moons

There are days when a magician has to be a magician, when the world needs magic too much for you to relax. I walk through the city – it is small, as cities go, and the magician who has made it her home is swamped past capacity. Arisha doesn’t object to my being here to help: some would. So I walk, and let the magic out. Some days it is easier than breathing to be a magician, but not on a Friday the 13^th with a full moon thrown up with it. Magic is borne of need and desire, and the desire all about me is for the stories to be true: for accidents and random luck, for a poor showing of miracles.

I ignore that, focusing on bindings and what the world needs. Holding one vehicle together, making sure ladders do not break. I have, in my day, made walls against creatures from Outside the universe to guard the world against harm, forced ancient powers to turn away from courses as old as time. It is a mistake younger magicians make to believe that this is not as important. A falling ladder could shatter a life, ruin a family, twist the myth of the day into something awful in their heads.

I lose track of the number of black cats I’ve saved from harm by the time evening rolls around. Jay is walking along beside me in worried silence; he is bound to me, and from far Outside the universe. I’ve been drawing on his strength slowly and steadily because he is tough and because he wants to help. We’ve walked over half the city, and the bindings I’ve made are holding or Jay would have said otherwise: he can see bindings as easily as humans see light, and even bend them if he has to.

I get hot dogs from a stand and eat two while Jay wolfs down four.

“Honcho? A lot of people are puthhing at the bindingth,” he says.

I raise an eyebrow. “Really?”

He rolls his eyes. “Not jutht yourth. It – it’th like they want the world to break, to show them...” he trails off, looking lost and confused.

I find a park bench and sit, and Jay plops down beside me. He’s not sucking on his thumb, which he does not during stress, but I can feel he’s getting there, unease humming through the bindings between us. “Humans do weird things, Jay. Sometimes people want to believe in a world bigger than the one they know, if only for a day, no matter if that world is all bad luck and missed chances, crazy-minded people and harm to everyone. We hunger, and sometimes we don’t know what we hunger for.”

“Oh! Like a hot dog. Becauthe you don’t know if it ith too thpicy until after you eat it,” he says proudly.

“Everyone does give it different toppings,” I say, “but sometimes they forget it’s a hot dog underneath all that.”

Jay nods seriously to that and gets off the bench, fighting back a yawn. “Then we need to make sure the hot dog is well cooked, right?”

I stand and stretch slowly. “I think you’re taking this metaphor a little too far.”

“You mean the fool moon and the bad luck? Becauthe,” he adds firmly, “food ith too important to be a metaphor.”

I smack him on the back of the head just before he could duck and he lets out an indignant squack that I waste magic on that. I continue to walk, circling toward the end of the city and the suburbs. Arisha would have questions about how I had kept going for so long that I have no desire to answer. There are magicians who would want me dead for being bound to Jay, and I don’t know if she is one.

We leave the city before we need to find out, and Jay doesn’t ask a single question about it since he doesn’t like saying the name Arisha at all. The bindings we made hold, dissolving as the moon begins to wan the next morning. I am certain there are people who will take the lack of weirdness as proof of weird but we did what we could in one small part of the world even if it was not enough.

I wake the next morning to Jay shaking me on my bed in the motel room. There are precisely thirteen dead mice piled outside the motel room door. I have no idea if this is the black cats thanking me or issuing a warning. I have Jay get rid of the bodies by unbinding them and removing stains as well and get the local paper. The headline is about Friday the 13^th in the city and how bad luck ran rampant.

I put the paper down, head back to the motel room, and go back to bed.

disposal

The thing that terrifies me about the universe is how quickly ones life can fall apart in it. How a place so solid can suddenly be liquid, how everything you build your life on can simply fall away and leave nothing else behind. There is a school for creatures from Outside the universe. I never went: the Deep School seemed to political, too driven. Too intent on making politicians. We don’t have those where I am from, but we have things like them. Creatures so adept at mimicry that they hide their true selves behind near-perfect masks. My experience of home and here is that the worst kind of monsters never look like monsters at all.

Her name was Myra Jeni, and she was a monster. A human one who made a deal with something Other for power. I don’t know why, or even to what end: the motives of humans confuse me even after forty years on this world, sixty before on another. The universe is solid. Real. But everything inside it can be as strange as those of us from Outside, all their certainties falling away to leave little more than fear behind. She had acquired a book made of smells rather than words, whose use could destroy minds in moments.

And so I showed her what I really looked like, when she brought the book into my office. And she is dead, and I am not. I have no passport in other names. No one I can call to remove corpses – human or otherwise – for me. And there is a magician. I can feel them circling the university, bindings and will gathering themselves together. I could fight. But the media studies department would be destroyed, my colleagues rendered mad if not destroyed. Universities are not conducive to sanity, I think: my battle against a magician would destroy too many.

