Mercy's Magic (8 page)

“Whoa, girl.” Lily spun and interrupted Mercy. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. How are you going to get him to drink said potion, even if I agree to make one for you?”

“Well, I’m going to find out where he is and I’m going to have to flirt with him. And maybe you could make it so that I drink a little too, like put it in a bottle that we could share.”

“Wait a minute, so this guy that just shot fireballs at you as if here some plumber who found a special flower, is going to let you into wherever he is staying to share a drink with you?”

“Yes…”

Wrinkles, brought on by confusion, lined every inch of Lily’s usually smooth face, while Mercy’s confidence remained undeterred. “But aren’t you afraid of falling in love with him?” Lily countered.

“Not if you give me an anti-potion. I could take it before, or just after and it wouldn’t affect me.”

The conversation was becoming louder, and Terra stirred.

Lily stood and faced Mercy. “Have you really gone loco?” She whispered now. “This is ridiculous. Mercy, think of how scared you were when you got here an hour ago. You practically fell into my arms. And now you’re willing to face him, head on and alone? I’m calling your aunt.”

“No you’re not,” Mercy said firmly. “She wants me to come into my own. That’s what I’m doing. I can do this, Lils, I know I can. And I’ve always helped you when you needed it.”

The women locked eyes, each standing firm in their opinions. Mercy put a hand on Lily’s shoulder. “Come on, Lily. Trust me. If things get out of hand, which they won’t, then you can go to Aunt Itzy. But I don’t want her to have to bail me out. I’ll be fine. I’ll stay in control. Okay? Please?”

They stood in silence a moment longer. Now Witchy Woman was playing on the oldies station. Lilly giggled. Mercy giggled. It was a moment to release the tension, and they both took advantage of the abrupt change in mood like a couple of hormonally charged teenage girls at a sleepover, after an intense pillow fight.

They fell back onto the couch, laughing together. It felt good for Mercy to laugh. She took a big sigh and finally relaxed.

“Alright,
sistah
, I think you’re insane, but I get it. There’s some warlock, or whatever he is, out there, playing with some dangerous stuff. I’ll do it, I still don’t know how you’re going to pull this off, but I’ll make the potion. Give me a day—two, tops. And I’ll watch Terra, of course.”

“Thank you, Lily. And remember, not a word to my aunt, unless completely necessary. Which it won’t be, I know it.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The next morning found Mercedes Cruz already impatient for the potion Lily was putting together. She went through the whole mission in her mind, how she would approach the man, how she would act, what she would say—what she would wear, even. A tiny part of her—intuition, Itzel would have said—wondered if the plan was viable or if it was one of those ideas born of insanity, sparked by stress. But, try as she might, Mercy couldn’t think of an alternate plan.

Mercy had to start from scratch. Joe had informed her, right after Lily and her had their boisterous discussion, that the mysterious man and his operation were now long gone. She had to find where the plant had moved. So there she was, at the train tracks trying to find the guy that almost choked himself to death last time they met, digging around for the ultimate clue: where the mysterious man and his operation had moved to.

She approached the abandoned train station where she’d originally met with Jim. The station was now being utilized as a hub that managed the signals and tracks. Outside the station, Mercy saw another man tinkering with an opened electrical box and approached him casually. “Excuse me, sir?”

“Yes?” He turned his head, surprised that someone had approached him at his usually desolate workplace.

“Is Jim working today?”

The man’s eyes darted toward the area behind the shack. He continued his wiring work and responded unkindly. “I don’t know who you are lady, but Jim and I are in the middle of an important job. And if you’re that strange lady he was telling me about the other day, I’d best be moving along.”  

Mercy didn’t say another word and walked away from the workstation, disappointed, because she had a lingering feeling that Jim knew what she was looking for. In fact, before the crazy idea of the love potion came to be, she felt Jim was the right man, the only man who could provide her with the information she needed. At times, Mercy even had suspicions that Jim might be some type of vessel.

On the way back to her car, defeated, Mercy passed an empty row of train cars. She found a young man sitting on a train car’s hitch, muttering to himself, obviously strung out on something. A burst of inspiration struck her or maybe a calculated transmission from afar.

