Black Magic (21 page)

CR 12 was a flat straight stretch north of town and despite the increasing rain, she hit sixty-five mph in no time. She thrummed her hands on the wheel in time to some beat that pounded in her head.
 

The rain picked up but it didn’t register. Her mind raced. She saw the route up I-75, figured the miles, calculated the time. She could make it. She
would
make it. Nothing could stop her now at the wheel of the big rig. Cops would be busy with hurricane stuff. She would power through the weather, weave through the traffic, move like the wind.

She’d go so fast she could
create
time. Like that freaking movie with the DeLorean. She needed to do eighty-eight and, wham, she’d be flying. She pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Then when she got back, she would have proven herself worthy. She and Cente would blow out of this cesspool of a town. They’d live like royalty on the beach with a snowstorm worth of coke. Awesome.

She drove into a downpour and the windshield looked like a waterfall. Each frenzied sweep of the wipers cleared a split-second view of the watery road. No problem. She had it under control. She didn’t need to see the road. She could feel it. She was one with it. The truck hit ninety.

The wheel tingled in her fingers. A swipe of the wipers flashed a yellow sign that said
Slow
–
Bridge Ahead
. That was the big canal north of town. She was making great time.
 

The truck powered over the little rise to the steel truss span. The wheel relaxed in her hands. Juliana thought how smooth the bridge surface was.

Then the cab nosed forward. The bridge wasn’t smooth. It was missing, crushed like its sister on the south side of town. The cab splashed nose first into the rushing water of the rain-swollen canal.

She had a moment of hope when she hung horizontal by her seatbelt in the cab, still above the shallow churning canal. Then the trailer plowed forward and thousands of pounds of steel and plastic crushed the cab like an empty soda can.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Barry Leopold had lived the last twenty-four hours in and out of some blissful, hallucinogenic dream. Every minute he did magic shifted between crystal clarity and utter nonsense.

Yesterday, after Lyle’s incantations, he felt like he’d floated out of the Magic Shop. He’d feigned illness when his mother got home. Her overprotective genes kicked in and she confined him to his room. As she slept that night, he used the hat.

Lizards, mice, turtles. The hat gave birth to a veritable ark of tiny creatures into the early morning hours. He collapsed into bed in ecstatic exhaustion.
 

His mother checked on him before she left for work. She let him sleep. The weather was turning nasty and she figured she would be sent home early.

Barry awakened later to a fuzzy recollection of recent events. But he knew he’d been on a magnificent high and the only way to continue it was with the magic hat. The more he performed, the better this flying carpet ride would be.

He locked the door behind him, a strict no-no in the Leopold household, but weren’t they beyond all that now? He pulled the hat out of his desk drawer and popped it open. Just the sound of the hat snapping into place made him coo with pleasure, anticipating the rush about to come. He draped the first thing he could find, a dirty T-shirt, across the top.

He wondered what to conjure, what creature to call forth. He fell back to the cliché, a rabbit. A cute little bunny.

“
Bakshokah apnoah,”
he said as he waved his hand over the hat in a lazy oval.
 

A charge hit his heart like a bolt of lightning and telegraphed that the rabbit had materialized. He moaned in ecstasy. He pulled away the shirt and looked into the hat’s black recess. Two aquamarine eyes glowed back from the darkness. The oddity of it did not register.

He reached into the hat. In his dreamlike state, all he felt was a bit of a pinch to his index finger. He extracted his hand and to his great surprise, his finger was gone. Blood burbled from the gash where something jagged had chopped away all below the first knuckle. He stared at his damaged digit with only the vaguest comprehension. Like a child with a boo-boo, he put his finger into his mouth. He cocked one eye and peered into the hat. Two bright blue dots stared back. The creature growled like gravel in a metal pan and leapt straight up. The rabbit cleared the brim of the hat before the dazed boy could react.
 

The mangy gray beast had ragged, asymmetrical ears. Twin rows of tiger shark teeth ringed its open mouth. It clamped on Barry’s nose.

Pain exploded straight into his brain and swept Barry’s confusion away. He shrieked. Blood spurted from both sides of the rabbit’s mouth as its teeth dug deeper. Barry panicked, grabbed the hare from hell with both hands and yanked. The rabbit tore his nose from his face with a sickening moist rip.

Barry dropped the wriggling creature. He grabbed his face and his severed finger slid into the gaping hole above his mouth. Blood sprayed out like a fire hose. Barry stepped back, tripped and landed on his ass on the floor.

The hat spun two full revolutions and toppled on one side, the opening facing Barry. Inside a constellation of bright blue eyes bobbed and weaved. He screamed.

More rabbits charged. A half-dozen of them bounded out of the hat like a migrating infestation. They leapt straight for Barry.

The horde bowled him over, enveloping him. Each rabbit bared its serrated teeth and tore a chunk of flesh from his body. Before he could process the horror of it all, one rabbit clamped down on his neck and ripped his carotid artery free. Barry went motionless.

The rabbits did not mourn. In unison, they leapt from the floor, aimed at Barry’s bedroom window. The glass shattered and the stampede burst out into the night, a fleeting mass of wet, gray fur lit with bright blue eyes. The swarm raced southward through the rain-soaked backyard in a beeline for downtown.

In front of the house, Barry’s mother’s car pulled up.

Wind whipped rain through Barry’s broken window and the white curtains fluttered like twin spirits of the night. The drops rinsed the blood from the wounds on Barry’s face and left the visage of a confused, nose-less boy staring up at the ceiling. One of the lenses of his glasses was shattered.

Two sharp raps sounded at Barry’s door.

“Barry?” his mother called. “Are you alright? Open this door!”

