Magic and the Modern Girl Read Online Free

cottage’s front door opened before I could answer her. “We’re in here,” I called out, trying desperately to sound nonchalant. Hoping that I could be nonchalant. Hoping that I was worrying for no good reason, that nothing was truly wrong, that there were dozens of benign explanations for how magical translucent stone could crumble away to useless green dust.
    David Montrose swept into my kitchen. I could still remember the first time that I’d seen him, appearing on my doorstep like Jane Eyre ’s Edward Rochester in the dark of a stormy night. He’d been furious with me then, enraged that I had released Neko from his form as a statue. Now, I recognized the power that had frightened me that night, the strength—both physical and astral—that coursed through his body, down his arms, into his fine-fingered hands. But I wasn’t afraid of him. He was my ally. My friend.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked, and we might have been picking up a conversation after a separation of a few minutes, not several weeks. Months, I thought, with a curious flip of my belly. It had been at least three months since I’d seen David. Um. Four. Could it really be five? Where did time go?
    Wordlessly, I offered him the silk bag.
    His dark eyebrows nearly met as his lips pursed into a frown. Silver glinted at his temples—more silver than I remembered. All of a sudden, I wondered what he’d been doing in his spare time, without needing to ride herd on me and my sometimes wayward witchcraft. There was a hardness to his eyes, a wariness, that made me think that he hadn’t spent the time catching up on back seasons of American Idol .
    Before I could ask him what was new, though, before I could say anything to direct his study of the green dust in the bag, the cottage door flew open again.
    “Let me guess, girlfriend. You just couldn’t stand the thought of an evening without—Oh.”
    If I hadn’t been so worried about the destruction of my witchy paraphernalia, I might have laughed at my familiar. Neko stopped just inside the door to my kitchen. With perfect timing, he absorbed the presence of my warder, immediately twitching to an alert status that made me wonder if all the rest of his existence—the late-night party hound, the fashion guru, the man-man lover extraordinaire—were all some elaborate acting gig, all artfully created to misdirect the world from his true purpose as a channel of magic power.
    Neko’s nostrils flared as he edged into the kitchen, and his gaze remained glued to the silk bag. I could almost see the hair rise on the back of his neck, and a low growl hummed deep in his throat. He moved like a ballet dancer, stepping sideways with a dangerous caution, and when he reached a single finger toward the sack, he glanced first at David’s face, then at mine, as if seeking approval. Permission.
    I nodded. “Go ahead. Either one of you. Both.”
    Poor Melissa was leaning against the counter, and I could see that Neko’s intensity frightened her. Hell, Neko’s intensity frightened me , and that was before I let myself wonder what David was thinking.
    My warder nodded slowly and loosened the ties on the bag. He peered inside like a chemist examining unexpected results in an experimental test tube. As his thin lips twisted into a frown, I forced myself to say, “There’s more.” My voice came out thin and broken, and I cleared my throat, wishing that I could toss back another mojito or two before continuing. “There’s more,” I repeated, and this time my words were too loud, but I brazened through. “My other runes, and my crystals. My books.”
    David passed the sack to Neko, who quivered daintily. I half expected him to hiss as he accepted the green dust, to offer up one of those terrifying feline sounds of disapproval, displaying fangs like a snake as he stretched his lips into a snarl. Instead, he weighed the evidence of destruction in his palm, shaking his head and setting it on the table with a moue of