by Renée Jaggér
“I wonder,” she said aloud, “if not being able to figure this shit out is the motivation we need?” She clenched her jaw. “But if that’s the case, then we’re right back where we started, with only being able to do magic when it’s absolutely necessary. We’re not really in control then, circumstances are.”
Roland sighed. “I don’t know. There aren’t any easy answers.” He took her hand again.
To their mutual shock, two lights flashed, then stabilized into a weak but steady dual glow. Red for Bailey and green for Roland, the illumination was strongest between their hands as a combined golden-white radiance, fading to their respective colors farther out along their wrists and arms.
“Hell,” Bailey exclaimed. “Wasn’t expecting that. It’s pretty, though. Like Christmas lights.”
Roland stared, bug-eyed, and then smiled. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? And it gives me an idea.”
“Me too,” Bailey agreed, oddly confident that they were on much the same track. “Something about bouncing a spell off each other or whatever. You’re the expert, so I’ll let you find a more sophisticated way of saying it.”
He laughed. “Right, right. We will attempt to use each other as nodes in a circuit, essentially. Then, by paying attention to the thoughts and sensations that go with that, we ought to be able to progress toward sustained magical flow separately.”
Excitement rose in both of them, seeming to fill the air. It even seemed the sky brightened for a few seconds. Bailey wondered if the Other was somehow directly affected by their emotions, but there wasn’t time to ponder that. Their main goal was to try out their new idea.
“Okay,” Roland began. “You have an affinity for electricity, so we’ll do that. Makes sense anyway since I just used the term ‘circuit.’ I have more experience with defending and redirecting, so try to sort of, well, shock me. Then I’ll loop it back to you, and we’ll see if we can keep it going, and for how long.”
She nodded, breathed deep, and raised her hands.
It took a few minutes, but soon enough, their plan started to work. Bailey again conjured a few sparks, staying calm and focusing on the task at hand, and after an agonizing pause when failure seemed imminent, a small and thin bolt of crackling reddish lightning leaped from her fingers into the palm of Roland’s left hand.
He deflected it into his right hand, turning it green in the process, and gently tossing it back at her. She caught it.
A loop was established. The odd tingling sensation that Bailey had always associated with magic was present, not an acute alarm like she was used to, but as “background noise.” It was almost pleasant.
Time passed, and the circular flow of power did not diminish. Bailey thought of what Roland and Marcus had both said about how magic was embedded within the very fabric of reality, and she found herself wondering, Could it be infinite?
Roland spoke, his voice calm and nearly monotone. “Incredible. We’ve achieved an equilibrium state while casting. I’ve never seen this before.”
Bailey met his gaze, diverting a small part of her attention while keeping most of it focused on looping the power between them.
“How do we do it by ourselves, though? Can I just juggle it between my hands or something?”
The wizard didn’t answer right away. “Maybe. It’s worth a try.”
He pulled back physically and magically, and there was a crackling sound and an unpleasant sense of disharmony as the linked streams of lightning were forcibly separated. And yet, their attention to the circuit was such that Roland was able to maintain a perfect loop between his hands.
For Bailey, it was messier and more frightening, but it worked. Violent eruptions of sparks appeared around her, and her hands jerked as the muscles seized. She feared she was on the verge of electrocuting herself, but somehow she kept calm and stabilized the flow. Soon she held a steady bolt of lightning like the ones in those novelty plasma globes between her palms.
“Ha!” Roland chuckled. “We did it. We pulled this off, and this is a game-changer. I’ve never seen magic used this way before.”
Bailey closed her eyes and willed the lightning to cease. She directed it downward and felt it jump into the damp earth by her feet. The heat, light, and strange tingling went away.
Roland did likewise, then he blew out his breath and paced back and forth a few steps.
“So,” Bailey asked him, “what does this mean? Like, in terms of magical theory.”
The wizard stopped. “It means we’ve all only been taught part of the discipline. Witches and wizards, in our age and our current tradition, are trained to use their powers for shows of strength and specific creative tasks, which is well and good. But either someone forgot about this, or no one ever learned it to begin with. I suspect Marcus knows about it, though, so it’s probably just something that fell out of the curriculum—the discipline of long-term sustained channeling, where a spell can be maintained indefinitely and with a minimum of effort once the caster has hit equilibrium. This is huge, Bailey. I’m going to need time to process the magnitude of it.
“At least today’s training sort of explains the strange results from your blood test. Your magic is different from a wizard’s, which is the device was calibrated for. I mean, it showed you were both strong and weak, which is…”
At that moment, the air about ten feet from them split open to disclose a shimmering portal of dark purple. Marcus stepped through.
“How are you doing?” the shaman asked.
Bailey burst out laughing, partly from relief, and partly from his timing. “Better than we were a little while ago,” she told him.
Roland nodded. “We’ve made progress. We can’t do much yet, but we just had a major breakthrough in terms of understanding what we’re capable of. It would take a while to explain it.”
The big man raised a hand in a gesture that seemed to indicate he was letting them off the hook from having to tell him all the details.