I had not thought it in my nature to wait for death, or even banishment.

There is a knock on the door. A boy of perhaps 10, pale and thin, pokes his head in. “Hi? You’re Profethor Rafael Deyo?”

I have the body in the corner, behind the couch. The floor is decorated in stains. The walls are filled with old books, musty with age and power. The kid glances toward the body and then back at me, waits. I will miss this place. I stand and nod. “I am. You are not a pupil, I trust?”

The boy grins at that. “Nope. I’m Jay.”

“And that should mean something to me?”

He shakes his head firmly. “I hope not.”

“Is this some offer from the Deep School then?”

“Huh? No. I’m with Honcho. The magithan,” Jay says. “He athked me to talk to you before thingth got unavoidable.”

“I was forced to murder one of my students today. Magicians do not take kindly to my kind killing humans.”

“Oh, that.” He waves it away with a hand. “Humanth kill each other all the time. I think they get some kind of-of fun out of breaking bindingth. Like they’re all connected tho they have to prove they’re not. It’th really weird.”

“You are not human.”

“I hide my nature good,” he says. I am ancient and powerful in my own way; I could level the university with the movements of my real body, with limbs both real and not. I suspect I would bounce right off of Jay’s pride.

“Prove it.”

He grins hugely and gestures and the stains are unbound from the floor and gone, in ways magicians do not operate. I am huge and aweful in my true form, but there is no power in me to simply make bodies cease to exist, or to get rid of questions humans would ask.

“My secretary saw her come in.”

“Honcho can deal with that,” Jay says, and pads over to the body, picking up the book and flipping through it. He wrinkles his nose at the smells. “Thith ith a very bad book.”

“It is.”

He walks over and hands it to me. “You thould keep it. We travel a lot.”

“You would trust me with such a thing?”

“You were willing to let Honch banith you,” he says firmly.

“Banish?”

“Yeth, that word. I don’t like that word much at all.” Jay pauses, eyes unfocusing again. “And Honcho thinkth that monthterth who become teacherth do it to teach and to learn. You had a whole life and you threw it away to thtop one perthon with an evil book tho that maketh you good.”

“It does?”

Jay lets out a huge sigh. “I jutht thaid so.” He holds out a hand. “Come on: there ith a thtore on the camputh and you’re going to buy me a computer game.”

“I am?”

“And Honcho will come and deal with the body and do magic thingth to make everything okay. Becauthe that ith what magicithans do.”

I pause. It seems like Jay is trying to tell himself that as much as me, but his nature is too hidden for me to be certain, and I do not know the magician waiting outside the campus at all. I do know few magicians offer second chances at anything, or even alliances with our kind. I take the boy’s hand and head out the door.

“What do I do if this happens again?”

“Make friendth who can help you deal with it,” Jay says firmly. “Making friendth ith an important part of being in the univerthe.”

I have colleagues and acquaintances, but I do not trust enough to have friends. I consider his words, and nod, and head to the campus store. A human voice whispers in my head briefly, the magicians touch gone as quickly as it comes. That the magician got into my mind so easily is almost worrying. I buy Jay just one game despite his request for a second and the pouts and pleas for another game are just as entertaining as the magician said they would be.

I never went to the Deep School. I have a feeling not even it could have prepared me for this magician.

tetris

The town of Raven’s Bluff boasts neither ravens nor a bluff. The mighty Wagnashi River is actually a creek and the town’s claim to condominiums is a hotel trying to upsell itself. Poorly. Given all that, I didn’t expect the history of the town to have any real weight behind it but it turned out that the creature lurking in the woods was real: all shifting fur and claws, old and maddened with age. I made a door and sent it back home halfway around the world, to one of those areas explorers think they’ve mapped and understood.

The local trapper who got hold of me through the email address Charlie set up for me months ago doesn’t question whether it is gone, just thanks me and offers directions to the nearest pawn shop when I ask. It turns out to be a couple of towns away but it’s not hard to find someone offering me a ride and no questions. I buy a few older handheld computer games and take them back to Raven’s End, the hotel/condo development still renting rooms. For cash. With no questions asked, which is generally how magicians like it.

Jay is sitting on one of the two double beds in the hotel room cross-legged when I enter. He looks to be about ten and human, though is neither of those things as he is from far Outside the universe and bound into my service. He doesn’t look up from his phone when I enter.

“Jay.”

“I’m occupied.”

“With a game.”

“Yeah. I am achieving entelechy.”

I pause, the bag of games in hand, and close the door carefully behind me before discarding shoes and coat. “And that means?”

“Actuality. My true nature and not my potential one,” he says, fingers dancing at inhuman speeds over the phone.

“You’re getting a high score in a computer game, aren’t you?”

“I might be.”

