Trio of Sorcery (2 page)

She had learned how to keep secrets from a very young age. Probably some child psychologist would make much of that, but she couldn't see that it had harmed her any.

Then again, there weren't a lot of kids who grew up being able to see things that no one else could. Saying “Look at that!” and pointing at the creature that was perfectly clear to
you,
but invisible to everyone else, taught you pretty quickly to keep your mouth shut.

Good thing that most people go, “Oh, what an active imagination!” when you're a little kid, not “Lock her up, she's nuts!”

Not that she could actually
do
magic until she was old enough to realize that it really did matter what the neighbors thought about you. That was the year that the other kids started calling her “Wednesday.”

Memaw wasn't big on family photo albums, but they did have one, and now Di could admit that the nickname was apt. There were three photos of her from that year, two of them the mandatory class and school photos, and there she was, a stick-straight, solemn-eyed, dark-haired child with
her hair in two equally straight ponytails. And while the teen glamour magazines were showing straight, straight mod hair, either long or short, no one around her town wore their hair like that. The flip was very much the thing, with some teasing on top. Not big hair, like the fifties, but not ironed-flat straight either.

She hated the nickname and she hated Wednesday Addams. But most of all she hated Jimmy Mason, who had first started calling her that.

She sighed and rested her head on her hand, elbow on the arm of the love seat.

She had Memaw cut her hair boyishly short, but nothing would get him to stop. Finally she decided she was going to curse him.

It wasn't hard to get “something” from him. She used her big vocabulary for once, standing where the teachers could see her, but not necessarily hear her, and started taunting him. Finally, as she had known he would do, he flew into a rage and came at her.

She'd been dodging worse things than him for two years at that point (though never, never as bad as the things she encountered once she was a Guardian). She was coming into her magic, and arcane critters smelled that, and scented her youth, and came hunting. She easily dodged him, but while he was windmilling away, trying futilely to hit her, she snatched a tiny handful of hair. He squalled and came at her harder, which was when the teachers finally took notice (or resignedly knew they were
being forced to take notice, they didn't care for her either), and pulled him off.

She had her prize.

She took it home and began to construct a Curse Doll. Memaw caught her at it of course, because all manner of tiny little nasty things started flitting about her the moment she began doing something that dark. Rather than stop her, though, Memaw just stared her down until she stopped of her own accord.

Then Memaw told her, in blunt and no uncertain terms, about the Threefold Law. “Now,” she finished. “I don't for a minute think that boy doesn't deserve a set down. But if you give more tit than he gave tat,
you
will be getting every bit of that, times three, right in
your
face. Reckon you want that?”

Now, by this point, she was accustomed to actually stopping and thinking things through when confronted by such a question, and it didn't take much thinking to realize that no, she didn't want that. All he'd done was taunt her. Well, she'd taunted him back, she'd made him furious, and gotten him in trouble at school for fighting on top of that. The score was probably even at this point.

But Memaw hadn't let it rest there. “You want to teach some sprout a lesson, you put the Mirror on him,” she continued, an ever-so-slightly malicious smile on her face. “I'll show you.”

So that afternoon she had taken the doll and showed Di how to cast the Mirror of Consequences on someone. It was
hard.
It was the hardest spell she had ever done to
that point, even with assistance, and it was still hard, to this day, because you had to be absolutely fair about it, or it wouldn't work, it would be flawed, and the flaws would break it. What it did was to reflect everything that someone did right back at him. So there were immediate consequences to his actions and words, instead of delayed. If he taunted someone, those taunts would be reflected back on him, so that instead of getting the laughs he'd gotten before from calling her Wednesday, people wouldn't find it quite so funny, and would think about the time he'd called them, or a friend, similar names. If he tried to fight, he would lose; either his opponent would suddenly find more strength and skill than he normally had, or an authority figure would take notice and intervene right away. The more he hated, the more he would
be
hated.

But it wasn't all one-way, this Mirror. If he started acting nice to people, that would be reflected too. People would like him more, just for starters.

Now they call that “instant karma,”
she reflected.

“You've done this before, haven't you?” she'd said to Memaw, who only smirked.

Well, Jimmy got his dose of instant karma when everyone started calling him “Mason Jar.” It was a stupid name, it wasn't even that much of an insult except that Jimmy was built like a fireplug. But it got his goat. And when he came at people, the teachers noticed
instantly.
He didn't have any time to taunt her anymore, and without him to keep it going, people stopped calling her Wednesday.

Later that year his dad's job moved them down south, so she had no idea what happened to him. But Memaw had reminded her to take the spell off him, so she did. Reluctantly, but she did. Did he ever learn his lesson? Maybe. Maybe not. Whether he did or not, as Memaw reminded her, was up to
him,
not her.

“You can't make someone change,” she'd said. “All you can do is make it uncomfortable for 'em not to. And if you aren't around to supervise, well, better take the heat off before they boil over.”

Memaw had let Di read virtually anything she wanted to, from the old grimoires in spidery handwriting to the comic books that she got with her allowance money. And maybe that was the reason why, all those comic books, and the idea that if you had power you had to do something good with it, that she'd done what she had done. She still could not imagine herself saying anything but yes to the question that had been posed to her, the night she turned sixteen.

