Chapter 6
SIX
Joan stayed out of the house for as long as she could.
She’d have stayed away for eternity if it had been possible, but Molly’s indication that Joan’s presence had been requested at the evening’s party was reinforced with a call first from their mother, then from George, because Merlin didn’t debase himself by talking on the phone.
She was taking her shift at CZ’s, watching Mik sleep, as the clock ticked down.
Mik had, reportedly, woken up, eaten, watched TV, reorganized CZ’s entire apartment, attempted a breakout, been thwarted, and was now sleeping again.
Joan had quietly cleaned CZ’s kitchen so the space seemed a bit more livable, running her hand over the raggedy money tree CZ was rapidly killing on the counter and watching it perk up under her fingers.
Mik was still sleeping by the time she finished with all that, so Joan sat down.
They were wrapped in a knit blanket on the couch, the TV low, snoring in a super ugly, kind of adorable, deliriously funny way. Joan recorded a video. Or two. Then second-guessed herself, because they really didn’t know each other that well and maybe this was bullying.
A socked foot dug into Joan’s thigh. “Where are you going tonight? CZ said he’d be home early to take over.” Mik yawned, stretching obnoxiously as their shirt rode up to reveal a cute stretch of soft belly. “You can head out if you need to.”
“What, so you can make another escape attempt?” Joan said half-heartedly. She was not CZ; if Mik ran, she didn’t possess the strength to stop them. She could maybe cast and blow up the whole building.
“Yes,” Mik said. They flopped onto their back. “No. How was your meeting with the spellmaker?”
“Only sort of helpful. I mean, the good news is I think we know how to fix you, we need to seal your magic, but that usually takes four witches in tandem and I’m just me,” Joan said.
“Bad news, apparently, you’re probably a constant magic suck, and once someone else figures that out, they can generally track your location.
Sort of medium news—that might mean you’re linked to whoever did this to you. ”
“Then can’t I surrender myself to witch authorities? Won’t they strip me of the magic?” Mik said. “And then follow that thread back to the source?”
Joan patted their foot. “If you’d asked me that yesterday, I’d have said yes. Today, I’m thinking it’s less likely. They’d probably follow the links back to your kidnapper—”
“Original kidnapper.”
“Original kidnapper, instead of us, the secondary kidnappers,” Joan corrected. “But I’m not convinced they’ll seal you and set you free.”
“You think they’ll guinea pig me.”
It wasn’t a question, so Joan didn’t answer. Joan herself might benefit from Mik being guinea pigged. It was an intoxicating thought.
Mik rubbed their eyes. “I want to see you cast.”
“Oh, I can’t cast,” Joan reminded them quickly. “Things backfire. Spectacularly.”
Mik leveraged themself up, sitting crisscross on the couch. “Last week, I’d never seen magic. I was a perfectly ordinary person. Boring, even, and I barely had any friends, and I wasn’t a part of anything, and I thought I could disappear and no one would notice.”
They took a deep breath. “Now my memories are a mess, and I live with a vampire, and magic is real. I mean, that’s like the coolest thing that could ever possibly happen to me, and it’s also apparently the worst. I don’t know if anyone missed me or noticed I was gone besides my parents, and I don’t want to think about it.
Let me see what happens when you try magic, please.
One itty-bitty spell. It’ll make me feel better if I’m not the only messed-up witch.
I mean, my grandmother had, like, premonitions, and she claimed she made the hens lay better eggs, but that’s the closest I’ve been to real magic. That I remember, at least.”
Joan had long ago stopped giving people demonstrations of her ability or lack thereof. People always wanted to see for themselves. The Greenwood curiosity.
But Mik, sleep-addled Mik, was a human, mostly, and the apartment was empty, and while Joan hadn’t been the one to do this to Mik, a weird mix of guilt and pity churned in her, leading her to make bad decisions.
Like track down Grace to try to help Mik.
And this, as she cleared the coffee table of everything but a loose receipt from the pharmacy she’d gone to last night for their meds.
“Keep the vomit bucket close,” Joan muttered, and Mik dutifully picked it up, hovering beside Joan as she leaned forward over the receipt, concentrating.
She’d attempt a little origami, maybe set the crane she’d make flying. It was an easy, low-level spell they taught to five-year-olds. And, critically, it did not involve any combustible magic. Joan had made that mistake too many times.
