by Mindy Klasky
“The what?” Moira asked, clearly distracted, now that her plans for playing tour guide had been disrupted.
“The Artistic Avenger,” the guy said. “She’s been coming out here every night. She’s picketing Congress, trying to get them to increase the budget for the arts. She’s got a slogan and everything—Empower The Arts. Everyone’s been talking about her.”
Everyone. Everyone but me. Me, and every last one of my correspondents. This was the first I’d heard of the Artistic Avenger.
Will, oblivious to the turmoil in my thoughts, placed an easy hand against the small of my back, accepting that our fingers were no longer entwined. He said to Moira, “Do you mind if we go closer?”
She shrugged and glanced at the traffic light, which was conveniently changing to green. Our little group sifted into the crowd that had already gathered around the so-called Artistic Avenger. A half-dozen policemen watched us, shifting their weight but making no move to interrupt this apparent expression of free speech.
There was no mistaking her, up close. Instinctively, I took a step away from Will, distancing myself from the human warmth, the human attraction that he offered.
Ariel, I thought, fighting the urge to close my eyes.
She turned and stared at me. Witch, she thought. A golden pearl dropped into the center of my powers, an immediate payback from our contact. I fought to keep from laughing out loud at the sensation, even as I struggled not to let anyone see the bond between us, the connection that pulled me forward.
Then she was moving, dancing like a professional ballerina. Absolutely conscious of the space she occupied, she spun in a tight circle, generating energy from some unseen, unimaginable point of physical perfection. I could not count how many times she rotated, could not measure the actual path of her graceful arms, her perfect legs. The crowd began to applaud, but she continued, seeming to gain strength from every person who noticed the display, who gathered around her makeshift stage.
All of us cried out as she stopped her spinning, as she transformed the glorious arcing energy into a single leap. She ended up at the base of the stairs, the shimmering marble steps that led up to the Capitol. She bent over, collecting a poster that I had not seen before, that no one had noticed before she displayed it to the crowd. I knew what it would say before I could see it.
Empower The Arts.
Silently, she worked the poster into her ballet, raising it, then letting it fall, treating it like a partner for a silent pas de deux.
I suddenly remembered a book that Gran had read to me every night when I was a little girl, when I was going through my ballerina phase. (After the flight attendant phase, before the veterinarian phase. Funny. I never had a librarian phase.) The book was The Red Shoes, and it retold the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. The story had terrified me, even as I felt compelled to hear it over and over and over again.
And when I watched Ariel dance in her fire cloud of a dress, I remembered that fairy tale. I remembered the feeling of consumption, of compulsion. I remembered the magic of a child’s dreams, the magic of my own witchy abilities.
And then she stopped. She set down her poster. She stood, frozen and perfect, panting just a little in the nighttime air.
People began to murmur. The policemen shifted, as if they anticipated trouble from the assembled crowd. A man held up his cell phone, taking Ariel’s photograph. Another man called out, “What’s your name? Who are you?”
But she did not answer. Instead, she raised her chin. Met my eyes. Quoted from The Tempest, from lines delivered by the play’s Ariel to Prospero, to the magician who looked so distractingly like my warder. “At last I left them i’ the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell, there dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake o’erstunk their feet.”
Ariel’s speech, reporting how the spirit had tricked men with magic.
A tiny cascade of astral energy trickled back to me—nearly half a dozen drops of ripe, raw power. Even as I gasped at the sensation, my anima turned away and sprinted into the darkness beyond the Capitol Plaza. I gave chase without thinking.
“Wait!” I called. “Ariel!”
I thought that I felt her dress against my hand as I clutched at the summer night. I thought that I saw a glimpse of darkness, blacker than the midnight bushes at the base of the building. I thought that I heard a whisper as someone lighter than air glided past a copse of trees.
I clutched at a stitch in my side as I chased her—or a shadow of her—around the corner of the building. I blinked in the light of overhead lamps as we emerged on yet another marble-covered terrace. I cursed as I realized that she had disappeared.
She was gone, as if she had never been there. As if she had not revealed herself to hundreds of onlookers, to the Capitol police. As if our encounter had been by chance, had been an accident.
I put my hands on my knees and leaned over, trying to catch my breath.
“Jane!” Will’s footsteps pounded onto the terrace as he caught up to me. “What the hell was that?”
I sucked in great heaving breaths of air, trying to think of an excuse that could be remotely, conceivably, fantastically possible. Maybe the truth was a better out. “I thought she was someone I knew.”
“Must have been someone important,” he said.
“It was.” I couldn’t think how to explain. I couldn’t think how to tell him that she was an anima, that I was a witch. I couldn’t think how to let him know that my world was crazy and mixed up and that he’d be better off to leave me alone, if he wanted to live with even the faintest hint of normalcy.
“Are you okay?”
Well. I wasn’t expecting that. Demands about Ariel, sure. Exclamations about how crazy I was acting, of course. But concern? Coupled with the pucker of a worried frown?
“Yeah,” I said, pushing myself upright. “I’m fine.” I planted a hand against the stitch that still felt as if it was going to sever my side. “But, Will? I’m going to need a raincheck on dinner.”
