Sorcery and the Single Girl Read online

  And then, I realized that the “thunder” had not stopped. The low growl continued, barely at the edge of my hearing. It sounded as if the entire house was humming, as if the stone foundation beneath the cottage was vibrating. The note was deep enough that I wasn’t certain I could hear it with my ears, but my body had no doubt. I felt it in my bones.

  And it was getting closer.

  Or larger. Or louder. Or more ominous. Something.

  I glanced at David, hoping he was ready to laugh off the vibrating threat. My warder, though, offered no hint of comfort.

  Instead, he stood on the other side of the table. His feet were planted solidly on the ornate silk carpet; he looked as if he had coalesced from its swirling design. His hands hung loose at his sides, his fingers extended downward. I tried to tell myself that if we were in real danger, if something truly threatened us from the astral plane, he would clench his fingers into fists.

  But then I realized that I’d never seen David make a fist. He channeled energy when he worked as a warder. He guided flows of power. He needed his hands relaxed, available to direct anything that came his way. Even when he had encountered the sword-wielding guard at the safehold, he had kept his body loose. Alert, but loose. Like he was now.

  The noise—if it really was a noise—grew stronger. I could feel it now with my entire body, feel it the same way that my eyes saw, that my ears heard. It was oppressive and large, like a wave of power rolling over the house.

  But it wasn’t a wave. It didn’t rise and fall back. It didn’t ebb and flow.

  It only grew stronger. Steadier. Pushing like a crowbar against a padlock hasp.

  This was magic. Magic I had never seen before. Magic I could not measure, could not predict. I tried not to picture it as a wall of carved jasper, blood-red stone cut through with jagged black lines.

  “Neko,” I said, gesturing sharply. He quivered, but he obeyed, coming to stand by my left side. I settled my fingertips on his shoulder, leaning against him and immediately feeling the familiar augmentation as he bolstered my powers, as the lens of his inherent abilities mirrored my strength back on itself, focusing my magic desires, my goals.

  I tried to distract the vibrating force, to change its direction, break its concentration. There wasn’t anything to touch, but I raised my hands in front of me, splaying my fingers wide.

  I could feel the pressure of the malevolent force, sense it with my body and my mind. I imagined my fingers pushing against it, forcing into a doughy solid. Not stone. Not jasper. Anything but jasper.

  There was a familiarity about the energy, a vaguely discernible recognition that let me move into even closer contact. I melded with the wall of power more closely than I would have thought possible. It felt like a physical thing, an object I could push against, that I could move.

  I glanced at Neko, making sure he was close enough for me to draw on. His almond eyes were huge in his face, and his cheeks were pale. He stared at me steadily, without blinking. It seemed that he had stopped breathing.

  David, too, was completely still. Watchful. Ready. Waiting to see what I could do with my powers. Waiting for me to save us from whatever this strange attack might be.

  I took three breaths to calm myself. I touched my forehead, to offer up the strength of my thoughts. I touched my throat, to offer up the power of my astral voice. I touched my heart, to offer up the devotion of my spirit. I took a deep breath, and I declaimed the words Haylee had whispered in the restaurant the night before:

  Looking, thinking, sensing—be

  Elsewhere, somewhere, someplace. Free

  Your mind from what you see here,

  Let your thoughts be empty, all clear.

  Turn away.

  Turn away.

  Turn away.

  There was a flash of darkness.

  It was the same flare of power I’d experienced countless times in the past, but it seemed all the more dramatic for our surroundings. For just an instant, everything in the basement—the basement itself—disappeared. The six newlit candles were sucked into darkness, even the orange afterglows of their wicks extinguished into nothingness.

  There was darkness, but more than that. There was a complete and utter lack of sensation. My entire body ceased to be. I could not hear the sharp panting of my breath, feel the drumbeat of my heart. I could not smell the nervous perspiration that pricked beneath my arms, could not feel Neko’s shoulder, could not see David’s rigid warder body, interposed against the vibrating threat.

  And then sensation flooded back, rushing in with a purity and a power that made me stagger. The candles guttered as if a tornado had passed overhead. My ears were filled with the sound of my own heart, galloping as if I’d just stumbled across the finish line of the Marine Corps Marathon. I tasted salt at the back of my throat, and I realized that I’d bitten my tongue.

  The vibration was gone.

  The oppressive force had dissipated, shattered into a million shards. I could sense their remnants, glimpse them from the edges of my witchy senses, like fog drifting away after sunrise. I struggled to gather up a handful, to study the ghostly remains, to figure out who had attacked us and why.

  Before I could succeed, though, David stumbled and fell to his knees. He gripped his head with both hands and rocked back and forth. Even before I ran to his side, I could see he was trembling, shaking like a man caught in a fever.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Neko! Turn on the lights!”

  I blinked as the overhead bulbs burst on. David flinched and buried his face in his hands, moaning like the wind around an abandoned castle’s towers. I gripped his wrists, held them tightly, willing strength and power and calm into my warder. Neko crouched beside us, glancing rapidly from my face to David’s.

  “David!” I said, desperately hoping he retained enough reason to answer me. “What should I do? How can I help you?”

