Chapter 5 Impractical Magic #3
“Funnily enough, I did not purposefully plan to begin my day with a hedgehog residing in my coat pocket, Casimir. It’s almost like a damn spell went awry for the fifty millionth time of late.
Could have hit and hurt any number of unsuspecting folks in the café, but mercifully, I only find myself with a ceramic hedgehog brought to life, albeit also potentially a coffee shop full of witnesses to him removing his flat cap before he went on his merry way. ”
Casimir’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding. Vividus Animo, hey?” He sounded impressed. “I thought it was just the occasional candle flickering, your socks changing colour, the local rats following you from the sewers like some kind of haunted Pied Piper?”
“That was one time, and you’ll never let me forget it, will you? Anyway, things may have…escalated of late,” she said reluctantly. She dared to make a moment of eye contact, but his affectionate eye-roll fired her up again. “I can’t help it!”
Casimir stroked the hedgehog on the nose. “Bridgey is going to be furious when she notices he’s gone. She loves those things.”
Sage addressed the hedgehog directly. “There go my perfect hazelnut lattes, all thanks to you.”
It gave a little grunt back.
“Now, you’ll transform back to your previous state come midnight, as far as our Vividus Animo evidence extends, so I suppose you can just sort of…explore the place. I think I have some of Mal’s cat food in the back, should you get peckish. Do ceramic ornaments get peckish?”
Sage had a habit of attracting animals wherever she went at the best of times.
On the rare occasions she was forced to attend a social event against her will, she could almost always locate the nearest cat within seconds of arriving.
She would then spend the majority of the evening enjoying their company alone until it was time to leave.
She placed the hedgehog down onto the carpet and watched with intrigue as he began to explore the new terrain of the museum.
It really was an extraordinary spell, she had to admit.
But her mind raced with the possibilities of what else could have happened.
Someone could have been seriously hurt by the bolt; it could have exploded the whole place.
Her entire life could have come to a standstill again.
She exhaled deeply and leaned her head back against the door’s cold glass.
It was only a few moments before Casimir’s hands landed reassuringly on her shoulders.
Having arrived at her safe space and found his company waiting, the current of her magic began to slow, the feeling of a whipped-up, raging tidal wave ebbing away.
“I must look on the bright side, I suppose. He’ll actually be a very interesting case study. We can monitor him throughout the day to see how the magic fades.” She dusted her hands off onto her coat.
Casimir gave her an amused, slightly baffled look. “You’re acting rather calmly, Specs, all things considered. It’s about this time that you normally bite my head off and somehow conclude that it’s all my fault.”
“I’m sure it is somehow. I think I might be in shock,” Sage said matter-of-factly. “Better put the kettle on. I need to see to that delivery before we get into anything else.” She walked off to find it, but Casimir tugged her back by her sleeve.
He returned his glasses to his nose and gave a more serious sigh before he finally dared himself to say it. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
Casimir had discovered the secret of Sage’s witchery for himself a long time ago, during their university days, when she was younger and less adept at hiding the truth.
Fiery, reactive magic was combining with ignored grief and rampant hormones to ruin things on a regular basis, her powers even more unpredictable than she currently found them to be.
It wasn’t solely her misfiring magic to blame for the revelation.
Casimir was, although he often didn’t act like one, an extremely intelligent man, with whip-smart instincts and, crucially, a penchant for sticking his nose into other people’s business, to analyse them while they were distracted by his charm and good looks.
He always liked to tell her how she had beguiled him from the very first moment they met.
The fact that he had cracked her code was just one of the many, many inconveniences that he had caused Sage over the years. But ultimately, this was one inconvenience that she was very, very glad of.
To Casimir’s credit, he had barely batted an eyelid the night that he returned to their student house to find Sage struggling alone, all those years ago.
On her twenty-first birthday, Sage’s magic had made a whole new quantum leap into the realms of out of control.
She missed her parents terribly and wished they could have been there for her graduation, and she had never felt more alone.
Reaching a sixth year of being pushed down, spurned and unused, her powers were flooding her veins, fired up and screaming for attention.
Fed up of being dismissed, her magic had taken to bursting out of her fingertips in painful shocks each time a boom of thunder crashed in the matching, self-made storm outside.
The room around her was destroyed: a smouldering armchair, the contents of her wardrobe thrown from its hangers, the blankets on her bed ripped to shreds.
She had locked herself away to protect her housemates, but, noticing her absence from the end-of-year celebrations, Casimir had broken down the bedroom door, scooped her up and placed her in the shower fully clothed—to either snap her out of it or soothe her senses.
Only someone who had studied strangeness and sorcery as intently as she and he would ever have known how to piece it all together.
The sudden disappearances for days on end.
The unlikely occurrences that somehow seemed to unfold around her.
The coin flip of either damage or quiet wonder that was left in her wake while he followed alongside her, determined to make her smile.
“It’s magic, isn’t it?” he had said quietly, leaning back against the sink with his chin pressed to his chest to stare at his own feet.
She’d only nodded, then rested her forehead on her knees and let the water soak her through to the bone.
Seconds later, he had slid inside the cubicle and sat with her beneath the warm stream.
That moment of unspoken care and closeness between them, for once not a barb to be found, might have been enough to bond them for life all by itself, but the years since had made sure of it.
Their matched intelligence had resulted in many project pairings through their degree, and, quickly, an academic rivalry had formed.
Eventually, however, in third year, something like a truce was declared, and a reluctant friendship blossomed from their shared fascination with the occult.
A joint dissertation followed, one that honed in on the notorious supernatural reputation of Port Sylvan.
Having him nearby to say, “Wow, really?” ignited a spark in Sage that she rarely felt at any other time.
It was a youthful feeling, a bubbling excitement.
They had become unexpectedly inseparable, and when Sage had landed herself the curator role at her hometown’s museum, she had joked that Casimir was the only choice as her accomplice.
Their list of discoveries, acclaimed research papers and peer-reviewed publishing was impressive.
They had become some of the finest minds in their field, an almost incomparable wealth of knowledge on the topic of magic and sorcery through British local history.
For all of his infuriating qualities (and there were a lot of them), Cas was the impossibly patient anchor that firmly held Sage down when storms cracked open the sky and threatened a tidal wave of disaster.
It made sense that he had found her that night, when her own thunder and lightning came crashing cruelly and mercilessly around her.
It was the first time of many that he had saved her from herself.
And, very fortunately, Casimir had proven himself over the years to be a worthy secret keeper. Sage often considered how very differently her life could have played out had it been a less trustworthy friend she’d made by accident.
Looking at him now, a few more smile lines ghosting around his brown eyes and slightly more accomplished facial hair to speak of, her heart gave a kick with the same glow of frustration, familiarity and fondness. He saw through her every time.
“Don’t, Cas.” Sage threw a hand up to silence him.
He tutted in protest. “Didn’t say a word. All the realms know there’s no point.”