by Mindy Klasky
Raven lifted her phone as soon as I set foot in the kitchen. “Okay if I film?” She was already moving her fingers over the control buttons.
“Absolutely not.” I needed caffeine in my bloodstream before I could even consider being ready for my close-up. I could just make out the ghosts of bruises around Raven’s wrists, evidence of where David had gripped her the night before.
As my cinematographer pouted, Emma spoke up. “We helped ourselves to brekkie. David said you’d want a cuppa.”
And that explained Spot’s watchful presence upstairs. The dog must have been under strict orders to guard me. After all, it was decidedly un-warderlike for David to leave me alone, sleeping, while half a dozen visitors took over the downstairs of our home.
Emma pressed a mug into my hand. “David said to remind you he had some sort of confab in the village? A meeting with an estate agent?”
I ran a rapid English-to-American translator over her words. David was meeting with a realtor in Parkersville? First I’d heard of it. A twist of anxiety rippled through my gut.
To disguise my concern, I took a sip of tea. Emma had brewed it to her English standards—strong enough to melt a spoon. I stumbled to the refrigerator and fished out the cream. Or, rather, I excavated an empty cardboard carton. I dropped it into the trash, silently cursing Neko.
“Oh,” Raven said, looking up from her own mug of some delectable ecru beverage. “I guess we finished off the cream.”
I cast a silent apology toward my familiar and fortified myself with a slug of bitter tea. When I looked up, Raven and Emma were staring at me with curious eyes. I tried to put myself in their shoes. They’d traveled halfway across the country, on Clara’s word that they’d find a magicarium waiting for them in Maryland. Whether they were paying their own tuition or not, they’d made sacrifices to be here. At the very least, they’d left behind their home. Probably family. Friends.
And it was up to me to make sure their journey was worthwhile. What sort of impostor was I, pretending to be a magistrix?
The sort of impostor who had learned a thing or two in her first career, as a librarian. In my last professional job at the Peabridge Library, I’d regularly conducted “reference interviews”, asking my patrons a series of questions so that I tracked down the information they actually wanted, instead of what they initially asked for. It was time to use the same skills in service of my magicarium.
I took a deep breath and then jumped in. A few easy questions, to break the ice… “How long ago did you awaken your familiars?”
Emma answered promptly. “Seven years ago, this past May.”
“And they’re bound directly to you?” Some familiars were tied to specific witchy resources. Technically, Neko was bound to the Osgood collection in my basement, not to me.
Emma nodded, casting a fond glance toward the living room. The familiars and warders had broken out a deck of cards. It looked like Kopek was in the hole by three stacks of pennies.
I didn’t want to ignore Raven. I asked her directly, “And Hani? What was he before you woke him?”
“A rooster,” she said. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, I could see the animal roots—the red hair bright as a coxcomb, the bustling way he collected cards to deal the next hand.
I glanced at Emma. She said, “Basset hound.” I could imagine her holding the figurine of her familiar, running her fingers down its flanks before she spoke the spell to bring it to life. While many witches might have asked for a more dynamic partner, Emma seemed content with Kopek.
As moon-bound familiars, neither Hani nor Kopek would be quite as … challenging as Neko. They wouldn't be quite as interesting, either. But that was no fault of the familiars or their witches.
“And your warders? You haven’t been teamed with anyone else?”
Emma shook her head. Raven, though, looked distinctly uneasy. “How many?” I asked her.
“Counting Tony?”
I braced myself as I nodded. I’d seen witches who had burned through multiple warders before, and there was always some tangle of drama involved.
“Four.”
Four. I tried to believe there was a benign explanation, but she certainly didn’t volunteer any exculpatory facts. I decided not to press her. Not now. Not when I was trying to build some essential rapport. Instead, I turned my attention back to Emma. “What do you want from the Madison Academy?”
“Well, I… We…” She turned to Raven, but I cut her short.
“No, I’ll ask your sister in a moment. I want to know why you came here.”