“I got some older games you might want to play.”

He pauses the phone reluctantly, takes the bag and checks the handheld games over, eyes widening at a few. I arranged to win a small lottery a few days ago when we were short on funds. Jay looks up. “They are nice. Thank you for them.”

He goes back to his phone. I give him until the count of ten and reach out, raising his chin with a finger. “Jay.”

“I am occupied,” he snaps.

“Since when are you occupied and not busy?”

He blinks, then begins blushing a little as the implications sink in. It has been a long time since he tried to avoid speaking esses in front of me. “Occupied meanth very buthy,” he says firmly.

“You could put that game on pause and play these.”

“I thaid I wath buthy!”

“Jay.” I don’t raise my voice, but a hint of power creeps under it. A magician can’t be other than what they are. He flinches back, colour draining from his pale face and whimpers softly, hands gripping his phone tightly. I sit down on the bed beside him and he scoots to the side, trembling as he tries to hide that he is trembling. “You’re scared of me. You’ve been acting scared of me for a few days now and I don’t like that.”

He says nothing, teeth digging into his lower lip. If he was human, he’d ben drawing blood. He’s tough enough to take shotguns to the chest and barely bruise, but that’s physical damage; the bindings between us hum with fear and uneasiness.

“You only try and avoid esses that much when you’re really scared of someone. Like a monster who might eat you. Which means I did something recently, and probably forgot I did that; sometimes magic has to protect a magician from themselves.” No response. “And sometimes that has costs, but they’re not ones I want my friends to pay. Please.”

“You did thomething bad to thome bindingth,” he whispers, because he sees the world in bindings as easily as we see light and hear sound. “Thomething bad, and did worthe than unmake them and it’th all not falling apart and I’m thcared!”

“I know you are. You’ve never been scared of me before, have you?”

Jay shakes his head, not moving.

“Charlie was. I am.” That wins a slow blink. “Being a magician is what I am, Jay. The magic is just part of what I do.” I reach over, resting my hand on his right hand, gently pull it off his phone. “You really think I’d eat you given how you’d taste?”

That wins a surprised giggle. “That’th why I don’t bathe,” he says with a hesitant grin.

“Uh huh.” I raise his right hand slowly toward his face. “I’m not saying to not be afraid of me, Jay. But not this much, if you can. I’m saying I won’t eat you, and I promise that.”

He relaxes abruptly, letting out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding and shoves his right thumb into his mouth to suck on it. That’s new, damage I caused to his nature over a month ago. Until now, he’s only done it under stress. This time it’s from relief. He doesn’t suck on it long before removing it and reaching for the bag of games.

“You won’t eat me even if I beat you in tetrith?” he says warily.

“I’ve never played tetris.”

“Oh.” Jay considers that. “I don’t think I thould be afraid of anyone who hath never even played tetrith,” he says, and begins describing how the game works even as he turns it on. We’re not all right: the bindings that bind him to me and me to him are not even close to all right, and he’s not able – or willing – to talk about whatever I did that fractured them, but he relaxes as he describes the game, has he play, shows me a few tricks and beats every high score I try and set.

As displays of strength go against magicians, it’s not one I consider impressive but it seems to count for him so I don’t protest at all as he insists I keep playing and beats me in every one of the games I bought until he yawns after a good ten hours and falls dead asleep, head resting on my shoulder. I put him into the bed slowly, leaving the games beside it, and half-wonder how he’s going to react when he finds out I’ve never played pacman. 

Jay's Journal

My name is Jay. It’s not really, but I like Jay. The magician named me that, and it’s mine. I’ve never had a journal before but I like them. I can write words and they come out just fine. They don’t when I talk them, but that’s because I’m not really human. And that’s OK: most things in this world aren’t human. I’m not sending this to anyone. I’m keeping it on me. In case I forget, because the edges of the bindings have gone all fuzzy. The ones called memories. And I’m writing this on paper because I’m scared.

I’m always scared, but this is a different kind of scared. I am travelling with a the magician who wanders, and that’s rare and he’s a good person and I’m told that is rare too. But he’s still a person and people are weird and they break bindings and pretend they don’t or can’t even realize there was a binding at all. They change ALL the time and it’s hard to keep up with. But magicians are good at fixing broken things, and Honcho (that’s what I call him, and I’m using it here) is good at realizing when bindings have gone sour. Because he has me. Because I have him.

But.

But today was bad. Today was past sour milk and into really bad.

There was this man with a small magic who did bindings to children, of other voices. He would throw his voice and change it. Make adults hear horrible things, like their children promised to kill them. Or do worse things. Things children don’t do with adults. Things no child would ask. The man would put power in his voice and force Bad Things to happen. Things you don’t do, not to anyone. Things adults shouldn’t be forced to do, the magician said, and his voice was so cold I hid around a corner for him and Honcho didn’t even notice.

