Contrariwise
6
This was what she’d wanted for most of her life—first consciously, then subconsciously—and her words tumbled over each other in her rush to explain. Hartgrave closed the door behind them and leaned against it, listening without interrupting. When she skidded to a verbal stop, she focused on him long enough to notice that he seemed neither surprised nor impressed.
“Well?” she said.
He sighed. “Well what?”
“It was incredible, but I can’t be going around doing magic by accident, don’t you see? I need your help or I’ll be a hazard—I may already be a hazard—and I have a class at noon, and all these students—oh God, if I hurt a student— ”
He held up a hand and shook his head. “There’s no danger of that.”
“Oh? What about this?” She thrust the cup remnant in his direction. “I’m involuntarily doing magic, and you’re standing there making assumptions.”
“You didn’t do magic.”
“Another assumption.”
“No, Daggett.” He pushed away from the door. “I know you didn’t.”
Now he was simply being unreasonable. She suppressed the urge to stamp her foot like a child. “You can’t say that! You weren’t even there.”
“Who knows more about magic, you or me?”
“You, but—”
“Trust me,” he said, looking at her with such intensity that she wondered whether he was trying to mesmerize her.
Well, it wasn’t working. She glared at him. “I can’t think of anyone I trust less.”
His lips thinned, but his answer was smooth as silk: “And yet you sleep in the Inferno with me.”
“Not with you,” she muttered, annoyed at the little swoop down her spine his words had triggered. Irritating man with his irritatingly striking voice.
“And willingly go places with me where no one would ever find you,” he said, gesturing around the room.
This potentially threatening statement did not deter her. If worst came to worst, she had a jagged porcelain shiv at hand.
“You have to help me if you don’t want to risk random explosions on campus,” she insisted .
He screwed up his face, pinched the bridge of his nose and let go of a breath in a whooshing exhale. “Listen: You’re not doing magic. You’ll never do magic. You are utterly, completely, genetically unable to perform the smallest bit of it.”
This time she did stamp her foot. “Come on! You can’t expect me to buy that. You said everyone’s capable.”
“No. I said virtually everyone is capable.” He paused to let that sink in. “You are not.”
Emily had always thought the idea of hearts skipping beats at times of great emotion was romantic nonsense, but hers genuinely halted for an instant before accelerating at an alarming pace.
It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. He had to be lying.
His face gave nothing away.
“So everyone but me can do magic—that’s what you want me to believe?” Her words wavered. Her whole body was once again shaking, but for an entirely different reason than when the cup cracked. “You just don’t want to train me, or”—an idea struck full-force—“or you’re afraid I’ll be more powerful than you. I really did get through your pretend wall, didn’t I—”
“I’m sorry to disillusion you,” Hartgrave said, his voice now a weapon as sharp as her piece of cup, “but you have not been doing magic. You have been undoing it, to my great frustration.”
She threw up her hands. “That’s the same thing!”
“No.” The louder she got, the quieter he went. “It’s the opposite thing. You’re a hurricane cutting a swath of destruction wherever you go—you, Daggett, are anti-magic.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “What?”
“You disrupted my repairs to the cup. You demolished the spells hiding this room—yes, there are spells hiding this room,” he added as her breath hitched in shock. “And you’ve damaged your computer so many times I’ve lost count.”
Perhaps he saw in her expression that she was mentally explaining all his examples away, gathering the shreds of hope around her. (Spells! She’d been doing wild, unhelpful spells!) He leapt forward, catching her wrists with his bare hands.
And oh God, it was worse than before, much worse. It felt like anarchy. Fire licking her skin. Blood drying in her veins.
She screamed—and just like that, it was over. He’d let go. The pain stopped as completely as if he’d flipped it off with a switch.
“See?” He shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “You’ve got anti-magic on your skin, probably seeping from your pores. And that hellish agony is what happens when it reacts with the magic on me.”
Her wrists looked undamaged, but her heartbeat in her ears sounded like an endless loop of no no no . That couldn’t be what magic felt like, that terrible, wrong-on-every-level sensation. Not magic, which embraced him and cooperated with him and made him one with the universe .
