Spellbent (6 page)

On the bright side, I wouldn’t have to worry about trying to contact anyone if this got much worse. The entire downtown would look like an inferno of bad magic to anyone even remotely sensitive.

Surely the governing circle knew what was going on by now, and would do something to help. They are a group of seven powerful witches and wizards who act as the local government for the Talents in Columbus and a few counties beyond. They arbitrate disputes, set policies, and enforce the laws set forth by the Virtii, ancient air spirits who had been tasked by the powers that be with overseeing Talented humankind.

Past that, I was stupidly hazy on the details, like who was part of the circle, how many people worked for them, how much power they had, and how quickly they could turn my life to utter shit if I pissed them off. The circle doesn’t shine a very strong light on its activities, but my ignorance was mostly my own fault. I’d never been much for paying attention to local politics, and my understanding of our laws was pretty much at a kindergarten “white magic good, necromancy bad” level. But I wasn’t living in abject ignorance—at least I did know that Benedict Jordan was their leader.

Mr. Jordan pretty much owned Columbus. He was a direct descendant of the two most powerful Talented families who’d founded the city, and he had been head of the governing circle for at least twenty years. He was also the controlling partner of the Jordan, Jankowitz Jones law firm downtown and sat on the city council. Rumor had it that he was worth billions; he owned the high-end clothing store chain The Exclusive, and it seemed like he owned half the buildings in the trendy Short North.

So, I figured with so much trouble downtown, and him having so much money tied up in it, he would be bound to send the cavalry out to help us
tout de suite.
Yeah. I seriously needed to work on my clairvoyance.

Smoky had smashed through the plate-glass doors; vines were devouring the glass where his blood had smeared.

I stared down at the shotgun in my hands. It was like trying to stop a forest fire with a can of gasoline. And unless I found a piece of rope or a good intact spiderweb, another try at a binding spell would probably be useless. What on Earth could I use to stop Smoky that wouldn’t involve him shedding more blood?

Gee, maybe if I swore real hard he’d faint,
I thought darkly.
Or maybe I could jump into his mouth and hope he chokes on me?

Then my mind flashed on Cooper’s brief lecture on the uses of goose droppings. Offal could always be used to control the creature that produced it... if you could just figure out how. And Smoky had left plenty of fur on the car seats and some hide on the grass.

“I’m an idiot.” I ran back down the stairs.

The lights went off just as I entered the tunnel leading to the garage. I hunted vainly in my thigh pockets for my penlight, found nothing but a wad of dryer lint. Fortunately, Cooper had showed me lots of dryer lint tricks during our hours of shame at the Laundromat. I used the wad and a dead word for “cold flame” to light a green faery fire in the palm of my left hand. It didn’t cast much illumination, but it was enough to let me hurry through the dark and tremendously forbidding garage.

Cooper wouldn’t need to use these crappy little props for rink y-dink spells,
Old Lady Mabel complained as I skirted the starving thatch of Smoky’s vines.
He’d be calling down the ghost of Thomas Edison to juice the whole building and light it up like Christmas. He’d have shrunk Smoky right back down before he left the park. We’d be at the Panda Inn by now.

As I emerged from the garage, I realized something was terribly wrong with the sky. The slate- gray clouds had become a pearly white flatness streaked with ruby highlights. The air hung still and dead. The white of the sky cascaded down like an ethereal waterfall at the edge of the Grove; I could barely see the trees beyond.

“Motherfucker,” I whispered, shivering with a mixture of frustration and fear.

Someone—presumably a wizard employed by the governing circle—had cast an isolation sphere on the entire downtown area. I’d done a paper on isolation spheres in my freshman enchantments class at OSU, so I knew in painful detail what kind of trouble I was in. The sphere would be invisible to any mundanes outside it, but anyone attempting to approach the barrier would find himself with a sudden compulsion to turn around and go back the way he’d come. Inside, the sphere was much like trapping a spider under a jar, and I the unlucky cricket trapped with it.

The white color of the sky meant we were totally locked down. Nothing could get in or out, not man nor spirit nor spell nor electrical signal. But that wasn’t the bad part.

The ruby highlights meant the governing circle mages had hugely sped up time within the globe. And
that
meant that the governing circle had sensed the reality tear and had decided the easiest way of dealing with it was to isolate it, time-accelerate it, and wait an hour to see if whatever was causing trouble starved or died in the years that had passed within the globe. They’d be able to call a tornado in to mask any magical destruction to the city. Apparently Mr. Jordan had decided to go for an insurance write-off.

The cavalry wasn’t coming to save me or anyone else.

“Goddammit, this isn’t
fair!
I need
help
down here!” I screamed at the blank sky.

“Be quiet,” the ferret fussed. “They’ll hear you.” Palimpsest was sitting on the hood of the Dinosaur. I hurried across the Street.

“‘They’? It’s a ‘they’ now, for certain?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t
want
my help,” Pal replied crossly.

“Mostly I need your nose. Help me find where Smoky left his skin.
This”—
I shook the shotgun at him—”was a very, very bad idea. I need to work an old-fashioned control spell.”

“I might not know everything—”

“No!
Really?”

“—but I don’t think you’re ready for an incantation of that complexity, which is why I suggested the shotgun in the first place.”

“And your suggestion got us
this
lovely bit of helpful intervention from the local pointy-hats.” I jabbed my middle finger toward the sky. “So if I
can’t
take care of this my ownself,
you’re
going to be here for a very, very long time. So try to be a little supportive,
please?”
I asked.

The ferret seemed to shrink into himself. “I’m sure now that Smoky is tracking something, but I don’t yet know what it is. I caught smells of rage and pain and hunger. . . I think it did kill those men in the garage.”

