Madison's Song

by Christine Amsden

  People always ask how you know if you’re in love, like there’s some formula. I figure it’s harder to let yourself be loved. At least for me.

  Had she been talking about him? If so, then she wasn’t the only person who had trouble letting herself be loved.

  “Talk to me,” Scott said. “Why are you afraid of magic?”

  Madison shifted uncomfortably and tried to look away from him. He tipped her chin so she had no choice.

  “I’m not,” she said.

  “Liar. I need the truth now.” Scott felt her tremor and immediately quashed his responding sympathy. Something did have her afraid, but what? And could he somehow figure it out so he could help her along?

  Madison licked her lips. “My father never let me sing. Said my gift was from the devil.”

  That was part of it, Scott sensed, but there was more. “Two years ago, Evan and I were following Cassie to make sure she got home safe one night. You and Kaitlin were with her, and Jacob Travis was following you.”

  “Evan told me,” Madison said. “He told me he was a blood mage.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jacob was at the bank the day a man pulled a gun on me. Apparently, I did something that made him realize I had a touch of magic.”

  “You pulsed.” Scott frowned. It had surprised him. It had shocked the hell out of Evan, and no wonder. Grown sorcerers didn’t pulse. It was a sign that their magic had been hopelessly repressed their entire life. Regaining control over it could be tricky. “Didn’t Evan ever try to figure out why you were so repressed?”

  “Honestly, I resisted his efforts. He didn’t really push me, though. At first because there was only so much he could teach me anyway. Then when he found out we were related, he wanted to teach me more, but I told him I wasn’t interested.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not like I have that much magic anyway.”

  “But you didn’t even want to use as much as you have.” Scott didn’t phrase it as a question. He was thinking out loud. “Because your father said it was from the devil.” There was something else, something right in front of his eyes if he could only... Then inspiration struck. “What did your mother think about magic?”

  * * *

  Madison felt paralyzed by the question. Her mother. When she thought about her mother, she usually remembered a frail, almost ethereal creature barely there one day then gone the next. Her mother had loved her. Given her hugs and kisses every night at bedtime. It was the only time in her life that Madison could remember getting hugs and kisses at all, and she clung to those memories with a fierce protectiveness that other memories could not intrude upon.

  Only...

  I had a one-night stand with the devil and gave birth to a demon child.

  Her mother hadn’t said the words to her, but she had said the words. She had meant them. And Madison had felt them.

  “Why did she say that?” Scott asked, and only then did Madison realize she had whispered the words out loud.

  Madison poked at the painful memory, wincing at the emotional backlash. What had she done? She’d always been such a good girl. A naturally good girl. She had wanted to please her parents. She hated to disappoint anyone and loved compliments. When she was young she would show off for her parents, who would praise her accomplishments to their friends. Madison was only two and knew every letter and number. She recognized her name and could spell a few simple words. By three she was reading simple books. By the time she started kindergarten, she was reading chapter books.

  Good girl. Smart girl. Devil’s spawn.

  “My mom loved candles and incense,” Madison said. “She’d fill the house with them and light them, especially at night. She loved the glow. So did I. I touched a flame once but it didn’t burn me. It danced away.”

  “Did that scare your mom?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I was young and I was never exactly empathic. But maybe, looking back. She put all her candles away after that. She got sick and I wanted to make her happy so I got them out again. Set them up around her bedroom while she was asleep. I didn’t have any matches or a lighter. My parents didn’t exactly leave that stuff lying around with a couple of pre-schoolers in the house. But somehow I lit the candles anyway.”

  “Basic early manifestation,” Scott said.

  “Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of my mom. She yelled at me never to do that again. She took me to church – she was always more religious than Dad. Told the priest I needed an exorcism.”

  “Did the priest-?”

  “No. He talked her down. But my mom said that to him. She said, ‘I had a one-night stand with the devil and gave birth to a demon child.’ Afterward, I tried to pretend it was a bad dream. I must have convinced myself it was because when my dad finally told me he’d adopted me it couldn’t have surprised me more.”

  “You loved your mom very much.”

  “Of course I did. She loved me too. Didn’t she?” Madison suddenly wasn’t sure. She wished she’d never had this conversation. That she’d kept those memories where they belonged, in the deep dark recesses of her soul.

  “Yes,” Scott said firmly. “She loved you. She was just scared. Didn’t understand. She hugged you every night, didn’t she?”

  “Is that love?”

  “It must be. I didn’t think your father’s rants could have touched you so deeply.”

  “No, they couldn’t have. They didn’t. I defied him in the end.”

  Scott laced his fingers through the fingers of her good hand, the contact bringing her back to the moment. Back to reality. “She loved you, Madison, but she didn’t understand magic. I need you to understand that. At any other time and place I’d say it didn’t really matter, that you could live the rest of your life without touching magic at all.”

  “I know.” She did know. She’d planned for that life. She had refused Evan’s offer to teach her secrets that other sorcerers would kill for and never thought twice about it. She’d accepted magic in her life peripherally, in her friends and newfound family, but never head on.

