Spellbent (4 page)

Smoky started having some kind of seizure. The howls and growls coming from him were sounding less and less dog-like. I couldn’t think of any Earthly creature that made a shriek like metal sheets being rent in half, a rumble like wet bones being crushed beneath a dire war machine. I ran toward the crater, giving the little dog a wide berth.

I came within a few yards of the crater’s edge and stopped. I’d expected to see the bottom crawling with lava or hellfire, but there was only a void of utter blackness. My head swam with vertigo, bile rose in my throat, and every cell in my body thrummed with pain: I was staring into the heart of Nightmare.

I closed my eyes, certain the horrible Dark would surely melt my brain into epileptic gelatin. I could still feel it with every nerve and every pore, an evil heat that would cook me and everybody else down to ash.

Stumbling away from the portal, I bent and grabbed a handful of sod and dirt and hurled it at the crater, shouting what I hoped would work as a sealing chant. I circled, staring at the ragged edge of the crater, pushing the nightmare shadows out of my mind with images of closing doors, healing wounds, windows blocked shut with nails and boards.

The longer I stayed near the portal, the more afraid I was that I would trip and fall inside, that it would grow and swallow me up. And I was desperately afraid I was too weak to get it closed. An ice pick of pain lanced behind my eyes; I was burning through so much magic energy that my blood sugar was getting low. If the spell didn’t start working soon, I was going to pass out.

I chanted the words for “close” in every language my mind could bring forth, all the while casting handfuls of good, fresh dirt into the vile portal like antibiotics into an infection.

Finally,
finally,
it was working. I felt the ground start to move under my feet, and the sides of the crater started to pull together. Yard-wide jagged cracks opened in the park’s lawn as the crater’s edges sealed, a puckered scar m the earth.

I took a step back, breathing hard, pressing against my temples to try to ease my throbbing skull.
You did it. You actually did it.

A metallic scream dispelled my sense of relief. I turned, dreading what I might see. Smoky was still thrashing. His body was stretching and growing; I could hear his bones crackling. Blade-like reptilian spines erupted from his back. He was fairly steaming with the bad magic I’d felt from the portal.

I backed away. I’d never even
heard
of anything like this happening to a familiar. Definitely time to call for help.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pant pocket and called up Mother Karen’s number. I pressed the phone to my ear.

“Jessica, is that you?” Mother Karen didn’t sound like herself. “Jessica? It’s so dark, it’s hard to hear you.”

It wasn’t Karen. I felt my knees buckle as I recognized the voice. “Aunt Vicky?” I stammered.

“Jessica, I’ve been waiting so long for you. When will you come visit me? It’s so cold in here, and the snakes won’t leave me alone—”

I shut off the phone and stared at it, shivering. My aunt Victoria had been dead for over five years; she’d murdered her philandering husband, Bill, with rat poison, then killed herself with a bottle of sleeping pills and a fifth of gin as she cried over his body.

I’d found the corpses four days later after I got worried because nobody was answering the phone; flies had found them much sooner. It was a memory I’d tried hard to purge from my mind.

I turned the phone on again. The menu was no longer in English. The characters resembled Cooper’s tattoos: sigils that came from no known human language; symbols he’d described seeing in his dreams.

“Oh
fuck,”
I whispered.

Smoky was still growing, changing. His body was hugely elongated now, and a third set of stocky, clawed legs was sprouting from the bottom of his rib cage. His skin was splitting, his white hide hanging in bloody tatters over swelling gray scales.

I was shaking with panic. The pain in my head was making it hard to think; I had
no
idea what I could do. Thunder rumbled, and the first raindrops started pattering down from the sky.

I can help,
I heard in my mind.
Let me out of this car and I can help.

The ferret? I didn’t expect him to be able to communicate so soon.

I dropped my phone back in my pocket and hurried toward the Lincoln. “Hang on tight,” I called, hoping the ferret would hear and understand. “I’m gonna turn the car over.”

