Ruby had the idea—help the magic users in New Orleans survive Hurricane Katrina. Pretty charitable for a tiny cat. Winston thought he knew why. The southeast Asia tsunami scared her, made her realize her home on the Oregon Coast was vulnerable to natural disaster, too.
But when her offer of help turns into a rescue, Ruby watches helplessly as other familiars move into her little house. And Winston expects her to rebel, because she is, after all, a cat…
“Disaster Relief,” by World Fantasy Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook through various online retailers here.
Disaster Relief
A Winston & Ruby Story
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Winston’s unusual sense of charity began late on Christmas night 2004. He and Ruby, his familiar, were watching television in the living room, Winston slouched on his couch, Ruby curled at his side. She had her tail wrapped around her small body, and her yellow eyes focused on the roaring fire.
They had exchanged a few gifts—he had made her a cat-sized box bed out of sandalwood, and she had given him half a dozen mice in various states of decay. He’d known what it had cost her to give them up—she’d probably been saving them for that proverbial rainy day—so he’d thanked her and placed them in a drawer to deal with later. He knew better than to give them back. He’d tried that with the dead rabbit on his birthday, and had hurt her feelings so badly that she hadn’t talked with him for nearly a week.
He was surfing, looking for something, anything, A Christmas Story, the horrible live-action version of the Grinch, when he saw the Breaking News icon at the bottom of CNN’s crawl.
“Change it,” Ruby muttered. “It’s probably some new tape from Osama Bin Idiot out to ruin the holiday.”
She’d been calling him that since the presidential election. She didn’t understand why someone didn’t wrap their front paws around his throat and kick out his stomach with their back paws. At least she hadn’t offered to get a familiar friend to sway his magical companion toward the dark side of magic to take care of the problem, like she had after 9/11. Then she had claimed she was taking the human approach to the problem, but Winston could see she was as broken up by the coverage as he had been.
He should have changed the channel; he realized that later. The moment he saw the Breaking News icon, the holiday really and truly was over even before he heard the word “tsunami” and heard that tens of thousands of people were feared dead.
Ruby shuddered against him as the initial video footage sent through some unbroken internet connection showed a huge wall of water sweeping a beach, overcoming a pool, and slamming into a hotel. She buried her face in her paws and pretended to sleep, but after a few moments, she asked that he mute the volume.
He did, for both of their sakes.
And he resisted the urge to go to the window, to look at the ocean several yards below the stone wall of his tiny house, and to make sure that the waves he saw were small ones, familiar ones, the ones that always appeared this late in the season on a moonlit night.
Instead, he’d sent what little money he had to the Red Cross, mostly by the same internet that had given him the early pictures and ruined his Christmas. And when he and Ruby had gone to the shop on Monday the 27th, the first time they’d been there since the spending spree the tourists had indulged in on the 24th, she had insisted he stop the car at the beachside hotels, particularly the tall exclusive resort hotel that vaguely resembled the one demolished in Thailand. Ruby had wanted to get out of the car, to make sure the pool was still there, to look at the distance between the ocean’s edge and the patio on the hotel’s lower level, but Winston wouldn’t let her.
He was as shaken by the images that came out of Southeast Asia as she was, only he didn’t admit it verbally. He just stocked the cliffside house with cans of Fancy Feast and bags of Friskies. He bought enough bottled water to last four months, and he found all kinds of dehydrated food for campers and some Meals Ready to Eat from a military supply store on the web. That, and bandages, and first aid kits, and emergency flashlights, and candles, and blankets, and everything else he could think of.
Because, he realized after weeks of watching that footage, when the tsunami hit the Oregon Coast, Seavy Village would be as cut off as Banda Aceh. It took three weeks for rescue teams to reach some of the most remote villages. He figured any tsunami here would be triggered by an earthquake that would level Portland and maybe even Seattle; by the time people thought of Seavy Village and Newport and Tillamook and all the other coastal towns, the residents would be on their own for a very long time.
His house would survive even the biggest tsunami. The cliff face he was on was made of lava rock, and the house was way above the historic tsunami line. But his store wouldn’t survive a tsunami, so he made Ruby practice the run that they’d have to make to the Church of St. Peter at the top of the hill. He’d instructed Ruby to jump on his shoulder, and he would use what little magic he had to glue her there, so that she wouldn’t get trampled or hurt or swept away.
He found himself thinking of disaster and destruction much more than he wanted to. He would look at the ocean as an enemy, not as his beloved home, and then he would imagine trying to survive here with his very little magic, his beautiful familiar, and no rescue in sight.
