Mind Games

by Christine Amsden

  I didn’t. At times it made me feel dense, but I simply couldn’t make sense of any of it. The more I tried, the more tears I shed over a man who had abandoned fifteen years of friendship and a brand new romance without so much as telling me why.

  It could have been a spell. In my daydreams, I still found out it was a spell. Perhaps his father didn’t want to see us together after all, despite what he had said to the contrary.

  But only the Blairs might know that sort of powerful mind magic, and some of the things Matthew had let slip recently made me think even they couldn’t have done it. At least, not so forcefully and permanently. Inconsistencies, as Matthew had said.

  So I spent my evenings at home with Madison, teaching her to cook. She learned quickly, as with just about everything else – everything except self-confidence, perhaps.

  Her confidence had taken a severe blow when her father had kicked her out, refusing to pay for her college tuition unless she agreed to teach math instead of music. In the same conversation he had also let slip that he had adopted her, something Madison hadn’t brought up again since.

  She hadn’t started dating Nicolas for a few weeks after that, though he had pestered her, intrigued by her gift. She had given in to his pestering the day he had helped Kaitlin and me move into the house, two days after she herself had moved in. I figured her father must have said something to her on the way out, because her self-confidence had taken another huge blow, but she refused to say what it might have been.

  “How was your first day of student teaching?” I asked Madison while we prepared the spaghetti sauce for dinner. She already had garlic and onions sautéing in olive oil, and the familiar aroma filled the kitchen.

  “Good. For the most part.”

  “For the most part?”

  She looked at me askance before saying. “I had Elena in my class today. Actually, I’ll have Adam on Wednesday.”

  “Was there a problem with Elena?” I worried for my nine-year-old sister, Elena, more stuck in the middle than any of the others. She had the gift of speaking to the dead, but she spent so much time speaking to them that some days it seemed like a curse. It was, perhaps, the one gift I would turn down.

  “She gets teased,” Madison said.

  “Oh?” I might have guessed, although I also wondered if Elena would notice.

  “I found her in the music room during recess, crying.”

  Clearly, she did notice. I took out my frustration on some innocent parsley, chopping it into tiny bits, while my big sister instincts went on overdrive.

  “I sang to her,” Madison said. “To make her feel better. It’s not a permanent fix, though.”

  “Who was teasing her?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. But Cassie, you know you can’t rescue her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She has to learn to stand up for herself.”

  I gaped at Madison. “You should talk!”

  Madison’s face turned as red as the tomato sauce she was busily adding to the pot. “You can’t rescue me, either.”

  “I could try. It might help if you told me what you need rescuing from. Was it something your dad said? Or is it Nicolas? If it’s Nicolas–”

  “Nicolas is great. We have a lot of fun together.”

  “Really? I’m surprised you have anything in common.”

  “Because he’s three-and-a-half years younger than me?”

  “Younger than that, maturity-wise. You’ve always been mature for your age, and, well, let’s face it. Nicolas is a bit immature for his.”

  “So? Maybe I’ve always been too mature for my age. Do you know what we did last night?”

  I shook my head.

  “Had a water gun fight. Actually, he would light himself on fire and I would put it out, which was a little different from the fights I used to have with my brother when I was eight. But it’s been about that long since I let go like that. I was… I was silly.”

  I had trouble imagining Madison playing like that. Which, I supposed, was precisely the point.

  “So,” Madison said, “how was your day?”

  “Got a new partner and a new lead on the McClellan case.” I added fresh herbs to the sauce and gave it a quick stir.

  “The McClellan case?” She flinched. “Do you even want to solve that one?”

  “Why? He ever do anything to you?”

  “What was the lead?”

  I studied Madison’s profile before answering, wondering at our string of answering questions with questions. She got uncomfortable whenever I mentioned the McClellan case, but it didn’t make any sense. She had never even met the guy, though I had told enough stories to gain her empathic hatred on my behalf.

  “His brother found a pamphlet from the Gateway Christian Church with a warning on it. Thinks maybe the preacher stirred some of his parishioners into doing it. Like a hate crime.”

  Madison shuddered. “Do you think they could have done it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Sorcerers aren’t invincible. And if they did, it means David wasn’t killed because of who he was, but because of what he was.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not all sorcerers are bad.” I didn’t know why I felt the need to defend them to Madison, who wasn’t exactly arguing, but I did. “Some are real heroes.”

  “Can they really be a hero if you owe them for it afterward?” Madison asked.

  “Some choose not to accept debt, like vampire hunters.” I still felt I owed Evan a debt, though the magic no longer bound me to him because he disagreed. “Wait. Why? Do you owe someone a debt? My brother?”

  “I don’t owe your brother a debt.”

  “Someone else?” I asked.

  “I saw some of those pamphlets at school today,” Madison said in a pitifully see-through attempt to change the subject. “I wondered if they were what made Elena cry.”

  “At an elementary school?” I didn’t want to believe it. “Do they even know what it means?”

  “They know the gist of it. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I suppose. So, who do you owe?”

  Madison blanched, but before she had a chance to answer or flee, someone rang the doorbell.

