Dirty Magic (35 page)

This room was where Danny had gone to find the potion manual and the old pictures of our mother. Evidence of his snooping was everywhere—from the torn lids on a few boxes to a sticky puddle of soda and the footprints he left in the dust.

“At least I don’t have to worry about him turning into a criminal mastermind,” I muttered to myself. The sarcasm felt forced and overly optimistic given the fact that at that moment my brother needed the help of machines and tubes to breathe, eat, and piss.

I swallowed the bile that rose at that thought and moved forward with a determination borne from denial. Going through those old boxes suddenly felt a lot less scary than contemplating the idea that my brother might never wake up from his nightmares.

The first box was a loser. Nothing but some old clothes. The acid-washed denim jacket I’d worn my entire fifteenth year after Volos told me I looked cool in it. Next came some old CDs from bands no kids today had ever heard of. Hell, they’d barely even heard of CDs.

The second box revealed I was getting warmer. Some old beakers and a few tools of the potion trade. But the third box presented the mother lode: a heavy marble mortar and pestle, an empty olive-wood saltcellar, and a ceremonial athame. I ran my thumb over the edge of the blade, which was dull and curled over as if it had simply lost the will to hold its edge. Mama had given it to me for my twelfth birthday. At the time I thought it was the most precious thing in the entire world. The jeweled handle and shiny metal made it seem like a rare treasure. But looking now with adult eyes and the tarnish of maturity, I realized it was little more than cheap brass and aluminum, now browned and pitted from time. And as for the “precious jewels,” they were little more than paste gems glued into the handle.

My fingers rubbed dust from my nose and brought with them the sour stink of the brass on skin. Much like the future Uncle Abe had promised me, the athame had proven little more than a glittering illusion. In reality the promises of power and happiness were worth less than that cheap brass knife.

I jerked myself out of those memories and threw the knife back in the box. A quick wipe of my hands on my jeans didn’t dispel the scent, but it made me feel a little better. That was another benefit of being older: I realized my emotional connection wasn’t to the cheap metal or the paste jewels, but to the woman who’d given the knife to me. Funny how I’d used it every day as a girl, but now it might as well have been an alien artifact.

I grabbed the box and stacked the other on top. The cubbyhole wasn’t large enough for any potion work. I stopped and considered my options. Doing magic in our home seemed sacrilegious somehow—not to mention dangerous. That left one option: the old garage-turned-storage shed out back.

I headed that way, hefting the two boxes with me. After I’d dumped them outside the door, I went back in to grab a few more supplies: candles, matches, and a couple more beers because it was never a good idea to do dirty magic sober—blocked the flow of energy.

Naturally, I was aware that all my prep work was its own form of procrastination. Truth was, it wasn’t the early autumn chill that made my hands shake. But once I had everything hauled to the dusty, old shed, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I pried open the double doors and was immediately assaulted by the scents of gasoline from the old lawn mower and fertilizer I’d bought for the flowers I’d never gotten around to planting.

I dragged in the boxes and set to work, clearing space on the old workbench. The small lantern from Danny’s fifth-grade campout went on the shelf. The meager light wasn’t much to brag about, but once I lit a few candles visibility would improve.

Next came the bag of ceremonial tools. Lots of wizards these days scoff at the old ways. They see the ceremonial traditions as little more than superstitious mumbo jumbo. I wasn’t sure I disagreed, but the routines had always helped to relax me and get me into the right frame of mind for cooking up a potion. I wasn’t sure they did much to help the magic work, but they sure made me feel better. Or they had—back when I did magic regularly.

After I made sure the doors were shut, I went back and prepared the initiating rituals. First, I lit four candles—one for each direction on the compass. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. My lungs hitched as if they were congested. I cleared my throat and tried again. This time the air flowed more smoothly into my lungs until my ribs expanded. On the exhale, I tried to release all my stress. I blew for a long time. Felt as though I could have exhaled for a year and I’d still have tension to spare.

The wind kicked up outside. Leaves scuttled across the lawn and pelted the side of the shed. Inside the garage, every noise was amplified, which did nothing to calm my jittery nerves. I did the inhale, exhale thing again.

It didn’t help. So I took a swig of beer instead.

“All right,” I said to the empty room. “Start with something easy.”

I dug around in the box of equipment and pulled out a glass dish and a hot plate. I took a step back and chewed on my lip.

I knew I didn’t begin to have the proper equipment to formulate a complex antipotion. Especially since getting it right would require my getting ahold of a sample of Gray Wolf and reading its energy to break down the components. Plus, many alchemical processes—even the down-and-dirty ones used on the street—took time.

My main goal that night was just to dip my toe back in those old, familiar waters to make sure I could handle it. The thought made my stomach quicken and my face flush. I licked my lips and tried to remind myself it was just this once—for Danny. If I failed no one had to know. In fact, even if I succeeded no one could know.

I had a bottle of vodka in the house and could probably scrounge up some herbs to make a basic Spagyric elixir, but distillation would take up to a week. And even then, after I’d filtered the solution through a pair of panty hose, it would have to sit an additional twenty-four hours before it was usable.

On the other hand, I found an old vial containing some sort of herbal extract. I opened the stopper and sniffed. The astringent scent of concentrated rosemary brought back memories of the cleansing bath salts I’d made for my mother one Christmas. Smiling at the memory, I decided I could manage a simple operation to make a “salt of salt” preparation of rosemary.

Salt of Salt requires a basic calcination procedure—basically, burning something down to white ash. I poured some of the thick, brown rosemary extract onto the dish. Next, I struck a match and touched it to the solution. The alcohol in the extract caught immediately, and soon the heat intensified the sharp pine scent inside the space. The mixture of infused alcohol and rosemary needles turned into a thick, black resin after a few moments. I took a small metal wand and stirred it, humming to myself as I worked.

