Lives of Magic (Seven Wanderers Trilogy) (8 page)

On our eighth evening in New York, I closed my eyes. I figured on the occasions I had worked magic, I was scared. But what did it feel like?

I tried to bring myself back to the events when I knew I had used my magic: the earthquake in San Francisco, the fall in Oregon, in the shower. Each time I had been under emotional duress, pulled beyond my limit. I put myself in all of those terrifying scenarios again.
What did I do? How did I do it?

Minutes passed before the silence in the room weighed on my mind.

“Can you turn on a radio or something?” I asked Kian. He fiddled with the radio near the television until rock music played clearly. He raised an eyebrow at me.

“Too quiet,” I said.

“Must be horrible to concentrate with,” he muttered, but I chose to ignore him. He turned the volume up, sprawled back out on his bed and resumed reading his book, a historical account of World War I.

I closed my eyes again and focused. Soon the music was seeping into my mind, driving me crazy, yet I could not get up to turn it off. I realized I was driving it into my thoughts — it was a welcome distraction from what I was doing. The noise forced its way in like it was trying to corral whatever was hiding to come out. Thinking about the music and my magic at the same time was stirring something in my heart.

A new song came on. A piano played a few bars of a frantic intro before the other instruments joined in. I focused on that, but the power in me kept building. Stunned, I realized being distracted helped.

My magic was locked off to me if I searched for it. As is the way of the universe, I found it right when I stopped looking.

By the time the song moved into the chorus, my chest was seizing. It became hard to breathe. I fought the urge to cough and sputter. I knew where my magic was now. I could feel it buzzing in my blood, my muscles, and my bones. It was like a spark that ignited throughout my body. I developed a new perspective that allowed me to see it and separate it from my human self.

I took myself back to the time Kian had chased me. I had pushed the ocean away from me when I fell, creating ice. When the earthquake struck near my home, I had shoved its power away, at least subconsciously. Now, I experimented.

I mentally pushed and squeezed at the magic, moulding it, forming it to my body. The concentration of it in my chest would kill me, I was sure. I could feel sweat running down my face, but I continued. Eyes tightly closed, I mentally eased the magic into me. Soon I wore what felt like a suit of magic. It pulsed in an unfamiliar way, out of sync with my heart.

Slowly, I opened my eyes. Kian was still on his bed, but he eyed me curiously. Stunned, I saw night had fallen. I sat up. My magic suit vibrated.

“What …” Kian began.

I tried to open my mouth to interrupt him, but my throat vibrated. My teeth chattered. It was all I could do to keep the magic with me.

“Gwen?” Kian asked.

I sat staring at him, wide-eyed. I was unable to speak for fear of letting go of the suit would either fade the magic or have it explode from my body. I held up one shaking finger, telling him to give me a minute.

I lay back down again and closed my eyes. This fragile state of mind would not do. Now I could see myself from the side. I could see the power that had taken me over.

I controlled it once,
I said to myself,
I can do it again.

The memory of the people on the pier came back to me. I had been helpless. I would not be again. Seeing myself from the side allowed me to imagine the magic like an aura, hanging around me, suffocating me. I began mentally kneading it back into my body. The resistance I found in my mind scared me.

Finally, I had pummelled it into the depths of my soul, where it belonged. Before opening my eyes again, I searched around for any hints that memories had been unlocked.

Nothing yet,
I sighed to myself. Then I sat up.

Kian still watched me. His book was put away. The radio played more rock music. Gripping the edge of my bed, I stood. I extended my arms out towards the window and pushed at the magic again, this time through my fingertips. As if on cue, the window curtains blew open to reveal the rising sun as if a gust of wind had disturbed them. It was dawn.

“Wow,” I breathed.

“S
o you just stopped thinking about it?” Kian asked me skeptically.

I nodded.

We were walking through Central Park on a sunny afternoon, days after my experimenting with fitting into magic. Belief had finally started to seep into me, and I felt like the very knowledge of who I had been (whoever that was) was giving me strength.

After sleeping off my initial fatigue, I had been trying new things every chance I got. The buzzing in my bones hadn’t stopped — it was there every time I looked for it, like an electrical current. I got used to it eventually.

Kian tested me, but moving objects was not a skill I possessed. Any time I tried to do something it was as if a small wind hit my target object and disappeared. It seemed a stereotype of possessing magic that I had to make rocks fly around. Kian assured me there was more to it, and I would find out with more memories.

