Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  Like the house they surrounded, the plants were obviously meticulously cared for. The blueberry bush on my left looked particularly inviting, its plump berries magazine perfect with their glistening coat of morning dew. I didn’t dare pick one, though. I didn’t touch anything.

  Beautiful as it was, this place was giving me serious “witch’s garden” vibes. I didn’t want to bend so much as a blade of grass if I could avoid it. Fortunately, there was a stone path just a few feet away. A crazy one that zigzagged around the clumps of plants as if it was as desperate as I was not to touch anything, but I made do. My bare feet actually made it easier to follow the stones when the garden spilled across the walkway, and I managed not to step on anything all the way to the house’s front door, which was painted a garish, glossy shade of candy-apple red. Taking a deep breath, I lifted my hand to knock, but my knuckles had barely touched the wood when a cross voice spoke behind me.

  “We’re closed.”

  I must have jumped a foot in the air. Heart pounding, I whirled around to see a squat woman standing on the path I’d just come from.

  Going by her frizzy gray hair and stout, hunched body, I placed her age in the mid-sixties, maybe early seventies. Her face, however, looked much older: a pile of ruddy wrinkles with two beady eyes gleaming out through the folds like chips of dark glass.

  Not surprisingly, considering where we were, she was dressed for gardening in high-waisted trousers with mud on the knees, green rubber boots, and a short-sleeved white T-shirt that showed off her wrinkly, heavily freckled arms. But while her look was pure Midwestern grandma, the magic rolling off her was the strangest I’d ever felt. It wasn’t sharp like a dragon’s or overwhelming like a spirit’s, but it was definitely there, which was remarkable in and of itself since humans didn’t usually put out enough magic for me to feel. Even more remarkable was how nice it felt. The power she radiated was as bountiful and inviting as the garden surrounding us, a stark contrast to the annoyance in her beady eyes as she glowered at me.

  “Um,” I said, pulling out the card Peter had given me to make sure I had the name right. “Are you Dr. Rita Kowalski?”

  “Not yet,” the woman replied, lifting her chin stubbornly. “We don’t open until ten a.m.”

  I turned the card around so she could see it. “It says here you’re open twenty-four hours a day.”

  “To the right people,” she countered, pointing a bony, freckled finger at the line that did indeed say exactly that. “What makes you think that includes you?”

  I winced. She had me there. “I was just hoping…That is…I’m having a bit of an emergency, and Peter—the priest who gave me your card—said you could help.”

  Her expression softened when she heard Peter’s name. “I suppose you’re talking about your magic?”

  I nodded rapidly. “I hurt it really bad a week ago. I was trying to stay off it and let it heal, but something happened tonight where I had to use it, and it kind of…broke.”

  “So I see,” the woman said, looking me up and down. “But what do you want me to do? If you’re hurt, go to a doctor. That’s what they’re for.”

  “I can’t afford a doctor.”

  “Then what makes you think you can afford me?” she snapped, pointing at the meticulous house with its lovely garden on an acre of land under the open sky. “Does this look cheap?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wringing my hands. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “No, you said exactly what you meant,” she said crossly, folding her stubby arms. “You think I’m off-brand, a low-quality substitute good you’re only using because emergency forced you here. If it were up to me, I’d kick you out for that, but I like Peter, and the woods did let you in, so I’ll give you another chance. Now, tell me again why you’re here. Properly, this time.”

  I took a silent breath, buying time as I scrambled for the right thing to say. Fortunately, I had a lot of experience dealing with powerful beings of prickly honor.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, lowering my head. “I didn’t mean any offense. It’s just that I’ve never met a professional Shaman before, and I didn’t know how to act. I don’t think you’re inferior. Quite the opposite. I kept walking because I knew anyone who lived in these woods would have to be an expert, and that’s what I need. I’ve done something to my magic that I don’t even understand, and—”

  “I’ll say,” the woman interrupted with a snort. “I can feel it screaming from here.”

