Spellbent (18 page)

“Honey, I don’t have any SpongeBob Band-Aids— come on, I need to put this, on your knee to keep the germs out. Stop being silly!”

What are the odds we could conjure up a Sponge- Bob SquarePants Band-Aid for the kid?
I wondered to Pal.

“SpongeBob isn’t in my repertoire,” Pal replied darkly. “And Fates willing, he never will be.”

The woman finally wrestled the bandage onto the little girl’s knee and carried her out of the restroom past me, the child shrieking at the indignity of it all.

The bloody paper towel lay forgotten and forlorn on the counter. I approached it, holding my ear.

“Can I use kid blood instead of adult blood?” I asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Pal replied.

“Well, then looks like somebody out there still likes me,” I replied. “At least enough to save me from the creeping horror of used feminine hygiene products. What now?”

“Pick up that paper towel and take it with you into a stall,” he said.

I did as he asked, awkwardly latching the door behind me with the towel still in my hand. “Should I sit or stand?”

“Whichever best helps you concentrate. And you will need to concentrate very hard to get this to work,” he replied.

I sat down on the toilet. Pal hopped off my shoulder onto the top of the paper dispenser.

“All right,” said Pal. “I need you to focus on the child’s blood. Concentrate. Tease out the spiritual essence lingering in the dying cells. Can you feel it?”

“Yes.” I could feel the child in her mother’s arms, still wailing and kicking as her mother carried her back to the family SUV, SpongeBob utterly forgotten, but the girl’s fury still in full foam because she couldn’t have ice cream.

“Keep focusing on the child’s essence. Think of it as a cloak you could wear to hide yourself, and focus on your own essence cloaking the child. Keep that image in your mind, keep focusing, and repeat after me:
Vestri animus Ut mei, meus animus ut vestri, os meus phasmatis, os meus vomica..

I stared unblinking at the bloody paper towel as I quietly repeated the chant, over and over. The towel began to darken, harden, the edges beginning to glow and smoke.

“. . .
Os meus vomica—”

The paper towel exploded in a shower of purple sparks. Startled, I ducked and slipped sideways off the toilet, shaking my hand to put out the flames I was sure had engulfed my flesh. Then I realized my hand didn’t hurt, and I stared at my pink, unburned palm. The paper towel hadn’t even left ashes behind.

“Did—did it work?” I asked.

Pal had only narrowly avoided getting knocked off his perch. He looked me up and down. “Yes. I believe that worked nicely. You’ll have to do that again this time tomorrow, maybe sooner if you perform a lot of other spells in the meantime. That sort of thing can make this counter-charm wear off. And to make best use of this, we should hie ourselves to wherever you plan to go.”

I got up and Pal jumped back onto my shoulder. When I pushed out of the stall, I saw that a teenage girl in a Worthington Cardinals T-shirt had come into the restroom. The girl was standing with her back to the door, staring at me like I’d just beamed down from Mars.

Bet she heard me chanting, right? Or the explosion? Or me talking to you just now?
I thought to Pal.

“Any or all of those are likely,” Pal replied. “To be safe you should do a memory-wipe charm.”

Cooper, for all his delighting to push the limits when it came to public displays of magic, had long ago made sure I learned a reliable, simple charm for erasing the last two minutes of a mundane’s memory. It was, literally, a snap.

Trouble was, I had lost my desire to play by the governing circle’s rules.

I noticed a pink plastic watchband on the girl’s right wrist. “Hello there! Do you have the time?”

“Uh. Yeah.” The girl nervously looked down at her watch. “It’s four thirty.”

“Jimmy crickets! We have time to catch the bus!” I replied, putting on a maniacal smile. “And we just looove the bus, don’t we, Mister Weezypants?”

The girl backed out of the restroom and ran like hell.

“‘Mister Weezypants’?” Pal said as the door swung shut. “You shouldn’t provoke people like that. And you should have erased her memory.”

“Foo, she didn’t see that much,” I replied. “And if I can’t mess with people in my condition, what good is it being armless and half blind and homeless and nearly broke, anyway?”