  That had to change now. Her life depended on it. Scott’s life depended on it. Clinton... Well, she’d worry about him some other time.

  “Is there a way for me to touch less magic at once?” Madison asked, lifting her ruined hand. It throbbed, making her wince, but there was no comfortable position. All she could do with this pain was endure.

  “Yes, but I think it burned you because you expected it to. Most of magic comes down to expectations. It works a certain way because we believe it does.”

  She knew that. Looking back, she didn’t even think it had burned her the moment she’d touched it. It had overwhelmed her, but the burning had come later. Madison drew in a deep breath and sat up.

  “It isn’t even dinnertime yet,” Madison said. “Let’s get to work.”

  Chapter 26

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED IN a blur of lessons, lectures, and magic. Madison’s burnt stump of a hand continued to pain her, although she didn’t end up incurring any other injuries. She wasn’t sure if that was progress, or a sign that she was shying away from the magic too much.

  Two weeks had never seemed like much time, but when fourteen days became thirteen, then twelve, then ten, then seven... it seemed like even less.

  “Magic flows from all living things,” Scott tried to explain to her so many times that one accounting flowed into the next. “You gather it from the earth beneath our feet, the plants, the trees, the animals, the sky above, the sun and the moon.”

  “The moon isn’t alive,” Madison said.

  “It’s part of the cycle. Part of our rhythms. Part of us. Draw on its strength.”

  She tried. Truly she did. Sometimes she could even feel it, just as Scott described, but only when she focused all her thoughts on the task. It did not come naturally to her. Meanwhile, she needed some part of her concentration to work a spell.

  “Evan said his mentor
believed electricity interfered with magic,” Madison said one day as she searched for something to explain her inability to surrender to the magic. “Maybe it does, but you’ve never noticed because you have so much of it.”

  “Belief is a powerful thing. It shapes the world around us. Sorcerers believing diametrically opposite things about the workings of magic have managed to cast spells with similar results, yet they can only do it their way.”

  “They create their own reality?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I wonder if they believe diametrically opposite things, or only seem to. There has to be a right answer, don’t you think?”

  “Of course I do. I think I’m right.”

  Madison laughed when he said that, more than once she laughed, but she still didn’t understand. Magic had never made sense to her when Evan had tried to teach her, either. She had learned enough to be able to identify and control the potential within, but not to harness or manipulate it.

  Maybe it all came down to her mother and her long-buried fear that using magic made her evil. But she didn’t believe using magic made Scott evil. Or Evan. It was a part of who they were. Yet thinking about it within herself made her feel uneasy.

  But one time... she thought back to a day when Evan had come pounding on the door of the house she’d shared with Cassie and Kaitlin. Cassie was mad at him, and wouldn’t let him in. Evan tried to break in so Cassie opened the front door and slapped him, hard. After that, the house had seemed to jump.

  Madison had been afraid. Of course she had been. There had been a boiling pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove right next to her, and when it spilled...

  When it spilled, she had summoned up a shield to protect herself. Evan had been so proud of her for that magical working, but she had never been able to tell him the truth.

  It hadn’t been magic at all. She had offered a quick prayer to God, and He had responded.

  She didn’t explain any of that to Scott, either. She would need far more than prayer this time, and they both knew it. So she continued to work, and he continued to teach, and every day when he came back looking a little more tired, he grew a little less patient.

  “It’s in your blood, Madison! You’ve found it. You’ve felt it. Why can’t you get this simple concept?”

  She’d fought back tears when he said that, but had continued fighting to control increasingly vast amounts of magic. He’d said there would be more at the full moon, but the amount of magic in Scott’s blood seemed to increase exponentially.

  “I need a break,” Madison finally told him after a nonstop week in which she’d done nothing but eat, sleep, and work magic. She cried when Scott was gone doing whatever it was he did, but if he’d noticed, he hadn’t mentioned it.

  “There’s no time for a break. The full moon is in a week.”

  “Are they even going to leave us in here together?” Madison asked. It was one of the doubts she had about this plan. Surely they wouldn’t leave her in here with a werewolf.

  “I’m working on that. You’ve only got one thing to worry about. And so far you haven’t managed to hold enough magic to work the spell. We should already be working on the spell itself – it’s incredibly complex.”

  Madison felt tears sting her eyes even though Scott was in the room with her. She hated crying in front of other people, but she wasn’t sure she could stop herself this time, so she rushed into the bathroom, pausing to put the splintered door in place as a pseudo-barrier. No one had come to repair it, which left Madison feeling awkward every time she went in there.

  “Madison!” Scott called after her.

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “I’m sorry, Madison. I know you’re doing your best.”

  Was she doing her best? She wasn’t so sure. She turned on the faucet, splashed water on her face and tried to get herself under control. Then she returned to the bedroom to face yet another round of practice.

