by Devon Monk
Sean, in his ever-present after-hours robe and pajamas, stood just slightly in front and to one side of Duncan as if he were trying to protect him. From what?
From me?
Horror trotted fast fingers from my gut to my throat.
Kit was next to her husband. She also wore a robe. She held a plastic bowl dripping water onto the carpet.
“Hey.” I blinked hard and locked my teeth so they would stop chattering. “Are we okay? Are you okay?”
“We’re all fine,” Sean soothed. “You can let go of the magic now, Random. Just let go.”
Magic?
Storm clouds curled against the ceiling, pulsing with light. Rain fell, faint and weirdly insubstantial, like someone had scratched raindrop flecks in the air with a metal paintbrush.
My nightstand was littered with broken glass from my lamp, and the air smelled of fire and electricity.
But it was the razor blades gathered in snowdrifts against the edges of the floor that made my heart pound too hard, too fast.
I’d been dreaming those knives. I’d made them out of magic in my dream to save Duncan.
And I’d made them out of magic in real life too. I could have hurt Duncan, Mr. Spark, Mrs. Spark. I could have killed them.
“All the magic you pulled up, dude.” Duncan waved at the room, like I couldn’t see it. See it all. His hand was bleeding. He was bleeding. Blood.
I’d done that. I’d hurt him.
I made a high, whining sound in the back of my throat, suddenly unable to breathe.
I’d hurt Duncan with magic.
This had to be a nightmare. This had to be the real nightmare. I wanted to wake up, needed to wake up.
Now, now, now.
“Easy. Easy, son. Everything is all right.” Sean crossed to my bed, reaching out as if to comfort me, gather me to him.
But I couldn’t look away from the blood on Duncan’s skin.
“You are seriously freaking out, Ran.” Duncan lifted his hand. That’s when he noticed the line of blood spinning down the center of his palm and trickling to his elbow.
“Oh, shit.” He quickly turned his back to me, toward his mom. She grabbed a sock off the top of my dresser and started mopping up the blood, trying to find the source of the wound.
That sound came out of my throat again and I clutched at the blankets, scrambling back against the headboard.
I should leave. Save them. From me. From magic.
But I was frozen. Trapped.
“Random?” Mr. Spark again. Gentle. Patient. “Son, you had a bad dream. But we’re all fine.” The mattress dipped as he sat next to me.
“Duncan is fine. It’s a scratch. I just need you to let go of the magic, okay?”
A warm hand cradled the side of my face, cupped my cheek and tipped my head so that I was forced to look away from Duncan and had to look into his dad’s eyes instead.
He wasn’t wearing his glasses. That’s what I noticed. That one detail that showed just how quickly he’d rushed in here.
“Let go.” He nodded. “Go ahead and break the spell.”
I imagined scissors. Snipped. Everything in my room went silent.
It had been noisy? Yes. Wind. A storm. Rain falling like a thousand tiny ball bearings striking tin.
“Good.” Mr. Spark’s encouraging smile matched his voice. “You’re fine, Random. We’re fine. Duncan’s fine.”
My skin was too cold, too hot. I wanted to throw up. Wanted to escape this moment. To step out of my skin and never step back in again.
“Easy,” he said. “Just keep your eyes on me. I’ve got you. You’re okay. Drink this for me.” A glass of water appeared in his hand.
I drank.
“Eat this.” One of Duncan’s meal bars was exchanged for the glass.
I chewed, swallowed, never breaking eye-contact with Mr. Spark. His eyes were warm and welcoming and my everything right now.
“Good. Very good. Okay, now you can lay back down.”
I couldn’t move. I was stuck as if someone had stitched all the edges of me into the fabric of the air.
“Shove over, Ran.” Duncan pushed gently at my shoulder, urging me to the other side of my bed.
He’d done this so many times when we were kids—we both had—that I switched into automatic and moved over. He dropped down next to me, fiddled with the pillows then nudged me onto one.
Shouldn’t the pillow be wet? The blankets too? I was pretty sure the ice water Mrs. Spark threw at me had been real. Why wasn’t my bed wet?
“This?” Duncan shoved his hand in front of my face. “Is a Band-Aid.”
I focused on the little beige strip of plastic pressed against the back of his hand. He picked at the edge of it and pulled it off, revealing a shallow cut maybe an inch long.
“It’s not bleeding anymore. It’s barely a paper cut. There isn’t even any blood on the Band-Aid.” He turned the plastic strip so I could see the white rectangle that had been pressed against his wound.
Then, he said the words I really needed to hear from him. “You’re an idiot. I’m fine. I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”
That was our childhood promise. When we got hurt in the game, when we got hurt wrestling with each other, that’s what we said when we were telling the whole truth about how bruised up and broken we were after a hit.
“Jesus. Duncan.” I breathed and everything emptied out of me. The fear, the confusion, the shock, the guilt, leaving me a Random-shaped puddle in the middle of my bed. “I hurt you. I hurt you with magic.”
He stretched out on his side facing me, tucked one arm under his head while still holding his hand annoyingly close to my eyes.
“This is a scratch. Tiny. Nothing to worry about.”