By the time Hurricane Katrina formed in the south Atlantic, he had stopped watching television and listening to news on the radio. He huddled in his little shop, playing classical music on the Bose system he’d indulged in, and mixing spells in the back.
The spells were for his mail order business. He made a small fortune selling tiny spells—an aphrodisiac here, a love potion there (nothing powerful, just enough to send little waves of attraction), a protection spell or a spell that gave the user just a little bit of courage. He couldn’t do much; he was never a great mage. But that didn’t matter. Most people didn’t want a lot of magic; they just wanted a bit of hope.
It wasn’t until he went to the nearby grocery store for his favorite sandwich (turkey on rye with avocado for him; tuna on white with cheese for Ruby) that he realized Katrina had gone from another hurricane disaster to a nightmare on the scale of the tsunami.
He wasn’t going to tell Ruby, but she knew. She could tell just from his face. She made him turn on the radio, and when they got home, she pushed the remote for CNN all by herself. When she didn’t like that coverage, she went to MSNBC and FOX and the BBC, then back again, staring at the water as it pooled in that famous city as if it were coming for her.
One night during that awful week—he couldn’t remember which one; they all seemed to blur—when he sat at his computer to give more money to the Red Cross (and some in Ruby’s name to the Humane Society), Ruby jumped on his lap.
“What about Boyce?” she asked before Winston could punch the send button, completing his first transaction.
“Boyce?” Winston asked, feeling confused. Boyce Theriot was a colleague of his. They exchanged ingredients, shared recipes for some smaller spells, and occasionally helped each other with tough clients.
Boyce Theriot lived in New Orleans.
Winston couldn’t believe he had forgotten that. He had relied on that fact so many times. Boyce had gotten him ingredients that no one else could, at least not in the states, because of New Orleans’ voodoo culture.
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Winston said, not wanting to think about it.
Ruby put a paw on his hand, guiding it away from the mouse and that click that would send a few hundred dollars into the ether.
“Would we be?” she asked, nodding toward the screen. “If it happened here?”
“Ruby, I’ve explained this. We don’t have levees, and we’re not in a hurricane zone—”
“I’m not stupid,” she said in that tone she used when she was completely serious. She knew that the Pacific coast had its horrible storms—every winter they seemed to suffer what the Atlantic would call a Category 1 Hurricane—and it was only a matter of time before something bigger hit. But the Pacific coast seemed geared for wind and heavy rain. It was the tsunami, the earthquake, the threat of total annihilation, like that which had happened in Southeast Asia, that worried him the most.
“I know,” he said, and slid his hand away from her very tiny, but very insistent paw. “I didn’t mean to say you were stupid. I—”
“If something happens here,” she said, “like the tsunami or the earthquake or if one of the volcanoes blows, would we be all right?”
She hadn’t asked him this before. She had watched him buy the extra food and the bandages, watched him stockpile the blankets and the kerosene stoves, and hadn’t said a word.
He’d been relieved about that. He didn’t want to lie to Ruby, not that he ever had.
He wasn’t sure he could lie to her, and keep her as his familiar.
“I don’t know,” he said. And that was truthful. He didn’t know. The other correct, truthful answer would have been it depends.
“You don’t know why?” She climbed off his lap and sat on the small square of desk right in front of the keyboard, careful not to touch the computer in anyway. She was good about that, good about most things, really, except when she wanted his attention.
“Because,” he said, “if we’re here in the house, we should be okay, and I have a plan for the store. But if we’re on the other side of town, or at the river crossing, which is below sea level, we might not make it home. We might not be all right at all.”
“And,” she said as if she were the one making the point all along, “your magic can’t help us. You can’t teleport like some. You can’t fly. You can’t—”
“I know what I can and cannot do, Ruby,” he snapped. Then his face heated. He didn’t like yelling at her. But her litany sounded too much like all of his instructors. They had finally decided that he was the most inept of all mages, the kind who had such a minor talent that they were barely better than the non-magical. His skills were tiny, his knowledge of the magical world just about as small. Part of the problem, his mentor Gerry Bellier had said, was that Winston didn’t even understand magic on the larger scale. It didn’t make sense to him, like calculus wouldn’t make sense to a three-year-old.
Only a three-year-old could grow into the mental skills that would enable him to understand calculus. Bellier implied that Winston would never understand the larger magicks. And so far, he was right.
“Boyce is more talented than I am,” Winston said.
“But he runs a shop,” Ruby said.
“A lot of mages do,” Winston said. “It’s a front.”
“It’s not his front,” Ruby said. “It’s his life. He’s told you that.”
“He’s in the French Quarter,” Winston said. “It didn’t flood. He’ll be all right.”
