Spellbent (25 page)

“Do you have any idea where the rest of your soul is?” I asked.

“Based on the dreams I’ve been having lately, I’m pretty sure the rest of my soul is in a hell. I think Cooper’s in there, too. All of him. I got the feeling that his getting dragged in there was inevitable if it didn’t happen during his life, it’d happen when he died. You get touched by something that turns into a hell, it’s not gonna let you go easy. It’s probably got my number, too, and it’s just waiting for me to screw up a big spell or die. I know damn well that if I try to go rescue him, I’ll be just as stuck as he is.”

I thought of the Wutganger and wondered whose soul it had been a piece of. “That demon I fought downtown—”

“Not mine,” the Warlock replied. “That I’m very sure of.”

He paused. “I love my brother, Jessie, I do. But. I can’t go after him. I just can’t. I’d lay down my life for him if I thought I stood a chance of helping him, but I’m Mr. Snowball here. And.. . there are things worse than dying. Even if it’s inevitable.. . I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”

“You don’t have to go after him,” I replied. “I’ll do it. I’ll bring him home, one way or another.”

“Jessie, this is
hell
we’re talking about. There are lots of hells in this universe—anybody who dies with a big load of guilt or hate’s just as likely to create their own as they are to pass on to the Great Beyond—but the one thing they’ve all got in common is that they’re worse than most people can possibly imagine. You go looking for Cooper—even supposing you don’t get killed right away by whatever’s in there, supposing you get out alive—you’ll be changed by it. Cooper will have been changed by it. Your lives will
not
be the same. You don’t want to do this, trust me,” he finished, not really sounding like he thought he’d be able to talk me out of anything.

“I can’t leave him down there,” I said. “I can’t live with myself knowing I could have done something, but wasn’t brave enough to try. I should have helped my aunt Vicky, but I totally failed her; I can’t do that to Cooper. I
have
to do this. Can you at least help me find a way into where he’s trapped?”

“Yeah. I. . . I can find that field again. Opening a portal there shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You’ve done portals before?” I asked.

“No. . . but the barrier between that hell and our world is precious thin out there.”

The Warlock shivered and pulled his robe closed, looking even sicker than he had before, and I finally put two and two together.

“You’re spiritually bound to Cooper, aren’t you?” I asked. “If he dies, you die.”

The Warlock had gone a shade paler, but he forced a smile. “Which is good news, right? I’m still up and around, so that means hell hasn’t killed him yet. And . . . his death is no guarantee of my death. There are. . . measures I can take.”

He fingered the sword-and-shield pendant at his neck.

My mouth went dry, thinking of Mr. Jordan’s story of how my mother saved me from cancer. The Warlock, for all his fighting and dodgy deals and insatiable appetite for sex, had always claimed he never committed nonconsensual violence. He never even took a familiar because he said he didn’t believe in taking advantage of those who’d been forced into magical servitude.

“What kind of measures?” I asked. “Necromancy? After all your talk of not hurting other people?”

“Get off that high horse right now, Jessie,” the Warlock said, softly but with real menace. “You eat meat the same as me; you’re willing to accept the death of other creatures to support your own life.”

“But not the death of
people,”
I insisted. “And I know good and well it would take nothing less than human sacrifice to stop what’s going to happen to you if Cooper dies.”

He paused. “Come upstairs with me to our apartment. There’s something you should see. Both of you, I suppose,” he added, flicking his eyes toward Pal.

Pal climbed up on my shoulder, and I followed the Warlock through the kitchen to a flight of polished wooden stairs that led to the second floor. The Warlock’s breathing became labored near the top. I could feel the wards on the stairs; uninvited visitors would be overcome with nausea and vertigo before they got even halfway up. His apartment entrance was certain to have a subtler and more deadly set of protections.

