Magic and the Modern Girl

by Mindy Klasky

  Empower The Arts, said the first one, her old standby.

  All Our Life Is Drama, said another.

  Museums Are Not Dead, said a third.

  Each sign raised a scatter of applause. She pirouetted with her handiwork, swirling in the floodlights. Dance Is Life. She ran from one end of the vast memorial platform to the other, raising cheers with her words.

  “We’ve got to do something. Now.” I felt David’s words against my back more than heard him. He grasped my arm and pulled me closer, relying on Neko to follow with a familiar’s ingrained bond.

  “What?” I said, reluctant to turn away from Ariel’s spectacle. “I can’t control her. I can’t even feel her. Not with magic. Not now.”

  “Do you see what she’s doing with the signs?” We were jostled by the crowd behind us. Everyone was pushing closer, forcing us up against the velvet rope.

  “They’re not real, are they?” I squinted to make out the precise magic, to understand what she’d done to weave her arcane messages.

  “No.” I knew David well enough to comprehend that his anger was boosted by his inability to control what was happening.

  The crowd behind us started to chant. “A-ven-ger! A-ven-ger! A-ven-ger!” I felt as if I was at a pep rally for the emo crowd.

  Ariel kicked her dance into high gear. She was moving faster now, more smoothly. I felt Neko twitch beside me, almost as if he was going to pounce on her. The posterboard messages changed faster, flashing forward with a speed fed by magic. Each one transformed, until they all said the same thing: Empower The Arts.

  The crowd behind was enraptured, spun into my anima’s production like audience members at a hypnotist’s stage show. Everyone was eager to reach Ariel, desperate for her attention. Someone planted a hand between my shoulder blades and shoved me hard so that he could get closer to the magical creature on the limestone stage.

  Even as David grabbed at my arm to steady me, I staggered forward, my head breaking the plane of the velvet rope. I blinked, and everything changed.

  Ariel was still there. She was still dancing. But her frantic energy was absent. Her terrible power was gone. She raised her hands above her head, and they were empty. Her arms were spread, without any poster, without any words.

  The velvet rope held back her power. It delineated the force that mesmerized the crowd. If I could get past the rope, I could get to her. I would have a chance at regaining control over my anima, at taking back the magic that was rightfully mine.

  David pulled me back to safety so abruptly that my teeth rattled. I tugged at his arm. “The rope! We have to take down the rope!” I had to shout to make myself heard above the crowd.

  Somehow, he understood me. Somehow, he knew what had to be done. He bellowed at Neko, ordered him to stand ready to catch Ariel. He put his hands on the nearest stanchion, spread his fingers around the polished brass.

  One, I could hear him count. Two. Three.

  He tugged with the strength of a man who spent his afternoons splitting wood. The velvet swayed wildly, and three of the stanchions tumbled down the steps. The crowd went wild, leaping forward, frantic to breach the barrier, desperate to get to Ariel, to her magic, to her message.

  Neko and I, blessed with a split-second warning, were the first people to hit the top step. I scrambled up to my anima, skidded to a stop in front of her, Neko slipping to my side.

  Come, I thought, holding out my hand.

  Witch. Her voice was as flat as it had been in my basement. Her eyes were dull. But a single drop of power fell onto the parched landscape of my mind.

  I order you to return to me, I thought. Come home. Now.

  She raised a hand, as if she were intent on cutting me off. There was a brutal barrier between us. I knew that Neko felt it, too; he was forced to step back, shoved away by the tremendous power she projected. I felt heavy, smothered by a force, a gravity that I had never known before.

  And suddenly I understood just how much my initial spell had failed. Not only had I freed my anima. Not only had I released her upon the city. Not only had I invested her with a bizarre mission, a freakish obsession based on a single wayward thought. But I had somehow blocked the natural channel between us. I had somehow locked up all of the power that she was generating, all of the magic that spun out of her own spellcraft, all of the strength that should have flowed back to me. It was there, growing, pulsing, generating more and more pure arcane ability.