She turned, slammed a paw on the return key, and somehow did not complete his Red Cross transaction. Then she hit the mouse with her tail, and suddenly they were in one of his favorite programs, Google Earth, flying over the entire country.
“Zoom in,” she said.
He didn’t ask where. He knew what she wanted to show him. So he found New Orleans, and on the old satellite pictures, taken before the disaster, the town looked like it always had.
His heart constricted.
“Type in his address,” she said.
He did, and the program showed him the street, at the far end of the French Quarter, not too far from downtown.
“Now type in Charity Hospital,” she said.
He did, and then closed his eyes. Boyce’s shop wasn’t that far from Charity. In fact, it seemed closer to downtown than the French Quarter proper. Had Boyce lied on his website, just to attract more business? Or were there some peculiarities that Winston didn’t know about New Orleans, about the way it counted its neighborhoods, about the way it labeled its subcultures?
“Seems to me,” Ruby said, “that little shop of his is filled with water. Where does he live?”
Winston didn’t know. He’d known Boyce for nearly thirty years, and yet they hadn’t spent time together since they were young apprentices in San Francisco. He’d never seen Boyce’s home and Boyce had never seen his.
They had become business acquaintances and nothing more.
“Maybe I don’t understand all this human money stuff and everything,” Ruby said, “but it seems to me if he earned a comparable income to yours in that city, he wouldn’t be living in the Garden District. He’d be living somewhere that’s also underwater. You think he’s lying on his roof somewhere, waiting to be rescued?”
Winston winced. He didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to go back to the previous screen and finish his donation to the Red Cross.
“Do you?”
“I could do a locate,” Winston said feebly.
“And then what?” Ruby asked. “You can’t just teleport him here.”
“I know my weaknesses,” Winston snapped. “Stop reminding me.”
“Stop acting like someone with no magic at all. You have a friend here. Help him.”
Winston stared at her. The sentiment was amazingly uncatlike. Cats did not help others in need.
Winston frowned. “Why do you care?”
She raised her chin. The whiskers on the end of it twitched, but the ones on her nose did not. The look she gave him was regal, and it implied that he was the stupid one in the room, not her.
“It could be us,” she said. “We might be on our roof one day. We could be stranded here. I would hope someone would care enough to find us. I would hope that someone would care enough to help.”
The thought was alien to him. He never expected help. He had had such a difficult childhood that when he became a mage, he didn’t even expect help from a familiar. That had gotten him into trouble in his early years. An aphrodisiac he’d designed had gone bad because he hadn’t had a familiar. His client nearly died, and he fled San Francisco with the police on his heels. They thought he was dealing drugs, and by his refusal to use a familiar, he probably had been. Magic made herbs special. Herbs without magic were simply cheap ways of getting high.
“You never thought of getting help, did you?” Ruby sighed.
“We’re going to be on our own, Ruby,” he said.
“Well, Boyce shouldn’t be. No one should be. Jeez.” She exhaled a mouthful of tuna breath so strong it almost knocked him over. Then she jumped on his thighs hard enough to give him bruises.
She left the computer and went back to her fireplace, sitting with her back to him, just to make sure he got the message.
What would he do if he located Boyce? Tell the authorities where to find him? They were already overburdened. He wasn’t going to go to New Orleans. He wasn’t the kind of man who went into a disaster zone, and for all her tough talk, Ruby wasn’t the kind of cat who went there either.
She barely liked to leave the house, tolerating the ride to the shop only because she saw it as part of her turf as well.
Her anger radiated out toward him. He could feel it as if it were his own. Later, if he learned that Boyce had died and he could have done something to prevent the death, he would feel guilty. So guilty, in fact, that it might cripple him, just like that incident in San Francisco had.
“All right,” he said. “We’re going to do a locate. For whatever good that’ll do.”
Ruby’s ears flattened but she didn’t turn around. She didn’t believe him.
He got up and went to the small closet where he kept his personal supplies. He got a few herbs, mixed a tiny potion, and dipped his fingers in it. Then he recited the spell in English, because his Latin was atrocious, and leaned back.
A puff of smoke appeared between him and Ruby. In it, he saw a high school cafeteria filled with hundreds of cots. Aid workers passed out cards or certificates or some kind of identification—he couldn’t tell—to the left of the vision; to the right, a guard stood at the door, watching people as they went in and out.
Winston didn’t see Boyce, not that he was sure he’d recognize him even if he were there. In the last thirty years, their only interaction had been on the phone. And, it seemed, everyone in that cafeteria had the same Southern accent—long, slow, and charmingly musical.
