Magic and the Modern Girl
Page 31
These were tears of frustration, of anger, of failure. I hadn’t lied to Will. I did love him. I wanted to be with him. I wanted to bring him into my crazy, magic, mixed-up life.
But I couldn’t. And I wanted something else, something more, something I still wasn’t certain I could ever really have.
I stood up. I made myself walk into my bathroom. I washed my face, combed my hair. I stopped in my bedroom and collected David’s jacket. I snagged my key chain from the bowl beside the phone.
There was no need to tell Gran that I was taking her Lincoln. If she needed to drive anywhere, she could always rely on her husband.
As soon as I left the city behind, the night time roads were dark. The interstate had overhead lights, but the county roads were lit only by moonlight. Only by moonlight and the Lincoln’s high beams as I sped toward the Pennsylvania border.
This time, I found the final turnoff on the first try. A little bit of magic, a little bit of memory—the side road glinted in the night like a beacon. The grass was still high, waving in a midnight breeze.
The house sat quietly in its clearing. No lights were on. The porch looked deserted, its glider abandoned. I listened to the Lincoln’s engine, ticking its way to coolness. I forced myself to open my door, to climb out of the car.
I hugged David’s jacket to me as I took a deep breath of the cold country air. The smell of wood smoke was heavy; I could see a faint stream curling from the chimney. I smiled, wondering how much exertion had gone into the split wood that fed the fire.
A shadow whispered toward me from the porch. I’d been wrong. The glider had not been abandoned. It had held Spot, the black lab whose sleek body almost disappeared in the night. The dog shoved his head against my arm, levering his nose against my side until I reached down to pet him. His tail moved like a scythe, and a faint whine rose in the back of his throat. I said, “Okay, then. Let’s go.”
My voice was a lot shakier than I expected it to be.
The dog led me around the back of the house, to the kitchen door. He butted his head against my arm again, clearly telling me to knock. I wanted to resist. I wanted to run back to Gran’s car. I wanted to flee back to the known and the safe, to my cottage, to the Peabridge, to everything I understood.
I raised my hand and knocked.
David was waiting for me.
Of course, he was waiting for me. I’d driven a full-sized automobile down his driveway, headlights blazing. I’d crunched on the walkway from the front of the house to the back.
I was his witch.
“Hello,” he said, and the greeting was so ordinary, so common, it stole my breath away.
“Hello,” I said. I held out his jacket. “I wanted to bring this back to you.”
He took it and stepped aside so that I could move into the kitchen. The only lights gleamed from under the cabinets; the entire room looked as if it had been sleeping peacefully until I’d arrived. Two goblets glinted on the center island, flanking a tall green bottle. David had already poured. He passed one of the glasses to me, asking unnecessarily, “Wine?”
I nodded. The crimson liquid smelled spicy, rich.
Spot whined, and David pointed toward the dog-bed in the corner of the room. He backed up the gesture with an authoritative flash of his hand, a silent command. The dog’s nails clicked on the tile floor as he complied, and the lab sighed as if he’d completed one of Hercules’s labors when he sank onto the plaid padding.
I followed David into the picture-perfect living room. He draped his jacket over the back of one chair. I forced myself to sit on the couch and was relieved—terrified—when he sat beside me. I swallowed wine noisily. Flames crackled in the fireplace in front of us.
He watched me over the rim of his own goblet, matched my motion as I set my glass on the wooden coffee table in front of us. I looked around the room, studying its perfect precision, its spartan, designer-certified shelves. “There’s a problem,” I said.
“Yes?” I could smell his shampoo on his hair. I remembered the sight of him, still wet from his shower, wrapped in the gray towel that had revealed far more than it had hidden.
I forced myself to take a steadying breath. “I don’t think there’s enough space on the shelves.”
He looked over his shoulder, studying the shelves in question. When he turned back to me, he settled closer. I wanted to push away, to restore the distance between us, but there was nowhere else to go. I felt like I had risked everything on that single sentence; I had dealt every card in my deck, and I had nothing left to play. I couldn’t breathe while I waited for him to reply.
“Enough space?” he asked.
“For all the books in my basement.” My answer quivered.
“And why would we need to fit all of your books on these shelves?” He sounded amused. Tolerant. Patient.
I forced myself to deliver my answer, forced my words past the distraction of his body so close to mine. “I’ll have to take them with me when I move out of the cottage. When Kit takes my job. She’ll need the place to live, since I’m sure Evelyn won’t be any more generous with her salary than she was with mine.”
“You can’t move out here.” My heart stuttered. David went on. “What about your grandmother? She needs you nearby.”
That answer was easy. “She’s got Uncle George. Besides, Nuri can summon us if anything happens.”
“And Clara?” There was a clear smile behind his words now.
“She’s going back to Sedona. Anyway, I think she and I just might get along better with some space between us. A lot of space.”
“And Melissa?” He shrugged like he was trying to solve one of the central problems of the universe. “It’ll be a lot harder to have mojito therapy all the way out here.”
I thought of my best friend, sweetheart roses clutched to her chest. “Somehow, I think mojito therapy is going to be a lot rarer from here on out.”
David was enjoying this. “I thought you liked being a librarian?”
