by S. E. Smith
“God, Wallace. Do you have to be so clumsy?”
Randi’s smile fooled everyone, including her at first, until Wallace had become the target of the woman’s dislike.
“Sorry.” The apology was automatic, and she wished she could take it back. “I didn’t know you were that close.”
Randi bumped her again—again not an accident. There wasn’t anyone here to see. Water sloshed up against one side of her cup. The pit of her stomach turned into a black hole.
The woman lurched back a step. “Ouch!”
She looked at Randi-with-an-I and decided she’d had enough. “Now what?”
Randi’s mouth went tight. “What the hell did you do?”
“Nothing.” Wallace stared at the paper cup in her hand. Whole. Full of water. Her stomach remained hollowed out. There wasn’t much worse than a pissed off witch who hated people like her. People like her meaning “not very talented.” In all fairness, other obvious reasons for Randi’s issues with her appeared not to be a factor. She was doing her best to keep an open mind about that. Some people were not nice. That was Randi.
They were in the kitchen at Maddy Winters’ Kensington home, two bus rides and a long, long walk from Wallace’s South Berkeley apartment. Randi lived in San Francisco and drove a red Lexus.
Randi hooked a finger in the cup Wallace held and jerked. Water went airborne.
The black hole in her mid-section shifted, and it was like being on the ocean in bad weather; her usual reaction to conflict—it made her sick to her stomach. There was a hiss, and then the only thing left of the water was steam, and that odd hollowness in her stomach, and the nausea. She’d been reacting to conflict like that since foster home number three, starting when she was eight or nine. She was twenty-six now, and nothing had changed.
Randi staggered back a step, one hand on her upper chest. Her mouth and eyes twisted up in pain. “What the—ouch.”
“Are you okay?” Wallace had never, ever been able to see anyone in distress and do nothing about it. She reached for Randi and got her hand slapped away.
“Listen to me, you no talent street bitch.”
Street bitch was Randi’s favorite rhyme for “street witch.” A term, it so happened, that barely applied to Wallace, and one that Randi didn’t use when others were around to hear. She’d been called a lot worse. A lot.
“I don’t know what you did, but that was out of line.” Randi put her hands on Wallace’s shoulders and shoved. “You are nothing. Nothing, you hear me?”
Wallace hit a limit she hadn’t known she had. For the sake of getting along, she’d put up with a lot of bullshit from Randi. Dozens of verbal jabs disguised as jokes that Wallace let slide because she did not want the stress. But this? Crossing into the physical? No. “Leave me alone, Randi.”
Randi leaned close. “If you ever do that again, I will harm you.”
“Maddy won’t like that.”
They both heard a commotion from the living room. Randi lowered her voice. “Who do you think she wants around in the long run? A no talent like you? Or me?” She set her weight on one hip. “I really don’t think there’s going to be any contest.”
Wallace willed the woman to settle down. The calmer and more peaceful Wallace was, the calmer others were. That had been her lifelong observation. After years of being picked on as a girl, taunted for being poor, for being an orphan, for being tall, being black, too smart, too dumb, not black enough, for being different, she’d developed a gift for internal serenity.
“What the ever loving hell?” Maddy Winters strode into the kitchen where Wallace and her nemesis stood in silence. Her pointy-toed shoes clicked with authority, and her eyes were big and wide and fixed on Randi.
Well thank God for any favors to come her way. Randi was about to get in trouble for the unauthorized use of magic.
“Randi?” Maddy was all of what, five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet? There wasn’t a single person in his house who wasn’t afraid of Maddy if she was angry.
Not so for Wallace. She could be angry enough to end the world, and she wouldn’t scare anyone. Not that she would ever get that angry, but if she did, she wouldn’t impress anyone. Nobody, but nobody, took her seriously in that respect. Her one, meager, talent had nothing to do with magical power, though it had kept her alive through a lot of unpleasantness. Without her ability defuse a volatile situation, she’d have been dead a long time ago.