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  “Don’t think this means you’re off the hook. And don’t forget to ask who it is before you open the door.” Opening the door could weaken the threshold, so it was always best to know who waited on the other side.

  “Who is it?” Madison asked.

  “It’s me,” came an achingly familiar voice. “Evan.”

  Madison looked helplessly at me while I shook my head, feeling strangely dizzy. This couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not when I had just made my first step forward with my life. I couldn’t see him now. I wouldn’t.

  “Go away!” I called when Madison didn’t look willing to challenge him. I strode toward the door while she retreated to the kitchen.

  “Cassie, please, we need to talk. It’s important.”

  The last thing he had said to me was a nonverbal door in my face, and I had every intention of reciprocating. If that’s as much as he cared about me, then that’s as much as I cared about him. Which was not at all. He could disappear from the face of the earth for all I cared. An expanding pressure in my chest tried to disagree, but I held firm.

  “We have nothing to say to one another.” I retreated to the kitchen so it would be more difficult to hear him, and easier to steel my resolve. Madison stared at me with wide, frightened eyes, and kept shooting meaningful looks at the front door.

  “He has no power over me,” I said, wishing it were true.

  “Will those plants you put on the porch keep him out?”

  A picture of Evan on the front porch of Belinda Hewitt’s home, turning her plants to dust, flashed through my mind. No, they wouldn’t hold him, but they weren’t our only form of protection. Nicolas stopped by weekly to recharge several powerful runes. That brought forth an image of Nicolas trying to heal Kaitlin,
inadvertently hurting her, and Evan stepping in to tell the younger sorcerer to get an apprenticeship. Actually, Nicolas had finally taken the advice, and now spent his days with Clark Eagle, but he was just beginning.

  I peered out the front window, and sure enough, Evan had set up a casting circle. He was, at that very moment, deep in concentration, his lips moving slightly in a chant.

  Damn him, he was breaking into my house! I didn’t care who he thought he was, or how much he thought he could get away with, he had no right! The nerve of that arrogant, self-centered…

  I flung open the front door and, ignoring every lesson I had ever learned about the consequences of disturbing a sorcerer in the middle of casting, I slapped him. Hard. Across the face. It left a satisfying sting in my palm as a red mark appeared on his cheek.

  The satisfaction didn’t last long. The next thing I knew, the house jumped. Everything in it, and by everything I am including myself, leaped into the air and froze there for a minute or two, suspended. I might have been watching a freeze-frame from a cheesy fantasy show if it weren’t for the undeniable fact that I, too, hung in midair. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t scream. Only my brain remained active, and it chugged along at a million miles a second, largely wondering if I would survive my ill-considered fit of temper. I didn’t think I would hang in the air forever, it was the coming down part I dreaded. And what might come down on top of me.

  The moment came with a heart-stopping jolt, followed by a graceless landing that bruised my tail bone. I closed my eyes, waiting for the roof to come down on me, but it remained miraculously in place.

  Then came a high-pierced shriek from the kitchen. Remembering the large pot of boiling spaghetti sauce, I scrambled to my feet and raced to the kitchen to see my fears realized: The stock pot lay on the floor, its molten contents strewn across ceiling, cabinets, and floors.

  “Madison!” I raced to her side, almost losing my footing in a patch of slick sauce. “How bad is it? Are you burned? Should I call Nicolas?”

  She shook her head, groaned, and clutched at her back, which had apparently landed hard against the refrigerator. “I’m okay. Just freaked out.”

  As my racing heart began to slow, I took in more elements of the confusing scene before me. Madison actually sat, surrounded by a pool of sauce, but none of it had touched her. I actually patted her dark brown hair, expecting the color to have hidden the sauce and my hand to come away sticky. It didn’t. Her pale blue shirt couldn’t have hidden any sauce if it tried. The stuff had quite simply missed her.

  “How-? What-?” Oh yeah, she was hiding things. I took a step backward, nearly slipping in the sauce again, but this time Evan caught me before I could fall.

  He could have used his magic – a cold, impersonal assist – but he didn’t. He caught me with arms around my waist and hands braced on my elbows. He caught me with his whole body, pulling me against him, holding me as closely as if he had never pushed me away.

  My body betrayed me. It leaned into him for a moment, finding comfort in his warmth and his scent. It longed to kiss him, to feel the unmatched eroticism in the touch of his lips. It longed to forget the last two months, to pretend they had never happened, and to allow him access to my tortured heart once again.

  The responding ache of pain finally snapped me back to reality. I jabbed backwards with my elbows to push him away, then flew into the living room to put space between us. The movement left a trail of red footprints across the beige carpet.

  “Are you okay?” Evan asked Madison.

  “Fine.” She stood and gave him a shy smile.

  “Let me help clean this mess.” Before either Madison or I had a chance to respond, let alone stop him, Evan began levitating bits of pasta sauce back into the stock pot. He seemed to have trouble separating the sauce from the carpeting where I had trampled it in, but the tile floor in the kitchen turned out spotless.

  “So much for dinner,” Madison said. “I’m going to run out and get something. What do you want? Pizza? Chinese? Or, you know what? I’ll just surprise you.”

