Page 4 of A Winding Wave of Magic
2
MAN OF THE CROWD
…the world seems full of good men—even if there are monsters in it.
— BRAM STOKER,DRACULA
Normally, I loved Boston in the snow. Snow meant fewer people who might bump into me along with every random thought flying through their heads. Snow meant quiet, a cloak that hushed the memories seething from every surface, every sidewalk, every patch of land in a city that had been continuously inhabited for at least seven thousand years.
Today, however, it just slowed me down.
By the time I jogged into Gasson Hall, one of the several neo-Gothic buildings at the center of Boston College’s campus atop Chestnut Hill, I was a mess, earning the baleful stares of the portraits of the college’s former presidents lining the walls of the meeting room.
All of them male. All of them priests. All of them men who very well might have cheerfully burned my ancestors alive if they had lived a few centuries earlier.
Professor James was chatting with the guest of honor next to several stacks of chairs waiting to be arranged around the room.
“Professor,” I called out. “Dr. Cardy. I am so sorry I’m late. My alarm didn’t go off. Please accept my apologies.”
Overkill? Probably, since I was maybe ten minutes late. Even so, Professor James’s glare matched the presidential portraits as he crossed the room to meet me. “How nice of you to join us at last, Ms. Whelan.”
“I amsosorry, Professor.” One boot was completely soaked from stepping in an ice-hidden curbside puddle, and the backs of my legs were splattered with slush. I dropped my bag near the lectern, then removed my coat and draped it over the top, but kept on my gloves.
Professor James stared as he often did whenever I showed up to our meetings with my hands covered. “Still?” It was a subject that had come up before. “Aren’t you hot in those things?”
I didn’t answer as I used a paper napkin to wipe snow off my boots.
“It’s distracting,” he continued in the Hepburn-esque New England drawl that only people over the age of eighty seemed to have anymore. “You must know that.”
I frowned. It was a quirk, like Aja had said. We all had them. Academia drew oddballs like moths to a dusty, library-filled flame, and nowhere more than the Department of Irish Studies. Aja only wore one pair of shoes—green combat boots with bright pink laces. Another professor in the department regularly colored his combover with black spray paint, and yet another had nothing in their office but a terrarium that was home to a human skull.
Sometimes, though, I wondered if Professor James knew my secret. That my obsession with hand accessories wasn’t about vanity, but protection. From him. And from myself.
I rubbed my hands together but made no move to remove the black wool. “Eczema.”
He scowled. “Yes. Well. Come and meet our guest.”
I followed him to where Rachel Cardy was examining the portrait of Jeremiah O’Connor, the fourth president of BC.
“Dr. Cardy. It’s an honor.” I offered my hand, glove on, to shake hers, bracing myself for the impact.
The hard truth was, the gloves didn’t always work. Nor did coats, hats, jeans, shoes, or other items of clothing.
According to Gran, seers sensed meaning, which was why some thoughts or memories spoke louder than others. If something mattered to a person, whether it was as small as a glance or as massive as a war, that meaning left its mark. On a bench. A desk. A piece of paper. A scrap of clothing.
Those echoes couldusuallybe muted by more barriers that didn’t carry any history in them. Leather worked reasonably well. Wool was a close second. Cotton, linen, and other natural fibers came in as distant thirds.
But even on good days, these barriers only did so much. If the day was bad, or by some mistake, if I happened to touch an actual person in the midst of their actual meaningful experience? Gloves or not, I Saw everything. And it was like walking into a tsunami.
Still, I’d face a mental tidal wave as many times as it took today to get back into my professor’s good graces. My escape to quiet rural bliss depended on it.
Dr. Cardy shook my hand, and a summer breeze blew through my body. The room smelled of lilacs, despite it being February, overlaying a symphony of emotions that somehow worked in concert instead of against each other. Generalwarmthas well as the typically magnanimous curiosity of her kind emanated from the tiny, bright-faced woman.
And what do we have here?she thought.
Dr. Cardy was obviously a siren, an energy magnet with the ability to transform potential into reality through passion. Siren power was a constant source of frustration to other fae for its unpredictable and intangible qualities. Shifters could sense it, but not recreate it; seers could See it, but not firmly separate it from other emotions or thoughts; sorcerers could feel it, but couldn’t manipulate it or anything touching it.
Siren ingenuity and innovation were unmatched, and they tended to become celebrities of culture and art (or at the very least, their muses). At the same time, they were more mercurial than the rest of us, with contagious moods that were often responsible for crowd-swaying moments in history, from mob hysteria to the greatest civil rights marches.