“I’m sorry, Maddy.” Randi smoothed her golden hair into place. “I guess I overreacted.”
“What happened?”
“I was getting a drink, and she was here.” That was a familiar tone of scorn.
Maddy shot Wallace a glance. Wallace kept her expression neutral. Nothing would touch her.
Randi was all about the wide-eyed incredulity. Honestly, you’d think she was the nicest person in the whole world. “She jostled me.”
“Say what?” Wallace lost a bit of her I don’t give a shit about this attitude.
“You ran into me.” Randi pointed at her. “And I was just so hyped up from our practice, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t mean it, Maddy. Honestly, I didn’t. You know I’m working on my control.” Randi’s saccharine smile disappeared when she faced Wallace. “I apologize. I should not have used magic against anyone, but especially someone as defenseless as you.”
True. It was true, and she, from her place of disturbed serenity, summoned a smile. Her stomach stayed empty, and it was making her lightheaded. God, she wanted this to be over. Back to no one paying attention. She’d just sit in the back, failing at everything, and they’d all just leave her alone.
“I got fed up.” Randi bounced up on her feet. Quite the trick in those shoes. She looked to Maddy for support. Wallace couldn’t tell what Maddy thought, but nothing good, considering her frown.
“Fed up over what?” Maddy said.
“Wallace. We’re all fed up with her. I’m sorry, Maddy, but she contributes nothing. It’s just so much easier when she’s not here. You must have noticed that. And then she was in here giving me a hard time.”
“No. No I was not.” She did not raise her voice. She’d seen this dynamic played out way too often to think that being angry would help her right now. Her lack of talent, and her deep and abiding desire to avoid conflict, however, did not mean she had to listen to Randi tell lies with that innocent who me? voice. Wallace ignored the emptiness biting at her stomach, that seasick-like movement
Randi’s anger smoothed out. And then she smiled, but that was because most of the others walked into the kitchen. Maddy’s frown did not change.
Wallace looked past Randi and crumpled her paper cup. Great. Palla and Moeletsi Tau were at the head of the line of onlookers. The Yin and Yang of male perfection those two; fit, cut, gorgeous, one white and one black, one an utter asshole, and the other the most patient being on earth.
The rest were woman Maddy insisted had talent, coming in from the living room where they’d been practicing according to the rules Maddy laid down. Aside from Palla and Moeletsi, they were all street witches, and all of them had more talent in their little fingers than she had in her entire body.
“It’s about time someone said something. Your incompetence. You hold us all back. You don’t belong here.”
Maddy held up her hands. She caught Wallace’s eye and there was a thousand years of understanding there. More of the same old bullshit. Wallace might not be much of a witch, but there were things she had in common with Maddy that nobody else did. “Stop it. Right now.”
Palla leaned against the counter nearest to him and crossed his arms over his chest. He had a five o’clock shadow going, probably for show, given what he was, and he looked scary as hell. Not for show. He nodded at Wallace. “She dead drop you?”
“Whatever that means.” Nothing good, that was for sure.
“Did she cut off your magic?” He had a deep voice, not a trace of accent. Pure white California. Someone in the back of the crowd la
ughed. That was directed at her because Wallace didn’t have much magic to cut off.
“No, sir.” She hated herself for that. Calling him sir. But her years spent on the streets and in and out of various shelters had drilled into her the safety in showing respect to someone in authority. “No, sir, she did not.”
He gave her one of his patented fuck you, bitch glares. She didn’t take it too personally. Palla was an equal opportunity hater. “Did you dead drop her?”
Randi whirled on Palla. “She absolutely did not.”
“That’s enough.” Maddy Winters had a lot of presence. Enough to make Palla lapse into silence. The kitchen got quiet.
