Awakening (Birth of Magic #1)

by P. T. Dilloway

  We were in the gym and on our first glass of punch when Harry started talking about Judy Gradkowski, the girl who had recently dumped him. They’d met in Anatomy 102 and done some work as lab partners. Harry began to cry as he recounted their courtship. Clearly he wasn’t ready to go back to dating quite yet. “It’s all right,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  We sat down on the bleachers, Harry continuing to bawl while the orchestra started up. Since this was a respectable institution, they didn’t play jazz like in the clubs downtown most of the kids would be frequenting after this was over. Instead they played more traditional music, the kind Marco and I had danced to. I watched as Ethan and Celia glided around the dance floor, Celia clearly taking the lead. I interposed mine and Marco’s faces on them and the scene changed from a college gymnasium with its blue-and-white paper streamers and bunting to a hall of marble pillars and floors in Italy.

  Alexis saved me from beginning to cry like Harry. The dress she’d been working on earlier fit her perfectly, accentuating the slimness of her young body. She’d left her golden hair down, so that it hung almost to her waist. The way she glided around on her shoes was more confident than any of the couples on the dance floor.

  “Sue? Sue Johnson?” she said.

  “Do I know you?”

  “It’s Abigail. Abigail Stanton.” This was the name of one of Alexis’s clients, an old rich widow it was unlikely Harry would know.

  “Abigail! My goodness. I haven’t seen you in ages. What are you doing here?”

  “I came here with a date, but the heel took off with some floozy.”

  We needn’t have bothered with the script we’d prepared earlier. From the way Harry was gaping at Alexis we might as well have been speaking Latin. Alexis must have sensed this, as she turned to Harry and flashed her brightest smile. “And who is this young man?”

  “Harrold Ward,” I said. “He’s my date for the evening.”

  “Is that so? I don’t suppose you’d mind if I borrowed him for a dance or two, would you?”

  “Of course not. I’m not much of a dancer,” I said.

  Alexis took Harrold’s hand and had to practically haul him off the bleachers and onto the dance floor. Out of necessity she took the lead, guiding Harrold’s semi-conscious form around in a vague sort of waltz. I left them to this, hurrying out a side entrance, into the night.

  ***

  I didn’t go straight to the science building. An evening gown didn’t make the ideal wardrobe for sneaking around at night, so first I vanished myself home to change. I took a moment to look in the mirror again and remind myself that I wasn’t Sue Johnson anymore. I was back to being Stephanie Joliet, a witch with an important job to do.

  Having not been in Ethan’s lab before I couldn’t vanish myself there. I settled for the top of the stairs, where I figured it would be unlikely for anyone to see me at this hour. I put on my nightcrystal lenses, the darkened hallway turning as bright as it had been when I was here with Celia earlier.

  Through the glasses I didn’t see anyone, but I did see the door to the lab was open. My hand went instinctively to my Colt. It could always be a janitor cleaning up the place, but I doubted it. More likely it was the G-man who had been here earlier, trying to sneak a peek while Ethan wasn’t around—the same as I was doing.

  As I got closer though, it became clear it wasn’t the G-man. I heard the sounds of someone ransacking the place, tossing bits of metal around with a clang, but whoever it was wasn’t speaking English. They were speaking German.

  I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. If the American government knew Ethan was up to something important, the Nazis could have found out as well. The only question was whether they wanted to take Ethan’s work for themselves or just to sabotage it for anyone else. Either way I wasn’t going to let them finish the job until I got a look at it.

  I stopped at the doorframe and then slipped the Colt from its holster. I took a deep breath, counted to three, and then rolled into the doorway. There were five of them, wearing ordinary suits, trench coats, and fedoras, nothing to identify them overtly as Nazis. They were all blond and blue-eyed and so close in height and weight they could be brothers.

  “Party’s over, boys. Grab a cloud,” I called out, training the Colt on them.

  One in a black trench coat smiled at me as he put his hands up. In unaccented English he said, “Are the Americans so hard up to find competent agents they recruit a woman?”

  This was supposed to be a clever ploy so I’d tell him who’d sent me. That way if he survived, he could tell the SS who was wise to them. “Maybe they are,” I said. “All that matters is that I’ve got my heater aimed at your slimy face.”

  “Put the gone down, foolish girl, before you hurt yourself.”

  I fired a warning shot that grazed the left shoulder of his jacket before burying itself in the wall. That only left me with four shots left, but I could take them without the gun if I needed to, though I’d rather do this without magic. The last thing Gretel would want were these goons telling the American government a witch had broke up their heist. The Americans probably wouldn’t believe them, but I didn’t like taking chances.

  “Now, you want to come quietly with me or do you want to play rough?”

  “Surely we can come to an agreement beneficial to both of us?”

  “I don’t deal with Nazis.”

  “As you wish.” I had made one critical error in not casing the entire floor before heading to the lab. I should have realized these five would have brought some backup in case someone got wise to them, but I didn’t. At least not until someone sapped me on the back of the head.

  I dropped to my knees, the Colt slipping from my hand. The talkative Nazi snatched it away while someone grabbed me by the hair, jerking me backwards. I found myself looking up at a man who must have been seven feet and three hundred pounds—all of it muscle. Then I was looking into the barrel of my Colt.

