Joy of Witchcraft (15 page)

“Where did this come from?”

“It was shoved under the windshield wiper on my car. I suspect the wards kept the Court’s delivery person from getting any closer to the house.”

“At least we know they’re good for one thing,” I muttered, and I started skimming the words.
Requirements for all magicaria… Demonstration of consistent progress among a majority of students… Ongoing monitoring… In danger of termination prior to the end of the semester… Substantial advancement must be shown by the conclusion of this week or we will be forced to suspend the charter of the Jane Madison Academy.

I wished there was a way to harness the flash of anger that heated my face. “How many times can they change the rules?”

“As many times as they want. They’re the only game in town.”

“But how, in the name of Hecate, can they assess the progress of
any
of my students, much less a majority of them? They never took a baseline measurement!”

David shrugged. “You granted them monitoring access when you accepted your charter.”

I bit back a harsh reply. He was right, of course. The Court had always monitored the workings of the Jane Madison Academy. That was where I’d first run into conflict with Norville Pitt.

But their requirements were unreasonable. They didn’t have a “before” so they couldn’t possibly measure an “after.” They certainly couldn’t take into account the different nature of the magic I taught. My students
always
had a hard time finding their footing—it had taken months before Gran and Clara caught on to what I did. Raven and Emma had studied for weeks before they understood the odd balance I expected, the different exchange of power that my magicarium used. My new students hadn’t had a chance to try. And I was pretty sure I didn’t want to launch them down that path, not until I’d identified the traitor.

Even without the complication of a student trying to dismantle my entire magicarium, the Court was being unrealistic when they demanded a sign of progress by the end of the
week
. By the end of the term, sure, that was fair. But I couldn’t be certain I’d have anything to show in five short days.

“Call Clara,” David said. “Ask her and your grandmother to help out with classes, starting this morning.”

My immediate reaction was to protest. The house was crowded enough without adding another two witches, another two familiars into the mix. My students needed
fewer
distractions, not more. And while I was sure Gran would lend her fierce support to everything I attempted, I wasn’t certain I had the patience to deal with Clara’s weird ideas.

“They were the first witches who figured out how to work with you,” David said, as if I’d voiced my objections out loud. “They were the first ones to understand the potential of what you do. Let them show your students. Let them help.”

He glanced at the parchment scroll, and his worried frown carved even deeper across his face. He had enough on his plate, with Pitt’s inquest. It was already killing him to entrust my classes to Caleb’s and Tony’s protection, when he couldn’t invest absolute trust in all of my students. I shouldn’t be adding to his troubles.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll call them.”

“And don’t mention the Court’s most recent ultimatum to your students. Whoever is trying to shut you down could just skew the results for a week, without ever bothering to summon another monster.”

His advice made sense. I just hated that we’d come to that point. I dragged myself to my phone and called Gran and Clara.

They arrived by mid-morning. In keeping with my innovative balance of powers, they instructed their familiars to work with other witches. Nuri perched on the arm of the sofa, closing her fingers around Bree’s shoulder like gentle talons sinking into a perch. Majom followed Clara’s orders and curled up by my feet. I tried to ignore the sensation as he plucked at the hem of my jeans, teasing at the stitches with his ever-curious fingers.

We worked as a group for over two hours, trying to light a single candle with our pooled powers. Sometimes the wick kindled from the center of the wax column, drowning itself in a few short seconds. Sometimes, the flame leaped high enough to scorch the ceiling, necessitating an immediate banishing spell. Sometimes, the candle tottered back and forth on its plate, tilting first toward one witch and then another before it ended its crazy dance by toppling onto its side. Sometimes—most often—nothing happened at all.

And so I had to consider the option seriously when Clara said, “Jeanette? I have something new we could try.”

I was too frustrated by our collective magical failure to bother correcting her about my name. Instead, I used my best magistrix to ask, “What’s that, Clara?”

“It’s something we were trying at Oak Canyon, before I came out here.” She waited for me to nod encouragement. I caught my students’ attention swinging from her to me and back again, as if they were watching a tennis match. “We attune our powers to the field of cosmic waves and use those ripples to act
in
directly on the world around us.”