She squished her paper cup into oblivion. This was it, then. She was nothing compared to the rest of them. She didn’t belong here, and now it was over. The middle of her stomach still felt strange, and she was dizzy. Having an audience for the second most humiliating moment of your life was enough to make a girl sick. “Look. There’s no reason to draw this out.” She faced Maddy. “Thank you for asking me to come here way back when. I mean it. I’ve had fun, most of the time, learning stuff and trying things out. But I don’t belong here. We all know that.”
She didn’t want to go. She wanted Maddy to say, hell no, you have to stay. She wanted everyone to want her to stick around and say Randi should leave, but there was nothing but silence. Her purse and her coat were by the door so there wasn’t going to be a walk of shame through the house. She stuck out a hand.
No handshake. “Thanks, Maddy. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
Tau rested a shoulder against one side of the kitchen doorway. Not quite blocking the way out, but she was going to have to brush past him. He had this way of being too quiet. Like he was thinking about how to get into your mind and fuck you up. For all the bad-ass silence, when he talked, he had an accent that melted panties at twenty paces. “I think she should not go.”
“What did you do?” Maddy was not a tall person, but it was easy to forget when she was intense like this. Her power was serious. Deadly serious. “Do you even know?”
Palla was halfway in the kitchen, and that made her nervous, that he was bothering to come this close. She wasn’t sure about Tau’s job, but Palla was an enforcer. Literally. He worked for a demon warlord, and it was his job to scare people into staying in bounds and to take care of the ones who didn’t. Just about all of the demon warlord’s inner circle were killers. They had to be these days, but yeah. She was a bit too aware of that right now. You broke the rules, you paid the price, and there stood the guy who took all your money.
Using magic here without supervision was against the rules.
Randi about hit the ceiling. “You can’t be serious. She did nothing.”
From the middle of the kitchen, Palla turned so he was looking behind him at Tau. The hair on the back of her neck lifted. He said in a louder than necessary voice, “Count off if you felt that.”
That confused everyone in the kitchen until they realized he was asking the people in the rest of the house to count off. Four people called off their names. That meant there were two other people in the house who hadn’t been working with their group.
“Ten of us,” Palla said. It was dumb to think about him and Tau in terms of ethnicity, but it was hard not to. One of the things she’d learned from Maddy was that demons who were human-born tended to manifest with the physical characteristics of one or more of their human parents, going down either the patriarchal or matriarchal side. In most cases, there were humans on both sides of the genetic soup that gave a demon life. Most. But not all.
She knew three things about Tau; he was from Africa, he was gorgeous, and he was dangerous. Maybe he was Entelechy, maybe he wasn’t. The impression she’d always had was there were single digit numbers of people who knew anything about the guy, and they were not talking. Do not mess with Tau, that was the message.
Palla was Entelechy; a demon without human parents. So ancient he was one of the first-origin kin. The demons called themselves kin. Or demonkind, but mostly kin, from what she’d observed. The reason he was here tonight instead of out enforcing shit, was that all of Nikodemus’s heavy hitters took turns with Maddy’s street witches. Just her luck, this was Palla’s two weeks of duty. He looked standard European, but who the hell knew? He was out of her league, same as Tau.
She was going to have to walk past Palla and Tau. Fun evening.
“Wallace,” Maddy said.
She turned her attention to Maddy. “I can’t do anything. Nothing that matters. You know that. You’ve been watching me do nothing for weeks.”
“What happened in here wasn’t nothing.”
She licked her lower lip.
Maddy looked around her kitchen. “I think we’re done for the night. See you all Friday? You, too, Randi.”
That gentle but firm dismissal sent a crowd in the direction of the door. Tau made room. He got a few melting looks from the departing witches. If he cared, it didn’t show. At least she wouldn’t have to make the walk of shame. She headed for the doorway, too.
“Wallace, can you stay a few minutes? Please?”
Chapter 2
Five minutes later, she was alone with Maddy, Tau and Palla. Fun. Not very. Now she did feel sick.
