The Opposite of Magic

An Eye-Opening Cup of Coffee

4

Well, he started it.

This thought made her feel no better. She wanted his expertise in matters far removed from computers, and what was she offering beyond keeping his secret? Nothing. Not even respect.

She should apologize. But she couldn’t knock on his door without nullifying their agreement. She grabbed a sheet of paper, scratched out a mortifying mea culpa and set it by his door—right where the welcome mat belonged if there was one, which of course there wasn’t and never would be.

After that, she made a tactical retreat.

The history department break room, one floor up, was as good a place as any for feeling bad about herself. Better, actually, because it was impossible to sit there without considering that the history department had an entire break room , complete with refrigerator and sink, but couldn’t make space for one more office if that office was for her.

She laid her head on her arms. If you counted time spent together, Hartgrave was the second-closest thing to a friend she had—right after Bernie, to whom she hadn’t said much all week. Good God, but that was depressing.

She was busy, sure—she’d been busy for years. But at some point, clearly, that stopped being an explanation for complete isolation and became an enabling excuse. It wasn’t even as if all her hard work had come to much. She was teaching at a minor college on a contract that expired in six months, and then what?

She thought of calling her parents just to hear their voices. But they would know something was wrong and would ferret it out of her. And then the nagging concern in the back of their minds would be her situation rather than crop failure, a poor way of repaying them for cheering her up. Instead, she seized the faculty coffeepot and set it brewing.

If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was back in the goose-wallpaper kitchen with her father as he waited for his early-morning fix. (Her mother needed no artificial stimulants to hit the fields at 5 a.m.) Emily loathed the taste of coffee, but oh, she loved the smell. When the machine stopped percolating, she poured herself a cup just to extend the calming by association.

Yes, that was nice. She leaned against the countertop and breathed in deeply. Then out. Then in .

“A novel way to absorb caffeine,” said the person she was resolutely not thinking about.

The cup slipped from her fingers and cracked into four shards on the tile floor.

Hartgrave considered the mess. “Now you know how I felt when you burst in on me .”

She opened her mouth, could think of nothing to say that would be guaranteed not to involve her foot, and settled on the ever-versatile, “Um ...”

“I accept your apology,” he said.

She felt slightly less disconnected from the world. Better than smelling coffee.

“Thank you,” she said, heartbeat decelerating back to normal. “How did you find me?”

“Asked my enchanted mirror.”

Was he kidding? He had to be. But she wanted him to have an enchanted mirror, so she said “really?” with great hopefulness.

One side of his mouth twitched. Almost a smile—at her expense. “No, not really. This was just an obvious place to check.”

“Okay,” she said, wagging her finger at him, “but how did you know I hadn’t gone home for the night?”

“Your bag’s still in the Inferno.”

She grinned. “Inferno? Is that what you call the basement?”

He shrugged, looking away. Perhaps it embarrassed him to be caught out with an imagination. “Seems appropriate.”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or worry about his state of mind .

But he was right, “Inferno” did fit the vibe.

“Be that as it may,” she said, “there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a scrying device. Lots of historical conjurors were said to have owned them. Agrippa, for instance.”

Hartgrave made a dismissive noise. “I read his De occulta philosophia . A load of crap.”

“Oh?” she said, interested. “Why?”

“If you really want my opinion, you’ll have to ask tomorrow.”

That was her cue to thank him for easing her conscience and wish him a pleasant evening. (Well, maybe not “pleasant.” A bad choice of words.) But second-closest thing to a friend reasserted itself.

She sighed. “Would you like some coffee?”

His lips twitched again. “Someone ought to drink it.”

Definitely time to acquire real friends.

She poured him a cup and turned back just in time to catch him about to throw away the remains of the one she’d broken. “Wait—don’t! I want to try to fix it.”

“You’re deeply attached to this generic Ashburn mug?”

“It’s not mine, it’s the department’s.”

“They’re ten dollars. Buy a new one.”

There would go her life savings. “I’d rather not.”

Hartgrave squinted at her as if, of the two of them, she were the harder to fathom. Then he sat at the table, cup pieces in hand. When he started fitting them together, she caught on and crowded in.

“Daggett. ”

“Right, right.” But she took only one step back, wanting to be as close to the action as he’d allow.

He wrapped his hands around the four pieces. She just had time to hold her breath, and then he let go, revealing a perfectly intact mug. No cracks. Not even a hint. Hey, presto.

“That’s truly amazing,” she whispered.

He shrugged in a weary sort of way. What, was he too cool for magic? What a strange wizard he was. Convincer. Whatever.

“Thank you,” she said, reaching for the results. “I’ll put it back.”

He whisked the cup away by its handle. “No!”

This was odd enough that she couldn’t come up with any response besides, “Uh …”

“Give it time to sit,” he said. He leapt up and pushed the cup into the cabinet—behind other examples, as if he didn’t want her to even look at it.

She would have suspected he didn’t actually fix it if not for the clear evidence that he had. “So it’s, what, not quite ready to be used? You were holding it without problems.”