  But I could not reach it. I could not free it. I could not take back what should have been mine.

  “Jane!” David’s bellow cut through my revelation.

  I turned in reflex. The crowd had caught up with Neko and me. They were no longer held back by the velvet rope; they weren’t restrained by any sense of justice or rightness or reserve.

  Without another thought, Ariel turned and ran, darting around the side of the building. Neko scampered after her, leading the pack that clamored for more information, for more dancing, for more, more, more.

  I fell to my knees at the top of the suddenly desolate steps.

  David’s hand on my arm was demanding, irresistible. “Are you hurt?” His voice was so harsh I almost failed to recognize it.

  I shook my head. After a few deep breaths, I managed to say, “It’s working. My magic is building. She has it all, within her. It’s locked up, so that I can’t get at it.”

  David pulled me to my feet. “They’ll be back in a minute. Let’s get out of the spotlight.” He marched me down the endless steps, holding me upright when my knees decided to imitate Jell-O. Only when we were on the ground level, halfenrobed in shadows beside the Reflecting Pool, did he let us stop. “I don’t understand,” he said. “The night that you created her, you said that everything worked exactly as we planned.”

  I stared into the darkness, toward the accusing finger of the Washington Monument. George Washington. The man who could not tell a lie. “About that spell,” I said, unable to meet his eyes.

  “What happened, Jane?” His words were frozen.

  How could I tell him? How could I admit that he had distracted me? That I had been thinking of his arms, of his chest, of his bed, of that entire glorious, mistaken afternoon, when all the time I should have been focused on creating my anima? How could I admit that I had let a stupid promotional poster sway my concentration?

  “My God, Jane, are you all right?”

  I whirled at the new voice, recognizing it even before I found the speaker. Will.

  He skidded to a stop beside us. “What’s going on? I grabbed a cab when I got your message. The driver had on WTOP. They said there was some sort of disturbance at the memorial.” He glanced up the stairs. “Some sort of riot?”

  David stepped forward before I could speak. “It’s over now. Everything is under control.”

  Will ignored him. “Jane, are you all right?” he repeated.

  “I’m fine.”

  David put a hand on my arm. “I said, it’s over now.”

  I slipped away from his touch, crossing my arms over my chest. Will looked from me to my warder. “It’s David, right?”

  “That’s right.” I could hear the abrupt authority in his voice, the animalistic boundary that he was drawing. I didn’t want to be part of that argument, though. I didn’t want to be his possession.

  “Well, thanks for making sure that Jane was safe.” Will planted his feet more firmly. In a different age, he would have been summoning his second and setting a place for dueling pistols at dawn. He turned to me and offered a soothing hand. “Let’s get out of here. Are you ready for dinner?”

  “Dinner?” David sounded like an adult laughing at a child’s knock-knock joke.

  “We had plans.” Will managed to swallow some of his defensiveness.

  “Jane doesn’t like to eat dinner this late.” David was tossing down his own gauntlet.

  “She didn’t have any problem accepting my invitation this afternoon,” Will said.

  “Where are you going?”
David asked, eyes narrowing. It sounded as if he thought that Will was lying, that he was making up our late-night dinner plans.

  “If you really have to know, Paparazzi. In Georgetown,” Will said. That was news to me, and I winced, but only because David and I had once shared a midnight meal there. “A little alfredo for two.”

  My warder apparently had not forgotten. He raised a provoking eyebrow. “She prefers baked ravioli. For dinner.”

  “But sesame bagels for breakfast.”

  I couldn’t believe it. David was actually knocked silent; Will had deflated him with one simple line. A line that made me blush as David absorbed its full import, but one line all the same.

  My warder turned to me stiffly. “We have to finish this conversation. Tomorrow. Phone me after you wake up.”

  He strode into the darkness. Before I could even look at Will, my familiar came loping out of the shadows. “Neko,” I said, cutting off whatever was going to pass as a smart comment from him. “Go after David. Tell him everything you learned.”