Dinner, and more. Dinner, and whatever other silent bargain we had begun to strike, our fingers twined together, then his palm against the small of my back.
He set his jaw and swallowed before speaking. “I was afraid that you were going to say that.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Does this have anything to do with that guy? The one who was at your house the other night?”
I couldn’t blame him for asking. “Yeah,” I said, regretting the answer.
Will didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned around and headed back to the car. He shoved his hands in his pockets when we stopped at the traffic light, waiting like ordinary pedestrians. The lecture crowd had disappeared, moving along without us to Moira’s next step on the architecture parade.
When we got back to the car, Will opened my door first, waited for me to get settled, then closed me in and walked around to his side. He put the key in the ignition before turning to me. “Can you tell me any more about it?”
I heard him trying to be reasonable. I heard him trying to make sense out of what I’d said. What I hadn’t said. I shook my head and stared out the window.
Yeah, I could tell him. I could tell him I was a witch. I could tell him I had magical powers unsurpassed on the entire Eastern seaboard, when they weren’t busy disintegrating from lack of attention and ill use. I could tell him I’d made an anima, that I’d somehow crossed her wires, somehow turned her into some strange activist for the arts, because of what I’d been thinking at the precise moment that I summoned her to life.
I could tell him all of it.
Because everything had gone so well whenever I’d let men know about my powers.
“I can’t,” I finally said, when we were halfway back to Georgetown. “Not right now. I just can’t.”
He didn’t find anything else to say before he dropped me off in front of the Peabridge gates. I hadn’t really expected one, but I still missed his kiss good night.
12
I tr
ied to call David, but of course he didn’t pick up. The man was never there when I wanted him. What sort of warder was he? I left a gibbering message and paced the living room for half an hour, waiting for him to call back.
Realizing that I could walk a marathon before I heard from my distant astral protector, I threw myself into my pajamas and climbed into bed.
I spent the night not sleeping.
I spent the night staring at my ceiling, trying to convince myself that I really could read mystical patterns in the shadows of the leaves. (With my ability to read runes apparently gone forever, I figured that I might as well try to find magical import somewhere.) I tossed and turned, tangling my sheets so badly that I had to get up not once, not twice, but three separate times, to straighten them into some semblance of order. I kept punching my pillow, turning it upside down, folding it double.
I spent the night worried that I had lost my anima, pinning my hopes on Gran and Clara where there was no reason to believe they could help me, tangling my relationship with David beyond repair, and now, I was losing whatever had been tentatively beginning with Will.
Shared garlic shrimp or not.
I finally gave up at four-thirty and dragged myself out of bed. I stood under my shower until the water ran cold, and then I tugged on a pair of torn jeans and a faded T-shirt. Melissa had seen me in worse.
The stroll to Cake Walk was actually a type of magic. The air was kissed with the first hint of autumn—I actually wished that I had grabbed a sweater before setting out. Occasional cars rumbled past me, jostling over the cobblestone streets and the abandoned trolley tracks. A blue jay squawked as I walked past one house, opening its mouth and releasing a sound that seemed much too large for its body. Squirrels coursed back and forth over the sidewalks, occasionally stopping to nibble on the acorns they were storing away with all the industriousness that I apparently lacked.
By the time I got to the bakery, I had found my own sort of Zen. That, or sleep deprivation had finally turned off my brain, forcing me to navigate my way through the front door by willpower alone. I shuffled up to the counter, eyes closed to express my dramatic exhaustion, and I proclaimed, “Last night, I didn’t get to sleep at all.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” finished a laughing voice melodically.
A strange voice. A man’s voice.
My eyes flew open. “Oh!” I echoed, my single syllable spoken in a tone of utter astonishment.
The guy sitting at the counter was grinning. The facial expression increased his cherubic look—he had cheeks that a grandmother would love to pinch, and he carried a few extra pounds around his middle. He was beginning to lose his hair—just a bit at the top, making him look a little like an understudy for a medieval friar. The skin around his brown eyes crinkled as he registered my confusion.
I stammered, “I’m s-sorry! I didn’t realize there’d be anyone else here.” Frantically, I looked for Melissa behind the counter, swallowing a little flutter of panic when I couldn’t find her, even crouching by the foot of the refrigerated case.
Before I could translate my confusion into a coherent sentence, I heard Melissa’s feet on the back stairs. “Great,” she said, as she hitched up the loose shoulder strap on her overalls. “You two have finally met!”
“Er,” I muttered, suddenly conscious of my torn jeans and the ragged hem on my too-often-laundered T.
“Rob Peterson,” the cherub said, extending his hand.
I shook automatically and completed the round of introductions. “Jane Madison.”
“Melissa said you might be stopping by, but she figured it would be later in the morning.”
This was Melissa’s dream date. This was the guy she had debated asking out for over a year. This was the guy who had come into the bakery every day for forever, the guy who had a favorite coffee, a favorite pastry, a favorite type of cake.
Melissa laughed, as if she always introduced her boyfriends to me. “Iced tea or hot?”
“Hot,” I said, grateful for the note of normalcy. “It actually feels like fall out there.”
