Joy of Witchcraft

by Mindy Klasky

  And a flash of darkness filled the corner.

  My mind understood what was happening before my eyes could translate the scene. Cassie’s words had not been idle; she had not merely been pleading her case. Each repetition of Zach’s name had been a summons, a cry of witch to warder.

  He’d used his own magical powers to travel into the room from across the hall, or wherever he’d been in Blanton House. He had his good arm wrapped around Tupa’s neck, dragging the familiar even as he materialized next to Cassie. Tupa bleated in surprise when he saw everyone arrayed against his mistress; he reached out his tiny hands to offer aid to his witch.

  Cassie grabbed onto those fingers, clutching them like a woman drowning in a well. Zach shifted his weight, pulling his casted arm around to offer some semblance of protection. He pulled witch and familiar closer to his chest, and then he nodded his head, triggering his warder’s magic.

  All three blinked out of existence.

  David roared in frustration, leaping into the corner. Luke followed on his heels, immediately kneeling and spreading his palms to the floor. Caleb circled behind us witches, edgy and dangerous, even though no direct threat remained.

  Luke started a steady stream of curses, each phrase more colorful than the last as he expanded the circle of his awareness. He ended with a speculation on Zach’s heritage, a hell of a lot more exotic than the Greek monsters Cassie had summoned into our midst. Bree finally stepped forward, gentling her warder with a firm hand on his shoulder.

  Heartsick, I led everyone downstairs. We crossed through the basement to the first townhouse, and we gathered in the parlor, collapsing onto the formal couches and chairs. Before I could figure out what to say, Tony strode into the room, his lips set in a grim line. “They’re gone.”

  Skyler. He meant Skyler and Siga and Jeffrey had departed.

  I closed my eyes as David filled him in on all that had happened. Somewhere along the way, Alex and Garth came in. Neko must have reached out to Seta, summoning the group. Emma and Raven arrived too, their familiars in tow.

  It didn’t matter that they missed the beginning of the story. They heard the end. They knew Cassie had betrayed us. That she was gone. Safe beyond our reach.

  Raven recovered first. “So? What do we do now?” she asked.

  Before I could fashion an answer, the tall case clock began its slow toll of midnight. At the same time, chimes sounded in the foyer—the doorbell, in a five-note pattern. Someone who didn’t belong inside the magicarium. Someone who David hadn’t cleared as a friend.

  Sick with dread, I followed my warder into the hall. No good guest arrived this late at night. As the entire magicarium gathered behind us, David raised his bare sword and nodded for Neko to open the door.

  Ethan Beck stood on the doorstep. Teresa Alison Sidney’s warder was immaculate in a navy pinstripe suit. A heavy sword hung low on his hips, suspended from a well-worn leather belt that somehow contrived to look normal. If Ethan was surprised by his armed reception, he gave no sign. Instead, he directed his gaze to David.

  “David Montrose,” he said. “By your bonds as a warder of Hecate, I summon you to fulfill your oath. Teresa Alison Sidney requires your attendance.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “No!” I cried, clutching David’s arm. “You can’t go now!”

  David’s fingers were firm on mine. “I have no choice.”

  I turned to Ethan, already knowing my pleas were futile. “Let me talk to Teresa. Let me explain.”

  He didn’t even bother to shake his head. “Your warder is bound, Magistrix.” Of course he granted me my title. He was reminding me that Teresa had made possible the very continuation of the Jane Madison Academy. David had seen to that when he’d struck his obscene bargain.

  One day—that was the deal David had brokered. Twenty-four hours.

  We needed to track down Cassie. We needed to fight Teresa and Maria Hernandez, all the other Coven Mothers who had planted the NWTAs. I needed to testify before the inquest.

  “All will be well,” he’d said before he knelt in front of Teresa, his back to the harpy-spawned flames.

  He’d lied.

