by Mindy Klasky
Raven surprised me by answering before her sister. She chose each word with uncharacteristic diplomacy. “It’s not that the magic will be too thin. Maybe the balance will be too hard. Maybe we can’t do what you’re asking of us. Maybe we don’t have the skill.”
I heard what that admission cost her. I heard the blatant yearning in her voice. She had felt the power of a joint working. She could imagine the new music we’d write, the unheard notes we’d discover when we finally reached our proper pitch. If we reached it.
“You do have it,” I swore. “Every one of you.”
“How can you be sure?” That was Cassie. Her voice was tiny, folded in on itself. Her freckled face looked pinched, as if even those four words had cost her too much. Her question hung in the air, a desperate plea that clenched my heart more than anything else I’d heard. Cassie had paid a higher price for my new scheme than anyone else sitting in the circle. She’d been threatened in ways the rest of us had only seen in nightmares.
I understood why they all asked questions. They’d applied to my magicarium, and I’d chosen them. I’d interviewed everyone, of course, selecting the four newcomers from a pool of two dozen eager witches, all with a tolerance for quirkiness, all attracted to the Jane Madison Academy’s unheard-of Second Class ranking after only a semester of existence. They had all been willing to take the chance that the magicarium would disband at the end of its first or second semester if we failed to complete our scheduled Major Workings.
They’d thought it would be easy because they were working with the chosen, with the elite. They hadn’t signed up for monsters. And they hadn’t expected the academic rug to be pulled out from under them before the semester ended.
I knew I could teach these women. They just had to have faith. They only had to find the balance once, and then they’d be able to work the spells forever—like riding a bike.
But we had to succeed by sunset, or Hecate’s Court would shut us down forever. I glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was already a few minutes after four. The winter sky outside was already growing dark.
I finally allowed myself to look at David. After all, he was the only other person who knew our true deadline. I’d sensed him listening to my students, plumbing their questions, their protests, as if those words alone would let him identify the traitor. I’d felt his protective presence, something solid as I fielded their frustration.
I knew that no matter what happened, even if the Court shut us down before the weekend, David would be there for me. He would love me. He would pick me up, comfort me, convince me I could go on in the world, as a witch, as a woman.
But I didn’t want him to have to do that. I didn’t want to break.
“One more hour,” I said. “Give me until sunset tonight. If we haven’t made it work by then, we’ll take the weekend off. On Monday, we’ll go with something new. I promise.” Even now, I couldn’t tell them what that new thing would be. I couldn’t hint that the entire magicarium was at stake. The words were too raw. I swallowed hard and said, “All I ask is that you commit yourself to the process for the rest of today. Give me every single thing you have. Hold back nothing.”
And they did.
For the first time since we’d begun the candle-lighting spell, I found myself overwhelmed by the energy swirling across our circle. There was too much power, too much astral force to be contained. More than once, I caught Zach reeling from a stray burst, fighting to keep his feet as we bombarded the room with our collective strength.
After one particularly vicious blast, David muttered something, and he paced the perimeter of our circle. I sensed what he was doing with his energy—not offering up protection from exterior forces; the wards around the house did that. Instead, he was setting up a sort of swaddling, a protective layer. He was cushioning us from the backlash of the forces we were raising. He was protecting us from ourselves.
I tugged on my bond to Neko, even though he crouched by Skyler’s feet. I asked him to pull the familiars into a tighter circle, to focus the mirrors they offered up to us witches. I begged him to share how it had felt to work with Nuri and Majom. The familiars’ strange communication network seemed perfectly suited to understanding my communal magic. With their whole images, maybe they could finally explain to the witches what we needed.
Neko scowled, but he did as I asked. And the other familiars clearly attempted to convey the information to their witches. Some of those conversations obviously made more sense than others. I could read Bree’s face more easily than I could scan any book in the basement. I saw the moment when Perd reached out to her, the instant that she heard his horsey thoughts, that she translated them into something that made sense from a witch’s perspective.
Skyler’s comprehension was clear as well. At first, though, she resisted the input from Siga. Skyler seemed not to trust her porcine collaborator. Watching the portly woman’s s insistence, I wondered how they could possibly work together on regular witchcraft. I’d never seen a witch and a familiar who weren’t in perfect sync, who didn’t enjoy completely compatible styles of communication. But Siga insisted, pushing through with a repeat of Neko’s information again and Skyler finally gave a reluctant nod.
Alex got the message faster, but she shook her head. She didn’t see how it would work. I watched Seta reach out to Neko, who shook his head in an unusual display of exasperation. My familiar squared his shoulders, clearly trying another way of explaining the same facts. He sighed when that method failed too, but he tried once more. And somehow, that last image made sense to Alex. She scooted her chair forward so it was in line with the rest of us. She planted her feet on the floor as if she intended to remain engaged.
And that left Cassie. I was captivated by the other witch’s hands. She twisted her fingers as she listened to Tupa, contorting them into painful knots. I watched her swallow, and my throat ached in sympathy, as if my lips were chapped and dry, as if my belly twinged with nerves.
