Tags: angst (mild), bipoc character, depression, emotional hurt/comfort, fat character, humor, magic user, memory loss, off-screen death of a parent, past tense, pov third person limited, unreliable narrator, water spirit, wlw
*
Having a job with a halfway decent schedule, a livable wage, health insurance, and no terrible coworkers was the kind of magic most of Merrily’s friends from undergrad had longed for while they were in classes. Here Merrily was, three years after graduation, working at the family coffee shop, and she wondered if maybe it was actually a curse.
Hobb Hill Beans and Leaves had been in the Shire family for generations, and when Merrily had come looking for a job after college, Aunt Trish had welcomed her with open arms. Merrily had been grateful.
She was grateful.
It might not seem like she was grateful, but only because Hobb Hill was about the most boring place someone could possibly live, and bemoaning this fact was one of Merrily’s most beloved pastimes—one she often had time to indulge, since there was nothing else to do.
It was dull. It was stagnant. It was depressing in the extreme to be here while most of her friends were finishing master’s degrees or getting married or going on exotic vacations. They were doing things, and Merrily was stuck here… doing nothing.
But it wasn’t such a bad life, really. At least she still got to Practice.
“Here’s your half-caff vanilla latte with that good luck charm, Portia,” she said, passing the cup across the counter to a willowy woman in a gray suit. “You’re going to rock this interview. I believe in you.”
Portia smiled as she took the cup, drank without hesitation, and calmed. “Thanks, Merrily. I know it’s going to be okay. I just have to…”
“You’ve just gotta be you,” Merrily finished for her. “The Universe will do the rest.”
Portia looked down at her watch, blanched, and headed for the door without even saying goodbye.
Please let that charm work. Portia deserves her break, Merrily thought as she picked up a rag and began wiping down the counters. Time to lean, time to clean.
The bright chime of the front door signaled another customer, and Merrily looked up only to freeze, breath caught in her chest, stunned like a fawn in the headlights.
This woman, she thought, might be the most beautiful woman on the entire planet.
And then she thought, Oh god, I smell like a sweaty coffee bean!
She flushed brilliantly as the customer—a plush, curvaceous woman, a little shorter than Merrily herself, with dark-brown skin, big brown eyes, and long brown hair that cascaded down her back and shoulders in a riot of curls—rushed toward the counter, looking relieved and distressed.
“Welcome to Beans and Leaves, can I—?”
“It’s you, isn’t it? Please tell me it’s you. I really, really need it to be you.” Her voice was sweet and melodic. Merrily could have listened to her babble all day.
“It’s absolutely me,” Merrily agreed instantly, dazed. “Um. What am I?”
“A witch,” the woman said. “The only unregistered witch in the tri-county area—and, possibly, the only one not in the pocket of the Cherry Grove Homeowner’s Association. Please, I need your help. It’s urgent.”
Merrily straightened, nodding more to herself than the woman. “Yeah— I—I do magic, yes. I guess you could call me a witch. And I don’t… work with an HOA. So. I might be able to help.”
“Oh, thank the Source. I’m Thea,” the woman said, holding out a small, expertly manicured hand. Merrily took it on instinct. “And I need you to break a curse.”
Merrily winced. “Ah, okay, well— That’s—That’s super unfortunate, I really do feel for you, Thea, but—”
“But what?”
Merrily tried to pull her hand away, gently.
Thea did not let it go.
Oh, no.
“Well…” Merrily shrugged, trying to let her down easy. “I do small magic? The Little Practice, we call it. Good luck charms, help with intentions, dream-reading, stuff like that. Curses, that’s…”
“That’s…?” Thea kept hold of her hand, a prisoner caught in the limbo of the over-the-counter area that was normally reserved for the passing of currency and drinks.
“Well, that’s Big Magic,” Merrily said. “I don’t do that. I’m sorry. You’ll have to find someone else.”
Thea looked at her. And blinked. And then—to Merrily’s horror—began to cry.
“No no no, don’t do that, please don’t do that,” Merrily begged, trying to pull away to find her a tissue, but Thea held tight to her hand.
“There—is—no—one—else,” Thea said in a thin, shaking voice on the edge of disaster.
