Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Not that I went far—just off to college for four years. But even then, J was there, the comforting shadow and sounding board at my elbow, not to mention the tuition check in the mail. Now that phase was over, and it was time to be an adult.

  Somehow.

  And that was why I was starting to panic.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Torres,” the woman on the other end of the phone line was saying. “Your résumé was quite good, of course, but…”

  I kinda tuned her out at that point. It was the same thing everyone had been saying for the past three months. I’m smart, I’m well educated—the aforementioned four years at Amherst will do that—and I’m a hard worker. All my references were heavy on that point. I’ve never shied away from a challenge.

  Only these days, nobody wanted to hire someone with a liberal-arts degree and minimal tech skills, no matter how dedicated they might be.

  It wasn’t my fault, not really. I know how to use computers and all that. It’s just that I can’t. Or, I can, but it doesn’t always end well.

  I’m a Talent, which is the politically correct way of saying magic user. Magician. Witch. Whatever. Using current—the magical energy that floats around the world—is as natural to me as hailing a cab is to New Yorkers. Only problem is, current runs in the same time-space whatever as electricity, and like two cats in the same household, they don’t always get along. They’re pretty evenly balanced in terms of power and availability, but current’s got the added kick of people dipping in and out, which makes it less predictable, more volatile. Which means a Talent…well, let’s just say that most of us don’t carry cell phones or PDAs on our person, or work with any delicate or highly calibrated technology.

  I’m actually better than most—for some reason my current tends to run cool, not hot, meaning I don’t have as many spikes in my—hypothetical—graph. Nobody’s been able to explain it, except to say I’m just naturally laid-back. I guess it’s because of that I’ve never killed a landline, or any of the basic household appliances just by proximity the way most Talent do, but there’s always the risk.

  Especially when we’re under stress. You learn to work around it, and I wouldn’t give up what I am, not for anything, but sometimes current is less a gift and more a righteous pain in the patoot. Especially when you’re trying to find a job in the Null world.

  Ms. Marin had finished making apologies, finally.

  “Yes, thank you. I do appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.” J taught me manners, too. I hung up the phone, and stared at my toes again. The sweat of my treadmill workout seemed far away, and the dream-sweat closer to my skin, somehow.

  Damn it. I had really hoped something would come out of that interview. Something good, I meant.

  Lacking any other idea or direction, I wandered over to the desk, where a pile of résumés, a notepad, and my breakfast—a three-egg omelet with hash browns and ketchup—waited for me to get my act together. There were still half a dozen places I needed to call, to follow up on applications and first interviews. I sat in the chair and stared at the notepad, with its neatly printed list—the result of ten weeks of intensive job-hunting—and felt a headache starting to creep up on me. At this rate, I really was going to be begging for temp jobs or—god help me—going back to retail. My life’s ambition, not really. I might not know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn’t want.

  I forked up a bit of the omelet and took a bite, less because I was hungry and more because it was there. Other Talent found their niche, why couldn’t I? All right, so a lot of them became artists, or lawyers, or ran their own companies, where their weirdness wasn’t noticed, or was overlooked. None of that really interested me, even if I’d had an inch of artistic or entrepreneurial talent, which I didn’t. Academia maybe, but the truth was that while I loved learning, school mostly bored me.

  Me bored was a bad idea. When I was bored I did things like create a spell that would burn out selected letters in neon signs all over town, until it looked as though there was a conspiracy against the letters Y and N. Listening to people’s crackpot theories about what had really happened for the rest of the week had been fun, but…

  But I needed something to do.

  They say you should follow your interests, go for what you’re passionate about. To do something that mattered would be nice. I needed to be able to get my teeth into something, to feel that it was worthwhile. Other than that…I didn’t know. I guess that works if you’ve got some kind of artistic talent, or want to make the world a better place, or have an isotope named for you. Me, not so much.

