Dead But Not Forgotten

by Charlaine Harris

  That didn’t make him comfortable with me being the one doing the yanking.

  “Can you get a bowl from the kitchen?” I asked. The fruit was ripening with glorious speed, and that meant I needed to focus on suspending the spell. The last thing I wanted was to cover my entire dining room with rotten cherries.

  “Sure,” said Bob. The footsteps started again, followed by the sound of a cabinet swinging open. I kept my attention focused on the cherry tree, where the cherries were about two seconds away from the peak of ripeness.

  Witchcraft is a funny thing. All the really good spells are in Greek or Latin or something that sounds like Greek or Latin, but is probably as made up as Klingon or Pig Latin. It doesn’t make sense. Either only people in Europe ever figured out how magic worked—and I know that’s not true—or magic didn’t exist until some point after the rise of the Roman Empire, and that doesn’t make sense, either. We have stories about vampires and weres and fairies that go back way earlier than the Caesars, so why should witchcraft be any different? Answer is, it shouldn’t be. Our insistence on dead languages is all in our heads.

  It’s all in our heads, but I still didn’t want a dining room full of rotten cherries. I rattled off the syllables of the break spell, making the modified hand gesture I’d concocted to go with them, and was gratified when the cherries stopped swelling. The tree rustled once before settling in its pot with a faint but audible thump that knocked the first few cherries off their branches. Most of them hit the table. I managed to catch one and looked at it admiringly before I popped it into my mouth, where it burst in a sweet rush of cherry juice against my tongue.

  “Well?”

  I turned to face Bob, grinning with cherry-flavored lips, before spitting the cherry seed into my palm. I tucked it into my pocket for luck and said, “I’m baking a pie tonight.”

  The nice thing about being a witch in a committed if complicated relationship with another witch is not needing to explain things like, “Where did you get twenty pounds of fresh cherries?” Bob wouldn’t have bothered to ask even if he hadn’t seen the tree. Instead, he went for the practical side of things, asking, “What are we going to do with a cherry tree?”

  I paused in the act of pitting a bowlful of cherries, looking past him to the dining room where our cherry tree, branches still laden with fruit, waited for its fate to be decided. “I don’t know. I think it makes a nice centerpiece, don’t you? Plus we can trigger another harvest any-time we feel like a fresh slice of cherry pie.”

  Bob looked at me dubiously. I beamed at him. That only seemed to intensify his dubiousness, returning him to what I sometimes thought of as his factory setting: the funereal, almost dour man who’d managed to catch my full attention just by seeming like the last person in the world who’d have any interest in the arcane. “And you don’t think anyone will notice the buckets of cherry seeds? Or were you planning to bribe all the neighbors into silence with cherry pies?”

  “Now that you suggest it . . .” I batted my eyelashes. Bob scowled. Laughing, I went back to pitting cherries.

  “Amelia.” Bob sounded perfectly calm, which didn’t really tell me much; Bob almost always sounded perfectly calm. Bob was one of those men who could have looked a charging T. rex in the face and said, “I thought you were extinct,” while the rest of us were working up a good head of running and screaming. That was part of his appeal, if I was being honest with myself. He kept me calm. “I know you well enough to know that you didn’t just start experimenting with cherry stones because you wanted a pie. What were you trying to accomplish here? What was the goal?”

  I focused a little more tightly on the bowl of pitted cherries in front of me. It was starting to look disturbingly like a bowl of organs, making me wonder whether haruspicy would work if you read fruit instead of a sliced-open dove. “I want to try something,” I said quietly.

  “What was that?”

  “I said, I want to try something.” I raised my head. “I haven’t really been stretching myself since that whole thing with Sookie and the blood bond, and I can’t really say that using a ritual someone else created to sever an artificial connection to a dead man is ‘stretching myself.’ The universe doesn’t want to connect living things to dead ones. Breaking them apart doesn’t really upset the natural order of things. Good for me if I don’t want the magic going strange, but not so good if what I’m looking for is a learning experience.”

  “As someone who’s been on the receiving end of a ‘learning experience,’ can I just say that I’m not really that excited when you go looking for them?”

  I flicked a cherry at him. It bounced off his shirt, leaving a little red mark behind, like a lipstick stain or a wound. Bob looked at it, sighed, and murmured a word with too many vowels. The stain lifted off his shirt and flapped, like a molecule-thin butterfly, to hover in the air above the garbage. Once there, it burst, sending cherry juice raining down on the coffee grounds and used paper towels.

  “Very mature,” he said.

  “I’m not going to turn you into a cat again,” I said. “I know what I did wrong that time, and besides, it’s not like the spell I want to try would be directed at you. I’ve learned my lesson about using magic on my boyfriend.”

  “It’s a miracle,” said Bob dryly. “So what, exactly, do you want to attempt that would somehow be made easier by being able to magically generate a cherry crop in our dining room?”

  I smiled hopefully. “Help me get our pie in the oven and I’ll explain?”

  Bob sighed and reached for the spare cherry pitter.

