The applause, when Bryce finished, was polite.
“The Challenger, representing the candidate House Beauchamps.”
Sydney did not step forward, but curled the last three fingers on her left hand and rotated her wrist a quarter turn.
An invisible violin began to play a waltz.
Sydney moved her right hand, bending her fingers into sharp angles. She stepped twice on the floor with her left heel and spoke the word that unlocked the spell she had prepared.
All of the assembled members of the Unseen World turned to the person next to them, and once partnered, began to dance.
Everyone except Sydney, who smiled to watch the magicians move through her chosen patterns, and the man who walked through the crowd to her side. Dark-haired and sharp-featured, magic coiled beneath his skin. Ian Merlin. Interesting, that he had been unaffected by the spell’s influence. She had tailored it very specifically.
“You seem,” he said, “in need of a partner.”
Sydney looked at him. “I seem to be doing just fine on my own.”
“They’ll hate you less, when the spell is over, if you’re dancing too.”
“And why,” she asked, “would you care if they hate me?”
“Because you seem interesting.” He held out his hands.
“I suppose that’s a good enough reason.” Sydney stepped close and allowed Ian to lead her in the dance, an exact mimic of the enchanted magicians. He was a good dancer, graceful and confident. She could feel the warmth of him through his tuxedo, in his hand on the skin of her bare back.
“They’ll be furious,” Ian said, looking around at the dancing magicians.
“Most of them,” Sydney agreed. “They’ll also realize that I’m no one to be trifled with. They’ll pay attention to me—they’ll see me, and my magic.”
“And why does that matter?” Ian asked. “You look like the sort of woman who gets noticed on a regular basis.”
“Noticed,” she said, “is very different from seen.” The fingers of Sydney’s left hand fluttered against Ian’s back as she ended the spell.
She ignored the fade of the music, the stunned hush of the room that turned into whispers that turned into noise. “Do you want to get out of here?”
Ian took her offered hand. “Your magic was the only thing I came to see.”
“I hope it was worth it.”
“Very much.”
She paused as they got to the street. “Just to be clear, I asked you to leave with me because I want take you to bed. How do you feel about that?”
Ian swallowed hard. “Good. I feel good.”
She smiled, and flagged down a cab.
? ? ?
Sydney slipped from Ian’s bed and into a bathroom down the hall, closing the door behind her. She pressed her back against the cold tile of the wall. The aftereffects of magic could only be delayed so long, and her spell had been big. The cost must be paid.
Hot and cold flashed through her, shaking her until her joints ached. Blood dripped from her nose and trickled down the back of her throat. She reached over and turned on the faucet so that no sound of weakness might leak from the walls.
She breathed in. Let the pain expand to fill her skin, let it become one with breath and bone, until it was nothing more than an ache—until the throb of magic was the same as the bruised pain in her feet from her shoes, as the blister coming up on one heel, as the much more pleasant ache in her thighs from the sex. One pain among others. It was nothing more. She wouldn’t let it be.
She thought of Bryce Dee, sweating from the effort of casting, even with a waiting pool of magic to access. Imagined that he slept peacefully, his cost already paid.
She had been one of the ones to pay it, and now she paid her own.
“Sydney?” Ian’s voice, sleepy and warm from the bedroom. She turned off the faucet. There were more pleasant ways to distract herself.
? ? ?
Later, Sydney walked home, thirty-seven blocks, in her heels. She had refused Ian’s offer of a cab: “I like the night.”
The air was cool on her flushed cheeks, and the distance long enough for her to finally feel grounded again after a spell of that size and its aftershocks. The pain now no more than background noise, but remnants of magic still burned through her blood as she walked past the warmth and light of restaurants and bars, past beautifully decorated store windows. She slowed a bit passing those, looking at their jewel-box designs, color and pattern like a fairy tale on acid, dressed up in this season’s fashion. She craved beauty like that, showy and strange. Like what magic should have been.
Six months and thirteen days. That was how long she had been out of Shadows. Not free, not yet. But out. It was getting easier to believe—last week she had gone an entire day without wondering if that would be the day Shara changed her mind and forced her to return forever, the doors sealed shut behind her. That was impossible, yes—her magic had broken those doors open before and could again. But there was a type of terror that didn’t care about reality, a fear that lived in secret places, and it clawed at her soft insides. It clawed harder at night, which was another thing she hated. But she’d been out long enough to almost sleep through the night now, most nights. There were nightmares still, of course, but things were getting easier.
Easier, but not safe. Not free.
Not yet.
The first night she’d spent outside of Shadows, she hadn’t slept at all. She hadn’t even tried. Instead, she had spent the entire night—her shadow still weeping pieces of darkness from that first deep cut necessary to sign her name on her contract, to indicate the measure of her debt to the House—standing outside, watching the stars and imagining what she would do when she truly earned her freedom.
She had imagined scrawling “fuck you” after her name on that heavy grey paper, imagined breaking the bottle where her shadow was converted to ink, imagined snapping the pen in her hand. Imagined driving that pen through Shara’s heart, or her throat, or some other soft and vulnerable place. She had imagined a thousand ways that freedom would feel. She had begun to plan, then, a way to get to it faster.
Now, at night, when she couldn’t sleep, she didn’t count sheep. She imagined a match and a contract burning. She fell asleep to the image of smoke rising through the air.
A cab slowed next to her, but she waved the driver on.
“Are you sure, lady? Those shoes look like killers.”
“So am I,” she called back. The window shut as the car sped away.