On the Verge (A Charmed Life Book 1) (30 page)

Tracy looked quickly back to Nick, who had a surprised expression on his face.  He looked back at Tracy with a curious expression, and seemed to find an answer to his unspoken question in her face.  His face grew amused, and he nodded to her, then turned towards Jacob, walking up behind him to clasp him on the shoulder.

“You can be such a girl sometimes, Jacob.  Why don't we just head out and you can buy me a beer in celebration of your victory?”

Jacob looked at Nick, confused.  “Um … yeah! Sure!” he said quickly, then grinned at Tracy, a look of stunned bewilderment, then disbelieving relief on his face.  “That'd be great!” He straightened up a little and cleared his throat.  “I mean, cool, man, let's go.”

Nick let out a roar of laughter as he slapped Jacob hard on the back.  Jacob stumbled forward a couple steps, then gave a little half-hearted laugh of his own, caught up in Nick's enthusiasm.  He turned to look at Tracy.  “You coming?”

Tracy took a deep breath, then nodded.  “Don't want to disappoint my adoring fans,” she said regretfully.  “Besides, you're my ride.”

The crowd in the lobby was thankfully smaller than Tracy had expected, from how Nick had been talking - but still, over a dozen people wanted to shake her hand and congratulate her.  Her stomach churned from all the attention for something she really didn't want to think about, and the words “I just got lucky,” kept tumbling from her lips, which the excited little crowd promptly dismissed.

Finally, they were through - it probably had been only a few minutes, but it felt like ages to Tracy.  The sun outside was still high - it'd only been a couple of hours since she'd gone in.  Half the day was still left to her.  “Hey, Jacob?” she asked softly, “I'm not in the mood to go drinking…  could you just shadow-step me to my apartment?”

Jacob nodded, his hand clasping her shoulder lightly.  “Hey, Tracy,” he quietly murmured, “You did well today.  And I'm not talking about you winning.”

She nodded silently to him, then gave him a small hug before smiling softly to Tyra and Nick.  “Seeya, Slate.  Seeya, Obsidian.”

They smiled and murmured back, “Later, Rose.”

The shadows lifted up around her, coiling and encasing her.  It wasn't cold, but it felt like it should be cold, like a cloud passing in front of the sun.  She closed her eyes and stepped forward, and felt a smooth rushing sensation, a faint twisting motion of the world turning around her, and opened her eyes to find herself in her apartment with Nameless calmly sitting on her dinner table and staring at her.

She smiled and paid some attention to Nameless, but didn't stay long.  Instead, she picked up her purse and transferred her wallet to it from the sports bag, got her keys, and headed down to the garage to get her truck.  She felt like she was in limbo as she drove through the streets, watching over her own shoulder with a surreal sensation, not even aware any longer of the pressure of other magic-users around her.  Her head was spinning too much with all that had happened in the past hour.  It was forever and a few minutes when she was knocking on a door and Sing was opening it to smile at her.

She fell into his arms, sobbing, and startled though he was, he held her close and made soothing noises, drawing her into his apartment and closing the door behind him.

The lights flickered, hummed, buzzed, but Tracy didn't hear it anymore.  She'd woven a shield of air specifically to get rid of the buzzing noise - a complex little magic to set up, but didn't take much effort to maintain.  The light they made was harsh and unflattering, and there was little she could do about that, but Chad's schedule had gotten shifted to half the room's relief, and tomorrow and for the rest of the week, the office would be using desk lamps instead of the overhead lights.  She was looking forward to that.

She leaned back to look at her white board, scoured clean and with a new inspirational quote written on it every week.  This week, it read, 
It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. --Aristotle Onassis
  Tracy smiled softly, and turned her attention back to the phone.  “I can do that, sir, but you will have to wait quite a while more.  If you'll give me a chance, I might be able to save you a lot of time.”

There was some angry shouting, and Tracy nodded.  “Of course, Sir.  I'll put you into the queue, then.”  She cut off the next protest with a quick press of the transfer button, and sighed.  “Just hurting themselves,” she said to herself, and checked the clock.  Just about time to leave.  Not enough time to handle a full call.  She triggered a break on the phone, shunting her next call to the next available rep.

“Another one for the board?” John asked.

Tracy gave a wry little smile.  The words hadn't changed, but the sentiment was different.  “Yeah, gotta reference the wisdom.”  She looked at the board, biting at her lower lip as she pondered the quote.  What light?  In smaller text under the main quote, there were a lot of small words listed.  Jewelry, charm bracelet, good food, time with friends.  Renne Faire and her truck.  She'd already used all the easy things that inspired her and cheered her up, and it was the end of the day and she was feeling tired and brain-dead.  Impulsively, she just drew a silly little kitty-face on the board.  It was juvenile, but it reminded her of Nameless.