  “Wait. A. Minute.” With a superhuman effort, he stiffened his fingers, raised them from his face. He let me move his hands into my lap, cradling them gently. His lips were gray; all the color had drained from his flesh, leaving terrifying, bruised-looking pools beneath his eyes. If I hadn’t known better, I would have bet good money that he’d been ill for weeks, that he’d been recovering from the worst of the flu, bronchitis and pneumonia combined.

  “Let’s get you upstairs,” I said matter-of-factly, needing to do something, anything, to set things to rights. “Neko, put his right arm around your shoulder.”

  I wouldn’t have sounded so calm if I had realized what a task I proposed. One witch with no upper-body strength and a familiar who spent more time at a hair salon than at the gym were nearly outmatched by a fit, well-muscled warder. The diet books always said that muscle weighed more than fat, and David seemed determined to prove the rule.

  I don’t think we induced more than half a dozen bruises by knocking him against the stair railing on our way up. And his head was certainly already aching when Neko let it bang, hard, against the door frame. And he honestly wasn’t any paler than he had been by the time we dropped him on the sofa, wrestled his shoes off, and manhandled his feet up onto the couch.

  “Run downstairs and blow out the candles,” I said to Neko. “I’m just going to get a damp towel from the kitchen.”

  By the time I returned with the towel in one hand and a glass of water in the other, David had pulled himself up into something resembling a sitting position. He winced as he leaned back against the sofa’s arm, but I had to admit he looked better than he had in the awkward position Neko and I had managed. He took the glass of water and swallowed with painful-looking bobs of his throat, but he batted my hand away when I tried to wipe the towel across his face.

  I could have persisted—I think I might have been able to do anything to his weakened body, even without bringing my powers into play. His lips, though, had begun to return to a remotely normal shade, and the green-blue shadow of veins had faded from his forehead. I decided that he was recovering, and I crou
ched back onto the edge of the coffee table.

  “Thank you,” I said, and my voice trembled as I thought of what might have happened downstairs. “Thank you for trying to fight that thing.”

  “What in the name of Hecate’s own private hell did you do down there?”

  Neko arrived at the top of the stairs just in time to hear the end of David’s furious question. I wasn’t surprised to see my familiar turn tail, pulling the basement door closed behind him.

  Coward.

  I tried to understand the venom in David’s voice. I assumed he’d been frightened—if not as badly as I had been. I knew he was exhausted. I could only guess how much his body ached.

  But anger? Outright, untamed rage?

  “I was trying to save us?” I cursed inwardly when my answer came out sounding like a question.

  “By using Dark Magic?”

  “Dark—”

  “What gives you the right to work a Will Breaking spell?”

  “Will—”

  “And how did you think I wouldn’t notice, when it was directed against me?”

  “Stop!” I said, as he pulled himself up straighter against the armrest. I could see he was only moving to expand his lungs, to get more volume so that he could continue his excoriation. “Just stop for one damned minute!” I said. Whether he heeded my demand, or was merely too weak to go on, I took full advantage of his silence. “Directed against you? I was fighting against that…that thing! That pressure! The jasper wall that was threatening all of us!”

  And then I realized what was going on. I remembered David’s stance as the thrumming power had approached. I remembered his legs spread wide, his back strong and straight. His hands hanging loosely at his sides, fingers extended. And I recalled the odd familiarity of the magic I’d opposed, the way I had seemed to know it, somehow, some way.

  David had been working a spell.

  He was a warder. He wasn’t able to do much magic. But he had some at his disposal—he’d told me as much the first time we’d sat down to dinner to discuss the wonderful world of witchcraft. He could use magic to protect his ward, to protect me.

  Usually, it was minor stuff—reading the auras of people around us, making sure they weren’t plotting any unseemly attacks. He could light candles and extinguish them. I’d been the recipient of his headache-banishing spell several times, when I’d pushed my own powers beyond their natural scope.

  But the thing that had threatened in the basement? That was an entirely new range of activities. That was completely beyond anything I’d seen from David before.

  Without thinking, I threw the damp towel at him, hitting him square in the middle of his chest. He reacted slowly, and was left grasping for the cotton cloth as it slid onto the cushion of the couch. “You bastard!” I said. “You were the power! You were pretending to threaten me!”

  “I had to do something.” His words were nearly as heated as my own. “You weren’t bothering to practice.”

  “I’ve had enough practice!”

  “I decide when you’ve had enough practice. I’m the warder.”

  “And I’m the witch!” I sprang to my feet, began pacing between the coffee table and the front door. Dammit! He had really frightened me. He had really made me believe that something malevolent was after us, that something truly evil was converging on my cottage.

  “Now that we’ve established our roles,” he said, ignoring the furious glare I shot his way, “maybe you’ll deign to tell me where you learned a spell that has been banned for public use?”

  Haylee.

  Haylee had taught me the illegal spell by working it on the unsuspecting staff at Café La Ruche. She hadn’t intended to teach me: I had just observed. Apparently, I’d paid close enough attention to master the magic on my own.

  Or had I mastered it?

  Haylee’s spell had certainly not had the same effect as mine. Everyone at the bistro had gone about their business physically unharmed, waiting on other tables, collecting other patrons’ money. No one had been hurtled to the floor; no one had been left bruised and breathless.

