CHAPTER ONE
Elysian
Elysian counted her steps from the curb to the porch, trying to drown out the thoughts tumbling over each other.
One, two, three, four, is anyone even hiring at this time of year?
Five, six, seven, this is going to destroy my resume, who would look twice at someone who only lasted four months?
Eight, nine, ten, oh my God, am I going to have to go back on my parents’ health insurance?
Eleven.
Twelve.
Her heels clicked on the concrete steps, and the whole house shifted subtly on her arrival. The wards recognized her and welcomed her with a sensation similar to slipping into a warm bath. The sense of relief was a drop in the bucket of her roiling anxiety, but it was a relief all the same.
The door unlocked as she approached and swung outward. Her keys were in her bag, tucked into the same corner at the very bottom where they had rested untouched for years.
Her roommate Annette sat in the kitchen window seat, ignoring her open book in favor of staring out at Elysian’s herb patch. There was very little to see this late in the year, except the odd patch of mostly melted snow and a couple of tenacious monkshoods, but evidently it was more diverting than the book.
Annette looked up, her eyebrows rising as Elysian stomped into the kitchen, pulled a wine glass out of the dish rack and sloshed it full of the cheap red wine they usually used for making sauces.
“Bad day at work?” Annette asked.
“Last day at work,” Elysian managed, before her throat closed up and her eyes started to burn. She carried her wine through to the living room and sat on the carpet, leaning against the coffee table.
She waited for Annette to sigh, snap “Again?” or “What did you do?”
Instead she padded into the living room after Elysian and draped herself over the couch. As she passed she tapped Elysian on the shoulder, and for a moment the glow of a minor blessing flowed through her. It was the same warmed sensation that she felt when she passed through the wards.
“Layoffs?” Annette said. “Right before New Year’s, seriously?”
Elysian shrugged. “It’s tidy, I guess. New year, new streamlined structure.”
“You’ll find another job,” Annette said. She sounded like she believed it, which made Elysian feel worse. It was so much easier when no one believed in you, they were never disappointed.
“Will I? I already have one lay-off and six months of unemployment on my resume, what do you think employers are going to think when they see a second one?”
“It’s not like you were fired twice. Being laid off isn’t a career killer.”
“Some people don’t see the difference,” Elysian said, staring into her glass. It was empty, but she’d found a comfortable position on the carpet and didn’t want to get up for more. “Even when they’ve laid off all but one of the other photographers and half the writing staff, some people hear that you were laid off and think ‘Sure, but the ones they kept must be their best staff. If they got laid off, they were the dead wood.’”
“Nobody thinks that,” Annette said, but she didn’t sound too certain.
“What if I’m just stuck in this cycle forever? Another six months of job hunting, and then the miracle happens, but just when I’m finding my feet here comes a ‘staff rationalization’. Sorry, Elysian, we love your work, but last in, first out… I work hard, and I’m good at what I do, but so much of its luck, Annette.” The tears were prickling at her eyes again. Elysian scrubbed at them with the back of her hand. She wasn’t going to cry over losing her joke of a job, taking pictures of high school football players and cat show winners for a small-town paper.
“You’ll be OK,” Annette reassured her. “You must have been paid a severance, right?”
Elysian laughed. “I worked there less than four months, ‘Nette. The veterans got a severance. My contract says that within the first six months they can terminate me for any reason, at any time.”
“And you signed it?”
“It’s not 1967 anymore,” Elysian sniped. “Of course I signed it, I was desperate for a job at that point and it looked pretty standard to me. Most jobs start with a trial period.”
“OK,” Annette held her hands up in surrender. “But you have savings. You’re always talking about how much of your pay you’re putting aside.”
Elysian stared down at her hands, letting the silence linger.
“You don’t have any savings?” Annette said, nerves starting to creep into her voice.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” Elysian admitted. “When I was unemployed before, I ended up dipping pretty deep into my savings, just to keep up to date on rent and bills. It took me a long time to find this job.”
“How deep?”