Time to go!  She gathered up her things and stuffed them into her purse, filled out her time sheet for the day, then hit the button on her computer for clocking out.  Around her, half the room was standing up and stretching, working out stiff and aching legs after hours of sitting on the phone, and the exodus began.  She was so glad they'd updated the time tracking system - now that everyone had the time clock program on their computer, there wasn't the huge pile-up in the lobby as everyone waited in line to use the single station for clocking out.

She was using her pale green windbreaker today, and even that was overkill as she stepped outside into the warm spring morning.  It was more habit than anything else.  The tiny trees lining the street were budding with bright green buds, and the air held that damp feel laden heavily with all the living, verdant scents of flowers and fresh growth, and new grass.  Tracy's bus stop was to the left, but she turned right instead, towards the park a couple blocks down.  This was where the scents were coming from, and she absolutely loved walking in the park in the spring, luxuriating in the burst of new bloom.  Every day seemed a bit different as the park changed and grew lush and green.

While normally it might still be a bit cool for her, now the sun was warming her wonderfully, especially in the thin windbreaker.  She slipped it from her shoulders and tied it round her waist, then hiked her purse on her shoulders and smiled to everyone she passed.

The park was as wonderful as she was hoping, though the soil was fairly wet from recent spring rains.  The smells were rich and wonderful, and she loved the people-watching she could do in the park.  There were kids emerging from the winter months to swarm the jungle gym, with mothers sitting nearby on a bench, talking with each other.  The joggers, rusty after months of winter, but exuberant to take advantage of the lovely weather, made their way through the park with an excess of energy and many rests.               

She left the mostly-dry concrete path when she got to the river running down the middle of the public park, turning off it to follow along the rock-lined riverbank.  Ironically, staying close to the river gave her the driest shortcut through the forested area, the stones giving excellent drainage, and gave her a moment of privacy after a long day of dealing with people.  Despite her love of people-watching, she was grateful for that illusion of being alone for a moment, all the sounds of the city muffled and distant.

It was a peaceful little walk, didn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes, and she was through the park and stepping up to a nondescript little three-story building with apartments on the upper two floors and a used book store on the first floor.  She circled around back, went down a set of stairs to an unmarked basement, and pulled out her key ring to get the right key.

Inside was a short hallway, and she took a deep breath as she walked in, let it out as mist coiled from her parted lips.  “Ahhhhh…” she said, and let a wind follow her in, bringing fresh air into the slightly musty basement along with her.  Several heads looked up as she came in, including Tyra's.  “Hi, Tracy!” cried the black woman.  “Nice t'see y'!”

Tracy smiled warmly and strode past her, holding out her fist.  Tyra held up her own fist, and the two both made a faint explosion noise, splaying their fingers when their fists struck.

“How was th' nine to five?” Tyra drawled.

“Ah, about normal.  Nothing out of the ordinary.  You got anything tonight?”

Tyra shook her head.  “Gotta show up, but there's no jobs scheduled, so Ah'm prolly just goin' t'be bored out of mah skull.”

“You get dinner already?”

“Yeah.  Pizza 'n salad in t'other room.  Y'all owe me ten.”

Tracy nodded confirmation as she smiled and chirped a happy, “Thank you!”

She didn't usually prefer pizza - too greasy, usually - but Tyra's favorite pizza was a chicken bacon pizza with alfredo sauce from a little mom-and-pop place she knew, and it was absolutely delicious.  She couldn't chow down just yet, though - she contented herself with a quick, light salad as a snack, then ducked into the locker room to change.  It was a bland and sterile changing room, a bit smaller than her high school gym locker room, but otherwise having the exact same feel.  She unlocked her own locker, where she stored her things while she was at work, and quickly changed into a spare set of workout clothes, then stepped through the far door to go into the arena.

She'd gotten caught up in Jacob's view of the community - filled with lords and hunters, fights and politics, that she'd started to make assumptions that it was all like that.  Pax, Lord Brin, Slate, none of them had thought to tell her otherwise.  When Jacob had casually mentioned 'other arenas,' she'd assumed were all the same as the first - big, office-like dome building with an impressive coliseum contained within, where deadly battles took place on a daily basis.

What she'd missed is that Jacob had thrown himself directly into the midst of all the politics and combat by joining the hunters right away.  There was a reason his focus was a knife, after all.  When she'd realized one of the arenas was close to her workplace, she'd dropped in and was surprised to find that it was tiny, subdued, and entirely unimpressive.  The arena proper was just a plain little room with white-painted concrete walls and padded floors and cameras in the corners of the room.  There was no fancy sci-fi transparent aluminum to protect bleachers - it was a projection TV back in the main room where Tyra had been lounging, with some ratty but comfy old couches to sit on.