My best friend dug out my favorite mug from beneath the counter, filling it with water so hot it almost boiled. She waved me toward the tea selection, and I spent an inordinate amount of time selecting English Breakfast. Plain old English Breakfast. Ordinary, easy-to-choose English Breakfast.
Still ignoring the boyfriend-elephant in the center of the room, I asked brightly, “Do you have some cream? I need to brew this strong.”
Melissa produced a small pitcher from the refrigerator. “Tough night last night?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
I hadn’t believed it. I had thought and rethought and re-rethought about what I had seen. And the only thing that had kept me sane at three in the morning had been the belief that I could hash out the details with my best friend as soon as the sun rose. Alone.
“That sounds like my cue to head back upstairs,” Rob said.
“I didn’t mean—” I protested, even though that had been precisely what I’d meant.
He grinned and shrugged. “I need to take a shower before I head down to the office.”
“But you were here first!” I struggled one last time to be polite. To share Melissa.
“This morning, yeah. But you’ve got something to talk about, and I strongly suspect it doesn’t include me.” He picked up his cup of coffee and walked behind the counter. He stopped to brush a quick kiss against Melissa’s lips, and then he turned back to me. “It was a pleasure meeting you.” His eyes twinkled, and I wondered what he’d been expecting, what Melissa had told him I was like.
“Yeah,” I said, forgetting all the graceful social skills that Gran had taught me over a lifetime of meeting new people. I listened to his feet climb the stairs. And then I could just make out the faintest sound of the shower running in the upstairs apartment. Something about that noise, that slightly illicit, caught-in-the-morning sound, made me realize the import of the scene I’d walked in on. My best friend had a relationship that had progressed to spending-the-night-on-a-school-night. Not that there was anything wrong with that. “That’s Rob!”
Melissa smiled. “I noticed.”
“Rob Peterson!” This time, she only nodded. I couldn’t help but steal a glance at the calendar, at its smooth, unblemished page of blank squares, nary a red X in sight. “But he seems like a really nice guy!”
Melissa harrumphed a little. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”
“Well—” There wasn’t any graceful way to finish that sentence. Instead, I settled for a new direction. “No! It’s just that I was surprised to finally meet him. Surprised to find him here so early!”
“Or so late,” Melissa said, utterly unconcerned.
I knew that I was supposed to say something ribald, something encouraging, something utterly in keeping with our feminist-charged friendship. I knew that I was supposed to give her a high five, or some complicated handshake, or exclaim, “You go, girl!”
Instead, I passed my cup back for a refill of hot water.
She obliged, and then she said, “So? What’s up?”
“It’s probably nothing major…”
“Of course. You make it over here by six o’clock every morning, when there’s nothing major going on.”
I made a face. “Will and I went to a lecture last night, down at the Smithsonian.”
“Oh, no! Not a lecture!” Her mocking tone made it sound as if we had done something worse than tour every last nightclub in D.C.
“That’s not the problem,” I said, and my voice was serious enough that she stopped her joking. She leaned in, intent now on what I had to tell her. “Have you heard about the Artistic Avenger?”
“The what?”
At least I wasn’t the last person in town to know about the newest crackpot sensation. “The Artistic Avenger. Apparently, she’s been camping out on the Capitol steps. Campaigning for better funding for creative enterprise. Her slogan is Empower The Arts.”
“Your anima!”
I nodded grimly. “Ariel.”
Melissa sucked in her breath and said, “What happened?”
So I told her about all of it, ending with Will driving me home, about our awkward parting. “I don’t know what to do, Melissa. I really like this guy.”
“Then tell him.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
I sighed in exasperation. “What am I supposed to do? Put on my favorite apron, invite him over for a cup of coffee and say, ‘By the way, I forgot to mention that I’m a witch.’”
“Sounds about right. Personally, I wouldn’t bother with the apron, but to each her own. And you might want to take a couple of Belly Laughs, so that you have something to feed him when he starts to ask you questions.” She gestured toward the caramel nut clusters on the counter between us, rounded into high domes of salted sweetness.
“I’m not joking!”
Melissa shook her head. “Neither am I! Listen to yourself, Jane. You sound different when you talk about this guy. You’re relaxed around him. You’re comfortable talking to him. You aren’t twisting yourself into a pretzel to be his idea of the perfect girlfriend. You already trust him. Now you just have to share this one little thing with him.”
I started to protest out of habit, but then I cut off my own words.
Melissa was right. Things were different with Will. I didn’t sit at my desk, hoping against all breathless hope that he was going to set foot inside the Peabridge. I didn’t stare at my phone with laser vision, trying to make him call. I didn’t worry about every word that I said to him, didn’t weigh each and every syllable before I dared to set it into a conversation.
I was comfortable with him.
Even though I’d only known him for a few weeks, I was comfortable with him.
And if—if was a huge word, but it was one I was going to have to swallow at some point—if there was really something there, really the basis of a true relationship, then Will was going to have to find out about my powers. I wasn’t exactly going to settle down in the suburbs with an SUV, a Jack Russell terrier, two-point-four children, and a husband who knew nothing of my magic—Bewitched’s Samantha Stephens all neatly packaged for the twenty-first century.
