by R. L. King
“That is true,” Kolinsky admitted. “But I do not believe that. And you do not either.”
“No,” Stone said with a sigh. “I don’t.” He grinned. “Well, at any rate, if I go up there and don’t come back, you’ll know something’s up. You’ll have to watch the show to find out what happened. Do you even own a television?”
“I do not,” Kolinsky said. “But if you are unable to determine the nature of the curse and it takes effect once more, I doubt there will be any show to watch.”
“That’s what I like about you, Stefan. Cheerful and optimistic to the end.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Verity did a lot of thinking over the next few days, but primarily her mind was occupied by an upcoming event she’d been looking forward to for a long time: her twenty-first birthday. She couldn’t entirely stop thinking about the motorcycle accident and feeling guilty over Jason’s breakup with Kristen, but the thought that in just a couple more days she would be a legal adult in all senses of the word provided a welcome diversion.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Edna Soren had said when she got caught woolgathering during a tricky ritual and admitted her mind had been elsewhere. “So you’re twenty-one. What does that get you? You already drink when you want to—don’t think I don’t know about it. And you’ve had a fake ID since before you were eighteen, right?”
“Well…yeah. But it’s nice to know I can get rid of it now. And maybe Jason will finally stop treating me like his kid sister.”
“Won’t happen,” Edna said with a snort. “That’s the way families work. You get stuck as the youngest, you get treated like a kid until you’re my age.” She shrugged. “Getting married and having a kid of your own helps some, I’ve heard. So maybe you should spend more time looking for Mr.—or Ms.—Right.”
“Yeah, no. Not ready for that any time soon. I have enough trouble dealing with Jason’s relationships.” She’d already given Edna the whole story surrounding the breakup, the night she’d gotten back and found the old woman had returned home. Edna had brushed off the breakup itself (“Feh—she wasn’t good enough for him anyway”), but her pride at Verity’s spellwork had shown through despite her best efforts to maintain her usual irascible demeanor.
“So, you have plans?”
“For my birthday? I dunno. Jason will probably take me out to dinner or something.”
“No clubbing in L.A.?”
She shook her head. “Just too much of a pain to drive down there in the truck, and I’m not gonna drag Jason. He’d go just to make me happy, but he’s never been crazy about my kind of clubs.” She smiled faintly, recalling the night just before she’d turned eighteen when she and Stone and Jason had gone to an industrial/BDSM club in San Francisco in search of the Evil’s leadership. As the resident expert on goth culture, she’d been allowed to work up their wardrobes, and had chosen black jeans, skintight black T-shirt, stompy combat boots, and a black leather jacket for Jason. She’d done the best she could, but with his long, dirty-blond hair and surfer tan, he’d looked about as goth as Brad Pitt.
Stone, on the other hand, had appeared almost alarmingly at home at the place. Her smile widened a little as she remembered his initial dismay at the more formal, military-chic outfit she’d selected for him, but damn if he hadn’t looked good in it. Despite the seriousness of their mission, she couldn’t help having fun portraying a dominatrix with Stone as her “date” and Jason as her bodyguard.
Those had been good days, when they’d all been together. She wished it could be that way again—as much as she liked Edna and valued the training she’d received, a small but steadily growing part of her felt more homesick for the Bay Area than she ever had for the region where she’d grown up.
“Eh,” Edna said, brushing it off. “You’ll figure out something to do. Let me know if I can help, or if you need the truck that night. I doubt I’ll be going anywhere exciting anytime soon.”
Yeah, Verity thought. Me neither.
Jason showed up in his Mustang at six o’clock the night of her birthday. “So, you ready to go have some fun?”
“Been ready all day.” So far, her day hadn’t been very exciting: lessons with Edna, helping out with some of the old woman’s caretaker chores, catching up on some reading. She didn’t often get mopey, but today she couldn’t help dwelling on how little her current life matched what she’d anticipated things would be like when she’d reached the lofty age of twenty-one: the end of her apprenticeship, a small, close-knit group of young mages as friends, and going out clubbing and dancing at least three times a week. Instead, she was lucky to get to the clubs a couple times a month, and most of her mage friends had drifted off to other parts of the country (she still maintained a close relationship with her ex-girlfriend, Sharra, but since they lived on opposite sides of the country with no portal close by, visits required planning).
That, and it looked like she was on the hook for at least another year of study. Both Edna and Stone had assured her that four years was a perfectly normal and reasonable length for a magical apprenticeship—essentially it was like going to college—but ever since she’d found out Stone started his at fifteen and finished it in three years, she’d always harbored the idea in the back of her mind that she could finish hers off in a similar timeframe. The thought of being twenty-one and fully trained as a mage had been appealing: the world would truly be open to her, especially now that she could use the portals without her former problems.
Except that she had no money other than the stipend Edna paid her for helping out with the caretaker duties, which wasn’t even enough to buy a beater car, let alone get her own apartment.
Ah, well. Life had a way of throwing things at you to see how you dealt with them. And today she didn’t care—she was twenty-one!