“I don’t see him,” Winston said, and the moment he spoke the words, a man sat up. He wore a raunchy t-shirt one size too small and a pair of blue jeans a size too big. His hair was thin and pulled back into a ponytail. But his eyes were the same. They were almost silver and they accented his café au lait skin, making him seem exotic and magical at the same time.
He looked through the smoke at Winston. Then he tilted his head. “Who don’t you see?” he asked.
Ruby trotted to Winston’s side. Winston leaned forward. “Boyce?”
“Winston? Winston Karpathian, is that really you?”
Everyone around Boyce was staring at him as if he’d gone crazy. It would seem that way too, if they had no magic. They wouldn’t be able to see inside the smoke hole at the opening he had created in their corner of the universe.
“It’s me,” Winston said. “Where are you?”
“I dunno. Some podunk town that has more references to Jesus on its billboards than the churches in New Orleans do.” He sounded lost.
“Hey buddy.” The man next to Boyce touched his shoulder. “You all right?”
“Tell me the name,” Winston said. “We’ll get you out of there.”
“Who’re you? God?” Boyce asked. Winston had never heard such hopelessness in a man’s voice before.
“Hell, no,” said the man next to him, obviously thinking Boyce was talking to him. “I’m just trying to help.”
“I can wire you some money,” Winston said. “Call me, and we’ll figure it out.”
“Call you. You have a phone number?”
“What the hell?” the man next to Boyce stood up, vaguely offended. “Lemme get some help here.”
Winston felt his own cheeks heat. Of course Boyce wouldn’t have his phone number. That was in Boyce’s shop, probably like everything else.
“Yeah,” Winston said. He recited the number and added, “You can call collect.”
Then the smoke ring faded. Ruby leaned against Winston, her little body tense. “That’s a human shelter, huh?”
Winston nodded. A lot of the details hadn’t registered for him until now: How many people had just curled up on their cots, staring at nothing; How no one really talked, except the aid workers; How the kids played listlessly in the corner.
He shuddered, and Ruby leaned harder, as if he could make things better.
And then his phone rang.
***
The next few days became a blur. The $200 he was going to send to the Red Cross, and the $50 he was going to send to the Humane Society (which Ruby protested—she felt he should still send that money) went to a plane ticket that got Boyce Theriot out of northern Louisiana and to Portland, Oregon. Winston had to charge another $50 on his credit card—the one he kept for emergencies—to get one of those airport limos to pick Boyce up, because Winston couldn’t do it.
His only car was a Gremlin, bought because he liked the magical name, and he’d had it almost as long as he lived in Oregon. He found the problem that made it belch blue smoke, but he knew the undercarriage was so rusted that one day it would simply fall off.
While he waited for the limo to show up, he cleaned the guest room. He hadn’t had a guest since he moved into the cliff house decades ago, and the bed had gotten buried beneath books and blankets and trinkets he’d found. The job was larger than he expected, and he even had to use a cleaning spell—something he hadn’t done in a decade—to get the dust out of the mattress. He went to the Factory Outlet store and bought fresh sheets, a new comforter, and towels. Ruby wanted to keep the new stuff for them, and let Boyce use the older things from Winston’s bed, but that felt wrong to him.
Now that he had resigned himself to company, he wanted to do a good turn by him.
The limo arrived late Friday night. Winston watched through the front window as people piled out. In the glow of the streetlights against the dark sky, it almost looked like an art film version of those clown cars he’d seen as a child. More and more people got out until he thought the entire vehicle would collapse from their loss.
Ruby sat on the back of the couch, looking more like a cat than a familiar. She watched from a position that guaranteed she could see the people, but they couldn’t see her. And she could run for the bedroom at a moment’s notice.
Winston left her inside. He went onto his front stoop, watching as the tallest, thinnest of the group took a receipt from the limo driver. The air smelled clean and sharp; the wind was strong off the ocean, usually something he loved.
But he felt nervous now, as if he had plunged into a world he hadn’t quite expected.
The limo drove off, leaving five people in the street. Only five. It had seemed like so many more.
“Winston?” The tall, thin man came toward him and he realized it was Boyce. He hadn’t remembered Boyce being tall or thin, but now that he saw Boyce walk, he knew that this was his old friend. How could anyone forget that walk, which was half sashay, half swagger?
Winston stepped off the porch and plastered a smile on his face. He hoped he wasn’t shaking. “Boyce,” he said, extending his hand.
“I hope y’all don’t mind, but I gathered a few more of us. When I realized we could do a locate, I did, and then they did, and well, we can be our own little magical shelter, right?”
Our own little magical shelter was, at the moment, Winston’s home. But he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t turn these people away. He knew they had less than he had.
