Spellbent (8 page)

“What are you doing to her?” the woman demanded.

“We’re taking her to Riverside Hospital,” Cold replied smoothly.

“No you’re not. That ambulance is empty. You don’t even have a stretcher. Who are you?”

The first man frowned and made a small motion with his fingers; I recognized it as a common memory-wipe spell.

The woman countered it effortlessly with a wave of her hand. “Tell me who you are, or I’m calling the governing circle!”

“We
are
the governing circle, ma’am. Benedict Jordan wants this girl brought in for questioning—”

“Questioning? Look at her, she’s nearly dead!”

“This is none of your concern—”

“It is very much my concern! I’m her master’s proxy, and I’m a licensed healer. I hereby invoke my rights and I’m taking her with me! You two can just.. . just shove on back to whatever hole you crawled out of!” Her voice was shrill with fear, but she wasn’t backing down.

Cold stepped toward her, then stopped, looking irritated and baffled. “Mr. Jordan won’t be happy about this.”

“He can be unhappy as he wants to be, but he’s not so much as talking to this girl on the phone until she’s out of danger.”

“You’re the witch with the foster kids, right?” Cold said, eyeing the teenager. “You should really think about what might happen to your kids if you weren’t around to take care of them.”

“Get out of here!”

“Suit yourself.” Cold shrugged, and then smiled as if he’d suddenly realized that this annoying interruption in his assignment meant he’d get off work early that night. He gestured for his assistant to follow him back to the ambulance.

Once the men were gone, the woman quickly cast a stasis spell on Jessie. The bleeding instantly stopped, thank Goddess, but I decided it was prudent to stay right where I was on her chest, just in case her heart started to fail.

“Jimmy, please help me put her in the car,” the woman said, picking up Jessie’s cell phone. She closed it and slipped it into a pocket of her dress.

“Yes, Mother Karen,” the boy replied.

Karen looked at me curiously as she and the boy pulled off Jessie’s bandolier and then carefully lifted her body. “I didn’t know Jessica had a familiar. Are you new?”

I nodded.

“Good thing you were around tonight, little fellow. I didn’t realize what you were trying to do until after I hung up, but . . . well, I got here. Just in time, it looks like.”

Karen and Jimmy laid my mistress across the backseat of the minivan. Karen looked down at Jessie’s burned face and bitten-off arm and shook her head.

“What on Earth did you get yourself into tonight, Jessica?”

Palimpsest: Virtus

I stayed curled on Jessie’s chest as Karen drove north on High Street. Under the stasis spell, the girl’s heartbeat bad slowed to maybe ten beats a minute, and her blood oozed through her veins like syrup.

“Jimmy, please cast that stealth charm of yours on the car.”

“But you said I wasn’t supposed to—” the boy began.

“I said you were not to use it for racing your friends on the freeway,” Karen said sharply. “This is different. We need to hurry.”

“Okay.” The boy closed his eyes and began to recite a Japanese racing charm.

The car shimmered around us, then went translucently blue.

Mother Karen stomped down on the accelerator. We sped up the street at ninety miles per hour, zipping right through slower vehicles. I caught quick glimpses of the interiors of tall vans and SUVs as we passed through them, the occupants oblivious but for one little girl in a car seat who goggled at us as we zoomed beneath her feet.

Karen slowed slightly as she turned off onto a side street, and after a few twists and turns the boy stopped his recitation. The minivan turned visible again, and she braked as the tires crunched on a gravel driveway in front of a big, barn-red house.

The front door opened, and a couple of teen girls in shorts and halter tops stepped onto the front porch.

Karen rolled down her window and called, “Girls, please clear off the kitchen table and put down one of the medical drops.”

The girls disappeared back into the house as Karen and Jimmy got Jessie out of the backseat. They carried her into the house, through a short hallway into a bright country-style kitchen, and laid Jessie down on a rectangular table covered in a green plastic tablecloth. I hopped off her chest onto the top rung of one of the ladder-back wooden chairs.