Regardless of my weak magic, I felt empowered for the first time in my life. I felt strong. And despite myself, I revelled in Kian’s approval. Though I did not always pass his tests — he began warning me after he threw a lamp and nearly hit my head — I was adjusting to the life of a magician. The security guards at the hotel, who knew us by name at this point, were called again every so often, but only eyed the wreckage suspiciously and left.

I was only disappointed that I could not increase my memories faster. Since fitting into the magic, I had bits and snippets of the past thrown at me. It was either pieced together or too abstract. A tiny mud house. Fog. Green everywhere. A grey sky. Always, a grey sky would loom above me.

I had two coherent visions. In one, I was riding a horse. The world was quiet. The sound of hooves and the smell of horse filled my senses. In the other, I was cold, wet, and annoyed. I waded through an extremely cold stream with people all around me, leading horses and holding weapons above our heads.

Both memories felt lonely to me. The emotions were simple, nothing stood out. I longed for another memory of
him.

“Your powers obviously lie in the physical world,” Kian told me, eating one of the three hotdogs he had bought from a vendor. “Which makes sense, since your magic is of a past world. The old will have control over the new. Such is the way of the world.”

I didn’t get it, but sometimes I just let him talk to hear his voice.

“And yours?” I asked him.

He hadn’t used any magic, as far as I could tell, since we arrived in New York.

“Not natural,” he said simply. “I wasn’t born with any.”

He looked to see if I was following, and saw that I was not.

“Magic is simply manipulation,” he explained. “You were given the gift of manipulating your surroundings, and you never sought magic outside of your own talents, so that is all you know. Others,” I could have sworn I saw him shudder, “want to grow their magic, exploit it. Use it. They learn and perfect ways of moving beyond the realm of their natural abilities, becoming …”

“A magician?” I asked.

“A monster,” Kian answered. “Magic is addictive just like any other strength that feeds the body and the mind. It is hard to have enough.”

I didn’t probe his comments and instead focused on the day.

It had been a few weeks since I was supposed to go to school. Around me, teenagers who had just gotten out of classes wandered home in large gangs, usually smoking and cursing. It seemed so counter-intuitive to the positive hum of the park.

We walked back to the hotel, each lost in our own thoughts. We were almost back to the hotel when I stopped on the pavement.

“What is it?” Kian asked.

I could feel the subway train rumbling below my feet. A small fear at the back of mind thought of the surging sea or the rolling bay in San Francisco. The underground thunder rumbled through my shoes and into my spine. What if the magicians tore through the earth with a power much greater than this train? All I had been doing was moving pebbles with small pulses of magic.

My thoughts shifted to escaping the magicians. At this point they were just black blobs in my mind, like abstract images — I had no idea what to actually expect. The vibrations of the train matched the buzzing of my magic until they became one.

Suddenly, my stomach dropped and I gasped and grabbed for Kian. I was submerged to my thighs in concrete, as solid as it had ever been. Below, I could feel my legs encased in concrete and my feet dangling painfully over the subway tunnel.

Kian’s eyes were so wide that it would have been comical were I not so panicked. He grabbed my arms and tried to shield me from the public, luckily sparse at this time of day. Everyone was either hurrying with heads low or walking determinedly.

It was something I had remarked on earlier about this city: people feared to look at each other or to notice each other. Well, it worked out for me since this was a hell of a situation to talk myself out of.

“What did you do?” Kian whispered at me frantically.

Hanging there hurt. My thighs were pinched and Kian’s tugging at my arms and torso didn’t help.

“I don’t know!” I had tried to whisper but my voice came out high and shrill. “I was just thinking about the train.”

Kian reached down and hugged me around the torso, then pulled hard. My body, aching after everything I had put it through in the last weeks, protested. His dark hair was in my face.

“Kian, that’s not going to work!” I nearly shrieked at him.

The light turned green nearby, a crowd of people who had been waiting at a stoplight were about to cross our path at any moment. He leaned down again to me.

“You use your magic by pushing, right?” he asked.

I nodded. I hated myself for the tears welling up in my eyes, and his panic wasn’t helping.

“Well,” Kian’s bright eyes were on the group coming towards us, “
push
!”