“There’s not a lot of room,” he said. “But we’ll make do.”
Then he realized that everyone—except Boyce—was carrying an animal. Of course. Familiars. He felt his heart sink just a little. How would Ruby react to a French poodle, two other cats, and a Chihuahua?
He wanted to warn her (in fact, he wanted to remind her that Chihuahuas weren’t food) but he couldn’t. He just hoped she figured this out. He opened his front door, and let the crowd inside.
They squeezed in. In addition to himself and Boyce, there were two more men and two women. Everyone looked a little lost. They all wore mismatched clothing, and their hair seemed in need of a comb. The animals clung to their mages.
Ruby still sat on the back of the couch, her yellow eyes wide. She looked at Winston as if demanding an explanation.
“I only have one extra bedroom,” he said, “but it has a king bed.”
As if that made a difference. As if five people could fit comfortably on that bed.
“If y’all don’t mind, we can just pile up some blankets in the front room,” one of the women said.
“Nonsense, Nurleen,” one of the men said. “You women can have the bedroom and we men can stay out front.”
Winston swallowed hard. He hated crowds. He didn’t much like people, and he suddenly felt trapped here, in his own home. “We’ll settle rooms in a minute,” he said. “Let’s do introductions first.”
Introductions. He started by going over to Ruby and putting a hand on her back. She jumped. Then she crawled into his arms, just like the other familiars were doing. She watched as the introductions went around.
Nurleen Bremmer of Gulfport, Mississippi. She was heavyset and dark-haired, wearing a Metallica t-shirt and sweatpants that looked like they’d seen better days. Her home disintegrated around her and she was lucky enough to grab Princess, her white and gold cat (and familiar) before everything vanished in a haze of wind, rain, and water.
Wendi Phillips of Biloxi, Mississippi. She had red hair so bright it would’ve made Lucille Ball proud, and her French poodle looked dyed to match. Wendi wore her own clothes—she managed to fit some outfits and underwear in her purse, she later informed everyone—but that was all she had.
Palmer Kent of New Orleans stood beside Boyce, and looked smaller for it. Kent wasn’t much bigger than a child, and the Chihuahua he had with him—named after the Rock—didn’t help much.
And Savion DeChutney, from Moss Point, Mississippi, who didn’t say much because he looked like he might burst into tears at any moment. He was dark, with ritual scarring that made him seem scary, but his cat—Noel—spoke for him half the time because he was so honored to be taken in by someone who understood him.
Then Boyce sighed. “Y’all know me. To stop you from asking, the hurricane got Riddell. One of my bookshelves fell over as the house started to go, and he was crushed…”
Boyce didn’t finish. Riddell was both his dog and his familiar. One of those small little decorative dogs—since Winston had never met him, he hadn’t paid much attention to the breed—but he knew the dog probably hadn’t been much bigger than Ruby.
Ruby shuddered and looked at Winston’s bookshelves as if they were the enemy. Maybe they were. All he knew was that he would have to comfort her later.
“We sure are honored, Winston, that you took the time and trouble to give up your home like this,” Boyce said. “To be among like-minded people, I can’t tell you….”
Winston smiled at them, unsure what to do next. He hadn’t planned to give up his home, just to provide a haven. “I’ve got some stew on the stove,” he said, thankful that he’d planned a large meal instead of something for two. “Let’s eat and get to know each other.”
***
The stories made him sad. Wendi had a beauty shop in Biloxi—not the hairdressing kind, but the kind that with a bit of magic dust and a lot of pep made people feel like they had some worth. The shop was gone now. Nurleen taught sleight-of-hand to tourists, then did a full fledged David Copperfield-like show in one of the casinos. From there, she used a bit of magic to see someone who was sad in the audience, someone she could help with a touch or a small wish. Nothing big, just enough to keep her hand in the practice.
Savion was a supplier—that was how Boyce knew him—specializing in difficult-to-find ingredients for hard-to-make spells. His warehouse had collapsed in the wind when the hurricane had come aground, the items scattered.
“No insurance,” he’d said, head down, dipping the french bread Winston had baked in his soup. “I mean, how do you tell adjusters that eye of newt actually has a value?”
And Boyce, who hadn’t gone to his shop after the loss of his familiar. He couldn’t face it—partly because he knew that part of New Orleans was under water. Instead, he used what little magic he could to get himself out of the city, and then, drained and spent and worried about casting spells without his familiar, he hitched a ride to the nearest shelter, which took him to the high school where Winston had caught up with him.
Everyone was tired, and sad, and lost, but grateful. Grateful to have a place to go, grateful to have something else to think about. The animals were quiet. They all eyed Ruby, knowing this was her turf, and she glared back at them, establishing herself as dominant.
