Spellbent (24 page)

The Warlock stood over me wearing old black jeans and a black velvet bathrobe that was loosely belted beneath his thickly pelted chest. He carried an unopened dark glass bottle of ginger ale. His fingers were armored with silver rings, and on a silver chain he wore an oblong bronze pendant of a bas-relief sword against a shield. Where Cooper was wiry and smooth, the Warlock was burly and furry, but they both had the same curly black hair, sharp gray eyes, and quick smile.

As I looked at him more closely, though, I realized he seemed sick: He was much paler than usual, his lips slightly blue, and his eyes looked sunken. His full beard and mustache were sprung with loose curls and wild hairs. It looked like he hadn’t trimmed or waxed them in days, and usually he was quite vain about his facial hair.

“Looks like somebody’s been home-brewing demat potions,” the Warlock said, glancing into the bucket. “The question is, did you bring enough for the whole class?”

“I’ve—I’ve got five doses left,” I coughed.

“Good girl,” the Warlock said, flicking the metal cap off the bottle with his thumb and offering it to me. “This should make you feel a little better.”

“Thanks.” I managed to sit up and took the bottle from him. The ginger ale was sharply sweet and cool, and felt wonderful going down.

The Warlock frowned at the bandages on my face. “Did. . . have you lost your eye?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. Why?”

A terrible realization seemed to eclipse his face for a moment, but his expression quickly cleared. “It’s . . . nothing. I’ll tell you later.”

He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Well, I’m glad to see Cooper’s been teaching you the good stuff, unless the potion was Spiderboy’s idea.” He jerked his head toward Pal, who was sitting on one of the bar stools, looking a bit woozy.

“Spiderboy?” I asked, completely baffled.

“Your familiar’s a quamo. If he were in his real form, he’d be a big arachnid, tall as me.”

“This fellow is quite perceptive,” Pal admitted.

“How did you know?” I asked the Warlock.

“When people come into my bar, I like to know exactly who they are,” he replied, then raised his hands to the rafters. “We seek, and magic almost always provides the solution. And speaking of knowing who everybody is—you’re not wearing your own aura, young lady. What’s up with that?”

“Mr. Jordan put an anathema on me after the accident downtown. He doesn’t want me looking for Cooper. Pal showed me how to dodge the curse by trading spiritual profiles with other people.”

The Warlock shook his finger at Pal in mock admonishment. “You’re a naughty one, aren’t you? Clever, but
very
naughty. Wouldn’t want to be you when your jailers get wise to what you’ve been doing.”

The Warlock walked behind the bar and poured himself a tall glass of dark ale from the tap. He toasted me with the glass before he took a drink:

“Here’s to our health.”

He drained half the ale, set the glass aside, and said, “Tell me what happened downtown. Everything.”

I got to my feet and sat down at the bar beside Pal. “I figured you’d heard all about it by now.”

The Warlock shook his head grimly. “No, nothing, though of course I got some ideas. Coop and me, we’ve always had this connection, since before I can remember. Something big happens to either of us, the other feels it. So last weekend, I was in here working the room, making the new customers feel at home, when
boom,
I feel like I been hit by lightning, and I know Coop’s in trouble. But before I can do anything else, I’m down for the count. Opal gets me awake maybe half an hour later, but goons from the Circle Jerk are here herding my customers out the door. They’ve got a scroll from a Virt saying they’re putting the place under indefinite isolation. Won’t say why. Won’t say shit to me. They just clear out everybody but me and Opal, and then slap the sphere on the whole building.”

The Warlock shook his head and took another long drink of his ale. “Phones don’t work, cable doesn’t work, can’t get anything but static on the radio. At least we got electricity and running water. They had a mundane kid drop some groceries in the front foyer yesterday, so I guess they don’t mean to starve us. Don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do if I run out of decent beer, though.”

