by Mindy Klasky
“Losing!” I said, and I probably spoke a little too loudly. Definitely spoke a little too loudly, I amended, when a dozen people at nearby tables turned to stare. “Losing,” I repeated in a softer voice, and then I told them about my search for runes, about the gift I truly had intended to make to Clara, about the cleaning spell that had left me dizzy and dull in my kitchen.
Gran reached out and patted my hand, the eternal picture of loving concern. “Don’t you worry, dear. I’m sure that you just need a rest. And Clara can get new runes elsewhere. I’m sure…” She trailed off, obviously uncertain about just where a witch went to acquire the basic tools of her trade. Witch*Mart, maybe?
I shook my head. “That’s just it,” I said. “I’ve had too much of a rest. David says that abandoning my magic is what put me into this ridiculous situation.”
“Ah, David,” Gran said. I recognized the fondness in her voice. She had always liked my warder, always trusted him. He, for his part, treated her with the exquisite courtesy of an ambassador addressing a dowager empress. That respect, along with the occasional well-chosen basket of sweets, had made him a great favorite in Gran’s household. “How is David these days? I never hear you talk about him.”
“He’s fine, Gran.” I answered automatically, the same programmed response that I’d used as a sullen teenager, when my grandmother wanted to know who I was hanging out with, where we were going. But then, I forced myself to stop, to think about my answer. “I haven’t seen a lot of him lately. I think that he’s fine.”
And yet, even then I knew I was telling something of a lie. Physically, of course, my warder was as well as ever; I had seen that on Friday night. But what exactly had my slacking off meant to him? Why, precisely, had he been so angry with me? So abrupt? What had he been doing during the past five months? And how had he felt, being rejected by his witch, being forced back into the mundane work of Hecate’s Court?
I’d been too wrapped up in my own drama to ask him.
Gran, never a fool, pounced on my nonresponsive response. “Make me a promise, Jane.”
“Oh, no.” I pushed my plate back with authority, casting an immediate appeal to Clara. Please, I asked her silently. Get me out of this. It was almost worth it to harness my magic, to face another wave of dizziness and confusion, if only I could get my mother to read my mind.
Clara said, “Oh, a promise! You always have been one for promises, Mother. That’s one of the many things I love about you.”
I gave Clara a dirty look. Maybe Goneril and Regan just had bad publicists. Maybe they had been right to gang up on their stupid, insensitive, uncaring parent. “Gran,” I said, dismissing vengeance on Clara from my thoughts. “I am not making any promises today.”
“This one is easy to keep, Jane. And it’s right. It’s good. You should do it.”
Of course, Gran would think that she was right and good. Gran always thought that she was right and good.
And, truth be told, she was.
Oh, she might have gotten a little carried away with some of her promises. She’d made me swear that I wouldn’t lick any toads, for heaven’s sake. But I had to admit, I’d come across the situation—or one close to it—given the requirements of witchcraft and a certain potion that Neko had coached me on brewing. And sure enough, I’d stuck by my oath. A vow was a vow, no matter how silly it sounded when Gran got me to say it out loud.
She was staring at me across the table, her eyes sharp and curious, like a bird’s. I knew from past experience that she had all the patience in the world. She would simply sit there and wait until I agreed to whatever promise she was going to demand. I might as well give in to the inevitable and wrap this thing up quickly. “Fine, Gran. I promise.”
Her smile was so quick that I almost missed it. “Talk to David about this witchcraft problem of yours.”
“Gran, I already did that! David was the first person I called when I realized what was happening.”
“And how did that conversation go?”
I took a sip of cold tea, manufacturing a break to think some more. Gran knew me so well. She had clearly discerned that things had not gone well when I summoned David. Exactly how much had she read between the lines? Did she know how dismissive David had been? Did she believe that I had actually hurt his feelings by ignoring him for so long? I thought back to my mandate that he answer me, my pulling rank on him. Maybe, just possibly, in a teensy, tiny way, I had overstepped my bounds as his witch. Or at least as his friend.