But Winston wasn’t sure how long that would last. She pretended to be tough, but she was soft at heart. He could feel her trembling as she sat on his lap, watching their guests.
When he finally took her into his bedroom that night—he wasn’t willing to give up this little bit of personal space—she climbed onto the bed and closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”
She was so stressed she wasn’t flirting with him. She wasn’t acting tough. She seemed exhausted.
He lay down beside her and she crawled on his chest. She didn’t purr.
“They can’t stay,” she said. “There’s too much conflicting magic. I can’t keep track of it.”
“I know.” He could feel it too, and that seemed odd to him. Usually he couldn’t feel much magic at all.
She put her head on her paws, and stared at him. “What are we going to do?”
He sighed. He had saved some money. It was his emergency fund—enough for surgery if Ruby got ill or a repair to his house that he couldn’t handle magically. He’d been trying to save for a new car, but he’d had trouble with that. The disasters across the country had tapped him—he gave money away instead of putting it in the bank.
He hadn’t thought of the downside of his charity. He preferred to keep it like everything else in his life—at arms length. But now there were five people in his house, four of whom he’d never met before, and one he hadn’t seen in thirty years.
Five people, and he could barely stand having two people in his store at the same time.
He shuddered.
“Big boy?” Ruby whispered. “What’re we gonna do?”
“I guess,” he said, “we need to find a house.”
***
Houses weren’t hard to find in Seavy Village. It was a coastal resort town, filled with second homes, which the locals called weekenders. Most of those places were empty and half of them were for sale. Many that weren’t were designated as vacation rentals.
It didn’t take Winston long to find one big enough for the group. When he told the real estate agent who handled the rentals what it was for, she perked up.
“I’m sure we can get you a break on the rent,” she said. “Maybe even get some local charity groups to kick in. You want me to check?”
He hadn’t expected help from anyone else, seeing this as entirely his problem which he brought on himself in a moment of selflessness. He mumbled something like that, and the agent grinned.
“We all been hoping we can help the evacuees. Most of them just didn’t come to Oregon or the coast. Everyone’s been wanting to do something, though. Those images from the Gulf…” She shuddered. “It could just as easily be here, you know. We get bad storms and tidal surges and—”
“I know,” he said, waving a hand. Her conversation was too close to the ones he’d had with Ruby. He didn’t want to think about what-ifs. Thinking about what-ifs had brought him here, doing his good deed.
“Well,” the real estate agent said with a smile. “Let me just see what I can do. No way should you handle this on your own.”
And she stepped in. He felt relief which also made him feel guilty. Finally, a competent person handling the problem. Someone other than him.
By the end of the day, he had a fully furnished vacation rental with six bedrooms and three bathrooms, along with some donated clothes, food for the animals, and some cash for the evacuees. The reporter from the paper came to photograph them moving in, and asked for everyone’s story. All of the mages looked confused when asked, and finally, the real estate agent had said that maybe the interviews should be done at a less traumatic time.
Still, the story ran the next day—Gulf Coast Evacuees Find Home In Seavy Village—and pictures of the mages, their “pets” and their meager belongings graced every single newspaper box in town.
Police Officer Scott Park, the only non-magical person who knew what Winston really did for a living, stopped into the store that afternoon. Winston was hiding in the back, hoping to have a little privacy. He’d hated the sound of the bell, worried that he’d have to be charming to a new customer, and was relieved to see that Park had come alone.
“Quite the good deed you did,” Park said. Ruby was rubbing her head against his hand. He’d helped save her life once, but she’d adored him even before that. She had been the one—by talking with him—to convince him that magic was real.
“Didn’t mean to have it publicized,” Winston said.
Park shrugged. “They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Winston nodded, but couldn’t meet Park’s eyes.
“They’re all friends of yours?”
“No,” Winston said. “Just Boyce. He helped you and me with a case once, remember?”
“Yeah,” Park said. “How come they can’t just conjure repairs?”
The question made Winston bristle, even though Park hadn’t meant to be rude. Winston ran a hand over the glass case that separated him from the rest of the store.
“I guess I’m not the only one with small magic,” he said.
“You’d think that people with larger magic would make it all go away,” Park said.
Winston raised his head. He hadn’t thought of that. If he had the ability, he would have done it. He wondered if there was something in the magical rules that prevented it, something about calling attention to one’s self.
But he couldn’t think of anything. Helping a neighbor or a friend with a serious problem was usually considered white magic (depending on the spell), and white magic was fine.
“Guess not everyone’s as good-hearted as you,” Park said, scratching Ruby at the base of her tail. She was purring so loud that she could probably be heard on the street.
