Chapter 7 In the Archive #2
Sage ignored him. “If I can make it to the end of October with no more…incidents,” she grimaced, “my magic will calm down again. I can go back to focusing on banishing my powers, and I might even finally get a decent night’s sleep for the first time in fifteen years, free from the worry of what this blasted stuff is capable of.
I’ll finally rest easy knowing that no one else got hurt by it, nor will they ever be. I could finally be normal.”
Theirs was the kind of friendship where silence felt as comfortable as conversation, but Sage could tell that this pause was a loaded one.
Finally, Casimir shrugged. “You couldn’t be normal if you tried, Specs. And you shouldn’t want it for yourself anyway. You’re far, far too good for anything as wretched and unbecoming as normal.”
He finished buttoning up his coat and reached out to her neck to brush away the rogue red ringlet that had slipped out of its clip.
Sage decided to pocket the strange Cas-shaped compliment and examine it in extraneous detail later, when she was alone and staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night.
She often found herself thinking of his passing comments in those moments.
It was extremely inconvenient when, frankly, she had better, far more useful things to be thinking about.
“But this is the part that always snags me…” Cas added with a wagging finger, as he lifted his satchel across his body.
He followed her back through to the archive.
“What sort of good-for-nothing, missing-the-point coven isn’t aware of the presence of bloody magic?
Surely they should be monitoring that sort of thing closely.
Haven’t they got security or a watchman or something?
What if it falls into the wrong hands? Or some poor, unsuspecting teenage witch blows up half of her school canteen?
That sort of thing must happen all the time. ”
With a huff, Sage scooped up the remaining stack of books on her desk.
She took a few steps up the rolling ladder and began to slide them back where they belonged on the bookshelves.
The coven’s inability to find her was a question that regularly kept her up at night, but as long as it remained true, then that was enough for her.
“I suppose they’ve just never noticed me. And thank the stars for it.”
Casimir scoffed as he gripped the ladder and peered up at her, handing over a final book. “Come on, now, Specs. How could anyone not notice you?”
He said things like that as though they were the most obvious thoughts in the world. She knew that if she turned around to face him, her annoyingly flushed cheeks would embarrass her, so she kept her focus determinedly on crucial shelving placement.
“Because I’ve worked damn hard to make sure they don’t. Ever since I made the…mistake.” She swallowed hard. “It’s been the only job that truly matters.”
Casimir gave another sigh behind her, but it wasn’t a cross one. It was one he’d given her a hundred times or more whenever this subject came up. She braved turning back to him.
“Sage, I know you rarely deign to take any notice of me, and I’ll confess, most of the time there’s good reason for that.
But when it comes to this, I wish you’d see sense.
” He gazed up at her with such unbearable, intimate recognition that she had to look away again.
Everyone else thought she was so strange and unknowable.
Cas knew everything about her. And still, he stayed.
He spoke uncharacteristically softly. “It wasn’t your fault. It really, really wasn’t your fault.”
The idea landed like a spinning penny, swaying to and fro to see which side it would land on.
As always, Sage slammed it flat instinctively.
She didn’t even bother to try to explain anymore.
They always reached a stalemate. Of course it was her fault.
There was no possible way that it could be proved otherwise.
She shrugged and descended the ladder. “The sooner it’s gone, the better. Then I can move on and leave the darkest part of my life behind forever.”
Cas gave her an unreadable look, then shook his head. He plucked away a couple of Mal’s cat hairs from his coat. “If you ask me, magic feels like something one never truly escapes. Not if it’s meant for you. It has a way of finding you, whether you invite it in or not.”
“Thank you for that encouraging sentiment,” Sage grumbled.
“I didn’t mean for that to sound quite as menacing as it did. What I mean is, evidently the universe has picked you from the stars as something very special. Don’t they say in almost every fairy tale ever written that you can’t run away from your destiny, Specs?”
“I haven’t run from it. I’ve fought it for fifteen years. And now it’s finally time for me to let it die.”
“Happy Halloween, indeed,” Cas said grimly, heading to unlock the front door. “But if you say so.”
“I don’t say so.” Sage tilted her head towards the cloak within the glass cabinet. “She does. We know it’s possible. Lilara proved it’s possible. And I’m almost there, I know I am.”
He gave a shake of his head that made her bristle as he turned to leave. For all their fundamental differences, it was rare that they ever failed to agree on something in the end or at least to find a compromise. But her magic was the one major point on which they could not understand each other.
“Oh.” He swung back on the doorframe and waved an unhelpful hand towards the towering stack of half-squashed unorganized cardboard boxes that remained in the doorway of the archive. “That delivery. It’s probably nothing important, but it’s over there. Somewhere.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you should consider running for prime minister? You’re fantastically organized and so wonderfully reliable,” Sage said, entirely deadpan.
She approached the stack of boxes and lifted the top one away, revealing the delivery that was still, as of yet, unaccounted for.
She shuffled it around slightly, looking for a note or a label.
“Last call for the pub?” Casimir said with a backwards salute.
Sage glanced at the notes that covered her desk.
The need for just a fraction more time tugged at her: indexing that mystery delivery, a quick check of her last scribbles, maybe a few more cross-references towards her hypothesis on bad tempers and impulsive bursts of magic.
There’d been an incident not far away in Wales mentioned in passing in a local newspaper: One Fearne Awbrey had borne witness to her neighbour shattering both his and his wife’s teacups without touching them following an England loss in a penalty shoot-out…
Fascinating and a reminder that Sage would have to make sure to control her fiery temper through October.
But it had been such a very, very long day…She’d even made a spelling error, which is when she knew it really was time to admit defeat. She could not risk mistakes, however small, until Halloween was over and the coven’s alert had waned.
“Oh, fine,” she conceded. She stacked the boxes back together unopened. “But it’s your round.”