Nothing? I’d lost control of magic and had used it to hurt someone. Used it to hurt him. My brother. My friend.
“Wh-what happened?”
“You were dreaming.” Sean sat at my desk, Kit leaned against it. He had his arm around her hips. The bowl she’d been holding was gone and he had his glasses.
I’d lost some time during my freak out.
“You were sleeping,” she said. “We heard something that sounded like thunder, and then glass breaking and other noises coming from your room.”
“Dude,” Duncan said, “it was amazing. Rain falling like glass out of this…this sky. Storm sky, and there was like little lightning bolts and fire and everything. So cool.”
“It hurt you. I hurt you.”
“You made magic so real I could smell the rain. So real, one of those bolts of lightning hit me.”
“Wait. What? You were struck by lightning?”
“Hell, yes, I was struck. It stung too. So cool.”
I covered my face with my hands and groaned.
He slapped my chest. “Seriously. Amazing. You should have magic nightmares more often. Do you think you can dream up a monster? Maybe Godzilla? A tiny Godzilla that destroys a tiny Tokyo?”
I groaned again. “You can’t be serious.”
“We could film it. Make some money. It would be sweet.” He settled down and did that thing where he flipped the pillow over, folded it, unfolded it, then put it back in its original position.
“Random,” Sean said.
I’d sort of hoped he’d left. I moved my hands away from my face and looked over at him.
“Are you okay to go back to sleep?”
“I’ll stay here with him, Dad.” Duncan yawned. “Shake him if he starts weather wizarding.”
“I thought you might.” Sean smiled fondly at Duncan but was still waiting for my answer.
“I’m not that tired.”
That was a big fat lie. I was tired. Very tired. My clock showed three in the morning. Kit hadn’t even gotten home until around midnight. Duncan and I had a road game tomorrow up in Tacoma. Sean had an early shift.
I didn’t want them to lose any more sleep because of me.
“I’ll drift off.”
“Do you want to
talk about your dream?”
No. No, I most certainly did not want to talk about that.
From the look on Sean’s face, he could tell. “All right. That’s all right.” He pressed against his thighs and stood. “If you decide you want to talk, any time, Ran, I’ll brew the coffee.”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
Kit reached over and pressed her hand against my hand. “We love you, Random. This was just a bad dream. Your magic got wrapped up in it, but we are not concerned it’s going to happen again tonight.”
I nodded. They might not be concerned, but I was.
She shook her head. “You are so stubborn. All right. I’m getting some sleep. Someone better make me espresso in the morning.”
“That would be me,” Sean said from the doorway. He held his hand out and she went to him.
I took a moment to watch them lean into each other’s space like they were pulling up to a cozy fire. There was love between them, given and received. It gave me hope that everything was all right. That my home, my family, was still here no matter how much I changed.
If I had lost control… I shivered hard. It could have been so bad. So much worse.
“Shut up,” Duncan said. “You’re thinking too loud and you’re worrying. You’re not going to blow up the house with your mighty, mighty magic.”
“You don’t know that.”
He grunted. He was still lying on his side, facing me, his eyes closed, my extra blanket from the bottom of the bed pulled up to his shoulders. He flopped his hand out without looking. It landed on my arm. “I got you. If you do magic, I’ll know.”
I just stared at him.
He finally opened his eyes, and it wasn’t the sleepy gaze of my friend behind that look. It was the steady stare of his wolf.
On guard. Because of me.
“For you,” he said. “I’ll look out for you. I’ll wake you up before anything disastrous happens.”
“You wake me up if I do magic,” I said. “Not just if it’s disastrous.”
He closed his eyes, a small smile on his mouth.
“Duncan. You wake me up the second I do magic.”
Still nothing.
“Promise.”
He slitted open one eye. “Promise I’ll wake you up the second you use dangerous magic, or at least as soon as I’ve recorded enough on my phone to post online.”
I kicked him and kept pushing. “Get out of my bed.”
He laughed and used his weight and stupid height to stay right where he was, one hand braced on my headboard, one foot hooked under my footboard.
“Out!”
“I’ll sleep on your floor. You know I will. And we have a game tomorrow. You don’t want me to be tired for the game do you?” He batted his stupid eyelashes at me and I stopped shoving.
“The second I start using magic, you wake me up.”
“Fine. I’ll wake you up. The second. Promise. Jesus, Random. It was just a little lightning storm.”
“You bled.” I hated that my voice cracked.
“I bleed a lot more on the ice, and I do that for fun. Your magic scratched me a tiny bit. Then you woke right up.”
“Did I?”
“Well, not when we called your name, but when Mom threw water on you—which, hilarious—you snapped right out of it.”
He pointed over his shoulder at the nightstand next to him. “See that cup of water? All set to go. I am so ready to throw it in your face and not get in trouble for it.” He gave me a big grin and I couldn’t help it, I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t enjoy this.” But the tightness in my chest finally unwound and I settled beneath my quilt. Not the same quilt that had been on my bed when I first went to sleep. They must have done a change of blankets while I was in the middle of my panic attack. The new quilt was an older one from the hall closet. It smelled of the lemon freshener Sean kept in there.