Bus, Bar, and Box Store

Despite my cavalier words, I left the library as quickly and quietly as I could. Pal and I crossed Granville Road and walked down High Street to the post office, where I dropped my letter to Karen into one of the big mailboxes out front, abandoning it to the whims of fate and the postal carriers.

We walked a bit farther down High to the bus stop. The bench under the Plexiglas shelter was already crowded with summer-quarter Ohio State students heading back to campus, so I leaned against the signpost to wait for the southbound #2 to arrive.

“Out of curiosity, where are we going?” asked Pal.

Well,
I replied,
I think the first thing I need to do is talk to the Warlock, if he hasn’t blown town entirely. And if he’s split, I need to see if I can track him down. If anyone has any ideas about what’s happened to Cooper—and why—it’s his own brother.

I heard the bus rumbling down the Street and dug in my pocket for six quarters.
Unless they’ve changed the schedule, this should eventually drop me just a couple of blocks from his bar in Victorian Village.

“I don’t think this is a very good idea,” replied Pal. “Jordan’s men have surely pressured and monitored the Warlock as much or even more than they’ve done to you. The anathema counter-charm won’t hold if they’ve set up specific detection spells near the bar.”

Well, it won’t hurt to take a look around, will it?
I asked.
I really do need to talk to him about everything that’s happened. And you’d be able to sense the spells and warn me away, wouldn’t you?

“I could sense most spells, yes,” he said, “but I can make no guarantees I’d be able to sense everything.”

I was starting to feel seriously annoyed.
Well, do you have a better idea?

Pal was silent for a moment. “No, I’m afraid not. I suppose we might as well take a careful look around.”

The bus ground to a hissing halt in front of the stop. Pal and I got on after the college students; the driver either didn’t notice Pal, or didn’t care one way or the other.

The bus made its leisurely way down High Street and finally dropped us off at Fifth at five thirty. High Street was bumper-to-bumper with rush-hour traffic. I crossed the street after the light turned red and headed west down Fifth toward the Warlock’s bar, Lingham Liquors Lounge.

I was a whole block away when the anathema sphere surrounding the bar became visible. The entire building was engulfed in a throbbing red glow that made my eye ache and my ears ring. Looking at it for more than a second made me want to throw up.

“Man,” I said, leaning against a nearby brick wall and closing my eye, hoping the nausea would pass. “That’s as subtle as a bullet in the head.”

Pal couldn’t look at it, either. “It’s unsubtle, but strong. I don’t sense anything else at work here, but what else could they possibly need? No Talent can go near the place, and the Warlock can’t get out.”

You think he’s still in there?
I asked.

“They wouldn’t bother warding an empty building.”

What about his mundane regulars and staff?

“Well, that spell’s nearly as powerful as the isolation sphere they cast to contain the Wutganger. It’s bound to make approaching the bar a fairly anxious prospect for anyone even remotely sensitive to such things.”

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one they felt like destroying financially,
I thought bitterly.
Is there any way to get past it?

“With magic, there’s almost
always
a way,” Pal replied. “But this one’s going to be sticky. I have to give this a good hard think.”

And I have to get some tea, and something to eat,
I replied, still feeling shaky and headachy.
And then I really need to find a place to crash for the night.

I backtracked down Fifth Avenue to Victorian’s Midnight Café. I ordered an iced tea, an oatmeal cookie, a grilled egg sandwich, and a small cup of water for Pal at the counter, juggled the drinks and dessert, and sat down in one of the comfy purple chairs by the window to wait for the waitress to bring out the rest of my order.

An eighteen- or nineteen-year-old white kid with dreadlocks and a scruffy soul patch was up on the stage in the corner, reciting a rambling poem about Che Guevara, John Lennon, and, near as I could tell, marijuana. He finished his verse to a smattering of applause, then gathered up his canvas messenger bag and went to the community bulletin board. He pulled a flyer with tear-off tags out of his bag and tacked it up among the ads for yoga lessons and used sofas and bicycles. I could just make out the words ROOMMATE WANTED at the top of his paper.

