Page 53 of Strange Lights

Project Leash & Collar

Adele gives me my first big solo project the summer I’m twenty. It isn’t driven by trust in my abilities, but rather my increasing desire for more in life. In short, it’s a manipulation to make sure I have something to keep me occupied, something to coerce me into staying instead of straying off into the real world full of appealing freedoms and far from forced responsibilities.

Lycanthropy. I have to modify the lycanthropy virus or find some other means to create a werewolf that can be controlled and directed. Put a metaphorical collar and a leash on them, Adele says. What a pesky thing free will is for someone like Adele. What exactly she wants from these werewolves is a mystery to me. An army of creatures for intimidation is my best guess.

But a small voice in my head tells me I am far from uncovering my mother’s secrets. I’ve started to question her motives more the older I get. Why does Agency 51 exist in the first place? To find, control, utilize magical creatures, beings, and items is the official line. My mother has always kept her secrets close to her chest. She rarely lets down her walls, and I doubt anyone knows more than a tiny fraction of her secrets, her dreams, her desires. I’m probably the closest thing she has to a confidante, and that’s saying something.

The absent reason, the missing why, always bothers me. I worry what I don’t know might come back to haunt me someday. But also, I don’t want to look too closely for fear of finding something that bites back. I’m guilty of sticking my head in the sand.

My first test subjects are werewolves who started as wolves. Although I learn loads in the course of my research and experimentation, Adele remains dissatisfied. I engineer a new strain of lycanthropy, aiming for a virus with a higher spreading rate, one that remains active for longer. Mostly just to see if I can. I’m bored and rather directionless, following Adele’s vague instructions. Even though it doesn’t do everything exactly the way I hoped it would, it’s a feat of science and magic intertwined in a way I’ve never read about. But I try not to feel cocky about achieving it, since Adele only scoffs and minimizes.

“The things I’ve seen magic do, Regina, the scale is impossible for you to fathom. This is small. I need you to think bigger.”

All I wanted was a Good job, kid.

Zara, at least, is an easily impressed audience. She follows me like a small and slightly inept intern any chance she gets, asking question after question and doing any grunt work I throw her way. I alternate between snappish and unfairly annoyed with her constant presence and grudging awe that the baby whose diapers I could swear I changed only days ago is somehow so independent.

There’s never a shortage of test subjects, and I never ask too many questions about that part of the process. Where the infected wolves go afterward, for example. Zara, who rarely keeps her mouth shut, doesn’t ask either. She sulks in her room for a day or two each time we change test subjects, before she reappears and we pretend like nothing happened.

I want to create a vaccine and treatment. The delay annoys Adele, who tells me to leave off this unnecessary step, but I work on it secretly. The virus burns itself out in wolves, but it doesn’t in humans. The vaccine isn’t perfect, doesn’t work on my own engineered strain of lycanthropy⁠—a strain proving more difficult to control than I anticipated. It mutates on its own, staying two steps ahead of my progress. It’s a fiddly process involving a bit of genetic engineering and a heavy dose of magic, and I’m not satisfied with my results.

The majority of my werewolf project so far has me hunched over books while Zara distracts me with impatient sighing and annoying questions. Magic has fascinated me since I learned of its existence, since I discovered some people have a pathway to access magic running through their veins. I’ve spent most of my life knee deep in obscure books learning about it; our library is extensive.

“You’re better at magic than Mother. Better than me too. Do you have more of it?” Zara asks me. I have a natural knack for accessing magic, and it helps that I find tethering as instinctive as breathing.

“You never have magic. You’re simply the conduit to channel it. It takes practice, like anything else,” I answer vaguely, flipping a page of the book I’m studying. In essence, magic is about accessing an energy that already exists in nature.

“Well then, how do I channel as much as you?” Zara asks. “And don’t say ‘practice’; I already practice a lot.”

“Certain spells and rituals developed over millennia can help. You can find them in books, you know.”

I myself rarely need spells. But I’m always looking and learning anyway. The trick is sorting through the chaff and finding the things that actually work. Unquantifiable knowledge is lost to time, facts allowed to slip from collective memory. Additional information lost to translation, like an endless game of telephone. And repeated discrediting campaigns from nonbelievers further muddle fact and fiction. Zara has a lot less patience for research than I do.

Right on cue, Zara groans. “I don’t want to look through dusty old books all day just to do a piece of magic that takes five minutes. Can’t I tether more people? You use me all the time. Why doesn’t it work the other way around?”

Magic needs tethers, people who keep the magic user grounded and linked to this reality. Adele doesn’t believe in using tethers, dislikes them, which has conversely led me to researching them intensely. She has no idea we cling onto her out of some sense of guilt or a pathetic desire for parental love. Adele believes in working alone, which frightens me. The deeper I delve into magic history and experimentation, as I study and learn the consequences and dangers for those who push too far, the more I think she’s overconfident, and the more I fear abandoning her. I don’t think the fact I use magic with exceptional ease and could probably tether an acquaintance halfway across the globe is a coincidence. Adele doesn’t know I use Meredith and Zara as tethers, that they use me, and none of us are stupid enough to tell her. She’s certainly never realized what the three of us do for her, how we save her time and time again with our safety lines. Adele may be awful, but she’s still my mother, and I can’t seem to cut that tie between us.

“It does work that way,” I say slowly. To an extent. I haven’t told her I suspect that my tethering abilities actually do run deeper than most. “But there are limitations. Drawbacks. If you’re depending entirely on others for your strength, what happens when they aren’t there?”

“You always are.”

I swallow hard. “But what if I’m far away?”

“Why would you ever be far from me?”

She doesn’t remember the moment I tried to leave her behind. I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood. “Of course not,” I say. I clear my throat before I continue. “But magic works in pieces. You should learn about them all.”

Zara stares at me expectantly.

“All right, all right, you win.” I close the book and give her my full attention. “Class is in session.

“Imagine your brain like a house. A house built in a metaphorical realm, surrounded by great swirling streams of raw energy. That’s magic. To use it, you open that door inside your mind, let it flow in and through you. Direct it where and how you want. All it takes is practice and visualization.”

“That’s basic, Reggie. I can do that part already. I want to know how to do it better.”

“I told you already. Spells help you control the flow. You have to put in the work to find them and learn them. Without them, it’s like trying to put out a flame with a bucket of water without knowing if you’re dealing with a raging wildfire or a single ember. You can get the job done without spells, but it’s messy and unrefined.”

“Are you calling me messy and unrefined?”