“Like… all of it deep. Plus some.” Elysian lifted her eyes to meet Annette’s. Her friend’s supportive smile had slipped away, replaced by a moue of concern. “Plus a lot.”
“So when you said you were putting money in savings, you were actually making credit card payments?”
“Yes. And I was doing well too. The debt is almost cleared, but I have zero savings.”
“Fricking…” Annette closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “OK. OK. In the morning, I’ll write to my uncle. Tell him you need a break on the rent.”
“It’s not your uncle anymore, Annette,” Elysian said. “He’s not… his grandson Bobby’s got the power of attorney.”
“Bobby? Baby Bobby?” Annette repeated, her brow furrowing.
“Bobby the second,” Elysian said. “Baby Bobby is his father.”
Annette’s face twisted. Elysian knew it was hard for her to be reminded of the way time rushed past outside the walls of their house, but she wasn’t willing to get bogged down in that tonight. Tonight her feelings could come first for once. “He’s already making noise about why I pay so little rent for such a large house. He’s not going to give me a break.”
“Ugh, that happens every time the house changes hands,” Annette said with a sigh. “No matter what they write in the will or how many times they explain it, they have to see for themselves what happens when they try to put this house on the market.”
“Well, if they evict me and get a stranger to rent the house, you’re going to end up with another roommate who puts all your furniture in the attic and decorates it in Scandinavian minimalist style. Or someone who will smoke in the kitchen. Best case scenario, someone who can’t see you and won’t make that Chicken Paprikash you like. Then you’ll have to go poltergeist on them.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get how bad the situation was right away, but there’s no need to lay it on that thick,” Annette said.
“I’m not trying to. I’m just trying to explain my thinking.” Elysian looked back down at her hands. She reached out, and her fingers brushed against the soft leather spine of her grimoire. She wasn’t actually sure that the coffee table was where she had left it last, but the book was always there when she reached out for it. “Because it’s not just me who will suffer if I go broke. You will. Whoever Bobby rents to definitely will. So if I was to give the situation a teeny, tiny magical nudge, that wouldn’t be me acting for my own gain, would it? I’d be trying to help you.”
“No.” Annette sat up. She couldn’t touch the book directly—only members of Elysian’s family could—but she could shove Elysian. Which she did, albeit jokingly. “That is an awfully fine line you’re trying to walk, Elysian,” Annette warned.
Elysian stroked the cover with her thumb, enjoying the butter-soft feel of the leather binding. She flipped it open. Every page was filled to capacity with writing—first the Latin, written by an ancestor whose name was long lost to them, then the handwriting of her fourth great-grandmother translating each page into a long dead French dialect. In the headers, footers, margins and anywhere else there was space her grandmother had added a patchwork English translation, peppered with gaps and question marks.
Elysian breathed out slowly as she flipped the pages, trying to let the book lead her to the right place.
“Jokes aside, please listen to me. Even if your main worry is what will happen to me, you’re threading a very fine needle here. You lost your mentor and inherited your grimoire years earlier than most witches do, and you don’t have the experience to tell the difference between a loophole and a noose.”
That was like a bucket of water over Elysian. She stopped flipping the pages, letting her fingers splay out over the open book like she was holding it down. Annette was right—she’d come home in a panic and tried to dive into the easy solution. Which was exactly what an unsupervised, bumbling amateur witch would do.
“What’s the damn point of magic if we can’t help our own families? Our own circle?”
The pads of her fingers began to feel warm, the sensation flowing up into her palm. She lifted it up, and square beneath her palm was an ink sketch of a woman, her head thrown back and her arms open in welcome to someone—something—just off the page.
Above the woman adhibete familiarem was inscribed in square Latin book hand. Beneath her, the familiar handwriting of Elysian’s grandmother read:
SUMMON FAMILIAR
The spell had a short blurb in Latin, which had been translated in its entirety into the forgotten French, but her grandmother had only circled a few key words and written their English equivalent above them. The words ‘support’, ‘teach’ and ‘grow’ leapt out immediately. Everything that she needed right now.
