Stranger Magics

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  I played dumb. “Your mother?”

  Toula shrugged. “Harrison said she worked for my father, and she was on the lam. Some low-level wizard, maybe just a witch. Had enough sense to keep her head down. Never tried to make contact with me. Of course,” she added, glancing at me, “seeing your wonderful relationship with your mother, maybe I lucked out, eh?”

  “I’d say so.”

  She smiled sadly. “Yeah, but you were never fostered. The Arcanum raised me—passed me around to different families living in the bunker, kept me in the little public school out there with all the other Arcanum kids. They used to call me a witch to get me riled up. Then they got old enough to know whose I was, and after that, they just avoided me.” Her dark blue eyes darted back to mine again. “My father was the bogeyman to a whole generation of wizard kids. You can imagine how popular that made me.” Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “It was the talk of the bunker the day they executed him. Nothing like walking down the hall, hearing snippets of an excited conversation around the corner, and then watching everyone shut up the instant they see you.”

  There just wasn’t a non-awkward response to that. “I knew he had died, but I didn’t know how long ago—”

  “My eighteenth birthday. Harrison let him live until I was grown, and they did it that morning. I was going to go down after school, and instead, they gave me a box of his shit to go through.” She shook her head as if dispelling the memory. “Hey, mind if I turn on the radio?”

  “Go ahead,” I replied, looking at Joey over my shoulder. The kid slept on, his brow furrowed, and I curled up against the door, thinking the old refrain for him:

  Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.

  And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  Chapter 13

  Night passes slowly over the North Atlantic, especially when one can’t sleep and isn’t a fan of flying to begin with. As Joey, too, was staring into space, I suggested we retire to the aisle near the toilets, where we might at least be able to help ourselves to the beverage carts. Joey agreed and leaned against the wall, staring out through a porthole at the blackness around us, and I joined him, though I kept my gaze fixed on the glowing switches of the first-class kitchen instead of the abyss outside the plane. “Holding up?” I enquired quietly.

  “Yep.” He turned from the window and folded his arms against the chill.

  Joey had said little during our brief return to Rigby, and in my hurry to pack, I’d neglected to say what needed to be said most of all. “Look,” I told him, “I’m sorry about . . . that thing we’re not going to discuss. I appreciate it. We all do. She wouldn’t have us—”

  “It’s okay,” he interrupted. “I, uh . . .” He struggled for the words, then murmured, “I knew things wouldn’t be . . . you know, normal . . . if I started working with Father. My advisors all discouraged me, but there’s the spiritual warfare thing and, well . . . Father’s pretty damn good at what he does. I know it wasn’t going to be like The Exorcist,” he continued, his color blossoming to full scarlet, “but I was prepared for weird. And Father—he told me that sometimes, in his work . . . you’ve got to cross some lines. You do it quietly, right, but you cross them.”

  I barely spoke above a whisper. “Let me tell you a little story about Paul when he was just a bit older than you. We did a stint in New Orleans. Somewhere along the way, he made the acquaintance of a . . . well, let’s call him a Houngan, I don’t know the proper term. Anyway, this fellow told Paul that he had a potion that would allow him to see the invisible. Well, I don’t know what possessed him in the end, but he took the man up on his offer, went off with him in the Quarter, and drank the stuff.”

  Joey’s eyes were saucers. “What happened?”

  “No permanent damage. He was out of his mind for a few hours—the stuff was mostly hallucinogens and moonshine—and I sat with him until the walls stopped melting. That’s actually not the craziest thing I’ve seen him do,” I added, watching Joey’s jaw drop, “but he’d be peeved if I shared anything worse. So yes, I know all about Paul’s philosophy on crossing lines for the cause. I mean, he works with me, right? I’m not exactly kosher.”

  Joey grinned. “I read his notes, remember?”

  “You know, I’m going to need a copy of those at some point.”

  “We’ll see. Question.”

  “Go for it.”

  “If we find this—you know—doohickey, is that going to be enough to get the job done?”