How could this be happening? She’d spent years dreaming about magic, researching it, longing for it—could she honestly be the only person in the world incapable of doing it?
She looked up, still grasping for a reason it was all a trick. The sympathy on Hartgrave’s face stopped her cold.
“I’m so sorry, Daggett,” he murmured. “I truly am.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling lightheaded as the truth of his unwanted message squeezed her like a vice. No magic. No magic ever .
She seemed to be running out of air. Strange patterns like black fireworks flashed before her eyes. She turned, wanting to get out, and the room spun.
He caught her from behind. This time, his skin didn’t touch hers. She felt only the press of his arms, the warmth of his chest and the thud of his rapidly beating heart.
“Sit,” he said, voice wavering. He lowered her to the floor and let go with a speed that suggested she was radioactive. Which, in a sense, she was.
She put her head between her knees and swallowed a sob. What were her years as an impoverished student, followed by her months as an impoverished lecturer, if not an attempt at fantasy fulfillment? To find that magic was real—real—and to have it snatched away, to be told she was literally destroying it ...
Once the dizziness passed, she lifted her head to look at him. “What’s wrong with me? Why am I anti-magic? Is it like being born anemic? ”
Before he could answer any of these questions, she whispered, “Can you fix me?”
He crouched in front of her. More gently than she would have thought possible, he said, “You are not a cup, Daggett.”
“Please! I’ll do anything—”
“Don’t ever promise that, not to anyone,” he snapped, a one-eighty in one second flat. His eyes blazed.
She let her head droop between her knees again.
“Daggett.”
Her throat was too clogged for a response.
“Daggett ,” Hartgrave repeated, a helpless edge creeping in. “Listen to me: You’re not broken. You’re just ... different.”
Her snort was desolation itself. A tear leaked from the corner of one eye.
“You haven’t really lost anything,” he said. “You never had it. Nothing has changed.”
Everything had changed.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “You’re extraordinary.”
“Extraordinarily useless, extraordinarily powerless—”
His rueful laugh bespoke experience to the contrary. “No. Anyone who discounts the power to destroy is a fool.”
“I don’t want to destroy!” More tears followed the track forged by the pioneer. She sat up and dashed them away. “That’s a horrible curse.”
“Yes, well—I’m the one who has to fix your computer. ”
A sudden recollection: Hartgrave, standing in her office for the first time, disgust all over his face. Or … was it dismay?
She’d thought at the time that he was reacting to the pile of books she was shelving, books like A Compleat System of Magick and Malleus Maleficarum . But no—he’d been reacting to her .
“You knew immediately, didn’t you,” she said. “As soon as you met me.”
He shrugged. “Suspected.”
“What do I look like to you?”
A smile ghosted across his face. “A sepia-tone photograph. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown sweater, brown pants ...”
He paused, as if waiting for a snappy comeback. Perhaps something about the pot calling the kettle monochromatic. But she didn’t have it in her, and he shifted, smile gone.
“Every person has an aura,” he said. “Someone with ability and training can see it. Nearly everyone creates small amounts of magic continuously—think carbon dioxide—and a minuscule amount hangs about them like a faint white corona. Unless they start convincing, that is. Then it’s quite bright. I assume it’s the aftereffects of drawing magic from the atmosphere.”
He paused. “You are also surrounded by a nimbus. But it’s pitch black.”
She stared at him in speechless horror.
“Which makes sense,” he added, “as any magic that comes into contact with you is fried to a crisp. ”
He said this so conversationally—as if it didn’t matter—that the urge to tell him off rose up from the acid in her stomach. You’ve got the interpersonal skills of a caged bull, you’re compulsively secretive and I hate you .
Actually, what she felt about him was far too complicated to boil down to a single emotion. But the fact remained that he could do magic—Hartgrave, who didn’t seem to care about it at all—and she couldn’t. Where was the justice in that?
“No need to come by at seven anymore,” she said, scrambling to her feet.
He looked befuddled. “What?”
“You never wanted to talk to me anyway, and now the feeling is mutual.”
She opened the door and slammed it shut behind her, the thunk sounding like the severing of an almost-friendship. It was then that she remembered her noon class. Oh no, what time was it?