Merrily just couldn’t let this happen. Not with tears. Not if she was never going to get her hand back.
And definitely not to the prettiest girl she’d ever seen.
“Okay, all right, I can at least take a look,” Merrily said. “Let’s have a seat, and you can tell me everything. Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, please,” Thea said, sniffling.
Merrily waited, her hand still warm in Thea’s steadfast embrace, and then—when it became obvious she wasn’t going to get it back—she said, “Well… I’ll… need both hands to brew it.”
“You can’t do it one-handed?” Thea asked, looking uncertain.
“I really need both hands.” Merrily gave her a smile. She couldn’t help it.
“If you think it’s necessary…”
Thea dropped her hand, and Merrily turned to look through the box of tea blends, thoughts racing. Big Magic? Breaking curses? She couldn’t do this; she’d be in way over her head.
She still remembered well what happened the only other time she’d tried Big Magic. She could hear Aunt Trish’s voice over the phone even now, years later, crackling and horrible with sadness: “I need you to give me a call as soon as you get this…”
But as she turned, her hand prickled with the awareness that it was no longer in Thea’s, and that… meant something.
It meant she had to try.
*
The Paradise Park gate was big, wrought iron, and looked like it had stood for centuries. Merrily waited in the pool of light cast by a street lamp and looked at her watch—three minutes past their meeting time—and then up and down the deserted street. No Thea—and no anyone else either, not this close to the edge of the forest this late at night.
More time to examine the gate without any… distractions.
Merrily bowed her head and sank deep inside herself. At her core there was a well, deep and ancient, filled to the brim with a soft golden light. She stood next to it and swirled her fingers through the radiance, feeling the warmth, the glow of it.
She didn’t do this. Ever. Even just coming here, to the wellspring, felt like asking for trouble. But Thea had been so desperate that she felt like she had to try.
The fact that Thea’s gorgeous doesn’t hurt either, Merrily thought, resenting her own weakness. Just can’t say no to a pretty face.
She pulled a handful of light out of the well, watching as it sank, glowing, into her skin like water into soil. She shifted her perspective outside herself and placed her glowing hand on the fence. The light slid over the iron posts with their shiny black paint and their sharply pointed finials. It sank between the bars, feeling out all the edges, down to the concrete where the sidewalk met the grass. It pooled and spun up again, illuminating her face as it surged up the big double gate, searching for the mechanism, the lock, the magic—
And abruptly stopped, because whoa, what the hell was that?
Merrily staggered back, tripping over her own feet and falling into a soft, warm body that wrapped protectively around her.
“Sorry I’m late,” Thea said cheerfully. “Though it seems like I arrived just in time.”
Dazed, Merrily regained her footing and turned to greet her. “Um, yeah, I guess you did. Thea, what did you say was the reason you can’t get inside this park again?”
“They banned me because I haven’t paid my HOA fines,” Thea said, tossing her curls defiantly. “If you don’t pay them on time they add fees. Why anyone thinks adding an extra fine to a fine you already couldn’t pay is the appropriate solution, I couldn’t tell you!”
“And… the HOA fines are for…?” Merrily asked, trying to make sense of the magic on the gate, the strange conjunction of power, like a wall made up of a thousand bricks all carved from different kinds of stone. She peered at it, looking for some physical manifestation of the layers of magic there.
“My window blinds are three-quarters-of-an-inch too wide.”
Merrily stopped, turning back toward Thea.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
Thea raised her hands in an eloquent shrug. “If I was, I wouldn’t be barred from the park, and we wouldn’t be out at eleven at night trying to fix it.”
Merrily snorted. “That’s ridiculous. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. That’s so—”
“Trust me, Merry-girl, nothin’ can kill your magic faster than bureaucracy,” Dad said, rifling through a stack of envelopes. Merrily stirred the soup on the stove, swaying to a vinyl on the record player. “It sucks the life out of everything it touches.”
“Never mind that, Dad,” Merrily said, leaning down to sip the soup from a spoon. “Come taste—what does it need?”
She held the spoon out for him, one hand cupped underneath, and he blew gently on the steaming liquid before taking a sip. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “Needs cumin. And intention. Don’t forget about it, or it’ll turn out weak and flimsy, like the excuses Mayor Dorchester makes every time somebody asks why management of Paradise Park is transitioning to one of those damned HOAs. It’s highway robbery—”
“Here, how much cumin?”
