Something Magic This Way Comes

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “No, sir,” Martha Jane called back. “I’m just getting started.”

  Martha Jane steadied herself and began moving her hands in circular motions above her head. Whereas with the dirt devil she had chanted soft and low, she now called out loudly so the sky could hear her over its own roar.

  “Winds blow, winds go, winds kindly go. Heed my words, winds I know.”

  Martha Jane repeated the chant as she continued with her hands, seeking the power and energy that fueled this mess. There! She had felt the tiniest tendril of power. She wasn’t the only one exploring the storm.

  Martha Jane slowed her hand motions to shape lazy circles. She wanted that power. She knew it was right there, so close.

  Martha Jane stopped her chant. She thought she’d heard a hiss somewhere. She listened, still seeking slowly with her hands and fingers. There again! Martha Jane reached her left hand upward and to the right.

  She’d never been zapped before, so Martha Jane wasn’t expecting to suddenly find herself hind-end down in the mud. Her heart raced, and she smelled heat. Her left fingertips burned. Martha Jane quickly stuck them in the cold mud beneath her to quell the pain.

  She jerked when she unexpectedly felt strong hands grab her under the arms and pull her up.

  “I’m okay, Daddy,” she said as she turned. “I’m not done yet. Please let me finish!”

  “It’s not Daddy, Martha Jane.”

  She gasped. It was Jediah, looking as miserable and cold as she felt.

  “Where have you been?” Martha Jane asked harshly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let me help you. Let’s do this together.”

  Martha Jane stared at him with surprise. “That would be a good idea if you hadn’t messed it up in the first place.”

  Jediah wiped the water out of his light blue eyes, eyes that matched her own. “I know,” he said loudly.

  They had to halfway shout to be heard over the weather. “But I can do enough to meet you halfway. I already got more than halfway. I didn’t lose control until the end, when the power was at its strongest.”

  His look was pleading. Martha Jane knew this was his one chance at redemption. How could she refuse?

  “Okay. Let me start, and then you come in.”

  Martha Jane reached up to the heavens again. She had already forged some of the basic pathways earlier, and it didn’t take her long to reach that point again.

  She was relieved to have her load lightened because her muscles were already tiring.

  This time, Martha Jane was expecting the power’s sizzling pop. As the invisible tendrils jumped for her, she snatched them with her left hand, the hand they’d already imprinted. The white hot burn traveled the length of her small body down to her toes and then back up to her fingertips.

  It grew as it accepted the immense power Martha Jane offered. Her own power was stronger than she’d imagined, and she could feel it seeping through her skin to combine with the storm’s power.

  Martha Jane’s fingertips turned white with a light that shone from within. The brightness exploded upward, reaching for the heavens with its energy and radiance. The narrow beam widened into a tightly woven twister that resembled a rope of golden light.

  Martha Jane started chanting again, but this time she changed her pitch. “Winds blow, winds go . . .”

  The glowing rope grew in width, pushing the clouds and rain away from the middle into that familiar funnel pattern. Martha Jane could see the weather inside the tiny tornado was actually clear and sunny, but she knew the folks in the schoolhouse probably couldn’t see the hope still hidden within the winds.

  She only had an instant to appreciate it, but Martha Jane thought the tornado was beautiful. This one didn’t belong to the family of black and gray funnels that usually wreaked havoc and destruction. Hers was a creation of life and goodness, the mix of swirling light and wind struggling to overcome the darkness and danger.

  Martha Jane continued to call and command. This was the most dangerous point of control, and if she lost it now, the original storm could regroup into something even uglier and more powerful.

  Martha Jane held tight as the luminous tornado grew to encompass more space. The clouds on the outside became more dispersed, and Martha Jane continued to push them away with the tornado walls, thereby breaking them apart.

  “Jediah!” Martha Jane screamed. “Stop the rain!”

  While Martha Jane realized she had a front row seat to watching a rainmaker work, she didn’t have the strength to spare. Her arms and shoulders shook painfully, and she hoped Jediah would be quick with his spellmaking. She’d done what she could by dissipating the rain clouds to where she thought he could handle them.

  Martha Jane could hear Jediah working loudly next to her. His words were muffled, but she could tell his chant had a different cadence to it from her own. She bit her bottom lip to keep focused on her own work.

  She needed to give Jediah every possible second to finish his job.

  “Are you almost done?” Martha Jane screamed. “I can’t hold this much longer!”

  “One more minute!”

  One more minute? Martha Jane wasn’t sure she could last one more second. While she still held the tornado with her hand motions, fatigue was taking its toll. Even the light that still spilled from her fingers was dimming at a risky rate.

  Then she saw Mama. Her smiling face was shaped within the swirls of the tornado walls, much like the shapes in the clouds Martha Jane often watched. Martha Jane blinked several times. She was certain when she looked again the face would be gone, but it was still there.

  Jediah didn’t seem to see anything. Martha Jane had found that to be the frequent case with clouds and shapes, but how could he not see Mama?

  Martha Jane watched the image as it shifted and moved within the funnel of light. How she missed her Mama, sweet and strong. Martha Jane tried to burn the image into her brain so she could remember it better later.