I forced my magic into the ground around me and popped up like a fish out of water. Kian caught me and we fell, landing sprawled on the ground. He put a hand to his head, wincing, but smiled at the stares we received from passersby.

When I got up to turn off the light in our hotel room that night, Kian motioned for me to use my magic instead. I sat reluctantly back down on the bed. After all, what if I fell right through?

“Don’t lose faith in yourself,” Kian said, reading or guessing my thoughts. “Today was an accident. You need to hug your power close to yourself, and not let anything else intrude. If your magic becomes connected to something else, then you’re giving it away, aren’t you?”

So many things I didn’t know — and didn’t really understand. Kian spoke about the supernatural as if it was all clear as day. This was normal to him. Not to me.

Focussing on the light switch, I imagined my fingers over the knob and pushed down. To my surprise, the lights went out. Smiling, I lay down.

I was in the darkness. Moonlight beat down on me like a ray of fire, urging me on. In this light, I was ashen. My long, pale hair floated near my face as I ran. I could feel the dirt and sweat on my skin. A power beat at my back
—
keep running, keep running. It was as if a hand pressed against my back and pushed me forwards. But I wasn’t being chased. I was chasing. I was the hunter, and I sought the only thing in the world that could satiate my yearning.

The anxiety in my chest built even as my air became strained. I was running too fast
—
but nervousness filled me. I was late for something. I was going to be late. I ran through the forest until I lost track of time. How was I still running? Magic. Hours passed.

I felt the hum of magic in my feet, moving me forward. Could it make me faster? I ran as if with a strong current. I felt like the wind. I could feel every twig and stone that I stepped on
—
every branch that I leapt across. I could not remember feeling my body so vividly in my human life.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I came to a clearing in the woods. No one. I searched with my eyes, knowing I was the only one there. My magic had already searched for life, and found none but the animals in the trees and the bushes.

My heart dropped into my feet and a steady ache replaced my shortness of breath. It grew and grew until I thought I was going to cry out. It hurt. Disappointment, sadness, and worry washed over me. I sank to my knees in the tall grass.

No
, my mind cried out in a voice I did not recognize,
no no no no no
.

My hands gripped stalks and I looked down at my short nails as they tore through the earth and dug up the grass, tearing it away. Fury. A large ring with what looked like a sapphire glinted on my hand. Suddenly, I could not bear to look at it. I tore it off and threw it into the darkness of the surrounding woods.

No
, my mental voice said,
not yet
.

Weary, I got up and walked through the clearing, my feet feeling like lead. The moonlight was my only guide as I began roaming the forest. Searching for him. I loved him and wanted him more than life. I would wander here for eternity if it meant I would find him. A distant voice told me he was gone, that he had done something … something horrible … and would not be coming back again. But I refused to accept it. I wandered until the night grew too dark, sobs threatening to break through my throat, tears spilling out.

The moonlight faded.

I opened my eyes to darkness but was still in my dream state. I felt more alive than I ever had, yet my mind was far away, still thinking and reacting like my other self — my dream self, my past self. I felt my human body as vividly as I had my dream body.

I had torn the sheets off my bed and was sweat soaked. Again. My mind raced with thoughts that weren’t mine, though the mesh of people and places just turned into one humming sound that I chose to ignore. I gasped for air, but a longing crushed my lungs. In the darkness, someone leaned over me. I could not hear what he said. I felt a weight on the corner of my bed and knew he was near. The longing was threatening to flatten me into the mattress. Decimate me.

I reached out blindly and touched his arm with my fingertips. A chill ran through me as I felt skin.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? STOP!
A part of my mind screamed at me. That was the old Gwen from Oregon, kicking me from the passenger seat in my head.

It’s him! It must really be him!
another part yelled back.

I was at war with myself, and my body was not paying a bit of attention to my rational mind.

Running my hands up the arms, I hugged the shape and pulled it down towards me. The broad shoulders stiffened and resisted, but only for a moment. The weight of another person came down on me, yet the pressure on my chest lessened. The longing was gone and replaced by the person in my arms.

I felt breath on my face. An instant later, wet lips touched mine. I could only issue a tiny gasp as he kissed me, hesitantly at first, and then with a greater urgency. His touch was warm and exhilarating. All reason was gone. I squirmed underneath him and shaped my body to his, clinging to him as if for dear life.