Magic and the Modern Girl by Mindy Klasky

to tell him that I wasn’t Haylee; I wasn’t his former witch (that was witch with a capital B ). I wasn’t the woman he had sworn to protect and fallen in love with and then been hurt by when she found another warder, a man who could help her climb the Coven’s social ladder faster.
    I was me, and I was utterly, completely confused.
    At least he didn’t try to make small talk. And he dropped me off at the Peabridge before taking the car back to Gran’s by himself. He did say, though, that he’d be back the next night, Sunday night. Tonight. The night that I was supposed to complete my big power-recharging working.
    Yea. Rah.
    The ironic thing was, I could feel power stirring inside me, more power than I had felt since recognizing my dire witchy straits. The palpitations or power arcs or whatever they were had become almost constant, and my fingers tingled as if I had rubbed them repeatedly with sandpaper. Energy sparked inside me, rounded up by the contraceptive spell that I had worked, by the arcane energy that I had passed to David. That he had passed back to me.
    I felt sick to my stomach.
    I glanced to the side, eager to find something to distract me from the jangle of magical energy that was keeping me off center. A bulletin board hung on the wall, featuring notices about apartments for rent and dogs to adopt. The bottom half was covered by the poster that Melissa had mentioned the week before, the ad for the high-school production of The Tempest . Empower The Arts proclaimed bold white letters, printed on a diagonal.
    Prospero’s face peered out at me above the slogan. Melissa was right. The actor did look like David. It was something about his eyes, combined with the line of his jaw. And his lips….
    I forced myself to look at Melissa, to twist my own lips into some sorry third cousin twice-removed of a smile. “Enough about my life of witchy glamour. How are you?” She grimaced and stirred the ice cubes in her milky coffee. That look could only mean another collision on her own personal dating highway to Hell. “That good?” I asked. “Who was he?”
    Melissa’s love life read like the Rand McNally Atlas of Dating Disasters. She was determined to find the Perfect Man by the day that she turned thirty, a deadline that was all too rapidly approaching. No one could accuse her of sitting back and letting the world move around her, though, of her passively waiting for action without trying.
    She had worked through a pantheon of dating rejects over the years, tallying up more first dates than any girl should suffer in a lifetime. She fit in at least one a week, selecting her endless string of hopefuls from a variety of sources: FranticDate.com was a favorite (although I kept telling her that she was bound to end up with an axe murderer if she kept that up), Washington Today Magazine (where there were more married men looking for a bit of spice on the side than there were good, solid candidates for marriage), Dedicated Metropolitan Singles (a constant source of earnest young men who weren’t quite ready for a prime-time dating experience). Then there was the great catchall, the collection of “independents” who came recommended by friends and family (where “friends” was a loose category, elastic enough to include such shrewd judges of character as the clerk at the local monolith bookstore who had recommended his cousin one evening when Melissa had taken an inordinately long time to find her discount card in the bottom of her purse. The cousin had turned out to be a Nietzsche freak with a lisp. Man and Thuperman became a tagline for months).
    “Which one was this?” I asked, bracing myself for my best friend’s tale of woe. Okay, who was I kidding? I loved her stories—each and every one of them. They made the shambles of my own nondating life seem a little less dire. What was the word? Schadenfreude? I had to admit it—I took pleasure in her misfortune. What else were best friends for?
    “An