Page 27 of No Charm Done

“Are you guys—” Diego started.

“—going over there?” Hector finished.

Luna looked around thoughtfully. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I think we are.”

“Cool,” the twins said. “Can we come?”

“Absolutely not,” Luna and Elias replied.

They’ve got us doing it too, he thought wryly.

The twins shrugged and returned to their ice cream, as if the whole conversation had been a mildly interesting diversion.

As they walked away, toward the distant glow of Park Avenue, Elias could hear the boys resuming their conversation behind them:

“Do you think they’re⁠—”

“—going to a costume party too?”

“Maybe. That lady was pretty⁠—”

“—weird herself.”

Weird. Yeah, that was one word for it. Here he was, walking through a blacked-out New York City, fifty years in his future, with a witch on his arm. This was shaping up to be the most delightful evening he’d had in over a century.

* * *

They’d been ambling through the outrageous July heat for about twenty minutes and Elias was starting to recognize the neighborhood. Greenwich Village was a bohemian enclave in his time, too: artists and radicals, cheap rent and cheaper wine. But this version was grittier, more desperate. The graceful buildings he remembered were now covered in graffiti, their stoops littered with trash. Where once he’d seen well-dressed rebels sipping absinthe in cafés, now he saw what appeared to be opium addicts nodding off in doorways.

Christ, he thought, what happened to this place?

Just outside Washington Square Park, they came across a naked man crouched beside a fire hydrant. He was surrounded by what looked like the contents of someone’s junk drawer: bottle caps, brass tokens, a broken watch, and numerous pencil stubs were arranged in a careful pattern around his feet. He was muttering under his breath while moving his hands in elaborate gestures over the collection.

Elias slowed down his pace to watch. “What do you reckon? One of our kind?” Poor bastard looked like he was trying to divine tomorrow’s weather from bottle caps. “Or just another New York loony?”

Luna shot him a look. “You keep saying that. ‘Our kind.’”

“So?”

“So? There’s no ‘our’ here. Witches and magicians aren’t the same. We’re not allies; we’re not friends. We’re completely different species.”

Species? He had to bite back a laugh. This gal was pretty as a picture and sharp as a tack, but her prejudices ran deeper than the Chicago River. “Species? Really? Last I checked, we’re all human beings who happen to possess magical abilities. That’s a pretty significant commonality.”

“Hardly.” Luna picked her way carefully around a pile of garbage bags. “Witches have innate powers. We’re born with it. Magicians are just . . . performers. Card tricks and smoke machines.”

Now that was genuinely annoying. “Oh, come off it, sweetheart. You’re too smart to really believe that. Some magicians are fakes, sure. I got my doubts about ole Maximillian the Magnificent, trust me. Some magicians are just palookas doing card tricks at birthday parties. But the council that sentenced me to the Void? Those weren’t party entertainers, kiddo. They were powerful enough to tear a hole in reality and stuff me right through it.”

“Well . . . yeah, some magicians have real power. But it’s still different from what we do.”

“How? How is it different?”

“Because . . .” He could see she was struggling now, grasping for words to explain something she’d apparently never thought about in quite this way before. “Because that’s just how it is. Witches and magicians have been enemies forever. Since the beginning of time.”

“Since the beginning of time?” Elias laughed, but not unkindly. “Come, now. This feud started somewhere, at some point, for some reason. But what?”

“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted.

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That you don’t know?”