I reminded myself that I was the magistrix here. I was in charge. I was responsible for making all of my students feel calm and comfortable in sharing their ideas. I kept my voice completely level as I said, “Cosmic waves… That’s a, um, new approach.”

Fifteen-love, me, if anyone was keeping score. I glanced over at Gran and was gratified by her nod of approval. I knew she wanted me to find better ways to work with Clara. My keeping an open mind was a present for her, a gift of thanks for all the years she’d put up with my being a ranty teenager.

Clara beamed as she took in my students’ rapt attention. “We’ve been working with waves a lot. They help us to measure power in the world around us, the
ka
of every living thing.”

The
ka
. The soul. Riiiiiiight.

But Gran gave me a small smile of encouragement. She was right, after all. I wanted my students to understand how we balanced new ideas at the Jane Madison Academy, how we tested theories. We were a regular laboratory for witchy knowledge, applying scientific theory to all sorts of new concepts. Observation. Hypothesis. Experimentation. Conclusion.

Clara had just offered up one of the craziest hypotheses I’d ever heard in my life. It wouldn’t take much of an experiment to blow it out of the water. But I owed Clara basic civility. The
Academy
owed her that much. I was a model of calm as I asked, “And how does the
ka
work with unliving things? Like, er, candles.”

Thirty-love. Ha!

My students’ attention bounced back toward Clara, whose smile was brilliant. It seemed as if she’d been waiting all day for the question, craving the precise moment when I opened the door for her to share her wisdom with the group. “The candle is woven into the Elemental Vibrations.”

“Elemental Vibrations?” I managed a tone of perfect neutrality.

“You know, Jeanette. The souls of inanimate objects.”

I glanced at Gran. She sucked air between her teeth, a miniature wince that my students would never have registered. I forced myself to say, “I’ve never heard of inanimate objects having souls. I thought that was part of the very definition of them being, you know,
inanimate
.”

Forty-love. One more point, and the game was mine.

Clara spoke with the perfect patience saints reserved for idiot children. “Of course inanimate objects have souls. That’s what makes a hellmouth so dangerous! Surely you realized that, after seeing the hellmouth in your own front yard!”

“
There wasn’t a freaking hellmouth in my own front yard!
” I shouted, before I could look at Gran, before I could remember my role as a magistrix.

I
felt
my students draw back in shock. Their familiars jumped too, reflecting the witches’ concern. Tony took a quick step toward Raven, only stopping when she raised a peremptory hand.

Stupid tennis game. I’d never understood how they scored the sport anyway.

Clara sounded hurt. “You saw the evidence, Jeanette, right before your eyes. That satyr had to come from somewhere. I can understand your being tied to tradition, but I hoped you’d have a shred of courage to look beyond classic coven teachings, just this once.”

Tied to tradition. Classic. Me. The witch who’d accepted a triple bond with her warder, who’d launched her own magicarium, who’d built an entire arcane practice on the sharing and exchange of power outside the ordinary bonds of familiar and witch…

I filled my lungs, ready to shout at Clara, ready to drown her ignorance with my volume, even if I had no hope of ever getting a single rational thought through her thick, woo-woo worshipping skull. I didn’t care if my students felt shut down. I didn’t care if I limited the range of discussion. I didn’t care if I destroyed a dozen other lines of scientific inquiry, if I could just eradicate my mother’s idiotic, feather-brained, idealistic—

“I could certainly use a break,” Gran said, leaning back in her chair and passing a hand in front of her face. “All this hard work certainly builds up an appetite.”

“We haven’t
done
any—” I started to snap. But I caught myself before I finished the sentence because I understood what Gran was trying to do. She was keeping the peace, the way she’d done from the very first day Clara catapulted back into my life. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s take a break. Why don’t we meet back here at one o’clock.”

The class exploded into chatter as the line of our circle broke. Emma crossed the living room and said to Clara, “That sounds quite brilliant, the work you’re doing at Oak Canyon. It makes me wish I never left.”