“As much as your heart tells you. Feel it with your innermost self. And then taste it, and if it’s not quite enough, add a little more.”
“…Merrily?” Thea’s voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “Are you all right? You look… like something’s wrong. Do you need a tissue? Are you going to—”
“I’m fine,” Merrily said, forcing the memory away. She swallowed the lump in her throat, shook off the taste of cumin on her tongue. “There’s… a lot of magic on this gate, Thea. Are you sure you can’t live without getting into this park? What’s keeping you from just… I dunno, going to a different one?”
Thea shook her head. “It’s not that easy. My stream is in this park. I can’t just go to another.”
“Your stream?” Merrily looked at her, confused, before the pieces slotted into place. The cascading hair. The fluid grace of her movement. The babbling. “Goddess, you’re a water spirit, aren’t you?”
“And you’re as smart as you are pretty,” Thea said with a grin which faded immediately. “I need to get back to my stream to replenish myself, recharge, but the only parts I can access are in this park.”
“And… if you don’t get in?” Merrily ventured hesitantly.
“I’ve… already begun to forget things,” Thea admitted. “If we stay away long enough, we forget who we are, where we’re from, that we’re magic at all. I don’t even remember which river I came from, which lake or ocean—the memory of this little stream is all that’s left.”
Merrily frowned but nodded. “There’s so many layers of spellwork in this wall, figuring out which curse applies to you would take weeks, maybe months, and I don’t think we have that kind of time. I’m going to just… bull my way through and see if I can blast a hole big enough that the whole thing fails.” Thea looked concerned and opened her mouth as if to protest, but Merrily cut her off. “I’m the witch, right? You asked for my help. So let me help.”
“If… you think that’s what’s best,” Thea said uncertainly, stepping back.
Merrily nodded again, gathering her strength. It should be relatively straightforward: pull as much power as she could, shove it at the lock until it broke, and then the integrity of the wall would fall—including the spell keeping Thea from her stream. It wasn’t the kind of Big Magic she’d done before, but that was a good thing. The less complex it was, the less power she’d be drawing on from outside herself, the less she’d be asking for from the Universe—the less it would want in return. This would work. It would be fine. Nothing terrible was going to happen.
Hopefully.
Merrily positioned herself in front of the gate and pulled her power up from the wellspring inside her, glowing golden and brilliant as it shone from her hands. It poured over the sidewalk, the fence, the gate. It lit the night with the radiance of dawn, glazing everything with a luminescence that pulsed in time with her heart. She stared at the big lock at the center of the gate, looked past it to the wall of magic, the curses, the layers of power that hundreds of witches had laid here to try to enforce these stupid rules.
“Don’t ever forget about the Little Practice, Merry-girl. It lets us do the unimaginable. When it’s time to break down your own barriers, you’ll know.”
Dad’s voice echoed in her head, making Merrily’s breath catch, but she pushed it away, pulling light into her hands until they were blinding with power. She stepped forward, grabbed the lock, and pushed.
A metallic screech broke the quiet of the night as Merrily was thrown backward onto the pavement. She blinked up at the moon before Thea’s anxious face blocked out everything else
“Oh, Merrily, I knew that was a bad idea—are you okay?” Thea offered her a hand to help her up, but Merrily waved it away. She felt fine—except she didn’t.
She’d failed.
She’d known she would.
“Bad luck,” she said quietly, pushing up on her elbows, then sitting, then standing. She dusted herself off. “Sorry.”
“Are you hurt?” Thea repeated, not seeming to understand.
“Not really,” Merrily said, hearing the dullness in her own voice. “But I’m pretty tired. Gonna go ahead and get home before it gets any later. Sorry, Thea. I’m sure you’ll figure something out, though.”
“Wait!” Thea said as Merrily turned to go, grabbing her hand once more. Merrily pulled it away. She wasn’t going to let Thea trap her. “Merrily, wait, please—I’m sorry it didn’t work, but can’t you find another way? Perhaps a different method? Maybe with some research, or—”
“Bye, Thea,” Merrily said, stuffing her hands in her pockets, turning away. “I hope you find someone who can help.”