“I always fancied going back to uni. Getting another degree.”
There. A general answer, just waiting for the fine tuning of a reference interview. “But if that were true, then any magicarium would do. There are plenty of coven schools, most a lot closer to Sedona. Why did you come to mine?”
“Your mum said you had different ideas about witchcraft. You weren’t all bound up in the whys and wherefores of a proper magicarium.”
A proper— I bit the inside of my cheek. I needed Emma to continue working with me, and ranting about Clara’s word choice wasn’t going to earn me any trust. I kept my voice perfectly level as I asked, “What different ideas appeal to you?”
Emma fiddled with her mug of tea, running her fingers over the handle. “The local coven were put out with me in short order. Said I needed sorting, needed to master a dozen different spells for lighting a candle. Took me months, that did. A couple of years. I still think one spell should be enough, if it’s worked properly.”
I nodded. Oak Canyon would follow the Rota, the traditional education system for young witches. In ordinary magicaria, students were sponsored by their Callers, the skilled seekers who tracked down women with supernatural abilities. A new witch worked through a series of standardized spells, practicing each one dozens, hundreds, thousands of times, until she could complete it perfectly under all conditions. Once a single task—lighting a candle, to take Emma’s example—was perfected with one spell, the novice witch learned an alternative incantation. Or two. Or three dozen. The process was deliberately mind-numbing, forcing the novice to submit over and over again to the authority of her coven.
My training had been a lot less conventional: David had taught me how to channel my power, drawing on the books in my basement. That haphazard education had crazed the conservative Washington Coven, but it had left me with virtually unequalled powers.
“We certainly won’t be working the Rota.” I was rewarded by Emma’s quick, grateful smile. I turned to Raven before I could lose my momentum. “And you? What do you want from the Madison Academy?”
“Emma wanted to come. I couldn’t let her go alone.”
“Actually,” I pointed out, “You could. She’d have Caleb and Kopek. What did you want to accomplish by coming out here?”
Raven fiddled with the rings on her left hand, twisting each a full circle. Her fingertips went to the pendant that hung between her breasts. Reflexively, she counted off all five points on the pentacle. I waited with pretended patience, knowing that she had to find the wherewithal to answer my question. I couldn’t offer it up for her. I could, though, prompt a little. “Or maybe you were trying to leave something behind?”
“I didn’t make friends in Oak Canyon,” she said at last. She met my eyes, defiance blazing as bright as the violet stripe in her hair.
“What kept you from bonding with them?” My voice was steady, non-judgmental. Hecate knew I’d had my own conflicts with my supposed coven sisters, before I’d found the strength to walk away from them forever.
Raven shrugged, as if she were trying to buck off a bad memory. “Derek Gleason.” Her jaw set defiantly, even as Emma snorted out half a laugh. “Alex Wilcox. Ryan Bard.”
I held up a hand. “Those are warders, I take it?”
She twitched a shoulder by way of answering.
“They were sworn to Oak Canyon witches?”
“Sworn to me, at first,” sh
e said. “After that, yeah. At least Derek and Alex stayed with Oak Canyon. Ryan left the job.”
I pushed. “And you left Oak Canyon, after Ryan. But why did you come here? What do you want to learn from me, Raven? What can I teach you?”
She stared into the living room, letting her eyes lose focus as Tony raked in a pile of change. I didn’t think she was conscious of taking out her phone, of turning the electronic device from edge to edge to edge. She didn’t make any move to turn on the camera, so I let her keep her pacifier. And I waited. And waited. And waited.
And Raven finally yielded. “I want to learn how to focus my powers. I start a spell, and I can feel the magic well up inside me. The energy is there. The strength. But it … leaks away while I’m trying to channel the working. No one understands that. No one in Sedona, anyway.”
I heard the yearning in her voice, an honesty that cut through everything—her vampish clothes, her camera, her drama queen tactics. And in that moment, I wanted to help her. I wanted to help both of them, to make my magicarium a place of perfect refuge and learning.