“Hey, kid,” she called out. He looked up, immediately on guard. Mercy understood. This wasn’t Beverly Hills.

“Yeah?” the kid asked, nervously.

“I’m not going to try and kidnap you or anything,” Mercy said. “I just... I need to find someone here and deliver a message. You want to make...” She fumbled through her purse, “A few bucks?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” he said doubtfully, scratching an incessant itch on the back of his neck.

“It’s legal,” Mercy offered. “Just a note. A piece of paper. You find this guy, he works here, and give it to him. Ten now, and twenty when you get back. That’s all I want.”

“Why can’t you do it yourself?” He was smart, too, actually probably just overly cautious after life had beaten him down more times than he’d remembered.

“Because...the man...uh, he might not want to meet with me. And I don’t want to be pushy with his coworker being there and all. But I need some information from him.”

The kid came closer, eyes on the bills in Mercy’s hand.

“I’m a private detective,” she explained to him. “I don’t even want to know your name. Okay?”

“I don’t know, lady,” he said. “Are you some type of narc, or something? I just want to be left alone, you know?”

“Look, all you have to do is go find a guy named Jim. Let him read this note, and then come back and tell me what he says. You’ll be safe, it’s a wide open workplace. You won’t even feel the need to leave the premises afterward. What do you say?”

Mercy held out the $10 and the note. She looked into her purse and drew out another dollar. “Get yourself a soda or water too, if you want.”

The fact that he was talking to a pretty P.I. was sinking in. He gazed at her with curiosity, then took the money—including the extra dollar—and the note.

“I’ll wait here for fifteen, twenty minutes. If you don’t find him by then, you don’t get the twenty. Alright?”

“Alright.” He was a little excited now. “His name is Jim?”

“Yes. He’s an older guy, a little heavy-set. You’ll know by the look on his face if it’s the right guy when he reads the note.”

“Alright, lady,” the kid said.

“I’ll watch your backpack for you if you want.” Mercy smiled. But this kid lived in a world where he didn’t really trust anyone. “No thanks, I got it. I’ll be back for the twenty, though.” And he took off.

Mercy sat on a bench and fanned herself. It was hot, and the concrete and trains added a few degrees. There was no breeze. She looked through one of the openings between the train cars toward the plant a couple of hundred yards down the tracks. It looked completely deserted. She closed her eyes. She didn’t feel
his
presence there, the powerful man, although she could have been mistaken. She had no desire to go into that place again.

A hand on Mercy’s shoulder startled her. She turned around to see the kid in front of her, a little excited. “I found him,” he said happily. “I could tell it was him because he got this really weird look on his face when he read the note.”

“Good job, kid,” Mercy said. “Did he respond?”

“He wouldn’t put it in writing. He made me memorize an address for you.” The kid closed his eyes, wrinkled his forehead in concentration. “10381 Calabasas Road. Tustin.”

Mercy took a pen to paper and wrote it down.

“He said I better forget the address and stay away from there.” His eyes rounded. “Don’t worry, lady, I won’t go there.”

On impulse, Mercy reached out and touched his forehead with her hand. She imagined erasing this information from his mind. The kid stood back a moment, confused. Then he looked at her again. Mercy closed her eyes again, and instead of taking this time, she gave him something that would hopefully help him in his immediate future.

“What was that you said, again?” she asked him.

“Uh, what?” He looked around, wondering how he’d wandered from the tracks to the station. “What? Hey, what the hell is this stuff in my bag...what’s this white stuff...who are you?”

Mercy smiled. She was indeed gaining powers, as if by osmosis. “Nothing,” she answered, handing him the twenty. He took it without question or hesitation. “Have a nice day, kid.”

“Uh...You too, lady,” he said. The young man tossed the backpack onto the tracks and gave Mercy one final look before sprinting away from the bizarre scene.