The bedroom door burst open. Over the howling wind, none of the neighbors heard Mrs. Leopold’s scream.

Chapter Fifty

Paco Mason hadn’t been home.

He’d left the Magic Shop and wandered a random route through town, not fully aware of where he was or where he was going. Everything around him looked like it was shattered and re-assembled, a kaleidoscope of bits and pieces of a world he no longer inhabited.

He arrived back at his house that afternoon. This world of disjointed shards was strange, but familiar. He walked through his house with light, fluid steps. He flourished his wand in great loopy arcs as he flitted from room to room in a strange combination that was half modern dance and half orchestral conductor, all in time with some lilting, unheard music. Each time the intoxicating power that coursed within him waned, he tapped a passing object with his wand.
Bakshokah korami
. It vanished in a puff of flame and smoke. A release of magic flowed down and out from its home and a sliver of it reinforced the high that propelled him around the house.

His mother came in the front door out of the storm. He just saw her as slices, an eyeball here, a hand there, all flitting like a flurry of multi-colored snowflakes that never quite made a full design.

Her voice came as if it had been shattered and reassembled out of order. Random, choppy syllables. The phrases made no sense but he understood the tone. Harsh. Angry. Threatening.
 

Her anger intruded on the blissful world that encased him. If she didn’t calm down she would ruin everything.

Suddenly her face reassembled from its fractured pieces and broke through his haze. Inches from his, she looked scared. She screamed his name as she shook the front of his shirt.
 

“Paco, what’s wrong with your eyes? Stop this, now!”

Stop? He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
 

He tapped her forehead with the wand.

“Bakshokah korami.”

She vaporized and a thrilling rush consumed him. She was the biggest thing he’d vanished. Bigger felt better. He floated over to the couch and tapped it.

“Bakshokah korami.”

He shuddered with the surge as the couch flamed and turned to mist. He tapped a table, a chair. Sulphurous smoke fogged the room. Paco’s mouth hung open. Drool dripped onto his shirt. Oh, bigger felt
so
much better.

The whole house. What if he could vanish the whole house? He tapped the wand to the wall.

“Bakshokah korami.”

Flames burst around him, the fire that he had always admired from afar. He was now part of it, within it.
 

The last second of his life was perfect.

The house and a good chunk of the ground around it disappeared in an orange flash and a pall of smoke, leaving a sandy crater behind. Rain splattered the sides and ran down to the bottom. Water collected and as it rose it covered a single gold coin and a black wooden wand.

Chuck Vreeland rolled over on the living room couch. Wind whistled through the eaves of the house. The damn storm wasn’t over yet. His plan was to drink himself into a stupor for the whole thing. The plan wasn’t working.

He swung his legs down and kicked a few empty beer cans across the floor. His distended stomach rolled onto his lap. His head spun a bit as he righted himself. Time to renew the fading buzz. He grabbed the open can on the end table and swallowed the last few flat, warm ounces. That wasn’t going to cut it.

Lucky for him, he’d stocked up for the emergency. Two cases of beer and three bags of Cheetos from the Food Bonanza. No hurricane was going to starve him out. He wobbled to the kitchen to refuel.

Light shined out from all around the edges of his son Zach’s door. The house had lost power before he fell asleep. If the kid had a way to power his computer for video games but his father had to drink warm beer… He lumbered down the hall and threw open the door to Zach’s room.

“How the fu–”

He hadn’t had enough to drink to explain this away. Three glowing silver rings floated in front of Zach as he sat at his desk. His head rolled in a lazy circle in sync with the spinning rings. His eyes were a solid blue milky haze.

In his alcohol-addled state, all these inexplicable components became background noise to a lone observation. His pistol lay on the desk. The gun that he kept locked up. The one that violated his parole. He charged in to retrieve it.

“Now boy, how the hell did you get my–”

As soon as he crossed the threshold, Zach turned to him with his unfocused, clouded eyes. He pulled the gun off the desk and fired at his father without aiming.

The bullet pierced Chuck’s forehead between the eyebrows and the force threw him back into the hall. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Zach placed the smoking gun back precisely where it lay before. He stared back up at the spinning rings.
 

To the magic, Chuck’s fleeting interruption was nothing of the sort. Power flowed unimpeded along the Vreeland house pipes and out to the cavern below the Apex plant.

Chapter Fifty-One

By afternoon the sky was black as coal. Gusty winds swept through Felix’s orange grove and bounced the trees back and forth like a child would a rattle. Standing on the front porch, he worried that the wind would strip his renewed crop of oranges from the branches and leave him no better off than before the miracle had blessed him.

But his bigger worry was for his wife Carlina. She had left for the Reverend Rusty’s revival early that morning and he had not heard from her since. The hurricane forming around them made the idea of an outdoor revival suicidal. He hoped the Rev would have enough common sense to call it off. After all, weather is an act of God. The Almighty couldn’t be sending
that
mixed a signal.

He tried his cell phone for the third time since noon. Another fast busy signal. Every circuit was jammed. Cell service had overloaded as soon as the evacuation orders were posted.
 

The WAMM News at Noon showed evacuation traffic snarls that stretched up both coasts. The Overseas Highway from the Keys was one long parking lot. For once, it paid to be in the middle of nowhere. No evacuation traffic would run up CR 12. Citrus Glade was the focal point of what everyone was trying to escape, ground zero of hell.

He couldn’t stand the waiting. He had a feeling Carlina was in trouble and he needed to get her home.
 

He entered the house. A gust of wind shook the rafters above him. The sky was almost dark as night. Power had been out for an hour and Angela colored by flashlight in the shadowy living room. She turned to face her father when he entered.

“Where’s Mommy?”