“Jane,” Gran said. “Do you remember last year? When you promised that you’d speak with Melissa after you two had your disagreement?”
Of course I remembered last year. I remembered how things had spun out of control for a long time, before they’d come back to normal. I remembered how much I had missed my best friend, how much I had needed her. I’d promised Gran that I’d reach out to Melissa, and it had taken me weeks to swallow my pride.
But as soon as I had done it, I’d felt infinitely better. Melissa and I had slipped back into our old friendship patterns with barely a hiccup. I sighed. “Okay, Gran,” I said. “I promise. I’ll work this out with David.”
Gran nodded, as if she’d been certain I would see the wisdom of her ways. “Go to him, Jane,” she said. “Don’t make him come to you.”
I hesitated. Before I could say anything, Clara said, “You do know where he lives, don’t you?”
“Of course, I know where my warder lives!” I snapped.
Gran merely nodded, as if she hadn’t heard the roughness of my tone. “Perfect, dear. Now, how about ordering some dessert?”
“Dessert sounds good,” I said. “But I want to heat up my tea.” Gran started to turn around, to seek out our waitress. “No,” I interrupted. “Using magic.”
My mother and grandmother cast twin skeptical glances toward me. Clara spoke first. “Jeanette, it’s really not a problem, to get another cup of hot water.”
I shook my head. “David said that I should use my powers. That I should get back into the habit of working magic.”
Gran looked doubtful, but she equivocated, “Well, if David says…”
That fired me up. My own grandmother didn’t trust me to make decisions about my magical powers, but if my warder said to…If my absent, judgmental warder said to…If the warder I had just promised to reach out to said to…I’d show her. I could do magic any time and any place. Of my own volition.
I folded my fingers around the clear glass mug, closing my eyes to concentrate better. As soon as I decided to work magic, I became aware of the noise surrounding us in the restaurant. A small child was screaming at a table across the room. A man was trying to get a waitress’s attention by bellowing, “Miss! Miss!” over and over again. A fire engine drove by outside, siren wailing.
I took a few deep breaths, trying to center myself for the working. Hurriedly, afraid that I would call embarrassing attention to what I was doing, I touched my fingers to my forehead, offering up the power of my thoughts. I brushed my palm against my throat, offering up the power of my voice. I fluttered my fingers over my heart, offering up the power of my spirit.
I remembered the words from one of my first spell books. They were originally meant to be used by a nursemaid, to raise the temperature of a healing draft or a poultice. My Lemon Lift was nearly as medicinal, I justified to myself.
“Fire and water, water and fire,
Combine now in gentle heat.
Hear this witch who does inquire
After an easy healing feat.”
The mug trembled in my fingers. My eyes flew open, and I caught a shudder in the air, like a shimmering reflection on a sunbaked summer road. My mind told me that my fingers should be burning, that my tea should have risen to the boiling point.
My body, though, told me something else. The tea was hotter, that was true. But my magic was nowhere near as powerful as I’d expected, as it should have been. My fingers tingled as I set the mug back onto the table, as if I’d fa
llen asleep in an odd position. I sighed and took a sip from the mug, faking a grin in response to Gran and Clara’s concerned smiles.
“There we go,” I said, anxious to shift their focus. “Well, which dessert were we going to order?”
It came down to the brownie sundae or the apple cobbler. Clara turned the conversation back to Gran’s impending nuptials, and no one was surprised when we ended up with both desserts, along with three spoons. We spent the rest of the morning talking about appropriate colors for an autumn wedding. I tried to let the distinctions between crimson and scarlet, between tangerine and orange carry me away from my worry about my warder—my warder, my witchcraft, and a promise that I might have made a little too rashly for my own good.
4
I’d lied to Clara.
I had absolutely no idea where David lived. In fact, when she asked me in Whitlow’s, I’d been so surprised that I hadn’t been able to answer for a moment. He and I had worked together for two years, and it had simply never occurred to me to wonder about where he lived.