“Merrily,” Thea whispered, so soft, so broken she almost didn’t hear it. “You were my last hope.”
But that wasn’t true. Because Merrily wasn’t anybody’s hope—not really—not anymore.
*
Before
Merrily yawned as she pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders, watching the horizon as the first rays of sunlight peeked gently over it. She went over the steps of the spell again in her mind, closing her eyes to listen to the sound of the river behind her as it flowed sluggish and powerful in its bed. She knew the steps to the dance by heart, of course—she’d been practicing for almost a year, ever since she realized there was a blight on this river. While she had taken her survey samples for Hydrology II, done dissections for Anatomy and Physiology, studied tissue under the microscope in Biology III, and even fought through Organic Chemistry, she was also doing this: committing each step, each flourish, each intention, to memory, so it could be repeated as easy as breathing.
One, two, three, four—
Merrily swayed to the rhythm of the river’s song, the melody it sang to her when she touched it, as she let the shawl slip from her shoulders and began the dance—moving into the water’s shallows and through the steps with powerful intent. It was so cold, but she felt exhilarated by the chill. The current tugged at her ankles, trying to pull her deeper in as the music swelled in her mind. An orchestra of strings, winds, and percussion cascaded over her as she twirled and stepped, clapped and dipped, tracing out the pattern of the spell in the water.
—five, six, seven, eight—
The worn-smooth rocks covered in moss under her feet made it easy to slip out into deeper water, until she was in the river up to her waist. Reaching her arms overhead, she called down the purification of the sun, inviting it to cleanse the river of the poison. As the music began to swell toward a crescendo, she headed toward the final steps of the spell.
One, two, three, four—
She spun and spun and spun, arms starting out at her sides and then slowly pulling in toward her torso, and with them, pulling the poison in and up through her, out of the river. This was the part she’d been afraid of, the part she knew was dangerous. This was the part that made this dance Big Magic. It hurt, prickling at her insides, stinging and burning her throat, eyes, nose, and palms. She turned, stepping and swaying, spinning and sweeping, water dancing and singing all around her.
—five, six, seven, eight.
Her feet touched the ground in front of an urn she’d placed earlier, and she bowed over it, pouring the poison out of herself and into the vessel to be carried away somewhere else. Feeling it leave her was a relief, and she laughed out of sheer joy to have finished.
She’d done it.
Big Magic.
For the first time ever, Merrily Shire pulled off a real spell, and in two weeks she was going to graduate from college, and everything was be smooth sailing from here.
That’s the way Dad always said it’d be. “Work hard up front, then it’s just smooth sailing, Merry.”
He was going to be so proud. She grabbed her phone to call him, unable to wait despite the fact that her wet clothes were freezing. A text message on the home screen from Aunt Trish just said, “Call me.” The voicemail indicator blinked.
The thing about Big Magic is that it never, ever turned out the way you planned. He’d always told her that.
Why hadn’t she listened?
“Merrily, honey? It’s Aunt Trish— I—I need you to give me a call as soon as you get this. It’s… honey, it’s… it’s about your Dad.”
*
Beans and Leaves was silent as Merrily sat on the counter, sipping steamed milk with caramel syrup—a comforting favorite. She looked up as the bell sounded over the door, unsurprised. She hadn’t locked it. Thea’s steps were light and slow.
“Merrily?” she called. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Merrily said, and sipped her drink. “I wasn’t really hurt.”
“So what happened?” Thea stepped into the small pool of dim lamplight, looking confused and a bit forlorn.
“You saw. I tried to open it. It didn’t work.”
“I saw something,” Thea agreed. “I’m not sure what it was. It looked like you were making yourself a battering ram.”
“That’s a way of opening it,” Merrily huffed.
“It is, I guess,” Thea said. “But… is it the best way?”
Merrily was silent, sipping her milk. She didn’t know what to say.
“Though sometimes a wall of water can break down a floodgate, most of the time it won’t,” Thea said softly. “Most of the time, a dam will stop the river, and there’s only one way to get through it: find a weakness and wear it out. That’s my power.”