  Now David said to Ethan, “Let me change clothes, and we can be on our way.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Of course it wasn’t necessary. Ethan was dressed as if he’d stepped off the runway in Milan. David looked like he’d been cleaning gutters—he wore faded jeans and a black T-shirt, the better for handling his sword in close quarters. The contrast worked to Ethan’s undisputed advantage. Without a visible sign of resignation, David reached for the buckle on his sword belt, ready to leave it behind.

  “You can keep your weapon,” Ethan said.

  David froze. I looked from his startled face to Ethan’s. All of us—the man on my porch and every last person crowding into the foyer behind me—knew Teresa Alison Sidney had been stealing power from my magicarium. She was our sworn enemy, had been from the moment I’d refused to join her prestigious coven.

  It made no sense that David would be allowed to keep his weapon.

  Ethan measured out his silence like a professional actor. When our tension was high enough to warp the very air we tried to breathe, he said, “Your sword will be bonded, of course.”

  David missed a full beat before he choked out, “Of course.”

  “If I may?” Ethan asked, gesturing toward the threshold.

  David worked his hand in a complicated pattern, calling back the wards that shut off access to our home. As the energy shifted, I turned to Tony, the closest ally at hand. “What’s he doing?” I hissed. “What is ‘bonding?’”

  Tony’s face was grim. “David’s weapon will be tied to Ethan’s. David will lose free will to draw or to mount any attack Ethan doesn’t permit. Any defense, either.” I gathered my breath to protest, but Tony’s fingers closed over my arm. “He’s done it before,” he said, the words so soft I barely heard them through my rage. “We all have. It’s how boys are trained.”

  Ethan and David were proceeding as if no one else was present. David knelt on the Turkish kilim, holding his unsheathed sword before him. Ethan matched the display with his own, standing tall as he settled his blade a scant six inches from David’s.

  Tony’s grip tightened on my biceps.

  The air shuddered between the weapons. My mind expected to see light there, some manifestation of magic unique to Ethan. There was no light, though, no specially colored glow like a witch would have produced.

  Instead, Ethan’s power presented as a close-bound sphere of metal spikes, miniature iron caltrops. The jagged bits buzzed with energy, a low and vicious sound that pressed against my eardrums.

  Ethan’s grip tightened on his sword. He shifted his feet to a wider stance, the better to command the energy he’d gathered. At his silent order, a single tight nod of his head, the caltrops leaped to David’s weapon, clinging as if it were magnetized. The buzzing rose in volume, vibrating all the air in the room, shaking my bones in their sockets.

  David’s arms trembled under the assault. The cords in his neck stood out as he labored to hold his own sword steady. I read determination in the planes of his face, but there was furious shame in his eyes, the awareness that he was being treated like child, mastered by an enemy.

  I closed my eyes until the buzzing died.

  When I opened them, Ethan was crooking one index finger, inviting David to stand. When David had climbed to his feet, Ethan made a fine show of returning his own weapon to his sheath. David’s blade followed the identical arc, sweeping into its own scabbard with the same secure snick. Ethan tightened his fingers on his grip for just a moment, forcing David to do the same, before he stepped back and rolled his shoulders like a hunting panther.

  “Excellent,” Ethan said after a silence settled over the foyer like a lead apron in a radiologist’s office. “Let’s not keep my mistress waiting.”

  David nodded once, in mute acceptance of the fate he’d brought on hi
mself. Ethan raised a hand to my warder’s neck, spreading his fingers wide for a secure grip. David’s eyes were burned out coals as he stared straight ahead, not focusing on anything—me, my students, the walls of Blanton House that he’d traded for.

  Ethan tightened his clasp on the man I loved and said, “Best of luck at the inquest, Magistrix.”