  “But—”

  “Now,” I said. “Go.”

  For once, he listened to me.

  I was shaking by the time I turned to Will.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was ugly. That was possessive and stupid and…rude.”

  “It was,” I agreed. I could see his face fall in the darkness, read the disappointment in his expression. I said, “David can have that effect on people.”

  “Really?” Will said. I knew that he was asking about more than my warder’s behavior. I knew that he was asking about me. I knew that he was asking if I forgave him, if I was willing to have dinner with him, if I was willing to do more.

  My heart was still pounding. I looked up at the floodlit stairs, realized that people were wandering up and down, as if it were any other night at the tourist spot.

  Ariel must have gotten away, slipped from the crowd. She was out there, somewhere, burgeoning with power that was rightly mine. I needed to find her, needed to tame her, needed to control her like the anima she was supposed to be.

  But for now, I needed time away from the chaos. I needed a human companion and a night without witchcraft and worry, without spells and deception. I slipped my hand into Will’s. “I’ll share alfredo with you any time,” I said. I managed not to look back at the memorial steps as we walked away. And for the rest of the night, I managed not to think about Neko and Ariel. And David. I didn’t think about David at all. Not even when the couple next to us shared an order of baked ravioli.

  16

  September ended, and Mabon, the Autumn Equinox, passed without any change in the magical environment. Ariel, the Artistic Avenger, the anima that was holding all of my power hostage, had apparently gone underground.

  I heard about her often enough. The Washington Post set up Avenger’s Watch, running a hotline by phone and a blog on their Web site. People sent in their sightings—dozens each week. I knew that some of them could not possibly be true. Ariel would not cut her hair, would not—could not—even bleach it. She was bound to wear her gauzy dress, no matter how cool the autumn air became. She was not going to take a trip to Rio, to the Bahamas, to Australia, to perfect a tan, no matter where the rumormongers placed her on the globe.

  I knew that she wasn’t a real, human woman. She was bound by the way that I had created her; her body was set, even if her mind had somehow gotten away from me. Those surface features could never change.

  Still, she remained perfectly elusive. She’d apparently lost her taste for dance concerts. She modified her tactics, leaving giant signs sprawled across places no real person could access. Empower The Arts was splayed across the reading room of the Library of Congress, the letters shaped out of books that had been pulled from the shelves, stacked on the floor. The slogan found its way onto the columns at the World War II Memorial, in bold, black letters that took some poor custodian days to scrub away. It was stenciled onto the doors of the National Archives.

  Ariel had a taste for vandalism that frightened me. But she certainly had a way of making her message heard.

  I was booting up my computer on the Tuesday after Columbus Day when my phone rang. A quick glance at caller ID said it was Will, calling from his cell.

  “Hey there,” I said. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” The busy life of an architect was catching up with my boyfriend—let me say that again, my boyfriend. He was finding it difficult to juggle nights at my place, days at his office, and the huge Harrison project that was swooping toward deadline—the housing plans for his dot-com billionaire with a colonial mansion fixation. I’d left him in my bed, curtains drawn, pillow over his head, groaning that he was going to take a personal day.

  “I’m heading back to my place. At least it’ll be quiet there.”

  Oh. That didn’t sound good. “What’s going on?”

  “David phoned. Apparently, he thinks that you’re screening your calls, because he called three times back-to-back. I picked up the fourth time.”

  I winced. David and I had been seeing each other twice a week, working with Gran and Clara on building up their powers. The witchcraft instruction was going only slightly better than our verbal correspondence. We nodded hello and actually verbalized goodbye. Otherwise, we spoke only to Gran, Clara and the familiars, pretending that we were too busy, too driven, to have anything else to say.

  Even Neko had given up making snarky comments, trying to reconcile us by way of his wit. There was a certain grim determination about every training session. The mood was made darker by the fact that I still had not succeeded in teaching Gran or Clara anything substantial. Sure, they could thaw a cheesecake. They could even, on a good day, summon their familiars, silently, from across the room.