“You wear things out?” Merrily asked, laughing.
Thea waggled her eyebrows, teasing, and said, “I do.” Then she grew more serious. “I thought perhaps we could try again—together—my way. Just try to… wear out the lock.”
“Thea, I…” Merrily swallowed, shaking her head. “I want to help, but…”
“But what?”
Thea looked at her, soft, open, so sweet and so kind and in so much need, and Merrily couldn’t help but spill the truth.
“I don’t do Big Magic because I can’t pay the price. Not again.”
“What kind of price is there?” Thea asked, quiet.
“It’s always different. It—It isn’t something you choose. The magic takes something from you. And last time, it—” Merrily hesitated, breathing in deep through her nose and out through her mouth. “It took my Dad. He died in a car wreck. I got the news right after I finished the only Big Magic I ever tried.”
“Oh, Merrily…” Thea looked stricken. She reached out to take Merrily’s hand, holding it in both of her own. She brought it to her lips to kiss, and for a moment Merrily let herself think about kissing those lips with hers, how soft they’d be, how sweet. But she couldn’t ask for that when she’d failed so thoroughly. When she had nothing to offer.
“You see now,” Merrily whispered, “why I can’t try again.”
“I see why you would struggle with it, yes,” Thea said, still holding her hand. “But—you know, don’t you, that the Source doesn’t take that way? It keeps the Universe in balance, yes, but it wouldn’t punish you for using the power it gave you.”
“It did, though,” Merrily argued. “I did the spell and—”
“And something terrible happened,” Thea agreed. “But that had nothing to do with your magic, Merrily, and everything to do with the choices of others—of the other drivers on the road, of the city managers, of the car manufacturers, of your father himself—but not of you. It wasn’t your fault.”
Merrily had seen thousands of people walk into Beans and Leaves, and none of them—not the pretty ones, not the nice ones, not even the insistent ones—had gotten as close to her in three years as Thea had in one day. With every word Thea spoke, it was as if she had worked her way into all the weaknesses inside Merrily’s armor of boredom and disinterest. Merrily had barely put her mug down before the tears started coming, and then she was wrapped in Thea’s warm embrace as a torrent swept through her.
Years, she’d waited. Years, she’d wasted.
Thea’s hand on her hair brought her back to herself; Merrily raised her splotchy, tear-stained face to look at Thea. “I’m—I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be.” Thea leaned forward. Merrily wasn’t sure what was going to happen—but then she felt the press of Thea’s lips to hers, soft and sweet as she’d imagined. When Thea pulled back, she whispered, “You’re all right. You know, now, don’t you? It was never your doing.”
Merrily nodded, sniffling.
“Do you think you could kiss me again?” Merrily asked, laughing a little. “I didn’t do my best the first time.”
Thea laughed, too, and peppered her face with kisses, gentle, cleansing, until meeting Merrily’s lips with her own again. This time, Merrily kissed back in earnest, opening to Thea with all the promise of spring, all the hope that had been dormant for so long.
“Will you try again?” Thea asked when she pulled away, not far, forehead pressed to Merrily’s.
“Yes,” Merrily agreed, tears still leaking from her eyes. “Yes. If you’ll help me, I’ll try again.”
*
The gate stood as solid as before, but Merrily looked at it with less fear now. There was no way she could do worse than she’d done earlier. And Thea was going to help.
“How do you want to do this?” Merrily asked. Thea’s fingers tangled with hers, her palm warm.
“Well—blasting it isn’t going to work,” Thea said. “You can see it, right? What does it look like?”
“Like a wall made up of lots of different kinds of bricks,” Merrily said, looking at it with her Sight again. “Very tall, and deep—like they’ve been laying bricks here for years, and never taken them off.”
“ ’Course they have,” Thea grumbled. “If I had been to my stream recently, I could be of more help—but my magic is so quiet right now…”
“It’s okay,” Merrily assured her. “We can do this. We’ll figure it out.”
Thea smiled and squeezed her hand, and that was a kind of magic all its own, the power in that little squeeze. It made something in her flutter to life, like flame on a wick. Merrily reached out with her other hand and touched the gate, saw past it to the wall beyond as she lay her hand against the bricks. Her light began to cover the wall, spilling over the different sizes and colors of bricks, highlighting each of them one at a time. She didn’t direct it beyond saying, Find the weaknesses.
