Magic and the Modern Girl

by Mindy Klasky

  So vague that I had to sit to concentrate. I closed my eyes, ducked my head into my hands, trying, trying to find that contact once again.

  And there it was. So far away that I could barely feel it.

  Neko.

  Jane. We’re at the White House. Come now.

  18

  Before I had fully registered the faint words, David stood before me. “Let’s go.”

  Clearly, his warder’s knowledge had brought him into the link; he had heard Neko’s message. But had he heard the faint tinge of desperation? The outright fear? Did he know what we were traveling to meet?

  Clara spoke up first. “What? Where are you going?”

  David was looking over his shoulder. The reference room had emptied out; all of the wedding guests had run outside to see if there were still fighter planes in the sky. I said, “We found Neko.”

  “Where?” asked Gran. Understandably, she looked around the library, as if she expected my mischievous familiar to be hiding behind a table.

  “He’s at the White House. And he needs us.”

  The words sounded absurd, like the summons of a comic book hero. And yet, they made perfect sense. Ariel had been playing all around the nation’s capital; she had acted out her mission on the steps of Congress, on the thresholds of federal landmarks. Stepping up to the president’s own home wasn’t really much of a change for her.

  “Are you ready?” David asked. “I can take all of us there.”

  Clearly, he wasn’t talking about driving. However impressive, his Lexus wasn’t going to cut through traffic at this hour. Between Halloween revelers in Georgetown and Secret Service officers responding to whatever had summoned the jets, it would take hours to get across town.

  I looked around the room. I had to tell Will what was happening. I had to let him know where I was going.

  “There isn’t time,” David said.

  “But—”

  “There isn’t time.” I knew that tone. I knew the iron behind those words. I’d seen David carve out ultimatums before, mandate my training, my safety. There would be no arguing the point.

  Will would have to understand.

  David was already orchestrating everything, taking it out of my control. “Sarah, put your arms around Majom’s shoulders. Good. Nuri, hold on to Clara. I’ll take you first.”

  He put both his hands on Clara’s right arm, pulling her close as if they were going to practice some somber ballroom dance. Nuri flew into the embrace, and then all three blinked out of sight.

  “Clara!” Gran exclaimed, and Majom scrambled out of her grasp, pouncing on the spot that his witch had occupied only moments before. I seized the boy just as David flashed back into sight, mere inches from where he had started.

  “Sarah, now,” he said, reaching out to clutch Majom’s hand at the same time that he settled his right palm on Gran’s shoulder. I started to speak, but they were gone before I could finish drawing a breath.

  Just—gone. Not a shimmer of air, not a glint of light. One moment, they were standing in front of me, and the next I was staring at empty space.

  Magic shouldn’t be that easy, I thought. There should be a visible transition, like the old transporter on Star Trek, shining with dancing lights as people came and went. I didn’t understand. I’d never truly appreciated what my warder was capable of doing.

  David reappeared. Silently, he held out his hand to me.

  “I—” I started to say. But I didn’t know how I intended to end that sentence. I didn’t know if I meant to protest. I didn’t know if I meant to thank him. I didn’t know if I meant to say that we were back to where we had stood a year ago, on Samhain, as our future rode on my ability to master powers I wasn’t sure I had.

  I set my fingers onto his palm, and then there was nothingness.

  Not darkness.

  Nothing.

  I had no body. I had no mind. I had no way of seeing, knowing, being. It was as if I were a blind woman and someone stood behind me, asking, “How many fingers am I holding up?” I had no tools to say.

  I wasn’t.

  And then, I was.

  I was standing in the middle of a green lawn. A tall iron fence stood behind me. Lush grass was underfoot, chilled with evening dew. The full moon sat serenely overhead, impossibly close, impossibly low in the sky. Incongruously, I could still taste buttercream and champagne at the back of my throat.

  Fighter planes screamed overhead.

