Spellbent (29 page)

“This doesn’t have a sizing charm, but by my eye it ought to fit. What it
does
have is a charm to nullify poisonous gases and provide oxygen in dead air. It won’t let you breathe underwater, but it would help in a sand- or ash-storm. . . unless the hell Cooper’s in squelches magic. But that’s a risk with anything I could give you. No matter what—” He rapped on the crown with his knuckles. “—it’ll stop a pretty good whack with a bat or sword, and it’ll bounce a bullet.”

I took the helmet from him and put it on my head. It was a little loose and smelled like stale hair spray, but I deemed it a fit. “Hey, thanks, I think this’ll work fine.”

“Great,” he said, scratching his beard. “There’s something else I wanted
you
to take a look at while you’re up here.”

“What?” I asked.

The Warlock reached up onto another shelf and pulled down what looked like an old hatbox. When he took off the lid, I saw that the box contained a pearly glass ball about the size of a grapefruit nestled in a bed of old-fashioned paper Easter grass. Something about it made my ocularis itch.

“You probably haven’t seen one of these before,” he said, lifting the glass ball. “It’s an odeiette. They were popular with wealthy Talents up until the late 1800’s, when everybody started going to the movies instead.”

“It’s making my ocularis tweak out a little,” I said. The itching was getting worse.

“Well, that’s good, actually, ‘cause that means maybe
I
didn’t get ripped off when I bought it. The guy told me that the visualization enchantment got screwed up, but you could still see into it if you have ghostsight or some other kind of clairvoyance Which I don’t
have,
but who am I to turn down a good deal on a real antique?”

He held the ball out to me. “Blink through and tell me if you see anything.”

I took the ball from him and took a look inside. On one of the middle gemviews, the glass cleared and I could see two striped ginger kittens playing: wrestling on a patch of green grass, leaping at a blue butterfly, over and over, tirelessly cute. I realized that
I
could hear them mock-growling and mewing as they tussled. Apparently the ocularis was sending more than just visual information to my brain.

“It’s kittens playing,” I told him as I passed the ball back to him. The ocularis had stopped itching. Evidently the irritation was some kind of built-in alert for whatever kind of vision I’d just had, and once seen, it went away.

“Oh good,” he said. “It’s something nice. The guy said it was cats but that could mean almost anything.”

Something nice.
I squinted at the ball. “What’s in that thing, exactly?”

“Kitten spirits. Ghosts under glass.”

I was starting to feel a bit creeped out. “How did they make it?”

“Well, in the early days odeiettes were used as duppy jars by spiritualists. . . they’d just sort of hunt around for loose spirits, capture them, and use these glass balls to observe them. Nobody but hardcore collectors wanted those; wraiths and poltergeists aren’t a happy bunch, so generally you’d just see the person inside endlessly screaming—”

“Person? They put
people
in these?”

“Well, yeah, it was mostly all people at first, but the necromancers who made ‘em started looking for scenes that might be a bit more, you know, fun to watch. So they’d set up scenes with animals or slaves fighting, or having sex, or playing, and when everybody involved was really getting into it, the necromancer would flash-kill the participants and scoop their spirits into the glass and voila!. Portable entertainment. These things were like the video iPods of the Victorian era.”

I stared at the pearly glass, feeling my stomach tighten. “That’s
horrible.”
b

“But it means you can see ghost loops through that stone eye. And that’s pretty sweet,” he said.

I
wasn’t going to be sidetracked “It’s horrible and just plain
Wrong.”

The Warlock shrugged. “It was a different
era.
The kittens in this thing would have probably ended up
in
a sack at the bottom of a river if they hadn’t ended up in here. They Wouldn’t have even been aware of
their
own deaths, if that makes you feel better about it.”

“How do you free spirits from these things?”

“Just break
the
glass, usually,” he replied.

“Then break it. Let them go.”

“But this is an antique_”

“I’ll pay you whatever for it! Seriously, it’s wrong. Let them go.”

