Magic and the Modern Girl

by Mindy Klasky

  She lifted the first stone she saw, a highly polished aventurine. Seemingly unaware of the three of us humans (or whatever Neko was), she raised the crystal to her lips, breathed on it once, with a breath that seemed scented with apples, even this far, across the room. Then, she folded the foggy stone inside her perfect hand, closed her fingers around it. Her brow furrowed with the sort of intense concentration I usually saw devoted to Samurai Sudoku puzzles spread in front of time-wasting library patrons.

  When she opened her palm and raised the aventurine to her lips again, I almost cried out loud. The crystal’s fog was gone. The spider cracks that had spread across its surface were healed. In their place was a placid glow, a subtle beacon of arcane power. Healing, the aventurine broadcast. Health.

  I waited to feel another drop of power fall into my reservoir of magical strength. I gathered myself for a deposit in the bank of my depleted witchy energy. But there was nothing.

  Maybe one stone wasn’t enough. Maybe one crystal didn’t register. I made a sound at the back of my throat, and Ariel immediately lifted her eyes to mine. “Yes, Witch?”

  “Nothing,” I thought, resenting my craven gratitude when her question fed me another drop of power. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  She inclined her head and reached for the next stone.

  And suddenly, I was overwhelmed with everything that had happened. I tried to step back, tried to turn around, to explain to David and Neko the communication that had passed between my anima and me.

  David was staring at me. His brow was creased, as if he was worried, as if he was disturbed by Ariel, or by the thoughts we had shared, or by something else in the strange working. I knew that I should ask him what was wrong, ask him why he was looking at me that way.

  My lips were too tired to form words, though. My feet were too tired to move me toward the men, to take me close enough to whisper. My arms were too tired to raise up, to gesture toward the crystals, even as I hoped that another drop of magical power would appear in the depths of my witchy powers.

  My anima might have fed me three drops of magical ability, but my physical power was utterly depleted.

  I barely kept my eyes open long enough to watch David disperse his protective wards. He reached out for me, concern in his eyes, but I could not let him touch me. Not after what had passed between us. Not after he had tossed me out of his bed the day before.

  He read my rejection through my exhaustion, and he said something to Neko, something I could no longer hear. My familiar eased an arm around my waist and helped me up the stairs. He guided me into my bedroom, onto my inviting mattress. He swung my legs onto the bed, settled a cotton throw across my body. I barely heard him tiptoe out of the room, and I might have only imagined a conversation that he muttered with David in the living room.

  As I fell asleep, I longed for another magical drop to return to the well of my powers. I knew that Ariel would work long into the night.

  7

  By morning, I had fully recovered.

  I quickly tested my reservoir of power, hoping to find it filled with anima-inspired magic. Nothing. Well, the three drops, contributed by Ariel the night before. But nothing else.

  I tried to drown my disappointment in the shower, and then I dressed for work quickly, pulling on my eighteenth-century garb. I couldn’t quite say when I’d become accustomed to settling wicker frames over my hips, to tweaking tiered skirts into place over those curving strips of wood, to flicking a patch of soft lace across my chest. I’d even mastered a couple of quick twists for my unruly auburn hair, securing my muslin cap with a couple of near-invisible bobby pins, as if I were—as Hamlet said—to the manner born.

  Of course, the melancholy Dane’s next line was “More honour’d in the breach than the observance,” and I didn’t have the luxury of breaching the Peabridge’s dress code. I made a face at myself in the mirror.

  Even though I was running late—as usual—I had to tiptoe down to the basement to see how my anima was faring. I had to make sure that there wasn’t a giant puddle of misdirected magical potential, soaking into the basement’s intricate silk rug.

  Ariel crouched beside my box of crystals, as if she had not moved all night long. I could make out a small pile beside her, a tumble of reinvigorated stones. From across the room, I could see that the minerals were shiny and clear, all hint of fog and striation washed away by the magical touch of my astral housekeeper.