He unlocked the door and led me in. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of tobacco, incense, and dirty liner boxes. He flipped on the living room light. The walls were decorated with paintings and framed sketches, mainly nudes of men and women I figured were some of the Warlock’s many lovers. He wasn’t a bad artist, either; though some of the drawings were a little flat, he had a real talent for capturing faces and expressions. The hardwood floors were littered with piles of books and drifts of dust and cat hair. A gray Persian stared at me irritably from the black leather couch beside the huge television set.

“It’s in the back,” the Warlock said, beckoning me to follow him down a broad, arched hallway that was far too long to exist solely within the confines of the building. “You want anything to eat? I think Opal made some tuna salad.”

“No, I’m good, thanks. Where
is
Opal, by the way?”

“She’s down in the garage. The anathema sphere cranked her claustrophobia up to eleven, so she’s been messing with our Land Rover. She’s trying to get it magicked up so it can get through the sphere without frying out the electrical system or blowing up the fuel tank. I was glad she found something to keep her occupied, but I figured it wasn’t gonna help us much since we didn’t have the stuff on hand to keep the sphere from frying
us.
But now that you’re here, and you brought goodies, maybe all that work wasn’t for nothing.”

“If she doesn’t finish, we can just shrink the Rover down and stick it in your pocket and walk out with it,” I said.

“When you’ve got a new hammer, everything looks like a nail, doesn’t it?” Pal commented.

Shush. It’s a most excellent hammer,
I thought back.

The Warlock looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “Surely you don’t think the sphere is the only barrier Jordan’s put up between here and there, do you?”

“Well . . . no, I suppose not,” I replied, feeling sheepish.

“Then I’d really feel much better about our chances if she got the Rover magicked up before we buzz on out of here to take you to certain death.”

“Gosh, thanks, Warlock, that just warms the very cockles of my heart—have you ever considered selling the bar and starting a new career as a life coach?”

“Y’know, I keep suggesting that to Opal, but for some weird reason she thinks it wouldn’t go over too well.”

“Seriously, though,” I said, “the potions I made expire tomorrow around sunrise—do you think she’ll actually have the truck properly enchanted by then?”

The Warlock nodded, looking distracted. “I have a feeling she’ll get it worked out in time. She’s been at it for thirty hours straight. She yelled at me to quit looking over her shoulder last time I went in there. Lady’s gotta have her space when she’s like that.”

“You’re going to have to deal with your anathema before then,” Pal reminded me.

“Oh, crap, yeah, my anathema,” I said. “I’ll need to leave to get some tissue in Worthington and do another counter-spell before four PM.”

“Do you have enough potion to get in and out of here and still cover us?” the Warlock asked.

“Yeah. I’ve got enough left—we should be good, as long as we’re out by tomorrow morning. Do you have forty dollars I can borrow for the cab?”

“How ‘bout I give you sixty, and you can bring us back some pizzas for dinner. There’s a place called Antolino’s just around the corner. I want mine with anchovies and black olives. And here’s the room I wanted to show you.”

He stopped and opened a door to a room lit only by the blue glow of fluorescent aquarium lights. Four rectangular hundred-gallon aquaria were lined up against the back wall, their aerators bubbling softly. At first glance, I thought the pink things crawling on the smooth rocks and swimming through the red and green algae fronds were some kind of salamanders or frogs.

Then I took a closer look and saw that the big- headed, short-tailed creatures had a distinctly human form. The largest was maybe six inches long, the smallest perhaps four. Their lids were sealed shut over huge dark eyes, and their toothless mouths gulped air at the water’s surface or gummed juice from the algae’s fronds. Fragile webbing stretched between their tiny fingers.

“We call ‘em the Jizz Kids,” the Warlock said. “We started out with, oh, I guess fifty or sixty. Now there’s two dozen. They were small as brine shrimp when we discovered them. Good thing they were that big, or Opal wouldn’t have even seen ‘em and would have flushed the whole batch. We lost over half in the first few weeks when we were trying to figure out what kind of environment suits them best. The water’s a little salty, about what you’d get in a river delta near the ocean, but pure ocean water dehydrates them. Had to special-order the river weed from Japan.”