The Warlock gave me a look of consternation, then shrugged and sighed. “Fine, if it’ll make you happy. But for the record, you owe me a thousand bucks.”

He pulled a folding knife
out
of his pocket and rapped the glass sharply with
it.
The glass cracked, and I saw two small glowing wisps and a third, much tinier wisp escape and disappear into the air.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well then. I’m pretty sure Opal’s done
with
the truck by now. So if you need to get another snack, grab a bottle of pop, use the facilities, get your sling back on, or anything like that, go for it,” the Warlock said. “And then we can head downstairs and get this show on the road.”

The Road to Hell

When Pal and I got down to the garage, we found Opal loading an arsenal of a dozen-odd grenades and a couple of wands and pistols into a box on the floor of the passenger side of the Land Rover.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Opal straightened, squinting at my sling. “You weren’t a lefty, were you?”

“No, I’m right-handed. . . what’s all that?”

“Insurance,” Opal said. “Warlock knows what everything is. You just gotta throw straight and hard as you can.”

“Okay..

The Warlock came around the back of the Land Rover. “You get something to drink upstairs?”

“Just water,” I replied. “My stomach’s feeling a little touchy.”

“Well, I got some ginger ale in a cooler in the back, in case you feel like something later.”

“This’ll take, what, about an hour to drive out there?” I asked.

“Traffic’s heavy on Fridays, so call it an hour and a half, provided we don’t run into trouble,” the Warlock replied.

“That’s all I got,” Opal said as she put a small string of what looked like firecrackers in the floorboard box, then turned to the Warlock, her face a tight mask of dismay. “Don’t go. Please?”

“Baby, you know I have to. I’m sorry,” he replied. Looking like she was going to start crying, Opal grabbed him by the back of the head and pulled his face down toward hers. They kissed so deeply I felt myself start blushing. When they came up for air, Opal released him and backed away, her arms crossed.

“Get the hell out of here,” Opal said softly, staring at her boots. “Don’t get killed.”

“You heard the lady,” the Warlock said to me. “Let’s get going.”

I nodded toward the Land Rover. “What’s the plan to get that out of here, again?”

“Well, I’m all for doing this as quickly as possible,” the Warlock replied. “Driving it will obviously be a problem once we’re immaterial, so I figure we can both take our potions and go through the barrier on foot. And then once we’ve rematerialized, Opal can put the Rover in neutral and roll it out onto the street, and I can hop in, grab the wheel, brake, and then you can get in, and we’re on our way.”

“Urn,” I said. “Isn’t that overly complicated? Not to mention dangerous?”

“Not really,” the Warlock said. “It won’t be going more than five or ten miles per hour when it clears the barrier, and if we wedge the door open—”

“But it’s the middle of rush hour. And what about all that?” I pointed at the box of stuff Opal had loaded. “Most of that’s magical, right? Won’t that trip whatever sensory alarms are in the sphere?”

“Uh.” Judging from the expression on his face, I guessed the Warlock hadn’t considered that problem.

“She has a point,” Opal said.

“Seriously, just let me shrink the Rover down and put it in my pack.. . we can walk it out of here and find someplace where we can expand it without any random people seeing us.”

“But it’ll get bounced around—all the ice and drinks’ll spill out of the cooler,” the Warlock protested.

I looked at him and cocked my head. “Surely you have some duct tape or bungee cords around here?”

“What about the engine?” he asked. “The gas’ll slosh everywhere inside it. It’s gonna get flooded, and we won’t be able to start it.”

“Won’t,” Opal said. “Figured it might end up ass- over-kettle. Charmed it so the fluids’ll stay put.”

“Okay, then?” I asked.

The Warlock shrugged. “I guess so.”

The Warlock, Pal, and I resolidified in the alley across the street from the bar.

“Urg. Dematerialization’s just as nasty as I remembered,” the Warlock said after he finished heaving near a pile of milk crates. “That potion could have stood a few more hours’ brewing, I think.”