When he stops noticing Important Things like me, that’s when I have to say something, grab his attention. Stop him. I didn’t. I was too scared even to move until it was too late.

He walked down the street, and even the broken people ran from him. He walked up to the man who had done this, who had twisted people up inside and out, and said: “Why?” in a tone of voice nothing could resist. And the man had smiled a not-smile and replied: ‘Because I could.”

And the magician went quiet. Death-quiet, like big creatures do before they eat you. His silence hurt, in a way silence shouldn’t. In a way that felt like this street, with the sick man and his sick trick that made bindings worse than broken. And the magician turned to me, because I’d finally followed, but I couldn’t force words out against the cold rage I saw in his face. “Go and wait down the street.” He forced me to do it, which he’d never done before. I didn’t fight him. I don’t think I could have. He was all magician, all power and will, and

he did something bad. I can’t remember it, not right. The street is okay. The families are okay. The man never had a trick. Never hurt anyone. Never was at all. Honcho didn’t break bindings. He didn’t unmake them. He made it so they never were at all, and just thinking of that makes my inside hurt awful. He broke a piece of the world. And a piece of himself to do it? Maybe? I don’t know. I think I did know what happened, and I no longer do. There never was a Bad Thing here at all, but I think that’s a bad thing too.

And I don’t know how to fix it.

I’m scared of him, almost. Sometimes. Close to now.

I’m scared for him.

(I’m thcared.)

safe

“I don’t know what lies you’ve been told, but this is an elementary school. There are no monsters here,” the vice principal snaps.

A small part of me wants to ask if the school has no children; I suppress it and keep silent. Iris Melchev picks up her pace, sharp gestures pointing out classrooms, posters, the lack of graffiti on walls as she marches down the hallway. Jay had stopped me as we’d been driving past the school, saying that something about it bugged him. He’s not human and sees the world as bindings; if he can’t tell why one is damaged it’s reason enough to find out more.

I’d told Maureen – the school secretary – that I was his uncle, we were new to the area, and had been told the local school was perhaps not safe. I didn’t have to thread power into my voice, not make her believe me in the ways magicians can. The words brought the vice principal out of her office so fast it was either magic or some personal catapult. Possibly both at once. I said Jay had been told stories by the other kids, she demanded to know the stories.

Jay looks to be about ten; he can look younger when he has to. He just said, “the thorieth were thcary,” and refused to tell her more, starting to suck on his right thumb when she pressed for details. He does that now under stress, after an incident that was entirely my fault; he refuses to blame me for it even now. The lisp is damage to his nature when he entered the universe from far Outside it. That he uses both as weapons is often impressive and worrying.

Iris began the tour after that; Jay is trailing behind the both of us, staring into classrooms in wide-eyed astonishment. Teachers are busy teaching classes, and the bindings he must be seeing between the students and to the teacher are probably as much terrifying as wonderful; he knows enough not to blurt out anything yet, but I can feel his incredulity through the bindings between us. I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions when this is over.

“We have bathrooms. Boys, girls, and other,” Iris says, as if this is both a point of shame and pride. I sense Jay start behind me, but send reassurance through the binding: he passes as a human boy until someone realizes he has no genitalia at all. Charlie travelled with Jay for over a month and never noticed; Jay hides his nature terribly well.

“Ah,” I say, since she’s clearly expecting something.

She frowns but doesn’t press her point.

“Excuthe me,” Jay says, “but doeth Other mean teacher?”

The vice principal turns, but meets only innocence behind the question. “No. No, it does not,” she says, trying not to look rattled. I want to ask why they bother having a third bathroom if she clearly expects it to shock people; I resist the urge and cough lightly.

“The school has a fingerprint-based fire alarm system, doors at either end, a cafeteria for lunches and a playground for the students,” Iris continues, heading out a side door.

The playground is all asphalt and plastics that have every edge coated in rubber to prevent harm. A few kids are out in it from an early class – grade one or two, at a guess – but they’re all playing tag in the lone soccer field or sitting on it watching everyone else play tag under the eye of a teacher. Not a single student is on the swings or slide and the playground doesn’t boast a merry-go-round or even monkey bars I recall from when I was a kid.

“Is there a reason no one is using the playground?” I ask.

“A second teacher is required to be on hand,” the vice principal says, “in case anyone is injured or –.”

“Nope.” Jay scowls at the playground and edges closer to me, squeezing my right hand with his left. “No one is here becauthe it ith too thafe, Honcho.”

That’s what he calls me instead of magician. I study it but there is no magic here, no echo of anything old. Something clearly has Jay worked up about it because he hasn’t stopped sucking his thumb. “I doubt there is a burial ground under it?”