“I’m a convincer and you’re not.”

“That could be remedied,” she said, trying for nonchalance and failing miserably.

“No, it couldn’t.”

Clearly she hadn’t dripped on him enough.

He gave her a measuring look. “Why are you so obsessed with magic?”

She laughed. What sort of question was that? “It’s magic. Wouldn’t anyone jump at the chance to do it? ”

He glanced down at his coffee, then back up at her with an expression she couldn’t parse. “Even so, you strike me as an outlier.”

“It’s my research specialty.”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head, “your level of passion goes way beyond scholarly interest. Come on. Why?”

She didn’t want to admit she’d never grown out of a childhood fixation. It was vaguely embarrassing. But she expected answers from him, so it was only fair to reciprocate.

“I loved fantasy adventures as a kid,” she muttered. “They made me feel like I could go anywhere and do anything.”

Wonder of wonders, he didn’t laugh. He just raised his eyebrows in a way that invited more details.

“Of course, I went nowhere and did nothing,” she said. “But it was so easy to live in those made-up worlds for a few hours a day and imagine it was just a matter of time before my turn came.”

He sighed.

The lack of mocking seemed only to underscore what a sorry story this was—that even Hartgrave thought it a low blow to make fun of that. She had to fill the silence with something.

“Everyone believed, once.” She leaned against the table, avoiding his eye. “Earth was a mysterious place. And then it wasn’t anymore.”

“The world is disenchanted,” he murmured.

First Agrippa, now Max Weber. He was clearly better read than his bookcase suggested. That raised her opinion of him for the brief time it took him to sip his coffee, frown and pop the cup in the microwave.

The microwave . If she could cast spells, she would cast them, by gosh.

“I refuse to believe you can mend a broken mug simply by willing it but you can’t increase the temperature of your coffee,” she said.

“I could.” He watched the cup turn, missing the stink eye she was giving him. “The microwave is equally good.”

“As magic?” There was something insulting about the universe choosing him to bestow its secrets upon when she was clearly the one who wanted them more. “I don’t understand you. You’ve got unimaginable power literally at your fingertips, and you’d just as soon use a piece of technology. I think you prefer technology. If I didn’t know better ...”

She trailed off, feeling as though she’d been staring at a picture of a vase that turned, in the blink of an eye, into two faces. “Oh ,” she whispered.

She had his full attention.

“Technology,” she said, gripping the table behind her. “That’s the answer. Technology is magic.”

Ping! declared the microwave.

The fleeting dismay on Hartgrave’s face was as good as an answer. He crossed his arms and said, “How many times do I have to remind you that you’ve used your question already,” but the damage was done. He’d never expected her to figure it out, and she had.

“Rumpelstiltskin!” She broke into a little jig. “Your name is Rumpelstiltskin— ”

The implications abruptly set in. Euphoria dimmed. Magic and the bane of her existence weren’t supposed to have anything to do with each other.

And if they did, who was pulling the strings?

She said, “How”—and stopped, silenced by the dark look on Hartgrave’s face. He took two steps toward her. It was all she could do not to shrink back.

“No,” he said softly—dangerously. And out the door he swept.

It should have struck her earlier, perhaps just after he knocked her head against the floor, but Hartgrave—slouching, aggravating, sarcastic Hartgrave—could manage scary quite credibly. This gnawed at her as she picked her way back to his Inferno, half-expecting him to jump out at her from the shadows.

She thought about turning around and going to her rental for safety’s sake, but certain frostbite was worse than possible doom. He probably didn’t realize she was sleeping here. And perhaps he didn’t mean to be ominous. The way his face twisted could have been a trick of the light.

She just didn’t know. She knew very little about him, really. So she sat at her apparently magical computer—wasn’t that a kick in the pants—and typed “Alexander Hartgrave + Ashburn College” into a search engine to see what details of his life it would serve up. Hopefully nothing involving violent crimes.

“Abracadabra,” she muttered, hitting the enter button.

Ashburn, it transpired, posted bios of most full-time employees. (She took a detouring moment to search for herself and found she was not sufficiently significant for her department to mention even in passing.) The college managed to garble her quarry’s name—“Hartgarve”—but helpfully identified him as director of the IT help desk, with previous employment at Mycro Corp. in California and a degree from Cornwall University in England.

This explained the indeterminate accent. But the Internet could uncover nothing else about him. She poked around Mycro Corp.’s website and found no mention of him there; ditto for Cornwall University. “Alexander Hartgrave” (and “Alex Hartgrave” and, for good measure, “Alexander Hartgarve”) in several search engines returned no hits aside from the bio. She tried networking sites. A court case search. A patent search. An international newspaper archive search. She even entered his name into online telephone directories, for all the good it did her.

How could someone so technologically connected be virtually invisible? It must be deliberate. Maybe he really was in hiding.

What was up with Hartgrave suddenly seemed like an even more intriguing question than how magic and tech got intertwined. Not just because the two questions might be related, but because a mystery involving a shadowy wizard promised adventure.

Nothing was more seductive than that.