  There had been a while, after Zaki’s murder, when I’d thought about going into law enforcement, but it was tougher these days for Talent to make it—less shoe leather and more high-tech toys. I might make it through the Academy, but spending the rest of my life pounding the pavement, unable to advance, didn’t thrill me. And J was even less happy with the idea. He wanted me in a nice, safe office. Preferably a corner office, with an assistant to handle the heavy lifting and typing.

  I scowled at the list again. Three advertising agencies, two trade magazines, and a legal aid firm. That was all I had left.

  “Screw it. Shower first.” Whatever the cause, I was sticky and sweaty, and my hair was kind of gross. Maybe washing it would get my brain going.

  The bathroom was reasonably luxe, with scented shampoos and conditioners and soaps, and I took my time. I thought I heard the phone ring, but since I was soaking wet and had just lathered up, I ignored it. This place wasn’t quite pretentious enough to rate a telephone in the bathroom. I’m not sure J would have let me stay here if there had been one—he’s sort of old-fashioned and genteel, and things like taking a phone call while you’re on the crapper would give him frothing fits.

  The thought, I admit, made me giggle, even in my depression. J is such a gentleman in a lot of ways, old school, and yet he kept up with me pretty well. I wonder sometimes what crimes he committed as a young’un, that he was the one to be landed with me.

  Far as I could tell, his only mistake had involved being in the wrong place at the right time. Zaki had enough sense to know he wasn’t a strong enough Talent, and didn’t have enough patience to mentor me, but his first choice was a disaster waiting to happen, and even as a kid I knew that the moment he introduced us. The guy was…well, he wouldn’t have sold me to pay off his gambling debts, but I wouldn’t have learned a whole lot, either.

  The moment was still crystal-sharp in my memory: Zaki’s worried presence, hovering; Billy’s pleasure at being asked to mentor someone for the first time in his life; the smell of a freshly washed carpet that didn’t hide the years of wear and tear…

  With an amazing lack of tact that still dogs me, I’d used my untrained, just-developing current to yelp for help. That had attracted the attention of a passerby on the street below, who—despite having already done his time as a mentor, and being way out of our league—came up the stairs, took one look, and took on the job.

  Zaki had been lonejack, part of the officially unofficial, intentionally unorganized population of Talent. J was Council—the epitome of structural organization. Despite that, they both got along pretty well, I guess because of me. I wasn’t the only lonejack kid mentored by a Council member, but I was the only one we knew of who stayed at least nominally a lonejack.

  “Maybe if you’d crossed the river, you’d have had a job offer waiting for you when you graduated,” I grumbled. “Why do you insist on thinking that nepotism’s a dirty word?”

  Truth was, I didn’t think of myself as either one group or the other, and maybe that was part of the problem. Born to one magical community, raised in another, Latina by birth and European by training, female imprinted on a—oh god, use the word—metrosexual male… Issues? I probably should have subscriptions at this point.

  My hair’s short enough that it doesn’t take long to wash, and by the time I got out of the bathroom, toweled off, and wrapped in one of the complimentary bathrobe
s, the strands were almost dry. I’m a natural honey-blonde, thanks to my unknown and long-gone mother, but it hasn’t been that shade since I was fourteen—I was currently sporting a dark red dye job that I had thought would look more office-appropriate. So much for that thought doing me any good. Maybe I’d go back to purple, and the hell with it.

  Contemplating an interviewer’s reaction to that, I walked to the bedroom, and saw that the light on the phone was blinking. Right, the call I’d missed. Whoever called, they’d left me a message.

  My heart did a little scatter-jump, and my inner current flared in anticipation, making me instinctively take a step away from the phone, rather than toward it. Normally, like I said, my current’s cold and calm, especially compared to most of my peers, but I’d been out of sorts recently, and wasn’t quite sure what might happen. Bad form to short out your only means of communicating with potential employers. Plus, the hotel would be pissed, and complain to J.