“I’m not good-hearted,” Winston said.
Park grinned. “That’s a matter of opinion, my friend.”
Maybe it was. But a good-hearted man didn’t force the people he’d invited into his home to move out the very next day. A good-hearted man didn’t feel relief when the people he helped closed the door behind them. A good-hearted man didn’t secretly hope he’d never see them again.
***
But of course he did. He was their contact in Seavy Village, and they came to him with questions. He was surprised at how much he knew.
When Nurleen asked who to contact at the local casino about performing her magical act, Winston told her. When Savion remembered that he had had a supplier in Portland who might need his services, Winston had the phone number. When Wendi wanted to know the name of a spa that might like a hairdresser who knew how to make her clients feel special, Winston knew the best place to go.
Winston even knew of a magic store for sale farther up the coast that seemed to suit Palmer Kent just fine. The owner wanted to get out of the area, and would take small payments, so long as they were guaranteed.
Winston didn’t guarantee them—he didn’t want that kind of financial burden—but Scott Park knew a banker who could (and did) arrange it all.
By the end of the first week, the group had a place to live, and four of them had work. Savion was heading to Portland in a few days, and Palmer was moving north. The women were so busy they barely spent time in the house.
That only left Boyce.
Boyce, who seemed lost without his familiar, Riddell.
Boyce, who had decided to spend his afternoons helping Winston in the shop.
***
Winston couldn’t say no, even though he wanted to. He couldn’t tell Boyce to leave him alone. Boyce had lost everything: his home, his business and, until he got a new familiar, his magic.
On his third day in the store, Boyce decided that Winston needed to redecorate.
Winston had kept the store the same since he opened it, decades ago. The front was filled with touristy impulse buys—toys, fake magic tricks, pinwheels. He had a few real antiques in the window, mostly bottles that looked like I-Dream-of-Jeannie bottles, and some harmless potions to one side.
The back, where he did most of his work, was blocked by a beaded curtain. In between the back and the front, he had a glass cabinet with his cash register on top, and some valuable stones inside.
Boyce had walked around the place, studying it as if he would get quizzed on it. When he noticed Winston watching, he said,
“Y’all need some color over on the north wall. And some carpeting starting just past the door there, with maybe a raised up area for people to sit. A red curtain might be nice instead of those beads. And some new product. I mean, really, what do tourists need with antique bottles? I ask you.”
Winston hadn’t answered. He’d let Boyce talk and draw up plans.
Ruby exhausted herself following Boyce everywhere, watching him make little drawings, glaring as he rearranged the existing merchandise. Her tail twitched every time she looked at him, and after a few days of this, her ears flattened too. She slept hard every night because she couldn’t nap; she was too afraid he might actually start implementing his plans.
Winston knew Boyce didn’t have the money to make the changes, and Winston wasn’t about to loan him any. Winston liked his store the way it was. When Boyce finally left, Winston would put the merchandise back where it came from. But Winston didn’t know when Boyce would leave.
They weren’t talking about it. Boyce wasn’t even searching for a new familiar.
Boyce did wait on the customers for him. Winston had a few local customers now that the newspaper articles had run. People were charmed to meet Boyce, and they bought small things to justify their presence in the store.
Winston mostly remained in the back, wishing he had Boyce’s skill with people. Customers laughed and joked, told stories and exchanged information. No one had ever seemed so relaxed in Winston’s place before.
He hated it.
He hated it all.
And he felt mean, petty and small for each little resentment. Boyce had lost his life, and now Winston felt like he was losing everything he valued in his, one tiny bit at a time.
That thought made him feel even smaller, and he tried to banish it. But it grew, like a blackness across his vision. He was growing afraid to mix new spells, afraid his resentment would color the magic.
Finally Ruby brought him a section of the local paper that someone had left near the front door.
She tapped an ad at the very edge of the back page.
Seavy Village Eighteenth Annual Dog Show
Contestants from all over the country compete for these prizes…
Winston frowned at it. “You’re not a dog.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You don’t even like them.”
“For Boyce,” she whispered.
“You don’t get familiars at dog shows,” Winston said. “They’re for showing off dogs that are already owned.”
If Ruby could have put her paws on her hips like an angry woman, she would have. Instead, she settled for her glare and a quick twitch of the tail.
“I know how to find familiars,” she said. “He needs to go.”
So Winston contacted the convention center and signed up as a vendor. He made a few dog treats, some calming potions, and charmed a few collars. Then he sent Boyce to man the table, and hoped that would be enough.
***
Boyce didn’t come back for two days, and when he did, he had a hollow ragged look around the eyes.