I was staring into the nearest aquarium, my face nearly against the glass. “Holy shit. These are homunculi.”

The Warlock smiled. “Glad to see Cooper hasn’t been ignoring your classical education.”

“How did you get these?”

“Well, when you come right down to. it, it’s because me and my lady are hopeless slobs.” He laughed. “It’s not a story for the dinner table, that’s for sure.

“Opal and I were down in this little place we have in the mountains about four months ago. Strong Earth magic site, though nothing like the Grove. Anyhow, she was on her period and really wasn’t in the mood for anything, so I ended up going into the bathroom to jack off—”

“Wait, whoa. This has already gone way past the ‘too much information’ line,” I said.

“No, really, this is important,” the Warlock insisted.

“No, really, my lunch is going to make friends with your floor if you give me any more details,” I replied. “Just hit the highlights, if you feel
that
compelled to share this lovely story of yours.”

“Well, there was some. . .“ He made swirling motions with his index fingers. “. . . mixing of male and female personal substances after we both forgot to flush, got the idea?”

“God help me, I do.”

“Okay. Not five minutes later, she got an emergency call from her sister in Gahanna. Her basement flooded, you know the drill. So we had to come back to the city.

“We drove back down to the cabin the following weekend. Opal went into the bathroom. People five counties over probably heard her holler when she lifted the toilet lid and found the kids swimming around in there. I bailed them all out and put them in a couple of mason jars, then took them back up here and started buying aquarium supplies.”

“That’s completely disgusting,” I said.

“Yet kind of cool, you have to admit,” the Warlock said. “They’re coming along pretty well. Don’t know if it was something in the water up there, or the ‘shrooms we were taking, or what. We’ve tried to repeat the experiment—”

“Details: do not want!”

“—but no luck so far. So what we have is possibly all there will ever be, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. They seem to be developing sort of like regular human fetuses—they’re absorbing their tails, for one thing—but I don’t think anyone will confuse them with regular human kids once their eyes have opened and they’re ready to live on dry land. If they’re
ever
ready for land life.”

The homunculi seemed to sense the Warlock’s presence, and they were crowding at the glass near him.

“Looks like the kids are hungry,” he said, and pushed aside his robe so he could get into the pocket of his black jeans. He pulled out a steel penknife and a purple healing crystal, then lifted the covers of the aquaria, drew the blade across his palm, and squeezed thick drops of blood into the water. The homunculi jostled one another to drink the Warlock’s blood.

 “They like yogurt, too,” he said as he sealed the wound on his hand with the crystal. “But they like my blood best.”

“So you’re planning to use some of them in a sacrifice ritual?”

“If
I have to. I don’t
want
to, understand that.” He turned to face me. “They won’t take Opal’s blood anymore; they’re
my
kids. I don’t know how long they’d last on yogurt and river weed. If
I
die, a lot of them are- gonna die, too.”

Manic Mechanic

The Warlock led me and Pal down to the basement garage. Opal, a tall, attractive, whip-thin woman with a shock of short bleached white hair, was hunched over the silver Land Rover’s huge engine. She wore a grubby blue mechanic’s jumpsuit and was smoking a clove cigarette and muttering a steady stream of automotive obscenities. I had often thought that if the Warlock and Opal were alcoholic beverages, the Warlock would be a smooth but strong stout-and-cider Snakebite and Opal would be a shot of Strawberry Surprise—the surprise being that the high-proof drink contained pure mouth- torturing capsaicin and not the slightest bit of strawberry, despite its pretty pink appearance.

I didn’t doubt that they loved each other, in their way. But their open relationship got so volatile at times that I’d asked the Warlock on one of our Panda Inn evenings how he and Opal had managed to share space for so long. He’d given me and the rest of the bar a long, drunken, pornographic oratory. Apparently Opal fucked like a mink in heat and as far as the Warlock was concerned, any amount of her crazy, caustic behavior paled in comparison.