“How?”

“Malevolent spirits will often attempt to possess the bodies of weaker creatures. But if the spirits are especially powerful and uncontrolled, the hosts often experience violent, fatal physical reactions.”

I paused, wincing as
1
thought of the men. “You mean they explode.”

“Yes, that would be one such reaction.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay. We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m sorry if I’ve been a horrendous ungrateful bitch, but this whole thing has me royally freaked. So can we start over, and try to get ourselves out of this mess?”

“I accept your apology. And yes, I’d quite like to get Out of here as well. I’ll find that hide you wanted.” He hopped off the car and scurried over to the grass where Smoky had made his transformation.

I followed, and soon we’d gathered a good handful of fur and limp, bloody, stinky hide. I wished I’d thought to bring along some hand sanitizer.

I’d never tried a control spell, and had only seen Cooper do them a few times. In
theory
it was all pretty straightforward: I just had to get inside the target creature’s head and take command.

Yep. Straightforward like busting through a brick wall with your bare hands. Hell’s bells.

I gingerly squeezed the handful of bloody hide and glanced at Pal, who was sitting on the picnic bench. “If I start barking, don’t you dare laugh at me.”

“Perish the thought,” he said.

“Okay then.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

I started a simple divination chant, asking the spirit residue on the hide and blood to lead me to Smoky. Palimpsest had told me the truth about the dog body being a mere puppet; though the flesh and blood was real, it felt as spiritually dead as a discarded Halloween mask. I focused on the faint, darker, alien essence that curled around the cells like aether.

Ancient words for “hunt” spilled from my lips in a dozen languages I could never name. I felt rather than saw Smoky standing on a deserted street, belching fire.

I knew his true name, his true nature.
Kyothalahüi, Servant of Flame.

“Become!” I barked in Smoky’s ancient, secret language.

I felt myself slip into his scaly skin, into his fragmented mind. My senses were crippled by his anger and pain, drowned by the ocean of information from a dozen too many legs and a hundred too many eyes.

I couldn’t control it, couldn’t understand it. The fire stopped, and the body stumbled.

I saw a dark, twisted form. Smoky’s faceted eyes wouldn’t focus for me. What was it?

The twisted thing darted forward. I felt a slashing pain at my throat, my belly. The thing was digging inside me, and I couldn’t stop it—

—I broke the connection, collapsing back onto the grass.

“Oh hell,” I gasped, rising onto my knees. “I messed up. Oh God, I messed up. .

“What happened?” asked Pal.

“There was this
thing.
A demon. Smoky was attacking it when I entered his mind, and the demon. . . I think it killed Smoky.”

A brief blast of cold, sulfurous wind rippled across the landscape. In its wake, the trees and grass lost their color. In the white light from the blank sky, the world suddenly looked as though it had been carved from bleached bone.

“Now
it killed Smoky,” Pal replied. “And the demon is changing the reality in our isolation sphere.”

My brain was just beginning to process what I’d sensed inside the dragon. “He never meant to hurt us—he was always focused on killing the monster that came into our dimension, but we all looked so alien to him, he couldn’t really see that we were his friends. Oh
hell.”

Smoky might have calmed down once the demon was dead, and I had no doubt that the demon
would
be dead if I hadn’t interfered.

I swallowed down the sick bile rising in my throat. I wanted to cry.

“Did he wound it?” Pal asked.

“I—I think so. He was burning it. But it was still strong enough to tear him up.”

“Let’s hope he weakened it. Because.. . well, you know what we have to do now,” Pal said.

We had to do what strong, terrifying Smoky hadn’t quite managed: kill the demon. And hope it didn’t kill us first.

Wutganger

Something bit my finger; I did a double take when I saw that it was the
grass.

“‘What the—” I scrambled to my feet.

The bone-gray grass had become unnaturally animated; the blades were widening, splitting open to reveal tiny, toothed maws that snapped at my sneakers.

“Oh dear!” exclaimed Pal, who abruptly leaped off the picnic table onto my shoulder.

The wooden top of the picnic table was shaking, tearing itself loose from the galvanized bolts holding it to the steel frame.

I hurried over to the relative safety of the road. The toothy sod was trying to heave itself free of the soil.

“What in the hell is
this?”
I asked Pal.

“I’m afraid I misjudged the nature of the reality shift,” he said, his voice quavering. “I don’t think Smoky was the cause of this; I think he was holding the decay in check.”

My heart sank. “Great. How bad will this get?”

“Very bad, I expect. The demon’s affecting organic matter. It’s only a matter of time before the very asphalt holding this road together is corrupted,” he replied. “Do you know where Smoky fell?”

“Yeah. It’s not far; I’m pretty sure he was just a few blocks south of the mall on High.”

I crept down the street with the Mossberg on one shoulder and Pal on the other. The air hung damp and still and stank of ozone and sulfur.

“I had a bad thought,” I said, scanning the nearby buildings nervously.

“What?” Pal asked.

“The grass—it
died.
Whatever it’s turning into, it’s not
alive
in the strictest sense of the word, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“So okay. If we don’t stop the demon, it’ll keep doing what it’s doing, right? Killing things and reanimating them?”

“Almost certainly.”

“So could the demon, you know, trick whoever’s monitoring the sphere into thinking everything in here’s good and dead and it’s A-okay to lift the barrier? And then all this shit could spill out into the rest of the world?” I asked.

Pal paused. “I would think that whichever magical hazards specialist your governing circle has monitoring the situation would be canny enough to recognize that threat.”

“And I’d have thought they’d have, you know,
helped
us, instead of leaving us in here to get slurped by the glop. But hey, I live on Naïve Lane in Happy Candycane Acres, what do I know?”