I shuddered to think how much he’d been consuming if he was in any danger of drinking his own bar dry. “They didn’t tell you
anything?”
I asked. “I thought they, you know,
had
to tell you something before they put you under house arrest or whatever this is supposed to be.”

The Warlock shrugged. “I’m no poster boy for upstanding citizenship. Only the good kids get niceties like legal rights when serious shit goes down, because the Circle Jerks know they can scare the good kids into being useful to them. Us malcontents just keep being a pain in their butts no matter what. Jordan made it clear years ago he only tolerates me because everyone likes my bar. So tell me, what the hell happened to make him change his mind?”

We both had two more drinks apiece as I told him my story. When I finished, the Warlock looked grim.

“Not surprised Jordan’s been leaning on you like that. Good for you for not caving. I wasn’t sure you’d have it in you to fight back if something like this happened,” he said, rubbing his temples as if he had a headache.

I wasn’t sure if I should be offended or not. “You know what’s happened to Cooper, don’t you,” I said.

“I have. . . suspicions, yeah,” the Warlock replied.

“Tell me,” I insisted.

The Warlock wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I gotta go to the little boys’ room first.” He left his seat behind the bar and retrieved the bucket from the middle of the floor. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. . . if you guys are hungry, there’s plenty of stuff for sandwiches in the fridge.” He gestured toward the kitchen behind a set of swinging doors, then turned and went down the hall to the men’s restroom.

“That man’s rather frightened,” Pal said.

“That’d be a first,” I replied. “Nothing scares the Warlock.”

“Well, this most certainly has,” Pal said. “I can smell it all over him.”

I finished the last of my third bottle of ginger ale and set it by my other empties. “So, you’re a giant spider.”

“Well, that’s an oversimplification. We’re not spiders; we bear only a superficial resemblance to arachnids—”

“Eight legs? Lots of eyes? Breathe through your abdomen? Little pinchy mouthparts?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Dude. You’re a
spider.”

“This isn’t fair. I haven’t once given you a hard time about being a hairless water ape,” Pal said.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, but. . . spiders are
completely
inhuman.”

“I never claimed to be human, did I?” Pal replied testily.

“Yeah, but.. . but we get along really well. Well,
now,
anyway. You’re sympathetic, you understand me. . . how’s that possible if you’re really a big spider alien?”

Pal sighed. “Jessie, I’ve had
practice.
You’ve been alive for a little over two decades—I’ve been a familiar for more than three
centuries.
Don’t you think I could learn a little something about human psychology and culture in all that time? And, well.. . it’s really not that hard to think and feel like a mammal once you’ve occupied their bodies for a while. Sometimes it’s rather hard to remember what it was like to live in my true form.”

“Won’t it be weird when you finally get to go back to your own body and your own people?” I asked.

Pal shifted uncomfortably. “Yes. I imagine I’ll have an adjustment period. Sometimes I’m. . . I’m not sure I
can
go back. I didn’t exactly fit in even before I was arrested.”

He shook himself and bounced on the bar stool as if he was trying to cheer himself up. “Ah well! I can certainly find a position in academia eventually. I’m sure one of my nestmates will give me a place to stay until I can find a suitable situation.”

The Warlock came back to the bar and stowed the rinsed-out plastic bucket on a lower shelf.

“You were saying you had suspicions about what’s happened to Cooper?” I said.

“Yeah, I was.” The Warlock poured himself another ale, looking troubled. “Did Coop ever tell you about our childhood?”

I shook my head. “Not much. He said you two were raised in foster homes, and I got the feeling that he didn’t like talking about it, so I never pressed him.”

“Okay, then.” The Warlock took a long drink before he said anything else. “Coop was maybe six or seven, and I was about nine months old. A sheriff’s deputy found Coop carrying me down a back road in Licking County, about eight miles outside Cedar Hill. We were filthy, thirsty, and Coop had near-total amnesia—he didn’t know anything but his own name. He didn’t have anything but the clothes on his back, and I didn’t have anything but a diaper and this on my neck.” He touched his sword-and-shield pendant.

