the waist. The dark skinny jeans from an era long gone were snug, but not enough to make me go look for a different pair. Underneath the sickness, she was a pretty girl, not that she seemed to notice. I didn’t comment as I stepped around the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. I gathered all the fruit on the counter and pulled out a cutting board. Nowadays, anything fresh was hard to come by. When I did get it, it was so expensive I could only afford it after it was past its prime, and the rich people no longer wanted it.
“What type of magic do you have?” I asked, cutting the inedible pieces away from the fruit. Nathalie came around the edge of the counter and crossed her arms over her chest, then leaned her hip against it.
There were three types of magic that witches and warlocks possessed.
White. Black. Gray.
None of them were better or worse than others, contrary to what some white magic users may have claimed. They didn’t decide your power level, it merely guided in the realm of what you were good at.
White magic excelled in healing, potions, and most nature magic. In short, they specialized at harmony. Their magic naturally gravitated toward it. They worked well with others. Their magic played ‘nice’.
Black did not. It was explosive. Aggressive. True black magic witches were rarer than white. They were inclined to attempt summonings and necromancy because their magic was more of a parasite than anything. It sought control.
Gray was somewhere in the middle.
In truth, it didn’t matter what she was, but if I was going to be working with her, I needed to have some concept of what she was capable of, beyond the information she could provide about the Antares Coven.
“Gray,” she answered. “But it’s weak.”
“Define weak.” I tossed the fruit in a blender and added a splash of water. The grinding took all of thirty seconds. She waited patiently, only speaking once I turned it off.
“Le Fay is largely a black magic line. One of the few still around. Because I’m gray, that was viewed as flexible. My family thought I had the potential to be good at both, if not great—and that was acceptable.” As she spoke, I pulled two plastic cups out and topped them both with the fruit smoothie. I slid one across the counter and took a rather large gulp of the other. “At least until I proved abysmal at all of it. I can’t draw on nature. I’m a terrible healer. When I partook in a summoning to raise an aunt that died in the Magic Wars, I managed to raise her body and banish her spirit . . .” She shook her head at the memory. “My magic doesn’t play nicely with others, but spells still go awry when I work alone.”
I took another long swallow from my smoothie and then lifted my eyes to her.
“You managed to bind me in the alley,” I pointed out.
She sniffed. “That was mostly Nathan, he was my mentor in the Antares Coven. My parents had me paired with him because he was good with fighting incantations, and they hoped he’d grow to like me.”
“Hoping to pawn you off for marriage?”
“Yup.”
“He’s probably dead, you know,” I said, then took another long drink of liquid fruit. “And if he’s not, I have to hunt him down. You can’t stop me.”
“I won’t,” she said solemnly. “I know you might find this hard to believe, but I don’t care if they die. Maybe that makes me a traitor. Maybe I deserve to be excommunicated over it . . .” She ran her long nails over the plastic countertop. “But it’s a dog-eat-dog world, you know? Everyone for themselves. As long as you have my back, I don’t really give a damn what happens to the rest of Antares. The world’s probably better off without them, anyway.”
I dipped my head in acknowledgement.
“So, if you suck at all magic, what are you good at?”
“Remembering things. I have an eidetic memory, and thanks to my family’s interesting version of an education, I do know most spells, curses, hexes, potions—you name it.”
“So, knowledge, in essence?” I asked. No judgement in my voice, though she clearly expected it.
“Yes . . .” Her voice trailed. “I know it’s probably not what you were hoping for.”
“Yes and no,” I replied, turning away to rummage through my cabinets for food. “You having some sort of magic could be useful.