“Good,” he said. “Clearly, your experiences have pushed you toward the ultimate goal, but your education has only begun. It will get rougher from here.”
Marcus turned around and stepped back into the glowing doorway, beckoning for the pair to follow.
“About time,” Bailey commented. “I was getting weirded out by never having to pee.”
Chapter Five
The night was wearing on. Not only were the roads awful and inefficient, given the rough terrain and lack of habitation in the area, but both groups of witches were terrible drivers.
“For fuck’s sake,” Townsend growled. “We know where they’re going. Can’t they just get there?”
Spall breathed out and slowly shook his head. “The goddamn sun’s going to be up before these chicks find their way into that goddamn valley. I’m not even positive they’re still in the same order. The Venatori might have gotten ahead of the Seattle stalkers by now. Christ!”
There had been detours and wrong turns. It was impossible for the agents to determine if it was the result of the witches screwing up and getting lost or some kind of bizarre cat and mouse game to throw the other group off.
They were reasonably confident, though, that neither batch of sorceresses knew Townsend and Spall were trailing them.
Of course, part of the reason their pursuit had (probably) remained undetected was because the two agents had kept far, far behind the women’s vehicles. That made it harder to track them in a timely manner.
Townsend resumed his complaining as they turned onto another winding pseudo-highway that seemed to have been haphazardly slapped between hills and trees. This had all gone on much too long, and now the Venatori were in the mix?
“God. With all this increased activity, we’re going to be looking at an exponential increase in bullshit paperwork. We could have been in Greenhearth, waiting to ambush them instead of trying to ride their coattails if it hadn’t been for all the goddamn forms we had to fill out last week. Just imagine what next week is going to be like.”
“Why?”
Spall snorted. He was half-focused on his mobile device as he sought to keep track of the witches’ movements. They were using some kind of magical cloaking that made the task more difficult, though not impossible. “Why should we torture ourselves by imagining something like that? Let’s not bother thinking about it until it comes. Which, of course, it will.”
“Yes.” Townsend sighed. “Unless we finally get some other sort of supernatural activity in the form of say, divine fucking intervention. Like, another trade war with China magically starts, and the cost of paper goes through the roof, so the office decides it no longer has the budget for paper, and of course, their computer systems will be backed up or will crash the instant they get two percent more traffic than usual. Thus, lo and behold, we don’t have to fill out the fucking forms.”
Spall grunted. “Not likely, but we can dream. This Bailey girl has had a shitstorm of bad luck. Every time she adjusts her position in her seat, scratches her head, or sneezes, fifty people end up in jail or the hospital. Then the paperwork angels of wrath and destruction descend from on high. It never fails. Remember I said something about taking a vacation? It’s still a very good idea. Maybe we could leave before this all blows up.”
His partner piloted the car up a slope that wound around the edge of some river whose name he didn’t know, nor did he care.
“Vacation’s not gonna happen. Let it go. And that was an accurate summation. Good job there,” he remarked, his voice deadpan. “Perhaps we’re bouncing off the bottom in terms of luck. Maybe one of these stupid ruckuses will accidentally knock a plane out of the sky. The plane would be carrying a shipment of paper, which would ideally then plummet straight into the caldera of one of these volcanoes, which would reactivate just long enough for the lava to consume every last particle of office supplies.”
Spall sighed, allowing himself the fantasy of such a wondrous thing happening. “That would be almost as good as a vacation—the office apocalypse. Yes. More likely, though, knocking a plane out of the sky would mean all the fucking paper rained down on us, and it would be our duty to collect every single piece by hand and then keep having to write the exact same goddamn information on every one.”
“Of course,” Townsend agreed. “You’d think that with our budget, they could switch to e-forms that autofill all the mundane crap, for God’s sake.”
The other agent was quiet for a minute as he concentrated on his device. “Looks like the first vehicle—our three runaways—is almost to Greenhearth. That is definitely where they’re going. They probably think they can deflect suspicion by saying they were just taking a shortcut back to Interstate 5 on the western side of the Cascades.”
Townsend burst out laughing. “Shortcut!” He snorted. “We have firsthand experience with how untrue that is. Anyway, if the three stalker sluts are going to the town, it’s safe to assume the Venatori ballbusters are as well. The more witches who end up in that little craphole, the worse it gets. Especially for us.”
Grimacing sadly, Spall concurred. “Yes. This is going to be seriously bad.”
Townsend sighed and drove on into the night.
* * *
It was dark in the woods when they stepped out of the Other and back into Oregon.
“Marcus,” Bailey inquired, “how long were we gone? Time seemed distorted in there.”
The shaman was unfazed by the question. “About half the night, a few hours. In a way, time passes in the Other no differently than it does here. It’s just that it doesn’t mean anything in that place. There’s no frame of reference for it.”
She didn’t understand what he meant by that, but Roland nodded vaguely, so she decided to let it go. The important thing was that they’d accomplished what they set out to do and hadn’t lost too much Earth-time while they were at it.
“Okay,” she replied. “I’m just glad we weren’t in there for a year or something. My dad would kill me.”
