Joy of Witchcraft

by Mindy Klasky

  Even without the complication of a student trying to dismantle my entire magicarium, the Court was being unrealistic when they demanded a sign of progress by the end of the week. By the end of the term, sure, that was fair. But I couldn’t be certain I’d have anything to show in five short days.

  “Call Clara,” David said. “Ask her and your grandmother to help out with classes, starting this morning.”

  My immediate reaction was to protest. The house was crowded enough without adding another two witches, another two familiars into the mix. My students needed fewer distractions, not more. And while I was sure Gran would lend her fierce support to everything I attempted, I wasn’t certain I had the patience to deal with Clara’s weird ideas.

  “They were the first witches who figured out how to work with you,” David said, as if I’d voiced my objections out loud. “They were the first ones to understand the potential of what you do. Let them show your students. Let them help.”

  He glanced at the parchment scroll, and his worried frown carved even deeper across his face. He had enough on his plate, with Pitt’s inquest. It was already killing him to entrust my classes to Caleb’s and Tony’s protection, when he couldn’t invest absolute trust in all of my students. I shouldn’t be adding to his troubles.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call them.”

  “And don’t mention the Court’s most recent ultimatum to your students. Whoever is trying to shut you down could just skew the results for a week, without ever bothering to summon another monster.”

  His advice made sense. I just hated that we’d come to that point. I dragged myself to my phone and called Gran and Clara.

  They arrived by mid-morning. In keeping with my innovative balance of powers, they instructed their familiars to work with other witches. Nuri perched on the arm of the sofa, closing her fingers around Bree’s shoulder like gentle talons sinking into a perch. Majom followed Clara’s orders and curled up by my feet. I tried to ignore the sensation as he plucked at the hem of my jeans, teasing at the stitches with his ever-curious fingers.

  We worked as a group for over two hours, trying to light a single candle with our pooled powers. Sometimes the wick kindled from the center of the wax column, drowning itself in a few short seconds. Sometimes, the flame leaped high enough to scorch the ceiling, necessitating an immediate banishing spell. Sometimes, the candle tottered back and forth on its plate, tilting first toward one witch and then another before it ended its crazy dance by toppling onto its side. Sometimes—most often—nothing happened at all.

  And so I had to consider the option seriously when Clara said, “Jeanette? I have something new we could try.”

  I was too frustrated by our collective magical failure to bother correcting her about my name. Instead, I used my best magistrix to ask, “What’s that, Clara?”

  “It’s something we were trying at Oak Canyon, before I came out here.” She waited for me to nod encouragement. I caught my students’ attention swinging from her to me and back again, as if they were watching a tennis match. “We attune our powers to the field of cosmic waves and use those ripples to act indirectly on the world around us.”

  I reminded myself that I was the magistrix here. I was in charge. I was responsible for making all of my students feel calm and comfortable in sharing their ideas. I kept my voice completely level as I said, “Cosmic waves… That’s a, um, new approach.”

  Fifteen-love, me, if anyone was keeping score. I glanced over at Gran and was gratified by her nod of approval. I knew she wanted me to find better ways to work with Clara. My keeping an open mind was a present for her, a gift of thanks for all the years she’d put up with my being a ranty teenager.

  Clara beamed as she took in my students’ rapt attention. “We’ve been working with waves a lot. They help us to measure power in the world around us, the ka of every living thing.”

  The ka. The soul. Riiiiiiight.

  But Gran gave me a small smile of encouragement. She was right, after all. I wanted my students to understand how we balanced new ideas at the Jane Madison Academy, how we tested theories. We were a regular laboratory for witchy knowledge, applying scientific theory to all sorts of new concepts. Observation. Hypothesis. Experimentation. Conclusion.

  Clara had just offered up one of the craziest hypotheses I’d ever heard in my life. It wouldn’t take much of an experiment to blow it out of the water. But I owed Clara basic civility. The Academy owed her that much. I was a model of calm as I asked, “And how does the ka work with unliving things? Like, er, candles.”

