couple of modern day moses’ searching for the promised land
CHAPTER ONE
Ms. Mariana Navarro James 1632 Mulligan Street New York, NY WZ10023
Ms. Navarro James,
On behalf of the Magical Congress of the United States of America, the Department of Magical Security has reviewed your application and is pleased to invite you to join us at the Auror Academy this coming fall. We are thrilled for you to join the ranks of the nation’s bravest and brightest. We look forward to your attendance on September 1st.
Mariana Navarro James has always known that she wanted to be an auror. She had declared it with utmost confidence to every vocational counselor, friend, and nosy old biddy who had inquired about her future since she was five. And of course, how could she not? What else could a kid ever dream of being when they had the Director of Magical Security as their dad and grew up snuggled against his chest, listening to him recount his adventures of the week?
(It was only in the last year or two that it had occurred to Mari that perhaps her father had tidied the stories he told her, sanitizing reality until it was an appropriate bedtime tale for a little girl. She had taken some advanced History of Magic courses in her last few years at school and had eventually come to the realization that some of the more terrible events in their recent history didn’t match what she thought she knew. Sometimes the bad guys won. Sometimes the good guys never made it home again. Sometimes the mundane becomes a nightmare. That thought had shaken her a little, but then again, she supposed they weren’t known as the nation’s bravest for nothing, were they?)
In the end, it wasn’t just the stories or the long shadow of Scott James that had drawn her to this field. Mari was eighteen, fresh out of Ilvermorny, and certain she knew what she wanted from her life. She wanted excitement, she wanted adventure, she wanted meaning. She wanted to know that the things she did made a difference. And the letter Mari had just opened in the foyer with trembling hands – it was everything she knew she wanted. The first step of the rest of her life.
So, quite rationally, her first reaction was to stuff the letter in her sweater pocket and dart out the front door before anyone had even seen that she had come home.
Mari rushed down the sidewalk she had jogged up only a few minutes before, trying hard to not look too much like she was fleeing the scene of a crime. She had no idea where she was going – only that she needed distance, room to breathe before she suffocated to death. She turned random corner after random corner with no specific location in mind, and eventually her panicked heartbeat began to calm. She drew in deep, needy breaths and slowed down, but she continued to let her feet take her where they would. What was she doing? Why was she being like this? It wasn’t like she hadn’t expected the acceptance letter, of course she had. Her dad would have told her if anything had gone wrong with her application process–
A car honked aggressively, followed by an impressive amount of swearing, and Mari jumped, jostled out of her thoughts. She blinked and looked around, taking in her surroundings for the first time since she’d run out of the townhouse. Oh. She’d somehow made it into the city proper. She must have been walking longer – or perhaps just faster – than she’d realized, to have made it this far. She almost never came out this far into the city on her typical runs. Usually she liked to use running as a way to clear her head, but the noise and distraction of the congested New York streets battled with the noise and distraction in her own thoughts, almost always resulting in nothing more productive than a pounding migraine.
Mari began to slow down, to let her brain catch up to what her feet had been doing, and was immediately shoulder checked by a woman behind her with a large purse, complete with very sharp brass hardware. “Ow!” she complained as the purse’s buckle smacked her hard enough to leave a bruise. The woman didn’t even glance back. Mari scowled, but kept up the pace to avoid being run over by anyone else. It was only a momentary distraction, but in that moment, the realization of where she had subconsciously been heading smacked into her harder than the purse.
Oh. Duh. Jacob’s apartment was only a few more miles away.
In the couple years since her brother had moved out of the townhouse, Mari had rarely gone to visit him on foot. There was a period of time after she’d gotten her Apparition license where she’d taken to popping up right in the middle of his living room, but it hadn’t lasted long – Jacob had instituted a ‘Front Door or Floo Entry Only’ policy after she’d caught him eating cold pasta in his boxers for the third time. Still, Mari felt pretty confident that she was going the right way as she took in her bearings with this new context. Oddly, she found that having this destination alleviated some of the pressure on her chest. Taking a deeper, steadier breath, Mari increased her speed to an easy jog and wound her way up the streets of New York.
It didn’t take long to find the right building. Mari jogged to the front door and punched a code into the adjacent keypad – a code, mind you, that her brother had no idea she knew, which she took as concrete evidence that she would be great at investigative work.
The door swung open with a short, sharp beep!, and as she ducked inside, Mari caught her reflection in the window. She wrinkled her nose. Her hair was back to its natural color – a mousy dark blonde that Mari insisted automatically made her fifteen percent more boring in any conversation. She had gotten the hang of changing her hair color on a whim and keeping it that way without much thought before she’d even started school, but sometimes when her attention was thoroughly engrossed elsewhere, she slipped and the natural color came seeping back without her even noticing. That wasn’t something she was willing to deal with today.