The light flowed over and to the other side. She could feel it moving along the length of the wall, but she couldn’t see it—blocked by the magic of the gate. She watched, waited, for some sort of sign—and then Thea gasped and squeezed her hand again.
“Merrily—is that yours?”
She turned to look, and a light—a brilliant beam about the size of an ink pen—shone into the darkness like a spotlight from the other side of the wall.
“I think we found our gateway,” Merrily said with a grin, and tugged Thea down the sidewalk toward that section of the fence. They stopped in front of it, and she readied herself for the spell—the Big Magic—to sink into the crevice and make it hers, to wear it out the way water would.
“Can I help?” Thea asked, and Merrily knew, in her heart, how she could.
“Dance with me?”
Under the stars, Merrily felt Thea’s hand on her shoulder, and her own found Thea’s waist. Together, they began to dance—to nothing, at first, no sound at all but their shared breaths, until a soft melody sprung up from all the places they touched, just the barest hint of the flute in Merrily’s head. Merrily led the dance, leaning into it, into her power, into Thea, and as they danced, the song grew louder, stronger. The beam of light expanded, the crack in the barrier growing with every turn they took around the sidewalk.
One, two, three, one, two, three—it had been a long time since she’d danced at all, much less like this, and the feel of the magic flowing through her was like nothing else. It was like seeing the world for the first time—and also like coming home. She laughed, unable to help herself or look away. The light kept growing, shining brighter over them as new cracks in the wall began to form, branching out from the first as their dance began to wear down the magic.
“It’s working,” Thea said, grinning so hard it must hurt.
“We’re doing it,” Merrily agreed. She pressed her forehead to Thea’s, rubbed their noses together, and the song grew, a tune that echoed in her mind, sounding very familiar as it crashed joyously over her. “Thea—?”
Just then, behind Thea’s head, light poured in like a sunrise over the horizon as the wall came down all at once, crumbling to dust. Thea shuddered and something in her seemed to break as well. She turned from the dance and ran, past the unlocked iron gate and straight for the stream in the back corner of the park. Merrily followed, watching as Thea leaped from the little footbridge into the stream, fully clothed, and something—happened.
Merrily had thought she’d seen Big Magic before. She’d thought she’d done Big Magic before.
There was Big Magic.
And then there was this.
Before her, Thea seemed simultaneously the same and wholly different, transformed by her contact with the water. The song that had played in Merrily’s head as they had danced swept through the boughs of the trees overhead, joyous and bubbling, and Merrily remembered where she’d heard it before. She rushed forward and knelt by the bank.
“It was you, the river near the woods—the one I danced in—”
“It was you, who healed me,” Thea said, smiling widely, tears gathering in her big brown eyes. “I felt so good after being sick for so long, I got right up and left—but I forgot to come back, and I kept forgetting, until suddenly I couldn’t remember even when I tried to. All I remembered was this little stream, and I knew I had to get here, and that I should go to you for help. Now I know why.”
Merrily swallowed around a lump in her throat. She threw her arms around Thea’s waist. “You have to know you helped me just as much,” she whispered. “I couldn’t have done it—any of this—without you.”
“No,” Thea agreed, and tipped Merrily’s face up to her own with gentle fingers under her chin. “And now it’s done. What would you like to do next?”
“Well… I… think I’d like to take you on a date, if you’ll have me,” Merrily laughed, and Thea laughed too.
“Yes, Merrily, I’ll have you,” Thea whispered, and for a moment Merrily closed her eyes, listening to the river song, feeling Thea’s presence wash over her. Then, Thea pulled her up, up, into a kiss, sweet and searing with the force of life that Merrily had been missing. Pure and golden and powerful: the kind of kiss that knocked the world a little off its axis, that shifted the ground under one’s feet, that slid everything just enough out of place that it fell into something so much better.
The kind of kiss that you could build an empire around.
The kind of kiss that wore down all defenses.
“I’ll pick you up at eight, then?” Merrily asked, breathless, lips still brushing Thea’s.
“Bold of you to assume I’m letting you leave.”