Duncan dropped his hand on my arm again, a heavy, familiar weight. I closed my eyes, feeling like I’d never erase the image of Duncan, standing in my room, face confused, as blood dripped down his arm.
Turned out using magic and then panicking afterwards was exhausting.
Despite my best intentions, I fell asleep.
Twenty-Three
Morning came too soon, wrapped in the smells of sausage and strong coffee. I had to push Duncan out of bed, and he grumbled about it, so I took the shower first.
Kit was already off to work. Sean had of our plates ready, coffee steaming in travel mugs on the table.
“I did some preliminary research.” He nodded toward one of the plates on the table.
I sat and started in on the food. I was starved.
“There are some classes you can take. The basic things to do when magic doesn’t behave how you expect it to.” He took a drink of his coffee.
“Kit is going to check in at the hospital and see if they’re still doing the online meditation sessions that help ground and focus. Help with anxiety too. There are a couple apps she recommended. She uses them when her co-workers drive her nuts. You could do those on the road.”
My stomach knotted and I put down my fork. “Maybe I shouldn’t go.”
Duncan strolled into the room and slapped the back of my head. “You’re going, idiot. We don’t have anyone to cover your position since Magee caught pneumonia, remember?”
“What if I lose control on the ice?”
Duncan flopped into a chair and stretched his long legs. He made a dismissive sound then folded a piece of toast in half and shoved it into his mouth.
“Is that something you’re concerned about?” Sean asked.
I was worried about magic, especially since the whole thing last night. But I’d never lost control on the ice.
As long as I was awake, I could control the magic inside me. No matter what the team captain thought.
“I think. I don’t think I’ll lose control. But last night…”
Duncan chased the toast with a gulp of coffee and stabbed at the sausage.
“Last night was a bad dream. It happens. You’re still you, Random. How many times I gotta say that? You’re not out to hurt anyone. Magic won’t hurt someone unless you want it to.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Yeah, yeah,” Duncan said. “You hit if you have to, but hockey hurt isn’t what I’m talking about. You flipped your shit over a tiny scratch last night. You aren’t going to Hulk out and start breaking bones.”
Sean’s phone alarm rang.
“That’s it, boys. Finish up. Are you packed?” He switched off the coffee maker, tucked his phone in his pocket and picked up his messenger bag that I knew carried an identical lunch to the one he’d made Kit this morning.
He was good with details like that.
“Packed last night,” Duncan said around a mouthful of sausages. “Before the magic show.” He stood, gathered his plate and mine.
I grabbed the toast before he whisked my plate away to the sink. He ran water. I picked up his travel mug.
“Random?” Sean asked.
“Packed.”
I finished my toast, pulled on my coat and hoisted my duffel and gear bag over my shoulders.
Sean locked the house and walked with us through the gentle drizzle to Duncan’s car.
Just like he had always done for away games he wasn’t able to attend, he gave us both a warm hug.
“Good luck tonight. I’m sorry your mother and I won’t be there but I’ll be listening.”
The league was underfunded enough that most of the games weren’t televised. But a local radio station had a broadcaster who was a fan. He and a friend did their best to cover all the games in the Pacific Northwest and they streamed the broadcast.
“It’s all good, Dad,” Duncan said as Sean released him from the hug. “We’ll be home tomorrow afternoon. With a win!”
“Don’t jinx it,” Sean chuckled. “Call me after the game.”
Duncan sauntered around to the driver’s side and Sean squeezed
my shoulder. “You are a fine hockey player, Random. And a very strong wizard. Both of those things are good. I want you to hear me say that. Did you hear me say that, or should I repeat it?”
I nodded. “I heard.”
He waited, searching my eyes one last time, then gave me a smile and another quick hug. “Good. Now go kick some ass.”
I laughed. He so rarely swore, it always surprised me when he did.
“Yes, sir.”
He winked, then strolled over to his car and ducked inside.
Duncan’s Vega gave out a tortured groan, wheezed, and grudgingly kicked over.
I got in fast before the old thing gave up for good.
Twenty-Four
The bus ride to Tacoma was tense. Playful shoves quickly shifted into arguments, friendly insults into snarls. Coach told everyone to settle down, which lasted until we crossed Oregon’s border.
Then everyone went back to snarling and shoving again.
We’d only pulled one win out of a game and now we were headed to face our rivals, the Tide. It was the end of October. We had a lot of season left. We had time to turn things around.
But it felt like we’d never get over this losing streak.
We’d been practicing hard. Working on plays that would shut down the Tide’s physicality and speed.
We were ready for this. Coach had told us so. Said it with confidence.
Nothing but a win was going to wash the bad mood off of us.
I put on my headphones, and flipped through my phone for music. A message pinged.
I didn’t recognize the number. Opened the text.
It was a photo of a letter. A lot like the last letter I’d gotten. White paper, printed message.
You were warned. Get out of the league or pay the price.
Beneath that, a grainy photo. It was the back alley in Redding. Seven guys closing in on someone. Closing in on me.
I was so shocked, I just stared at it as white noise filled my head.
Someone was following me? Someone had seen the fight?
Someone had sent those guys after me? To beat me up?