Jay considers that, then shakes his head, not getting the reference. “I don’t think tho?”

“What are you talking about,” Iris says, realizing we’re not playing the part of uncle and nephew well enough.

I crouch down and run fingers over asphalt. Nothing. The world can speak to magicians, even if we don’t want it to. This place is cold, devoid of magic, so empty it isn’t even haunted by a single echo of a child’s injury.

“Oh,” I say. “It’s so safe it’s dead, isn’t it?”

“Yup! Bindingth don’t want to work here at all. It feelth....” Jay trails off, frowning. “It feelth like dreamth can’t even be born becauthe it ith too coddled? I think?”

“Mr. Smith.” Iris Melchev’s voice is a cold warning.

She is human; it hardly means she isn’t dangerous. “Jay is a bit odd,” I say, which is nicely vague and wholly true.

“I’m thpecial,” Jay says proudly, and the vice principal’s face turns into a wall as she processes that along with the huge smile he offers.

I let the magic out, thinking about children and dreams and life. Skills that can be honed on playsets, games that can be true on pavement. It’s not enough to make this place feel alive, but it is the best I can do as Iris demands to know where Jay is staying and why his parents aren’t here.

“They are at work; I think this might work if you brightened up the playground a little. You could put in flowers?” I say, threading power under the words.

“We cannot: Some pupils may be allergic,” she says, her own authority a wall against magic.

I thank her before Jay can say anything else and pull him toward the door. She makes to follow when a few pupils drift over to the playground and ask if she can watch them on the slide, trapping her in her authority neatly.

Jay lets out a huge sigh of relief when we’re outside and removes his thumb from his mouth. “That wath not fun at all!”

“I had wondered why you didn’t stop,” I say as we head toward the car I’ve rented.

“It wath making her twitch,” he says. “And the bindingth thhe had on her own mind needed twitching a lot.” He shudders, not entirely faking it.

“The school is better now?”

“A little. You gave it room to get better,” he says proudly and hops into the car. “Now can we go away from here?”

“I could enrol you, you know.”

Jay’s eyes narrow to slits at that. He opens his mouth to reply, snaps it shut and just glowers at me when nothing suitable comes to him.

I grin and drive out into the street, circling the school once just for the glare he gives me and drive away, wondering how much else in the world is made so safe it is a kind of wound. And I have to wonder how much magic causes that: magicians defend the world against creatures from Outside, but perhaps – just perhaps – we might do the job too well at times. After all, a nightmare is a kind of dream and we protect the world against many nightmares.

fallow

There are things it is easy to forget if you’ve been a magician long enough. I imagine the police have this problem as well: you become something, you take up a mantle to help others, and you spend much of your time seeing the worst that the world has to offer. Magic can be like that: sometimes the only solution to a maze is to burn it down to ashes and walk through the result. Nevermind that the maze could be a home, an entire life, a way of seeing the world. You do what has to be done, and if you’re smart about it you learn to never mourn afterwards.

I spent many years in bars. I haven’t as much since a creature from Outside the universe bound himself to me. As such entities go, Jay is low-maintenance: give him a phone, tablet and internet connection, access to games and he’s happier than creatures that need sacrifices of puppies or banking executives. I’ve left him playing games and just gone out to walk, listening to the world, letting the magic out. I fix a few cars, shore up a sewer line, ease the atmosphere in one home a little to prevent another fight the kids will hear. I’ve done some terrible and impressive magic in my time, but this is what I enjoy: the small things, the little nudges toward making lives a little better.

A magician stands between the world and awful things beyond it seeking entrance. Using magic is just a small part of my nature, but the magic is why I became a magician. Sometimes one just gets so tired of being a wall. I slip out of side streets and into fields left fallow, waiting for a new season or perhaps to be host to some music festival or rally. The grass will remain. Sometimes what is able to bend is stronger than what which won’t. It’s hard to remember that. I met an exorcist once who explained his nature to me as, “I am an exorcist; we break before we bend” and being a magician is often the same: if we bend, something from Outside can enter the universe, can damage it, can hurt people.

But if we never bend –. I don’t know. Magicians don’t last, as a rule. The magic eats us up from the inside out, or we die trying to stop something or the last finally catches up with us. There has to be a balance between breaking and bending, between being river and rock. I haven’t found it. I don’t even know how to find it. I walk over grass that will survive me and wonder if perhaps magicians make the universe weak. Would the universe be strong against such things if we were not a wall against them? It’s one thing to think, but not something we can just decide to test. Not something I can risk the lives some Entities might destroy on.

