and laughed at me, gathering her clothes from where they were wadded up in the corner. “Annie, please. You’re years away from being able to do something this complicated.”
I stepped out of the office so that she could get dressed, and went to the phone at the front to call in my complaint. By the time I was done, the first customers had stepped in and Lyssa had come out looking like a normal, mainstream person again. She handed me a piece of paper and took to the counter to check out a customer.
“Annie, could you go and unload that shipment of orchids in the back?” she said with a perfectly charming smile.
I smiled back and nodded, sliding the piece of paper between my fingers as I went.
When I got to the back, I opened it to find a list of supplies.
Collect these for me before the end of today, please.
5 pink poppy petals
Orange seed
Snap dragon roots
Onion blossoms
27 evergreen needles
I raised my eyebrows. We had these things, and it wasn’t going to take me all day to collect them. It was hardly going to take me fifteen minutes. Then I turned the list over.
Hand-woven natural fiber rope
Fresh peppermint oil
An old iron key
Wind in a jar (just let the wind blow in and then cap it)
Natural ice (try the river by Sprucely further west, or ask Charlie)
Living Sumac
Milk
Eggs
Bread
Bananas
Diet Soda
I sighed. This probably would take me all day, or longer. I didn’t know how to test the freshness of peppermint oil, and I was slightly annoyed that the last five items looked like her grocery list.
Charlie had me collecting supplies, and now Lyssa. I was an intern getting sent on perpetual magic coffee runs.
Setting my teeth on edge, I turned around to find Charlie standing directly behind me, reading over my shoulder, and it didn’t even make me jump anymore.
“You rang?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” I grumbled.
“Lyssa did…” He snatched the list from my hand. “ ‘River by Sprucely…or ask Charlie’…that’s sweet. I’m starting to grow on her.”
I grabbed the list back. “Have you been teaching me warlock spells instead of witch ones?”
“You know I have,” he said with a frown. “It’s faster. You’ve told me repeatedly you just want to get this done as fast as possible. Why? You suddenly care about the brand?”
“Should I?” I asked.
He crossed his arms and leaned in. “Not if you’re planning to stop using it soon. Are you planning a longer stint, Thorn? A career, maybe?”
I felt the smile twitch at my lips, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, because it always came back to this question.
I knew that I didn’t want to be practicing warlock magic, though I didn’t know why. I knew that I didn’t want to use magic at all…though I didn’t know why. Somehow it felt like a forbidden fruit. Maybe it was because the one major spell I had worked had resulted in Charlie, and that made me believe that magic carried a heavier penalty for use than I was willing to bear.
“No,” I said finally. “But no more warlock spells. Understood?”
He cocked his head, and his smile only grew. “Understood. Shall we?”
A cold wind told me I wasn’t in the greenhouse anymore.
Chapter 7
I looked down and saw that I was standing on snow, and when I looked up, the glare off of the landscape nearly blinded me. I was staring at a horizon line that was a crisp blue above and shocking white below.
Charlie shoved a mini cooler and a hand spade at me. “Natural ice, Thorn. Hop to.”
I raised a hand to cover my eyes, still blinking against the sudden bright light, but another cold blast told me that even though Charlie had given me a cooler and a spade, he had neglected to provide me a coat or a hat and gloves.
I dropped to my knees and scooped several shovels full into the cooler and shut it, and then felt the air go warm again.
We were back in the office, and I was kneeling in front of the old refrigerator where we kept our lunches and a selection of cold sodas and bottled water for the hot summer days. I stood up and stowed the cooler in the freezer, and just as I turned around, the lights turned out.
I was in the Other Side.
Staring around, I realized that I was in a new room—some new place in Charlie’s vast network of castle that I hadn’t been before. Thick glass panes surrounded me in a rough dome. I must have been in Charlie’s concept of a greenhouse. A few panels stood open on ingenious little hinges, and today, they let in moonlight and brisk night air instead of rain to complement the mood set by the candelabras.
A heavy wooden door behind me opened silently and then banged against the wall to announce Charlie’s presence. He marched in holding the bag that I had received from the tea house host the night before, and set it on the table, gesturing me over.
“Moonlight roses are difficult to keep if you don’t have a demon, but fortunately, you have,” he said, opening the bag and withdrawing a small clay pot.
In it sat one of the saddest little rosebushes that I had ever seen. The leaves looked yellow and stunted, the thorns were massive, and each tiny little bud was a sickly, creamy white. It reminded me of an aquarium of blind cave fish that I had seen once at the zoo in Denver.
He set it carefully on the table and looked at me.
“These aren’t doing so well,” he said. “Heal them.”
I raised my eyebrows skeptically. “Heal them? With what? You said that magic didn’t work in the Other Side.”
“I said that spellwork couldn’t be performed in the Other Side, and that particularly pertained to the summoning spell I was trying to teach you. One can’t summon people to the Other Side. If one could, then there wouldn’t be much need to go to Earth ever, would there?” He didn’t smile. “You said you wanted to learn witch magic. So heal the roses.”
