I sat there, appalled, chilled. My first reaction was repulsion. He wanted to be one of them. He’d killed vampires to attain his selfish goal.
But how could I guess what I’d do if I were dying?
“Let me call Joe,” I said. “Please talk to him.”
***
Joe came through the door, like a breath of fresh air, tall and well-groomed and calm. Very calm. He shook his head at his brother. “What a mess you made, little brother. I don’t think this is as easy to fix as that ratty van of yours.” There was no hint of resentment that Michael had killed his wife. Perhaps it was different among vampires.
Michael laughed, but not in any sort of amusement. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I’m dying.”
“I know. I’ve seen your records.” He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Let’s see what I can do. Mary, if you’ll wait outside.”
I stepped out onto the little balcony outside the door and waited. I waited what seemed like an unreasonably long amount of time.
After a while, I opened the door, and saw that Joe had fastened his teeth on Michael’s neck, and was drinking, while supporting Michael’s body with his arms. It was the first phase of turning a human, the next phase involving the human drinking the vampire’s blood. It seemed to me like an unendurably private moment, and I was about to close the door, when Michael sort of sighed, then Joe eased him to the carpet. And I realized Michael wasn’t breathing.
I looked up at Joe who got a napkin from the kitchenette, and wiped his mouth, as if he’d just had a snack and not drained his brother.
“You killed him,” I said. “You didn’t turn him.”
“I couldn’t turn him,” he said. “You need permission from the council. I was trying to obtain it, when he started shooting immortals. They’d never allow me to turn a murderer.” He looked down at his brother’s corpse. “This was all I could get. Permission to drain him, to kill him while he still thought I was turning him, without the trauma of arrest and the horrors of murder by strangers.”
I looked at him and at Michael’s corpse.
“I suppose it would be foolish to ask you to consider heading a human police force, to protect humans?”
I couldn’t answer. Instead, I climbed down the apartment stairs, to the parking lot where I’d left my car parked. I threw my overnight bag in the back seat and I drove back home.
It was a difficult drive, because the rain started again, but my cats and my chicken needed me.
As I drove I realized tears were falling on the steering wheel and on my lap, though I didn’t feel like I was crying, nor sure why I was crying.
Perhaps I cried for Michael, for Joe, for me, for Ria, and for the entire damned human race.
The Price Of Gold
WHEN MICHAEL LAUREL DISAPPEARED, everyone had an opinion.
Everyone but Maria, who could barely remember Michael and who really didn’t want to hear about someone disappearing – because she often felt like disappearing herself.
Yet, there was no escaping speculation. Early morning, walking into school, past the office door that had been left ajar, she heard the first one.
“I don’t know if he’s dead or just beyond the reach of our magic,” the principal of Invisible High said. “We should never have admitted him. Family or no family. I know that the Laurels are an old magic family and all, but the boy had not a drop of talent, not one. Poor kid.”
Maria shook her head. Or maybe he would not have done any better anywhere else. Perhaps it was not his lack of talent, but how little he cared. She found this was true for most of her classmates.
At fourteen Maria was too tall for a frame that hadn’t quite filled in, yet, and she had a cloud of unruly red hair. But worse of all – or perhaps best, only not how she experienced it – she was the best witch at Invisible. At her command, with the careless wave of a hand, she could change her school uniform into a sparkling ball gown. At her whim, and with very little effort, she could change her desk to gold. Barely thinking about it, she could take a tattered, half-bald broom, found on the street, and cause it to fly with the best brooms produced by the best aviation-broom houses.
Her parents had sent her to the school because, though they were both sorcerers they were not at her level. They couldn’t teach her to control her power as she should. Her father worked as a day trader, putting his premonition ability to good use and her mother used her transforming ability to run her distinctive designer clothing shop in the small, expensive suburb of Lakeside where they lived.
They neither craved nor wished the kind of power that more magic could give them. And, if truth be told, Maria scared them a little, with her untrammeled magic. Which was probably why, she thought, they left her alone with her books most of the time.
They were afraid to let her play with the other little girls in the neighborhood, too. After all, people no longer believed in magic, and it was better that way. It wasn’t so long ago that those with special powers had been burned at the stake.
By sending her to a school system designed for witches, they’d thought she’d have enough friends.
By fourteen, Maria had learned this wasn’t true. And she didn’t even care. Not that much. She went to school, and she did her work, and she slouched through the hall in clothes that she could make far more glamorous if she cared, which she didn’t.
On the day after Michael disappeared, the hallways were decked in posters for the coming Witch Ball. Magical letters glowed out of the walls proclaiming Music By The Magical Jive; Broom Waltz; Foretelling and Magical Matching.
The posters were ornamented with pictures of girls and boys in their magical best – which considering how many people came to Invisible from all over the world meant everything from tuxedos to wizard robes – twirling madly in sparks of stars.