  I blinked, and everything around me started to move again. David was dropping my hand, stepping forward to see if Gran was all right, if Clara and Nuri had found their footing. Majom was frozen, staring up at the sky, his little jaw dropped in shock.

  White lights flooded the lawn around us, as brilliant as if we were being invaded by an alien mothership. I squinted, and I could just make out that the spotlights were on the roof of the iconic building behind me, the White House. The massive instruments picked out the six of us—Gran and Clara, the familiars, David and me.

  Beyond the lights, I heard the machinery of war. Jets shrieked by again, joined by the whupping sound of helicopters beating to hold their place in the sky. Men shouted orders to each other, anger merging with brutal military urgency. A siren rose and fell and rose again, like an endless ocean breaking waves against us.

  I stumbled forward on the grass, trying to get my balance, trying to figure out what was happening, why I was here. If I squinted, I could make out shapes on the lawn in front of me, curves and straight lines that had been seared into the ground, baring moist black earth. I shook my head, blinked hard, and then the shapes coalesced into letters, into words.

  Empower The Arts.

  The slogan was emblazoned in the White House lawn, etched there by some unknown force. Stunned, I looked up, and then I finally realized that we did not number six, there in the center of the maelstrom.

  We were eight.

  One more figure, known so well to me—slight, jaunty, standing out like a stain of ink in his midnight clothes against the noon-bright lawn. Neko.

  The last presence, the object of my dreams from the past two months. Impossibly tall. Impossibly thin. So pale that she almost disappeared in the floodlights, except for her midnight hair. A cloud of a gown swirled around her, bleached of its crimson and orange and yellow in the bright, white light. Ariel.

  Witch, she thought, raising her hands above her head.

  As she spoke the word inside my head, a rain of golden pearls fell inside my thoughts. The force of her power was so great, the energy of her magic so strong, that her single thought sent a cascade of astral wealth tumbling into my storehouse. It swirled into the green and red accumulated from Gran and Clara, tempting, tantalizing, never enough.

  But her word was more than a greeting. When she lifted her fingers above her wind-whipped hair, she cast a spell. Her magic was wild, different from anything that I had read and mastered in my books. She did not use words; she did not speak rhymes.

  She thought her magic into being. One flick of her wrists sent a golden dome above us. I could not see what she did, but I could read the effect. As I looked around, shocked, I saw Neko stagger a step closer to the anima. He moved like a zombie, like a creature possessed. Every line of his body was set against Ariel, fighting against her power. And yet she used him. She bounced her magic off of him. She used his essential nature to magnify her own beneath the golden dome.

  “Neko!” I cried out.

  I was astonished that I could hear my voice. The dome had changed everything. It had cut out the real world, sealed out the military might assembled above the White House lawn. It tempered the floodlights, turned them from blinding white to a warm gold, a shade that reminded me of sunshine and sand and warmth on a beach. When I peered at the insane world outside of Ariel’s dome, I could see that everything was moving much more slowly than we were moving inside; the people seemed almost frozen in their own time.

  I called out again, “Neko!”

  He turned
to me carefully, as if he needed to give conscious thought to managing each separate muscular contraction. He might have thought about smiling; I saw the beginning of a twitch in his lips, but he came nowhere near completing the motion. Nevertheless, I could hear the words that he slipped between his gritted teeth. “Nice dress, girlfriend.”

  Shocked, I looked down at my orange and silver nightmare. Ariel’s golden light had tempered the Gatorade; it seemed more like a mai tai now. The silver lamé, though, glittered with a vengeance.

  “Are you all right?” I exclaimed, taking a step toward my familiar.

  Ariel did not let him answer, though. Instead, she sealed his lips, pulling his gaze toward her, so that he could no longer look at me. I could read the resistance in every stiffened muscle of his body; I could see him fight her control. But still, he took a step away from me. Another. Another. And then my anima draped herself against him like an obscene parody of seduction.

  He’s my familiar now, Witch.

  Again, I felt her words raise a power in me, like the jangle of a miniature slot machine paying out. I was grateful for the strength—a weakness that she caught immediately.