  I thought for a moment, trying to recall the strength of the magic I’d felt in the merrows’ sphere, which I’d left locked in my fire safe in Rigby. “Possibly, but I doubt it. I think it’ll take at least three.”

  Joey nodded slowly. “And we’re waiting on Toula for other leads?”

  “That we are.” I paused, then said, “Look, we’ll have you on a plane home in good time for class Monday—”

  “Forget it. I spoke to Father before we left this morning, and he’s making my excuses for me. I’m in this to the bitter end, got it?”

  I shifted against the wall, feeling the twinge of guilt return. “Thanks, Joey.”

  He glanced around, then darted into the kitchen and extracted a Coke from the docked cart. “So how’re we coming on the second part of the problem?” he asked as he cracked it open.

  “Second part?”

  He took a long sip. “Two courts down, one to go. Any leads on the third?”

  I shook my head. “The only person connected with that court I’ve seen in decades is Slim, and he’s useless in this case.”

  The kid’s forehead creased. “That Rick guy? He’s fae?”

  “Witch-blooded fae,” I corrected. “Wizard mother, faerie father. When we mix, it’s like we cancel each other out.” Joey’s confusion deepened, and I leaned toward him to be better heard over the drone of the engines. “We work with magic in different ways—enchantment and spellcraft don’t play nicely together. Most of the time, if you find a mongrel, he’s sensitive to magic and unaffected by iron and silver, but he’s mortal, and he couldn’t cast a spell or create a simple glamour to save his life. They don’t have an easy time of it. There’s no place for them in Faerie—hell, I’ve known of faeries killing their mongrel kids to avoid dealing with them. If they have a place among the wizards at all, it’s as crafters. Slim’s one of the lucky ones.”

  Joey frowned. “You said ‘most of the time.’ What about—”

  “Occasionally,” I allowed, “you’ll find a mongrel who can pass for a witch—a kid with minimal magical ability,” I explained. “If you find a creepy old woman with seventeen cats who’s oddly good at the tarot and sells love potions, that’s a witch.”

  He nodded. “So that’s why we don’t call Toula a witch?”

  “Wizards take that term very personally.”

  Joey sipped his soda and stared into space for a long moment, then glanced back my way as the flicker of an idea crossed his face. “A locating spell.”

  “What about it?”

  “Do they exist?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Might work, might not. Depends on the wizard casting it. And that really is a wizard thing—I’m terrible at finding people, and I doubt Robin’s any better. He just stalks.”

  “But a good wizard could cast a functional locating spell?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  Joey bit his lip. “I was thinking . . . look, I know you’ve got a problem with the Arcanum,” he said quickly, “but what if we asked them to help out? To find the third faerie we need?”

  “Assuming, for the moment, that an Arcanum wizard would be willing to help us, he wouldn’t be able to do anything without magic,” I replied.

  “But we have magic,” Joey pointed out, lowering his voice. “The doohickey. You just said that we’re probably going to need at least a third—let’s get a spare, let the wizard use it enough to find Mab’s people, and then work on convinci
ng one of them to pitch in. Hmm?”

  “That . . . might work,” I grudgingly admitted. “But I want to avoid getting the Arcanum involved if at all possible, understood?”

  He finished his Coke and tossed it into the drink cart’s waste bag. “I understand avoiding bureaucracy in a time crunch, but I don’t see why you hate them so badly. Toula’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “She’s not really Arcanum. They hunted me for a few hundred years,” I muttered. “I find it rather difficult to trust them now.”

  His expression was inscrutable. “Would you trust them for your daughter’s sake?”

  “No,” I said, and sneaked a glance out at the night. “But I might have to for Meggy’s.”

  We made it to Dublin midmorning Friday. As will come as no surprise to anyone who’s spent more than a week in Britain or Ireland, it was drizzling as we taxied to the terminal.

  I sent Joey ahead of me through passport control. “You’re here on pleasure. Tourist,” I whispered as we deplaned. “You’re traveling alone. If there’s trouble, better for one of us to slip through solo.”