  “Then you know this is serious.”

  She shook her head. “It’s well past serious. Your magic’s the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some disasters. Frankly, I’m shocked Peter didn’t tell you to come to me sooner.”

  “Actually, he did,” I said, both for the sake of transparency and to defend my friend. “Peter gave me your card well before this happened.”

  The old woman looked horrified. “You mean you kept using your magic after it got so bad Peter sent you to me? Are you stupid?”

  “I didn’t do it because I wanted to! I told you, I was trying to stay off it, but this was an emergency. I had to do something or my partner was going to die!”

  “That was your bad decision,” she said, shaking her head in frustration as she turned away. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  My stomach turned to ice. “You mean my magic is broken beyond repair?”

  “No, I can repair it,” the woman said as she shuffled down the winding path. “But there’s no point, because you’re just going to break it again. Your magic already told you as loudly as it could that you were abusing it, and you didn’t listen. If you won’t heed your own body, why would you listen to me? I don’t waste my time on patients I can’t trust to follow the treatment protocol.”

  “But I will!” I promised, running down the path after her. “I’m normally really good about taking care of my magic. I only ignored it this time because I was under so much pressure, and I didn’t realize it was an emergency until tonight!”

  “Then why didn’t you go to an emergency facility?” she snapped, whirling around so fast I nearly smacked into her. “There’s a thousand clinics in the DFZ who could have looked at your magic. Many for dirt cheap, so don’t feed me that line about cost.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” she snapped. “I’m a doctor, sworn first to do no harm. It’s plain as day that you’ve been abusing your magic for years now. I’m not going to fix you up just so you can break yourself even worse next time.” She turned away again. “When you’re ready to address the underlying issues that got you to this point, we’ll talk. But if you’re just looking for another enabler, go somewhere else.”

  She turned on her heel and tromped off, leaving me gaping at her back. Honestly, I couldn’t say why I’d ordered the cab to take me here instead of going to a normal clinic. She was right, there were plenty of doctors I could have gone to even at my price range who didn’t live out in the crazy woods. I hadn’t even wanted her card when Peter had given it to me, and I still didn’t believe Shamans were real mages.

  Then again, maybe that was it. I’d already been to plenty of “real” doctors. Growing up, my mother had taken me to every developmental magic expert in the world, all respected Thaumaturges from the best universities, and none of them had ever been able to tell me why I was so terrible at casting spells. They’d all just looked at my magic and told me to try harder, but I was trying. I’d tried and tried and tried for so long, and everything still blew up in my face. That was why I hadn’t gone to a clinic even when using my magic had hurt so much it had brought tears to my eyes. I hadn’t been willing to spend my hard-earned money on another lecture about how this was all my fault. And that, I realized suddenly, was my answer.

  “I don’t want to be a failure.”

  The words came out in a sad little girl’s voice, but they were enough to make the old woman stop.

  “What makes you think you’re a failure?” she asked, turning around.
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  I shrugged helplessly. “The fact that I fail all the time? I don’t know why, but I’ve been a terrible mage my entire life. Even when I’m copying someone else’s spellwork line for line, it never works the way it’s supposed to. The magic always overloads or blows up in my face. Honestly, I’m amazed I didn’t break myself before now. I’ve been backlashed so many times I don’t even feel it anymore. The doctors always told me I just need to be more careful, but other mages can go all out without wrecking themselves. I can’t even fill a circle without getting it back in my face!” I scrubbed my hands through my hair. “It’s just so frustrating! I’m not stupid about anything else. I did great in all my other classes, but magic just…”

  “It doesn’t work,” the woman finished.

  I nodded glumly. “I don’t know what miracle I expect you to work, but you’re right. I can’t keep going like this, but I don’t know what to do. I’m not…I can’t…”

  I closed my eyes and turned away. I would not cry in front of a stranger. I was not that weak person. At least, I didn’t think I was until Dr. Kowalski put her gnarled hand on my shoulder.