I purposely exited the room before I could see which of the new witches gathered around to hear more about my mother’s Arizona adventures. It was bad enough to know one of them had betrayed me. If I discovered that anyone else believed Clara’s claptrap, I might shut down the entire magicarium—voluntarily—out of unbridled shame for witches everywhere.

Still, the word “NWTA” floated after me into the kitchen. “Nucleus!” Clara shouted. “With
tentacles
attached!”

The tentacles of my own life were tightening around me. I didn’t believe my mother’s hocus-pocus. I couldn’t rely on my grandmother’s weakling powers. I dared not trust my students as a group, not until I’d figured out who had released murderous mythological animals into our midst.

I thought about the scroll Hecate’s Court had left on the Lexus, and I wondered how much longer I had before my charter was revoked and all of my witchy possessions were at the mercy of Teresa and Pitt and anyone else who wanted to see me destroyed.

Desperate times. Desperate measures.

On Tuesday, I asked Gran to lead our session. I thought she might make headway with the students because her own powers were so weak. She couldn’t overwhelm them with the crimson energy she called her own; she couldn’t erase their own familiar magic. Once, right after lunch, I saw a spark leap off the end of the candle’s wick. Alas, everyone else saw it, and the group’s excitement pulled our energy off balance. We didn’t repeat the trick all day.

On Wednesday, I put Emma and Raven in charge. They’d worked with me the previous semester. They’d learned the trick I was having so much trouble teaching everyone else. Sadly, they’d only learned to balance the power across a tripod—the two of them and me. Each grew more frustrated as the day went on, as they failed to expand their lesson to the larger student group. I dismissed class in the middle of the afternoon because tempers were frayed. I made a point of staying inside the house, purposely not looking out the windows. Every student I’d ever known who attended boarding school found ways to sneak off campus. I could hardly expect my students to be less enterprising, and I suspected they all needed to blow off some steam.

On Thursday, I decided to practice without anyone leading the group. I let the energy flow, from Cassie to Clara, from Skyler to Gran. Sometimes Raven was in charge, sometimes Emma. Alex took the reins for a while; Bree swept in with her own indomitable style.

By the end of the day, I knew I had to go back to the methods that had worked for me before.
I
was the one who had taught Clara and Gran how to share power.
I
was the one who had finally gotten through to Raven and Emma. I had one day left to make the breakthrough. If I failed at teaching, I’d never need to worry again about which of my students had tried to tear apart the magicarium with the satyr and the orthros.

Friday morning, I woke when David’s alarm clock went off. As he headed into the shower, I covered my head with my pillow, willing myself to snag another few minutes of sleep. The winter nights were stretching longer; not a hint of daylight whispered past the window shade into our bedroom.

I couldn’t stay in bed forever, though. I finally dragged myself out from under the warm comforter, shivering in the cool air as I hunted up yesterday’s jeans. I sprang for a clean sweater—my favorite cable-knit in a blue-green yarn that set off the auburn glints in my hair. Down in the kitchen, I made coffee for both of us.

This was the day when everything had to change. I felt the tension tugging at the witchy bond that connected me to David. I must have transmitted my nerves; when Neko waltzed through the doorway for class, he took one look at both of us and whined, deep at the back of his throat. I gave him a tight shake of my head. I didn’t want him to say anything. I didn’t want him upsetting my students.

In the end, maybe things would have been better if he
had
upset the witches. Our morning session was a waste of time. Gran and Clara had declined to join us; after four straight days of driving back and forth to the farm, Gran’s sciatica was acting up. Clara claimed she had a field trip at the University of Maryland, some tour of antebellum cemeteries for Professor Kipperman’s class. Necropolises, Civil War graveyards—he sounded like one hell of an upbeat guy.

We broke for lunch and came back for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. I finally called another break when I caught
myself
falling asleep; I only jerked awake when Spot started snoring by the fireplace. I suggested that everyone but the dog get a jolt of caffeine, and we’d regroup at half past three. Spot staggered into the kitchen and curled up in his plaid bed.