I knew that must sound strange. After all that we had been through together, all the times that he had swooped in to my rescue….
But that was it. He had swooped in. He had come to me. Besides, we worked together. I didn’t waste my time worrying about where my library boss, Evelyn, lived. I didn’t waste a spare moment thinking about the respective abodes of my intern, the circulation clerk, the cataloger.
Now, boyfriends—I had a long history of caring about their houses. Deep in my heart, I think I had always been the teensiest bit suspicious of the I.B. (that used to stand for Imaginary Boyfriend, before everything went south, and I started making up brilliant new pet names for the lying, cheating scum of an Infuriating Boob). I had wondered about his home, pictured myself in his kitchen, his living room—okay, in his bedroom. I should have read a lot more into his never taking me to see his home.
And last year’s romantic debacle of the Coven Eunuch? In retrospect, everything had gone wrong just after I visited his house. Well, it had gone wrong from the moment we’d met, if I wanted to be brutally honest, but I’d become aware of the wrongness after I visited his home. All the clues were laid out for me there, everything that I should have known, should have recognized.
So why hadn’t I ever given any thought to where David lived?
Not that it really mattered now. I was a reference librarian. I could find one person’s home in a major metropolitan area, without even breaking a sweat.
Except, David wasn’t listed in any of the phone books I had at my fingertips—print or electronic. I needed to resort to more obscure databases. If I crossed my fingers and clicked on the box that said I had a legitimate legal reason to be searching credit records…. Well, no one would be the wiser.
Unless David decided to prosecute me for tracking him down.
Not that he would do that, I reminded myself for the thousandth time. It wasn’t as if we had fought. I had just hurt his feelings a little. He would be pleased to see me, I whispered inside my head. He would be thrilled that I had taken the initiative, come to him for a change.
Yeah. Right.
I’d always pictured David living in a D.C. rowhouse, maybe on the third and fourth floors of some nineteenth-century socialite’s converted city manse. I imagined him walking down a long block, shaded by oak trees. He was anonymous, lost in the city as he let himself in the security door on the street, as he climbed the flights of stairs to his own pied-à-terre. The house itself was filled with odd-shaped rooms, accented by dark corners where generations of dust defied good housekeeping.
David walked to little neighborhood restaurants, supplementing his empty refrigerator with leftovers from meals eaten at family-owned dives. He haunted used bookstores, trying to scare up a witchy title or two. And he rarely drove his gorgeous Lexus, the night-black car that I had seen only a handful of times, the luxury automobile with such sensuous leather that goose bumps rose on my arms whenever I thought of it.
Well, I was right about the car.
According to my rather illegal databases, David didn’t actually live downtown. He didn’t live in Washington at all. Instead, his home was out in the Maryland suburbs. The exurbs. Who was I kidding? He lived in the country. I pulled a map from the Internet, but I still checked one of the road atlases that we keep in the Peabridge reference collection, because I had never driven out that far from civilization.
On Saturday morning, I sent a quick e-mail to Gran before I swung by her apartment building. I used my own set of keys to borrow her Lincoln Town Car, not even stopping upstairs to say hello. She’d never miss the car—she only took it out once a month or so. Besides, she was the one who had made me promise to take this trip.
I worked my way through the city and headed into Maryland. I passed the infamous Beltway and watched the scenery change from freeway to small town America to open farmland. When I’d traveled almost to the Pennsylvania border, I knew that I was getting close. I double-checked the map a couple of times, but even using the odometer as a gauge, I missed the final turn and had to backtrack. Twice.
David lived at the end of a winding unpaved road. The countryside swelled in gentle hills to either side of the twisting drive, waist-high grass rippling like a living creature’s pelt. A clutch of trees ended the meandering path, and I pulled Gran’s car into a gravel-strewn turnout, parking next to a dusty white pick-up truck.
The house that nestled in the trees looked like a farmer’s dream from a generation or two past. A porch wrapped around the two sides of the building that I could see, and a glider invited me to settle onto its thick striped cushions. The clapboard walls were crisp with white paint, their hunter-green shutters beckoning like an advertisement for peaceful country life. From the front seat of the Lincoln, I couldn’t see inside the curtained windows.
