Dead But Not Forgotten (15 page)

“Isn't it obvious? I'm showing the world what a two-bit charlatan you are.” She was holding a censer in one hand. As she spoke, she inscribed a wide arc with her hand, leaving a trail of smoke behind her. It didn't move at all. One more sign of the absence of wind. “One little breeze? Really, Amelia? What's the value in that?”

“Well, it was sort of a ‘proof of concept' order, with a little bit of ‘not upsetting the local weather systems so much that we all get washed out to sea' as a bonus,” I said carefully. “You didn't live here when the hurricane hit. You don't know how bad things got.” How bad things still were, in certain parts of the city. It was difficult to overstate what Katrina had done to our beautiful city. There was a reason most of the local witches wouldn't even have attempted weather magic. It was the same reason that I was being so careful.

Minda snorted. “I've seen storms. That wasn't the hurricane's fault.”

I felt, rather than saw, Bob drawing himself up beside me. He'd missed Katrina completely, on account of his having been a cat at the time, but he'd still seen its marks. “Are you suggesting that it was the city's fault somehow?”

“No, I'm outright stating that it was
your
fault. All you lame-ass witches who couldn't bother to figure out the spells you needed to keep the weather under control. You deserved what you got.” She made another lazy circle with her censer. Another ring of smoke formed and hung preserved around her. “You're weak. You've been living in the Big Easy so long that you've started to think life should be all sunshine and games. Well, there's a new witch in town, and I am going to show you how it's
done
.”

There was something about those preserved loops of smoke that bothered me almost as much as the motionless air. I took a step forward, my shoes squelching in the mud. “Minda, let's talk about this. I don't think you really understand how delicate the systems are here. Make one mistake and we're all going to wind up paying for it.” I sounded like Bob. There was something almost poetic about that: I hadn't listened to his warnings, and now it looked as if Minda wasn't going to listen to mine.

I hadn't listened to his warnings . . . My eyes widened as I looked at Minda's loops of smoke in a new light. Viewed from the side, they were random, overlapping with one another to form an almost chaotic series of squiggles. But viewed from above . . . viewed from above, they would form a series of broken concentric circles. She was sketching a ritual circle, using water instead of earth and smoke instead of salt. It was brilliant. It was audacious.

It was going to get us all killed.

“Minda, you have to stop.”

“No, I don't,” she said smugly. “All I
had
to do was wait until I felt you start your spell, so that I could be ready to call you here to witness my greatest triumph. Now sit back, Miss Broadway, and get ready to see a
real
show.”

She flung her censer into the air, and the sky exploded.

The thing about magic is that it doesn't really care about right or wrong or maintaining the balance of things; magic finds its own balance if you give it long enough. What magic cares about is respect. Do you respect what you're doing? Do you understand it well enough to do it properly, or are you just a kid fooling around in your mama's closet and making a mess out of things? Magic isn't forgiving. It doesn't treat nicely with people who don't treat respectfully with it. But sadly, that doesn't mean the people who
are
respectful are immune from getting hurt.

Minda's frozen circle remained exactly where it was as the water around her kicked into windblown life, suddenly ripped into waves two and three feet high. It was the sort of water that normally accompanies a bad storm—and from the black clouds that were racing into view on the horizon, that was exactly what we were about to get. I tried to take another step toward the water, only to find myself pushed backward by a fierce wind that roared out of nowhere and knocked me into Bob.

He caught me before I could go sprawling, his strong hands gripping my shoulders as he leaned close and shouted against the wind, “She's going to blow us away!”

“Not just us!” I shouted back. Clouds of that size weren't going to be happy with three witches and a stretch of riverbank. They were going to keep on gathering until they found themselves a bigger target. “We need to stop her!”

“How do you suggest we do that? Throw rocks at her until she feels bad about herself and stops trying to kill us?”

“Not quite! Do you trust me?”

There was a brief pause. Bob didn't have to say anything for me to know how loaded a question that was, especially coming from me to him. Finally, without taking his hands off my shoulders, he shouted back, “Yes! Yes, Amelia, I trust you!”

“Good! Then hold on tight, because I'm going to need you keeping me grounded!” I plunged my hand into my pocket, digging through the lint and small debris of daily life until I found the thing that I was looking for: a cherry stone.

“This better work,” I murmured, and pulled it out of my pocket, chucking it into the onrushing wind as I began to chant.

The ritual I'd used to call my small, quickly stolen breeze had been based on the idea of calmness and respect in the face of something that was never meant to be commanded. I could recognize echoes of that ritual in Minda's chant, but where I had politely asked, she was ordering, and where I had offered, she was demanding. It was a harsh contrast that made me question my own motives a bit. Had I really been trying to push my understanding of magic, or had I been showing off?

Maybe a little bit of both, if I was being honest, and yet neither one was going to be as much of a stretch as what I was trying now. The wind was forming into a funnel around Minda, racing around and around in the classic cone shape that always made my heart feel like it was going to stop. She didn't seem to realize just how much danger she was putting herself in with that positioning. She kept chanting, and her chained winds carried my cherry stone—taken from a fruit that had grown on my magical cherry tree—once, twice, three times around her, all clockwise, sketching out the idea of a ritual circle in the air.