Mari glanced around the lobby – once she was suitably convinced that she was alone, she closed her eyes and concentrated. With a little pop! that was almost definitely just in her mind, she felt the change take over. She glanced back in the window, and her reflection this time was sporting her pulled back ponytail in her preferred color of bubblegum pink. She managed a little smile.
Much better.
Turning on her reflection, Mari bounded up the stairs two at a time. By the time she made it to the fourth floor, she was wheezing – she leaned against the railing for a moment, fighting for her breath. It had been unnecessary and had certainly worked up a sweat, but it made her feel better to have a reason she understood for her erratic heartbeat. Mari gave herself ten seconds for her breathing to become less dramatic before she pushed herself off the railing and stumbled down the hall. She knocked at the door marked 4D and leaned heavily against the doorframe while she waited, her gaze down to the floor as she regulated her breath. One breath. Two breaths. Three. Then the door swung open.
Mari glanced up, a flippant greeting to her brother already on her lips – and immediately, she found herself snapping ramrod straight. “Atticus!” she said in a bit of a gasp. “. . . hi!”
Stupid, Mari chastised herself. Stupid, stupid. It had never occurred to her that her brother’s roommate might answer the door, and now here she was in front of him, sweaty and breathing hard and probably not the best she had ever smelled. Rationally, Mari knew it was a dumb thing to be worried about – she’d known Atticus Prewett since she was a little kid, from back when Jacob first started bringing friends home to visit over the summer. He’d certainly seen her in worse states, but that didn’t mean Mari wasn’t cursing herself for not taking the extra minute to lengthen her eyelashes or make her breasts a little perkier when she was fixing her hair downstairs.
Atticus blinked blearily at her, tugging absently at his worn, crinkled shirt. Clearly, she’d woken him up – probably better for him, really, since it wasn’t exactly what Mari would call early in the day. He gave her a lazy, somewhat confused smile, and even with the disorientation in his expression, Mari felt her stomach do a small flip in response. “Uh, g’morning?” he said, half reply, half question. He glanced over his shoulder at the fireplace in the living room, dark with cold ashes. “Is our floo out again or something?”
Mari felt her cheeks flush, but tried to comfort herself that, after her sprint up the stairs, she was probably already so red with exertion that he wasn’t likely to notice the difference. The thought wasn’t all that comforting. “Uh, n-no, I, um. . . I was, y’know, just in the neighborhood,” Mari stuttered, embarrassed. She shifted back and forth from her heels to her toes, awkward, before the words she needed finally came to her. She looked past Atticus into the apartment. “So, uh, is Jacob up yet?”
To her surprise, his expression fell. Mari’s brow furrowed slightly and she nearly asked if Jacob was alright, but Atticus spoke first. “No, he’s been at Vanessa’s all week,” he replied with a shrug. “He hasn’t been around much lately.”
“Oh,” Mari replied, her voice hitching a little in surprise and disappointment. Jacob had always been good to talk to. He never got impatient with her rambling, no matter how many tangents she went on – it was why, when her head had finally cleared enough for her to figure out where she was going, she had come here. Jacob had always had time for her. . . except, of course, that had been before he’d gotten himself a girlfriend. Pursing her lips, Mari considered heading back home – but the thought sent a panicky thrum through her chest, and she knew right then that she wasn’t ready for the scene that awaited her at home, when her parents found out she’d gotten her acceptance letter. No, Mari couldn’t go home, not yet. . . her gaze fell back to Atticus, still looking a bit like an abandoned puppy.
Well, she was already here, wasn’t she?
Mari walked past Atticus into the apartment, perfectly uninvited. “Got any water?”
Atticus looked after her with a frown. “Sure, come on in, I guess,” he muttered under his breath before closing the door. He made his way into the kitchen. “Tap okay with you?” Mari gave an acquiescent shrug in response. She was parched enough now that he could have juiced a shoe into a glass in front of her, and she still would have drank it. He grabbed a somewhat dingy looking glass from a shelf and filled it in the sink before passing it to her.
Mari took it with a nod of thanks and perched herself on a wobbly barstool, looking around as she rehydrated. She caught sight of the living room – there were scattered sketchbook pages everywhere, covered with half-realized drawings, and a crumpled blanket and pillow on the couch. She raised an eyebrow and looked back at her begrudging host. “What, did you sleep there last night?”