As far as alchemical operations went, this was about as simple as they came. But, then, simple was exactly what I needed. The steps kept my hands busy and my mind quiet, and that alone was a blessing.

To speed things along, I lit the camp stove under the glass dish so it was burning from all sides. I sipped my beer as I kept one eye on the flames. If there had been a large quantity of extract, burning it down to ash might have taken hours or days even, but that night it took only about half an hour for the first round of heat to reduce the resin to a dark gray ash. I scraped the powder into my mortar and ground away at it for a few minutes with my pestle.

I repeated the heating and grinding two more times until the ashes were very light gray. Then the ashes went into a beaker with ten times its volume of water. Tap water worked just fine since I wasn’t cooking clean. If I had been, only sterilized and distilled water would do. After all that, it was simply a matter of letting it boil down until all the liquid evaporated. The white crystals that remained were the Salt of Salt.

I turned on my stool to look at the salt in the light. The white crystals gleamed dully in the poorly lit garage. I smiled at it and laughed at myself. It had been so long since I worked with magic that I guess I’d expected my first time back to feel … earth-shattering. Or at least dramatic. Instead, there had been a pleasing boredom to the process.

Despite what movies suggest, magic isn’t a flamboyant process. It’s not flying lasers from fingertips or flashes of lightning or wands waved and chants shouted. Instead, it’s a subtle art. Adepts don’t force magic on items, we coax and harness their inherent energies. The process I had gone through that night drew the elemental salt from the rosemary. Purified it with fire to reach its essential energy. Some believed fire elevated that energy, too. All that was left was for me to decide what other energies to mix it with to create the magic I needed.

But then I remembered that the kind of magic I needed was more complex than playing with simple herbs in a toolshed. I needed a lab and equipment and high-quality ingredients. One of those miracles I’d thought about earlier wouldn’t hurt, either.

Before I could get too worked up about that, though, I realized my back felt very warm. Too warm considering the night air was filled with early autumn’s chill. I turned and cursed. Flames licked up the sides of the camp stove and were dancing dangerously close to the wooden walls of the shed. I jumped up, looking around for something with which to put out the fire. Since I’d dissolved all the water, the only liquid on hand was the last half of my last beer. The fire hissed at me but didn’t surrender. Panic started to rise in my chest like heartburn. The edge of a cardboard box began to smolder. I whipped off my sweatshirt and started beating the box and the camp stove.

In the process of smothering the flames, my hand whacked the hot plate’s glowing red element. “Mother of fuck!” At that point, panic fled as rage roared in. With my right hand—the unburned one—I grabbed the cord of the stove and ripped it out of the wall.

I try not to stew in self-pity often, but it was all too much. Boxes went flying and tools clanked and shattered to the ground. I kicked the mortar for good measure, which added a nice big toe contusion to my burn and the puncture wounds in my neck from when Danny attacked me. I’m not sure when the kicking turned into crying, but before I knew it I was on the floor in the smoky shed bawling like a child. Through the haze of tears, I looked down to see the rosemary salt crystals lying scattered among broken glass.

Pressing the heels of my palms to my eye sockets, I tried some deep breathing to get my emotions under control. A pity party wouldn’t help Danny. I glanced down at the burn wound. An angry red blister slashed across my Ouroboros tattoo. I ran a finger along the snake design and remembered how proud I’d been the day I’d earned the right to get inked with the symbol of my coven. Within six months of that day, I’d walked away from magic completely.

Obviously, the fire had been a sign that I should have stayed away.

“I get it,” I said to the universe. “But as long as you’re sending signs, how about one to tell me what to do next?”

I waited for a good minute in the silence before I sighed, hauled myself off the ground, and cleaned up the mess. Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t run on a human schedule. That’s why it waited until the next morning to send its message.

W
hen I dragged myself into Danny’s room the next morning, I felt about ten types of shitty. Sleep hadn’t been an option the night before, so I’d left the house at the ass crack of dawn. Unfortunately, no matter how fast I drove, I couldn’t outrun my existing problems and even more waited for me in Danny’s room.

I froze at the door. Machines beeped like maniacal robots. The doctor shouted orders like a general in battle. And the nurses’ rubber-soled shoes squealed against the floors like stuck pigs.

“Kate!” Nurse Smith saw me and rushed over. She had something yellow—bile?—all over the front of her scrubs. She grabbed my arm and tugged me away from the door. Shock prevented me from fighting her.

Through the tangle of bodies surrounding my brother, I caught a glimpse of Danny’s ghostly white skin and blue-tinged lips. The frothy spittle spilling onto his chin. The rag-doll reflexes as the nurses moved him and poked him with needles.

A single word dove from my brain straight down to the dark pit of my stomach, where it cannonballed with all the force of a boulder: dying.

My soul shriveled within my skin.

“Kate, honey, I need you to listen to me,” she was saying from far away. “He’s gone into some sort of shock. Doc thinks it’s withdrawal from the potion.”

I blinked slowly. Nurse Smith, black void, Nurse Smith.

“We’re getting him stabilized and then Dr. Henry will come talk to you, okay?” She shook my shoulders. “Do you understand?”

Inhale, exhale, inhale.

Nodding took great effort. “Withdrawal. Stabilized.”

Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it.

She smiled, but it was fake. She patted my arm, but I didn’t feel it. “I’m going back in to help.”

“Wait! Where’s Pen?” I said, grabbing her before she could walk away.

“She left half an hour ago to run an errand. She’ll be back soon. Why don’t you go grab some coffee? Dr. Henry will be with you in a few moments.”