Circles don't need to be drawn with concrete materials. If I'd forgotten that, Minda's circle of smoke would have reminded me. She drew my circle for me, etching it around hers, and when she was done, I began to do something that was, if not impossible, at the very least difficult, and dangerous, and very, very ill-advised: I began casting multiple spells at the same time, a part of one and then a part of another and then a part of a third, all as I pulled on the world around me and tried to weave them together like a rope made of nothing but will and wind.

“Standing stasis, catch and hold—come to me, oh wind of Aeolus, master of—faster, faster, spin the wheel—keep the lines as drawn forever, heeding neither time nor—”
On and on it went, the three spells chasing one another like a dog chasing its own tail, until I no longer knew for sure where one ended and the next began. Bob was still behind me, his hands on my shoulders, lending his strength to my casting. If not for the twin solidities of his body and his will, I might have gone straight over into the mud and let Minda have this impromptu wizards' duel.

Won't Octavia be proud of me for getting my butt kicked in such a traditional way,
I thought dizzily, and kept on chanting. I could feel the winds starting to waver. Some of them were bowing to my insistent command that they heel, sit, and stay. Down, boys, down.

Maybe talking to forces of nature as if they were dogs wasn't the most respectful way to go about things, but I didn't have the time or energy for respect, given the circumstances. Minda was shrieking indignantly from her place on the water, and when her shrieks gave way to high, angry chanting in a language I didn't understand, I knew that the real fight was just beginning. I dug my heels into the mud.

The force of Minda's pocket storm slammed into me like a freight train only a few seconds later.

The thing about magic is that it hurts like hell when it punches you in the face. I managed to keep on chanting, but it was close. Bob held on more tightly as I reached into the storm with both hands, the triplicate spells of stasis and speed and binding spilling out of me and into the storm-torn winds, confusing them as much as they were confusing my own magic. Casting something to speed the world up and something to stop it at the same time seemed counterproductive, as if I would be canceling out my own magic rather than strengthening it. That was sort of the idea.

Minda had whipped these winds into a killing frenzy. I was all right with keeping them there—that was what my stasis was for, intended to prevent her from pulling her own magic out of the equation, no matter how much she might want to. And she was
going
to want to, if I had my way, because no one with half a brain would stay in the spell once she realized what I was doing. Assuming that what I was doing didn't backfire and age me into dust in a matter of seconds.

Belatedly, I realized that if the spell backfired in that specific way, Bob might well be within the blast radius, at least enough to catch a decade or two that he hadn't asked for and probably wouldn't want.
Sorry, sweetie,
I thought, and kept casting. My throat was starting to ache from the strain of shouting against Minda's storm. It seemed like a small price to pay, all things considered. The little reprobate had used
my
research,
my
ambition to set herself up to be Queen of the Storm. Well, if anybody was going to profit irresponsibly from my research, it was going to be
me
.

Stasis, to keep her storm from dissipating. Binding, to transfer it to me if she let it go. And finally, speed, to wear it out and wear it down to nothing before it could move beyond this empty little stretch of river. The gators and frogs that lived here wouldn't be happy about having their habitat churned to gumbo, but everyone else would live untroubled and unaware of how terribly wrong things had very nearly gone. That was enough for me.

Minda was pouring everything she had into the storm, whipping it to greater and greater heights. I just kept pushing and pulling at the same time, the motion reminding me of a spinning wheel twisting and turning the fiber into thread—or maybe Rumpelstiltskin's fabled wheel, turning straw to gold. I kept that image as central in my mind as I could, trying to use it to motivate myself.
Chase the impossible, Amelia. Do whatever it takes, but chase the impossible, and don't let it out of your sight.

The first length of fiber to spool down from the storm was surprising enough that I almost dropped the spell. It was rough and resisted being pulled; it burned my palms. I pulled it harder, starting to wind it around my arm the way I'd seen older witches work when they were unwinding store-bought yarn to turn it into a usable ball. And it kept coming, length after length of gray and blue and white fiber that was so much like wool as to make no difference, all of it spinning down out of the sky.

I kept pulling. Bob's hands tightened on my shoulders, holding me in place and giving me his strength. We were both nearly exhausted. I didn't know how I was doing what I was doing—that would be something to worry about later, when we weren't fighting for our lives against a crazed witch with a storm the size of Louisiana ready to chuck at anyone who riled her up.

But it wasn't really all that big anymore, was it? The storm that had seemed poised to take on the whole state was now barely big enough to cover the river, and it wasn't breaking free of that arbitrary boundary. Minda screamed again, sounding more frightened than angry this time, and there was a splash that didn't sound like raindrops or jumping frogs; somebody's “walk on water” spell had just gone the way of my patience, shattering into a million pieces and dropping her into the troubled, alligator-filled water beneath her feet.