  “What can’t you do?”

  I scrunched my face up tight. “I can’t keep being the weakest link,” I said in a whisper. “There are plenty of Cleaners who aren’t mages who make great money, so I thought I could get by, but Nik needed me tonight, and I just couldn’t. I only saved him by accident, and I’m still not sure I didn’t make everything worse.”

  “I see,” she said, even though none of that could have possibly made sense out of context. “What do you want to do, then?”

  “I want to stop,” I said angrily. “I know being a good mage is probably too much to ask, but I’d be over the moon if I could just not be a terrible one. I want to be someone who’s not a liability. Someone who can stand on her own.”

  Someone who could have saved Nik without blowing everything up.

  “Fair enough,” Dr. Kowalski said when I finally petered out. “Come with me.”

  I blinked my embarrassingly red-rimmed eyes at her. “You’re going to treat me?”

  “I’m open to trying,” she said, trotting past me toward her cheery red door. “I wasn’t willing to tape you back together, but if you can be that open with a stranger, I think we’ve got a good chance at making progress on your actual problem. Before we do anything, though, I need to look at your magic and assess the damage, and I can’t do that out here.”

  My knees started to shake. “Thank you,” I gasped, running after her. “Thank you so much!”

  “Save the praise until something actually works,” she cautioned. “Though I understand now why Peter took pity on you despite your prejudices. Hardly surprising for a priest of the Empty Wind, but that young man has a terminal soft spot for the lost.”

  I didn’t think I was lost. Desperate, maybe, but I felt like I knew where I stood. I just hated it.

  I wasn’t about to shoot my unexpected good fortune in the foot over semantics, though, so I kept my mouth shut, following on Dr. Kowalski’s heels as she opened the door and waved me inside.

  ***

  The interior of the house looked nothing like its meticulous exterior. Outside was all perfect brick and clean lines. Inside looked like an overstocked antique store mixed with a vegetable silo.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” Dr. Kowalski said as she stepped high over a pile of summer squash. “Brohomir of the Heartstrikers placed a produce order last week, but he hasn’t been by to pick it up yet.”

  “Brohomir of the Heartstrikers,” I repeated in a shaky voice. “You mean the Peacemaker’s brother?”

  She nodded.

  “You sell vegetables to one of the three great dragon seers?!”

  “I sell vegetables to anyone who’ll come and take them,” Dr. Kowalski said grumpily. “This clearing used to be a fecundity experiment site before I took it over. If I don’t sell the produce, it’ll bury me, but it’s such a hassle to get it shipped to local markets. Fortunately, dragons have large appetites and don’t mind flying in for a pickup.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. The Great Seer Brohomir was one of the most famous and feared dragons in the world. Even my dad spoke of him with respect, and he normally hated Heartstrikers. Of course, it was also well-known that Brohomir was crazy as a loon. That was pretty common for seers, though, so no one held it against him.

  “Here we are,” Dr. Kowalski said, leading me into a small room by the kitchen that had clearly been originally meant as a dining room but was now done up as an office, complete with a large cluttered desk, a couch for consultations, and walls decorated with framed diplomas from a world tour of respected magical universities.

  “Wow,” I said, looking in awe at the field of impenetrable Latin. “So which of these makes you a doctor?”

  “Take your pick,” Dr. Kowalski said, moving a crate of radishes off the desk chair so she could sit. “I was the leading expert in my field for years. Still am, honestly, but I got tired of university politics, and the universities got tired of Shamanism.”

  I shuffled my feet self-consciously, remembering my own thoughtless comments to Peter.

  “Schools of thought go in and out of fashion just as much as anything else,” the doctor went on. “Forty years ago, half the mages in the world were Shamans. It was quite the thing, but Shamanism’s emphasis on intuition and changing casting protocols to match the needs of each individual and situation made it unappealing to corporations. They wanted magic that would work the same way every time, even if it was less powerful, less efficient, and took more resources. As a result, Thaumaturges started getting all the high-paying jobs, and Shamanism fell into decline. Simple economics, really. It also didn’t help that the Archmage of the Merlin Council kept calling Thaumaturgy the only ‘real’ form of magic. She made the rest of us sound like quacks.”