Atticus cringed and raised an arm to run a hand through his dark hair, exposing a few inches of midriff. Mari tried not to be too obtuse as she stared, but subtlety had never been a great skill of hers. She’d have to work on that at the Academy. “Uh – more like I slept there this morning,” he admitted, looking a little sheepish. “I sort of hit a block with the novel, and I was up all last night trying to figure it out. All I managed was a pile of wasted paper. Normally I would have bounced ideas off of Jake, but. . . y’know. . . he’s been preoccupied. . .”
Oh, the novel.
Mari couldn’t help a sympathetic look. Jacob and Atticus had been working on a graphic novel together since they were sixteen and now, seven years later, it was still coming along at a trudge. Jacob was the writer, Atticus was the artist – and what an artist Atticus was, although Mari could never admit that out loud without sounding like a doe eyed lovesick schoolgirl. Jacob was good at what he did too, she guessed, and for a while, it had almost seemed like they might be able to actually put something together. But then they had their graduation exams, and then they’d had to go out into the world and find jobs, and then Jacob started his apprenticeship with their grandfather, and then he met Vanessa Thornwood (who Mari was convinced stole her brother’s heart, brain, and testicles to keep in a bottle around her neck), and the longer time when on, the more progress had slowed to an almost nonexistent crawl.
And yet, neither of them could give up on it. Certainly not Atticus, if his expression of tired frustration was anything to go off of. “What do you think the problem is?” Mari asked gently, her own problems already fading to a distant glimmer in her mind.
“I don’t know,” Atticus sighed, leaning against the counter with a defeated hunch to his shoulders. “I think I’m just. . . in a rut? I don’t feel like I have any new ideas, or at least, nothing worth playing out. So maybe – maybe that’s it. Maybe I’ve just used them all up?” Mari sipped her water and nodded sagely, trying not to overthink the situation. She knew Atticus only saw her as his best friend’s little sister – or, worse, as practically his own little sister. The vulnerability he was showing now was the kind that you can only get between childhood friends who have known each other almost as long as they’ve known themselves, the ones who have seen you at your worst and most embarrassing. It was the way he would have opened up to Jacob, or any of their old school friends, nothing more. He sighed again. “I know that must sound dumb – but it’s like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Without thinking, Mari reached out a hand to rest comfortingly on Atticus’s arm. He didn’t even glance up at her touch. “It’s not dumb,” Mari said firmly, before taking a second to reconsider. “Or, well, it does sound kinda stupid–” That got his attention, and Atticus looked up at her, looking vaguely hurt. Mari winced. Oh Circe help her, why was she so bad at this? “What I mean is, uh – maybe you just need some new inspiration. Go see some new sights, hear some new sounds. Have an adventure or something. You can. . . refill the barrel, or whatever you artist types need to do.”
Atticus scoffed lightly, looking at her like she’d just suggested they picnic on the moon – a lovely idea, of course, but completely unrealistic. “I can’t just up and ‘have an adventure’, Mar. I’ve got, like, adult shit to take care of. I have a job. I have rent. And besides, what about Jake? He’ll be at your granddad’s all summer, preparing new wands for the next school year. And all of his free time is going to be spent mooning over Vanessa. It’s not like I’m going to be able to convince to just up and leave for a month–”
“So? Who needs him?” Mari replied with a sniff, slightly less enthused now that her heartfelt suggestion had been met with stark incredulity. Still, she persevered. “And I know you have all that grown-up bullshit to deal with, but come on – that’s just an excuse. You can find someone to stay in your place for a month or two, some rich kid right out of Ilvermorny or something. And as for your job, you hate that place anyways.”
Atticus blinked in surprise. “How did you know that?”
Mari tapped the top of her nose playfully and winked. “A lady never reveals her sources.” The truth was Mari only had one source, and it was Jacob, who tended to relent information after an extended period of constant annoying questions. That was how she knew that Atticus had for a short (and surely meaningless) while dated the lovely hostess at the fancy white tablecloth restaurant he waited at. That was also how she knew they had broken up six months ago, and he still had to see both her and the bartender he’d caught her with every day when he went to work. After that, it was only a hop, jump, and skip away from the conclusion that Atticus probably hated his job.
See? She was good at sleuthing.
As for her current proposition, Atticus still didn’t look convinced. Mari had only been talking out of her ass, really, when she’d originally made the suggestion – but the more they went back and forth, the more sure she felt that this was the right option and the more determined she was to make Atticus see that as well. Her mind, unbidden, went back to the folded up acceptance letter in her pocket, and her breath hitched for just a moment. Was it possible that she could kill two birds with one stone? Before she could doubt herself, Mari spoke again, trying not to sound too eager. “What if– what if we . . . ran away? Together?”