Elysian imagined coming home, walking up the front path knowing that her familiar was waiting for her. Something that would love her. Understand her. Something that would be hers even when the life she had been trying to build slipped from her fingers.
“I didn’t see that spell when we compared our grimoires,” Annette said, her brow furrowing.
“The pages must have been stuck together,” Elysian said. She stared at the sketch of the woman. It was barely more than a few lines and some hatchmarks, but she still looked so happy. Every line of her body radiated joy at welcoming her familiar. “It’s a sign, right? The grimoire wants me to cast this spell. It must be what I need.”
“Our lease doesn’t allow pets,” Annette warned.
“A familiar is not a pet,” Elysian said, offended on her still-unknown familiar’s behalf. “It will probably be something like a mountain lion, or a wild bird. Actually, it will definitely be a wild bird,” she decided. “How can the universe not send a bald eagle?”
“Maybe it’ll send a turkey,” Annette replied. “And our lease definitely doesn’t allow mountain lions.”
Elysian tsked, ignoring her in favor of running her index finger down the list of spell ingredients. “Something that existed before you were born,” she said. “That shouldn’t be hard in this house.”
Everything in the room was identical to how it had been four decades earlier. The carpet was permanently scarred at the points where the four legs of the couch had pressed into the exact same four spots for years. It would be more challenging to find something in the room that was younger than she was.
Still, a spell this momentous couldn’t be cast with a random tchotchke. After a moment’s consideration, Elysian pulled off the ring she wore on her right hand and set it on the coffee table. It wasn’t a valuable ring, with a diamond chip set in a thin gold band, but her grandmother had worn it for fifty years, from the day grandpa gave it to her to the day she pressed it into Elysian’s palm.
“Something that didn’t exist yesterday,” Annette read, leaning over Elysian’s shoulder.
Elysian laughed bitterly. She stretched out and grabbed her purse from where she’d tossed it, and pulled out an envelope. “One notice of termination, still warm from the printer.”
Maybe it wasn’t a pleasant artifact, but as a potent symbol of what had brought her to this point, it would definitely add zing.
“Something that is not yours,” Elysian read. “I have to go steal something?”
“You stole my ankle boots yesterday,” Annette suggested.
“I did not.”
“I’m not the one who always kicks her shoes off under the couch.” Annette pointed and sure enough, the polished toe of one boot was peeking out from underneath Elysian’s usual seat on the faded sofa.
“This is not a confession,” Elysian said, pulling it out and placing it beside the ring and the envelope. “Last item. Something the color of the sky. Does that mean the color the sky is right now, or the color it is usually?”’
“Well, the boots are already black,” Annette said. “So get something blue and you’re covered either way.” She frowned. “Why does this list seem so familiar?”
“Spell components can get pretty samey,” Elysian said, rifling through her purse. She found her house key, deep in the corner, electroplated in a brilliant blue. She laid it beside the boot, the four objects forming a diamond on the coffee table.
There was no incantation listed, no complex ceremonial waving of knives and candles, nothing needing to be buried under the moonlight. She had set her intention and gathered her materials. All that was left was to want it to work.
And she did want it. Right down to the tips of her toes she wanted to be that woman in the picture, arms open for whatever was coming. She breathed deeply, into the back of her chest, letting her rib cage expand like she’d been taught to in yoga. At the edge of her perception she felt the wards on the house weaken, as her spell attempt competed with them for the available power.
After a moment she sighed. No eagle came swooping through the window. No mountain lion, either. Not even a stray cat or neighborhood dog.
“Maybe you should try it without the key,” Annette suggested. “Maybe you’re right, and the fourth item is supposed to be black.”
“Forget it,” Elysian said, swiping her ring off the table and sliding it back on her finger. “Half my spells don’t work, why would this one be any different?”
“You can try it again in the morning,” Annette said.
“You’re right,” Elysian said, though she wasn’t going to try casting the spell again. She pushed herself up to her feet, suddenly feeling the weight of a long, emotional day crash down on her. “I should get some sleep.”
“Put those boots back in the attic first,” Annette said.