  “Paranoid much?” he replied, but did as instructed.

  In truth, I was paranoid—I’ve never been a fan of anonymous crowds, and without magic to warn me of potential troublemakers among the throng, I felt half blind in the groggy press.

  I followed several passengers behind Joey, pressing my best American accent into service when questioned and fighting off the urge to copy the middle-aged border guard’s lilt. The language had changed since I’d first come to the island, but I still heard hints of familiarity in his voice and was trying to place it regionally even as he asked, “You’re forty?”

  “Baby face,” I replied, going for nonchalance in my shrug. “I get carded all the time—it’s such a pain . . .”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” he muttered, and stamped me through. I smiled and hurried on, kicking myself for going so long between passports and grateful for the advent of plastic surgery, which had made my lies plausible on more than one occasion in the past.

  Joey and I rendezvoused beside the baggage carousel once I was certain that we weren’t followed—I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, though I chalked it up to nerves after the plane ride—and I surprised him by stopping at a phone kiosk on the way to retrieve our rental car. “I’ll pay for this one while we’re here,” I explained, watching him inspect the wares. “Call Toula every so often and see how the work is progressing. If she finds anything promising in Europe, it would be simpler to extend our trip here than to go back and forth.”

  His eyebrow arched. “Or I could just text her and tell her to get in touch whenever she comes up for air. She seems to get a little twitchy when disturbed.”

  “Whatever you think best. And once you have it working, try to find a hardware store, okay? I’ll feel better if you’re carrying something iron based.”

  Joey purchased a phone, and within ten minutes, he had contacted Toula and pulled up an address for supplies. A short time later, the rental agent handed me the keys to a sporty little Fiat that most self-respecting Americans would dismiss as a clown car, and I slid behind the wheel, silently cursing the man for giving me a car with a manual transmission. “Where to?” I asked as Joey squeezed in and buckled up.

  “Hang on,” he said, reaching toward the GPS.

  “Can’t we do without the machine? Just read the directions and tell me where we’re going.”

  He scowled at his telephone. “We could try. But I can’t pronounce half of this.”

  “Give me that,” I said, pulling the phone out of his hand, and glanced at the screen. “Those aren’t so difficult . . .”

  “I couldn’t pronounce sídhe, remember?”

  “You still can’t,” I muttered, then headed out into the rainy morning.

  The hardware store Joey located was little more than a mom-and-pop establishment, and I remained in the car. I told him I needed to adjust to left-hand shifting—I was relying on muscle memory forty years unused, and my muscles had apparently developed amnesia in the intervening decades—but truthfully, hardware stores, with all of their exposed iron-bearing wares, creep me out.

  He emerged twenty minutes later with a large paper sack, which he stowed behind him before resuming his seat. “And what did we buy?” I asked, looking up from the road atlas the rental company had left in the door pocket. “Hammer? Rebar?”

  Joey smiled and wiped the rainwater from his face. “Nail gun.”

  “A what?”

  “Nail gun,” he repeated, evidently pleased with himself. “Great for construction, but if you employ a few, uh . . . modifications”—his eyebrows waggled—“that I may or may not have tried with some likeminded friends one boring summer, you can bypass all of the safeties and actually shoot nails.”

  I looked over my shoulder at the seemingly innocent bag. “How far?”

  “They’re short-range weapons, but I could hit a target consistently at twenty yards. Aiming’s a little tricky. But since someone wouldn’t let me bring my sword on this trip . . .”

  “Kid,” I muttered, “you’re brilliant. And concerning, but I can work with that.”

  “Good to know. She’s not fully operational yet,” he cautioned as I started the car. “I’m going to need a few hours of quiet time.”

  “Understood. You’re navigating for now,” I said, thrusting the atlas into his lap. “We’re heading toward Sligo. I think I have the route down, but shout out if I’m about to miss a turn.”

  His eyes drifted across the map. “We’re just going to pretend this is all pronounced phonetically, okay?”