  The Archmage was staunchly in the Thaumaturgy camp. She didn’t actually have control over what magic was taught in schools, but she was arguably the most influential magical authority in the world. When she said Thaumaturgy was the only proper way to go, people listened. Even my dad thought Shamans were a waste of time, and he wasn’t even human.

  “I can see why you’ve had problems.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Dr. Kowalski said, settling into her chair with a creak. “Chairing a university was good for the ego, but Shamanism has never needed institutional approval to shine. We might have lost our edge in the general population, but every priest is a Shaman by definition, so we’ve always got that.”

  “Why do priests have to be Shamans?” I wouldn’t have thought the gods cared what kind of magic you cast so long as you did your job.

  “Because priests serve the Mortal Spirits, and unlike Thaumaturges, Shamans don’t try to shove their gods into tiny circles.”

  “Oh.” I’d expected something grander, but that actually made a lot of sense.

  “But enough about the decline of my once-great discipline,” Dr. Kowalski said, pointing at the couch under the window, which was covered in books rather than vegetables for a change. “Sit down, and let’s have a look at your magic.”

  I nodded and scooted the piles aside to make myself a spot. When I sat down, the doctor reached out to take my hands. She prodded my palms with her calloused fingers for about thirty seconds, and then she placed her thumbs on the insides of my wrists as if she were checking my pulse.

  “Try to move some magic,” she ordered. “I know you can’t, but just try.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes, trying as hard as I could to reach out for the thick, wild power that saturated this part of the DFZ. There was so much here that I could feel it coating my skin like water, but no matter how I pushed, I couldn’t move so much as a drop of it.

  “Interesting,” Dr. Kowalski said as she released my hands. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a high draw? Like, really high?”

  I nodded. Draw was the measure for how much magic a mage could grab at o
ne time, and mine was off the charts. I knew this because my mother had bragged about it every day of my childhood. Thanks to my dad’s willingness to throw morals under the bus in his quest to create a perfect mage daughter, my genes had been heavily edited before I was born, resulting in a draw number that was slightly above what had been previously considered the human limit. All that ability was supposed to make me a prodigy, but like everything else involving me and magic, it had flopped. My outsized draw had allowed me to sense and move magic years before other kids even knew they were mages, but it hadn’t made me any better at handling or manipulating the power, which was the only part of casting that actually mattered.

  I explained all of this to Dr. Kowalski. Or, rather, I told her about my high draw number and why it hadn’t helped me, leaving out the draconic narcissism that had landed me in this position in the first place. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of being a test-tube baby. I was just tired of my dad hanging over every aspect of my life. Seriously, I couldn’t even break my magic without finding him in the wreckage. You’d think I’d be happy to lay all of my troubles at his feet, but I’d never be free if I kept blaming him for my problems, even if most of them were his fault.

  “I think I see your problem,” Dr. Kowalski said when I finished my story. “Two problems, really, but they’re interrelated.”

  “That was fast,” I said eagerly. “So can you fix me?”

  “Fix isn’t really the word,” she said, leaning back in her chair with a thoughtful scowl. “Humans move magic by reaching out with the innermost part of ourselves. Officially, that’s the mana-connecting prehensile self-perspective appendage, but it’s better known by its colloquial name, the soul. Human souls are what give us our unique ability to move and process magic outside of ourselves, both the ambient stuff that rises naturally from the ground and power contained in other vessels, including spirits and other living creatures. The ability to do this consciously and deliberately is what makes a person a mage, but all humans’ souls move magic to some degree whether they’re mages or not. As with any appendage, though, the soul can be damaged by overuse, resulting in a sprain or a tear.”