The Magic Touch Read Online Free PDF Page B

her fingertips and extended the star in a broad arc. “When I hold the wand out like this, I can feel need strings. Each string is attached to a child who has a longing.”
    Ray put his hands in his pockets and bent down to see. He peered closer, expecting to see the same veil of light the Blue Fairy spread on them at the union meeting. “I don’t see any strings.”
    “You can’t see them unless you have your own wand out.” Ray dug his hands deeper into his pockets. “Don’t worry,” Rose promised him. “Nothing bad will happen. That’s just a training wand. It doesn’t have enough pfft ”—she blew through her lips—“to break a soap bubble, but it’ll teach you everything you need to move on to the real thing.”
    “Yeah, right.” Ray put all the skepticism he felt into two words. Rose smiled at him encouragingly. She must think the craziness was catching. At last, he reached into his pocket.
    The baby wand had looked like a painted pencil when he got it in the guildhall, but when he took it out this time he felt a kind of electric shock. “Wow!”
    Rose nodded, studying him critically. “You’ve got the aptitude. No question about it.”
    Ray whisked the small stick through the air and felt texture there, as if he was running it over a ridged surface. Impossible. He tried it some more to make sure he wasn’t simply imagining the sensation. It was real. Magic really existed? He goggled at Rose, but she just nodded encouragingly at him to try it again, so he continued to wave the stick around. After a few moments, he began to get a feel for the shape of the air. Some of the bumps were higher than others. The high ones were more intense-feeling than the low ones. He deliberately stopped with the wand resting on a high, and felt the thrill of tension.
    “This is weird! How come I didn’t feel this before, when I got it?”
    “We suppress a lot in the hall,” Rose said. “Otherwise the roof would blow off.” Raymond let scorn and disbelief show on his face. She shrugged. “It happened once. Ask your grandmother. She was there.”
    He’d rather have dropped dead right there on the sidewalk than ask Grandma the kind of question she might answer with that look ,so Raymond just returned his attention to the feeling he got holding the wand. A nice sensation. He should have been terrified of it, but the wand wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t fear it if he tried. He liked it. Rose was right, there was nothing bad in the wand. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he just did. The feeling reached way down inside him and lit him up like springtime. He smiled and let out a deep breath.
    “That’s good,” he said.
    “That’s exactly what it is.” Rose nodded firmly. “It’s good. You have a lot inside you, and it resonates.”
    “Aw, come on,” Ray said, embarrassed. The sensation faded just a little, and he felt bereft at the loss. He clutched the little pencil-wand more tightly. Rose stared off into space, her eyes half-closed.
    “There’s that verse, by Tennyson I think, about Sir Galahad. Ever hear it? ‘My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.’”
    Ray gawked at her. “Bullshit,” he said.
    Rose shrugged. “Not everything that’s hackneyed is false, Ray. Keep your chin up,” she admonished him, reaching up to chuck him in the jaw with her knuckles. “It comes and it goes. You enjoy the high points and wade through the lows. We all do. It’s one of the balances of the job.”
    “About those rewards,” Ray wanted to know, as Rose turned to walk along the street again. “I heard something like a pension plan…?”
    “Later,” Rose said, with that exasperating smile of hers. “Wait until you do the job first, if you don’t mind. There are children out there who need us. Follow me.”
    O O O
    Half a block later, they stopped in front of a brick apartment building. Ray eyed it, wondering what was special about this one, out of half a dozen just like it