Maria didn’t even notice the posters. She didn’t pay any attention to them. To go to dances, you needed to have a date, or at the very least a friend. And Maria had no friends in the school. She made the best grades effortlessly. And then she crossed the barrier between Invisible and Lakewood High, and she went home to watch TV and dream she was a normal teenager with no power at all. One of those many she left Lakeside High with every day. One of the many who didn’t dream that in their school – as in most schools over the world – there was a secret entrance to Invisible High and the magical world where young witches and wizards got trained.
***
“We really should never have accepted him,” the flying teacher said. She was a tall, gangly woman with angular features.
Maria was helping her put away the brooms after flying lesson, because there were always two of three of the students who couldn’t quite control the brooms and left them scattered all over the landscape, from the nearby fields to the play areas for the young kids in Invisible Elementary next door.
The teacher didn’t have that much magic. She was just good at flying. But she could not far see where, in the thickets of bushes, in the rolling grass leading down to the river, the missing brooms might hide. And she had no idea how to bring them back unless she were physically riding them.
So Maria stayed after school and far saw where the brooms were, and she waved a hand, and pulled the brooms to her by the force of her magic.
The first lost brooms were together, in a thicket at the end of the school grounds. Maria didn’t need to scry to know that they’d been abandoned by a young couple who’d used their ineptitude at flying as an excuse to ditch their mounts and walk back, hand in hand, through the spring-flowering woods. Stacey and Paul had used up the entire period that way and got remarkably little flying done. But when push came to shove, they’d pass the class, and what else did they need? No employer in the world out there would hire people just because they flew brooms better. No one even knew people could ride brooms.
Maria guided the two brooms, side by side, to the pile of the other brooms, against the gym wall. “I heard the principal say the same thing,” sh
e told the flying teacher. “That he was only accepted because of his family. I always wondered why he was here; how he always managed to be promoted every year.”
The flying mistress gave her a worried look, then sighed. “The Laurels are very well off, very influential in the wizarding community. They refused to admit their son had no talent. And, you know... sometimes I wonder if people know what’s best for their children when they push them into programs like this, that they are totally unsuited for.”
Maria nodded. “Sometimes I wonder if I...”
The flying mistress gave her a startled, worried look, as though she could read what Maria didn’t say. That sometimes she wondered if Invisible High was the best for her too.
“Oh, my dear, but you are who the program was designed for,” she said. “Not, that,” she added piously, in the tone of someone reciting a spell – and it must be one, because every teacher said this at least once a day. “You’re any better than kids with no magical talent. Of course not. It’s just that everyone is gifted in a different way, and your gifts are perfect for this school.”
And Maria nodded and blushed and didn’t say anything else. Instead, she pulled the next missing broom from where it had been ditched – in the middle of the river, where Will had doubtlessly taken an opportunity of having a swim on this sweltering day.
But she wondered if that was true that the program was designed for people like her. Looking at the flying teacher, so lonely, so quiet, so gawky-awkward, she wondered if it was true for anyone.
The program tried to control these high magic kids by telling them – a hundred times a day – that they were no better than those without magic. Maria understood that. They were clearly afraid that witches would decide they were better than normals; or a different species, and turn on mundanes.
Only, the thing was, in the long history of witchcraft it had never been the witches who decided to eliminate those with no power. It was always the other way around. There was strength in numbers and most of the people had no magical power. Which made them ... what was expected.
Half the kids in Maria’s class spent their lives disguising how powerful they really were, even in school. And disdaining learning new spells. And forgetting their abilities.
Maria didn’t seem to have the knack of it. She liked magic. She liked performing magic. Of course it didn’t make her very popular. She expected she would be like the flying teacher someday – tall and gawky and awkward. And alone, very alone.
***
“If I hear there was any bullying that caused him to disappear,” the vice principal said, magically broadcasting his voice over the lunch room. “There will be severe punishment. You must remember that your magic does not exempt you from common, decent behavior. You’re not better than the kids with no magic. You’re just different. Each person is gifted in his or her very own way.”
Maria, sitting alone at the table in the corner bent her head over the peanut butter sandwich into which she had transformed the tuna sandwich her mother had packed her and thought what a load of nonsense it all was. Yes, everyone might be gifted in a different way – but if you had a gift for shaping flint tools, it wouldn’t do you much good in the twentieth century. And if you had a gift for witchcraft, a gift so large you could not deny it, then even your witch classmates would ostracize you. And if you had no gifts and were sent to a witch school... well... They’d probably ostracize you too.
She didn’t know if Michael had been bullied, but he didn’t need to be. Look at her. No one would bully her. No one would dare to. But she was still miserable.
She looked around the dark wood tables – she’d once peeked into the lunchroom at Lakeside, the school she entered Invisible through, and she’d been shocked at the Formica tops, the plastic chairs. She supposed, though, if custodians couldn’t magically clean, those would be better.