I would have given anything to take back the terrible events of Samhain. If I could have gone back in time, if I could have drawn the satyr to me, I would have spared Cassie the terror. But there was no way to change what had happened. The only thing I could do was build bridges to the future. I had to show Cassie, had to show all of them, that there were better ways to use magic. Better ways to work together.
At last Cassie’s twining fingers settled in her lap. She seemed to still them with a conscious effort, with a shake of her shoulders and a firm set to her jaw. She might have been listening to her familiar, but her eyes were locked on Zach. He was her strength. He was her comfort. He had saved her from the satyr, and he would keep her safe no matter what horror our current working released.
Which was absurd of course. Because all we were going to do was light a candle. We weren’t working magic in the middle of a hailstorm. We weren’t exposed on an open beach. We were merely sitting in a living room, gathered around a coffee table, staring at a column of pure white beeswax.
“Let us begin,” I intoned, and then I touched my fingertips against my forehead, my throat, and my chest. I watched each of the witches echo my movements, offering up pure thoughts, pure voice, and pure belief. I could not imagine any one of them a traitor—easygoing Bree, aristocratic Skyler, rebellious Alex, tortured Cassie.
First things first. Meet the Court’s demands.
“Dark shies.” We said the words together.
“Light vies.” I felt energy arc from me to Cassie’s Tupa. I measured something through my link to Neko, a pulsing power that he sent on to Skyler.
“Clear eyes.” There was a possibility hovering in the air, a potential for magic.
“Fire rise.” I poured myself into those last two words. I pushed my entire magical being into the phrase, into the spell. Tupa captured the energy I poured into our circle. He spun it into something new, something wider and deeper, like a fleece dragged through dew. There was a flash of darkness, and then the magic circled back to me. An arching rain
bow spread across the room. Cherry and walnut and lemon, emerald and sapphire and amethyst, gold and silver and bronze. I didn’t know which colors came from which witch, who poured any specific shade into our working. But they were all there, gathered together, organized, ordered.
And for just a heartbeat, the wick of the candle lit. I stared at the flame. I saw it appear out of nothing, coalesce into a perfect teardrop of color, indigo at its core, saffron at the edge. I blinked, and it was gone. But we had done it. We had lit the candle.
From the cheers around the room, you would have thought we’d cured world hunger.
We lit the candle again, all six of us, pouring in our power equally. Then, the familiars shifted around the circle, each one teaming with a new witch, and we worked the magic again. Emma started the harvest of power, asking each to offer up a share, until all were brought into the circle. Skyler lit the candle alone and we practiced dimming it with a controlled touch. Alex led us in an illumination, drawing from all of us to kindle the flame before she poured her own unique signature into the fire, darkening the light until it was almost black. She passed control to Cassie, who let the flame flicker into the pale green of new leaves, then to Raven who surged it back to violet.
With each working, I felt a little more power draw from my store. Even with all of our familiars, with seven witches to share the burden, with a simple candle-lighting spell, there was a cost to the work we did.
I knew I should rein in my students. I should congratulate them on a job well done. I should thank them for having held their faith, for having offered up the very best they had to give. I should be grateful they had saved the Jane Madison Academy, pushing back Hecate’s Court for a while more.
But it was too much fun. It was too much of a relief to watch the wick kindle again and again, to feel the give and take of our energy soaring across the circle.
“All right,” I finally said, fully intending to put a stop to the waste of energy. But I saw the disappointment on their faces, like children who were about to be deprived of a Christmas-morning toy. I glanced at David. I knew he wanted me to wrap things up, but he nodded once, giving me permission. “One last time,” I said. “Let’s work the spell together, and then we’ll break for supper.”
I glanced to my right, to where Neko curled by Raven’s feet. I settled my hand on Tupa’s shoulder. I watched each of the other witches make contact with the familiar closest to her. Everyone was comfortable. Everyone was confident that this spell would be the best.
“Dark shies,” I began.
Immediately, I knew this time was different. There was more power here than all the force we’d spent that afternoon. That made sense—my witches were celebrating their success. They were gathering their energy, prepared to let loose one last joyful blaze.
“Light vies.” The others felt it too. I saw it in their faces, in the sudden electric lines of their bodies.
“Clear eyes.” We were hurtling down a steep hill, rolling in a tire as if we had some death wish. I should stop us. I should bail out. I had to keep us safe, keep us sound.
But we were going too fast. I wasn’t in charge any more. We were a collective, working together. We were a tangle of witches, a storm of familiars. We were all of us and none of us and I could no more stop those last two words from ringing out than I could stop the Earth from rotating on its axis.
“Fire rise.”
Another flash of darkness, deeper and longer than any we’d seen that afternoon. My heart stopped. My eyes were blind. My ears were deaf. Every muscle in my body was paralyzed, and I knew I could never say anything, never do anything, never take action again.
Out of the darkness, a torch lit. Not a candle flame, not a simple flicker of wick against wax. An inferno. Great gouts of fire roared toward the ceiling.