“The last time we talked about this, Coop still said that he couldn’t remember a thing from his life before he was walking down that road. The story goes that he freaked out when the child psychologist was talking to him at the sheriff’s station and Coop set the room on fire. The local Talents got involved after that, and got us out of there. They figured out that we were brothers, but didn’t think Coop and I had the same father, so I was John Doe for a long time.

“That’s why I just go by Warlock—I figure if I can’t use my given name, might as well call myself what I am and nothing more.”

“Couldn’t they use a spell to find out who your parents were?” I asked.

“That’s where the Circle Jerks and our foster folks got suspiciously hazy,” the Warlock replied. “Anytime I asked, they just hemmed and hawed about it. Coop—he just flat didn’t want to know. That pissed me off for a long time, till I got a bit older and figured out that some things really are best to let lie. But when I was sixteen, I was mad that the people around me were lying to me, so I started trying to find out on my own where we’d come from.

“I got hold of some old spell books and tried doing divination spells on my blood to trace my lineage. But no matter what I tried, I just couldn’t get the magic to work. So then I tried to find a diviner to do the spells for me, but everybody wanted way more money than any teenager could come up with, or they told me they didn’t have time, or whatever. One way or another, I got the brush-off when they figured out who I was.

“So I started doing mundane detective legwork as best I could. I didn’t get any answers—I kept running into dead ends and locked doors. The only thing I found was a newspaper story in the C
edar Hill Ally
from the same day the deputy found us on the road. The story talked about a fire in the woods, and a farmhouse the firefighters found out in the middle of nowhere that had burned straight to the ground. I figured out that the fire was less than three miles from where we’d been picked up, so I decided I’d go Out there myself and have a look around.”

The Warlock took another long drink from his glass.

“So what did you find out there?” I asked.

“It took me a while to find the place,” the Warlock replied. “It’s far out in the hills in a tangle of woods and dirt roads that nobody’s ever going to pave. But I knew it the moment I saw it: a half-acre clearing, still charred and lifeless after fifteen years, with the burned wreck of a house and stone-lined basement out in the middle. I took one step onto the bare dirt and the evil of the place hit me like a punch in the gut, and before I knew it I was back in my Mustang burning rubber to get back to Columbus.

“I didn’t sleep right for months after I went to that place. I don’t know what happened there, but it was very, very bad, and Coop and I were part of it.”

The Warlock was silent for a moment. “I quit looking for answers after that. Scared, I guess. But I came to realize I have certain. . .
shortcomings
when it comes to magic. Dirty gray and red magic I’ve always been good at, but the high-end white stuff has always been hard for me. Never been able to heal for shit; if it weren’t for Opal, I’d be dead from a pickled liver by now.”

“Is she any good at regrowing arms or eyes?” I asked, hopeful.

The Warlock shook his head. “She’s good with your typical bar fight injuries because, surprise, that’s what we get around here. If your arm was busted she could fix it, but complex regeneration’s a little more than she’s had to deal with. Sorry.”

“No problem. Thought I’d ask the obvious,” I replied, pushing down a sudden swell of frustration. “So what’s the deal with ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’? Cooper’s always hated that song like crazy.”

The Warlock shook his head. “Can’t say I like that tune much myself. . . makes me want to puke every time I hear it. I don’t know why. But I’m sure it’s because of what happened to us. About ten years ago I decided to get myself an in-depth spiritual exam, and I didn’t get half the answers I was looking for. . . but I did find out I’m missing a chunk of my soul.”

I was boggled. “How can you be missing a part of your soul?”

“Trauma. Black magic. Probably a mix of both,” the Warlock replied. “I’m not missing a
big
piece, mind you, or I wouldn’t much seem like a human being. But it was enough to screw up my ability to use white magic from the get-go, because it makes me look like a demon to the spirits that be.”