“In… hurry?” he croaked out next to my shoulder. I ignored him. He’d be gone soon enough once I reached the train station. It’s not like he could board the train with the warding written into the metal seams, and even if he could, would he even be able to stay inside once it took off?
Why was I contemplating this?
I filled my thoughts with images of being thrown into a psych ward once people found out I was a ghost magnet, and it fueled the rest of my walk out of the neighborhood. Once I hit the outer line of trees, I stepped through the plush pine needle forest bed and let the evergreen aroma fill my lungs.
By the time I was out of the woods and stepping up behind the train station, my stress levels had hit a happy medium, allowing me to produce a smile when I stepped inside the station and approached the ticket booth. The witch sitting behind the glass glanced at my ticket and stamped it, then handed it back without checking to see who was standing in front of her. I could’ve been anyone. A terrorist. A really hot guy. She would’ve never known.
The ghost was waiting for me when I exited the station and stood on the wooden train platform, a sullen expression on his faded face. He must’ve used up most of his energy with the five words he’d already said because he struggled several times to speak until he finally managed to get out a single word that was barely audible.
“Stay.”
I looked up at him hovering above me after checking the platform for other witches, just to be sure no one would see me talking to literally nothing. “Why would I stay when you’re not real? Hmm?” Straightening, I adjusted my backpack so I wouldn’t have to see the ghost pouting at me. “You’ve been here for five years, and I swear to the goddess, every time you appear I feel more insane.”
The ghost made a whining noise in his throat, no doubt frustrated because he couldn’t actually respond to me now that he’d used up all of his ghostly oomph. Where did he even get it from? Why was he only able to speak a few words before he couldn’t keep doing it? I contemplated all the questions that had plagued me since he’d first appeared, mostly because the train was late, and I remained alone outside the station.
When I turned back to the ghost, I saw haunting, wet tears dripping down his faint cheeks. Even though I’d barely had a conversation with him, seeing the ghost upset was making me upset too. I checked around me just to be sure the platform was still empty and stepped closer to my companion.
“My mom is making me go visit my grandma,” I told him, watching him float further down until his feet were level with the floor, as if he was standing next to me. He was taller than me by at least a foot, something I’d never noticed before since he’d always hovered around above me. “Grandma’s a total batty nut case. She’ll probably make me tend her herb garden or pick up all the books she leaves everywhere. Girl has thousands of books, and she never puts them back. I can’t even use magic to clean them up now.” I chewed on my lip and flipped back one of my pink tipped curls, stealing another glance at the ghost. “You can’t come with me?”
He shook his head and that was that, because the train whistle shrieked at an unmistakable volume, and the train blew in like a hurricane. I gave the ghost one last glimpse as the train doors opened, and I stepped onboard the Incantation Express.
The train car was surprisingly empty, but then again hardly anyone magical was in this part of the country. Highborn Academy and the area around it was where most of the magical community lived, and they were welcome to it. Bunch of snotty witches with their snotty witch faces.
“Tickets please!” a warlock sang out as he pranced down the aisle between the seats. He bounced up to me and used a quick spell to make my ticket fly out of my hand and up to his, because he couldn’t walk a few more feet like a normal person. “Ahh, going all the way to Sunburst Mountain, ehh? That’s quite a trip,” he tutted secretively, like we were old friends, and we liked joking about how lame everywhere except Highborn was. “I hear that’s the premiere spot to grow Hilana.”
Hilana, aka. Wizard drugs. The magicians that juiced their powers used Hilana to do it.
The warlock had his eyebrows raised at me, not quite hinting that he was interested in my supply if I had one, which I did not. I met his gaze with a shrug because if I knew how to get Hilana, I sure as hell wouldn’t let anyone else have it. My powers might’ve been reduced to nothing, but that didn’t mean Hilana wouldn’t work on me. A spark of fire, a drop of water, any spell I could get out would make this feeling end, this feeling of being a worthless Ordinary.
With my ticket punched, I found a compartment facing the station so I could peer out to see if the ghost was still there on the platform.
He was gone.
After several hours of concentrating on a candle and unsuccessfully trying to make it light with my mind, the train pulled to a stop just before a cheerful voice announced I had reached Sunburst Mountain. I grabbed my bag and left the train car before the conductor could ask me for drugs again or offer ass scented candy.
I half expected to see my ghostly hallucination on the station platform as I shuffled across the wooden floor with my boots, but he wasn’t there. Instead, there was an old weathered warlock sitting next to the door, chewing gum, blowing bubbles, and popping them loudly. With every bubble pop came fizzles of sparks from his mouth. Show off.
Sighing to myself, I opened the door beside the warlock and stepped into the train station. It was as sparsely populated as the platform, with the only witch being the one behind the counter, and she looked as bored as I felt.
I whipped my phone out and walked through the station to the porch outside where upon I discovered no one was there to pick me up. Typical, I thought to myself as I quickly texted my mom.
Where’s grams? No one here. Did she forget?
Almost instantly, a reply came on my screen.
She’s not coming. It’s only three miles. Have fun walking.
I let out a stream of the worst swear words I knew and stomped my boots against every surface I could find until several streams of dirt drifted down from the porch overhang and fell onto my curly head.