“How?”
“You tell me.” This time, he did relax into just a hint of a grin. “It’s been different for every witch I’ve encountered. Witches don’t tend to congregate or proselytize, so each one is a solo practitioner who creates her own mechanisms to get the job done. Find a way to heal a plant, and you’re on your way.”
“I’m supposed to be getting that stuff for Lyssa…” I said.
“I’ll get it,” Charlie said. “She invited me in her note, so there shouldn’t be a problem. You attend to these.”
I pulled up a nearby stool, and stared down the night-blind roses. “But…how?”
“You’ll figure something out,” he said, walking away. “You’ve got all the time in the world.”
I sat down and stared at them again, certain that nothing was going to happen. I was going to sit here all day, get tired, and then Charlie would take me back to Earth just in time to screw up my sleep schedule because I was going to be exhausted enough for a full night’s rest at eight in the morning.
I didn’t bother staring for long, because I knew from all my time gazing into a quartz crystal that staring didn’t do me any good. Instead, I got up and wandered the greenhouse, looking at the strange collection of things that were all either thriving or dying in the perpetual night of the Other Side.
There was a table with eggs the size of bowling balls, all sitting in their own glass bowls and surrounded by large wads of gray-green moss. They looked more or le
ss like normal bird eggs, perhaps a little more elongated, but they smelled like burnt toast and seemed to give an unsettling twitch every so often.
There were vines that grew up one wall and out an open window, and through the transparent side of the greenhouse I could just make out the wobbly, glass-distorted forms of large, orange, star-shaped flowers. Little pots were scattered around beneath the tables on the floor, and each one seemed to hold a different type of fern, flower, or thorny monstrosity.
Against one wall, there was a patch of ground where the stonework floor had been pushed up and out of the way by a medium-sized tree, which I immediately recognized as some sort of sumac. It had large, bright red drupes all over that seemed to glow spectacularly in the dim light.
I was drawn to it by the beauty, and saw when I got closer that Charlie had taken all of the stones from the floor up and stacked them in a spot away from the tree, letting the dainty little trunk and roots have more room to grow. I reached out and touched one of the velvety branches, and much to my surprise, each bob on the tree seemed to grow brighter for a moment.
I withdrew my hand, but the bobs stayed alight, shedding a pink and red light brighter than the candles across the rest of the greenhouse. On the floor around it, the flowers in the little clay floor pots seemed to respond with their own light. It was dazzling.
“Living sumac.”
I turned around. Charlie had returned, and he set down a tray with bread, two cups, and a pitcher on the table next to him.
“It’s on your sister’s list,” he said solemnly. “I’d be happy to let her have some, or else we can find one back on Earth.”
I turned back to stare at the glowing tree. “This isn’t a normal sumac…”
Charlie smiled and scoffed a little. “It is. It just knows you’re here. Kendra left that one behind for my collection. Sumac is a common charm for consumables, like tea. Of course, most warlock spells call for the poison variety.”
“But…” I was having trouble keeping my eyes on Charlie; the tree was just so beautiful. “Why is it glowing?”
“I told you, it knows you’re here.” He lifted the pitcher and poured both of us a drink, then walked over and set one cup in my hand as we continued to admire the light. “It knows its family. Kendra gave this tree life. It’s welcoming you.”
“Trees can think?!”
“Trees grown here can, on a very basic level.” He took a drink from his cup, and I drank from mine. It was a mint tea. “Good work on the roses, Thorn.”
Frowning, I turned and glanced behind me. The pathetic little primrose bush had deepened in color, and every bloom had opened. It still looked…strange, somehow, but it was beautiful.
“I didn’t…” I started.
“I didn’t,” Charlie said. “So you must have.”
He glanced at me, and then back at the tree, and gave a rueful smirk.
“Sometimes,” He grabbed a pair of clipping shears stowed with other tools in an old clay pot from a nearby table. “You just need an interpreter.”
He gingerly took a small bud of a branch from the sumac and clipped it free, bringing it back to me. But by the time it had arrived, he had encapsulated it in some sort of pale amber stone, and it hung from a chain, like a long necklace. He lifted it over my head and set it around my neck, and I picked up the pendant charm to examine it.
“Training wheels,” Charlie said, walking back over to the roses. “We’ll see if that helps you any.”
I followed him back to the table and we sat down. I didn’t know why, but the feel of the sumac hanging around my neck was just right. I loved that stunning pendant already, and I looked up at Charlie to find him staring at me with the calculating expression that usually meant he wanted something.
I frowned. “Okay… so you’re doing my fetching for me, you got my number into Vince’s cell phone, and now you’re buying me jewelry—”
“I didn’t buy anything,” he innocently proclaimed.
“—did you screw up, or else what do you want?”
He took a deep breath, looked down, and then grinned up at me from beneath his brow. “Too much. I should have known it was too much. I need something from you to complete my spell. The one to make me human.”