Wait here and keep anyone from taking my seat, would you?
I thought to Pal.

“All right,” replied Pal, hopping off my shoulder onto the back of the chair.

I got up and approached the dreadlocked kid. I got a good whiff of him when I was three feet away. Yep, that poem had most definitely been about marijuana.

“Hi, I’m Jessie,” I said. “You’re looking for a roommate?”

He looked startled. “Whoa, did you have an accident or something?”

“Yes, it was extremely accidental, So, you need a roommate? What’s your name?”

“Uh, yeah, I’m Kai. Me and my buds, we have this house on East Avenue, and this guy Boomer just totally bailed on us, I think he was in trouble with the cops or something—”

“Is it a room to share with somebody else, or is it a private room? ‘Cause I need my own room, and my own bathroom would be sweet.”

“Well, see, Boomer
was
in the attic room, and that’s got its own bathroom, it’s just a sink and a toilet and a shower but sometimes the shower don’t work right, but Mikey wanted it so we were gonna rent out Mikey’s old room on the third floor—”

“Can I talk you into letting me rent the attic room and have Mikey stay put?”

“Uh. Well, see Mikey and I go way back and he was really cool and stuff when I was having trouble with my folks and so I really owe him—”

“I can make it worth Mikey’s while. And yours. Everybody in the house would find me to be a
very
worthwhile attic roommate.”

“Like how?” he asked.

“Like I can get you as much liquor as you want, whenever you want.. For free,” I replied. “And if you, perhaps, were into cultivating certain species of indoor plants that have been a bit reluctant to grow, I can help with that, too.,,

“Are you a farmer?” he whispered.

“Better.” I leaned in close to his ear and spoke low. “I’m a witch. The
real
kind. I can grow anything.”

“You’re shitting me,” he said doubtfully.

“Nope, not one bit. I’ll give you and your roommates a free demonstration at your place, say in two hours?”

He agreed, and gave me a copy of his flyer with his phone number and address. I folded it against my thigh and stuck it in my back pocket.

The waitress arrived with my grilled egg sandwich soon after I reclaimed my seat by the window.

“You want us to stay with
him?”
Pal said as the dreadlocked kid left the café.

I sipped my iced tea.
What, you want me to drag
nice
people into this swirling storm of shit that constitutes my life right now?

“Good point,” replied Pal. “But wouldn’t a hotel room be more. . . sanitary?”

Hotels cost money, which I don’t have so much of right now.
I set my tea aside and took a bite of the sandwich.
Even if our Pot Poet’s place turns out to be much worse than your standard student flop- house, well, you probably know a delousing spell and a decent cleaning spell, right? We’ll be good.

“Never mind the spells. . . you’ve never met these people before,” Pal said. “You have no idea if they’re safe or not. And can I have some of that sandwich?”

I scooped out some of the cheesy scrambled egg filling and put it on a napkin so Pal could eat it on the floor.

I’m figuring Kai doesn’t live with a junior Ed Gem. And even if he does, you know what? I’m not afraid of that right now,
I replied.
I killed a demon last week. Yeah, maybe it was pure luck, but you know, maybe it wasn’t. So I’m not afraid of some punk-ass stoner. I’m not afraid of some third-string football-player rapist. I’ve been afraid of so many things since Cooper disappeared.
. .
maybe people ought to start being afraid of me for a change.
I savagely bit off another mouthful of bread and egg.
Handling a houseful of sophomore guys is the least of my worries right now.

I finished my sandwich in silence, watching people come and go through the front door of the café. I’d been there with Cooper once when we were first dating, still so hot for each other that after a couple of espressos we’d ended up sneaking into the ladies’ room to make out. Cooper had just bent me over the sink and was about to do me from behind when an overcaffeinated lady with a sudden attack of diarrhea started pounding on the latched door. Cooper had to quickly turn himself invisible, and I had to scramble to get my jeans back on, but I was able to let the lady inside with apologies before the situation became dire.