Trio of Sorcery (7 page)

She transferred the candles to Emory and shook Zaak's hand.
Oh, yes. Up to his neck in magic, and gods help me, he has the gift for it too.
“Di Tregarde. Folklore and Mythology. Why does he think you're crazy?”

“Because I don't believe in all that woowoo crap,” Emory said with a touch of irritation, dumping the candles into Zaak's hands the minute Di let go, and shaking her hand himself. “This is all just a phase. He does this every year; we're juniors. Last year it was Buddhism. God only
knows what it will be senior year.” He rolled his eyes again. “Probably the Flat Earth Society.”

“Aw, come on, Emory, you
know
I'm onto something this time!” Zaak didn't seem at all put out by Emory's attitude. “Did I, or did I not, manage to magic my way into that closed class?”

“Well…you got in. There might have been a lot of reasons—”

“And I'm going out with Angela Harris!” The grin got larger and more triumphant.

“Now that, I must admit, is close to a miracle.” Emory shook his head.

“It wasn't a miracle, it was magic! The stuff works!” Zaak crowed triumphantly. “You just watch, my man, it won't be long before you're begging me to help you!”

At that moment the elevator door opened and they all turned to see who it was. From the happy look on Emory's face, it was exactly who he was hoping to see. Zaak reached for Di's arm and pulled her inside the apartment.

“Come in, sit down,” he urged. “Are these candles handmade?”

“My grandmother and I made them,” she said. “Beeswax and bayberry. We got the wax from a honey farm.”

“Better and better! Do you believe in magic? Not stage magic, that's Marshal's thing, I mean the real stuff.” He waved at one of the somewhat battered armchairs and perched eagerly on the corner of the equally battered sofa,
putting the candles down on a coffee table made of a door on two stacks of cinder blocks. They might have a lot of room, but her furniture was better. She really didn't want to know what the Indian bedspreads that covered the chairs and couch hid.

At least there weren't any busted springs poking her.

“Who's Marshal?” she asked. Someone who knew stage magic? That could be incredibly useful…

“Friend of ours, he'll be over tonight probably. So, do you?”

She shrugged.
Okay. Don't lie. It's never a good idea for a mage to lie, especially not around another mage….

“There's a lot of things you just can't explain by scientific means,” she temporized. “I'm studying folklore, and you have to wonder where some of that stuff came from, you know? Every culture has some form of ghost, every culture has some form of shape-shifter, or vampire. Every culture has good and bad magicians. So, I guess—”

She didn't need to go further. With a potential believer in front of him, Zaak was off and running. All she had to do was listen and make vague noises once in a while. It was too easy, and (not for the first time) she was just a little appalled at how naïve these self-taught occultists were. She wasn't going to have to pry, Zaak was practically pouring everything she wanted to know right into her lap. And if she'd been the sort of creature he was likely to run into, a magician who got power by draining it out of others,
who got what he wanted by controlling them, she could have made him hers within an hour.

It was quite possible that the only thing that had saved him so far was the simple fact that there were relatively few of that sort of predator…and so very many willing victims.

As she had feared, Zaak had picked up a handful of fairly dubious books, and now he was convinced he had the Answer. It wasn't that the books in question were
bad,
it was that, like Zaak himself, they were incredibly naïve. These “new Druids” and “modern pagans” wanted to believe that everything “out there” was just waiting to welcome you into a joyful realm of harmony, peace, and love.

Well, they were right about one thing. There was a great deal “out there” that was waiting to welcome you. But the universe was
not
a friendly place, all sweetness and light, and greeting the would-be magician with open arms. It was more like a tough neighborhood, filled with things that would be only too happy to mug you and take your metaphysical wallet. If you were lucky. If you weren't so lucky, they would beat you up and leave you bleeding in the metaphysical gutter. If you were
really
unlucky…

As it happened, maybe she could do something about that. And there was no question of
should she,
because as sure as rain on your picnic, anything bad that Zaak got into was going to end up involving her. Morality aside, it was going to spill over on her due to physical proximity.
And as for morality? Well, you didn't let a five-year-old toddle out onto the highway, now did you? Not if you were the sort of witch that Diana and Memaw had been
before
Di became a Guardian.

The big question was how she was going to handle this. Her mind was going a million miles a second, trying to juggle it. The obvious was to take him aside and play the Great and Powerful Oz with him and make him her student. It wasn't as if she couldn't do things that right now he could only dream about. The drawback was that she had no idea how good or bad an apprentice he would be. He could turn out to be nothing but trouble.

I don't need an apprentice. I don't want an apprentice. I could use some help, but right now, this kid is just trouble.

Okay, then maybe the subtle approach. He hadn't gotten into Harvard by being stupid. So perhaps the proper approach was to remind him that, like mundane physics, there was a physics of the metaphysical as well, and that every action had a reaction, every deed a consequence.

“I'm not saying I totally buy into this,” she replied, when she could get a word in. “But aren't you mostly talking about influencing the way that people think? I mean I assume that magic has to mostly work in small ways, and that would be the most logical, right? So what you're doing now, that would be changing how people react to what you want. You're changing their minds for them.”

That brought him to a screeching halt. “Uh,” he said after a moment.

“Well, doesn't it make sense? The class you got into, and the girl that you got to go out with you…if magic did that, wasn't it by changing what they were thinking?” she persisted.

“I…guess…” By this point, Emory and his girlfriend had stopped sucking each other's faces, closed the front door, and were actually listening.

“And is that ethical? I mean, this is Harvard and they make us take courses about that sort of thing. So shouldn't you apply that Moral Reasoning class you took? They make us take it for a reason, you know, it's not just to bore us to death. Is it ethical to go into someone's head without their permission and monkey around in there?” Zaak looked as if she had just smacked him in the face with a fish, as if none of this had even occurred to him. Probably it hadn't. After all, when the toddler gorges on candy, he's not thinking about the possible stomachache to follow. Over his shoulder, Emory was grinning.