“What are you smiling about?” Jason asked.
She shrugged. “Just happy, I guess. So, what’s the plan? You never told me. Where are we going, anyway?”
“It’s a surprise. You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“What I’m surprised about is that Fran let you have any time off.”
“Hey, I told her it was my little sister’s twenty-first, and if she didn’t give me the night off, I’d quit.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Okay, no, I didn’t. But she’s really not as bad as I make her sound like. She gets it.”
Verity nodded, looking out the window as the lights flew by. “You doing okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You know…Kristen. You talk to her at all, after?”
“Nah. It’s probably for the best. Break it off clean, you know?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Don’t worry about it, V. I’m a big boy—I can handle my own love life. And anyway, it’s not the day to talk about that.”
“Okay, message received. Hey, are we going to Santa Barbara?”
“Yep. Got reservations at the Del Mar—it’s up on the hill off 101, overlooking the ocean.”
“Cool. You know, I was just thinking about something you said—how when you turned twenty-one, you went to Vegas with a bunch of your buddies and spent the weekend gambling and getting drunk.”
“Yeah. It was pretty stupid, but I gotta say it was fun at the time. Why? Would you have wanted to do that?”
“I dunno. Probably not. Especially since Vegas is still full of Evil.” She’d still never told Jason about her quick trip there to help Stone when he thought he’d lost his magical powers permanently. She wasn’t sure why; for a while she felt as if she should keep his secret, and then it just didn’t seem like something to bring up anymore. “Besides, I’m not really the ‘get falling-down drunk and act like an idiot’ type.” She grinned. “I can act plenty stupid completely sober.”
“No shit.” He returned
her grin.
They reached the restaurant a short time later. Jason parked and popped the trunk, pulling out a large, battered cardboard box crisscrossed with overlapping tape.
Verity eyed it with curiosity. “What’s that? If it’s a birthday gift, you need some work on your wrapping skills, big bro.”
“Wait and see. Haven’t you ever heard that expression ‘good things come in ugly packages’?”
“No…no, I haven’t.”
The place was crowded, but the hostess led them to a secluded table next to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the moonlit ocean. Jason waited for Verity to choose a seat and took one across from her, setting the box on the floor next to him.
“This is nice,” she said. “So when do I get to see what’s in the box?”
“Patience,” he said. “Don’t you want to order a glass of wine?”
“Oh…right! I can do that now, can’t I?”
“Not like you didn’t do it before. But yeah—now I won’t give you grief about it anymore. You got a preference?”
She pondered. Her first glass of legal wine sounded like it should be a big deal in a symbolic way, but the truth was, she’d never paid much attention to the stuff. “I dunno—what do you recommend?”
“I think we should ask somebody who knows what they’re doing,” Jason said, looking at a point somewhere over Verity’s shoulder.
“Yeah, when the waiter comes back we can—”
“He’s off doing something else at present,” said a familiar voice from behind her. “Will I do?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Verity spun to find Stone standing there, a big smile on his face. She jumped up and pulled him into a hug. “Doc! What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t think I’d miss my apprentice’s twenty-first, did you?” He returned the hug, then stepped back and slipped out of his overcoat. “Mind if I join you two?”
She turned back to Jason, who was now sporting a cat-ate-the-canary grin. “You set this up, didn’t you?”
“Mmmaybe.”
Verity settled back into her seat, suddenly feeling a lot better about the evening. Spending her birthday with Jason would have been fun, of course, and she’d never turn down a free dinner at a nice restaurant, but the addition of Stone to the party had made it a bit less ‘dinner with her brother’ and a bit more of a proper occasion. “Is anyone else coming?”
“Just me, far as I know,” Stone said. “Aren’t I enough, then?”
“You’re too much,” she assured him. “I didn’t even think you’d make it down—aren’t you getting ready for finals?”
“Eh, I can afford to take a day or two.”
The waiter came by again, and Jason deferred to Stone’s choice of wine. When he asked Verity for her ID, she produced it with a flourish and a smile.
“So,” Stone said after the man had left. “How does it feel to finally reach the lofty age of twenty-one?”
“Not that different,” she admitted. “But good. Remember when you arranged to get me that fake ID from that girl at Stanford?”
“Corrupting minors even back then.”
“Yeah, but now you can have a clear conscience.” She opened her wallet again and pulled out the well-worn ID card. “Maybe I should burn it. Sort of an adulthood ritual. Then again, it does bring back a lot of memories. Remember that time when…”
For the next hour, Verity’s stress about her future melted away as the three of them ate good food, drank good wine, and reminisced about the adventures they’d shared over the last three years. It was funny in a way how events that had been emotionally draining and fraught with deadly danger while they were happening became treasured memories in retrospect. As bad as those times had been, she’d never felt closer to anyone than she’d felt to Jason and Stone while they’d been blundering their way through them, doing their best to prevent some dire situations.
She grinned at Stone. “I still wish I’d gotten a picture of you in your shorts and steampunk hat at Burning Man. If nothing else, I could have used it as leverage if I ever needed to blackmail you.”