  Thirty-love. Ha!

  My students’ attention bounced back toward Clara, whose smile was brilliant. It seemed as if she’d been waiting all day for the question, craving the precise moment when I opened the door for her to share her wisdom with the group. “The candle is woven into the Elemental Vibrations.”

  “Elemental Vibrations?” I managed a tone of perfect neutrality.

  “You know, Jeanette. The souls of inanimate objects.”

  I glanced at Gran. She sucked air between her teeth, a miniature wince that my students would never have registered. I forced myself to say, “I’ve never heard of inanimate objects having souls. I thought that was part of the very definition of them being, you know, inanimate.”

  Forty-love. One more point, and the game was mine.

  Clara spoke with the perfect patience saints reserved for idiot children. “Of course inanimate objects have souls. That’s what makes a hellmouth so dangerous! Surely you realized that, after seeing the hellmouth in your own front yard!”

  “There wasn’t a freaking hellmouth in my own front yard!” I shouted, before I could look at Gran, before I could remember my role as a magistrix.

  I felt my students draw back in shock. Their familiars jumped too, reflecting the witches’ concern. Tony took a quick step toward Raven, only stopping when she raised a peremptory hand.

  Stupid tennis game. I’d never understood how they scored the sport anyway.

  Clara sounded hurt. “You saw the evidence, Jeanette, right before your eyes. That satyr had to come from somewhere. I can understand your being tied to tradition, but I hoped you’d have a shred of courage to look beyond classic coven teachings, just this once.”

  Tied to tradition. Classic. Me. The witch who’d accepted a triple bond with her warder, who’d launched her own magicarium, who’d built an entire arcane practice on the sharing and exchange of power outside the ordinary bonds of familiar and witch…

  I filled my lungs, ready to shout at Clara, ready to drown her ignorance with my volume, even if I had no hope of ever getting a single rational thought through her thick, woo-woo worshipping skull. I didn’t care if my students felt shut down. I didn’t care if I limited the range of discussion. I didn’t care if I destroyed a dozen other lines of scientific inquiry, if I could just eradicate my mother’s idiotic, feather-brained, idealistic—

  “I could certainly use a break,” Gran said, leaning back in her chair and passing a hand in front of her face. “All this hard work certainly builds up an appetite.”

  “We haven’t done any—” I started to snap. But I caught myself before I finished the sentence because I understood what Gran was trying to do. She was keeping the peace, the way she’d done from the very first day Clara catapulted back into my life. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s take a break. Why don’t we meet back here at one o’clock.”

  The class exploded into chatter as the line of our circle broke. Emma crossed the living room and said to Clara, “That sounds quite brilliant, the work you’re doing at Oak Canyon. It makes me wish I never left.”

  I purposely exited the room before I could see which of the new witches gathered around to hear more about my mother’s Arizona adventures. It was bad enough to know one of them had betrayed me. If I discovered that anyone else believed Clara’s claptrap, I might shut down the entire magicarium—voluntarily—out of unbridled shame for witches everywhere.

  Still, th
e word “NWTA” floated after me into the kitchen. “Nucleus!” Clara shouted. “With tentacles attached!”

  The tentacles of my own life were tightening around me. I didn’t believe my mother’s hocus-pocus. I couldn’t rely on my grandmother’s weakling powers. I dared not trust my students as a group, not until I’d figured out who had released murderous mythological animals into our midst.

  I thought about the scroll Hecate’s Court had left on the Lexus, and I wondered how much longer I had before my charter was revoked and all of my witchy possessions were at the mercy of Teresa and Pitt and anyone else who wanted to see me destroyed.

  CHAPTER 9

  Desperate times. Desperate measures.

  On Tuesday, I asked Gran to lead our session. I thought she might make headway with the students because her own powers were so weak. She couldn’t overwhelm them with the crimson energy she called her own; she couldn’t erase their own familiar magic. Once, right after lunch, I saw a spark leap off the end of the candle’s wick. Alas, everyone else saw it, and the group’s excitement pulled our energy off balance. We didn’t repeat the trick all day.