  “David!” I cried, but I was too late. Both men had winked out of existence.

  ~~~

  Twelve hours later, I sat in a freezing hallway, flanked by two silent figures in pitch-black cloaks, wondering how things had come to this.

  After Ethan had disappeared with David, I’d snapped orders to the others. Tony and Caleb were in charge of the search for Cassie. They could use whatever resources the magicarium had to offer. Ignoring my students’ stricken gazes, I’d asked Luke to ferry Clara back to Gran’s. Then I’d retreated to my bedroom, where I hadn’t slept, hadn’t even tried to close my eyes.

  When the sun rose, Neko had come into my room. He’d laid out my clothes and applied my makeup. He’d shoved a purse in my hand, a tiny black bag that held lipstick and keys and a folded twenty-dollar bill.

  As promised, the representatives of Hecate’s Court had arrived at Blanton House promptly at eight. They’d transported me through an infinity of nothingness. And I’d spent the past four hours sitting in a corridor that could have been in any government building in any city anywhere in the world: beige floor and beige walls, fluorescent lights and an institutional clock.

  The only thing that stood out was the pair of double doors immediately to my left. They were carved out of black poplar, a wood sacred to Hecate. Both doors were completed by polished silver knobs, spheres twice the size of my fist, each embossed with a sacred pentacle.

  Another century or three creaked by. My guards were so still, I wondered if they’d been magically replaced by statues.

  Just as I was ready to scream my frustration, Court decorum be damned, the doors opened. They swung on silent hinges, angling in like the entrance to a pharaoh’s tomb. My hooded escorts sailed forward, taking up positions on either side of the gaping doorway as if I might not understand where I was supposed to walk.

  I’d expected a courtroom, with a dais and a judge and a traditional witness box. I’d anticipated tables for lawyers, and seats for jurors, special seating for the members of Hecate’s Court themselves. I’d thought there would be rows of benches for spectators.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The room inside was much dimmer than the hallway. Actual torches flickered from cressets set into the walls. I felt as if I were marching into a dungeon as I entered the chamber.

  A half circle of chairs greeted me, tall seats that looked like thrones. There were nine of them, three times three, the number sacred to Hecate.

  “Come forward, Witch, and be heard by Hecate’s Court,” someone intoned.

  The voice was ageless, sexless, and I could not tell which of the nine had spoken. I moved toward the semi-circle, trying not to wince as the heels of my shoes echoed on the marble floor. Marble for protection, like the doorstep we’d had at the farmhouse, like the centerstone that had done nothing to deter Pitt’s satyr.

  I stopped when I got to the perfect circle set in the focal point of the curve of thrones. Even in the flickering light, I knew I stood on a round of amethyst, a stone that had been used for millennia to ward off malevolent witchcraft, to protect against the evil eye.

  A column of power rose around me. It acted like a force field, restricting my ability to move. My arms were free, my shoulders and head, but my feet and knees and hips were locked into place. I could not lunge for the Court, even if I’d been inclined to attack them.

  One of the guards who had summoned me from Blanton House stepped to my side. He extended his arms, and a jasper collar materialized in his gloved hands. A frisson of energy sparked the exposed skin of my face.

  “Set your palms upon the stone, Witch.” The voice came from nowhere, from everywhere. I placed my hands on the mottled band, tightening my jaw against the jangled energy that shot through my palms and up my forearms. I stiffened my wrists and forced my fingers to stay on the black-veined stone.

  “Repeat after me,” intoned the Court member. “I, Jane Madison.”

  I repeated the words. “Do solemnly swear… Before Hecate and all the Guardians of Nature… That the testimony I shall give… Is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… Or may my powers never be restored.”

  I repeated the last phrase, curling the words into a question because they broke the tradition of mundane courts, the recitation I’d heard a million times in movies and on TV. Before I completed the word “restored,” the collar beneath my palms turned into a swarm of stinging wasps.

  It didn’t change form, not really. But its malevolent force surged upward, raking over my hands, my arms, my entire body. It burned like an acid bath, and as its power receded, it peeled away every vestige of my supernatural powers. The essence of my magic drained into the stone like water into sand. I was blind and deaf and dumb, not through my mundane senses, but through my astral self.