As the car’s engine ticked into silence, a huge Labrador retriever stirred on the porch. I’d missed him at first; he’d been in the shadows from the eaves. Before I could worry about opening my door, about approaching the possibly hostile hound, the dog began to pound his tail against the porch in a steady, welcoming rhythm. My warder might be forbidding, but his dog had failed to get the memo.
I wiped my hands against the skirt of my cotton dress. I’d dressed carefully for this meeting. I didn’t want David to think that I took this intrusion lightly. I’d thought about shorts; they were appealing, given the humid blanket that smothered the summer air. But shorts were too casual, too flippant. I’d tried on jeans, but they were too hot for the journey. I’d slipped into khakis, but I knew that they’d be wrinkled by the time I completed the drive.
At last, I’d settled on a sea-green sundress. Its halter neck left my shoulders bare, so it was cool enough for the weather. Neko had picked it out for me at the beginning of the summer. He and Jacques had somehow scored tickets for an afternoon tea at the British embassy, and the guys had invited Melissa and me to join them, on condition that Neko could dictate our wardrobe. So that we wouldn’t embarrass them. We, Melissa and I, not embarrass them, Neko and Jacques. As if Neko’s downing an entire pot of clotted cream hadn’t set our British hosts on edge….
Enough. I wasn’t accomplishing anything sitting in the car. Besides, with the air conditioner turned off, the heat was rapidly becoming oppressive. I could feel my hair curling against the back of my neck, rebelling against the simple French twist I’d accomplished before I’d left the cottage.
When I opened the car door, I became aware of a noise—rhythmic, constant. There was a sharp chop, followed by a sweeping sound, a pause, and then a repeat of the sequence. Over and over and over.
Curling my toes against the soles of my sandals, I followed a path around the edge of the house. The walkway was paved with shattered oyster shells, following the finest tradition of our colonial forefathers. I knew of a dozen books that discussed the layout of eighteenth-century footpaths. Perhaps I should get one for David, provide him with original source s
upport for his landscaping. That would surely sweeten my appearance on his proverbial doorstep. I could just head home, find the perfect volume, and then I’d return. I promised.
I turned back toward the car, but the dog blocked my way. I’d been so intent on keeping shards of shell from slipping beneath my feet that I had not heard the animal trailing along behind me. He stopped when I did, his heavy tail lashing back and forth. It was a friendly motion, not threatening, but it was enough to remind me that I had a mission. I had a reason for being here. I couldn’t retreat into the Peabridge’s collection as an excuse from confronting my warder.
Chunk, came the sound again. Swish. Pause. Chunk. Swish. Pause.
I took a fortifying breath and a few more steps, moving forward until I could peer around the corner of the house. The dog moved up to my side.
Chunk. Swish. Pause.
And there stood my warder, in the shade of a massive oak tree, dressed in faded blue jeans and a tattered plaid shirt. He wore a pair of protective goggles that would have been geeky, if they hadn’t made me realize just how hard he was working.
Working. Splitting wood. Coolly. Methodically. With a precision that sent a chill up my spine, despite the heavy August heat.
Chunk. His wedge-shaped maul bit deep into the edge of a round. Swish. He swept the cut wood off the block. Pause. He shifted the round, readying himself to make another Paul Bunyan stroke.
Chunk. Swish. Pause. Chunk. Swish. Pause. Chunk.
Silence.
I’m not sure what made him notice me at last. Maybe it was something about the witchy bond between us, the warder ties that stretched taut, even though we hadn’t worked together for months. Maybe it was the dog’s wagging tail. Maybe he just happened to glance up.
But he took his time setting down the maul, removing his goggles. He raised the tattered tails of his shirt and wiped his face dry. I became intensely aware of the sounds around us—the breeze cresting through the long grass in the field beyond the oak tree, the birds that called to each other from their hidden retreats.