              Mercy smiled and stared at the piece of paper in front of her where she wrote the address onto. “This was too easy. Perhaps there’s an engineer inside an engineer named Jim?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was about this time that Ariel Caliban walked the floor of the cavernous basement inside his mansion, hands locked behind his back, surveying the smaller operation that still managed to be just as productive as the one he had set up by the train tracks.

It took some effort moving the entire plant, and more than a little bit of magic. But Ariel the Powerful managed it in two days, all while the police slept under his whispering incantations. That night his unwilling and exhausted workers truly earned their keep. He’d never seen so much power come from laborers who weren’t built like oxen. Only one of them, an older, thin woman who couldn’t keep up, died from exhaustion. The rest did as they were told and worked from sunset to sunrise, loading giant rental trucks with expensive equipment and supplies.

The following day the laborers continued their unrelenting efforts as they reconfigured the entire operation at Ariel’s mansion. It wasn’t the loss of life or Ariel’s threats that they’d never see their families again that kept the workers on point and wide awake, but vicious and painful bursts the workers would feel spearing their sides whenever Ariel’s fiery eyes connected with theirs.  

His basement was extraordinarily large, definitely not up to code for such an impromptu factory, but it was one of the reasons he’d bought the place a couple of years ago. Ariel liked his privacy, and at first, he had planned to build a swimming pool down here. For now though, it would serve his purposes for the millions of counterfeit dollars he was manufacturing.

So he made his way through them. The echoing taps of his alligator boots sent shivers down the workers’ spines, as he tempted them to turn around with whispers of
hey
as he strolled by their backs
.
Only the whites of the armed guards’ eyes could be seen whenever Ariel nodded at them. They stood still, staring at the ceiling and no one dared speak to him. After the attempted raid he’d let loose his wrath, creating fireballs around him, and even though the guards were subdued under his spell, it didn’t shield them from the fright of their lives. Now they knew, just like the unfortunate captive workers, what Ariel was capable of.

Ariel stopped in front of Javier, for good reason too. Out of the dozens of nameless and faceless workers, by Ariel’s standards of course, it was time to question the unremarkable man.
This man, with the bushy moustache and disheveled hair is no one special
, he reflected.
Why does she want him in particular?
“Javier,” he taunted. “Why aren’t you looking at me when I talk? Who are you that they’d send
that
woman to look for you?”

Javier trembled at Caliban’s scrutiny but remained calm. They forced him to switch jobs since he’d suddenly become quite valuable. He went from mixing paint, a hazardous occupation that meant a slow death because of the ink’s carcinogens, to setting the large sheets of bills on the floor to dry. Javier tried to steady his hands and keep his head low. There was no way he’d peer into Ariel’s eyes this time. He knew he was greatly missed, by his wife and family, and also by his friends and co-workers at the chrome shop, where everyone there was like family as well. And he had an inkling about Grant’s wife, Mercy. Julia would always joke with him that Mercy dabbled in
Brujeria.
Everyone at the chrome shop knew she was a P.I., but they didn’t suspect anything else about her. Javier did though, but he kept the information to himself out of respect for Mercy and her family.

Javier prayed in Spanish, and began counting in his mind, repelling any thought or suspicion that Mercy was probably looking for him. He’d seen magic now, and he now knew that the man who held him captive was both evil and powerful. It made sense that Mercy could be around.
Uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco...
He felt Caliban probing his mind and continued counting with all his concentration.

Ariel picked up the numbers and was slightly puzzled. He grabbed Javier by the arm and looked into his dark brown eyes. The counting was all Javier could do to appear dull-eyed and calm. He kept at it. His lips became dry at the repetition.

Perhaps he’s gone mad
, Ariel thought to himself as he finally let Javier go.
Maybe this is the only way he can keep working
. It was of no consequence to Ariel. Javier went back to placing the large sheets and Ariel continued on.

He paced, watching everyone work in perfect order. The guards had been ordered to be on extreme watch, everyone was commanded to stand guard for hours on end, although no one knew where they had moved…or so Mr. Caliban projected.

He entered the elevator and rose to the main floor. The place was palatial and decorated likewise; he’d traveled far and wide to fill it with rare antiques from the Far East to Europe to Mexico—each item containing a unique and occult history.