So I turn back, halfway down the field, and walk back to pavement and deep into the town, touch the world with a few more small magics, focusing on that. Losing myself in it until I reach the hotel. Jay is sitting on his bed and offers up a huge grin when he sees me and begins burbling about a computer game he’s loving. I let the words wash over me, let his sheer enthusiasm ease my worries a little. There are creatures from Outside the universe like Jay, who see the universe as the best place to visit, who see it like a haven or tourist destination all rolled into one.

I think the world needs more of them. I suspect – I know – I need to meet more. I’ve met a few before, made deals with them, but far more I’ve bound or banished because it seemed necessary at the time. For now I just sit, and listen, and hope that Jay being bound to me makes me able to bend a little more than I think I can. I give him more money to buy some new games with, and Jay is wise enough not to ask me any questions at all.

Exhaling Catalysts Weekly Prompt:“a walk through the field is more about life than the walk itself, for the blades of grass that give way, hold the greater strength”

mothers

Small town motels tend to be cheap and grim affairs, though the one Jay and I ended up in last night is at least clean even if the mattress felt like sleeping on a rock filled with spikes. I’m stretching slowly when Jay pads into my room, cell phone clutched tight in his right hand. Jay looks to be ten but he isn’t at all, a creature from far Outside the universe bound into my service. Entering the universe when so newly born damaged him; I haven’t helped since, but he doesn’t blame me at all.

He says he does sometimes, but only because he knows it would make me feel better.

“Honcho; my phone doethn’t have a battery in it.” He holds it up, eyes narrowing, pale within a pale face. “It did when I went to thleep.”

“Yes. I took it out.”

“Why?” he snaps. I say nothing. “I could bind electrithity to it and make it work!”

“And not have the phone explode?” Jay says nothing in turn, glaring at me. The lisp is part of the damage to himself from entering the universe; that he sucks on his thumb in stress now is entirely my fault. He refuses to get angry with me over it, not truly. This – this I’m not as sure about.

“Magithans might not use phoneth, but other people do.” He crosses his arms. “I want it back.” He doesn’t add ‘now’, but we both hear the unsaid word; I’m not sure which of us is more surprised.

“It’s not a magician thing. It’s something else. I’m not going to be near any phone today; it isn’t safe.”

Jay deflates a little at that. “You could have just thaid that,” he mutters. “We didn’t have to have a fight.”

I think I manage to fight back a grin. “You consider that a fight?”

“Yeth! And that wath too,” he adds, his attempted glare spoiled by a grin trying to fight free of the scowl.

I shake my head and toss the sheets back onto the bed, grabbing my small duffel bag. “We’ll head out the back way and walk in the woods.”

“There’th thomething dangerouth in the woods?”

“No. Nothing at all.”

Jay goes and gets his own bag, waiting in the hallway. “I can’t use my phone becauthe...?” he says as we head outside, poking me in the side with a finger for a response.

“It’s Mother’s Day.”

Jay scratches his head. “Okay?”

“It’s a day devoted to being kind to mothers. You’ve met mine.”

Jay offers up a small nod. It wasn’t as bad as meeting my sister was; Jay ended up screaming at my sister to stop hurting me with words. But it was enough that he puts his phone into his pocket without another word.

“She’ll try and call me. She has a small talent, enough on a day like today to make phones ring. Perhaps even to try and make me answer them.”

“Oh,” he says in a very small voice.

I say nothing else as we cut through the parking lot and a small field leading into the woods proper. The forest is thick about the town and I hurry into it, seeking paths where we won’t meet hikers. Jay follows and is silent for almost two minutes.

“I could bind my phone tho no one can call me?”

“It might not stop her.” I wait until he scrambles over a log and beside me. “You don’t have to check your phone for messages every day, you know.”

“Checking email promptly helpth to keep the monthters in the internet locked inthide it,” he says. I know there are – forces, entities from Outside somewhere in the internet. It’s enough to avoid such things entirely; Jay radiates sincerity as I look at him.

“You’re trying too hard.”

He pouts. “But –.”

“But nothing. Imagine if your mother wanted to speak with you, kiddo.”

Jay stops dead at that, eyes growing wide.

“Jay?” I say, softly.

He lets out a whimper of fear and moves so fast I fall back into a tree as he impacts hard into my chest, shoving his right cheek against my chest and sucking violently on his right thumb before he’s simply gone: vanished from sight, even from all the ways in which a magician can see the world, though I can still feel and hear him.

“Jay.” I wrap my arms gently around him and he quivers, still hidden. Still terrified. He hasn’t had to move like he can in a long time. “It’s okay,” I say. “I didn’t think. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Really?” His voice is thin, scared, and he becomes visible, pulling his thumb free of his mouth with an effort as he lets me hold him, trembling still.

I reach down and raise his chin gently. “I think you know better than to doubt that.”

