Real Magic

by Chloe Garner

  “You couldn’t possibly be any worse off,” he answered, putting his arms up behind his head. She took the robe off and threw it up over his head like a sheet. He laughed, struggling to free himself as she looked down at the maze of cloths she had wrapped around her. She would have been decent to go in like that. Would have gotten more attention than she would have wanted, but she was certainly modest enough. She sighed.

  “I’m just going to get dressed over this stuff and worry about it later,” she said. “Glad I was wearing a sweater.”

  “My suit is going to be a pain,” he answered, and she laughed.

  “Why did you wear it if you were only going to change right back out of it?” she asked, struggling into her jeans in the confined space.

  “Because it sent a message to Tabby and the rest of the downstairs staff. If we took ourselves seriously, the message would trickle up and they wouldn’t try some of the more cheap tricks.”

  “I still have questions, actually,” Valerie said, pausing with her sweater spooled over her arms.

  “Oh?” he asked, turning his face half-sideways.

  “Liar,” she said, and he put a hand up to block his eye.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She put her sweater on, then got out of the car and climbed back into the passenger side.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  He climbed back, grunting on the way past.

  “These are hard to move in, in here.”

  “Told you,” she said. “You hiked them up to come across, but then you just sat on all of it and were like, why aren’t you moving?”

  He laughed.

  “So,” he said. “Questions.”

  She nodded, laughing and dodging as the second robe came flying up into the front seat.

  “Right. So. I mean. What does it all mean?”

  “Forty-two,” he said, and she looked back at him sharply.

  “Cheater,” he scolded, and she glowered at him.

  “I’m gonna look like such a bad date, you in a suit and me in my jeans,” she said.

  “Or I’m going to look super-eager,” he said. She put her face forward again, and he started tossing strips of fabric forward over her shoulder.

  “You’re actually going to take all of it off?” she asked, not looking back this time.

  “Not going to fit under the shirt,” he said. He’d stuffed as much stuff into his robes as she had into hers.

  “Oh, by the way, thanks for knocking off the floor flames,” he said. “I don’t think I could have done it without looking.”

  “I can’t believe they think that’s okay,” she said.

  “It’s not about being fair,” he said. “It’s about winning. Every time.”

  She closed her eyes, remembering the room.

  “Why were all of them there?” she asked. “Why am I so important?”

  “Shack managed to tell you a lot, then,” he said. “I’m telling you, your mom knows something, or something.”

  Valerie looked back at him, then closed her eyes and turned forward again.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Nothing you haven’t seen at a game of shirts and skins,” he said. “Should I warn you when I get down to my boxers?”

  “So I can look or so I can not look?” she teased.

  “Lady’s choice,” he answered.

  “Gemma is my dad’s sister,” she said. “His dad is Fact Alexander.”

  “You told me a lot of stuff,” Ethan said. “How did you avoid telling me that?”

  “It wasn’t my secret to tell,” she said. “If the Pure find out that Gemma and my dad are still working together, they’ll kill her, and she isn’t a really powerful magic user like my parents. She… She can just tell when someone’s lying, so everyone wants her to be on their side.”

  He whistled, low.

  “Can’t imagine what my dad would do for that kind of knowledge.”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah. I think it’s still dawning on me, how powerful it is. She just can’t defend herself, you know? She spies for my dad, so that they can prevent as many of the attacks as they can, but she’s taking all of these huge risks.”

  “I get it,” he said, his voice serious. “I know everyone is really trying hard to do the right thing, and then you’ve got my dad playing power politics. It’s so frustrating.”

  “Why do they do it like that?” Valerie asked. “Why bring up Hanson at all?”

  “Just trying to run up the bill,” he said. “Pretty normal tactic, actually. Make you feel like you’ve got all of this evidence against you, makes a neat list to put in front of the magic community if they need to do it that way. A longer list of stuff makes people less likely to check out any individual item. They can’t all be that thin, right? Stack ‘em together and people start to believe the Council must be onto something.”

  “Mmm,” Valerie said. The back door opened and Ethan came around to open her door, helping her out.

  “Let’s go eat,” he said. “We dodged a bullet today.”

  “I started to think that maybe I didn’t know what was going on,” Valerie said. “I really did.”

  “They could put you in front of a picture of the sky and convince you it was green,” he said. “They work hard at that kind of thing. They’re all of them bastards, and they’re only in it for their own power. Going to lose the war if they aren’t careful, because the people who are the closest to it, the ones who are most useful like your parents, they know just how full of it the Council is.”

  “Why is three-branch magic such a big deal?” Valerie asked. “I mean, everyone keeps trying to explain it that it damages their control, but… I mean, come on. Everyone who’s anyone actually knows better.”

  “All you have to do is keep everyone who’s anyone from talking about it, and then you’ve got this bar between the ones who are us and the ones who aren’t, and then talking about three-branch magic makes you one of the Superiors. It ropes them in and makes it so that they have to submit to the Council’s authority every single day. The Council wins every single day.”