“Gimme a break, it was my first time making it.” I shrugged off my knapsack and set it on the pavement. I took off my helmet and awkwardly strapped it one-handed to the side of the bag. Pal wobbled over to me and crawled up my jeans and shirt to my shoulder.

“You guys keep an eye out for pedestrians and cars.” I pulled the miniaturized Land Rover out of the zippered main compartment of my bag and set it on the pavement.

I felt Pal
stiffen,
his claws scratching against the dragonskin.

“Oh dear. Cold and Fear” the ferret said.

“What?” Still kneeling,
I
turned my head in the direction Pal was staring. Two men in dark suits stood in the entrance of the alleyway, both holding pistols. They were fifteen or sixteen yards away.

I heard a car pull into the other end of the alley. Doors opened, and I looked over my shoulder to see another pair of men in Suits emerge from a maroon Ford Taurus. They checked their watches, smoothed their shirts, hitched up their Sansabelt slacks, taking their time. The rat bastards had probably been lurking near the bar all this time, just waiting for me to come out with the Warlock.

A small granite pebble lay near my hand. Acting on sudden instinct, I set my hand down on the pebble to unobtrusively palm it between my index and middle fingers. I picked up the truck and stood up slowly. Clutching the Rover to my chest, I turned to fully face Cold and Fear.

“Put
your hands up where I can see them, Warlock,” said the man I assumed was Cold. “You, girlie, set down that toy.”

His partner Fear was hanging back, giving me a look midway between discomfort and
pity. Pity.
Like I wasn’t really a threat to them. . . and never could have been, because I was just a girl and a cripple and I wasn’t ever going to find that boyfriend of mine anyhow and wasn’t this a big waste of everybody’s time?
That
kind of pity.

“Aw, fuck,” muttered the Warlock, slowly raising his hands in the air.

“You’ve got no place to go,” Cold continued. “Come quietly, and you won’t get hurt. Mr. Jordan is prepared to forgive your crimes against the community if you’ll just end this nonsense.”

I stared at Cold and Fear, at their suits and CIA wannabe haircuts. Something about Cold reminded me of my stepfather. I remembered every time he’d treated me like a loser freak, every time he’d acted like I was a worthless burden he couldn’t wait to unload.
I
felt the blood rise in my face.

Damn Cold and his supercilious smirk. Damn Fear and his gun-toting pity Damn the jerks strolling up the alley behind me. Damn them
all.
The stone eye hummed in my skull. A cold, hard rage crackled adrenaline through my body.

“We totally give up!” I said loudly, then tossed the Range Rover wheels-down at Cold and Fear in a flat underhand pitch. “It’s all yours! Catch!”

The men stared at the little truck, momentarily baffled. I whispered a dead word for “big and heavy” as I let the palmed pebble fall to the ground.

The Rover expanded midair and the three-ton vehicle slammed down Onto Cold and Fear. I didn’t wait to see what happened to them; I whirled on the two other men, pointed at them and whispered a word for “fire.” They shouted in surprise as their clothing burst into flame.

“Stop, drop, and roll, jackass!” I hollered as I snatched up my knapsack and started running for the Land Rover. Pal held on to my jacket for dear life, and the Warlock was quick behind me.

I yanked the passenger-side door open, my foot slipping slightly in something that had spilled from beneath the vehicle. I didn’t look down as I threw my knapsack in the back and hopped in.

The Warlock jumped into the driver’s seat, slammed his door shut, and cranked on the ignition. His face was white. “Jesus H. Christ, Jessie. You totally pulped those two guys.”

“Get us the hell out of here,” I replied as I heaved my own door closed. The Warlock did as I asked, slamming the Rover into gear and stepping on the accelerator.

As we sped out of the alley,
I
looked back through the rear window at the men I’d set on fire. They’d managed to extinguish themselves; one was running back to the Taurus and the other was hurrying to tend to the two men I’d crushed. The crushed men were hard to look at, but their arms and legs were still twitching.