  “Lots of cultures have stories about witches who’ve bound a wind to their service somehow,” I said, taking another bite of cherry pie. It had come out perfectly, with a flaky golden crust and just the right amount of sugar to make the cherry juice that oozed out of the pastry taste like a little bit of heaven. “Winds are supposed to be like puppies. If you do the right things and say the right words, they’ll come when you call, heel, sit, stay, the whole nine yards. Doesn’t that sound like about the best thing you’ve ever heard? Who needs the SPCA when you can have a pet weather pattern?”

  “Since I was the last ‘pet’ you had, this isn’t really selling me on the idea,” said Bob blandly. “I have two major reservations. First, where does this wind come from? Are you stealing something from the local troposphere? Because we don’t have the most stable weather in the world here in New Orleans, and I don’t want the next hurricane to have your name on it.”

  His words stung, and rightly so. Living between the Mississippi and the haunted waters of Lake Pontchartrain meant that we were always at risk of a flood or storm, and the scars from Katrina were still all over the city for anyone with eyes to see. This was the last place for someone to be fooling around with weather magic—which was exactly why I planned to start fooling around with weather magic. If we could just find a way to make the storms a little less severe, either by making friends with the local winds or by taming breezes that could interfere when things started to get bad, we might be able to keep things from being quite so bad in the future.

  “You know that new girl, Minda? The one who thinks she’s better at witching than anyone?”

  Bob nodded, looking perplexed.

  I stabbed my fork into my pie. “I mentioned I was researching this ritual, and she said . . .” I swallowed. “She said, ‘Too little, too late,’ like the storms we’ve been having were my fault somehow. Like I should have been wrestling with the wind years ago. I asked her what she meant by that, and she said I knew what she meant. That if I wanted to sit around like some little old lady, knitting and gossiping while the world fell down, that was my lookout. It got under my skin, Bob. I won’t pretend it didn’t. I want to be able to do something the next time a storm blows up.”

  This time, Bob’s nod was slower, and he looked almost understanding. “You didn’t answer my questions,” he said. “S
tart there.”

  “I think you call the wind in from elsewhere; at least that’s how it tends to work in the old stories,” I said carefully. “Winds that live where you send out the call are more like, I don’t know, feral cats. They aren’t interested in being tamed. I don’t know why foreign winds would be any different, but everything I can find says that they are.”

  “This is sounding more and more sketchy,” said Bob. “What does Octavia have to say about this?”

  I bristled. “Nothing,” I said. “She’s not my sponsor anymore, and I don’t need her permission to try new things. I’d consult her if I thought I needed her. I don’t.”

  “And I would still be a cat if not for her, so you’ll forgive me for being a little cautious,” said Bob. “Which takes us to my other concern: What happens if this goes wrong? What happens if you attract a nice little wind and it comes with a not-so-nice big hurricane? I don’t want you to be the reason this city finally washes away.”

  “I’m getting a little annoyed about all the little ‘Amelia can’t control her magic’ comments tonight, okay? I’ll head out to the river before I try anything, and I’ve modified the stasis spell enough that it should be able to stop anything that I start before it snowballs out of control.” I forked off another bite of pie. “I won’t say it’s perfectly safe—magic is never perfectly safe—but I think it’s worth the risk, and I don’t think that the chances of it going wrong are high enough that it’s not worth doing.” I canted my chin down a bit and looked up at him through my eyelashes before playing my hole card: “I was really hoping you’d be there to check my ritual circle and make sure that I’m not missing any steps.”

  Bob sighed, the long, pained sound that meant I’d just won the argument. “Do you promise not to flood the state?” he asked.

  I grinned.

  Weather witchery is difficult for a lot of reasons. There’s the whole “weather is a big, complex thing” to be considered, as well as the potential for property damage if it’s done wrong, but mostly the problem is in the intricacy of the rituals involved. I normally wouldn’t have attempted something like this without at least three witches, preferably four or five. But with most of the practitioners in the city still focusing on cleaning up their own neighborhoods, it was just me and Bob setting up the circle down by the riverbank. Lightning bugs flickered in and out of view, and a soft breeze was blowing out of the west, smelling like fresh flowers and somebody’s home-baked muffins. It was making me hungry.

  “I’m still not sure this is a good idea,” said Bob.

  “Never know until you try it,” I said, and held out a hand. “Can I get the jasmine?” Bob solemnly handed me a Tupperware bowl full of dried flowers, and I commenced to scattering them around the lines of salt, iron ball bearings, and cedar ash that I had already drawn. Something this size required more effort than a slap-and-tickle “runes and salt and prayer” design. This was the kind of ritual where I needed to cast it like I meant it.

  “Let’s just go over things one more time,” Bob said.

  “I know what that means,” I said. “That means ‘Let me explain why this is a bad idea one more time, because I’m sure this is the time you’ll mysteriously decide to listen.’ Well, I’m not going to listen, and I’m not going to change my mind, so how about we skip that part and move straight to me getting down to business?”

  Bob smiled in that slow way that always made me want to tear his clothes off with my teeth. “It’s a good thing I like it when you’re impulsive,” he said, and took a step back from my circle. “I’m here if you need me.”