  On Wednesday, I put Emma and Raven in charge. They’d worked with me the previous semester. They’d learned the trick I was having so much trouble teaching everyone else. Sadly, they’d only learned to balance the power across a tripod—the two of them and me. Each grew more frustrated as the day went on, as they failed to expand their lesson to the larger student group. I dismissed class in the middle of the afternoon because tempers were frayed. I made a point of staying inside the house, purposely not looking out the windows. Every student I’d ever known who attended boarding school found ways to sneak off campus. I could hardly expect my students to be less enterprising, and I suspected they all needed to blow off some steam.

  On Thursday, I decided to practice without anyone leading the group. I let the energy flow, from Cassie to Clara, from Skyler to Gran. Sometimes Raven was in charge, sometimes Emma. Alex took the reins for a while; Bree swept in with her own indomitable style.

  By the end of the day, I knew I had to go back to the methods that had worked for me before. I was the one who had taught Clara and Gran how to share power. I was the one who had finally gotten through to Raven and Emma. I had one day left to make the breakthrough. If I failed at teaching, I’d never need to worry again about which of my students had tried to tear apart the magicarium with the satyr and the orthros.

  Friday morning, I woke when David’s alarm clock went off. As he headed into the shower, I covered my head with my pillow, willing myself to snag another few minutes of sleep. The winter nights were stretching longer; not a hint of daylight whispered past the window shade into our bedroom.

  I couldn’t stay in bed forever, though. I finally dragged myself out from under the warm comforter, shivering in the cool air as I hunted up yesterday’s jeans. I sprang for a clean sweater—my favorite cable-knit in a blue-green yarn that set off the auburn glints in my hair. Down in the kitchen, I made coffee for both of us.

  This was the day when everything had to change. I felt the tension tugging at the witchy bond that connected me to David. I must have transmitted my nerves; when Neko waltzed through the doorway for class, he took one look at both of us and whined, deep at the back of his throat. I gave him a tight shake of my head. I didn’t want him to say anything. I didn’t want him upsetting my students.

  In the end, maybe things would have been better if he had upset the witches. Our morning session was a waste of time. Gran and Clara had declined to join us; after four straight days of driving back and forth to the farm, Gran’s sciatica was acting up. Clara claimed she had a field trip at the University of Maryland, some tour of antebellum cemeteries for Professor Kipperman’s class. Necropolises, Civil War graveyards—he sounded like one hell of an upbeat guy.

  We broke for lunch and came back for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. I finally called another break when I caught myself falling asleep; I only jerked awake when Spot started snoring by the fireplace. I suggested that everyone but the dog get a jolt of caffeine, and we’d regroup at half past three. Spot staggered into the kitchen and curled up in his plaid bed.

  As soon as we settled into our working circle, I could tell something was off. Emma’s eyes were red when she sank onto the couch, and her gusty sigh could have fueled windmills. When I asked how she was doing, she offered up a feeble smile and a shrug. “I’m feeling a bit manky today, to tell the truth.”

  When Raven walked behind me to take her seat on the couch, she muttered, “Boy trouble.” I’d imagine Emma’s relationship with Rick was under a fair amount of stress. It had been one thing for the magicarium to adapt to the firefighter’s one-day-on, two-days-off schedule when everyone lived in the farmhouse. It was another thing entirely when Emma shared dormitory life with the other students. I couldn’t imagine any of the witches was thrilled about a male guest hanging around, especially one with Rick’s impressive persistence. And Emma, of course, had barely been allowed to leave the premises.

  Not my circus. Not my monkeys. My students’ love affairs were none of my business.

  Cassie’s pale face, on the other hand… That I definitely worried about. “How you doing?” I asked, as she settled back on the ladder-back chair she’d dragged in from the kitchen that morning. She swore the hard seat made her concentrate better. I would have been writhing in agony after the first hour of spellwork sitting on that torture device, but to each her own.