  Valerie sighed, putting her arm through his.

  The hostess seated them without wait, and they ordered their food quickly after. The restaurant was sleepy and quiet, and it made Valerie feel tired in a warm way.

  “So they meant that I couldn’t even think about magic in three-branch terms, or else I was a traitor,” she said, and he nodded.

  “My dad never even mentioned it to me,” he said. “Can’t speak for Shack, but obviously Ivory didn’t either, and I kind of feel like she would have told Sasha, if she’d known. I think she avoids conflict, though, so maybe not. I don’t know.”

  She looked over at the window.

  “I have no idea what I’m getting us into,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  “We’ll handle it,” he said.

  “Daphne said that she cares about justice, the Angelsword woman. That she cares about right. But I’m ultimately taking her word on it, the woman who showed up… right before the Pure did, with a whole bunch of information about the cast that you saw in Europe.”

  “I know Daphne, for what it’s worth,” he said. “Well, I know of her. We were at her house… her manor for about a week, and I saw it while I was out wandering one day. She isn’t one of them, and she wasn’t lying to you about that part.”

  Valerie nodded, closing her eyes, and Ethan reached across the table to take her hands with his.

  “Hey,” he said. “Stay with me. You’re too tough for this to take you out.”

  “I’m overwhelmed,” she said. “I didn’t want to deal with it then, but I thought I was going to have to, and then I didn’t. We all just… agreed that we could put it off, and I thought I’d gotten away with it. That I could just stay at school…”

  She opened her eyes.

  “Sasha and I were just talking, this morning, about where I was going to stay this summer.”

 
“With me,” he said, frowning. “Had we not talked about that? Unless your mom showed up to get you, that was the only place you’d have been safe.”

  She shook her head, giving him a tired half-smile.

  “Sasha assumed I would go with her,” she said. “I thought I’d just stay at school.”

  “By yourself?” he asked. “You’d die.”

  “I would have been fine,” she said. “My mom would have pitched a fit if I’d gone to live with you instead.”

  He looked to the side, then laughed quietly.

  “Didn’t look at it that way. I mean, if you wanted to, you could live at my mom’s house and literally never see me.”

  He squeezed her hands and let go.

  “I assume you don’t want to sleep in the car tonight,” he said.

  She hadn’t thought about that, yet, either.

  “I’m not going to sleep with you, Ethan,” she said. “Just to have said it out loud.”

  He twisted his mouth, then shrugged.

  “On the run from my dad isn’t really how I would have picked it,” he said. “Most places don’t take cash anymore.”

  “I can sleep in the car,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  “I can try to find something,” he said. “I’m just warning that we might be outnumbered by the roaches.”

  “I can fix that,” she said impulsively, before she’d thought about it, then shrugged and nodded. She could fix that.

  “We should conserve our supplies,” he said. “I don’t want it to happen like it did to you guys before.”

  She nodded.

  “Fine. I won’t bring magical holocaust to the roaches,” she said. “Seriously, though, I’m not proud. That stuff doesn’t bother me. Hot shower in the morning and I’m good to go.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her and she grinned.

  “Shut up.”

  He shrugged one shoulder, then sat back in his seat as their food came.

  “I’ve been on all of two dates with you,” she said. “And that’s if you count this one. You’re not going to see me naked. End of story.”

  “I just saved your life,” he said, picking up his fork and pointing it at her. “I think that counts as a date.”

  She shook her head.

  “You saved my freedom,” she said. “And while I’m grateful for that, there’s no way they could have held me. Not for long.”

  He gave her a broad grin and nodded.

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” he said, then winked and dug into his dinner.

  The little seaside motel had seen better days, but the woman running it seemed friendly enough, though she had been a bit too eager to ask about what they were doing out so late, the two of them.

  It seemed like a foregone conclusion that they were here to have sex, and that was why they were paying cash. Valerie took her driver’s license back from the woman and took the key, then went outside with Ethan, letting him wrap his little finger around hers as they walked along the front sidewalk, under the drooping awning of the motel.

  “Never done this before,” he said.

  “You know, you don’t get any points for that,” she answered. “I would have been disgusted if you had.”

  “A lot of people would be shocked,” he said. “I… had a reputation, before.”

  A reputation a lot of people had tried to warn her about.

  She shrugged.

  “I never knew that guy,” she said, and he nodded.

  “No, you never met him.”

  She smiled, then leaned over to kiss his cheek, unlocking the door and opening it.

  The bathroom mirror faced the door, and Valerie giggled at it. Ethan looked like he was here after prom, and Valerie looked like she’d just come from the mall.

  “What?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  “We need to buy you some street clothes tomorrow,” she said. “You stand out anywhere.”

  “I think I look good,” he said. “Even if I did get dressed in the back of a car.”