  Once I felt my current settle back down, I let myself look at the blinking light again. You could call first thing in the morning with bad news. Okay. You didn’t call and leave a message with bad news, did you? I didn’t know. Maybe. Just because everyone seemed eager to tell me no to my face didn’t mean that was the only way to do it.

  All right, this was me, keeping calm. Hitting the replay button. Stepping back, out of—hopefully—accidental current-splash range…

  “This message is for Bonita Torres. Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.” The speaker gave an address that I didn’t recognize, not that I knew damn-all about New York City, once you get past the basic tourist spots. “Take the 1 train to 125th. Be on time.”

  No name, no indication of where they got my name or number, just that message, in a deep male voice.

  An interesting voice, that. Not radio-announcer smooth, but…interesting.

  Someone smart would have deleted the message. Someone with actual prospects would have laughed and said no way.

  I’ve always been a sucker for interesting.

  two

  One of the first things J taught me was, before I decided on anything with repercussions, to step back and consider that decision from every possible angle. It only took a few minutes of thought, and sanity reasserted itself. The voice-mail message was weird, but intriguing. Or maybe it was intriguing because it was weird. Did that make it a good idea? No. In fact, it probably made it a very bad idea.

  J said I should consider, and think sanely. He didn’t say anything about listening to that sane voice, and very bad ideas were often a lot of fun.

  The guy hadn’t left a phone number for me to call back and say I’d be there, though. Oh god, and if this was from one of the résumés I’d sent out, I’d look a proper idiot calling now to follow up, if I’d already gotten an interview.

  I picked up the phone and was about to dial the callback code when I realized that, idiot, the call had to have come through the hotel switchboard. So I dialed 0 for the front desk, instead.

  “Hi. This is room 328? I just had a call come in, and they didn’t leave a name or number to reach them at, I don’t suppose…?”

  No, the woman at the front desk told me regretfully, they couldn’t. I didn’t know if it was a technological thing or a legal thing, and I didn’t bother to ask. The reason didn’t make a difference. I hung up the phone, still clueless, and stared at the paper with the details written on it, on top of the list of names and places I was supposed to call back. Handwriting was supposed to tell you about a person, right? My handwriting’s like J’s—squared and solid, and easy to read. I’d have made a crappy doctor.

  Maybe it was one of these places I’d already submitted my résumé to. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was through a contact of J’s who had thought my mentor would tell me to expect the call. That didn’t sound right—J would never forget to tell me something like that—but it was a possibility. Maybe it was a joke, a prank, or a weird cold-call solicitation. I had no idea, and no way of finding out—except for showing up.

  Tomorrow afternoon. All right. That gave me the rest of the day to follow up on my other résumés, and still get out and wander around the city before dinner with J. And then tomorrow…would bring whatever tomorrow would bring. Maybe J would have some idea what all this was about. I was pretty sure he’d have an opinion, at least.

  The carrot of playtime in Manhattan dangling in front of me, I made short work of the remaining names on my list. Not that it took much; two résumés were still “under consideration” two were thanks-no-thanks; at one place the HR person was out and would get back to me at some point before the next millennium, maybe; and one place, hurrah, they wanted to see me again on Friday!

  The fact that this was Monday didn’t fill me with huge levels of optimism, since if I was a hot prospect they’d get me in quick, right? But it was the best offer I’d gotten so far, so I thanked the nice guy on the phone, confirmed the time and place, and hung up the phone not quite as terminally depressed as I’d been earlier. Also, I’d determined that the mysterious phone call hadn’t come from any of these places, so that option was dealt with.

  Was I going to show up tomorrow? I honestly didn’t know.

  But for now, I had the afternoon to myself. I threw on a pair of black pants and a hot-pink T-shirt and my boots, left my stress at the door, and made my escape.

  Johnny, the twenty-seven-year-old engineering student from Tehran, was doorman today. He wished me a nice day and held the large glass door open, and I hit the sidewalk like a greyhound sighting a rabbit.