“Did you know?” he asked as he came through the shop’s door, carrying a box filled with the remaining merchandise, “how many animals got abandoned in the storms?”
Winston did know because Ruby followed the statistics. She wanted some kind of guarantee that she wouldn’t get lost if a tsunami hit the coast. He continually promised her he’d do his best, but they both knew that might not be enough.
“They’ve got shelters in California taking some of the overload,” Boyce said as he put the cash and credit card slips on the counter. He’d sold almost everything he brought. “They were doing a fundraiser at the show.”
Winston stared at the money. Boyce had earned more in one appearance than Winston had earned all fall.
“Would you think it rude of me to volunteer down there? I know you got me this lovely home and all, but I’m rootless, Winston. And Miss Ruby here doesn’t like me. I never did get on with cats.”
“Pfff,” Ruby said from a corner of the counter. “Like that’s the problem.”
Boyce glanced at her, started to say something, and then stopped. “I was just thinking that I could be useful, and much as I like helping you, you don’t really need me. We both know that.”
Winston swallowed. He didn’t want to nod, didn’t want to insult Boyce.
“I can hitch a ride with one of the volunteers. I have a bit of that money your locals gave me. The girls’d keep the house, if you don’t mind a little friendly competition—”
Winston didn’t see the women as any kind of competition at all. They were in different parts of the business.
“—and maybe I’d come back,” Boyce said.
“You’re not obligated,” Winston said. “I just wanted to help.”
Boyce grinned at him, then took his hands. “I know. And you have. You have no idea how much.”
***
Not a lot. That was how Winston summed it up later. He hadn’t helped much at all. He had given the five a destination, true enough, but he hadn’t sacrificed more than a few days of his time and a few hundred dollars of his money. In the end, most everything they’d received had come from the town, not from him.
And what bothered him the most was how much he had resented it. How much he wished for them to leave, for his quiet life to return.
Now that it was back, he felt only relief. And guilt for enjoying the silence. He’d tried to do something outside his nature. Somehow he had thought it would make him feel better. Instead, it left him feeling shaken.
He took some of Boyce’s advice. He put a light blue paint on the north wall, and took on consignment some paintings of wizards and fantasy dragons from a local artist. He took some of the scarves he’d brought with him from San Francisco thirty years ago, and draped them on the shelves, adding even more color.
He didn’t change the beads though, nor did he add a rug, which he thought would be a disaster in this wet climate. And he didn’t add a sitting area. He didn’t want the customers to stay any longer than they had to.
Ruby hated all the changes, until she realized that they brought in more customers, and more customers meant more pets for her. She preened at them, acted like a cat, and got a lot of attention. She even got her own write-up in the local paper as the most popular store cat in Seavy Village.
Her newfound fame didn’t alleviate her fears, but Winston realized nothing would. Just like nothing would change the odd feelings he’d had since the first of the year.
Finally, at Christmas, he realized he was living each day as if a disaster was about to happen, worrying that he had done things wrong when he’d only done what he could. Instead, he needed to look at each day as a blessing, each moment he had with Ruby in his quiet house in his quiet town as a gift—one that could vanish at any moment, yes, but one that he needed to value just the same.
On December 26th, a year after the tsunami that started his strange journey, he got a phone call. Boyce was back in New Orleans, helping clean up the city.
He had a new familiar, a puppy born to one of the rescue dogs who’d made it to California.
“She’s green,” he said, “but she’s enthusiastic. And she’s polite. Kinda reminds me of Ruby.”
Winston had almost laughed out loud at that. Ruby was never polite. And then he remembered: She had been polite in those days after the storm. She had been polite and considerate and frightened, just like he had been.
He congratulated Boyce, told his friend he admired his courage, and wished him the best. Then he hung up the phone and found his own familiar, huddled next to the fireplace.
She had stopped watching the television sometime in October, and he was grateful. Instead, she watched the flames. He picked her up, and held her close, feeling her little heart beat against his.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. “We’re safe.”
“For now,” she whispered.
“For now,” he agreed. Then he smiled at her.
“You got small dreams, Big Boy,” she said.
He nodded. He liked his small dreams. And his small house. And his small life.
He liked it all, and he would enjoy it as much as he could, for as long as he could.
Ruby sighed and snuggled into his arms. He sank down onto the rug in front of the fireplace, and watched the flames, relishing the moment.
Moments—that was all they had. But, he was beginning to realize, moments were more than enough.
Copyright © 2016 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Wizards Inc., edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Loren L. Coleman, Daw Books, November 2007
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and layout copyright © 2016 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Zuboff/Dreamstime, Vlastas/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.