  Just as the image did dissolve, the rain stopped, and Martha Jane saw the skies were finally clear. She sank to her knees in relief. She released the magic she held and thanked it with a blow away kiss. A soft breeze encircled her, brushed her skin with its tender essence, and silently departed.

  Martha Jane allowed her arms to sag by her sides, feeling the muscles cramp and twist. Her head dropped as she swallowed her grief at Mama being gone again. She would have to make do with the memory of Mama’s image and the certainty that Mama had given her strength to hold tight for those last few important seconds. Martha Jane wiped away the mixture of rain, sweat and tears covering her face.

  “Come on, Martha Jane,” Jediah said from her side.

  “Let’s go home. The others can stay and clean up.”

  Jediah took her elbow and helped her up. Martha Jane leaned into his strong body as they high-stepped through the deep puddles back to the schoolhouse.

  “I guess you and Liza will marry after all,” Martha Jane told him.

  “Maybe,” Jediah said. “She wouldn’t come with me this morning though. I’m going to have to think on that one.”

  Martha Jane stopped short of the schoolhouse door.

  Daddy was there waiting with a big smile. Mrs. Barnett stood behind him, hopefully trying to word her apology to Jediah. Liza stood next to her mother, blissfully unaware that she might not really be getting married anytime soon. The other people were already working together to clean away the debris and water.

  Life would go on, Martha Jane knew, even if it was different. She supposed it was the way of things, and who was she to not move ahead in the face of change?

  Jediah tugged at her elbow. “Are you all right? Are you ready to go?”

  “Yes,” she finally said. “I think so.” Martha Jane stepped forward and with purpose into her new life.

  FIREBIRD AND SHADOW

  Darwin A. Garrison

  MISSY Watkins sat in the alley, rocking back and forth and praying for a deeper darkness. She longed fo
r a perfect, pitch-black night. Only that could hide both her and the motionless figure that lay not five feet away.

  As her tears tracked down her face to disappear among the Texas raindrops splashing around her, trickster lightning flared. The blue white glare highlighted the corpse lying flat on its back in the downpour.

  Choking back a moan, she shook her head in useless denial. No matter how dark her wishes made it, Tommy was still dead. The mortal remains of the only person to take any interest in her since she ran away lay open-eyed and staring in the downpour. That knowledge mixed with the rank smells of blood, urine, and the rotting garbage in the dumpsters that surrounded her to twist her stomach. Missy was alone again, and Tommy’s killers would be back for her next.

  A traitorous sob escaped from her lips as she tried to take in a deep breath. She snapped her mouth shut and looked around to see if anyone had come back to hear. The shadows were everywhere, but none of them moved or flickered. A shudder of relief and cold ran through her. Shadows without color or motion could be trusted, but not the ones that moved or flickered with the lights and colors that only she could see.

  Missy could feel the chill creeping up her spine as a rivulet of water trickled down. She needed to move, to get out of the rain and dry off. Otherwise, she could end up sick again, as she had that first week after she ran away from her mother.

  The shiver that ran through her at that thought had little to do with rain or Tommy’s body. She could still remember the rough hands of the last “uncle” her mother had brought back to the trailer. Like all the times before, her mom had disappeared with him into the back bedroom, but after all the grunting and moaning was over, he had come back and looked at Missy in a way that made her feel nervous and sick.

  She could not remember all of what happened next, but she would never forget the feel of those hands grabbing her, tearing at her clothes, groping her roughly all over. Her mother’s screams and the sound of something smacking the man seemed strangely separate from the foul movement of coarse fingers across Missy’s body as she screamed and twisted. The last solid image she retained from inside the trailer was the glyph of the firebird. She had woven the sign and sent it burning its way into the man’s eyes.

  If only she could forget running into a cold March night turned blood red by the light of the burning trailer. And the screams. She could still hear the man’s voice twisting with her mother’s in the distance as she ran away.

  Missy had meant to go back to Denton, back to Gram and her little two bedroom house. Her Gram would always take her back. Missy had not been the one to start all the arguments. She and Gram had gotten along just fine so long as Missy’s mother had not been home. Before she could clear Dallas, though, she had gotten sick. That probably would have been the end of her if Tommy had not peeked into her cardboard box one morning to find out who was coughing.

  She wanted him back, crooked smile and all. He was supposed to take her back to Denton, and Gram would have let them both live with her. Why was he lying in an alley with the back of his head blown out?

  Why had he left her alone? He should have been more careful!

  A colorful string came loose from the hiding shroud she had woven. Missy snatched at it in panic and began trying to work it back into the pattern, but others began to trickle out as she worked. Her heart fluttered as the only cover she had been able to make for herself came more and more undone at her every touch. If only she had been able to spend more time with Gram, she would have learned how to weave the strings better. As it was, all she had was an inkling of the right way to do anything, except for the firebird.

  She knew the firebird best of all. Oh, how she would have liked to have its warmth and light, but not here where it might draw the attention of Tommy’s killers.

  A sound like a hastily indrawn breath, more felt than heard, announced the complete dissolution of her shroud. All her strings broke free and Missy was once again open to the night and all that lived in it. She gathered her threads as best she could and cowered deeper into the corner formed by the dumpsters. Taking in one deep breath and holding it, she listened with all her heart.

