Page 8 of Magic for Nothing

Of course, if the Covenant came for us tomorrow, all the thinking ahead in the world wouldn’t save us. Uncle Ted and Artie are noncombatants. Elsie can hold her own in a bar fight, but not much more than that. Dad, Aunt Jane, Mom, and me would be the only ones prepared to fight. We couldn’t stand against Covenant numbers. Calling Alex and Verity home, even with their respective significant others, wouldn’t tip the balance in our favor. About the only thing that could help would be—

The front door opened. The heavily tattooed, short-haired woman in the doorway beamed at me, her frilled apron entirely at odds with her combat boots, cut-offs, and tattered khaki shirt.

“Grandma!” Elsie and I broke into a run at the same time, and we both slammed into my maternal grandmother. Alice laughed, putting her arms around us and squeezing us tight.

There’s something about grandma hugs that puts the world into perspective. Alice held us for a count of ten, long enough that it qualified as a good, solid embrace, but short enough that we weren’t blocking the doorway long enough to get yelled at. Then she let go, stepping back so we could come inside.

“Hello, my darling girls,” she said, still beaming. “Oh, Annie, haven’t you grown? Elsie, dearest, I love your hair.”

“I’d have dyed the tips red if I’d known you were coming,” said Elsie, almost shyly.

Alice beamed. “It looks lovely as it is. Now come on, both of you. We have cookies, cocoa, and battle planning to get to.”

“Yes, Grandma,” we chorused dutifully, and filed inside. I hung back, trying to get a good look at the tattoos on her arm and shoulder. They change every time I see her, and while some of the same designs show up over and over again, they’re almost never in the same place. I’d been studying Grandpa Thomas’ books as closely as I could, and I was starting to puzzle out the meanings behind some of the tattoos. They’re not just art. They’re pictographic representations of the spells and runes in his notes, inked on flesh and turned into something practical.

My grandmother being a living spellbook isn’t nearly as weird as the fact that she looks roughly the same age as Elsie. She spends most of her time in parallel dimensions, searching for her husband. She ages—I saw her looking almost as old as Mom once—and then she somehow runs the clock backward, keeping herself young enough for the strain she puts her body under. The rest of the family is pretty sure Grandpa Thomas is long dead, although no one wants to say it to her face.

I’m still reserving judgment. After all, if she can survive out there, maybe so could he.

We stepped into the living room. The mice on the coffee table started cheering, causing the people who were already there to stop what they were doing and turn to look. And the kids I used to go to school with thought their families were weird.

“HAIL!” shouted the mice. “HAIL THE RETURN OF THE PRECISE AND POLYCHROMATIC PRIESTESSES!”

“Oh, goodie,” said Elsie.

“HAIL THE GATHERING OF THE FIVE PRIESTESSES!” continued the mice.

“At least they can count?” I said.

“HAIL!” said the mice.

Elsie groaned.

Aeslin mice look basically like normal, nonintelligent, nonreligious rodents. They have a tendency to clothe themselves in scraps of paper, candy wrappers, fabric, and whatever else they can find, and their front paws are more like hands, but apart from that, if seen from a distance, there’s really no way to tell the Aeslin mice from something the cat might drag in. Until they open their mouths. Aeslin mice are highly prone to religious mania, and like to share their worshipful joy at every possible turn. Our colony worships the family. So yeah, that’s fun.

“Did Elsie fill you in?” asked my father. There was a large whiteboard in the center of the room. He was standing next to it, a marker in his hand. It looked like they were trying to work out what sort of resources we had available to us in case of an attack that didn’t give us time to call in reinforcements. The little columns were dauntingly short.

“She said there’d been an attack.” I walked over to the stairs, throwing my gym bag as far up the steps as it would go. “On a scale of one to ‘we’re all about to die,’ is there any chance I can stop to take a shower?”

“Not just yet, dear,” said my grandmother, appearing at my elbow and guiding me toward the rest of the family. “We need to talk to you.”

I blinked at her before turning to really look at the front room. Dad was next to the whiteboard; Artie was on the couch with Uncle Ted, looking like he was about to be physically ill. Mom and Aunt Jane had set up a folding card table, and were drawing on what looked like a map of North America. Their placement coincidentally put as much distance as possible between Grandma and Aunt Jane. They don’t get along. It looked pretty normal for an impromptu family gathering . . . except for Artie. He never looked that upset unless Sarah was in danger, or he had to leave the house and interact with girls he wasn’t related to.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “What’s going on?”

Mom and Dad exchanged a look. She shook her head.

“Oh, no,” she said. “This is your plan. This is your fault. You get to be the one who tries to sell it as a good idea, instead of a good way to get our baby killed.”

“Uh, hello?” I said. “I’m standing right here.”

Dad grimaced and said nothing.

“Annie, look at me,” said my grandmother. I obligingly turned to look at her. “Who do I look like?”

“That’s easy,” I said. “Every other woman in the family.” If there’s a Healy mold, it was struck using my grandmother as the model. She’s short, blonde, and curvy—just like her daughter, my sister, and my cousin. Even Mom and Shelby fit that general description, like Dad and Alex both went out and found girls who reminded them of dear old mom. It’s a little creepy, if I think about it too hard: family resemblances are one thing, but I like to think a family should have slightly more genetic variation than your average hive of bees.

“That’s right. Your grandfather always called it the ‘Carew look’— said we took after my grandmother’s side of the family. My mother was also short and blonde, so I suppose we started reinforcing it early.” Alice reached out and cupped my chin in her hand. I would have pulled away from almost anyone else, including Mom, but something about the sadness in her eyes kept me from moving. “You, though . . . you look just like your grandfather.”