She didn't remember most of it, actually. Which the few other Guardians she'd spoken to so far had told her was pretty typical. Mostly they all remembered very intense light, the sense that they were being offered enormous power if they only used it to keep ordinary folks safe, and someone or something waiting for an answer. And then the next day…well, there it was. Where there had been a little warm glow of magic inside, there was now this—atomic reactor. And there was the certain knowledge that if
it was ever used selfishly it would be abruptly taken away. There were no second chances when you were a Guardian. And Di suspected that if you said no, you wouldn't ever remember getting the offer.

Memaw had recognized what had happened to her. The moment that Di came down to breakfast that first morning, Memaw had given her a strange look…and from then on treated her not like a teenager, but like an adult who simply didn't have as much experience as she did.

She had shown Di some passages in some of those old grimoires, about how to call the Guardians if you were in trouble. There was even something like it in a Dione Fortune book, although Fortune didn't call them “Guardians,” and her ritual was dorky and awkward, if sincere, and
nothing
like the ones the witches used. By that point, of course, Di had known that the ritual itself didn't matter, it was that you knew Guardians existed, and that if you got into occult trouble that you hadn't caused, and you called on them, they'd come.

“But what if what happens is your fault, Memaw?”

“Depends. But everything has consequences, my girl, and those consequences fall harder on those who meddle with magic. Just bear in mind, when you get the Call, you must answer.”

Within a week of accepting the power and the job, she had gotten the Call.

That
memory was as clear as the one of being offered Guardianship was vague.

The funny thing was she had half expected to be jolted awake in the middle of the night, or to see some ethereal creepy-crawly come smashing through her bedroom window. What happened was much calmer than that. In the middle of the day, a strange woman had come up to the door and knocked. When Memaw answered, the woman had said hesitantly, “They say someone here can help me—”

Then she had seen Di, standing behind Memaw, and nodded. And Di had
known.

“I can,” she said steadily, and stepped forward. And Memaw, who otherwise would have had all manner of questions, simply moved aside.

It had been a matter of a family curse, which Di had never felt was a particularly fair situation, and in this case, where the woman was someone's illegitimate child, the daughter of a man she didn't know, it was particularly unfair. This first time—other Guardians told her the first time was always easy and clear-cut—the solution was simple and straightforward. She offered herself as the woman's Champion, was accepted, and fought a mage-duel with the revenant that kept the curse going. It fell and dissipated, and that was that. Well, not
quite
that simple; it had been one heck of a fight and had required everything she could muster. But she had never had a moment of doubt that, as long as she kept her head, she was going to win.

As “just” a witch, she would never have had the strength to fight off a revenant like that. It probably would have taken an entire coven to take the thing down, and maybe
not even then. Most of the time, if a family curse was involved, all a coven could do was shield one individual from the effects of the curse; the next appropriate family member would then find the full curse descending on him or her. And it was heartbreaking, utterly heartbreaking, to see someone who was the last in a line have to decide whether or not to risk having a child. Not
children,
because it would be difficult to protect two people from a powerful, generational curse with the resources of a single coven; three would be almost impossible. A single child would be all that a cursed individual would dare to have. And then that meant that eventually the parent would have to subject that child not only to the need to protect itself but the decision of whether or not to have a child of his or her own. And so on…

But no. Di was a Guardian. And if the person in question was truly innocent, and the curse in question entirely unfair, she could end it by ending the thing that powered it.

Even if…as in this case…the thing that powered it was the tattered and bitter remains of the spirit of the person that had created the curse in the first place.

It had been simple. It had been very clear-cut. The solution was obvious and well within her arsenal of spells. As other Guardians said, the first time was always clear-cut and easy in the sense that the solution was obvious. But easy in the sense that it was effortless? Not even close.

It's raining. Why does it always rain when the shit hits the fan?

And night. It was always night when bad things happened, but that was kind of par for the course. Bad Things liked the night. The few Bad Things that didn't like the night generally preferred the other extreme, burning sun and destructive heat. She didn't think it was likely she was going to run into any ancient Egyptian demons any time soon, so she had better get used to after-hours work.

Mind you, she was having no trouble actually seeing. There was so much lightning that it was like a disco or a rock concert.

It was midnight, she was in the middle of nowhere, and it wasn't just raining, it was bucketing down. If Di hadn't been reasonably sure that some Guardianly immunity from lightning strikes was going to protect her while she was doing Guardian business, she'd have been flat on the ground praying she didn't get hit.

She slogged through knee-high weeds in her toughest (soaked) jeans and the rubber stable boots she was glad Memaw had insisted she wear, with a sledgehammer in one hand and a duffle in the other, making her way by what she could see in the flashes. She was in the barren graveyard of an old farmstead, which itself was nothing
more than the stump of an old chimney and a riot of blackberry vines. The graveyard was so old and abandoned that the headstones were all but unreadable, but she didn't need headstones to tell her where her target was. The spell she had cast to allow her to see magic left no doubt as to where she was going. She crossed the line where the old wooden fence had once been, stepped onto the graveyard soil, and paused.

A heavy black miasma hung over the grave she was seeking. She approached it, keeping her shields up against a thick fog that actually resisted her as she pushed her way to the headstone. It couldn't touch her, not through her protections. It kept clear of her by a good three inches, trying to surge forward but not getting past her shields.