  “Stupid little girl. But at least now we will have someone to lay the blame on.”

  “Go ahead and shoot it,” I said, grinning at him. “See what happens.”

  “If you wish.” He pulled the trigger, but instead of putting a bullet in my skull, the handle of the Colt became red hot. This was a little trick I’d picked up when I began selling arms professionally. Any weapon with the protective spell cast on it couldn’t be used to commit a crime. If someone tried, they got a nasty burn like my Nazi playmate.

  His scream gave me the opening I needed. The man holding me might have an advantage in height and weight, but he was just as vulnerable to an elbow in the groin as any other man. He bellowed with pain, releasing his grip on my hair. I somersaulted forward to snatch my Colt from off the floor. As I rolled back onto my knees, I saw the other four Nazis had Lugers out, trying to draw a bead on me.

  I didn’t give them the chance, diving behind an island in the middle of the room. One decided to try firing his gun anyway, the bullet not making it through the wood of the island. “This is your last chance,” I said. “You boys can surrender and turn yourselves in or you can make a stop at the hospital first.”

  “Take her!” the talkative Nazi shouted in German.

  I figured they would split into two teams, trying to get me in a pincer. This guess turned out to be right. I peeked over the island in time to see them spreading out. I had enough practice with the Colt that I didn’t need any magic to guide my bullets—one into each man’s shoulder. They all dropped to the floor, rolling around in pain. I dropped behind the island to reload the Colt.

  The Nazi leader cursed at his minions in German. When I looked over the island again, I saw him grabbing the big one who’d jumped me by the shoulder. “Get her, you fool!”

  With a groan the big Nazi got to his feet—at least for a few seconds. I put one shot into each of his knees to send him crashing back down. Keeping my Colt trained on the remaining Nazi, I came around the island. “All right, sport, fun’s over. Get your ha
nds up and keep them there.”

  “You haven’t won yet,” he said. When he raised his hands, I saw one clutching a grenade. Looking down, I saw the pin at his feet. Usually spies would bite on a cyanide capsule if they got captured, but he was going one better. This would not only kill him and his friends—along with me—it would also keep Ethan’s work from being completed or falling into the American government’s hands. Just the kind of spiteful trick I ought to have expected.

  There wasn’t a spell to stop a hand grenade from exploding, at least not one that I knew. The only thing I could do then was to vanish myself back to the stairs. I made it down to the first landing when the grenade went off. The explosion wasn’t enough to do more to me than shake loose some dust from the ceiling to land on me.

  I waited a minute in case there were any secondary explosions before I went back up there. It didn’t come as much of a surprise to find there wasn’t much left of the lab. The Nazis had become charred lumps scattered around the floor, while the rest of the lab was little more than a pile of rubble.

  Whatever Ethan had been working on, it was gone now.

  Chapter 6

  After what I’d gone through that night I should have been exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my bed most of the night, thinking about Celia and Ethan. While I should have been delighted my mission had ended and I could get back to normal, I kept thinking about how kind they had been to me. They had been willing to let me, a complete stranger, into their home after knowing me for just a few hours. And now Ethan’s work had been ruined, destroyed by a Nazi hand grenade.

  I didn’t climb out of bed until I smelled coffee and pastries downstairs. Alexis was waiting for me, looking fully rested, her skin practically glowing and hair perfectly smooth. By contrast I looked as if I’d been on a three-day bender with dark circles around my eyes and my hair a tangled mess.

  Alexis and I exchanged stories about the previous night over the coffee and pastries she’d fixed. “That Harold was such a nice boy,” she said. “A little shy but very sweet.”

  “He seemed unconscious to me—at least until you came on the scene.”

  “You’re not jealous, are you? You didn’t even want to go out with him.”

  “I know.” It was the old story: boys thought I was cute, but they turned to pools of jelly when they saw Alexis. Even Marco had been that way at first. Only Henry had ever been resistant to Alexis’s charms. I sighed and then downed my cup of coffee. “He didn’t get fresh with you, did he?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “He didn’t try to do anything improper?”

  “Oh, no, he was quite a gentleman.” She took a sip of her tea. “Did you find out what your friend was working on?”

  “Not exactly.” I told her about the Nazis in the lab and their leader blowing the place up with a grenade. “I guess we’ll never know now.”

  “It’s probably for the best, dear.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I suppose now you’ll want to go back to your old self. I was just starting to get used to you being young again.”

  “Not yet,” I said, pushing myself away from the table. “There’s something I have to do first.”

  ***

  It wasn’t hard to find Celia and Ethan. I just had to go back to the science building. The only real trick was getting through the ring of police around the place. One held a hand out for me to stop. “You can’t go up there, miss. It’s not safe.”

  “My friend worked in there,” I said, summoning more crocodile tears. “I have to make sure he isn’t hurt.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am—”

  “Sue!” Celia came running up behind the officer. “It’s all right, she’s a friend of mine.”

  Celia’s face was red, with real tears in her eyes. “I heard this morning,” I said. “Is Ethan—?”