  Missy knew what to listen for. Her Gram had taught her that much. She also knew to watch the shadows for flickers.

  “The people in the shadows will come for you someday,” Gram had warned her. “Your strings make you special, and they’ll want to take that for themselves.”

  Gram had told her of the shadow people the first time Missy had mentioned her strings. She had been so proud of the little shapes she had been able to weave with them, but her mother could never see and accused Missy of making things up to tease her when she was hungover.

  Her mother had not always been that way, so quick to take offense and strike out. Once she had even been happy and smiling, but that had been before Missy’s dad had died riding his motorcycle, and her mom had starting staying out late.

  When she showed the shapes to her Gram, though, she had not needed to explain a thing because Gram could see them.

  “Why, what a clever little doggy you made!” Gram had cooed at her the first time Missy had shown her one of her sculptures. Of course, it had been a kitty, but Missy could take a little criticism now that someone could actually see her work. She and Gram had spent that whole first afternoon making things with the strings that coiled out of Missy’s body, and Gram had taught her about the firebird and the shroud and, most importantly of all, about the shadow people.

  Missy had not actually believed Gram about the shadow people until she hit Dallas proper. After that, there had been no doubt. Shadow people moved everywhere, and each one tasted a bit different. What was worse, some of them would follow Missy and chase her until she got far enough away to hide under her shroud. If Tommy had not found her that morning, a shadow person would have finally gotten her, because she had not been able to weave a shroud for days.

  The sound of a footstep in a rain filled gutter caused her breath to catch in her throat. Another step followed the first . . . then another.

  “Oh, to hell with this,” she heard a frustrated woman’s voice say and the darkness disappeared before a flare of blue light.

  Missy bit down on her tongue to keep her teeth from chattering as the light moved forward to hover over Tommy’s body. His pale skin glowed like the summer sky beneath the brilliant globe. A woman stepped past the dumpster into Missy’s field of view.

  She wore a dark raincoat and held a clear vinyl umbrella over her head. Missy could see a pair of soldier’s boots peeking out from under the coat.

  “Ah, damn it,” the woman muttered as she squatted down on her heels by the corpse. “Poor kid. You didn’t deserve this. Don’s gonna be so pissed.” She reached out and drew her fingers over the body’s face, closing the eyes. Light flickered from her fingertips, and when her hand came away, the eyelids stayed shut.

  Missy watched the woman glance around the alley.

  She held her breath, asking in another silent prayer that this strange person would forget to look over her shoulder and back into Missy’s corner. The woman stood and extinguished her ghostly light, shook her head, and began walking through the passage toward the far street. Just as Missy started to relax, she heard a sound like rain bouncing off a hollow can coming from her left side.

  She slowly turned her head toward the sound and found a large, silver cat staring back at her. Not just silver in color, like a kind of gray. Oh, no. This was a cat made of silver metal. If its tail had not been twitching and its ears swiveling back and forth, Missy would have thought that the woman had dropped a statue as she passed.

  “Nice kitty?” she whispered. Both ears swiveled forward and the tail went still and rigid. Oops.

  The growl that came from the metal cat echoed and boomed as though a real animal had been caught in a snare drum. The clincher was the snarl, though.

  “Mryaaaow!” The woman’s footsteps faltered and Missy tried to jumped up to run . . .

  . . . Except that
her legs had fallen asleep while she had been hiding. At her first step, she tripped over her own feet, falling flat into a puddle. The cat hissed and jumped back as water splashed everywhere. She tried to get up again, but hot needles burned all the way down to her feet. Gritting her teeth, she lurched forward anyway. Another fall seemed imminent, but something rigid and unyielding caught the back of her tattered jacket, jerking her to a stop just short of the pavement.

  Missy screamed and twisted. She threw her arms back and tried to claw at the hand that held her but the old jacket was so big that she could not reach.

  Feeling her arms slip inside the oversized sleeves, a sudden inspiration hit and she began frantically trying to worm her way out of the jacket.

  That was when the hand let go.

  The cat yowled and scurried under a cardboard box as a second splash filled the alley. Blue light flared to life between the confining walls.

  “Hellfire, kid, I’m not going to hurt you,” the woman’s voice said, sounding more annoyed than angry.

  Missy had no intention of waiting around to find out, though. She was already doing her best to frog-lunge down the alley back toward the street.

  “Oh, for the love of Mike,” she heard the woman mutter as Missy finally managed to get back on her feet and start jogging forward awkwardly. The end of the passage loomed ahead of her, and hope had just started to rise when she hit the net . . .

  . . . Which came as a shock since the net had been invisible until she hit it.

  As Missy gazed at the now-fading multicolored strands, the unfairness of the situation threatened to loom up and swallow her. Then she realized that the net she had bounced off of had been made from threads just like the ones that came from her, just many times stronger and a lot more of them.

  She turned wide-eyed to face the calm footsteps that were approaching her from behind. The woman seemed to be in no hurry, and the floating globe of fairy light kept pace with her as she approached.