Mothercasting son of a hogmonkey! I should’ve known my mom would pull this shit on me. Ever since I lost my magic, she thought I needed to toughen up because life was only going to get harder for me. Not to rub it in, but DUUUUH! Of course life would be harder now. But what I didn’t need was my mom’s tough love in the face of a magic-less existence.
With my irritation levels reaching critical volumes, I stomped down the station steps and off into the direction of my grandmother’s house. I passed stores where various witches waved to me like nothing was different, mostly because my status as a magical reject wasn’t common knowledge, especially if my grandmother had kept it to herself. If they knew, they wouldn’t give me a passing glance, as if my state of being was a disease they didn’t want to catch.
“Jasmine!” someone shouted, a witch wearing a black dress with spiderwebs sewn into the fabric and enough cat hair on her skirts to build another cat. “You’re visiting Evelyn? Here, I needed to give her these for her supply. Would you mind bringing them to her?” I vaguely remembered the witch’s face from my visits here. I stopped walking long enough for her to approach and hand me a small velvet pouch that clinked with the sound of tiny glass bottles. She had feather fine white hair that was escaping from the brim of her black bowler hat, and she pushed a few strands back as she looked me up and down in appraisal. “You’ve grown so big, Jasmine! I would’ve hardly recognized you if you didn’t look exactly like Evelyn when she was young.”
Yeah, yeah. It’s not like I wasn’t here last summer, you old bag.
I raised the pouch and shook it to make the tinkling glass sound. “I’ll give this to her, don’t worry.” I turned as soon as it was polite to do so and continued down the unpaved city street with the black velvet pouch in my hand. The road to my grandmother’s house wasn’t short, but all methods of travel in a magical village required magic, surprise surp
rise. They didn’t even have horses. What kind of place doesn’t have horses?
My path reached the edge of town and I stepped out of the town outskirts onto a road paved with polished ebony stones. One stone looked exactly like the other, and eventually, I’d been walking for over an hour. My boots were rubbing several places on my ankles and feet raw, and I could feel a slight sunburn settling on my skin as the sun beat down on me like a pelting beam. Grandma better effing fix me up when I get there, or I swear to all that’s wicked, I’ll burn every single one of her spell books.
One hour rolled into two, and I found myself missing the ghost boy. Sure, his very existence was proof of my insanity, and I rejected his presence because of it, but at least he never judged me for being a loser. He’d even used his precious strength to tell me how awesome I was on many occasions. Granted, the more he stuck around me, the less energy he seemed to have. I dreaded the day when he could no longer even say my name.
Had I grown so used to him now that his absence made me sad?
Goddess, help me get a life so I’m not pining after a stupid ghost!
3
Uni-mule
My grandmother’s house stood before me like a little cottage of pure sunshine. I squinted in hatred and wiped the sweat on my sunburned forehead, wincing at the slight pain from touching my tender skin. Grandma owed me a general cure wounds tonic. And maybe some cookies.
I shuffled the last few steps up her porch and over to her front door where I pressed the buzzer and waited for her to answer it. A good five minutes passed before I figured she was either asleep or dead. Since both possibilities meant I’d have to keep waiting outside, there was only one other option, and I followed that thought off the porch and to the backyard where Grandma’s magical garden lay. The enchanted threshold allowed me to enter, as I was a blood relative, and the beauty of the garden opened up before me.
Rows on rows of herbs followed by a sturdy line of fruit trees with a large pond nearby. Tiny pixies flew here and there, eager to nibble on a leaf or two before they fell asleep amongst the flora. One zipped past my hair and giggled to itself at the expression on my face.
Further inside the garden sat a tall, majestic unicorn that held my grandmother’s gardening supplies on his back. Normally such a thing would be unheard of, not only because we were at war with magical beasts, but also because using a unicorn as a pack mule was insulting to them.
Seeing him probably meant she was nearby, and he whinnied when I came into view. A tumble of leaves stood up, wiggled, and turned to reveal my grandmother wearing a getup that looked like she was trying to turn into a plant.
“Jasmine, you’re here! I thought I heard you at the door. I would’ve come to pick you up at the station, but I had some gardening to do. I know you never had an interest in magical plants, but they are very delicate, very temperamental. If you don’t water them when they ask for it, they will die out of spite.”
Same.
She waddled over to the unicorn and put a trowel she was holding into his saddlebags. “This is Prince Zelimir. He was banished from his herd when they found out he’s half donkey.” She leaned closer to me in a whisper. “His father had an affair. Very unheard of with unicorns.”
“So he’s a unicorn mule?”
She hissed and waved her hand at me, checking the unicorn’s face. “Ssh. He doesn’t like that word. It’s very insulting.”
“He talks to you?” I eyed the uni-mule with suspicion, as I’d never met a magical beast before.
“Telepathically,” she answered.
No sooner had her words left her lips than a loud, painful echo sounded in my brain, followed by a voice saying, “Yo.”
“Oh my god,” I screeched in pain, holding my hands to my ears. “Make it stop! That hurts so much!”