“She's got you there, Zaak,” said Emory's girlfriend, who hadn't yet been introduced. She took care of that herself. “Hi, I'm Em.”

“Di.” She smiled, then turned back to Zaak. “And did you really think it through? I mean, there are consequences to changing things. What if someone who needed the course more than you got bumped? What if what you did caused someone to fail or get sick so the course slot opened? And what if you're preventing the guy this girl is really
meant
to be with from ever meeting her because
you've got her going out with you instead?” Not that she believed that anyone was
meant
to be with anyone else—but she would bet that he did.

Zaak was really looking ill now. “I—uh—”

“Isn't the law of magic supposed to be ‘do what you will
as long as you harm no one'?
I don't think that means ‘trampling all over someone else's life is okay.'” She raised her eyebrow in a Spocklike gesture she had perfected over years of practicing in the mirror. It was usually pretty effective.

It worked this time too.

“You seem to know a lot about this,” Zaak said weakly.

“My Field of Concentration is Folklore and Myth,” she pointed out. “I mean, come on.”

She might have said something more, except that there was a knock at the door, and when Emory answered it, the newcomer turned out to be none other than Marshal, the guy whose “thing” was stage magic.

Zaak was only too pleased to change the subject and quickly introduced Di to Marshal, and vice versa.

Marshal was not as good-looking as Emory, but he was attractive in a mismatched features, cute-like-a-hound dog way. He also had a sense of self-confidence about him, not cocky, just that he wasn't naïve and generally knew what he was doing. Emory had that sense too, but not to the extent that Marshal did.

“I should probably go,” she began, shoving herself out
of the couch, which was no easy feat since it had tried to swallow her the moment she moved in from the edge of it.

“Hey, stick around, you're the first person to talk sense at Zaak since he started in on this magic kick,” Emory replied cheerfully. “If you haven't got anything you have to do tonight, that is.”

“Or someone you need to meet,” Marshal added, looking at her with thinly disguised hope.

Marshal was someone else she was beginning to think she needed to talk to. “Well, the rest of my reading eventually, but…”

“Great! Let me get the beers.” She managed to conceal a wince. Of course. These were college guys. College guys and beer went together like peanut butter and jelly. Where there was one, there would be the other.

She didn't much like beer, but on the other hand, a little lubrication might help her interrogation. And since she didn't care if her beer was warm, she could make one last quite a long time.

And at least they aren't breaking out the roach clips and the rolling papers.
If there was one thing that a practicing magician shouldn't mess with, or at least, not without a
lot
of preparation and safeguards, it was drugs. Of any kind. Magic was all about control, and when you smoked, or dropped…your control went right out the window.

And that was bad, because when your control went, sometimes your protections did too.

Which was a little like being a drunk white guy, staggering into Bed-Stuy, wearing a Dixie flag T-shirt with twenty-dollar bills hanging out of his pockets. You were bound to attract attention, and most of it wouldn't be friendly.

Not a good idea. Oh, no.

Emory came back with both hands full of open bottles; she took one and settled in for the next few hours as the couch slowly pulled her into its saggy depths.

It didn't take much to get Marshal going either. He
loved
stage magic. And like his idol Houdini, he
loved
debunking, or at least the idea of it. He didn't bad-mouth Zaak's magic, though; he confined his ire to the “mediums” and “psychic readers.”

After two beers she was able to steer him right in the direction she wanted, which was to tell her the stage magician's perspective on how they did what they did. “The best and least harmful of 'em are no more than good psychologists,” he said with a shrug. “They tell you what you'd get from a good shrink, but they wrap it up in a much more palatable package, palatable for people that don't believe in psychiatrists, that is. Like, if the good advice is coming from the Great Beyond, they're more likely to follow than if it came from the guy on the chair next to the couch.”

“Especially if you believe in the Great Beyond and not in shrinks,” Di replied dryly. She shifted, holding on tight to the bottle. There was nowhere safe to put it down, so she was keeping it clamped between her knees.

“Exactly. Not to put down religion! But—” He shrugged. “I go along with Ben Franklin. ‘The Lord helps those that help themselves.' You know? And even when it's done with good intentions, how ethical is it to toy with peoples' feelings about the ones they've lost? How ethical is it to give them false contact? I think it's immoral, personally. Even Houdini said that he had to stop proving to people that mediums were phony by working the same tricks, then revealing he wasn't a medium and
showing
them the trick. He saw that they'd have such hope, such happiness to think they were in contact with a loved one before he pulled the reveal. And even though they learned not to get tricked by mediums again, fooling with their feelings like that was a crime.”

“So what about the bad mediums?” Em asked the question that Di wanted to, and Di silently blessed her for it. “I mean, what is it that they do that has you so riled up? If someone wants to waste money getting their palm read, is that so bad?”

Marshal's homely face darkened. “I'd like to string them up by their thumbs,” he growled. “They're parasites. They're worse than—than—Nixon! Worse than the Mafia. They give people hope, and rob them blind, and it's all a lie.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Look, there's all kinds of scams. Some mediums, they research you, or get someone to do it for them, and then they use stage magic to make you think that they're actually bringing in ghosts. These days, they'll have microphone pickups in the waiting
rooms, have a stooge in there pretending to be another client who's there to dig for information. Sometimes they'll make you leave everything in the waiting room and the stooge will go through purses and coat pockets. Then, wow, you get in the dark room, and there's stuff floating around, there's noises, you might even see the dead person! But what you're seeing is a projection of a photocopy of the photo they got out of your wallet. And the rest, that's all sleight of hand, escape tricks, even some of the kinds of special effects you see in stage shows.”