Some colour seeps into his cheeks as he blushes. He doesn’t offer up what his mom was, or whatever she must have tried to do to him. I hold him until he finally lets go on his own a good ten minutes later. It’s been weeks since he’s felt the need to cling, to emphasize the bindings between us this hard.

“Feeling better?”

“No,” he says, then pulls out the ghost of a grin from somewhere. “Can I get my battery back now?”

“No.”

Jay sticks out his tongue at that and looks a little better, walks a few steps and then stops. “Nathen?”

He doesn’t use my real name often, and not only because I like to keep it private. “Yes?”

“There ith a day for fatherth too?”

“Like Mother’s Day? Yes.”

Jay knows I killed my father, though no details as to the kind of magic my father was doing, or why it was necessary. He’s never asked; for all I know it’s entirely normal in the part of Outside he is from for childen to destroy parents. He is quiet for a little while, then ventures: “Ith it going to be worthe than today?”

“Probably not.”

“Oh. Good.” And he says nothing else at all, not even asking about his phone, just walks over beside me and wraps a hand in mine to squeeze it. Offering strength, as best he can.

I squeeze his hand in turn, and ask no questions about his mother, or his family at all. We just walk through the woods until day slowly turns into night, keeping company with our silences. There are days, and today is sometimes one of those, where I wish I’d never become a magician at all. I let out a breath and pull the battery for Jay’s phone from out of the air beside me.

He takes it, then places it in his other pocket without a word.

I think today might turn out be a good day after all.

We build so much from our grief;
& yet it is a bitter wonder that it
Stands so small beside memory.

masking

He wore a mask. Jay didn’t see it that way as he wandered the aisles of the WalMart, hunting down some new accessory for his tablet. He hides his true nature as a creature from Outside the universe easier than I hide being a magician, but it is not always enough to avoid attention. He is small and pale and tugs on the hand of one of the staff, asking about a micro sync cable.

It comes out as ‘micro thync,” thanks to his lisp, but he’s sucking on his right thumb as he asks and people explain his lisp away as that, not thinking further about it. Not defining him by it. The staff member crouches down, smiling and asking what model Jay wants. He recites it, and they file it away as precious kid, perhaps eight. Maybe seven. Lead him to the aisle he wants and help him get the item. He gives them a huge hug in reply and bounds down the aisles to me, informing me that he found it firmly and dragging me toward the check-out lanes.

The staff member grins over Jay’s head and I return it and ruffle his hair as we walk. He’s far less ashamed than he used to be about thumb-sucking in stress; I caused the habit to emerge by drawing on his future potential to save a town, damaging him inside and out like the lisp is another echo of. He’s turning it into a weapon, using it to make people forget about him. Because a ten year old who lisps travelling with a magician is someone who can be noticed and Jay hates that so much he’s made masks to hide behind.

And he doesn’t even notice it at all, as innocents seldom do. I wonder how much of even that is a mask now, but keep the thoughts to myself as I pay for the cable and wonder idly what other masks he might someday use and how much of Jay is entirely a mask to cover how scared he is of his own potential.

He ceases sucking his thumb the moment we leave the shop with a huge sigh of relief and opens up the package, plugging the cord into the spare battery for his phone. “I can use it with my tablet now,” he says proudly.

“And that is worth that entire performance?” I say dryly.

He blinks, thinks about it, nods. “Yup!”

“There is a creature from Outside the universe hiding in the mens washrooms at the food court; how is this cable supposed to help us deal with it again?”

Jay grins. “I can put it up on youtube and make lotth of money!”

I cuff him alongside the head and he just sticks his tongue out and hurries ahead of me, tablet in his hands. I count to ten in my head and follow in silence.

meetings

It is raining on top of the office building, a light rain dancing into an earth made artificial, the garden atop the JetSyne skyscraper existing to make some kind of statement. According to Richard, it is an attempt to be hip, which he said in a deeply sarcastic tone. Richard Brown is as drab as the name, the kind of person almost destined for management at some faceless conglomerate of a company. Though, on the face of it, I probably would be as well if my blandness was not an act of conscious choice as much as a statement of my nature. I have no idea what he did to owe favours to the magician Wu Ming, but he did so and she sent a messenger to me in turn.

Because, as she put it, if she could not destroy me – not even in her own city – then she could well use me. I am not like other magicians: I can wander, and I have bond myself to a creature from Outside the universe who bound himself to be first. Jay has been left in a hotel room with a TV and snacks and is desperately trying to hide his fear from me through our binding. Jay is very, very good at hiding and I’ve borrowed that power to walk through the JetSyne wards and sit in on a meeting about company productivity. Which as near as I can tell involves more work for less pay.

I am starting to think that anyone who wants to attend meetings should not be allowed to.