“Oh my God, what happened to her?” asked one of the girls, reeking of fear as she stared at Jessie’s burned face and bitten-off arm.

“There was some trouble downtown,” Karen said. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. I need you girls to keep the other kids out of here—they’re too young to see this,iñd I need quiet to work on her. There should be juice boxes and snacks in the little fridge in the playroom if anyone wakes up hungry or thirsty.”

Karen opened a nearby cabinet, pulled out a briefcase-sized white medical kit, and opened it on the kitchen counter. “I know this is kind of gruesome, but I need you to help me with this, Jimmy.”

He swallowed, turning a bit green. “Okay...“

From my vantage on the back of the chair, I peered at Karen as she pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves. She lifted up Jessie’s stump to inspect it. “Can you smell that, Jimmy?”

“Yes.” The boy looked as though he might vomit.

“That burned-hair smell is demon ichor. The rotten-chicken smell is demon venom—it’s full of putrescine and draculins among other things. It causes hemorrhagic fever when it gets in the human bloodstream, only it’s not contagious, fortunately.” Karen turned Jessie’s arm this way and that, the bloody bits of glass gleaming in the soft yellow light. “This is really nasty. I need you to get six extra boxes of gauze, then get the Tupperware box labeled BONE STARTER out of the basement chest freezer.”

“Yes ma’am.” He ran down the hall, clearly relieved that he had been given a reason to leave the kitchen.

Karen got a pair of kidney-shaped plastic pans out of the cabinet along with a squirt bottle of saline. She set one bowl under Jessie’s wounded arm and the other near the girl’s face.

“I’ll have to do this in two stages,” she told me. “The bone won’t grow if there’s still poison in her, so first thing is to get all the demon goo out of her system and make sure she doesn’t have an infection.”

Karen rinsed Jessie’s stump with the saline, then got tweezers and a pair of small, sharp scissors out of the kit. She pulled bits of gravel, glass, and corroded wire from the wound and trimmed away the ragged dead flesh and bone.

“I’m guessing from the smell of the venom that this was some kind of Plagueshadow or maybe a Wutganger?” Karen asked me.

I chirped and nodded from my chair-top perch.

Karen shook her head as she rinsed off the stump again. “I hope you realize that you’re both tremendously lucky to be alive right now.”

I most certainly did, but had no way of easily conveying that, so I mutely watched her work.

A half-grown ginger cat crept into the kitchen, peering up at me curiously. “Are you prey?” the kitten asked.

“No, I am not prey,” I replied sharply. “And I don’t want to play with you, either.”

“Oh.” The kitten looked crestfallen, then looked at Karen. “Will she make me tasty wet food?”

“Not now, kitten.”

“Will
you
make me wet food?”

“Can’t work the can opener, sorry.” It had often occurred to me that being able to communicate with other animals is usually far less useful than people seem to think it is.

“Her paw’s all gone,” the kitten said, gazing up at Jessie’s unconscious form.

“Yes, you’re quite observant.” I sighed.

“A dog got me and ate up my leg. Karen fixed me. She makes good paws,” the kitten chirped.

I spotted a moth fluttering down the hall in the entryway.

“Kitten, look behind you! Prey!”

“Prey?” The kitten mewed and bounded away in pursuit.

Saved by the bug,
I thought.

Karen had finished debriding Jessie’s arm. The older witch gathered jars of herbs and unguents from the cupboard and refrigerator and started pounding together a poultice with a mortar and pestle. Jimmy came back in with the frozen bone kit and extra gauze, and he and Karen spread the green paste thickly on Jessie’s wounds and bandaged her up.

Karen and Jimmy gathered up Jessie and carried her down the hall into a small guest bedroom. I leaped onto Jimmy’s shoulder as he passed by; he seemed surprised but didn’t try to shoo me off. The pair laid Jessie down on the plush double bed, and I scurried down Jimmy’s arm and took my place beside Jessie’s head. Karen cast the charm to cancel the stasis. The girl gasped and shuddered as her heart started to beat normally again.