Tau strolled to the kitchen table, and, Lord, but that man was finer than fine. Maddy sat and pointed at a chair. Wallace sat because what else was she going to do? Tau was keeping quiet, but occasionally she saw his pupils go from black to a wavy, streaky magenta, and then back. Palla leaned against the counter like he wanted to be anywhere but here.
Maddy waved a hand. “I’m not going to make excuses for Randi. There are many, many times I’ve wished talent came with being a decent, fair, person, but that is not the case. I know she’s been giving you a hard time. You’re not the only one, but it’s worse for you. You seemed to be handling it okay.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Please don’t yes, ma’am me.”
“Okay.”
“I’m guessing Randi was digging at you when none of us could see.” When Wallace didn’t answer, she said, “I’m sorry, Wallace. I should have been paying closer attention.”
She could be as mysterious as Tau, couldn’t she?
“What did she do?” Maddy placed her hands on the table. Palla was the only person here who wasn’t some shade of brown. She wondered if that worried him. Probably not. “We need you to be honest. Please.”
She hated the way she lapsed into old habits of sullen silence. She looked around the room, didn’t like what she saw, and concentrated on Maddy. “I was thirsty. I thought she was in the bathroom, or I wouldn’t have come in.” She’d never be back here. There was no reason to soft peddle the truth. “I got my water, and she tried to set it on fire.”
Tau’s eyebrows drew together. Palla still had his fuck you all glare, but it was trained on her at the moment. Maddy was thoughtful. She really, really wanted to go home.
Wallace said, “She thinks that shit is funny.”
Maddy spread her fingers. “And your reaction was?”
It occurred to her that of all the people who’d been here, only the demons had stayed behind. One of them did the local warlord’s dirty work, and the other one could turn your brains into jelly without you knowing he’d ever been there. “I’m sorry if I broke the rules. I didn’t mean to.”
“We know we’re working with people who often don’t have command of their abilities.”
She flicked a look in Tau’s direction. He lifted his hands as if he knew what she’d been thinking. He didn’t. She’d be sick to her stomach if he had a psychic hook in her. “I have been given no directive.”
Palla didn’t say anything, but then he was behind her, and she figured she’d be better off not trying to guess what he thought. Something horrible, for sure.
Of all the witches working with Maddy these last weeks, she was the only one originally from East Oakland. The token. And she was going to be t
he one who got kicked out. She tried a smile, but it didn’t work very well. “I’d be dead if I’d done something bad. Right?”
“Wallace.” Maddy had to be made of patience. How did anyone deal with all this training of newbie witches and stay in such a good mood? “We don’t sanction witches who are practicing here.”
Sanction.
Her stomach dropped to her toes, and she got lightheaded again. Sanction was the word they used when the warlord decided someone needed to die for breaking one of his rules. Nikodemus didn’t fuck around. A demon who harmed one of the magekind—a human who could do magic—got sanctioned. Enslave or murder a demon, and that mage or witch got dead fast.
She looked between Tau and Maddy and it dawned on her to wonder if there was a reason they were at the table with her. Were they a couple? Beautiful people tended to pair up. Or maybe she was involved with Palla, and they were playing it cool. Or not.
“Did you dead drop Randi?” Maddy didn’t sound like she thought it was possible.
“All I know is the water did not go up in flames. If there was magic involved, I don’t see how it could have been from me.”
Maddy reached across the table and touched her fingers. A tingle of magic swept along her arm. “Nothing like that has happened before?”
“Well, sure.” Panic streaked through her when Tau’s attention shot to Palla. She shifted on her chair so she could see him, too. If she was going to die, she wanted to see it coming. “It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not magic. It’s just…me.”
“Meaning?”
“The two things aren’t related. The water and that dead dropping thing. They can’t be.”
“Why is that?”
She was dying of thirst. Dying. Dry as a bone. Tau stood up, and she flinched. But all he did was walk to the sink. “I can make people stop arguing. Make all the emotion go away. I’m person in the room making everyone else calmer. That’s a thing. A real thing.”