  I edged another mental fingertip toward my powers, wondering why my strength had not been built up by the operation. After all, David had been quite clear about the advantages of this working. The more I used my powers, the more I’d regain my strength. Ariel was a simple extension of myself; I should be reaping the benefits of her work.

  Except I wasn’t.

  I hadn’t lost the few drops of power that she’d fed me the night before; those still glistened like lonely quarts of milk in a grocery store cooler the night of a Washington snowstorm. But there’d been no growth. No additional power.

  Something was wrong. David had sensed something. He had been ready to tell me that what we had done was broken.

  Unless he wasn’t. Unless I’d imagined it all, as I fought to keep my feet, exhausted beyond all reason.

  Who was I fooling? I had no idea how this anima thing was really supposed to work. I’d studied the spell during the winter because I’d wanted to create an animate being, a creature that I could use to thumb my nose at the Coven. I hadn’t been concerned about regaining my witchy strength, about building any sort of astral boomerang.

  I would just ask David what was going on.

  But I had no desire to do that. I closed my eyes and sucked a sharp breath between my teeth. I could still picture the calm understanding in his eyes when he’d summoned Neko to assist me. Was there pity there, too?

  It had been bad enough that I’d thought of David while I was awakening Ariel, that I’d let that silly promotional poster for The Tempest steal away my attention. I wasn’t going to run crying to him now, when he’d likely tell me that I’d just have to be patient. That sometimes magic didn’t come easily. That some things took time to work. Especially when I’d been so irresponsible for so long, ignoring my powers for days, weeks, months. This was like a diet. I couldn’t lose a lifetime of Ben & Jerry’s fat by completing a single morning of treadmill miles.

  I would just have to give Ariel time to work. After all, the magical potential she must be generating had to go somewhere. I could reclaim what was mine later. After I’d grown accustomed to my anima’s eerie ways.

  And they were eerie. She worked in total silence, reaching for the next crystal with the uncanny accuracy of a blind man in a familiar space. She plucked a tiny apatite from its compartment. Ugly gray faded to clear blue as she worked, and I wondered if she felt a corresponding boost in her own mind. “Good work, Ariel,” I said, hoping that encouragement might turn the tide.

  She turned to me slowly, as if she were walking in her sleep. Witch, she said, and the word was toneless in my mind.

  “Um,” I said, speaking out loud because that felt more natural to me. “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Witch, she repeated, and I decided to believe that she was acknowledging my instructions.

  “Great! The crystals should take you the rest of today, at least.”

  Witch, was my anima’s only reply.

  That third repetition of my title was enough to slide a single drop of power into my mind. Well, that was better than nothing. And at least she didn’t offer sartorial advice, like Neko constantly did. I thought of my familiar’s presence, made comfortable over nearly two years of togetherness. Even when he wasn’t in the cottage, I’d always had a faint tie to him, the bond that I could use to summon him in an emergency. I reached out for that connection now, to comfort myself.

  It was gone.

  I could feel where it used to be, like a gulley carved deep by runoff water. There might have been a glimmer there, a
reflection of the old tie. But my power was well and truly missing, invested in the creation of the strange creature who toiled silently in front of me.

  Was this what David had meant, when he had said that losing my power would set Neko free? Was this how another witch could find my familiar, could steal him as her own?

  Neko! I thought. But there was no answer, no magical reply.

  I scrambled upstairs, grabbing my cell phone off the coffee table, where I’d left it the night before. It was faster to punch in Neko’s number from my stored list than to press ten separate buttons on my home phone. It rang and rang and rang. I finally snapped the cell closed and tried to tell myself that the radio silence meant nothing. Neko had left my cottage late last night. He and Jacques were probably still tangled in their sheets, lost inside their lovers’ bower.

  I needed to call David.

  I couldn’t call David.

  I had to.

  His number rang unanswered, as well. At least he had voice mail. “David, it’s me. I can’t feel Neko. It’s not working, this whole Ariel thing. Call me.”

  I’d tried to sound calm. Collected. Dispassionate.