“I do!” My nerves made me sound as if I was arguing. A log on the fire spat as it settled lower, sending up a little geyser of sparks. I tried again. “I do. But I’ve pretty much done what I can do at the Peabridge. It’s time to try something else.”
“Something else?” He stretched, as if he were disinterested, and then he settled back on the couch, closer yet. His arm trailed along the back of my sofa cushion. “There aren’t too many jobs out here in the country.”
“I could run a school.”
“A school?” He actually laughed out loud. I felt his fingertips on my shoulder, inching along to trace the neckline of my blouse.
“A school for witches,” I said defiantly. “A training ground for women like me. Like Gran and Clara. Witches who don’t want to work the Coven way.”
“The Coven way,” he repeated, and I felt the pulse of his fingertips against the hollow of my throat.
The magic flared between us just before he kissed me. I’d felt it building, gathering, coalescing even as my body responded to his touch. But I think that both of us were surprised when it snapped along the witch-warder bond like an electric shock. Like an electric shock—startling and brilliant, but without the pain.
“I’m sure you can work out something,” he whispered against the corner of my mouth. “Some sort of school.”
“With you,” I said, pulling him closer. My fingers tingled where they met his flesh. “With your help.”
And then he was pulling me to my feet. He was settling his palm against the flat of my back. He was steering me toward the stairs with an urgency that made me want to laugh. He was answering the way that I had wanted him to answer, that I had yearned for him to answer, during my long, nighttime drive.
But I stopped at the foot of the steps.
I wanted to go with him. I wanted to return to his bed. I wanted to erase the past three months of doubt and regret.
But I was still afraid. I was still afraid that I would wake up alone in that perfectly
orderly bedroom. That I would come downstairs to find David silent and withdrawn. That I would find Warder-David in his place, grim and protective.
“Jane,” he whispered, and he swept aside my hair to kiss the back of my neck.
The shock went through us again, the electric power, the promise of our magic. This time, though, he did not pull away. He folded his arms around me, pulled me back until I could feel his heart pounding in his chest.
My pulse raced to match his. Power pounded through my body, carried by every cojoined heartbeat. Our bond was a physical thing, enfolding us like golden robes. My power was melded to his; my strength was meshed with his. We were two astral beings, each drawing on the power of the ancients, separate, but inalterably together.
This was the man who had seen me—who had seen to the magical core of me and beyond—in Ariel’s magic circle on the White House lawn. This was the man who had stepped toward me, who had locked his gaze to mine, who had raised his arms to protect me, to join with me, against all the power arrayed against us.
His warder’s magic beat around us, through us, his strong and driving energy mixing with the swirling force of my own witchy powers, giving, taking, until I could no longer be sure which magic was mine, which was his.
This was why I could never have stayed with Will. This feeling, this force. Will could love me, always. He could honor me. He could respect me. But he could never share this feeling, this magical awareness, this perfect, golden perception of all the world around me, within me. No matter what he did, Will would never share this witchy part of me.
But David could. He did. He felt it, too.
I heard his breath catch in his throat. I forced myself to pull away from him just a little, just enough that I could turn to face him. I made myself look into his eyes, recognize the expression there. The love. The chance that he was taking with me, the vulnerability that he had never shown to another person, to another witch.
“David—” I started to say, and his name wove into our power.
“Jane,” he said, closing the conversation, wrapping it back around us, binding us together more completely, more honestly, than I’d ever been bound to any man—Will, or the Coven Eunuch, or the Imaginary Boyfriend, or all the other missteps I’d taken to arrive here, now.
Now I knew that, despite his playful seduction in front of the fireplace, David proposed more than a magic-charged romp. He was offering more than a warder’s required service. He was making a broader statement, announcing a deeper plan. We’d reached a new place, a different place, a place far scarier than any I had seen with him in two long years of attraction and respect, of flirtation and regret.
I turned away, suddenly overwhelmed by the gravity of it all. David was changing the rules. David was breaking down walls. My warder, who had always done what was right. My warder, who had always pulled back, always pulled away, even when I had not wanted him to do so. My warder, who had always been gone in the morning.
Terrified to accept what he was offering, I let myself be distracted by Spot, who was shifting noisily in his plaid bed. I scanned the kitchen through the doorway, glancing at the back door, looking for an escape, for a separation I was not at all sure I wanted.
I spied a brown paper bag that I had missed on the kitchen counter. A knife sat beside it, serrated edge barely visible in the dim light. “What’s that?” I asked.
David answered with a kiss that left me clutching at his arms for balance, a physical answer to an emotional question that I had not even known I still wanted to, needed to, ask.
Sheets of magic tumbled around us, so completely intertwining our powers that I could no longer say where my witchy abilities ended, where his warder’s tricks began. The bond between us expanded in my consciousness, the rope that had pulled him to me across time and space, the tie that had forged between us when I first stumbled on the magical books in my basement.
This was what I needed. This was the rapport I craved. This was the balance, the nature, the meaning—this was the most that witchcraft and love combined could be.
“Sesame bagels,” he whispered against my throat, turning me back toward the stairs. “For breakfast.”
MAGIC AND THE MODERN GIRL
A Red Dress Ink novel
ISBN: 978-1-4268-2256-8
© 2008 by Mindy L. Klasky
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