  But manipulate crystals? Brew a potion with any truly useful qualities whatsoever? Empower even the smallest charm?

  They could not harness their magic, and I was absolutely unable to find a key to unlock that barrier.

  I was just about ready to call a stop to the charade altogether. So what if the Artistic Avenger kept up her campaign? So what if she successfully lobbied Congress to increase funding for the arts? She wasn’t doing any harm on the magical front.

  And I was more and more certain that I was willing to let the magical bit of me slip away. What good had it done me, in the past two years, anyway? It had gotten me romantically involved with two real losers. It had dragged me into a snake pit of female jealousy that made high school look like fun. It had burdened me with a familiar who thought it was a game to pick apart every single thing I wore, ate or touched. It had left me with a brooding, possessive warder who apparently thought that I was more a thing for him to own than a person for him to respect.

  Life would be simpler without witchcraft. Life would be sane. Life would be normal. Life would be the perfect slice of pie I’d been feasting on with Will for nearly a month, minus the drag of failed training sessions. I was so, so tempted.

  I sighed and said, “What did he want?”

  “He said to call him. As soon as possible.”

  Great. I still hadn’t really told Will about David—at least not about sleeping with him. As far as Will knew, David was just my overprotective, overbearing warder. I kept telling myself that Will didn’t need to know anything else. After all, I was never going to end up in bed with David again. Not a chance of that.

  David was just a Number—a guy I’d slept with in the past—and Will and I weren’t sharing Numbers. I had no interest in the women he’d slept with before me; there was no reason to count them up. (Okay. I had a little interest. A lot of interest. But I cared more about keeping my own list secret, than about learning the specifics of Will’s.)

  “I’ll get back to him,” I said, trying to sound brisk and businesslike. And I would—when I was good and ready. I relished the opportunity to pay him back for all of my phone calls that he had ignored. Besides, I really resented his triple-calling. As if I would be the sort of person to screen my calls.
Oh. That’s right. He actually knew me pretty well.

  I glared at the red “message-waiting” light on my desk phone. Now, I was virtually certain that at least one call from David had triggered the signal. Well, that was fine. I could ignore him at work as well as I could ignore him at home. I glanced at the drawer where I kept my purse locked away. It was a good thing that Evelyn insisted that we keep the library a cell-free zone. David couldn’t reach me there, either. I’d talk to him when I was good and ready. And his hounding me at home made me that much more inclined to wait another day or two.

  I softened my voice and said to Will, “I’m sorry that he bothered you.”

  “I’m not,” Will said, and I could hear his grin over the phone line. “He sounded really surprised when I picked up the phone.”

  There was that gorilla behavior again. Why didn’t they just agree to a cage match and be done with it? I rolled my eyes and grunted, “You Tarzan. Me Jane.” Will responded by roaring like a lion. I started hooting like a chimpanzee, because I’d always had a soft spot for Cheeta.

  I looked up to find Evelyn standing over my desk. “Whoops! I’ve gotta run.” I hung up the phone and hastily spread a professional smile across my face.

  My boss tried to erase her startled expression, but she wasn’t quite fast enough. Not for the first time, I wondered what she really thought of me. I knew that she despaired of my ever gaining the level of professionalism that she hoped for. She pursed her lips and said, “Jane, I have a special project for you.”

  Oh, goody. “Sure. What do you want me to do?”

  “The fire marshal came by yesterday. He’s concerned about the papers on top of the bookshelves, down in the basement. If the sprinklers ever came on, they couldn’t flow freely with everything stacked up there.”

  If I recalled, Evelyn was the one who had decided to use the bookshelves as auxiliary file space. She’d argued that there was never enough storage in a special collection like ours. “Did you want me to move them?” I asked, trying to cut to the chase.

  “I think you should read through them. See if there’s anything worth keeping. They should be duplicates of our vendor records from the eighties. That’ll give you a good idea of the management issues the library has faced over time.”