Atticus looked at her sharply, clearly alarmed, and seemed to notice for the first time that she was touching him. He pulled away from her gently and shifted to put some distance between them. “Mari. . .”
Panic flooded her system and Mari launched into damage control mode. “Not like that!” she blurted out sharply, her voice a little higher than usual. She winced and cleared her throat before pushing through in a voice that was a closer approximation to her usual, casual tone. “I meant, uh– you’re not the only one who could use a change of scenery, y’know. I want to spend my last summer of freedom doing something– something totally insane. I want to be crazy and spontaneous one last time before I’m tied down with all of that bullshit too, and I can’t just live my life anymore. So. . . what if we went off on separate adventures, together? Just to keep each other company and make sure the other is alright and stuff? Would that be so bad?”
Atticus still looked dubious. “You don’t have school friends your own age that you would rather do this with? One last hurray and all that jazz?”
And honestly. . . Mari didn’t. Oh, sure, she had friends and all that, she wasn’t a complete loner – Vee would be down to go to Hell and back as a lark, if she asked, and the girls from her dorm were always up for a good time. But if she took this trip with them, it would wind up being something silly and juvenile – one last beat of her school days before she gave it all up. The idea of going with Atticus. . . that felt different. Bigger. Like– like the first step of the rest of her life?
(Mari might have laughed then, at how that thought now in this ridiculous context didn’t scare her nearly as much as the same thought she’d had earlier this morning, but she didn’t want to freak Atticus out by explaining, so she held herself back.)
“Nope,” Mari replied cheerily, completely confident. “Can’t think of anyone.” Atticus rolled his eyes and looked away from her, his gaze settling on the window. The view wasn’t much, just the gray stone of the too close building beside them, but Mari could tell he wasn’t really looking at it. He was considering her offer, really considering it. . . and in his own way, she could tell he needed this as badly as she did. He just needed one last push. She gave him a few moments of peace, and then wheedled in a singsong voice, “Also, I have a bank account my parents have been adding to since I was a kid that is begging to be blown through with irresponsible abandon.”
That drew an unexpected laugh from Atticus, and for a moment, Mari beamed with pride. Atticus could be so serious sometimes – it felt like a victory, to be able to make him laugh. But the joy she felt from his laugh was nothing compared to what she was about to experience in the next few minutes. “Okay,” Atticus agreed suddenly, nodding to himself. “I mean. . . yeah. Sure. Okay. What the hell, right? It’s not like I have anything to lose.”
For a moment, the world stopped turning. “Really?” Mari asked breathlessly, unsure that she could actually believe it. But Atticus was just looking at her – no correcting her misinterpretation, or laughing that she had fallen for such a joke. Just Atticus, serious and somber as a headstone; except, of course, that headstones never have smiles slowly creeping into their expressions. Mari gave a wide grin in response and, to keep herself from doing something phenomenally stupid (like launching herself into his arms), she downed the whole remaining glass of water. She might have choked, but who cared about something as stupid as that at a time like this? “Okay then!” she said in a tone of declaration, jumping down from the barstool. “We leave tomorrow, first thing in the morning! Show up at my place bright and early, seven am on the dot. No sleeping in. Bring everything that you’re going to need for the next two months. And bring plenty of sketchbooks!”
“Tomorrow??” Atticus said in alarm, scrambling to keep up with Mari’s sudden decisiveness. “Like, tomorrow tomorrow? You don’t think we need a little more time to get affairs in order and shit?”
“Tomorrow!” Mari shot back in a tone that brokered no argument. She strode to the door in her best imitation of the long, confident walk her mother used when she wanted people to get out of her way. “You said you would go, and it’s too late to turn back now.” Mari opened the door, and glanced back to see an awestruck Atticus still standing in the middle of his kitchen in his wrinkly pajamas. That was a sight that she would end up seeing a lot, she suspected, over the next two months. Her grin brightened. “See you in the morning!”
Mari closed the door behind her without waiting for a response. For a moment, she didn’t move, her brain too preoccupied running over what had just happened to consider anything so much as directing her feet to walk forward. She had really did just convince her brother’s best friend, the object of her ridiculous schoolgirl crush, to run away with her to nowhere in particular for an entire summer. It didn’t feel real – and yet, it was starting to feel more real with every passing moment. She laughed and pushed herself off the door, making her way merrily back into the real world. Tonight, she would let her parents celebrate her acceptance into the Academy. Tomorrow, she and Atticus would leave everything behind. And after that–
Well, who knew what would be waiting for them after that.