“What happened?”
Molly shrugged. “I closed my eyes. Mom came in. She sat down on the couch and turned on the TV, and never said a word. I opened my eyes and she was sitting there, three feet away, and hadn’t even seen me. I walked out really quietly, and she never even glanced at me. I mean, at first I thought she’d gone crazy or into denial or something. But she really hadn’t seen me. So I snuck back to my room, changed clothes, and she was none the wiser.”
I lifted my eyebrows, impressed. “Wow. Really?”
“Yes.” She peered up at me. “Why?”
“Your first time out you called up a veil on nothing but instinct. That’s impressive, kid. You’ve got a gift.”
She frowned. “Really?”
“Absolutely. I’m a full wizard of the White Council, and I can’t do a reliable veil.”
“You can’t? Why not?”
I shrugged. “Why are some people wonderful singers, even without training, and other people can’t carry a tune in a bucket? It’s something I just don’t have. That you do…” I shook my head. “It’s impressive. It’s a rare talent.”
She frowned over that, her gaze turning inward for a moment. “Oh.”
“Bet you got one hell of a headache afterward.”
She nodded. “Yes, actually. Like an ice-cream headache, only two hours long. How did you know?”
“It’s a fairly typical form of sensory feedback for improperly channeled energy,” I said. “Everyone who does magic winds up with one sooner or later.”
“I haven’t read about anything like that.”
“Is that what you did next? You figured out you could become the invisible girl, and went and studied books?”
She was quiet for a moment, and I thought she was about to close up again. But then she said, quietly, “Yes. I mean, I knew how hard my Mom would be on me if I was… showing interest in that kind of thing. So I read books. The library, and a couple others that I got at Barnes and Noble.”
“Barnes and Noble,” I sighed, shaking my head. “You didn’t head into any of the local occult shops?”
“Not then,” she said. “But… I tried to meet people. You know? Like, Wiccans and psychics and stuff. That was how I met Nelson, at a martial arts school. I’d heard the teacher knew things. But I don’t think he did. Some of Nelson’s friends were into magic, too, or thought they were. I never saw any of them do anything.”
I grunted. “What did all those people tell you about magic?”
“What didn’t they tell me,” she said. “Everyone thinks magic is something different.”
“Heh,” I said. “Yeah.”
“And it wasn’t like I could just go running around all the time. Not with school and the little ones to watch and my Mom looking over my shoulder. So, you know. Mostly books. And I practiced, you know? Tried little things. Little, teeny glamours. Lighting candles. But a lot of the things I tried didn’t work.”
“Magic isn’t easy,” I said. “Not even for someone with a strong natural talent. Takes a lot of practice, like anything else.” I walked quietly for a few steps and then said, “Tell me about the spell you used on Rosie and Nelson.”
She paused, staring at nothing, the blood draining from her face. “I had to,” she said.
“Go on.”
Her pretty features were bleak. “Rosie had… she’d already had a miscarriage, because she kept getting high. And when she lost the baby, she went to the hard stuff. Heroin. I begged her to go into rehab, but she was just… too far gone, I guess. But I thought maybe I could help her. With magic. Like you help people.”
Hooboy. I kept the dismay off my face and nodded for her to continue.
“And one day last week, Sandra Marling and I had a talk. And during it, she told me how they were discovering that the presence of a very strong source of fear could bypass all kinds of psychological barriers. Things like addiction. That the fear could drive home a lesson, reliably and quickly. I didn’t have much time. I had to do it to save Rosie’s child.”
I grunted. “Why do Nelson, too?”
“He was… he was using too much. He and Rosie sort of reinforced each other. And I wasn’t sure what might happen, so I tried the spell out before I used it on her, too.”
“You tested it on Nelson?” I asked. “Then did the same one on Rosie?”
She nodded. “I had to scare them away from the drugs. I sent them both a nightmare.”
“Stars and stones,” I muttered. “A nightmare.”
Molly’s voice became defensive. “I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there.”
“Do you have any idea how much you hurt them both?” I asked.
“Hurt them?” she said, apparently bewildered. “They were fine.”
“They weren’t fine,” I said quietly. “But the same spell should have done more or less the same thing to both of them. It acted differently on
Nelson than Rosie.“ And then I put two and two together again and said, ”Ah. Now I get it.“
She didn’t look up at me.
“Nelson was the father,” I said quietly.
She shrugged. A tear streaked down her cheek. “They probably didn’t even know what they were doing when it happened. The pair of them were just…” She shook her head and fell silent.
“That explains why your spell damaged Nelson so much more severely.”
“I don’t understand. I never hurt him.”
“I don’t think you did it on purpose.” I waved a hand, palm up. “Magic comes from a lot of places. But especially from your emotions. They influence almost anything you can do. You were angry at Nelson when you cast the spell. Contaminated the whole thing with your anger.”
“I did not hurt them,” she said stubbornly. “I saved their lives.”
“I don’t think you realize the ramifications,” I said.
She spun to me and shrieked, “I did not hurt them!”
The air suddenly crackled with tension; vague, unfocused energy centered on the screaming girl. There was enough energy to manage something unfortunate, and it was clear that the kid wasn’t in anything like control of her power. I shook my head and swung my left hand in a half circle, palm faced out, and simply drew in the magical energy her emotions had generated and grounded it into the earth before somebody got hurt.
A tingle of sensation washed up my arm, surprisingly intense. Her talent was not a modest one. I started to snap a reprimand for her carelessness, but aborted it before the first word. In the first place, she was ignorant of what she’d done. Not innocent, but not wholly at fault, all the same. In the second place, she’d just been through a nightmarish ordeal at the hands of wicked faeries. She probably couldn’t have controlled her emotions, even if she wanted to.
She stared at me in surprise as the energy she had raised vanished. The rage and pain in her stance and expression faded to uncertainty.
“I didn’t hurt them,” she said in a rather small voice. “I saved them.”
“Molly, you need to know the facts. I know you’re tired and scared. But that doesn’t change a damned thing about what you did to them. You fucked around with their minds. You used magic to enslave them to your will, and the fact that you meant well by it doesn’t matter at all. Somewhere inside of them both, they know what you’ve done to them, subconsciously.
They’ll try to fight it. Regain control of their own choices. And that struggle is going to tear their psyches to shreds.“
More tears fell from her eyes. “B-but…”
I went on in a steady voice. “Rosie was better off. She might recover from it in a few years. But Nelson is probably insane already. He might not ever make it back. And doing it to them has screwed around with your own head. Not as bad as Rosie and Nelson, but you damaged yourself, too. It’ll make it harder for you to control impulses and your magic. Which makes you a lot more likely to lose control and hurt someone else. It’s a vicious cycle. I’ve seen it in action.”