  Scott wasn’t seated inside their makeshift casting circle, though. The circle wasn’t even there. Scott had returned the sheets to the beds as he did before bedtime, or when he expected the guards to bring them meals. Except dinner had come and gone an hour ago, and no one ever collected him for their experiments at this time of night.

  Scott sat on the bed, on the bottom bunk, staring at the clock on the wall that ticked away their time like a bomb about to explode. He looked up when she emerged from the bathroom, leaning the broken door against a nearby wall.

  “Come here,” Scott said in a voice of command that would not be denied. Within seconds Madison found herself on the bed, not at the opposite end, but right next to him with his arm around her.

  She had come to crave his touches over the past week. They were the only things that made her feel alive and connected to the world. He usually wasn’t so overt, though – it was usually a clasped hand or a quasi-accidental brushing of thigh against thigh. They hadn’t repeated the kiss, though Madison wouldn’t mind at all. This time, he wasn’t trying to be circumspect or subtle. He pulled her against him and held on.

  “What are they doing to you when they take you upstairs?” Madison asked, not expecting an answer. He never answered.

  “What do you want, Madison?” Scott asked.

  “Huh?” Madison tried to straighten, to look Scott in the eyes and try to figure out where his question had come from, but he held her firmly against his side.

  “I don’t mean right now,” Scott said. “I mean in the future, if we get out of here.”

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “You said you needed a break. I thought maybe we should try talking about something pleasant for a change. And I’ve always wondered what you want out of life.”

  “You have?”

  He nodded, slightly. “Do you like teaching music?”

  “Oh yes.” She felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth, the first one in weeks.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I was kept from music for so much of my life, but I want to bring it to children. I want to make it a part of their lives. A lot of the people who studied music with me were interested in going off and becoming famous. I don’t know how many musicians only want to teach to bide their time until they get a big break, but not me. Music can be a part of everyone’s life in big ways or little ways, but it’s a gift. Even the ones who can’t carry a tune in a bucket can appreciate it.

  “There was this one kid last year, Josh, who had to repeat a grade and they were thinking of holding him back again. He’s got learning disabilities and there are specialists at the school helping him, but I know he thinks he’s just plain stupid. Spelling was the worst. Partway through the year, I hit on the idea of singing the spelling words to him. We made up a little song together – he’s got a nice young voice – and you should have seen the look on his face when he came to me holding up his first-ever perfect score.”

  Madison felt tears welling up in her eyes again, but for an entirely different reason as she remembered the look on Josh’s face. He had graduated to middle school, and he was one of the ones she would miss the most.

  “You used your gift to help him,” Scott said.

  “Maybe. But he started making up his own songs and did almost as well with those spelling tests. I made a difference in his life, and it’s going to stay with him.”

  “But you’re not happy,” Scott said. It wasn’t a question.

  Madison shrugged. “I’m not depressed, not like I used to be growing up. I still have trouble making friends, though. I guess I’ve been betrayed one time too many to really trust easily.”

  “So what do you want?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess for someone to see through my shyness and thick figure to the woman underneath. Isn’t that what we all want? For someone to really know us?”

  “I suppose.”

  “What do you want?” Madison asked, turning the tables back on him.

  “A cure. Dr. Akin
has been tempting me with the idea. If he weren’t such an evil man, it really would tempt me.”

  “How would your life be different if you weren’t a werewolf?” Madison asked. “Would your pack be better off without you?”

  “No.” Scott looked away. “I keep them safer than almost anyone could. My reasons for wanting to be human again are purely selfish.”

  “If it had never happened, what do you think you’d be doing right now?” Madison asked. “Following in your parents’ footsteps?”

  “No.” Scott laughed and shook his head. “I bet I would have joined the White Guard with Evan. I mean I help now, but it’s not my priority. I don’t trust Matthew, but I figure he’s better than Alexander, especially after this.” Scott gestured to indicate their prison.

  “There’s a glowing recommendation,” Madison said. She didn’t trust Matthew either, especially after what he’d tried to do to Cassie. “Lesser of two evils?”

  “No, I don’t think he’s evil.”

  Madison disagreed, but Scott hadn’t seen what the man had done to Cassie.

  “He helped you the other day,” Scott said. “That’s got to count for something.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t trust him.”

  “I don’t. But that doesn’t mean he’s evil. I think he has good intentions, but there’s an old saying about the road to hell.”

  “Do you think you’d be married if you hadn’t turned into a werewolf?” Madison asked, partly to change the subject, but only partly.

  “Yes.”

  They fell into silence after that. Madison kept hoping he’d reach for her, touch her, or even kiss her, but he stayed put on his side of the bed. And finally, he climbed up into his own bunk with nothing more than a whispered, “Goodnight.”

  Chapter 27

  FOR SCOTT, HIS DAYS IN CAPTIVITY passed in a sea of violence and fear that he had trouble keeping in check when he returned to teach Madison what she needed to know to make their plan work. He kept it from her, but he knew she suspected something. As long as she only suspected, that was fine with him.