  “He’s fine. He wasn’t up there at the time. They say it happened sometime last night.” Celia put an arm around my shoulder, drawing me close. “What happened to you at the dance? We saw Harry dancing with some other girl and then you didn’t come home. He didn’t try to hurt you, did he?”

  “No, of course not. I just needed to go out and do some thinking.”

  “You were thinking all night?”

  “I found a place to flop when I got tired. I came back this morning, but you’d already gone.”

  The police had Ethan on the landing where I’d taken cover last night. A detective looking like a more worn version of the G-man from yesterday jotted down notes as he talked to Ethan. I heard Ethan say, “It wasn’t anything valuable. Just an experiment.”

  “What sort of experiment?”

  Ethan waved his hand vaguely at this. “Just a basic physics experiment.”

  “Well someone must have thought it was important. You don’t usually see six guys just to steal a few Bunsen burners.”

  “I don’t know what they were after. Who were they?”

  “No idea,” the detective said. “Any ID they had got burnt to a crisp.”

  Celia let go of me to snuggle up to Ethan. I saw a look of relief cross his face as he saw her. He smiled slightly when he saw me too. “Sue, thank goodness you’re all right.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ethan,” I said. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “He says there was six people inside.”

  “Oh no. That’s terrible.”

  “These girls friends of yours?” the detective asked.

  “This is my fiancée Celia and this is Sue Johnson. She’s our friend.”

  “Your friends mind answering a few questions?”

  “Of course not,” Celia said. The detective asked her for an alibi. That was easy enough for her to provide; she had been with Ethan all night. “We stayed at the dance until it ended at eleven and then we went home and went to bed.”

  “The same bed?”

  Celia’s face reddened a bit at this. “No. We have separate rooms.”

  “So you could have snuck out when he weren’t looking.”

  “I wouldn’t destroy Ethan’s lab!” She squeezed his shoulder. “I couldn’t do something like that to him.”

  “What about you?” the detective asked.

  “Sue wouldn’t do that either,” Celia said.

  “She a mute or something?”

  “No—”

  “Then pipe down, sister.” Celia’s face turned even redder. I imagined she probably wanted to slap the detective but she was holding back. He glared at me; I looked down at my feet as I had with the G-man.

  “I was at the dance until nine or so. Then I went to a club. Morton’s. My shift went until they closed at two.” I forced some more tears out as I said, “I went home with a customer.”

  “He got a name?”

  “Benjamin, he said it was.”

  “What about a last name?”

  “I didn’t get that.” I turned to Celia and Ethan, who’d both gone deathly pale. “I’m so sorry. I meant to tell you—”

  Celia let Ethan go to wrap me in a hug. “It’s fine. You don’t need to be ashamed about it.”

  “I thought if I told you, you’d think I was a floozy.”

  “Of course we wouldn’t, Sue. You’re our friend.”

  The detective interrupted this tender scene by hocking up a wad of phlegm at my feet. “You got someone at Morton’s who will vouch for you?”

  “Yes,” I said. I had done a lot of business with Mr. Morton during Prohibition; he would cover my alibi if the detective bothered to check it. He wouldn’t if I had been convincing enough.

  “We’ll look into it,” the detective finally said. He snapped his notebook shut with finality. “Looks like whatever they wanted, they got more than they bargained for.”

  I tried not to let out a sigh of relief at this. The police had enough crimes going on in Rampart City that they didn’t bother with looking for trouble. The thieves had blown themselves up, which would be good enough for them. Who they were and
what they wanted wouldn’t matter. We were in the clear.

  I couldn’t say that for things between Celia, Ethan, and me.

  ***

  We took Ethan back to the apartment. After the shock of finding his lab destroyed and then the grilling from the police dick, he didn’t put up a fight as Celia put him to bed like a small child. She gave him a blue pill with a glass of water to wash it down with. He took the pill without complaint, followed by most of the water. Then he kissed Celia on the lips. “Thank you, baby,” he said.

  “You get some rest. We’ll figure the rest of this out later.”

  It didn’t take him long to fall asleep with the help of the pill. I went back to the living room, perching myself on the edge of a chair. I imagined Celia wanted us to be alone before she told me in no uncertain terms to get lost. I should have been happy about that but I wasn’t. It had been so long since I’d had a friend; I didn’t want to lose them so soon.

  Celia put a hand on my shoulder and then gave it a squeeze. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “I could use a cup of coffee,” I said.

  We went to a coffee shop down at the corner, slipping into a rear booth. After giving our orders to the waitress—coffee, scrambled eggs, and bacon for Celia and just coffee for me—we stared at each other in silence for a moment. I could feel real tears ready to gush out when Celia brought the hammer down on me.

  She took my hand in hers, giving it a squeeze. “Sue, I know we met just yesterday, but I want you to know I’ve really enjoyed being around you.”

  “Now you want me to take a powder. I understand.”

  “Sue—”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t level with you yesterday. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, not after you had been so nice to me. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “I understand, Sue. There are things I’m not proud of either.” She squeezed my hand again. “A lot of people have had to do things they aren’t proud of in this Depression. You’re a good kid, though. I know it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, wiping real tears away with my napkin. “Why did you bring me here then?”