Karen stretched and glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s nearly midnight now, so I should let the poultice work for a few hours then check her temperature and give her a potion,” she told Jimmy. “It looks like I’m going to be up all night. But you’ve got school tomorrow, so you should go to bed soon and try to get a little rest.”

Karen stopped, cocking her head to the side to listen to something I couldn’t hear. “Were you expecting some of your friends tonight?” she asked Jimmy.

The boy shook his head.

“Well, then there surely shouldn’t be any other Talents on our street tonight,” Karen said, hurrying out of the room. I hopped off the bed and ran along behind her.

Karen slid open the door to the hallway closet and searched through it. She found what looked like a long canvas rifle case, then unzipped it and pulled out an ivory-colored staff. It bore sigils for fire and light carved into its gleaming surface. I thought it might be polished dragon bone or mammoth tusk, and it gave off the emanations of very old, very strong enchantments.

Carrying the staff as if it were a loaded shotgun with a hair trigger, Karen flung open the front door and stepped out onto the porch. I followed close behind. Three black sport utility vehicles were speeding up the street and slid to a stop at the curb in front of Karen’s house. A dozen men in dark suits piled out of the cars and strode up the gravel driveway. I recognized Cold and Fear among them.

“Don’t come any closer,” Karen warned, pointing the staff at them. “What do you want?”

“You know what we want,” said Cold, stepping forward. “Mr. Jordan is adamant that the girl be turned over to him tonight. Give her to us, and we won’t bother you again.”

“You can’t have her,” Karen replied grimly. “You’re trespassing; get out of here.”

Cold sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose as if he was trying to ward off a headache. “Look. We all have better things to do right now. Don’t make us do this the hard
way.”

“So go away. That’s not hard at all,” Karen replied. Cold sighed again then nodded at the men behind him. They marched toward the house.

Karen began chanting an invocation in one of the ancient star languages humans aren’t supposed to know. I was impressed; clearly she was not your average suburban housewitch. She jumped off the porch onto the lawn and stabbed the end of the staff into the earth.

The staff burst in a blue bolt of lightning that shot straight up into the clouds and held there, a giant roaring Jacob’s Ladder spark between Earth and sky. The men and Karen were all knocked to their knees by the shock of the explosion, and for a moment I was certain I’d been deafened.

A round, bright portal opened where the bolt pierced the clouds, and a creature that looked like an enormous crystalline orrery began to drift down to Earth. My mouth went dry as I realized it was a Virtus. How had Karen managed to call a Virtus? The guardian spirit’s ten diamond eyes orbited around a pulsing magma heart, and as it slowly spiraled toward the house it left behind a trail of glowing mist that curled into mathematical symbols before it evaporated.

Fortunately, any mundane neighbors who might have been awakened by the noise in the street wouldn’t be able to see or hear what was happening on the lawn. I could feel that the house and its yards had a camouflage enchantment, presumably to keep the children’s practice sessions out of sight of the neighbors. The magic seemed strong enough to shield even the huge Virtus from view.

Mother Karen had gotten to her feet, her palms blistered from the exploding staff, her knees caked with mud and grass.

“Hear my plea!” she shouted up to the Virtus in its own ancient language. “These men have come to unlawfully abduct a girl under my protection.”

The Virtus’s inhuman jewel eyes all focused on Karen. “You claim a mark of duty to this girl?”

“Yes. I am her master’s rightful proxy,” she replied.

Trembling, Karen held her scorched palms up to the guardian. A glowing tentacle of plasma emerged from the Virtus’s heart and probed Karen’s left palm. A sigil glowed bright in her hand, and she gasped in pain.

“She has the proper mark,” the Virtus said in English, turning on the men, who had all gone pale. “Present your counter. Now.”

“Our. . . our master is Benedict Jordan—” Cold began.