And the next step in doing that would be to get them settled in adequate living quarters. “Okay,” I said, breaking the solemn atmosphere with an intentionally cheerful voice. I called out to the card sharks in the living room, “Guys? Can you join us for a sec?”
I was gratified that they abandoned their poker game immediately. Spot didn’t seem as thrilled; he padded over from his bed and sat beside me as all four men traipsed into the kitchen. I settled my palm on the dog’s neck, simultaneously taking and giving reassurance.
“First things first,” I said. “We obviously weren’t prepared for your arrival last night, but we’re back on track now. Emma, Raven, I appreciate your willingness to share the guest room last night, but that obviously won’t work on a long-term basis.”
I gave my students a smile filled with more confidence than I actually felt. “I’m going to ask Neko and Jacques to move out of their apartment above the garage. The place has two bedrooms, along with a full bath.”
Emma protested, “We can’t chuck them out!”
“They spend most of their time at Jacques’s place in the city.” They had anyway. When I’d come up with my brilliant plan in the middle of the night, I’d conveniently forgotten the dire relationship news Neko had hinted at the night before. I resisted the urge to chew my lower lip.
Raven cast a dubious glance toward her own familiar. “Doesn’t Neko need to stay close by?”
“I awakened him on the night of a full moon.” I watched them absorb that little bomb. Most witches considered my action rash to the point of insanity. When I’d first bound my familiar, though, I hadn’t known that the phase of the moon mattered. As a result, Neko could roam as far as he wished.
My lack of conformity to arcane norms clearly made an impression on my students. Good. That would help when we got to our first unconventional working, in about five minutes. But I still had to clarify the rest of the rooming arrangements. I turned to the warders and familiars. “Gentlemen, I appreciate your willingness to make do last night, but we obviously can’t keep you sleeping on couches and the floor. There are a couple of outbuildings on the property, an old greenhouse and a barn. Both have plumbing and electricity, and there are some cots in storage. Nothing very grand, but we’ll upgrade as we go along.”
“We’ll be fine,” Caleb said, before the others could speak. His eyes looked earnest beneath the bill of his baseball cap. Hani, though, looked like he had a few complaints to register, and Tony was gearing up as well. Caleb merely repeated in a forceful voice, “We’ll be fine. All of us.”
I smiled my appreciation, trying to include Emma as well. After all, she was the one who had conditioned her warder to such a positive outlook. Maybe she channeled Mary Poppins with that posh British accent. Come to think of it, where did Emma’s Brit thing come from? Raven didn’t have a hint of the U.K. in her own speech.
Making a mental note to find out more later, I settled down to the real business of the morning. My students had to show me their basic magical capacity. I had to find out if they were truly amenable to my unique ideas about working group magic. I said, “I don’t know how much Clara told you, but here at the Madison Academy we function as a community. Our goal is to provide constant mutual support in all magical workings.”
Emma and Raven nodded eagerly.
No time like the present to prove my point. I said, “Why don’t we move outside, then? Where we can be more comfortable?”
Comfortable. Not exactly. The air slapped us like a waterlogged towel the instant we stepped onto the porch. Beside me, Spot’s thick fur radiated heat like an electric blanket. I tried to nudge him away with my knee, but he steadfastly refused to yield. Sighing, I led my little party down the steps and into the center of the dusty lawn that surrounded the farmhouse.
We were witches. We harnessed the powers of the natural world. Even a natural world swaddled tight in summer heat.
I slipped off my sandals and wiggled my toes in the grass. Watching carefully, Raven and Emma followed suit. The thirsty blades prickled. It had been weeks since we’d seen measurable rainfall, despite the constant moisture in the air.
Raven presented her phone as soon as we were arranged in an uneven triangle, but I shook my head. My magicarium, my rules. Technology had no place in the middle of a magical working. Besides, in a few moments, she wouldn’t have a free hand to work the controls.