She breathed out, settling into stasis as she hovered her hands over the receipt.
The hand movements the spell required helped her focus on guiding the magic, which swirled in agitation over the receipt as Joan forged onward.
She thought of Grace’s assertion that Joan had no barrier, that magic moved through her at all times.
It was always at her fingertips, sparking around her, and she so rarely let it rise.
She breathed in, and magic funneled into her body, an icy rush that flashed along her veins and made her feel invincible.
She breathed it in and held it like a breath.
Trying to be cautious, she pushed a little bit of magic into the spell to actualize her intentions and held the rest within her. She finished with a small flourish.
The magic rushed into the paper, folding it rapidly.
Mik’s face shone with awe, and Joan couldn’t help the bubble of happiness that bloomed in her chest. That was her, she was doing that, she was changing the world around her.
Magic felt like a cool river on a hot day, soothing her and reminding her simultaneously of the great currents that fueled it, the lakes and oceans it flowed into.
She wanted to bathe in it forever, and for a second, she was buzzing with the very fabric of the universe.
But only for a second.
Her magic didn’t properly portion itself—only a sliver was needed here—it funneled into the spell, making it swell to outrageous proportions despite her efforts to hold it back. The magic in her unraveled like yarn, gaining speed.
“Oh fuck,” Joan said, scrambling back on the couch. She saw the moment the spell burst, too weak a container for the amount of magic slamming into it.
The paper disintegrated at an atomic level, reassembled itself just as fast, ripped into shreds, and then bumbled itself together in a perversion of the original folding. Then the ball took off, shooting across the room, bouncing off a wall and taking a new angle.
“Not planned?” Mik said with a yelp, defending their head as the ball rocketed toward them at roughly Mach 5.
“Not planned!” Joan yelled, letting loose her own shriek when she was sliced across the arm.
The ball returned to bonk her on the head, then took off again, whipping around the apartment.
But that wasn’t even the worst of it; the worst was the nausea that grabbed her by the gut.
Joan released all the energy in her on an exhale and bodily cut off the magic greedily funneling into the spell.
Dizziness overtook her. She scrambled for the bucket, letting a thin stream of bile into it.
She could channel more magic than she could handle, and it made her sick every time.
Mik was cursing, vaulting behind the couch and crouching in a defensive position. Even though Joan had stopped pouring magic into the spell, the paper was still full of the energy that had already streamed into it, and it wasn’t running out of steam.
She knelt on the floor, carpet digging into her knees, spitting into the bucket as a CVS receipt assaulted her continuously.
“Can I trap it?” Mik yelled, army crawling to the kitchen with the receipt tearing after them.
Joan groaned, spat again. “You can try. It’ll tire itself out eventually.”
Mik started making sobbing noises, and Joan stood up in panic, worried they’d had an artery sliced by paper.
They were laughing. Uproariously, in great peals of mirth that were punctuated by the occasional “ow” and “please have mercy.”
“I’m being killed via paper cut,” they howled. “This is incredible. Magic is incredible.”
“I told you it always goes wrong!”
Mik only laughed harder.
There was the sound of the door unlocking, and CZ walked in with several ginormous grocery bags. He promptly dropped one to snatch the magic ball out of the air. It struggled raucously in his grip, but he held on to it without issue.
“What the hell, guys,” he said. “My apartment!”
His throw pillows were on the floor, his curtains askew. The paper ball had knocked the loose mail off his counters and only now gave an angry dying buzz before going still and disintegrating in his hand. He sighed and dumped the ashes in the trash.
“What was the goal?” he asked.
“Origami,” Joan said, fumbling her way to the bathroom to wash out both her mouth and the bin she’d baby barfed into.
When she walked back out, CZ was leveraging his grocery bags onto the counter as he talked to Mik, who was up off the floor and, on the whole, looking much cheerier than Joan had ever seen them.
“I didn’t super know what was good,” he said, shrugging off his coat, “so I got every food Joan likes.”
“You could have asked them,” Joan said, but Mik didn’t seem to mind, already rummaging through a bag and producing some chips.
“Quiet,” Mik said. “I want it all. Turns out vomiting your guts up makes you hungry. As does being assaulted by paper.”
CZ walked over to Joan and dropped a kiss on her head. “You ready for your thing? Feeling okay?”
“No,” Joan grumbled. She hadn’t even found an outfit, like Molly said she had to.