  “Who?” David said again, and I could measure his recovery by the amount of raw rage behind the word.

  It wasn’t Haylee’s fault that my working was too powerful. It wasn’t her responsibility that I threw my powers around. I couldn’t give her up, when I was the one who had done something wrong. “It doesn’t matter who,” I said. And then, even though I knew it was dangerous to do so, I had to go on. “You shouldn’t be angry. You should be proud of me.”

  “Proud of you?” I flinched at the volume of his roar, even as a tiny corner of my mind was relieved by his rapid recovery. Surely Neko could hear downstairs. My familiar would have to interrupt, if a life-and-death battle erupted up here. He would need to come to my rescue. Wouldn’t he?

  “Proud of me,” I repeated, with a bit less confidence. In for a penny, in for a pound, I told myself. “We were working on self-defense, right? Well, I protected myself. I used my magic to keep myself safe. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “I want you to be able to go about in the world of witchcraft. I want you to be able to practice freely. Do you have any idea what would have happened, if I had not contained your brilliant little working? Do you have the faintest notion how quickly Hecate’s Council would have swarmed here?”

  The last smidgen of certainty drained from my mind. “H-Hecate’s Council?”

  David sighed. “Jane, there was enough power behind your spell to feel it from New York to Georgia.”

  “Georgia?” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Me? I had summoned that much force? With one little spell that I’d never even tried to cast before?

  David struggled up to a full sitting position, and I winced with him as he rubbed the back of his neck. “You should know this by now,” he said. “The Council monitors Dark Magic. There’s a whole group of witches who watch specifically for breaks in expected power. Your little show would have been off the scale.”

  “And so you stopped it?”

  “I absorbed it. As best I could. I broke it up, anyway. If anyone was already looking here, already focused on your house, they’d be able to see that something happened. But I was able to keep the energy from flowing out as one massive block. There will be ripples left around for days, though. I can’t do anything about that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, even though my words were inadequate. And I was. I truly was. If my spell had been as strong as David said—and I had no reason not to believe him—then he had been my lifesaver, keeping me safe from Council justice. I collapsed onto the other couch. “I thought that I was protecting us. Stopping that thing, whatever it was.”

  “You certainly did stop it.” He managed a ghost of a smile. For the first time since coming upstairs, I took a deep breath. Everything was going to be all right. We were safe.

  But that just made me return to my original question. “What was it? What did you summon?”

  His skin returned to its normal tone, and I realized that he must be blushing. David Montrose. My warder. Blushing.

  “What?” I pushed.

  “It was nothing.”

  “I felt it. Don’t tell me it was nothing.”

  “It was just…you.”

  “Me?”

  “You.” He started to shake his head, but winced before he truly got the motion going. “It was your stubbornness. Your refusal to work. Your rebellion. I gathered the energy and pushed it back at you.”

  My stomach dropped. “All of that was coming from me?”

  Instead of answering, he closed his eyes and eased his head to the back of the couch. “I shouldn’t have done it. I just wanted you to feel a touch of danger. A hint of what could be arrayed against you. Placing the centerstone isn’t a game, Jane. It’s the most serious working of magic. You’re going to build a safe haven for witches, a protected place for generations of practitioners to come. You’ll be vulnerable at that working. You can’t take
it lightly. And you’ll have to be prepared for the worst.”

  I fought against the chilly finger of fear that traced my spine. I spluttered for something to say. “So, you think that I am the worst.”

  He smiled, even though he didn’t lift his head. “I think that you are your own worst enemy. For now.” Before I could muster a response, he did sit up, and he looked straight at me. “Jane. This is important. Who taught you the Will Breaking Spell?”

  “No.”

  My fingers jangled, like limbs awakening from a sound sleep. I couldn’t tell him. There must be some mistake. Something that I had done wrong. Haylee had never intended to teach me the spell. I must have twisted her working when I attempted to reproduce it on my own. After all, Teresa Alison Sidney certainly wouldn’t let Haylee run around working Dark Magic. The strongest Coven Mother in recent history wasn’t going to let her best friend violate the laws of Hecate’s Council.

  David’s voice was persuasive. “Jane, if I’m going to keep you safe, I need to know.”

  For just a moment, I was thrown back in time. I was sixteen years old and sitting on Gran’s couch. I was explaining that she needed to give me the car keys, needed to trust me with her Lincoln so that Melissa and I could drive to a friend’s party. I’d pulled out the big guns. “Gran,” I had said. “You taught me everything I know. Now you have to trust me.”

  It had worked well enough then—Melissa and I went to the party, and I had drunk nothing stronger than water, afraid that even caffeine would rattle my nerves for the drive home.

  Now, I looked David straight in the eye. “David,” I said. “You taught me everything I know. Now you have to trust me.”

  It was a great line.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “I trust you. But don’t do anything stupid, Jane.”

  “Stupid!” I managed to sound scandalized at the notion.

  “Stupid,” he repeated, and then he waved toward the table. “Could you get me another glass of water? And open up the basement door. Tell Neko it’s safe to come out.”