I spoke the word of a long-dead tribe that described the act of putting a turtle or beetle back on its feet. I made a sweeping movement with both hands. The headache throbbed anew, but I ignored it. I wasn’t going to keel over just yet.

The Lincoln creaked over and whammed back down on its wheels. A moment later the ferret poked his head up in the open window.

I ran to the car and started to unbuckle the ferret’s harness, wishing I could remember more about what I was supposed to do with a newly awakened familiar. According to Cooper, familiars could be tremendously knowledgeable, veritable furry little walking magic encyclopedias, provided you were lucky enough to get an experienced one. If the ferret was as green as I was, though, it would be
Magic for Dummies
time and we were probably screwed.

Freed from his harness, the ferret clambered up the door’s spongy weatherstripping to the roof of the car so we were seeing eye-to-eye.

“So do
you
have any idea what’s going on here?” I asked.

“His true body is coming through into this plane,” the ferret told me, staring wide-eyed at Smoky’s increasingly monstrous form. The ferret sounded smart, his voice like that of an excitable middle-aged librarian inside my head. Finally, some good luck.

“It’s what?” I asked.

“This animal body. . . it’s just a flesh vessel for my consciousness. I am not a ferret, and the entity that has inhabited Smoky’s body is most assuredly not a cute little doggy. If I’m not mistaken, he’s changing into something close to his true form,” the ferret said. He had a little bit of an accent, I realized. A Canadian librarian. /

“But why?”

“Clearly the magic from the portal has. . . altered him.”

“But how?” I did realize I was starting to sound like a three-year-old.

“I’d hazard to say it’s a side effect of whatever disastrous magic caused that portal to open.”

“Which is a fancy way of saying you don’t know?” The pain was making me crabbier than usual. The ferret reared back, looking offended. “I admit I’ve never seen anything like this before, but I am certainly capable of educated conjecture.”

The rain was coming down harder; it looked like Cooper and I had called up a real gully washer of a storm.

“Why wasn’t I affected?”

“Well, you’re not a transdimensional being like us familiars, are you?” the ferret replied. “Badly controlled portal magic will inevitably affect us; I was lucky to be farther away.”

“So what are you?” I asked. “What’s your true form?”

The ferret blinked. “You might find my true form.. . upsetting. I would seem somewhat alien in my natural state.”

“Alien how?”

The ferret shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “Can’t I just tell you later, once we’ve gotten to know each other a bit better? I’ve been a familiar for more than three hundred years, and during my service I’ve unfortunately encountered many humans who are prejudiced against—”

“Okay, fine, whatever.” I held up my hands; we really didn’t have time to argue. Whatever he was, I was stuck with him, at least for a while. “Do you have a name?”

“My name in your language is ‘Palimpsest.’ You can call me Pal, if you like.”

Smoky roared. He’d grown positively huge; his scaled body was over twenty feet long, and I guessed he’d stand as tall as me once he got his six sets of taloned legs working under him. His tail was long and covered in the blade-like scales. His red-eyed head looked more crocodilian than canine, and his maw was filled with serpentine teeth the length of my hand.

Smoky roared again, and bright green flame erupted from his mouth. His transformation seemed nearly complete.

“A dragon? All this time, he was really a dragon?” I asked.

“For lack of a better name, yes, a dragon. But he shouldn’t be here.” Pal’s whiskers quivered as he sniffed the air. “I. . . something’s not right here. I can feel a shift. I think he’s warping reality.”

“Warping? How?” I asked, thinking of my brief chat with my dead, damned aunt.

“I don’t have a good sense of exactly what’s happening yet. But I worry that once torn, the fabric of your world could keep tearing. You were right to close the portal as you did; now you’ve got to deal with Smoky.”

My stomach sank. “Deal with him how?”

“Subdue him, however you have to. He’s too dangerous to let run around loose.”

Was he talking about killing Smoky? Jesus. I sure wasn’t looking forward to that. “Would Cooper’s shotgun work, or do I need to summon up the Caladbolg or some damn thing like that?”