Determinedly ignoring her exasperated sigh as she tucked the device into her bra, I brushed my fingertips against my forehead, my throat, and my heart, dedicating my magic to the power of Hecate. Then, smiling with what I hoped was honest encouragement, I spoke the words of one of the simplest spells I knew:
“Word flows, power shows,
Force grows, wind blows.”
I used my magic to give the slightest push to the air around me, and a gentle breeze wafted across the yard. Everyone—witches, warders, familiars, and Spot—relaxed at the cooling touch. I watched Raven and Emma settle more comfortably on their bare feet.
The breath of fresh air drifted away, and we were left sweltering beneath the leaden sky. I smiled at both my charges. “Simple, right?”
Emma nodded, but her eyebrows knit. She clearly didn’t understand why I had just demonstrated one of the most basic spells in the entire witchy arsenal. Raven swallowed a sigh, tossing her hair over her shoulders, flashing the violet stripe like a warning. She was already bored with the Madison Academy.
I was going to enjoy the next stage of my little demonstration.
Before I could extend my hands for theirs to start our communal working, Neko wandered over from the garage. His hair was set in immaculate little spikes, and his T-shirt and jeans were a perfect match for Raven’s body-skimming garments. My tiny spell had summoned him, as I’d known it would. Spot whuffed and shifted a few steps away.
I smiled. “We’re just getting started.” Neko nodded and glided to my side, standing close enough that I could feel the heat from his body, distinct from the oppressive air. I gestured to Emma and Raven. “Come on. Bring your familiars into the circle.”
Kopek lurched to Emma’s side and put a blunt-fingered hand on her shoulder. When Hani strutted over to Raven, he expanded his chest, as if he were crowing about all his grand accomplishments. Tony and Caleb watched from the sidelines, clearly uncertain about the demands I was making of their witches. Neither seemed inclined to intervene—yet—but I wondered how long a leash they would grant me.
Of course, I knew we weren’t doing anything dangerous. Nothing that would require warders’ protection. This demonstration was just a simple group wind-summoning, nothing that would exercise even David’s over-developed sense of protectiveness.
I nodded at my students. “Make your offerings.”
They complied, focusing on their breathing and yielding up their minds and voices and hearts. Emma shifted her weight to lean more heavily on Kopek. Raven flut
tered her fingers over her bra, reaching reflexively for her camera. When I gave a tight shake of my head, though, she sighed and settled her fingertips against my proffered palm. I closed the physical loop with her sister.
Neko hovered at the back of my thoughts, bolstering my magical presence with the mirror of his craft. Kopek and Hani were more difficult to sense, but they flickered at the edges of my arcane awareness, each offering energy to his own witch.
I took a calming breath and exhaled slowly, willing my students to follow my example. I breathed again and tightened my focus. One more time for complete centering. And then I made my voice steady and firm as I spoke the beginning of the spell: “Word—”
My students’ power manifested around mine, taking a form that seemed nearly physical. Nervous, they both fed too much energy into our connection. I was braced against the competing pushes of their magic, but the intensity of their combined drive made me stagger. Neko sidled closer, leaning in so I could draw stability from him. His presence let me focus on the witches beside me.
In one quick glimpse, I could see what had truly driven Raven from the Oak Canyon Coven. Not her dalliances with multiple warders. Rather, her magical energy manifested as a blatant contradiction. At first glance, her powers seemed like a granite monolith. That surface, though, was actually like pumice, riddled with channels. The more I peered, the more I made out a network of intricate passageways that offered virtually unbounded magical capacity. A coven, however, would see the countless cracks as deformities, faults that should be ground down and destroyed forever.
Even as I discovered the truth, I backed off, determined not to undermine my first student before I could teach her how to use her strength to her best advantage. Instead, I turned to Emma. And there, I found a magic that could not have been more different. If Raven was fine-carved stone, Emma was a placid pool—unfathomable, uncharted water. Her powers drove to the core of the earth, glowing with the placid silver of liquid moonlight. I could only imagine how frustrated she had been by whatever baby steps the Oak Canyon Coven had offered her.