  I pulled onto the road, pleased that I had yet to stall out. “Do you have any idea what a tricky bastard English is by comparison?”

  “I’ve been told.” He pushed his damp hair back and settled into his seat. “Why Sligo?”

  “The county includes the ruins of several monasteries,” I replied. “The sphere is hidden in one of them. We’ll retrieve it tonight.”

  Joey nodded slowly. “So . . . the plan is to break into a historical site after hours and remove an artifact? That sounds only slightly felonious.”

  “It’s only felonious if we get caught, remember. And since I put it there in the first place, I have no reservations about taking it out again.”

  He snorted. “Oh, yeah, I can see that conversation going well—’I swear, Officer, I was coming right back for it! Just got delayed for a few years, you know how it goes . . .’”

  “Precisely.” I chuckled.

  “What were you doing at a monastery, anyway? Just passing through?”

  “Something like that,” I said quietly, and Joey had enough sense to drop the matter. I stared out at the road as he scanned the radio dial, letting the rhythmic swish of the wipers calm my nerves, and tried to see the land I remembered through the rain.

  Once we’d checked into a hotel, I left Joey to tinker with his nail gun in peace, then slid into the rental car and drove out of town, heading for the countryside and whatever wilderness might be left. I couldn’t see the old terrain, but I could feel it, and with each bend in the road, the pieces of the landscape began to slot back into my mental map. But as I focused on my bearings, I let down my guard, and the memories started to float to the surface, until I heard from the recesses of my mind a much-loved voice, long silenced: I knew you would come.

  Defeated, I pulled the car off the road, cut the ignition, and sat alone while the rain pounded down, allowing myself to hear Étaín once again.

  Chapter 14

  She was my world when I was young. Soft of face, with hair so blonde it was nearly white and eyes like glacial pools; she was my provider, my nurturer, my protector, and my tutor. We lived alone, the two of us, in a cozy one-room thatched-roof cottage in the middle of a grassy meadow that stretched for leagues and never went to straw. Ten running steps out the door was our lake, a glorified pond stocked with all manner of fish and graced with the oc
casional swan. The sun might rise and set for a fortnight without our receiving a guest, and I never paid it any mind—I had Étaín, she loved me, and that was all the mattered.

  By the time I was three, I realized that I could do things she could not—I could make fish leap onto the shore, for instance, or I could take our roof apart and scatter it across the meadow. My tiny body contained all the power of a god, and the only thing standing between me and chaos was Étaín, whose smile could charm me into obedience. Her brief melancholic spells terrified me—perhaps, I reasoned, she might stop loving me and leave if I displeased her—and I did anything I could to make her happy.

  As I grew, I began to catch more frequent glimpses of Étaín’s sadness, brief flickers of despair and resignation when she thought I wasn’t looking, and I tried all the harder to make her happy—an acre of thornless roses just for her, a little boat of gold for our fishing trips, a bed so soft that she could sink into it and nearly disappear. She smiled and called me her little angel, and taught me words from a language I had never heard. She tried to teach me the stars, but ours moved unpredictably, and the exercise was always a failure. But I didn’t care—why would I need to navigate when I would never, ever leave our cottage by the lake?

  And then, when I was seven, Mother summoned me for the first time.

  Étaín explained to me what a mother was, and she warned me that I must be on my best behavior and not wiggle around when I visited. Fearful of this unknown mother, I clung to Étaín’s skirt and refused to go when the air parted in two and the messenger stepped into the meadow. She pried me loose, kissed my forehead, and sent me on my reluctant way.

  When I first saw Mother’s throne room and spied her seated on the crystal dais in the middle, my heart leapt. She was younger than Étaín, it seemed, her hair like honey, her eyes dark as old wood, her face and form slender, her movements graceful when she rose to receive me. But her smile was thin and cold, almost predatory, and I shrank away in fear. Her laugh was as beautiful as her face and as sharp as her smile, and she dismissed me without a second look.