Here, the oak tables, the broad wood chairs looked better, but she knew that the other school couldn’t be worse for cliques and groups. The pretty witches hung together, as did the powerful wizards. They specialized and made groups of that specialty. And they used their magic to make themselves popular. Vast giggling groups of glamour-intensive people whose magic made them popular ate together every day.
And ignored people like Maria who were too serious, too intense, too whatever and people like Michael who had no power at all.
Bullying would be merciful by comparison to being treated as invisible. Sometimes Maria thought she could vanish into thin air and no one would know.
“Michael didn’t go home last night,” the vice principal said. “And our foretellers can’t find him anywhere. He’s not in the magical dimension, nor in any of the schools invisible high connects to. We can’t find him at all. There are two reasons for this – either he’s been kidnaped by a more powerful magical entity who is hiding him, or...”
The VP never said or what, but Maria knew. Or Michael was dead.
While the vice-principal thundered about bullying, she wondered if he had been bullied, and if that was it. Or if he’d simply been as ignored, as lonely as she was until he disappeared. It could have happened that way, she thought. Some days she thought she could burst like a soap bubble and stop existing.
***
Posters of Michael appeared on the walls of the school, by sixth period. Alternating with the posters of couples twirling and the glamorous enticement to the witches ball, there was the picture of Michael, serious-solemn, staring from the walls. The top of the poster said “Missing” and the Bottom “Michael Laurel.” And that was all.
The picture itself showed a dark haired boy, with overgrown, lanky hair and intense dark eyes staring out at those who walked by. And walk by they did. Groups and couples, and the occasional loner like Maria. They walked by laughing or talking, or thinking of their multi-dimensional geometry quiz.
And Maria wondered what good the posters could possibly be. They were even easier to ignore than Michael had been.
Perhaps that was why, towards the end of the evening, she used her magic, on an empty hallway, when no one was looking, to pull one of the posters off the wall.
***
She lay it out on the white carpet of her room after school, and stared at it a while.
The large house in the suburbs was empty and echoing. Her parents were out at a dinner given by dad’s company or his clients or something. Maria didn’t know which, and cared even less.
Instead, after doing her homework, including studying what had gone wrong at Salem – for history – and memorizing the new weather changing formula for physics, she sat down in front of the poster, staring at it.
Michael didn’t look special at all. He never had. They’d been in the same schools since elementary and though Maria had had her share of crushes on boys at school, she’d never even thought of Michael. He just was. A boy like any other. With no magic.
They didn’t have the same classes, of course. Michael was in remedial everything, from transformational physics to arcane architecture. He would pass every year, but as far as she knew he never learned anything. It was just one of those things.
And every year he was a little quieter at recess. Every year he sat alone in the lunch room. Every year.
She stretched out her hand to the face that showed, in tri-dimensional projection in the poster. And at that moment she heard it. Help.
It was said in Michael’s voice, and it sounded both urgent and despairing.
For a moment she thought it was built into the poster, and then she realized that was not it, at all. It was just she’d been thinking of him. And she’d established such a connection that she could hear him.
Half fearful, afraid she was communicating with the dead – which was a course she wouldn’t even take till eleventh grade – she extended her mind in the direction of that help and she said “Is this Michael? And where are you?”
It took a long time, and when his voice came it was as if from a long way off. “Yes, I’m Michael,” he
said. “And I’m trapped.” And then, faint and in her mind only: Help me!
***
The sane thing to do, Maria knew, would be to call an adult for help. But as she reviewed, in her mind, the adults she could reach – her parents or the teachers at the school – she realized it wouldn’t do. For one, Mother had left for a business dinner with her buyers. And dad was working late.
As for the school, given what their far seers hadn’t found, why would they believe Maria had found something? Maria knew that adults in general and teachers in particular hated to be shown up by kids.
Instead, she got out her materials for meditation and concentration class. It was obvious she could not find Michael as she found the broomsticks, by thinking about it. Something more was needed. Meditation and concentration was where the other students were taught to improve their skills.
And though Maria hadn’t needed it, she had dutifully studied her lessons and knew what to do. From her backpack, she extracted the requisite candles and incense and set about creating a circle around Michael’s poster. Then she closed the blinds on her windows tightly, and sat down on the floor, looking at the poster of Michael and thinking of where he might be.
Suddenly, without transition, she found herself before him in a landscape that appeared to be completely composed of grey spider webs. Buildings, land forms, human-like figures, all was shrouded in grey mush.
Only Michael had color and looked fully alive, as he stared out at her.
“Where?” she asked, but even as she asked, she got the mental coordinates of his location, the feeling of where it was.
In the school in Maria’s neighborhood there was a stall in the bathroom – the third from the left, on the second floor bathroom – where, should a student from Invisible High enter, the back wall opened and allowed access to the front hall of Invisible High. The arrangement was the same at other schools. It conveyed the students from their world into another world, in which humans had never existed. There, Invisible High had been built, and there they could indulge in broom flights and do all the magic they wished without fearing a repeat of what was called in the school’s textbooks The Salem Incident.
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 13
