Preview

Wanda laid it out slowly, all of them gathered around the kitchen table. As she spoke, she took off her cape and the ornate headdress Peter had never seen her without. Now that it didn’t frame her face, giving her the elegiac appearance of some specter or demi-goddess, Peter realized how young she was. Geez, she’s practically a founding member of the Avengers and she’s younger than I am! 

As Wanda kept going—for what felt like hours—she took up a deck of cards from what seemed like nowhere and began to shuffle it. Dealing, flipping, weaving them back into her shuffling hands. It was all Greek to Peter. Less than Greek; he’d picked up enough of that language from Hercules, but with Wanda he was totally lost. But he could recognize the regularity with which certain cards were coming up. Maybe there was something to the cards. Or maybe Wanda literally wasn’t working with a full deck.

Peter could admit that the rigors of the working world had dented his bona fides as nerd supreme, but he still had a mind for arcana. He could explain what a Sith was, recite when spice was first discovered, and moreover, he could keep up with alien rivalries, corporate intrigues, lasers and FTL—most of what went into his normal working day. But he was hard-pressed to keep up when things went all Neil Gaiman. Anytime things rhymed, really. Mary Jane seemed to be following along with considerable investment, considering she was listening to someone who had just announced her intent to have congress with her husband. Peter tried not to be uncharitable and chalk it up to some boy-girl thing: Peter man! Peter like hard facts, logic! Mary Jane woman! Like emotion! Destiny! Scented soaps!

Wanda dealt for the final time. The Lovers, naturally. The World. And Death, upside-down. Peter wondered how these cards got upside-down, anyway. Was that a normal shuffling thing? Most Hoyle’s cards didn’t have a right-side up—if they made a Tarot deck like that, would the Fates just have to shake their fists, maybe write an asterisk on each card when there was a caveat attached?

Wanda finished her tale. The Tarot cards disappeared into her hands, then just disappeared. None of them spoke. Mary Jane pushed her chair out and came to her feet. Peter was too stunned to follow her; by the time he thought too, she was back. She’d been getting Wanda a mug of hot chocolate.

The spectacle of Mary Jane extending hospitality to the woman who intended to cuckold her—cuckquean her?—shocked Peter out of his stupor.

“Let me get this straight,” he said firmly, but trying not to be too firm. Me Peter man! Want hard facts! No feelings! Was it too much to ask that a guy didn’t have to sort out Lovecraftian deities and masculinity in the same day? “There’s some kind of mystical ritual that needs to be performed every… ten? Ten years?”

Wanda nodded. Peter felt for her, but with some relief. The way Wanda had explained it, it only counted if the spellcaster was ‘blooded’—sexually mature. So if she’d first done it ten years ago, she would’ve been about nineteen. He couldn’t imagine she’d be short on takers for some good old-fashioned sex magic, but the X-Men had always described her as soft, introverted. She could’ve been a virgin when first called upon to do it.

“And because you’re…” How to describe it? Wanda’s history with Magneto and the High Evolutionary and Chthon (whoever that was) made Mary Jane’s soap opera turns look as simple as calculus. “Affiliated with Chthon and the Mount Wundagore bunch, you have to sleep with a married man to cast this spell.”

“Yes,” Wanda said. “It’s sympathetic magic. To prevent the chaos gods from transgressing the border between our realm and theirs, we must perform a transgression of our own. A mirror to block their way. You can’t push past your own reflection.”

Why not? Harry Potter does it all the time, Peter thought, but didn’t say. Perfectly nice evening with the wife and now the Scarlet Witch had turned it into Indecent Proposal.

“And—because of the parameters of the spell—it has to be me.”

“Not you, specifically, but a totem, a weaver of the Web of Life and Destiny, and someone with a soul-bond to someone with whom he regularly… merges.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Mary Jane said, making Peter half-wince, half-laugh. If he wasn’t allowed to make jokes…

But Wanda seemed to lighten at the jibe. Mary Jane’s gift for reading the room put Wanda at ease instead of causing her to further tense up. “Spiritually, I mean. Sex is a very mystical experience. Your auras, your focus, your desire… well, if you’re doing it right, anyway.”

Mary Jane smiled back at her. If I had known she was this cool with people trying to sleep with me, I would’ve introduced her to Felicia a lot sooner, Peter thought.