  My heart was pounding so hard that I could barely breathe, but I still needed to get to work. In fact, Evelyn was standing guard at the front door of the Peabridge. She nodded to greet me as I sailed in with less than a minute to spare. “How was your weekend, Jane?” she asked, her face even more heavily powdered than usual, as if she were trying to tone down any hint of florid expression against the shock of her magenta-and-peach suit.

  “Fine,” I said, thinking that I’d better keep things simple. No need for Evelyn to hear about my mistake with David. Or my failure at yoga class. Or the arcane creature who crouched in the basement of the Peabridge gardener’s cottage.

  Simple was going to be my watchword for the workday. I was going to be a good reference librarian, a solid worker. There was nothing I could do about my magical problems until David called me back.

  Before I could elaborate a harmless lie about my weekend adventures, there was a flurry of activity on the library steps, and a flash of muslin and indigo-dyed trousers. “Kit!” Evelyn exclaimed.

  “I’m here,” my intern said. “I’m on time!” She brandished a large paperboard box. “And I have the pastries from Cake Walk!”

  Evelyn glanced at the giant clock on the wall over the coffee bar. “Well, it is just nine.” I could see that she wanted to argue about something, wanted to launch into yet another explanation that Katherine Elizabeth Montague—Kit—should be wearing a dress instead of a boy’s outfit.

  But Kit was too valuable to me to lose. I clutched her arm and said, “We’d better get ready for the first coffee wave, before Colonial Story Hour begins.”

  Kit flashed me a grateful smile and followed me across the large reference room. She started to set up the coffee bar with swift, automatic motions. Kit had graduated from Georgetown University in May. She’d spent her summer in town to avoid heading home to a horrendously large family in horrendously crowded New York.

  Kit had been accepted into graduate level public policy programs at Harvard and Brown; she was such an attractive candidate that both schools had offered her full scholarships. She knew that she wanted to change the world, that she wanted to focus on schools and teaching and where the collective we were failing the children of America.

  But she also knew that the rest of her life hung on the decision she had to make. Harvard, Brown. Harvard. Brown. She couldn’t go wrong. But she wanted to go right. So she had begged extensions from both programs and committed herself to working for a year to decide.

  Working without pay. Working as an intern at the Peabridge Library because we were close to Georgetown University, and because we were familiar, and because she just happened to wander by the day that we posted a notice in our front window announcing our internship (my little brainchild, when I’d realized that I would likely murder the next children who came in for story hour, if I had to continue doing the activity unassisted). I didn’t know how she supported herself; I was afraid to ask, for fear that she would admit she couldn’t make ends meet, that she would announce that she had to leave.

  And Kit was perfect for the job. She had the academic knowledge that Evelyn craved and an enthusiasm for working with small children that left me truly awed. The only catch was that Kit flat-out refused to wear a colonial woman’s clothes. She said, “What am I going to do, chase after kids with eight layers of petticoats tripping me up?”

  My point exactly. That was why I had sought an intern in the first place. I was tired of kid-chasing.

  Kit was the one who hit on a compromise. She would wear colonial costume—but the far more forgiving attire of an eighteenth-century young man. Evelyn had wanted to protest the first day, but she found herself swayed by our shrewd college graduate’s justifications: (1) the kids should see more than just women’s costumes, (2) there was a surplus of men’s clothing that had been donated to the Peabridge by Colonial Williamsburg, (3) (and the killer argument, in my humble opinion) Kit might be more successful in bringing more boys into our summer program, expanding the library’s demographic in the Georgetown community.

  Kit had a future as a public policy maker. She won her argument handily, and I gained an intern who freed me from the worst of my job responsibilities. My savior even lived a block away from Cake Walk, so she brought over our morning pastries, along with gossip from Melissa.

  As if on cue, Kit exclaimed as we set out the display of baked goods, “Oh, Melissa wanted me to give you a message!”

  “She’s won the lottery, and we’re on our own for baked goods for the rest of the year?”