  He locked the door behind them and came to stand next to her, leaning his head sideways to kiss her neck. She bent her knees and ducked away, holding up a finger.

  “Nope,” she said. “Just because we are sleeping in a motel room together should not give you any ideas.”

  “It isn’t the hotel room giving me ideas,” he said, tipping his head to the side and smiling at her, then he shook his head. “No, I can be a gentleman. If for no better reason than I know that you’re better armed than me right now.”

  “Better believe it,” Valerie answered happily enough. She went to sit on a bed, which creaked but smelled clean enough, and he sat opposite her.

  “Will we make it tomorrow?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “For someone who never has any idea where she is, you’re awfully good at finding the place you’re supposed to go.”

  “I don’t pay attention unless it’s important,” she said. “I found the cottage by just going and looking for it, and I’ve looked at that address in North Carolina… so many times. I’m a good student. You shouldn’t be surprised I ended up memorizing it.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “It’s that I can’t understand how you never know where you are.”

  “I get there,” she shrugged, laying down and pulling the blankets out from under her to snuggle in. They were lightweight, and not what she wanted today - the manic edge of giddiness wasn’t far off, still - but it was clean, it was safe, and Ethan was here.

  He stood after a moment, taking off his suit jacket and going to lay it on the end of the bed. He glanced at her, then shrugged out of the shirt as well, coming back to lay down opposite her and getting into the second bed.

  “You’re sure?” he asked. “I mean, not just sex, but…”

  “Not here,” she said. “Not now. I need to think.”

  “What did you do all the way here?” he asked, not teasing.

  “Reeled,” she said. “None of that made sense.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay.”

  “Someday, though,” she said. “I think.”

  He smiled.

  “Someday.”

  They slept late.

  No alarms to wake them up and exhausted from the previous day, the window outside was fully lit before Valerie’s eyes opened the first time, then she was sitting up in bed, alert and listening, afraid of things her mind couldn’t have named, just that moment.

  Ethan shifted and rubbed his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, not moving.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing I think. I don’t know.”

  He sat up slowly.

  “Did you hear something?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. I think… I think a dream’s still got me.”

  He looked over his shoulder at the window, then at his watch.

  “If we’re going to make it before dark, we should get going,” he said. “I’ll get dressed and check out. You said you wanted a shower.”

  She shook her head.

  “I just want to go. I don’t know why we’re here.”

  “Because we needed a place to sleep,” he said, stretching and going to get his shirt. “And it was on the way to North Carolina.”

  “We should have gone back to school,” she said. “Lady Harrington wouldn’t have let them take me.”

  “She wouldn’t have had a choice,” Ethan answered. “You know that. They declared themselves your guardians. What the Council says is what happens to you, and while Lady Harrington could put up a few procedural roadblocks, they would have gotten you eventually.”

  She nodded, finding her shoes and beginning to walk up and back between the beds.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “No one will tell me what to do.”

  “Go get in the car and start it for me, then decide what you want for breakfast,” he said. “How about that?”

  “Pancakes,” she said, and he gri
nned.

  “Easy choice.”

  “Why are you so calm?” she asked, and he shook his head.

  “Don’t know. Maybe because I’m just glad you didn’t disappear without me again.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “You know you’re going to a breakfast place in a tuxedo, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “So we can either go shopping first or we can make a scene of it. I don’t care.”

  She grinned, then closed her eyes and nodded.

  “All right. Yeah. Okay. We’re okay.”

  “We’re okay. And we’re going to get help.”

  She nodded.

  “And we’re going to get help. You really have to buy new clothes before we eat. I’m not going to sit and watch you eat pancakes in that.”

  He grinned and nodded.

  “All right. Here, where’s your key?”

  She went and got it from the nightstand, handing it to him awkwardly.

  “Someday,” he said, looking at her hand.

  “Get in the game, Trent,” she answered, and he grinned.

  “Yeah. I’ll meet you out at the car.”

  She looked around the room, feeling cold and a bit empty with nothing to pack or carry, then she left, walking back out to the car and opening the door.

  They hadn’t locked it, but Ethan swore they didn’t need to - that it was like the driveway to Survival School, and no one would mess with it so long as they didn’t call attention to it.

  She pulled up her sweater to go digging though for whatever she’d used to start it the first time, and while she’d managed to start the engine in mere seconds the first time, without the robe on it was a lot harder to find things, and it took her a couple minutes this time.

  Ethan came back out and got in as she finished the cast, and the engine roared to life again. He put the car in reverse and looked over his shoulder.

  “Are we going to have to keep it running sometimes?” he asked. “How many times can you start it?”

  “I’m going to see if I can figure out another way that lets you just turn the key without the key being there,” Valerie said. “I can’t keep doing it this way.”

  He looked over at her appraisingly for a moment and she raised an eyebrow.

  “What?”

  “Just looking at what I need to blend in with,” he said, grinning and pulling out of the parking spot.