  And you are mine, as well.

  Another coin. Another link in the chain that she was building, the chain that already bound Neko, that she was stretching toward me. She was giving me strength. But she could take it all back, take it all away from me. She could gather me to her, in the same way that she had gathered Neko. She could bind me. Bind me, and Gran, and Clara, their familiars, David. She could control every one of us. If I did not find a way to stop her.

  “What’s going on here, Jeanette?” Clara’s voice was angry, frightened. Majom stood in front of her; she had pulled the boy close so that his head rested against her belly. The golden light made his white hair look blond.

  Nuri repeated, “What?” for good measure. The solid woman had not abandoned Clara, but she had reached out for Gran, bringing her into their frozen still life. All four members of my commune stared at me as if I had the answers, as if I knew all the facts. I wanted to tell them that I didn’t have the least idea what was happening, that I couldn’t control, couldn’t predict what was going on.

  I wasn’t about to admit that, though, to my creature. I wasn’t going to add to my anima’s arsenal in any way that I could prevent. I could only hope that my thoughts were blocked from hers, that she could only read my conscious mental speech, not the ideas that flickered in my mind before I voiced them.

  Instead, I looked to my warder. Our warder. David. I forced my voice to sound even, testing it once inside my head before daring to speak aloud. “The circle is cast, then? Our workings here can’t harm anyone outside?”

  David nodded tersely. “The circle is cast.”

  Sometime after this was over, I’d have to talk to him about that. I’d have to find out how Ariel had managed her arcane protection without invoking the elements, without laboriously tracing out the cardinal points on a compass. It might come in handy to be able to act so quickly. You know, if I ever needed to act on my plan to take over the world, starting on the White House lawn.

  I had no idea if that’s what Ariel actually wanted, if that’s what she had planned. But there was no time like the present to find out. I turned to her, keeping my arms loose at my sides. “Empower The Arts, Ariel? Isn’t that a little over the top? A little too much of a good thing?”

  At first, I thought that she wasn’t going to answer, she wasn’t going to give me the benefit of her strength from a mental reply. But then, I realized she was merely parsing my words, trying to figure out what they meant. I remembered her, crouching in my basement, in the confusing minutes after I had made her. Neither of us had known the truth then, the way that the magical world apparently worked. Neither of us had known the consequences.

  When she spoke, it sounded as if she was weaving the words to make unfamiliar fabric, harnessing a known warp and weft to create an unexpected design. You ordered me. You set my mission.

  Again, that damned distracting payoff, the clamor of new power hitting my body, my mind, like a drug. All of a sudden, I understood women who let themselves be kept. I understood women who let men control them with trinkets, who let jobs bind them with bonuses. I wanted to do anything that Ariel required, anything that she demanded, just so that she would speak to me again. Instead, I summoned strength I didn’t know I had to announce, “I created you to serve me. I ordered you to do my bidding.”

  Yes, Witch.

  Ah! She answered me. Even when I challenged her, she fed me. The words felt so good. I took a step closer, as if that would strengthen the bond between us, as if I could eke out a fractionally higher payoff by forcing out another mental reply from her. The motion brought me nearer to Neko.

  On the surface, he looked perfectly calm. His right foot rested slightly in front of his left. His weight was evenly distributed. Ariel curved against him, her flowing gown obscuring the precise line between their forms.

  But when I looked at Neko’s face, I could see the strain that he was under. I could see the eyes of a prisoner. His jaw was set so hard that I feared his teeth might crack. He was a bound man, a tempered man, a constrained and emasculated man.

  He was a familiar, wholly bound to a witch. Not even a witch—an anima, who had taken on a role that was not hers, who had taken on power she could not be permitted to keep.

  “No!” I said. “You are not doing what I commanded! I only meant for you to bolster my powers. I only meant for you to feed me back my strength.”

  I am doing that.

  And she was. Oh, yes, she was, and the shimmer of her words almost made me beg for further confirmation. One stern glance at Neko, though, was enough to make me bite my tongue. Hard. Hard enough to draw tears to my eyes.