  Kit made a face and shook her head. “At least I’d understand what she meant by that. No, I’m supposed to tell you that she made a special pot of Caramel Caravel, and now she’s sailing to The Tempest on Friday night. Does that make any sense to you?”

  I winced at the mention of the damned play, but I nodded. Caramel Caravel…Melissa had said that her would-be beau preferred caramel flavors for his coffee. Melissa must have kept her obligation under our Friendship Test. She had spoken to Rob-Peterson-the-Lawyer. Why they were going to the Shakespeare play, though, I really couldn’t say.

  With Ariel returned to the front of my consciousness, I reached out with another tentative mental finger, gauging again the accumulation of cleared-crystal energy. Nothing added. Nothing new. I glanced at the phone on my desk and willed David to call. At least I wasn’t foolish enough to be disappointed when it stayed silent.

  He’d call me when he got my message. David was responsible that way. David was responsible every way. Before I could dwell more on my warder-inspired peccadillo, the library doors opened and a half-dozen mothers swarmed in, surrounded by their whining, crying brats. I watched a smile bloom on Kit’s face, and I shook my head at her crazed enthusiasm. “Divide and conquer?” I asked.

  “Come on, kids!” she called out, not even bothering to nod. “Down to the basement!”

  In exchange for Kit’s cheerful herding of the masses, I twisted my lips into a smile and ducked behind the coffee bar. When Evelyn had first instituted our beverage service, I had resented the time that I spent as a barista—after all, I hadn’t attended library school to learn how to pour the perfect latte.

  Now, though, with our new and improved simplified menu, I found that I was nowhere near as down on the notion of library-cum-coffee bar. It would seem practically churlish to begrudge the poor mothers of Georgetown a simple cup of coffee. Although, I still thought they overstepped their bounds when they asked me to pour their caffeinated brew over ice.

  It only took a couple of minutes to get them all served and to settle them at a table in the reference room, where they pretended to whisper to each other about the house-and-garden show down at the Convention Center. The grand display of stage whispers lasted for about thirty seconds, and then they were chattering away in normal voices. My reference librarian
nerves were on edge, but I knew that Evelyn wanted the local community to feel at home around us, so I pasted a smile on my lips and headed back to my desk to get some real library work done.

  I straightened my mobcap and fired up my old computer. I had half a dozen e-mails waiting for me, and I quickly settled into a series of short research projects. I could still remember when I’d started at the Peabridge, how every new request sent me delving into incredible specialized resources. I’d loved learning new things, exploring new intellectual opportunities.

  Now, it seemed as if I knew my subject matter a little too well. There was one person asking about colonial customs for Thanksgiving. Again. (Our founding fathers did not observe the holiday.) Two more patrons were planning even further ahead, asking about Christmas. Again. (I had a little more to tell them. I already knew they weren’t going to be pleased when they learned there was no Santa Claus, no Christmas Tree and gifts were minimal.)

  I enjoyed helping patrons—I still got a thrill out of locating the occasional rare and obscure resource. But these days, there was too much same old, same old about my job.

  I got my first interesting question of the day when I opened an e-mail from a woman who lived a few blocks away from the library. She wanted me to track down some finer points of colonial garden layouts, designs that were intended to maximize vegetable yield in poor soil. I wondered whether she really wanted to serve a family of four through the dog days of summer, all on the plantings of her quarter acre lot.

  I muttered the research librarian’s motto: Ours not to wonder why. Remembering a specialized treatise that I had shelved a few weeks before, I pushed back my chair and wandered into the stacks, taking along my very own cup of coffee (with a half shot of cinnamon syrup for good measure, and a white plastic lid snapped on top for good stewardship of the library’s collection).

  Mindful of past disasters involving my colonial skirts and awkward library shelves, I pushed a step stool over to the stacks with my toe. I set my cup of coffee in a conveniently book-free space on a shelf just below eye level, and then I stepped onto the round step stool as gracefully as I could manage. I stretched for the volume that I recalled, certain that it was hiding beside the ragged leather-bound farm accounts from one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.