And the fighters who contested here very rarely ran the risk of slaying one another.  A few bruises, maybe, and even then only if very unlucky.  The matches she'd watched here were more like SCA rattan fights than any serious attempt to hurt each other - mild little elemental attacks against carefully donned armor with a point-based scoring system … she'd had a very angry discussion with Jacob when she'd found out about that.  He'd known about it, of course - it'd just never occurred to him to let her know such a system was available for her to use.

She wasn't here for a fight today.  She was just here for a safe place to practice - somewhere she didn't have to worry about wrecking anything or having anyone outside the community see her.  She was wearing her keiko-gi, as she usually did.  She'd gotten into the habit of thinking of her magic and her martial arts as one and the same, and one practice often flowed into another - though at the Aikido classes she had to be very careful not to let herself slip.  Control, again.  That seemed to be the watchword in every aspect of her life.

She straightened up, tucked her hands just under her diaphragm, and took a deep breath in, then slowly out, her breath wisping from between her lips in that soft, cool mist.  Though she was ready to use her magic, she just held it in place, for the moment, and shifted to the first stance for her Tai Chi, the slow, simple movements very calming for her, letting her gather her mind and loosen her body, to feel where she was tight after a full day of sitting behind a phone.  Each movement flowed into the next, her feet making soft whispers of noise as they slid across the exercise mats. 

Her first time through the motions, as usual, she focused on the basic structure.  She was overly aware of which muscles were tight from her day of sitting, overly aware of how stiff she felt.  The second time through, she flowed more easily, her muscles loosening up, sliding into the movements more naturally.  And as she started into the forms for the third time, she finally released the magic.

One thing she had found as Spring had come was that it got easier to create water and ice.  Water didn't come from nowhere - she'd been pulling water from herself and from the air around her.  As the dry winter air shifted to the moist air laden with Spring showers, water had suddenly been in abundance for her to use.

She lifted her hand before her, and a streak of frost etched itself on the concrete wall.  Her foot slid in a half-circle across the floor, and frost trailed behind it, etching a single arc of frost from her big toe.  The mist sliding from between her lips with each breath lifted around her, not fading away as swiftly as it should, and it swirled with her motions as she slowly stepped through the empty room, tracing patterns across the floor and wall with the movements of her hands.  As the temperature dropped, the mist started trailing from her fingers, too, leaving floating patterns in the air of graceful arcs and curves that she could pass through without disturbing them.

From the outside, it seemed very simple.  Tiny bits of ice and frost and mist, simple patterns traced from her fingers and toes - but Tracy knew how very delicate this kind of control was.  As the patterns became more complex, she had to spend more and more will towards keeping them from spreading, keeping ice from forming where she didn't want it -  but the largest difficulty was the floating mist.  She had to keep it in place against the faint breezes, against her moving through it - reforming it behind her even as the pattern became more and more intricate and involved.  It's not like she or the mist were actually intangible, after all!

She flowed through the Tai Chi forms without thinking, now, guided by muscle memory of thousands of times through the forms.  Her focus was mainly on the magic, on incorporating it into her physical movements - a new layer on top of the physical.  When she'd started learning Tai Chi, she'd just been mimicking stances.  Then she'd become more aware of her balance, and how she needed to have that balance during each stance.  She'd learned how her breathing affected her movement, and dealt with the bizarre concept of needing to practice how to breathe.  Then, she'd built upon that balance between the stances, flowing from one to another.  Every time she'd thought she'd figured it out, there'd been another layer to expand upon.  This was just more of the same - it felt so natural just to incorporate her inner magic into these ancient movements.

Like Tai Chi itself, the way she used the magic wasn't directly applicable to fighting.  The control it taught, the balance, the focus - that was the goal.  Slow, delicate, gentle - but the simple stances formed the foundation of any combat stance.  Focus on every step, every breath, every thought, every emotion.  Her spirit sang with the calm contentment of simply being, the art of movement, the wonder of the magic.

And then she was done.  The pattern was too complex, she'd done too many repetitions, and it was starting to fray around her.  Delicate patterns broke apart as her arm swung through them, trailing behind her wrist and hand.  She finished off the forms one last time, letting go of the mists so that they could swirl and dance with her, then brought herself up to the original stance, standing straight as she brought her hands in to her sides.  As she did so, the ice on the walls flowed down to the floor, the ice on the floor flowed towards her feet, and leaped up into the air before her to gather together, spiraling inwards to create a sphere of ice for her to reach out and take in her fingers.

The first time she'd gathered the ice to her, she'd been surprised at how much of it there was, how heavy it had been, all collected at once.  Now, she was ready - she held it partly with her fingers, partly with her will.  The ice was cool against her skin, but as she'd soon come to learn, not truly cold.  The ice didn't numb her or freeze her, and it didn't grow more uncomfortable to hold over time.  She lifted it up to her face, looked into the sphere, and smiled softly to see all the tiny crystalline structures inside.  Different, every time … like herself.  Changing in tiny ways every day, but still basically the same overall.