  She shrugged and rubbed her hands together, an unconscious gesture I’d caught her repeating hundreds of times since our first working. I couldn’t be certain because she never talked about it, but I suspected she twined her fingers together when she thought about the satyr, when she flashed back on the memory of that terrible night. At least that was my speculation, because she usually glanced at Zach as she tugged at her knuckles. Sure enough, she was checking out her warder now, her gaze pinned to the increasingly ragged cast on his arm.

  He’d apparently drawn the short stick for this last session of the day. Even though David was taking the lead on watching over all our sessions, the other warders rotated in on a regular basis. I’d done my best to convince my students this was standard operating procedure, although Raven and Emma knew it was not. They’d worked with me last semester, when I hadn’t worried about a snake in our midst. They knew that David generally took days off, that he wasn’t bound to every single session I led. I wondered if they’d talked about the change back in the dormitory. I worried that our traitor was even more wary than she might otherwise be.

  Alex sat apart from the group, her chair pushed back from the imaginary line of our circle. Skyler was on her cell phone. Bree was in the midst of telling some story to her familiar, a dirty joke, from the way she lowered her voice and raised her eyebrows.

  No one cared. No one was paying attention. No one thought we could possibly complete our working.

  “Ladies!” I said, and my voice was too sharp. I was as tired of the stupid candle-lighting spell as they were.

  Alex cleared her throat, immediately snagging my attention. The other witches studiously avoided her, and I realized she’d been appointed their speaker, the one selected to deliver bad news. She rubbed at her tattooed biceps, looking as if she’d rather be anywhere but in my living room, surrounded by her fellow inmates.

  “We were talking just now,” she announced, her tongue stud tapping her teeth on the “t” sounds.

  “About what?” I truly didn’t intend to sound like an ice queen. But I felt singled out by their private conversation, as if they’d all gotten together to point at my ugly haircut and call me names behind my back. Not that Neko would let me walk around with bad hair.

  “If we’re going to spend weeks working on a single spell like this, maybe we should just go ahead and follow the Rota.” When I didn’t respond, Alex glared at her sister witches, clearly demanding additional support before she brazened on. Her ears blazed scarlet be
neath their rows of piercings. “Look. We thought we were going to learn differently here at the Jane Madison Academy. We thought we wouldn’t have to do the repetitious stuff. The boring stuff.”

  Here it was. Open rebellion in the ranks.

  I glanced at Neko, hoping he could translate the level of seriousness of this protest. He could at least reach out to the other familiars and gauge their concern.

  Except Neko was fascinated by the seam of his jet-black jeans. He stared at the stitching as if it carried a message from the past, as if aliens had used the fabric to convey all the secrets of the universe.

  Traitor. Even if he was only expressing the same revulsion for the candle spell that I felt.

  Well, it wasn’t fair to leave Alex hanging. And I wasn’t going to let her take the fall for the group, even if my students had other ideas. “So?” I asked everyone. “Is this the way all of you feel? Is Alex the only one who’d prefer to go back to the Rota?”

  I wasn’t surprised that Bree had the guts to meet my eyes immediately. Honesty seemed to come as easily to her as snow in the high plains. “She’s not saying she wants the Rota. None of us want that. But we don’t want to repeat the same four-line spell every day for the rest of the year.”

  Skyler found her own voice, locking her jaw and drawling her Boston vowels. “We know your method works for small groups. You told us about finding the balance with your mother and grandmother. Raven and Emma said they made it work. But maybe seven is too many. Maybe it’s a type of magic that can’t be spread that thin.”

  “Emma?” I asked. “Raven?” Because I knew the magic wouldn’t be spread thin. If we found the balance, the magic would be deeper than anything my students had ever experienced. The overwhelming harmony of seven witches reflecting their powers off seven different familiars… The sheer energy, echoed from woman to woman, repeated across the circle… I could imagine it, like a color I’d never seen before.