The current speaker is one Melissa Engelbert, the CPO. Chief Planning Officer apparently means co-ordinating events. It also means making arrangements for the wards and protections the company has against magicians, especially the one who is the city. I could take the wards down from inside and let Wu Ming in; I haven’t yet. It takes an interesting kind of courage to try and close a part of a magicians city from them, even if it only one office tower: there are many reasons to do so, and some of them are even benign.

It is, after all, a very quick way to get the attention of said magician if you want to.

Ms. Engelbert, the ‘Ms.’ thrown out into the room like a drawn sword, is talking about graphs and production values and the company pension plan. I have no idea if it is my being here, or something Wu Ming asked of Richard, but he raises a hand.

“Excuse me, but we import much of our products from China. Whose record in human rights is frankly appalling at best: I am not sure JetSyne can dare to claim that it is going to deny insurance to workers for moral reasons given that. At least not without being duly laughed at.”

She pauses mid-flow. The CEO, one Albert Spencer, lets out a low rumble of laughter from his vast seat at the end of the room. He is quiet, the kind to listen more than speak, and reminds me of a magician as he stirs in his chair. The stirring triggers a memory and I am almost certain I know what he is, which is all the more reason to keep quiet.

“We are about profits and productivity,” Spencer says. “People are a distant second to the accumulation of wealth, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I wouldn’t,” Richard says.

“Ah.” The CEO lets out along breath. “Recently married, are we?”

Richard looks confused but nods.

“That would explain it. It is unwise to let pangs of remorse limit oneself. Continue,” he says, waving a hand to Ms. Engelbert.

She talks about mining operations, though calls it datamining and apparently means the internet. Which is reason enough for a company to not want magicians to be involved in their affairs, but perhaps not enough to go this far. I listen for at least ten minutes to her lecture on a subject everyone else in the room seems to know before a man with no chin stands and begins talking about shareholder return and market value and the need to be trim and lean.

I cough. Heads snap about, suite rustling like scared pigeons. I’m wearing jeans, a cheap jacket, t-shirt. I don’t belong and as far as they can tell I wasn’t in the room a moment ago. I stretch from where I’ve been leaning against the wall and feel Ms. Engelbert draw up power. Practitioners aren’t magicians, but they can use magic. Enough time, enough effort, a large enough source of power and they can do small things in a small area. It took all her skill to make the wards, that and more beside. I feel out her power, and the sacrifices made to bolster it.

“You would solve a lot of issues if manpower and time wasn’t wasted on wards,” I say softly. “Or if half the interns didn’t have their own future drained out of them to help power said wards. There is this saying, you know that we borrow the land from our children. Which means we’re leasing it from them at a rather enviable rate, don’t you think? We are always in debt to the future, especially companies forced to straddle it.”

Ms. Engelbert speaks a Word and the air shudders under it, the other suits spinning to stare in shock. I don’t know how many knew of magic, or even her, until that point. Most large companies have at least one person whose job it is to keep out gremlins, leprechauns and the like. It tends to be uncommon knowledge at best.

I catch the Word and unravel it between my fingers. “I am a magician, Ms. Engelbert. I could unmake all the wards now, let the magician who claims this city know what you’ve been doing here. But you haven’t been doing anything wrong, just being too paranoid for your own good. Being a corporation instead of people. That, too.”

Richard has gone still and pale; whatever he expected of me, this wasn’t it. Neither will be this, I think.

I turn to the CEO and bare my teeth in a smile. “How has JetSyne been treating you, Albert Spencer? Is this an acceptable hoarde?”

He stirs, and for a moment I catch a glimpse of banked fires in his eyes and greed so deep nothing will ever fill it. No one else recognizes a dragon; myth conditions people deeply. They expect scales and wings, not a hunger without end, not glimpses of what a dragon must give up for power. A dragon’s fire can burn a magician to ashes but can’t he hot enough to replace where their heart, their soul, where they used to be. Only wealth touches that coldness, and it’s never enough at all.

“You could kill me,” I say, low and hard, for his ears alone. “But you would lose JetSyne and Wu Ming would kill you in turn. I would wound you enough for that at the least, and I am not without allies who would avenge my death if even my enemies like her failed to do so.”

“Magicians are not welcome here,” he says for everyone’s ears, and nothing more.

“If we were, I would be worried.” I bow to him, and undo the wards about the place. It is easy from the inside, so easy that Ms. Engelbert grips the table to stop herself from crying out as how quickly I undo years of work. I don’t tell her she could have been a magician if she’d wanted it enough; I have no need to be that cruel.

I just turn and walk to the door. “We have no reason to interfere in your affairs, not truly. Your company is not doing anything other companies would not do if they could. But if you push this, I will call in the debts owed to the future and you will learn just how far your hungers take you and to what end they always need. It would help if you have less meetings,” I finish with, closing the door and heading down the stairs.

Security does not stop me when I leave.