Seven thirty-five, according to her watch. The watch that had stopped working just like every other watch she’d ever owned.
Because of her. She was the problem.
She barreled along the corridors like the destructive hurricane she was, shot past Bernie without answering his “where’s the fire” and took the stairs two at a time. When she burst into the classroom, she discovered she wasn’t late after all. She lectured with furious zeal about the Great Depression and returned to her office to grade papers, to the possible detriment of the authors .
Upsetting enough that she would never cast a spell. Worse still that her body stood in opposition to all the everyday things making the world tick. But most terrible of all, somehow, was the knowledge that she obliterated magic just by existing.
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” she whispered, laying her head on the essay-covered table.
She ached to call her father and tell him everything. Mom was the supplier of advice, which she could also use, but at the moment she most needed consolation—Dad’s specialty. He cheered her up after disappointments and (if she was really, really disappointed) plied her with cookies. The day she’d realized she had to take the Ashburn offer, the one she’d tossed in a drawer because surely something better would come along, he’d driven the two hours to Iowa City with homemade ginger snaps.
But she couldn’t talk to him about this . He would think she was losing it and be uneasy about her mental health for the rest of his life. The simple fact that she couldn’t tell her parents she was anti-magic made the pain of being so all the more keen.
She went to her bookcase, the one packed full of her childhood, and pulled out a paperback with a taped-up cover and contents she could practically recite from memory. She read about the orphaned hero leaving his gray, mundane world for the riotous color and adventure of the magical one, and she felt simultaneously better and worse .
Two tears fell on a page. She blotted the wet spot with her sleeve and closed the book. Hard to use fantasy for comfort now. Back to grading.
Just then, the Inferno door creaked open and clicked shut, followed by the echoing sound of a man wearing boots. The only man who appeared at seven every night.
The clock on her desk showed it was in fact the appointed time. He showed up—he showed up as if nothing had happened. She turned and found him standing in her archway, face an unreadable blank.
“Go away,” she said, the words quavering.
“I once told you that, if you recall.” He crossed over the threshold and straddled her computer chair. “Refresh my memory—did you leave me alone?”
“I know you want to enjoy my misery, but could you do it later?”
Instead of answering, he spun the chair around and booted up her computer.
“Hartgrave—”
“Yes, yes, I’m reveling in the Schadenfreude ,” he muttered. “Thanks for that. I was running low.”
She watched him at the computer, keys clacking under his agile fingers. It was so easy for him and so depressingly difficult for her. Hadn’t she always felt different? Wasn’t that why she used to pretend she was magical and everyone else wasn’t? And all along, it was the other way around.
A pensive tune wended from her speakers.
“‘Mood Indigo,’” Hartgrave said.
“That’s appropriate. ”
“What an astonishing coincidence.” He stood. “This is my collection. Log me off the computer when you don’t want to listen anymore.”
She squinted at him. He was behaving like a person trying to make someone feel better, or as close to it as he probably could get.
“Wait.”
He stopped under the arch and looked back, eyebrows raised.
“You can stay,” she said. “If you want.”
“Oh?”
“Misery loves company.”
He snorted. “Misery loves making company equally miserable.”
She probably owed him an apology—again. But the best she could do was a murmured, “It wouldn’t be seven o’clock without you.”
She gestured to the couch and he stretched out on it, draping his long legs over the arm, making himself fit in a space sized to her nearly foot-shorter frame. He looked at her—really looked. “Will you be all right?”
She shrugged. She didn’t mean to say anything, but the words bubbled up and spilled out. “Why didn’t you tell me from the start that I’m anti-magic? Why did you let me scheme and plan and—and hope?”
“Because the misguided belief that something good might happen is better than despair,” he said, and she was struck by the intensity of the words. “At least, I thought you would see it that way.”
She didn’t. Better to know the truth, as painful as it was. Better to know straight away. But she couldn’t fault him for trying to spare her this heartache—a strangely touching act from this man of all men.
She turned back to the essays, his music almost tangible in the air around her, his silent presence more comforting than it had any right to be. Not ginger snaps, but far, far better than nothing.