Roland sighed. “The Other would be a convenient place to hide from Shannon, though, wouldn’t it? I bet she doesn’t even know the place exists. It doesn’t have clothing stores, after all, so there’s no need for her to pay attention to it.”
“Shut up, Roland.” Bailey kneed him in the side, though not too hard. He pretended to cringe in pain, but by now she knew when he was faking it.
Ignoring their little exchange, Marcus turned to face them, dismissing the portal from existence with a wave of his hand before he spoke.
“You two,” he began, “will need rest and downtime before you venture back into that place. Rest from dealing with the Other, specifically. There can be no rest from your training in this world if you want to develop at the speed the situation requires.”
Bailey frowned but didn’t argue. She and Roland had been the ones to suggest they increase the tempo of their learning regimen, after all.
Marcus gestured to the girl. “You, in particular, Bailey. Roland likely has some new knowledge and difficult adjustments to make, but this is a whole new mode of existence for you. Our minds can only adapt to so much new material at once.”
“Correct,” said Roland. “In fact, I’d say we should get some sleep as soon as reasonably possible. We need time to process all we’ve learned. In the morning, we can—”
The shaman cut him off. “Not just yet. First, a quick review.”
He was about to protest, but Bailey put a hand on his arm. She looked at Marcus. “Okay. Review, how?”
“First,” the craggy man explained, “I will tell you what was truly happening in there, so you understand just what it was you did. Then we’ll try to do it again. Here.”
The girl folded her arms, and the wizard leaned against a tree.
Marcus spread his hands. “The Other naturally suppresses magic, or rather, it dissipates it. The place is thoroughly magical, so it absorbs the arcane, like trying to fire a squirt gun underwater.”
“Good analogy,” Roland complimented him.
The shaman went on, “You two were, in fact, using huge amounts of magic. It required more to have any effect whatsoever. But once you acclimated to the conditions there, you were able to make that tremendous effort without overthinking it. To use another analogy, it was like going through physical training with an oxygen deprivation mask on your face and heavy gear strapped to your body. You learn to use air more efficiently, and after the equipment is removed, you re-master the art of breathing without much trouble.”
Now, Bailey thought, it was starting to make sense. She’d somehow assumed the Other would be a place where magic was augmented, but the reverse was true. Back here, magic was more potent via the power of contrast.
Then she furrowed her brow. “Wait, before you told me magic was a normal part of reality, not separate from it. How does that explain the Other being ‘made of magic’ or whatever?”
The shaman had to pause for a second. “What is found in the Other,” he said at length, “is not fundamentally different from the material from which our world is made. But the proportions and concentrations are different, and it is located in a corner of the universe that is not subject to what we call space-time. That’s the best answer I can give you.”
“Fair enough.” She shrugged. She could tell Roland wanted to discuss the subject more, but he shut up while Marcus finished his spiel.
“So,” the shaman declared, “your arcane muscles are now stronger, so to speak—but beware the dangers of not knowing your own strength. Try to use as little raw power as you can, and focus instead on control and duration.”
Roland spread his hands. “Okay. Use it to what, though? I get the impression you’re building up to having us demonstrate our newfound skills.”
Marcus smiled. “Destroy me if you can,” he stated. “Using only the bare minimum. Don’t level the hills and trees around us. I’ve taken a liking to this landscape, and repairing it will take a while for an old man who’s a long way from home.”
Bailey shot him a wry though sympathetic look. “You’re not that old
, Marcus. It’s not like you have to apologize to us just because you’re not young and hip or something. Just try not to talk about music, and we should all be fine.”
He gave a low chortle, and it occurred to her that she didn’t know his age. He was certainly over forty, but she doubted he was any more than fifty-five. Gunney and her father were probably older.
“No,” said the shaman. “The music you listen to is terrible. Now try to kill me.”
Roland flexed his hands and assumed his persona of being too cool to be anything but bored with the situation. “Well, if you insist.”
Bailey just grinned and raised her fists.
* * *
“The hell?” Spall exclaimed as some alert beeped madly on his device.
Townsend glanced briefly at him. The road was too winding and erratic to risk taking his eyes off it for long. “What?”
His partner examined the screen for a few seconds. “Oh, crap. Real-time map of everyone’s favorite single-stoplight Nowheresville in rural Oregon. There are a bunch of goddamn flares going off in the woods just outside town, or something like that. So, you know, probably a bunch of magic.”
The driver’s teeth clenched almost without his knowledge or permission. “That’s System B-5, right?”
“Yeah,” Spall mumbled.
“Then it is magic. You should know that. That system tracks the electromagnetic discharges created by arcane disturbances. Anytime someone is throwing down with a bunch of curses, fireballs, attempts at enchanting a lottery ticket or a dating app profile, or trying to raise the dead, it makes a nice flare.”
Spall made a sour face. “Whoops. I forgot,” he retorted in a monotone. Then he grew a bit more lively. “But if that’s true, we are well into ‘metric fuck-ton’ territory in terms of the amount of magic being thrown around in Podunk there. It looks like the goddamn Fourth of July.”
Townsend raised his eyebrows. “Metric fuck-ton, you say? That much?”