Grandmother pat at the uni-mule with a sour but gentle look. “Zelimir, she has to get used to you first. I’m terribly sorry, Jasmine. I’ll put him in the stable and we’ll go inside.”
The pain in my head whirled around, almost deafening me from the power of his magic, but it had passed by the time she returned to me, sans uni-mule.
I followed her inside her house and sat at her yellow kitchen table, watching her remove her leafy hat and gloves and putting them on a hook on the wall. With a wave of her finger, pots and silverware emerged from the cabinets as the fridge opened and several ingredients flew into the pots, just in time for the stove burner to flicker on by itself. Once she’d taken off her coat, revealing a simple blue dress underneath, she folded her wide body into the chair across from me and produced a deck of tarot cards with a snap of her wrinkled fingers.
“What’s that for?” It was a stupid question, emphasized by her blank look in my direction.
“I need to see what’s been happening with you.”
“I could just tell you,” I mumbled, but she shook the cards at me until I chose three and laid them facing down on the table.
She flipped the first over, revealing an upside down ‘the Hermit’ card. “Your past is loneliness and isolation.” Like I needed a tarot card to tell me that. The second card she flipped to reveal ‘the Lovers’ and I rolled my eyes like this was a bad made-for-tv movie.
“Seriously, grandma? The Lovers? Did you put that there on purpose so you can set me up with someone’s grandson again?”
“Don’t mock my cards, child,” she grouched, and flipped the third card over in defiance, then stopped cold, staring at it hard. I looked down to see ‘Death’ as my future card.
“Ahh, shit,” I swore, earning a smack from my grandmother for swearing. I picked up the card and studied the ghostly skeleton girl on it. “What does this mean? Getting ‘Death’ as my future isn’t good, right?”
Grandma glared at me and tapped the deck on the table. “You never learned how to read tarot? I gave you that book last summer.”
Looking guilty, I put the ‘Death’ card back next to the others. “I can’t shuffle cards.”
She humphed at me and put my cards into her deck again, shuffling them expertly and not showing off at all. “You are forgetting the Lovers as your present. You have already met one of the lovers that will join you on your journey.”
“That’s ridiculous. I don’t know anyone I want to kiss, much less anything else.” She shrugged her shoulders at me. “You still didn’t tell me about the death thing.”
“Death is in your future. Humans tend to believe this card means rebirth, shedding off your old self and making yourself brand new. Witches aren’t so simplistic. Death is death. No pleasant hidden meaning. All three of the cards were very powerful to me. The loneliness was great. Your romantic life is flourishing. And there will be enough death to fill a valley.”
“Effing awesome.” I got another look from her in protest of my potty mouth. The aroma of beef stew was starting to fill the room, and my stomach growled, making me remember how much my face and feet were hurting. Grandma got up without another word and left me there to wait for her return.
The tarot deck was still sitting on her side of the table and I snatched it out of curiosity, pulling three cards again since she’d shuffled the deck, and placing them out in front of me. I flipped them over one by one only to find that I’d drawn the same three cards, except this time the second and third cards were switched, leaving Lovers in my future and Death in my present.
This was too much of a coincidence, even for a magic-less witch like me.
Unable to shuffle the cards properly, I dealt the deck out in stacks of three, then two, then four, then three again until I was certain it was mixed up enough, and flipped over the top card on each of the three stacks.
The Hermit.
Death.
The Lovers.
I heard my grandmother coming into the room and setting down a bottle of something in the middle of the table. I met her eyes and saw her looking at the cards I’d dealt for myself.
“The placement is different,” I told her, pointing to the Lovers.
“I tried twice and got these cards both times.”
She sat down in her chair again and pushed the bottle towards me. “That’s because I already dealt your fortune. It cannot be changed now. If you’d read the book I gave you, you’d know that.”
“But the placement changed.”
She started gathering up the cards and I picked up the bottle she’d brought, uncorked it, and drank the cure wounds tonic that tasted like Pepto Bismo. “That just means you will have both death and love in your present and future. Nothing to read into. But if you’re going to be reading, it should be—”
“The book you gave me, yeah yeah.” The pain disappeared from my face and feet as the tonic started working, and I felt more relaxed, like I’d just taken my hair out of a ponytail after a long day.
“Hmph,” she grunted, sitting back into her chair, absently flipping the cards around with her fingers. “Time hasn’t dulled your attitude.”
I swung one leg over the other and cradled my boot in my hand. “And who do I get that from, I wonder?” She smiled, and I smiled back. It was such a normal visit with her, I was almost surprised, until the spell was broken when a vacant look fell over her wrinkled face.
“Why didn’t he come with you?” Before I could ask the obvious, who she was talking about, she continued under her breath. “Stones in the moonlight, cold steel and smoke, wolves in the alley, his face isn’t solid.” I stood up and put my hand on her shoulder, the words coming out of her mouth in an unending loop.
“Okay, grandma,” I told her as she kept mumbling to herself. “Let’s get to bed.” She allowed me to lead her to the bedroom at the end of the hall beside the kitchen and I tucked her into her starlit bed like she was a newborn baby.
Neck-Romancer: A Neck-Romancer Novel Page 2