  I grew up in Boston, went to school outside the city, had been to Rome and Paris and London and Dubai and Tokyo and a dozen other major cities with J dragging me around. All that travel gave me a reasonable sense of sophistication, but drop me in the middle of New York City and I felt like a little kid again. There’s not more current running through the wiring of Manhattan than anywhere else; it’s not any more vibrant or powerful…but somehow it always feels that way to me.

  Not just me, either. J says there’re more Talent in New York, Chicago, and Houston than anywhere else, and more of the fatae, the nonhumans of the Cosa Nostradamus—those with and of magic—too. I wasn’t so blasé that I wouldn’t be excited about the chance to see more fatae. Sure, there were some up in Amherst; my freshman composition teacher had been a dryad, and a couple of centaurs used to hang around the stables I rode at, taunting the ponies and stealing grain and treats. But the exotics, the rare breeds, they were in New York, where nobody even looked once, much less twice.

  The hotel was only a ten-minute walk from my destination: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Specifically, the Temple of Dendur, the reconstructed ruins of a building once dedicated to Isis. Anytime the museum’s open, you’ll find people standing there under the glass walls, staring at the installation, soaking up the ancient ambience. Some of us are soaking up more than that. The Temple by itself may or may not have been anything especially mystical or magical in its original location, beyond whatever the faith of its followers gave it, but when it was relocated to the museum, they managed to place the sandstone structure directly over a major ley line convergence, one of the sweetest in the city.

  Ley lines are like a funnel for natural current, the energy of the earth itself, the basic stuff magic is formed around. I wasn’t going to suck any of it up today, just say hello, make my curtsy, as J always said. It’s only polite.

  Someone came up next to me. I assumed another tourist, someone who didn’t know not to stand so close, gawking at the Temple, same as me. Half-right, anyway.

  “You’re new.”

  Oh lord. Not that I didn’t appreciate attention, when I was in the mood, but… “You’re using a very old line.”

  “Old and tested and true. I’m none of those things.”

  I laughed, and turned to consider the owner of the voice. Tall, well above my own five-six, and nicely built, with deep blue eyes and raven-black hair setting off evenly tanned skin. Might be too old for me, by
a smidge, but if he didn’t mind I wasn’t going to say anything.

  Oh, the outlook for the afternoon had definitely improved.

  “I’m Gerry,” he said, offering one nicely formed hand, the fingertips bitten but not torn up. There were just enough calluses to make his skin firm, rather than soft, and he shook like a guy who had nothing to prove, a single solid pump. “I’m harmless in public, entertaining in private, and up-to-date on all my shots and papers. May my old lines and I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  This hadn’t exactly been the distraction I’d been thinking of, but when you’re made such a very nicely packaged offer…I cast a look over the Temple, and be damned if I didn’t feel a very distinct smirk coming off the energy rising out of it. Or maybe that was just me, projecting.

  “You may, indeed.”

  Three hours and more than one cup of coffee later, I knew enough about Gerry to know that he would be a disaster long-term, even if I had been thinking that way. I also knew that he had a very confident appeal and a sweetly coffee-scented kiss, and if I hadn’t been otherwise promised for the evening, we might have gotten better acquainted. Not that well acquainted, no; I’m an unabashed flirt, not a skank. But he was sweet, and he gave me his phone number and e-mail, with strict instructions to get in touch.

  Maybe I would. Maybe not. Gerry was sweet, but he didn’t have even a twitch of Talent, didn’t seem to know anything about the Cosa Nostradamus—I’d been subtle but thorough on that—and I’ve always been shy about getting involved with Nulls. It gets…complicated. Better to stick to your own kind, who already know the deal.

  I made it back to the hotel just in time to change for dinner. J’s not a fuddy-duddy, even if he is Council, but there are standards for our dinners together, and I appreciate them as much as he does.