And born out of the heart of that holocaust, wrapped in burning wings and sheathed in molten robes of pure white heat, was a woman. A woman with the body and wings of an eagle, with vicious talons where her feet should have been. She shrieked a wordless cry of incandescent rage and started to sail around the room.
CHAPTER 10
A harpy.
That was the word my stunned brain supplied, the name for the creature born of fire. I could see it as if I were reading a page from Brighton’s Magickal Beasts and the Spells That Bind Them. I could make out every letter set in cold, dispassionate ink.
Harpies were ancient beings, sired by the winds upon daughters of hoary kings. Originally, they were handmaidens to women in labor; they brought newborn babes into the world. But as centuries passed and they could not bear their own young, harpies turned bitter and vengeful. They stole infants. They murdered women in the prime of life, women who were capable of giving birth to their own healthy children. And the entire time they worked their vengeance they sang—clear, strong notes that were their birthright from their fathers.
The creature in my living room swooped over our heads, her wicked claws slicing the air with a sharp whistle. She opened her mouth to cry again, a song that broke my heart. It wove together the pride of an eagle surveying her domain and the wail of a devastated mother watching over the shell of her stillborn babe.
I could not tear my eyes from her. I dared not look away, for fear that those vicious talons would rake across my head, would tear through the hopeless, helpless flesh of the students I had placed in mortal danger. But even as I ducked when the harpy completed her next circuit, I recognized the true threat of the beast we had set free.
Because there was one thing Brighton didn’t get right in his treatise, one thing the book failed to mention: This harpy was on fire.
In the split second when she burst from the candle flame, I’d thought she was clothed in molten robes. Now, when I stared into her burning heart, I could make out a shimmering image of Norville Pitt. This was an idealized version of the man—taller and slimmer and blessed with better hair than the real Pitt could ever hope to have. I was staring at the harpy’s glorified vision of her maker.
Even so, Pitt’s body was obscured by a shadow, a dark spot the size and shape of a woman. The harpy had seen someone else when she was created. The harpy had seen a woman. One of my students. I squinted against the heat shimmering off the monstrous creature, but I could not make out any details in the shadow. I could not tell who had betrayed us.
The harpy spread her wings and cried, a shattering wail that made my heart stutter. She was draped in feathers, white-hot plumes that covered her body, all the way down to her cruel, clawed feet. Each of those feathers was a separate burning flame, hot enough to ignite whatever it touched.
The curtains were the first thing to kindle. The harpy launched herself from the table and flew around the room, beating her wings with the fury of an unjustly caged prisoner. Tongues of fire licked their way from ceiling to floor, tasting the wall beside the windows. The harpy completed another circuit, shedding a feather that started to chew its way through the hardwood floor. She swooped low and brushed the couch, starting a slow smolder that was no match for whatever fire-retardant chemicals were supposed to keep us safe.
“Out!” David shouted. “Now!”
And once I heard his voice, I realized everyone was shouting. Witches were calling for their familiars. Zach was bellowing at Cassie. Familiars were bleating, howling, crying to be free. David was trying to usher us all to the front door, through the wards that were designed to keep evil out, to keep us safe.
“Spot!” he called. “Come!” And then to all of us, he repeated, “Now!”
I understood what he was saying. I knew what I was supposed to do. But I could not yield to the harpy without a fight. I could not give up this house I had come to love, this home where David and I had discovered our life together. I could not yield the treasures in my basement, the Osgood collection that had been entrusted to my care by whatever magical forces had set me on this journey years before.
I lunged toward the arch that led to the kitchen. I had to reach the base
ment. I had to raise some sort of spell, some type of shield, anything, everything to keep my arcane possessions safe.
The harpy screamed again, a terrible, perfect song of devastation. Her claws brushed above my hair, and my skin was immediately parched by the downdraft of her wings. A feather drifted clear of her body, a bright white curl no longer than my thumb, and it burned like lava when it caressed my cheek.
I brushed the feather free, grinding it into the floor so it could wreak no further harm. That action cost me a second, maybe two. But that was enough time for the harpy to round on me. She hovered in the archway, slowly flapping her wings and blocking my way. The motion fanned the flames around her body, feeding them, magnifying them.
Despite the heat, despite the white-hot wall before me, I stumbled forward. One step. Another.
The paint kindled on the smooth walls beside the arch, bubbling up, turning into thousands of gaping black mouths. “No!” I cried, trying to ignore the heat, to push past the pain, but the harpy threw back her wings and thrust forward with her full avian force, nearly knocking me off my feet. My eyes burned and my throat closed on a sob. I realized I was crying, but no tears made their way down my cheeks; they evaporated in the brutal wind of the harpy’s wings.
“Jane!” Neko’s fingers closed on my arm.
“Help me!” I commanded. He resisted, though, pulling back, trying to drag me toward the front door. I reached out on the channel that bound us together, the tightly linked line of witch to familiar. I had to compel him. I had to force him through the wall of fire, to the basement stairs, to the treasure we had to protect.