“Are you working on more than one spell right now, Charlie?” I raised an eyebrow. “That you needed to qualify that statement?”
“If you’re going to dissect me like that, maybe you should major in linguistics,” he leaned forward. “It’s a lot to ask, Thorn. I know it is, especially from you, but it has to come from a friend and I am very short on those.”
“Are we friends?” I asked loftily.
He leaned back, and sat upright. “Are we?”
I was still holding the pendant strung around my neck in the warm palm of my hand, protecting the precious thing. We were sitting in a greenhouse garden—albeit a twisted, demonic one—and sipping mint tea. Charlie had brought my father together with the first woman to make him happy since my mother died. He had also nearly killed a girl, but I kind of felt that was more my fault than his. He had turned Gates into a cat, but still…
“Yes,” I said warily, taking a deep breath. “I guess we are. In a very loose sense of the word.”
He nodded, echoing my frown. “I need a memory, Thorn. One of yours, and something that evokes emotion.”
A bitter taste rose in my throat, because the first thought that came to me was my mother. Maybe it was because I had just been thinking about my father and Janet, but she was the first to come to my mind. I subtly shook my head as I looked away, and I felt the pressure building in my chest.
My memories made me who I was, and they were the last thing I had of my mother, and countless other people and things I had cherished that had departed from my life for good. When it came down to it, memories and experiences were the only things we had that were ours forever and couldn’t be taken away from us. Charlie knew I prized mine; he had seen it in me from nearly our first meeting.
He wasn’t asking a lot. He was asking everything.
“Now, Thorn, don’t panic—”
“Why?” I asked suddenly. “You want a memory, which I assume I’m not ever getting back or this wouldn’t be a big deal. I want to know why.”
Charlie nodded. “Because thoughts are an abstraction, like all of the Other Side, except for those things of permanence I bring here from Earth. A memory is a thing of permanence, but also an abstraction. I need it to allow my crossing as a being from this plane to yours. It’s a key element in making me human.”
I chewed my lip, thinking. It couldn’t just be any memory; he had said it had to be something emotional.
I thought about giving him a bad memory, but I couldn’t think of a single one I really wanted to let go of. So many of them had taught me a valuable lesson. The bad ones were nearly more precious than the good, because they had taught me to be the person I was. If I gave up one of them, I was likely doomed to repeat my past mistakes.
And I didn’t want to give up a good one, either. It had to be something inconsequential, but emotional, and something that wouldn’t screw me up for having lost it.
I stood up, screeching my stool back across the stone floor. Charlie got up much more gracefully.
“I need to think,” I said quietly. “I need to go for a walk, but not here, not—”
Charlie held up a hand to stop me. “That’s fine, Thorn. You go. I’ll take care of the things that Lyssa needs.”
The light whipped up around me, like everything breaking into a sandstorm of color, and I was standing back on the street in front of my apartment.
Gates was sitting in the window, watching me with the same cat-faced expression she always had, but I saw her mouth open in a meow and she got up to pace pack and forth across the sill when she noticed me.
I lifted a hand to wave at her. Something in my expression must have told her I wasn’t coming in, because she settled back down.
I turned and started to walk.
I got to the corner, and considered going inside the sandwich place, but then remembered that it was still too early in the day, and they wouldn’t be open until lunch. I turned crossed the street and walked onto campus, down past the engineering building and all the way to the library. I stopped into the student center and took a bench, hoping my thoughts would sort themselves out.
I had just gotten up to get myself a soda from the vending machine, hoping the caffeine would shake loose a non-critical memory that fit Charlie’s criteria, when a man walked up to me.
He had long blond-white hair that was pulled back in a ponytail, a tall, thin frame, and piercing green eyes.
“Annie Hawthorn,” he said with a friendly smile. “How grateful I am to finally meet you.”
I smiled hesitantly. “I’m sorry… how do I know you?”
“You have something that belongs me,” he said with a sharp grin. He offered his hand, and I stared down at it. “My name is Stark.”
Chapter 8
My eyes shot straight up from his unanswered handshake to the look of smug satisfaction on his face.
“Oh…so he does talk about me, then,” he said, withdrawing his hand. He waved his hand, and in a flourish of gold demons’ dust, the soda I had been about to purchase appeared in his palm. He offered it to me.
My eyes were still as large as dinner plates. “I’m not drinking that. I’m not accepting any favors, either. And I have no job vacancies for demons—already overstaffed.”
Another flourish and the drink disappeared. “So he talks about me a lot, then. You should know he’s not the most loyal creature you’ll ever encounter. But then, you’re a smart young woman, so you probably already knew.”
He was smooth like Charlie. I instantly disliked him, and I didn’t play into his game by opening my mouth. Agreeing with a demon was only the first step down the path to much more dangerous folly.
“Shall we sit?” He gestured to a table.
“No, thanks,” I said, suddenly wishing that I wasn’t a person who auto-piloted to polite pleasantries so easily. “I’ll be leaving now.”