“Illusion, apprentice,” he reminded her. “Wouldn’t have shown up in a photo.” He leaned back, stretching out his long legs and sipping his after-dinner drink. “It’s good to see you two. We really should get together more often.”
“I’d like that,” she said. It was a familiar refrain: at least one of them said it every time they did get together, but they were all so busy with their various pursuits that they knew snatching an occasional weekend from their packed schedules would be the best they could manage any time soon. For a moment, she thought about tentatively broaching the subject of moving back up north, but decided not to. No point in jeopardizing the warm, nostalgic mood they all seemed to be in. Of course, part of that warmth might have come from the three glasses of wine she’d put away during dinner, but either way she was enjoying it.
“So,” Jason said, “I just want to say something, and then I’ll give you your presents.” He raised his glass. “V, I know I don’t get serious very often and neither do you, but—well, I just want to say I’m proud of you. I remember when we were kids, when you used to be a little snot-nosed tomboy following me around like a lost puppy, and then there was—all that stuff when you were a teenager, which I still feel bad about not being there for you as much as I should have been—but now, look at you. You’re all grown up, almost done with your magic training—how weird is that, right?—and you’ve turned into a pretty damned awesome person I’m proud to call my sister. So—to Verity, the best sister a guy could wish for.”
“Hear, hear,” Stone said, raising his own glass and clinking it with Jason’s. “If I might add something of my own before Jason regales you with gifts…” He set his glass down and fixed an uncharacteristically serious gaze on Verity. “When I met you two, three years ago, I’d—settled into a bit of a rut. Teaching, magic mostly confined to study and the occasional ritual…I thought it was what I wanted. Settle down and be a scholar. But then you two came along and completely upended my neat little world. I still can’t believe I’d been living so close to a major Evil infestation for years and had no idea about it. And then when I discovered you were a mage, Verity, and that you two were the children of someone I used to know…it seemed somehow as if it were meant to be. I don’t believe in God—at least not the way most people define him—but I do believe the universe sometimes nudges people together for reasons of its own.” He took a deep breath and raised his glass. “Verity…I’m eternally grateful that the universe nudged you and Jason into my path. You’re a fine apprentice, an admirable young woman, and you’ve made my life better for having known you.”
Verity felt her cheeks getting hot. Damn it, I am not gonna cry! But it was no use—she blinked tears away, swiping impatiently at them with her sleeve. “Come on, you two—you’re embarrassing me. Let’s go back to trading insults, okay?”
“I meant ever word of it, Verity,” Stone said. “I’ll go back to insults tomorrow, don’t you worry—but tonight, I want you to know how proud I am of how far you’ve come.”
She met his eyes for a moment, and their gazes locked. Stone’s glittered, not with tears, but with an intensity she’d rarely seen in him. For just a second, she focused on the sharp planes of his face, the way his dark hair fell over his forehead, the keen intelligence in his bright blue eyes. For just that moment, he wasn’t her magical mentor and teacher, but an attractive man who wasn’t that much older than she was…
For just a second, she thought Stone might have looked at her in a similar way. But then he was grinning again as he broke the gaze, and the moment slipped away…if it had ever been there at all. “Come on, then—let’s give the birthday girl her gifts.” He glanced sideways and nodded toward something. “And I believe this is for you as well.”
The waiter approached, carrying a small chocolate cake with a single large green candle in the center.
As he leaned in to light it, Verity rolled her eyes. “You guys aren’t gonna sing, are you?”
“Gods forbid,” Stone said. “Don’t worry—no party hats or off-key serenades. But you can’t have a milestone birthday without drinking too much alcohol and lighting baked goods on fire. I believe it’s some sort of law over here, isn’t it?”
“Go ahead, V,” Jason urged. “Make a wish and blow it out.”
She thought about it a moment, wondering if it would be too much to ask of God or the universe or whoever for more freedom, more options, a real job, and herself, Jason, and Stone all reunited back in the Bay Area. That was a lot of wishing for one candle. What the hell, she thought, and blew out the flame.
Jason bent to pick up the ragged cardboard box, which he placed on the table’s one remaining empty chair. “Okay. Time for gifts. I’ve got two for you, plus something else that’s not exactly a gift. They’re not flashy, but I think you’ll like ’em.” He opened the box so Verity couldn’t see its contents, and pulled out a wrapped package about twice the size of a large shirt box.
Verity shoved her plate aside, ripped the paper off, and opened the box. Inside was a black leather jacket. In contrast to her current scuffed biker jacket with its zippers and rivets, this one was smooth and sleek, with a more streamlined, military style. “I saw you checking it out a while back,” Jason said. “Since you’re grown up now, I thought you might like something a little more upscale.”
She grinned and slipped it on. She hadn’t thought Jason had been looking when she’d paused to drool over it a month ago; in many ways, he was a typical guy, oblivious to such things. Apparently this time she’d been wrong. “I love it. Thanks, Jase. It’s perfect.”