“The shotgun should work as well as anything else,” Pal replied.

I popped the Lincoln’s trunk and got into our duffel bag of supplies; I found a packet of Advil and a warm bottle of Gatorade. Hoping the combination would kill my headache, I popped the two pills and chugged the drink. I found a PowerBar gel packet and stuck it in my thigh pocket for later, just in case.

Next, I opened up the long black gun case. Inside was a twelve-gauge, pump-action nine-shot Mossberg
590
“Intimidator” with a black plastic stock. It was fully loaded with cartridges that contained eighteen pellets of mixed silver and iron buckshot: a little something for any sort of hostile creature Cooper and I might encounter out in the woods or in the bad parts of the city. We’d started toting firearms after a close call with a pack of drunk werewolves in Logan County. I hoped the shot would be enough to penetrate Smoky’s thick scales, if it came to that.

A sheathed silver dagger and a bandolier of twenty extra cartridges lay in foam cutouts above the shotgun. Below the shotgun was a holstered Colt .380 “Pocketlite” automatic pistol and a seven-shot clip loaded with silver bullets half-jacketed in iron. Cooper had enlisted the Warlock’s help to put various minor enchantments on the weapons to improve their accuracy and stopping power; Cooper’s skills definitely lay in making love and not war.

Some mundanes—specifically the farmers— wondered why we relied on firearms for defense instead of magic. Sure, there are binding spells and such.. . but think of the opera singer trying to perform in a riot. If you’re in a panic, squeezing a trigger is a whole lot more reliable than trying to cast a spell.

Make no mistake: There
are
killing words. But using a killing word on a familiar or a human being is as serious as deciding to ram your car full-speed into a crowd of pedestrians; it should never be done unless you’re left with no other choice, and even in a clean- cut self-defense situation the consequences are severe. There’s an allowance for word-killing demons and other bad characters, but most Babblers won’t go near that kind of magic, no matter what. Once you’ve crossed the border into necromancy, it’s hard to get your spirit clean again. You start losing your ability to do white magic, and pretty soon all you’re good for is death magic on the fast lane to hell.

And there’s the little detail that grand necromancy is illegal and will get you imprisoned or worse. So, killing words? I was sure I’d never use them. Guns and knives seemed far less dangerous.

I slung the bandolier across my body, loaded the Colt, and clipped the holster and the dagger to the waistband of my cargo pants, then hefted the shotgun. Palimpsest ran across the roof onto the trunk lid and hopped onto my shoulder, perching on one of the shotgun cartridges.

Cooper had taken me out to the range every few weeks so we could practice target shooting; the first time I’d fired the shotgun the recoil had damn near knocked me flat. The bruise under my collarbone would have lasted a week if Cooper hadn’t healed it. But since then, I’d learned to properly brace myself and could handle the gun pretty well. I’d been good with the Colt from the start; the small gun fit my hand perfectly.

I slammed the trunk shut. Smoky had wobbled to a full twelve feet and was snorting the air, apparently searching for the scent of something. His scaly skin steamed in the rain, smelling of hate and pain and rage.

I raised the shotgun to my shoulder, my heart pounding. His eyes looked most vulnerable. I hated everything about this situation.

“Smoky,” I said, struggling to keep my voice and hands steady. “Smoky, look at me, boy.”

Smoky ignored me and launched himself across the park toward the Statehouse. He moved like a giant centipede across the street and down the ramp to the Capitol Square’s underground parking garage.

“Don’t let him get away!” Pal exclaimed. “The farther he goes, the worse the damage might be!”

Cursing, I pelted after Smoky, even though I knew there was no way I could keep up with him. The rain was cold against my skin, and my hair and clothes were getting soaked. At least the downtown area was nearly deserted. Except on the evenings when there was a Blue Jackets hockey game at Nationwide Arena or a concert at the Ohio or Palace theaters, the city’s downtown pretty much rolled up its sidewalks and shut down after seven o’clock on Sunday night.