  This was what life had been like before I discovered my magic. This was how I’d lived before I found the Osgood collection, before I awakened Neko and came into my witchy inheritance. I’d forgotten what it was like to live as a mundane, to sense the world around me directly, without the sparkling veil of magic.

  The guard settled the jasper torque around my neck, shifting it to weigh heavily on my collarbones. I closed my eyes to steady myself. I tried to think of what David would say if he were here, how he would calm me, how he would remind me that Hecate’s Court was part of the natural order of the magical world, that everything happening to me was right and fair and proper.

  But I could not hear David’s voice. Teresa had him. I faced the Court without my warder, without my lover, without my friend.

  “Miss Madison,” a voice hissed, and my eyes flew open. I recognized the speaker even before I found him in the room, in the center of the half-circle of chairs.

  Norville Pitt.

  He had not dressed up for the court. In fact, he looked like the same rumpled bureaucrat he’d seemed to be the first time I met him. He wore wrinkled brown trousers that could have been fished out of a reject bin at Goodwill, and his short-sleeve dress shirt was yellowed under the armpits. Stretched-out suspenders arched over his cracked plastic pocket protector. He’d combed a few strands of hair sideways across his skull, but mostly he was bald. His top teeth worried at his lip, his overbite making him look like a fat Oestera rabbit.

  But I wasn’t fooled by appearances. Norville Pitt had countless resources at his command. And he was bent on destroying me, on destroying my magicarium—all because he hated David, hated what my warder had done to expose his excesses, his crimes.

  I sucked in a deep breath and centered myself enough to say, “Mr. Pitt.”

  And without preamble, he launched into a series of questions. He fired off each interrogatory like a pistol shot, maneuvering me into one-word answers that I desperately wanted to explain.

  Yes. I’d awakened my familiar on the night of the full moon. But I hadn’t known the consequences of doing that; I hadn’t realized I was breaching arcane tradition. I merely got out “but” before Pitt launched into his next query.

  Yes. I’d rejected membership in the Washington Coven. But only after I’d been betrayed by one of its members, spied on and embarrassed and used for my own magical abilities. Another “but” before Pitt bulled past me.

  Yes. I’d released an anima into Washington DC, resulting in a magic battle in public space. (But I’d controlled the damage, shielding our working so no ordinary citizens ever learned of the event.)

  Yes. My warder was David Montrose who had been rejected by the Washington Coven. (But that had been years before I’d met him, and he’d suffered his own betrayal from those conniving witches.)

  Yes. David had planted docu
ments in Norville Pitt’s office at the ministry. (But he’d been desperate to show that Pitt was abusing his power, taking bribes and stealing from the witches he’d sworn to protect.)

  I gave up trying to slip in explanations. The Court could plainly see what Pitt was doing; they could hear him interrupt me. They clearly had no interest in the complete story, in the full truth. No one reined in Pitt; no one commanded him to stop. And so I answered, giving myself over to the process.

  Yes. David had maintained an office on the grounds of the Jane Madison Academy.

  Yes. David had ordered Pitt off Academy grounds even though Pitt arrived in his capacity as Head Clerk of Hecate’s Court.

  Yes. David had allowed his dog to snarl at Pitt.

  Every admission twisted my belly. I was betraying David, offering him up like a sacrifice on a smoke-wreathed altar.

  “Yes or no, Miss Madison. Did David Montrose steal records from Hecate’s Court to build his alleged case against me?”

  Those records had been vital to David’s discovery that Pitt was extorting witches, that he was taking bribes, usurping money and goods and power that were never meant to be his. Pitt’s question was too simple. He was ignoring the true facts, the important ones.

  “Miss Madison,” Pitt punched out my name. “Did David Montrose steal records from Hecate’s Court?”

  There wasn’t a simple yes or no.

  “Miss Madison!”

  “If you ask that,” I said, “then you have to ask what was in those documents. You have to ask how you took bribes from a dozen different covens. You have to ask how you joined forces with the Washington Coven Mother to destroy my magicarium. We put all the information in the Allen Cask! We presented evidence to this Court! We told the truth and now you’re trying to—”

  “Witch!”