  “All right.” I sank to the ground, sitting cross-legged to minimize the risk that I’d somehow blur one of the lines I’d spent so much time and care to draw. Resting my hands on my knees, I thought back to the words I’d translated from the books of folklore that first led me down this possibly foolish road. There were so many different variations, and so many possibilities, all of them leading to either success or failure.

  I’m not a girl who likes to fail.

  What I am is a girl who likes to get things right the first time. I’d spent so long staring at the slips of paper with my translations written on them that when I closed my eyes, I could see the strings of cursive unspooling against my eyelids like a map waiting to be followed. The first word came to my tongue like a promise. The second followed like a prayer, and then it was just words upon words, spilling out into the cool night air with all the force of a vow that had been yearning to be heard. Magic is a thing that lends itself to metaphor, because there’s nothing in this world or any other that can be said to be exactly like it; magic is what magic is, and all our descriptions have to call upon other things, or make no sense at all.

  I could feel Bob standing behind me, his love and support mingling with a healthy dose of wariness and concern. It wasn’t like mind reading—I couldn’t tell if he was wondering whether he’d left the oven on or admiring my ass—but it was a sort of temporary empathy, his magic resonating back on mine in a form of complicated sonar. I could feel the moths in the air and the frogs in the mud and the gators in the water around me the same way, although they were mostly just presence and not personality. That was all right by me. I’ve never much felt the need to get up close and personal with any part of an alligator, and that includes its feelings.

  The ritual was long enough to be exhausting and short enough to be achievable. I gasped out the last of the words and felt the air around me go suddenly and impossibly still, as if I had—without moving—stepped into the eye of a storm. Bob cleared his throat nervously. I opened my eyes.

  Nothing hovered in the still air in front of me; nothing twitched its ephemeral tail back and forth like an anxious puppy, waiting for me to notice it and remark on how clever it was. My eyes went wide. “Bob?” I squeaked. “Do you, uh . . . I guess ‘see’ isn’t the best word here, is it? Do you perceive what I’m perceiving?”

  “Do you mean, ‘Can I tell that there is a breeze of some sort hanging a foot from your face’? Because if that’s what you mean, then yes, I can.” Bob sounded rattled. I wasn’t sure if that was because he hadn’t had faith in my magical abilities, or because this whole situation was more than a little unnerving. I was going with the latter, since I was pretty rattled, and I had absolute faith in my own magical abilities. Besides, that way I didn’t have to be mad at him, and I was going to want some celebratory sex as soon as we got back to the apartment.

  Slowly, I began to grin. “It worked,” I said. “I put together a ritual based on research and logic, and it worked. I am the man.”

  “Point of order,” said Bob.

  “I am the woman,” I amended. Cautiously, I reached for the stationary wind. “Hi, little fella. I’m Amelia. I’m the one who called you here. It’s nice to meet you. I hope we’re going to be friends.”

  “Do winds make friends?”

  “Shush. Having a moment of deep mystic import here,” I said, and continued reaching my hand toward the nothing I could sense hovering just outside the boundaries of my ritual circle. Something brushed my fingertips, something insubstantial as air that nonetheless tingled like an electrical storm. My eyes widened in wonder and delight—

  —and just like that, my little bit of tamed nothing was gone, vanishing back into the night. I jolted backward, feeling as if I’d just been stung by a swarm of hornets.

  “What just happened?” I demanded. “Where’d my wind go?”

  “Where did all the winds go?” Bob sounded more frightened than dismayed. I twisted without getting out of my ritual circle, frowning at him. He frowned right back, gesturing wildly with his hands. “The air is completely still. How often have you been this close to the water and not felt any wind at all? They stopped right before yours showed up. I thought it was part of your spell.”

  “I didn’t cast anything that should have interfered with the wind outside of the
one I was calling,” I protested. I climbed to my feet, the pins and needles in my calves telling me that I should probably have done that a few minutes earlier. “I’m serious, Bob, I know what I did and didn’t do, and I didn’t do anything as big as that.”

  Bob frowned slowly. “Who did you tell that you were going to try this?”

  “Not much of anyone, really . . .” I said. His frown deepened. I sighed. “All right, I may have told a few of the other witches. Just to get their perspective on things.”

  “Did you share your notes?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

  Bob picked up a handful of salt and flower petals from the edge of the ritual circle, holding his hand flat and blowing on the mess as hard as he could. It drifted out as an improbable cloud before falling to the mud, forming a rough arrow that pointed east.

  “I love magic,” I said, and grabbed the ritual supplies before taking off at a run.

  Without wind, the surface of the river was perfectly still, more like a sheet of glass than an actual body of water. The fireflies had disappeared. They probably didn’t know how to fly in air that wasn’t moving at all. I ran, and Bob paced me, both of us watching for anything out of the ordinary. I don’t know what I was expecting, really; a circle like mine, maybe, or someone holding up a sign that read, I am the source of all your problems.

  Honestly, the woman standing on the surface of the water about eight feet out from shore was overkill where the “unusual sights” department was concerned.