  Madison grabbed her purse and flip flops before racing out the front door as if the hounds of hell were on her heels. Since she had been afraid of Evan for years, maybe she thought they were. She had softened to him when he had saved my life, at least until she’d learned about the debt. Now I had no idea what she thought of him.

  “I can’t believe you did that to her,” I said when we were alone.

  “Did what?”

  “Scared her like that.”

  “Me? I can’t believe you slapped me while I was casting a spell. Have you lost your mind?” He gestured at the toppled tables and lamps, as well as the sofa and recliners that had come to rest in a new configuration.

  To cover the growing tension in the house, I began pushing things back into place. “You were trying to break into my house. You did break into my house! Get out!”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.” I shoved at the sofa with my hip until I felt it settle into its comfortable carpet grooves.

  “You don’t need to talk, just listen.” Evan levitated the recliners back into place before I had a chance to take out my frustration on them. He then proceeded to put the rest of the living room back in order while increasingly irrational torrents of anger washed over me. I wasn’t so helpless that I needed magic to reposition the furniture. I wanted to manhandle the furniture; I needed to take my frustration out on something before I lost it and did the unthinkable – cry in front of him.

  I didn’t think for a minute that he was being gallant. No, he was showing off. Look at me, and look what I can do! You can’t keep me out of your house, or your life.

  “You know what?” I said. “I do have some things to say to you, Mr. I-can-do-whatever-I-want-and-you-can’t-stop-me! You slammed the door in my face. Do you remember doing that? I was on your porch, naively thinking everything between us was great. And what might have given me that impression?”

  “Cassie–”

  “Let me see,” I said. Then I forced my voice into a falsetto whine. “Oh Cassie, I’ve been in love with you since the first grade!”

  Evan took a step backwards as if I’d struck him. Which I had done, I thought as I reveled in the pink slap mark still smarting his cheek. “Cassie, there are things you don’t understand.”

  “You think so, do you? Well, maybe there are things you don’t understand, like the definition of love. And I don’t mean to get all philosophical on you, I’m just talking basics here.”

  “Cassie, I came here to tell you the truth.” He did not look me in the eyes.

  “Oh yeah? Well, maybe I don’t want to hear it anymore. Maybe I don’t care.” It wasn’t true, the part of me that was more hurt than angry tried to say. I did want to know. Isn’t that what I needed for closure?

  Maybe, said the part of me that was more angry than hurt, but I couldn’t let him know I still cared. That would give him way too much power over me. He already had too much.

  “You care,” Evan said, gently. “I know you better than that.”

  I thought I’d known him, too. “I’m going out with Matthew Blair.”

  “You’re… what?” Evan crossed the room to me. Though I scurried backwards, he easily caught me between himself and the sofa.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said. “But I just wanted you to know I’ve moved on.”

  “He’s a mind mage.”

  “I know what he is.”

  Evan pulled himself back just far enough to stare into my face, as if looking for signs of warping. I stared back, mutinously.

  “See any pink?” I asked. A pink tinge to the whites of the eyes indicated someone was under the influence of a love potion.

  “Matthew’s too good for that,” Evan said. “He’d be more subtle. More sinister. Are you in love with him?”

  “If I were, I wouldn’t tell you.” I wasn’t, either. I mean, I lik
ed the guy, but we hardly knew one another. I found him fascinating and charming and maybe, just maybe, the thing I needed right now.

  “Cassie, this is serious. You can’t trust him.”

  “What do you think he’ll do? Use an intoxicating kiss and the honor of a debt to make me think I’m in love with him, and then slam the door in my face?”

  Evan took another step backwards. It left me enough room to breathe, although my treacherous body missed his heat.

  “Cassie, I-I’m sorry. I-thought. I was hoping… I went to your father because I didn’t want it to be about the debt. I had to know you loved me.”

  I rarely saw Evan lose his composure. The sight should have thrilled me, all things considered, but it didn’t.

  “Just go away,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”

  “Matthew’s wanted you for a while, you know, because of what I told you before. Because you’ve got a powerful family, and will probably have powerful children, but have no power of your own.”

  A chill ran down my spine at the reminder. I had forgotten. How had I forgotten?

  “You’re beginning to see,” Evan said. “Fight it, Cassie.”

  I shook my head.

  “He thinks you’re burned out or repressed,” Evan continued.

  “And you? What do you think?” I’d asked before, but I couldn’t remember his answer. “Or did you find someone better? A sure thing?”

  “I’ll get you free from him,” Evan said, ignoring my question. It made me wonder if there really was someone else. Someone better.

  “I don’t need your protection.”

  “You’re getting it anyway.”

  “Oh yeah? Who protects me from you?”

  He stared at me for a long moment, his eyes full of tortured thoughts I couldn’t begin to understand. Then he groaned, and tugged me closer. “No one.” With that, his lips descended toward mine.

  I didn’t meet him halfway, or even lean forward. But I didn’t turn away, either. In the instant before I felt his lips on mine, my heart jumped. I closed my eyes, ready for the mind-numbing sensation.