  “But the rest of it,” I said. “It was a mistake. It was confused. You were new-made, and I was not clear. I never intended you to embrace the role of Ariel, from the play.” I waved at the etched grass beneath our feet, at the slogan burned there. “I never intended you to spread these words. I’m a librarian, not an activist!”

  You intended it all. I know. I remember.

  This time, my mind was not flooded with power alone. This time, I was not treated solely to a fraction of my squandered strength, rationed out and returned to me as I had once requested. This time, I was shown what Ariel herself had seen. I was given her mission.

  It was all there, wrapped inside a golden cloud. I sensed her newness, her confusion, as she gathered together her consciousness from raw earth and water, from the air and fire that I had poured into her making. I felt her uncertainty as she heard my commanding spell of awakening, as she recognized me as her witch, as her creator.

  I felt the solidity of her first thought, the strength of her resolve. I felt the fierce certainty as she absorbed my thoughts, my memories, turned them into herself.

  Empower The Arts, I had thought. I had flashed upon the afternoon I’d spent with David, the incredible sparking power that we had shared in his office, in his bed. Empower The Arts, I had thought. I had shied away from that recollection, desperate to separate myself from what I had done, what we had done. Empower The Arts, I had thought. I had reached out for the poster, for the image of Prospero, the actor David, the safe David. Empower The Arts, I had thought. Save me from what I had done. Empower The Arts. Strengthen me. Empower The Arts. Move me past my own resolve.

  And so she had.

  My anima had done precisely what I had commanded. She had skipped over what I had meant; she had plunged into what—precisely—I had said. She had let me flee my own thoughts, my own desires. She had mastered her mission early, breeding power, collecting strength. But she had hoarded that energy, keeping the magic that went beyond my own. She had stockpiled it so that she could complete the mission I had given her, the mission I had never intended, the mission that I had made explicit.

  And now she was beyond me. Outside me. Greater than I could ever hope to control.<
br />
  Every droplet of power that Ariel spared for me was born out of the swirling pool of her abilities—my abilities, multiplied by her dumb working. She had absorbed all of my commands; she had regenerated my powers. But she had kept the surplus for herself—was going to continue to keep it for herself—because that was what I’d asked of her. That was what I had commanded.

  For the first time, I was fully conscious of what I had done, of just how badly I had betrayed myself. My familiar. My warder.

  I looked at David.

  He saw what I saw. He knew what I knew. He remembered what I remembered—the afternoon in his house, the evening in my basement. Even as I understood all that had happened, and how, and why, my warder understood it all, as well.

  I was standing in front of him, more exposed than I had ever been before. I wasn’t the witch who had overextended herself and needed to be tucked into bed. I wasn’t the student who had stretched her powers thin, mastering a new spell and needing to be fed a restorative dinner. I wasn’t the protégé who had lulled him into relaxing, who had stolen a kiss one night long ago. I wasn’t the woman who had come to him in curiosity, in longing, who had drawn him to his bed.

  I was Jane Madison.

  I was the sum of all my roles, the combination of witch and woman. I was more naked before him than I’d ever been before, than I could ever have imagined being. This wasn’t about a ridiculous orange dress. It wasn’t about silver bows on my shoes. It wasn’t about the memory of a green cotton sundress, torn off my body and tangled on his floor.

  It was about me.

  “Help me,” I said.

  Or I thought. Or I breathed. I don’t know how I spoke to him. I don’t know how I reached out for him. I just knew that he was the only thing that could guide me through this knowing, he was the only person who had the power to bring me back to where I’d been before, to what I’d been, before I’d given so much away to Ariel.

  And he stepped toward me.

  He locked eyes with me. He waited for me to acknowledge his presence, to tell him that I understood that everything was changing, everything had changed. He was my warder. He was my protector. He was the man who was sworn to keep me safe, sworn to protect me as a witch, as a woman.